n 1841
he sent, as Minister to Washington, Lord Ashburton, one of the Baring
Brothers who had had such large business relations with many of the
States and with the old National Bank. Ashburton and Webster were
personal friends, and they were likely to find a solution to other
important and pressing problems engaging the attention of both
countries. One of these disputes had to do with the suppression of the
nefarious African slave trade, which still flourished in spite of the
most stringent of laws, national and international. The difficulty lay
in the enforcement of law. The South did not regard slavery as an
unmixed evil, and hence Southern Presidents had not been overzealous of
invoking the severe law against the slave trade. England stood ready to
enforce her laws, but then the traders would raise the American flag.
This necessitated the exercise of the obsolete right of search of
suspected vessels, if anything was to be done. But the people of the
United States resented the exercise of the right, and Northern statesmen
were also loath to allow this. To obviate all difficulty the two
Governments agreed in 1842 to maintain a joint naval patrol of the
African coast. The South was not quite pleased, and a great many people
of the West were displeased that Webster had yielded the right of search
in disguise, as it was thought.

At the same time a matter of larger importance to the North, the
settlement of the long-disputed boundary between Maine and Nova Scotia,
was pending. Since 1838 there had been quarrels and actual encounters
along the northeastern boundary, which had won the name of "the
Aroostook War." Both Maine and the National Congress had appropriated
money to maintain American rights on the border, and here again there
was reason to fear war. Webster and Ashburton took up the problem and by
mutual concessions came to a fair but very unpopular agreement. They
also settled outstanding disputes concerning the long boundary between
the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains.

But the question of dividing Oregon was left untouched even by these
friendly diplomats. Nor could they do more than discuss the critical
Creole trouble, which just now came to complicate the relations of both
peoples, evidently desirous of avoiding war. The Creole was a vessel
engaged in the domestic slave trade. In 1841 this ship, bound for New
Orleans, was seized by the slaves on board, who killed its crew and
carried it into the port of