(This is a reworking of a couple of old soc.history.what-if posts of mine.)
I have recently been reading Frederick Merk's *The Oregon Question: Essays in Anglo-American Diplomacy and Politics* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1967). Without going into details, one can say that the essence of the US-British dispute for most of the 1818-1846 period was that the US insisted on the so-called Utrecht Line (the 49th parallel) as the boundary, while the British insisted on following that line only as far west as the Columbia River, with the border then following that river to the Pacific. Since no agreement could be reached on partition, joint occupation was agreed on instead, but it was obviously not a permanent solution. We have had some discussions of the possibility of a British-American war over Oregon in the mid-1840's (which IMO was very unlikely unless Cass was elected president in 1844, and unlikely even then--those willing to go to war for 54-40 were never more than a vociferous minority). In this post, I would like to discuss a different possibility which seems to have been somewhat neglected--that of a peaceful settlement of the Oregon Question long before the mid-1840s. I have attached a map I scanned from Merk's book:
A solution of the Oregon Question would require one of two things. The first would be Americans settling for less than the 49th parallel. The only time I can see any willingness to do this was in 1818, when in a last-ditch effort to avoid joint occupation, Gallatin and Rush offered the British the Gulf of Georgia and the territory that it drained. This offer, unofficial and confidential, was evidently rejected by the British out of hand; it was not mentioned by the British plenipotentiaries in their report submitted to the Foreign Office. Neither side regarded the harbors in the Gulf of Georgia is being of very great importance compared to the question of who would control the valley of the Columbia south of the 49th parallel. As Merk notes, "Ultimately some of these harbors did become major ports. They developed into entrepots of a world-wide commerce. They became so largely because railroads gave them overland connection with a continental interior. But in 1818 railroads were a development still in the future. No one dreamed of the impact they would make on modern life." pp. 59-60.
(So one reason for the Gallatin-Rush offer may simply have been that the US didn't regard the harbors in the Gulf of Georgia area as very important. But another reason may be a curious geographical error. The British had complained that the 49th parallel as a boundary would divide not only the Columbia River but a river flowing into the Gulf of Georgia. Unless this issue could be compromised, no partition would be possible. It is now known that no rivers of magnitude flow into the Gulf of Georgia south of the 49th parallel, and it was already known in 1818 that the one major river, the Fraser, that does have a gulf outlet, lies entirely north of 49 degrees. However, in 1818 it was thought that there was a major river that rose in the north and entered the gulf south of 49 degrees. This was the "Caledonia River"--a grossly distorted version of the very minor Skagit River. The "Caledonia" is shown on the map I have scanned. Merk has a wonderful chapter on "The Ghost River Caledonia in the Oregon Negotiations of 1818" tracing the history of this mysterious "ghost river" to a map in a North West Company propaganda pamphlet of 1817, and asking "Was the river a mere error of cartography or a stratagem of propaganda designed to block a boundary settlement unfavorable to the interests of the North West Company?" He suggests that the latter may be the case, and adds "If the Caledonia River was a stratagem designed to add to the difficulties of a boundary settlement at the line of the 49th parallel, it was a success. It increased the determination of the British against that line, and it induced Gallatin and Rush to offer to deflect that line sufficiently southward...to leave a crucial area south of 49 degrees within British territory. In diplomacy a concession once offered is a commitment. It is a commitment even if offered informally and rejected offhand in an unsuccessful negotiation. The gulf offer was such a commitment. It could not, since it was informally made, be honorably recorded by the British nor openly exploited by them in later negotiations. And it was not. But it was probably stored in the memories of the British negotiators, Robinson and Goulburn, and these two were still, in the years of the Oregon crisis, high in the service of the British government." Merk, pp. 64-5. It also was not without effect on Gallatin, who proposed reviving it in 1826, but he was firmly vetoed by Adams, who recognized that it would be political suicide.)
