Essay by Liam Riordan
Riordan is American historian specializing in the Revolutionary era (ca. 1760-1830), UMaine faculty member since 1997. Non-traditional, and especially non-textual, sources are important to my research and teaching, which draws on interdisciplinary cultural studies and social history methods
Today’s boundaries of the state of Maine are easy to picture in the far northeastern corner of the United States, but that seemingly enduring border was a matter of enormous uncertainty, conflict, and negotiation among Wabanaki, French, Acadian, British, and US individuals and groups over several centuries. Just as the large manuscript collections of the Kennebec and Pejepscot Proprietors reveal dramatic conflict over land claims in the mid-coast region of Maine that have been expertly assessed for the Colonial and Revolutionary eras by historians Ian Saxine, Lisa Brooks, and Alan Taylor, so too, the international border of the United States and Canada was created by human actions over a long period of time and was not formed by a natural or organic process.
Many overlapping authorities had strong claims in this borderland, starting, of course, with Wabanaki Nations, especially the Passamaquoddy (Peskotomuhkati) Maliseet (Wolastoqey), and Micmac (Mi’kmaq), whose Homelands were cleaved in two by the lasting demarcation of the international border by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (officially, the Washington Treaty) of August 9, 1842. A printed map from the treaty year gives some sense of the sharp differences of opinion about where the border should run as it shows proposed borders by the British, US, and a neutral arbiter in 1831 as well as the final line of 1842
The sundering of Indigenous Homelands, which are not depicted on the map, remains potent and poses ongoing challenges for these First Nations, as signified by their distinct preferred names today (as noted with the Indigenous preferred version in parentheses above). In addition, fixing the border involved not just a clash between national and imperial authorities, but also sharp differences among settlers and leaders in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia as well as those in the new sovereign polities of New Brunswick, Upper and Lower Canada, which were fused as the Province of Canada in 1841 (previously Quebec), and Maine that all came into being during the critical border formation period after 1783.
How the long-fixed line of 1842 was created can be examined in extraordinary detail with the material in the Maine Historical Society’s Thomas Barclay Collection that contains documents, land surveys, and maps dating from 1764 to 1893. The collection was mostly gathered by British commissioner Thomas Barclay (1753-1830), loyalist of New York and Nova Scotia, and British agent Ward Chipman (1754-1824), loyalist of Massachusetts and New Brunswick. Both men served on multiple border commissions, and their impact was extended since each was assisted (and followed) by a son in similar official capacities. Other key figures with prominent surviving papers in the collection include British commissioner John Ogilvy (1769-1819) of Scotland and Upper Canada, US commissioner James Sullivan (1744-1808) of Massachusetts and Maine, loyalist Robert Pagan (1750-1820) of Glasgow, Maine, and New Brunswick, and numerous surveyors who undertook arduous work in interior lands that remained relatively unknown to Euro-Americans even into the twentieth century. The fur trader and map maker David Thompson (1770-1857), famous today for his trans-continental journeys and voyage down the Columbia River to the Pacific in 1811, has correspondence and maps in the Barclay Collection from the early 1820s.
A critical challenge to create the border arose from how to translate the confident but imaginary projections made by distant imperial authorities to accord with the actual landscape of the northeast as understood by the people who lived there. Erroneous geographic claims that confounded establishing the border date from as early as the royal charter for Nova Scotia of 1621, long disagreements about the boundaries of French Acadie, and where to draw the line between colonial Massachusetts and Nova Scotia. Some of the earliest documents from 1764 pertain to areas at the eastern end of the border (a survey of Passamaquoddy Bay by John Mitchell) and in the west (treaties with the Chenussio and Seneca, both Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, tribes) negotiated with Indian Superintendent William Johnson at Johnson Hall in New York and even further west at Fort Niagara.
