Commentary
The cooperation and friendliness that nowadays marks the “Special Relationship” between the United States and Great Britain was a long time in the making. It must be remembered that the USA had to fight a bloody war from 1775 to 1783 to secure the independence of the original 13 rebel British colonies, and that from 1812 to 1814 the two nations were at war again. In both cases, American armies invaded what is now Canada, hoping to carve yet more territory from the United Kingdom’s North American holdings.
The war for independence concluded with the Treaty of Paris, an article of which had set the border between British North America and the United States as a line stretching west from Lake of the Woods to the Mississippi River. This decision was taken in a fit of geographical ignorance because the Mississippi does not extend that far north, so uncertainty about the exact boundary remained until an 1818 agreement entitled “Convention respecting fisheries, boundary, and the restoration of slaves.”…