A CRISIS AND A COMPROMISE
In 1840 there were 200 Abolition societies, with a membership of over 200,000. Agitation had created all over the North a spirit of hostility to slavery as it existed in the South, and especially to the admission of new slave States into the Union. In 1840 the struggle over the application of Texas for admission into the Union had already, for three years, been mooted. Objections to the admission of the new State were many, such as: American adventurers had wrongfully wrested control of the new State from Mexico; boundary lines were unsettled; war with Mexico would follow, etc.; but chiefly, Texas was a slave State, which was, in the South, a strong reason for annexation. There were, however, many sound and unanswerable arguments for the admission of the new State, just such as had influenced Jefferson in purchasing the Louisiana territory: Texas was contiguous, her territory and resources immense.
On the issue thus joined the first great gun had been fired by Dr. Channing, who, though still more moderate than some, might now be classed as an Abolitionist. August 1, 1837, he wrote a long open letter to Henry Clay against annexation, and in that letter he said:
To me it seems not only the right but the duty of the Free States, in case of the annexation of Texas, to say to the slave-holding States, "We regard this act as the dissolution of the Union; the essential conditions of the National Compact are violated."[36]
This was very like the pronunciamento already made by Garrison—"no union with slavery."
The underlying reasons that controlled Southern statesmen in this contest over Texas, and the motives that animated them in the fierce battles they fought later for new slave States, are thus stated by Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, of New England.[37]
It should in justice be remembered that the effort at that period to enlarge the area of slavery was an effort on the part of the South, dictated by a desire to remain in the Union, and not to accept the issue of an inherent incompatibility of a political union between slave-holding and non-slave-holding States.
In 1840 the first effort for the annexation of Texas, by treaty, was defeated in the Senate.
If the Southerners had been as ready to accept the doctrine of an inherent incompatibility between slave and free States as were Dr. Channing and those other Abolitionists who were now declaring for "no union with slave-holders," they would at once have seceded and joined Texas; but the South still loved the Union, and strove, down to 1860, persistently, and often passionately, for power that would enable it to remain safely in its folds.
Texas was finally admitted in 1845, after annexation had been passed on by the people in the presidential election of 1844. In that election Clay was defeated by the Abolitionists. Because Clay was not unreservedly against annexation the Abolitionists drew from the Whigs in New York State enough votes, casting them for Birney, to defeat Clay and elect Polk; and now Abolitionism was a factor in national politics.
The two great national parties were the Democrats and the Whigs, the voters somewhat equally divided between them. For years both parties had regarded the Abolitionists precisely as did the non-partisan meeting at Faneuil Hall, in August, 1835—as a band of agitators, organized for the purpose of interfering with slavery where it was none of their business; and both parties had meted out to this new and, as they deemed it, pestilent sect, unstinted condemnation. But at last the voters of this despised cult had turned a presidential election and were making inroads in both parties. Half a dozen Northern States, in which in 1835 "no protest had been made against the fugitive slave law of 1793," had already passed "personal liberty laws" intended to obstruct and nullify that law. And now it was "slave-catchers" and not Abolitionists who were being mobbed in the North.
Boston had reversed its attitude toward the Abolitionists. On May 31, 1849, the New England Anti-Slavery Society was holding its annual convention in that very Faneuil Hall where, in 1835, Abolitionism had been so roundly condemned; and now Wendell Phillips, pointing to one of two fugitive slaves, who then sat triumphantly on the platform, said, "amid great applause, ... 'We say that they may make their little laws in Washington, but that Faneuil Hall repeals them, in the name of the humanity of Massachusetts.'"[38]
Poets headed by Whittier and Longfellow, authors like Emerson and Lowell, and orators like Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips, had joined the agitators, and all united in assaulting the fugitive slave law. The following, from James Russell Lowell's "Biglow Papers," No. 1, June, 1840, is a specimen of the literature that was stirring up hostility against slavery and the "slave-catcher" in the breasts of many thousands, who were joining in an anti-slavery crusade while disdaining companionship with the Abolitionists:
"Ain't it cute to see a Yankee
Take such everlastin' pains
All to get the Devil's Thankee
Helpin' on 'em weld their chains?"
