USA > Mississippi > The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources > Part 19
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While thus in two important ways the relation of the West to the new Republic had been settled on its own soil, we need now to turn to a consideration of the diplomatie foil and fence at Paris, which were ended on November 30, 1782, in a provi- sional treaty of peace.
This diplomatie struggle had resulted in a distinct American triumph, owing in large measure to the prevision and daunt- less convictions of Jay, and to a natural revulsion in the minds of the other American commissioners against both open and sinister efforts of Vergennes, - a revulsion reluctantly reached, however, by Franklin. John Adams was confident that the western population could not be appeased if their expectations were abridged, and he had proved himself a courageous ally of Jay, and had insisted that with firmness and delicacy - the latter not precisely his own trait - the commissioners could get all for which they contended. Franklin was never any- thing if not politie. Shelburne's opinion of him was that " he wanted to do everything by cunning, which was the bottom of his character," and most Englishmen have taken that view of him ever since. He was certainly never more astute - which may be a more pleasing word - than in now yielding to Adams and Jay : and he was never more successfully judicious than in disarming the resentment of Vergennes, when that minister dis- covered how he had been foiled. So peace and independence
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PEACE SECURED.
were triumphantly won, and what the West most needed for its future development was gained.
The new boundaries had been settled on lines that ultimately startled even those who had conceded them, and constituted one of the grounds for the later assaults by Fox and his adherents. Of the eight hundred thousand square miles of territory with which the young Republic entered upon her career, one half of it, of which France and Spain would have deprived her, lay west of the Alleghanies. This broad extension was but the begin- ning of an ultimate domain, which is measured to-day by three and a half millions of square miles. The courts in the United States have always held that the territory secured through this treaty was not a concession of conquered lands. It was rather the result of a rightful partition of the British empire upon lines which had bounded the American colonies. Livingston, in letters to Franklin in January, 1782, had enforced this view : "The States," he says, " have considered their authority to grant lands to the westward coextensive with the right of Great Britain." This extension to the Mississippi, he again says, " is founded on justice; and our claims are at least such as the events of the war [referring to Clark's successes] give us a right to insist upon," while the settlements in the West "render a relinquishment of the claim highly unpolitic and unjust."
To secure these bounds, the American commissioners had acted almost defiantly towards France. Lee understood their spirit when he asked in Congress : "Shall America submit the destiny of the west to France, while Spain, her ally, stands ready to grasp it ?" Hamilton read Congress a lesson, when he said that it was not France who could have extorted from us " humiliating or injurious concessions as the price of her assist- ance," but Congress, who placed France in a condition to do it, by imposing on the commissioners the obligation of deferring to Vergennes. This degradation had been felt in Congress, and to a demand to recede from it, the friends of those instructions had apologized for the injunctions by declaring them only for- mal ; but no one then knew that France had intrigued to secure their enactment as a means to save the western country to Spain. It was fortunate that under Jay's lead the commission- ers disregarded those instructions, and Adams certainly did not construe them as imposing the necessity of following the advice of Vergennes.
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PEACE, 1782.
When Livingston, after the treaty was signed, called the conduct of the commissioners in question for making the treaty without the privity of Vergennes, Jay fittingly replied that France could have no complaint, since the treaty had nothing in contravention of the treaty of 1778; that it could not be bind- ing till France had concluded a general treaty ; and that the instructions presupposed France would act in the interest of America, while it was proved she was planning for Spain's and her own advantage. This explanation of Jay gave the tone to the advocates of the commissioners in Congress. Richard IIenry Lee said that France deprived herself of the right of privity when she began to plot against her American ally. Rutledge and Arthur Lee contended that the public good re- quired the action of the commissioners.
"The English," said Vergennes, when it was all over, "had bought rather than made a peace." While all Europe was wondering at the British concessions, it is not difficult to under- stand the British motive. The party of peace, which Grenville Sharp represented, had got the upper hand. The stubbornness of King George and his advisers had given way to those indu- bitable principles which often wreck the present to settle the future. It had become necessary to decide whether Canada should be environed with a kindred people, or with the race of Bourbon aliens.
