From Farm Boy to Senator

“I went up to him and said very calmly, ‘Can I see you alone in one of the lobbies?’

“He replied, ‘Certainly.’ I suppose he thought I was going to beg his pardon and ask his assistance. We passed one of the anterooms of the Capitol. I looked into one of the grand jury rooms, rather remote from the main court-room. There was no one in it, and we entered. As we did so I looked at the door, and found that there was a key in the lock; and, unobserved by him, I turned the key and put it in my pocket. Mr. Pinkney seemed to be waiting in some astonishment.

“I advanced towards him and said: ‘Mr. Pinkney, you grossly insulted me in the court-room, and not for the first time either. In deference to your position, and to the respect in which I hold the court, I did not answer you as I was tempted to do on the spot.’

“He began to parley.

“I continued. ‘You know you did; don’t add another sin to that; don’t deny it; you know you did it, and you know it was premeditated. It was deliberate; it was purposely done; and if you deny it, you state an untruth. Now,’ I went on, ‘I am here to say to you, once for all, that you must ask my pardon, and go into court to-morrow morning and repeat the apology, or else either you or I will go out of this room in a different condition from that in which we entered it.’

“I was never more in earnest. He looked at me, and saw that my eyes were pretty dark and firm. He began to say something. I interrupted him.

“‘No explanation,’ said I; ‘admit the fact, and take it back. I do not want another word from you except that. I will hear no explanation; nothing but that you admit it and recall it.’

“He trembled like an aspen leaf. He again attempted to explain.

“Said I, ‘There is no other course. I have the key in my pocket, and you must apologize, or take what I give you.’

“At that he humbled down, and said to me: ‘You are right, I am sorry; I did intend to bluff you; I regret it, and ask your pardon.’

“‘Enough,’ I promptly replied. ‘Now, one promise before I open the door; and that is, that you will to-morrow state to the court that you have said things which wounded my feelings, and that you regret it.’

“Pinkney replied, ‘I will do so.’

“Then I unlocked the door, and passed out.

“The next morning, when the court met, Mr. Pinkney at once rose, and stated to the court that a very unpleasant affair had occurred the morning before, as might have been observed by their honors; that his friend, Mr. Webster, had felt grieved at some things which had dropped from his lips; that his zeal for his client might have led him to say some things which he should not have said, and that he was sorry for having thus spoken.’

“From that day,” adds Mr. Webster, “there was no man who treated me with so much respect and deference as Mr. William Pinkney.”

I have recorded this anecdote that my young readers may understand clearly that the young lawyer was manly and self-respecting, and declined the method of satisfaction then in vogue from high and honorable motives.

CHAPTER XXIV.

MR. WEBSTER IN BOSTON

Before his second Congressional term had expired, Mr. Webster carried out a plan which was first suggested by the destruction of his house and library. His talents demanded a wider arena. Moreover, his growing family necessitated a style of living for which his professional income was insufficient. Happily as his life had flowed on in the chief town in his native State, he felt that he must seek a new residence. For a time he hesitated between Albany and Boston, but happily for the latter he decided in its favor, and in August, 1816, he removed thither with his family, fixing his home in a house on Mt. Vernon Street, but a few rods from the State House.

It mattered not where Daniel Webster might choose to locate himself, he was sure to take at once a leading position both as a lawyer and a man. He was now thirty-four years old. He had outlived his early delicacy, and began to assume that dignity and majesty of mein which made him everywhere a marked man. Appearances are oftentimes deceptive, but in his case it was not so. That outward majesty which has been quaintly described in the statement that “when Daniel Webster walked the streets of Boston he made the buildings look small,” was but the sign and manifestation of a corresponding intellectual greatness. By his removal New Hampshire lost her greatest son, and Boston gained its foremost citizen.

