CENTENNIAL TRIBUTES.
On the 18th of January, 1882, the hundredth birthday of Daniel Webster,
the Marshfield Club assembled at the Parker House, in Boston, to
take suitable notice of the anniversary. Though thirty years had
elapsed since his death there was one at least present, Hon. Robert
C. Winthrop, who had been intimately associated with him in public
life, having been his successor in the Senate, and a warm personal
friend. Most notable among the addresses was that of Gov. Long, of
Massachusetts, which I shall venture to insert here, as containing
in brief compass a fitting estimate of the great statesman whom the
company had assembled to honor.
GOVERNOR LONG’S ADDRESS.
“It is but a poor tribute that even the most eloquent voice, least
of all mine, can pay for Massachusetts to the memory of her greatest
statesman, her mightiest intellect and her most powerful orator. Among
her sons he towers like the lonely and massive shaft on Bunker Hill,
upon the base and the crest of which his name is emblazoned clearer
than if chiseled deep in its granite cubes. For years he was her
synonym. Among the States he sustained her at that proud height which
Winthrop and Sam Adams gave her in the colonial and provincial days.
With what matchless grandeur he defended her! With what overwhelming
power he impressed her convictions upon the national life! God seems
to appoint men to special work, and, that done, the very effort of
its achievement exhausts them, and they rise not again to the summit
of their meridian. So it was with Webster. He knows little even of
written constitutions and frames of government who does not know
that they exist almost less in the letter than in the interpretation
and construction of the letter. In this light it is not too much to
say that the Constitution of the United States, as it existed when
it carried our country through the greatest peril that ever tested
it, was the crystallization of the mind of Webster as well as of its
original framers. It came from them and was only accepted by some of
our own as a compact of States, sovereign in all but certain enumerated
powers delegated to a central government. He made it the crucible of
a welded Union—the charter of one great country, the United States
of America. He made the States a nation and enfolded them in its
single banner. It was the overwhelming logic of his discussion, the
household familiarity of his simple but irresistible statement, that
gave us munition to fight the war for the preservation of the Union and
the abolition of slavery. It was his eloquence, clear as crystal and
precipitating itself in the school-books and literature of a people,
which had trained up the generation of twenty years ago to regard
this nation as one, to love its flag with a patriotism that knew no
faction or section, to be loyal to the whole country, and to find in
its Constitution power to suppress any hand or combination raised
against it. The great Rebellion of 1861 went down hardly more before
the cannon of Grant and Farragut than the thunder of Webster’s reply
to Hayne. He knew not the extent of his own achievement. His greatest
failure was that he rose not to the height and actual stroke of his
own resistless argument, and that he lacked the sublime inspiration,
the disentanglement and the courage to let the giant he had created
go upon his errand, first of force, and then, through that, of surer
peace. He had put the work and genius of more than an ordinary lifetime
of service into the arching and knitting of the Union, and this he
could not bear to put to the final test; his great heart was sincere
in the prayer that his eyes might not behold the earthquake that would
shake it to those foundations which, though he knew it not, he had made
so strong that a succeeding generation saw them stand the shock as
the oak withstands the storm. Men are not gods, and it needed in him
that he should rise to a moral sublimity and daring as lofty as the
intellectual heights above which he soared with unequaled strength. So
had he been godlike.
“A great man touches the heart of the people as well as their
intelligence. They not only admire, they also love him. It sometimes
seems as if they sought in him some weakness of our common human
nature, that they may chide him for it, forgive it, and so endear him
to themselves the more. Massachusetts had her friction with the younger
Adams, only to lay him away with profounder honor, and to remember him
devotedly as the defender of the right of petition and ‘the old man
eloquent.’ She forgave the overweening conceit of Sumner, she revoked
her unjust censure of him, and now points her youth to him in his high
niche as the unsullied patriot, without fear and without reproach, who
stood and spoke for equal rights, and whose last great service was to
demand and enforce his country’s just claims against the dishonorable
trespass of the cruisers of that England he had so much admired.
Massachusetts smote, too, and broke the heart of Webster, her idol, and
then broke her own above his grave, and to-day writes his name highest
upon her roll of statesmen. It seems disjointed to say that, with such
might as his, the impression that comes from his face upon the wall,
as from his silhouette upon the background of our history, is that of
sadness—the sadness of the great deep eyes, the sadness of the lonely
shore he loved, and by which he sleeps. The story of Webster from the
beginning is the very pathos of romance. A minor chord runs through it
like the tenderest note in a song. What eloquence of tears is in that
narrative, which reveals in this giant of intellectual strength the
heart, the single loving heart, of a child, and in which he describes
the winter sleighride up the New Hampshire hills when his father told
him that, at whatever cost, he should have a college education, and he,
too full to speak, while a warm glow ran all over him, laid his head
upon his father’s shoulder and wept!