In short, interesting as it would be to speculate on what are now Seattle, Tacoma, etc. as a part of Canada, I do not see much chance of the British accepting the Gallatin-Rush offer in 1818. After 1818, I think it very unlikely that the US would agree to any border south of the 49th parallel--especially since the US thought its position strengthened by the Adams-Onis treaty whereby the US acquired from Spain all of the latter's claims north of the 42nd parallel. The 1823 negotiations again failed to resolve the 49th parallel versus Columbia River dispute. And in the 1826 negotiations, Adams could not possibly have agreed to anything less than the 49th parallel even if he wanted to (and as mentioned above, Gallatin did unsuccessfully try to get Adams to revive and even expand the 1818 offer). The Jacksonians in Congress, out to destroy his administration as revenge for the "corrupt bargain," would have eaten him alive.
(Actually, there *was* one subsequent president who was willing to consider the Columbia River line. "In 1842, during the Webster-Ashburton negotiations, President Tyler favored a project for settling the Oregon dispute on the line of the Columbia River, provided that Britain would bring pressure to bear on Mexico to sell northern California to the United States. The cash payment was to be used to reimburse British and American creditors. But nothing came of this scheme." Thomas A. Bailey, *A Diplomatic History of the American People,* tenth edition (1980), p. 252. IMO this is very unlikely to come off. Mexico, unwilling in OTL even to recognize the independence of Texas, would be very unlikely to agree to part with northern California even under British pressure. And even if it could be arranged, the treaty would come under fierce fire from Tyler's opponents, both Whigs and Democrats, in the US Senate, who would denounce it as a sell-out; they would have preferred the 54° 40' line but even if they knew that was unrealistic they would at least favor holding out for the 49th parallel. Would the gain of Northern California be enough to mollify them? I am not sure, since many of them probably would argue that the US was bound to pick up northern California from a weak Mexico before long, anyway. [1] One should note that even in OTL the Webster-Ashburton treaty did not have unanimous support in the Senate; it was ratified by 39-9, which means that a switch of eight votes could defeat ratification. There were arguments that the US had conceded too much on the Maine boundary. What the objectors to the treaty did not realize was how favorable the treaty's settlement of the disputed area between Lake Superior and the Lake of the Woods was to the US--unknown to the negotiators, it contained a large part of what would become the iron-ore mines of Minnesota...)
So the question is whether (before the mid 1840's) the British could have agreed on the 49th parallel. My view is that there was one chance--in 1826. As Merk notes of the British cabinet discussions of this time (p. 156):
"As soon as the Cabinet began its discussion of the Oregon issue [in the spring of 1826] a division appeared in its ranks. The division was occasioned by a suggestion made by Liverpool that the old American proposal of the 49th parallel be given reconsideration. How the members divided and how close the division was cannot be ascertained. All that is known is that Liverpool, who usually stood with Canning, was ranged on one side and that Canning was on the other. The division was evidently close, for it remained long unresolved and eventually had to be compromised. In the meantime Canning carried on a persistent claim of propaganda within the Cabinet to turn Liverpool and his abettors away from any thought of new concessions to the United States."
Eventually Canning and Liverpool reached a compromise: While generally adhering to the Columbia River line:
"They proposed to concede to the United States, in the region adjoining Juan de Fuca Strait, a quadrilateral of territory, a detached tract, comprising roughly the Olympic Peninsula. This tract was to be bounded on the north by the strait of Juan de Fuca; on the west by the ocean; on the south by a line drawn from a point south of Gray's Harbor to Hood's Canal; on the east by Hood's Canal and Admiralty Inlet to the Straits. The offer was intended to give the United States a portion of the deep-water harbors inside the straits, especially Port Discovery, which Vancouver described as particularly excellent." (Merk, p. 168)
There was never any chance that the US would accept this offer: "It was the offer of an enclave. It was the presentation, for an American naval station, of an isolated tract of land hemmed in on every side by British territory or by water that would be dominated by the British navy. Gallatin at once rejected the offer. He declared that even to take it for reference to his government would be inconsistent with his instructions." (Merk, p. 169)
So this "compromise" offer got nowhere; but it did for the first time indicate a British willingness to yield *something* north of the Columbia. The very fact that someone like Canning--who made no secret of his views of the "ambitious and overbearing views of the States"--was willing to make such a concession shows that Liverpool's advocacy of a more flexible line was having some effect.
