A colossal figure. We boys in Massachusetts were all brought up to worship Webster, and worship him we did; till the Fall came, and the seventh of March speech turned reverence into righteous wrath.
There was a certain likeness in feature between Mr. Webster and Mr. Gladstone. The eyes in both were dark, deep set, and wide apart, beneath heavily overhanging brows. In both the flame was volcanic. The features in both were chiselled strongly, the lines clear cut, the contour of the face and the air of command much the same in the great American and the great Englishman; but Mr. Gladstone had, before the political disasters of his later years had angered him, a benignity which Webster lacked. In stature, in massiveness of frame, in presence, in that power which springs from repose and from the forces of reserve, there was no comparison. Webster had all this, and Gladstone had not. I have before me as I write a private photograph of Mr. Gladstone, from the camera of a lady who had something more than technical skill, who had a sympathetic insight into character and an art-sense. Among the hundreds of photographs of the Tory-Liberal, the Protectionist-Free Trader, the Imperialist-Home Ruler, this is the finest and truest I have seen. But it is one which brings out his unlikeness to Webster far more clearly than those resemblances I have noted. If those resemblances have not before been remarked, there are, I imagine, few men living who have seen both men in the full splendour of their heroic mould.
The records of those later days are full not only of admiring friendship for Webster, but also of that bitterness which his apostasy—for so we thought it—begot. Even friends turned against him after his support of the Fugitive Slave Law. As for his enemies, there was no limit to their language. A single unpublished incident will show what the feeling was. At a meeting of the Abolitionists in the Boston Melodeon, Charles Lenox Remond, a negro, in the course of a diatribe against the white race, called Washington a scoundrel. Wendell Phillips, who was on the platform, intervened:
"No, Charles, don't say that. Don't call Washington a scoundrel. The great Virginian held slaves, but he was a great Virginian still, and a great American. It is not a fit word to use. It is not descriptive.
"Besides, if you call Washington a scoundrel, how are you going to describe Webster?"
Besides, again, the Fugitive Slave Law wrought the redemption of Massachusetts; and we owe that redemption to Webster, indirectly. It was the rendition of Anthony Burns, in 1854, two years after Webster's death, which completed the conversion of the Bay State from the pro-slavery to the anti-slavery faith. But what I can tell of the unwritten history of those black days must be for another time.
Whatever Webster's faults, and whatever resentment he aroused in 1850, he remained, and will long remain, the foremost citizen of Massachusetts in that generation. Go to his opponents if you want testimony for that. Ask Wendell Phillips, and he answers in one of his finest sentences, pouring scorn on the men who took up, so late as 1861, Webster's mission to crush anti-slavery agitation:
It was Webster who announced from the steps of the Revere House that he would put down this agitation. The great statesman, discredited and defeated, sleeps at Marshfield by the solemn waves of the Atlantic. Contempsi Catiline gladios; non tuos pertimescam. The half-omnipotence of Webster we defied; who heeds this pedlar's empty speech?
Ask Theodore Parker, who delivered in the Music Hall of Boston a discourse on Webster's death; half-invective, more than half-panegyric, whether he would or no. It was, I think, Parker who said of him that four American masterpieces in four different kinds were Webster's. The ablest argument ever heard in the Supreme Court of the United States, that in the Dartmouth College case, was his. His was the noblest platform speech of his time at the dedication of Bunker Hill Monument. His the most persuasive address to an American jury, in the White murder case at Salem, with its tremendous epigram, "There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession." His, finally, the profoundest exposition of constitutional law, the reply to Hayne in the United States Senate. All these were Webster's, and to Webster alone could any such tribute be paid.