The Maine Northeast Boundary Controversy & the Treason Of Daniel Webster

 
By Stephen J. Martin

 
In 1839, the United States was nearly drawn into her third major war within 60 years against Great Britain. But instead, the “Aroostook War” turned out to be a phony war. From a patriotic viewpoint, a real war—for a variety of reasons—probably should have been fought. The horrors of war being what they are, and nearly all of America’s wars having been unnecessary and disastrous to the American people and beneficial only to plutocrats, that remarkable statement requires a careful analysis of the reasons for such an assertion, which the author herein sets forth.

The Treaty of Paris of 1783, which settled the American Revolution, defined the northeast border between “British America” (now Canada) and the United States as follows:

. . . by a line drawn along the middle of the River St. Croix from its source directly north to the . . . highlands, which divide the rivers that fall into the Atlantic Ocean from those which fall into the River St. Lawrence; (then:) from the northwest angle of Nova Scotia, viz., the angle which is formed by a line drawn due north from the St. Croix River to the highlands; along the said highlands . . . to the northwesternmost head of the Connecticut River. . . . [It should be noted that at this time, New Brunswick was part of Nova Scotia.—Ed.]¹

There seems to have been no great difficulty regarding this description or the in tent of the negotiators at the time. But, as the area along the border was very sparsely settled (and indeed is only marginally more populous today) there were few occasions until the 1820s for the nitty-gritty details of treaty interpretation to af fect Anglo-American relations very much. Canadian scholar George Classen admits that the British negotiators had an eye to conciliation of the former colonies with the purpose of re-establishing profitable commercial interests, posthaste, while the treaty was being drawn.² Classen also is among the first to advance the now widely accepted doctrine that political reunification ought to be a cornerstone of British policies calling for the maintenance of British colonies in North America.³

British and Canadian scholars had no difficulty locating where the “highlands” of the treaty were located until long after the War of 1812. That war exposed the weakness of the Treaty of Paris boundary from the British point of view, as the highlands extend very near to the St. Lawrence River —leaving a convenient jumping-off point for invasions of Canada by the United States.

These highlands, as a result of the dastardly Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, now lie totally within Canadian jurisdiction. The fledgling Canadian nation eventually realized also that landward communications between the Maritime provinces and the rest of the nation were also severely hampered by straight-forward interpretations of the Treaty of Paris. Later Anglo-Canadian statesmen and military authorities became increasingly cognizant of the need to adjust the status quo. Therefore, much was made in subsequent years of the supposed ambiguities regarding these highlands and the “northwest angle of Nova Scotia.” The current northern boundary of the state of Maine is the result of a carefully designed construct by post-War of 1812 Canadian negotiators, including Lord Ashburton. The state of Maine and the United States were thereby duped and deprived (through both ignorance and effective use of propaganda) of 3,207,680 acres of prime timberland and numerous beautiful lakes, swift-flowing rivers and mineral wealth.

Not only was there treasonous perfidy on the part of the American negotiator, Sen. Daniel Webster (and other American politicians), but—as in the case of many of history’s most poignant controversies concerning Great Britain’s relations with other peoples—there is clear evidence of a cover-up involved as well. Maine’s state historian, writing less than 70 years after Webster-Ashburton, bemoans the fact that “ . . . important correspondence of the governors of Maine with the State Department in Washington closes abruptly with the year 1839. Inquiry and search at the State House in Augusta have not brought to light the manuscript correspondence of 1840-1842.”⁴

That Webster had done the American people a terrible disservice was not at all apparent in 1842 to the politicians and concerned citizens of Maine. Many Mainers saw the Webster-Ashburton Treaty as a disturbing but necessary political compromise. Largely as a result of Webster’s “success” in giving Maine 7/12ths of what was hers, his reputation was expanded from being merely a great orator. His legacy has been bequeathed to us as including the attributes of an astute and clever statesman as well. Only the first half of these accolades are justified in connection with “Black Daniel.”

It is to Gen. Winfield Scott (of later Civil War fame) that credit—such as it is—for American avoidance of war in the late 1830s must go. Many folks nowadays erroneously assign the role of “peacemaker” to Webster, but it was the future commander in chief of the Union forces at the outbreak of the War between the States who quelled the military movements and petty disturbances known collectively as the “Aroos took War.”

A brief chronology of these disturbances is needed to set the historical framework. Predictably, establishment historians have failed to stress many key markers in un raveling the truth surrounding this significant border dispute.

With the close of the War of 1812, the British and American negotiators at Ghent were not prepared or commissioned to re-delineate the border. However, it was at this time that the British first began to suggest a “revision” or “variation” in the northeast boundary that would “secure a direct line of communication between Quebec and Halifax.”⁵ The American commissioners rightfully and forcefully objected, and a status quo ante bellum was declared on Christmas Eve, 1814. “A commission to study and settle disputed points of boundary between the United States and British provinces” was the only positive action taken under the Treaty of Ghent.⁶

These new British commissioners were made aware—before commencing negotiations—of the important military implications of allowing the traditional location of the highlands to stand. Lt. Gov. Carleton realized “on strict inquiry,” that the Temiscouata highlands were “justifiedly the letter of the Treaty [of Paris].”⁷ Yet, the British began a carefully designed subterfuge anyway to force a “compromise” upon the Yankees.

In point of fact, military/strategic considerations also assume additional color when examined in light of the timber trade. The best mast poles had long since been cleared from royal lands throughout the easily accessible parts of Atlantic Canada. The remaining stands of old-growth trees suitable for use by the Royal Navy were contained within the disputed territory—which (the British now began to claim) consisted of nearly everything north of Bangor. The Aroostook War, which was essentially a logger’s dispute initially, quick ly began to take on ramifications of geopolitical significance.

The commissioners for both countries met in St. Andrew’s, New Brunswick in the same year (1817) that a certain John Baker became the first American settler in the upper reaches of the St. John River Valley just to the west of Madawaska. (Madawaska was settled by some of those “French neutrals” or “Acadians” who had been the victims of earlier British outrages when they were harried illegally out of their ancestral lands on the Nova Scotian peninsula beginning in 1755.) The commissioners met sporadically over the next five years without reaching an amicable solution.⁸

The commission’s admission of failure in 1822 (two years after Maine became a state separate from the mother state of Massachusetts) returned the border dispute to a condition of uncontrolled flux. The subsequent years were characterized by incursions by Canadian logging crews, relatively toothless resolutions by the Maine Legislature to protect her sovereignty over the northern reaches, and mutual recriminations back and forth across the undisputed sections of the border. In 1827, Baker and a small group of U.S. settlers attempted to raise the American flag in the Madawaska region. When he refused to lower it upon the orders of a New Brunswick official on the scene, he was arrested and carted off to jail in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Strictly speaking, this could be considered the starting point of the “war.”

The governor of Maine protested to the federal authorities, who procured Baker’s release. In 1828, a strong federal garrison, which never sent a soldier to the “war,” was established at the young border town of Houlton, Maine. The Aroostook War was carefully kept by higher authorities on both sides of the Atlantic to a Maine v. New Brunswick dispute. Thus, the Houlton garrison (manned at times by later Civil War heroes such as Irwin McDowell, Joseph Hooker and John B. Magruder⁹) served merely to prevent an outright occupation of northern Maine by New Brunswick during the dispute.