W'y it's jest es clear es figgers,
Clear es one and one makes two,
Chaps that makes black slaves of niggers
Want to make w'ite slaves o' you.
In the meantime the people of the South, much excited, were resorting to repression, passing laws to prevent slaves from being taught to read, and laws, in some States, inhibiting assemblages of slaves above given numbers, unless some white person were present—all as safeguards against insurrection. Thus, in 1835, an indictment was found in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, against one Williams, who had never been in Alabama, for circulating there an alleged incendiary document, and Governor Gayle made requisition on Governor Marcy, of New York, for the extradition of Williams. Governor Marcy denied the request. The case was the same as that more recently decided by the Supreme Court of the United States, when it held that editors of New York and Indiana papers could not be brought to the District of Columbia for trial.
The South, all the while clamoring to have the agitators put down, had by still other means than these contributed to the ever-increasing excitement in the North. Southerners had mobbed Abolitionists, and whipped and driven out of the country persons found in possession of The Liberator or suspected of circulating other incendiary literature. And violence in the South against the Abolitionists had precisely the same effect on the Northern mind as the violence against them in the North had from 1835 to 1838, but there was this difference: the refugee from the distant South, whether he were an escaped slave or a fleeing Abolitionist, could color and exaggerate the wrongs he had suffered and so parade himself as a martyr. While this was true, it was also quite often true that the outrage committed in the South against the suspect was real enough—a mob had whipped and expelled him without any trial. And this is another of the lessons as to the evil effects of mob law that crop out all through the history of the anti-slavery crusade. No good can come from violating the law.
In 1848 another presidential election turned on the anti-slavery vote, this time again in New York State. Anti-slavery Democrats bolted the Democratic ticket, thus electing General Taylor, the Whig candidate.
In the canvass preceding this election originated, we are told, the catch-phrase applied to Cass, the Democratic candidate—"a Northern man with Southern principles." The phrase soon became quite common, South and North—"a Southern man with Northern principles," and vice versa.
The invention and use of it in 1848 shows the progress that had been made in arraying one section of the Union against the other. Later, a telling piece of doggerel in Southern canvasses, and it must also have been used North, was
He wired in and wired out,
Leaving the people all in doubt,
Whether the snake that made the track
Was going North, or coming back.
Over the admission of California in 1849 there was another battle. California, 734 miles long, with about 50,000 people (less than the usual number), and with a constitution improvised under military government, applied for admission as a State. Southerners insisted on extending the line of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific, thereby making of the new territory two States. The South had been much embittered by the opposition to the admission of Texas. Texas was, nearly all of it, below the Missouri Compromise line, and the South thought it was equitably entitled to come in under that agreement. Its case, too, differed from that of Missouri, which already belonged to the United States when it applied for admission as a State. Texas, with all its vast wealth, was asking to come in without price.
Another continuing and increasing cause of distraction had been the use made by Abolitionists of the right of petition. As already shown, petitions to Congress against slavery had been received without question till 1836, when Northern conservatives and Southern members, hoping to abate this source of agitation, had combined to pass a resolution to lay them on the table, which meant that they were to be no further noticed. The Abolitionists were so delighted over the indefensible position into which they had driven the conservatives—the "gag law"—that they continued, up to the crisis of 1850, with unflagging zeal to hurry in monster petitions, one after another. The debates provoked by the presentation of these petitions, and the more and more heated discussions in Congress of slavery in the States, which was properly a local and not a national question, now attracted still wider public attention. The Abolitionists had almost succeeded in arraying the entire sections against each other, in making of the South and North two hostile nations. Professor John W. Burgess, dean of the Faculty of Political Science in Columbia University, says: "It would not be extravagant to say that the whole course of the internal history of the United States from 1836 to 1861 was more largely determined by the struggle in Congress, over the Abolition petitions and the use of the mails for the Abolition literature, than anything else."[39]
The South had its full share in the hot debates that took place over these matters in Congress. Its congressmen were quite as aggressive as those from the North, and they were accused of being imperious in manner, when demanding that a stop should be put to Abolition petitions, and Abolition literature going South in the mails.
