The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources, Part 20

Author: Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897. cn
Publication date: 1897
Publisher: Boston ; New York : Houghton, Mifflin and Co.
Number of Pages: 622


USA > Mississippi > The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources > Part 20


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The traffic which the Canadians had long conducted through- out the region northwest of Lake Superior was now likewise threatened by the Grand Portage becoming, under the treaty, the American boundary. This passage was the water-way - called by a misconception in the treaty Long Lake -which with some interruptions connected Lake Superior with the Lake of the Woods. The trade passing along this communication had amounted to about £50,000 annually, and there were nearly three hundred men yearly following it at the end of a course of eighteen hundred miles from Montreal. Haldimand, prompted by the solicitude of the Canadian traders, had advised them not at present to throw any doubt on the divisionary line which was to be tracked along these linked and unlinked waters. To question it would, he feared, lead to a joint survey, and that to a disclosure to the Americans of the channels of trade in that direction. Meanwhile the Canadians had begun to search for another portage wholly on British ground, and one Frobisher had speedily found it by the way of Lake Nepigon.


This passage of the Grand Portage was supposed by the commissioners in Paris to be the true source of the St. Lawrence waters by a water-way of a steady ineline, but broken by carry- ing-places. It was really known by those more familiar with the country to be cut by a divide which turned the streams on one hand to Lake Superior and on the other to the Lake of the


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THE GRAND PORTAGE.


Woods. Modern exploration, indeed, as the line is run, has shown several minor divides in addition. It is said that the suggestion of making this broken current the line of the treaty came from one Peter Pond, a native of Boston, who had been connected with the North West Company, and whose represen- tations were accepted by the English commissioners. This was easier for them, because Pond's statements seemed to be in accordance with Mitchell's map of 1755, the principal one used by the negotiators. In this map, as in all the contempo- rary maps, Lake Superior is shown to be well filled with islands ; and the mid-water line, athwart the lake, was defined as passing the northern end of Phillipeaux Island on its way to the Grand Portage. This was in accordance with a belief that the north end lay nearly opposite the entrance of the water-way. The fact is, that it is much more nearly on a line with the south end, and by this misconception the international line on modern maps makes an unexpected turn in order to throw that island on the American side.


It was at that time also supposed that a line passing from Lake Superior up this water-way and crossing the Lake of the Woods would at the northwest angle of that lake strike the 49° of latitude, and if then continued due west on that parallel, that it would strike the Mississippi somewhere in its upper parts. Mitchell had not exactly figured this condition in his map, but it could be inferred from what he did show.


In 1785, this same vagrant Bostonian Pond made, as we shall see, a plot of this region, in which he was the first to emphasize the fact that the Mississippi really rose far south of the 49° of latitude, and so cut off Englishmen from the chance of navigat- ing that river. This development actually left a space of about one hundred miles between the springs of the Great River and the Lake of the Woods. In this interval there was, of course, by the treaty no definition of bounds, -a difficulty solved after Louisiana was acquired by dropping the line due south from the lake till it reached the 49th parallel, along which the boundary was then carried west to the mountains.


The proclamation of 1763 was the cause of other difficul- ties on the southern border. Florida at the general peace was


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PEACE, 1782.


restored to Spain, England having held it since 1763. It was the sole success of the miserable intrigue in which Spain had been engaged, and if the later admission of Lord Lansdowne (Shelburne) is to be believed, England yielded it now in the hopes that it would embroil the United States and Spain in the future. Whether yielded for that purpose or not, it certainly became a bone of contention, and D'Aranda is said to have warned his sovereign that it would.


Its retention by England would, under the secret clause of the new treaty which had been agreed upon, have stopped the bounds of the Republic at the latitude of the mouth of the Yazoo, 32º 28', instead of carrying them farther south to 31°, - another result of the proclamation of 1763, and equally the source of later troubles with Spain. Notwithstanding such a diminution of the Republic's area, Jay had hoped the negotiation would have left west Florida in the hands of England, and in the usual ignorance of the geography of the source of the Missis- sippi, he urged it upon the English commissioners as affording near the mouth of that river a complement of the commercial rights which they acquired at the source.


The fact that England in the proclamation of 1763 had an- nexed this debatable territory - now containing perhaps ten thousand inhabitants - to west Florida, as well as Galvez's successes in capturing the English posts within it, was the ground of the claim which Spain urged for possessing to the Yazoo. If Congress, in 1779, had yielded to the importunities of Patrick Henry, and had succeeded in doing what Galvez later did, the secret clause of 1782 might have proved effective. As it was, the success of Galvez had been at the time grateful to Congress, and when, at the close of the war, Oliver Pollock presented to that body a portrait of his friend, the Spanish gov- ernor, it was accepted " in consideration of his early and jealous friendship, frequently manifested in behalf of these States."


If the United States, in the conclusions which had been reached, had any occasion for gratitude, it was because in the perilous issue England for a brief interval showed something of that " sweet reconciliation " which Hartley and Franklin had talked so much about, for that temporary blandness came, as John Adams said, at the right moment to serve America's terri-


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VERGENNES.


torial ambition. Certainly, the United States had no ground for gratitude to France or Spain, neither of which had any other intention than to aggrandize the other, humiliate England, and cripple America. Fortunately, to secure these results the inde- pendence of the United States was necessary, and this was the only proposition to which Vergennes was constant. There was indeed no reason to expect anything else of the Bourbon polit- ical twins. " The Americans know too much of politics," said Talleyrand, "to believe in the virtue called gratitude between nations. They know that disinterested services are alone enti- tled to that pure sentiment, and that there are no such services between States." This was the key to the diplomacy of that age, and times have not much changed.


Sparks in his time, and Wharton of late years, trusting too implicitly in the public and even confidential professions of Ver- gennes and Rayneval, - two so expert masters of duplicity that they needed constantly to struggle to prevent duplicity becom- ing masters of them, - have believed that the suspicions of Jay and Adams as to the purposes of France were without founda- tion, and that Franklin had the clearest conception of the situa- tion ; but the publications of Circourt, Fitzmaurice, Doniol, and Stevens have indicated that the insight and prevision of Jay was true, when, a fortnight before the treaty was signed, he wrote to Livingston as follows : "This court is interested in separating us from Great Britain, and on that point we may, I believe, depend upon them ; but it is not their interest that we should become a great and formidable people, and therefore they will not help us to become so. It is their interest to keep some point or other in contest between us and Britain to the end of the war, to prevent the possibility of our sooner agree- ing, and thereby keep us employed in the war and dependent on them for supplies. Hence they have favored and will con- tinne to favor the British demands as to matters of boundary and the Tories."


The provisional treaty was made definitive on September 3, 1783, after England, France, and Spain had agreed among themselves to other terms of peace in the preceding January. The interval since the signing of the preliminary treaty had allowed England time, through new political leaders in the coali-


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PEACE, 1782.


tion with North, which Fox managed, to recover from her trac- table mood, and the final treaty was signed by those who did not formulate it. It was useless to hope in the revision for the rectification of what John Adams called "inaccuracies," and its language was unchanged.


1


CHAPTER XIII.


THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST.


1783-1787.


THE war for independence was over. Jefferson reckoned that the struggle had cost the people of the United States something like $140,000,000, while it had caused England the ineffectual expenditure of at least five times as much. It was acknowledged in the House of Commons that every soldier sent across the sea had cost £100 sterling. Brissot, with only ap- proximate correctness, put it rather strikingly : " The Ameri- cans pay less than a million sterling a year for having main- tained their liberty, while the English pay more than four mil- lion sterling additional annual expense for having attempted to rob them of it."


But this monetary disparity was no. test of the far greater loss which Great Britain had suffered. Her dominion had been curtailed by a million square miles, as it was then computed, and this territory constituted an area best assured of a future among all her possessions. Her prestige was injured, and her hereditary enemy across the Channel gloated on the spectacle. Her colonial children had been divided : a part of them were left suspicious of her, the rest were looking to her for substan- tial recognition of their loyalty. Her savage allies had been turned over to the tender mercies of those whose possessions they had ravaged. There was a population of about three and a quarter million, mostly her kin in blood, whom she had alien- ated when she most needed their support. All this had hap- pened because her ministry were blind to the advance of human ideas, and were stubborn in support of an obstinate king, who could not see that the world moved on, and that there was an inevitable waning of old assumptions in the royal prerogative and Parliamentary rights.


The American commissioners had made a triumph under the


226


THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST.


guiding influence of Jay and Adams, as Hamilton at the time recognized, which ent by a double edge. Not only had Eng- land felt one edge, but France had felt the other. "The Count de Vergennes and I," said one of these commissioners, " were pursuing different objects. He was endeavoring to make my countrymen meek and humble, and I was laboring to make them proud." It proved, indeed, the pride that goeth before a fall, and that fall was very near being a fatal one · when, some years later, John Adams's predictions were verified. " England and France," he said to the president of Congress, September 5, 1783, " will be most perfectly united in all artifices and endeavors to keep down our reputation at home and abroad, to mortify our self-conceit, and to lessen us in the opinion of the world."


A few days after the signing of the preliminaries, John Adams, addressing Oswald, one of the British commissioners, deprecated any resentment which the mother country might be disposed to harbor. " Favor and promote the interests, reputa- tion, and dignity of the United States," he said, " in everything that is consistent with your own. If you pursue the plan of cramping, crippling, and weakening America, on the supposi- tion that she will be a rival to you, you will make her really so ; you will make her the natural and perpetual ally of your natu- ral and perpetual enemies," - and she came near doing so. Some days after Adams had written thus, Jay, in addressing the secretary of foreign affairs (December 14, 1782), said in explanation of the complacency shown by Britain in the pre- liminaries, and in the king's speech : " In the continuance of this disposition and system, too much confidence ought not to be placed, for disappointed violence and mortified ambition are certainly dangerous foundations to build implicit confidence upon."


A few months later, Jay again wrote (April 22, 1783) : " They mean to court us, and in my opinion we should avoid being either too forward or too coy. . . . There are circum- stances which induce me to believe that Spain is turning her eyes to England for a more intimate connection. They are the only two European powers which have continental posses- sions on our side of the water, and Spain, I think, wishes for a league between them for mutual security against us."


227


CRITICAL CONDITIONS.


Similar apprehensions were shared by sagacious observers on both sides. Madison wrote to his father (January, 1783) : " The insidiousness and instability of the British cabinet forbid us to be sanguine." Hamilton warned (March 17, 1783) Wash- ington of the "insincerity and duplicity of Lord Shelburne." Benjamin Vaughan wrote in February from London that the treaty " had put many good people into ill humor, and it has given a thousand pretexts to the bad people among us." Franklin found it easy to believe that any change of affairs in Europe, or mishaps among the Americans, would find the min- istry ready to renew the war, for, as he wrote, the British court " is not in truth reconciled either to us or the loss of us." He maintained this opinion steadily, and wrote (September 13) to the president of Congress that the English court " would never eease endeavoring to disunite us." These views were reflected in the expressions of Richard Henry Lee, William Bingham, and many others.


In entering upon its new career, the young Republic was in- deed surrounded by hazards greater than she had surmounted. When, on January 20, 1783, hostilities were declared at an end, they gave place to internal dissensions and external in- trigues. These things startled the steadfast patriots. "There has not been a more critical, delicate, and interesting period during the war," wrote Elias Boudinot to Washington. Wash- ington at one time was forced to say of the sad conditions: " I think there is more wickedness than ignorance mixed with our councils."


Jay, in September, 1783, was urging upon Gouverneur Mor- ris : " Everything condncing to union and constitutional energy of government should be cultivated, cherished, and protected, and all counsels and measures of a contrary complexion should at least be suspected of impolitic views and objects."


A better spirit of union might have parried some of the dangers, but there were others naturally inseparable from having for neighbors on the northern frontiers those who, when the treaty was soberly reviewed, saw how much they had lost. Still greater peril came from the inherent weakness of the con- federaey.


Edmund Randolph wrote to Washington : "The nerves of


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THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST.


government are unstrung, both in energy and money, and the fashion of the day is to calumniate the best services if un- successful." Franklin felt that these rumors of incapacity and wrong were doing the State much injury, and persistently held that matters were better than they seemed. "Our domestic misunderstandings," he wrote to Hartley, " are of small extent, though monstrously magnified by your microscopic newspapers."


