The Works of Daniel Webster, Volume 1

by Daniel Webster

In August, 1814, Mr. Webster was reëlected to Congress. The treaty of Ghent, as is well known, was signed in December, 1814, and the prospect of peace, universally welcomed by the country, opened on the Thirteenth Congress toward the close xli of its third session. Earlier in the season a project for a Bank of the United States was introduced into the House of Representatives on the recommendation of Mr. Dallas, Secretary of the Treasury. The charter of the first incorporated bank of the United States had expired in 1811. No general complaints of mismanagement or abuse had been raised against this institution; but the opinions entertained by what has been called the “Virginia School” of politicians, against the constitutionality of a national bank, prevented the renewal of the charter. The want of such an institution was severely felt in the war of 1812, although it is probable that the amount of assistance which it could have afforded the financial operations of the government was greatly overrated. Be this as it may, both the Treasury Department and Congress were now strongly disposed to create a bank. Its capital was to consist of forty-five millions of the public stocks and five millions of specie, and it was to be under obligation to lend the government thirty millions of dollars on demand. To enable it to exist under these conditions, it was relieved from the necessity of redeeming its notes in specie. In other words, it was an arrangement for the issue of an irredeemable paper currency. It was opposed mainly on this ground by Mr. Calhoun, Mr. Webster, Mr. Lowndes, and others of the ablest men on both sides of the House, as a project not only unsound in its principles, but sure to increase the derangement of the currency already existing. The speech of Mr. Webster against the bill will be found in one of these volumes, and it will be generally admitted to display a mastery of the somewhat difficult subjects of banking and finance, rarely to be found in the debates in Congress. The project was supported as an administration measure, but the leading members from South Carolina and their friends united with the regular opposition against it, and it was lost by the casting vote of the Speaker, Mr. Cheves. It was revived by reconsideration, on motion of Mr. Webster, and such amendments introduced that it passed the House by a large majority. It was carried through the Senate in this amended form with difficulty, but it was negatived by Mr. Madison, being one of the two cases in which he exercised the veto power during his eight years’ administration.

On the 8th of January of the year 1815, the victory at xlii New Orleans was gained by General Jackson. No occurrence on land, in the course of the war, was of equal immediate interest, or destined to have so abiding an influence on the future. Besides averting the indescribable calamity of the sack of a populous and flourishing city, it showed the immense military power of the volunteer force of the country, when commanded with energy and skill. The praises of General Jackson were on every tongue throughout the land, and Congress responded to the grateful feelings of the country. A vote of thanks was unanimously passed by the Senate and House of Representatives.

In the interval between the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Congresses (March-December, 1815), Mr. Webster was busily engaged at home in the practice of the law. He had begun at this time to consider the expediency of removing his residence to a wider professional field. Though receiving a full share of the best business of New Hampshire, it ceased to yield an adequate support for his increasing family, and still more failed to afford any thing like the just reward of his legal attainment and labors. The destruction of his house, furniture, library, and many important manuscript collections, in “the great fire” at Portsmouth, in December, 1813, had entailed upon him the loss of the entire fruits of his professional industry up to that time, and made it necessary for him to look around him for the means of a considerably increased income. He hesitated between Albany and Boston; and, in consequence of this indecision, the execution of his purpose was for the present postponed.

