BOUNDARY TROUBLES WITH ENGLAND.
Two important controversies with foreign powers became prominent during
Tyler's presidency; but he had little to do with the settlement of
either, beyond successively placing in his cabinet the two great
statesmen who dealt with them. Webster, while secretary of state,
brought certain of the negotiations with England to a close; and later
on, Calhoun, while holding the same office, took up Webster's work and
also grappled with--indeed partly caused--the troubles on the Mexican
border, and turned them to the advantage of the South and slavery.
Our boundaries were still very ill-defined, except where they were
formed by the Gulf and the Ocean, the Great Lakes, and the river St.
John. Even in the Northeast, where huge stretches of unbroken
forest-land separated the inhabited portions of Canada from those of New
England, it was not yet decided how much of this wilderness belonged to
us and how much to the Canadians; and in the vast, unsettled regions of
the far West our claims came into direct conflict with those of Mexico
and of Great Britain. The ownership of these little known and badly
mapped regions could with great difficulty be decided on grounds of
absolute and abstract right; the title of each contestant to the land
was more or less plausible, and at the same time more or less defective.
The matter was sure to be decided in favor of the strongest; and, say
what we will about the justice and right of the various claims, the
honest truth is, that the comparative might of the different nations,
and not the comparative righteousness of their several causes, was the
determining factor in the settlement. Mexico lost her northern provinces
by no law of right, but simply by the law of the longest sword--the same
law that gave India to England. In both instances the result was greatly
to the benefit of the conquered peoples and of every one else; though
there is this wide difference between the two cases: that whereas the
English rule in India, while it may last for decades or even for
centuries, must eventually come to an end and leave little trace of its
existence; on the other hand our conquests from Mexico determined for
all time the blood, speech, and law of the men who should fill the lands
we won.
The questions between Great Britain and ourselves were compromised by
each side accepting about half what it claimed, only because neither was
willing to push the other to extremities. Englishmen like Palmerston
might hector and ruffle, and Americans like Benton might swagger and
bully; but when it came to be a question of actual fighting each people
recognized the power of the other, and preferred to follow the more
cautious and peaceful, not to say timid, lead of such statesmen as
Webster and Lord Melbourne. Had we been no stronger than the Sikhs,
Oregon and Washington would at present be British possessions; and if
Great Britain had been as weak as Mexico, she would not now hold a foot
of territory on the Pacific coast. Either nation might perhaps have
refused to commit a gross and entirely unprovoked and uncalled-for act
of aggression; but each, under altered conditions, would have readily
found excuses for showing much less regard for the claims of the other
than actually was shown. It would be untrue to say that nations have not
at times proved themselves capable of acting with great
disinterestedness and generosity towards other peoples; but such conduct
is not very common at the best, and although it often may be desirable,
it certainly is not always so. If the matter in dispute is of great
importance, and if there is a doubt as to which side is right, then the
strongest party to the controversy is pretty sure to give itself the
benefit of that doubt; and international morality will have to take
tremendous strides in advance before this ceases to be the case.
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the treaties and wars by
means of which we finally gave definite bounds to our territory beyond
the Mississippi. Contemporary political writers and students, of the
lesser sort, are always painfully deficient in the sense of historic
perspective; and to such the struggles for the possession of the unknown
and dimly outlined western wastes seemed of small consequence compared
to similar European contests for territorial aggrandizement. Yet, in
reality, when we look at the far-reaching nature of the results, the
questions as to what kingdom should receive the fealty of Holstein or
Lorraine, of Savoy or the Dobrudscha, seem of absolutely trivial
importance compared to the infinitely more momentous ones as to the
future race settlement and national ownership of the then lonely and
unpeopled lands of Texas, California, and Oregon.
Benton, greatly to the credit of his foresight, and largely in
consequence of his strong nationalist feeling, thoroughly appreciated
the importance of our geographical extensions. He was the great
champion of the West and of western development, and a furious partisan
of every movement in the direction of the enlargement of our western
boundaries. Many of his expressions, when talking of the greatness of
our country and of the magnitude of the interests which were being
decided, not only were grandiloquent in manner, but also seem
exaggerated and overwrought even as regards matter. But when we think of
the interests for which he contended, as they were to become, and not as
they at the moment were, the appearance of exaggeration is lost, and the
intense feeling of his speeches no longer seems out of place or
disproportionate to the importance of the subject with which he dealt.
