Oregon boundary dispute

Tensions grew as American expansionists, such as Senator Edward A. Hannegan of Indiana and Representative Leonard Henly Sims of Missouri, urged Polk to annex the entire Pacific Northwest all the way to the 54°40′ parallel north (which is what the Democrats had called for during the presidential campaign).

Naval captains such as the Spanish Juan José Pérez Hernández, British George Vancouver and American Robert Gray gave defining regional water formations like the Columbia River and the Puget Sound their modern names and charted them in the 1790s.

Creating a colony called Santa Cruz de Nuca on Vancouver Island, the Spanish were the first European colonisers of the Pacific Northwest outside Russian America to the north.

[4] In 1808 Alexander Andreyevich Baranov sent the Nikolai, with the captain "ordered to explore the coast south of Vancouver Island, barter with the natives for sea otter pelts, and if possible discover a site for a permanent Russian post in the Oregon Country.

Starting with a party of the Montreal-based North West Company (NWC) employees led by David Thompson in 1807, the British began land-based operations and opened trading posts throughout the region.

Albert Gallatin, the main American negotiator, had previously instructed to have a tentative agreement by the convening of the third session of the 15th United States Congress, set for 16 November.

A final proposition was made to the British plenipotentiary, Frederick John Robinson, for the continuation of the 49th parallel west while leaving the United Kingdom, as Gallatin stated, "all the waters emptying in the sound called the Gulf of Georgia.

The British plenipotentiaries William Huskisson and Stratford Canning on 29 June pressed instead for a permanent line along the 49° parallel west until the main branch of the Columbia River.

With the British formally abandoning claims south or east of the Columbia River, the Oregon Question thence became focused on what later became Western Washington and the southern portion of Vancouver Island.

[12] In a letter to Prime Minister Lord Liverpool in 1826, Canning presented the possibilities of trade with the Qing Empire if a division of the Pacific Northwest was to be made with the Americans.

The British negotiators to allay this attack offered a detached Olympic Peninsula as American territory, giving access to both the Straits of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound.

John Floyd, a Representative from Virginia, spearheaded a report that would "authorize the occupation of the Columbia River, and to regulated trade and intercourse with the Indian tribes thereon.

Initially focusing on the Pacific Northwest, Ashburton presented Secretary of State Daniel Webster the 1824 partition proposal made by Canning of a division along the Columbia River.

[19] In opposition to Linn's bill, Calhoun famously declared that the U.S. government should pursue a policy of "wise and masterly inactivity"[32] in Oregon, letting settlement determine the eventual boundary.

[33] By early 1843, Webster returned to the Oregon Question, formalising a plan that included the 1826 British offer of the Olympic Peninsula enclave and the purchase of Alta California from Mexico.

Meeting with Prime Minister Robert Peel's Foreign Secretary, Earl of Aberdeen on 29 November, Everett presented the terms considered by President John Tyler.

[34] However during President Tyler's State of the Union address that year on 6 December, he claimed "the entire region of country lying on the Pacific and embraced within 42° and 54°40′ of north latitude".

[2][41] In a column in the New York Morning News on December 27, 1845, editor John L. O'Sullivan argued that the United States should claim all of Oregon "by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us".

He made an offer that likely originated from Simpson: Americans could select naval bases on the portion of Vancouver Island south of the 49th parallel or along the Strait of Juan de Fuca in return.

[36] Diplomatic channels continued negotiations throughout 1844; by early 1845 Everett reported the willingness of Aberdeen to accept the 49th parallel, provided the southern portion of Vancouver Island would become British territory.

U.S. Secretary of State James Buchanan on 12 July[43] offered the British any desired ports on the portion of Vancouver Island south of this line,[19] though navigation rights of the Columbia River were not included.

Democratic expansionists in Congress from the Midwest, led by Senators Lewis Cass of Michigan, Edward A. Hannegan of Indiana, and William Allen of Ohio, called for war with the United Kingdom rather than accepting anything short of all of Oregon up to Parallel 54°40′ north.

Webster confided to Viscount Ossington, a personal friend, on 26 February 1846, that it would be a "stupendous folly and enormous crime" for the two nations to declare war over the Pacific Northwest.

Relations were improved when the officers organized a ball at Vancouver on February 3, 1846,[50] later theatrical performances by the ship's crew, including Love in a Village and The Mock Doctor, along with picnics.

Sent to aid other British vessels navigate difficult channels and rivers, HMS Cormorant, a paddle steamer, arrived at the Strait of Juan de Fuca in June.

[48] Due to his extensive travels throughout the western stations of the HBC, Governor Pelly instructed George Simpson to draft a plan for the British Government if hostilities were to arise with the Americans.

[54] Lord Stanley, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, favored the plan, declaring that the HBC had to finance military operations west of Sault Ste.

The key was the overwhelming naval power which Britain could have brought to bear against the United States, combined with a diplomatic and political landscape that ultimately favored the British government's aim of protecting their interests robustly but without resort to armed conflict.

[55] Louis McLane, the American minister in the United Kingdom, reported to Buchanan on 2 February that the British were prepared "to commission immediately some thirty ships-of-the-line in addition to steamers and other vessels held in reserve".

[64] David M. Pletcher notes that while Polk's bellicose stance was the by-product of internal American politics, the war crisis was "largely of his own creation" and might have been avoided "with more sophisticated diplomacy".