the most richly endowed by nature. In his lifetime it was impossible
to judge him aright. His presence usually overwhelmed criticism; his
intimacy always fascinated it. It so happened, that he grew to his
full stature and attained his utmost development in a community where
human nature appears to be undergoing a process of diminution,--where
people are smaller-boned, less muscular, more nervous, and more
susceptible than their ancestors. He possessed, in consequence, an
enormous physical magnetism, as we term it, over his fellow-citizens,
apart from the natural influence of his talents and understanding.
Fidgety men were quieted in his presence, women were spellbound by it,
and the busy, anxious public contemplated his majestic calm with a
feeling of relief, as well as admiration. Large numbers of people in
New England, for many years, reposed upon Daniel Webster. He
represented to them the majesty and the strength of the government of
the United States. He gave them a sense of safety. Amid the flighty
politics of the time and the loud insincerities of Washington, there
seemed one solid thing in America, so long as he sat in an arm-chair
of the Senate-chamber. When he appeared in State Street, slowly
pacing, with an arm behind him, business was brought to an absolute
stand-still. As the whisper passed along, the windows filled with
clerks, pen in mouth, peering out to catch a glimpse of the man whom
they had seen fifty times before; while the bankers and merchants
hastened forth to give him salutation, or exchange a passing word,
happy if they could but catch his eye. At home, and in a good mood, he
was reputed to be as entertaining a man as New England ever held,--a
gambolling, jocund leviathan out on the sea-shore, and in the library
overflowing with every kind of knowledge that can be acquired without
fatigue, and received without preparation. Mere celebrity, too, is
dazzling to some minds. While, therefore, this imposing person lived
among us, he was blindly worshipped by many, blindly hated by some,
calmly considered by very few. To this hour he is a great influence in
the United States. Perhaps, with the abundant material now accessible,
it is not too soon to attempt to ascertain how far he was worthy of
the estimation in which his fellow-citizens held him, and what place
he ought to hold in the esteem of posterity. At least, it can never be
unpleasing to Americans to recur to the most interesting specimen of
our kind that has lived in America since Franklin.
He could not have been born in a better place, nor of better stock,
nor at a better time, nor reared in circumstances more favorable to
harmonious development. He grew up in the Switzerland of America. From
a hill on his father's New Hampshire farm, he could see most of the
noted summits of New England. Granite-topped Kearsarge stood out in
bold relief near by; Mount Washington and its attendant peaks, not yet
named, bounded the northern horizon like a low, silvery cloud; and the
principal heights of the Green Mountains, rising near the Connecticut
River, were clearly visible. The Merrimack, most serviceable of
rivers, begins its course a mile or two off, formed by the union of
two mountain torrents. Among those hills, high up, sometimes near the
summits, lakes are found, broad, deep, and still; and down the sides
run innumerable rills, which form those noisy brooks that rush along
the bottom of the hills, where now the roads wind along, shaded by the
mountain, and enlivened by the music of the waters. Among these hills
there are, here and there, expanses of level country large enough for
a farm, with the addition of some fields upon the easier acclivities
and woodlands higher up. There was one field of a hundred acres upon
Captain Webster's mountain farm so level that a lamb could be seen on
any part of it from the windows of the house. Every tourist knows that
region now,--that wide, billowy expanse of dark mountains and vivid
green fields, dotted with white farm-houses, and streaked with silvery
streams. It was rougher, seventy years ago, secluded, hardly
accessible, the streams unbridged, the roads of primitive formation;
but the worst of the rough work had been done there, and the
production of superior human beings had become possible, before the
Webster boys were born.
Daniel Webster's father was the strong man of his neighborhood; the
very model of a republican citizen and hero,--stalwart, handsome,
brave, and gentle. Ebenezer Webster inherited no worldly advantages.
Sprung from a line of New Hampshire farmers, he was apprenticed, in
his thirteenth year, to another New Hampshire farmer; and when he had
served his time, he enlisted as a private soldier in the old French
war, and came back from the campaigns about Lake George a captain. He
never went to school. Like so many other New England boys, he learned
what is essential for the carrying on of business in the
chimney-corner, by the light of the fire. He possessed one beautiful
accomplishment: he was a grand reader. Unlettered as he was, he
greatly enjoyed the more lofty compositions of poets and orators; and
his large, sonorous voice enabled him to read them with fine effect.