Without clearly formulating his opinions, even to himself, and while
sometimes prone to attribute to his country at the moment a greatness
she was not to possess for two or three generations to come, he,
nevertheless, had engrained in his very marrow and fibre the knowledge
that inevitably, and beyond all doubt, the coming years were to be hers.
He knew that, while other nations held the past, and shared with his own
the present, yet that to her belonged the still formless and unshaped
future. More clearly than almost any other statesman he beheld the
grandeur of the nation loom up, vast and shadowy, through the advancing
years.
He was keenly alive to the need of our having free chance to spread
towards the northwest; he very early grasped the idea that in that
direction we ought to have room for continental development. In his
earliest years, to be sure, when the Mississippi seemed a river of the
remote western border, when nobody, not even the hardiest trapper, had
penetrated the boundless and treeless plains that stretch to the
foot-hills of the Rockies, and when the boldest thinkers had not dared
to suppose that we could ever hold together as a people, when once
scattered over so wide a territory, he had stated in a public speech
that he considered the mountains to be our natural frontier line to the
west, and the barrier beyond which we ought not to pass, and had
expressed his trust that on the Pacific coast there would grow up a
kindred and friendly Republic. But very soon, as the seemingly
impossible became the actual, he himself changed, and ever afterwards
held that we should have, wherever possible, no boundaries but the two
Oceans.
Benton's violent and aggressive patriotism undoubtedly led him to assume
positions towards foreign powers that were very repugnant to the quiet,
peaceable, and order-loving portion of the community, especially when
he gave vent to the spirit of jealous antagonism which he felt towards
Great Britain, the power that held sway over the wilderness bordering us
on the north. Yet the arrogant attitude he assumed was more than
justified by the destiny of the great Republic; and it would have been
well for all America if we had insisted even more than we did upon the
extension northward of our boundaries. Not only the Columbia but also
the Red River of the North--and the Saskatchewan and Frazer as
well--should lie wholly within our limits, less for our own sake than
for the sake of the men who dwell along their banks. Columbia,
Saskatchewan, and Manitoba would, as states of the American Union, hold
positions incomparably more important, grander, and more dignified than
they can ever hope to reach either as independent communities or as
provincial dependencies of a foreign power that regards them with a
kindly tolerance somewhat akin to contemptuous indifference. Of course
no one would wish to see these, or any other settled communities, now
added to our domain by force; we want no unwilling citizens to enter our
Union; the time to have taken the lands was before settlers came into
them. European nations war for the possession of thickly settled
districts which, if conquered, will for centuries remain alien and
hostile to the conquerors; we, wiser in our generation, have seized the
waste solitudes that lay near us, the limitless forests and never ending
plains, and the valleys of the great, lonely rivers; and have thrust our
own sons into them to take possession; and a score of years after each
conquest we see the conquered land teeming with a people that is one
with ourselves.
Benton felt that all the unoccupied land to the northwest was by right
our heritage, and he was willing to do battle for it if necessary. He
was a perfect type of western American statesmanship in his way of
looking at our foreign relations; he was always unwilling to compromise,
being of that happy temperament which is absolutely certain that its
claims are just and righteous in their entirety, and that it would be
wrong to accept anything less than all that is demanded; he was willing
to bully if our rights, as he deemed them, were not granted us; and he
was perfectly ready to fight if the bullying was unsuccessful. True, he
did not consistently carry through all his theories to their logical
consequences; but it may well be questioned whether, after all, his
original attitude towards Great Britain was not wiser, looking to its
probable remote results, than that which was finally taken by the
national government, whose policy was on this point largely shaped by
the feeling among the richer and more educated classes of the Northeast.
These classes have always been more cautious and timid than any others
in the Union, especially in their way of looking at possible foreign
wars, and have never felt much of the spirit which made the West stretch
out impatiently for new lands. Fortunately they have rarely been able to
control our territorial growth.
No foot of soil to which we had any title in the Northwest should have
been given up; we were the people who could use it best, and we ought to
have taken it all. The prize was well worth winning, and would warrant a
good deal of risk being run. We had even then grown to be so strong that
we were almost sure eventually to win in any American contest for
continental supremacy. We were near by, our foes far away--for the
contest over the Columbia would have been settled in Canada. We should
have had hard fighting to be sure, but sooner or later the result would
have been in our favor. There were no better soldiers in the world than
the men of Balaclava and Inkerman, but the victors of Buena Vista and
Chapultepec were as good. Scott and Taylor were not great generals, but
they were, at least, the equals of Lord Raglan; and we did not have in
our service any such examples of abnormal military inaptitude as Lords
Lucan and Cardigan and their kind.
