Caroline Affair

Caroline Affair In 1837 a group of men led by William Lyon Mackenzie rebelled in Upper Canada (now Ontario), demanding a more democratic government. There was much sympathy for their cause in the United States, and a small steamer, the Caroline, owned by U.S. citizens, carried men and supplies from the U.S. side of the Niagara river to the Canadian rebels on Navy Island just above Niagara Falls. On the night of Dec. 29, 1837, a small group of British and Canadians loyal to the Upper Canadian government crossed the river to the U.S. side where the Caroline was moored, loosed her, set fire to her, and sent her over the falls. One American was killed in the incident. Americans on the border were aroused to intense anti-British feeling, and soldiers under Gen. Winfield Scott were rushed to the scene to prevent violent American action. The affair passed over, though it had an aftermath, when one of the men who had taken part in the attack boasted of that fact when he was in the United States and was arrested as a criminal. That matter, too, was smoothed over, but the Caroline Affair and the Aroostook War helped to make relations with Great Britain very tense in the years before the Webster-Ashburton Treaty.

Caroline Affair the destruction by burning and casting adrift on the Niagra river the USS Caroline in 1838 by loyal Canadians. The ship had been dispatched with supplies and ammunition to aid rebel Canadians. The incident increased Anglo-American tensions until the Webster-Ashburton Treaty.

Webster‐Ashburton Treaty (1842).This treaty settled many long‐standing issues between the United States and England that by 1842 had become acute. These included U.S.‐Canadian boundary disputes; the 1837 burning by Canadians of a U.S. steamship, the Caroline, in the Niagara River, with the death of a crewman; the 1840 arrest in New York State of a Canadian, Alexander McLeod, accused of involvement in the Caroline affair; and the refusal of British authorities to return to the United States the African‐American slaves who in 1841 had seized and diverted to the Bahamas a U.S. brig, the Creole, transporting them from Virginia to New Orleans.

To resolve these issues, the British government appointed Lord Ashburton (Alexander Baring) to meet Secretary of State Daniel Webster in Washington. The resulting treaty, concluded in August 1842, resolved the boundary disputes, incorporated an extradition agreement, and provided for joint U.S.‐British squadrons to halt the African slave trade. Other issues, including the McLeod and Creole matters, were resolved by an exchange of notes included in the treaty package. To facilitate the final boundary settlement between Maine and New Brunswick, President John Tyler authorized Webster to draw from the president's Secret Service fund. In 1846, when Webster stood accused of wrongdoing related to the negotiations, Tyler defended his secretary of state's actions before a congressional committee, helping to exonerate him.

The Webster‐Ashburton Treaty granted the United States nearly 60 percent of the disputed area in the Northeast, including a strategic military location at the top of Lake Champlain, along with a region west of Lake Superior, Minnesota's Mesabi Range, that later proved rich in iron ore. It also allowed Americans to turn westward and encouraged what proved to be an enduring Anglo‐American rapprochement.
See also Antebellum Era; Expansionism; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Canada; Slavery: The Slave Trade.

Bibliography

Howard Jones , To the Webster‐Ashburton Treaty: A Study in Anglo‐American Relations, 1783–1843, 1977.
Howard Jones and and Donald A. Rakestraw , Prologue to Manifest Destiny: Anglo‐American Relations in the 1840s, 1997.

Howard Jones