Daniel Webster was an American politician who represented New Hampshire (1813–1817) and Massachusetts (1823–1827) in the United States House of Representatives.
Career
After some months in the office of Thomas W. Thompson of Salisbury he gave up these studies to accept a position as teacher in an academy in the small village of Fryeburg, the salary ($350) making it possible for him to aid his father in keeping his elder brother Ezekiel, in college. Offered reappointment at "five or six hundred dollars a year, a house to live in, a piece of land to cultivate" and the probability of a clerkship of the court of common pleas, he was tempted to settle down to spend his days "in a kind of comfortable privacy". But father and friends advised him to pursue the study of law and with a careful definition of his ideals he returned, in September 1802, to Thompson's office. The embryo lawyer pondered the limitations of his calling. Conceding the power of the law to help "invigorate and unfold the powers of the mind, " he tried to offset the hard didactic style of the legal treatise with excursions into history and the classics and made random attempts of his own at expression in verse and rhyme. He long expected that only a miracle would make it possible to transfer to "the capital of New England. " Now, upon the urgent invitation of Ezekiel, who was teaching school there, he went to Boston and had the rare good fortune to be accepted immediately as a clerk by Christopher Gore, who had just returned from a diplomatic mission abroad. Influenced by the stimulating scholarship of such an employer and his circle of distinguished associates, Webster's fertile mind developed apace. Upon Gore's advice but to his father's surprise and disappointment he declined the profitable clerkship of the court of common pleas which paternal influence had proudly arranged for him. Admitted to the Boston bar in March 1805, he was recalled to Boscawen by a sense of filial obligation. His intention had been to set up an office in Portsmouth, but his father's illness made it a duty "to drop from the firmament of Boston gayety and pleasure, to the level of a rustic village, of silence and of obscurity". In September 1807, some little time after his father's death, he transferred his labors to Portsmouth where he remained for nine "very happy years. " To this new home he brought his bride, Grace Fletcher. In his practice of law, the young attorney promptly won distinction. Following the superior court in most of the counties of the state, he found it possible to achieve a practice worth nearly $2, 000 a year. He enjoyed the professional rivalry of Jeremiah Mason, whom he once rated as the greatest lawyer in the country. From their frequent clashes in court he learned the importance of the most careful preparation of his arguments and of the most effective diction. Webster consciously dropped his earlier florid style and sought to achieve the short incisive sentences with which Mason was so masterful. Meantime, the two rivals at the bar became the best of political friends. During the Portsmouth period Webster was being drawn more and more into politics. He soon became a champion of the shipping interests of New England and of their protection against the retaliatory measures of Great Britain and France in their war for European supremacy. When Jefferson instituted a policy of economic coercion that struck a ruinous blow at the commercial prosperity of New England, Webster contributed a pamphlet, Considerations on the Embargo Laws (1808), which effectively voiced the Federalist opposition. By the time that the controversy over neutral rights had led to the outbreak of hostilities with Great Britain, Webster had achieved a recognized place among the Federalists of Portsmouth. In a Fourth of July oration in 1812 he vigorously condemned the administration for having led the nation into an unjustifiable war. But, unlike the Federalist diehards who had been for years at least toying with the idea of separating New England from the Union, Webster renounced the idea of resistance or insurrection and took his stand for full freedom of criticism and "the peaceable remedy of election". A month later in his famous "Rockingham Memorial, " presented at a Federalist mass meeting in Rockingham County, N. H. , he reiterated his anti-war views even more forcefully. The enthusiastic reception of this memorial, both by the convention which proceeded to nominate him for Congress and by Federalists generally, launched Webster, with his election in November, upon a national political career. Made a member of the committee on foreign relations, he presented, on June 10, 1813, a series of resolutions calling upon the government to explain the events immediately preceding the outbreak of hostilities and had the satisfaction of making a powerful impression and of seeing his resolutions adopted eleven days later. Aiming to embarrass the administration as much as possible, he loosed his eloquence against bounties to encourage enlistments and in favor of the repeal of the Embargo Act; in ringing words he proclaimed the constitutional right of the opposition to voice its protests and to utilize full freedom of inquiry. He himself refused to vote taxes in support of the war and denounced the government's draft bill, not only as an "infamous expedient" but as clearly "unconstitutional and illegal". Webster even suggested the expedient of state nullification of a federal law under "the solemn duty of the State Governments to protect their own authority over their own militia, and to interpose between their citizens and arbitrary power". Since the conscription bill failed, there was no contemporary test of this doctrine. Webster was careful, however, to repudiate any thought of disunion. During the sessions of the Hartford Convention he was busy at Washington and had in the meantime advised the