It was of course to be expected that men like Benton would bitterly
oppose the famous Ashburton treaty, which was Webster's crowning work
while secretary of state, and the only conspicuous success of Tyler's
administration. The Ashburton treaty was essentially a compromise
between the extreme claims of the two contestants, as was natural where
the claims were based on very unsubstantial grounds and the contestants
were of somewhat the same strength. It was most beneficial in its
immediate effects; and that it was a perfectly dignified and proper
treaty for America to make is best proved by the virulent hostility with
which Palmerston and his followers assailed it as a "surrender" on the
part of England, while Englishmen of the same stamp are to this day
never tired of lamenting the fact that they have allowed our western
boundaries to be pushed so far to the north. But there appears to be
much excuse for Benton's attitude, when we look at the treaty as one in
a chain of incidents, and with regard to its future results. Our
territorial quarrels with Great Britain were not like those between most
other powers. It was for the interest of the whole western hemisphere
that no European nation should have extensive possessions between the
Atlantic and the Pacific; and by right we should have given ourselves
the benefit of every doubt in all territorial questions, and have shown
ourselves ready to make prompt appeal to the sword whenever it became
necessary as a last resort.
Still, as regards the Ashburton treaty itself, it must be admitted that
much of Benton's opposition was merely factious and partisan, on account
of its being a Whig measure; and his speeches on the subject contain a
number of arguments that are not very creditable to him.
Some of his remarks referred to a matter which had been already a cause
of great excitement during Van Buren's administration, and on which he
had spoken more than once. This was the destruction of the steamer
Caroline by the British during the abortive Canadian insurrection of
1837. Much sympathy had been felt for the rebels by the Americans along
the border, and some of them had employed the Caroline in conveying
stores to the insurgents; and in revenge a party of British troops
surprised and destroyed her one night while she was lying in an American
port. This was a gross and flagrant violation of our rights, and was
promptly resented by Van Buren, who had done what he could to maintain
order along the border, and had been successful in his efforts. Benton
had supported the president in preventing a breach of neutrality on our
part, and was fiercely indignant when the breach was committed by the
other side. Reparation was demanded forthwith. The British government at
first made evasive replies. After a while a very foolish personage named
McLeod, a British subject, who boasted that he had taken part in the
affair, ventured into New York and was promptly imprisoned by the state
authorities. His boastings, fortunately for him, proved to be totally
unfounded, and he was acquitted by the jury before whom he was taken,
after a detention of several months in prison. But meanwhile the British
government demanded his release--adopting a very different tone with
Tyler and the Whigs from that which they had been using towards Van
Buren, who still could conjure with Jackson's terrible name. The United
States agreed to release McLeod, but New York refused to deliver him up;
and before the question was decided he was acquitted, as said above. It
was clearly wrong for a state to interfere in a disagreement between the
nation and a foreign power; and on the other hand the federal
authorities did not show as much firmness in their dealings with
England as they should have shown. Benton, true to certain of his
states-rights theories and in pursuance of his policy of antagonism to
Great Britain, warmly supported the attitude of New York, alleging that
the United States had no right to interfere with her disposal of McLeod;
and asserting that while if the citizens of one country committed an
outrage upon another it was necessary to apply to the sovereign for
redress, yet that if the wrong-doers came into the country which had
been aggrieved they might be seized and punished; and he exultingly
referred to Jackson's conduct at the time of the first Seminole War,
when he hung off-hand two British subjects whom he accused of inciting
the Indians against us, Great Britain not making any protest. The
Caroline matter was finally settled in the Ashburton treaty, the British
making a formal but very guarded apology for her destruction,--an
apology which did not satisfy Benton in the least.
It is little to Benton's credit, however, that, while thus courting
foreign wars, he yet opposed the efforts of the Whigs to give us a
better navy. Our navy was then good of its kind, but altogether too
small. Benton's opposition to its increase seems to have proceeded
partly from mere bitter partisanship, partly from sheer ignorance, and
partly from the doctrinaire dread of any kind of standing military or
naval force, which he had inherited, with a good many similar ideas,
from the Jeffersonians.
