USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 4 > Part 11
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EVERETT, EDWARD .- Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions (4 vols., Boston, Little, Brown, 1859-1868).
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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
FROTHINGHAM, PAUL REVERE .- Edward Everett, Orator and Statesman (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1925)-Gives an excellent glimpse of Everett as governor.
FUESS, CLAUDE MOORE .- The Life of Caleb Cushing (2 vols., N. Y., Har- court, Brace, 1923)-A well-rounded picture of Cushing's political activities.
GRIFFIN, SOLOMON BUCKLEY .- People and Politics, Observed by a Massa- chusetts Editor (Boston, Little, Brown, 1923)-Part II presents a keen-minded journalist's observations on State and National political matters.
HALE, EDWARD EVERETT .- Letters on Irish Immigration (Boston, Phillips, Sampson, 1852)-One view of the racial prejudice of the times. .
HOWE, MARK ANTONY DE WOLFE .- The Life and Letters of George Bancroft (2 vols., N. Y., Scribner's, 1908)-Chapter IV of Volume I is helpful on Bancroft's early political career.
LODGE, HENRY CABOT .- Daniel Webster (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1911).
MARTYN, CARLOS .- Wendell Phillips, the Agitator (N. Y., Funk & Wag- nalls, 1890).
MCCARTHY, CHARLES .- "The Antimasonic Party: A Study of Political Antimasonry in the United States, 1827-1840" (American Historical Society, Annual Report for the Year 1902, Vol. I, pp. 365-574)-The standard study of Antimasonry, with a chapter on the party in Massa- chusetts.
MORSE, JOHN TORREY .- John Quincy Adams (N. Y., Houghton Mifflin, 1896)-The life story of Adams is an essential part of the history of Massachusetts in this period.
NASON, ELIAS, and RUSSELL, THOMAS .- The Life and Public Services of Henry Wilson, late Vice President of the United States (Boston, Russell, 1876).
PIERCE, EDWARD LILLIE .- Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (4 vols., Boston, Roberts, 1877-1893)-Indepensible to the study of Sumner.
RANTOUL, ROBERT .- Memoirs, Speeches, and Writings (Boston, Jewett, 1854)-Edited by Luther Hamilton.
SCHOULER, JAMES .- "The Whig Party in Massachusetts" (Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, Vol. L, pp. 39-53, Boston, 1917)-A brief sketch.
SEWARD, WILLIAM HENRY .- Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams, Sixth President of the United States (Auburn, N. Y., Derby, Miller, 1849).
STORY, MOORFIELD .- Charles Sumner (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1900)-An excellent biography.
SUMNER, CHARLES .- Works (15 vols., Boston, Lee & Shepard, 1875-1883).
WEBSTER, DANIEL .- Writings and Speeches (18 vols., Boston, Little, Brown, 1903).
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POLITICAL HISTORY
WINTHROP, ROBERT CHARLES .- Addresses and Speeches (4 vols., Boston, Little, Brown, 1852-1886)-See especially Vol. I.
WINTHROP, ROBERT CHARLES .- Addresses and Speeches on Various Occa- sions (Boston, Little, Brown, 1852).
WINTHROP, ROBERT CHARLES, JR .- A Memoir of Robert Charles Winthrop (Boston, Little, Brown, 1897).
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CHAPTER IV
DANIEL WEBSTER, STATESMAN (1782-1852)
BY CLAUDE M. FUESS Phillips Andover Academy
A NEW ENGLANDER
For the national Hall of Fame in New York City, the first New Englander to be chosen was Daniel Webster. The decision was generally approved, for Webster, more in some respects than any other American statesman, stirred the popu- lar imagination. Nature, when she moulded him, was in a lavish mood; as Whittier described him-
"New England's stateliest type of man, In port and speech Olympian."
His imperial presence, his affluent personality, his robust masculinity were all calculated to arouse admiration, and he looked and acted like a leader. In public affairs no American of his generation made a more important or enduring contri- bution to history.
Daniel Webster, by inheritance, training, and temperament, was ideally qualified to represent the "upper circle" of Massa- chusetts society, the "solid men of Boston," merchants and manufacturers and bankers and members of the professional classes. He was never any man's tool. He was too honest and independent to be subservient to anybody. He was not even a consistent adherent of a party : although he helped to organize the Whigs, he more than once opposed their policies and he was largely responsible for their downfall. Massa- chusetts at that period was, in spite of an occasional radical moment, conservative in its mood; and most of its trusted citizens-men like Levi Lincoln and Caleb Cushing and John Davis and Rufus Choate, were upholders of the established order. Of this stable society Webster was the dominating
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DANIEL WEBSTER, STATESMAN
voice,-a voice sonorous, clear, and reassuring. He was New England's trumpeter, always at his post to defend her against aspersion.
