Tenth. In general he mastered his subjects; his subject did not master him. Solidity, sincerity, gravity, self-restraint, characterized his every thought and every utterance. But sometimes the volcano poured out its molten lava.
Mr. Webster made an impression upon the people of Massachusetts, in his time, as of a demi-god. His magnificent presence, his stateliness of manner, his dignity, from which he never bent, even in his most convivial and playful moments, his grandeur of speech and bearing, the habit of dealing exclusively with the greatest subjects, enabled him to maintain his state. His great, sane intelligence pervades every thing he said and did. But he has left behind few evidences of constructive statesmanship. There is hardly a great measure of legislation with which his name is connected, and he seems to us now to have erred in judgment in a great many cases, especially in undervaluing the great territory on the Pacific. He consented readily to the abandonment of our claim to the territory between the forty-ninth parallel and that of fifty-four forty, which would have insured our supremacy on the Pacific, and have saved us from the menace and rivalry there of the power of England. He voted against the treaty by which we acquired California. That, however, is a proof of a larger foresight than that of any of his contemporaries. Alone he foresaw the terrible Civil War, to which everybody else of his time was blind. What even he did not foresee was the triumphant success of the Union arms. It is hardly to be doubted that if the Civil War had come in 1850 or 1851 instead of 1861 its result would have been different. But Mr. Webster's great service to the country, a service second to that of Washington alone, is that he inspired in the people to whom union and self-government seemed but a doubtful experiment, the sentiment of nationality, of love of the flag, and a passionate attachment to the whole country. When his political life began, we were a feeble folk, the bonds of the Union resting lightly upon the States, the contingency of disunion contemplated without much abhorrence by many leading men, both North and South. Mr. Webster awoke in the bosom of his countrymen the conception of national unity and national greatness. It has been said more than once that the guns of our artillery in the great battles of the Civil War were shotted with the Reply to Hayne.
A few years ago the State of New Hampshire presented to the United States for the Memorial Hall a statue of Webster—a ceremonial in which I had some part. After it was over, I got a letter from a brave Union soldier, who told me he had been stationed as a sentinel in a place in the woods where several sentries had been killed within a short time by a shot from the thicket. As he paced up and down on his midnight watch, thinking that at any moment his death-shot might ring out from the darkness and gloom about him, he kept up his heart by repeating to himself, over and over again, the great closing sentences of the Reply to Hayne, ending with the well-known words, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable."
History has not yet settled the question of the motive that inspired the 7th of March speech.[4] Doubtless there were good and patriotic men, men who had loved him till that hour, who went to their graves believing that Webster fell—fell like Lucifer, Son of the Morning. There are doubtless men living who think so to-day. To the thought of these men Whittier gave voice in his terrible Ichabod, which is said to have wounded the great heart of its subject more than any other stroke that ever smote his mighty forehead. But the general judgment of his countrymen, first mellowing and softening into the belief which Whittier himself expressed in his later and tender poem, "The Lost Opportunity," seems gradually coming to the conclusion that Webster differed from the friends of freedom of his time, not in a weaker moral sense, but only in a larger and profounder prophetic vision. When he resisted the acquisition of California, he saw what no other man saw, the certainty of the Civil War. It was not given even to him to foresee its wonderful and victorious result. When he compromised he saw in like manner the danger he tried to avert. He did not see the safety only to be attained through the path of danger and strife. I was one of those who in the conceit and presumption of youth, a lover of the liberty to which he then seemed to me to be recreant, judged him severely. But I have learned better in my old age. I think of him now only as the best type of the farmer's boy of the early time; as the great example of the New England character of the day of his earlier manhood; as the great defender and lover of Massachusetts, as the orator who first taught his country her own greatness, and who bound fast with indissoluble strength the bands of union; as the first of American lawyers, the first of American orators, the first of American statesmen, and as the delightful citizen and neighbor and friend, of whom the people of his town said when he was laid in the grave:
"How lonesome the world seems;" and of whom his nearest friend said, when he died:
"From these conversations of friendship no man—no man, old or young—went away to remember one word of profanity, one allusion of indelicacy, one impure thought, one unbelieving suggestion, one doubt cast on the reality of virtue, of patriotism, of enthusiasm, of the progress of man—one doubt cast on righteousness, or temperance, or judgment to come."
[A second paper to follow.]
