The Brothers' War

by John C. Reed

WEBSTER

Calhoun was the pre-eminent champion of the southern cause in the union, while Toombs was that of southern nationalization seeking independence. Webster was the pre-eminent champion of American nationalization seeking continental union. Toombs and Webster are therefore in antithesis; and it will be well for me to begin the chapter by anticipating some of the characteristics of the former, who will be treated at large later on, and briefly contrasting the two.

By nature Toombs was so prone to action that even in his daily recreation—talk with the nearest to him was by far the most of it—his immense and tireless outpouring of fine phrase, wisdom, and wit was the increasing wonder of all who knew him. Webster’s proneness was to repose, almost indolence. He often seemed lethargic. His activity could be excited only by the pressure of necessity. This difference between the two showed itself very markedly in their several careers. Toombs, coming to the bar in the last year of his nonage, took the profession at once to his heart, settled in his native county, in a lucrative field of practice, overcame all hindrances of natural defects and insufficient training seemingly by a mere act of will, and in four or five years his collecting a thousand-dollar fee in an adjoining county was no very uncommon thing. When he was twenty-eight he was a fully developed lawyer and advocate on every side—law, equity, and criminal—of the courts of that prosperous planting community, then overrunning with cases of importance, and his annual income from practice was $15,000. Webster went up much more slowly. He read long and industriously; was not called until he was twenty-three; for the next two and a half years was content with an income of $600 or $700; and then for nine years at Portsmouth his average income was $2,000 yearly. Even when Webster at thirty-four removed to Boston he was hardly as a lawyer the equal of Toombs at twenty-eight; and I believe that the latter was always the superior lawyer. The greater reputation of Webster is due to the greater reputation of his cases, and of the tribunal wherein he long held the lead.

We see a like difference between the two in congress. Webster shirks the routine duties of his place to gain opportunity for practice in the United States supreme court. Toombs stays away from all courts during the session, and gives every measure before the body to which he belongs its proper attention, study, and labor. But the performance by him of all the many duties of representative or senator, whether little or great, with unparalleled diligence, ability, and splendor, has been so completely obscured by the few of Webster’s great congressional exploits, that it is not now cared for by anybody.

The greater lawyer and the greater congressman has been accorded the lesser renown. This is because of the relation which each one bore to the two publics which I have tried to make you understand,—the southern public and the northern public. Toombs’s legal career was mainly in the courts of his own State. It was not much heard of outside, in even the southern public, until his extraordinarily meritorious discharge of congressional duties involving a mastery of law was observed. Although some of Webster’s cases in State courts were celebrated, his greatest ones, to be considered in a moment, were won in the United States supreme court, in the eyes of both publics watching intently. The highest accomplishments of Toombs in the non-sectional parts of his congressional career were almost matters of indifference at the time to both publics, becoming steadily more absorbed in pro- and anti-slavery politics; and what he did in the other part of it excited the hostility of the northern public, and brought him obloquy instead of good name. The few memorable deeds of Webster in congress were victorious vindications of the cause clearest of all to the northern, that is, the free-labor, public. That public has at last not only conquered, but it has annexed the other as a part of itself. And so Toombs’s fame as a lawyer and statesman has been left so far behind that it can hardly hope ever to have impartial and fair comparison with that of Webster.

Just one more parallel, and I shall proceed with my sketch. Each one of the two, in order to accept his mission of leadership, was plainly made by his destiny to abandon a previously cherished doctrine for a new and contrary one. Toombs was once an ardent union man, Webster was once almost a secessionist. In his Taylor speech, made in the United States house of representatives July 1, 1848, speaking of the then expected acquisition of territory, Toombs said:

“All the rest of this continent is not worth our glorious union, much less these contemptible provinces which now threaten us with such evils. It were better that we should throw back the worthless boon, and let the inhabitants work out their own destiny, than that we should endanger our peace, our safety, and our nationality by their incorporation in our union.”

The silly embargo measures, making war upon our own citizens instead of our enemies, had deeply injured New England interests. On their heel came the second war with England, into which the government of France had, as Mr. Lodge says, “tricked us ... by most profligate lying.”[66] This war paralyzed the production and occupations of Webster’s people.

A speech made by him July 4, 1812, is “a strong, calm statement of the grounds of opposition to the war.”[67] Mr. Lodge quotes and emphasizes a passage as proof that Webster, although a federalist, and the majority of his party in New England were—to use the words of the same author—“prepared to go to the very edge of the narrow legal line which divides constitutional opposition from treasonable resistance,”[68] was then standing by the union with might and main. This quotation, separated from its circumstances and the immediate sequel, strongly supports the contention. The speech being printed, circulated widely among those federalists who were gravitating so strongly towards “treasonable resistance.” By reason of it Webster was chosen as a delegate to a convention, held the next month. This man, whom Mr. Lodge would have us believe to be so fixedly counter to the then uppermost revolutionary sentiment of his party, was chosen to be their mouthpiece. He wrote their report—the “Rockingham Memorial” in the form of a letter to President Madison. Mr. Lodge thus contrasts the report and the speech. “In one point the memorial differed curiously from the oration of the month before. The latter pointed to the suffrage as the mode of redress; the former distinctly hinted at and almost threatened secession, even while it deplored a dissolution of the union as a possible result of the administration’s policy.”[69] Then the biographer most confidently states that in the speech Webster was declaring his own views, but in the other document he was declaring those of members of his party.

But the average American will be sure that those familiar with the speech at the time did not strain its counsels as far away from their own as Mr. Lodge does, otherwise they would not have elected him as delegate; and further, he never would have made their report for them unless he had been known to entertain their own sentiments.[70]