George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 10

[215] view, was to possess no territory on the Mississippi,

Chap. IX.} 1779.

from its source to its mouth.

On the same day, Gerry obtained a reconsideration of the article on the fisheries. The treaty of Utrecht divided those of Newfoundland between Great Britain and France, on the principle that each should have a monopoly of its own share.

Richard Henry Lee brought up the subject anew, and, avoiding a collision with the monopoly of France, he proposed that the right of fishing on the coasts and banks of North America should be reserved to the United States as fully as they enjoyed the same when subject to Great Britain. This substitute was carried by the vote of Pennsylvania and Delaware, with the four New England states.

But the state of New York, guided by Jay and Gouverneur Morris, altogether refused to insist on a right by treaty to fisheries; and Gouverneur Morris, on the eighth of May, calling to mind ‘the exhausted

May 8.

situation of the United States, the derangement of their finances, and the defect of their resources,’¹ moved that the acknowledgment of independence should be the sole condition of peace. The motion was declared to be out of order by the votes of the four New England states, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, against the unanimous vote of New York, Maryland, and North Carolina; while Delaware, Virginia, and South Carolina were equally divided.

The French minister now intervened, and on the twenty-seventh of May congress went back

27.

o its resolve, ‘that in no case, by any treaty of ’