The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society (Vol. I, No. 3)

by Oregon Historical Society

It was a great step taken toward settlement when the claims of all nations but Great Britain and the United States were eliminated from the question. But elimination of claims was not the only respect in which progress towards settlement had been made during the period which closed with the convention between Great Britain and Russia. The ten years between the treaty of Ghent and this convention show a substantial approach to agreement between Great Britain and America. The events of the year 1818 in particular mark this approach. This year, so important in the history of the relations between Great Britain and America, opened with the issue of the order of January 26 by the British government for the restitution of Fort George, the post at the mouth of the Columbia, which, under the name of Astoria, had been taken possession of by the British early in the late war. This order, which was formally carried out in October of that year, gains in significance the more closely the whole history of the case is examined. Astoria, it will be remembered, was the name of the trading post established in 1811 by the Pacific Fur Company, of which John Jacob Astor, of New York, was founder and chief stockholder. It was nominally an American company, and was established under the American flag; but of the party of thirty-three that landed April 12, 1811, to form the settlement, all except three are said to have been British subjects. On the twelfth day of November, 1813, in the absence of Mr. Astor’s agent, who was an American, Mr. McDougall, his sub-agent, a British subject, representing himself and the other partners present, likewise British subjects, signed the bills of sale, and delivered up Astoria to the Northwest Company, a British company. One month later, Captain Black, of the British navy, in the sloop-of-war, Racoon, arrived in the Columbia, and took possession of Astoria in the name of his sovereign, and in honor of his sovereign changed the name to Fort George. He seems to have been chagrined not a little to find that, instead of the glory of battering down an American fort, nothing awaited him but to take peaceful possession in the name of his king of a British settlement.

By the first article of the treaty of Ghent, “all territory, places, and possessions whatsoever, taken by either party from the other during the war” should be restored. In view of the history just given, it is not strange that the British government, when called upon by the United States to make restitution of Astoria in accordance with this article of the treaty, objected, on the ground that the place was already a British settlement when taken possession of by a British officer. And yet, in the course of the negotiations that followed, Great Britain yielded this point, and through her representative, Lord Castlereagh, “admitted, in the most ample extent, our right to be reinstated, and to be the party in possession while treating of the title.” Accordingly, October, 1818, the order first issued January 26 preceding, was executed, and Fort George was formally handed over to an American officer specially sent to the Columbia to receive it, and once more the American flag floated over this British settlement.

This act of restitution, under these circumstances, can hardly be regarded as less than a concession on the part of Great Britain, a concession the full significance of which appears only when the act of restitution is taken in connection with the convention of joint occupation entered into by the two governments that year, and with certain intimations made by the British Plenipotentiaries in the conferences which led up to that convention. It was in this convention that the boundary between the two countries west from Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains on the forty-ninth parallel was agreed upon. In the preliminary conferences the representatives of Great Britain insisted that the boundary west of the Rocky Mountains should be settled at the same time with the boundary eastward; that the two should stand or fall together. In response to this wish, the American representatives proposed that the same line of the forty-ninth parallel be extended westward to the Pacific. This the representatives of Great Britain refused to accept, nor would they themselves propose a line; but they did intimate that the Columbia River itself was the most convenient boundary that could be adopted, and that they would not agree to any boundary that did not give to Great Britain a harbor at the mouth of the Columbia River in common with the United States. The American representatives not consenting to this, after further proposals and counter proposals, none of which were acceptable to both governments, it was finally agreed to adopt the now celebrated plan of joint occupation as that plan is embodied in the third article of the convention of that year.

Thus it is that the order of the British government for the restitution of Astoria at the opening of the year 1818, taken in connection with all the circumstances of the case, and the convention of joint occupation made by the two governments at the close of the year, taken in connection with concessions in conferences made by both parties, make this year an era in the history of the Oregon Question. In particular, two important lines had been proposed and discussed, each proposal showing an important concession on the part of the party making it, and each line proposed practically setting a limit for the future, in its direction, to the territory that remained in question. For it may safely be said that from this time the extreme limits of the claims of the several parties were fixed; that henceforth the United States would not press their claim to territory north of latitude 49°, nor would Great Britain press hers to territory south of the Columbia. The territory longer in question lay between these two lines, and it is doubtful if ever after this year there was a time when the question might not have been settled by Great Britain’s consenting to the line of the forty-ninth parallel, or by the United States’ consenting to that of the Columbia. With these limits to their several claims practically agreed upon by Great Britain and the United States, and a plan of joint occupation adopted at the close of the year 1818, it remained only to eliminate claims of other nations to the territory in order to reduce the question to its simplest terms. This elimination, as we have seen, was effected by the conventions of 1819, of 1824, and of 1825, the last of which left Britain and America free to settle the question of sovereignty between themselves.

The conditions of the Oregon Question at the close of the period ending 1825 were, upon the whole, not unfavorable to America. It is true Great Britain was the party in possession at this time through the settlements of the Hudson’s Bay Company, but when it is remembered that these settlements were made even before the more important concessions of the conventions were made, these concessions are only the more strongly significant of the disposition of the government of Great Britain to treat fairly, at least, the claims of America. It is especially significant of this disposition that the settlement at Fort George was abandoned in the spring of 1825 by the British company in the expectation that the Americans would speedily occupy it, and, though the Americans failed at once to occupy it, it was left by the British unoccupied for five years, as if they were waiting for the Americans to come and claim their own. When we remember Britain’s well known doctrine, of occupation within a reasonable time as necessary to establish full title to lands claimed on the ground of prior discovery and exploration, this can hardly be regarded as else than an invitation on the part of Britain to the United States to come and make good their title to at least that part of Oregon that lay south of the Columbia.

