WEBSTER
Calhoun was the pre-eminent champion of the southern cause in the union,
while Toombs was that of southern nationalization seeking independence.
Webster was the pre-eminent champion of American nationalization seeking
continental union. Toombs and Webster are therefore in antithesis; and it
will be well for me to begin the chapter by anticipating some of the
characteristics of the former, who will be treated at large later on, and
briefly contrasting the two.
By nature Toombs was so prone to action that even in his daily
recreation--talk with the nearest to him was by far the most of it--his
immense and tireless outpouring of fine phrase, wisdom, and wit was the
increasing wonder of all who knew him. Webster's proneness was to repose,
almost indolence. He often seemed lethargic. His activity could be excited
only by the pressure of necessity. This difference between the two showed
itself very markedly in their several careers. Toombs, coming to the bar
in the last year of his nonage, took the profession at once to his heart,
settled in his native county, in a lucrative field of practice, overcame
all hindrances of natural defects and insufficient training seemingly by a
mere act of will, and in four or five years his collecting a
thousand-dollar fee in an adjoining county was no very uncommon thing.
When he was twenty-eight he was a fully developed lawyer and advocate on
every side--law, equity, and criminal--of the courts of that prosperous
planting community, then overrunning with cases of importance, and his
annual income from practice was $15,000. Webster went up much more slowly.
He read long and industriously; was not called until he was twenty-three;
for the next two and a half years was content with an income of $600 or
$700; and then for nine years at Portsmouth his average income was $2,000
yearly. Even when Webster at thirty-four removed to Boston he was hardly
as a lawyer the equal of Toombs at twenty-eight; and I believe that the
latter was always the superior lawyer. The greater reputation of Webster
is due to the greater reputation of his cases, and of the tribunal wherein
he long held the lead.
We see a like difference between the two in congress. Webster shirks the
routine duties of his place to gain opportunity for practice in the United
States supreme court. Toombs stays away from all courts during the
session, and gives every measure before the body to which he belongs its
proper attention, study, and labor. But the performance by him of all the
many duties of representative or senator, whether little or great, with
unparalleled diligence, ability, and splendor, has been so completely
obscured by the few of Webster's great congressional exploits, that it is
not now cared for by anybody.
The greater lawyer and the greater congressman has been accorded the
lesser renown. This is because of the relation which each one bore to the
two publics which I have tried to make you understand,--the southern
public and the northern public. Toombs's legal career was mainly in the
courts of his own State. It was not much heard of outside, in even the
southern public, until his extraordinarily meritorious discharge of
congressional duties involving a mastery of law was observed. Although
some of Webster's cases in State courts were celebrated, his greatest
ones, to be considered in a moment, were won in the United States supreme
court, in the eyes of both publics watching intently. The highest
accomplishments of Toombs in the non-sectional parts of his congressional
career were almost matters of indifference at the time to both publics,
becoming steadily more absorbed in pro- and anti-slavery politics; and
what he did in the other part of it excited the hostility of the northern
public, and brought him obloquy instead of good name. The few memorable
deeds of Webster in congress were victorious vindications of the cause
clearest of all to the northern, that is, the free-labor, public. That
public has at last not only conquered, but it has annexed the other as a
part of itself. And so Toombs's fame as a lawyer and statesman has been
left so far behind that it can hardly hope ever to have impartial and fair
comparison with that of Webster.
Just one more parallel, and I shall proceed with my sketch. Each one of
the two, in order to accept his mission of leadership, was plainly made by
his destiny to abandon a previously cherished doctrine for a new and
contrary one. Toombs was once an ardent union man, Webster was once almost
a secessionist. In his Taylor speech, made in the United States house of
representatives July 1, 1848, speaking of the then expected acquisition of
territory, Toombs said:
"All the rest of this continent is not worth our glorious union, much
less these contemptible provinces which now threaten us with such
evils. It were better that we should throw back the worthless boon,
and let the inhabitants work out their own destiny, than that we
should endanger our peace, our safety, and our nationality by their
incorporation in our union."
The silly embargo measures, making war upon our own citizens instead of
our enemies, had deeply injured New England interests. On their heel came
the second war with England, into which the government of France had, as
Mr. Lodge says, "tricked us ... by most profligate lying."[66] This war
paralyzed the production and occupations of Webster's people.
A speech made by him July 4, 1812, is "a strong, calm statement of the
grounds of opposition to the war."[67] Mr. Lodge quotes and emphasizes a
passage as proof that Webster, although a federalist, and the majority of
his party in New England were--to use the words of the same
author--"prepared to go to the very edge of the narrow legal line which
divides constitutional opposition from treasonable resistance,"[68] was
then standing by the union with might and main. This quotation, separated
from its circumstances and the immediate sequel, strongly supports the
contention. The speech being printed, circulated widely among those
federalists who were gravitating so strongly towards "treasonable
resistance." By reason of it Webster was chosen as a delegate to a
convention, held the next month. This man, whom Mr. Lodge would have us
believe to be so fixedly counter to the then uppermost revolutionary
sentiment of his party, was chosen to be their mouthpiece. He wrote their
report--the "Rockingham Memorial" in the form of a letter to President
Madison. Mr. Lodge thus contrasts the report and the speech. "In one point
the memorial differed curiously from the oration of the month before. The
latter pointed to the suffrage as the mode of redress; the former
distinctly hinted at and almost threatened secession, even while it
deplored a dissolution of the union as a possible result of the
administration's policy."[69] Then the biographer most confidently states
that in the speech Webster was declaring his own views, but in the other
document he was declaring those of members of his party.
