"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