The Fathers of the Constitution | Page 6

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 proteges 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.*
* See Lord Bryce's Introduction (p. xxiv) to W. A. Dunning. "The
British Empire and the United States" (1914).
The fisheries of the North Atlantic, for which Newfoundland served as
the chief entrepot, 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