“I desire to call the attention of all sober-minded men at the north, of all conscientious men, of all men who are not carried away by some fanatical idea or some false impression, to their constitutional obligations. I put it to all the sober and sound minds at the north as a question of morals and a question of conscience, What right have they, in their legislative capacity or any other capacity, to endeavor to get round this constitution, or to embarrass the free exercise of the rights secured by the constitution to the persons whose slaves escape from them? None at all; none at all. Neither in the forum of conscience, nor before the face of the constitution, are they, in my opinion, justified in such an attempt.”
I must believe that as time rolls on the outcry against this position of Webster’s, so unshakably founded in conscience and reason as the position is, must not only cease, but turn to words of praise and commendation. The northern fanatics who tried to abolish slavery by repudiating such solemn contracts as the resolution of March 1, 1845, respecting the admission of Texas, and the fugitive slave restoration clause of the federal constitution, while purposing to stay in the union, were just as morally wrong as were the southern fanatics who proposed to stay in the union and enjoy its benefits and not pay the taxes necessary for its maintenance.
One other passage of this speech has been strongly attacked. Webster opposed applying the Wilmot proviso to California and New Mexico, where, as he said, “the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth ... settles forever with a strength beyond all terms of human enactment, that slavery cannot exist.” To apply the proviso would be, as he added, to “take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of nature,” and “to re-enact the will of God;” and its insertion in a Territorial government bill would be “for the mere purpose of a taunt or reproach.” Mr. Lodge, reprehending most severely, confidently asserts that though these Territories were not suited to slave agriculture, yet that their many and rich mines could have been profitably worked by slaves.[80] He stresses the fact that certain slave owners declared that they would, if they could, so work these mines. This distinguished author is to be reminded of how cheaply Seius could replace any one of his slaves that he worked to death in Ilva’s mines. Let him re-read the Captivi of Plautus,—not to mention many other ancient records just as instructive,—and realize that in that time it was not only one race that furnished slaves, but that every free human being was in lifelong danger of falling to a master. The prisoners taken in the incessant wars kept the slave markets glutted. A few months’ work of one of his slaves would bring the master enough to pay the purchase money and leave a considerable sum to his credit with the banker. The Spaniards worked their mines with Indians to be had for the catching in near-by places. And Mr. Lodge mentions mining with the labor of criminals and serfs. In all the instances that he has in mind the worker can be had for his keep or a little more than that. But to have mined with the slaves of the south,—that was widely different. There was no way to get such a slave except to rear or hire or buy him in a protected market. Does Mr. Lodge really believe that Seius would have permitted his eight hundred slaves to sicken in the mines of Ilva if each one had been worth at least $1,000 in the market? Really the leading industry of the south was slave rearing. The profit was in keeping the slaves healthy and rapidly multiplying. This could be done at little expense in agriculture, where even the light workers were made to support themselves. But had a planter gone into a mining section, where he could get no land, for corn to feed his slaves and stock, and for cotton to bring him money, he would have found no margin of profit whatever in mining. I was reared in the gold-bearing district of Georgia. I can remember old Mr. John Wynne, a wealthy cotton planter living in Oglethorpe county, some six or seven miles from my father’s, who, when—to use plantation parlance—he had laid by his crop at the middle or end of July, would work his gold mine until cotton-picking became brisk about the middle of September. He made money out of his gold mine, without injuring his other far more valuable mine, that is, the natural increase of his negroes. And I heard of other such mine workers. But you could not have tempted one of these shrewd business men to settle with his slaves outside of a cotton-making district in order to mine. Had either Mr. Clingman or Mr. Mason—mentioned by Mr. Lodge—made the trial, he would have soon returned to his old neighborhood a sadder and wiser man.
The negro’s work as a slave in the coal and iron mines of the south never commenced until after the thirteenth amendment freed him. Since then he has done much cruelly hard work as servus poenae—a slave of punishment—in these mines, for convict lessees, having no other interest in him than to get all the labor possible during his term.
So it is clear that Webster, in contending that the conditions in these Territories were prohibitive of slavery was as statesmanly and perspicacious as he was generally in other matters.
