Thwarting Southern Schemes and British Bluster in the Pacific Northwest

James Robbins Jewell

FOUR MONTHS BEFORE JOHN BROWN seized the armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, events in the far northwestern corner of the United States also brought the nation to the brink of war—not with itself, but with England. The blood spilled in June 1859 belonged to a pig, leading to one of the most bizarre episodes in U.S. diplomatic history. After Abraham Lincoln's election as president, the tensions from decades of mutual suspicions between the United States and its northern neighbor, compounded by the presence of a vocal group of southerners in the regional capital of Victoria, took on overtones of the Civil War.

As the Civil War began, the Pacific Northwest presented very real concerns for the Union government. Royal Governor James Douglas was openly belligerent toward the United States. Therefore, he might have ignored British neutrality and launched preemptive strikes into Washington Territory, or ignored attempts by southern sympathizers on Vancouver Island trying to outfit a raider with which to attack U.S. commerce in the Pacific. Miners in the Fraser River region with Confederate sympathies might have launched paramilitary attacks into Washington Territory.

A new northern front of the Civil War opened in December 1863 when Confederate agents seized the S.S. Chesapeake off Cape Cod and sailed it to Nova Scotia. A second cross-border operation occurred in September 1864 when twenty Confederate agents attempted to capture the U.S.S. Michigan, the sole Union warship patrolling the Great Lakes. The attempt was foiled when one of the conspirators was captured and revealed the plot. Most famously, on October 19, 1864, a Confederate lieutenant and twenty men crossed from Quebec into Vermont, robbing three banks in the small town of St. Albans, making off with $200,000 before fleeing back across the border. That no military (or paramilitary) operations emerged in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War demonstrates how effectively Union officials in the region controlled the situation and avoided another front of the war breaking out on the Pacific Slope.

Long before the outbreak of the Civil War, however, U.S. officials wrestled with the dilemmas posed by their uncertain northwestern border. Political maneuvering between the two countries had dominated the "Oregon question" ever since Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1805 at Fort Clatsop, Oregon. In 1818, the United States and England agreed to the joint occupation of the disputed Oregon lands (essentially from 54°40' latitude south to the present-day California–Oregon border, and west of the Continental Divide). Failure to work out a satisfactory division of those lands in 1827 led to an extension of the joint occupancy agreement, a policy that was still in place in the 1840s. Growing U.S. expansionist sentiments in the Pacific Northwest rekindled British distrust and led to rising tension between the British and Americans, reaching a critical level during the 1844 presidential campaign. James K. Polk based his enthusiastic expansionist candidacy on American braggadocio, political rhetoric, and Manifest Destiny. Polk's campaign platform called for the "reannexation of Texas and the reoccupation of Oregon." The British took the hostile political language quite seriously, and prepared to defend the farthest western region of British North America from U.S. expansionism.

Despite the heated rhetoric, which served its purpose in helping to get Polk elected, the president-elect softened his demands. Although in his inaugural address he spoke boldly about pursuing all of Oregon, Polk's initial offer to the British was more restrained. Like his predecessors, Polk's first official proposal to settle the nagging Oregon question was to extend the 49th parallel as a boundary line all the way to the Pacific Ocean. When British officials refused the offer, Polk asked Congress to terminate the 1827 joint occupation agreement. The expansionist House quickly complied, but the measure was shot down in the Senate. In response to the rapidly deteriorating situation, one British official suggested sending naval vessels both to the Puget Sound region and to the mouth of the Columbia River. In March 1845 it appeared the two nations might go to war over the unsettled Oregon question.

By then, with the annexation of Texas underway and war with Mexico looming, the vigor of President Polk's expansionism was evident. Fortunately, the British ambassador returned with a new offer: England agreed to the 49th parallel line, excluding Vancouver Island, with the details regarding the San Juan Islands (between Vancouver Island and the mainland) to be worked out in arbitration. In April 1846, with General Zachary Taylor's forces already south of the Rio Nueces, provoking war with Mexico, Congress agreed to arbitration with Britain and averted war on two fronts.

Relations between the two nations improved after 1846 but remained precarious, as the dispute over San Juan Island made obvious in 1859. Both U.S. and British citizens had settled the island, repeating the pattern of joint occupancy and uncertain ownership. Then came a military showdown that commenced with the death of a pig.

The British inhabitants, who outnumbered the Americans until May 1859, were employees of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), and they did not recognize U.S. claims to any part...