But the average American will be sure that those familiar with the speech
at the time did not strain its counsels as far away from their own as Mr.
Lodge does, otherwise they would not have elected him as delegate; and
further, he never would have made their report for them unless he had been
known to entertain their own sentiments.[70]
The popular wave that he had thus mounted carried the draftsman of the
"Rockingham Memorial" into congress, where, while British armies were
actually treading our soil, he voted against the taxes proposed for
national defence. Mr. Lodge does not go the full length of sustaining this
conduct.[71] The severe comment of another biographer will be cordially
approved by average readers, northern and southern.[72]
The facts properly considered show that from the speech of July 4, 1812,
on, Webster, although he stood aloof from the Hartford convention
movement, was in full sympathy with the federalists of New England, whom
the national government by its unrighteous oppressions had driven to
contemplate disunion as a possible measure of self-protection.
This attitude of Webster towards the union was entirely contrary to that
which afterwards became his power and glory among his countrymen. We wish
it noted that as he changed with the people of New England from
anti-tariff to pro-tariff politics, he likewise changed with them in their
principles as to the union; and that Toombs went with the south, in an
opposite direction, that is, from embrace to rejection of the union.
Having in the foregoing brought out the prominent characteristics of
Webster's nature and career, and having also impressed you that he, like
all other great statesmen, could lead only by following his people, I will
cursorily trace him from stage to stage through his development. He was
selected in infancy, if not before by providence, to be made not the
expounder of the constitution, but the invincible defender of the union.
When his activity begins, he is at first to consolidate the union by the
management of some great law cases, and delivery of occasional addresses
to popular assemblies; and afterwards in his high place as United States
senator he is to demonstrate to the northern public its complete guaranty
of their highest material interests, and set it in their hearts above all
things else. Thus did providence assign to him the preservation of the
greatest of all democracies, to the end that there be no break in the
future course of human improvement.
Before his activity begins the powers train him. They gave him a long
education, and a slow growth as a statesman. He could never remember when
he had been unable to read. His feeble physique while a child shielded him
from the labor required of the other children, and permitted him to enjoy
books. Early he soaked his mind in the King James version of the bible and
other good English standards. As he grew apace his opportunities of
reading were far better than those of Calhoun, who never saw even a
circulating library until he was in his thirteenth year, and soon was
taken away from that. These opportunities he used in his leisurely way.
His mind was strong and his memory good, and he digested and kept under
command what he read. His schooling and college course were in the main
continuous. He got to Dartmouth at fifteen, where he spent four years.
Here he made the reputation of being the best speaker and writer of all
the students. In his study for the law he took ample time. And in his
first years of practice he had much leisure. Besides revelling in the
Latin classics, Shakspeare, Milton, Pope, and Cowper, and much history, he
was keenly observant of what was going on about him. We know how Jeremiah
Mason gave him lessons both in law, rhetoric, and elocution to his great
advancement. We know too that his interest in current political questions
was vigilant. He took his seat in congress May, 1813, being then a little
over thirty-one. His speech against a bill to encourage enlistments made
January 14, the next year, shows, as Mr. Lodge says, that "he was now
master of the style at which he aimed."[73] Of this peculiar style I shall
say something after a while. Mention of his greatest exploits in
consolidating the union is now in order.
The first of these is his conduct of the Dartmouth college case in the
United States supreme court. It is entirely out of place for me to give
even the briefest notice of the details which fill Mr. Shirley's unique
book.[74] Little more than emphasis of the effect of the decision to knit
more closely the bonds of union between the States is required. This
effect will be considered more carefully when we comment on Gibbons _v._
Ogden, which finishes the important work commenced in the other. It needs
only to remind the reader now that the protection of contracts against
impairing State legislation has contributed probably more than anything
else to the prosperous development of American internal trade and
commerce,--a most potent factor in consolidating the union,--and that this
protection originates in the Dartmouth college decision. But there is
something special to be said of Webster as to the case. He did not stress
the constitutional point--that upon which the judgment was finally
placed--either in his law-brief or argument. The victory is all due to his
consummate management of the court, especially of the chief-justice. The
latter really found the true ground of the decision. But the powers had
Webster in hand, and it suited their purposes to crown their _Liebling_
with the credit of the decision. When he found out the reasons given for
the ruling he had won, I fancy that a good angel of his destiny whispered
in his ear he ought to have discerned that the weal of all classes of his
entire country, and not merely that of its colleges, was at stake in his
case, and he must never in the future overlook such an opportunity again.
In his Hanover fourth of July speech, made when he was only eighteen years
old, to quote from the authority we make so much use of, "the boy Webster
preached love of country, the grandeur of American nationality, fidelity
to the constitution as the bulwark of nationality, and the necessity and
the nobility of the union of the States."[75] Mr. Lodge impressively adds,
"and that was the message which the man Webster delivered to his fellow
men."[76] His Fryeburg fourth of July speech, made not long afterwards,
was in the same strain. After the powers had thus started him in the way
they wanted him to go, we have noted above how he was carried by the
federalists of New England into a movement hostile to the union. This
brief wandering from his destiny, as it were, is to be compared with his
neglect to grasp the point in the Dartmouth college case which was in the
exact line of that high destiny. This shows how even the greatest genius
must stumble and grope before it has found the right road. I think the
Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, First Part of Henry VI, and the Sonnets of
Shakspeare are like examples.