His expectations of a largely increased professional income were fully realized. In Portsmouth his fees had never exceeded two thousand dollars per year. The third year after his removal his fee-book foots up over fifteen thousand dollars as the receipts of a single year, and this record is probably incomplete. His biographer, Mr. Curtis, says: “I am satisfied that his income, from 1818 until he again entered Congress in 1823, could not have been on an average less than $20,000 a year, though the customary fees of such counsel at that time were about one half of what they are now.” Now, for the first time, he was able to pay in full his father’s debts, which he had voluntarily assumed, declining to have his small estate thrown into bankruptcy.

I shall have occasion, hereafter, to point out with regret the fact that his expenses increased even more rapidly than his income, and that he voluntarily incurred debts and pecuniary obligations which all his life long harassed him, and held him in an entirely unnecessary thraldom. On the subject of national finance Mr. Webster, as we have seen, held the soundest views; but in the management of his own finances, for the larger portion of his active life he displayed an incapacity to control his expenditures and confine them within his income which caused his best friends to grieve. In this respect, at any rate, I cannot present the hero whom we so deservedly admire as a model.

The large increase in Mr. Webster’s income is sufficient to prove that he was employed in the most important cases. But fifteen years had elapsed since, as a raw graduate of a country college, he humbly sought an opportunity to study in the office of a well-known Boston lawyer. Now he took his place at the bar, and rapidly gained a much higher position than the man who had kindly extended to him a welcome. It is to the credit of Mr. Gore’s ability to read character and judge of ability that he foresaw and predicted all this when through his influence his student was led to decline the clerkship of a New Hampshire court, which then would have filled the measure of his ambition.

And how was all this gained? I can assure my young readers that no great lawyer, no great writer, no great member of any profession, lounges into greatness. Daniel Webster worked, and worked hard. He rose early, not only because it gave him an opportunity of doing considerable while he was fresh and elastic, but because he had a country boy’s love of nature. Whether in city or country, the early morning hours were dear to him. As Mr. Lee says, “He did a large amount of work before others were awake in the house, and in the evening he was ready for that sweet sleep which ‘God gives to his beloved.’”

During the period which elapsed between his arrival in Boston and his return to Congress as a Representative of his adopted city his life was crowded, and he appeared in many notable cases. But there was one which merits special mention, because he was enabled to do a great service to the college where he had been educated, and prove himself in a signal manner a grateful and loyal son.

Of the celebrated Dartmouth College case I do not consider it necessary for my present purpose to speak in detail. It is sufficient to say that it was menaced with a serious peril. The chartered rights of the college were threatened by legislative interference; nay, more, an act was passed, and pronounced valid by the courts of New Hampshire, which imperilled the usefulness and prosperity of the institution. The matter was carried before the Supreme Court of the United States, and Mr. Webster’s services were secured. The argument which he made on that occasion established his reputation as a great lawyer. The closing portion was listened to with absorbing interest. It was marked by deep feeling on the part of the speaker. It is as follows:

“This, sir, is my case. It is the case not merely of that humble institution, it is the case of every college in our land; it is more, it is the case of every eleemosynary institution throughout our country—of all those great charities founded by the piety of our ancestors, to alleviate human misery, and scatter blessings along the pathway of life. It is more! It is, in some sense, the case of every man among us who has property of which he may stripped, for the question is simply this: ‘Shall our State Legislatures be allowed to take that which is not their own, to turn it from its original use, and apply it to such ends or purposes as they in their discretion shall see fit?’

“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 light over our land!

“It is, sir, as I have said, a small college, and yet there are those who love it—”

Here the orator was overcome by emotion. His lips quivered, and his eyes filled with tears. The effect was extraordinary. All who heard him, from Chief Justice Marshall to the humblest attendant, were borne away on the tide of emotion as he gave expression in a few broken words to the tenderness which he felt for his Alma Mater.

When he recovered his composure, he continued in deep, thrilling tones, “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 fili! And thou too, my son!’”

