the United States.

Under these circumstances it was fortunate for the United States that the American Peace Commissioners were broad-minded enough to appreciate the situation and to act on their own responsibility. Benjamin Franklin, although he was not the first to be appointed, was generally considered to be the chief of the Commission by reason of his age, experience, and reputation. Over seventy-five years old, he was more universally known and admired than probably any man of his time. This many-sided American—printer, almanac maker, writer, scientist, and philosopher—by the variety of his abilities as well as by the charm of his manner seemed to have found his real mission in the diplomatic field, where he could serve his country and at the same time, with credit to himself, preach his own doctrines.

When Franklin was sent to Europe at the outbreak of the Revolution, it was as if destiny had intended him for that particular task. His achievements had already attracted attention; in his fur cap and eccentric dress “he fulfilled admirably the Parisian ideal of the forest philosopher”; and with his facility in conversation, as well as by the attractiveness of his personality, he won both young and old. But, with his undoubted zeal for liberty and his unquestioned love of country, Franklin never departed from the Quaker principles he affected and always tried to avoid a fight. In these efforts, owing to his shrewdness and his willingness to compromise, he was generally successful.

John Adams, being then the American representative at The Hague, was the first Commissioner to be appointed. Indeed, when he was first named, in 1779, he was to be sole commissioner to negotiate peace; and it was the influential French Minister to the United States who was responsible for others being added to the commission. Adams was a sturdy New Englander of British stock and of a distinctly English type—medium height, a stout figure, and a ruddy face. No one questioned his honesty, his straightforwardness, or his lack of tact. Being a man of strong mind, of wide reading and even great learning, and having serene confidence in the purity of his motives as well as in the soundness of his judgment, Adams was little inclined to surrender his own views, and was ready to carry out his ideas against every obstacle. By nature as well as by training he seems to have been incapable of understanding the French; he was suspicious of them and he disapproved of Franklin’s popularity even as he did of his personality.

Five Commissioners in all were named, but Thomas Jefferson and Henry Laurens did not take part in the negotiations, so that the only other active member was John Jay, then thirty-seven years old and already a man of prominence in his own country. Of French Huguenot stock and type, he was tall and slender, with somewhat of a scholar’s stoop, and was usually dressed in black. His manners were gentle and unassuming, but his face, with its penetrating black eyes, its aquiline nose and pointed chin, revealed a proud and sensitive disposition. He had been sent to the court of Spain in 1780, and there he had learned enough to arouse his suspicious, if nothing more, of Spain’s designs as well as of the French intention to support them.

In the spring of 1782 Adams felt obliged to remain at The Hague in order to complete the negotiations already successfully begun for a commercial treaty with the Netherlands. Franklin, thus the only Commissioner on the ground in Paris, began informal negotiations alone but sent an urgent call to Jay in Spain, who was convinced of the fruitlessness of his mission there and promptly responded. Jay’s experience in Spain and his knowledge of Spanish hopes had led him to believe that the French were not especially concerned about American interests but were in fact willing to sacrifice them if necessary to placate Spain. He accordingly insisted that the American Commissioners should disregard their instructions and, without the knowledge of France, should deal directly with Great Britain. In this contention he was supported by Adams when he arrived, but it was hard to persuade Franklin to accept this point of view, for he was unwilling to believe anything so unworthy of his admiring and admired French. Nevertheless, with his cautious shrewdness, he finally yielded so far as to agree to see what might come out of direct negotiations.

The rest was relatively easy. Of course there were difficulties and such sharp differences of opinion that, even after long negotiation, some matters had to be compromised. Some problems, too, were found insoluble and were finally left without a settlement. But such difficulties as did exist were slight in comparison with the previous hopelessness of reconciling American and Spanish ambitions, especially when the latter were supported by France. On the one hand, the Americans were the protégés of the French and were expected to give way before the claims of their patron’s friends to an extent which threatened to limit seriously their growth and development. On the other hand, they were the younger sons of England, uncivilized by their wilderness life, ungrateful and rebellious, but still to be treated by England as children of the blood. In the all-important question of extent of territory, where Spain and France would have limited the United States to the east of the Alleghany Mountains, Great Britain was persuaded without great difficulty, having once conceded independence to the United States, to yield the boundaries which she herself had formerly claimed—from the Atlantic Ocean on the east to the Mississippi River on the west, and from Canada on the north to the southern boundary of Georgia. Unfortunately the northern line, through ignorance and carelessness rather than through malice, was left uncertain at various points and became the subject of almost continuous controversy until the last bit of it was settled in 1911. ¹

The fisheries of the North Atlantic, for which Newfoundland served as the chief entrepôt, had been one of the great assets of North America from the time of its discovery. They had been one of the chief prizes at stake in the struggle between the French and the British for the possession of the continent, and they had been of so much value that a British statute of 1775 which cut off the New England fisheries was regarded, even after the “intolerable acts” of the previous year, as the height of punishment for New England. Many Englishmen would have been glad to see the Americans excluded from these fisheries, but John Adams, when he arrived from The Hague, displayed an appreciation of New England interests and the quality of his temper as well by flatly refusing to agree to any treaty which did not allow full fishing privileges. The British accordingly yielded and the Americans were granted fishing rights as “heretofore” enjoyed. The right of navigation of the Mississippi River, it was declared in the treaty, should “forever remain free and open” to both parties; but here Great Britain was simply passing on to the United States a formal right which she had received from France and was retaining for herself a similar right which might sometime prove of use, for as long as Spain held both banks at the mouth of the Mississippi River, the right was of little practical value.

Two subjects involving the greatest difficulty of arrangement were the compensation of the Loyalists and the settlement of commercial indebtedness. The latter was really a question of the payment of