The Plymouth oration, delivered in 1820, begins a new and very important
stage of Webster's career. As Virginia was the mother of the southern
States, so New England was in large measure the mother of the northern.
The latter was the very fountain of the free-labor nationalization. And as
she was known to be exceptionally advanced in intellectual as well as
material development, she was to all the free States both their great
example and highest authority. Hardly anybody has even yet fully taken in
all the permanent good which New England has done for herself at home and
for her children and scholars outside. Of course still less of it was
understood in 1820. But in the Plymouth oration Webster set forth so much
of it, the effect upon New England was magical. It was as if he had raised
a curtain concealing great riches and treasures of her merit and glory,
the existence of which had not been suspected. New Englanders all fell in
love with him, and accorded him the foremost place among their
counsellors.
The anti-slavery spirit of the speech deserves special notice. I do not
mean to emphasize the oft-quoted passage denouncing the African
slave-trade; for everybody in the south--even the smuggler and the few
purchasers who encouraged him--had been against legalizing it, for reasons
mentioned above, from a time long before the southern States showed a
desire in the constitutional convention to stop the trade at once. I mean
his mention of slavery in the West Indies. I do not think that he had the
south in mind, stressing as he does the absenteeism of the masters and the
mortgages of their lands for capital borrowed in England. But much else
that he says of the evil effects of slavery could be easily applied, at
least in some measure, to the system as it then existed in the south, such
as, for instance, the backwardness to make permanent improvements or endow
colleges. His contrast of New England with the West Indies is intended to
show that a free-labor community is far superior to a slave-labor
community in the most important elements of a good and progressive
civilization. His conviction of this truth is serious and undoubting. And
those few words, "the unmitigated toil of slavery," which show that he
erroneously believed that the slave toiled as hard as the wage-earning
laborer, evince a strong moral revulsion on his part.
We summarize as to the Plymouth oration. It made Webster really the
political leader of New England, which--the animosity excited by the
embargo and the late war having become a forgotten thing of the past--is
now both in command of and also in the van of the free-labor and
anti-slavery nationalization, destined by the powers to perpetuate the
union.
We have told you how Webster--being at the time the very antipodes of what
he was afterwards when he talked with Bosworth as to the Rhode Island
case--missed the true and cardinal point in the Dartmouth college case,
and how the powers, after having Marshall to establish it, gave all the
glory of the great accomplishment to Webster. We come now to Gibbons _v._
Ogden, argued in 1824, in which the latter made far more than ample amends
for his shortcoming, and taught even the great Marshall how to decide.
New York State had given Fulton and Livingston for a term exclusive steam
navigation of all its waters, and Webster was to maintain that the grant
impugned the federal constitution and was therefore invalid. The question
was _res integra_, without analogies which often help us forlorn advocates
who cannot find a precedent and are utterly without any literature
suggesting the _ratio decidendi_. I know I cannot explain to a layman how
such cases as these bewilder and paralyze the typical Anglo-American
judge, who has walked all his life by precedent and not by sight. Further,
Webster's side antagonized prevailing sentiment and, it would be hardly
too much to say, the public conscience; either one of which generally
sways courts more powerfully than the law-brief, argument, and appeal of
complete advocates. The only thing which Webster could oppose to these
formidable odds was just a clause of a sentence of the constitution, this
clause being only of twelve words when even the belonging context is read
into it,[77] and appearing to be, we cannot say surplusage, but neither
well-considered nor of any particular force. Out of this he constructed
such a perfect and wise doctrine of the immunity of our interstate
commerce from local attack and restraint that every succeeding generation
has admired its wisdom more, and subsequent additions and extensions of
importance are all manifest conclusions from the promises which he made
good.
Reading and reflecting for writing my "American Law Studies" familiarized
me with a few instances in which a man has left a lasting impress upon the
development of the law (some of which instances will be mentioned in a
moment). Thus I was led to meditate Webster's work in this case; and it
becomes an increasing wonder to me. Read what his biographer tells of the
unfavorable circumstances of the preparation for the argument and how he
overcame them by superhuman effort. Read also his own account as given by
Harvey, how Wirt, his associate, older and of much more experience in that
court, disparaged the ground upon which he said he should stand, and
proposed another; and how Marshall drank in every word of Webster's
argument, and afterwards virtually reproduced it in the opinion.
But the great thing is what he did for the law. The current distribution
of the common law under its larger heads was made by Hale and Blackstone
after that of the contemporary civilians, which is founded upon that of
the Institutes of Justinian. This book is but a reproduction of that of
Gaius. So we may assert of this last mentioned author that it is his
systematization which still obtains both in the English and Roman law,
that is to say, the entire law of the enlightened world.[78] A few English
chancellors perceptibly moulded equity; Mansfield almost created English
commercial law; in our country, Hamilton, in one argument overturned the
doctrine of tacking securities, and in another remade the essentials of
libel; our great text-author Bishop, with his treatise often worked over
in new editions, is really the enacter of the American law of divorce; and
Marshall's additions to our federal law will never be forgotten. By what
he did in Gibbons _v._ Ogden, Webster has won a proud place in the small
company of great law-givers.
