No American historian stands higher as an authority than Mr. Rhodes. He says on page 161, vol. I, of his "History of the United States," published in 1892: "Until the closing years of our century a dispassionate judgment could not be made of Webster; but we see now that in the war of secession his principles were mightier than those of Garrison. It was not 'No Union with slave-holders,' but Liberty and Union that won."
This tribute to services Webster had rendered to the Union in his great speech in 1850, in which he advocated "Liberty and Union, now and forever," exactly as he was advocating it in 1830, is just. How pathetic that the historian was impelled also to record the fact, in the same sentence, that for nearly half a century partisan prejudice had rendered it impossible to form a dispassionate judgment of him who had pleaded in vain for the Union without war!
After an able analysis of his "7th of March speech," and a discussion of his record, in which he paralleled Webster and Edmund Burke, Mr. Rhodes declares: "His dislike of slavery was strong, but his love of the Union was stronger, and the more powerful motive outweighed the other, for he believed that the crusade against slavery had arrived at a point where its further prosecution was hurtful to the Union. As has been said of Burke, 'He changed his front but he never changed his ground.'"[49]
Daniel Webster's name and its place in history may be likened to a giant oak, a monarch of the forest, that, while towering high above all others, was stripped of its branches; for a time it stood, a rugged trunk, robbed of its glory by a cyclone; but its roots were deep down in the rich earth; the storm is passing away; the tree has put out buds again; now its branches are stretching out once more into the clear reaches of the upper air.
Mr. Rhodes seems to be the first historian of note to do justice to Daniel Webster and the great speech which, McMaster takes pains to inform us, historians have written down as his "7th of March speech," in spite of the fact that Mr. Webster himself entitled it "The Constitution and the Union."
Other historians besides Mr. Rhodes have come to the rescue of Webster's speech for "the Constitution and the Union." Mr. John Fiske says of it in a volume (posthumous) published in 1907: "So far as Mr. Webster's moral attitude was concerned, although he was not prepared for the bitter hostility that his speech provoked in many quarters, he must nevertheless have known it was quite as likely to injure him at the North as to gain support for him in the South, and his resolute adoption of a policy that he regarded as national rather than sectional was really an instance of high moral courage."[50]
Mr. William C. Wilkinson has recently written an able "Vindication of Daniel Webster," and, after a conclusive argument on that branch of his subject, he says: "Webster's consistency stands like a rock on the shore after the fretful waves are tired with beating upon it in vain."[51]
Mr. E. P. Wheeler, concluding a masterly sketch of Daniel Webster, setting forth his services as statesman and expounder of the Constitution, and not deigning to notice the partisan charges against him, concludes with these words:
"Great men elevate and ennoble their countrymen. In the glory of Webster we find the glory of our whole country."
The story of Daniel Webster and his great speech in 1850 has been told at some length because it is instructive. The historians who had set themselves to the task of upholding the idea that it was the aggressiveness of the South, during the controversy over slavery, and not that of the North, that brought on secession and war, could not make good their contention while Daniel Webster and his speech for "the Constitution and the Union" stood in their way. They, therefore, wrote the great statesman "down and out," as they conceived. But Webster and that speech still stand as beacon lights in the history of that crusade. The attack came from the North. The South, standing for its constitutional rights in the Union, was the conservative party. Southern leaders, it is true, were, during the controversy over slavery, often aggressive, but they were on the defensive-aggressive, just as Lee was when he made his campaign into Pennsylvania for the purpose of stopping the invasion of his own land; and the South lost in her political campaign just for the same reason that Lee lost in his Gettysburg campaign: numbers and resources were against her. "The stars in their courses fought against Sisera."