their territories touch for three thousand miles. During the
nineteenth century the coastwise shipping of the United States
was often forced to seek the shelter of the British West Indies.
The fisherfolk of England and America mingled on the Grand Bank
of Newfoundland and on the barren shores of that island and of
Labrador, where they dried their fish. Indians, criminals, and
game crossed the Canadian boundary at will, streams flowed across
it, and the coast cities vied for the trade of the interior,
indifferent to the claims of national allegiance. One cannot but
believe that this intimacy has in the long run made for
friendship and peace; but it has also meant constant controversy,
often pressed to the verge of war by the pertinacious insistence
of both nations on their full rights as they saw them.

The fifteen years following Adams's encounter with Canning saw
the gradual accumulation of a number of such disputes, which made
the situation in 1840 exceptionally critical. Great Britain was
angered at the failure of the United States to grant her the
right to police the seas for the suppression of the slave trade,
while the United States, with memories of the vicious English
practice of impressment before the War of 1812, distrusted the
motives of Great Britain in asking for this right. Nearly every
mile of the joint boundary in North America was in dispute, owing
to the vagueness of treaty descriptions or to the errors of
surveyors. Twelve thousand square miles and a costly American
fort were involved; arbitration had failed; rival camps of
lumberjacks daily imperiled peace; and both the Maine Legislature
and the National Congress had voted money for defense. In a New
York jail Alexander McLeod was awaiting trial in a state court
for the murder of an American on the steamer Caroline, which a