There was another cause of complaint from the South, and this was grave. By the "two underground railroads" that had been established, slaves, estimated at 2,000 annually, abducted or voluntarily escaping, were secretly escorted into or through the free States to Canada. To show how all this was then regarded by those who sympathized with the Abolitionists, and how it is still looked upon by some modern historians, the following is given from Hart's "Abolition and Slavery":
"The underground railroad was manned chiefly by orderly citizens, members of churches, and philanthropical citizens. To law-abiding folk what could be more delightful than the sensation of aiding an oppressed slave, exasperating a cruel master, and at the same time incurring the penalties of defying an unrighteous law?"
Southerners at that time thought that conductors on that line were practising, and readers of the above paragraph will probably think that Dr. Hart in his attractive rhetoric is now extolling in his history, "higher law doctrines."
It is undoubtedly true that, in 1850, a large majority of the Northern people strongly disapproved of the Abolitionists and their methods. Modern historians carefully point out the difference between the great body of Northern anti-slavery people and the Abolitionists. Nevertheless, here were majorities in eleven Northern States voting for, and sustaining, the legislators who passed and kept upon the statute books laws which were intended to enable Southern slaves to escape from their masters. The enactment and the support of these laws was an attack upon the constitutional rights of slave-holders; and Southern people looked upon all the voters who sustained these laws, and all the anti-slavery lecturers, speakers, pulpit orators, and writers of the North, as engaged with the Abolitionists in one common crusade against slavery. From the Southern stand-point a difference between them could only be made by a Hudibras:
He was in logic a great critic
Profoundly skilled in analytic,
He could distinguish and divide
A hair 'twixt South and South West side.
As to how much of the formidable anti-slavery sentiment of that day had been created by the Abolitionists, we have this opinion of a distinguished English traveller and observer. Mr. L. W. A. Johnston was in Washington, in 1850, studying America. He says:
"Extreme men like Garrison seldom have justice done to them. It is true they may be impracticable, both as to their measures and their men, but that unmixed evil is the result of their exertions, all history of opinion in every country, I think, contradicts. Such ultra men are as necessary as the more moderate and reasonable advocates of any growing opinion; and, as an impartial person, who never happened to fall in with one of the party in the course of my tour, I must express my belief that the present wide diffusion of anti-slavery sentiment in the United States is, in no small degree, owing to their exertions."[40]
And Professor Smith, of Williams College, speaking of the anti-slavery feeling in the North in 1850, says:
"This sentiment of the free States regarding slavery was to a large degree the result of an agitation for its abolition which had been active for a score of years (1831-1850) without any positive results."[41]
But no matter what had produced it, the anti-slavery sentiment that pervaded the North in 1850 boded ill to slavery and to the Constitution, and the South was bitterly complaining. Congress met in December, 1849, and was to sit until October, 1850. Lovers of the Union, North and South, watched its proceedings with the deepest anxiety. The South was much excited. The continual torrent of abuse to which it was subjected, the refusal to allow slavery in States to be created from territory in the South-west that was below the parallel of the Missouri Compromise, and the complete nullification of the fugitive slave law, seemed to many to be no longer tolerable, and from sundry sources in that section came threats of secession.
In 1849-50 the South was demanding a division of California, an efficient fugitive slave law, and that the territories of New Mexico and Arizona should be organized with no restrictions as to slavery. Other minor demands were unimportant.
Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Stephen A. Douglas, Lewis Cass, and other conservative leaders came forward and, after long and heated debates in Congress, the Compromise of 1850 was agreed on. To satisfy the North, California, as a whole, came in as a free State, and the slave trade was abolished in the District of Columbia. To satisfy the South, a new and stringent fugitive slave law was agreed on, and the territories of New Mexico and Arizona were organized with no restrictions as to slavery.