And he is entitled to a liberal share of the glory which the Dartmouth
college decision has won, for without him Marshall would have had no
opportunity.
To estimate the prodigious effect of the rulings in these two cases, try
to realize to yourself what would be the consequences to American trade
and commerce if the States were not effectually kept from infringing
contracts or granting monopolies of transportation. Try to realize the
loss, the inconvenience, the trouble, the vexation, all the evil that
would have unavoidably befallen us if these two companion decisions and
the subsequent ones following them as precedents or extending them as
analogies, had not made practically the whole of American inland business
a unit--to use Webster's word--under the protection everywhere of the same
impartial law. The longer you think it over the more confirmed will be
your opinion that from no other cause has the evolution away from the old
independence of States towards a permanent union and a single organism of
perpetually federated communities been more furthered. The unification of
production and distribution thus given resistless impulse has almost of
itself alone worked the unification of all our States. So looking back
from the standpoint of to-day we may be sure that the powers had Webster
by his accomplishment in the cases now in mind, to build for perpetual
union far better than he knew.
It needs not to dwell upon the Bunker Hill oration, made June 17, 1825. It
is, as I believe, the most familiar as a whole of all speeches to
Americans. It did not stop with adding greatly to the influence he had won
over New England by the Plymouth oration; it revealed him to the whole
country as its supreme orator. Bear in mind its theme, remembering how
large a part the battle of Bunker Hill was in founding our union.
The plainest manifestation that providence ever made of its favoritism to
Webster was its having Adams and Jefferson both to die on the same day of
all the year the most commemorative of each. By the eulogy of the two
patriots which Webster made the next month he attained the height of his
popular celebrity. His subject was no longer one that principally
concerned New England and the north, but it was the co-operation of both
sections in making the United States. Slowly, but surely, he has climbed
to the top of authority, whence he ever draws audience and attention from
north and south, both in the present and for ages after the brothers' war.
These three popular speeches just noticed are unique in oratory, not in
their general character, but in the nobility of the subjects, the ripeness
of the occasion, the profound wisdom of treatment, and the extraordinary
elevation and perfection of style.
Another stage begins in 1830 with the reply to Hayne. What Webster says
therein, recommending brotherly love between the sections, and commending
the union, he reproduced with grateful variation in many memorable
passages of later speeches. The original and reproductions are the most
precious gems of our literature, ranking in excellence even above Poe's
poetry, America's best.
The speech of 1833 against Calhoun's nullification resolutions, that which
won for Webster the cognomen, The Expounder of the Constitution, belongs
to the next succeeding stage, wherein he rose from supreme panegyric to
invincible defence of the union. As we have already given in a former
chapter this performance its due praise, we need not say more of it.
This chapter would not be complete if we failed to glance at the
essentials of Webster's greatness as an orator, and to point out the means
used by the powers to give him his extraordinary excellence. He did not
stale himself by discussing trivial matters. When he rose, people knew
that he had an important message, and they ought to attend. In harmony
with this was his uniform seriousness, gravity, and becoming dignity of
manner; and even in his merry-making humor, as instanced in describing
Hayne leading the South Carolina militia, he never stooped. He spoke to
the sound common sense and the regnant conscience of the masses. His
propositions, his illustrations, his argument went home without effort to
every one who thought at all and who cared for moral virtue. The entire
country has heard with great acceptance that Davy Crockett said to him,
"Mr. Webster, you are not the great orator people say you are; for I heard
your speech, and I understood every word of it." Whether this be an
invention or not, it well characterizes his easy intelligibility. Herbert
Spencer could have exampled the main proposition of his able essay on
style by Webster's best efforts, and every part and parcel of
them--statement of proposition, necessary explanation and narrative,
distinctions, illustrations, reasoning, invocation of feeling--appeal to
the sense of justice. I often feel that he is not more majestic in any
particular than the always manifest meaning of what he says. In this he
reminds of Bacon.
He chose only the most important subjects; he befittingly addressed always
the higher nature of his hearers; and he always spoke with a transparent
clearness. But all this does not indicate more than the mere beginning of
true eloquence. The greatest teachers--those who win and keep the
admiration of the world--have, as their worshippers teach us, gifts of
expression commensurate with the desert of their communications. Remember
Homer, Plato, Demosthenes, Vergil, Cicero, Dante, Bacon, Goethe, and above
all Shakspeare. As the reader hangs over them he becomes more and more
unconscious of what we call, rather vaguely, their style. Their diction,
in unhackneyed use of hackneyed words, in metaphors that flash like
electric sparks, in appropriateness of varied rhythm, and all appertaining
jewels, becomes to him but a belonging of the much more precious sense. As
it must impart that without impediment it is unconsciously made as like it
as the protecting coloring of animals is made like that of the objects
amidst which they lurk. There has been but one other which admits of
comparison in world-wide secular importance with Webster's theme--that
which inspired
"Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento."
We have learned how the AEneid was prized above all other poetry, not only
by the Romans themselves, but, long after they had become a mere name and
memory, by the different nations of Europe. Plainly it was because Vergil,
in that "stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man," had fitly
celebrated the greatest factor delivering from barbarism, and spreading
civilization abroad, that had yet appeared in history,--the Roman empire.
