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If any feeling has been displayed on my part it has been indulged with a view of eliciting results which it was believed would be salutary and acceptable. At the same time there has been no intention to abandon those prudential considerations entirely consistent with a free assertion of what it might be supposed the people, through their representative, would eventually approve and sustain. At the period of forming the treaty of 1783. Massachusetts and the other colonies were independent of each other, as to territorial rights The United States as such did not exist. Altho, the colonies constituted common agents to form treaty, the territorial rights secured did not by virtue of that instrument accrue to the nation, but were were merit acknowledged and confirmed by it not the existing individual corporations, according to preexisting grants. Crownlands only being excepted.

  When the Union of the States was framed, in that happy arrangement we are still permitted to witness, and which created a general guardianship, without extinguishing a particular independence, the compact left Massachusetts the proprietor, as one party, in severally of all her soil. The held it fully with undiminished interest and has conceded her jurisdictional control only by that magnanimous act, usually called the separation, which received validity from the concurrence of Congress.
   the Union having no right to cede the territory,  the treaty making power as only a constituent part, cannot exercise a function beyond the grasp of the delegated power over the whole, nor, indefinitely, by an umpire, do what it could not accomplish without, that is consent to the alienation or the possibility of an alienation of territory which I will show is solemnly acknowledged, through the President to be ours.
   It has therefore been believed to be due this State to advance the doctrine that the submission of its boundary to an umpire, unknown to herself, and upon term not confided to her consideration will leave her at liberty to act upon the result as to the country and herself may be dictated by the most just