“I am, respectfully,
“Your obedient servant,
“Daniel Webster.”
[25] Joseph White, an old man of eighty, was found murdered in his bed, in Salem, Massachusetts, on the morning of April 7, 1830. A few weeks later four men—Richard Crowninshield, George Crowninshield, John Francis Knapp, and Joseph J. Knapp, Jr.—were arrested on the charge of murder. On June 15 Richard Crowninshield committed suicide in his cell; George Crowninshield, having proved an alibi, was discharged; and the two Knapps were tried between July 20 and August 20, the former as principal and the latter as accessory. Joseph made a full confession, outside of court, on the government’s promise of impunity; but afterwards refused to repeat this testimony on the witness-stand. It was shown that the fatal blow was struck by Richard Crowninshield; that John Francis Knapp, who had bargained with Richard Crowninshield to commit the murder, was lurking in the neighborhood during the commission of the crime; and that Joseph J. Knapp was also an accessory before the fact, having, indeed, projected the murder. The Knapps were executed. A detailed description of the extraordinary network of circumstances, before and after the murder, is given in the volume entitled “Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster.”
[26] The “Great Debate” in the Senate, between Webster and Hayne, had an unexpected origin. A resolution had been introduced by Senator Samuel Augustus Foot, of Connecticut, merely ordering an inquiry into the expediency of throwing restrictions around future sales of public lands of the United States. Into the discussion of this resolution, which lasted five months, was brought a large number of partisan pleas, tariff arguments, local jealousies, and questions of the right and wrong of slavery, and of the respective powers of the State and national governments. Recriminations and even personalities were not infrequent; and some of the Southern speakers did not refrain, in defence of the new “nullification” doctrine, from criticism of New England Federalism as having been essentially selfish, derisive, and unpatriotic. Senator Robert Young Hayne (1791-1840), of South Carolina, who had been a member of the Senate since 1823, was conspicuous, in this debate, for his advocacy of the idea that a State might suspend Federal laws at its discretion; and his assertions to that effect, combined with sharp criticisms of Massachusetts, led Mr. Webster to make his famous reply. Mr. Hayne was subsequently Governor of South Carolina, at the time of the almost armed collision between that State and President Jackson, in 1832, over the nullification of tariff laws. At one time Governor Hayne actually issued a proclamation of resistance to the authority of the general government; but subsequently Congress modified the objectionable tariff provisions and the State repealed its nullification ordinance, which President Jackson’s firmness had certainly made “null, void, and no law.”
[27] It had been charged that John Quincy Adams, during his presidency (1825-1829), had sought to purchase the support of Webster by giving offices to members of the old Federalist party, then merging into the “National Republican” or Whig party. Furthermore, the opposition had declared that Adams’s bestowal of the Secretaryship of State upon Henry Clay was in accordance with a bargain by which Adams was to be supported by the Clay vote in the House of Representatives.
[28] Mr. Webster here quotes parts of lines 69 and 74 of Macbeth, Act III. Scene 14.
[29] The Ordinance of July 13, 1787, was an act of the Congress of the Confederation,—prior to the beginning of the constitutional government of the United States in 1789,—which, in its sixth article, said of the “Northwest Territory,” organized by this Ordinance: “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Under the provisions of this Ordinance Ohio became a State in 1802. Says Johnston in his “History of American Politics “: “The Ordinance of 1787 is noteworthy as an exercise by the Congress of the Confederacy of the right to exclude slavery from the territories. It will be found that the language of this Ordinance was copied in the efforts made in 1819 (Missouri), 1846 (Wilmot Proviso), and 1865 (XIIIth Amendment), to assert and maintain for the Federal Congress under the Constitution this power of regulating and abolishing slavery in the territories of the United States, and finally in the States as the result of civil war.”
[30] The line between Pennsylvania, a free State, and Maryland, a slave State; originally run by two surveyors bearing these names.
[31] The “Virginia Resolutions of 1798,” of which the most important is here quoted, and the similar Kentucky Resolutions of the same year, were protests of the Republican, or Anti-Federalist, legislatures of the two States, against the “Alien and Sedition Laws” passed by the Federalist majority in Congress. These laws were the outgrowth of an almost warlike feeling between the United States and France, due to a variety of causes, for the most part discreditable to France. They authorized the President to order out of the country any foreigner he deemed dangerous; and imposed fines and imprisonment upon alleged conspirators against Government measures, or libellers of Congress or the President. The laws were deemed by the Anti-Federalists to be autocratic and semi-monarchical. The Virginia protesting resolutions were put into form by James Madison, afterwards President.
[32] James Hillhouse (1754-1832), of Connecticut.
[33] The District of Columbia is governed directly by Congress, but sends no representative thereto.