Mr. Webster did not take his seat until February, being detained at the North by the illness of his daughter Grace. When he arrived he found Congress at work upon a bank bill possessing the same objectionable features of paper money and large capital as the former schemes which he had helped to overthrow. He began his attack upon this dangerous plan by considering the evil condition of the currency. He showed that the currency of the United States was sound because it was gold and silver, in his opinion the only constitutional medium, but that the country was flooded by the irredeemable paper of the state banks. Congress could not regulate the state banks, but they could force them to specie payments by refusing to receive any notes which were not paid in specie by the bank which issued them. Passing to the proposed national bank, he reiterated the able arguments which he had made in the previous Congress against the large capital, the power to suspend specie payments, and the stock feature of the bank, which he thought would lead to speculation and control by the state banks. This last point is the first instance of that financial foresight for which Mr. Webster was so remarkable, and which shows so plainly the soundness of his knowledge in regard to economical matters. A violent speculation in bank stock did ensue, and the first years of the new institution were troubled, disorderly, and anything but creditable. The opposition of Mr. Webster and those who thought with him, resulted in the reduction of the capital and the removal of the power to suspend specie payments. But although shorn of its most obnoxious features, Mr. Webster voted against the bill on its final passage on account of the participation permitted to the government in its management. He was quite right, but, after the bank was well established, he supported it as Lord Thurlow promised to do in regard to the dissenter's religion. Indeed, Mr. Webster ultimately so far lost his original dislike to this bank that he became one of its warmest adherents. The plan was defective, but the scheme, on the whole, worked better than had been expected.
Immediately after the passage of the bank bill, Mr. Calhoun introduced a bill requiring the revenue to be collected in lawful money of the United States. A sharp debate ensued, and the bill was lost. Mr. Webster at once offered resolutions requiring all government dues to be paid in coin, in Treasury notes, or in notes of the Bank of the United States. He supported these resolutions, thus daringly put forward just after the principle they involved had been voted down, in a speech of singular power, clear, convincing, and full of information and illustration. He elaborated the ideas contained in his previous remarks on the currency, displaying with great force the evils of irredeemable paper, and the absolute necessity of a sound currency based on specie payments. He won a signal victory by the passage of his resolutions, which brought about resumption, and, after the bank was firmly established, gave us a sound currency and a safe medium of exchange. This was one of the most conspicuous services ever rendered by Mr. Webster to the business interests and good government of the country, and he deserves the full credit, for he triumphed where Mr. Calhoun had just been defeated.
Mr. Webster took more or less part in all the questions which afterwards arose in the House, especially on the tariff, but his great efforts were those devoted to the bank and the currency. The only other incident of the session was an invitation to fight a duel sent him by John Randolph. This was the only challenge ever received by Mr. Webster. He never could have seemed a very happy subject for such missives, and, moreover, he never indulged in language calculated to provoke them. Randolph, however, would have challenged anybody or anything, from Henry Clay to a field-mouse, if the fancy happened to strike him. Mr. Webster's reply is a model of dignity and veiled contempt. He refused to admit Randolph's right to an explanation, alluded to that gentleman's lack of courtesy in the House, denied his right to call him out, and wound up by saying that he did not feel bound to risk his life at any one's bidding, but should "always be prepared to repel, in a suitable manner, the aggression of any man who may presume on this refusal." One cannot help smiling over this last clause, with its suggestion of personal violence, as the two men rise before the fancy,—the big, swarthy black-haired son of the northern hills, with his robust common sense, and the sallow, lean, sickly Virginia planter, not many degrees removed mentally from the patients in Bedlam.
In the affairs of the next session of the fourteenth Congress Mr. Webster took scarcely any part. He voted for Mr. Calhoun's internal improvement bill, although without entering the debate, and he also voted to pass the bill over Mr. Madison's veto. This was sound Hamiltonian Federalism, and in entire consonance with the national sentiments of Mr. Webster. On the constitutional point, which he is said to have examined with some care, he decided in accordance with the opinions of his party, and with the doctrine of liberal construction, to which he always adhered.
