for the benefit of his brother in a manner which few sons would have
dared, and no son ought to attempt. His father, now advanced in years,
infirm, "an old man before his time" through hardship and toil, much
in debt, depending chiefly upon his salary of four hundred dollars a
year as Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and heavily taxed to
maintain Daniel in college, had seen all his other sons married and
settled except Ezekiel, upon whom he leaned as the staff of his
declining years, and the main dependence of his wife and two maiden
daughters. Nevertheless, Daniel, after a whole night of consultation
with his brother, urged the old man to send Ezekiel to college also.
The fond and generous father replied, that he had but little property,
and it would take all that little to carry another son through college
to a profession; but he lived only for his children, and, for his own
part, he was willing to run the risk; but there was the mother and two
unmarried sisters, to whom the risk was far more serious. If they
consented, he was willing. The mother said:
"I have lived long in the world, and have been happy in my
children. If Daniel and Ezekiel will promise to take care of
me in my old age, I will consent to the sale of all our
property at once, and they may enjoy the benefit of that
which remains after our debts are paid."
Upon hearing this, all the family, we are told, were dissolved in
tears, and the old man gave his assent. This seems hard,--two stout
and vigorous young men willing to risk their aged parents' home and
dignity for such a purpose, or for any purpose! In the early days,
however, there was a singular unity of feeling and interest in a good
New England family, and there were opportunities for professional men
which rendered the success of two such lads as these nearly certain,
if they lived to establish themselves. Nevertheless, it was too much
to ask, and more than Daniel Webster would have asked if he had been
properly alive to the rights of others. Ezekiel shouldered his bundle,
trudged off to school, where he lived and studied at the cost of one
dollar a week, worked his way to the position of the second lawyer in
New Hampshire, and would early have gone to Congress but for his
stanch, inflexible Federalism.
Daniel Webster, schoolmaster and law-student, was assuredly one of the
most interesting of characters. Pinched by poverty, as he tells us,
till his very bones ached, eking out his income by a kind of labor
that he always loathed (copying deeds), his shoes letting in, not
water merely, but "pebbles and stones,"--father, brother, and himself
sometimes all moneyless together, all dunned at the same time, and
writing to one another for aid,--he was nevertheless as jovial a young
fellow as any in New England. How merry and affectionate his letters
to his young friends! He writes to one, soon after leaving college:
"You will naturally inquire how I prosper in the article of
cash; finely, finely! I came here in January with a horse,
watch, etc., and a few rascally counters in my pocket. Was
soon obliged to sell my horse, and live on the proceeds.
Still straitened for cash, I sold my watch, and made a shift
to get home, where my friends supplied me with another horse
and another watch. My horse is sold again, and my watch
goes, I expect, this week; thus you see how I lay up cash."
How like him! To another college friend, James Hervey Bingham, whom he
calls, by turns, "brother Jemmy," "Jemmy Hervey," and "Bingham," he
discourses thus:
"Perhaps you thought, as I did, that a dozen dollars would
slide out of the pocket in a Commencement jaunt much easier
than they would slide in again after you got home. That was
the exact reason why I was not there.... I flatter myself
that none of my friends ever thought me greatly absorbed in
the sin of avarice, yet I assure you, Jem, that in these
days of poverty I look upon a round dollar with a great deal
of complacency. These rascal dollars are so necessary to the
comfort of life, that next to a fine wife they are most
essential, and their acquisition an object of prime
importance. O Bingham, how blessed it would be to retire
with a decent, clever bag of Rixes to a pleasant country
town, and follow one's own inclination without being
shackled by the duties of a profession!"
To the same friend, whom he now addresses as "dear Squire," he
announces joyfully a wondrous piece of luck:
"My expenses [to Albany] were all amply paid, and on my
return I put my hand in my pocket and found one hundred and
twenty dear delightfuls! Is not that good luck? And these
dear delightfuls were, 'pon honor, all my own; yes, every
dog of them!"
To which we may add from another source, that they were straightway
transferred to his father, to whom they were dear delightfuls indeed,
for he was really getting to the end of his tether.
