Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
law, and no injunction was laid upon Congress to extend the laws or
institutions of any state or group of states over the territorial
domain. In his speech on “Exclusion of Slavery from the Territories,”
on August 12, 1848, he stated his position thus:
It will not be contended that this sort of slavery exists by
general law. It exists only by local law. I do not mean to deny
the validity of that local law where it is established; but I say
it is, after all, local law. It is nothing more. And wherever that
local law does not extend, property in persons does not exist.
Well, Sir, what is now the demand on the part of our Southern
friends? They say, “We will carry our local laws with us wherever
we go. We insist that Congress does us injustice unless it
establishes in the territory in which we wish to go our own local
law.” This demand I for one resist, and shall resist. It goes upon
the idea that there is an inequality, unless persons under this
local law, and holding property by authority of that law, can go
into new territory and there establish that local law, to the
exclusion of the general law. (_Works_, Vol. V, p. 309.)
It was the unfortunate Seventh of March Speech that proved Webster’s
undoing--this and the Fugitive Slave Bill in which he was deeply
implicated. The situation was desperately critical, Webster was
pessimistic, and this was a last gesture of reconciliation with the
South. Presidential ambitions and runaway slaves were stewing in a
common political pot with Abolition societies and northern mercantile
interests. Webster was puzzled, hesitated, emptied another glass of
the wine of the Constitution, and went for the Fugitive Slave Bill. It
was a tragic political mistake. To be sure a tremendous address was
presented to him, signed by the most respectable persons in Boston and
Cambridge, but it was an empty honor. Webster’s influence was gone,
never to be regained. There is something pathetic in his futile attempt
to stifle the New England conscience by ramming the Constitution down
its throat:
Sir, the principle of the restitution of runaway slaves is not
objectionable, unless the Constitution is objectionable. If the
Constitution is right in that respect, the principle is right,
and the law providing for carrying it into effect is right. If
that be so, and if there is no abuse of the right under any law
of Congress, or any other law, then what is there to complain of?
(“Speech on the Compromise Measures,” in _Works_, Vol. V, p. 433.)
And there is something pathetic also in the hurt vanity of the old man
that his judgment should be questioned. His self-pride was offended
when the Abolitionists rejected his legal dogmatisms, and set up their
own dogmatisms. He regarded them as mischief-makers. “I am against
agitators, north and south,” he exclaimed petulantly. He recognized no
higher law than the Constitution and Blackstone, and he would suffer no
popular interference with Congress.
Then, Sir, there are the Abolition societies, of which I am
unwilling to speak, but in regard to which I have very clear
notions and opinions. I do not think them useful. I think their
operations for the last twenty years have produced nothing good
or valuable.... They have excited feelings.... I cannot but see
what mischiefs their interference with the South has produced ...
everything that these agitating people have done has been, not to
enlarge, but to restrain, not to set free, but to bind faster,
the slave population of the South. (“Seventh of March Speech,” in
_Works_, Vol. V, p. 357.)
I desire to call the attention of all sober-minded men at the
North, of all conscientious men, of all men who are not carried
away by some fanatical idea or some false impression, to their
constitutional obligations. I put it to all the sober and sound
minds at the North as a question of morals and a question of
conscience. What right have they, in their legislative capacity or
any other capacity, to endeavour to get around this Constitution,
or to embarrass the free exercise of the rights secured by the
Constitution to the persons whose slaves escape from them? None at
all; none at all. Neither in the forum of conscience, nor before
the face of the Constitution, are they, in my opinion, justified in
such attempt. (_Ibid._, p. 355.)
If the later Webster had no message for the conscience of New England,
neither had he any for the intelligence of New England. The realistic
Federalism that had listened to him in 1820 was gone, submerged by the
flood waters of the renaissance; and the current transcendentalism
seemed to him insubstantial and dangerous. The rising liberalism of
the forties left him wholly untouched; it could not leaven the heavy
materialism of his nature. He was quite unacquainted with the new
Massachusetts that was coming to expression; he had lived too long with
“the lawyers, the politicians, and rich merchants and manufacturers,”
to understand the greater world of Concord. While he had been living on
the subsidies of State Street, and contracting his mind to the compass
of a banker’s, the intellect of Massachusetts had become liberal. And
in becoming liberal it aroused him from indifference to hostility.
Writing to a friend in explanation of his refusal to visit Concord in
his later years, he said:
Many of those whom I so highly regarded in your beautiful and quiet
village have become a good deal estranged, to my great grief, by
abolitionism, free-soilism, transcendentalism, and other notions
which I cannot but regard as so many vagaries of the imagination.
(Quoted in Sanborn, _Life of Thoreau_.)
But if he was scarcely acquainted with the little group of thinkers
and liberals--Emerson, Thoreau, Channing, Parker, Garrison, Phillips,
Edmund Quincy, Whittier, Lowell, Higginson, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Margaret Fuller--they were well acquainted with him and took his
measure exactly. The intellect of Massachusetts--so long ignored by
Webster--had its revenge. Its voice carried farther than his, and it
painted his portrait in no flattering strokes. The fierce storm that
suddenly beat upon him broke the old man’s spirit. He had fed too long
on adulation to endure censure. No doubt that censure was severe, but
it was far juster than the earlier adulation had been. Whittier’s
_Ichabod_ is familiar to every American schoolboy. Lowell, then in his
liberal mood, characterized him as “a statesman who had communicated no
impulse to any of the great ideas of the century, as a statesman whose
soul had been absorbed in tariff, banks, and the Constitution, instead
of devoting himself to the freedom of the future.” Emerson, who had
long studied him critically, gave an extraordinarily just analysis of
his character:
Mr. Webster is a man who lives by his memory, a man of the past,
not a man of faith or of hope. He obeys his powerful animal
nature;--and his finely developed understanding only works freely
and with all its force, when it stands for animal good; that is,
for property. He believes, in so many words, that government exists
for the protection of property. He looks to the Union as an estate,
a large farm, and is excellent in the completeness of his defence
of it so far. He adheres to the letter.... What he finds already
written, he will defend. Lucky that so much had got well written
when he came. For he has no faith in the power of self-government.
Not the smallest municipal provision, if it were new, would receive
his sanction. In Massachusetts, in 1776, he would, beyond all
question, have been a refugee. He praises Adams and Jefferson, but
it is a past Adams and Jefferson, that his mind can entertain.
A present Adams and Jefferson he would denounce. So with the
eulogies of liberty in his writings,--they are sentimentalism and
youthful rhetoric. He can celebrate it, but it means as much from
him as from Metternich or Talleyrand. This is all inevitable from
his constitution. All the drops of his blood have eyes that look
downward. (“The Fugitive Slave Law.”)
To the transcendental mind Webster’s economic realism was peculiarly
repugnant, and it was this which inspired Theodore Parker’s critical
analysis of Webster’s career--the most scathing and explicit of
all contemporary estimates. What Parker discovers most hateful in
Webster’s career was his adherence to the principles of Federalism,
from the “Basis of the Senate” speech in 1820, to the New York speech
on November 18, 1850. The persistence of his economic realism was an
affront to the liberals of the humanitarian school that had moved
far from the position of Fisher Ames. Webster might do lip service
to humanitarian ideals, Parker asserted, but always he came back in
the end to his polar conception--“The great object of government is
the protection of property at home, and respect and renown abroad”
(_Works: Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 220).
It was this same persistent realism that made Webster so useful to
the rising capitalism. His work in the Senate was supplemented by his
work in the court room. He was the greatest corporation lawyer of the
day, certain to be found defending vested interests, never on the side
of the leaner purse. Probably more than any other man except John
Marshall, he contributed to the work of bringing the Constitution under
the sovereignty of the judiciary. His most significant contribution,
certainly, was his argument in the celebrated Dartmouth College
case, delivered before the Supreme Court in 1818, which resulted in
one of the foundation decisions on which later has been erected the
solid structure of our corporation law.[439] By engrafting upon the
Constitution the principle that a contract lies beyond the reach of
legislative power to annul, the decision assured greater security for
private property than exists under any other judicial system in the
world. Alexander Hamilton could not have asked for more.
It was the singular ill fortune of Webster to have been born too late
to profit from the old mercantile Federalism to which his affections
were always attached, and too early to profit by the industrial
Federalism that came to greatness after the Civil War. If fate had
been kinder to him, and he had appeared on the political horizon a
generation earlier or a generation later, he would have reaped in far
greater abundance those high civic honors he so foolishly coveted. The
economic groups whom he served would have been in position to reward
a servant so conspicuously able and useful. As a contemporary of John
Adams he might have become a notable political philosopher--provided
always that he had not turned Tory as Emerson suggested. But unhappily
for his fame he was launched between tides on a stormy sea and his
stately bark foundered in the squall of Abolitionism.
Footnotes
[433] Quoted in Theodore Parker, _Daniel Webster: Additional Speeches_,
Vol. I, p. 195. Considerable information will be found in this
excellent study.
[434] See “The Tariff,” in _Works_, Vol. III, pp. 118-122.
[435] See his “Apology and Defense,” in _Works_, Vol. V, pp. 146, 240.
[436] See “The Bank of the United States,” _Works_, Vol. III, p. 35.
[437] See “Speech in Wall Street,” in _Works_, Vol. II, p. 55.
[438] See “The Landing at Plymouth,” in _Works_, Vol. II, pp. 204-205.
[439] Theodore Parker denied Webster credit for the argument, pointing
out that “the facts, the law, the precedents, the ideas, and the
conclusions of that argument, had almost all of them been presented by
Messrs. Mason and Smith in the previous trial of the case” (_Additional
Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 171). The statement is confirmed by Beveridge.
Part Two: The Rise of Liberalism