As lumbermen and settlers gathered in the border area, the risk of conflict became acute, culminating in the Aroostook War in 1838-39, when the Legislatures of Maine and New Brunswick backed their rival lumberjacks with reckless jingoism. Diplomacy failed repeatedly to obtain a compromise line. Arbitration was tried with little better success, as the United States refused to accept the award of the King of the Netherlands in 1831. The diplomats tried once more, and in 1842 Daniel Webster, the United States Secretary of State, and Lord Ashburton, the British Commissioner, made a compromise by which some five thousand miles of the area in dispute were assigned to Great Britain and seven thousand to the United States. The award was not popular on either side, and the public seized eagerly on stories of concealed "Red Line" maps, stories of Yankee smartness or of British trickery. Webster, to win the assent of Maine, had exhibited in the Senate a map found in the French Archives and very damaging to the American claim. Later it appeared that the British Government also had found a map equally damaging to its own claims. The nice question of ethics involved, whether a nation should bring forward evidence that would tell against itself, ceased to have more than an abstract interest when it was demonstrated that neither map could be considered as one which the original negotiators had used or marked.* * See "The Path, of Empire", by Carl Russell Fish (in "The Chronicles of America").