Eventually—over the vehement pro tests of the Maine Legislature—the dispute was consigned to the arbitration of the king of the Netherlands, who rendered a decision in 1831, which was rejected by Maine. Fortunately, Maine had retained veto power over these negotiations, which were initiated by Washington, D.C. Just as unfortunately, as it turned out, they were offered more land by a foreign potentate than they eventually received as a result of the efforts of a next-door neighbor. Maine legislators were correct in their criticisms of the king’s position as a virtual vassal of the British sovereign, but they turned out to be seriously deficient in their judgment of the character to whom their dispute was eventually assigned. Senator Daniel Webster (of New Hampshire and Massachusetts) later became John Tyler’s secretary of state, and, in this capacity he awarded Maine less under Webster-Ashburton than the Dutch king had determined upon.

Continued depredations by Canadian logging crews during the 1830s led Maine’s first official geologist to conclude that:

The claim set up by Great Britain to more than 10,000 square miles of the territory of Maine, on the pleas that the St. John does not empty into the Atlantic, but pours its waters into the Bay of Fundy, and that the chain of highlands designated in the Treaty of 1783, is the range which divides the Penobscot and Kennebec waters from the Allagash and Walloostook is certainly too absurd for serious refutation. . . .¹⁰

It was about this time, or perhaps earlier, that British commissioners began to seriously suggest that the due north line from the source of the St. Croix River re ferred to by the Treaty of Paris ought to terminate at Mars Hill, a lonely promontory near the New Brunswick border halfway between Houlton and Presque Isle. No less a reactionary “patriot” than Henry David Thoreau commented on this absurd notion while hiking in western Maine sometime afterward:

I thought that if the commissioners themselves, and the king of Holland with them, had spent a few days here (a boggy lowland along the proposed line of “highlands”) looking for that highland they would have had an interesting time, and perhaps it would have modified their views of the question somewhat.¹¹

The Canadian rebellions of 1837 led by William Lyon MacKenzie and Louis Joseph Papineau increased tensions all along the border. The U.S. government’s refusal to assist the patriots of Canada in a repeat of the republican rebellion of 1776 struck many as strange and even somewhat suspicious. Inexplicably, British troops were allowed uncontested passage over Maine’s territory as they traveled from Nova Scotia to quell the republican revolts in Upper and Lower Canada.¹² It became increasingly evident throughout the boundary controversy that the federal government by this time had become enamored more with economic prosperity and close ties with the bankers of Europe than they were with upholding principle.

Late in 1838, the state of Maine ap pointed a land agent to travel through the northern portions of Maine and to report back on the extent of illicit logging by Canadians. The newly elected firebrand governor, Democrat John Fairfield, had displaced the more cautious Whig Edward Kent, partly as a result of his promises to do something about the dispute. When the agent reported that 200-250 loggers were removing tens of thousands of dollars worth of Maine timber, the Maine Legis lature passed a secret resolve, on January 24, 1839, giving the land agent authority to “dispose of all teams, lumber and other materials in the hands and possession of trespassers by destroying the same or otherwise.”¹³

The state land agent, Rufus McIntire, subsequently headed north accompanied by a posse of 200 under the Penobscot County sheriff and Capt. Rines of the state militia. The Canadian lumbermen then took matters into their own hands: They raided the armory at Woodstock, New Brunswick, and, returning to the Aroostook River, surprised the leaders of the posse in their beds. McIntire and four others were seized, and most of them ended up in the Fredericton jail. This led to mutual recriminations of the most severe type. British regulars were called to the support of the New Brunswick authorities, and the Maine Legislature authorized the expenditure of $800,000 and the mustering of 10,000 militiamen to support Maine’s sovereignty.¹⁴ Hundreds of militiamen were rushed to the vicinity of McIntire’s seizure (thus came the founding of Fort Fairfield, Maine) in support of the civil posse.

Both Maine’s Gov. Fairfield and New Brunswick’s Gov. Harvey appealed to their superiors. A joint statement from Henry Fox, England’s minister to Wash ing ton, and American Secretary of State John Forsyth urged the Americans to remove their forces from the “disputed territory” in return for a British promise to keep the regulars to the north and east of the St. John River. In an era when state’s rights still meant something, this pompous pronouncement from Washington, D.C. was ignored by Fairfield, while the federal Congress reproached Forsyth by voting overwhelmingly to support Maine by further authorizations of troops and materiel. Fairfield’s intransigence at this juncture was, undoubtedly, duly noted by Washing ton’s anglophiles such as Webster and Pres i dent Martin Van Buren.

