In a private note I had the honor to address you, at your request, in January last I gave you the leading historical facts relating to our Northeast boundary to the time of its settlement by the treaty of Washington, in 1842.

That boundary, by the treaty of Ghent, was not varied from the same as described in the treaty of 1783. Its description in the latter was in words so clear and explicit as to leave no doubt in the mind of any one disposed to give them a fair construction as to their true meaning, yet it was twenty-five years from the time when the commissioners from the two Government first met for the purpose of marking the boundary by suitable monuments to the time of its settlement in 1842.

During this long period the efforts of the agents of the British Government were untiring to force that boundary to the south of its true position, efforts in which they were finally partially successful, and for which they were indebted not to the justice of their claim, but to a magnanimous disposition on the part of our Government (the consent of Maine having been reluctantly given) to yield the right for the sake of a peaceable settlement of a question which had been long in dispute.

Military and commercial considerations, to which England has ever been keenly alive, indicated strongly the importance of some other mode of communicating with her Canadian possessions than is afforded by the navigation of the Saint Lawrence, which for half the year is obstructed by ice or dangerous.

The Ashburton treaty gave them so much of the valley of the Saint John as has enabled them to open a line of communication overland between Halifax and Quebec, within their own territory, but this is very far from being such a communication as is demanded by the growing importance of the Canadas. Halifax, their only sea-port of consequence, is 780 miles, nearly, distant from Montreal by this circuitous and otherwise unfavorable route, and hence in the construction of their Grand Trunk Railroad they have been forced to allow its eastern terminus to meet the Atlantic in the State of Maine, at Portland, a point which is only 294 miles from Montreal, with favorable ground intervening for the construction and operation of a railroad, and with a harbor not excelled by any other on the Atlantic sea-board.

This terminus and the portion of the State of Maine lying north and east of it and of the Grand Trunk road England covets, and as she has never been particularly scrupulous in her first hostile movement would be directed to securing possession of and holding permanently, if possible, all that portion of Maine described above. In confirmation of this I refer to the reasons which have induced the belief, now so general, of the intention of the British Government to take forcible possession of the harbor of Portland, in January last, by way of retaliation for the seizure of Mason and Slidell.

That so serious a movement was contemplated for so slight a provocation is just ground for alarm, and to avoid the like danger in future and secure peace with England we must remove the temptation to encroachment now presented by the imperfectly defended condition of that portion of our territory embracing the eastern and northern parts of Maine.

We must, in particular, strengthen the defense of Portland, so as to render it impregnable by land and by water. Other points need