I rejoice exceedingly at our successes both in the North and in the South. If we continue to do thus, it will not be in the power of the execrable junto to prevent us from having a safe and honorable peace next winter. In this idea I shall ever include the fisheries and the navigation of the Mississippi. These, Sir, are the strong legs on which North America can alone walk securely in independence. If you do not get a wise and very firm friend to negotiate the fishery, it is my clear opinion that it will be lost, and upon this principle that it is the interest of every European power to weaken us and strengthen themselves. I heartily wish you success in your negotiations and that when you secure one valuable point for us (the fishery) that you will not less exert yourself for another very important object,--the free navigation of the Mississippi, provided guilty Britain should remain in possession of the Floridas. Fishing as a matter of states' rights resulted in the pioneering Potomac River Compact of 1785, when representatives of Maryland and Virginia met under George Washington's sponsorship at Mt. Vernon to deal with fishing and tolls. Maryland owned the river to the Virginia shore line, and agreed to allow Virginians to fish in it in return for free entry of Maryland ships through the Virginia capes. The compact, in force to this day, was the first step taken in behalf of interstate commerce. With its example to follow, other states eased the barriers to their commercial interests, with immeasurable benefit to the Union. Commercial fishing in Virginia was, as the century closed, on the verge of the stability it had sorely lacked. Its reliance on Indians for knowledge and skill, as in the first of the 17th century, was as dead as its reliance on England for manufactures in the last of the 18th. Just around the corner were railroads and steamboats with their comparatively swift transportation. Teeming cities needed to be fed, and after nearly two centuries of education in the ways of the Chesapeake Bay and its marine life, Virginia fishermen knew how to keep the markets stocked. In 1794 a French visitor, Moreau de Saint Mery, wrote: