128 AMERICAN DIPLOMATIC QUESTIONS 



ate. There can be no doubt that the bitterness of personal 

 abuse, and the feelings of hostility against England that 

 developed in this debate were induced, to some extent at 

 least, by political reasons, for the discussion soon assumed 

 a party cast. The Democrats, led by Douglass and Cass, 

 attacked the treaty; the Whigs, under Sumner and Seward, 

 generally supported it. The committee resolution was 

 adopted, and the fury of the Senate finally spent itself in a 

 declaration reasserting the principles of the Monroe Doctrine. 



The storm at the capitol spread over the country, and the 

 feelings of enmity toward England became' more than ever 

 pronounced. With an administration in power whose plat- 

 form was essentially anti-British, a vigorous diplomatic 

 campaign against England was expected. Mr. Marcy, the 

 Secretary of State, had already expressed an opinion, that 

 the Mosquito protectorate was void; that the erection of 

 the Bay Islands into a British colony was unwarranted and 

 .in clear violation of the terms of the treaty, and that with 

 the exception of British Honduras, to whose occupation by 

 England he made no objection, Great Britain should at once 

 abandon all her territorial claims in Central America. He 

 was not to be shaken from his conviction that the American 

 interpretation of the phraseology of the Clayton-Bui we? 

 treaty, as held by the Democratic party, was a correct one, and 

 that its acceptance by England should therefore be insisted 

 upon. With such positive instructions Mr. Buchanan, the 

 American Minister in London, was directed to enter upon 

 negotiations with Lord Clarendon. 



The earnest efforts of these two men to harmonize their 

 conflicting views of the true meaning and intent of the 

 Clayton-Bulwer treaty resulted in a total failure. Lord 

 Clarendon made a lengthy statement in defence of his posi- 

 tion, in which he maintained that Belize was not a part of 

 Central America, as understood by the negotiators of the 

 treaty, as it had for many years been a British possession, 

 acknowledged by Spain, later by the Central American states, 

 and, finally, recognized by the United States, as evidenced 

 by the fact that an American consul had been sent to Brit- 



