In August, 1795, the Treaty was ratified by Washington as President of the United States; and, in 1796, the Commissioners began their work, the third Commissioner being an American lawyer. The work was not concluded until another explanatory article had been, on the 15th of March, 1798, signed on behalf of the two Governments, relieving the Commissioners from the duty of particularizing the latitude and longitude of the source of the St. Croix, provided that they described the river in such other manner as they judged expedient, and laying down that the point ascertained and described to be the source should be marked by a monument to be erected and maintained by the two Governments. Eventually, on the 25th of October, 1798, the Commissioners, who had discharged their duties with conspicuous fairness and ability, gave their award. They identified the Scoodic The St. Croix river determined in 1798. river, as it was then called, with the St. Croix of Champlain; they selected the Eastern or Northern branch of the river as the boundary line in preference to the South-Western, thereby including in American territory a considerable area which the English had claimed; they marked beyond further dispute the point which was thereafter to be held to be the source of the St. Croix; but they did not demarcate the actual boundary line down the course of the river.
From the source of the St. Croix, according to the words of the Treaty of 1783, which have been already quoted, a line was to be drawn due North to the Highlands which formed The Maine Boundary question. the water parting between the streams running into the St. Lawrence and those running into the Atlantic Ocean, and this line was supposed to form the North-West angle of Nova Scotia. No provision was made in the Treaty of 1794 for determining the boundary North of the source of the St. Croix river, and the labours of the St. Croix Commission were confined to identifying that river from the mouth to the source. A far more serious and more prolonged controversy arose over the territory to the North of the source, threatening to bring war between Great Britain and the United States, and not settled for sixty years.
As in the case of the St. Croix, the framers of the Treaty of 1783, in specifying a line drawn due North from the source of that river, to meet the Highlands which parted the basin of the St. Lawrence from that of the Atlantic, had recourse to past history and used definitions already in existence. The old definitions of the boundary. Nova Scotia, as granted to Sir William Alexander, was, according to the terms of the charter, bounded from the source of the St. Croix
‘by an imaginary straight line which is conceived to extend through the land, or run Northward to the nearest bay, river, or stream emptying into the great river of Canada’.
The Royal Proclamation of 1763, which constituted the province of Quebec after the peace signed in that year, defined the Southern boundary of Quebec as passing
‘along the Highlands which divide the rivers that empty themselves into the said river St. Lawrence from those which fall into the sea’.
The Quebec Act of 1774 again defined the Southern boundary of Quebec as
‘along the Highlands which divide the rivers that empty themselves into the river St. Lawrence from those which fall into the sea, to a point in 45 degrees of Northern latitude on the Eastern bank of the River Connecticut’.
In the Commission to the Governor of Nova Scotia issued in 1763, the Western boundary of Nova Scotia from the source of the St. Croix was defined