companies the draft of a bill to promote safe intercourse with Oregon and begins: "In compliance with the request you did me the honor to make last winter while in Washington I herewith transmit," etc.[1] In addition to this there is Lovejoy's recollection of what Whitman told him during their return. Lovejoy writes:
"The Doctor often expressed himself to me about the remainder of his journey, and the manner in which he was received at Washington and by the Board of Missions at Boston. The Doctor had several interviews with President Tyler, Secretary Webster and many members of Congress, touching the interests of Oregon. He urged the immediate termination of the treaty with Great Britain relative to this country, and the extension of the laws of the United States, and to provide liberal inducements to emigrants to come to this coast."[2]
All this is probable, but there was nothing novel in it, because the Linn Bill which had passed the Senate the month before had all these objects in view. Lovejoy's recollection shows not a trace of the Spalding legend of Whitman's having arrived in the nick of time to save Oregon from being "traded off for a cod fishery." Every account that has been published of Whitman's interviews with Tyler and Webster except this of Lovejoy is entirely fictitious, and not only fictitious but impossible, and could have originated only with a man ignorant of diplomacy in general and of the Oregon diplomacy in particular.
In the first place, Oregon was in no danger of being lost to the United States. The real danger was that the government would be pushed by the Oregon advocates in the West into an aggressive policy which might result in war with England.[3] When the Linn Bill passed the Senate February 3, by a vote of 24 to 22, providing for the extension of the laws of the United States over the whole of the Oregon territory, the erection of courts and the granting of lands to settlers,[4] there was not the slightest danger of the Senate ratifying a treaty to alienate the territory. The appearance of a solitary missionary in Washington advocating what a majority of the Senate had already voted, and what state legislatures were demanding in resolutions[5] was veritably a drop in
- ↑ See Nixon, p. 315.
- ↑ Gray's Oregon, p. 326. I use the earlier letter this time, the only essential difference between the two being a parenthetical statement that Congress was in session when Whitman arrived, which is a mistake and may be an explanatory afterthought of Lovejoy's.
- ↑ Lord Palmerston said in the House of Commons, March 21, "if that bill passed into a law, an event which he conceived to be impossible, it would amount to a declaration of war." London Times, March 22, 1843, p. 3, col. 4.
- ↑ The bill and the debates are conveniently summarized by Greenhow, pp. 377-388.
- ↑ "There were militant resolutions of the Legislatures of Illinois and of Missouri, relating to the Territory of Oregon." J. Q. Adams's memorandum of a meeting of the
