When the ten-year limit of the joint occupancy feature of the Convention of 1818 was about to expire, our three diplomats were sharply confronted with the Oregon Question once more. John Quincy Adams had become President, Henry Clay was his Secretary of State, and Albert Gallatin, who had refused a cabinet position and a nomination for vice president, now consented to serve as United States Minister to Great Britain. In sending Minister Gallatin instructions under date of 19 June, 1826, Secretary of State Clay said: "You are then authorized to propose the annulment of the third article of the Convention of 1818, and the extension of the line on the parallel of 49, from the eastern side of the Stony Mountains, where it now terminates, to the Pacific Ocean, as the permanent boundary between the territories of the two powers in that quarter. This is our ultimatum, and you may so announce it."
There still were no American settlers in the region. The fixing of the boundary was apparently impossible, but Gallatin succeeded in concluding on 6 August, 1827, a convention to continue indefinitely the joint occupancy feature and providing that either side could terminate the agreement by giving the other side twelve months' notice. President Adams felt that it was a compromise, but a good one. Said he to Congress: "Our conventions with Great Britain are founded upon the principles of reciprocity."[227] In the course of the negotiations there was submitted a declaration prohibiting both sides from "exercising, or assuming to themselves the right to exercise, any exclusive sovereignty or jurisdiction over the said territory, during the continuance in force of the present convention."[228] That declaration was not made a formal part of the convention except so far as it is covered by Article III, which provides that nothing in the convention shall impair the claims of either party "to any part of the country westward of the Stony or Rocky Mountains."[229]
Oregon was projected into the struggles of joint occupancy. It remains to follow the interest of the three diplomats. Clay could not have forgotten Oregon wholly during his campaigns for the presidency or during his great fight for the Compromise of 1850, including the free constitution of California. He did not, however, come into definite contact with the Oregon case after his term as Secretary of State. Gallatin entered permanently upon private life in 1831. For about eight years he was a banker and then devoted himself to literature. There is abundant evidence that he remembered Oregon. He wrote in the field of ethnology about Indians of the west and, in 1846, when Oregon was reaching toward a final struggle in diplomacy, he wrote his well known pamphlet on The Oregon Question, beginning: "I had been a pioneer in collecting facts and stating the case."[230] When he wrote that pamphlet he was eighty-five years old and within three years of his death.
Adams continued longest in the public service; indeed, his wish to die in the harness was gratified. The ex-President entered Congress in 1831 and represented the same district in the House of Representatives until his death in 1848. He knew the Oregon Question from end to end. He knew how Doctor Floyd and others had tried, in 1821, to persuade Congress to establish a settlement on the Columbia. He knew about William A. Slacum's investigation and report, in 1837, as well as the report of the Wilkes Expedition, in 1841. On returning from church on 24 July, 1842, he called on Lord Ashburton and spent an hour with him learning about the negotiations with Secretary Webster for a treaty in which, as he found, the "Oregon Territory and Columbia River question remains open."[231] The Webster-Ashburton Treaty was concluded on 9 August, 1842, but there were further negotiations, for in March, 1843, after an illness of eight days, Adams got to the State Department and had a three hours' talk with Secretary of State Daniel Webster. He was displeased. Webster seemed frank enough with him about some points, but he admitted with apparent reluctance that Great Britain would not object to the United States extending southward from the Columbia River to San Francisco, at the expense of Mexico, if Great Britain was given a free hand north of the Columbia. Remembering the Puget Sound region as a part of such a sacrifice, Adams wrote in his diary: "What an abime of duplicity!"
On 16 February, 1843, as Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, he reported unfavorably Senator Linn's bill for the occupation of Oregon Territory. For this he has been criticized, but no one knew so well as he what lay behind that Article III in the Convention of 1827.
After the election of 1844, with its successful battle-cry of "Fifty-four, Forty, or Fight!" Congressman Adams watched the Oregon Question closely. He got through the House a call on the President for papers in the case and his diary of 14 December, 1845, says: "My chief occupation was to read the discussion between the successive Secretaries of State, Daniel Webster, Abel P. Upshur, John C. Calhoun, and James Buchanan, with the British Ministers Henry S. Fox and Ricard Pakenham, concerning the contest of title between the United States and Great Britain to the Oregon Territory. The most remarkable reflection to which this correspondence gives rise in my mind is that, notwithstanding the positive declaration of Mr. Polk in his inaugural speech of the unquestionable title of the United States to the whole Oregon country to latitude 54.40, notwithstanding a repetition of the same declaration in his recent message to Congress, and notwithstanding the constant professed inflexibility of his official newspaper in support of this claim, he has actually repeated the offer heretofore made by Mr. Monroe, and repeated by me, of continuing the boundary-line between the British possessions and the United States in the latitude of 49 from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, and that it has again been rejected by Great Britain."[232] He was of opinion that the offer ought not to be repeated or accepted if made by Great Britain, but he felt that Mr. Polk "will finish by accepting it."
He was right, Mr. Polk did accept it. The treaty was concluded on 15 June, 1846, and it is a great blessing that the end came through diplomacy without an appeal to arms. Few realized at the time how close we had come to war. The cry of "Fifty-four, Forty, or Fight!" was looked upon as mainly bluster for campaign purposes. But what of the other side? Within the last five years were published for the first time the Warre and Vavasour papers,[233] by which it is revealed that the British Government had sent the two secret agents into the Oregon country and they had shown how feasible would have been a war of conquest in that region. Instead of war, Great Britain renewed the offer of the forty-ninth parallel as a compromise boundary and it was accepted.
Each of our three diplomats lived beyond the Biblical allotment of years. Adams died in 1848 at eighty-one years of age, Gallatin in 1849 at eighty-eight, and Clay in 1852 at seventy-five. Grand old men, all of them! The public annals of their day are shot through and through with the records of their thoughts and deeds. Inadequate collections of their works have been saved, the greatest of which is the monumental diary of John Quincy Adams. He, himself, has written of that diary; "There has perhaps not been another individual of the human race, of whose daily existence from early childhood to fourscore years has been noted down with his own hand so minutely as mine."[234]
It has not been possible to search every document for this occasion, but enough has been gleaned to show something of the debt of gratitude which the Oregon country owes to the diplomatic triumphs achieved by the brains and hands of these three great men.
When the century of peace shall be rounded out on next Christmas eve, it would be well to send to Quincy, Lexington, and Trinity churchyard in New York wreaths of evergreens from the Oregon hills,—memorial tributes to Adams, Clay and Gallatin.