DANIEL WEBSTER

1782-1852

It is perhaps impossible to decide which orator of ancient and modern times has been in all respects the greatest of all. The reason is, of course, that no one is able to estimate the value of the "personal equation," which, in oratory more than in other things, is a factor in the problem. Moreover, the special circumstances under which a given oration is delivered exercise an immense influence in the general effect upon the hearers. The fact that Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg gave his noble words a weight and pathos which they would not have had elsewhere. When Webster answered Hayne, the spectre of disunion had already cast over the country the shadow of its pestilential wings. These elements help the orator, as sunshine and verdure, shade and color, help the temple-which had no great impressiveness in the architect's drawing. The student sees only the printed page, and must reconstruct from memory or information the surroundings of the occasion, and the personality of the man.

After making all allowances, however, it is at least highly probable that Webster, when he made that speech in reply to Hayne, was, then and there, the greatest of all orators living or dead. That speech was not the mere effort of the moment; it was the sum and substance of his whole moral, intellectual, and political life, gathered up into one thunderbolt of eloquence, and launched at once into human history. That speech was his creed, his experience, his aspiration, his work in the world-in short, it was himself. After reading that, all else that Webster spoke sounds like an echo, a prophecy, or a reminiscence; we need not linger over them; we have seen the orator at his apogee, superb with the light that never was on sea or land. The hour and the man met, and were glorified together.

Webster was born at Salisbury (Franklin), N. H., on January 18, 1782. He got his earliest instruction from his mother, and his family, by rigid economy, were able to send him to Exeter Academy and Dartmouth College, where he graduated in 1801; afterwards studying law and being admitted to practice in 1805. As a boy he had found it difficult to speak pieces on elocution days; and it was not until he made his Fourth of July oration in Dartmouth that anyone supposed he had the possibility of oratory in him. It was an ornamental and rather heavy performance; but it contained ideas, and pleased the village audience highly.

Indeed, he had furnished himself, in his early reading, with the best models; he was familiar with the Bible, as well as with Milton and a few other great writers of poetry and prose; and he knew by heart, and had thoroughly analyzed, the constitution of the United States. That constitution, and all that it meant and implied, was the central thought of his life; around that everything was grouped; to vindicate and champion it was the mission of his life. And well was he fitted for the enterprise. His form and face were incarnate dignity and eloquence;

so that when he spoke, the eye had already prepared the ear for what was to come. His mind, with its superb native imaginative powers, its ethical elevation, and its assiduous training in the methods and perspicacity of the law, had ever kept in view the broadest and most fundamental problems of statesmanship; so that when he was called from his country law-office at Boscawen, after having made what seemed a sufficient reputation in the way of arguments before a jury, to take his seat in Congress in 1813, he was then really taking his first step upon the stage which was to be peculiarly his own. His forensic oratory had been practically irresistible in its argumentative strength, its quiet simplicity, comprehensible to the most ordinary intelligence, as of one man talking reasonably with another; and its gradually rising eloquence, based upon the very nature of the theme, and therefore never seeming forced or strained. The book of human nature lay open to him as the book of law; he knew how to move men and win their allegiance. Yet his legal record is exceptionable in the constancy with which he abstained from making the worse appear the better reason; he was always on the side of right, as well as on the winning side; and his victories were also victories for justice and morality. Webster, in fact, always rose to the full measure of the emergency or condition which confronted him; and he handled the highest questions of state with the same majestic and easy command that he had manifested in the disputes of the court-room. In whatever crisis he was always Webster; until it might be said of him as of the invincible Launcelot in the fairy legend, "His very name-this conquered.”

He was a Federalist member of the House from 1813 to 1817, from New Hampshire; but in 1816 he removed to Boston, and was elected to Congress from Massachusetts in 1823. Elected United States Senator in 1827, he became one of the Whig leaders in the Senate, and took part in the famous debates against Hayne and Calhoun. In 1841 he was appointed Secretary of State, and was again elected to the Senate in 1845. Five years later he again became Secretary of State. He died at Mansfield, Mass., October 24, 1852.

The manner in which the debate between Webster and Hayne arose has been often told. A resolution of inquiry offered by Foote as to sales and surveys of Western lands, had called into question the interpretation of the constitution on the point of the limits of State sovereignty; and Webster's speech, replying to Hayne's contention that the State was all-powerful in matters concerning itself, maintained the supreme rule of the Union. Hayne's speech had been so clever that it was doubted whether an effective rejoinder could be made; the only person entirely free from anxiety on that score was Webster himself. He had been preparing for this occasion all his life; and had actually made a study of the particular subject now to be discussed, some years before, when a resolution had been proposed to cede public domains to the States in which they were situated. "It struck me as being so unfair," Webster explained afterwards, that I prepared an argument to resist it, embracing the whole history of the public lands and the government's action in regard to them. Had Hayne tried to make a speech to fit my notes, he could not have hit it better. No man,' he adds, "is inspired with the occasion: I never was!" There was an immense concourse of people to hear the speech, the importance of which, indeed, could hardly be exaggerated; and in this case the fable of the mountain in labor was reversed. No mouse was brought forth; but a progeny so sublime and potent, that a great nation has accepted it as the incarnation of its principles ever since.

REPLY TO HAYNE

Delivered in the Senate of the United States, January 26, 18301

MR.