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As early as January, 1782, Livingston, in the uncertainty of the future, had intimated to Franklin that a nentral Indian territory beyond the mountains would be preferable to a direct British contact in that direction. In this the American foreign secretary was not probably fully aware of the purposes of France and Spain. In June, D'Aranda gave to Jay a copy of Mitch- ell's map, on which he had marked what he proposed to make, if he could, the western limits of the American States. It showed a line running north on the back of Georgia to the mouth of the Kanawha, and so to Lake Erie. It afforded a recognition of the grants which had been later made in the ter-
NOTE. - The opposite section of a Carte générale des Treize Etats Unis et. Indépendants de l'Amérique Septentrionale d'après M. Bonne, Ingénieur Hydrographe de la Marine de France, 1782, shows the French view of the limits of the United States, to be allowed by the treaty, - the line running south from "Sandoské fort " on Lake Erie. The dotted line at the top of the map extends to Sandusky on Lake Erie.
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ritory restricted by the proclamation of 1763. All this was as far as the Bourbon cabinets were inclined to go. To this was opposed the American argument that the very prohibitions under that proclamation were an acknowledgment of the States' inherent charter rights, which that instrument had only tempo- rarily assailed, as Livingston had rehearsed to Franklin.
This line drawn on Mitchell's map was the first clear indica- tion of what Spain was striving for. D'Aranda coupled his graphic argument with claiming that the Spanish capture of the Illinois fort had pushed their rights eastward till they reached the territory belonging to the Indians. Jay hardly needed the promptings of recent instructions from Livingston to deny the Spanish conquest and to maintain the American rights.
Rayneval now put into Jay's hands a paper in which he tried to show that after 1763 England had never considered the western country a part of her " established " colonies, and that Spain never acquired the territory above the Natchez. The country between the Spanish possessions and the Alleghanies was, as he claimed, the inheritance of the natives, and to secure them in their rights he proposed a tortuous line, running north from the Gulf to the mouth of the Cumberland, on the east of which the Indians should be under the protection of the Americans, and on the west the Spanish should have a similar supervision, with an exclusive right to the navigation of the Mississippi. In September, Jay acquainted Vergennes that it was his determination to abate nothing of the Mississippi claim. It was a sign to the French minister that he had both alertness and firmness to deal with in the American commissioners.
De Grasse, after being captured by the British fleet in the West Indies, had been taken to England, and, passing on parole from London to Paris, he is thought to have carried an intimation from the English cabinet which induced Vergennes to send Rayneval to the English capital. Oswald believed that Rayneval's object was to bring Shelburne to allow that both banks of the Mississippi should go to Spain. If he could have accomplished this, Vergennes, as Rayneval intimated in a paper which he gave to Jay, was prepared to support England at the final settlement in a demand for the limits of the Quebec Act. Rayneval had never agreed with Jay's views, and had thought
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VERGENNES AND SHELBURNE.
any concession made by the American commissioner too small. In pressing upon Shelburne the necessity of hemming the Americans in on the west, he revealed for the first time to the English cabinet what was really the purpose of France and Spain, and opened the English mind to what North had warmly contended for, - the integrity of the bounds of 1774 in the Ohio valley, both as a justice to their Indian allies, and as preserving the forts which they had erected north of the Ohio. It brought back the old proposition of Vergennes, made two or three years before, of closing the war by dividing the western country between England and France.
Vergennes's present purpose was patent. He wished to weaken the United States, and he desired to have England acknowledge that the bounds of Canada ran to the Ohio, so that if ever a turn in fortune rendered it possible, France could recover by treaty her possessions in the St. Lawrence valley. Just what Rayneval's purpose was in this English mission has been a subject of controversy. Diplomatic denials in the mouth of such a man count for little. If we take his ostensible instructions as evidence, they contravene the charac- ter of both Vergennes and his creature. It is necessary always to remember that Vergennes never had any purpose but to aggrandize France.
Shelburne was clearly suspicious. He saw that to release the Americans from the French toils, and from any evil to Britain resulting therefrom, was to give the new nation an extent of territory which would conduce to its dignity and buttress its independence against Bourbon intrigue.
Oswald, the English agent, in talking with Franklin, signifi- cantly hinted at the recent Russian discoveries "on the back of North America" as affording a possible base for a friendly power to move against Spain, if that country drove both Eng- land and the United States to extremities. "This appeared a little visionary at present," said Franklin, " but I did not dis- pute it."
So the Spanish and French Bourbons were thwarted in reality by the adhesion of England to her old colonial charters, and by her purpose to make them an inheritance for her emancipated colonies. The conquest of the northwest by Clark told in the final result rather more against the pretensions of Spain than
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PEACE, 1782.
against those of England. Clark himself, in March, 1780, had suspected that Spain would gladly have had the British capture all posts east of the Mississippi, so that they might be retaken by her troops, to establish there a claim which would serve to help her to their possession at the peace.