He attacked the whole treaty, article by article, when it came up for
ratification in the Senate, making an extremely lengthy and elaborate
speech, or rather set of speeches, against it. Much of his objection,
especially to the part compromising the territorial claims of the two
governments, was well founded; but much was also factious and
groundless. The most important point of all that was in controversy, the
ownership of Oregon, was left unsettled; but, as will be shown farther
on, this was wise. He made this omission a base or pretext for the
charge that the treaty was gotten up in the interests of the
East,--although with frank lack of logic he also opposed it because it
sacrificed the interests of Maine,--and that it was detrimental to the
South and West; and he did his best to excite sectional feeling against
it. He also protested against the omission of all reference to the
impressment of American sailors by British vessels; and this was a valid
ground of opposition,--although Webster had really settled the matter by
writing a formal note to the British government, in which he practically
gave official notice that any attempt to revive the practice would be
repelled by force of arms.
Benton occupied a much less tenable position when he came to the
question of slavery, and inveighed against the treaty because it did not
provide for the return of fugitive slaves, or of slaves taken from
American coasting vessels when the latter happened to be obliged to put
into West Indian ports, and because it did contain a provision that we
ourselves should keep in commission a squadron on the coast of Africa to
cooeperate with the British in the suppression of the slave-trade.
Benton's object in attacking the treaty on this point was to excite the
South to a degree that would make the senators from that section refuse
to join in ratifying it; but the attempt was a flat failure. It is
hardly to be supposed that he himself was as indignant over this
question as he pretended to be. He must have realized that, so long as
we had among ourselves an institution so wholly barbarous and out of
date as slavery, just so long we should have to expect foreign powers to
treat us rather cavalierly on that one point. Whatever we might say
among ourselves as to the rights of property or the necessity of
preserving the Union by refraining from the disturbance of slavery, it
was certain that foreign nations would place the manhood and liberty of
the slave above the vested interest of the master--all the more readily
because they were jealous of the Union and anxious to see it break up,
and were naturally delighted to take the side of abstract justice and
humanity, when to do so was at the expense of outsiders and redounded to
their own credit, without causing them the least pecuniary loss or
personal inconvenience. The attitude of slave-holders towards freedom in
the abstract was grotesque in its lack of logic; but the attitude of
many other classes of men, both abroad and at home, towards it was
equally full of a grimly unconscious humor. The southern planters, who
loudly sympathized with Kossuth and the Hungarians, were entirely
unconscious that their tyranny over their own black bondsmen made their
attacks upon Austria's despotism absurd; and Germans, who were shocked
at our holding the blacks in slavery, could not think of freedom in
their own country without a shudder. On one night the Democrats of the
Northern States would hold a mass meeting to further the cause of Irish
freedom, on the next night the same men would break up another meeting
held to help along the freeing of the negroes; while the English
aristocracy held up its hands in horror at American slavery and set its
face like a flint against all efforts to do Ireland tardy and incomplete
justice.
Again, in his opposition to the extradition clause of the treaty,
Benton was certainly wrong. Nothing is clearer than that nations ought
to combine to prevent criminals from escaping punishment merely by
fleeing over an imaginary line; the crime is against all society, and
society should unite to punish it. Especially is there need of the most
stringent extradition laws between countries whose people have the same
speech and legal system, as with the United States and Great Britain.
Indeed, it is a pity that our extradition laws are not more stringent.
But Benton saw, or affected to see, in the extradition clause, a menace
to political refugees, and based his opposition to it mainly on this
ground. He also quoted on his side the inevitable Jefferson; for
Jefferson, or rather the highly idealized conception of what Jefferson
had been, shared with the "demos krateo principle" the honor of being
one of the twin fetiches to which Benton, in common with most of his
fellow-Democrats, especially delighted to bow down.
But when he came to the parts of the treaty that defined our
northeastern boundary and so much of our northwestern boundary as lay
near the Great Lakes, Benton occupied far more defensible ground; and
the parts of his speech referring to these questions were very strong
indeed. He attempted to show that in the matter of the Maine frontier
we had surrendered very much more than there was any need of our doing,
and that the British claim was unfounded; and there seems now to be good
reason for thinking him right, although it must be admitted that in
agreeing to the original line in earlier treaties the British had acted
entirely under a misapprehension as to where it would go. Benton was
also able to make a good point against Webster for finally agreeing to
surrender so much of Maine's claim by showing the opposition the latter
had made, while in the Senate, to a similar but less objectionable
clause in a treaty which Jackson's administration had then been trying
to get through. Again Webster had, in defending the surrender of certain
of our claims along the boundary west of Lake Superior, stated that the
country was not very valuable, as it was useless for agricultural
purposes; and Benton had taken him up sharply on this point, saying that
we wanted the land anyhow, whether it produced corn and potatoes or only
furs and lumber. The amounts of territory as to which our claims were
compromised were not very large compared to the extent of the Pacific
coast lands which were still left in dispute; and it was perhaps well
that the treaty was ratified; but certainly there is much to be said on
Benton's side so far as his opposition to the proposed frontier was
concerned.
