Here is the aspect of Webster's great stroke that was so long ignored. He did not satisfy the whole South. He did not make friends for himself of Southerners generally. What he did do was to drive a wedge into the South, to divide it temporarily against itself. He arrayed the Upper South against the Lower and thus because of the ultimate purposes of men like Cheeves, with their ambition to weld the South into a genuine unit, he forced them all to stand still, and thus to give Northern pacifism a chance to ebb, Northern nationalism a chance to develop. A comprehensive brief for the defense on this crucial point in the interpretation of American history, is Professor Foster's contribution.
NATHANIEL WRIGHT STEPHENSON [ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]
WEBSTER'S SEVENTH OF MARCH SPEECH AND THE SECESSION MOVEMENT, 1850
The moral earnestness and literary skill of Whittier, Lowell, Garrison, Phillips, and Parker, have fixed in many minds the antislavery doctrine that Webster's 7th of March speech was "scandalous, treachery", and Webster a man of little or no "moral sense", courage, or statesmanship. That bitter atmosphere, reproduced by Parton and von Holst, was perpetuated a generation later by Lodge. [1]
Since 1900, over fifty publications throwing light on Webster and the Secession movement of 1850 have appeared, nearly a score containing fresh contemporary evidence. These twentieth-century historians—Garrison of Texas, Smith of Williams, Stephenson of Charleston and Yale, Van Tyne, Phillips, Fisher in his True Daniel Webster, or Ames, Hearon, and Cole in their monographs on Southern conditions—many of them born in one section and educated in another, brought into broadening relations with Northern and Southern investigators, trained in the modern historical spirit and freed by the mere lapse of time from much of the passion of slavery and civil war, have written with less emotion and more knowledge than the abolitionists, secessionists, or their disciples who preceded Rhodes.
Under the auspices of the American Historical Association have appeared the correspondence of Calhoun, of Chase, of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, and of Hunter of Virginia. Van Tyne's Letters of Webster (1902), including hundreds hitherto unpublished, was further supplemented in the sixteenth volume of the "National Edition" of Webster's Writings and Speeches (1903). These two editions contain, for 1850 alone, 57 inedited letters.
Manuscript collections and newspapers, comparatively unknown to earlier writers, have been utilized in monographs dealing with the situation in 1850 in South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Tennessee, published by. universities or historical societies.
The cooler and matured judgments of men who knew Webster personally—Foote, Stephens, Wilson, Seward, and Whittier, in the last century; Hoar, Hale, Fisher, Hosmer, and Wheeler in recent years-modify their partizan political judgments of 1850. The new printed evidence is confirmed by manuscript material: 2,500 letters of the Greenough Collection available since the publication of the recent editions of Webster's letters and apparently unused by Webster's biographers; and Hundreds of still inedited Webster Papers in the New Hampshire Historical Society, and scattered in minor collections. [2] This mass of new material makes possible and desirable a re-examination of the evidence as to (1) the danger from the secession movement in 1850; (2) Webster's change in attitude toward the disunion danger in February, 1850; (3) the purpose and character of his 7th of March speech; (4) the effects of his speech and attitude upon the secession movement.