The fundamental treaty that made fixing the international border such a long and difficult process, however, was the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution in 1783. It made multiple ambiguous geographic assertions, especially about the placement of the boundary separating the yet-to-be-created province of New Brunswick and the future state of Maine. The large terrain involved in determining the northeastern border stretched from islands in Passamaquoddy Bay in the east, to identifying the actual St. Croix River (as well as its source), and deciding how to follow the long St. John (Wolostoq) River and its tributaries, which was made especially vexing by reference to a supposedly definitive “highlands” that separated watershed drainages between the Atlantic and the St. Lawrence River. (See, for example, the map of the “imaginary” highlands produced by the British in 1840, below)
Maine’s international border was the most bitterly contested segment, and an excellent visual orientation appears in Stephen J. Hornsby’s “Negotiating the International Boundary,” which should be consulted along with additional related plates in the Historical Atlas of Maine. Areas of the northeastern border with a less dense colonial presence to the west, from the northwesternmost head of the Connecticut River, through the Great Lakes, and the eastern border’s terminus at Lake of the Woods (the intersection of modern-day Ontario, Minnesota, and Manitoba) were negotiated with broader strokes.
The Treaty of Paris (1783) caused the most prolix problems in establishing the border, and subsequent US-British treaties gradually tried to make sense of its language starting with the Jay Treaty (1794). This authorized the St. Croix Commission of 1796-98 that established which of the rivers that flowed into Passamaquoddy Bay was actually the St. Croix intended in 1783. It also agreed upon the interior source (or headwaters) of the St. Croix as the western end of the Chiputneticook Lakes, which would be the starting point for vexing questions about the interior route for decades to come. A color engraving of the 1817 monument to mark the source of the St. Croix, based on a sketch by British surveyor Joseph Bouchette of Montreal, includes an iron ring on a tree, placed by surveyors to identify the location in 1797.
The border work of the 1790s, skillfully assessed by David Demeritt, included the dramatic rediscovery of the remains of the French settlement of 1604 on Bone Island (modern-day St. Croix Island) and Robert Pagan deposition. This relied on information shared by Passamaquoddy knowledge keepers. This is outstandingly documented in the map of the interior canoe route between the St. John (Wolostoq) and Penobscot rivers that Chief Francis Joseph Neptune shared with Pagan on birch bark as well as Pagan’s letter to Ward Chipman about his meetings with First Nation people [insert links: mmn map https://www.mainememory.net/artifact/6883; pagan letter https://www.mainememory.net/media/pdf/9383.pdf, and link to access digitization of coll. 26, box i, folder 19 in full]. The Passamaquoddy Homeland had been dramatically disrupted when loyalist refugees, including commission officials like Pagan, established the town of St. Andrews on an important Passamaquoddy site in 1783. Neptune and other tribal members who participated in the border work of the 1790s worked diplomatically to protect their territory from increasing colonization, as also highlighted by the Passamaquoddy treaty with Massachusetts in 1794, an essential legal precedent for the Maine Indian Land Claims Settlement Act of 1980.
Settling other issues, especially those in Article 5 that related to the interior border from the source of the St. Croix to the highlands and beyond proved elusive. The geographic range of maps produced in this period, to the east in 1817 and to the west in 1820 arose from the opaque issues at stake as well as interest-driven motives to acquire rich timber lands (on both sides) and to preserve an overland route from New Brunswick to Quebec (for the British). The costs to raise and support the surveying teams in their field efforts were extreme and more than four boxes of the Barclay Collection includes financial records and receipts from 1796 to 1827.
The Treaty of Ghent (1814), which brought the stalemate of the War of 1812 to a close, included four articles that sought to methodically resolve the location of the border through the joint work of US and British commissions. Of the four commissions it authorized, only the one tasked with settling the sovereignty of islands in Passamaquoddy Bay was resolved expeditiously in 1816-17. Pragmatic recognition of settlement on the ground led Moose Island (the location of modern-day Eastport, Maine) to go to the US, while loyalist homesteads on Deer, Campobello and Grand Manan led them to be recognized as British.
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.
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.