CHAPTER XII FISHERIES
If, on looking back, I were to select the things which I have done in public life in which I take the most satisfaction, they would be, the speech in the Senate on the Fisheries Treaty, July 10, 1886, the letter denouncing the A. P. A., a secret, political association, organized for the purpose of ostracizing our Catholic fellow-citizens, and the numerous speeches, letters and magazine articles against the subjugation of the Philippine Islands.
I do not think any one argument, certainly that my argument, caused the defeat of the Fisheries Treaty, negotiated by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain and Mr. Bayard during Mr. Cleveland's first Administration. The argument against it was too strong not to have prevailed without any one man's contribution to it; and the Senate was not so strongly inclined to support President Cleveland as to give a two-thirds majority to a measure, unless it seemed clearly for the public interest. He had his Republican opponents to reckon with, and the Democrats in the Senate disliked him very much, and gave him a feeble and half-hearted support.
The question of our New England fisheries has interested the people of the country, especially of New England, from our very early history. Burke spoke of them before the Revolutionary War, as exciting even then the envy of England. One of the best known and most eloquent passages in all literature is his description of the enterprise of our fathers. Burke adds to that description:
"When I reflect upon the effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of Liberty."
The War of the Revolution, of course, interrupted for a time the fisheries of the American colonies. But the fishermen were not idle. They manned the little Navy whose exploits have never yet received from history its due meed of praise. They furnished the ships' companies of Manly and Tucker and Biddle and Abraham Whipple. They helped Paul Jones to strike terror into St. George's Channel. In 1776, in the first year of the Revolutionary War, American privateers, most of them manned by our fishermen, captured three hundred and forty- two British vessels.
The fisheries came up again after the war. Mr. Jefferson commended them to the favor of the nation in an elaborate and admirable report. He said that before the war 8,000 men and 52,000 tons of shipping were annually employed by Massachusetts in the cod and whale fisheries. England and France made urgent efforts and offered large bounties to get our fishermen to move over there.
For a long time the fisheries were aided by direct bounties.
Later the policy of protection has been substituted.
John Adams has left on record that when he went abroad as our representative in 1778, and again when the Treaty of 1783 was negotiated, his knowledge of the fisheries and his sense of their importance were what induced him to take the mission. He declared that unless our claims were fully recognized, the States would carry on the war alone. He said:
"Because the people of New England, besides the natural claim of mankind to the gifts of Providence on their coast, are specially entitled to the fishery by their charters, which have never been declared forfeited."
In the debate on the articles of peace in the House of Lords,
Lord Loughborough, the ablest lawyer of his party, said:
"The fishery on the shores retained by Britain is in the next article not ceded, but recognized as a right inherent in the Americans, which though no longer British subjects, they are to continue to enjoy unmolested."
This was denied nowhere in the debate.
John Adams took greater satisfaction in his achievement when he secured our fisheries in the treaty of 1783 than in any other of the great acts of his life.* After the treaty of 1783 he had a seal struck with the figures of the pine tree, the deer and the fish, emblems of the territory and the fisheries secured in 1783. He had it engraved anew in 1815 with the motto, "Piscemur, venemur, ut olim." I have in my possession an impression taken from the original seal of 1815. This letter from John Quincy Adams tells its story:
"QUINCY, September 3, 1836.
"My Dear Son: On this day, the anniversary of the definitive treaty of peace of 1783, whereby the independence of the United States of America was recognized, and the anniversary of your own marriage, I give you a seal, the impression upon which was a device of my father, to commemorate the successful assertion of two great interests in the negotiation for the peace, the liberty of the fisheries, and the boundary securing the acquisition of the western lands. The deer, the pine tree, and the fish are the emblems representing those interests.
"The seal which my father had engraved in 1783 was without the motto. He gave it in his lifetime to your deceased brother John, to whose family it belongs. That which I now give to you I had engraved by his direction at London in 1815, shortly after the conclusion of the treaty of peace at Ghent, on the 24th of December, 1814, at the negotiation of which the same interests, the fisheries, and the bounty had been deeply involved. The motto, 'Piscemur, venemur, ut olim,' is from Horace.
"I request you, should the blessing of heaven preserve the life of your son, Charles Francis, and make him worthy of your approbation, to give it at your own time to him as a token of remembrance of my father, who gave it to me, and of yours.
"JOHN QUINCY ADAMS."
"My son Charles Francis Adams."
[Footnote]
* See Ante, p. 131.
[End of Footnote]
The negotiations of 1815 and 1818 were under the control of as dauntless and uncompromising a spirit, and one quite as alive to the value of the fisheries and the dishonor of abandoning them as that of John Adams himself. If John Quincy Adams, the senior envoy at Ghent, and the Secretary of State in 1818, had consented to a treaty bearing the construction which is lately claimed he never could have gone home to face his father. When the War of 1812 ended, Great Britain set up the preposterous claim that the war had abrogated all treaties, and that with the treaty of 1783 our rights in the fisheries were gone. There was alarm in New England; but it was quieted by the knowledge that John Quincy Adams was one of our representatives. It was well said at that time that, as
"John Adams saved the fisheries once, his son would a second time."
When someone expressed a fear that the other commissioners would not stand by his son, the old man wrote in 1814, that—
"Bayard, Russell, Clay, or even Gallatin, would cede the fee-simple of the United States as soon as they would cede the fisheries." (pp. 21-22).
These fisheries still support the important city of Gloucester, and are a very valuable source of wealth to the hardy and enterprising people who maintain them. Their story is full of romance. A touching yearly ceremonial is celebrated at the present time in Gloucester in commemoration of the men who are lost in this dangerous employment.
But the value of the fisheries does not consist chiefly in historic association or in the wealth which they contribute to any such community.
They are the nursery of seamen, more valuable and less costly than the Naval School at Annapolis. They train the men who are employed in them to get to be at home on the sea. They are valuable for naval officers and for sailors. Whenever there shall be a war with a naval power, they will be thrown out of employ, and will seek service in our Navy. All the English authorities, I believe, concur in this opinion. I read in my speech a very interesting letter from Admiral Porter who testified strongly to that effect.
While it is true that many of our common sailors engaged in our cod and other fisheries are of foreign birth, it is equally true that they, almost all of them, come to live in this country, get naturalized and become ardent Americans. This is true of the natives of the British Dominions. But it is still more true of the Scandinavians, a hardy and adventurous race, faithful and brave, who become full of the spirit of American nationality.
Mr. Bayard who was, I think, inspired by a patriotic and praiseworthy desire to establish more friendly relations with Great Britain, seemed to me to give away the whole American case, and to have been bamboozled by Joseph Chamberlain at every point. The Treaty gave our markets to Canada without anything of value to us in return, and afforded no just indemnity for the past outrages of which we justly complained, and gave no security for the future.
The Treaty, which required a two-thirds majority for its ratification, was defeated by a vote of twenty-seven yeas to thirty nays. There were nine Senators paired in the affirmative, and eight in the negative. The vote was a strict party vote, with the exception of Messrs. Palmer and Turpie, Democrats, who were against it.
I discussed the subject with great earnestness, going fully into the history of the matter, and the merits of the Treaty. I think I may say without undue vanity that my speech was an important and interesting contribution to a very creditable chapter of our history.