Ohio and New York. The British were supporting Indian conflicts with American settlers in the Northwest (Ohio and Michigan). The British were continuing to impress sailors into British service who were US citizens. American merchants wanted compensation for 250 merchant ships which the British had seized in 1793 and 1794. Southern interests wanted monetary compensation for the holders of freed slaves evacuated by the British in 1783. American merchants wanted the British West Indies to be reopened to American trade. The boundary with Canada was vague in many places, and needed to be more sharply delineated. The final treaty settled some but not all of the issues. The Federalist Party called for the Senate to ratify the Jay treaty, but the Republican Party was strongly opposed. Led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the Republicans strongly favored France and believed Britain was ideologically opposed to American values. Close ties with London would doom republicanism in America. President George Washington waited until the last moment then made the decisive intervention so the Treaty was ratified by exactly a 2/3 vote, and the necessary money was appropriated. The result was two decades of peace in a time of world war. The peace lasted until the Republicans came to power and Jefferson rejected a new treaty and began an economic attack on Britain. Bradford Perkins argues that the treaty was the first to establish a special relationship between Britain and the United States, with a second installment under Lord Salisbury. In his view, the treaty worked for ten years to secure peace between Britain and America: "The decade may be characterised as the period of "The First Rapprochement." As Perkins concludes, "For about ten years there was peace on the frontier, joint recognition of the value of commercial intercourse, and even, by comparison with both preceding and succeeding epochs, a muting of strife over ship seizures and impressment. Two controversies with France… pushed the English-speaking powers even more closely together." Starting at swords' point in 1794, the Jay treaty reversed the tensions, Perkins concludes: "Through a decade of world war and peace, successive governments on both sides of the Atlantic were able to bring about and preserve a cordiality which often approached genuine friendship." Historian Joseph Ellis finds the terms of the treaty "one-sided in Britain's favor", but asserts a consensus of historians agrees that it was "a shrewd bargain for the United