Foote believed that the activity of the American squadron in the early fifties had broken up the slavetrade. How far wrong he was appears in the report of the Secretary of the Navy for 1860, wherein no less than eleven slavers are mentioned as prizes taken in 1859. The one most important to this history was the ship Erie, captured on August 8, 1860, off the Congo, by the sloop-of-war Mohican, Commander Sylvester W. Godon. She had eight hundred and ninety-seven slaves on board. She landed those that survived at Monrovia.
The number of slavers captured that year was most remarkable. At first glance one would say that the Buchanan administration was honestly striving to enforce the law, but the fact is, this flurry of activity was but a part of a scheme to enlarge the borders of American slave territory. Buchanan and his Secretary of the Navy, Isaac Toucey, deliberately told Congress that the administration was “active in its endeavors to suppress the African coast slave-trade,” when they were active only in an effort to annex Cuba to the United States. On the same page where Toucey boasts that his department was "active" (p. 9, report of the Secretary of the Navy, 1860), he says:
“Cuba is now the only mart in the world open to this trade. . . . If Cuba were to pass under the Constitution of the United States by annexation the trade would then be effectually suppressed.”
