First in importance, if not in dignity, the relations of the United States with England, at any period of our history, and the mode in which they were handled, are topics of permanent interest. How often these two kindred nations have been on the verge of war, and how that peril has been encountered and averted cannot cease to be instructive. Nor is it of less consequence to note the course of a President, who, during an administration fraught with the most serious hazards to the internal relations of the United States with each other, kept steadily in view the preservation of peace and good will between the United States and Great Britain, while he abated nothing from our just claims or our national dignity. Mr. Buchanan left to his successor no unsettled question between these two nations, that was of any immediate importance, and he left the feeling between them and their respective governments in a far better condition than he found it on his accession to the Presidency, and in a totally different state from that which ensued after the beginning of our civil war.
But when he became President, two irritating and dangerous questions were pending, inherited from former administrations. The first of these related, as we have seen, to the British claim of a protectorate over the Mosquito coast, and to the establishment of colonial government over the Bay Islands; territories that belonged respectively to the feeble republics of Nicaragua and Honduras. It has been seen in a former chapter how the ambiguity of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty had led the British government to adopt a construction of it which would support these claims, and which would justify the pretension that by that treaty the United States had receded from what was called the “Monroe Doctrine.” This treaty, concluded in 1850 by the administration of General Taylor, was supposed in this country to have settled these questions in favor of the United States, and that Great Britain would withdraw from the territories of Nicaragua and Honduras. But she did not withdraw. Her ministers continued to claim that the treaty only restrained her from making future acquisitions in Central America, and that the true inference from this was that she could hold her existing possessions. It was, as has been seen, in the hope of settling this question, that Mr. Buchanan accepted the mission to England in 1853. Why it was not settled at that time, has been already stated in detail. It remained to be amicably and honorably settled, under his advice and approbation, after he became President, by treaties between Great Britain and the two Central American States, in accordance with the American construction of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty.