should be impressed from the ships so to be searched. A pirate had been, by the law of nations, a man without a country: he was the lawful prize of all honest ships. The plain meaning of any statute declaring the slave-trade piracy was to deliver up the slaver to the vengeance of any lawfully authorized patrolman of the high seas. Great Britain was entirely willing that every British slaver should be treated so, but even John Quincy Adams was constrained to declare to the British authorities, at the behest of the slaver power, that the slave-trade was "statutory piracy" — something different from high-sea robbery. It could never be allowed by the people of the United States that an American slaver should be treated as a high-sea robber by any other power than an American court!
Anyone wishing to examine the original documents pertaining to this branch of the subject will find them in Sen. Doc., 18 Cong. 2 Sess. I. No.1; and American State Papers, Foreign, V. Probably the most interesting of our public documents on the slave-trade are No. 283, Ho. Rep., 27 Cong. 3d Sess., and Doc. No. 115, Ho. Ex. Rep. 26 Cong., 2d Sess.
The radical trouble was that cotton-growing was becoming so profitable that people who in 1808 thought slavery a dying institution had become aggressive for the spread of it, and so men were always found in Congress to block legislation that would hinder the slavers. Worse yet, the law of May 15, 1820, was thwarted by the United States District Attorneys who brought indictments against captured slavers under previous Statutes. It appears by the records, for instance, that in the United States District Court for Maryland, Captain Jason L. Pendleton, of the slaver brig Montevideo,
