Thirty Years' View (Vol. II of 2)

Well, there is no such line as 54° 40'; and that would seem to be enough to quiet the excitement which has been got up about it. But there is more to come. I set out with saying, that although this fifty-four forty was never established as a northern boundary for the United States, yet it was proposed to be established as a northern boundary, not for us, but for Great Britain – and that proposal was made to Great Britain by ourselves. This must sound like a strange statement in the ears of the fifty-four forties; but it is no more strange than true; and after stating the facts, I mean to prove them. The plan of the United States at that time was this: That each of the three powers (Great Britain, Russia, and the United States) having claims on the north-west coast of America, should divide the country between them, each taking a third. In this plan of partition, each was to receive a share of the continent from the sea to the Rocky Mountains, Russia taking the northern slice, the United States the southern, and Great Britain the centre, with fifty-four forty for her northern boundary, and forty-nine for her southern. The document from which I now read will say fifty-one; but that was the first offer – forty-nine was the real one, as I will hereafter show. This was our plan. The moderation of Russia defeated it. That power had no settlements on that part of the continent, and rejected the continental share which we offered her. She limited herself to the coasts and islands where she had settlements, and left Great Britain and the United States to share the continent between themselves. But before this was known, we had proposed to her fifty-four forty for the Russian southern boundary, and to Great Britain the same for her northern boundary. I say fifty-four forty; for, although the word in the proposition was fifty-five, yet it was on the principle which gave fifty-four forty – namely, running from the south end of Prince of Wales' Island, supposed to be in fifty-five, but found to have a point to it running down to fifty-four forty. We proposed this to Great Britain. She refused it, saying she would establish her northern boundary with Russia, who was on her north, and not with the United States, who was on her south. This seemed reasonable; and the United States then, and not until then, relinquished the business of pressing fifty-four forty upon Great Britain for her northern boundary. The proof is in the executive documents. Here it is – a despatch from Mr. Rush, our minister in London, to Mr. Adams, Secretary of State, dated December 19, 1823.

(The despatch read.)

Here is the offer, in the most explicit terms, in 1823, to make fifty-five, which was in fact fifty-four forty, the northern boundary of Great Britain; and here is her answer to that proposition. It is the next paragraph in the same despatch from Mr. Rush to Mr. Adams.

(The answer read.)

This was her answer, refusing to take, in 1823, as a northern boundary coming south for quantity, what is now prescribed to her, at the peril of war, for a southern boundary, with nothing north! – for, although the fact happens to be that Russia is not there, bounding us on the north, yet that makes no difference in the philosophy of our Fifty-four-Forties, who believe it to be so; and, on that belief, are ready to fight. Their notion is, that we go jam up to 54° 40', and the Russians come jam down to the same, leaving no place for the British lion to put down a paw, although that paw should be no bigger than the sole of the dove's foot which sought a resting-place from Noah's ark. This must seem a little strange to British statesmen, who do not grow so fast as to leave all knowledge behind them. They remember that Mr. Monroe and his cabinet – the President and cabinet who acquired the Spanish title under which we now propose to squeeze them out of the continent – actually offered them six degrees of latitude in that very place; and they will certainly want reasons for this so much compression now, where we offered them so much expansion then. These reasons cannot be given. There is no boundary at 54° 40'; and so far as we proposed to make it one, it was for the British and not for ourselves; and so ends this redoubtable line, up to which all true patriots were to march! and marching, fight! and fighting, die! if need be! singing all the while, with Horace —

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."

I come to the line of Utrecht, the existence of which is denied upon this floor by senators whose fate it seems to be to assert the existence of a line that is not, and to deny the existence of one that is. A clerk in the Department of State has compiled a volume of voyages and of treaties, and, undertaking to set the world right, has denied that commissioners ever met under the treaty of Utrecht, and fixed boundaries between the British northern and French Canadian possessions in North America. That denial has been produced and accredited on this floor by a senator in his place (Mr. Cass); and this production of a blundering book, with this senatorial endorsement of its blunder, lays me under the necessity of correcting a third error which the "fifty-four-forties" hug to their bosom, and the correction of which becomes necessary for the vindication of history, the establishment of a political right, and the protection of the Senate from the suspicion of ignorance. I affirm that the line was established; that the commissioners met and did their work; and that what they did has been acquiesced in by all the powers interested from the year 1713 down to the present time.

