Mr. Webster did not hesitate as to the course he should pursue upon his return. He had been reëlected to the Senate in January, 1839, and after the session closed in July, 1840, he threw himself into the campaign in support of Harrison. The people did not desire Mr. Webster to be their President, but there was no one whom they so much wished to hear. He was besieged from all parts of the country with invitations to speak, and he answered generously to the call thus made upon him.
On his way home from Washington, in March, 1837, more than three years before, he had made a speech at Niblo's Garden in New York,—the greatest purely political speech which he ever delivered. He then reviewed and arraigned with the greatest severity the history of Jackson's administration, abstaining in his characteristic way from all personal attack, but showing, as no one else could show, what had been done, and the results of the policy, which were developing as he had predicted. He also said that the worst was yet to come. The speech produced a profound impression. People were still reading it when the worst really came, and the great panic broke over the country. Mr. Webster had, in fact, struck the key-note of the coming campaign in the Niblo-Garden speech of 1837. In the summer of 1840 he spoke in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and was almost continually upon the platform. The great feat of 1833-34, when he made sixty-four speeches in the Senate on the bank question, was now repeated under much more difficult conditions. In the first instance he was addressing a small and select body of trained listeners, all more or less familiar with the subject. In 1840 he was obliged to present these same topics, with all their infinite detail and inherent dryness, to vast popular audiences, but nevertheless he achieved a marvellous success. The chief points which he brought out were the condition of the currency, the need of government regulation, the responsibility of the Democrats, the miserable condition of the country, and the exact fulfillment of the prophecies he had made. The argument and the conclusion were alike irresistible, but Mr. Webster showed, in handling his subject, not only the variety, richness, and force which he had displayed in the Senate, but the capacity of presenting it in a way thoroughly adapted to the popular mind, and yet, at the same time, of preserving the impressive tone of a dignified statesman, without any degeneration into mere stump oratory. This wonderful series of speeches produced the greatest possible effect. They were heard by thousands and read by tens of thousands. They fell, of course, upon willing ears. The people, smarting under bankruptcy, poverty, and business depression, were wild for a change; but nothing did so much to swell the volume of public resentment against the policy of the ruling party as these speeches of Mr. Webster, which gave character and form to the whole movement. Jackson had sown the wind, and his unlucky successor was engaged in the agreeable task of reaping the proverbial crop. There was a political revolution. The Whigs swept the country by an immense majority, the great Democratic party was crushed to the earth, and the ignorant misgovernment of Andrew Jackson found at last its fit reward. General Harrison, as soon as he was elected, turned to the two great chiefs of his party to invite them to become the pillars of his administration. Mr. Clay declined any cabinet office, but Mr. Webster, after some hesitation, accepted the secretaryship of state. He resigned his seat in the Senate February 22, 1841, and on March 4 following took his place in the cabinet, and entered upon a new field of public service.
CHAPTER VIII.
SECRETARY OF STATE.—THE ASHBURTON TREATY.
There is one feature in the history, or rather in the historic scenery of this period, which we are apt to overlook. The political questions, the debates, the eloquence of that day, give us no idea of the city in which the history was made, or of the life led by the men who figured in that history. Their speeches might have been delivered in any great centre of civilization, and in the midst of a brilliant and luxurious society. But the Washington of 1841, when Mr. Webster took the post which is officially the first in the society of the capital and of the country, was a very odd sort of place, and widely different from what it is to-day. It was not a village, neither was it a city. It had not grown, but had been created for a special purpose. A site had been arbitrarily selected, and a city laid out on the most magnificent scale. But there was no independent life, for the city was wholly official in its purposes and its existence. There were a few great public buildings, a few large private houses, a few hotels and boarding houses, and a large number of negro shanties. The general effect was of attempted splendor, which had resulted in slovenliness and straggling confusion. The streets were unpaved, dusty in summer, and deep with mud in winter, so that the mere difficulty of getting from place to place was a serious obstacle to general society. Cattle fed in the streets, and were milked by their owners on the sidewalk. There was a grotesque contrast between the stately capitol where momentous questions were eloquently discussed and such queerly primitive and rude surroundings. Few persons were able to entertain because few persons had suitable houses. Members of Congress usually clubbed together and took possession of a house, and these "messes," as they were called,—although without doubt very agreeable to their members,—did not offer a mode of life which was easily compatible with the demands of general society. Social enjoyments, therefore, were pursued under difficulties; and the city, although improving, was dreary enough.
Society, too, was in a bad condition. The old forms and ceremonies of the men of 1789 and the manners and breeding of our earliest generation of statesmen had passed away, and the new democracy had not as yet a system of its own. It was a period of transition. The old customs had gone, the new ones had not crystallized. The civilization was crude and raw, and in Washington had no background whatever,—such as was to be found in the old cities and towns of the original thirteen States. The tone of the men in public life had deteriorated and was growing worse, approaching rapidly its lowest point, which it reached during the Polk administration. This was due partly to the Jacksonian democracy, which had rejected training and education as necessary to statesmanship, and had loudly proclaimed the great truths of rotation in office, and the spoils to the victors, and partly to the slavery agitation which was then beginning to make itself felt. The rise of the irrepressible conflict between freedom and slavery made the South overbearing and truculent; it produced that class of politicians known as "Northern men with Southern principles," or, in the slang of the day, as "doughfaces;" and it had not yet built up a strong, vigorous, and aggressive party in the North. The lack of proper social opportunities, and this deterioration among men in public life, led to an increasing violence and roughness in debate, and to a good deal of coarse dissipation in private. There was undoubtedly a brighter side, but it was limited, and the surroundings of the distinguished men who led our political parties in 1841 at the national capital, do not present a very cheerful or attractive picture.
