Mr. Adams to Lord Stanley
My Lord: It has come to the knowledge of the government which I have the honor to represent that an export duty of 20 cents per thousand feet has recently been levied in her Majesty’s province of New Brunswick upon lumber which is sawed from logs grown in the territory of the State of Maine, bordering on the tributaries of the river St. John’s, and floated down to the mouth of that river under the rights of free access recognized by the third article of the treaty of boundaries between Great Britain and the United States, ratified on the 22d of August, 1842. I am directed to inform your lordship that it is the opinion of my government that this action is in contravention of the provisions of the article aforementioned.
This appears not to be a new question between the two countries. I find it to have been carefully and thoroughly presented to the attention of her Majesty’s government by my predecessor, Mr. Everett, on behalf of the United States, in a note dated on the 28th of June, 1844, drawn up under urgent special instructions from Washington, and addressed to the Earl of Aberdeen, then acting as her Majesty’s secretary of state for foreign affairs. The arrangement seems to suffer so little change in its character during the interval that without a repetition of it on my part I trust I may be permitted to refer your lordship at once to the paper containing it for the grounds on which the remonstrance is now revived.
It is no more than proper for me to observe that this paper was responded to by Lord Aberdeen in an elaborate note, dated 9th of December, 1844, in justification of the proceeding complained of.
The question appears to have been left open as a cause of difference between the two countries until the negotiation of the treaty of the 5th of June, 1854, when under the provision of its fourth article the right of New Brunswick to lay any such export duty was explicitly renounced.
It is inferred that the expiration of that treaty, in accordance with the fifth article, reserving a power of termination on notice of either party at the end of ten years from its date, has been regarded in New Brunswick as reviving the right to lay this duty. Hence the resuscitation of the law before complained of.
I am authorized to say that it is impossible for my government to acquiesce in the construction of the provision in the treaty of 1842, upon which this right appears to be claimed. Whilst I may be permitted to express my regret that the result of the rescision of the reciprocity treaty should be in this case the revival of differences thought at the time of its ratification to have been permanently reconciled, I cannot but infer from the general friendly disposition of the government of both countries a reciprocal disinclination to sanction by reason of it any needless reopening of ancient causes of irritation. In this view I cannot restrain the expression of my regret that her Majesty’s province of New Brunswick should have been so prompt in returning to a practice which has never been regarded in the United States as otherwise than unjust to that portion of their people dependent in some degree upon a free navigation of the St. John’s, and which the very fact that it has been once explicitly renounced renders it still more irritating. I do not entertain a doubt that some mode may be arrived at in this case, as it has been in the still more delicate one of the reciprocal rights of fishery involved in the expiration of the same treaty, of avoiding the difficulties that may be apprehended to grow out of it.
I pray your lordship, &c., &c., &c.
The Right Hon. Lord Stanley, &c., &c., &c.