In the Current of the Revolution 375 



of the arch. John Gibson was a man of note and 

 of unblemished character; he was made a general 

 by Washington, and held high appointive positions 

 under Madison and Jefferson; he was also an As- 

 sociate Judge of the Court of Common Pleas in 

 Pennsylvania. Throughout his life he bore a repu- 

 tation for absolute truthfulness. He was the mes- 

 senger who went to Logan, heard the speech, took 

 it down, and gave it to Lord Dunmore. We have 

 his deposition, delivered under oath, that "Logan 

 delivered to him the speech nearly as related by Mr. 

 Jefferson in his Notes," when the two were alone 

 together, and that he "on his return to camp deliv- 

 ered the speech to Lord Dunmore," and that he also 

 at the time told Logan he was mistaken about Cre- 

 sap. Brantz Mayer, who accepts his statement as 

 substantially true, thinks that he probably only re- 

 ported the substance of Logan's speech, or so much 

 of it as he could recollect; but in the State Depart- 

 ment at Washington, among the Jefferson Papers 

 (5-1-4), is a statement by John Anderson, a mer- 

 chant in Fredericksburg, who was an Indian trader 

 at Pittsburg in 1774; he says that he questioned 

 Gibson as to whether he had not himself added 

 something to the speech, to which Gibson replied 

 that he had not changed it in any way, but had 

 translated it literally, as well as he could, though he 

 was unable to come up to the force of the expres- 

 sions in the original. 



This evidence itself is absolutely conclusive ex- 

 cept on the supposition that Gibson was a malicious 