At this point, Gen. Scott was hastened to Maine with instructions to attempt the peaceful resolution of the impending conflict. Arriving in early March of 1839, he had a difficult time at first dispelling the notion among the citizenry that he came as the avenging angel to drive the British from their territory once and for all. Scott was chosen primarily because of his amicable relations with Gov. Harvey. The two had served opposite each other in the Niagara campaign during the War of 1812.¹⁵ Scott had earned Harvey’s undying respect by returning a porcelain doll replica of Harvey’s wife that Harvey had left behind after his escape back across the British lines after having been captured and briefly interned by American troops.¹⁶

Scott cajoled the Mainers to accept the removal of the militia, leaving only a small civil posse behind, in return for Harvey’s promise that his government would not “seek to take military possession of that territory, or to seek, by military force, to expel therefrom the armed civil posse. . . .”¹⁷ Scott had met his objective, and the immediate crisis was dispelled. The truce was not the same as a permanent peace, however. The posse, left temporarily unmolested, took advantage of the lull in oversight to send a contingent down the Fish River, where they erected a strong blockhouse on the confluence of the St. John River. This was the founding of Fort Kent, Maine. The British authorities howled like mad over this supposed rupture of the agreement between Scott and Harvey.

In November of 1840, feisty John Baker, supported by Rines, held a town meeting in Madawaska to set up the voting for the presidential election. A Canadian magistrate named Rice attended and protested that the meeting was “unlawful, illegal and uncalled for.” Rice was forcibly removed from the meeting, and Harvey insisted that strong blockhouses be built across from both the major American posts in the St. John Valley. In April of 1841, Baker was once again arrested, this time for “enticing several of her majesty’s troops in Madawaska to desert to the American side.”¹⁸

In June, Tyler’s secretary of state, Webster, suggested that the civil posses would be replaced by small contingents of federal troops, “it being understood that the detachments of British troops will be continued in their present position” opposite the American posts.¹⁹ This brought immediate protests from Lord Palmerston, but the troops arrived on schedule at Fort Kent in September. These continued irritations led both governments to decide upon negotiations to resolve the entire scope of remaining boundary disputes from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The negotiators chosen for the task were, of course, Webster and his dear friend Lord Ashburton. Ashburton’s given name was Alexander Baring, and he was chief officer and majority stockholder of the famous Baring’s Bank. Webster had been on the bank’s payroll since 1831.²⁰ Cana da’s Prof. Classen admits that British officials were greatly relieved at the choice of Webster. In the spring of 1839, while the crisis in Maine was at its peak, Webster had been Ashburton’s guest during the American’s lengthy sojourn in England. Classen states that “this helped to turn him into something of an anglophile.”²¹ In addition, Ashburton’s connections both with Maine and with America’s prosperous anglophile elites were quite extensive and of a long duration.

Alexander Baring had first come to America in 1795, where he was met and entertained by Gen. Henry Knox, who owned 2 million acres of land in southern Maine. Baring ended up purchasing half of those lands, which he held throughout the rest of his life. He also became a regular visitor at the home of Sen. William Bingham. On August 23, 1798, Baring married Anne Bingham, and four years later his younger brother Henry married her sister, Maria Bingham.²² Lord Ashburton’s alliance with the “upper crust” of the mid-Atlantic region led eventually to the ultimate coup: the landing of the account of the Bank of the United States by Baring’s Bank.²³

After Andrew Jackson successfully reined in the anti-democratic and largely British-controlled Second Bank of the United States during the 1830s, it was Webster who—working with another close friend named Nicholas Biddle—did his level best to get the bank rechartered, against the wishes of the American people. Even though the firm of N.M. Rothschild took over the account of the Second Bank in 1835,²⁴ Webster continued to collect his retainer throughout the period of his border “negotiations” with his boss. It is re ported that he also collected an unusually substantial sum from the Barings during the height of the border crisis in 1839.²⁵ Sydney Nathans in his 1973 book titled Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy makes it exceedingly obvious that, enduring popular impressions to the contrary, Webster was never a friend of the people.

