270 CORRESPONDENCE, ETC., PRIOR TO TREATY OF 1818 



ties which had always been enjoyed by the people of the United States 

 in these fisheries, and declaring thai they should continue to enjoy 

 the right of fishing on the Grand Bank, and other places of com- 

 mon jurisdiction, and have the liberty of fishing and of drying and 

 curing their fish within the exclusive British jurisdiction on the 

 North American coasts, to which they had been accustomed while 

 themselves formed a part of the British nation. This stipulation 

 was a part of that treaty by which His Majesty acknowledged the 

 United States as free, sovereign, and independent States, and that 

 he treated with them as such. 



It cannot be necessary for me to prove, my lord, that that treaty 

 is not, in its general provisions, one of those which, by the common 

 understanding and usage of civilized nations, is or can be considered 

 as annulled by a subsequent war between the same parties. To sup- 

 pose that it is, would imply the inconsistency and absurdity of a 

 sovereign and independent state, liable to forfeit its right of sov- 

 ereignty, by the act of exercising it on a declaration of war. But 

 the Aery words of the treaty attest that the sovereignty and inde- 

 pendence of the United States were not considered or understood as 

 grants from His Majesty. They were taken and expressed as exist- 

 ing before the treaty was made, and as then only first formally 

 recognised and acknowledged by Great Britain. 



Precisely of the same nature were the rights and liberties in the 

 fisheries to which I now refer. They were, in no respect, grants 

 from the King of Great Britain to the United States; but the 

 acknowledgment of them as rights and liberties enjoyed before the 

 separation of the two countries, and which it was mutually agreed 

 should continue to be enjoyed under the new relations which were 

 to subsist between them, constituted the essence of the article con- 

 cerning the fisheries. The very peculiarity of the stipulation is an 

 evidence that it was not, on either side, understood or intended as a 

 grant from one sovereign state to another. Had it been so under- 

 stood, neither could the United States have claimed, nor would Great 

 Britain have granted, gratuitously, any such concession. There was 

 nothing, either in the state of things, or in the disposition of tfre 

 partie-. which could have led to such a stipulation, as on the ground 

 of a grant, without an equivalent, by Great Britain. 



Yet such is the ground upon which it appears to have been con- 

 templated as resting by the British Government, when their pleni- 

 potentiaries at Ghent communicated to those of the United States 

 their intentions as to the North American fisheries, viz: "That the 

 British Government did not intend to grant to the United States, 

 gratuitously, the privileges formerly granted by treaty to them, of 

 fishing within the limits of the British sovereignty, and of using the 

 shores of the British territories for purposes connected with the 

 British fisheries." 



These are the words in which the notice, given by them, is re- 

 corded in the protocol of conference of the 8th of August, 1814. To 

 this notice the American plenipotentiaries first answered, on the 9th 

 of August, that they had no instructions from their Government 

 to negotiate upon the subject of the fisheries; and afterwards, in 

 their note of 10th November, 1814, they expressed themselves in the 

 following terms: 