R. PRESIDENT: When the mariner has been tossed for many days, in thick weather, and on an unknown. sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course. Let us imitate this prudence, and, before we float farther on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to conjecture where we now are. I ask for the reading of the resolution.

[The secretary read the resolution, as follows:

"Resolved, That the committee on public lands be instructed to inquire and report the quantity of public lands remaining unsold within each State and territory, and whether it be expedient to limit, for a certain period, the sales of the public lands to such lands only as have heretofore been offered for sale, and are now subject to entry at the minimum price. And, also, whether the office of surveyor-general, and some of the land offices, may not be abolished without detriment to the public interest; or whether it be expedient to adopt measures to hasten the sales, and extend more rapidly the surveys of the public lands."]

We have thus heard, sir, what the resolution is, which is actually before us for consideration; and it will readily occur to everyone that it is almost the only subject about which something has not been said in the speech, running through two days, by which the Senate has been now entertained by the gentleman

1[The famous debate between Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts, and Robert Y. Hayne, of South Carolina, in the United States Senate was a result of the wide and irreconcilable differences that separated the representatives of the North from those of the South, and as such, it is of the greatest value to the student of political history. The immediate and direct cause of the debate

was a resolution introduced by Mr. Foote, of Connecticut, relating to the sale and survey of public lands. In the course of the discussion Mr. Hayne made an elaborate argument to prove that New England had always pursued an unfriendly course towards the Western States. In rejoinder Webster delivered his historic" Reply to Hayne." -EDITOR.]

from South Carolina. Every topic in the wide range of our public affairs, whether past or present-everything, general or local, whether belonging to national politics, or party politics, seems to have attracted more or less of the honorable member's attention, save only the resolution before the Senate. He has spoken of everything but the public lands. They have escaped his notice. To that subject, in all his excursions, he has not paid even the cold respect of a passing glance.

When this debate, sir, was to be resumed on Thursday morning, it so happened that it would have been convenient for me to be elsewhere. The honorable member, however, did not incline to put off the discussion to another day. He had a shot, he said, to return, and he wished to discharge it. That shot, sir, which it was kind thus to inform us was coming, that we might stand out of the way, or prepare ourselves to fall before it, and die with decency, has now been received. Under all advantages, and with expectation awakened by the tone which preceded it, it has been discharged, and has spent its force. It may become me to say no more of its effect, than that, if nobody is found, after all, either killed or wounded by it, it is not the first time, in the history of human affairs, that the vigor and success of the war have not quite come up to the lofty and sounding phrase of the manifesto.

The gentleman, sir, in declining to postpone the debate, told the Senate, with the emphasis of his hand upon his heart, that there was something rankling here, which he wished to relieve.

[Mr. Hayne rose, and disclaimed having used the word rankling.]

It would not, Mr. President, be safe for the honorable member to appeal to those around him upon the question, whether he did, in fact, make use of that word. But he may have been unconscious of it. At any rate, it is enough that he disclaims it. But still, with or without the use of that particular word, he had yet something here, he said, of which he wished to rid himself by an immediate reply. In this respect, sir, I have a great advantage over the honorable gentleman. There is nothing here, sir, which gives me the slightest uneasiness; neither fear, nor anger, nor that which is sometimes more troublesome than either-the consciousness of having been in the wrong. There is nothing, either originating here, or now received here by the gentleman's

shot. Nothing original, for I had not the slightest feeling of disrespect or unkindness towards the honorable member. Some passages, it is true, had occurred since our acquaintance in this body, which I could have wished might have been otherwise; but I had used philosophy and forgotten them. When the honorable member rose, in his first speech, I paid him the respect of attentive listening; and when he sat down, though surprised and, I must say, even astonished, at some of his opinions, nothing was farther from my intention than to commence any personal warfare: and through the whole of the few remarks I made in answer, I avoided, studiously and carefully, everything which I thought possible to be construed into disrespect. And, sir, while there is thus nothing originating here, which I wished at any time, or now wish to discharge, I must repeat, also, that nothing has been received here which rankles, or in any way gives me annoyance. I will not accuse the honorable member of violating the rules of civilized war-I will not say that he poisoned his arrows. But whether his shafts were, or were not, dipped in that which would have caused rankling, if they had reached, there was not, as it happened, quite strength enough in the bow to bring them to their mark. If he wishes now to gather up those shafts, he must look for them elsewhere; they will not be found fixed and quivering in the object at which they were aimed.

The honorable member complained that I had slept on his speech. I must have slept on it, or not slept at all. The moment the honorable member sat down, his friend from Missouri* rose, and, with much honeyed commendation of the speech, suggested that the impressions which it had produced were too charming and delightful to be disturbed by other sentiments or other sounds, and proposed that the Senate should adjourn. Would it have been quite amiable in me, sir, to interrupt this excellent good feeling? Must I not have been absolutely malicious, if I could have thrust myself forward to destroy sensations, thus pleasing? Was it not much better and kinder, both to sleep upon them myself, and to allow others also the pleasure of sleeping upon them? But if it be meant, by sleeping upon his speech, that I took time to prepare a reply to it, it is quite a mistake; owing to other engagements, I could not employ even the * [Webster here refers to Thomas Hart Benton, Senator from Missouri.-EDitor.]