governor of New Hampshire against appointing delegates to a body that might be unduly influenced by the separatist forces. Reëlected in 1814, Webster became influential in the attempts to make peacetime adjustments to the economic lessons taught in the recent war. Legislation to reëstablish the United States Bank was modified by Calhoun to meet Webster's objections to the lack of adequate safeguards for financial stability and was passed by Congress only to receive a presidential veto. He later voted against the bank bill which did not contain such safeguards but which was signed by the President in April 1816. In the discussions of fiscal policy, including the matter of specie payment for government revenues, Webster revealed an amazing knowledge of and devotion to sound principles of public finance. In the discussion of the tariff he proclaimed himself not an enemy of manufactures, but as opposed to rearing them in hotbeds. His loyalty to the mercantile interests of his section, however, caused him to oppose the high protective duties of the tariff of 1816, especially those originally proposed for cotton, iron, and hemp, which menaced the imports of New England and threatened to add to the cost of shipbuilding. In August 1816, midway in his second term in Congress, Webster transferred his residence to Boston, where he sidetracked politics for a law practice that was soon bringing in $15, 000 a year. During his last winter at Washington, he had given much of his time to legal work. He was retained before the Supreme Court in three important prize cases and was soon to add to his laurels in the Dartmouth College case. As a result of the complicated operation of party politics in New Hampshire, Webster's alma mater had become a pawn upon the political chess board. A Republican legislature in 1816 enacted a law changing the character of the institution and its governing body, placing it under the thumb of the general court. A suit in which the college trustees sought to defend their rights against the new political forces was carried to the New Hampshire superior court, from which it was appealed to the United States Supreme Court. Webster, after accepting a small fee from the other side, had revealed his sympathies with the college trustees. He had closed the argument for them before the superior court and now for a fee of $1, 000, out of which he was to engage an associate, he was placed in charge of the case in the Supreme Court. The notes and briefs of his colleagues furnished most of his materials, but these he carefully overhauled and brilliantly presented. He closed with an appeal in which with consummate pathos he presented the case of the small college which he loved as the case of every college in the land. When on Feburary 2, 1819, the Court in its decision completely upheld the college and its counsel, Webster became in the opinion of many the foremost lawyer of the time. Three weeks after the Dartmouth College victory he appeared for the Bank of the United States in McCulloch vs. Maryland and received a fee of $2, 000 for his services. In three other important cases involving grave constitutional issues that shortly came before the Supreme Court, Webster was to play an important part. In the midst of a busy law practice Webster could not keep out of the public eye. In December 1819 he opposed the admission of Missouri as a slave state and drafted the memorial of a Boston protest meeting. He made the feature address in favor of free trade at a meeting of New England importers in Faneuil Hall in the autumn of 1820. He was chosen as a presidential elector in the campaign of that year. He played an influential but conservative rôle in the Massachusetts constitutional convention of 1820-21 and helped to hold the democratic forces in check. On December 22, 1820, he delivered at Plymouth a powerful oration in celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims. Achieving another great oratorical triumph at the laying of the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill monument on June 17, 1825, he made popular the occasional oratory that was to thrive for decades. He served for a brief period in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in the spring of 1822. In the fall he was drafted to represent Boston in Congress and was promptly made chairman of the judiciary committee when he took his seat in December 1823. A brilliant oration on Greek Independence (January 19, 1824) signalized his return to the national political arena, but he was soon busied with less romantic topics. The tariff question - to him at this time "a tedious, disagreeable subject" - was now to the fore and the financiers, merchants, and shipbuilders of Boston expected him to challenge Henry Clay's arguments for protection. Accordingly, on April 1 and 2, 1824, Webster attacked the proposed bill and its principles and announced his inability to accord it his vote. In the preliminaries of the presidential contest of 1824 Webster's private choice was Calhoun; he shared the distrust of New England Federalists for John Quincy Adams. Busied with his own reëlection he avoided any formal commitment, but in the contest in the House he gave his vote to Adams and influenced others in the same direction. Webster had hopes of the mission to Great Britain but Adams showed no inclination to gratify him. Yet, as party lines reshaped themselves under the new administration, Webster became an increasingly loyal supporter. He supported the President's doctrine on internal improvements, pleading for a truly national interest to justify federal aid; he led the futile fight for a revision of the federal judicial system; he made an eloquent appeal for representation in the congress at Panama. Reëlected to Congress almost unanimously, he championed the President in the bitter dispute with Georgia over the Cherokee lands. All the while Webster kept up