THE SEVENTH OF MARCH SPEECH.
Were I to undertake a complete account of Mr. Webster’s public acts
during the last ten years of his life, I should require to write a
volume upon this part of his life alone. This does not enter into my
plan. I aim only to give my young readers a general idea of the public
and private life of the great statesman, and must refer them for
particulars to the valuable Life by George Ticknor Curtis, already more
than once referred to.
Mr. Webster was strongly opposed to the annexation of Texas, foreseeing
that it would justly be resented by the people of the North as
tending to increase “the obvious inequality which exists in the
representation of the people in Congress by extending slavery and slave
representation.”
Slavery was the one great flaw in our otherwise glorious system of
government. It was a standing reproach among the European nations that
a government which claimed to be free held in forcible subjection
three million slaves. It sowed dissension between the North and the
South, and seemed to be the entering wedge destined ere long to split
asunder the great republic. There were men on both sides of Mason and
Dixon’s line who openly favored separation, but Mr. Webster was not
one of these. His ardent devotion to the Union we have already seen
in the glowing peroration to his memorable speech against Hayne. He
watched with an anxiety which he did not attempt to conceal the growing
exasperation of feeling between the two sections. Though he took the
Northern view, he saw that there must be mutual concessions or the
Union would be dissolved. He did not wish that event to come in his
time, and it was in this frame of mind that he made his last great
speech in the Senate—what is known as the seventh of March speech.
It was a strong and temperate statement of the existing condition of
affairs, and of the necessity of compromise. In making this speech Mr.
Webster was fully aware that he was hazarding his popularity—nay, was
sure to lose it—that he would grieve his best friends, and excite a
storm of indignation at the North. He was not mistaken. The minds of
men were in no mood for temperate counsels. They were in no mood to
appreciate the patriotic motives which actuated the great statesman.
He was charged with falling from honor and making undue concessions to
slavery. Upon this last point I shall express no opinion. I only claim
that Mr. Webster’s motives were pure, and that though he may have gone
too far in his concessions, he was influenced thereto by the depth of
his devotion to the Union. There were not wanting those who charged him
with making in his speech a bid for the Presidency, forgetting that he
could not have injured his chances more effectually than by stirring up
against himself his warmest political friends.
That Mr. Webster had an honorable ambition to serve his country in that
great office—the greatest in its gift—no one will dispute. He knew his
own fitness, and would have rejoiced to crown a life of high service
with this elevated trust. But I have said elsewhere that it is only in
an ideal republic that the greatest citizens reach the highest posts,
and our republic is not an ideal one.
In the light of our present experience we can see that Mr. Webster was
wrong in supposing that the republic could go on indefinitely with
slavery as its corner-stone. Any compromise could be only for a time.
But he was an old man—sixty-eight years of age—grown cautious and
conservative with advancing years, and he could not see through the
clouds that gathered before him.
With this brief vindication of his motives I proceed to give an extract
from his last great speech:
“Secession! Peaceable secession! Sir, your eyes and mine are never
destined to see that miracle. The dismemberment of this vast country
without convulsion! The breaking up of the fountains of the great deep
without ruffling the surface! Who is so foolish—I beg everybody’s
pardon—as to expect any such thing? Sir, he who sees these States now
revolving in harmony around a common center, and expects to see them
quit their places and fly off without convulsion, may look the next
moment to see the heavenly bodies rush from their spheres and jostle
against each other in the realms of space, without causing the wreck
of the universe! There can be no such thing as a peaceable secession.
Peaceable secession is an impossibility. Is the great Constitution
under which we live, covering this whole country, is it to be thawed
and melted away by secession, as the snows on the mountain melt under
the influence of a vernal sun, disappear and run off? No, sir! No, sir!
I will not state what might produce the disruption of the Union; but,
sir, I see as plainly as I see the sun in heaven what that disruption
must produce; I see that it must produce war, and such a war as I will
not describe in its two-fold character.
“Peaceable secession! Peaceable secession! The concurrent agreement
of all the members of this great government to separate! A voluntary
separation with alimony on one side, and on the other! Why, what
would be the result? Where is the line to be drawn? What States are
to secede? What is to remain America? What am I to be? An American no
longer? Am I to become a sectional man, a local man, a separatist, with
no country in common with the gentlemen who sit around me here, or who
fill the other House of Congress? Heaven forbid! Where is the flag of
the republic to remain? Where is the eagle still to tower? or is he to
cower, and shrink, and fall to the ground? Why, sir, our ancestors,
our fathers, and our grandfathers, those of them who are still living
among us with prolonged lives, would rebuke and reproach us; and our
children and our grandchildren would cry out shame upon us, if we of
this generation should dishonor these ensigns of the power of the
government and the harmony of the union which is every day felt among
us with so much joy and gratitude. What is to become of the army? What
is to become of the navy? What is to become of the public lands? How is
each of the thirty States to defend itself?
“I know, although the idea has not been stated distinctly, there is
to be, or it is supposed possible that there will be, a Southern
confederacy. I do not mean, when I allude to this statement, that any
one seriously contemplates such a state of things. I do not mean to
say that it is true, but I have heard it suggested elsewhere that the
idea has been entertained that, after the dissolution of this Union
a Southern Confederacy might be formed. I am sorry, sir, that it has
ever been thought of, talked of or dreamed of, in the wildest flights
of human imagination. But the idea, so far as it exists, must be of
a separation, assigning the slave States to one side, and the free
States to the other. Sir, I may express myself too strongly, perhaps,
but there are impossibilities in the moral as well as in the physical
world, and I hold the idea of a separation of these States, those
that are free to form one government, and those that are slaveholding
to form another, as such an impossibility. We could not separate the
States by any such line if we were to draw it. We could not sit down
here to-day and draw a line of separation that would satisfy any five
men in the country. There are natural causes that would keep and tie us
together, and there are social and domestic relations which we could
not break if we would, and which we should not if we could.”
In describing the consequences of secession it must be admitted
that Mr. Webster spoke like a true prophet. All the evils that he
predicted—the war such as the world had never seen—came to pass, but
out of it the Union emerged stronger than ever, with its chief burden
and reproach thrown overboard. Much as the war cost, we feel to-day
that we are the better off that it was fought. Let us not blame Mr.
Webster that he could not penetrate the future, and strove so hard to
avert it. Probably his speech postponed it, but nothing could avert it.
Can we doubt that if the great statesman were living to-day he would
thank God that He had solved the great problem that had baffled the
wisdom of the wisest, and brought substantial good from fratricidal
strife?
Among those who listened with rapt attention to Mr. Webster was John C.
Calhoun, his great compeer, who had risen with difficulty from the bed
where he lay fatally sick, to hear the senator from Massachusetts. “A
tall, gaunt figure, wrapped in a long black cloak, with deep, cavernous
black eyes, and a thick mass of snow-white hair brushed back from the
large brow,” he seemed like a visitant from the next world. It was his
last appearance in the Senate. Before March was over he had gone to his
rest!