"All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter."
Great statesmen, on great occasions, speak not only to their countrymen and for the time being, but they speak to all mankind and for all time. So spoke Burke in that famous sentence when advocating, in the British Parliament in 1776, "conciliation with America"; and so did Daniel Webster speak, in the Senate of the United States, on the 7th of March, 1850, for "the Constitution and the Union." If George III and Lord North had heeded Burke, and if the British government and people, from that day forth, had followed the wise counsels given in that speech by their greatest statesman, all the English-speaking peoples of the world, now numbering over 170,000,000, might have been to-day under one government, that government commanding the peace of the world. And if all the people of the United States in 1850 and from that time on, had heeded the words of Daniel Webster, we should have been spared the bloodiest war in the book of time; every State of the Union would have been left free to solve its own domestic problems, and it is not too much to say that these problems would have been solved in full accord with the advancing civilization of the age.
The sole charge of inconsistency against Webster that has in it a shadow of truth relates to the proposition he made in his speech as to the "Wilmot proviso." That celebrated proviso was named for David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, its author. It provided against slavery in all the territory acquired from Mexico. The South had opposed the Wilmot proviso because the territory in question, much of it, was south of the Missouri Compromise line extended. Mr. Webster had often voted for the Wilmot proviso, as all knew. In his speech for the Compromise, by which the South was urged to and did give up its contentions as to the admission of California, and its contentions as to the slave trade in the District of Columbia, Webster argued that the North might forego the proviso as to New Mexico and Arizona for the reason that the proviso was, as to these territories, immaterial. Those territories, he argued, would never come in as slave States, because the God of nature had so determined. Climate and soil would forbid. Time vindicated this argument. In 1861 Charles Francis Adams said, in Congress, that New Mexico, open to slave-holders and their slaves for more than ten years, then had only twelve slaves domiciled on the surface of over 200,000 square miles of her extent.[43]
Daniel Webster's services to the cause of the Union, the preservation of which had been the passion of his life, had been absolutely unparalleled. It is perhaps true that without him Abraham Lincoln and the armies of the Union in 1861-65 would have been impossible. The sole and, as he then stated and as time proved, immaterial concession this champion of the Union now (1850) made for the sake of preserving the Union was his proposition as to New Mexico and Arizona.
Henry Clay spoke before Webster. These words were the key-note of Clay's great speech: "In my opinion the body politic cannot be preserved unless this agitation, this distraction, this exasperation, which is going on between the two sections of the country, shall cease."
The country waited with anxiety to hear from Webster. Hundreds of suggestions and appeals went to him. Both sides were hopeful.[44] Anti-slavery people knew his aversion to slavery. He had never countenanced anti-slavery agitation, but he had voted for the Wilmot proviso. They knew, too, that he had long been ambitious to be President, and, carried away by their enthusiasm, they hoped that Webster would swim along with the tide that was sweeping over the majority section of the Union. In view of Mr. Webster's past record, however, it would be difficult to believe that Abolitionists were really disappointed in him had we not many such proofs as the following stanza from Whittier's ode, published after the speech:
Oh! dumb be passing, stormy rage
When he who might
Have lighted up and led his age
Falls back in night!
The conservatives also were hopeful. They knew that, though Webster had always been, as an individual, opposed to slavery, he had at all times stood by the Constitution, as well as the Union. At no time had he ever qualified or retracted these words in his speech at Niblo's Garden in 1839: "Slavery, as it exists in the States, is beyond the reach of Congress. It is a concern of the States themselves. They have never submitted it to Congress, and Congress has no rightful power over it. I shall concur therefore in no act, no measure, no menace, no indication of purpose which shall interfere or threaten to interfere with the exclusive authority of the several States over the subject of slavery, as it exists within their respective limits. All this appears to me to be matter of plain imperative duty."
Nullifying the fugitive slave law was a plain "interference" with the rights of the slave States.
Mr. Webster's intent, when he spoke on the Compromise measures, is best explained by his own words, on June 17, while these measures were still pending: "Sir, my object is peace. My object is reconciliation. My purpose is not to make up a case for the North or a case for the South. My object is not to continue useless and irritating controversies. I am against agitators, North and South, and all narrow local contests. I am an American, and I know no locality but America."