The Fourteenth Congress assembled in December, 1815. An order of things in a great degree new presented itself. After a momentary pause, the country rose with an elastic bound from the pressure of the war. Old party dissensions had lost much of their interest. The condition of Europe had undergone a great change. The power of the French emperor was annihilated; and with the return of general peace, all occasions for belligerent encroachments on neutral rights had ceased. Two thirds of our domestic feuds had turned on foreign questions, and there was a spontaneous feeling throughout the country in favor of healing the wounds which these feuds had inflicted upon its social and political harmony. Nor was this all. New xliii relations and interests had arisen. The public debt had been swelled by the war expenditure to a large amount, and its interest was to be paid. Domestic manufactures had, in some of the States, grown up into importance through the operation of the restrictive system and the war, and asked for protection. The West began to fill up with unexampled rapidity, and required new facilities of communication with the Atlantic coast. The navy had fought itself into favor, and the war with Algiers, in 1816, forbade its reduction below the recent war establishment. The necessity of a system of coast defences had made itself felt. With all these loud calls for increased expenditure, the public finances were embarrassed and the currency was in extreme disorder. In a word, there were new and great wants and interests at home and abroad, throwing former topics of dissension into the shade, and calling for the highest efforts of statesmanship and a patriotism embracing the whole country.

Among those who responded with the greatest cordiality and promptness to the new demand were the distinguished statesmen of the preceding Congress, and conspicuous among them Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Lowndes, and Cheves. It will excite some surprise at the present day, in consideration of the political history of the last thirty years, to find how little difference as to leading measures existed in 1816 between these distinguished statesmen. No line of general party difference separated the members of the first Congress after the peace. The great measures brought forward were a national bank, internal improvement, and a protective tariff. On these various subjects members divided, not in accordance with any party organization, but from individual convictions, supposed sectional interests, and general public grounds. On the two first-named subjects no systematic difference of views disclosed itself between the great Northern and Southern leaders; on the third alone there was diversity of opinion. In the Northern States considerable advances had been made in manufacturing industry, in different places, especially at Waltham (Mass.); but a great manufacturing interest had not yet grown up. The strength of this interest as yet lay mainly in Pennsylvania. Navigation and foreign trade were the leading pursuits of the North; and these interests, it was feared, would suffer from the attempt to build up manufactures by a protective tariff. It is accordingly a xliv well-known fact, which may teach all to entertain opinions on public questions with some distrust of their own judgment, that the tariff of 1816, containing the minimum duty on coarse cotton fabrics, the corner-stone of the protective system, was supported by Mr. Calhoun and a few other Southern members, and carried by their influence against the opposition of the New England members generally, including Mr. Webster. It has been stated, that, during the pendency of this law before Congress, he denied the constitutionality of a tariff for protection. This statement is inaccurate; although, had it been true, it would have placed him only in the same relation to the question with Mr. Calhoun and other Southern members, who at that time admitted the principle of protection, but lived to reject it as the grossest and most pernicious constitutional heresy. It would have shown only that, in a long political career, he had, on the first discussion of a new question, expressed an opinion which, in the lapse of time and under a change of circumstances, he had seen occasion to alter. This is no ground of just reproach. It has happened to every public man in every free country, who has been of importance enough to have his early opinions remembered. It has happened to a large portion of the prominent men at the South, in reference to almost every great question agitated within the last generation. The bank, internal improvements, a navy, the Colonization Society, the annexation of Texas, the power of Congress over the territories, this very question of the tariff, the doctrine of State rights generally, are subjects on which many prominent statesmen of the South, living or recently deceased, have in the course of their career entertained opposite views.

But it is not true that Mr. Webster in 1816 denied the constitutionality of a tariff for protection. In 1820, in discussing the subject in Faneuil Hall, he argued that, if the right of laying duties for protection were derived from the revenue power, it was of necessity incidental; and on that assumption, as the incident cannot go beyond that to which it is incidental, duties avowedly for protection, and not having any reference to revenue, could not be constitutionally laid. The hypothetical form of the statement shows a degree of indecision; while the proposition itself is not to be gainsaid. At a later period, and after it had been confidently stated, and satisfactorily shown by Mr. xlv Madison, that the Federal Convention intended, under the provision for regulating commerce, to clothe Congress with the power of laying duties for the protection of manufactures; and after Congress had, by repeated laws, passed against the wishes of the navigating and strictly commercial interests, practically settled this constitutional question, and turned a vast amount of the capital of the country into the channel of manufactures; Mr. Webster considered a moderate degree of protection (such as would keep the home market steady under the occasional gluts in the foreign market, and shield the domestic manufacturer from the wholesale frauds of foreign importation) as the established policy of the United States; and he accordingly supported it. It is unnecessary to state, that this course has been pursued with the approbation of his constituents, and to the manifest good of the country. No change has taken place in Mr. Webster’s opinions on the subject of protection which has not been generally shared and sanctioned by the intelligence of the manufacturing States. There are strong indications, even, that in the Southern States the superiority of the home market over the foreign is beginning to be felt.

