The Brothers' War

by John C. Reed

The popular wave that he had thus mounted carried the draftsman of the “Rockingham Memorial” into congress, where, while British armies were actually treading our soil, he voted against the taxes proposed for national defence. Mr. Lodge does not go the full length of sustaining this conduct.[71] The severe comment of another biographer will be cordially approved by average readers, northern and southern.[72]

The facts properly considered show that from the speech of July 4, 1812, on, Webster, although he stood aloof from the Hartford convention movement, was in full sympathy with the federalists of New England, whom the national government by its unrighteous oppressions had driven to contemplate disunion as a possible measure of self-protection.

This attitude of Webster towards the union was entirely contrary to that which afterwards became his power and glory among his countrymen. We wish it noted that as he changed with the people of New England from anti-tariff to pro-tariff politics, he likewise changed with them in their principles as to the union; and that Toombs went with the south, in an opposite direction, that is, from embrace to rejection of the union.

Having in the foregoing brought out the prominent characteristics of Webster’s nature and career, and having also impressed you that he, like all other great statesmen, could lead only by following his people, I will cursorily trace him from stage to stage through his development. He was selected in infancy, if not before by providence, to be made not the expounder of the constitution, but the invincible defender of the union. When his activity begins, he is at first to consolidate the union by the management of some great law cases, and delivery of occasional addresses to popular assemblies; and afterwards in his high place as United States senator he is to demonstrate to the northern public its complete guaranty of their highest material interests, and set it in their hearts above all things else. Thus did providence assign to him the preservation of the greatest of all democracies, to the end that there be no break in the future course of human improvement.

Before his activity begins the powers train him. They gave him a long education, and a slow growth as a statesman. He could never remember when he had been unable to read. His feeble physique while a child shielded him from the labor required of the other children, and permitted him to enjoy books. Early he soaked his mind in the King James version of the bible and other good English standards. As he grew apace his opportunities of reading were far better than those of Calhoun, who never saw even a circulating library until he was in his thirteenth year, and soon was taken away from that. These opportunities he used in his leisurely way. His mind was strong and his memory good, and he digested and kept under command what he read. His schooling and college course were in the main continuous. He got to Dartmouth at fifteen, where he spent four years. Here he made the reputation of being the best speaker and writer of all the students. In his study for the law he took ample time. And in his first years of practice he had much leisure. Besides revelling in the Latin classics, Shakspeare, Milton, Pope, and Cowper, and much history, he was keenly observant of what was going on about him. We know how Jeremiah Mason gave him lessons both in law, rhetoric, and elocution to his great advancement. We know too that his interest in current political questions was vigilant. He took his seat in congress May, 1813, being then a little over thirty-one. His speech against a bill to encourage enlistments made January 14, the next year, shows, as Mr. Lodge says, that “he was now master of the style at which he aimed.”[73] Of this peculiar style I shall say something after a while. Mention of his greatest exploits in consolidating the union is now in order.

The first of these is his conduct of the Dartmouth college case in the United States supreme court. It is entirely out of place for me to give even the briefest notice of the details which fill Mr. Shirley’s unique book.[74] Little more than emphasis of the effect of the decision to knit more closely the bonds of union between the States is required. This effect will be considered more carefully when we comment on Gibbons v. Ogden, which finishes the important work commenced in the other. It needs only to remind the reader now that the protection of contracts against impairing State legislation has contributed probably more than anything else to the prosperous development of American internal trade and commerce,—a most potent factor in consolidating the union,—and that this protection originates in the Dartmouth college decision. But there is something special to be said of Webster as to the case. He did not stress the constitutional point—that upon which the judgment was finally placed—either in his law-brief or argument. The victory is all due to his consummate management of the court, especially of the chief-justice. The latter really found the true ground of the decision. But the powers had Webster in hand, and it suited their purposes to crown their Liebling with the credit of the decision. When he found out the reasons given for the ruling he had won, I fancy that a good angel of his destiny whispered in his ear he ought to have discerned that the weal of all classes of his entire country, and not merely that of its colleges, was at stake in his case, and he must never in the future overlook such an opportunity again. In his Hanover fourth of July speech, made when he was only eighteen years old, to quote from the authority we make so much use of, “the boy Webster preached love of country, the grandeur of American nationality, fidelity to the constitution as the bulwark of nationality, and the necessity and the nobility of the union of the States.”[75] Mr. Lodge impressively adds, “and that was the message which the man Webster delivered to his fellow men.”[76] His Fryeburg fourth of July speech, made not long afterwards, was in the same strain. After the powers had thus started him in the way they wanted him to go, we have noted above how he was carried by the federalists of New England into a movement hostile to the union. This brief wandering from his destiny, as it were, is to be compared with his neglect to grasp the point in the Dartmouth college case which was in the exact line of that high destiny. This shows how even the greatest genius must stumble and grope before it has found the right road. I think the Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, First Part of Henry VI, and the Sonnets of Shakspeare are like examples.

The Plymouth oration, delivered in 1820, begins a new and very important stage of Webster’s career. As Virginia was the mother of the southern States, so New England was in large measure the mother of the northern. The latter was the very fountain of the free-labor nationalization. And as she was known to be exceptionally advanced in intellectual as well as material development, she was to all the free States both their great example and highest authority. Hardly anybody has even yet fully taken in all the permanent good which New England has done for herself at home and for her children and scholars outside. Of course still less of it was understood in 1820. But in the Plymouth oration Webster set forth so much of it, the effect upon New England was magical. It was as if he had raised a curtain concealing great riches and treasures of her merit and glory, the existence of which had not been suspected. New Englanders all fell in love with him, and accorded him the foremost place among their counsellors.

The anti-slavery spirit of the speech deserves special notice. I do not mean to emphasize the oft-quoted passage denouncing the African slave-trade; for everybody in the south—even the smuggler and the few purchasers who encouraged him—had been against legalizing it, for reasons mentioned above, from a time long before the southern States showed a desire in the constitutional convention to stop the trade at once. I mean his mention of slavery in the West Indies. I do not think that he had the south in mind, stressing as he does the absenteeism of the masters and the mortgages of their lands for capital borrowed in England. But much else that he says of the evil effects of slavery could be easily applied, at least in some measure, to the system as it then existed in the south, such as, for instance, the backwardness to make permanent improvements or endow colleges. His contrast of New England with the West Indies is intended to show that a free-labor community is far superior to a slave-labor community in the most important elements of a good and progressive civilization. His conviction of this truth is serious and undoubting. And those few words, “the unmitigated toil of slavery,” which show that he erroneously believed that the slave toiled as hard as the wage-earning laborer, evince a strong moral revulsion on his part.

We summarize as to the Plymouth oration. It made Webster really the political leader of New England, which—the animosity excited by the embargo and the late war having become a forgotten thing of the past—is now both in command of and also in the van of the free-labor and anti-slavery nationalization, destined by the powers to perpetuate the union.

We have told you how Webster—being at the time the very antipodes of what he was afterwards when he talked with Bosworth as to the Rhode Island case—missed the true and cardinal point in the Dartmouth college case, and how the powers, after having Marshall to establish it, gave all the glory of the great accomplishment to Webster. We come now to Gibbons v. Ogden, argued in 1824, in which the latter made far more than ample amends for his shortcoming, and taught even the great Marshall how to decide.