Webster-Ashburton Treaty

The Webster-Ashburton Treaty was an agreement signed at Washington on August 9, 1842, between the United States and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Daniel Webster, the American Secretary of State, negotiated it with Lord Ashburton, a peer and Privy Council member sent to the United States on a special mission. Its first purpose was to settle stretches of the boundary between the United States and the British dominions in North America that the second article of the 1783 Treaty of Peace had described but that had never been fixed; rather than argue further over their rights, the two governments agreed a conventional line with equivalents and compensations. Article I traces that line from the monument at the source of the St. Croix River north to the St. John River and onward. The treaty also dealt with the suppression of the African slave trade, binding each country to keep a naval squadron of not less than eighty guns on the African coast, working independently but in concert, and it set out when fugitives charged with crimes such as murder, piracy, arson, robbery or forgery would be delivered up to the other country's justice.