“The greatness of Webster and his title to enduring gratitude have
two illustrations. He taught the people of the United States, in the
simplicity of common understanding, the principles of the Constitution
and government of the country, and he wrought for them, in a style of
matchless strength and beauty, the literature of statesmanship. From
his lips flowed the discussion of constitutional law, of economic
philosophy, of finance, of international right, of national grandeur
and of the whole range of high public themes, so clear and judicial
that it was no longer discussion, but judgment. To-day—and so it will
be while the republic endures—the student and the legislator turn
to the full fountain of his statement for the enunciation of these
principles. What other authority is quoted, or holds even the second
or third place? Even his words have imbedded themselves in the common
phraseology, and come to the tongue like passages from the Psalms or
the poets. I do not know that a sentence or a word of Sumner’s repeats
itself in our every-day parlance. The exquisite periods of Everett are
recalled like the consummate work of some master of music, but no note
or refrain sings itself over and over again to our ears. The brilliant
eloquence of Choate is like the flash of a bursting rocket, lingering
upon the retina indeed after it has faded from the wings of the night,
but as elusive of our grasp as spray-drops that glisten in the sun. The
fiery enthusiasm of Andrews did, indeed, burn some of his heart-beats
forever into the sentiment of Massachusetts; but Webster made his
language the very household words of a nation. They are the library
of a people. They inspired and still inspire patriotism. They taught
and still teach loyalty. They are the school-book of the citizen. They
are the inwrought and accepted fiber of American politics. If the
temple of our republic shall ever fall, they will ‘still live’ above
the ground like those great foundation stones in ancient ruins, which
remain in lonely grandeur, unburied in the dust that springs to turf
over all else, and making men wonder from what rare quarry and by what
mighty force they came. To Webster, as to few other men, is it due
that to-day, wherever a son of the United States, at home or abroad,
‘beholds the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored
throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies
streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted,
nor a single star obscured,’ he can utter a prouder boast than, _Civis
Romanus sum_. For he can say, I am an American citizen.”
As a fitting pendant to this eloquent tribute I quote a portion of the
address of Mr. Winthrop, whose name, personally and by inheritance,
makes him one of the most eminent sons of Massachusetts:
“And, after all, Mr. President, what are all the fine things which
have ever been said of him, or which ever can be said of him, to-night
or a hundred years hence, compared with the splendid record which
he has left of himself as an advocate in the courts, as a debater
in the Senate, as an orator before the people? We do not search out
for what was said about Pericles or Demosthenes or Cicero or Burke.
It is enough for us to read their orations. There are those, indeed,
who may justly desire to be measured by the momentary opinions which
others have formed and expressed about them. There are not a few who
may well be content to live on the applauses and praises which their
efforts have called forth from immediate hearers and admirers. They
will enjoy at least a reflected and traditional fame. But Webster will
always stand safest and strongest on his own showing. His fame will
be independent of praise or dispraise from other men’s lips. He can
be measured to his full altitude, as a thinker, a writer, a speaker,
only by the standard of his own immortal productions. That masterly
style, that pure Saxon English, that clear and cogent statement, that
close and clinching logic, that power of going down to the depths
and up to the heights of any great argument, letting the immaterial
or incidental look out for itself, those vivid descriptions, those
magnificent metaphors, those thrilling appeals—not introduced as mere
ornaments wrought out in advance, and stored up for an opportunity of
display, but sparkling and blazing out in the very heat of an effort,
like gems uncovering themselves in the working of a mine—these are some
of the characteristics which will secure for Webster a fame altogether
his own, and will make his works a model and a study, long after most
of those who have praised him, or who have censured him, shall be
forgotten.
“What if those six noble volumes of his were obliterated from the
roll of American literature and American eloquence! What if those
great speeches, recently issued in a single compendious volume, had
no existence! What if those consummate defenses of the Constitution
and the Union had never been uttered, and their instruction and
inspiration had been lost to us during the fearful ordeal to which
that Constitution and that Union have since been subjected? Are we
quite sure that we should have had that Constitution as it was, and the
Union as it is, to be fought for, if the birth we are commemorating had
never occurred—if that bright Northern Star had never gleamed above
the hills of New Hampshire? Let it be, if you please, that its light
was not always serene and steady. Let it be that mist and clouds
sometimes gathered over its disk, and hid its guiding rays from many a
wistful eye. Say even, if you will, that to some eyes it seemed once
to be shooting madly from its sphere. Make every deduction which his
bitterest enemies have ever made for any alleged deviation from the
course which he had marked out for it by others, or which it seemed to
have marked out for itself, in its path across the sky. Still, still
there is radiance and glory enough left, as we contemplate its whole
golden track, to make us feel and acknowledge that it had no fellow in
our firmament.”
THE END.
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Transcriber's Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. All other
spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.
Italics are represented thus _italic_.
End of Project Gutenberg's From Farm Boy to Senator, by Horatio Alger Jr.