However, he was only able to rally eight other senators to his support,
and the treaty went through the Senate triumphantly. It encountered an
even more bitter opposition in Parliament, where Palmerston headed a
series of furious attacks upon it, for reasons the precise opposite of
those which Benton alleged, arguing that England received much less,
instead of much more, than her due, and thereby showing Webster's
position in a very much better light than that in which it would
otherwise have appeared. Eventually the British government ratified the
treaty.
The Ashburton treaty did not touch on the Oregon matter at all; nor was
this dealt with by Webster while he was secretary of state. But it came
before the Senate at that time, and later on Calhoun took it up, when
filling Webster's place in the cabinet, although a final decision was
not reached until during Polk's presidency. Webster did not appreciate
the importance of Oregon in the least, and moreover came from a section
of the country that was not inclined to insist on territorial expansion
at the hazard of a war, in which the merchants of the sea-board would be
the chief sufferers. Calhoun, it is true, came from a peculiarly
militant and bellicose state, but on the other hand from a section that
was not very anxious to see the free North acquire new territory. So it
happened that neither of Tyler's two great secretaries felt called upon
to insist too vehemently upon going to extremes in defense of our
rights, or supposed rights, along the Pacific coast; and though in the
end the balance was struck pretty evenly between our claims and those of
our neighbor, yet it is to be regretted that we did not stand out
stiffly for the whole of our demand. Our title was certainly not
perfect, but it was to the full as good as, or better than, Great
Britain's; and it would have been better in the end had we insisted upon
the whole territory being given to us, no matter what price we had to
pay.
The politico-social line of division between the East and the West had
been gradually growing fainter as that between the North and South grew
deeper; but on the Oregon question it again became prominent.
Southeastern Democrats, like the Carolinian McDuffie, spoke as
slightingly of the value of Oregon, and were as little inclined to risk
a war for its possession, as the most peace-loving Whigs of New England;
while the intense western feeling against giving up any of our rights on
the Pacific coast was best expressed by the two senators from the slave
state of Missouri. Benton was not restrained in his desire to add to
the might of the Union by any fear of the possible future effect upon
the political power of the Slave States. Although a slave-holder and the
representative of slave-holders, he was fully alive to the evils of
slavery, though as yet not seeing clearly how all-important a question
it had become. The preservation and extension of the Union and obedience
to the spirit of Democracy were the chief articles of his political
creed, and to these he always subordinated all others. When, in speaking
of slavery, he made use, as he sometimes did, of expressions that were
not far removed from those of men really devoted to the slave interests,
it was almost always because he had some ulterior object in view, or for
factional ends; for unfortunately his standard of political propriety
was not sufficiently high to prevent his trying to make use of any
weapon, good or bad, with which to overturn his political foes. In
protesting against the Ashburton treaty, he outdid even such slavery
champions as Calhoun in the extravagance of his ideas as to what we
should demand of foreign powers in reference to their treatment of our
"peculiar institution"; but he seems to have done this merely because
thereby he got an additional handle of attack against the Whig measures.
The same thing was true earlier of his fulmination against Clay's
proposed Panama Congress; and even before that, in attacking Adams for
his supposed part in the treaty whereby we established the line of our
Spanish frontier, he dragged slavery into the question, not, apparently,
because he really particularly wished to see our slave territory
extended, but because he thought that he might use the slavery cry to
excite in one other section of the country a feeling as strong as that
which the West already felt in regard to territorial expansion
generally. Indeed, his whole conduct throughout the Oregon controversy,
especially when taken in connection with the fact that he stood out for
Maine's frontier rights more stoutly than the Maine representatives
themselves, shows how free from sectional bias was his way of looking at
our geographical growth.