The American union, immeasurably exceeding that empire in immediate good
to millions at home, and in fair promise to all the earth, was Webster's
subject. It got from him an appropriate style. The variety of ornament in
his language reaches all the way from the modest violets of the
Anglo-Saxon common to Bunyan and King James's version, up to the most
gorgeous trappings which are part and parcel of the sense in the best
passages of Paradise Lost. There is also a variety of idiom. He uses that
of the field or street, or of the gentleman or of the scholar, as best
suits. He affected short sentences, and also pure English words. He told
Davis to weed the Latin words out of his speech on Adams and Jefferson.
But when occasion calls he can revel in that latinity of our tongue which,
as De Quincey has noted, becomes intense with Shakspeare, when he is
soaring his strongest. If you are inclined to dispute this, look over the
last two sentences of the reply to Hayne. How you would lower this sublime
peroration into the dust, if you replaced the Latin with native
derivatives, or changed the long for short sentences in what is now above
all example in English or American oratory, and can be paralleled in
structure, "ocean-roll of rhythm," and exquisite words only by the most
famous paragraphs of Cicero and Livy. As our last word here, Webster
always imparts the wisest counsel as to the American union in phrase
all-golden, and his eloquence is entitled to praise beyond all other,
because it is always what his high subject demands.
As I have to do mainly with the permanent and lasting in Webster, I can
merely allude to his physical endowments, described with such rapture by
March, Choate, and many others of his time, and well summarized by Mr.
Lodge. I must remind the reader how it accorded with the purpose of the
powers to bestow upon their favorite majesty of form, mien, and look, a
voice that suggested the music of the spheres, action that would have been
a model to Demosthenes; in short, a physique for the orator superior to
any on record. These things helped him mightily in his day.
Apparently I finished with Webster's education some pages back of this.
But the more important part of it has not as yet been touched upon; and it
is incumbent upon me to tell it, because of the lesson we ought to learn
from it.
The largest and most characterizing part of our education--perhaps it
would more accurately express my meaning to say our culture--each one of
us gets from his associations, from his contact with the people of all
sorts around him in his infancy, boyhood, and manhood often as far on as
middle age, if not sometimes farther. We get it by imitation, unconscious
and conscious, and by absorption from what we see, hear, and read, etc.,
which absorption is often most active when we are least aware of it. Now
let us consider the community of which Webster was the product.
In the Plymouth oration, as we have already suggested, he exhibits the
exceptional progress and acquisitions of New England. What other community
ever showed greater courage against danger or greater energy against
obstacles, and such wise building-up of a new country in a strange land?
The Pilgrim Fathers could not have liberty and their own religion at home,
and for these they went into the wilderness. There they kept the savage at
bay. With soil and climate both unfavorable they wrought out general
plenty and comfort. They prospered in industry. They equalized as far as
they could all in property rights. And these liberty-lovers gave the
regulation of local affairs to the town meeting, of which Webster says:
"Nothing can exceed the utility of these little bodies. They are so many
councils or parliaments, in which common interests are discussed, and
useful knowledge acquired and communicated."
Jefferson, the great apostle of popular self-government, most earnestly
longed to see all America outside of New England divided into such
townships as hers.
But to return to the Pilgrims. They established schools and churches
everywhere. Free education was maintained by taxation of all property.
Let us sum up. Here was a country in which everybody had been well trained
in the available ways of self-support and also of saving and
accumulating,--the very first essential to make good citizens. Such
citizens were required to administer their public affairs themselves; and
thus they received the very best political education and training in a
school of genuine democracy,--which is the next essential. The children of
each generation were schooled better than those of the former, the
colleges and universities constantly did better with the students, and
libraries open to the public both multiplied and enlarged,--the third
essential. And education and business were rationally mixed, until in
Webster's time it might be said with truth that the average New Englander
worked with a will, and wisely, every day to maintain himself and family,
and also found leisure to add something of value to his store of
knowledge. Here is another essential. The moral and religious atmosphere
became purer and purer, and more and more on all sides good intention was
conspicuous in the light, and evil intention hid itself deep in the dark.
This is the last essential.
The foregoing is made up from the Plymouth oration. Webster was too near
to discern all the intellectual and moral advancement and the opulent
future promise of his own community, the proper fruit of the conditions
just summarized.[79] Let us indicate by only such a paucity of examples as
we have room for. Able and fully furnished lawyers everywhere. Think of
Story, a most diligently attending judge and one of the best; also
finding time both to be the first law professor and most fertile and
eminent author of the age, exhausting English and American sources and
authority in his books, and crowding them with a civil law learning to be
surpassed only by that of the Roman jurists of Germany; let Ticknor, whom
we may call the founder of the post classical school of literature in our
country, suggest the students of modern languages who followed in an
illustrious line,--let him suggest also the famous historians, such as
Prescott, Bancroft, Hildreth, Motley, Parkman, really representatives of
the school just mentioned, using methods that got into the American air
first from Ticknor; let Channing suggest the pulpit,--Channing, who raised
religion from the gloom of dogma and orthodoxy into a life of angelic joy;
what can one say to describe Emerson in a breath,--the teacher to us all
of fit aspiration, right thinking, noble expression, the highest virtue
and truest religion, and who lived, as Dr. Heber Newton has lately told,
the most perfect of lives as a man; Hawthorne, showing the world sick with
its yearning for moral redemption that even a disgraced, lone, and
friendless woman can by a subsequent life of unreserved confession,
purity, and love to her neighbors turn a horrible brand of guilt into a
jewel more precious and brilliant than diamond,--how his consummate
achievement rebukes the sixty years' dilatoriness of Goethe over his
unfinished Faust; and divine poets, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and
Holmes,--the last two conspicuous in letters, Lowell being in my judgment
the greatest American man of letters; I have said nothing of the statesmen
and orators, beginning with Fisher Ames and John Adams,--and there are
others in every high round of the intellectual life known all over the
land whose names I must omit.