a busy practice before the Supreme Court and other courts of the country. In June 1827 he was elected to the United States Senate. The death of Mrs. Webster (January 21, 1828) temporarily destroyed his zest for work and his interest in public affairs. But soon he was in the thick of the fight that accompanied the passage of the tariff act of 1828. The Webster of this period was less satisfied than hitherto with economic theories and more concerned with the realities of life. He had established intimate associations with the Lawrences and Lowells and the mill-owners of his state generally, and had taken a small block of stock when the Merrimack Manufacturing Company was incorporated in 1822. The tariff of 1824 had been followed by a vast increase of investment in wool manufacturing and Webster was now (May 9, 1828) frank in stating that nothing was left to New England "but to consider that the government had fixed and determined its own policy; and that policy was protection". Since the new bill, with all its "abominations, " did grant the protection to woolens which the act of 1824 had by implication pledged, he accorded his active support to the measure and helped accomplish its passage. Henceforth, Webster was an aggressive champion of protection. The months that followed brought bitter disappointments: Adams was defeated for reëlection by Jackson, and Webster's favorite brother, Ezekiel, whom he helped launch a career in New Hampshire politics, died. His energy seemed to ebb and he wondered at times whether he was not growing old. But life took on new meaning following his marriage. Another month and he was in the thick of the battle against the Calhoun doctrine of nullification. With leonine grace and energy and in the rich tones of his oratory, he met the challenge of Calhoun's mouthpiece, Robert Y. Hayne; rising to the height of his forensic abilities in this famous debate of January 1830, he won what his admirers hailed as a brilliant victory over the cause of state rights and nullification. Praising the Union and what it had accomplished and still promised to achieve for the nation, he declared that in origin it preceded the states and insisted that the Constitution was framed by the people, not as a compact but to create a government sovereign within the range of the powers assigned to it, with the Supreme Court as the only proper arbiter of the extent of these powers. Nullification could result only in violence and civil war, he proclaimed; he was for "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" No wonder that, with the plaudits of his audience still ringing in his ears, with the nation-wide fame achieved in this great outburst of eloquence, rosy dreams of the White House continued henceforth to play in Webster's mind. The tariff problem which had aroused Calhoun and the South still remained. Southern efforts to force a reduction of duties led to the measure of July 1832 in which Webster was concerned primarily with maintaining protection upon woolen cloths. But even the lower duties of this act did not satisfy South Carolina which forced the issue of nullification in the ordinance passed by a convention of that state in November. Webster made clear his intention to support the President in his defiance of the nullifiers and crossed lances with Calhoun in an important debate the following February. Meantime, against his advice, Clay joined with the anti-tariff leaders in pressing legislation agreeable to the latter; finally in March 1833 the "Compromise Tariff" was enacted. Bitterly disappointed, Webster voted with the opposition. The only satisfaction he could find in the outcome was in the thought that "the events of the winter have tended to strengthen the union of the States, and to uphold the government". To this end and for the honor of being known as the "Defender of the Constitution, " Webster had sacrificed for the time even his lucrative Supreme Court practice. Politics had developed ever new intricacies. The opposition forces of varying views but with common interests in vested rights had combined in the Whig party. Naturally, Webster joined the new coalition. Any temptation toward continued cooperation with Jackson was removed by the latter's war on the Bank of the United States, which Webster supported both on principle and as a profitable client. There was the further fact that Webster, who was as careless in handling his own money as he was profound in his mastery of the principles of public finance, was heavily indebted to the bank for loans extended to him. He had actively advocated the recharter bill and had vigorously condemned Jackson's veto, especially the constitutional grounds that it set forth. Reëlected to the Senate in 1833, Webster regarded Jackson's removal of deposits from the bank as presenting an issue that might lead to the presidential office. He distinguished himself, however, by the constructive quality, in contrast to the personal vituperation of his associates, that marked his reply to Jackson's protest against the resolution of censure which the Senate had adopted. As the election of 1836 drew near the Whigs of the Massachusetts legislature nominated him as their candidate. With other Whig nominees in the field, however, he had few enthusiastic supporters outside of New England and Pennsylvania, despite the friendly visit he had paid to the West in the summer of 1833, and he received only the electoral vote of Massachusetts. Following this defeat, he gave serious consideration to retirement from active politics, either to recoup his fortune, which had suffered with his law practice, or to improve his presidential chances for 1840. Just at this time, one of the worst for profitable investment, he was acquiring with borrowed money extensive land holdings in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. His interests were largely speculative, except that he planned a huge country estate near La Salle, Ill. , which was for a time operated by his son, Fletcher. His own personal interests continued in his seaside home at Marshfield where, with the continual lure of "the sea, the sea, " he lived in almost feudal ease among devoted retainers and entertained with a lavish hand. Unable to realize upon his ill-timed investments, he was increasingly harassed by his creditors and financial embarrassment haunted him to the end. Only the willingness of his wealthy friends to be levied upon in emergency saved him from actual disgrace. His Massachusetts followers, however, would not consent to his retirement. After another Western tour - which was a veritable series of ovations - during which the panic of 1837 broke, he returned to the special session of Congress and took a brilliant part in the Whig fight against Van Buren's sub-treasury plan, again breaking lances with Calhoun. The question of slavery and the right of petition brought similar clashes and Webster was impressed with the storm clouds so ominous for the future. In the summer of 1839, following reëlection, he and his family visited England, where he hoped to find buyers for his western lands and to acquaint himself still further with the details of the menacing boundary dispute between Maine and Canada. He returned to find that the Whigs had nominated General Harrison for the presidency and he participated in the campaign with all the more zest because he expected it to bring to a close his senatorial career, with retirement to the bar in the event of Van Buren's reëlection and the prospect of a cabinet appointment if Harrison should succeed. The victorious Harrison made Webster secretary of state, after having paid a tribute to his knowledge of public finance by offering the alternative of appointment to the Treasury Department. On Harrison's death a month later, John Tyler, his successor, retained the cabinet in office. Webster had anticipated the enactment of a series of Whig measures such as those for which Henry Clay made himself the spokesman in the ensuing months (Writings and Speeches, XVIII, 100). Soon, however, President Tyler, a Southern Whig of the state-rights school, became involved in a dispute with the Clay following when he successively vetoed the two measures by which the Whigs sought to reëstablish a United States bank. In the split that followed all the members of Tyler's cabinet except Webster resigned. The latter, who was extremely unhappy about these conditions and suspicious of the leadership of Clay, tried to play a conciliatory rôle. He regretted "the violence & injustice" which had "characterized the conduct of the Whig leaders"; he was determined, moreover, not to "throw the great foreign concerns of the country into disorder or danger, by any abrupt party proceeding" (Ibid. , XVI, 386; XVIII, 110). He was referring to the complicated negotiations over the Maine boundary which, with consummate skill, tact, and dignity and with the cordial cooperation of the President, he carried on and brought to a successful adjustment in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. In this agreement was included an arrangement for joint cruising squadrons to operate off the coast of Africa in the suppression of the slave trade, which was expected to terminate a long-standing controversy over the right of search. His eminently satisfactory discharge of his duties in the State Department included successful negotiations with Portugal, important discussions with Mexico, and the preliminaries to the opening of diplomatic relations with China which led to the commercial treaty negotiated by Caleb Cushing in 1844. Meantime, he rejoiced in the enactment of a Whig tariff (1842) which wiped out what seemed to him the iniquities of the measure of 1833 and returned to the principle of protection. Webster, who had for sometime been under strong Whig pressure to resign, at length with some reluctance (May 8, 1843) left the only office which had ever allowed reasonable satisfaction for his ambition and his talents. He had aspired to a diplomatic mission to England and had tried to juggle events to that end but fate dictated his retirement to private life. Burdened with debt, he returned to meet the heavy demands for his legal services that promised to replenish his exchequer. A seat in the Senate was awaiting his convenience and the returned statesman, convinced that the sober businessmen and conservatives of Massachusetts had never deserted him, took satisfaction in a reconciliation with his old party associates in which he felt no necessity for offering apologies for his recent independent course. He cooperated cheerfully in support of Clay's candidacy for the presidency in the campaign of 1844 and in the following winter allowed himself to be returned to the Senate. Devoted to the vested interests of his state - indeed, a virtual pensioner dependent upon their bounty - Webster deemed it his "especial business" as a member of Congress "to look to the preservation of the great industrial interests of the country" from Democratic free-trade propensities. All the activities of the protectionists, however, did not prevent the reductions under the Walker Tariff of 1846. Meanwhile, as he had feared, the annexation of Texas had been followed by war with Mexico. Webster had opposed the acquisition of Texas and the resulting extension of slavery and now joined in the Whig policy of condemning the war. He held, however, that supplies should be voted as long as the war was not connected with territorial aggrandizement and that the struggle should be brought to a speedy and successful termination. To this end he gave his second son, Maj. Edward Webster, who died of exposure in service near Mexico City. Though Webster, impervious to the lure of empire, introduced resolutions repudiating all thought of the dismemberment of Mexico, the