but I will not do a thing unnecessarily that wounds the feelings of others, or that does discredit to my own understanding. ... Mr. President, in the excited times in which we live, there is found to exist a state of crimination and recrimination between the North and South. There are lists of grievances produced by each; and those grievances, real or supposed, alienate the minds of one portion of the country from the other, exasperate the feelings, and subdue the sense of fraternal affection, patriotic love, and mutual regard. . . . I hear with distress and anguish the word "secession"; especially when it falls from the lips of those who are patriotic, and known to the country and known all over the world for their political services. Secession! Peaceable secession! Sir, your eyes and mine are never destined to see that miracle! The dismemberment of this vast country without convulsion! The breaking up of the fountains of the great deep without ruffling the surface!... Sir, he who sees these States now revolving in harmony around a common center, and expects to see them quit their places and fly off without convulsion, may look the next hour to see the heavenly bodies rush from their spheres, and jostle against each other in the realms of space, without causing the wreck of the universe. No, Sir! No, Sir! I will not state what might produce the disruption of the Union; but, Sir, I see as plainly as the sun in heaven what that disruption itself must produce; I see that it must produce war, and such a war as I will not describe, in its twofold character. ... No, Sir! There will be no secession! Gentlemen are not serious when they talk of secession. ... slavery from the territories, Webster said: "... The prevailing motives with the North for agreeing to the recognition [by the Constitution] of slavery in the Southern States. . . rested upon the supposition that no acquisition of territory would be made to form new States on the southern frontier of this country, either by cession or conquest. I have said that I shall consent to no extension of the area of slavery upon this continent, nor to any increase of slave representation in the other House of Congress. I have now stated my reasons for my conduct and my vote. We of the North have already gone, in this respect, far beyond all that any Southern man could have expected, or did expect, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.” Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster, National Edition, Vol. X, pp. 37, 43. Never did there devolve on any generation of men higher trusts than now devolve upon us, for the preservation of this Constitution and the harmony and peace of all who are destined to live under it. Let us make our generation one of the strongest and brightest links in that golden chain which is destined, I fondly believe, to grapple the people of all the States to this Constitution for ages to come. We have a great, popular, constitutional government, guarded by law and by judicature, and defended by the affections of the whole people. No monarchical throne presses these States together, no iron chain of military power encircles them; they live and stand under a government popular in its form, representative in its character, founded upon principles of equality, and so constructed, we hope, as to last forever. In all its history it has been beneficent; it has trodden down no man's liberty; it has crushed no State. Its daily respiration is liberty and patriotism; its yet youthful veins are full of enterprise, courage, and honorable love of glory and renown. Large before, the country has now, by recent events, become vastly larger. This republic now extends, with a vast breadth, across the whole continent. The two great seas of the world wash the one and the other shore. We realize on a mighty scale the beautiful description of the ornamental border of the buckler of Achilles: Now, the broad shield complete, the artist crowned In living silver seemed the waves to roll, And beat the buckler's verge, and bound the whole. In spite of his magnificent eloquence Webster could not commend his compromise policy to his Massachusetts constituency. A member of the legislature called him "a recreant son of Massachusetts, who misrepresented her in the senate." Theodore Parker compared him to Benedict Arnold, and declared later, in a sermon, that "not a hundred prominent men in all New England acceded to the speech." A mass meeting in Faneuil Hall, "the cradle of Liberty," passed resolutions of censure on the speech. And John Greenleaf Whittier, the abolitionist poet, following the example of the stern Hebrew prophets, baptized Webster with the significant name Ichabod ("where is the glory?"). All else is gone; The soul has fl When faith is lost The man is de Then, pay the re And hide the s When Daniel Webster will be no secession! Ger they talk of secession" he gant optimism of the orato delivered his speech, the 1 sissippi sent out the follow a Southern convention to b to consider the feasibility of: We have arrived at a peric country, when the fears of th well be excited, lest the noble ment on earth may, ere long, discord, engendered by an u spirit of fanaticism [abolitioni bretheren of the non-slave-hol longer be disguised, that our called, disregarding the compr promises without which it woul 1 Daniel Webster knew of t same seventh-of-March speech sai vention held at Nashville"; and who [shall] meet at Nashville for for the overthrow of this Union, - Writings and Speeches of Dar of the slave-holding States, are determined to pursue towards those States a course of policy, and to adopt a system of legislation by Congress, destructive of their best rights and most cherished domestic institutions. In vain have the citizens of the Slave States appealed to their bretheren of the free States in a spirit of brotherly love and devotion to that Constitution framed by our fathers and cemented by their blood. . . . The spirit of forbearance and concession, which has been for more than thirty years manifested and acted upon by the slave-holding States, has but strengthened the determination of their Northern bretheren, to fasten upon them a system of legislation in regard to their peculiar domestic institutions . . . fatal in its effects. . . . Slavery as it exists in the Southern States . . . is not a moral or political evil, but an element of prosperity and happiness both to the master and slave. ... Abolish slavery, and you convert the fair and blooming fields of the South into barren heaths; their high-souled and chivalrous proprietors into abject dependents—and the now happy and contented slaves into squalid and degraded objects of misery and wretchedness! The Southern States have remonstrated and forborne, until forbearance is no longer a virtue. The time has arrived when, if they hope to preserve their existence as equal members of the Confederacy, . . . they must prepare to act — to act with resolution, firmness, and unity of purpose, trusting to the righteousness of their cause, and the protection of the Almighty Ruler of the destinies of nations, who ever looks benignently upon the exertions of those who contend for the prerogatives of freemen; therefore, be it Resolved by the Legislature of the State of Mississippi, That they cordially approve of the action of the Southern State Convention held at the city of Jackson [Mississippi] on the first Monday of October, 1849, and adopt the following resolutions of said body.... [Then follow thirteen resolutions protesting against any attempt to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia or to exclude it from the land ceded by Mexico in 1848; and declaring their |