Page:Some Observations Upon the Negative Testimony and the General Spirit and Methods of Bourne and Marshall in Dealing with the Whitman Question.pdf/10

 organizing or leading the immigration of 1843. There we have the whole thing in a nutshell. (While it is a side issue, yet Marshall makes so much of it that I wish to interject a thought here about his claim that those missionary letters in group one were for a long time dishonestly concealed by the claimants of the Whitman "Legend." Now I want to ask why, if the missionaries, including Dr. Treat, who was connected with the American Board, were in a conspiracy to hide the evidence, they did not put the letters where they could not be found, and especially why did they allow Marshall himself free access to them so that the whole story was right there before him. Does that look like conspiracy to conceal the evidence?)

The space at our command compels us to limit our inquiry to the case of the first group of the written records, that is the missionary letters. But we are prepared to prove that the same general facts apply to the other two groups of letters, essentially the same conditions prevail in the subject matter of all.

And now for the examination of these records in the light of the three qualifications which we have laid down. First we assert, and the story as given by these very writers themselves sustains our assertion, that the missionary letters and reports do not at all contradict the claim in regard to Whitman's aims, subsequently reduced to writing. Examine these letters as given in Marshall's own book, and you will find that they nowhere claim that Whitman did not have such political and national aims. They merely say that he did go on his desperate winter ride in order to do some work connected with the missions, and, somewhat vaguely, declare that he had important business that compelled him, as he thought, to take that journey. Now right here is where the whole matter of the negative testimony of Bourne and Marshall comes in. They assume that everything connected with Whitman's Ride must have gone into those letters. Now would that necessarily have followed at all? Weare indeed obliged to admit that those letters prior to Whitman's ride, so far as they are extant, do not make any definite claim of his political purposes. But does that at all prove the contention that he had no such aims? Not at all, unless it can also be proven that all the records and letters have been preserved and correctly interpreted and reported, that the letters must have covered the same subject matter as the later recollections, and that there was no reason for withholding from the letters the claim later brought up for those political purposes. And this, as the reader can see, involves at once the other qualifications which we have mentioned in connection with the written records. In other words, we claim broadly that not only do those letters not contradict the subse-