This speech, which was masterly in point of logic as well as a powerful appeal to the feelings, was successful, and the opponents of the college were disastrously defeated.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE ORATION AT PLYMOUTH

The three-fold character in which Daniel Webster achieved greatness was as lawyer, orator and statesman. In this respect he must be placed at the head of the immortal three whose names are usually conjoined. Mr. Calhoun did not pretend to be a lawyer, and Mr. Clay, though he practiced law, possessed but a small share of legal erudition, and when he gained cases, was indebted to his eloquence rather than to his mastery of the legal points involved. Both, however, may claim to be orators and statesmen, but even in these respects it is probable that the highest place would be accorded to their great compeer.

Up to the age of thirty-eight Mr. Webster had not vindicated his claim to the title of a great orator. In Congress and in his profession he had shown himself a powerful, eloquent and convincing speaker, but it was not until he delivered at Plymouth his celebrated discourse on the two hundredth anniversary of the settlement that he established his fame as a great anniversary orator.

Probably no better selection of an orator could have been made. The circumstances of his own early career, born and brought up as he was on the sterile soil of one of the original States of New England, trained like the first settlers in the rugged school of poverty and simplicity, wresting a bare subsistence from unwilling nature, he could enter into the feelings of those hardy men who brought the seeds of civilization and civil liberty from the shores of the Old World to find a lodgment for them in the soil of the New. He could appreciate and admire the spirit which actuated them, and no one was more likely to set a proper value on the results they achieved.

So, by a happy conjuncture, the orator fitted the occasion, and the occasion was of a character to draw forth the best powers of the orator. It gave him an opportunity to pay a fitting tribute to the virtues of the stern but conscientious and deeply religious men, who had their faults indeed, but who in spite of them will always receive not only from their descendants but from the world a high measure of respect. Of the oration, the manner in which it was delivered, and its effect upon his audience, we have this account by an eye and ear witness, Mr. Ticknor:

“In the morning I went with Mr. Webster to the church where he was to deliver the oration. It was the old First Church—Dr. Kendall’s. He did not find the pulpit convenient for his purpose, and after making two or three experiments, determined to speak from the deacon’s seat under it. An extemporaneous table, covered with a green baize cloth, was arranged for the occasion, and when the procession entered the church everything looked very appropriate, though when the arrangement was first suggested it sounded rather odd.

“The building was crowded; indeed, the streets had seemed so all the morning, for the weather was fine, and the whole population was astir as for a holiday. The oration was an hour and fifty minutes long, but the whole of what was printed a year afterwards (for a year before it made its appearance) was not delivered. His manner was very fine—quite various in the different parts. The passage about the slave trade was delivered with a power of indignation such as I never witnessed on any other occasion. That at the end when, spreading his arms as if to embrace them, he welcomed future generations to the great inheritance which we have enjoyed, was spoken with the most attractive sweetness, and that peculiar smile which in him was always so charming.

“The effect of the whole was very great. As soon as he got home to our lodgings all the principal people then in Plymouth crowded about him. He was full of animation and radiant with happiness. But there was something about him very grand and imposing at the same time. In a letter which I wrote the same day I said that ‘he seemed as if he were like the mount that might not be touched, and that burned with fire.’ I have the same recollection of him still. I never saw him at any time when he seemed to me to be more conscious of his own powers, or to have a more true and natural enjoyment from their possession.”

The occasion will always be memorable, for on that day it was revealed to the world that America possessed an orator fit to be ranked with the greatest orators of ancient or modern times. A year afterwards John Adams, in a letter to Mr. Webster, said of it: “It is the effort of a great mind, richly stored with every species of information. If there be an American who can read it without tears I am not that American. It enters more perfectly into the genuine spirit of New England than any production I ever read. The observations on the Greeks and Romans; on colonization in general; on the West India Islands; on the past, present and future of America, and on the slave trade are sagacious, profound and affecting in a high degree. Mr. Burke is no longer entitled to the praise, the most consummate orator of modern times. This oration will be read five hundred years hence with as much rapture as it was heard. It ought to be read at the end of every century, and indeed at the end of every year, forever and ever.”