It was Sen. Webster (a director of the Boston branch of the Second Bank of the United States²⁶) who, in the early days of 1838, urged Nicholas Biddle “to step up the (Second) Bank’s economic squeeze”—which had been the real cause of the Panic of 1837 to begin with. At the same time, Webster was urging a Senate inquiry into the causes of the panic with the intent of blaming the Jackson administration. Most establishment historians continue to blame Jackson’s anti-bank policies and his famous “specie circular” for the panic, but Nathans makes it clear that it was a crisis manufactured by the banking interests with the ultimate goal of discrediting Jacksonian democracy and rechartering the bank.²⁷ It was also Webster who reined in the democratic tendencies of the Anti-Masonic Party. Nathans credits Webster for this by saying it was he who “contained Anti-Masonry.”²⁸

Elevated to the Department of State by the Whig victory of 1840, Webster was, during the 1840s, ideally situated to put his aristocratic and anglophilic tendencies to good use. In an important and rare volume titled The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance, author Ralph Hidy discloses the extraordinary degree of faith the Barings had in Biddle and Webster.²⁹ Webster was continually being advised by Barings officials as to the proper course which America ought to follow in order “to rejuvenate American banks and currency.”³⁰ Thus, had Webster done nothing else to deserve condemnation over his negotiations for the northeast boundary other than to fail to disclose his own serious conflict of interest, he would still have been open to excoriation. But plenty of other nefarious actions were involved.

Various writers concur that Webster’s view of the northern third of Maine was that it was just so much wasteland which could conveniently be sacrificed to the greater good of improving relations with Merrie Olde England. The resumption of the flow of credit from England was far above any concern for American honor in his esteem. In order to push his plan for concessions on the part of Maine in return for a resolution of the conflict, Webster spent thousands of dollars from a secret State Department account to bribe Maine newspapermen to drop their antagonistic editorial stances toward yielding territory.³¹ Worst of all, Webster produced a map in front of the recalcitrant Maine politicians which he purported had belonged to Ben Franklin. He claimed it was the very map that had been used during the treaty negotiations of 1783. A bold red line across the middle of the current-day state of Maine had been drawn, Webster claimed, the right-hand point of which served as the indicator of the “northwest angle of Nova Scotia.” The same point was, he said, also the terminus of the due north line from the marker in the little town of Amity (the current writer’s hometown) which marked the source of the St. Croix.³² The Mainers were sufficiently cowed by this purported boundary well below even the Mars Hill line (and frightened by Webster’s assertion that the British might find a copy of the map in Paris any day) that they agreed to less land under Webster-Ashburton than even the king of the Netherlands had been willing to grant them 11 years before.

Sen. F.O.J. “Fog” Smith of Maine was complicit in the “red line map” affair. He was taken on by Webster as a secret agent of the State Department and given an advance of $500 for his part in betraying his own state.³³ Smith’s plan for befuddling the minds of Maine’s people was that “ . . . Public sentiment on this matter can be brought into the right shape in Maine by enlisting certain leading men of both political parties (yet not politically) and through them, at a proper time, guiding aright the public press.”³⁴

Smith then proceeded to hold conferences with various editors and advanced Webster’s plans in a three-part series of articles he titled, “The Northeastern Boundary—Why Not Settle It?”³⁵

