It may be considered certain that so wise a statesman as Webster—a statesman whose foresight was so palpably the consequence of his insight, and whose piercing intellect was so admirably adapted to read events in their principles—never indulged in such illusions as those which cheered so many of his own adherents, when they supposed his triumph in argumentation was to settle a matter which was really based on organic differences in the institutions of the two sections of the Union. He knew perfectly well that, while the Webster men were glorying in his victory over Calhoun, the Calhoun men were equally jubilant in celebrating Calhoun's victory over him. Which of them had the better in the argument was of little importance in comparison with the terrible fact that the people of the Southern States were widening, year by year, the distance which separated them from the people of the Northern States. We have no means of judging whether Webster clearly foresaw the frightful civil war between the two sections, which followed so soon after his own death. We only know that, to him, it was a conflict constantly impending, and which could be averted for the time only by compromises, concessions, and other temporary expedients. If he allowed his mind to pass from the pressing questions of the hour, and to consider the radical division between the two sections of the country which were only formally united, it would seem that he must have felt, as long as the institution of negro slavery existed, that he was only laboring to postpone a conflict which it was impossible for him to prevent.
But my present purpose is simply to indicate the felicity of Webster's intrepid assault on the principles which the Southern disunionists put forward in justification of their acts. Mr. Calhoun's favorite idea was this,—that Nullification was a conservative principle, to be exercised within the Union, and in accordance with a just interpretation of the Constitution. "To begin with nullification," Webster retorted, "with the avowed intent, nevertheless, not to proceed to secession, dismemberment, and general revolution, is as if one were to take the plunge of Niagara, and cry out that he would stop half-way down. In the one case, as in the other, the rash adventurer must go to the bottom of the dark abyss below, were it not that the abyss has no discovered bottom."
How admirable also is his exposure of the distinction attempted to be drawn between secession, as a State right to be exercised under the provisions of what was called "the Constitutional Compact," and revolution. "Secession," he says, "as a revolutionary right, is intelligible; as a right to be proclaimed in the midst of civil commotions, and asserted at the head of armies, I can understand it. But as a practical right, existing under the Constitution, and in conformity with its provisions, it seems to me nothing but a plain absurdity; for it supposes resistance to government, under the authority of government itself; it supposes dismemberment, without violating the principles of union; it supposes opposition to law, without crime, it supposes the total overthrow of government, without revolution."
After putting some pertinent interrogatories—which are arguments in themselves—relating to the inevitable results of secession, he adds, that "every man must see that these are all questions which can arise only after a revolution. They presuppose the breaking up of the government. While the Constitution lasts, they are repressed";—and then, with that felicitous use of the imagination as a handmaid of the understanding, which is the peculiar characteristic of his eloquence, he closes the sentence by saying, that "they spring up to annoy and startle us only from its grave." A mere reasoner would have stopped at the word "repressed"; the instantaneous conversion of "questions" into spectres, affrighting and annoying us as they spring up from the grave of the Constitution,—which is also by implication impersonated,—is the work of Webster's ready imagination; and it thoroughly vitalizes the statements which precede it.
A great test of the sincerity of a statesman's style is his moderation. Now, if we take the whole body of Mr. Webster's speeches, whether delivered in the Senate or before popular assemblies, during the period of his opposition to President Jackson's administration, we may well be surprised at their moderation of tone and statement. Everybody old enough to recollect the singular virulence of political speech at that period must remember it as disgraceful equally to the national conscience and the national understanding. The spirit of party, always sufficiently fierce and unreasonable, was then stimulated into a fury resembling madness. Almost every speaker, Democrat or Whig, was in that state of passion which is represented by the physical sign of "foaming at the mouth." Few mouths then opened that did not immediately begin to "foam." So many fortunes were suddenly wrecked by President Jackson's financial policy, and the business of the country was so disastrously disturbed, that, whether the policy was right or wrong, those who assailed and those who defended it seemed to be equally devoid of common intellectual honesty. "I do well to be angry," appears to have been the maxim which inspired Democratic and Whig orators alike; and what reason there was on either side was submerged in the lies and libels, in the calumnies and caricatures, in the defamations and execrations, which accompanied the citation of facts and the affirmation of principles. Webster, during all this time, was selected as a shining mark, at which every puny writer or speaker who opposed him hurled his small or large contribution of verbal rotten eggs; and yet Webster was almost the only Whig statesman who preserved sanity of understanding during the whole progress of that political riot, in which the passions of men became the masters of their understandings. Pious Whig fathers, who worshipped the "godlike Daniel," went almost to the extent of teaching their children to curse Jackson in their prayers; equally pious Democratic fathers brought up their sons and daughters to anathematize the fiend-like Daniel as the enemy of human rights; and yet, in reading Webster's speeches, covering the whole space between 1832 and 1836, we can hardly find a statement which an historian of our day would not admit as a candid generalization of facts, or an argument which would not stand the test of logical examination. Such an historian might entirely disagree with the opinions of Webster; but he would certainly award to him the praise of being an honest reasoner and an honest rhetorician, in a time when reason was used merely as a tool of party passion, and when rhetoric rushed madly into the worst excesses of rhodomontade.
