After much more to the same effect, Professor McMaster proceeds: "The attack by the press, the expressions of horror that rose from New England, Webster felt keenly, but the absolute isolation in which he was left by his New England colleagues cut him to the quick."[48]
On Mr. Webster's speech, its purpose and effect, we have this opinion from Mr. Lodge:
"The speech, if exactly defined, is in reality a powerful effort, not for a compromise, or for the fugitive slave law, or for any other one thing, but to arrest the whole anti-slavery movement, and in that way put an end to the danger which threatened the Union and restore harmony to the jarring sections."
And then he adds:
"It was a mad project. Mr. Webster might as well have attempted to stay the incoming tide at Marshfield with a rampart of sand, as to check the anti-slavery movement with a speech."
To undertake at this time to arrest the whole anti-slavery movement by holding up the Constitution was indeed useless.
Seward, who had spoken for the "higher law," was riding on the tide of anti-slavery sentiment that was submerging "the Sage of Marshfield," who had stood for the Constitution. Seward's reputation, in the years following, went steadily up, while Webster's was going down. Webster died, in dejection, in 1852.
Seward, at Rochester, in 1854, later on in the same crusade, made another famous declaration—there was an "irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom." The conflict was "irrepressible," as Seward well knew; and this was simply and solely because the anti-slavery crusade could not be suppressed. Clay and Webster, now both dead and gone, had tried it in vain. Every one knew that if, in 1850, or at any other time, the anti-slavery hosts had halted, and asked for, or consented to, peace, they could have had it at once.
Mr. Lodge, in the following paragraph, seems to have almost made up his mind to defend Webster. He says: "What most shocked the North were his utterances in regard to the fugitive slave law. There can be no doubt that, under the Constitution, the South had a perfect right to claim the extradition of fugitive slaves. The legal argument to support that right was excellent." This would seem to justify the speech in that regard. "But," Mr. Lodge adds, "the Northern people could not feel that it was necessary for Daniel Webster to make it." They wanted him to be sectional or to hold his tongue. Then Mr. Lodge goes on to say: "The fugitive slave law was in absolute conflict with the awakened conscience and moral sentiment of the North."
The conscience of the North at that time, Mr. Lodge means, was a higher law than the Constitution; and Webster's "excellent argument," therefore, fell on deaf ears.