Claim

• Author: Craig Forcese
• Pages: 65-71

65

Chapter 9

Claim

An extraordinary outrage committed from Her Britannic Majey’s

Province of Upper Canada on the persons and property of the

citizens of the UnitedStates.

— seCretary of state john forsyth (5 january 1838)1

I   over this question of whether the Caroline or

the place it had berthed could be considered “neutral” that US

and British diplomats were soon sparring in a battle of letters

between 1838 and 1842. This was not an idiosyncratic issue. The

rights and duties of neutrals was a chief foreign policy preoccu-

pation of the period. As the term suggests and is discussed later,

neutrality required non-belligerent states to support neither side

in a conf‌lict. The young American republic enforced this princi-

ple through federal Neutrality Acts, initially designed to keep the

United States remote from European conf‌licts by barring Amer-

icans from participating in hostilities against belligerents in a for-

eign war, including (by 1818) civil wars.2 Enforcement of these rules

was, however, often beyond the means of the federal government in

the decentralized early republic. And now, with events in New York

in 1837, foreign rebels supported by American citizens operating

from American soil and using American weapons were engaged in

hostile activities against a neighbouring power. The obvious ques-

tion was whether the US government could plausibly overlook its

own failure to repress this insurgency, and invoke neutrality to