Execution of British Treaty.
After the presentation of several petitions on this subject, the House resolved itself into a Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union, when the resolution for carrying into effect the British Treaty being under consideration—
Mr. Coit said, that the importance of the resolution before the committee would preclude all necessity of analogy for any member's asking their attention to his observations. He should only add to it, that he should endeavor not to repeat what had been already said.
He observed, that the discussion of the merits of the Treaty came before the committee under peculiar disadvantages, for, besides the prejudices against it that might be supposed to have been caused by extraneous circumstances, the agitation of the important constitutional question relative to the right of the Legislature to concur in giving validity to this Treaty, which was claimed to be valid and complete without that concurrence, and the refusal of a call for papers had very naturally a tendency to give a bias to the minds of some gentlemen against the Treaty; for himself, he was fully satisfied the Legislature had no constitutional connection with the business of making Treaties.
Mr. C. said he should attempt to run through the objections which had been made to the Treaty, and consider its merits independently of the peculiar circumstances under which it was now presented to the committee, and then give his own view of it as relative to those peculiar circumstances.
The objects of the negotiation, he said, very naturally were divided into three parts—the inexecution of the Treaty of 1783; mutual complaints between the United States and Great Britain relative to transactions independent of the Treaty; and arrangements for the intercourse between the two nations, commercial and political. But as gentlemen had made their objections generally in the order in which the several articles of the Treaty had been arranged, he should follow the same order in his observations in answer to them.
The first objection which had been made was, that no compensation had been stipulated to the United States for the supposed breach of the Treaty of 1783, in carrying off the negroes. This objection, he had supposed, was so completely answered by his colleague, (Mr. Hillhouse,) who had been up the day before, that he should not have added on that head, but that he had since found gentlemen still insisting on that objection. He was particularly surprised to hear the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Findlay) stating that he conceived the negro article to have been put into the Treaty expressly as a compensation or set-off for the engagement to pay the British debts. This pretension, he thought, had been fully refuted by the extract from Mr. Adams's journal, quoted by Mr. Jefferson in his correspondence with Mr. Hamilton, and which had been read by his colleague. From that extract, it appeared that a claim for negroes and other property which had been plundered, carried off, and destroyed by the British, was made by our commissioners, as a set-off against a claim made by the British commissioners for restoration of confiscated estates; and that the one of those claims was abandoned with the other. Had the gentleman from Pennsylvania taken the pains to examine the journal of Mr. Adams, which might be seen by any member of the committee at the office of the Secretary of State, he would have found how the article came to be inserted.
Before the signing of the Treaties with which the extract made by Mr. Jefferson is closed, stands in the original the history of this article in these words:
"Mr. Laurens said, there ought to be a stipulation that the British troops should carry off no negroes or other property; we all agreed. Mr. Oswald consented, and then the Treaties were signed," &c.
This, Mr. Coit said, was all the mention he could find respecting this article, except in a subsequent part of the same letter, in which Mr. Adams observes: