From Farm Boy to Senator

It was a strong and temperate statement of the existing condition of affairs, and of the necessity of compromise. In making this speech Mr. Webster was fully aware that he was hazarding his popularity—nay, was sure to lose it—that he would grieve his best friends, and excite a storm of indignation at the North. He was not mistaken. The minds of men were in no mood for temperate counsels. They were in no mood to appreciate the patriotic motives which actuated the great statesman. He was charged with falling from honor and making undue concessions to slavery. Upon this last point I shall express no opinion. I only claim that Mr. Webster’s motives were pure, and that though he may have gone too far in his concessions, he was influenced thereto by the depth of his devotion to the Union. There were not wanting those who charged him with making in his speech a bid for the Presidency, forgetting that he could not have injured his chances more effectually than by stirring up against himself his warmest political friends.

That Mr. Webster had an honorable ambition to serve his country in that great office—the greatest in its gift—no one will dispute. He knew his own fitness, and would have rejoiced to crown a life of high service with this elevated trust. But I have said elsewhere that it is only in an ideal republic that the greatest citizens reach the highest posts, and our republic is not an ideal one.

In the light of our present experience we can see that Mr. Webster was wrong in supposing that the republic could go on indefinitely with slavery as its corner-stone. Any compromise could be only for a time. But he was an old man—sixty-eight years of age—grown cautious and conservative with advancing years, and he could not see through the clouds that gathered before him.

With this brief vindication of his motives I proceed to give an extract from his last great speech:

“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! Who is so foolish—I beg everybody’s pardon—as to expect any such thing? 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 moment 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! There can be no such thing as a peaceable secession. Peaceable secession is an impossibility. Is the great Constitution under which we live, covering this whole country, is it to be thawed and melted away by secession, as the snows on the mountain melt under the influence of a vernal sun, disappear and run off? No, sir! No, sir! I will not state what might produce the disruption of the Union; but, sir, I see as plainly as I see the sun in heaven what that disruption must produce; I see that it must produce war, and such a war as I will not describe in its two-fold character.

“Peaceable secession! Peaceable secession! The concurrent agreement of all the members of this great government to separate! A voluntary separation with alimony on one side, and on the other! Why, what would be the result? Where is the line to be drawn? What States are to secede? What is to remain America? What am I to be? An American no longer? Am I to become a sectional man, a local man, a separatist, with no country in common with the gentlemen who sit around me here, or who fill the other House of Congress? Heaven forbid! Where is the flag of the republic to remain? Where is the eagle still to tower? or is he to cower, and shrink, and fall to the ground? Why, sir, our ancestors, our fathers, and our grandfathers, those of them who are still living among us with prolonged lives, would rebuke and reproach us; and our children and our grandchildren would cry out shame upon us, if we of this generation should dishonor these ensigns of the power of the government and the harmony of the union which is every day felt among us with so much joy and gratitude. What is to become of the army? What is to become of the navy? What is to become of the public lands? How is each of the thirty States to defend itself?

“I know, although the idea has not been stated distinctly, there is to be, or it is supposed possible that there will be, a Southern confederacy. I do not mean, when I allude to this statement, that any one seriously contemplates such a state of things. I do not mean to say that it is true, but I have heard it suggested elsewhere that the idea has been entertained that, after the dissolution of this Union a Southern Confederacy might be formed. I am sorry, sir, that it has ever been thought of, talked of or dreamed of, in the wildest flights of human imagination. But the idea, so far as it exists, must be of a separation, assigning the slave States to one side, and the free States to the other. Sir, I may express myself too strongly, perhaps, but there are impossibilities in the moral as well as in the physical world, and I hold the idea of a separation of these States, those that are free to form one government, and those that are slaveholding to form another, as such an impossibility. We could not separate the States by any such line if we were to draw it. We could not sit down here to-day and draw a line of separation that would satisfy any five men in the country. There are natural causes that would keep and tie us together, and there are social and domestic relations which we could not break if we would, and which we should not if we could.”

In describing the consequences of secession it must be admitted that Mr. Webster spoke like a true prophet. All the evils that he predicted—the war such as the world had never seen—came to pass, but out of it the Union emerged stronger than ever, with its chief burden and reproach thrown overboard. Much as the war cost, we feel to-day that we are the better off that it was fought. Let us not blame Mr. Webster that he could not penetrate the future, and strove so hard to avert it. Probably his speech postponed it, but nothing could avert it. Can we doubt that if the great statesman were living to-day he would thank God that He had solved the great problem that had baffled the wisdom of the wisest, and brought substantial good from fratricidal strife?

Among those who listened with rapt attention to Mr. Webster was John C. Calhoun, his great compeer, who had risen with difficulty from the bed where he lay fatally sick, to hear the senator from Massachusetts. “A tall, gaunt figure, wrapped in a long black cloak, with deep, cavernous black eyes, and a thick mass of snow-white hair brushed back from the large brow,” he seemed like a visitant from the next world. It was his last appearance in the Senate. Before March was over he had gone to his rest!

CHAPTER XXXVII.

CLOSING SCENES

Mr. Webster’s public life was drawing to a close. After the death of Gen. Taylor he accepted for a second time the post of Secretary of State, but there is nothing in his official work that calls for our special attention. Important questions came up and were satisfactorily disposed of. There was a strong hand at the helm.

June, 1852, brought him a great disappointment. The Whig Convention assembled in Baltimore to nominate a candidate for the Presidency. Mr. Webster was by all means the leader of that party, and was one of the three candidates balloted for. But in the end the successful man was Gen. Winfield Scott. It was a nomination like that of Harrison and Taylor, dictated solely by what was thought to be availability. In this case a mistake was made. Gen. Scott was disastrously defeated by Gen. Franklin Pierce, the nominee of the Democracy.

Gen. Pierce, though parted by politics, was a devoted friend of Mr. Webster, and the reader may be interested to know that on hearing of his nomination, he spoke thus: “Well, all I can say is, and I say it in sincerity, if the people of the United States were to repudiate caucuses, conventions, politicians and tricksters, and rise in the glory of their strength and might, without waiting for any convention to designate a candidate, but bent on placing in the Presidential chair the first citizen and statesman, the first patriot and man, Daniel Webster, it would do for republican government more than any event which has taken place in the history of the world. These are my sentiments, democracy or no democracy.”

This is certainly a remarkable tribute from the nominee of one party to an unsuccessful candidate of another, but Gen. Pierce had shown on many occasions his warm friendship and admiration for Mr. Webster.

At Mr. Webster’s age it was not likely that he would ever again be a candidate for the Presidency. His last chance had slipped away, and the disappointment was keen. He was already in declining health, induced partly by a severe accident which befell him in May, 1852, when he was thrown headlong to the earth while riding behind a span of horses to Plymouth. Probably the injury was greater than appeared. Towards the end of September, while at Marshfield, alarming symptoms were developed, and his grand physical system was evidently giving way. That month was to be his last. His earthly work was done, and he was never again to resume his work at Washington. The closing scenes are thus described by Mr. Curtis:

“It was past midnight, when, awaking from one of the slumbers that he had at intervals, he seemed not to know whether he had not already passed from his earthly existence. He made a strong effort to ascertain what the consciousness that he could still perceive actually was, and then uttered those well-known words, ‘I still live!’ as if he had satisfied himself of the fact that he was striving to know. They were his last coherent utterance. A good deal later he said something in which the word ‘poetry’ was distinctly heard. His son immediately repeated to him one of the stanzas of Gray’s ‘Elegy.’ He heard it and smiled. After this respiration became more difficult, and at length it went on with perceptible intervals. All was now hushed within the chamber; and to us who stood waiting there were but three sounds in nature: the sighing of the autumn wind in the trees, the slow ticking of the clock in the hall below, and the deep breathing of our dying friend. Moments that seemed hours flowed on. Still the measured beat of time fell painfully distinct upon our ears; still the gentle moaning of the wind mingled with the only sound that arose within the room; for there were no sobs of women, no movements of men. So grand, and yet so calm and simple, had been his approach to the moment when he must know that he was with us no more, that he had lifted us into a composure which, but for his great example, we could not have felt. At twenty-three minutes before three o’clock his breathing ceased; the features settled into a superb repose; and Dr. Jeffries, who still held the pulse, after waiting a few seconds, gently laid down the arm, and amid a breathless silence, pronounced the single word, ‘Dead.’ The eyes were then closed, the remains were removed from the position in which death came, and all but those who had been appointed to wait and watch slowly and mournfully walked away.”