Hartley had warned Franklin while the negotiations of peace were pending that the victorious States might, after all, reject the authority of Congress, as they had that of Britain, so that the peace would be but the ill-fated moment for relaxing all control. Hamilton wrote to Washington on March 17, 1783: " There is a fatal opposition to continental views. Necessity alone can work a reform. But how produce this necessity ? how apply it? how keep it within salutary bounds ? I fear we have been contending for a shadow." There was no better proof of it than the fact that not a quarter of the requisi- tions which Congress had made, and was to make, on the States for the necessary expenses of government were and could be met. The need of a central controlling power was more and more engaging the attention of circumspect observers. Hamil- ton now undertook to devise a plan of a military establishment for the peace. He urged that a system independent of and controlling the separate States was essential, if the western country was to be protected and the navigation of the Missis- sippi to be secured.


It was soon evident, such was the laxity of the bonds between the States, that the stipulations of the recent treaty could not be enforced. The only power to hold the States to their obliga- tions in this respect was that same Congress whose demands were of no avail in asking pecuniary support for the government.


That there existed a disposition on both sides not honestly to observe the conditions of the treaty was only too apparent, - on the part of the British because they did not wish to ob- serve them, and on the part of the American Congress because they could not. Jefferson spoke of Congress as "inactive spec- tators of the infractions because they had no effectual power to control them." Adams contended that the British ministry


229


THE LAKE POSTS.


were in the first instance responsible for a breach of the com- pact. Jay maintained that the blame lay with the Americans, and he said to John Adams "that there had not been a single day, since the treaty took effect, in which it had not been vio- lated by one or other of the States."


It is safe, however, to assume with Richard Henry Lee, " that both countries were to blame, and transgressions were on each side coequal." Hamilton said, "The question is one so mixed and doubtful as to render a waiver expedient on our part." At the end of a long controversy over this point of first responsi- bility, it was "Curtius's " opinion that " the parties were as remote from agreement as when they began." The real appre- hension was whether either side, actuated by passion, should take advantage of the infractions of the other, and deliberately put common concessions out of reach. Hamilton remonstrated with Governor Clinton on such "intemperate proceedings " in New York as really put the treaty in jeopardy.


That breach of the treaty which seriously affected our western history was in the detention of the military posts on the Great Lakes, which were, by the terms of the treaty, included in the concessions to the Republic. There was, perhaps, some ground for the fear, on the part of the British, that the concession had seemed like abandoning their Indian allies, and that some time was needed to reconcile them to the change. Such had been the fear of Hartley, and he had proposed for the definitive articles a delay of three years in which to pacify the tribes. The suppression on the part of the English, however, for a long time of any reason for the detention was in a high degree irritating. When it was announced, it proved an allegation that threw the blame upon the Americans, since it was held that there had been obstruction in the several States to the col- lection of British debts, which were to be paid under the terms of the peace, and that the posts were retained as security for the unpaid indebtedness. There can be no doubt that the rightful processes of law for collecting debts had been impeded, as Jay in his report acknowledged. Hamilton, in his Observations on Jay's Treaty, points out that various acts respecting the British debts, in New York, Virginia, and South Carolina, antedated the conclusion of the treaty, as fixed in the final ratifications.


230


THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST.


Rhode Island, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Georgia had made the debts payable in depreciated paper money, when the obligation was in sterling. Congress virtually acknowledged this when it called upon the States (April 13, 1787) to repeal these same laws. Hamilton further urged it was " an usurpa- tion upon the part of any State to take upon itself the business of retaliation." Indeed, Pennsylvania, in showing that one of her acts complained of had in reality been passed before the treaty was made, pointedly affirmed that " when treaties are broken on the one part, representatives from the other contracting party to repair the breach should always precede retaliation."


