1 2 70 MISCELLANEOUS. 



the basis of requiring of us the renunciation of the shore or boat fish- 

 eries, and of no others. At the first interview his lordship used this 

 distinct and emphatic language: 



"As, on the one hand, Great Britain could not permit the vessels of 

 the United States to fish within the creeks and close upon the shores of 

 the British territories, so, on the other hand, it was by no means her 

 intention to interrupt them in fishing anywhere in the open sea, or 

 without the territorial jurisdiction, a marine league from the shore." 

 Again, and on a subsequent occasion, he said, it is not "of fair com- 

 petition that his Majesty's government has reason to complain, but 

 of the preoccupation of British harbors and creeks." The confer- 

 ences, tne correspondence, proceeded and terminated on this suppo- 

 sition that we relinquish the inner grounds, as they are called, and 

 retained the outer, or vessel fisheries. We were no longer to interfere 

 with the colonists in the "harbors and creeks;" but, beyond the com- 

 mon three-mile maritime jurisdiction, were to retain every right to 

 catch fish that we had previously enjoyed. Did space allow, I could 

 show from both sides of the correspondence that this original thought 

 of Lord Bathurst was kept continually in view, and that the bays 

 mentioned by the crown lawyers were not even once referred to. Is 

 it, then, to be believed for a single moment recalling, as we fairly 

 may do, the course pursued by Mr. Adams and Mr. Gallatin at 

 Ghent, in 1814, and the remarks of Lord Bathurst the following 

 year that, after three years of negotiation, a treaty should have 

 been formed which took from us very much more than the British 

 government required us to surrender at the outset? The thing seems 

 utterly impossible.* 



Our statesmen have been accused, on the other side of the Atlantic, 

 of a limited knowledge of international law, but never of sacrificing 

 our interests: in truth, the standing charge against them is, that they 

 overreach, and drive too hard bargains. But, on the supposition 

 that the right of fishing has been abandoned in the bays of British 

 America, those who negotiated, and those who confirmed, the con- 

 vention of 1818, allowed themselves to be most scandalously duped, 

 and never subsequently discovered the fraud. 



Contemporaneous exposition is always authoritative to some ex- 

 tent; and in this case, I consider it is as decisive as are the essays 

 of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, in interpreting the constitution. 



The crown lawyers, who had no part in concluding the treaty 

 before us, cannot be allowed to interpret it for our government, when 

 we have the declarations of the minister who opened the conferences, 

 and the ministers who signed the treaty itself. From this position 

 we are not to be driven. What, then, is the testimony of Messrs. 

 Gallatin and Rush? On the very day on which they affixed their 

 signatures to the convention, (October 20, 1818,) they wrote to the 

 Secretary of State, (who was no other than John Quincy Adams) 

 that "We succeeded in securing, besides the rights of taking and 



* The extract from John Quincy Adams's diary which I have inserted as a note, in 

 considering the crown lawyers' reply to Lord Falkland's first query, shows, conclu- 

 Bively, that as late as May 15, 1818, and after the negotiations of more than two years, 

 our government had not even proposed to surrender any portion of the fishing-grounds 

 which we occupied under the treaty of 1783. Mr. Adams records, at the date men- 

 tioned: "Perhaps we should ultimately offer to give up the right of drying and curing on 

 the shore, and reserve the whole right of fishing " 