In bringing about this compromise, Daniel Webster was, next to Clay, the most conspicuous figure. He was the favorite son of New England and the greatest statesman in all the North. On the 7th of March, 1850, Mr. Webster made one of the greatest speeches of his life on the Compromise measures. Rising above the sectional prejudices of the hour, he spoke for the Constitution and the Union. The manner in which he and his reputation were treated by popular historians in the North, for half a century afterward, on account of this speech, is the most pathetic and, at the same time, the most instructive story in the whole history of the anti-slavery crusade.
Mr. Webster was under the ban of Northern public opinion for all this half a century, not because of inconsistency between that speech and his former avowals, an averment often made and never proven, but because he was consistent. He stood squarely upon his record, and the venom of the assaults that were afterward made upon him was just in proportion to the love and veneration which had been his before he offended. His offence was that he would not move with the anti-slavery movement.[42] He did not stand with his section in a sectional dispute.
Henry Clay, old and feeble, had come back into the Senate to render his last service to his country. He was the author of the Compromise. Daniel Webster was everywhere known as the champion of the Union. Henry Clay was known as the "Old Man Eloquent," and he now spoke with all his old-time fire; but Webster's great speech probably had more influence on the result.
Before taking up Mr. Webster's speech his previous attitude toward slavery must be noted. The purpose of the friends of the Union was, of course, to effect a compromise that would, if possible, put an end to sectional strife. Compromise means concession, and a compromise of political differences, made by statesmen, may involve some concession of view previously held by those who advocate as well as by those who accept it. Webster thought his section of the Union should now make concessions.
Fanaticism, however, concedes nothing; it never compromises, although statesmanship does. One of the most notable utterances of Edmund Burke was:
"All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter."
Great statesmen, on great occasions, speak not only to their countrymen and for the time being, but they speak to all mankind and for all time. So spoke Burke in that famous sentence when advocating, in the British Parliament in 1776, "conciliation with America"; and so did Daniel Webster speak, in the Senate of the United States, on the 7th of March, 1850, for "the Constitution and the Union." If George III and Lord North had heeded Burke, and if the British government and people, from that day forth, had followed the wise counsels given in that speech by their greatest statesman, all the English-speaking peoples of the world, now numbering over 170,000,000, might have been to-day under one government, that government commanding the peace of the world. And if all the people of the United States in 1850 and from that time on, had heeded the words of Daniel Webster, we should have been spared the bloodiest war in the book of time; every State of the Union would have been left free to solve its own domestic problems, and it is not too much to say that these problems would have been solved in full accord with the advancing civilization of the age.
The sole charge of inconsistency against Webster that has in it a shadow of truth relates to the proposition he made in his speech as to the "Wilmot proviso." That celebrated proviso was named for David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, its author. It provided against slavery in all the territory acquired from Mexico. The South had opposed the Wilmot proviso because the territory in question, much of it, was south of the Missouri Compromise line extended. Mr. Webster had often voted for the Wilmot proviso, as all knew. In his speech for the Compromise, by which the South was urged to and did give up its contentions as to the admission of California, and its contentions as to the slave trade in the District of Columbia, Webster argued that the North might forego the proviso as to New Mexico and Arizona for the reason that the proviso was, as to these territories, immaterial. Those territories, he argued, would never come in as slave States, because the God of nature had so determined. Climate and soil would forbid. Time vindicated this argument. In 1861 Charles Francis Adams said, in Congress, that New Mexico, open to slave-holders and their slaves for more than ten years, then had only twelve slaves domiciled on the surface of over 200,000 square miles of her extent.[43]
Daniel Webster's services to the cause of the Union, the preservation of which had been the passion of his life, had been absolutely unparalleled. It is perhaps true that without him Abraham Lincoln and the armies of the Union in 1861-65 would have been impossible. The sole and, as he then stated and as time proved, immaterial concession this champion of the Union now (1850) made for the sake of preserving the Union was his proposition as to New Mexico and Arizona.
Henry Clay spoke before Webster. These words were the key-note of Clay's great speech: "In my opinion the body politic cannot be preserved unless this agitation, this distraction, this exasperation, which is going on between the two sections of the country, shall cease."
