States would be justified in declaring war at any moment, Great Britain looked uneasily for the first symptoms of retaliation. When Madison took so earnest a tone, Merry might reasonably expect that his words would be followed by acts.
These shocks were not all that the new British minister was obliged to meet at the threshold of his residence in Washington. At the moment when he was, as he thought, socially maltreated, and when he was told by Madison that America meant to insist on her neutral rights, he learned that the Government did not intend to ratify Rufus King's boundary convention. The Senate held that the stipulations of its fifth article respecting the Mississippi might embarrass the new territory west of the river. King had not known of the Louisiana cession when he signed the Treaty; and the Senate, under the lead of General Smith,[1] preferred to follow its own views on the subject, as it had done in regard to the second article of the treaty with France, Sept. 30, 1800, and as it was about to do in regard to Pinckney's claims convention, Aug. 11, 1802, with Spain. Merry was surprised to find that Madison, instead of explaining the grounds of the Senate's hesitation, or entering into discussion of the precise geographical difficulty, contented himself with a bald statement of the fact. The British minister thought that this was not the most courteous way of dealing with a treaty negotiated after a full acquaintance with all the circumstances,
- ↑ Diary of J. Q. Adams (Oct. 31, 1803), i. 269.