The schoolmaster lived, it appears, on the easiest terms with his
pupils, some of whom were older than himself. He tells a story of
falling in with one of them on his journey to school, who was mounted
"on the ugliest horse I ever saw or heard of, except Sancho Panza's
pacer." The schoolmaster having two good horses, the pupil mounted one
of them, strapped his bag to his own forlorn animal and drove him
before, where his odd gait and frequent stumblings kept them amused.
At length, arriving at a deep and rapid river,
"this satire on the animal creation, as if to revenge
herself on us for our sarcasms, plunged into the river, then
very high by the freshet, and was wafted down the current
like a bag of oats! I could hardly sit on my horse for
laughter. I am apt to laugh at the vexations of my friends.
The fellow, who was of my own age, and my room-mate, half
checked the current by oaths as big as lobsters, and the old
Rosinante, who was all the while much at her ease, floated
up among the willows far below on the opposite side of the
river."
At the same time he was an innocent young man. If he had any wild oats
in his composition, they were not sown in the days of his youth.
Expecting to pass his life as a country lawyer, having scarcely a
premonition of his coming renown, we find him enjoying the simple
country sports and indulging in the simple village ambitions. He tried
once for the captaincy of a company of militia, and was not elected;
he canvassed a whole regiment to get his brother the post of adjutant,
and failed. At one time he came near abandoning the law, as too high
and perilous for him, and settling down as schoolmaster and clerk of a
court. The assurance of a certain six hundred dollars a year, a house,
and a piece of land, with the prospect of the clerkship by and by, was
so alluring to him that it required all the influence of his family
and friends to make him reject the offer. Even then, in the flush and
vigor of his youth, he was _led_. So was it always. He was never a
leader, but always a follower. Nature made him very large, but so
stinted him in propelling force, that it is doubtful if he had ever
emerged from obscurity if his friends had not urged him on. His
modesty in these innocent days is most touching to witness. After a
long internal conflict, he resolved, in his twentieth year, to "make
one more trial" at mastering the law.
"If I prosecute the profession, I pray God to fortify me
against its temptations. To the wind I dismiss those light
hopes of eminence which ambition inspired and vanity
fostered. To be 'honest, to be capable, to be faithful' to
my client and my conscience, I earnestly hope will be my
first endeavor."
How exceedingly astonished would these affectionate young friends have
been, if they could have looked forward forty years, and seen the
timid law-student Secretary of State, and his ardent young comrade a
clerk in his department. They seemed equals in 1802; in 1845, they had
grown so far apart, that the excellent Bingham writes to Webster as to
a demigod.
In these pleasant early letters of Daniel Webster there are a thousand
evidences of a good heart and of virtuous habits, but not one of a
superior understanding. The total absence of the sceptical spirit
marks the secondary mind. For a hundred and fifty years, _no_ young
man of a truly eminent intellect has accepted his father's creeds
without having first called them into question; and this must be so in
periods of transition. The glorious light which has been coming upon
Christendom for the last two hundred years, and which is now beginning
to pervade the remotest provinces of it, never illumined the mind of
Daniel Webster. Upon coming of age, he joined the Congregational
Church, and was accustomed to open his school with an extempore
prayer. He used the word "Deist" as a term of reproach; he deemed it
"criminal" in Gibbon to write his fifteenth and sixteenth chapters,
and spoke of that author as a "learned, proud, ingenious, foppish,
vain, self-deceived man," who "from Protestant connections deserted to
the Church of Rome, and thence to the faith of Tom Paine." And he
never delivered himself from this narrowness and ignorance. In the
time of his celebrity, he preferred what Sir Walter Scott called "the
genteeler religion of the two," the Episcopal. In his old age, his
idea of a proper sermon was incredibly narrow and provincial. He is
reported to have said, late in life:--
"Many of the ministers of the present day take their text
from St. Paul, and preach from the newspapers. When they do
so, I prefer to enjoy my own thoughts rather than to listen.
I want my pastor to come to me in the spirit of the Gospel,
saying, 'You are mortal! your probation is brief; your work
must be done speedily; you are immortal too. You are
hastening to the bar of God; the Judge standeth before the
door.' When I am thus admonished, I have no disposition to
muse or to sleep."
