TEEATY OF SEPTEMBER 3, 1183. 9 



dividing between them the British Empire in North America; and 

 standing on this basis the Commissioners on the part of the United 

 States asserted and insisted throughout the negotiations that the 

 British interests in the North Atlantic Coast fisheries were subject 

 to such division and that the pre-existing rights of the Colonies 

 therein must be recognized and continued by the treaty. 



The people of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and of the other 

 Colonies had continuously and freely resorted to these fisheries and 

 exercised unrestricted fishing rights and liberties there until the 

 time of the Kevolution, and had borne almost unaided the burden 

 of maintaining and defending their own and British interests in 

 these fisheries against the aggressions of the French during the 

 wars between Great Britain and France. In view of such continuous 

 usage and enjoyment and by virtue of the services rendered by them 

 in defence of these fisheries, the American Colonies asserted and 

 insisted that they had in them at least the equal rights of joint 

 owners with Great Britain and the other British Colonies. John 

 Adams, one of the American Commissioners in the peace negotiations, 

 bears witness, in a statement written by him in 1822 in review of 

 these negotiations, that the grounds and principles on which the 

 fisheries article of the treaty of 1783 was contended for on their part 

 and finally yielded on the part of Great Britain were among others 

 the following: 



That New England, and especially Massachusetts, had done more 

 in defence of them than all the rest of the British empire. That 

 the various projected expeditions to Canada, in which they were 

 defeated by British negligence, the conquest of Louisburg, in 174."), 

 and the subsequent conquest of Nova Scotia, in which New England 

 had expended more blood and treasure than all the rest of the 

 British empire, were principally effected with a special view to the 

 security and protection of the fisheries. 



That the inhabitants of the United States had as clear a right 

 to every branch of those fisheries, and to cure fish on land, as the 

 inhabitants of Canada or Nova Scotia; that the citizens of Boston, 

 New York, or Philadelphia, had as clear a right to those fisheries, 

 as the citizens of London, Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow, or Dublin. 



And further: 



We considered that treaty as a division of the empire. Our inde- 

 pendence, our rights to territory and to the fisheries, as practised 

 before the Revolution were no more a grant from Britain to us than 

 the treaty was a grant from us of Canada, Nova Scotia, England, 



