Page:The Californian vol. 2.pdf/238

Rh 1803, the Louisiana territory west of the Mississippi River, extending indefinitely north-westward, and adding a new feature to our boundary, in which Great Britain was interested. Then followed the war of 1812-14, and the second treaty of peace, signed at Ghent, in the Netherlands, December 24, 1814, by Lord Gambier, Henry Gaulburn, and William Adams, on the part of Great Britain, and John Quincy Adams, James A. Bayard, Henry Clay, Jonathan Russell, and Albert Gallatin, in behalf of the United States, and ratified by the Senate in February, 1815.

The fourth article of the treaty of Ghent referred to the boundary question. It recited that, whereas certain stipulations had been agreed upon by the treaty of 1783, concerning the islands that were to belong to the United States, and whereas the several islands in the Bay of Passamaquoddy, which was part of the Bay of Fundy, and the Island of Menan in the Bay of Fundy, were claimed by the United States, as being within their boundaries, and also claimed by Great Britain, as within the limits of the Province of Nova Scotia, in order to decide the matter two Commissioners shall be appointed, whose decision shall be final and conclusive. In the event of the Commissioners disagreeing, they should make reports, jointly or separately, in detail, of all the evidences and their opinions, and the reports should be submitted to some friendly sovereign or State, who should be requested to decide upon the differences, when the decision should be taken as final.

The fifth article of the treaty of Ghent provided, in the same manner, for ascertaining that point in the highlands lying due north from the source of the St. Croix River, which, according to the treaty of 1783, was to form the north-west angle of Nova Scotia; and also for ascertaining the north-westernmost head of the Connecticut River; and for ascertaining that part of the boundary between the source of the St. Croix and the St. Lawrence Rivers. Commissioners were at the same time provided for, to settle the line through the lakes and rivers from the St. Lawrence to the Lake of the Woods.

The Commissioners appointed to decide upon the proprietorship of the islands in the Bay of Fundy met in New York November 24, 1817, and awarded three islands in the Bay of Passamaquoddy to the United States, leaving the great Menard Island to Great Britain, which award was accepted, and on the 18th of June, 1822, all the islands in the chain of lakes and rivers were apportioned satisfactorily; but that part of the boundary in doubt, between the St. Lawrence and St. Croix Rivers, remained unsettled, though the Commissioners had met a number of times in New York in 1821, and though nearly forty maps had been made by the surveyors. The two points still in doubt were the north-west angle of Nova Scotia and the north-westernmost head of the Connecticut River.

It is not to be supposed that there was any real difficulty about the actual location of these two points. The difficulty was a diplomatic and political one entirely, and, to carry his point, the British Commissioner, acting for the British Government, insisted upon employing in the survey the geocentric method of ascertaining latitude, by which a difference of two miles was made in the location of the forty-fifth parallel, on which an important portion of the boundary depended. On the other side, the United States Commissioner adhered to the ancient survey made in 1774, and to the treaty of 1783, which was drawn up according to a map published in 1775. The two miles gained by the new survey placed Rouse's Point, with the entrance to Lake Champlain and the fortress erected there by the United States, on the British side of the line, which was clearly not the intention of the treaty of 1783.

In the meantime, however, new complications had arisen. The United States had, by acquiring the Louisiana territory, given alarm to Great Britain, who had designs on the northwest coast of North America. Astor, by his effort to establish trade on the Columbia River, had given still further alarm. Great Britain was well aware that the United States had pretensions in that quarter, which they were at some difficulty to maintain, an account of the occupancy of the country by the Hudson's Bay Company, but which, nevertheless, they resolutely asserted on every occasion when the subject was brought forward. In order to secure, if not the whole, a portion at least, of the west coast of America, this British Company pushed their explorations westward, keeping almost an even pace with United States explorers as to time and extent of discoveries. All these movements entered into the boundary question.

Great Britain had taken the position with regard to our rights to the fisheries on the Atlantic Coast, secured to us by the treaty of 1783, that we had forfeited them by the war of 1812, and had expressly refused to renew or recognize them by the treaty of Ghent. But the United States maintained that they were revived by the restoration of peace, and were of the nature of transitory rights in a judicial sense, which, oddly enough, meant a permanent right in the ordinary definition of the term. This matter, requiring settlement, was finally adjusted by the Convention of the 20th of October, 18 1 8, which secured forever to the people