Jared Sparks (a Mainer, and later president of Harvard University) had also been sent to Augusta by Lord Ashburton to push concern over the red line map.³⁶ Sparks had supposedly found the map in the archives in Paris, though, to this day, it has never been proved that any of the negotiators in 1783 had ever used this map for preliminary discussions, let alone as the final trophy of their boundary agreement. In deed, a copy of Franklin’s red boundary line (which Franklin had mentioned by that exact description in his correspondence) was eventually found in Madrid. The map corresponds exactly to the ancient claims by Maine that the Temiscouata highlands were those intended by the commissioners in 1783.³⁷ Evidence of Ashburton’s direct complicity and even bribery in this affair is found in Geraldine Scott’s volume, Ties of Common Blood: A History of Maine’s Northeast Boundary Dispute with Great Britain. The pertinent section is worth quoting in full:

Gov. Fairfield and the Legislature as a whole were not aware of F.O.J. Smith’s collaboration with Webster in the preparation of Maine’s public for what would be forthcoming. Lord Ashburton, as well as President Tyler and Secretary of State Webster, had employed funds from secret accounts for propaganda purposes, to expedite a quick settlement. Ashburton gave app. $14,500 to someone, secretly. He . . . referred to it again in a letter marked “private and confidential.”³⁸

Ms Scott quotes the letter as follows:

The money I wrote about went to compensate Sparks, to send him, on my first arrival, to the governors of Maine and Massachusetts. My informant thinks that without this stimulant Maine would never have yielded.³⁹

In 1846, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs brought charges against Smith and Webster in connection with using public funds to corrupt the press of Maine. Smith and former President Tyler were forced to testify, but no convictions were brought.⁴⁰

There is evidence that a secret deal had been cut between the British and American governments in advance of the official opening of negotiations between Webster and Ashburton. Ashburton was in Wash ington, D.C. for two months, and was cloistered with Webster on several occasions before formal talks began. Gov. Harvey expressed great confidence in his correspondence with other Canadian leaders that the treaty would be resolved in a way favorable to Canadian interests.⁴¹ Some how Harvey also knew that the U.S. regulars at Houlton would present no threat and that they were not supporting Maine during the conflict.⁴²

Those who have studied the aftermath of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty have concluded that we may never know the details of the manner in which Webster secured passage of this deal.⁴³ As the attitude of Maine statesmen seems to have been universally conditioned by a belief that the Tyler administration was intent upon giving up Maine land in order to appease Great Britain, it is truly amazing that Webster was able to secure their meek surrender. His complete victory is even more impressive given that Mainers had been led also to expect that any land ceded by the federal government would be made up by other cessions of Canadian land elsewhere.⁴⁴ This never came about.

The furor among Maine’s people once the Webster surrender was announced was further exacerbated when Gov. Carleton of New Brunswick declared publicly that he and the British negotiators at the time of the Treaty of Ghent all clearly understood that the “northwest angle of Nova Scotia” was indeed far to the north of the St. Lawrence watershed. This was clear in that British commissioners at Ghent had proposed that the United States should cede land north of the St. Lawrence in return for land elsewhere.⁴⁵ When Alexander Baring admitted later that he never had the slightest authorization to bargain for one square inch of Canadian soil prior to Webster-Ashburton,⁴⁶ Maine citizens were understandably livid.

James Buchanan summed up the prevalent feeling of the people of Maine with an impassioned speech on the floor of the Senate when he said:

Thus have we yielded to a foreign power that ancient highland boundary for which our fathers fought. Thus has it been blotted out from the treaty which acknowledged our independence. Thus has England reclaimed an important portion of that territory which had been wrested from her by the bravery and the blood of our Revolutionary fathers. . . . On the east, on the north and on the west, Maine is now left naked and exposed to the attacks of our domineering and insatiable neighbor.⁴⁷

Given that northern Maine is now entirely under the thumb of a Canadian corporation (Irving Corp. of New Brunswick owns over 3/4 of northern Maine), Buchanan’s words have a strangely prophetic quality to them. We should have gone to war in 1839.

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