The Commonwealth, in return, was proud of him, gave him banquets and endorsed his notes, cast votes fruitlessly for him as President, and heaped honors upon him in profusion. In his attitude on the tariff, on internal improvements, on nullifi- cation, on paper currency, on the national bank, on Texas, and on slavery, he spoke authoritatively for his constituents. Even when he differed from them at first, his persuasive eloquence would usually bring them over to his side. His sound judgment made him a safe counsellor. Massachusetts could rely upon Daniel Webster. He seemed as substantial as the New Hampshire granite from which he sprang.
WEBSTER A NATIONALIST
Although he labored always in the interests of Massachu- setts, his knowledge and his ambitions far transcended his own local environment. Except for a few days' service in the Massachusetts Legislature, he never held public office except under the national government. Ten years as Congressman, nineteen as United States Senator, five as Secretary of State -that is a remarkable record of constructive service. Rhodes has said that the history of the United States for a quarter of a century before 1850 might be written from the speeches, state papers, and letters of Webster. His was a mind which comprehended the Nation as a unified whole; he visited other sections than his own and thought in terms not of North or South or West, but of an entire continent. It seemed en- tirely fitting that he should open his "Seventh of March Speech" with the words, "I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an Ameri- can." Nevertheless, his strength was always from New Eng- land, and he instinctively returned to Marshfield or Boston to renew his vitality at the sources from which it had been derived.
EARLY LIFE (1782-1795)
Although Webster is usually thought of as a Massachusetts man, he was actually born in New Hampshire, on a farm in
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SCHOOL AND COLLEGE
Stevenstown (now Franklin), near what was then the Ameri- can frontier. His first colonial ancestor settled at Hampton in 1636; and his father, Captain Ebenezer Webster, was a stalwart pioneer, a tall swarthy man, with a heart "which he seemed to have borrowed from a lion." He won a com- mission in the French and Indian War under Lord Jeffrey Amherst and fought through the Revolution. His lack both of money and of a formal education did not prevent him from serving in both houses of the New Hampshire legislature, sitting in the State convention which ratified the Federal Constitution, and becoming a lay judge of the Court of Com- mon Pleas for the county.
After the death of his first wife in 1774, he married Abi- gail Eastman, by whom he had three daughters and two sons: Ezekiel, the older, and Daniel, born January 18, 1782, in a frame dwelling three miles west of the Merrimac. A year later Captain Webster moved to Elms Farm, in the present town of Franklin, about fifteen miles north of Concord. Here, not far from the river and in sight of the White Moun- tains, the lads were brought up.
Daniel was delicate and sickly, and therefore was excused from the heavier tasks on the farm. Captain Webster once said to his wife, "We must give him up; we can never raise this child." Nevertheless, after the numerous illnesses of boyhood had passed, he became a vigorous man, capable of enduring great fatigues. He survived his brother Ezekiel, supposed to have a much sturdier constitution, by more than twenty years. Much of his boyhood was spent outdoors, learning to love nature in even her sternest aspects. In his Autobiography, written in 1830, Webster declared that he could not remember a time when he could not read the Bible. Like the other children of that sparsely settled neighborhood, he trudged two or three miles daily to the town schools; and he found in the small local circulating library such works as the Spectator, Pope's Essay on Man, and Don Quixote.
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE (1796-1801)
In May, 1796, Captain Webster, who perceived his son's promise, took him to the Phillips Exeter Academy to be
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DANIEL WEBSTER, STATESMAN
taught under that great preceptor, Benjamin Abbot. A shy sensitive youth, not particularly well dressed, he did not mix with his schoolmates. He was encouraged by his teachers to continue with his education, though nervous timidity prevented him from speaking before the school; and he was unable to participate in the formal declamation exercises. After nine months at Exeter he was placed under a Boscawen clergyman. He entered Dartmouth, rather poorly prepared, in the autumn of 1797.
