History of the United States, Volume 3

Webster's Home at Marshfield. Mass. The War of 1812 revealed the need of better means for direct communication with the remote sections of the Union. Transportation to Detroit had cost fifty cents per pound of ammunition, sixty dollars per barrel of flour. All admitted that improved internal routes were necessary. The question was whether the general Government had a right to construct them without amendment to the Constitution. The Whigs, like the old Federalists, affirmed such right, appealing to Congress's power to establish post-roads, wage war, supervise inter-state trade, and conserve the common defence and general welfare. As a rule, the Democrats, being strict constructionists, denied such right. Some of them justified outlay upon national rivers and commercial harbors under the congressional power of raising revenue and regulating commerce. Others conceded the rightfulness of subsidies to States even for bettering inland routes. Treasury surplus at times, and the many appropriations which, by common consent, had been made under Monroe and later for the old National Road, encouraged the whig contention; but the whig policy had never met general approval down to the time when the whole question was taken out of politics by the rise of the railroad system after 1832. The National Road, meantime, extending across Ohio and Indiana on its way to St. Louis, was made over in 1830 to the States through which it passed.
Daniel Webster. From a picture by Healy at the State Department, Washington. The Whig Party deserves great praise as the especial repository, through several decades, of the spirit of nationality in our country. It cherished this, and with the utmost boldness proclaimed doctrines springing from it, at a time when the Democracy, for no other reason than that it had begun as a state rights party, foolishly combated these. Yet Whiggism was mightier in theories than in deeds, in political cunning than in statesmanship. It was far too fearful, on the whole, lest the country should not be sufficiently governed. To secure power it allied itself now with the Anti-Masons, strong after 1826 in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania; and again with the Nullifiers of South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, led by Calhoun, Troup, and White. It did the latter by making Tyler, an out-and-out Nullifier, its Vice-President in 1840. A leading Whig during nearly all his political career was John Quincy Adams, one of the ablest, most patriotic, and most successful presidents this country has ever had. He possessed a thorough education, mainly acquired abroad, where, sojourning with his distinguished father, he had enjoyed while still a youth better opportunities for diplomatic training than many of our diplomatists have known in a lifetime. He went to the United States Senate in 1803 as a Federalist. Disgusted with that party, he turned Republican, losing his place. From 1806 to 1809 he was professor in Harvard College. In the latter year Madison sent him Minister to St. Petersburg. He was commissioner at Ghent, then Minister to England, then Monroe's Secretary of State, then President.