Lawrence.
As lumbermen and settlers gathered in the border area, the risk
of conflict became acute, culminating in the Aroostook War in
1838-39, when the Legislatures of Maine and New Brunswick backed
their rival lumberjacks with reckless jingoism. Diplomacy failed
repeatedly to obtain a compromise line. Arbitration was tried
with little better success, as the United States refused to
accept the award of the King of the Netherlands in 1831. The
diplomats tried once more, and in 1842 Daniel Webster, the United
States Secretary of State, and Lord Ashburton, the British
Commissioner, made a compromise by which some five thousand miles
of the area in dispute were assigned to Great Britain and seven
thousand to the United States. The award was not popular on
either side, and the public seized eagerly on stories of
concealed "Red Line" maps, stories of Yankee smartness or of
British trickery. Webster, to win the assent of Maine, had
exhibited in the Senate a map found in the French Archives and
very damaging to the American claim. Later it appeared that the
British Government also had found a map equally damaging to its
own claims. The nice question of ethics involved, whether a
nation should bring forward evidence that would tell against
itself, ceased to have more than an abstract interest when it was
demonstrated that neither map could be considered as one which
the original negotiators had used or marked.
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