Congress had indeed formulated its right to the trans-Alle-
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ghany country on these ancient charters, and it had not recog- nized that there was in the proclamation of 1763 any abatement of those rights. Neither in the negotiations at Paris, nor in the planning for a public domain, had this profession been lost sight of.
Of the territory which the treaty had saved to the Ameri- cans, Jefferson said at the time in his Notes on Virginia : " The country watered by the Mississippi and its eastern branches
NOTE. - The opposite map is from " A Plan of Captain Carver's Travels in 1766 and 1767," in his Travels, London, 1781. It shows the relation of White Bear Lake (touching 47º), the supposed source of the Mississippi, to the Lake of the Woods.
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216
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constitutes five eighths of the United States, two of which five eighths are occupied by the Ohio and its waters ; the residuary streams which run into the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic, and the St. Lawrence make the remaining three eighths."
Under her treaties with France and Spain, England claimed a right to use the Mississippi from its source to the sea, and the new treaty following an offer which Jay had made through Vaughan, when he sent him to England to counteract the plots of Rayneval, confirmed to the United States an equal share with England in that navigation, and Shelburne, at the time in ignorance of the attendant geography, imagined that Brit- ish manufactures were by this privilege likely to find a new market. The denial of this British right to the river by Spain led, as we shall see, to complications which gave some romantic interest in the near future to the history of the western settle- ments. England's claim to that right rested now, curiously enough, on the supposition that the upper reaches of the Great River were available for shipment or travel from Canadian territory, and when the source of the Mississippi was found to lie wholly within the American domain, and when the purchase of Louisiana in 1803 had secured both banks of the Mississippi to the United States, England abandoned the right, and made no reference to it in the treaty of 1814.
The concession of territory which the treaty made to the United States in the extreme northwest was everywhere a sur- prise. Luzerne wrote to Vergennes : "The Americans, in push- ing their possessions as far as the Lake of the Woods, are preparing for their remote posterity a communication with the Pacific." The prophecy has been fulfilled.
A discontent, much like that of France, was at once mani- fested in Canada at the line which the treaty had given the United States on the north. There was a widespread feeling among the Americans that England would never consent to dividing the Quebec of 1774. General Irvine, when in com- mand at Fort Pitt, had felt confident of this. Haldimand had long struggled to make the Quebec Bill effective. Now when he saw that his efforts had not only failed on the Ohio, but that farther east the Americans had gained Niagara and Oswego, he felt a sense of shame in the necessity which it involved of
217
THE TORIES.
removing the Iroquois, the British allies, to the other side of Lake Ontario. This necessity made Sir John Johnson call the treaty an " infamous " one.
The surging of the war had not made the fate of the Ohio country certain, notwithstanding the brilliant exploits of Clark. The negotiations at Paris had accordingly lingered, with many counter-plots, as we have seen, over the destiny of that region. Franklin at one time had feared that England was trying to detach France from the American alliance by offering to restore Canada to her, and but for Rodney's defeat of De Grasse (April, 1782), there might have been some chance of it. The English, on the other hand, had had their fits of distrust for fear that France might prevent the United States coming to an independent negotiation, when the Ohio country would have been the consideration in other diplomatic bargains. That Eng- land had a lingering hope in some way to secure that country as a refuge for the loyalists is evident. " We did not want such neighbors," said Franklin, who had been too much ex- asperated against the Tories soberly to estimate what a loss the country was to suffer by their expulsion. Franklin indeed had suggested to Oswald that these political outlaws should even be denied a home in Canada, and that the American juris- diction ought to extend to the Arctic circle and so accomplish their exclusion. He added, with a mock graciousness, that per- haps some of the Canadian waste lands could be sold to indem- mify the royalists for the confiscation of their estates. This was an intimation that he very soon regretted he had given. He confessed, however, that there might be some Americans who felt that Canada in British hands would be the best guar- antee of the American Union.
It has been claimed by Dr. Wharton, in his International Law Digest (iii. 913), that if Franklin had not been hampered by his fellow negotiators, he would probably have secured Canada to the United States, but there is little ground for such a belief. He could have had as little hope of it, when the test came, as Vergennes had of restoring the ancient reign of France within its borders. Grenville, in a letter to Fox, stated the question squarely when he said that England would naturally see little reason to give away a fourteenth province, after she had lost thirteen.
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PEACE, 1782.