So suppose that Canning dies in 1826 (in OTL both he and Liverpool died in 1827) and that Liverpool persuades the Cabinet that the Hudson's Bay Company is exaggerating the importance of the Columbia, and that the Cabinet should agree to the 49th parallel. The Oregon Question is settled two decades earlier than in OTL. (Of course there is the theoretical possibility that the Jacksonians in the Senate, out to get revenge against Adams and Clay for the "corrupt bargain," will defeat the treaty and denounce even the 49th parallel as a sell-out, even though it had previously been the maximum US demand, and insist on "all Oregon" up to 54-40. I really doubt it, though. Such a demand did not become widespread until the 1840's in OTL. Moreover, many of Adams' opponents in the Senate were Southerners who had no particular interest in maximum US expansion into the far Northwest.) Some consequences:
(1) There will probably not be much more pre-1846 settlement of Americans north of the Columbia than in OTL. The overwhelming majority of pre-1846 American settlers in OTL settled south of the Columbia. No doubt one reason for this was that this area was regarded as certain to become part of the US, a certainty obviously lacking for the territory north of the river. One could say that Americans might have been more willing to settle to the area north of the river if that area had already become part of the US. As against this, however, Merk (pp. 240-1) argues that the real reason US settlers in Oregon for the most part kept to the Willamette Valley is simply that it was magnificent farmland. "Its beautiful prairies and oak openings, constituting an island in a sea of forest that swept otherwise practically unbroken from the Cascades to the Pacific, made it the ideal land of the pioneer. Here was the perfect combination of fertile soil, timber in quantity sufficient for all needs, yet not so heavy as to require years of clearing, and close at hand a river that led to a market...Such facts will explain also why Americans were so late in beginning settlement of the disputed country north of the Columbia. This was a heavily wooded area, as Dr. McLoughlin more than once pointed out to his superiors when they complained of the slow growth of the Puget Sound Agricultural Company."
(2) There will however be a major difference in the nature of US expansionism in the 1840's. Expansionism in OTL could be popular in both the North and South in those days largely because both southern (Texas) and northern (Oregon) areas were looked on as likely future acquisitions. If the Oregon Question is long since settled, if the *only* direction for expansion is in Texas (and subsequently in Mexico and the Caribbean) expansionism loses much of its OTL bi-sectional appeal and becomes a one-sidedly southern venture. This raises the question of whether an expansionist like Polk could win in 1844, given the narrowness of his OTL margins in such important northern states as New York, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. And if you believe that the election of 1844 helped to make the ACW possible, it could be that the death of Canning in 1826 instead of 1827 would have surprisingly momentous consequences for US history...
(One curious footnote: in the Webster-Ashburton negotiations, the British permanent under-secretary of the Foreign Office, Henry Unwin Addington, made the most extreme proposal that Britain ever made on the Oregon Question: "That proposal was to draw a line starting where the crest of the Rocky Mountains is intersected by the forty-ninth parallel, dropping southwardly along the crest to the Snake, and thence following the channel of the Snake and the Columbia to the sea." Merk, p. 198. This would have left to Britain nearly all of the present states of Washington and Idaho. Addington evidently realized that this proposal was sure to be rejected, so as a fallback position Ashburton was authorized to propose the old "49th parallel to the Columbia and thence along the channel of the river to the sea" offer that the Americans had already rejected three times. Addington would not even authorize Canning's "enclave" concession of sixteen years earlier. He later claimed not to be aware of it--even though he as a protege of Canning had been the one who actually made it!)
[1] Unless of course the British got it. As the *New York Courier* put it, "This idea that England is desirous to possess herself of the Californias seems as great a bugbear with the American people as the designs of Russia on India are with the English." *Niles' Weekly Register,* LXIII, 337 (Jan. 28, 1843), quoted in Bailey, p. 253.