How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [48]
The advice Adams gave Rush reveals both the passing of the torch and the evolution of the new nation. Adams described an aspect of that evolution when he replied to Rush, “Not that we were British subjects at the Treaty of 1783, but as having been British subjects … our right was clear and indubitable to fish in all the places in the sea where British subjects had fished or ever had a right to fish.” Passing the torch, Adams went on to advise this rising leader: “Former treaties, not formally repeated in a new treaty, are presumed to be received and acknowledged. The fisheries are therefore ours, and the navigation of the Mississippi theirs, that is the British, as much as ever.”6
Adams provided a powerful argument for Rush to use in negotiating American rights to fish in the coastal areas and bays of Nova Scotia, Labrador, and Newfoundland. But that same logic worked against Rush regarding the Mississippi River. Free access to the Mississippi and Columbia Rivers was England’s primary concern in negotiating the boundary between the United States and Canada from the Great Lakes to the West Coast. Of primary concern to the United States (following the Louisiana Purchase) was total control of the Mississippi River and, to an increasing extent, control of the Columbia River farther west. Rush, therefore, needed to break with the past in asserting access to rivers while preserving the past in claiming American fishing rights. In both cases, he succeeded in getting more than he gave.
How did he pull this off? Regarding the northern border, he succeeded in part by agreeing to postpone agreement on that segment of the boundary west of the Rocky Mountains (affecting the Columbia River). For the segment from the Great Lakes to the Rockies, one element that contributed to Rush’s success was yet another river, the St. Lawrence, 950 miles away. Rush explained in his memoirs:
An attempt was made by the British plenipotentiaries to connect with this article a clause securing to Great Britain access to the Mississippi and right to its navigation.… We said that we could consent to no clause of that nature.… The United States have claimed, in a subsequent negotiation, the right of navigating the St. Lawrence, from its source to its mouth. The essential difference in the two cases is that the upper waters of the St. Lawrence flow through territory belonging to both countries.
Had England insisted on access to the Mississippi, it would have had no case for opposing American navigation on the St. Lawrence, an avenue of commerce that was as vital to Canada as the Mississippi was to the United States.
Why, then, the 49th parallel? Why not stick with the straight line established in the 1783 treaty? It commenced at the northwest corner of Lake of the Woods “and from thence on a due west course to the river Mississippi.” The problem was that it didn’t intersect the Mississippi. The headwaters of the Mississippi turned out to be south of that latitude. This error was known by the time Rush was renegotiating the boundary, which was why the British initially sought a border providing access to the river. Once England abandoned this issue, other waterways became crucial to British interests in this prerailroad era—those being the waterways that led to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s settlement at Winnipeg. From Winnipeg, waterways lead to Lake of the Woods and from there to Lake Superior. Once on the Great Lakes, cargo could ship to the St. Lawrence River and the sea. While the precise latitude of Lake of the Woods was not yet known, it was known that Winnipeg was just below the 50th parallel. This knowledge may have accounted for the 1812 reference to the 49th parallel as the southern border of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and for its use in stipulating the U.S.-Canadian boundary in the agreement Rush negotiated