His sons read in his manner, even to his rustic pronunciation of some
words. Daniel's calm, clear-cut rendering of certain noted
passages--favorites in his early home--was all his father's. There is
a pleasing tradition in the neighborhood, of the teamsters who came to
Ebenezer Webster's mill saying to one another, when they had
discharged their load and tied their horses, "Come, let us go in, and
hear little Dan read a psalm." The French war ended, Captain Webster,
in compensation for his services, received a grant of land in the
mountain wilderness at the head of the Merrimack, where, as miller and
farmer, he lived and reared his family. The Revolutionary War summoned
this noble yeoman to arms once more. He led forth his neighbors to the
strife, and fought at their head, with his old rank of captain, at
White Plains and at Bennington, and served valiantly through the war.
From that time to the end of his life, though much trusted and
employed by his fellow-citizens as legislator, magistrate, and judge,
he lived but for one object,--the education and advancement of his
children. All men were poor then in New Hampshire, compared with the
condition of their descendants. Judge Webster was a poor, and even
embarrassed man, to the day of his death. The hardships he had endured
as soldier and pioneer made him, as he said, an old man before his
time. Rheumatism bent his form, once so erect and vigorous. Black care
subdued his spirits, once so joyous and elastic. Such were the fathers
of fair New England.
This strong-minded, uncultured man was a Puritan and a Federalist,--a
catholic, tolerant, and genial Puritan, an intolerant and almost
bigoted Federalist. Washington, Adams, and Hamilton were the civilians
highest in his esteem; the good Jefferson he dreaded and abhorred. The
French Revolution was mere blackness and horror to him; and when it
assumed the form of Napoleon Bonaparte, his heart sided passionately
with England in her struggle to extirpate it. His boys were in the
fullest sympathy with him in all his opinions and feelings. They, too,
were tolerant and untheological Puritans; they, too, were most
strenuous Federalists; and neither of them ever recovered from their
father's influence, nor advanced much beyond him in their fundamental
beliefs. Readers have, doubtless, remarked, in Mr. Webster's oration
upon Adams and Jefferson, how the stress of the eulogy falls upon
Adams, while cold and scant justice is meted out to the greatest and
wisest of our statesmen. It was Ebenezer Webster who spoke that day,
with the more melodious voice of his son. There is a tradition in New
Hampshire that Judge Webster fell sick on a journey in a town of
Republican politics, and besought the doctor to help him speedily on
his way home, saying that he was born a Federalist, had lived a
Federalist, and could not die in peace in any but a Federalist town.
Among the ten children of this sturdy patriot and partisan, eight were
ordinary mortals, and two most extraordinary,--Ezekiel, born in 1780,
and Daniel, born in 1782,--the youngest of his boys. Some of the elder
children were even less than ordinary. Elderly residents of the
neighborhood speak of one half-brother of Daniel and Ezekiel as
penurious and narrow; and the letters of others of the family indicate
very plain, good, commonplace people. But these two, the sons of their
father's prime, inherited all his grandeur of form and beauty of
countenance, his taste for high literature, along with a certain
energy of mind that came to them, by some unknown law of nature, from
their father's mother. From her Daniel derived his jet-black hair and
eyes, and his complexion of burnt gunpowder; though all the rest of
the children except one were remarkable for fairness of complexion,
and had sandy hair. Ezekiel, who was considered the handsomest man in
the United States, had a skin of singular fairness, and light hair. He
is vividly remembered in New Hampshire for his marvellous beauty of
form and face, his courtly and winning manners, the weight and majesty
of his presence. He was a signal refutation of Dr. Holmes's theory,
that grand manners and high breeding are the result of several
generations of culture. Until he was nineteen, this peerless gentleman
worked on a rough mountain farm on the outskirts of civilization, as
his ancestors had for a hundred and fifty years before him; but he was
refined to the tips of his finger-nails and to the buttons of his
coat. Like his more famous brother, he had an artist's eye for the
becoming in costume, and a keen sense for all the proprieties and
decorums both of public and private life. Limited in his view by the
narrowness of his provincial sphere, as well as by inherited
prejudices, he was a better man and citizen than his brother, without
a touch of his genius. Nor was that half-brother of Daniel, who had
the black hair and eyes and gunpowder skin, at all like Daniel, or
equal to him in mental power.