The country waited with anxiety to hear from Webster. Hundreds of suggestions and appeals went to him. Both sides were hopeful.[44] Anti-slavery people knew his aversion to slavery. He had never countenanced anti-slavery agitation, but he had voted for the Wilmot proviso. They knew, too, that he had long been ambitious to be President, and, carried away by their enthusiasm, they hoped that Webster would swim along with the tide that was sweeping over the majority section of the Union. In view of Mr. Webster's past record, however, it would be difficult to believe that Abolitionists were really disappointed in him had we not many such proofs as the following stanza from Whittier's ode, published after the speech:
Oh! dumb be passing, stormy rage
When he who might
Have lighted up and led his age
Falls back in night!
The conservatives also were hopeful. They knew that, though Webster had always been, as an individual, opposed to slavery, he had at all times stood by the Constitution, as well as the Union. At no time had he ever qualified or retracted these words in his speech at Niblo's Garden in 1839: "Slavery, as it exists in the States, is beyond the reach of Congress. It is a concern of the States themselves. They have never submitted it to Congress, and Congress has no rightful power over it. I shall concur therefore in no act, no measure, no menace, no indication of purpose which shall interfere or threaten to interfere with the exclusive authority of the several States over the subject of slavery, as it exists within their respective limits. All this appears to me to be matter of plain imperative duty."
Nullifying the fugitive slave law was a plain "interference" with the rights of the slave States.
Mr. Webster's intent, when he spoke on the Compromise measures, is best explained by his own words, on June 17, while these measures were still pending: "Sir, my object is peace. My object is reconciliation. My purpose is not to make up a case for the North or a case for the South. My object is not to continue useless and irritating controversies. I am against agitators, North and South, and all narrow local contests. I am an American, and I know no locality but America."
In his speech made on the 7th of March he dwelt at length on existing conditions, on the attitude of the North toward the fugitive slave law, and argued fully the questions involved in the "personal liberty" laws passed by Northern States. Referring to the complaints of the South about these, he said: "In that respect the South, in my judgment, is right and the North is wrong. Every member of every Northern legislature is bound by oath, like every other officer in the country, to support the Constitution of the United States; and the article of the Constitution which says to these States that they shall deliver up fugitives from service is as binding in honor and conscience as any other article. No man fulfils his duty in any legislature who sets himself to find excuses, evasions, escapes, from this constitutional obligation."
And further on he said: "Then, sir, there are the Abolition societies, of which I am unwilling to speak, but in regard to which I have very clear notions and opinions. I do not think them useful. I think their operations for the last twenty years have produced nothing good or valuable.... I cannot but see what mischief their interference with the South has produced."
In these statements is the substance of Webster's offending.
Webster's speech was followed, on the 11th of March, by the speech of Senator Seward, of New York, in the same debate. Quoting the fugitive slave provision of the Federal Constitution, Mr. Seward said: "This is from the Constitution of the United States in 1787, and the parties were the Republican States of the Union. The law of nations disavows such compacts; the law of nature, written on the hearts and consciences of freemen, repudiates them."[45] The people of the North, instead of following Webster, chose to follow Seward, the apostle of a law higher than the Constitution; and when, ten years later, it appeared to them that the whole North had given in its adhesion to the "higher law" doctrine, the people of eleven Southern States seceded, and put over themselves in very substance the Constitution that Seward had flouted and Webster had pleaded for in vain.
Anti-slavery enthusiasts in the North generally, and Abolitionists especially, in their comments on Webster's speech scouted the idea that the preservation of the Union depended upon the faithful execution of the fugitive slave law or the cessation of anti-slavery agitation. "What," said Theodore Parker, "cast off the North! They set up for themselves! Tush! Tush! Fear boys with bugs!... I think Mr. Webster knew there was no danger of a dissolution of the Union."[46]
The immediate effect of the speech was wonderful; congratulations poured in upon Mr. Webster from conservative classes in every quarter, and he must have felt gratified to know that he had contributed greatly to the enactment of measures that, for a time, had some effect in allaying sectional strife. But the revilings of the Abolitionists prevailed, and it turned out that Daniel Webster, great as he was, had undertaken a task that was too much even for him. His enemies struck out boldly at once: and years afterward, when the anti-slavery movement that Webster's appeals could not arrest had culminated in secession, and when the Union had been saved by arms, the triumphant hosts of the anti-slavery crusade all but succeeded in writing Daniel Webster down permanently in the history of his country as an apostate from principle for the sake of an office he did not get. Here is their verdict, which Mr. Lodge, a biographer of Webster, passes on into history:
"The popular verdict has been given against the 7th of March speech, and that verdict has passed into history. Nothing can be said or done which will alter the fact that the people of this country, who maintained and saved the Union, have passed judgment on Mr. Webster, and condemned what he said on the 7th of March as wrong in principle and mistaken in policy."
Here are specimens of the assaults that were made on Webster after his speech. They are selected from among many given by one of his biographers.[47]
"'Webster,' said Horace Mann, 'is a fallen star! Lucifer descended from Heaven.'... 'Webster,' said Sumner, 'has placed himself in the dark list of apostates.' When Whittier named him Ichabod, and mourned for him in verse as one dead, he did but express the feeling of half New England:
'Let not the land once proud of him
Mourn for him now,
Nor brand with deeper shame his dim
Dishonored brow.
* * * * * * *
Then pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame!
Walk backward with averted gaze
And hide his shame.'"
After much more to the same effect, Professor McMaster proceeds: "The attack by the press, the expressions of horror that rose from New England, Webster felt keenly, but the absolute isolation in which he was left by his New England colleagues cut him to the quick."[48]
On Mr. Webster's speech, its purpose and effect, we have this opinion from Mr. Lodge:
"The speech, if exactly defined, is in reality a powerful effort, not for a compromise, or for the fugitive slave law, or for any other one thing, but to arrest the whole anti-slavery movement, and in that way put an end to the danger which threatened the Union and restore harmony to the jarring sections."
And then he adds:
"It was a mad project. Mr. Webster might as well have attempted to stay the incoming tide at Marshfield with a rampart of sand, as to check the anti-slavery movement with a speech."
To undertake at this time to arrest the whole anti-slavery movement by holding up the Constitution was indeed useless.
Seward, who had spoken for the "higher law," was riding on the tide of anti-slavery sentiment that was submerging "the Sage of Marshfield," who had stood for the Constitution. Seward's reputation, in the years following, went steadily up, while Webster's was going down. Webster died, in dejection, in 1852.
Seward, at Rochester, in 1854, later on in the same crusade, made another famous declaration—there was an "irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom." The conflict was "irrepressible," as Seward well knew; and this was simply and solely because the anti-slavery crusade could not be suppressed. Clay and Webster, now both dead and gone, had tried it in vain. Every one knew that if, in 1850, or at any other time, the anti-slavery hosts had halted, and asked for, or consented to, peace, they could have had it at once.
Mr. Lodge, in the following paragraph, seems to have almost made up his mind to defend Webster. He says: "What most shocked the North were his utterances in regard to the fugitive slave law. There can be no doubt that, under the Constitution, the South had a perfect right to claim the extradition of fugitive slaves. The legal argument to support that right was excellent." This would seem to justify the speech in that regard. "But," Mr. Lodge adds, "the Northern people could not feel that it was necessary for Daniel Webster to make it." They wanted him to be sectional or to hold his tongue. Then Mr. Lodge goes on to say: "The fugitive slave law was in absolute conflict with the awakened conscience and moral sentiment of the North."
The conscience of the North at that time, Mr. Lodge means, was a higher law than the Constitution; and Webster's "excellent argument," therefore, fell on deaf ears.
No American historian stands higher as an authority than Mr. Rhodes. He says on page 161, vol. I, of his "History of the United States," published in 1892: "Until the closing years of our century a dispassionate judgment could not be made of Webster; but we see now that in the war of secession his principles were mightier than those of Garrison. It was not 'No Union with slave-holders,' but Liberty and Union that won."