It is also to be said that Webster rarely indulged in personalities. When we consider how great were his powers of sarcasm and invective, how constant were the provocations to exercise them furnished by his political enemies, and how atrociously and meanly allusions to his private affairs were brought into discussions which should have been confined to refuting his reasoning, his moderation in this matter is to be ranked as a great virtue. He could not take a glass of wine without the trivial fact being announced all over the country as indisputable proof that he was an habitual drunkard, though the most remarkable characteristic of his speeches is their temperance,—their "total abstinence" from all the intoxicating moral and mental "drinks" which confuse the understanding and mislead the conscience. He could not borrow money on his note of hand, like any other citizen, without the circumstance being trumpeted abroad as incontrovertible evidence that Nick Biddle had paid him that sum to defend his diabolical Bank in the Senate of the United States. The plain fact that his speeches were confined strictly to the exposition and defence of sound opinions on trade and finance, and that it was difficult to answer them, only confirmed his opponents in the conviction that old Nick was at the bottom of it all. His great intellect was admitted; but on the high, broad brow, which was its manifestation to the eye, his enemies pasted the words, "To be let," or, "For sale." The more impersonal he became in his statements and arguments, the more truculently was he assailed by the personalities of the political gossip and scandal-monger. Indeed, from the time he first came to the front as a great lawyer, statesman, and patriot, he was fixed upon by the whole crew of party libellers as a man whose arguments could be answered most efficiently by staining his character. He passed through life with his head enveloped "in a cloud of poisonous flies"; and the head was the grandest-looking head that had ever been seen on the American continent. It was so pre-eminently noble and impressive, and promised so much more than it could possibly perform, that only one felicitous sarcasm of party malice, among many thousands of bad jokes, has escaped oblivion; and that was stolen from Charles Fox's remark on Lord Chancellor Thurlow, as Fox once viewed him sitting on the wool-sack, frowning on the English House of Lords, which he dominated by the terror of his countenance, and by the fear that he might, at any moment, burst forth in one of his short bullying, thundering retorts, should any comparatively weak baron, earl, marquis, or duke dare to oppose him. "Thurlow," said Fox, "must be an impostor, for nobody can be as wise as he looks." The American version of this was, "Webster must be a charlatan, for no one can be as great as he looks."
But during all the time that his antagonists attempted to elude the force of his arguments by hunting up the evidences of his debts, and by trying to show that the most considerate, the most accurate, and the most temperate of his lucid statements were the products of physical stimulants, Webster steadily kept in haughty reserve his power of retaliation. In his speech in reply to Hayne he hinted that, if he were imperatively called upon to meet blows with blows, he might be found fully equal to his antagonists in that ignoble province of intellectual pugilism; but that he preferred the more civilized struggle of brain with brain, in a contest which was to decide questions of principle. In the Senate, where he could meet his political opponents face to face, few dared to venture to degrade the subject in debate from the discussion of principles to the miserable subterfuge of imputing bad motives as a sufficient answer to good arguments; but still many of these dignified gentlemen smiled approval on the efforts of the low-minded, small-minded caucus-speakers of their party, when they declared that Webster's logic was unworthy of consideration, because he was bought by the Bank, or bought by the manufacturers of Massachusetts, or bought by some other combination of persons who were supposed to be the deadly enemies of the laboring men of the country. On some rare occasions Webster's wrath broke out in such smiting words that his adversaries were cowed into silence, and cursed the infatuation which had led them to overlook the fact that the "logic-machine" had in it invectives more terrible than its reasonings. But generally he refrained from using the giant's power "like a giant"; and it is almost pathetic to remember that, when Mr. Everett undertook to edit, in 1851, the standard edition of his works, Webster gave directions to expunge all personalities from his speeches, even when those personalities were the just punishment of unprovoked attacks on his integrity as a man. Readers will look in vain, in this edition of his works, for some of the most pungent passages which originally attracted their attention in the first report of the Defence of the Treaty of Washington. At the time these directions were given, Webster was himself the object of innumerable personalities, which were the natural, the inevitable results of his speech of the 7th of March, 1850.