When the new President appeared upon the scene he was followed by a general rush of hungry office-seekers, who had been starving for places for many years. General Harrison was a brave, honest soldier and pioneer, simple in heart and manners, unspoiled and untaught by politics of which he had had a good share. He was not a great man, but he was honorable and well intentioned. He wished to have about him the best and ablest men of his party, and to trust to their guidance for a successful administration. But although he had no desire to invent a policy, or to draft state papers, he was determined to be the author of his own inaugural speech, and he came to Washington with a carefully-prepared manuscript in his pocket. When Mr. Webster read this document he found it full of gratitude to the people, and abounding in allusions to Roman history. With his strong sense of humor, and of the unities and proprieties as well, he was a good deal alarmed at the proposed speech; and after much labor, and the expenditure of a good deal of tact, he succeeded in effecting some important changes and additions. When he came home in the evening, Mrs. Seaton, at whose house he was staying, remarked that he looked worried and fatigued, and asked if anything had happened. Mr. Webster replied, "You would think that something had happened if you knew what I have done. I have killed seventeen Roman proconsuls." It was a terrible slaughter for poor Harrison, for the proconsuls were probably very dear to his heart. His youth had been passed in the time when the pseudo classicism of the French Republic and Empire was rampant, and now that, in his old age, he had been raised to the presidency, his head was probably full of the republics of antiquity, and of Cincinnatus called from the plough, to take the helm of state.
M. de Bacourt, the French minister at this period, a rather shallow and illiberal man who disliked Mr. Webster, gives, in his recently published correspondence, the following amusing account of the presentation of the diplomatic corps to President Harrison,—a little bit of contemporary gossip which carries us back to those days better than anything else could possibly do. The diplomatic corps assembled at the house of Mr. Fox, the British minister, who was to read a speech in behalf of the whole body, and thence proceeded to the White House where
"the new Secretary of State, Mr. Webster, who is much embarrassed by his new functions, came to make his arrangements with Mr. Fox. This done, we were ranged along the wall in order of seniority, and after too long a delay for a country where the chief magistrate has no right to keep people waiting, the old General came in, followed by all the members of his Cabinet, who walked in single file, and so kept behind him. He then advanced toward Mr. Fox, whom Mr. Webster presented to him. Mr. Fox read to him his address. Then the President took out his spectacles and read his reply. Then, after having shaken hands with the English minister, he walked from one end of our line to the other, Mr. Webster presenting each of us by name, and he shaking hands with each one without saying a word. This ceremony finished he returned to the room whence he had come, and reappeared with Mrs. Harrison—the widow of his eldest son—upon his arm, whom he presented to the diplomatic corps en masse. Mr. Webster, who followed, then presented to us Mrs. Finley, the mother of this Mrs. Harrison, in the following terms: 'Gentlemen, I introduce to you Mrs. Finley, the lady who attends Mrs. Harrison;' and observe that this good lady who attends the others—takes care of them—is blind. Then all at once, a crowd of people rushed into the room. They were the wives, sisters, daughters, cousins, and lady friends of the President and of all his ministers, who were presented to us, and vice versa, in the midst of an inconceivable confusion."
Fond, however, as Mr. Webster was of society, and punctilious as he was in matters of etiquette and propriety, M. de Bacourt to the contrary notwithstanding, he had far more important duties to perform than those of playing host and receiving foreign ministers. Our relations with England when he entered the cabinet were such as to make war seem almost inevitable. The northeastern boundary, undetermined by the treaty of 1783, had been the subject of continual and fruitless negotiation ever since that time, and was still unsettled and more complicated than ever. It was agreed that there should be a new survey and a new arbitration, but no agreement could be reached as to who should arbitrate or what questions should be submitted to the arbitrators, and the temporary arrangements for the possession of the territory in dispute were unsatisfactory and precarious. Much more exciting and perilous than this old difficulty was a new one and its consequences growing out of the Canadian rebellion in 1837. Certain of the rebels fled to the United States, and there, in conjunction with American citizens, prepared to make incursions into Canada. For this purpose they fitted out an American steamboat, the Caroline. An expedition from Canada crossed the Niagara River to the American shore, set fire to the Caroline, and let her drift over the Falls. In the fray which occurred, an American named Durfree was killed. The British government avowed this invasion to be a public act and a necessary measure of self-defence; but it was a question when Mr. Van Buren went out of office whether this avowal had been made in an authentic manner. There was another incident, however, also growing out of this affair, even more irritating and threatening than the invasion itself. In November, 1840, one Alexander McLeod came from Canada to New York, where he boasted that he was the slayer of Durfree, and thereupon was at once arrested on a charge of murder and thrown into prison. This aroused great anger in England, and the conviction of McLeod was all that was needed to cause immediate war. In addition to these complications was the question of the right of search for the impressment of British seamen and for the suppression of the slave-trade. Our government was, of course, greatly hampered in action by the rights of Maine and Massachusetts on the northeastern boundary, and by the fact that McLeod was within the jurisdiction and in the power of the New York courts, and wholly out of reach of those of the United States. The character of the national representatives on both sides in London tended, moreover, to aggravate the growing irritation between the two countries. Lord Palmerston was sharp and domineering, and Mr. Stevenson, our minister, was by no means mild or conciliatory. Between them they did what they could to render accommodation impossible.