Towards the close of his speech Mr. Webster describes in an amusing way a supposed conflict in South Carolina between the customs officers of the government and a local force led by his opponent. It was playful, but Col. Hayne was moved by the ridicule with which it covered him more than by any of Mr. Webster’s arguments.
It need hardly be said that the entire address was listened to with rapt attention. As it proceeded those friends of Mr. Webster who doubted his ability to cope with the Southern champion, and who had listened to his first words with feelings of anxious solicitude, became cheerful and even jubilant. In fact they changed aspects with Hayne’s friends who had awaited the opening of the speech with supercilious disdain. The calm power, the humorous contempt, with which Mr. Webster handled the doughty champion annoyed them not a little.
I do not mean to underrate the ability or eloquence of Col. Hayne. Upon this point it is sufficient to quote the opinion of Mr. Everett, the tried and intimate friend of Daniel Webster, who says: “It is unnecessary to state, except to those who have come forward quite recently, that Col. Hayne was a gentleman of ability very far above the average, a highly accomplished debater, an experienced politician, a person possessing the full confidence of his friends, and entirely familiar with the argument on which the theory controverted in Mr. Webster’s speech rests.”
Mr. March, in his “Reminiscences of Congress,” a book from which I have received valuable help in the composition of this chapter, describes Hayne’s oratory in these terms:
“Hayne dashed into debate like the Mameluke cavalry upon a charge. There was a gallant air about him that could not but win admiration. He never provided for retreat; he never imagined it. He had an invincible confidence in himself, which arose partly from constitutional temperament, partly from previous success. His was the Napoleonic warfare: to strike at once for the capital of the enemy, heedless of danger or cost to his own forces. Not doubting to overcome all odds, he feared none, however seemingly superior. Of great fluency and no little force of expression, his speech never halted, and seldom fatigued.”
Mr. Webster swept on to the close of his speech with power unabated. Some of his friends had feared he could not sustain his elevated flight, that he would mar the effect of his great passages by dropping to the commonplace. They had no need to fear. He thoroughly understood his own powers. At length he reached the peroration—that famous peroration, so well known, yet, in spite of its familiarity, so impossible to omit here.
“When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory, ‘What is all this worth?’ nor those other words of delusion and folly, ‘Liberty first and Union afterwards:’ but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the seas and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”
Hayne attempted a reply to this speech, but it had little effect. It was followed by a telling résumé of his positions by Mr. Webster, and so far as these two speakers were concerned the discussion closed.
It is remarkable how little effort this famous oration cost it author. The constitutional argument, to be sure, was familiar to him, and he had but to state it, but for the great passages, including the exordium, the peroration, the encomium upon Massachusetts, the speaker was indebted to the inspiration of the moment; yet they are so compact, so fitly expressed, so elegantly worded, that he would be a bold man who should suggest even a verbal change.