In the year 1805, being the second year after the acquisition of Louisiana, President Jefferson sent ministers to Madrid (Messrs. Monroe and Charles Pinckney) to adjust the southern and southwestern boundaries with her; and, in doing so, the principles which had governed the settlement of the northern boundary of the same province became a proper illustration of their ideas. They quoted these principles, and gave the line of Utrecht as the example; and this to Don Pedro Cevallos, one of the most accomplished statesmen of Europe. They say to him:

"It is believed that this principle has been admitted and acted on invariably since the discovery of America, in respect to their possessions there, by all the European powers. It is particularly illustrated by the stipulations of their most important treaties concerning those possessions and the practice under them, viz., the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and that of Paris in 1763. In conformity with the 10th article of the first-mentioned treaty, the boundary between Canada and Louisiana on the one side, and the Hudson Bay and Northwestern Companies on the other, was established by commissioners, by a line to commence at a cape or promontory on the ocean, in 58° 31' north latitude; to run thence, southwestwardly, to latitude 49° north from the equator; and along that line indefinitely westward. Since that time, no attempt has been made to extend the limits of Louisiana or Canada to the north of that line, or of those companies to the south of it, by purchase, conquest, or grants from the Indians."

This is what Messrs. Monroe and Charles Pinckney said to Don Pedro Cevallos – a minister who must be supposed to be as well acquainted with the treaties which settled the boundaries of the late Spanish province of Louisiana as we are with the treaties which settle the boundaries of the United States. The line of Utrecht, and in the very words which carry it from the Lake of the Woods to the Pacific Ocean, and which confine the British to the north, and the French and Spanish to the south of that line, are quoted to Mr. Cevallos as a fact which he and all the world knew. He received it as such; and thus Spanish authority comes in aid of British, French, and American, to vindicate our rights and the truth of history.

(The letter was read.)

Another contribution, which I have pleasure to acknowledge, is from a gentleman of Baltimore, formerly of the House of Representatives (Mr. Kennedy), who gives me an extract from the Journal of the British House of Commons, March 5th, 1714, directing a writ to be issued for electing a burgess in the place of Frederick Herne, Esq., who, since his election, hath accepted, as the Journal says, the office of one of his Majesty's commissioners for treating with commissioners on the part of France for settling the trade between Great Britain and France. The same entry occurs at the same time with respect to James Murray, Esq., and Sir Joseph Martyn. The tenth article of the treaty of Utrecht applies to limits in North America, the eleventh and fifteenth to commerce; and these commissioners were appointed under some or all of these articles. Others might have been appointed by the king, and not mentioned in the journals, as not being members of Parliament whose vacated seats were to be filled. All three of the articles of the treaty were equally obligatory for the appointment of commissioners; and here is proof that three were appointed under the commercial articles.

One more piece of testimony, and I have done. And, first, a little statement to introduce it. We all know that in one of the debates which took place in the British House of Commons on the Ashburton treaty, and after that treaty was ratified and past recall, mention was made of a certain map called the King's map, which had belonged to the late King (George III.), and hung in his library during his lifetime, and afterwards in the Foreign Office, from which said office the said map silently disappeared about the time of the Ashburton treaty, and which certainly was not before our Senate at the time of the ratification of that treaty. Well, the member who mentioned it in Parliament said there was a strong red line upon it, about the tenth of an inch wide, running all along where the Americans said the true boundary was, with these words written along it in four places in King George's handwriting: "This is Oswald's line;" meaning, it is the line of the treaty of peace negotiated by Mr. Oswald on the British side, and therefore called Oswald's line.

