Daniel Webster's First Bunker Hill Oration: Together with Other Addresses Relating to the Revolution

Front matter

Google to make the world's books discoverable online.

It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one that was never subject

to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books

Preface

Ik the uniform entrance requirements now generally adopted by our colleges, Webster^s "First Bunker Hill Oration '' is placed among the books which are to be "carefully studied under the immediate direction of the teacher/^ It is with the purpose of marking out distinct lines for such study that this edition of Webster^s famous speech has been prepared. Three others of Webster^s best-known orations, dealing with kindred topics, have been added, that pupils* training may not, unless it is absolutely necessary, be confined to the single oration prescribed.

F. N. S.

University of Michigan, September, 1895.

Contents

FACIE

Introduction ix

Suggestions for Teachers xxvi

Introduction

I. Biography

Daniel Webster was born on the 18tli of January, 1782, and died on the 24th of October, 1852. We may say that his life covers one distinct period of the nation's life, for he was born in the year wlien Great Britain recognized the independence of the United States, and lie died in the year of " Uncle Tom^s Cabin," the year when anti-slaveiy sentiment was gathering headway for the inevitable collision of the Civil War.

Of this period Webster is the great representative. There were men among his contemporaries who were better, wiser, more original, more popular than he, but there was no one in this period who in so many fields of activity, as lawyer, statesman, and orator, can rightfully claim so large a share of our attention.

Webster's native place was Salisbury, New Hampshire. His early life was passed upon his father's farm. . In 1797, with very little preparation, he entered Dartmouth College, from which he was graduated in 1801. Until he reached his junior year he gave small promise of the jiowers he afterward developed. We read with astonishment in his ^^ Autobiography," that while a youth he was never able to ^^ speak a piece " before the school. After the first two years at Dartmouth, however, he came rapidly forward, and by the close of the junior year was esteemed the best writer and debater in the College.

Shortly after his graduation, Webster entered upon the

X INTEODUGTION

study of the law in the office of Christopher Gore, a leading attorney of Boston. He was making rapid progress when suddenly, midway of his studies, came one of those accidents which make or mar a young man^s fortunes. He was offered a position as clerk in the Court of Common Pleas, near his home, at a salary of fifteen hundred dollars. He was deeply in debt, his father was old, and the family estate, mortgaged to pay his college expenses, was heavily encumbered. '^ I had felt,^^ he says, '' the res angustm till my' bones ached. ^^ To accept the place meant comfort, a competency, and respite from the long, hard struggle. But, as Mr. Gore pointed out to him, it meant also the death of his ambitions ; he would be a clerk for life. Convinced by the arguments of the attorney, he resolved to refuse the offer, and with many misgivings went home to break the news to his father. What happened may be told in his own words :

" I got home one afternoon, just at sunset, and saw my father in his little room, sitting in his arm-chair. He was pretty old then, and tall, and very thin. His face was pale, and his cheek sunken, and his eyes — which were always large and very black — seemed larger and blacker than I ever saw them. He seemed glad to see me, and, almost as soon as I sat down he said : ' Well, Daniel, we have got that office for you.^ ^ Yes, father,^ said I, ^the gentlemen were very kind, I must go and thank them ! ' ' They gave it to you without my saying a word about it.^ ' I must go and see Judge Farrar, and tell him I am much obliged to him.^ And so I talked about it very carelessly, and tried to make my father understand me. At last he began to have some suspicion of what I meant ; and he straightened himself up in his chair, and looked at me as if he would look me through. ^ Daniel, Daniel,^ said he, ^ don^t you mean to take that office ? ^ ^ No, indeed, father,^ said I ; ^ I hope I can do much better than that.

INTRODUCTION XI

I mean to use my tongue in the courts, not my pen ; to be an actor, not a register of other men^s acts. I hope yet, sir, to astonish your honor in your own court by my professional attainments/

^^ For a moment I thought he was angry. He rocked his chair, slightly ; a flash went over an eye, softened by age, but still as black as jet ; but it was gone, and I thought I saw that parental partiality was, after all, a little gratified at this apparent devotion to an honorable profession, and this seeming confidence of success in it. He looked at me for as much as a minute, and then said very slowly, ^ Well, my son, your mother has always said you would come to something or nothing. She was not sure which ; I think you are now about settling that doubt for her.^ This he said, and never a word spoke more to me on the subject.^' ^