This testimony is the more interesting because the writer less then five years later was himself, with his great contemporary, Mr. Jefferson, to be the subject of an address which will always be reckoned as one of Webster’s masterpieces.

And now, since many of my young readers will never read the Plymouth oration, I surrender the rest of this chapter to two extracts which may give them an idea of its high merits.

“There are enterprises, military as well as civil, which sometimes check the current of events, give a new turn to human affairs, and transmit their consequences through ages. We see their importance in their results, and call them great because great things follow. There have been battles which have fixed the fate of nations. These come down to us in history with a solid and permanent interest, not created by a display of glittering armor, the rush of adverse battalions, the sinking and rising of pennons, the flight, the pursuit and the victory; but by their effect in advancing or retarding human knowledge, in overthrowing or establishing despotism, in extending or destroying human happiness.

“When the traveler pauses on the plain of Marathon, what are the emotions which most strongly agitate his breast? What is that glorious recollection which thrills through his frame and suffuses his eyes? Not, I imagine, that Grecian skill and Grecian valor were here most signally displayed, but that Greece herself was here displayed. It is because to this spot, and to the event which has rendered it immortal, he refers all the succeeding glories of the republic. It is because, if that day had gone otherwise, Greece had perished. It is because he perceives that her philosophers and orators, her poets and painters, her sculptors and architects, her government and free institutions, point backward to Marathon, and that their future existence seems to have been suspended on the contingency whether the Persian or the Grecian banner should wave victorious in the beams of that day’s setting sun. And, as his imagination kindles at the retrospect, he is transported back to the interesting moment, he counts the fearful odds of the contending hosts, his interest for the result overwhelms him, he trembles as if it were still uncertain, and grows to doubt whether he may consider Socrates and Plato, Demosthenes, Sophocles and Phidias, as secure yet to himself and the world.

“‘If God prosper us,’ might have been the appropriate language of our fathers when they landed upon this Rock. If God prosper us, we shall begin a work which shall last for ages; we shall plant here a new society in the principles of the fullest liberty and the purest religion; we shall fill this region of the great continent, which stretches almost from pole to pole, with civilization and Christianity; the temples of the true God shall rise, where now ascends the smoke of idolatrous sacrifice; fields and gardens, the flowers of summer and the waving and golden harvest of autumn shall extend over a thousand hills and stretch along a thousand valleys never yet, since the creation, reclaimed to the use of civilized man.

“We shall whiten this coast with the canvas of a prosperous commerce; we shall stud the long and winding shore with a hundred cities. That which we sow in weakness shall be raised in strength. From our sincere but houseless worship there shall spring splendid temples to record God’s goodness, and from the simplicity of our social unions there shall arise wise and politic constitutions of government, full of the liberty which we ourselves bring and breathe; from our zeal for learning institutions shall spring which shall scatter the light of knowledge throughout the land, and, in time, paying back where they have borrowed, shall contribute their part to the great aggregate of human knowledge; and our descendants through all generations shall look back to this spot, and to this hour, with unabated affection and regard.”

I close with the solemn and impressive peroration in which the orator addresses those who are to come after him.

“Advance then, ye future generations! We would hail you as you rise in your long succession to fill the places which we now fill, and to taste the blessings of existence where we are passing, and soon shall have passed, our own human duration. We bid you welcome to this pleasant land of the fathers. We bid you welcome to the healthful skies and the verdant fields of New England. We greet your accession to the great inheritance which we have enjoyed. We welcome you to the blessings of good government and religious liberty. We welcome you to the treasures of science and the delights of learning. We welcome you to the transcendent sweets of domestic life, to the happiness of kindred and parents and children. We welcome you to the immeasurable blessings of rational existence, the immortal hope of Christianity, and the light of everlasting truth!”