THE MURDER OF CAPTAIN

JOSEPH WHITE

DANIEL WEBSTER

ADDRESS TO THE JURY DELIVERED IN August, 1830, at tHE TRIAL of Frank KNAPP FOR THE MURDER OF JOSEPH WHITE

INTRODUCTION

Daniel Webster, lawyer, orator, and statesman, was born in Salisbury, New Hampshire, January 18, 1782. His father, a sturdy frontiersman, soldier, farmer, member of the legislature, and county judge, was always struggling with poverty and always handicapped by a sense of the deficiencies of his early education. Living on the frontier, Daniel was compelled to depend for his early education on his mother and the scanty schooling customary in winter; and for much of this he was indebted to the fact that he was the weakest of the family. When he was fifteen years old a family council decided to send him to college. After an imperfect preparation he entered Dartmouth College, and was graduated in 1801. He at once began the study of law, supporting himself meanwhile, and assisting his brother Ezekiel in college, by copying, teaching, and other miscellaneous labors. He was admitted to the bar in Boston in 1805, from the office of Christopher Gore, and began the practice of law at Boscawen, a small town near his home. Two years later he moved to Portsmouth. There he soon enjoyed a stimulating competition and helpful friendship with Jeremiah Mason, at that time leader of the New Hampshire bar. Webster's remarkable abilities as a lawyer and orator soon brought him recognition. In 1813 he took his seat in Congress. During the next few years he was building his legal reputation and becoming known in cases before the Supreme Court. In 1816 he moved to Boston, and for the succeeding five years devoted himself exclusively to the practice

of law. This was a period marked by rapid intellectual growth and by the first exhibition of his talents on a large scale. By his argument in the famous Dartmouth College Case, in 1818, he established a national reputation as a constitutional lawyer; and the Plymouth oration, in 1820, showed him to be a master in the art of occasional oratory. In 1830 came the celebrated "Reply to Hayne," whereby he gained his well-earned title of the Expounder of the Constitution.

Webster's fame as a statesman rests on his exposition of the idea of nationality. He was not a constructive genius, but did a great work in preparing the way for others. His Hayne reply put the government in an attitude of preparation, an attitude due to Webster's great and successful argumentation. His "Liberty and Union" sentiment was reëchoed in his last notable speech, delivered March 7, 1850, a speech at once the most loudly praised and the most strongly censured of any in the history of American oratory. "I wish to speak to-day," he said in opening, "not as a Massachusetts man, not as a Northern man, but as an American." The Union was with him the paramount issue. The result is well known. Many of his Northern admirers turned from him as a recreant bidding for Southern votes for the presidency. The truth of the charge is still a mooted question, but Webster's side of the case has no doubt received too little consideration. He was still for the Union with a passionate devotion, with an equal dislike for the abolitionist and the secessionist, who endangered the Union. But his highly developed sense of nationality led him to attempt compromise when compromise was no longer possible; the sectional issue was already forced too far for even Webster to help avert the dreaded result of "states dissevered, discordant, belligerent."

Webster's one great life purpose was to make the United States a nation, to read nationality into the Constitution and fix it in the minds of the people; in this he succeeded. His one great ambition was the presidency; in this he failed. He died at his home in Marshfield, Massachusetts, October 24, 1852, disappointed at his loss of the nomination for the presidency, for which he had long been a logical candidate, but an office which could not have added to, and might easily have detracted from, his national fame,

a fame resting secure on the record of his invaluable services during a peculiarly critical period in our national development.

Though critics have differed widely regarding Webster from political and ethical standpoints, none have ever questioned his right to be ranked among the world's greatest orators. Not inaptly may he be called the American Demosthenes, for he had the combined simplicity and strength of the great Greek, and excelled the latter in natural endowments.

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The first thing to be noted regarding Webster's oratory first thing always noted by those who saw him—is his physical equipment. It is necessary for one to understand the mere physical influence of the man himself in order to appreciate the immediate influence of his speeches. In face, form, and voice, nature did her utmost for the "godlike Daniel." Making all due allowances for the exaggerations of contemporary hero worshipers, Webster's physique, carriage, and look were so unusual as to command unusual attention. When visiting England he was pointed out on the streets of Liverpool by an English navvy, who said, "There goes a king." And Sydney Smith exclaimed, "Good heavens! he is a small cathedral in himself." Webster was five feet ten inches in height, and after reaching maturity weighed a little less than two hundred pounds. While these are the proportions of a large man, they are not unusual, and do not explain why he was so often called a "giant." This is rather explained by the fact that, as Phillips says of O'Connell, "his presence filled the eye." Webster had an unusually large head, his brain being one of the three heaviest on record; straight black hair; a high, broad forehead; heavy, black, "beetling" eyebrows; high cheek bones; a prominent aquiline nose; a large, firm mouth; a swarthy (copper) complexion; and, most remarkable of all, large, deep-set black eyes, "glowing like anthracite coal." Even in his youth he was noted for the "Batchelder eyes" (from his mother, and also inherited by Caleb Cushing, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John G. Whittier). Webster himself says that as a boy in his native town he was called All-Eyes. Attractive in repose, when aroused few could withstand his look; "the dull black eyes under the precipice of brows," wrote Carlyle to Emerson, "like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown.”