There is nothing in our literature more pleasing than the glimpses it
affords of the early life of these two brothers;--Ezekiel, robust,
steady-going, persevering, self-denying; Daniel, careless of work,
eager for play, often sick, always slender and weakly, and regarded
rather as a burden upon the family than a help to it. His feebleness
early habituated him to being a recipient of aid and favor, and it
decided his destiny. It has been the custom in New England, from the
earliest time, to bring up one son of a prosperous family to a
profession, and the one selected was usually the boy who seemed least
capable of earning a livelihood by manual labor. Ebenezer Webster,
heavily burdened with responsibility all his life long, had most
ardently desired to give his elder sons a better education than he had
himself enjoyed, but could not. When Daniel was a boy, his large
family was beginning to lift his load a little; the country was
filling up; his farm was more productive, and he felt somewhat more at
his ease. His sickly youngest son, because he was sickly, and only for
that reason, he chose from his numerous brood to send to an academy,
designing to make a schoolmaster of him. We have no reason to believe
that any of the family saw anything extraordinary in the boy. Except
that he read aloud unusually well, he had given no sign of particular
talent, unless it might be that he excelled in catching trout,
shooting squirrels, and fighting cocks. His mother, observing his love
of play and his equal love of books, said he "would come to something
or nothing, she could not tell which"; but his father, noticing his
power over the sympathies of others, and comparing him with his
bashful brother, used to remark, that he had fears for Ezekiel, but
that Daniel would assuredly make his way in the world. It is certain
that the lad himself was totally unconscious of possessing
extraordinary talents, and indulged no early dream of greatness. He
tells us himself, that he loved but two things in his youth,--play and
reading. The rude schools which he trudged two or three miles in the
winter every day to attend, taught him scarcely anything. His father's
saw-mill, he used to say, was the real school of his youth. When he
had set the saw and turned on the water, there would be fifteen
minutes of tranquillity before the log again required his attention,
during which he sat and absorbed knowledge.
"We had so few books," he records in the exquisite fragment
of autobiography he has left us, "that to read them once or
twice was nothing. We thought they were all to be got by
heart."
How touching the story, so well known, of the mighty struggle and long
self-sacrifice it cost this family to get the youth through college!
The whole expense did not average one hundred and fifty dollars a
year; but it seemed to the boy so vast and unattainable a good, that,
when his father announced his purpose to attempt it, he was completely
overcome; his head was dizzy; his tongue was paralyzed; he could only
press his father's hands and shed tears. Slender indeed was his
preparation for Dartmouth. From the day when he took his first Latin
lesson to that on which he entered college was thirteen months. He
could translate Cicero's orations with some ease, and make out with
difficulty and labor the easiest sentences of the Greek Reader, and
that was the whole of what was called his "preparation" for college.
In June, 1797, he did not know the Greek alphabet; in August of the
same year he was admitted to the Freshman Class of Dartmouth on
engaging to supply his deficiencies by extra study.
Neither at college nor at any time could Daniel Webster be properly
called a student, and well he knew it. Many a time he has laughed, in
his jovial, rollicking manner, at the preposterous reputation for
learning a man can get by bringing out a fragment of curious knowledge
at the right moment at college. He was an absorbent of knowledge,
never a student. The Latin of Cicero and Virgil was congenial and easy
to him, and he learned more of it than the required portion. But even
in Latin, he tells us, he was excelled by some of his own class; and
"his attainments were not such," he adds, "as told for much in the
recitation-room." Greek he never enjoyed: his curiosity was never
awakened on the edge of that boundless contiguity of interesting
knowledge, and he only learned enough Greek to escape censure. He
said, forty years after, in an after-dinner speech:
"When I was at school I felt exceedingly obliged to Homer's
messengers for the exact literal fidelity with which they
delivered their messages. The seven or eight lines of good
Homeric Greek in which they had received the commands of
Agamemnon or Achilles they recited to whomsoever the message
was to be carried; and as they repeated them verbatim,
sometimes twice or thrice, it saved me the trouble of
learning so much Greek."
