Beyond Borders - Mapping Maine and the Northeast Boundary

Historian Francis M. Carroll’s A Good and Wise Measure: The Search for the Canadian-American Boundary, 1783-1842 provides the best top-down view of border-formation in the wake of the Treaty of Ghent. When it became clear that the commission process would not produce a result in the early 1820s, both sides reluctantly prepared for arbitration by a neutral third party. US and British officials presented the king of the Netherlands with voluminous documentation, which informed his carefully-reasoned and pragmatic decision in 1831. However, its mostly riverine border for Maine did not account for the highlands designated in the 1783 treaty. His proposed border would have limited Maine’s access to rich forests north of the St. John River, and state interests mobilized, especially in the US Senate, to reject the proposal, although it had other more pro-American dimensions. Attempts to reopen negotiations came to an undeniable halt in 1833, and, thus, fifty years after the War of American Independence had ended, the border between the US and British North America still remained unknown.

Growing border tension and violence from 1827 to 1841, especially arising from the Rebellions in Lower and Upper Canada in 1837-38 and conflict over access to timber in the Aroostook “War” of 1838-39, encouraged the new Whig and Tory governments of the US and Britain to finally settle the northeastern border in 1842. The final treaty process was led by US Secretary of State Daniel Webster and his British counterpart Lord Ashburton, himself a former land speculator in Maine, who had married Anne Bingham in 1798, whose father had once been the largest landowner in eastern Maine. Ashburton’s assessment of the 1842 treaty included that the final border was a “good and wise measure” because it fairly balanced US and British interests with each side willing to reconsider past sticking points that could have led to a third Anglo-American war.