The Brothers' War

by John C. Reed

Let us sum up. Here was a country in which everybody had been well trained in the available ways of self-support and also of saving and accumulating,—the very first essential to make good citizens. Such citizens were required to administer their public affairs themselves; and thus they received the very best political education and training in a school of genuine democracy,—which is the next essential. The children of each generation were schooled better than those of the former, the colleges and universities constantly did better with the students, and libraries open to the public both multiplied and enlarged,—the third essential. And education and business were rationally mixed, until in Webster’s time it might be said with truth that the average New Englander worked with a will, and wisely, every day to maintain himself and family, and also found leisure to add something of value to his store of knowledge. Here is another essential. The moral and religious atmosphere became purer and purer, and more and more on all sides good intention was conspicuous in the light, and evil intention hid itself deep in the dark. This is the last essential.

The foregoing is made up from the Plymouth oration. Webster was too near to discern all the intellectual and moral advancement and the opulent future promise of his own community, the proper fruit of the conditions just summarized.[79] Let us indicate by only such a paucity of examples as we have room for. Able and fully furnished lawyers everywhere. Think of Story, a most diligently attending judge and one of the best; also finding time both to be the first law professor and most fertile and eminent author of the age, exhausting English and American sources and authority in his books, and crowding them with a civil law learning to be surpassed only by that of the Roman jurists of Germany; let Ticknor, whom we may call the founder of the post classical school of literature in our country, suggest the students of modern languages who followed in an illustrious line,—let him suggest also the famous historians, such as Prescott, Bancroft, Hildreth, Motley, Parkman, really representatives of the school just mentioned, using methods that got into the American air first from Ticknor; let Channing suggest the pulpit,—Channing, who raised religion from the gloom of dogma and orthodoxy into a life of angelic joy; what can one say to describe Emerson in a breath,—the teacher to us all of fit aspiration, right thinking, noble expression, the highest virtue and truest religion, and who lived, as Dr. Heber Newton has lately told, the most perfect of lives as a man; Hawthorne, showing the world sick with its yearning for moral redemption that even a disgraced, lone, and friendless woman can by a subsequent life of unreserved confession, purity, and love to her neighbors turn a horrible brand of guilt into a jewel more precious and brilliant than diamond,—how his consummate achievement rebukes the sixty years’ dilatoriness of Goethe over his unfinished Faust; and divine poets, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes,—the last two conspicuous in letters, Lowell being in my judgment the greatest American man of letters; I have said nothing of the statesmen and orators, beginning with Fisher Ames and John Adams,—and there are others in every high round of the intellectual life known all over the land whose names I must omit.

In this enumeration I have intentionally looked somewhat forward; for what is in one particular generation you cannot find out until its effects are plain in the next. I want to accentuate it that Webster belonged to a society which had made some of the extraordinary figures whose names are given, and was making the rest of them. When the view just suggested has been taken, and if in comparing New England with any other community—even with Athens, Florence, England, or Germany, in their best eras—periods of time be equalized and differences of population be properly allowed for, it will appear that the conditions moulding Webster were more energetic in productivity than can be found elsewhere. And if, in this comparison, the relative general condition of the masses in each community be duly taken into the account, the result will be far more favorable to New England; for a high level of the masses is a much better proof of a fecund culture than merely many striking individual instances.

Thus we bring out the point that Webster was born, grew up, and lived in a nursery prolific in men and women of extraordinary powers and virtues. How insignificant is the muster-roll of any other part of our country! I compare that of the south because I am familiar with it, and one can with better manners disparage his own section than another. The ante-bellum southern treasures of art and literature except speeches, political and forensic, can be counted on the fingers of one hand without taking them all. The poetry of Poe, a few essays of Legaré, especially that on Demosthenes, Calhoun’s Dissertation on Government, and Toombs’s Tremont Temple lecture, are all that are pre-eminent; and some of the historians of our literature insist that Poe was southern only in his prejudices, and not in his making. To turn away from authors, how few can be found to compare in education, polish, and literary or scientific accomplishments with average New Englanders of their several professions or occupations. Toombs, in the diamond-like brilliance of his extempore effusion in talks or speeches, is as solitary in the south as Catullus, the greatest of the spontaneous poets of his nation, was in the Rome of his day.