It seems to be a law, that the fame of all public men shall be "half disfame." We are specially warned to beware of the man of whom all men speak well. Burke, complimenting his friend Fox for risking every thing, even his "darling popularity," on the success of the East India Bill, nobly says: "He is traduced and abused for his supposed motives. He will remember, that obloquy is a necessary ingredient in all true glory; he will remember, that it was not only in the Roman customs, but it is in the nature of human things, that calumny and abuse are essential parts of triumph."
It may be said, however, that Webster's virtue in this general abstinence from personalities is to be offset by the fact that he could throw into a glance of his eye, a contortion of his face, a tone of his voice, or a simple gesture of his hand, more scorn, contempt, and hatred than ordinary debaters could express by the profuse use of all the scurrilous terms in the English language. Probably many a sentence, which we now read with an even pulse, was, as originally delivered, accompanied by such pointing of the finger, or such flashing of the eye, or such raising of the voice, that the seemingly innocent words were poisoned arrows that festered in the souls of those against whom they were directed, and made deadly enemies of a number of persons whom he seems, in his printed speeches, never to have mentioned without the respect due from one Senator to another. In his speech in defence of the Treaty of Washington, he had to repel Mr. Ingersoll's indecent attack on his integrity, and his dreadful retort is described by those who heard it as coming within the rules which condemn cruelty to animals. But the "noble rage" which prompted him to indulge in such unwonted invective subsided with the occasion that called it forth, and he was careful to have it expunged when the speech was reprinted. An eminent judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in commending the general dignity and courtesy which characterized Webster's conduct of a case in a court of law, noted one exception. "When," he said, "the opposite counsel had got him into a corner, the way he 'trampled out' was something frightful to behold. The court itself could hardly restrain him in his gigantic efforts to extricate himself from the consequences of a blunder or an oversight."
Great writers and orators are commonly economists in the use of words. They compel common words to bear a burden of thought and emotion, which mere rhetoricians, with all the resources of the language at their disposal, would never dream of imposing upon them. But it is also to be observed, that some writers have the power of giving a new and special significance to a common word, by impressing on it a wealth of meaning which it cannot claim for itself. Three obvious examples of this peculiar power may be cited. Among poets, Chaucer infused into the simple word "green" a poetic ecstasy which no succeeding English poet, not even Wordsworth, has ever rivalled, in describing an English landscape in the month of May. Jonathan Edwards fixed upon the term "sweetness" as best conveying his loftiest conception of the bliss which the soul of the saint can attain to on earth, or expect to be blessed with in heaven; but not one of his theological successors has ever caught the secret of using "sweetness" in the sense attached to it by him. Dr. Barrow gave to the word "rest," as embodying his idea of the spiritual repose of the soul fit for heaven, a significance which it bears in the works of no other great English divine. To descend a little, Webster was fond of certain words, commonplace enough in themselves, to which he insisted on imparting a more than ordinary import. Two of these, which meet us continually in reading his speeches, are "interesting" and "respectable." The first of these appears to him competent to express that rapture of attention called forth by a thing, an event, or a person, which other writers convey by such a term as "absorbing," or its numerous equivalents. If we should select one passage from his works which, more than any other, indicates his power of seeing and feeling, through a process of purely imaginative vision and sympathy, it is that portion of his Plymouth oration, where he places himself and his audience as spectators on the barren shore, when the Mayflower came into view. He speaks of "the interesting group upon the deck" of the little vessel. The very word suggests that we are to have a very commonplace account of the landing, and the circumstances which followed it. In an instant, however, we are made to "feel the cold which benumbed, and listen to the winds which pierced" this "interesting" group; and immediately after, the picture is flashed upon the imagination of "chilled and shivering childhood, houseless, but for a mother's arms, couchless, but for a mother's breast,"—an image which shows that the orator had not only transported himself into a spectator of the scene, but had felt his own blood "almost freeze" in intense sympathy with the physical sufferings of the shelterless mothers and children.