It was not at "school" that he had this experience, but at Dartmouth
College. For mathematics, too, he had not the slightest taste. He
humorously wrote to a fellow-student, soon after leaving college, that
"all that he knew about conterminous arches or evanescent subtenses
might be collected on the pupil of a gnat's eye without making him
wink." At college, in fact, he was simply an omnivorous reader,
studying only so much as to pass muster in the recitation-room. Every
indication we possess of his college life, as well as his own repeated
assertions, confirms the conclusion that Nature had formed him to use
the products of other men's toil, not to add to the common fund. Those
who are conversant with college life know very well what it means when
a youth does not take to Greek, and has an aversion to mathematics.
Such a youth may have immense talent, and give splendid expression to
the sentiments of his countrymen, but he is not likely to be one of
the priceless few of the human race who discover truth or advance
opinion. It is the energetic, the originating minds that are
susceptible to the allurements of difficulty.
On the other hand, Daniel Webster had such qualities as made every one
feel that he was the first man in the College. Tall, gaunt, and
sallow, with an incomparable forehead, and those cavernous and
brilliant eyes of his, he had much of the large and tranquil presence
which was so important an element of his power over others at all
periods of his life. His letters of this time, as well as the
recollections of his fellow-students, show him the easy, humorous,
rather indolent and strictly correct "good-fellow," whom professors
and companions equally relished. He browsed much in the College
library, and had the habit of bringing to bear upon the lesson of the
hour the information gathered in his miscellaneous reading,--a
practice that much enlivens the monotony of recitation. The half-dozen
youths of his particular set, it appears, plumed themselves upon
resembling the early Christians in having all things in common. The
first to rise in the morning--and he must have been an early riser
indeed who was up before Daniel Webster--"dressed himself in the best
which the united apartments afforded"; the next made the best
selection from what remained; and the last was happy if he found rags
enough to justify his appearance in the chapel. The relator of this
pleasant reminiscence adds, that he was once the possessor of an
eminently respectable beaver hat, a costly article of resplendent
lustre. It was missing one day, could not be found, and was given up
for lost. Several weeks after "friend Dan" returned from a distant
town, where he had been teaching school, wearing the lost beaver, and
relieving its proprietor from the necessity of covering his head with
a battered and long-discarded hat of felt. How like the Daniel Webster
of later years, who never could acquire the sense of _meum_ and
_tuum_, supposed to be the basis of civilization!
Mr. Webster always spoke slightingly of his early oratorical efforts,
and requested Mr. Everett, the editor of his works, not to search them
out. He was not just to the productions of his youth, if we may judge
from the Fourth-of-July oration which he delivered in 1800, when he
was a Junior at Dartmouth, eighteen years of age. This glowing psalm
of the republican David is perfectly characteristic, and entirely
worthy of him. The times that tried men's souls,--how recent and vivid
they were to the sons of Ebenezer Webster, who had led forth from the
New Hampshire hills the neighbors at whose firesides Ezekiel and
Daniel had listened, open-mouthed, to the thousand forgotten incidents
of the war. Their professors of history were old John Bowen, who had
once been a prisoner with the Indians; Robert Wise, who had sailed
round the world and fought in the Revolution on _both_ sides; George
Bayly, a pioneer, who saw the first tree felled in Northern New
Hampshire; women of the neighborhood, who had heard the midnight yell
of savages; and, above all, their own lion-hearted father, who had
warred with Frenchmen, Indians, wild nature, British troops, and
French ideas. "O," wrote Daniel once, "I shall never hear such
story-telling again!" It was not in the cold pages of Hildreth, nor in
the brief summaries of school-books, that this imaginative,
sympathetic youth had learned that part of the political history of
the United States--from 1787 to 1800--which will ever be its most
interesting portion. He learned it at town-meetings, in the
newspapers, at his father's house, among his neighbors, on election
days; he learned it as an intelligent youth, with a passionately loyal
father and mother, learned the history of the late war, and is now
learning the agonizing history of "reconstruction." This oration is
the warm and modest expression of all that the receptive and
unsceptical student had imbibed and felt during the years of his
formation, who saw before him a large company of Revolutionary
soldiers and a great multitude of Federalist partisans. He saluted the
audience as "Countrymen, brethren, and fathers." The oration was
chiefly a rapid, exulting review of the history of the young Republic,
with an occasional pomposity, and a few expressions caught from the
party discussions of the day. It is amusing to hear this young
Federalist of 1800 speak of Napoleon Bonaparte as "the gasconading
pilgrim of Egypt," and the government of France as the "supercilious,
five-headed Directory," and the President of the United States as "the
firm, the wise, the inflexible Adams, who with steady hand draws the
disguising veil from the intrigues of foreign enemies and the plots of
domestic foes." It is amusing to read, as the utterance of Daniel
Webster, that "Columbia is now seated in the forum of nations, and the
empires of the world are amazed at the bright effulgence of her
glory." But it is interesting to observe, also, that at eighteen, not
less fervently than at forty-eight, he felt the importance of the
message with which he was charged to the American people,--the
necessity of the Union, and the value of the Constitution as the
uniting bond. The following passage has, perhaps, more in it of the
Webster of 1830 than any other in the oration. The reader will notice
the similarity between one part of it and the famous passage in the
Bunker Hill oration, beginning "Venerable men," addressed to the
survivors of the Revolution.
