The Secretary of State was not alone in his alarm at the President’s bold stand on this question. He, with others, finding themselves unable to induce the President to change his attitude on this point, and finding that in the present mood of congress the resolution of notice was likely to pass, used every endeavor to induce him to consent to a renewal of the proposition for compromise on the line of the forty-ninth parallel, or to invite such a proposal from the British government.
On the twenty-fifth of February, Mr. Calhoun, now returned to the senate, called upon the President and met there Senator Colquitt, of Georgia. Mr. Calhoun urged upon Mr. Polk that it was important that some action of pacific character should go to England upon the next steamer, and asked the President’s opinion of the policy of the senate’s passing a resolution in executive session, advising the President to reopen negotiations on the basis of the forty-ninth parallel. Mr. Polk was unwilling to advise such a course; he did, however, finally tell Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Colquitt, in confidence, as members of the senate, that if Great Britain should see fit to submit a proposition for compromise on that line, he should feel it his duty, following the example of Washington on important occasions, to submit the proposition to the senate confidentially for their previous advice. This course had already been considered in cabinet two days before, on the reading of a dispatch from Mr. McLane, our Minister in London, and had met with the almost unanimous approval of the members.
The house had already, on the ninth of February, passed the resolution of notice; the senate yet delayed and debated. But from the time when the President consented to encourage a further proposition of compromise from the British government by promising to submit the same to the senate for advice, events moved rapidly to a favorable conclusion. April 17 the resolution of notice passed the senate. Formal notice was addressed by our President to the Minister in London on the twenty-eighth of April, was received by him in London on the fifteenth of May, and on the twentieth of May was by him presented to Lord Aberdeen. Two days before receiving the notice, however, on the eighteenth of May, Lord Aberdeen had addressed a note to Mr. Packenham, at Washington, instructing him to offer a compromise on the basis of such a modification of the line of the forty-ninth degree of north latitude as would give to Great Britain Vancouver’s Island, and allow her the free navigation of the Columbia for a limited term of years. On the tenth of June, in a message to the senate, the President submitted this proposal, and asked the senate’s previous advice. This was formally given in a resolution adopted June 12, by a vote of thirty-eight to ten, in which the senate advised the President to accept the proposal of the British government. A treaty based upon this proposal was concluded and signed on the fifteenth day of June by the representatives of the two powers. This treaty, on the following day, was laid before the senate by the President, for its approval, and three days later was confirmed without amendment. This convention provided for the extension of a line on the forty-ninth degree of north latitude, westward from the Rocky Mountains, to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver’s Island, and thence southerly, through the middle of said channel, and of Fuca Straits, to the Pacific Ocean.