Webster, Daniel

Daniel (1782-1852), a noted American orator and statesman. Born January 18, 1782, at Salisbury, New Hampshire. Died October 24, 1852, at Marsh-field, Massachusetts. His father, Ebenezer Webster, was a sturdy frontier farmer, a man of influence and character, who led his neighbors at White Plains, Ticonderoga, Bennington, and West Point. He was the kind of man that plain people put on committees and have confidence in. Daniel was born in a one-story clapboarded house shortly after Cornwallis' surrender. He was the ninth child, not very strong, and much attached to books. His older brothers, now that quiet times had come on, settled to the work of clearing up the farm and let Daniel grow up to be the scholar. Not that he did not ride the horse that plowed the corn and bring the cows home from pasture, but Daniel was the pet, and a new book, bought or borrowed, was always for him. Chores were never allowed to detain Daniel from attending such sessions of the district school as the meager facilities of that day afforded.

A manufacturer of cotton goods took advantage of current events to print the newly formed Federal Constitution on a gayly colored handkerchief bordered with eagles and flags. Daniel secured one of these at the neighborhood store. "From this," he afterward wrote, "I learned that there was a Constitution and that there were thirteen states."

At the time when Ebenezer Webster was wondering how he could raise money to send his son away to an advanced school, he received an appointment on the bench of the court of common pleas for the county. The position was sort of an assistant and counselor to the judge, a justiceship, it might be called, requiring a knowledge of the people and that degree of hard common sense and integrity of purpose for which he was noted. The office was one of dignity, and afforded the means of sending Daniel to Phillips Exeter Academy and later to Dartmouth College. The story runs that Daniel read Luke's description of the Last Supper and the scene in the garden so understandingly and so expressively that no further examination was decreed requisite for admission to the academy. He outstripped his classmates in ordinary class work, but broke down utterly in declamation. For one who afterward became the orator of the United States Senate this experience may seem strange. "I could not speak before the school. Many a piece did I commit to memory and rehearse in my room over and over again, but when the day came, and the schoolmaster called my name, and I saw all eyes turned upon my seat, I could not raise myself from it. When the occasion was over I went home and wept bitter tears of mortification."

At Dartmouth (1797) Daniel shunned Greek and mathematics, but got on well with Latin and read widely in literature and history. He was not counted a profound scholar, but rather an extraordinarily well informed young man. His shyness wore off and he soon gained reputation as a speaker. When the college town wanted a Fourth of July orator (1800) Webster was invited. Professors of rhetoric have taken an interest in this speech because it was his first public effort. It was very evidently a young man's speech, abounding in high flown expressions such as "Washington, who never felt a wound but when it pierced his country, who never groaned but when fair freedom bled"; Napoleon, "the gasconading pilgrim of Egypt who will never dictate terms to sovereign America"; Great Britain, that "haughty Albion"; Columbia seated "in the forum of the nations," and the "empires of the world are amazed at the bright effulgence of her glory." Our new navy is to "fulminate destruction on Frenchmen till the ocean is crimsoned with blood and gorged with pirates."

A boyish effort, certainly, but not without promise nor unworthy of the patriot who, thirty years later, closed his reply to Hayne in the crowded, breathless Senate chamber with these words, "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!"

After graduation Webster read law and taught school to aid his brother Ezekiel through college. Having finished reading law in the Boston office of Christopher Gore, Webster, much to the disappointment of his aged father, declined an appointment as clerk of court in his home county at $1,500, but he opened an office in Boscawen, so as to be near the old farm. After his father's death, he removed to Portsmouth, the metropolis of the state. Returning to the subject of Webster's style, we may repeat his own testimony, "If anybody should think I was somewhat familiar with the law on some points, and should be curious enough to desire to know how it happened, tell him that Jeremiah Mason compelled me to study it. He was my master. He had a habit of standing quite near the jury,--so near that he might have laid his finger on the foreman's nose,--and then he talked in a plain conversational way, in short sentences, and using no word that was not level to the comprehension of the least educated man. This led me to examine my own style, and I set about reforming it altogether."

A comfortable and lucrative practice now put Webster quite at ease and gave him leisure for politics. He was elected to Congress by the Federalists on an anti-war platform and took his seat May, 1813, as an opponent of President Madison and the party then carrying on the War of 1812 with Great Britain. Webster easily became the leader of the opposition party, but as the country on the whole supported the president's course, Webster's talents appeared to the country at large as rather provincial in their scope. He seemed interested in New England shipping to the neglect of larger issues.

