A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 3, part 2: Martin Van Buren
History
A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 3, part 2: Martin Van Buren
Presidents -- United States; United States -- History -- Sources; United States -- Politics and government; Van Buren, Martin, 1782-1862
Sir Charles R. Vaughan explained, under date of the 24th of March, with
regard to his observation "that the mode in which it was proposed by the
United States to settle the boundary was complicated; that he did not
mean to apply it to the adoption of a rule in the settlement of disputed
questions of location, but to the manner in which it is proposed by the
United States that the new commission of survey shall be selected and
constituted."
On the 8th of December, 1834, Sir Charles R. Vaughan transmitted a note
to the Department of State, in which, after a passing expression of the
regret of His Majesty's Government that the American Government still
declined to come to a separate understanding on the several points of
difference with respect to which the elements of decision were fully
before both Governments, but without abandoning the argument contained
in his note of 10th February last, he addressed himself exclusively to
the American proposition for the appointment of a new commission to be
empowered to seek westward of the meridian of the St. Croix highlands
answering to the description of those mentioned in the treaty of 1783.
He stated with regard to the rule of surveying on which the proposition
was founded that however just and reasonable it might be, His Majesty's
Government did not consider it so generally established and recognized
as Mr. McLane assumed it to be; that, indeed, no similar case was
recollected in which the principle asserted had been put in practice;
yet, on the contrary, one was remembered not only analogous to that
under discussion, but arising out of the same article of the same
treaty, in which the supposed rule was invested by the agents of the
American Government itself; that the treaty of 1783 declared that the
line of boundary was to proceed from the Lake of the Woods "in a due
west course to the Mississippi," but it being ascertained that such
a line could never reach that river, since its sources lie south of
the latitude of the Lake of the Woods, the commissioners, instead of
adhering to the natural object--the source of the Mississippi--and
drawing a new connecting line to it from the Lake of the Woods, adhered
to the arbitrary line to be drawn due west from the lake and abandoned
the Mississippi, the specific landmark mentioned in the treaty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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