This does not accord with what is usually observed in our churches,
where sermons of the kind which Mr. Webster extolled dispose many
persons to sleep, though not to muse.
In the same unquestioning manner, he imbibed his father's political
prejudices. We hear this young Federalist call the Republican party
"the Jacobins," just as the reactionists and tories of the present day
speak of the present Republican party as "the radicals." It is amusing
to hear him, in 1802, predict the speedy restoration to power of a
party that was never again to taste its sweets. "Jacobinism and
iniquity," he wrote in his twentieth year, "are so allied in
signification, that the latter always follows the former, just as in
grammar 'the accusative case follows the transitive verb.'" He speaks
of a young friend as "too honest for a Democrat." As late as his
twenty-second year, he was wholly unreconciled to Napoleon, and still
wrote with truly English scorn of "Gallic tastes and Gallic
principles." There is a fine burst in one of his letters of 1804, when
he had been propelled by his brother to Boston to finish his law
studies:--
"Jerome, the brother of the Emperor of the Gauls, is here;
every day you may see him whisking along Cornhill, with the
true French air, with his wife by his side. The lads say
that they intend to prevail on American misses to receive
company in future after the manner of Jerome's wife, that
is, in bed. The gentlemen of Boston (i.e. we Feds) treat
Monsieur with cold and distant respect. They feel, and every
honest man feels, indignant at seeing this lordly
grasshopper, this puppet in prince's clothes, dashing
through the American cities, luxuriously rioting on the
property of Dutch mechanics or Swiss peasants."
This last sentence, written when he was twenty-two years old, is the
first to be found in his published letters which tells anything of the
fire that was latent in him. He was of slow growth; he was forty-eight
years of age before his powers had reached their full development.
When he had nearly completed his studies for the bar, he was again
upon the point of abandoning the laborious career of a lawyer for a
life of obscurity and ease. On this occasion, it was the clerkship of
his father's court, salary fifteen hundred dollars a year, that
tempted him. He jumped at the offer, which promised an immediate
competency for the whole family, pinched and anxious for so many
years. He had no thought but to accept it. With the letter in his
hand, and triumphant joy in his face, he communicated the news to Mr.
Gore, his instructor in the law; thinking of nothing, he tells us, but
of "rushing to the immediate enjoyment of the proffered office." Mr.
Gore, however, exhibited a provoking coolness on the subject. He said
it was very civil in the judges to offer such a compliment to a
brother on the bench, and, of course, a respectful letter of
acknowledgment must be sent. The glowing countenance of the young man
fell at these most unexpected and unwelcome words. They were, to use
his own language, "a shower-bath of ice-water." The old lawyer,
observing his crestfallen condition, reasoned seriously with him, and
persuaded him, against his will, to continue his preparation, for the
bar. At every turning-point of his life, whenever he came to a parting
of the ways, one of which must be chosen and the other forsaken, he
required an impulse from without to push him into the path he was to
go. Except once! Once in his long public life, he seemed to venture
out alone on an unfamiliar road, and lost himself. Usually, when great
powers are conferred on a man, there is also given him a strong
propensity to exercise them, sufficient to carry him through all
difficulties to the suitable sphere. Here, on the contrary, there was
a Great Eastern with only a Cunarder's engine, and it required a tug
to get the great ship round to her course.
Admitted to the bar in his twenty-third year, he dutifully went home
to his father, and opened an office in a New Hampshire village near
by, resolved never again to leave the generous old man while he lived.
Before leaving Boston, he wrote to his friend Bingham, "If I am not
earning my bread and cheese in exactly nine days after my admission, I
shall certainly be a bankrupt";--and so, indeed, it proved. With great
difficulty, he "hired" eighty-five dollars as a capital to begin
business with, and this great sum was immediately lost in its transit
by stage. To any other young man in his situation, such a calamity
would have been, for the moment, crushing; but this young man,
indifferent to _meum_ as to _tuum_, informs his brother that he can in
no conceivable way replace the money, cannot therefore pay for the
books he had bought, believes he is earning his daily bread, and as to
the loss, he has "_no uneasy sensations on that account_." He
concludes his letter with an old song, beginning,
"Fol de dol, dol de dol, di dol,
I'll never make money my idol."
