Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
laws respecting property.... The property was all freehold ...
alienation of the land was every way facilitated, even to the
subjecting of it to every species of debt. The establishment of
public registries, and the simplicity of our forms of conveyance,
have greatly facilitated the change of real estate from one
proprietor to another. The consequence of all these causes has
been, a great subdivision of the soil, and a great equality of
condition; the true basis, most certainly, of a popular government.
“If the people,” says Harrington, “hold three parts in four of the
territory, it is plain there can neither be any single person nor
nobility able to dispute the government with them; in this case,
therefore, _except force be interposed_, they govern themselves.”
(“The First Settlement of New England,” in _Works_, Vol. I, pp.
35-36.)
Wholly English then, after the soundest English liberal tradition,
was Webster’s political philosophy in the year 1820, compact of sober
eighteenth-century realism, quite unaffected by French romantic
equalitarianism. The great principle to which he adhered was the
principle that government to be stable must be founded in men’s
interests; thus founded no cause is given for revolutionary upheavals.
“The disastrous revolutions which the world has witnessed, those
political thunder-storms and earthquakes which have shaken the pillars
of society to their very deepest foundations, have been revolutions
against property.” Such were Webster’s convictions on the eve of
those two great upheavals, the rise of Jacksonian democracy and the
rejuvenation of the slave economy, that unseated the authority of the
old school of political realism, and turned him aside from the plain
path to lose himself in a tangle of constitutional legalism.
English also was his economic theory, to which, like Franklin before
him, he gave close thought. In the year 1820 he was a frank disciple
of Adam Smith and the _laissez faire_ school. Mercantilism he derided
as exploded;[434] and Physiocratic agrarianism seemed to him unduly
hostile to commerce. He never concerned himself, like Franklin, with
humanitarian ends. His sympathies went strongly for free trade,
individual initiative, and a competitive order--sympathies which to
the end of his life he never wholly outgrew. In those early days the
mercantile interests commanded his loyalty far more readily than
the manufacturing interests. Next to his Marshfield farm he loved
a full-rigged ship, and the thought of Yankee skippers plowing the
seven seas in well-freighted bottoms fired his imagination and kindled
his patriotism. But if in the background of his thought he remained
_laissez faire_, with the necessary implications of a diminished
political state and reliance upon the law of supply and demand above
tariffs, bounties, and political regulations, unfortunately in the
foreground of expediency were the loud demands of his constituents for
protective tariffs, internal improvements, and a policy of governmental
paternalism. His economics came into collision with politics, and
under the drive of necessity he went reluctantly along the path which
Hamilton had marked out a generation before.
The change came between the years 1824 and 1825. In the earlier year
he aroused himself to a strong defense of _laissez faire_ economics in
opposition to Clay’s clever campaign cry, the American System; in the
later year he endeavored half-heartedly to defend New England interests
in the game of subsidies. He was honestly ashamed of the whole mess; to
Webster any tariff was a “tariff of abominations”; but his mouth was
stopped by the clamor of the Lowell textile masters.[435] But having
chosen his side, thereafter he defended his course vigorously, and
joined forces with Clay in extolling the principle of protection. The
same dubious shift is revealed in his changing attitude towards public
finance. In 1815 he was an old-fashioned Federalist in his preference
for a metallic currency and his belief that the public credit must rest
on the public income; bank paper, stocks, bonds, and other agencies of
the new finance he distrusted as likely to encourage speculation.[436]
Twenty years later he was the outstanding champion of the Bank in its
mortal quarrel with Jackson. In defending his public career before his
constituents in Faneuil Hall in 1842, he said: “The subject of currency
has been the study of my life, in preference to all other public
topics”; and the result of those studies had made him a confirmed
bullionist. Nevertheless when “Old Bullion Benton” proposed to restore
a metallic currency, Webster derided the plan on the ground that bank
money was necessary; and when the subtreasury system was established he
denounced it bitterly.[437] He was a partisan to the cause of the Bank,
and as its attorney he defended its case before the American public, as
he defended its cases before the Supreme Court. He was no longer a free
man but was deep in the subsidies of financial interests; nevertheless
his old realism convinced him--as it had convinced Hamilton--of the
necessity of shaping the public policy to the desires of the bankers.
He justified it not only on the grounds of economic determinism, but by
professing to discover in business the strong friend of national unity.
The planters and farmers were local and sectional in outlook, but the
“mercantile classes, the great commercial masses of the country, whose
affairs connect them strongly with every State in the Union and with
all the nations of the earth, whose business and profession give a sort
of nationality to their character”--these men, he argued, gave solidity
and stability to government--they were the cohesive force that bound
the whole together.[438] In serving such clients he was but serving a
greater cause.
After 1824 the earlier Webster with his solid understanding, his
frank realism, his honest exposition of fundamental principles,
slowly gave way to the lawyer, the politician, the opportunist of
the unhappy later years. With the change the last authentic voice of
the eighteenth century was silenced; the break with the old English
tradition was complete. Immediate, domestic issues muddied his thought,
and Webster and America plunged into a bitter partisanship produced
by the new alignments of an equalitarian agrarianism, a capitalistic
industrialism, and a feudal slavocracy. Federalism was dead and in its
stead was the Whig party, patched together of odds and ends, devoid
of principles, seeking only expediency; and of this party Webster
became an outstanding spokesman. It was an ignoble time, and his great
abilities were not substantial enough to save him from the common
meanness. Whoever wishes to understand how great was his fall need
only compare the speech of 1820 on “The Basis of the Senate” with the
“Declaration of Whig Principles and Purposes” of 1840 (_Works_, Vol.
II, p. 41).
To his contemporaries, however, his position was secure. His reputation
was extraordinary, and he seemed as fixed and brilliant as the north
star. After the reply to Hayne, his fame as the defender of the
Constitution was in every mouth. That celebrated speech, perhaps the
most celebrated in our congressional history, was delivered on the
January 26, 1830, and awakened an amazing response. Men were moved to
tears by its eloquence, and its circulation in pamphlet form exceeded
that of any other pamphlet since the founding of the government. It is
not a great constitutional argument, but it better served the purpose
of inspiring in the public a grandiose conception of national unity
under the organic law, than any reasoned statement could have done.
For political purposes rhetoric was more effective than historical
argument, and its sonorous sentences, and in particular the stately
conclusion, vastly appealed to the taste of the generation. Three
years later Webster applied himself more closely to the subtleties of
the question. Calhoun’s masterly argument with its exposition of the
theory of concurrent majorities could not be answered by rhetoric, and
on February 16, 1833, Webster spoke on “The Constitution not a Compact
between Sovereign States” (_Works_, Vol. III, p. 449). His argument is
strictly legal and rests on four theses: that sovereignty inheres in
the people; that as individuals acting collectively in their sovereign
capacity, they ordained and established the Constitution; that the
Constitution thus established is the supreme law of the land, acting
immediately upon the individual citizen and recognizing no intermediary
sovereign state; and that as an “executed contract” it is irrevocable
and final, with the necessary functions to construe its powers and
execute its will.
Of these four theses, two may be regarded as Webster’s chief
contribution to the great debate: the doctrine of immediacy, and the
doctrine of an executed contract. The latter, quite obviously, is no
more than Burke’s theory of the British constitution as founded on a
compact entered into following the Revolution of 1688, and as such,
by analogy from the Common Law, inviolable without the consent of
both parties to the instrument. As developed by Burke the theory is
somewhat tenuous, but as applied by Webster to the interpretation of
a written document it is extraordinarily plausible to the legal mind.
The doctrine of immediacy, on the other hand, would seem to have been
derived from Judge Story. The argument of Webster in expounding the
principle of immediate contact between the individual citizen and the
Constitution follows the argument of Story’s _Commentaries_ too closely
to escape comment. Theodore Parker explicitly states that Webster got
his argument from Story, and circumstances bear out his assertion. The
two men had long been close friends. Webster’s speech was delivered a
month after the _Commentaries_ was finished. In his earlier speeches
such principle found no place, and it is reasonable to suppose that,
confronted by the Calhoun resolutions, Webster should have turned to
the materials gathered by his learned friend and frequent adviser. Here
was his reply ready to hand, a mass of legal fact and constitutional
exposition, together with a clear and simple theory. Nearly a month
elapsed before Webster rose to speak, and then he threw _Story on
the Constitution_ at Calhoun’s theory of compact. Whether such an
interpretation is reasonable or not, the speech added greatly to
Webster’s reputation as an expounder of the Constitution.
In 1833 he stood at the meridian of his renown; thereafter the
westering sun of his fame went slowly down. He had come to evil
times when opportunism and compromise--so imperative if the country
were to hold together at all--seemed immoral to men who insisted
that righteousness be legislated upon America, and weakness to men
who demanded their pound of flesh. The black shadow of slavery fell
across his path, and despite his wish to avoid all controversy on the
subject, he could not evade the issue. It drove him into a corner, and
the sword of the Constitution that he sought to defend himself with
was turned in the end against him. Webster’s antipathy to slavery was
of long standing and he gave frank expression to it in his speeches.
The position which he finally came to assume, in face of the growing
abolition sentiment in Massachusetts, was taken deliberately and was
worthy of a lawyer. He would oppose the extension of slave territory,
but he would not interfere with slavery in the old slave states. The
Constitution, he argued, recognized slavery as existing in certain
commonwealths by virtue of state laws, but those laws did not run
beyond the confines of the state. The territories were under Federal