550 CORRESPONDENCE, ETC. 



Under these conflicting constructions, you are pleased to invite 

 mv views on the subject as I was one of the negotiators of the con- 

 vention. 



Honored by such a call upon me, I feel that the national rights and 

 interests at stake in the just construction of this convention, are of 

 a description so high as necessarily to command my obedience to 

 the call. 



At the same time, with the public duty which your letter devolves 

 upon me and which I am ready to meet, I cannot be insensible to the 

 peculiarity of its nature, coming, as the call does, more than thirty 

 years after the negotiation was held. I might well be distrustful of 

 my personal recollections, and would hardly dare to draw upon them 

 oii an occasion so solemn after this long interval, unless under the 

 corroborations of documentary and other evidence. Treaties and 

 conventions as other written instruments are to be interpreted by 

 their own words, in conjunction with the antecedent and collateral 

 facts necessary to the elucidation of their words. 



Premising thus much I may be allowed to say, and here at least I 

 am able to speak with confidence, that the convention of 1818 was 

 entered into with great circumspection on our side. Mr. Monroe 

 was then President, and Mr. Adams Secretary of State. Looking to 

 their attributes with reference to this particular question, the former 

 was calm-minded and wise; the latter of quick perception and 

 abundant knowledge, with little predisposition to yield opinions 

 carefully formed on the basis of his country's rights. From the 

 latter, my colleague and myself received our instructions in due form, 

 accompanied by full information the better to guide us in under- 

 standing and applying them. I need only recall the name of Albert 

 Gallatin for all to feel how experienced, how sagacious, and how 

 highly-gifted a public man my colleague was. To speak once more 

 of Mr. Adams, it may be safely affirmed, that no one of our official 

 functionaries ever understood the fishery question better, in all its 

 comprehensive extent, or examined it more sedulously in detail. It 

 might almost be said that, in instructing us, he went to the work 

 with something of filial reverence to exalt, if possible, his sense of 

 public duty. He remembered the share which his great revolutionary 

 sire, the elder Adams, had in concluding the treaty with great Britain 

 in 1783, and knew that he would have preferred surrendering his 

 commission to surrendering our rights to the fisheries in any of the 

 seas, bays or gulfs of the colonial coasts of British America. The 

 negotiations of that convention had before them therefore, supposing 

 they could have been negligent themselves, the prospect of rebuke 

 from their government if, by the use of incautious words, or omission 

 of apt ones, they became the means of depriving American fishermen 

 of the right to resort to any bay off that coast and take fish at 

 pleasure. There was, in fact, but the single exception you mention: 

 they were not to go within three miles from the shore, which would 

 barely imply of course a width of over six miles at the entrance of 

 such bay. You will gather from this remark that, as the surviving 

 negotiator of the convention, I coincide in the construction of its 

 first article which our government puts upon it; and I proceed to 

 unfold the main considerations which have long and forcibly im- 

 pressed upon me the soundness of this construction. 



