one from Southern States."
It is very unpleasant to think that the great sentences of the Reply to Hayne, which the country knows by heart, were never delivered by Mr. Webster in the Senate chamber as we have them. Yet so it is. The speech was taken down in short-hand by Joseph Gales, one of the editors of the National Intelligencer, and one of the best stenographic reporters of that day. He was requested by Mr. Webster beforehand to report his speech, which he did. He wrote out his short-hand report at length. That report was submitted to Mr. Webster, and he, with it in his possession, wrote out in his own hand a revised version of the speech. Mr. Everett says, in the Life prefixed to his edition of Mr. Webster's Works, that Mr. Webster had Gales's report but a part of a day. But it is absolutely impossible that Mr. Everett is correct, although the statement was published in Mr. Webster's lifetime. The short-hand notes, and the speech as written out from them by Gales, and the speech in Mr. Webster's handwriting, are now all in the possession of the Boston City Library. They were purchased of Mrs. Gales, widow of Joseph Gales, for the sum of $575 by Robert C. Winthrop, acting in behalf of himself and twenty-two other subscribers who gave $25 each for the purpose. Mr. Webster wrote out the whole of it, although about a third of his manuscript is missing, not, however, the most important or the best known portion. The draught itself shows traces of revision and reconsideration by Mr. Webster in the matter of the structure of some important sentences. He changes Gales's report a great deal, and then in revision makes corrections again and again of his own draught. We give the famous passage about Massachusetts, and the noble peroration, as they are reported by the accurate short-hand writer, doubtless literally as they were spoken, and the passages as finally composed by Mr. Webster and now familiar to the world. The sentences actually spoken well account for the great impression made upon the auditors. They are such as Webster would have been likely to utter on a great occasion and great theme. But we do not like to think that any word or syllable among those that have stirred our hearts from our earliest boyhood did not, in fact, come from the inspired lips of the great patriot and orator. The emotion is like that felt when a lover of Milton sees the manuscript of Comus or Lycidas in the library at Cambridge, and learns that any other than the fit word and perfect phrase could ever have occurred to the poet to express his thought. The exquisite beauty of the verse still abides. But the sense that it was an inspiration is gone.
It is said that when Milo in his exile read Cicero's speech in his defence, he exclaimed, "O Cicero, hadst thou spoken thus, Milo would not be now eating figs at Marseilles." We cannot say that of the Reply to Hayne. Its grandeur is there as it came unpremeditated and fresh from heart and brain. But it is a little unpleasant to think that the phrases that all Americans know by heart differ so much from those which commanded the applause of the listening Senate on that great day which settled in the tribunal of reason the fate of the Republic.
The Passage about Massachusetts as Actually Spoken
"Sir, I shall be led on this occasion into no eulogium on Massachusetts. I shall paint no portraiture of her merits, original, ancient or modern. Yet, sir, I cannot but remember that Boston was the cradle of liberty, that in Massachusetts (the parent of this accursed policy so eternally narrow to the West), etc., etc., etc. I cannot forget that Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill are in Massachusetts, and that in men and means and money she did contribute more than any other State to carry on the Revolutionary war. There was not a State in the Union whose soil was not wetted with Massachusetts blood in the Revolutionary war, and it is to be remembered that of the army to which Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown a majority consisted of New England troops. It is painful to me to recur to these recollections even for the purpose of self-defence, and even to that end, sir, I will not extol the intelligence, the character and the virtue of the people of New England. I leave the theme to itself, here and everywhere, now and forever."
As Written Out by Mr. Webster and Printed
"Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomium 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 in separating 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."
Peroration as Actually Spoken
"When my eyes shall be turned for the last time on the meridian sun, I hope I may see him shining bright upon my united, free and happy country. I hope I shall not live to see his beams falling upon the dispersed fragments of the structure of this once glorious Union. I hope I may not see the flag of my country with its stars separated or obliterated; torn by commotions, smoking with the blood of civil war. I hope I may not see the standard raised of separate State rights, star against star, and stripe against stripe; but that the flag of the Union may keep its stars and its stripes corded and bound together in indissoluble ties. I hope I shall not see written as its motto, 'First liberty, and then union.' I hope I shall see no such delusive and deluded motto on the flag of that country. I hope to see, spread all over it, blazoned in letters of light and proudly floating over land and sea, that other sentiment, dear to my heart, 'Union and Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable.'"
Peroration as Written Out by Mr. Webster and Printed