Mr. Webster took an active and efficient part, at the first session of the Fourteenth Congress, in the debates on the charter of the Bank of the United States, which passed Congress in April, 1816. While the bill was before the House, he moved and carried several amendments similar to those which he had caused to be introduced into the bill of the former year. He exerted himself in vain, however, against the participation of the government in its management, and, in common with several independent members usually supporting the administration, he voted against it on its passage. Among the amendments to the bill, of which Mr. Webster procured the adoption, was one which required deposits, as well as the notes of the bank, to be paid on demand in specie.

But the great service rendered by Mr. Webster to the currency of the country in the Fourteenth Congress was in procuring the adoption of the specie resolution, in virtue of which, from and after the 20th of February, 1817, all debts due to the treasury were required to be paid in the legal currency of the country (gold or silver), in treasury notes, or the notes of the Bank of the United States, or in notes of banks which are payable xlvi and paid on demand in the same legal currency. This service can hardly be appreciated at the present day by those too young to recollect the state of things existing in this respect during the war and after its close. This resolution passed the two houses, and was approved by the President on the 30th of April, 1816. It completely accomplished its object; and that object was to restore to a sound basis the currency of the country, and to give the people a uniform circulating medium. Of this they were destitute at the close of the war. All the banks, except those of the New England States, had suspended specie payments; but their depreciated bills were permitted by general consent, and within certain limits, to circulate as money. They were received of each other by the different banks; they passed from hand to hand; and even the public revenue was collected at par in this degraded paper. The rate of depreciation was different in different States, and with different banks in the same States, according as greater or less advantage had been taken of the suspension of the specie obligation.

What was not less harassing than this diversity was the uncertainty everywhere prevailing, how far the reputed rate of depreciation in any particular case might represent justly the real condition of a bank or set of banks. In other words, men were obliged to make and receive payments in a currency of which, at the time, the value was not certainly known to them, and which might vary as it was passing through their hands. The enormous injustice suffered by the citizens of different States, in being obliged to pay their dues at the custom-houses in as many different currencies as there were States, varying at least twenty-five per cent. between Boston and Richmond, need not be pointed out. For all these mischiefs the resolution of Mr. Webster afforded a remedy as efficient as simple; and what chiefly moves our astonishment at the present day is, that a measure of this kind, demanded by the first principles of finance, overlooked by the executive and its leading friends in Congress, should be left to be brought forward by one of its youngest members, and he not belonging to the supporters of the administration. But commanding talent and profound knowledge of the subjects to be treated vindicate to themselves a position in public bodies, which official relations can neither confer nor take away. It would not be easy to name a political xlvii measure, in the history of the government, which has accomplished its design with greater simplicity and directness; and that design one of paramount importance to the country, and coming home to the business of every individual.

In all the other public measures brought forward in this Congress for meeting the new conditions of the country, Mr. Webster bore an active part, but they furnish no topic requiring illustration. At the close of the first session, in August, 1816, he executed the project to which we have already alluded of removing to a wider professional field. After some hesitation he decided on Boston, in which and its vicinity he has ever since made his home. He had established friendly relations here at an early period of life. In no part of the Union was his national reputation more cordially recognized than in the metropolis of New England. He took at once the place in his profession which belonged to his commanding talent and legal eminence, and was welcomed into every circle of social life.