Webster absorbed and absorbed, assimilated and assimilated, all the better elements of this marvellous New England culture, which I am painfully conscious of having most insufficiently described above, until at last he mounted its eminences in his profession, in the politics of democracy, æsthetic taste, and especially statesmanly eloquence. So assured was his stand upon these eminences that all the wisest and most refined of the section spontaneously and involuntarily did him obeisance, recognizing in him their ideal of wisdom and counsel befittingly expressed. We can stop to give only two examples. Edward Everett is the one American master of grand rhetoric. He heard the reply to Hayne, and, as he says, he could not but be reminded throughout of Demosthenes’ making the unrivalled crown oration. Choate, profoundly versed in the law, the incomparable forensic advocate and popular speaker, daily flying higher with inspiration drawn from Demosthenes and Cicero—he poured out his admiration in many utterances that have already become classic. Webster was made in and by New England, and not for herself alone. The toast, “Daniel Webster,—the gift of New England to his country, his whole country, and nothing but his country,” to which he responded December 22, 1843, tells but the truth. No American other than a New Englander ever had what one may term such a greatness breeding environment as he. And passing in review all the famous children of those famous six States, whether they spent their lives at home as Choate, or developed elsewhere as Henry Ward Beecher, it is my decided opinion that Daniel Webster as fruit and example of her culture is New England’s greatest glory.

There remain now but a few prominences of Webster for me to touch upon.

His speech of March 7, 1850, was fiercely denounced by the root-and-branch abolitionists. Horace Mann called him a fallen Lucifer. Sumner charged him with apostasy. Giddings said he had struck “a blow against freedom and the constitutional rights of the free States which no southern arm could have given.” Theodore Parker could think of no comparable deed of any other New Englander except the treachery of Benedict Arnold. Wittier condemned him to everlasting obloquy in a lofty lyric, which from its very title of one word throughout was reprobation more stinging than the world-known lampoon of Catullus against Julius Cæsar. The effect of this tempest has not yet all died out; and in many quarters of the north Webster is still regarded as a renegade. His defenders, however, multiply and become more earnest and strong. Let us consider this speech with the serenity and riper judgment which should mark the historical writer of to-day.

First and foremost let us grasp the wide difference of the situation from that at the beginning of 1833. Then, the question was only remotely a pro-slavery or southern one. A southern president, the most popular American, of great firmness of purpose and extraordinary courage, had taken a decided stand against the movement of one southern State hostile to the general government,—a stand the more decided because he cordially hated Calhoun, who was leading the movement. The southern leaders outside of that State did not approve of nullification; most of them believing it was an absurdity for a State to contend she could stay in the union and at the same time rightfully refuse to perform a condition of that union. It seemed that no southern State except Virginia would stand by South Carolina in the event of a collision between her and the United States. We can well understand that Webster could then see no danger to the cause he loved above all others, that is, the union, in uncompromisingly demanding that the revenue be collected, and with force if necessary.

Nullification was palpably unjustifiable, even under the doctrine prevalent in the south. We have explained how Calhoun’s extreme desire for peaceable remedies only, led him to champion this illogical measure. The theory of State sovereignty demanded that, instead of the nullification ordinance, South Carolina pass an ordinance of secession, conditioned to commence its operation at a stated time if the objectionable duties had not been repealed. The situation in 1833 was that all the north and nearly all of the south were arrayed under a southern leader against only one southern State, making a demand which was plainly untenable in either one of the two differing schools of constitutional construction.

But the situation, in 1850, was a south solidly united, not upon such an obvious heresy as nullification, but aroused as one man to protect the very underpinning of its social structure. It was standing confidently upon the doctrine of State sovereignty, which, as the historical records all showed, was the creed of the generation, both north and south, that made the constitution. As we have already told, Calhoun in 1833 probably convinced Webster that the States were sovereign. That did not mean that the force-bill was wrong; it meant only that if South Carolina chose, she could rightfully secede. And we may say that this great argument of Calhoun, demolishing as it does the premises of Webster, was really irrelevant, for it did not support his own proposition. Now in 1850, as Webster saw it, the south was justified by the constitution, however foolish might be her policy, and he was too conscientious to oppose what he believed right and just. In addition to this claim by the south of State sovereignty as abstractly right, his conscience told him that some of her practical demands were just. It had been provided not only that all of Texas south of 36° 30′ be admitted with slavery, but further that four other States be made out of the same territory. Although Webster was a free-soiler from first to last, his conscience told him peremptorily that the only honest course of congress as to the provision mentioned, which was really a solemn contract with Texas, was to perform the contract in good faith. This advice, of course, aroused the ire of the abolitionists, who had united upon the position that no other slave State should ever be admitted into the union. And he boldly said that the south was right in her complaint that there was disinclination both among individuals and public authorities at the north to execute the fugitive slave law. Meditate these serious words: