I come to the line of Utrecht, the existence of which is denied upon this floor by senators whose fate it seems to be to assert the existence of a line that is not, and to deny the existence of one that is. A clerk in the Department of State has compiled a volume of voyages and of treaties, and, undertaking to set the world right, has denied that commissioners ever met under the treaty of Utrecht, and fixed boundaries between the British northern and French Canadian possessions in North America. That denial has been produced and accredited on this floor by a senator in his place (Mr. Cass); and this production of a blundering book, with this senatorial endorsement of its blunder, lays me under the necessity of correcting a third error which the "fifty-four-forties" hug to their bosom, and the correction of which becomes necessary for the vindication of history, the establishment of a political right, and the protection of the Senate from the suspicion of ignorance. I affirm that the line was established; that the commissioners met and did their work; and that what they did has been acquiesced in by all the powers interested from the year 1713 down to the present time.
In the year 1805, being the second year after the acquisition of Louisiana, President Jefferson sent ministers to Madrid (Messrs. Monroe and Charles Pinckney) to adjust the southern and southwestern boundaries with her; and, in doing so, the principles which had governed the settlement of the northern boundary of the same province became a proper illustration of their ideas. They quoted these principles, and gave the line of Utrecht as the example; and this to Don Pedro Cevallos, one of the most accomplished statesmen of Europe. They say to him:
"It is believed that this principle has been admitted and acted on invariably since the discovery of America, in respect to their possessions there, by all the European powers. It is particularly illustrated by the stipulations of their most important treaties concerning those possessions and the practice under them, viz., the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and that of Paris in 1763. In conformity with the 10th article of the first-mentioned treaty, the boundary between Canada and Louisiana on the one side, and the Hudson Bay and Northwestern Companies on the other, was established by commissioners, by a line to commence at a cape or promontory on the ocean, in 58° 31' north latitude; to run thence, southwestwardly, to latitude 49° north from the equator; and along that line indefinitely westward. Since that time, no attempt has been made to extend the limits of Louisiana or Canada to the north of that line, or of those companies to the south of it, by purchase, conquest, or grants from the Indians."
This is what Messrs. Monroe and Charles Pinckney said to Don Pedro Cevallos—a minister who must be supposed to be as well acquainted with the treaties which settled the boundaries of the late Spanish province of Louisiana as we are with the treaties which settle the boundaries of the United States. The line of Utrecht, and in the very words which carry it from the Lake of the Woods to the Pacific Ocean, and which confine the British to the north, and the French and Spanish to the south of that line, are quoted to Mr. Cevallos as a fact which he and all the world knew. He received it as such; and thus Spanish authority comes in aid of British, French, and American, to vindicate our rights and the truth of history.
(The letter was read.)
Another contribution, which I have pleasure to acknowledge, is from a gentleman of Baltimore, formerly of the House of Representatives (Mr. Kennedy), who gives me an extract from the Journal of the British House of Commons, March 5th, 1714, directing a writ to be issued for electing a burgess in the place of Frederick Herne, Esq., who, since his election, hath accepted, as the Journal says, the office of one of his Majesty's commissioners for treating with commissioners on the part of France for settling the trade between Great Britain and France. The same entry occurs at the same time with respect to James Murray, Esq., and Sir Joseph Martyn. The tenth article of the treaty of Utrecht applies to limits in North America, the eleventh and fifteenth to commerce; and these commissioners were appointed under some or all of these articles. Others might have been appointed by the king, and not mentioned in the journals, as not being members of Parliament whose vacated seats were to be filled. All three of the articles of the treaty were equally obligatory for the appointment of commissioners; and here is proof that three were appointed under the commercial articles.
One more piece of testimony, and I have done. And, first, a little statement to introduce it. We all know that in one of the debates which took place in the British House of Commons on the Ashburton treaty, and after that treaty was ratified and past recall, mention was made of a certain map called the King's map, which had belonged to the late King (George III.), and hung in his library during his lifetime, and afterwards in the Foreign Office, from which said office the said map silently disappeared about the time of the Ashburton treaty, and which certainly was not before our Senate at the time of the ratification of that treaty. Well, the member who mentioned it in Parliament said there was a strong red line upon it, about the tenth of an inch wide, running all along where the Americans said the true boundary was, with these words written along it in four places in King George's handwriting: "This is Oswald's line;" meaning, it is the line of the treaty of peace negotiated by Mr. Oswald on the British side, and therefore called Oswald's line.
Now, what I have to say is this: That whenever this royal map shall emerge from its retreat and resume its place in the Foreign Office, on it will be found another strong red line about the tenth of an inch wide, in another place, with these words written on it: Boundaries between the British and French possessions in America "as fixed by the treaty of Utrecht." To complete this last and crowning piece of testimony, I have to add that the evidence of it is in the Department of State, as is nearly the whole of the evidence which I have used in crushing this pie-poudre insurrection—"this puddle-lane rebellion"—against the truth and majesty of history, which, beginning with a clerk in the Department of State, spread to all the organs, big and little; then reached the Senate of the United States, held divided empire in this chamber for four months, and now dies the death of the ridiculous.[9]
We must now introduce the gentlemen of 54-40 to Frazer's River, an acquaintance which they will be obliged to make before they arrive at their inexorable line; for it lies in their course, and must be crossed—both itself and the British province of New Caledonia, which it waters. This, then, is the introduction to that inevitable acquaintance, hitherto ignored. It is a river of about a thousand miles in length (following its windings), rising in the Rocky Mountains, opposite the head of the Unjigah, or Peace River, which flows into the Frozen Ocean in latitude about 70. The course of this river is nearly north and south, rising in latitude 55, flowing south to near latitude 49, and along that parallel, and just north of it, to the Gulf of Georgia, into which it falls behind Vancouver's Island. The upper part of this river is good for navigation; the lower half, plunging through volcanic chasms in mountains of rock, is wholly unnavigable for any species of craft. This river was discovered by Sir Alexander Mackenzie in 1793, was settled by the Northwest Company in 1806, and soon covered by their establishments from head to mouth. No American or Spaniard had ever left a track upon this river or its valley. Our claim to it, as far as I can see, rested wholly upon the treaty with Spain of 1819; and her claim rested wholly upon those discoveries among the islands, the value of which, as conferring claims upon the continent, it has been my province to show in our negotiations with Russia in 1824. At the time that we acquired this Spanish claim to Frazer's River, it had already been discovered twenty-six years by the British; had been settled by them for twelve years; was known by a British name; and no Spaniard had ever made a track on its banks. New Caledonia, or Western Caledonia, was the name which it then bore; and it so happens that an American citizen, a native of Vermont, respectably known to the senators now present from that State, and who had spent twenty years of his life in the hyperborean regions of Northwest America, in publishing an account of his travels and sojournings in that quarter, actually published a description of this New Caledonia, as a British province, at the very moment that we were getting it from Spain, and without the least suspicion that it belonged to Spain! I speak of Mr. David Harmon, whose Journal of Nineteen Years' Residence between latitudes 47 and 58 in Northwestern America, was published at Andover, in his native State, in the year 1820, the precise year after we had purchased this New Caledonia from the Spaniards. I read, not from the volume itself, which is not in the library of Congress, but from the London Quarterly Review January No., 1822, as reprinted in Boston; article, Western Caledonia.
(The extract.)