isit and inquire, yet it could
not well be discerned by the Executive of the United States how such
visit and inquiry could be made without detention on the voyage, and
consequent interruption to the trade. It was regarded as the right of
search, presented only in a new form and expressed in different words;
and I therefore felt it to be my duty distinctly to declare, in my
annual message to Congress, that no such concession could be made, and
that the United States had both the will and the ability to enforce
their own laws, and to protect their flag from being used for purposes
wholly forbidden by those laws, and obnoxious to the moral censure of
the world."

This statement would tend, as Lord Aberdeen thinks, to convey the
supposition, not only that the question of the right of search had been
disavowed by the British plenipotentiary at Washington, but that Great
Britain had made concessions on that point.

Lord Aberdeen is entirely correct in saying that the claim of a right of
search was not discussed during the late negotiation, and that neither
was any concession required by this government, nor made by that of her
Britannic Majesty.

The eighth and ninth articles of the treaty of Washington constitute a
mutual stipulation for concerted efforts to abolish the African
slave-trade. The stipulation, it may be admitted, has no other effects
on the pretensions of either party than this: Great Britain had claimed
as a _right_ that which this government could not admit to be a _right_,
and, in the exercise of a just and proper spirit of amity, a mode was
resorted to which might render unnecessary both the assertion and the
denial of such claim.

There probably are those who think that what Lord Aberdeen calls a right
of visit, and which he attempts to distinguish from the right of search,
ought to have been expressly acknowledged by the government of the
United States. At the same time, there are those on the other side who
think that the formal surrender of such right of visit should have been
demanded by the United States as a precedent condition to the
negotiation for treaty stipulations on the subject of the African
slave-trade. But the treaty neither asserts the claim in terms, nor
denies the claim in terms; it neither formally insists upon it, nor
formally renounces it. Still, the whole proceeding shows that the object
of the stipulation was to avoid such differences and disputes as had
already arisen, and th