Occupation had been attempted, it will be remembered, in the case of the establishments of the Pacific Fur Company at Astoria and other points on the south and east of the Columbia. The whole conduct of England in regard to these establishments, made for the purposes of trade, goes to show that she regarded them as belonging to a legitimate mode of occupation, the right of which she not only assumed to herself, but was ready to allow to America. The failure of the settlements and their ultimate abandonment as a mode of American occupation were due to the accidents of war, not to the interference of diplomacy. The convention of 1818, of joint occupation, was the embodiment of no new principle, but simply the formal assent of both parties to a principle of occupation assumed by America in the Astoria settlements, and by Great Britain in those in the valley of the Columbia, and by each tacitly allowed to the other.

In 1821, however, three years after the convention of joint occupation, a movement was begun in the Congress of the United States toward an occupation of the territory in dispute, of a very different character, which, if it had actually been adopted as a measure enjoined upon the executive, and once been attempted to be carried out, would have met from Great Britain a very different response. In the house of representatives, December 10, 1821, on motion of Mr. Floyd, of Virginia, a committee was appointed to inquire into the expediency of occupying the Columbia River and the country adjacent thereto; and the committee had leave to report by bill or otherwise. Later in the same session this committee reported a bill providing for the occupation of the mouth of the Columbia. The occupation contemplated by this bill was to be, first of all, military occupation, or, as one of the advocates of the bill wished to make it by amendment, “an occupation by military force only, with some encouragement to settlers.” The view of the territorial rights of the United States in that region on which the bill was based was briefly and clearly put by another of its advocates: “The bill under consideration does not attempt a colonial settlement. The territory proposed to be occupied is already a part of the United States.” The convention of joint occupation of 1818 left the question of sovereignty of the entire territory westward of the Rocky Mountains in abeyance. All occupation, therefore, of any part of this territory, to be lawful under this convention, must be of such a nature as to leave the question of sovereignty to be settled by agreement of the powers participant in the convention. Whatever rights either of the two parties to the convention had, or conceived that it had, by the act of entering into the convention it agreed, so long as the convention was in force, neither to assert sovereignty, nor to do any act in the territory covered by the convention that could be justly construed as an act of sovereignty. What acts the two powers might lawfully do under the convention were not clear at first, but it is difficult at this day to understand how anyone who looked carefully into the question could have failed to see that the acts contemplated in this first bill providing for occupation were not such as could lawfully be done under the convention. The same may be said of all the measures proposed in congress in regard to the occupation of the territory during the earlier period of the convention. There were men in congress who saw the unlawful character of each measure as it was proposed, and opposed it on this ground. Others joined these actively, on the ground that the Oregon Territory, if settled, because of its distance and the barriers which separated it from the United States, never could become a part of the union. To these were added enough who based their opposition on other grounds to defeat every such measure, either in the senate or in the house, or, as was the case in the early history of congressional agitation, in both houses of congress.

This early discussion in congress of our interests in Oregon, though it failed to reach any practicable plan of occupation, was not without valuable results. It served to clarify the minds of men in congress, and out of it, on the nature of the question involved, and through the information brought out and published in the course of the debates and reports went far toward enlightening the public mind on the character and resources of the territory in dispute. In the course of the negotiations that preceded the convention of 1818, and led up to it, Mr. Adams, as Secretary of State, in a letter of instructions to the American Plenipotentiaries, had expressed his government’s low estimate of the interests involved in the Oregon Question. “It may be proper,” he then wrote, “to remark the minuteness of the present interests, either to Great Britain or to the United States, involved in this concern, and the unwillingness, for this reason, of this government to include it among the objects of serious discussion with them.”

Such words, written on the eve of the first congressional agitation of the question, could hardly have been written at the close of that discussion. For at that time the Oregon Question had become a matter of widespread interest, and both government and people were disposed to include it among objects of serious discussion. Agitation of the question in congress had the further effect of bringing the two governments to make another attempt to effect a settlement by convention. In 1824, when measures providing for occupation had been discussed in congress for three years, Mr. Adams, Secretary of State, wrote that though the government was aware that the convention of 1818 between the United States and Great Britain had four years to run, the President was of the opinion that the present was not an unsuitable moment for attempting a new and more definite adjustment of the claims of the two powers in question; that the Oregon Territory was a country daily assuming an aspect political, commercial, and territorial of more and more interest to the United States. Negotiations were at this time renewed between the two governments, but failed to issue in any agreement. Two years later they were resumed, on motion of the British government, but the two governments adhering substantially to their several positions of 1818, no settlement was reached. The third article of the convention of 1818 was, however, renewed for an indefinite period. In the communications of Mr. Clay to Mr. Gallatin during this period of negotiation, there is manifested an increase of interest in the question on the part of the American government, even over that of two years before.

The depth of this interest and the source of its inspiration appear from various expressions of these official communications. “The President,” Mr. Clay writes, “is anxious for a settlement on just principles. Such a settlement alone would be satisfactory to the people of the United States, or would command the concurrence of the senate.” “Much better,” he continues, “that matters of difference should remain unadjusted than be settled on terms disadvantageous to the United States, and which, therefore, would be unsatisfactory to the people and to other departments of government.”