1779-1782.]

Peace negotiated.

97

time the English insisted that a neutral belt of Indian territory should be created west of the mountains. That point was finally waived; the Americans withdrew their pretensions to the territory north of Lake Erie; and the St. Lawrence River system, from the western end of Lake Superior to the forty-fifth parallel, was made the boundary. From the forty-fifth parallel to the sea, the boundary was described as following the "highlands which divide those rivers that empty themselves into the St. Lawrence from those which fall into the Atlantic Ocean." The country was little known; the commissioners were probably confused; and the ground was thus prepared for a dispute which lasted fifty-nine years. In the course of the negotiations the American ambassadors, Instructions Jay, Adams, Franklin, and Laurens, became ignored. suspicious of the French court. There is now some reason for believing that Vergennes, the French minister, had dealt honorably with the American interests, and could have secured excellent terms. "Would you break your instructions?" asked one of the fellow-commissioners of Jay. "I would," he replied, "as I would break this pipe." Thenceforward the Americans dealt directly and solely with the English envoys.

The next question to be settled was the claim of the English to the navigation of the Mississippi, which was The Missis- supposed to reach northward into British tersippi. ritory. It was yielded; the Americans, however, received no corresponding right of navigation through Spanish territory to the sea. Next came the fisheries. As colonists the New Englanders had always enjoyed the right to fish upon the Newfoundland banks, and to land at convenient spots to cure their fish. Adams, representing New England, insisted that "the right of fishing" should be distinctly stated; he carried his point.

The fisheries.

The main difficulties disposed of, three troublesome minor points had to be adjusted. The first was the question of the loyalists. They had suffered from Loyalists. their attachment to the British government; they had been exiled; their estates had been confiscated, their names made a by-word. The British government first insisted, and then pleaded, that the treaty should protect these persons if they chose to return to their former homes. The Americans would agree only that Congress should "earnestly recommend" to the thirteen legislatures to pass Relief Acts. Then came the question of private debts due to the British merchants at the outbreak of the Revolu tion, and still unpaid. Some of the American envoys objected to reviving these obligations; but Adams, when he arrived, set the matter at rest by declaring that he had "no notion of cheating anybody." Finally came the question of the treatment of the slaves who

Debts.

Slaves.

had taken refuge with the British armies; and the English commissioners agreed that the British troops should withdraw "without causing any destruction or the carrying away any negroes or other property of the American inhabitants." On Nov. 30, 1782, a provisional Treaty treaty was signed; but it was not until Sept. signed. 3, 1783, after the peace between France and England had been adjusted, that the definitive treaty was signed, in precisely the same terms.

With great difficulty a quorum was assembled, and on Jan. 14, 1784, it was duly ratified by Congress. The treaty was a triumph for American diplomacy. "It is impossible," says Lecky, the ablest historian of this period, "not to be struck with the skill, hardihood, and good fortune that marked the American negotiations. Everything the United States could with any show of plausibility demand from England, they obtained."

1783.]

union.

Treaty. Union.

47. Political Effects of the War.

99

Thus in seven years America had advanced from the condition of a body of subordinate colonies to that of a American nation. Furthermore, the people, who at the beginning of the struggle were scattered and separated, and who scarcely knew each other, were now united under a government; the Confederation, however weak, was the strongest federation then in existence. The people had learned the lesson of acting together in a great national crisis, and of accepting the limitations upon their governments made necessary by the central power.

Dan

The spirit of the new nation was now to be subjected to a test more severe than that of the Revolution. Union not ger banded the colonies together during the perfected. war; would they remain together during peace? Sectional jealousies had broken out in Congress and in camp; and in the crisis of 1777 an effort had been made to displace Washington. There had been repeated instances of treachery among military officers and among foreign envoys. The States were undoubtedly much nearer together than the colonies had been; they had accepted a degree of control from the general government which they had refused from England; but they were not used to accept the resolutions of Congress as self-operative. Their conception of national government was still that national legislation filtrated from Congress to the State legislatures, and through that medium to the people.

The interior of the country was in a confused and alarming state. The territorial settlement with the States had only begun, and was to be the work of years. The Indians were a stumbling-block which must be removed from the path of the settlers

Frontier difficulties.

Within the States there were poverty, taxation, and disorder, and a serious discontent.

Nevertheless, the system of the colonies was a system of union. The State governments all rested on the same Common basis of revolution and defiance of former institutions. established law; but when they separated from England they preserved those notions of English private and public law which had distinguished the colonies. The laws and the governments of the States were everywhere similar. The States were one in language, in religion, in traditions, in the memories of a common struggle, and in political and economic interests.

Commercially, however, the situation of the country was worse than it had been in three quarters of a cenTrade tury. Though the fisheries had been saved hampered. by the efforts of Adams, the market for the surplus fish was taken away. As colonies they had enjoyed the right to trade with other British colonies; as an independent nation they had only those rights which England chose to give. For a time the ministry seemed disposed to make a favorable commercial treaty; but in 1783 an Order in Council was issued cutting off the Americans from the West Indian trade; and it was not until 1818 that they recovered it.

A great political principle had been strengthened by the success of the Revolution: republican government had been revived in a fashion unknown since an

government

encouraged.

Republican cient times. The territory claimed by Virginia was larger than the island of Great Britain. The federal republic included an area nearly four times as large as that of France. In 1782 Frederick of Prussia told the English ambassador that the United States could not endure, "since a republican government had never been known to exist for any length of time where the territory was not limited and concentred." The

1783.1

Political Effects of the War.

ΙΟΙ

problem was a new one; but in communities without a titled aristocracy, which had set themselves against the power of a monarch, and which had long been accustomed to self-government, the problem was successfully worked out. The suffrage was still limited to the holders of land; but the spirit of the Revolution looked towards abolishing all legal distinctions between man and man; and the foundation of later democracy, with its universal suffrage, was thus already laid.

Influence of rights of man.

The influence of the republican spirit upon the rest of the world was not yet discerned; but the United States had established for themselves two principles which seriously affected other nations. If English colonies could by revolution relieve themselves from the colonial system of England, the French and Spanish colonies might follow that example; and forty years later not one of the Spanish continental colonies acknowledged the authority of the home government. The other principle was that of the rights of man. The Declaration of Independence contained a list of rights such as were familiar to the colonists of England, but were only theories elsewhere. The success of the Revolution was, therefore, a shock to the system of privilege and of class exemptions from the common burdens, which had lasted since feudal times. The French Revolution of 1789 was an attempt to apply upon alien ground the principles of the American Revolution.