"Thus, friends and citizens, did the kind hand of overruling
Providence conduct us, through toils, fatigues, and dangers,
to independence and peace. If piety be the rational exercise
of the human soul, if religion be not a chimera, and if the
vestiges of heavenly assistance are clearly traced in those
events which mark the annals of our nation, it becomes us on
this day, in consideration of the great things which have
been done for us, to render the tribute of unfeigned thanks
to that God who superintends the universe, and holds aloft
the scale that weighs the destinies of nations.
"The conclusion of the Revolutionary War did not accomplish
the entire achievements of our countrymen. Their military
character was then, indeed, sufficiently established; but
the time was coming which should prove their political
sagacity, their ability to govern themselves.
"No sooner was peace restored with England, (the first grand
article of which was the acknowledgment of our
independence,) than the old system of Confederation,
dictated at first by necessity, and adopted for the purposes
of the moment, was found inadequate to the government of an
extensive empire. Under a full conviction of this, we then
saw the people of these States engaged in a transaction
which is undoubtedly the greatest approximation towards
human perfection the political world ever yet witnessed, and
which, perhaps, will forever stand in the history of mankind
without a parallel. A great republic, composed of different
States, whose interest in all respects could not be
perfectly compatible, then came deliberately forward,
discarded one system of government, and adopted another,
without the loss of one man's blood.
"There is not a single government now existing in Europe
which is not based in usurpation, and established, if
established at all, by the sacrifice of thousands. But in
the adoption of our present system of jurisprudence, we see
the powers necessary for government voluntarily flowing from
the people, their only proper origin, and directed to the
public good, their only proper object.
"With peculiar propriety, we may now felicitate ourselves on
that happy form of mixed government under which we live. The
advantages resulting to the citizens of the Union are
utterly incalculable, and the day when it was received by a
majority of the States shall stand on the catalogue of
American anniversaries second to none but the birthday of
independence.
"In consequence of the adoption of our present system of
government, and the virtuous manner in which it has been
administered by a Washington and an Adams, we are this day
in the enjoyment of peace, while war devastates Europe! We
can now sit down beneath the shadow of the olive, while her
cities blaze, her streams run purple with blood, and her
fields glitter with a forest of bayonets! The citizens of
America can this day throng the temples of freedom, and
renew their oaths of fealty to independence; while Holland,
our once sister republic, is erased from the catalogue of
nations; while Venice is destroyed, Italy ravaged, and
Switzerland--the once happy, the once united, the once
flourishing Switzerland--lies bleeding at every pore!"
He need not have been ashamed of this speech, despite the lumbering
bombast of some of its sentences. All that made him estimable as a
public man is contained in it,--the sentiment of nationality, and a
clear sense of the only means by which the United States can remain a
nation; namely, strict fidelity to the Constitution as interpreted by
the authority itself creates, and modified in the way itself appoints.
We have never read the production of a youth which was more prophetic
of the man than this. It was young New England that spoke through him
on that occasion; and in all the best part of his life he never
touched a strain which New England had not inspired, or could not
reach.