The acquisition of the country between the Ohio and the lakes, the joint control of most of the midland seas and the en- tire jurisdiction over others, was of itself a prosperous stroke. It carried a sufficient success, even though England did not concede the navigation of the lower St. Lawrence, which she in fact denied down to the conclusion of the reciprocity treaty in 1854.
There had been, during the closing months of the negotia- tions, more than one proposition as to these northern bounds submitted to the English ministry.
Rayneval, as we have shown, had been content to leave the question to English diplomacy, never once questioning that she would stubbornly stand by the Quebec Bill, and Vergennes, when the final negotiations were approaching, had written to Luzerne that the Americans had no claim whatever to carve away any part of the Quebec of 1774. Oswald, however, had felt the pressure of Franklin, and he had pointedly reported to Townshend that to reduce Quebec to the limits which it had under the proclamation of 1763 was " necessary and indispen- sable " to a peace. Accordingly, Townshend, on September 1, instructed the British agent to consent " to a confinement of the boundaries of Canada, at least, to what they were before the act of Parliament of 1774, if not to a still more contracted state on an ancient footing." This was practically an acceptance of the Nipissing line of 1763. Jay met the occasion within a short time, and on October 5 put into Oswald's hands some articles which Franklin had approved, and which embraced this Nipissing line, which turned from the St. Lawrence at 45° north latitude, and ran straight to Lake Nipissing, and thence to the source of the Mississippi. Three days later, Oswald forwarded the draft to London for his Majesty's consideration.
The line did not, as Franklin had anticipated, prove satis- factory, and Strachey, one of the under-secretaries, was sent to Paris to strengthen Oswald's hands, bearing a letter to him dated October 23. There had intervened some military snc- cesses for the British arms, and the ministry felt more encour- aged in their ability to press a recognition by the United States of the loyalists' claims to the Ohio country. Accordingly, Strachey was expected either to secure this, or, as an alterna- tive, to push the northeastern boundary from the St. Croix
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THE BOUNDARIES.
westward to the Penobscot. But it was too late, and the Amer- ican commissioners were as firm as ever.
In November, Strachey sent to the foreign secretary a new draft of a treaty, accompanied by a map which showed Os- wald's line, and two others, now submitted by the Americans, who were prepared to accept either one of them. One of these lines followed the 45th parallel due west to the Mississippi, thereby accepting the peninsula between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron in lieu of what now constitutes the upper parts of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The other proposition was a line starting from where the 45th parallel touched the St. Lawrence, and following the mid-channel of river and lakes westward and beyond Lake Superior. This line took the re- verse in the exchange of peninsular territories. Strachey, in his letter accompanying the draft, recommended that certain " loose " expressions in it should be " tightened " in the en- grossment of it in London, and premised that the American commissioners were "the greatest quibblers " he had ever known. They had been quibbling to some effect.
The foreign secretary, on November 19, at the instance of the Duke of Richmond, adopted the mid-lake line, and urged the signing of the treaty before the assembling of Parliament. Eleven days later it was signed, and in sending it the same day to London, Strachey wrote : "God forbid, if I should ever have a hand in another peace !" John Adams said : "The peace depended absolutely upon the critical moment when it was signed, and haste was inevitable."
On December 10, Strachey, who had in the mean while gone to London, wrote back to Oswald that he had found " Mr. Townshend and Lord Shelburne perfectly satisfied." The sat- isfaction did not prove, however, sufficient to insure quiet.
The American commissioners might well congratulate Liv- ingston that the bounds which they had secured showed little to complain of and not much to desire. But in England upon second thought, and in Canada at once, there was little of such complacency, because of the weighty loss which befell the mer- cantile interests. The trade of Canada was not very great, but . it was its all. Shelburne congratulated himself that while Canada afforded only £50,000 annual revenue, he had put an
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PEACE, 1782.
end to the war which had cost £800,000 a year. The treaty's partition of the valley of the Great Lakes had, moreover, dealt a blow to Canada in throwing more than half of the west- ern trade in skins -reckoned at £180,000 - into the con- trol of the Americans. It was estimated that not far from four thousand Indians of the watershed of the upper lakes were accustomed to gather for trade at Mackinac, which was also by the treaty brought within the American bounds. Haldi- mand, by dispatching Calvé to them, lost no time in trying by seductive speeches to keep these tribesmen faithful to British interests. The North West Company of Montreal stood ready to profit by such opportunities as long as the surrender to the Americans of the western posts could be delayed. Through this postponement the company was enabled for some years to control the trade of the more distant west through stations at La Baye and Prairie du Chien.
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