Admitted to the bar in 1805,he went to Boscawen, near his home, to practise ; but he soon outgrew that little village, and upon the death of his father, who lived barely long enough to hear his first speech at the bar, he transferred his business to his brother and removed to Portsmouth. He now came into almost daily competition with the leading lawyers of the State, and his powers grew apace. The head of the New Hampshire bar at this time was one Jeremiah Mason, a man of great ability. He has recorded his first encounter with young Webster: ^^He broke upon me like a thunder shower in July, sudden, portentous, sweeping all before it.^^ But, in his own way. Mason was as good a lawyer as Webster, and exerted a powerful influence upon him. In particular, he taught him the value of plain, homely speech. Webster at the outset of his career was given to a flowery diction, and to a manner that bordered dangerously on the theatrical. Mason was plain, simple, and direct. But it was the plain-spoken Mason who always won the suit. As Webster said, he was ^^ a cause-

' Curtis : lAfe of Webster, vol. i., p. 72.

Xll INTRODUCTION

getting man/^ '' He had a habit of standing quite near to the jury, so near that he might have laid his finger on the foreman's nose ; and then he talked to them in a plain, conversational way, in short sentences, and using no word that was not level to the comprehension of the least educated man on the panel. This led me to examine my own style, and I set about reforming it altogether/'

In 1817, feeling that he needed still wider opportunities, Webster removed to Boston. Meanwhile he had been drawn into the current of national politics. As early as 1804, while yet a student in Mr. Gore's office, he had publi&hed a pamphlet entitled ^^An Appeal to Old Whigs.'' In 1808, in another pamphlet, he had inveighed against the embargo. But these, being anonymous, had not helped to bring their author into prominence. His opportunity came in 1812, when in the ^' Eockingham Memorial " he made a spirited and able argument against the war with England. The document attracted wide-spread interest, and led almost immediately to Webster's election to Congress. His rise in influence was now rapid. Some ingenious resolutions directed against the foreign policy of President Madison brought him prominently before the country, and being re-elected, he came back in 1814 the recognized leader of his party in the House. Again he made himself conspicuous, this time principally by his speeches on finance. In 1817 he tried to withdraw from politics, as he said, forever. He determined thereafter to devote himself to the law. But, for a man of Webster's abilities, this was simply out of the question. ^^ As I was sitting in my office, poring over Mansfield and Black stone, in the autumn of 1822, there came a committee to me. They did not look like clients. I did not believe they had any lawsuits. Thomas H. Perkins was chairman. Another of the members is now living — Mr. William Sturgis — and they stood up straight in my presence. I threw down

INTRODUCTION XUl

my law books, and they said : ^ Sir, we have come to tell you your destiny. You must give up these law books. We come to tell you that, on Monday next, you will be chosen to represent the city of Boston in the Congress of the United States. We come to make no request, we come to enter into no discussion, we take no answer ;^ and Colonel Perkins made a graceful bow, and, with his committee, went off.^^^

Webster accepted the nomination, and from this date to the close of his life never again put off the political harness. Transferred to the Senate in 1827, he attained three years later, in the debate with Ilayne, the very summit of his renown. In 1841, President Harrison called him to the Cabinet as Secretary of State, and he held over under President Tyler until 1843. The next year he was elected Senator, but in 1850 he was again appointed Secretary of State, a position which he held in 1852, when at the age of seventy, his public career and his life came to a close together.

From 1830 Webster was looked upon as a possible candidate for the presidency. He eagerly desired the nomination, and his failure to obtain it embittered the closing years of his life.

As a lawyer, Webster^s name is associated with many noted cases, but with none of more wide-reaching consequences than the Dartmouth College case. The occasion of this suit was as follows : ^ The president of Dartmouth College quarrelled with the trustees and was dismissed from office. By way of revenge he went over to the opposite political party — the Democrats — and brought about the election of a Democratic legislature. To pay their political debt, the legislature set aside the colonial charter of the College, passed a bill turning the College into a State university and provided for a new board of trustees ;

^ Speech at a Public Reception in Boston, 1852.

^ I foUow here the narrative of Lodge, Daniel Webster^ Chap, lit xiv INTRODUOTION

whereupon the old board, composed of Federalists, brought suit against the new board, composed of Democrats, to recover the College seal and other property. The case was carried up to the Supreme Court, and here, in 1818, Webster, on behalf of the old board of trustees, made his famous speech. As it happened, the Chief -Justice, John Marshall, was a leading Federalist. Webster took advantage of this fact, and by introducing the political aspects of the case, but doing it so delicately and adroitly that no suspicion was aroused, won the entire sympathy of the Chief-Justice and ultimately of a majority of the court. As a result Marshall wrote one of his great decisions, in which, embodying a minor point of Webster^s argument, he maintained that charters granted to private corporations are contracts within the meaning of the constitution,^ and therefore cannot be set aside by the legislature of a State. ^ By this decision more than by any other ever made, the powers of the several States were limited and those of the Federal Courts extended.

As a statesman, Webster exerted a powerful influence upon congressional legislation and public sentiment. His congressional speeches upon finance, upon the tariff, upon the Constitution, and upon the extension of slavery, were in his time, and are now, recognized as signal events in American history and substantial additions to American literature. The greatest of these speeches was the ^^ Eeply to Hayne.^' It was the outcome of a controversy as old as the Union itself, with regard to the powers of the several States under the Federal Constitution. Three different views had been held by political leaders, and by

^ **No State . . . shaU pass any bUl of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts." — U. S. Constitution, Art. I., Sec. X.

« The constitutional point, oddly enough, originated with the deposed president, who was thus *' hoist with his own petard."

INTRODUCTION xv

them impressed upon the public mind. According to one view, held by Jefferson and Madison, and embodied in the ^^ Virginia Resolutions,'^ the States are merely parties to a compact — the Constitution. In case the central government oversteps the powers conferred by the States upon it in the compact, the States, acting in unison, have the right to interfere and assert their original sovereignty. This doctrine, as set forth in the " Virginia Resolutions,^' was comparatively harmless, for the States were expected in taking remedial measures to act in concord ; there was no thought of a disruption of the Union. ^ But by others, especially by Senator Calhoun, of South Carolina, it was given a new and an extreme interpretation. In the view of these men, each State has the sovereign right, in the absence of any higher authority, to judge for itself whether congressional legislation encroaches on its powers. Legislation offensive to the State may be ^* nullified '' or declared of no effect within its borders. If this measure fails, the State has the right to secede from the Union. These views having been advocated on the floor of the Senate by Robert Y. Ilayne, of South Carolina, Webster spoke in opposition to them in a speech remarkable for its logic, its satire, its pathos, its elevation of sentiment — in short, for every good quality that a speech can possess. To the views of Hayne he opposed the " national " view, that the States in 1787 were welded into a nation by the adoption of the Constitution and were thenceforward one and indivisible. This view was not original with him. It was an early tradition strengthened and made clear by the decisions of Chief-Justice Marshall. It was not, indeed, the correct view, for our oneness as a nation is dependent, not upon a written document, but upon the de-

* This is not the common view. I have adopted here the opinion expressed by Judge T. M. Cooley, in a recent address on the Webster-Hayne Debate.

xvi INTRODUCTION

velopment of a national spirit. But whether it was ori inal or not, or whether it was correct or not, the ^' Rep 7r to Hayne '' drove it deep into the feelings and understandings of the great mass of the American people ; so that the war of arms which thirty years later followed the war of words, found the sentiment of the majority upon the side of union.

At various times throughout his life Webster was called upon to make commemorative or occasional addresses. While he was yet a student at Dartmouth, in 1800, he was invited by the people of the town of Hanover to deliver an oration on the Fourth of July. Nine years later, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Dartmouth, he spoke on ^^ The State of our Literature,'' giving reasons why America should be a centre of literary activity. But these and similar efforts attracted little attention. The address which established his reputation in this style of oratory was that which goes by the title of ^^The First Settlement of New England,^^ delivered at Plymouth in 1820. John Adams, himself no mean orator, pronounced it finer than anything of Burke^s, and he had listened to Burke. And George Ticknor, a foremost man of letters of the time and a competent critic, wrote that he was '' never so excited by public speaking before in his life.^' ^* When I came out,'^ he says, " I was almost afraid to come near him. It seemed to me as if he was like the mount that might not be touched and that burned with fire.^^

Five years later, with somewhat less of youthful exuberance, but with greater command of his resources, Webster wrote and delivered the ^^ First Bunker Hill Oration."' It may seem strange to some that he rated this speech, when he had finished the composition of it, as little better than a failure. The opening was not to his taste ; he was satisfied with nothing except the address to the veterans. To a friend he wrote as follows :

INTRODUCTION xvil

^^I did the deed this morning, i.e., I finished my speech ; and 1 am pretty well persuaded it is a speech that Yf'A\ finish me, as far as reputation is concerned. There is no more tone in it than in the weather in which it has been written; it is ^perpetual dissolution and thaw.'"* He was wholly mistaken. The address was not only brilliantly successful on the immediate occasion, but went through edition after edition, and was translated into many languages. If we except Lincoln's Gettysburg address, the brevity of wliich makes comparison unfair, the ^^ First Bunker Hill Oration" is easily the first of commemorative addresses, ancient or modern, American or English.

A similar misgiving oppressed him with regard to the eulogy of Adams and Jefferson, delivered in 1826 ; and what strikes us now as most remarkable, is that lie doubted the effectiveness of tlie two fictitious speeches which reproduce with fine dramatic effect the debates of the Continental Congress. '^ He was quite uncertain," he said to a friend, " whether they were the best or the worst part of the discourse." Such mis judgments, however, are not uncommon on the part of famous writers, being simply evidences of the insatiable hunger for perfection which characterizes all great genius.

'^ The Character of Washington," a speech in his best vein, belongs to 1832. In 1843 he gave the "Second Bunker Hill Oration," an address inferior in unity and spirit to the first — he was too old for such an occasion, he said — ^yet containing single passages of remarkable force and beauty. His last speech of this kind was at the laying of the corner-stone of the addition to the Capitol, in 1851.

* Curtis : Life of Webster, vol. i., p. 251.

Xviii IJSTRODUaTION

II. Characteristics of Webster's Oratory.

The effect of Webster's oratory was due in part to his appearance and manner of delivery, in part to his ideas, in part to the language in which his thoughts were clothed. Each of these may be considered in turn.

It was Webster's good fortune that in his outward person he was as near perfection as nature permits her children to go. *^His very presence/' said a New England writer who had no reason to love him, ^^ was an oration." ^^ Mr. Webster had a natural ascendency of aspect and carriage," writes Emerson, '' which distinguished him over all his contemporaries. His countenance, his figure, and his manners were all in so grand a style, that he was, without effort, as superior to his most eminent rivals as they were to the humblest."^

He had in full measure the indefinable quality known as personal magnetism, so that literally, by a smile, or a gesture, or by his mere presence, he could ^^hold children from play and old men from the chimney corner." '' When he appeared in State Street, slowly pacing, with an arm behind him, business was brought to an absolute standstill. As the whisper passed along, the windows filled with clerks, pen in mouth, peering out to catch a glimpse of the man whom they had seen fifty times before. "^

In stature Webster was not above the medium, though, with his massive limbs and stately carriage, he impressed everyone as a giant. He had straight black hair, eyes that glowed like embers under his jutting brows, and a complexion " of burnt gunpowder." His voice, we are told, was in volume and quality an instrument of marvellous perfection. '^ It was low and musical in conversation ; in

* The Fugitive Slave Law,

* Parton, iu the North Amei'ican Review^ January, 1867.

debate it was high but full, ringing out in moments of excitement like a clarion, and then sinking to deep notes with the solemn richness of organ- tones. "^ In his openair addresses he could make himself heard to a greater distance than any other speaker of whom we have trustworthy information.

Upon almost all topics of public interest Webster had well-defined convictions, to which he gave in his speeches and correspondence almost daily utterance. They were in general, as we have seen, not original ideas. Nor, for a man in his position, was it necessary that they should be. '^ A constitutional statesman, ^^ says "Walter Bagehot, *' is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.^^ Webster had uncommon abilities for using the ideas of other men, and especially for divining and expressing ^* common opinions, ^^ ideas held by the people at large but not yet come to utterance. As a voice for the commonalty he gave expression in his speeches to three leading sentiments : one was. Our nation has a great past which has made us what we are ; the second. The Union must be maintained at whatever cost ; the third. We have a sure and splendid future. By dwelling upon the first, as in the two Bunker Hill addresses, Webster did much to establish in the public mind what is termed the *^ historic consciousness,^^ an abiding sense that our national life has its roots in the past and is a continuous growth. His belief in the Union amounted to a passion. ^^Union,'^ he said, in the second Bunker Hill address, ^Mias been the source of all our glory and greatness thus far, and is the gi'ound of all our highest hopes ;^^ and there are few speeches in his collected works in which this sentiment does not appear. His hopes in the future were as strong as his reverence for the past. He was an optimist ; that is, he had the conviction that the tendency of human events is toward good and

* Lodge : Daniel Webster, p. 192.