war ended in a treaty which gave the United States a vast domain carved out of this neighbor republic. Should the new territory be dedicated to freedom or be thrown open to the westward march of Negro slavery, was the inevitable question that arose. Webster had been from the start a strong critic of the peculiar institution of the South as "a great moral and political evil, " but had conceded that within the Southern states it was a matter of domestic policy, "a subject within the exclusive control of the States themselves". He voted consistently for the Wilmot Proviso, but preferred the "no-territory" basis that would prevent a controversy from arising over slavery. With the triumph of the expansionists he saw nothing in the future but "contention, strife, and agitation". Dreams of the presidency still haunted him. In the spring of 1847 he had made a Southern tour in which he was dined and wined until his body and spirits drooped. Even after his recuperation at Marshfield and his return to court for many a strenuous session, he took it for granted, at the age of sixty-six, that people were beginning to say, "He is not the man he was". The death of his daughter Julia and of his son Edward depressed him even more. When out of sheer expediency his party turned to a military hero, Gen. Zachary Taylor, he acquiesced in his own repudiation with what grace he could. In the first winter of the new administration Webster beheld with alarm a serious crisis in the sectional controversy. The abolitionist extremists were advocating a dissolution of the Union and the anti-slavery forces in Congress were bent upon pressing their strength to accomplish the exclusion of slavery from the territories, while Southern leaders, increasingly conscious of the seriousness of the minority status of the South, were developing a sense of Southern nationality and preparing, if need be, to launch a movement for a separate Southern confederacy. Like other conservative statesmen, Webster came to feel that the Union was seriously at stake and was determined to do all in his power to avert the danger. It must not be overlooked that Webster, as the champion of protection, was alarmed to find the continued discussion of the slavery question an obstacle to Whig efforts at tariff revision, causing Southern Whigs whose rights, property, and feeling had been constantly assailed to argue that they would never "give a single vote for the Tariff until this Slavery business is settled, " and that Northern men would have to "take care of their own interests". To Webster the more important public question of the tariff was being sacrificed to the slavery controversy. He had, therefore, become increasingly annoyed at the militant intransigentism of the anti-slavery forces, especially those who would not believe that "I am an anti slavery man unless I repeat the declaration once a week". While he believed in the power of Congress legally to exclude slavery from the territories, he had stated as early as 1848 that there was "no longer any important practical question" as to slavery extension. He therefore rose on March 7, 1850, "to beat down the Northern and the Southern follies, now raging in equal extremes". In a well-considered speech he declared himself for Clay's compromise measures and poured oil on troubled waters. He spoke "not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American". Slavery was an evil but not so great an evil as disunion. There could be no peaceful secession, he informed the South. On the other hand, he condemned the unnecessary severity of the anti-slavery forces and admitted that Northerners had not lived up to their obligations to return fugitive slaves. Congressional prohibition in the territories was useless since a law of nature had settled "beyond all terms of human enactment, that slavery cannot exist in California or New Mexico". To the conservative element of the country Webster's performance seemed "Godlike"; but the anti-slavery men, including those of his own party, could see him only as a fallen star. Nor did he recover their good graces. Webster became, after Taylor's death, secretary of state in Fillmore's cabinet (July 22, 1850). He supported the legislation that substantially covered the ground of Clay's compromise measures and followed with concern the storm that still raged. Even as late as the summer of 1851 the question of secession was being discussed in certain Southern states and Webster felt called upon to write a timely letter denying the right of secession and denouncing it as revolution. In the State Department Webster conscientiously and creditably performed the duties of his office, writing the famous "Hülsemann letter" in reproof of the attitude of the Austrian chargé toward American policy in the Hungarian revolution and dealing with more than ordinary diplomatic difficulties with Spain, Mexico, Peru, and Great Britain. His presidential aspirations were again revived in 1852, without serious embarrassment to his relations with Fillmore who was also a candidate. But both men were shelved by the Whigs and, sick in mind and body, Webster repudiated General Scott's nomination and prophesied the downfall of his party. As the summer progressed, serious illness and suffering stared from his dark countenance. Always fond of the good things of life, he had found since his second marriage increasing opportunity for self-indulgence. Lavish hospitalities, with good food and good drink given and received, made him grow portly though rarely sluggish. Only his active life and early rising kept down the inroads of disease. His annual hay fever became increasingly more distressing. Financial worries pressed down upon him and made him wish at times that he "had been born a miser". By autumn the inroads of a fatal malady, cirrhosis of the liver, had marked his days and he died on October 24, 1852, murmuring, "I still live. "