The Works of Daniel Webster, Volume 1Webster, Daniel
History
The Works of Daniel Webster, Volume 1
Webster, Daniel
United States -- Politics and government -- 1815-1861
believed that no difference of views in regard to important matters
arose between him and Mr. Tyler. For the result of the principal
negotiation, Mr. Tyler manifested great anxiety; and Mr. Webster has
not failed, in public or private, to bear witness to the intelligent and
earnest attention which was bestowed by him on the proceedings,
through all their stages, and to express his sense of the confidence
reposed in himself by the head of the administration, from the
beginning to the end of the transactions.
If the position of things was difficult here, it was not less so on the
other side of the Atlantic; indeed, many of the causes of embarrassment
were common to the two countries. There, as here, the correspondence,
whether conducted at Washington or London, had of late years done
nothing toward an amicable settlement of the great questions at issue.
It had degenerated into an exercise of diplomatic logic, with the
effect, in England as well as in America, of strengthening each party in
the belief of its own rights, and of working up the public mind to a
reluctant feeling that the time was at hand when those rights must be
maintained by force. That the British and American governments, during a
considerable part of the administrations of General Jackson and Mr. Van
Buren, should, with the fate of the reference to the King of the
Netherlands before their eyes, have exerted themselves with melancholy
ingenuity in arranging the impossible details of another convention of
exploration and arbitration, shows of itself that neither party had any
real hope of actually settling the controversy, but that both were
willing to unite in a decent pretext for procrastination.
The report of Mr. Featherstonhaugh, erroneously believed, in England, to
rest upon the results of actual exploration, had been sanctioned by the
ministry, and seemed to extinguish the last hope that England would
agree to any terms of settlement which the United States would deem
reasonable. The danger of collision on the frontier became daily more
imminent, and troops to the amount of seventeen regiments had been
poured into the British Provinces. The arrest of McLeod, as we have
already observed, had brought matters to a point at which the public
sensibility of England would not have allowed a minister to blink the
question. Lord Palmerston is known to have written to Mr. Fox, that the
arrest of McLeod, under the authority of the State of New York, was
universally regarded in England as a direct affront to the British
government, and that such was the excitement caused by it, that, if
McLeod should be condemned and executed, it would not be in the power
either of ministers or opposition, or of the leading men of both
parties, to prevent immediate war.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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