In the New Hampshire of 1805 there was no such thing possible as
leaping at once into a lucrative practice, nor even of slowly
acquiring it. A country lawyer who gained a thousand dollars a year
was among the most successful, and the leader of the bar in New
Hampshire could not earn two thousand. The chief employment of Daniel
Webster, during the first year or two of his practice, was collecting
debts due in New Hampshire to merchants in Boston. His first tin sign
has been preserved to the present day, to attest by its minuteness and
brevity the humble expectations of its proprietor. "D. Webster,
Attorney," is the inscription it bears. The old Court-House still
stands in which he conducted his first suit, before his own father as
presiding judge. Old men in that part of New Hampshire were living
until within these few years, who remembered well seeing this tall,
gaunt, and large-eyed young lawyer rise slowly, as though scarcely
able to get upon his feet, and giving to every one the impression that
he would soon be obliged to sit down from mere physical weakness, and
saying to his father, for the first and last time, "May it please your
Honor." The sheriff of the county, who was also a Webster, used to say
that he felt ashamed to see the family represented at the bar by so
lean and feeble a young man. The tradition is, that he acquitted
himself so well on this occasion that the sheriff was satisfied, and
clients came, with their little suits and smaller fees, in
considerable numbers, to the office of D. Webster, Attorney, who
thenceforth in the country round went by the name of "All-eyes." His
father never heard him speak again. He lived to see Daniel in
successful practice, and Ezekiel a student of law, and died in 1806,
prematurely old. Daniel Webster practised three years in the country,
and then, resigning his business to his brother, established himself
at Portsmouth, the seaport of New Hampshire, then a place of much
foreign commerce. Ezekiel had had a most desperate struggle with
poverty. At one time, when the family, as Daniel observed, was
"heinously unprovided," we see the much-enduring "Zeke" teaching an
Academy by day, an evening school for sailors, and keeping well up
with his class in college besides. But these preliminary troubles were
now at an end, and both the brothers took the places won by so much
toil and self-sacrifice.
Those are noble old towns on the New England coast, the commerce of
which Boston swallowed up forty years ago, while it left behind many a
large and liberally provided old mansion, with a family in it enriched
by ventures to India and China. Strangers in Portsmouth are still
struck by the largeness and elegance of the residences there, and
wonder how such establishments can be maintained in a place that has
little "visible means of support." It was while Portsmouth was an
important seaport that Daniel Webster learned and practised law there,
and acquired some note as a Federalist politician.
The once celebrated Dr. Buckminster was the minister of the
Congregational church at Portsmouth then. One Sunday morning in 1808,
his eldest daughter sitting alone in the minister's pew, a strange
gentleman was shown into it, whose appearance and demeanor strongly
arrested her attention. The slenderness of his frame, the pale yellow
of his complexion, and the raven blackness of his hair, seemed only to
bring out into grander relief his ample forehead, and to heighten the
effect of his deep-set, brilliant eyes. At this period of his life
there was an air of delicacy and refinement about his face, joined to
a kind of strength that women can admire, without fearing. Miss
Buckminster told the family, when she went home from church, that
there had been a remarkable person with her in the pew,--one that she
was sure had "a marked character for good or evil." A few days after,
the remarkable person came to live in the neighborhood, and was soon
introduced to the minister's family as Mr. Daniel Webster, from
Franklin, New Hampshire, who was about to open a law office in
Portsmouth. He soon endeared himself to every person in the minister's
circle, and to no one more than to the minister himself, who, among
other services, taught him the art of preserving his health. The young
man, like the old clergyman, was an early riser, up with the dawn in
summer, and long before the dawn in winter; and both were out of doors
with the sun, each at one end of a long saw, cutting wood for an
appetite. The joyous, uncouth singing and shouting of the newcomer
aroused the late sleepers. Then in to breakfast, where the homely,
captivating humor of the young lawyer kept the table in a roar, and
detained every inmate. "Never was there such an actor lost to the
stage," Jeremiah Mason, his only rival at the New Hampshire bar, used
to say, "as he would have made." Returning in the afternoon from
court, fatigued and languid, his spirits rose again with food and
rest, and the evening was another festival of conversation and
reading. A few months after his settlement at Portsmouth he visited
his native hills, saying nothing respecting the object of his journey;
and returned with a wife,--that gentle and high-bred lady, a
clergyman's daughter, who was the chief source of the happiness of his
happiest years, and the mother of all his children. He improved in
health, his form expanded, his mind grew, his talents ripened, his
fame spread, during the nine years of his residence at this thriving
and pleasant town.