Meanwhile, the debtors themselves were flying over the mountains, where they could not be followed, impoverishing in some degree the producing power of the east, and adding to that population which Franklin, in his Sending Felons to America, charged the British government with pouring into the States. Boudinot, then president of Congress, had early fore- seen the difficulty. On April 12, 1783, he wrote to Lafayette : " The terms of peace give universal satisfaction, except that no time is mentioned for the American merchants paying their English debts. Having the greatest part of their estates in the public funds, and having suffered greatly by the depreciation of the money, inevitable ruin must be their portion if they have not three or four years to accomplish the business." Congress did, indeed, in the following June, send instructions to have a limit of three years for paying the debts inserted in the definitive treaty, but no change was made. Franklin, in a more exasper- ated spirit, rebuked the British importunity, when he said it was British depredations that had made Americans unable to meet the demands of their British creditors. As the years went on, and the liquidation of the debts was still arrested, Tom Paine reminded the British creditors that it was their commercial restrictions that interfered with the course of justice, in de- priving the American merchant of his legitimate gains. It was estimated that these debts amounted to about $28,000,000, and to this $14,000.000 in interest was to be added, making , $42,000,000 in all. It was Jay's advocacy of paying this in- terest that came near at a later day (1794) defeating his con- firmation as special envoy to England. Rufus King thought that no jury would award interest. John Adams claimed that the war had annulled England's rights to interest.


231


DEPORTATION OF SLAVES.


The chief infringements of the treaty on the American side were due to Virginia. It was owing to her tobacco crop that her planters now owed nearly as much as all the other States combined. Brissot put it in this way : "The independent Americans have but little money. This scarcity rises from two causes. First, from the kind of commerce they heretofore have carried on with England, and afterwards from the ravages of a seven years' war. This commerce was purely one of exchange. and in certain States, as Virginia, the importations always sur- passed the exportations, and the result was that they could not but be debtors to England."


This question of the creditors' obligations was mixed up in the publie mind with a rightful demand for compensation due the Americans for the loss of fugitive slaves, carried off by the British at the evacuation of New York. The president of Con- gress wrote to Franklin, June 18, 1783: " It has been an ill- judged scheme in the British to retain New York so long, and send off the negroes, as it has roused the spirit of the citizens of the several States greatly." The value of such slaves was placed by their former possessors at more than $400,000, and they were said to number, adults and children, less than three thousand, as commissioners, sent to watch the evacuation of New York, reported.


That this deportation of the blacks took place was acknow- ledged by Pitt, but it was contended that when the slaves fled within the British lines, in some instances in response to Carle- ton's proclamations, they became British property, and could be rightfully carried off like other acquired chattels, and that the terms of the treaty had reference only to seizing slaves for the purpose of carrying them off, which had not been done, though there was a doubt in some cases if the slaves had not come within the British lines after the signing of the treaty. Joseph Jones wrote to Madison that this rape of the blacks would inevitably be used to justify delay in paying the British debts. Hamilton contended that if it was infamous in Great Britain to seduce the negroes, it would have been still more infamous to surrender them back to slavery. He held that the British interpretation had much in its favor, and the act was not " such a clear breach of treaty as to justify retaliation." On


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THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST.


much the same grounds the British might demand, it was contended, the deserters from their service who had yielded to American seductions. At all events, this carrying off of slaves instigated the Virginia Assembly in May, 1784, to put statu- tory obstacles in the way of English creditors. Patrick Henry was a warm advocate of these retaliatory acts. Richard Henry Lee and others of less passionate mood opposed them, but in vain. Among the soberer remonstrants was George Mason, who wrote to Mr. Henry : "On the whole, we have better terms of peace than America had cause to expect, and I cannot but think it would be highly dangerous and imprudent to risk a breach of the peace." In the sequel, Virginia grew more mod- erate, and there was talk of a plan to liquidate the debts in seven annual installments. Jefferson could flatter himself that before the last installment of the debts was paid, the value of the deported slaves could be reserved. Virginia, meanwhile, had made her compliance contingent upon that of the other States, and upon the surrender of the deported negroes. In these demands, as in her imperative demands for the evacuation of the posts, she was led by Patrick Henry. Congress in the end, and on a report from Jay, did, as we have seen, what it could to induce the recalcitrant States to purge their statute- books of all laws hindering the collection of such debts ; the relief, however, was not absolute till the adoption of the Federal Constitution gave such matters into other hands.




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