169 



'« tion of the right of fishing upon the Bank of Newfoundland, in 

 " favour of the' French, as before." Falin, vol, 2, p. C93. 



And vr. Jefferson, in his Report on the Fisheries, of 1st Febru- 

 ary, 1791, had said : 



"Spain had formerly relinquished her pretensions to a partici- 

 " pation in these fisheries, at the close of the preceding war : and 

 " at the end of this, the adjacent continent and islands being divided 

 " between the United States, the English, arid French, (for the last 

 " retained two small islands merely for this object,) the right offish- 

 ''■ ingwas appropriated to them also." 



I did not entertain a doubt that the object of the British govern- 

 ment then was, to exclude us from the whole of this fishery, unless 

 upon our own coast ; nor do I now, that if we had then acquiesced 

 in their principle, they would have excluded us from it after the 



peace entirely. 



I did, therefore, feel a deep and earnest solicitude for them. 

 Nor was that solicitude allayed by the discovery that there was ia 

 the heart of the mission itself, a disposition and an influence operat- 

 ing against them almost as inflexibly, and, in my estimation, far 

 more dangerously, than the British adversary himself. 



There were but two possible ^7ays, after the British notification, 

 of preserving these rights and liberties from total extinction. The 

 one was,-by obtaining a new recognition of them in the treaty, which 

 could not "be done without oftering an equivalent ; and the other 

 was, by asserting that they had not been forfeited by the war, and 

 would remain in full vigour, although the treaty should be conclud- 

 ed without such an article. 



In preparing the draught of the treaty, Mr. Gallatin had drawn an 

 article, stipulating anew the recognition, and ollering, as the equiva- 

 lent, the recognition of the British right to navigate the Mississippi, 

 contained in the same treaty of 1783, and of which the British ple- 

 nipotentiaries had demanded the renewal. 



Mr. Gallatin was a citizen of the Western Country, and as inca- 

 pable aa any other member of the mission, of sacrificing an essen- 

 tial interest of one quarter of the Union, to a minor interest of ano- 

 ther. I was, therefore, profoundly mortified to see his article ob- 

 jected to on a principle of canjlictiiig sectional interest, and still 

 more so, to hear Mr. Russell observe, after his opinion had been 

 disclosed by his vote, that the fisheries were an interest of a disaf- 

 fected part of the country. I was as far as Mr. Russell froni ap- 

 proving the policy or the measures then predominating in New- 

 England : but to cast away and surrender to the enemy the birth- 

 right of my country, an interest as lasting as the ocean and the shores 

 of my native land, for a merely momentary aberraiion, rather of its 

 legislature than its people, was so far from meeting my concur- 

 rence, that it sickened my soul to hear it hiuted from one of her 

 own sons, 



Considered merely and exclusively with reference to sectional 

 interests, Mr. Gallatin's proposed article was fair and just. It pr*- 