Thus died a man whom all generations will agree in pronouncing great; a man not without faults, for he was human, but one to whom his country may point with pride as a sincere patriot, a devoted son, who, in eloquence at the bar and in the Senate, is worthy of a place beside the greatest orators of any nation, or any epoch. He has invested the name of an American citizen with added glory, for he was a typical American, the genuine product of our republican institutions. No poor boy who reads his life need despair of becoming eminent, for he can hardly have more obstacles to overcome than the farmers’ boy, who grew up on the sterile soil of New Hampshire, and fought his way upward with unfailing courage and pluck. Not once in a century is such a man born into the world—a man so amply endowed by his Creator—but he did not rely upon his natural talents, but was a firm believer in hard work. With all his marvelous ability he would not otherwise have left behind him such a name and fame.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

CENTENNIAL TRIBUTES

On the 18th of January, 1882, the hundredth birthday of Daniel Webster, the Marshfield Club assembled at the Parker House, in Boston, to take suitable notice of the anniversary. Though thirty years had elapsed since his death there was one at least present, Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, who had been intimately associated with him in public life, having been his successor in the Senate, and a warm personal friend. Most notable among the addresses was that of Gov. Long, of Massachusetts, which I shall venture to insert here, as containing in brief compass a fitting estimate of the great statesman whom the company had assembled to honor.

GOVERNOR LONG’S ADDRESS

“It is but a poor tribute that even the most eloquent voice, least of all mine, can pay for Massachusetts to the memory of her greatest statesman, her mightiest intellect and her most powerful orator. Among her sons he towers like the lonely and massive shaft on Bunker Hill, upon the base and the crest of which his name is emblazoned clearer than if chiseled deep in its granite cubes. For years he was her synonym. Among the States he sustained her at that proud height which Winthrop and Sam Adams gave her in the colonial and provincial days. With what matchless grandeur he defended her! With what overwhelming power he impressed her convictions upon the national life! God seems to appoint men to special work, and, that done, the very effort of its achievement exhausts them, and they rise not again to the summit of their meridian. So it was with Webster. He knows little even of written constitutions and frames of government who does not know that they exist almost less in the letter than in the interpretation and construction of the letter. In this light it is not too much to say that the Constitution of the United States, as it existed when it carried our country through the greatest peril that ever tested it, was the crystallization of the mind of Webster as well as of its original framers. It came from them and was only accepted by some of our own as a compact of States, sovereign in all but certain enumerated powers delegated to a central government. He made it the crucible of a welded Union—the charter of one great country, the United States of America. He made the States a nation and enfolded them in its single banner. It was the overwhelming logic of his discussion, the household familiarity of his simple but irresistible statement, that gave us munition to fight the war for the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery. It was his eloquence, clear as crystal and precipitating itself in the school-books and literature of a people, which had trained up the generation of twenty years ago to regard this nation as one, to love its flag with a patriotism that knew no faction or section, to be loyal to the whole country, and to find in its Constitution power to suppress any hand or combination raised against it. The great Rebellion of 1861 went down hardly more before the cannon of Grant and Farragut than the thunder of Webster’s reply to Hayne. He knew not the extent of his own achievement. His greatest failure was that he rose not to the height and actual stroke of his own resistless argument, and that he lacked the sublime inspiration, the disentanglement and the courage to let the giant he had created go upon his errand, first of force, and then, through that, of surer peace. He had put the work and genius of more than an ordinary lifetime of service into the arching and knitting of the Union, and this he could not bear to put to the final test; his great heart was sincere in the prayer that his eyes might not behold the earthquake that would shake it to those foundations which, though he knew it not, he had made so strong that a succeeding generation saw them stand the shock as the oak withstands the storm. Men are not gods, and it needed in him that he should rise to a moral sublimity and daring as lofty as the intellectual heights above which he soared with unequaled strength. So had he been godlike.

“A great man touches the heart of the people as well as their intelligence. They not only admire, they also love him. It sometimes seems as if they sought in him some weakness of our common human nature, that they may chide him for it, forgive it, and so endear him to themselves the more. Massachusetts had her friction with the younger Adams, only to lay him away with profounder honor, and to remember him devotedly as the defender of the right of petition and ‘the old man eloquent.’ She forgave the overweening conceit of Sumner, she revoked her unjust censure of him, and now points her youth to him in his high niche as the unsullied patriot, without fear and without reproach, who stood and spoke for equal rights, and whose last great service was to demand and enforce his country’s just claims against the dishonorable trespass of the cruisers of that England he had so much admired. Massachusetts smote, too, and broke the heart of Webster, her idol, and then broke her own above his grave, and to-day writes his name highest upon her roll of statesmen. It seems disjointed to say that, with such might as his, the impression that comes from his face upon the wall, as from his silhouette upon the background of our history, is that of sadness—the sadness of the great deep eyes, the sadness of the lonely shore he loved, and by which he sleeps. The story of Webster from the beginning is the very pathos of romance. A minor chord runs through it like the tenderest note in a song. What eloquence of tears is in that narrative, which reveals in this giant of intellectual strength the heart, the single loving heart, of a child, and in which he describes the winter sleighride up the New Hampshire hills when his father told him that, at whatever cost, he should have a college education, and he, too full to speak, while a warm glow ran all over him, laid his head upon his father’s shoulder and wept!

