The House of Representatives was early deserted. An adjournment would hardly have made it emptier. The speaker, it is true, retained his chair, but no business of moment was or could be attended to. Members all rushed in to hear Mr. Webster, and no call of the House or other parliamentary proceedings could call them back. The floor of the Senate was so densely crowded that persons once in could not get out.
Seldom, if ever, has a speaker in this or any other country had more powerful incentives to exertion; a subject, the determination of which involved the most important interests and even duration of the Republic—competitors unequaled in reputation, ability, or position; a name to make still more renowned or lose forever; and an audience comprising, not only American citizens most eminent in intellectual greatness, but representatives of other nations where the art of oratory had flourished for ages.
Mr. Webster perceived and felt equal to the destinies of the moment. The very greatness of the hazard exhilarated him. His spirits arose with the occasion. He awaited the time of onset with a stern and impatient joy. He felt like the war-horse of the Scriptures, who 'paweth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength: who goeth on to meet the armed men who sayeth among the trumpets, ha! ha! and who smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the Captains and the shouting.'
A confidence in his resources, springing from no vain estimate of his power but the legitimate off-spring of previous severe mental discipline, sustained and excited him. He had gauged his opponents, his subject and himself.
He was, too, at this period in the very prime of manhood. He had reached middle-age—an era in the life of man when the faculties, physical or intellectual, may be supposed to attain their fullest organization and most perfect development. Whatever there was in him of intellectual energy and vitality the occasion, his full life and high ambition might well bring forth. He never arose on an ordinary occasion to address an ordinary audience more self-possessed. There was no tremulousness in his voice or manner; nothing hurried, nothing simulated. The calmness of superior strength was visible everywhere; in countenance, voice and bearing. A deep-seated conviction of the extraordinary character of the emergency and of his ability to control it seemed to possess him wholly. If an observer more than ordinarily keen-sighted detected at times something like exultation in his eye, he presumed it sprang from the excitement of the moment and the anticipation of victory. The anxiety to hear the speech was so intense, irrepressible and universal that no sooner had the vice-president assumed the chair that a motion was made and unanimously carried to postpone the ordinary preliminaries of senatorial action and take up immediately the consideration of the resolution.
Mr. Webster arose and addressed the Senate. His exordium is known by heart everywhere. "Mr. President when the mariner has been tossed about for many days in thick weather and on an unknown sea he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun to take his latitude and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course. Let us imitate this prudence and before we float further on the waves of this debate refer to the point from which we departed that we may at least be able to form some conjecture where we now are. I ask for the reading of the resolutions."
Calm, resolute, impressive was this opening speech. There wanted no more to enchain the attention. There was a spontaneous though silent expression of eager attention as the orator concluded these opening remarks. And while the clerk read the resolution many attempted the impossibility of getting nearer the speaker. Every head was inclined closer toward him, every ear turned in the direction of his voice—and that deep, sudden, mysterious silence followed which always attends fullness of emotion. From the sea of upturned faces before him the orator beheld his thought, reflected as from a mirror. The varying countenance, the suffused eye, the earnest smile and ever attentive look assured him of the intense interest excited. If among his hearers there were some who affected indifference at first to his glowing thoughts and fervant periods, the difficult mask was soon laid aside and profound, undisguised, devout attention followed.
In truth, all sooner or later, voluntarily, or in spite of themselves were wholly carried away by the spell of such unexampled eloquence. Those who had doubted Mr. Webster's power to cope with and overcome his opponent were fully satisfied of their error before he had proceeded far in this debate. Their fears soon took another direction. When they heard his sentences of powerful thought towering in accumulated grandeur one above the other as if the orator strove Titan-like to reach the very heavens themselves, they were giddy with an apprehension that he would break down in his flight. They dared not believe that genius, learning—any intellectual endowment however uncommon, that was simply mortal—could sustain itself long in a career seemingly so perilous. They feared an Icarian fall. No one surely who was present, could ever forget the awful burst of eloquence with which the orator apostrophized the old Bay State which Mr. Hayne had so derided, or the tones of deep pathos in which her defense was pronounced:—
"Mr. President: I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts. There she is—behold her and judge for yourselves. There is her history, the world knows it by heart. The past at least is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill, and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons falling in the great struggle for independence now lie mingled with the soil of every State from New England to Georgia, and there they will remain forever. And sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it, if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it, if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed to separate it from that Union by which alone its existence is made sure it will stand in the end by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked, it will stretch forth its arm with whatever vigor it may still retain over the friends who gather around it and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments of its own glory and on the very spot of its origin."
No New England heart but throbbed with vehement emotion as Mr. Webster dwelt upon New England sufferings, New England struggles, and New England triumphs during the war of the Revolution. There was scarcely a dry eye in the Senate; all hearts were overcome; grave judges and men grown old in dignified life turned aside their heads to conceal the evidence of their emotion.