xxxii INTRODUCTION 



rights would undoubtedly have presented itself in due course. But the 

 fact is that the development of the British colonies in North America 

 was not so rapid in the years succeeding the American Revolution as in 

 more recent years, and the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars found the 

 colonies very much in the same condition as at the signing of the defi- 

 nite treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States. A 

 revision of the treaty might have been proposed by Great Britain in the 

 interest of its colonies, and resisted by the United States in the interest 

 of its people and inhabitants, but the treaty would have been the measure 

 of the rights and duties of the respective nations, and statesmanship 

 would have solved the problem, however acute or complicated it might 

 have been. The War of 1812, however, caused the two nations to recon- 

 sider the Treaty of 1783, at a time when the feeling between the two 

 countries was tense, and when compromise was objectionable to the 

 conqueror of Napoleon and disadvantageous to the chastened, if not 

 humiliated, opponent of Great Britain in the War of 181 2. 



The government of Great Britain maintained that war abrogated 

 commercial treaties and that the fishery stipulations of 1783 were com- 

 mercial agreements; whereas the United States maintained that the 

 Treaty of 1783 was a definite treaty of peace between the two countries, 

 and that the fisheries article was of the nature of a partition of empire 

 unaffected by war, as were the boundaries between the two nations. The 

 question was not academic, because the American government claimed 

 the right to have its people and inhabitants resort to the fishing grounds 

 and to be unmolested in the exercise of the rights secured to them by the 

 Treaty of 1783. American fishermen actually resorted to the North 

 American waters, and Americans were not only molested in the exercise 

 of their treaty rights, but their vessels were seized in the enjoyment of 

 those rights. There can be no doubt that the War of 1812 suspended the 

 exercise of the rights, but suspension and annulment are in fact and 

 in law different and distinct. The conclusion of peace would restore the 

 inhabitants of the United States to their treaty rights, if war did not 

 annul the provisions of the treaty. The American negotiators of the 

 Treaty of Ghent of 18 14 were unable to secure the acceptance of their 

 contention that the treaty rights were merely suspended, not abrogated, 

 by war, and the treaty of peace between the two countries avoids any 

 mention of the subject, although it was discussed in the negotiations, 

 and the views of the American and British commissioners were set forth 

 at length and maintained by assertion and counter-assertion. Disputes 

 occurring after the conclusion of peace made the question the subject of 

 negotiation, and eventually commissioners, Messrs. Gallatin and Rush 



