The Aroostook War never happened, but it certainly mattered. In the west, a few thousand New England militiamen walked north through Maine, some funds were appropriated, and one militiaman died of measles. To the east, New Brunswick moved some troops up the Saint John River and mobilized some local irregulars itself. The administrators of the disputed area on both sides were arrested and confined to Houlton and Fredericton, respectively. Fighting never broke out, and by the late winter of 1839 both American and Colonial forces had withdrawn from the area. The treaty of Daniel Webster and Lord Ashburton in 1842 was mutually acceptable to both Great Britain and the United States, and by then Aroostook had disappeared from all but the most local newspaper headlines. Despite the agitation of Democratic and popular newspapers, along with the power of the state rights movement in Maine at the time, the war never got hot. However, it had long-standing political consequences in both New Brunswick and Maine. State Democrats and the Whigs who controlled the legislature found themselves in an odd alliance with Southern Democrats, including Henry Clay and John Calhoun, against Democratic President Martin Van Buren, who had failed to avoid a repeat of the affair Caroline. This marked the beginning of twenty years of Democratic dominance in Maine. In New Brunswick, the consequences of non-war were more subtle. The government was not consolidated or taken over by any special interest party, but the completion of a military road that would have been impossible if the Americans had received the upper Saint John River watershed connected New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to the rest of what would soon become Canada. It also made the colonies much less open to invasion... middle of paper... and focused on calming tempers in London, Fredericton, Washington and Augusta rather than empowering the local government for a small collection of lumberjacks and farmers. The result was barely acceptable in Maine and a relief everywhere. If the war had indeed resulted in great bloodshed, it would have been a smaller-scale version of the fighting around Niagara during the War of 1812, nearly forty years earlier. The burning of villages, the destruction of crops, and the British naval invasion of New England from Halifax would have brought no benefit to any of the parties involved and would have led, in the absence of an immediate and decisive victory on both sides, to a conflict even greater on the issue the disputed area in the future. The real-life Aroostook “War” was the best outcome for the British Army, the American government, and the Maine Democratic political machine.