The territory along the Pacific coast lying between California on the
south and Alaska on the north--"Oregon," as it was comprehensively
called--had been a source of dispute for some time between the United
States and Great Britain. After some negotiations both had agreed with
Russia to recognize the line of 54 deg. 40' as the southern boundary of the
latter's possessions; and Mexico's undisputed possession of California
gave an equally well marked southern limit, at the forty-second
parallel. All between was in dispute. The British had trading posts at
the mouth of the Columbia, which they emphatically asserted to be
theirs; we, on the other hand, claimed an absolutely clear title up to
the forty-ninth parallel, a couple of hundred miles north of the mouth
of the Columbia, and asserted that for all the balance of the territory
up to the Russian possessions our title was at any rate better than that
of the British. In 1818 a treaty had been made providing for the joint
occupation of the territory by the two powers, as neither was willing to
give up its claim to the whole, or at the time at all understood the
value of the possession, then entirely unpeopled. This treaty of joint
occupancy had remained in force ever since. Under it the British had
built great trading stations, and used the whole country in the
interests of certain fur companies. The Americans, in spite of some vain
efforts, were unable to compete with them in this line; but, what was
infinitely more important, had begun, even prior to 1840, to establish
actual settlers along the banks of the rivers, some missionaries being
the first to come in. As long, however, as the territory remained
sparsely settled, and the communication with it chiefly by sea, the hold
of Great Britain gave promise of being the stronger. But the aspect of
affairs was totally changed when in 1842 a huge caravan of over a
thousand Americans made the journey overland from the frontiers of
Missouri, taking with them their wives and their children, their flocks
and herds, carrying their long rifles on their shoulders, and their axes
and spades in the great canvas-topped wagons. The next year, two
thousand more settlers of the same sort in their turn crossed the vast
plains, wound their way among the Rocky Mountains through the pass
explored by Fremont, Benton's son-in-law, and after suffering every kind
of hardship and danger, and warding off the attacks of hostile Indians,
descended the western slope of the great water-shed to join their
fellows by the banks of the Columbia. When American settlers were once
in actual possession of the disputed territory, it became evident that
the period of Great Britain's undisputed sway was over.
The government of the United States, meanwhile, was so far from helping
these settlers that it on the contrary rather threw obstacles in their
way. As usual with us, the individual activity of the citizens
themselves, who all acted independently and with that peculiar
self-reliance that is the chief American characteristic, outstripped the
activity of their representatives, who were obliged all to act together,
and who were therefore held back by each other,--our Constitution,
while giving free scope for individual freedom, wisely providing such
checks as to make our governmental system eminently conservative in its
workings. Tyler's administration did not wish to embroil itself with
England; so it refused any aid to the settlers, and declined to give
them grants of land, as under the joint occupancy treaty that would have
given England offense and cause for complaint. But Benton and the other
Westerners were perfectly willing to offend England, if by so doing they
could help America to obtain Oregon, and were too rash and headstrong to
count the cost of their actions. Accordingly, a bill was introduced
providing for the settlement of Oregon, and giving each settler six
hundred and forty acres, and additional land if he had a family; so that
every inducement was held out to the emigrants, the West wanting to
protect and encourage them by all the means in its power. The laws and
jurisdiction of the Territory of Iowa were to be extended to all the
settlers on the Pacific coast, who hitherto had governed themselves
merely by a system of mutual agreements.
The bill was, of course, strongly opposed, especially on account of the
clause giving land to the settlers. It passed the Senate by a close
vote, but failed in the House. Naturally Benton was one of its chief
supporters, and spoke at length in its favor. He seized the kernel of
the matter when, in advocating the granting of land, he spoke of
immigration as "the only thing which can save the country from the
British, acting through their powerful agent, the Hudson's Bay Company."
He then blew a lusty note of defiance to Great Britain herself:--
I think she will take offense, do what we may in relation to this
territory. She wants it herself, and means to quarrel for it, if she
does not fight for it.... I grant that she will take offense, but
that is not the question with me. Has she a _right_ to take offense?
That is my question! And this being decided in the negative, I
neither fear nor calculate consequences.... Courage will keep her
off, fear will bring her upon us. The assertion of our rights will
command her respect; the fear to assert them will bring us her
contempt.... Neither nations nor individuals ever escaped danger by
fearing it. They must face it and defy it. An abandonment of a right
for fear of bringing on an attack, instead of keeping it off, will
inevitably bring on the outrage that is dreaded.
