s, President Madison created
a new commission by sending John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and Jonathan
Russell to join Gallatin and Bayard. In the last week in June, the
commissioners repaired to Ghent, which had been chosen as the place of
meeting. Thither the British negotiators followed them in leisurely
fashion. The first joint conference was not held until August 8, 1814.

The task of the American commissioners was one of very great difficulty.
Confronted by the unexpected demand that the revision of the Canadian
boundary, the fisheries, and the establishment of an Indian state in the
Northwest should be included in the _pourparler_, they could only reply
that they had been instructed to discuss only matters of maritime
law--impressments, blockades, and neutral rights. There seemed so little
likelihood of agreement that the American commissioners prepared to
leave Ghent. But the British Ministry abated its extreme demands and
continued the negotiations. At the same time new instructions from
Washington advised the American representatives that they might drop the
subject of impressments if they found it an insuperable obstacle in the
way of peace.

The insistence of the British agents upon the principle of _uti
possidetis_--the state of possession at the close of the war--again
threatened to break off negotiations, for the Americans resolutely
insisted on the _status quo ante bellum_, a restoration of all places
taken during the war. It was at this juncture that tidings arrived of
the British repulse at Plattsburg. For a week the British Ministry
debated the feasibility of renewing the war; but the complications at
the Congress of Vienna, the "prodigious expense" of continued war, the
change in public opinion, and the emphatic conviction of Wellington that
the Ministry had "no right from the state of the war to demand any
cession of territory"--these and many lesser considerations disposed the
Cabinet to ask the American envoys to prepare a draft of a treaty.

Strong differences of opinion developed among the Americans when they
set to work upon their preliminary draft. As the representative of
Western interests, Clay set himself obstinately against any further
recognition of the British right--secured by the treaty of 1783--of free
navigation of the Mississippi. Adams was equally determined not to
sacrifice the correlative right to the Labrador and Newfoundland
fisheries, which his father had secured in the Treaty