In this enumeration I have intentionally looked somewhat forward; for what
is in one particular generation you cannot find out until its effects are
plain in the next. I want to accentuate it that Webster belonged to a
society which had made some of the extraordinary figures whose names are
given, and was making the rest of them. When the view just suggested has
been taken, and if in comparing New England with any other community--even
with Athens, Florence, England, or Germany, in their best eras--periods of
time be equalized and differences of population be properly allowed for,
it will appear that the conditions moulding Webster were more energetic in
productivity than can be found elsewhere. And if, in this comparison, the
relative general condition of the masses in each community be duly taken
into the account, the result will be far more favorable to New England;
for a high level of the masses is a much better proof of a fecund culture
than merely many striking individual instances.
Thus we bring out the point that Webster was born, grew up, and lived in a
nursery prolific in men and women of extraordinary powers and virtues. How
insignificant is the muster-roll of any other part of our country! I
compare that of the south because I am familiar with it, and one can with
better manners disparage his own section than another. The ante-bellum
southern treasures of art and literature except speeches, political and
forensic, can be counted on the fingers of one hand without taking them
all. The poetry of Poe, a few essays of Legare, especially that on
Demosthenes, Calhoun's Dissertation on Government, and Toombs's Tremont
Temple lecture, are all that are pre-eminent; and some of the historians
of our literature insist that Poe was southern only in his prejudices, and
not in his making. To turn away from authors, how few can be found to
compare in education, polish, and literary or scientific accomplishments
with average New Englanders of their several professions or occupations.
Toombs, in the diamond-like brilliance of his extempore effusion in talks
or speeches, is as solitary in the south as Catullus, the greatest of the
spontaneous poets of his nation, was in the Rome of his day.
Webster absorbed and absorbed, assimilated and assimilated, all the better
elements of this marvellous New England culture, which I am painfully
conscious of having most insufficiently described above, until at last he
mounted its eminences in his profession, in the politics of democracy,
aesthetic taste, and especially statesmanly eloquence. So assured was his
stand upon these eminences that all the wisest and most refined of the
section spontaneously and involuntarily did him obeisance, recognizing in
him their ideal of wisdom and counsel befittingly expressed. We can stop
to give only two examples. Edward Everett is the one American master of
grand rhetoric. He heard the reply to Hayne, and, as he says, he could not
but be reminded throughout of Demosthenes' making the unrivalled crown
oration. Choate, profoundly versed in the law, the incomparable forensic
advocate and popular speaker, daily flying higher with inspiration drawn
from Demosthenes and Cicero--he poured out his admiration in many
utterances that have already become classic. Webster was made in and by
New England, and not for herself alone. The toast, "Daniel Webster,--the
gift of New England to his country, his whole country, and nothing but his
country," to which he responded December 22, 1843, tells but the truth. No
American other than a New Englander ever had what one may term such a
greatness breeding environment as he. And passing in review all the famous
children of those famous six States, whether they spent their lives at
home as Choate, or developed elsewhere as Henry Ward Beecher, it is my
decided opinion that Daniel Webster as fruit and example of her culture is
New England's greatest glory.
There remain now but a few prominences of Webster for me to touch upon.
His speech of March 7, 1850, was fiercely denounced by the root-and-branch
abolitionists. Horace Mann called him a fallen Lucifer. Sumner charged him
with apostasy. Giddings said he had struck "a blow against freedom and the
constitutional rights of the free States which no southern arm could have
given." Theodore Parker could think of no comparable deed of any other New
Englander except the treachery of Benedict Arnold. Wittier condemned him
to everlasting obloquy in a lofty lyric, which from its very title of one
word throughout was reprobation more stinging than the world-known lampoon
of Catullus against Julius Caesar. The effect of this tempest has not yet
all died out; and in many quarters of the north Webster is still regarded
as a renegade. His defenders, however, multiply and become more earnest
and strong. Let us consider this speech with the serenity and riper
judgment which should mark the historical writer of to-day.
First and foremost let us grasp the wide difference of the situation from
that at the beginning of 1833. Then, the question was only remotely a
pro-slavery or southern one. A southern president, the most popular
American, of great firmness of purpose and extraordinary courage, had
taken a decided stand against the movement of one southern State hostile
to the general government,--a stand the more decided because he cordially
hated Calhoun, who was leading the movement. The southern leaders outside
of that State did not approve of nullification; most of them believing it
was an absurdity for a State to contend she could stay in the union and
at the same time rightfully refuse to perform a condition of that union.
It seemed that no southern State except Virginia would stand by South
Carolina in the event of a collision between her and the United States. We
can well understand that Webster could then see no danger to the cause he
loved above all others, that is, the union, in uncompromisingly demanding
that the revenue be collected, and with force if necessary.
