e fields of corn in any
part of America, from Canada to Florida."

* * *

Jay's Treaty, so-called from John Jay, who acted on behalf of the United
States in negotiating the measure, secured a temporary and unsatisfactory
adjustment of the differences between the United States and Great
Britain. The fact that Washington was willing to approve the treaty,
although dissatisfied with it, is its sufficient vindication, and the
agreement on the part of England to surrender the western posts was no
small advantage for the United States, especially in the impression which
it produced on the Indians of the decline of British and the growth of
American power. The worst features of the treaty were that it restricted
the commerce of the United States, so far as concerned molasses, sugar,
coffee, cocoa and cotton, the last-mentioned article being already a
product of the United States, and that it failed to protect the seamen on
American vessels against seizure and impressment by the British. It was,
taken as a whole, a humiliating compact, and in its commercial provisions
an abandonment of the principle which inspired the Boston Tea Party, and
for which Americans had fought in the war of independence. The mutual
freedom of intercourse and internal trading, including common navigation
of the Mississippi, was advantageous only to Great Britain, which
country, as subsequent events showed, had not given up hope of
reconquering the trans-Ohio region, and carrying British dominion from
the Lakes to Mobile.

The United States had to do something, however, to show that the American
Republic was not either secretly or openly an ally of the French Republic
against the remainder of Europe, and while the Jay Treaty was not what
Washington and the American people desired, it was all that England would
agree to. As a _modus vivendi_ with our only dangerous neighbor it enabled
the American people to devote to domestic development the energies which
would otherwise have been expended in war, and to grasp the neutral
carrying trade upon which war would have placed an embargo. England would
doubtless have been gratified with any plausible excuse that would have
enabled her to destroy American commerce, and to be without a rival on the
Atlantic. Jay's Treaty prevented this, and England had to leave to her
friends, the Barbary pirates, the work of preying on the American carrying
trade in European waters.[2]