Note 733 — Chapter V
Reading edition
This is principally the work of John M. Shirley in his book Dartmouth College Causes and the Supreme Court of the United States. The volume is crammed with the results of extensive research, strange conglomeration of facts, suppositions, inferences, and insinuations, so inextricably mingled that it is with the utmost difficulty that the painstaking student can find his way.
Shirley leaves the impression that Justices Johnson and Livingston were improperly worked upon because they consulted Chancellor Kent. Yet the only ground for this is that Judge Marsh sent Webster's argument to Kent, who was Marsh's intimate friend; and that the Reverend Francis Brown, President of Dartmouth, went to see Kent, reported that his opinion was favorable to the College, and that the effect of this would be good upon Johnson and Livingston.
From the mere rumor, wholly without justification, that Story was at first against the College—indeed, had drawn the College Acts (for so the rumor grew, as rumors always grow)—Shirley would have us believe, without any evidence whatever, that some improper influence was exerted over Story.
Because Webster said that there was something "left out" of the report of his argument, Shirley declares that for a whole hour Webster spoke as a Federalist partisan in order to influence Marshall. (Shirley, 237.) But such an attempt would have been resented by every Republican member of the court and, most of all, by Marshall himself. Moreover, Marshall needed no such persuasion, nor, indeed, persuasion of any kind. His former opinions showed where he stood; so did the views which he had openly and constantly avowed since he was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1783. The something "left out" of Webster's reported argument was, of course, his extemporaneous and emotional peroration described by Goodrich.
These are only a very few instances of Shirley's assumptions. Yet, because of the mass of data his book contains, and because of the impossibility of getting out of them a connected narrative without the most laborious and time-consuming examination, together with the atmosphere of wrongdoing with which Shirley manages to surround the harried reader, his volume has had a strong and erroneous effect upon general opinion.