He was at fifteen years of age a slender lad "of swarthy skin, spare of frame, thin-faced, with prominent cheek-bones and piercing black eyes." His roommate, Bingham, said of him, "He had an independent air and was rather careless in dress and appearance, but showed an intelligent look." For the first two years of his course his record was no more than commonplace. Then he seemed suddenly to find himself, and, as a junior, wrote essays and verses and won praise for his public speaking. He developed gradually, acquiring self- confidence as a result of normal growth. Investigation has revealed that, as an undergraduate, "he read much, but did not seek or reach the highest honors." Still he was suffi- ciently outstanding to be selected in 1800 by the citizens of Hanover to deliver an Independence Day oration, and he ac- quitted himself with credit. He graduated in 1801 with some distinction.
APPRENTICESHIP IN THE LAW (1801-1812)
Webster now commenced the study of law in the good old- fashioned way in the office of a Salisbury attorney. Mean- while his brother Ezekiel had entered Dartmouth, and in order to aid him financially, Daniel accepted employment as head of an academy at Fryeburg, Maine, in the shadow of the White Mountains. Not yet twenty years old, he spent the winter days in teaching and the evenings in copying deeds, at one shilling, six pence, for each document. When the session was over, he was urged to remain at Fryeburg; but he wisely resumed his studies at Salisbury, spending his leisure hours by himself in the woods and along the streams. "When think- ing is to be done," he wrote later, "one must, of course, be
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THE ROCKINGHAM MEMORIAL
alone. No man knows himself who does not thus sometimes keep his own company."
Seeking a wider field, Webster in 1804, went to Boston and, through the impression made by his unusual personality, secured a place in the office of Christopher Gore, a wealthy and polished gentleman who later rose to be Governor and United States Senator. In March, 1805, on Gore's motion, he was admitted to practice law and set out at once for New Hampshire. There, unwilling to abandon his now infirm father, he hung out his shingle in the village of Boscawen. For two years, in a society which had for him no charms, he devoted himself to "a life of writs and summonses," earning about $600 annually in fees, but consoling himself by hard study. When his father died in April, 1806, Daniel turned over his Boscawen clients to his brother and moved to Ports- mouth, where, in May, 1807, he was entered as a counselor of the Supreme Court.
Webster's extensive reading and lonely meditation were now valuable assets, and his experience in Salisbury and Boscawen had familiarized him with technical legal procedure. In the professional competition which he faced at Portsmouth, he held his own from the beginning, and his powers developed rapidly as his opportunities broadened. With other members of the bar, such as Jeremiah Smith and Jeremiah Mason, he followed the circuits of the Superior Court from one county to another, with such success that he was soon conceded to be one of the leading advocates in the State. His income jumped almost at once to approximately $2,000 a year. Now financially independent, he married, May 29, 1808, Grace Fletcher, daughter of a Hopkinton clergyman, a woman of gentle nature and unmistakable charm. Webster was prob- ably never happier than from 1808 to 1819.
THE ROCKINGHAM MEMORIAL (1812)
Webster's entrance into practical politics was unpremedi- tated. Under his father's instruction, he had been brought up with a high regard for Washington and Hamilton and a reverence for the Constitution, which he first read as a boy from the print on a cotton handkerchief. In a period of
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DANIEL WEBSTER, STATESMAN
strong party feeling when every intelligent man had to take sides, Daniel Webster's inherited conservatism made him a Federalist. As a resident of a prosperous seaport, he de- plored the policies of President Jefferson, especially the Em- bargo Acts, which threatened to destroy the commerce of the coast States. In 1808 he published a thin pamphlet in which he argued against the constitutionality of an unlimited em- bargo, but it failed to gain attention.
June 18, 1812, Congress declared war on England. Webster by that date had become one of Portsmouth's foremost citizens, and his Independence Day oration a few weeks later was listened to with sober attention. Courage- ously pointing out that the offenses of France had been just as flagrant as those of Great Britain, he exposed the war as inexpedient and wrong. This address was widely circulated as antiwar propaganda; and the orator, representing Ports- mouth at an assembly of the people of his county, drew up the so-called Rockingham Memorial, in which he dwelt upon the danger to the Union from the action of a "small but heated majority," and went so far as to say: "We shrink from the separation of the States, as an event fraught with incalculable evils" ; and he concluded : "The Government may be assured that the tie which binds us to the Union will never be broken by us." Nothing in the Rockingham Memorial is inconsistent with Webster's later views on the inviolability of the Federal Union.
