In his speech made on the 7th of March he dwelt at length on existing conditions, on the attitude of the North toward the fugitive slave law, and argued fully the questions involved in the "personal liberty" laws passed by Northern States. Referring to the complaints of the South about these, he said: "In that respect the South, in my judgment, is right and the North is wrong. Every member of every Northern legislature is bound by oath, like every other officer in the country, to support the Constitution of the United States; and the article of the Constitution which says to these States that they shall deliver up fugitives from service is as binding in honor and conscience as any other article. No man fulfils his duty in any legislature who sets himself to find excuses, evasions, escapes, from this constitutional obligation."
And further on he said: "Then, sir, there are the Abolition societies, of which I am unwilling to speak, but in regard to which I have very clear notions and opinions. I do not think them useful. I think their operations for the last twenty years have produced nothing good or valuable.... I cannot but see what mischief their interference with the South has produced."
In these statements is the substance of Webster's offending.
Webster's speech was followed, on the 11th of March, by the speech of Senator Seward, of New York, in the same debate. Quoting the fugitive slave provision of the Federal Constitution, Mr. Seward said: "This is from the Constitution of the United States in 1787, and the parties were the Republican States of the Union. The law of nations disavows such compacts; the law of nature, written on the hearts and consciences of freemen, repudiates them."[45] The people of the North, instead of following Webster, chose to follow Seward, the apostle of a law higher than the Constitution; and when, ten years later, it appeared to them that the whole North had given in its adhesion to the "higher law" doctrine, the people of eleven Southern States seceded, and put over themselves in very substance the Constitution that Seward had flouted and Webster had pleaded for in vain.
Anti-slavery enthusiasts in the North generally, and Abolitionists especially, in their comments on Webster's speech scouted the idea that the preservation of the Union depended upon the faithful execution of the fugitive slave law or the cessation of anti-slavery agitation. "What," said Theodore Parker, "cast off the North! They set up for themselves! Tush! Tush! Fear boys with bugs!... I think Mr. Webster knew there was no danger of a dissolution of the Union."[46]
The immediate effect of the speech was wonderful; congratulations poured in upon Mr. Webster from conservative classes in every quarter, and he must have felt gratified to know that he had contributed greatly to the enactment of measures that, for a time, had some effect in allaying sectional strife. But the revilings of the Abolitionists prevailed, and it turned out that Daniel Webster, great as he was, had undertaken a task that was too much even for him. His enemies struck out boldly at once: and years afterward, when the anti-slavery movement that Webster's appeals could not arrest had culminated in secession, and when the Union had been saved by arms, the triumphant hosts of the anti-slavery crusade all but succeeded in writing Daniel Webster down permanently in the history of his country as an apostate from principle for the sake of an office he did not get. Here is their verdict, which Mr. Lodge, a biographer of Webster, passes on into history:
"The popular verdict has been given against the 7th of March speech, and that verdict has passed into history. Nothing can be said or done which will alter the fact that the people of this country, who maintained and saved the Union, have passed judgment on Mr. Webster, and condemned what he said on the 7th of March as wrong in principle and mistaken in policy."
Here are specimens of the assaults that were made on Webster after his speech. They are selected from among many given by one of his biographers.[47]
"'Webster,' said Horace Mann, 'is a fallen star! Lucifer descended from Heaven.'... 'Webster,' said Sumner, 'has placed himself in the dark list of apostates.' When Whittier named him Ichabod, and mourned for him in verse as one dead, he did but express the feeling of half New England:
'Let not the land once proud of him
Mourn for him now,
Nor brand with deeper shame his dim
Dishonored brow.
* * * * * * *
Then pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame!
Walk backward with averted gaze
And hide his shame.'"