Now, what I have to say is this: That whenever this royal map shall emerge from its retreat and resume its place in the Foreign Office, on it will be found another strong red line about the tenth of an inch wide, in another place, with these words written on it: Boundaries between the British and French possessions in America "as fixed by the treaty of Utrecht." To complete this last and crowning piece of testimony, I have to add that the evidence of it is in the Department of State, as is nearly the whole of the evidence which I have used in crushing this pie-poudre insurrection – "this puddle-lane rebellion" – against the truth and majesty of history, which, beginning with a clerk in the Department of State, spread to all the organs, big and little; then reached the Senate of the United States, held divided empire in this chamber for four months, and now dies the death of the ridiculous.9

We must now introduce the gentlemen of 54-40 to Frazer's River, an acquaintance which they will be obliged to make before they arrive at their inexorable line; for it lies in their course, and must be crossed – both itself and the British province of New Caledonia, which it waters. This, then, is the introduction to that inevitable acquaintance, hitherto ignored. It is a river of about a thousand miles in length (following its windings), rising in the Rocky Mountains, opposite the head of the Unjigah, or Peace River, which flows into the Frozen Ocean in latitude about 70. The course of this river is nearly north and south, rising in latitude 55, flowing south to near latitude 49, and along that parallel, and just north of it, to the Gulf of Georgia, into which it falls behind Vancouver's Island. The upper part of this river is good for navigation; the lower half, plunging through volcanic chasms in mountains of rock, is wholly unnavigable for any species of craft. This river was discovered by Sir Alexander Mackenzie in 1793, was settled by the Northwest Company in 1806, and soon covered by their establishments from head to mouth. No American or Spaniard had ever left a track upon this river or its valley. Our claim to it, as far as I can see, rested wholly upon the treaty with Spain of 1819; and her claim rested wholly upon those discoveries among the islands, the value of which, as conferring claims upon the continent, it has been my province to show in our negotiations with Russia in 1824. At the time that we acquired this Spanish claim to Frazer's River, it had already been discovered twenty-six years by the British; had been settled by them for twelve years; was known by a British name; and no Spaniard had ever made a track on its banks. New Caledonia, or Western Caledonia, was the name which it then bore; and it so happens that an American citizen, a native of Vermont, respectably known to the senators now present from that State, and who had spent twenty years of his life in the hyperborean regions of Northwest America, in publishing an account of his travels and sojournings in that quarter, actually published a description of this New Caledonia, as a British province, at the very moment that we were getting it from Spain, and without the least suspicion that it belonged to Spain! I speak of Mr. David Harmon, whose Journal of Nineteen Years' Residence between latitudes 47 and 58 in Northwestern America, was published at Andover, in his native State, in the year 1820, the precise year after we had purchased this New Caledonia from the Spaniards. I read, not from the volume itself, which is not in the library of Congress, but from the London Quarterly Review January No., 1822, as reprinted in Boston; article, Western Caledonia.

(The extract.)

