Famous American Statesmen

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

With all these sorrows crowded into Mr. Webster's life, he could not cease his pressing work in Congress. Andrew Jackson had become President, and John C. Calhoun had preached his Nullification doctrines till South Carolina was ready to separate herself from the Union, because of her dissatisfaction with the tariff laws. Webster had somewhat changed his views, and had become a supporter of the "American System" of Henry Clay, the system of "protection," because he thought the interests of his constituents demanded it. For himself, he loved agriculture, but he saw the need of fostering manufactures if we would have a great and prosperous country.

On December 29, 1829, Mr. Foote, a senator from Connecticut, introduced a resolution to inquire respecting the sales and surveys of western lands. In a long debate which followed, General Hayne of South Carolina took occasion to chastise New England, in no tender words, for her desire to build up herself in wealth at the expense of the West and South. On January 20, Webster made his first reply to the General, having only a night in which to prepare his speech. The notes filled three pages of ordinary letter paper, while the speech, as reported, filled twenty pages.

Again General Hayne spoke in an able yet personal manner, asserting the doctrines of nullification, and attempting to justify the position of his State in seceding. Mr. Webster took notes while he was speaking, but, as the Senate adjourned, his speech did not come till the following day. Again he had but a night in which to prepare.

When the morning of January 26 came, the galleries, floor, and staircase were crowded with eager men and women. "It is a critical moment," said Mr. Bell, of New Hampshire, to Mr. Webster, "and it is time, it is high time, that the people of this country should know what this Constitution is." "Then," answered Webster, "by the blessing of Heaven they shall learn, this day, before the sun goes down, what I understand it to be."

When Webster began speaking his words were slowly uttered. "Mr. President,—When the mariner has been tossed, for many days, in thick weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course. Let us imitate this prudence, and before we float farther on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to conjecture where we now are. I ask for the reading of the resolution."

And then with trenchant sarcasm, unanswerable logic, and the intense feeling which belongs to true oratory, Mr. Webster taught the American people the strength and holding power of the Constitution, which a civil war, thirty years later, was to prove unalterably. The speech, which filled seventy printed pages, came from only five pages of notes. When asked how long he was in preparation for the reply to Hayne, he answered, his "whole life."

How often his loving defence of Massachusetts has been quoted! "Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomiums upon Massachusetts. She needs none. There she is—behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history: the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill,—and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for Independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State, from New England to Georgia; and there they will lie forever. And, sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it—if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it—if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed to separate it from that union, by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked: it will stretch forth its arm, with whatever of vigor it may still retain, over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin.

"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 lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured—bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as 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 sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!"

Of course, this reply to Hayne electrified the country, and Webster began to be mentioned for the presidential chair. No one who ever heard him speak, with his wonderful magnetism, his majestic enthusiasm, his rich, full voice, and his unsurpassed physique, could ever forget the man, his words, or his presence. When he visited Europe, some said, "There goes a king." When Sydney Smith saw him, he exclaimed, "Good Heavens! he is a small cathedral by himself."

Through Jackson's administration Webster was his courteous opponent in most measures, but in the nullification scheme he was heart and hand with the fearless, self-willed general. When Henry Clay brought forward his compromise tariff bill, which pacified the nullifiers, Webster opposed it, believing that, in the face of this opposition to the Constitution, concession was unwise.