Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/73

Rh Tyler's Administration to the line of 49 degrees six weeks before Whitman could have reached Washington, and (d.) the fact that an analysis of the vote and a comparison of it with the speeches shows that on February 3, 1843, not merely a bare majority, but certainly one more than two-thirds of the entire Senate were ready to enact any legislation about Oregon that we had a right to enact, without first giving the twelve months' notice which was all that was needful to abrogate the treaty of 1827.

Our "candid" author searching for "the truth of history wherever it may be found" has absolutely nothing to say about this great debate, except that on page 50 he quotes six lines from the speech of that political nonentity, McDuffie, of South Carolina, but with no intimation that it was the only such foolish speech on the Oregon question delivered at that session of Congress.

Yet, never having in all his writings intimated that Webster had thus himself, in 1842, in his negotiations with Ashburton, and in these two explicit statements of January 18 and February 3, 1843, committed himself and Tyler's Administration irrevocably to "no line south of 49 degrees as a negotiable boundary line for the United States," he devotes 16 pages of this "Reply" (79-95), to an attempt to show that Webster, in March or April, 1843, was ready to part with Oregon because he thought it worthless, when Whitman (who, as late as April, 1846, according to Spalding's letter, edited by Whitman, and published in Palmer's Journal, knew nothing about the only part really in dispute after 1824), arrived in Washington and prevented it. To prove this Mr. Eells quotes one palpable forgery (p. 82), in the extract from a speech which it is alleged Webster delivered on a proposition before the Senate in 1844, for a mail route from Independence, Mo., to the mouth of the Columbia, beginning, "What do you want of that vast and worthless area?" The internal evidence that Webster never wrote this is irresistible, for, whatever were Webster's failings, he always uttered sensible and dignified English in discussing important public affairs, and the final sentence of this extract as quoted by Gunsaulus in his Introduction to Nixon's "How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon," is, "Mr. President, I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific Coast one inch nearer to Boston than it is now." When I wrote to Dr. Gunsaulus and asked his authority for this he was obliged to confess that he had none. Finding it in Fields' "Our Western Archipelago," and obtaining from