"Nevertheless, we are the friends of Brazil and her best customer, and it may be well for her to bear in mind the liberal policy and the marked degree of friendly consideration which this government has ever observed towards her people. A duty in this country of a few cents a pound on Brazilian coffee would touch a popular nerve in that, which would vibrate through every department of the empire, and convey its impressions to the throne itself. To provoke such retaliation would be a crime scarcely short of deliberate regicide on this continent.
"As for the rights of riparian States to rivers that are owned in common, the doctrines held by the United States with regard to the navigation of the Mississippi, when both banks at its mouth were owned by France or Spain, are too well known to require repetition here. Suffice it to say that the American people were not only prepared to maintain that right by force, but they also insisted for a place of free deposite at its mouth—a place where they might load and unload, tranship and deposite, without any fees or charges whatever, save those of wharfage and storage.
"With regard to the St. Lawrence, the doctrine held by the United States was, that the right of American citizens to use the waters of that river for floating their vessels to and from the sea rested on the same ground and obvious necessity which had been urged to the Mississippi; that the treaties concluded at the Congress of Vienna, which stipulated that the navigation of the Rhine, the Moselle, the Meuse, and other great rivers of Europe, should be free to all nations, covered this ground; and, finally, that this claim, while its enjoyment was necessary to the development and prosperity of many States of this Union, was not injurious to Great Britain, nor could its exercise violate any of her just rights.[13]
"This claim was resisted by the British government chiefly on the ground that the St. Lawrence was not navigable from the sea all the way up to the lakes; that there were connected with it portages, or artificial canals, leading through British territory; and that the right, if vested in a foreign nation, to use these in war, might prove inconvenient, if not injurious, &c. And, furthermore, it was held that the American government could not insist upon its claim unless we were prepared to concede to British subjects the rights of free navigation upon the Mississippi river.[14]
"In reply to this, it was held that, so far as geographical knowledge then extended, the Mississippi and all of its tributaries laid wholly within the territory of the United States; that Great Britain had no more right than any other foreign nation to the navigation of this river. But if further research and discovery should establish the fact that the waters of the Mississippi connect themselves with Upper Canada, as those of the St. Lawrence do with the United States, then, and in that case, the American government would be both willing to recognise and ready to concede the right of British subjects freely to navigate the Mississippi through such connexion from the lakes, or the land, to the sea.[15]
"With regard to the St. Lawrence, the American Executive advanced, among other arguments, the very doctrine that, in its comprehensive sense, now applies to the Amazon.
"In the case of the St. Lawrence, two powers, and only two, were concerned in its navigation. Though each owned a portion of the great lakes, yet neither of them did as the upper riparian States of the Amazon have done, viz: convert those upper waters into inland seas, by declaring their navigation free, and inviting all the world to come, and each nation under its own flag, for traffic and trade.
"Had the United States been the sole proprietor of the great lakes, and had it been thought proper to proclaim the freedom of the seas for these waters, and to make the navigation of them as free to all nations as is the navigation of the blue waters of the deep sea, then the navigation of the St. Lawrence would have been a question in which the whole commercial world would have been equally interested with this government. It would have represented the case of the Dardanelles after Russia became part owner of the Black sea, and the navigation of it was thrown open to the world. It would have been an exact type of the case presented with regard to the Amazon since the decrees of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, which have made the running waters of it and its navigable tributaries as free to man's use as is the air we breathe, or the blue waters ploughed by American keels in the middle of the ocean.
"But as it is, principles broad enough to cover this case of the Amazon were laid down by American statesmen with regard to the St. Lawrence, when they maintained that if that river had been 'regarded as a strait connecting navigable seas, as it ought properly to be, there would be less controversy. The principle on which the right to navigate straits depends is, that they are accessorial to those seas which they unite, and the right of navigating, which is not exclusive, but common to all nations—the right to navigate the seas drawing after it that of passing the straits.'
"And this is the doctrine upon which the people represented in the Memphis convention, and who are again, in the persons of their representatives, about to assemble in the city of Charleston for the further consideration of this and other great questions, found their hopes. They believe it just, and desire to see it endorsed and to hear it proclaimed from the chambers of the Capitol.