This is the account given by Mr. Harmon of New Caledonia, and given of it by him at the exact moment that we were purchasing the Spanish title to it! Of this Spanish title, of which the Spaniards never heard, the narrator seems to have been as profoundly ignorant as the Spaniards were themselves; and made his description of New Caledonia as of a British possession, without any more reference to an adverse title than if he had been speaking of Canada. So much for the written description: now let us look at the map, and see how it stands there. Here is a map – a 54° 40' map – which will show us the features of the country, and the names of the settlements upon it. Here is Frazer's River, running from 55° to 49° and here is a line of British posts upon it, from Fort McLeod, at its head, to Fort Langley, at its mouth, and from Thompson's Fork, on one side, to Stuart's Fork on the other. And here are clusters of British names, imposed by the British, visible every where – Forts George, St. James, Simpson, Thompson, Frazer, McLeod, Langley, and others: rivers and lakes with the same names, and others: and here is Deserter's Creek, so named by Mackenzie, because his guide deserted him there in July, 1793; and here is an Indian village which he named Friendly, because the people were the most friendly to strangers that he had ever seen; and here another called Rascals' village, so named by Mackenzie fifty-three years ago, because its inhabitants were the most rascally Indians he had ever seen; and here is the representation of that famous boundary line 54° 40', which is supposed to be the exact boundary of American territorial rights in that quarter, and which happens to include the whole of New Caledonia, except McLeod's fort, and the whole of Stuart's lake, and a spring, which is left to the British, while we take the branch which flows from it. This line takes all in – river, lakes, forts, villages. See how it goes! Starting at the sea, it gives us, by a quarter of an inch on the map, Fort Simpson, so named after the British Governor Simpson, and founded by the Hudson Bay Company. Upon what principle we take this British fort I know not – except it be on the assumption that our sacred right and title being adjusted to a minute, by the aid of these 40 minutes, so appositely determined by the Emperor Paul's charter to a fur company in 1799, to be on this straight line, the bad example of even a slight deviation from it at the start should not be allowed even to spare a British fort away up at Point McIntyre, in Chatham Sound. On this principle we can understand the inclusion, by a quarter of an inch on the map, of this remote and isolated British post. The cutting in two of Stuart's lake, which the line does as it runs, is quite intelligible: it must be on the principle stated in one of the fifty-four-forty papers, that Great Britain should not have one drop of our water; therefore we divide the lake, each taking their own share of its drops. The fate of the two forts, McLeod and St. James, so near each other and so far off from us, united all their lives, and now so unexpectedly divided from each other by this line, is less comprehensible; and I cannot account for the difference of their fates, unless it is upon the law of the day of judgment, when, of two men in the field, one shall be taken and the other left, and no man be able to tell the reason why. All the rest of the inclusions of British establishments which the line makes, from head to mouth of Frazer's River, are intelligible enough: they turn upon the principle of all or none! – upon the principle that every acre and every inch, every grain of sand, drop of water, and blade of grass in all Oregon, up to fifty-four forty, is ours! and have it we will.

This is the country which geography and history five-and-twenty years ago called New Caledonia, and treated as a British possession; and it is the country which an organized party among ourselves of the present day call "the whole of Oregon or none," and every inch of which they say belongs to us. Well, let us proceed a little further with the documents of 1823, and see what the men of that day – President Monroe and his cabinet – the men who made the treaty with Spain by which we became the masters of this large domain: let us proceed a little further, and see what they thought of our title up to fifty-four forty. I read from the same document of 1823:

Mr. Adams to Mr. Middleton, July, 22, 1823.

"The right of the United States, from the forty-second to the forty-ninth parallel of latitude on the Pacific Ocean we consider as unquestionable, being founded, first, on the acquisition by the treaty of 22d February, 1819, of all the rights of Spain; second, by the discovery of the Columbia River, first from the sea at its mouth, and then by land, by Lewis and Clarke; and, third, by the settlement at its mouth in 1811. This territory is to the United States of an importance which no possession in North America can be of to any European nation, not only as it is but the continuity of their possessions from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, but as it offers their inhabitants the means of establishing hereafter water communications from the one to the other."

From 42° to 49° is here laid down by Mr. Monroe and his cabinet as the extent of our unquestionable title, and on these boundaries they were ready to settle the question. Five other despatches the same year from Mr. Adams to Mr. Rush, our minister in London, offer the same thing. They all claim the valley of the Columbia River, and nothing more. They claim the land drained by its waters, and no more; but as the Columbia had a northern prong, drawing water just under the mountains from as far north as 51° – yes! 51 – not 54-40, they offered to cut off the head of that prong, and take the line of 49, which included all that was worth having of the waters of the Columbia, and left out, but barely left out, Frazer's River – coming within three miles of it at its mouth.

On Friday, Mr. President, I read one passage from the documents of 1823, to let you see that fifty-four forty (for that is the true reading of fifty-five) had been offered to Great Britain for her northern boundary: to-day I read you six PASSAGES from the same documents, to show the same thing. And let me remark once more – the remark will bear eternal repetition – these offers were made by the men who had acquired the Spanish title to Oregon! and who must be presumed to know as much about it as those whose acquaintance with Oregon dates from the epoch of the Baltimore convention – whose love for it dates from the era of its promulgation as a party watchword – whose knowledge of it extends to the luminous pages of Mr. Greenhow's horn-book!

Six times Mr. Monroe and his cabinet renounced Frazer's River and its valley, and left it to the British! They did so on the intelligible principle that the British had discovered it, and settled it, and were in the actual possession of it when we got the Spanish claim; which claim Spain never made! Upon this principle, New Caledonia was left to the British in 1823. Upon what principle is it claimed now?

This is what Mr. Monroe and his cabinet thought of our title to the whole of Oregon or none, in the year 1823. They took neither branch of this proposition. They did not go for all or none, but for some! They took some, and left some; and they divided by a line right in itself, and convenient in itself, and mutually suitable to each party. That President and his cabinet carry their "unquestionable right" to Oregon as far as 49°, and no further. This is exactly what was done six years before. Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Rush offered the same line, as being a continuation of the line of Utrecht (describing it by that name in their despatch of October 20th, 1818), and as covering the valley of the Columbia River, to which they alleged our title to be indisputable. Mr. Jefferson had offered the same line in 1807. All these offers leave Frazer's River and its valley to the British, because they discovered and settled it. All these offers hold on to the Columbia River and its valley, because we discovered and settled it; and all these offers let the principle of contiguity or continuity work equally on the British as on the American side of the line of Utrecht.

This is what the statesmen did who made the acquisition of the Spanish claim to Oregon in 1819. In four years afterwards they had freely offered all north of 49 to Great Britain; and no one ever thought of arraigning them for it. Most of these statesmen have gone through fiery trials since, and been fiercely assailed on all the deeds of their lives; but I never heard of one of them being called to account, much less lose an election, for the part he acted in offering 49 to Great Britain in 1823, or at any other time. For my part, I thought they were right then, and I think so now; I was senator then, as I am now. I thought with them that New Caledonia belonged to the British; and thinking so still, and acting upon the first half of the great maxim – Ask nothing but what is right – I shall not ask them for it, much less fight them for it now.

CHAPTER CLIX.

OREGON JOINT OCCUPATION: NOTICE AUTHORIZED FOR TERMINATING IT: BRITISH GOVERNMENT OFFERS THE LINE OF 49: QUANDARY OF THE ADMINISTRATION: DEVICE: SENATE CONSULTED: TREATY MADE AND RATIFIED

The abrogation of the article in the conventions of 1818 and 1828, for the joint occupation of the Columbia, was a measure right in itself, indispensable in the actual condition of the territory – colonies from two nations planting themselves upon it together – and necessary to stimulate the conclusion of the treaty which was to separate the possessions of the two countries. Every consideration required the notice to be given, and Congress finally voted it; but not without a struggle in each House, longer and more determined than the disparity of the vote would indicate. In the House of Representatives, the vote in its favor was 154 – headed by Mr. John Quincy Adams: the nays were 54. The resolution as adopted by the House, then went to the Senate for its concurrence, where, on the motion of Mr. Reverdy Johnson, of Maryland, it underwent a very material alteration in form, without impairing its effect, adopting a preamble containing the motives for the notice, and of which the leading were to show that amicable settlement of the title by negotiation was an object in view, and intended to be promoted by a separation of interests between the parties. Thus amended, the resolution was passed by a good majority – 40 to 14. The yeas and nays were:

Messrs. Archer, Ashley, Atherton, Bagby, Barrow, Benton, Berrien, Calhoun, Cameron, Chalmers, John M. Clayton, Corwin, Crittenden, Davis, Dayton, Dix, Greene, Haywood, Houston, Huntington, Jarnagin, Johnson of Maryland, Johnson of Louisiana, Lewis, McDuffie, Mangum, Miller, Morehead, Niles, Pearce, Pennybacker, Phelps, Rusk, Sevier, Simmons, Speight, Turney, Upham, Webster, Woodbridge.