MEMBER OF CONGRESS (1813-1817)
The Rockingham Convention led to Webster's nomination and election to Congress. He took his seat at the special session opening May 24, 1812. Henry Clay was then Speaker and John C. Calhoun was a member of the Military Com- mittee, both ardent supporters of the war. Webster himself was named on the Committee on Foreign Relations, but was displaced at the beginning of the second session. Although not much over thirty, he had come out at once as a leader of the opposition, his first speech being a discussion of the Berlin and Milan Decrees, in which he examined the causes of the war with England.
Throughout that conflict he was a gadfly to the administra-
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RETURN TO THE LAW
tion. He attacked a proposal for increasing the bounty on enlistments; he fought a plan for a compulsory draft of soldiers, arguing that individual States alone had the right of conscription; he spoke against a plan for doubling the land tax; he criticised the conduct of the war, urging the military leaders to abandon their "futile projects" for the invasion of Canada and to "go to the ocean." When the Embargo and Non-Intercourse Acts were repealed (April 7, 1814), he broke into a chant of triumph. Stopping always just short of sedi- tion, he did all that he could to embarrass President Madison and his Cabinet. On the other hand, he disapproved of the strong New England movement for separation from the Union; and he urged New Hampshire not to send delegates to the Hartford Convention.
During his two terms in Congress, Webster spoke fre- quently on matters of national policy. When a national bank was proposed, he, as a true Hamiltonian, blocked a plan for irredeemable paper money and advocated a specie-paying in- stitution. Although he could not prevent the passage of the original bill, he did succeed in eliminating some objectionable features. Business men found in Webster a champion of their interests, a leader ready to succeed Hamilton as the op- ponent of the agrarian philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. On the tariff, however, Webster showed himself to be, like most of the New England Federalists, a theoretical free trader. At that period the prosperity of the Northeast was dependent mainly on its commerce, and the development of manufactur- ing was only just beginning. More than a decade passed before practical considerations made Webster a reluctant con- vert to the doctrine of protection for "infant industries."
RETURN TO THE LAW (1816-1818)
When the Fourteenth Congress expired in 1817, Webster was established as a resident of Boston, once more a lawyer and determined to abandon political life. Not thirty-five years of age, he had reached the pinnacle of his profession in New Hampshire, and craved a wider field. In August, 1816, the Websters took up their abode on Mount Vernon Street. He fitted into Boston society as if he had been born on Beacon
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DANIEL WEBSTER, STATESMAN
Hill; and for the remainder of his career he was regarded as a true Bostonian.
While in Congress, Webster had not relinquished his legal practice. During the winter of 1813-1814 he argued several cases before the Supreme Court. He took his place at once among the most sought-for attorneys. When he opened an office in Boston, he was received by his competitors as an equal. Curtis estimated that his fees from 1818 to 1823 could not have been much less than $20,000 a year-a large professional income for those days.
Like most of the lawyers of his time, Webster occasionally accepted criminal cases, and some of his pleas have become classics. Notable was his successful defense of the Kenniston brothers, accused in 1817 of assaulting and robbing a man named Goodridge. In 1821 he was counsel for Judge Pres- cott, when he was impeached before the Massachusetts Senate on the charge of corruption. His most notable achievement was the securing of the conviction, in 1820, of Francis and Joseph Knapp for complicity in the murder of Captain White of Salem. Rufus Choate, and later George S. Boutwell, maintained that Webster's most thrilling oratorical effort was his summing-up in the trial of Francis Knapp, in which he concluded : "It must be confessed, it will be confessed; there is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is con- fession."
Brilliant though he could be before a jury, Webster was even better suited to argument before a court, and it was his destiny to be identified with controversies which settled momentous constitutional questions. In a series of important suits, Webster defended the power and jurisdiction of the Federal Government, thus enabling Chief Justice John Marshall to add one stone after another to the firm consti- tutional structure which he had been erecting ever since his appointment in 1801. Of these great cases, the first was that of Dartmouth College v. Woodward.
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE (1818)
This celebrated case goes back to the charter of Dartmouth College issued by King George Third in 1769. The insti-
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DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE
tution continued without interruption under the charter after the Revolution. When national parties were formed, the trus- tees of Dartmouth proved to be Federalists in the State party struggle. The Democratic Legislature, in the spring of 1815, passed an act creating a new institution, to be called Dart- mouth University, and transferring to it all the property and powers of Dartmouth College. The college trustees put up a vigorous fight. Defeated before the Supreme Court of the State, they appealed, on a writ of error, to the Supreme Court of the United States. Webster, as counsel, was virtually the sole reliance of the plaintiffs; but he fully justified their confidence. In March, 1818, in an argument more than five hours long, he shrewdly stressed the point that it was an attack by the evil forces of democracy on the institutions of conservatism-an argument which would appeal to Marshall. The technical point which he raised very late in the case, and most insistently stressed, was the claim that the Dartmouth charter was an irrevocable contract contrary to the Federal Constitution, which stipulated that no State could pass an act impairing the obligation of contracts.