This tribute to services Webster had rendered to the Union in his great speech in 1850, in which he advocated "Liberty and Union, now and forever," exactly as he was advocating it in 1830, is just. How pathetic that the historian was impelled also to record the fact, in the same sentence, that for nearly half a century partisan prejudice had rendered it impossible to form a dispassionate judgment of him who had pleaded in vain for the Union without war!
After an able analysis of his "7th of March speech," and a discussion of his record, in which he paralleled Webster and Edmund Burke, Mr. Rhodes declares: "His dislike of slavery was strong, but his love of the Union was stronger, and the more powerful motive outweighed the other, for he believed that the crusade against slavery had arrived at a point where its further prosecution was hurtful to the Union. As has been said of Burke, 'He changed his front but he never changed his ground.'"[49]
Daniel Webster's name and its place in history may be likened to a giant oak, a monarch of the forest, that, while towering high above all others, was stripped of its branches; for a time it stood, a rugged trunk, robbed of its glory by a cyclone; but its roots were deep down in the rich earth; the storm is passing away; the tree has put out buds again; now its branches are stretching out once more into the clear reaches of the upper air.
Mr. Rhodes seems to be the first historian of note to do justice to Daniel Webster and the great speech which, McMaster takes pains to inform us, historians have written down as his "7th of March speech," in spite of the fact that Mr. Webster himself entitled it "The Constitution and the Union."
Other historians besides Mr. Rhodes have come to the rescue of Webster's speech for "the Constitution and the Union." Mr. John Fiske says of it in a volume (posthumous) published in 1907: "So far as Mr. Webster's moral attitude was concerned, although he was not prepared for the bitter hostility that his speech provoked in many quarters, he must nevertheless have known it was quite as likely to injure him at the North as to gain support for him in the South, and his resolute adoption of a policy that he regarded as national rather than sectional was really an instance of high moral courage."[50]
Mr. William C. Wilkinson has recently written an able "Vindication of Daniel Webster," and, after a conclusive argument on that branch of his subject, he says: "Webster's consistency stands like a rock on the shore after the fretful waves are tired with beating upon it in vain."[51]
Mr. E. P. Wheeler, concluding a masterly sketch of Daniel Webster, setting forth his services as statesman and expounder of the Constitution, and not deigning to notice the partisan charges against him, concludes with these words:
"Great men elevate and ennoble their countrymen. In the glory of Webster we find the glory of our whole country."
The story of Daniel Webster and his great speech in 1850 has been told at some length because it is instructive. The historians who had set themselves to the task of upholding the idea that it was the aggressiveness of the South, during the controversy over slavery, and not that of the North, that brought on secession and war, could not make good their contention while Daniel Webster and his speech for "the Constitution and the Union" stood in their way. They, therefore, wrote the great statesman "down and out," as they conceived. But Webster and that speech still stand as beacon lights in the history of that crusade. The attack came from the North. The South, standing for its constitutional rights in the Union, was the conservative party. Southern leaders, it is true, were, during the controversy over slavery, often aggressive, but they were on the defensive-aggressive, just as Lee was when he made his campaign into Pennsylvania for the purpose of stopping the invasion of his own land; and the South lost in her political campaign just for the same reason that Lee lost in his Gettysburg campaign: numbers and resources were against her. "The stars in their courses fought against Sisera."
Mr. Webster in his great speech for "the Constitution and the Union," as became a great statesman pleading for conciliation, measured the terms in which he condemned "personal liberty" laws and Abolitionism. But afterward, irritated by the attacks made upon him, he naturally spoke out more emphatically. McMaster quotes several expressions from his speeches and letters replying to these assaults, and says: "His hatred of Abolitionists and Free-soilers grew stronger and stronger. To him these men were a 'band of sectionalists, narrow of mind, wanting in patriotism, without a spark of national feeling, and quite ready to see the Union go to pieces if their own selfish ends were gained.'" Such, if this is a fair summing up of his views, was Webster's final opinion of those who were carrying on the great anti-slavery crusade.[52]