On March 4, 1817, the fourteenth Congress expired, and with it the term of Mr. Webster's service. Five years were to intervene before he again appeared in the arena of national politics. This retirement from active public life was due to professional reasons. In nine years Mr. Webster had attained to the very summit of his profession in New Hampshire. He was earning two thousand dollars a year, and in that hardy and poor community he could not hope to earn more. To a man with such great and productive talents, and with a growing family, a larger field had become an absolute necessity. In June, 1816, therefore, Mr. Webster removed from Portsmouth to Boston. That he gained by the change is apparent from the fact that the first year after his removal his professional income did not fall short of twenty thousand dollars. The first suggestion of the possibilities of wealth offered to his abilities in a suitable field came from his going to Washington. There, in the winter of 1813 and 1814, he was admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States, before which he tried two or three cases, and this opened the vista of a professional career, which he felt would give him verge and room enough, as well as fit remuneration. From this beginning the Supreme Court practice, which soon led to the removal to Boston, rapidly increased, until, in the last session of his term, it occupied most of his time. This withdrawal from the duties of Congress, however, was not due to a sacrifice of his time to his professional engagements, but to the depression caused by his first great grief, which must have rendered the noise and dust of debate most distasteful to him. Mr. and Mrs. Webster had arrived in Washington for this last session, in December, 1816, and were recalled to Boston by the illness of their little daughter Grace, who was their oldest child, singularly bright and precocious, with much of her father's look and talent, and of her mother's sensibility. She was a favorite with her father, and tenderly beloved by him. After her parents' return she sank rapidly, the victim of consumption. When the last hour was at hand, the child, rousing from sleep, asked for her father. He came, raised her upon his arm, and, as he did so, she smiled upon him and died. It is a little incident in the life of a great man, but a child's instinct does not err at such a moment, and her dying smile sheds a flood of soft light upon the deep and warm affections of Mr. Webster's solemn and reserved nature. It was the first great grief. Mr. Webster wept convulsively as he stood beside the dead, and those who saw that stately creature so wrung by anguish of the heart never forgot the sight.
Thus the period which began at Portsmouth in 1807 closed in Boston, in 1817, with the death of the eldest born. In that decade Mr. Webster had advanced with great strides from the position of a raw and youthful lawyer in a back country town of New Hampshire. He had reached the highest professional eminence in his own State, and had removed to a wider sphere, where he at once took rank with the best lawyers. He was a leading practitioner in the highest national court. During his two terms in Congress he had become a leader of his party, and had won a solid national reputation. In those years he had rendered conspicuous service to the business interests of the nation, and had established himself as one of the ablest statesmen of the country in matters of finance. He had defined his position on the tariff as a free-trader in theory and a very moderate protectionist when protection was unavoidable, a true representative of the doctrine of the New England Federalists. He had taken up his ground as the champion of specie payments and of the liberal interpretation of the Constitution, which authorized internal improvements. While he had not shrunk from extreme opposition to the administration during the war, he had kept himself entirely clear from the separatist sentiment of New England in the year 1814. He left Congress with a realizing sense of his own growing powers, and, rejoicing in his strength, he turned to his profession and to his new duties in his new home.
CHAPTER III.
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.—MR. WEBSTER AS A LAWYER.
There is a vague tradition that when Mr. Webster took up his residence in Boston, some of the worthies of that ancient Puritan town were disposed at first to treat him rather cavalierly and make him understand that because he was great in New Hampshire it did not follow that he was also great in Massachusetts. They found very quickly, however, that it was worse than useless to attempt anything of this sort with a man who, by his mere look and presence whenever he entered a room, drew all eyes to himself and hushed the murmur of conversation. It is certain that Mr. Webster soon found himself the friend and associate of all the agreeable and distinguished men of the town, and that he rapidly acquired that general popularity which, in those days, went with him everywhere. It is also certain that he at once and without effort assumed the highest position at the bar as the recognized equal of its most eminent leaders. With an income increased tenfold and promising still further enlargement, a practice in which one fee probably surpassed the earnings of three months in New Hampshire, with an agreeable society about him, popular abroad, happy and beloved at home, nothing could have been more auspicious than these opening years of his life in Boston.
The period upon which he then entered, and during which he withdrew from active public service to devote himself to his profession, was a very important one in his career. It was a period marked by a rapid intellectual growth and by the first exhibition of his talents on a large scale. It embraces, moreover, two events, landmarks in the life of Mr. Webster, which placed him before the country as one of the first and the most eloquent of her constitutional lawyers, and as the great master in the art of occasional oratory. The first of these events was the argument in the Dartmouth College case; the second was the delivery of the Plymouth oration.