During his absence in Washington a great fire burned up his Portsmouth house and library, inflicting a loss of $6,000, all he had accumulated. Webster decided to move to Boston. What now seems a peculiar wave of public indignation made Webster all the more ready to leave Congress which, of course, is what a change of residence meant. He, with others, voted to change the compensation of members of Congress from $6 per day for the time Congress actually sat, to $1,500 per annum. This now seems a small salary, but there was a loud outcry. Such abominable extravagance and such shameless stealing of the people's money had never been seen in America. Grand juries and legislatures, indignation meetings and newspapers from one end of the country to the other, clamored for the defeat at the polls of all congressmen participating in this atrocious salary-grabbing scheme. Scores of congressmen were not renominated even, and scores were defeated at the next election. Webster felt that genuine corruption such as is attendant upon large expense, especially in war time, went unrebuked and that public opinion in a democracy is intolerant, indiscriminating, and ungrateful.

In 1823, however, Webster reentered Congress as a representative of the Boston district of Suffolk. During his service as congressman he delivered his first Bunker Hill address in the open air at the laying of the cornerstone of the monument. The veterans of the Revolutionary War were in front of him. School boys are familiar with the lines beginning, "Venerable men, you have come down to us from a former generation." Another Discourse in Commemoration of the Lives of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson was delivered in Faneuil Hall, August 2, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the date on which the engrossed copy of the Declaration was laid upon the table of Congress for signature. The most brilliant portion of this oration is the supposed speech of John Adams beginning, "Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote."

This speech was supposed by many to be a quotation and to have been delivered by John Adams, but Webster wrote that he had no guide in writing it beyond the known character of Adams and a suggestion from his widow, adding, "I will tell you what is not generally known. I wrote that speech one morning before breakfast in my library, and when it was finished my paper was wet with tears."

In 1827 Webster took his seat in the Senate. Here his real fame was won. He had not been a national character in the House, or at least had not thrown himself into legislation heartily, but in the Senate with the raising of large issues Webster rose to a commanding position. His famous encounter with Hayne has been referred to. Webster became the spokesman of the principle that states are subordinate to the nation, that the national government derives its authority, not from the states but from the people--a question settled only by the Civil War. As a New England man, he supported a manufacturer's tariff, and as a maintainer of national authority, he opposed the doctrine of states' rights and supported President Jackson in his famous controversy with Calhoun and South Carolina. Calhoun, Clay, and Webster were the strong men of the Senate. Calhoun won Clay to his support. As the history of this period is too extended for review, it may be stated in a word that Webster's great speech for the Union is that known as The Constitution Not a Compact Between the States.

From this time on, Webster was recognized as a national leader of the Whig Party. He became an avowed candidate for the presidency, but was passed by repeatedly for other candidates. In 1840 the Massachusetts Whigs put Webster forward for nomination, but the convention took Harrison. As McMaster puts it, "Though nobody wanted him to be president, the whole country wanted to hear him speak," and Webster entered heartily into the log-cabin, hard-cider campaign that ensued. It is estimated that no less than 75,000 persons were in attendance at the largest meeting held.

Following Harrison's election, Webster left the Senate for a seat as secretary of state in the new cabinet, but Harrison's death, the completion of negotiations to establish the boundary between Maine and Canada, the unpopularity of John Tyler, now president, and a desire to be free to seek the nomination for the presidency induced Webster to resign and return (1842) to his home.

In 1844 Webster was passed over and Henry Clay was nominated but defeated at the polls, and Webster was returned by Massachusetts to his old seat in the Senate. With Clay out of the way it now seemed possible and probable that Webster might be the next candidate of the Whig party, but Taylor, returning with military laurels from the Mexican war, was nominated and elected, while Webster retained his seat in the Senate. The real issue of the Mexican War was the disposition to be made of acquired territory--whether this new territory should be slave or free. Webster made his famous Seventh of March Speech supporting the compromise movement of 1850. Southern men and business men with commercial interests in the South, all conservative men, were loud in their praise. Two hundred thousand copies of his speech were called for, but the anti-slavery men, the Free-Soilers, and the Northern Whigs set upon Webster in full cry. Sumner declared him an apostate; Horace Mann called him a "fallen star"; Theodore Parker said he had not a hundred adherents worth counting in all New England. Whittier wrote his Ichabod, beginning,

Without doubt, Webster failed to realize that the controversy relative to slavery had reached so acute a stage. Desirous of the presidency, he refused to believe that the South could no longer support a Northern man, and that his old neighbors would no longer support a man who tried to hold Southern adherents. Webster again left the Senate for a place in Fillmore's cabinet, but all hope of recognition by a national convention faded out when the Whigs of 1852 placed Gen. Winfield Scott in nomination. October 24th of that year Webster died at Marshfield, a bitterly disappointed, unhappy man. By all odds the best account of Webster's life is that by John Bach McMaster.

Webster went wrong on some public questions:

What do we want with the vast worthless area, this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of catcus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts, or these endless mountain ranges, impenetrable, and covered to their base with eternal snows? What can we ever hope to do with the western coast, a coast of three thousand miles, rock-bound, cheerless and uninviting, and not a harbor on it? What use have we for such a country? Mr. President, I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific coast one inch nearer to Boston than it is now.--Webster, Speech on the Union Pacific.

See Hartford Convention; Clay; Calhoun; Hayne; Salary Grab