He was right enough in his disposition to resent the hectoring spirit
which, at that time, characterized Great Britain's foreign policy; but
he was all wrong in condemning delay, and stating that if things were
left as they were time would work against us, and not for us.
In this respect Calhoun, who opposed the bill, was much wiser. He
advocated a policy of "masterly inactivity," foreseeing that time was
everything to us, inasmuch as the land was sure in the end to belong to
that nation whose people had settled in it, and we alone were able to
furnish a constantly increasing stream of immigrants. Later on, however,
Calhoun abandoned this policy, probably mainly influenced by fear of the
extension of free territory, and consented to a compromise with Great
Britain. The true course to have pursued would have been to have
combined the ideas of both Benton and Calhoun, and to have gone farther
than either; that is, we should have allowed the question to remain
unsettled as long as was possible, because every year saw an increasing
American population in the coveted lands, and rendered the ultimate
decision surer to be for us. When it was impossible to postpone the
question longer, we should have insisted upon its being settled entirely
in our favor, no matter at what cost. The unsuccessful attempts, made by
Benton and his supporters, to persuade the Senate to pass a resolution,
requiring that notice of the termination of the joint occupancy treaty
should forthwith be given, were certainly ill-advised.
However, even Benton was not willing to go to the length to which
certain Western men went, who insisted upon all or nothing. He had
become alarmed and angry over the intrigue for the admission of Texas
and the proposed forcible taking away of Mexican territory. The
Northwestern Democrats wanted all Texas and all Oregon; the Southeastern
ones wished all the former and part of the latter. Benton then concluded
that it would be best to take part of each; for, although no friend to
compromises, yet he was unwilling to jeopardize the safety of the Union
as it was by seeking to make it still larger. Accordingly, he
sympathized with the effort made by Calhoun while secretary of state to
get the British to accept the line of 49 deg. as the frontier; but the
British government then rejected this proposition. In 1844 the Democrats
made their campaign upon the issue of "fifty-four forty or fight;" and
Polk, when elected, felt obliged to insist upon this campaign boundary.
To this, however, Great Britain naturally would not consent; it was,
indeed, idle to expect her to do so, unless things should be kept as
they were until a fairly large American population had grown up along
the Pacific coast, and had thus put her in a position where she could
hardly do anything else. Polk's administration was neither capable nor
warlike, however well disposed to bluster; and the secretary of state,
the timid, shifty, and selfish politician, Buchanan, naturally fond of
facing both ways, was the last man to wish to force a quarrel on a
high-spirited and determined antagonist like England. Accordingly, he
made up his mind to back down and try for the line of 49 deg., as proposed
by Calhoun, when in Tyler's cabinet; and the English, for all their
affected indifference, had been so much impressed by the warlike
demonstrations in the United States, that they in turn were delighted,
singing in a much lower key than before the "fifty-four forty" cry had
been raised; accordingly they withdrew their former pretensions to the
Columbia River and accepted the offered compromise. Now, however, came
the question of getting the treaty through the Senate; and Buchanan
sounded Benton, to see if he would undertake this task.
Benton, worried over the Texas matter, was willing to recede somewhat
from the very high ground he had taken,--although, of course, he
insisted that he had been perfectly consistent throughout, and that the
49th parallel was the line he had all along been striving for. Under his
lead the proposal for a treaty on the basis indicated was carried
through the Senate, and the line in consequence ultimately became our
frontier, in spite of the frantic opposition of the Northwestern
Democrats, the latter hurling every sort of charge of bad faith and
treachery at their Southern associates, who had joined with the Whigs
in defeating them. Benton's speech in support of the proposal was
pitched much lower than had been his previous ones; and, a little
forgetful of some of his own remarks, he was especially severe upon
those members who denounced England and held up a picture of her real or
supposed designs to excite and frighten the people into needless
opposition to her.
In its immediate effects the adoption of the 49th parallel as the
dividing line between the two countries was excellent, and entailed no
loss of dignity on either. Yet, as there was no particular reason why we
should show any generosity in our diplomatic dealings with England, it
may well be questioned whether it would not have been better to have
left things as they were until we could have taken all. Wars are, of
course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain
kinds of peace. Every war in which we have been engaged, except the one
with Mexico, has been justifiable in its origin; and each one, without
any exception whatever, has left us better off, taking both moral and
material considerations into account, than we should have been if we had
not waged it.