OREGON TREATY: NEGOTIATIONS COMMENCED, AND BROKEN OFF.
This was a pretermitted subject in the general negotiations which
led to the Ashburton treaty: it was now taken up as a question
for separate settlement. The British government moved in it, Mr.
Henry S. Fox, the British minister in Washington, being instructed
to propose the negotiation. This was done in November, 1842, and
Mr. Webster, then Secretary of State under Mr. Tyler, immediately
replied, accepting the proposal, and declaring it to be the desire
of his government to have this territorial question immediately
settled. But the movement stopped there. Nothing further took
place between Mr. Webster and Fox, and the question slumbered till
1844, when Mr. (since Sir) Richard Pakenham, arrived in the United
States as British minister, and renewed the proposition for opening
the negotiation to Mr. Upshur, then Secretary of State. This was
February 24th, 1844. Mr. Upshur replied promptly, that is to say,
on the 26th of the same month, accepting the proposal, and naming
an early day for receiving Mr. Pakenham to begin the negotiation.
Before that day came he had perished in the disastrous explosion of
the great gun on board the Princeton man-of-war. The subject again
slumbered six months, and at the end of that time, July 22d, was
again brought to the notice of the American government by a note
from the British minister to Mr. Calhoun, successor to Mr. Upshur
in the Department of State. Referring to the note received from Mr.
Upshur the day before his death, he said:
"The lamented death of Mr. Upshur, which occurred within a
few days after the date of that note, the interval which took
place between that event and the appointment of a successor,
and the urgency and importance of various matters which offered
themselves to your attention immediately after your accession
to office, sufficiently explain why it has not hitherto been in
the power of your government, sir, to attend to the important
matters to which I refer. But, the session of Congress having
been brought to a close, and the present being the season of the
year when the least possible business is usually transacted, it
occurs to me that you may now feel at leisure to proceed to the
consideration of that subject. At all events it becomes my duty
to recall it to your recollection, and to repeat the earnest
desire of her majesty's government, that a question, on which so
much interest is felt in both countries, should be disposed of
at the earliest moment consistent with the convenience of the
government of the United States."
Mr. Calhoun answered the 22d of August declaring his readiness
to begin the negotiation and fixing the next day for taking up
the subject. It was taken up accordingly, and conducted in the
approved and safe way of conducting such negotiations, that is to
say, a protocol of every conference signed by the two negotiators
before they separated, and the propositions submitted by each always
reduced to writing. This was the proper and satisfactory mode of
proceeding, the neglect and total omission of which had constituted
so just and so loud a complaint against the manner in which Mr.
Webster and Lord Ashburton had conducted their conferences. Mr.
Calhoun and Mr. Pakenham met seven times, exchanged arguments and
propositions, and came to a balk, which suspended their labors.
Mr. Calhoun, rejecting the usual arts of diplomacy, which holds in
reserve the ultimate and true offer while putting forward fictitious
ones for experiment, went at once to his ultimatum, and proposed the
continuation of the parallel of the 49th degree of north latitude,
which, after the acquisition of Louisiana, had been adopted by Great
Britain and the United States as the dividing line between their
possessions, from the Lake of the Woods (fixed as a land-mark under
the treaty of Utrecht), to the summit of the Rocky Mountains--the
United States insisting at the same time to continue that line to
the Pacific Ocean under the terms of the same treaty. Mr. Pakenham
declined this proposition in the part that carried the line to the
ocean, but offered to continue it from the summit of the mountains,
to the Columbia River, a distance of some three hundred miles;
and then follow the river to the ocean. This was refused by Mr.
Calhoun; and the ultimatum having been delivered on one hand, and no
instructions being possessed on the other to yield any thing, the
negotiations, after continuing through the month of September, came
to a stand. At the end of four months (January 1845) Mr. Pakenham,
by the direction of his government, proposed to leave the question
to arbitration, which was declined by the American secretary, and
very properly; for, while arbitrament is the commendable mode of
settling minor questions, and especially those which arise from the
construction of existing treaties, yet the boundaries of a country
are of too much gravity to be so submitted.
Mr. Calhoun showed a manly spirit in proposing the line of 49,
as the dominant party in the United States, and the one to which
he belonged, were then in a high state of exultation for the
boundary of 54 degrees 40 minutes, and the presidential canvass,
on the democratic side, was raging upon that cry. The Baltimore
presidential convention had followed a pernicious practice, of
recent invention, in laying down a platform of principles on which
the canvass was to be conducted, and 54-40 for the northern boundary
of Oregon, had been made a canon of political faith, from which
there was to be no departure except upon the penalty of political
damnation. Mr. Calhoun had braved this penalty, and in doing so had
acted up to his public and responsible duty.
The new President, Mr. Polk, elected under that cry, came into
office on the 4th of March, and acting upon it, put into his
inaugural address a declaration that our title to the whole of
Oregon (meaning up to 54-40), was clear and indisputable; and
a further declaration that he meant to maintain that title.
It was certainly an unusual thing--perhaps unprecedented in
diplomacy--that, while negotiations were depending (which was
still the case in this instance, for the last note of Mr. Calhoun
in January, declining the arbitration, gave as a reason for it
that he expected the question to be settled by negotiation), one
of the parties should authoritatively declare its right to the
whole matter in dispute, and show itself ready to maintain it by
arms. The declaration in the inaugural had its natural effect in
Great Britain. It roused the British spirit as high as that of the
American. Their excited voice came thundering back, to be received
with indignation by the great democracy; and war--"_inevitable
war_"--was the cry through the land. The new administration felt
itself to be in a dilemma. To stand upon 54-40 was to have war in
reality: to recede from it, might be to incur the penalty laid
down in the Baltimore platform. Mr. Buchanan, the new Secretary
of State, did me the honor to consult me. I answered him promptly
and frankly, that I held 49 to be the right line, and that, if
the administration made a treaty upon that line, I should support
it. This was early in April. The secretary seemed to expect some
further proposition from the British government; but none came.
The rebuff in the inaugural address had been too public, and too
violent, to admit that government to take the initiative again. It
said nothing: the war cry continued to rage: and at the end of four
months our government found itself under the necessity to take the
initiative, and recommence negotiations as the means of avoiding
war. Accordingly, on the 22d of July, Mr. Buchanan (the direction
of the President being always understood) addressed a note to Mr.
Pakenham, resuming the negotiation at the point at which it had been
left by Mr. Calhoun; and, conforming to the offer that he had made,
and because he had made it, again proposed the line of 49 to the
ocean. The British minister again refused that line, and inviting a
"fairer" proposition. In the mean time the offer of 49 got wind. The
democracy was in commotion. A storm was got up (foremost in raising
which was the new administration organ, Mr. Ritchie's Daily Union),
before which the administration quailed--recoiled--and withdrew its
offer of 49. There was a dead pause in the negotiation again; and so
the affair remained at the meeting of Congress, which came together
under the loud cry of war, in which Mr. Cass was the leader, but
followed by the body of the democracy, and backed and cheered on by
the democratic press--some hundreds of papers. Of course the Oregon
question occupied a place, and a prominent one, in the President's
message--(which has been noticed)--and, on communicating the failure
of the negotiation to Congress, he recommended strong measures
for the security and assertion of our title. The delivery of the
notice which was to abrogate the joint occupation of the country by
the citizens of the two powers, was one of these recommendations,
and the debate upon that question brought out the full expression
of the opinions of Congress upon the whole subject, and took the
management of the questions into the hands of the Senate and House
of Representatives.