General Jackson's Secretary of State, gave those famous instructions which cost him the consent of the Senate to his nomination as Minister to England.
On the whole, there was evidence of a liberal, progressive spirit in Clay's diplomatic transactions; and it gave him much pleasure to say that, during the period when he was Secretary of State, “more treaties between the United States and foreign nations had been actually signed than had been during the thirty-six years of the existence of the present Constitution.” He concluded treaties of amity, commerce, and navigation with Central America, Prussia, Denmark, the Hanseatic Republics, Sweden and Norway, and Brazil, and a boundary treaty with Mexico. With Great Britain he was least successful in bringing matters in controversy to a definite and quite satisfactory conclusion. So a treaty concerning the disputed territory on the northwest coast, the Columbia country, provided only for an extension of the joint occupation agreed upon in the treaty of 1818, thus merely adjourning a difficulty, while by another treaty the northeastern boundary question was referred to a friendly sovereign or state, to be agreed upon, for arbitration.
The one disputed question between Great Britain and the United States which he did bring to a conclusion was one left behind by the treaty of Ghent, — the indemnity for slaves carried off by the British forces in the war of 1812. After seven
