Croix was depicted on the maps, but no river known by that name existed in 1783.The British identified it with the Schoodic, the Americans with the Magaguadavic.Arbitration in 1798 upheld the British in the contention that the Schoodic was the St.Croix but agreed with the Americans in the secondary question as to which of the two branches of the Schoodic should be followed.A similar commission in 1817 settled the dispute as to the islands in Passamaquoddy Bay.
More difficult, because at once more ambiguous in terms and more vitally important, was the determination of the boundary in the next stage westward from the St.Croix to the St.Lawrence.The British position was a difficult one to maintain.In the days of the struggle with France, Great Britain had tried to push the bounds of the New England colonies as far north as might be, making claims that would hem in France to the barest strip along the south shore of the St.Lawrence.Now that she was heir to the territories and claims of France and had lost her own old colonies, it was somewhat embarrassing, but for diplomats not impossible, to have to urge a line as far south as the urgent needs of the provinces for intercommunication demanded.The letter of the treaty was impossible to interpret with certainty.
The phrase, "the Highlands which divide those rivers that empty themselves into the river St.Lawrence from those which fall into the Atlantic Ocean," meant according to the American reading a watershed which was a marshy plateau, and according to the British version a range of hills to the south which involved some keen hairsplitting as to the rivers they divided.The intentions of the parties to the original treaty were probably much as the Americans contended.From the standpoint of neighborly adjustment and the relative need for the land in question, a strong case in equity could be made out for the provinces, which would be cut asunder for all time if a wedge were driven north to the very brink of the St.Lawrence.
As lumbermen and settlers gathered in the border area, the risk of conflict became acute, culminating in the Aroostook War in 1838-39, when the Legislatures of Maine and New Brunswick backed their rival lumberjacks with reckless jingoism.Diplomacy failed repeatedly to obtain a compromise line.Arbitration was tried with little better success, as the United States refused to accept the award of the King of the Netherlands in 1831.The diplomats tried once more, and in 1842 Daniel Webster, the United States Secretary of State, and Lord Ashburton, the British Commissioner, made a compromise by which some five thousand miles of the area in dispute were assigned to Great Britain and seven thousand to the United States.The award was not popular on either side, and the public seized eagerly on stories of concealed "Red Line" maps, stories of Yankee smartness or of British trickery.Webster, to win the assent of Maine, had exhibited in the Senate a map found in the French Archives and very damaging to the American claim.Later it appeared that the British Government also had found a map equally damaging to its own claims.The nice question of ethics involved, whether a nation should bring forward evidence that would tell against itself, ceased to have more than an abstract interest when it was demonstrated that neither map could be considered as one which the original negotiators had used or marked.** See "The Path, of Empire", by Carl Russell Fish (in "The Chronicles of America").
The boundary from the St.Lawrence westward through the Great Lakes and thence to the Lake of the Woods had been laid down in the Treaty of 1783 in the usual vague terms, but it was determined in a series of negotiations from 1794 to 1842 with less friction and heat than the eastern line had caused.From the Lake of the Woods to the Rockies a new line, the forty-ninth parallel, was agreed upon in 1818.Then, as the Pacific Ocean was neared, the difficulties once more increased.There were no treaties between the two countries to limit claims beyond the Rockies.Discovery and settlement, and the rights inherited from or admitted by the Spaniards to the south and by the Russians to the north, were the grounds put forward.British and Canadian fur traders had been the pioneers in overland discovery, but early in the forties thousands of American settlers poured into the Columbia Valley and strengthened the practical case for their country."Fifty-four forty or fight"--in other words, the calm proposal to claim the whole coast between Mexico and Alaska--became the popular cry in the United States; but in face of the firm attitude of Great Britain and impending hostilities with Mexico, more moderate counsels ruled.Great Britain held out for the Columbia River as the dividing line, and the United States for the forty-ninth parallel throughout.Finally, in 1846, the latter contention was accepted, with a modification to leave Vancouver Island wholly British territory.A postscript to this settlement was added in 1872, when the German Emperor as arbitrator approved the American claim to the island of San Juan in the channel between Vancouver Island and the mainland.** See "The Path of Empire".