Nullification was palpably unjustifiable, even under the doctrine
prevalent in the south. We have explained how Calhoun's extreme desire for
peaceable remedies only, led him to champion this illogical measure. The
theory of State sovereignty demanded that, instead of the nullification
ordinance, South Carolina pass an ordinance of secession, conditioned to
commence its operation at a stated time if the objectionable duties had
not been repealed. The situation in 1833 was that all the north and nearly
all of the south were arrayed under a southern leader against only one
southern State, making a demand which was plainly untenable in either one
of the two differing schools of constitutional construction.
But the situation, in 1850, was a south solidly united, not upon such an
obvious heresy as nullification, but aroused as one man to protect the
very underpinning of its social structure. It was standing confidently
upon the doctrine of State sovereignty, which, as the historical records
all showed, was the creed of the generation, both north and south, that
made the constitution. As we have already told, Calhoun in 1833 probably
convinced Webster that the States were sovereign. That did not mean that
the force-bill was wrong; it meant only that if South Carolina chose, she
could rightfully secede. And we may say that this great argument of
Calhoun, demolishing as it does the premises of Webster, was really
irrelevant, for it did not support his own proposition. Now in 1850, as
Webster saw it, the south was justified by the constitution, however
foolish might be her policy, and he was too conscientious to oppose what
he believed right and just. In addition to this claim by the south of
State sovereignty as abstractly right, his conscience told him that some
of her practical demands were just. It had been provided not only that all
of Texas south of 36 deg. 30' be admitted with slavery, but further that four
other States be made out of the same territory. Although Webster was a
free-soiler from first to last, his conscience told him peremptorily that
the only honest course of congress as to the provision mentioned, which
was really a solemn contract with Texas, was to perform the contract in
good faith. This advice, of course, aroused the ire of the abolitionists,
who had united upon the position that no other slave State should ever be
admitted into the union. And he boldly said that the south was right in
her complaint that there was disinclination both among individuals and
public authorities at the north to execute the fugitive slave law.
Meditate these serious words:
"I desire to call the attention of all sober-minded men at the north,
of all conscientious men, of all men who are not carried away by some
fanatical idea or some false impression, to their constitutional
obligations. I put it to all the sober and sound minds at the north as
a question of morals and a question of conscience, What right have
they, in their legislative capacity or any other capacity, to endeavor
to get round this constitution, or to embarrass the free exercise of
the rights secured by the constitution to the persons whose slaves
escape from them? None at all; none at all. Neither in the forum of
conscience, nor before the face of the constitution, are they, in my
opinion, justified in such an attempt."
I must believe that as time rolls on the outcry against this position of
Webster's, so unshakably founded in conscience and reason as the position
is, must not only cease, but turn to words of praise and commendation. The
northern fanatics who tried to abolish slavery by repudiating such solemn
contracts as the resolution of March 1, 1845, respecting the admission of
Texas, and the fugitive slave restoration clause of the federal
constitution, _while purposing to stay in the union_, were just as morally
wrong as were the southern fanatics who proposed to stay in the union and
enjoy its benefits and not pay the taxes necessary for its maintenance.
One other passage of this speech has been strongly attacked. Webster
opposed applying the Wilmot proviso to California and New Mexico, where,
as he said, "the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the
formation of the earth ... settles forever with a strength beyond all
terms of human enactment, that slavery cannot exist." To apply the proviso
would be, as he added, to "take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance
of nature," and "to re-enact the will of God;" and its insertion in a
Territorial government bill would be "for the mere purpose of a taunt or
reproach." Mr. Lodge, reprehending most severely, confidently asserts that
though these Territories were not suited to slave agriculture, yet that
their many and rich mines could have been profitably worked by slaves.[80]
He stresses the fact that certain slave owners declared that they would,
if they could, so work these mines. This distinguished author is to be
reminded of how cheaply Seius could replace any one of his slaves that he
worked to death in Ilva's mines. Let him re-read the Captivi of
Plautus,--not to mention many other ancient records just as
instructive,--and realize that in that time it was not only one race that
furnished slaves, but that every free human being was in lifelong danger
of falling to a master. The prisoners taken in the incessant wars kept the
slave markets glutted. A few months' work of one of his slaves would bring
the master enough to pay the purchase money and leave a considerable sum
to his credit with the banker. The Spaniards worked their mines with
Indians to be had for the catching in near-by places. And Mr. Lodge
mentions mining with the labor of criminals and serfs. In all the
instances that he has in mind the worker can be had for his keep or a
little more than that. But to have mined with the slaves of the
south,--that was widely different. There was no way to get such a slave
except to rear or hire or buy him in a protected market. Does Mr. Lodge
really believe that Seius would have permitted his eight hundred slaves to
sicken in the mines of Ilva if each one had been worth at least $1,000 in
the market? Really the leading industry of the south was slave rearing.
