Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. This history of the American slave-trade grew out of a study of the history of the American navy. The navy was in a way connected with the slave-trade, but the subject was so large that only the briefest mention of what the navy did on the slave coast could be made in The History of Our Navy. The discovery that our naval ships, in forces ranging from a single schooner to a frigate squadron, had cruised on the coast of Africa at intervals during a period of nearly forty years for the proclaimed purpose of suppressing the slave-trade without accomplish ing so much as a restriction of it, determined me to give the subject a separate consideration. What I have gathered I have set down here as well as I could.