While national and imperial leaders were pleased with the 1842 border, local grievances persisted. Maine commissioners to the negotiations in Washington, DC, especially William Pitt Preble, who had been a significant figure in the process since 1828, accepted the outcome grudgingly, at best, and Webster was later criticized for using government funds to secretly pay for pro-treaty newspaper propaganda to sway public opinion in Maine. Border residents who were not seen as full members of the polity due to the shared Anglocentric bias of US and British officials, both French-speakers in the Madawaska region and Wabanaki individuals, Tribes, and Nations, continue to suffer the repercussions of not conforming to the border’s dictates of belonging to one state.
The Barclay Collection, as its name implies, came into being as part of the colonial process that remade northeastern North America as Euro-American space. Nonetheless, the long-lasting international border of 1842 is not as all powerful as it sometimes seems. It is important to recall that borders connect as well as separate, and that the international boundary has often been used strategically in local and regional contexts to challenge and evade national and imperial power. The rich records about the creation of the border preserved here provide readers with the historical resources to reconsider how and why the border was created in the manner that it was. As scholars like Rachel Bryant, Andrea Bear Nicholas, and Micah A. Pawling have argued about the Indigenous past in the cross-border region, and as Wabanaki political and language activism demonstrates in 2022, Native peoples remain fundamentally invested in their sovereignty and the imposition of the international border in their Homelands and its ongoing consequences for daily life. Direct digitized access to this original material should encourage us to reconsider our stewardship of the northeastern border and how the borderlands can best be revitalized and sustained in the future.
Bibliography
Print Resources
Allis, Jr., ed., Frederick S. William Bingham’s Maine Lands, 1790-1820 (Boston: Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, volumes 36 and 37, 1954). Also accessible online: https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/977
Bryant, Rachel. “Imaginary Lines: Transcending the St. Croix Legacy in the Northeast Borderlands,” Native America and Indigenous Studies, 1.1 (Spring 2014), 49-64.
Carroll, Francis M. A Good and Wise Measure: The Search for the Canadian-American Boundary, 1783-1842 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001)
Demeritt, David. “Representing the ‘True’ St. Croix: Knowledge and Power in the Partition of the Northeast, William and Mary Quarterly, 54. 3 (July 1997), 515-548
Dunbabin, J. P. D. “Red Lines on Maps: The Impact of Cartographical Errors on the Border between the United States and British North America, 1782-1842,” Imago Mundi, 50 (1998), 105-125
Gregory, Alice. “How did a Self-Taught Linguist Come to Own an Indigenous Language?,” The New Yorker, April 12, 2021
Hornsby, Stephen J. “Negotiating the International Boundary” in Stephen J. Hornsby and Richard W. Judd, eds., Historical Atlas of Maine (Orono: University of Maine Press, 2015), plate 21
Hoy, Benjamin. A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States border across Indigenous Lands (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021)
Mancke, Elizabeth and Osihkiyol Crofton-Macdonald, “Indigenous Knowledge and Imperial Projections: Maine’s International Borders, 1783-1842” in Richard Judd and Liam Riordan, eds., What We Know, What We Wish: The Bicentennial of Maine Statehood and the Urgency Public History (forthcoming)
Nicholas, Andrea Bear. “Mascareene’s Treaty of 1725,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal 43 (1994), 3-18, an essay of much broader scope than its title indicates.
Pawling, ed., Micah A. Wabanaki Homeland and the New State of Maine: The 1820 Journal and Plans of Survey of Joseph Treat (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007)
Saxine, Ian. Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (New York: New York University Press, 2019)
Taylor, Alan. Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990)
Angela Tozer, “Democracy in a Settler State? Settler Colonialism and the Development of Canada, 1820-67” in Julien Maudit and Jennifer Tunnicliffe, eds., Constant Struggle: Histories of Canadian Democratization (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), 87-115
Online Resources
Avalon Project (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/default.asp) at the Law School of Yale University includes full text versions of all the essential treaties and many diplomatic documents related to the northeast boundary, such as the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Quebec Act (1774), Treaties of Paris (1763 and 1783), the Jay Treaty (1794), the Treaty of Ghent (1814), and the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842).
Dictionary of Canadian Biography (http://www.biographi.ca/en/index.php) has excellent scholarly assessments of a vast number of individuals including many Indigenous people and borderland residents.