At Portsmouth, too, he had precisely that external stimulus to
exertion which his large and pleasure-loving nature needed. Jeremiah
Mason was, literally speaking, the giant of the American bar, for he
stood six feet seven inches in his stockings. Like Webster, he was the
son of a valiant Revolutionary officer; like Webster, he was an
hereditary Federalist; like Webster, he had a great mass of brain: but
his mind was more active and acquisitive than Webster's, and his
nineteen years of arduous practice at the bar had stored his memory
with knowledge and given him dexterity in the use of it. Nothing shows
the eminence of Webster's talents more than this, that, very early in
his Portsmouth career, he should have been regarded at the bar of New
Hampshire as the man to be employed against Jeremiah Mason, and his
only fit antagonist. Mason was a vigilant, vigorous opponent,--sure to
be well up in the law and the facts of a cause, sure to detect a flaw
in the argument of opposing counsel. It was in keen encounters with
this wary and learned man that Daniel Webster learned his profession;
and this he always acknowledged. "If," he said once in conversation,--
"if anybody thinks I am somewhat familiar with the law on
some points, and should be curious to know how it happened,
tell him that Jeremiah Mason compelled me to study it. _He_
was my master."
It is honorable, too, to both of them, that, rivals as they were, they
were fast and affectionate friends, each valuing in the other the
qualities in which he was surpassed by him, and each sincerely
believing that the other was the first man of his time and country.
"They say," in Portsmouth, that Mason did not shrink from
remonstrating with his friend upon his carelessness with regard to
money; but, finding the habit inveterate and the man irresistible,
desisted. Webster himself says that two thousand dollars a year was
all that the best practice in New Hampshire could be made to yield;
and that that was inadequate to the support of his family of a wife
and three little children. Two thousand dollars in Portsmouth, in
1812, was certainly equal, in purchasing power, to six thousand of the
ineffectual things that now pass by the name of dollars; and upon such
an income large families in a country town contrive to live, ride, and
save.
He was a strenuous Federalist at Portsmouth, took a leading part in
the public meetings of the party, and won great distinction as its
frequent Fourth-of-July orator. All those mild and economical measures
by which Mr. Jefferson sought to keep the United States from being
drawn into the roaring vortex of the great wars in Europe, he opposed,
and favored the policy of preparing the country for defence, not by
gunboats and embargoes, but by a powerful navy of frigates and ships
of the line. His Fourth-of-July orations, if we may judge of them by
the fragments that have been found, show that his mind had
strengthened more than it had advanced. His style wonderfully improved
from eighteen to twenty-five; and he tells us himself why it did. He
discovered, he says, that the value, as well as the force, of a
sentence, depends chiefly upon its meaning, not its language; and that
great writing is that in which much is said in few words, and those
words the simplest that will answer the purpose. Having made this
notable discovery, he became a great eraser of adjectives, and toiled
after simplicity and directness. Mr. Everett quotes a few sentences
from his Fourth-of-July oration of 1806, when he was twenty-four,
which shows an amazing advance upon the effort of his eighteenth year,
quoted above:--
"Nothing is plainer than this: if we will have commerce, we
must protect it. This country is commercial as well as
agricultural. _Indissoluble bonds connect him who ploughs
the land with him who ploughs the sea_. Nature has placed us
in a situation favorable to commercial pursuits, and no
government can alter the destination. Habits confirmed by
two centuries are not to be changed. An immense portion of
our property is on the waves. Sixty or eighty thousand of
our most useful citizens are there, and are entitled to such
protection from the government as their case requires."
How different this compact directness from the tremendous fulmination
of the Dartmouth junior, who said:--