ion to the Loyalists was a mere pretext, is
manifest from the fact that the Commissioners agreed that there should
be no more confiscations or proscriptions against the Loyalists; for if
the laws under which these prosecutions were instituted and
confiscations made were State laws, with which Congress had no power to
interfere, how could the Congress Commissioners stipulate that there
should be no more confiscations or proscriptions?

Dr. Franklin, the most experienced and ablest of the American
diplomatists, was the most crafty and overbearing against England. At
the beginning of the negotiations for peace, he demurely proposed, and
half converted Mr. Oswald to his proposition, to concede Canada (which
at that time meant all British North America) to the United States,
though his commission related simply to the independency of the thirteen
colonies; and when the British Cabinet vetoed this extra-official and
extravagant proposition, Dr. Franklin and his colleagues overreached the
ignorance and weakness of the British diplomatists by carefully
constructed maps for the purpose of making the boundary lines between
the proposed possessions of Great Britain and the United States on their
northern and north-western frontiers. These lines were so ingeniously
drawn as to take from Great Britain and include in the United States the
immense and valuable territories, back settlements, and the whole
country between the Alleghany Mountains and the Mississippi, and which
have since become the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa,
Wisconsin, Missouri, Michigan, Minnesota, etc.--to not one foot of which
the thirteen American colonies had the slightest claim--territories
ample to compensate Loyalists for their losses and banishment, but whose
interests, together with these most valuable possessions, were lost to
Great Britain by the subserviency of the British Commissioner, Oswald (a
London and American merchant), who looked to his own interests, and was
the subservient tool and echo of Dr. Franklin. The above territories
were a part of the domain of Congress, irrespective of any State, and
therefore at the absolute disposal of Congress. Yet, with these immense
accessions of resources, the American Commissioners professed that the
Congress had no power or means to compensate the United Empire Loyalists
for the confiscation and destruction of their property! One knows not at
which most to marvel--the boldness, skill, and success of t