His detractors charged that the entire speech was a bid for the support of the south in his eager struggle for the presidency. That he passionately longed for the chair was manifest. But his was not the sordid ambition of the professional place-hunter. He had a heaven-reaching aspiration to show America what a president should be in those angry times. He must have been conscious that he was the only man of gifts to do the great deed. What an appropriate climax that would have been for the invincible defender of the union, who, when replying to Hayne twenty years before, had outsoared Pindar in eulogizing South Carolina leading the south, and Massachusetts leading the north, in the same breath; and who, neither from prepossession in favor of his native community or resentment because of attack upon it by those of the other section, had ever been removed out of brotherly love for all his countrymen alike. If you can do an all-important thing for your fellows which you believe no one else can do, and are without ambition for opportunity, are you not a poor grovelling creature? Webster, knowing that secession could not be peaceable, and seeing it become more and more probable, racked with fears for the union, and aghast at the menace of fraternal bloodshed, like Calhoun, he cheated himself with a futile remedy. We have told you of Calhoun’s proposal to disarm the combatants. In his amiability Webster believed with his whole soul that he could as president make his countrymen love one another as he himself loved them, and that he could pour upon the waters now beginning to rage oil enough to safe the ship of union through the tempest soon to be at its height. It was an aspiration high and holy, deserving of eternal honor from all America. You cannot read this great speech of March 7 aright if you do not discern that Webster was seriously alarmed. When you see that a dear one’s malady is fatal, you will not confess it to others,—not even to yourself. His excited exclamations, “No, sir! no, sir! There will be no secession! Gentlemen are not serious when they talk of secession,” cannot deceive a reader whose wont it has been to look into his own heart. Webster did not see the future with the superhuman prevision of Calhoun; but he had observed the course of things in that stormy session. Is it to be believed that he had overlooked the tremendous significance of Toombs’s speech of December 13, and of the wild plaudits it brought from the southern members? And try to conceive what must have been the effect upon him of that most solemn and the saddest great speech in all oratory of Calhoun just three days before. Read the 7th of March speech by its circumstances and it is revealed to you, as by a flashlight, that Webster had peeped behind the curtain which he had prayed should never rise in his lifetime. Horror-struck as he was, he would not despair of his country,—he would not believe that the brothers’ union was about to turn into a brothers’ war. Oh, let nobody dishonor his better self by seeing in this glorious speech, which our best and most lovable have placed in their hearts beside Washington’s farewell address, the bid of a turncoat. Rather let us learn to understand its supreme statesmanly reach; its impartiality towards and just rebuke of the orator’s own section and its merited castigation of the other courageously given, while affection for both is kept uppermost; its grand dignity, moral height, and pre-eminent patriotism. Let us also learn properly to estimate the disfavor with which he regarded ever afterwards during the rest of his life the active anti-slavery men of the north, whom he could not understand to be other than bringers of the unspeakable calamity he would avert. And let us give him his due commiseration for missing the nomination, and realizing that the hopes of saving his country which he had cherished so fondly were all, all shattered. When we do our full duty to him we will, northerners and southerners alike, agree that Whittier’s palinode ought to have gone full circle before it paused.
What is Webster’s highest and best fame? In answer we think at once of the reply to Hayne, its loftiness throughout, its eagle ascensions here and there, and most of all the organ melodies at the grand close, beside which the famous apostrophe of Longfellow is harsh overstrain. The next moment we feel he is higher in his profound love for his whole country than in his unequalled eloquence. He and Lincoln were the supereminent Americans who could never, never forget that the people of the other section were their own full-blood brothers and sisters. They are the supreme exponents of that American brotherhood, more deeply founded and more lasting than either one of the nationalizations which we have explained, out of which a continental is first, and then a world-union to come. To save our union was also to do the better deed of saving that brotherhood. For this each strove in his own way. I believe that the people of the world-union will pair them in Walhalla, and set them above all other heroes, crowning Webster as the monarch of speech which prepared millions with faith and fortitude for the crisis, and crowning Lincoln the monarch of counsels and acts in the crisis. It will be understood that neither was called away before his mission was finished. The greatest work of each was example of the love with which we should all love one another; and that was complete.