Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/230

218 legitimate mode of occupation, the right of which she not only assumed to herself, but was ready to allow to America. The failure of the settlements and their ultimate abandonment as a mode of American occupation were due to the accidents of war, not to the interference of diplomacy. The convention of 1818, of joint occupation, was the embodiment of no new principle, but simply the formal assent of both parties to a principle of occupation assumed by America in the Astoria settlements, and by Great Britain in those in the valley of the Columbia, and by each tacitly allowed to the other.

In 1821, however, three years after the convention of joint occupation, a movement was begun in the Congress of the United States toward an occupation of the territory in dispute, of a very different character, which, if it had actually been adopted as a measure enjoined upon the executive, and once been attempted to be carried out, would have met from Great Britain a very different response. In the house of representatives, December 10, 1821, on motion of Mr. Floyd, of Virginia, a committee was appointed to inquire into the expediency of occupying the Columbia River and the country adjacent thereto; and the committee had leave to report by bill or otherwise. Later in the same session this committee reported a bill providing for the occupation of the mouth of the Columbia. The occupation contemplated by this bill was to be, first of all, military occupation, or, as one of the advocates of the bill wished to make it by amendment, "an occupation by military force only, with some encouragement to settlers.' The view of the territorial rights of the United States in that region on which the bill was based was briefly and clearly put by another of its advocates: "The bill under consideration does not attempt a colonial settlement. The territory proposed to be occupied is already a part of the United States." The