The profit was in keeping the slaves healthy and rapidly multiplying. This
could be done at little expense in agriculture, where even the light
workers were made to support themselves. But had a planter gone into a
mining section, where he could get no land, for corn to feed his slaves
and stock, and for cotton to bring him money, he would have found no
margin of profit whatever in mining. I was reared in the gold-bearing
district of Georgia. I can remember old Mr. John Wynne, a wealthy cotton
planter living in Oglethorpe county, some six or seven miles from my
father's, who, when--to use plantation parlance--he had laid by his crop
at the middle or end of July, would work his gold mine until
cotton-picking became brisk about the middle of September. He made money
out of his gold mine, without injuring his other far more valuable mine,
that is, the natural increase of his negroes. And I heard of other such
mine workers. But you could not have tempted one of these shrewd business
men to settle with his slaves outside of a cotton-making district in order
to mine. Had either Mr. Clingman or Mr. Mason--mentioned by Mr.
Lodge--made the trial, he would have soon returned to his old neighborhood
a sadder and wiser man.
The negro's work as a slave in the coal and iron mines of the south never
commenced until after the thirteenth amendment freed him. Since then he
has done much cruelly hard work as _servus poenae_--a slave of
punishment--in these mines, for convict lessees, having no other interest
in him than to get all the labor possible during his term.
So it is clear that Webster, in contending that the conditions in these
Territories were prohibitive of slavery was as statesmanly and
perspicacious as he was generally in other matters.
His detractors charged that the entire speech was a bid for the support of
the south in his eager struggle for the presidency. That he passionately
longed for the chair was manifest. But his was not the sordid ambition of
the professional place-hunter. He had a heaven-reaching aspiration to show
America what a president should be in those angry times. He must have been
conscious that he was the only man of gifts to do the great deed. What an
appropriate climax that would have been for the invincible defender of the
union, who, when replying to Hayne twenty years before, had outsoared
Pindar in eulogizing South Carolina leading the south, and Massachusetts
leading the north, in the same breath; and who, neither from prepossession
in favor of his native community or resentment because of attack upon it
by those of the other section, had ever been removed out of brotherly
love for all his countrymen alike. If you can do an all-important thing
for your fellows which you believe no one else can do, and are without
ambition for opportunity, are you not a poor grovelling creature? Webster,
knowing that secession could not be peaceable, and seeing it become more
and more probable, racked with fears for the union, and aghast at the
menace of fraternal bloodshed, like Calhoun, he cheated himself with a
futile remedy. We have told you of Calhoun's proposal to disarm the
combatants. In his amiability Webster believed with his whole soul that he
could as president make his countrymen love one another as he himself
loved them, and that he could pour upon the waters now beginning to rage
oil enough to safe the ship of union through the tempest soon to be at its
height. It was an aspiration high and holy, deserving of eternal honor
from all America. You cannot read this great speech of March 7 aright if
you do not discern that Webster was seriously alarmed. When you see that a
dear one's malady is fatal, you will not confess it to others,--not even
to yourself. His excited exclamations, "No, sir! no, sir! There will be no
secession! Gentlemen are not serious when they talk of secession," cannot
deceive a reader whose wont it has been to look into his own heart.
Webster did not see the future with the superhuman prevision of Calhoun;
but he had observed the course of things in that stormy session. Is it to
be believed that he had overlooked the tremendous significance of Toombs's
speech of December 13, and of the wild plaudits it brought from the
southern members? And try to conceive what must have been the effect upon
him of that most solemn and the saddest great speech in all oratory of
Calhoun just three days before. Read the 7th of March speech by its
circumstances and it is revealed to you, as by a flashlight, that Webster
had peeped behind the curtain which he had prayed should never rise in his
lifetime. Horror-struck as he was, he would not despair of his
country,--he would not believe that the brothers' union was about to turn
into a brothers' war. Oh, let nobody dishonor his better self by seeing in
this glorious speech, which our best and most lovable have placed in their
hearts beside Washington's farewell address, the bid of a turncoat. Rather
let us learn to understand its supreme statesmanly reach; its impartiality
towards and just rebuke of the orator's own section and its merited
castigation of the other courageously given, while affection for both is
kept uppermost; its grand dignity, moral height, and pre-eminent
patriotism. Let us also learn properly to estimate the disfavor with which
he regarded ever afterwards during the rest of his life the active
anti-slavery men of the north, whom he could not understand to be other
than bringers of the unspeakable calamity he would avert. And let us give
him his due commiseration for missing the nomination, and realizing that
the hopes of saving his country which he had cherished so fondly were all,
all shattered. When we do our full duty to him we will, northerners and
southerners alike, agree that Whittier's palinode ought to have gone full
circle before it paused.
What is Webster's highest and best fame? In answer we think at once of the
reply to Hayne, its loftiness throughout, its eagle ascensions here and
there, and most of all the organ melodies at the grand close, beside which
the famous apostrophe of Longfellow is harsh overstrain. The next moment
we feel he is higher in his profound love for his whole country than in
his unequalled eloquence. He and Lincoln were the supereminent Americans
who could never, never forget that the people of the other section were
their own full-blood brothers and sisters. They are the supreme exponents
of that American brotherhood, more deeply founded and more lasting than
either one of the nationalizations which we have explained, out of which a
continental is first, and then a world-union to come. To save our union
was also to do the better deed of saving that brotherhood. For this each
strove in his own way. I believe that the people of the world-union will
pair them in Walhalla, and set them above all other heroes, crowning
Webster as the monarch of speech which prepared millions with faith and
fortitude for the crisis, and crowning Lincoln the monarch of counsels and
acts in the crisis. It will be understood that neither was called away
before his mission was finished. The greatest work of each was example of
the love with which we should all love one another; and that was
complete.