important matter to them was the occupation of Oregon. In Ohio,
Michigan, and northern Illinois there was some indifference as to Texas,
but none on the subject of Oregon. The vast region stretching from the
forty-second parallel of north latitude to Alaska, and embracing an
empire in itself, was held jointly with England, whose fur traders had
actually occupied the country on the northern side of the Columbia
River. England desired to hold the promising region. Under the agreement
of 1818, renewed in 1828, either country was to give one year's notice
of a purpose to abandon joint control, and, should the relation with
England be dissolved, the stronger party would doubtless obtain the
better part of the territory. The people of the Northwest under radical
leadership soon learned to demand all Oregon; English fur interests
understood the situation well, and they pressed their Government to
seize all the territory along the Pacific to the Bay of California. And
English relations with Mexico were such that Lower California was apt to
be added to Oregon in case of a break with the United States.

In the East there had been reason for increasing irritation between the
two Governments. British public opinion had been distinctly unfriendly
since the Canadian insurrection of 1837-38, when so many Americans gave
assistance to the insurgents. And this unfriendliness was fed by the
ill-concealed desire of the people of the West for the annexation of
Canada to the United States. When the American ship Caroline, which had
been assisting the Canadian insurrectionists, was seized and destroyed
by the English on Lake Erie, an American citizen was killed. This was
amicably arranged; but in 1840 a certain Alexander McLeod, then in New
York, avowed that he had killed the American and was promptly seized by
the state authorities and put on trial for his life. McLeod now claimed
that he had done the deed in obedience to orders, and the British
Minister came to his assistance. Officers of the American State
Department took the same view, but they were helpless, and for a time it
seemed that one of the States would put to death as a murderer a man
whom both England and the United States recognized to be innocent. War
seemed imminent, but as so often happens in Anglo-Saxon procedure, a way
out of the legal _impasse_ was found in a fictitious _alibi_, and McLeod
was acquitted.

When Sir Robert Peel became the head of the English Government i