Mr. Webster was indeed crushed by this new sorrow. He wrote to his friend Mrs. Ticknor, "I cannot speak of the lost ones; but I submit to the will of God. I feel that I am nothing, less even than the merest dust of the balance; and that the Creator of a million worlds, and the judge of all flesh, must be allowed to dispose of me and mine as to his infinite wisdom shall seem best."
In 1848, when Mr. Webster was sixty-six, the presidency once more eluded his grasp by the nomination of another "available" man, General Zachary Taylor, one of the heroes of the Mexican War. Webster had spoken earnestly for Harrison and Clay; now he was unwilling longer to work for the party which had ignored him and nominated a man whom, though an able soldier, he thought unfitted for the place as a statesman. If it was a mistake to show that he was wounded in spirit, as it undoubtedly was for so great a man, it was nevertheless human.
The thing which Mr. Webster had feared these many years was now coming to pass. A violent agitation of the slavery question in the Territories was upon the nation. For thirty years slavery had been odious to the North, and carefully nurtured by the South. In 1820, when Missouri was admitted as a State, the North insisted that a clause prohibiting slavery should be inserted as a condition of her admission to the Union. Henry Clay devised the compromise by which slavery was prohibited in all the new territory lying north of latitude 36° 30', which was the southern boundary of Missouri. This line was called Mason and Dixon's line, from the names of the two surveyors who ran the boundary line between Maryland and Pennsylvania.
Year by year the hatred of slavery had intensified at the North. February 1, 1847, David Wilmot of Pennsylvania introduced in Congress his famous proviso, by which slavery was to be excluded from all territory thereafter acquired or annexed by the United States. And now, in 1849, the conflict on the slavery question was more virulent than ever. California, having framed a constitution prohibiting slavery, applied for admission to the Union. New Mexico asked for a territorial government and for the exclusion of slavery.
The South claimed that the Missouri Compromise, extending to the Pacific coast, guaranteed the right to introduce slavery into California and New Mexico, and threatened secession from the Union. Again Henry Clay settled the matter,—for a time only, as it proved,—by his famous Compromise of 1850, by which California was admitted as a free State, the Territories taken from Mexico left to decide the slavery question as they chose, the slave-trade abolished in the District of Columbia, more effectual enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law demanded, with some other minor provisions.
The Fugitive Slave Law, which provided for the return of the fugitives without trial by jury, and expected Christian people to aid the slave-dealers in capturing their slaves, was especially obnoxious to the North. Some of the States had passed "Personal Liberty Bills," punishing as kidnappers persons who sought to take away alleged slaves.
Mr. Webster saw with dismay all this bitterness, and knew that the Union which he loved was in danger. He hoped to avert civil war, perhaps to still the tumult forever, and so gave his great heart and brain to the Clay compromise. On March 7, 1850, he delivered in Congress his famous speech on the Compromise bill. The Senate chamber was crowded with an intensely excited audience. Mr. Webster discussed the whole history of slavery, opposed the Wilmot Proviso, because he thought every part of the country settled as to slavery, either by law or nature,—he could not look into the future and see Kansas,—and then condemned the course of the North in its resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, which he held to be constitutional. The words in reference to restoring fugitive slaves created a storm of indignation at the North, which had looked upon Webster as a great anti-slavery leader, and who had said in the oration at Plymouth, "I hear the sound of the hammer, I see the smoke of the furnaces where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs. I see the visages of those who, by stealth and at midnight, labor in this work of hell, foul and dark, as may become the artificers of such instruments of misery and torture. Let that spot be purified, or let it cease to be of New England. Let it be purified, or let it be set aside from the Christian world; let it be put out of the circle of human sympathies and human regards, and let civilized man henceforth have no communion with it." In his speech to Hayne he had said, "I regard domestic slavery as one of the greatest evils, both moral and political."
Probably Mr. Webster had not changed his mind at all in regard to the enormity of slavery, but he hoped to save the Union from war. He indeed helped to postpone the conflict, but if the presidency had before this been a possibility to him, it became now an impossibility forever, and his own words had done it.
President Taylor died July 9, 1850, when the discussion of the Compromise matter was at its height, and Millard Fillmore became President. He at once made Webster Secretary of State. Mr. Webster bore bravely the reproaches of the North. He said, "I cared for nothing, I was afraid of nothing, but I meant to do my duty. Duty performed makes a man happy; duty neglected makes a man unhappy.... If the fate of John Rogers had stared me in the face, if I had seen the stake, if I had heard the fagots already crackling, by the blessing of Almighty God I would have gone on and discharged the duty which I thought my country called upon me to perform."
At the next national Whig convention, General Winfield Scott was nominated to the presidency. Multitudes throughout the country were disappointed that Webster was not chosen. Boston gave him a magnificent reception. Marshfield welcomed him with a gathering of thousands of people nine miles from his home, who escorted him thither, scattering garlands along the way. "I remember how," says Charles Lanman, "after the crowd had disappeared, he entered his house fatigued beyond measure, and covered with dust, and threw himself into a chair. For a moment his head fell upon his breast, as if completely overcome, and he then looked up like one seeking something he could not find. It was the portrait of his darling but departed daughter, Julia, and it happened to be in full view. He gazed upon it for some time in a kind of trance, and then wept like one whose heart was broken, and these words escaped his lips, 'Oh, I am so thankful to be here. If I could only have my will, never, never would I again leave this home!'"