Webster's voice was in harmony with his physical impressiveness. It had great compass, was low and musical in conversation, in debate high and full, now ringing out like a clarion, and then sinking to deep, rich, organlike notes.

Withal he had a dignity in carriage and delivery which comported with these physical attributes. It has been said that his fame as an orator rests upon the fact that "he never spoke except on great themes." Though this may not be literally true, certain it is that there runs through all his speeches a vein of seriousness and dignity befitting the subject and the occasion. Speaking usually on great themes, he always had the great manner,—sometimes pompous and heavy, perhaps, but never any suggestion of the "funny man." He never descends to personal abuse. The nearest approach to this, perhaps, may be found in his "Reply to Hayne,” where his elephantine humor and withering sarcasm were used with crushing effect; but these were justified by the nature and method of Hayne's attack.

With such marvelous physical gifts, we should naturally expect that the immediate influence of his oratory would be very effective, and such was the case. Two or three instances must suffice. Mr. Ticknor, a man not disposed by training or habits to indulge a facile enthusiasm, after hearing the Plymouth oration wrote to a friend:

"I was never so excited by public speaking before in my life. Three or four times I thought my temples would burst with the gush of blood; for, after all, you must know that I am aware it is no connected whole, but a collection of wonderful fragments of burning eloquence, to which his whole manner gave tenfold force. When I came out I was almost afraid to come near him. It seemed to me as if he was like the mount that might not be touched and that burned with fire."

The immediate effect of his peroration in the Dartmouth College and Hayne speeches has been so frequently told that it requires no repetition here. After the Seventh of March speech (previously alluded to) a noted abolitionist leader and bitter opponent is reported to have said, "When Webster, speaking of secession, asked 'What is to become of me?' I was thrilled with a sense of some awful impending calamity." Again, while addressing an immense audience in Boston, at a time when the Whig party thought of dissolution, Webster asked, "If you break up the Whig party, where am I to go?" James Russell Lowell, who was in the audience, said, "We held our breath, thinking where he could go; but if he had been five feet three, we should have said, 'Who cares where you go?'" In his Autobiography of Seventy

Years, Senator Hoar writes of the time when he first saw Webster, June 17, 1843, at the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument:

"His countenance, his figure, and his manners were all in so grand a style that he was, without effort, as superior to his most eminent rivals as they were to the humblest. He, alone of all men, did not disappoint the eye and the ear, but was a fit figure in the landscape. There was the monument and there was Webster!... The whole occasion was answered by his presence."

Favorable as were Webster's natural endowments, they were not brought to the perfection he attained without training. The "oratorical instinct” developed early. As a boy he cultivated the art of declaiming and reading aloud. We are told how the passing teamsters, while they watered their horses, delighted to get "Webster's boy," with his delicate look and great dark eyes, to come out beneath the shade of the trees and read the Bible to them with all the force of his childish eloquence. At Exeter Academy timidity overcame him and he could not summon courage to declaim. “Many a piece did I commit to memory,” he said, “and recite and rehearse in my own room, over and over again; yet when the day came on which the school collected to hear declamations, when my name was called, and I saw all eyes turned to my seat, I could not raise myself from it." At college, however, he found his voice, and devoted much time to practice in speaking. He thus attracted sufficient notice to be invited by the citizens of the town of Hanover to deliver a Fourth of July oration. As to his manner of speaking in his college days, Senator Lodge writes 1: "He would enter the classroom or debating society and begin in a low voice and almost sleepy manner, and would then gradually rouse himself like a lion, and pour forth his words until he had his hearers completely under his control, and glowing with enthusiasm." This characterization is interesting in that it describes Webster more especially as he was in his later days, - a lion that needed to be aroused. He was conscious, of course, of his superb physical gifts, and as he grew older came to rely on them more and more. Though a man with great capacity for work, and often devoting himself with intense and protracted application, he was phlegmatic in temperament, and his constitutional sluggishness naturally increased as he grew older, until a direct stimulus was needed to make him exert himself. "In his latter days he made 1 Lodge, Daniel Webster (American Statesman Series), p. 19.