“The greatness of Webster and his title to enduring gratitude have two illustrations. He taught the people of the United States, in the simplicity of common understanding, the principles of the Constitution and government of the country, and he wrought for them, in a style of matchless strength and beauty, the literature of statesmanship. From his lips flowed the discussion of constitutional law, of economic philosophy, of finance, of international right, of national grandeur and of the whole range of high public themes, so clear and judicial that it was no longer discussion, but judgment. To-day—and so it will be while the republic endures—the student and the legislator turn to the full fountain of his statement for the enunciation of these principles. What other authority is quoted, or holds even the second or third place? Even his words have imbedded themselves in the common phraseology, and come to the tongue like passages from the Psalms or the poets. I do not know that a sentence or a word of Sumner’s repeats itself in our every-day parlance. The exquisite periods of Everett are recalled like the consummate work of some master of music, but no note or refrain sings itself over and over again to our ears. The brilliant eloquence of Choate is like the flash of a bursting rocket, lingering upon the retina indeed after it has faded from the wings of the night, but as elusive of our grasp as spray-drops that glisten in the sun. The fiery enthusiasm of Andrews did, indeed, burn some of his heart-beats forever into the sentiment of Massachusetts; but Webster made his language the very household words of a nation. They are the library of a people. They inspired and still inspire patriotism. They taught and still teach loyalty. They are the school-book of the citizen. They are the inwrought and accepted fiber of American politics. If the temple of our republic shall ever fall, they will ‘still live’ above the ground like those great foundation stones in ancient ruins, which remain in lonely grandeur, unburied in the dust that springs to turf over all else, and making men wonder from what rare quarry and by what mighty force they came. To Webster, as to few other men, is it due that to-day, wherever a son of the United States, at home or abroad, ‘beholds the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured,’ he can utter a prouder boast than, Civis Romanus sum. For he can say, I am an American citizen.”

As a fitting pendant to this eloquent tribute I quote a portion of the address of Mr. Winthrop, whose name, personally and by inheritance, makes him one of the most eminent sons of Massachusetts:

“And, after all, Mr. President, what are all the fine things which have ever been said of him, or which ever can be said of him, to-night or a hundred years hence, compared with the splendid record which he has left of himself as an advocate in the courts, as a debater in the Senate, as an orator before the people? We do not search out for what was said about Pericles or Demosthenes or Cicero or Burke. It is enough for us to read their orations. There are those, indeed, who may justly desire to be measured by the momentary opinions which others have formed and expressed about them. There are not a few who may well be content to live on the applauses and praises which their efforts have called forth from immediate hearers and admirers. They will enjoy at least a reflected and traditional fame. But Webster will always stand safest and strongest on his own showing. His fame will be independent of praise or dispraise from other men’s lips. He can be measured to his full altitude, as a thinker, a writer, a speaker, only by the standard of his own immortal productions. That masterly style, that pure Saxon English, that clear and cogent statement, that close and clinching logic, that power of going down to the depths and up to the heights of any great argument, letting the immaterial or incidental look out for itself, those vivid descriptions, those magnificent metaphors, those thrilling appeals—not introduced as mere ornaments wrought out in advance, and stored up for an opportunity of display, but sparkling and blazing out in the very heat of an effort, like gems uncovering themselves in the working of a mine—these are some of the characteristics which will secure for Webster a fame altogether his own, and will make his works a model and a study, long after most of those who have praised him, or who have censured him, shall be forgotten.

“What if those six noble volumes of his were obliterated from the roll of American literature and American eloquence! What if those great speeches, recently issued in a single compendious volume, had no existence! What if those consummate defenses of the Constitution and the Union had never been uttered, and their instruction and inspiration had been lost to us during the fearful ordeal to which that Constitution and that Union have since been subjected? Are we quite sure that we should have had that Constitution as it was, and the Union as it is, to be fought for, if the birth we are commemorating had never occurred—if that bright Northern Star had never gleamed above the hills of New Hampshire? Let it be, if you please, that its light was not always serene and steady. Let it be that mist and clouds sometimes gathered over its disk, and hid its guiding rays from many a wistful eye. Say even, if you will, that to some eyes it seemed once to be shooting madly from its sphere. Make every deduction which his bitterest enemies have ever made for any alleged deviation from the course which he had marked out for it by others, or which it seemed to have marked out for itself, in its path across the sky. Still, still there is radiance and glory enough left, as we contemplate its whole golden track, to make us feel and acknowledge that it had no fellow in our firmament.”

THE END