Benns: British West India Carrying-Trade 165 
course subscribed to them, and he it was who later was com- 
pelled to bear the brunt of the attack because of them. 
In his long note of instructions to McLane, dated July 20, 
1829 — about the time of the Wilmington conference— Van 
Buren sketched somewhat in detail the course of the long con- 
troversy up to the British order in council of 1826 which 
closed the British colonial ports to American shipping. He 
then wrote: 
In reviewing the events which have preceded, and more or less con- 
tributed to, a result so much to be regretted, there will be found three 
grounds upon which we are most assailable, 1st, in our too long and 
too tenaciously resisting the right of Great Britain to impose protect- 
ing duties in her colonies; 2nd, in not relieving her vessels from the 
restriction of returning direct from the United States to the colonies 
after permission had been given by Great Britain to our vessels to 
clear out from the colonies to any other than a British port; and 3rdly, 
in omitting to accept the terms offered by the act of Parliament of July, 
1825, after the subject had been brought before Congress, and deliber- 
ately acted upon by our Government. It is, without doubt, to the com- 
bined operation of these causes, that we are to attribute the British 
interdict. You will therefore see the propriety of possessing yourself 
fully of all the explanatory and mitigating circumstances connected with 
them, that you may be enabled to obviate, as far as practicable, the 
unfavorable impression which they have produced.® 
These three points, which were later assailed because they 
admitted that Great Britain had been right and that the 
United States had been wrong, were quite evidently copied 
almost intact from Gallatin's note to Clay of September 22, 
1826. ^ 
In order to remove “the unfavorable impression" which 
errors of a previous administration had produced, McLane 
was authorized to acknowledge the right Of Great Britain to 
impose protecting duties in her colonies. At the same time 
he was instructed to withdraw the former demand of the 
American Government that British ships entering the United 
States from the British West Indies must return directly to 
those islands; and was authorized to state that President 
Jackson was willing to adopt either the method of treaty or 
that of separate legislation as a means of arranging the 
colonial trade.^® But even in adopting this conciliatorjr atti- 
tude, Van Buren was introducing no new note. Clay had au- 
® Senate Docs., 21 Cong., 2 Sess., I, No. 20, p. 9. 
® See above, p. 130. 
Senate Docs., 21 Cong., 2 Sess., I, No. 20, pp. 10, 12, 13, 