In an audacious mood at the end of his formal speech, he appealed to the emotions of the judges :
"Sir, you may destroy this little institution; it is weak ; it is in your hands! I know it is one of the lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out, But if you do so, you must carry through your work! You must extinguish, one after another, all those greater lights of science which for more than a century have thrown their radiance over our land. It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it. ... "
Here, we are told, his voice broke, and his glowing eyes were suffused with tears. The court listened eagerly to his closing words :
"Sir, I know not how others may feel, but, for myself, when I see my alma mater surrounded, like Cæsar in the senate-house, by those who are reiterating stab after stab, I would not, for this right hand, have her turn to me and say, Et tu quoque, mi filli! And thou too, my son!"
The debt which Webster owed to Dartmouth was repaid in full then and there. Justice Story, who had been counted as
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DANIEL WEBSTER, STATESMAN
one of the opponents of the college, was converted by Web- ster's eloquence; and, when the decision was rendered by the Chief Justice himself in February, 1819, it established the principle that a private charter creates a corporation under the protection of that clause in the Constitution which prohibits States from passing laws impairing the obligation of contracts. This doctrine, which immensely widened the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, has been cited in more than a thousand subsequent cases, and has been sustained on every occasion when it has been questioned. After the decision, Joseph Hopkinson wrote to President Francis Brown, of Dartmouth, "I would have an inscription over the door of your building, 'Founded by Eleazar Wheelock, Refounded by Daniel Webster.' " .
WEBSTER AS A CONSTITUTIONAL LAWYER
The Dartmouth affair was the first of a long series of cases in which Webster appeared as an interpreter of the Constitu- tion, usually upholding the authority of the Federal Govern- ment over the individual States. Fifty-four of these are cited by Wheeler in order to show the influence of Webster in the field of constitutional law. One of the most significant was Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), testing the validity of a New York statute granting to Fulton and Livingston the exclusive right of steam navigation on all the waterways in the State. Webster was summoned unexpectedly to appear before the Supreme Court on the following morning. After working for eleven consecutive hours to complete his brief, he ad- dressed the Supreme Bench in one of the most lucid and force- ful pleas he ever made. It was his thesis-later sustained by the Court-that the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce is complete' and entire, and that no State can grant a monopoly over its waterways.
Among other cases of hardly less importance was McCul- loch v. Maryland (1819), in which Webster used the famous argument that "the power to tax is the power to destroy," and the Court duly denied the right of a state government to tax the United States Bank. The case of Ogden v. Saunders (1827) settled the question as to the relative jurisdiction of
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LEGAL REPUTATION
Congress and of the States in the matter of bankruptcy. Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837) involved the right of a State to charter a free bridge in competition with a previously chartered toll bridge. In Rhode Island v. Massa- chusetts (1846) Webster, associated with Rufus Choate, won a victory for their state in a dispute over a boundary line. The Passenger Cases (1849) brought Webster for the last time before the Supreme Court on a constitutional problem- the authority of a State to impose a tax on alien passengers brought within its borders. Through his arguments in these and many similar cases runs a consistent and clear theory of a strong central government, supreme over the whole people, with rights and powers which must be respected and obeyed.
WEBSTER'S LEGAL REPUTATION
Webster as an advocate had his failures, among them the Girard Will Case (1844), in which he argued unsuccessfully that the bequest of Stephen Girard for a college in Phila- delphia was not a charity because it provided for an institution in which the teaching of Christianity was forbidden. On the whole, he rendered an extraordinary service in his arguments for a strong, just, and stable government. While he was, perhaps, less learned in precedents than some of his oppon- ents, he was aided by his legal acumen and an amazingly accurate memory. In one or two departments he was un- doubtedly excelled by other men-Choate, for instance, being his superior with a jury. But Webster, although he was not fond of protracted investigations and often was impatient regarding details, had a rare faculty for seizing upon the real point at issue. When the facts had been outlined by a junior counsel, Webster would scan the brief and toil at top speed in preparation for his argument. He was not easily stirred to action; but, once aroused, he was irresistible.
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