XX INTnODUGTION

not toward evil. He never doubted for an instant the permanence and the ultimate predominance of American ideas and institutions. The prophetic strain runs through all his speeches, and reaches a climax in his last great address, delivered but a year before his death. ^

In style, Webster was self -restrained, orderly, and direct. Emerson says of him :

*'He was so simple and wise in his rhetoric; he saw through his matter, hugged his fact so close, went to the principle or essential, and never indulged in a weak flourish, though he knew perfectly how to make such exordiums, episodes, and perorations as might give perspective to his harangues without in the least embarrassing his march or confounding his transitions. In his statement things lay in daylight ; we saw them in order as they were. Though he knew very well how to present his own personal claims, yet in his argument he was intellectual, — stated his fact pure of all personality, so that his splendid wrath, when his eyes became lamps, was the wrath of the fact and the cause he stood for.

"His power, like that of all great masters, was not in excellent parts, but was total. He had a great and everywhere equal propriety. He worked with that closeness of adhesion to the matter in hand which a joiner or a chemist uses, and the same quiet and sure feeling of right to his place that an oak or a mountain have to theirs. After all his talents have been described, there remains that perfect propriety which animated all the details of his action or speech with the character of the whole, so that his beauties of detail are endless. He seemed born for the bar, born for the senate, and took very naturally a leading part in large private and public affairs ; for his head distributed things in their right places, and what he saw so well he compelled other people to see also. " ^

The orderliness of Webster^s mind is exhibited in his paragraphing. With few exceptions, the topics of the paragraphs are logical divisions of the theme, so that to write a list of paragraph-topics is to make an analysis of the oration. In the internal structure of the paragraph unity

^ The address at the laying of the corner-stone of the addition to the Capitol. ' Hie Fugitive Slave Law,

INTliOD UCTION XXI

is carefully maintained. The principal thought is usually announced in the opening sentence, and is then developed in regular and natural sequence to the close. The reader should notice, however, that within the limits of the paragraph, Webster artfully varies the construction. Excessive parallelism, the common vice of oratorical compositions, is of rare occurrence. In the ^' First Bunker Hill Oration,^' there are but two paragraphs in which parallel construction is made prominent.^ In the remaining paragraphs it is alternated with other varieties of structure. Thus paragraph 4 opens with an inverted sentence, that is, a sentence in which the predicate comes before the subject. ^^ Nearer to our own times, more closely connected with our fates, and therefore still more interesting to our feelings and affections, is the settlement of our own country by colonists from England.^' Then follows, in a different type of sentence, a fine example of parallel construction. *^ We cherish every memorial of these worthy ancestors ; we celebrate their patience and fortitude ; we admire their daring enterprise ; we teach our children to venerate their piety ; and we are justly proud of being descended from men who have set the world an example of founding civil institutions on the great and united principles of human freedom and human knowledge. ^^ Here the parallelism, which is in danger of becoming monotonous, is interrupted by an inverted sentence : "To us, their children, the story of their labors and sufferings can never be without its interest. ^^ The fourth sentence recurs to the structure of the second, though with a change of tense : " We shall not stand unmoved on the shore of Plymouth,^^ etc., but here the parallelism ceases ; the closing sentence is of a different type : " No vigor of youth, no maturity of manhood, will lead the nation to forget the spots where its infancy was cradled and defended."

' Paragraphs 7 and 44.

XXU INTRODUCTION

The construction of Webster's sentences is simple and straightforward, so that an occasional complexity or subtlety attracts an undue amount of attention. The following passage will illustrate this point : ^^ Men have seen that it (classical learning) might exist without mental superiority, without vigor, without good taste, and without utility. But in such cases classical learning has only not inspired natural talenf ^ The words ^^has only not inspired, '^ which in Carlyle or De Quincey would be passed without remark, are in Webster's paragraph so different from his ordinary mode of expression as actually to arrest the reader's attention, and make him question whether he has read aright.

In the placing of words and phrases Webster is so uniformly accurate that if, now and then, he transgresses a precept of the text-books, the reader may well raise the question whether the precept is not at fault rather than the author. For example, there is a rule in most rhetorics that the word "only" should immediately precede the word it modifies. This rule is obviously violated in such sentences as the following : " It did not, indeed, put an end to the war ; but, in the then existing hostile state of feeling, the difficulties could only be referred to the arbitration of the sword. "^ " Above personal considerations, above local considerations, above party considerations, he felt that he could only discharge the sacred trust whicli the country had placed in his hands by a diligent inquiry after real merit and a conscientious preference of virtue and talent."^ But it is the rule which is at fault, not Webster. The usage of good writers is to place "only" immediately before the word it modifies whenever another position would cause ambiguity ; in other cases its position is

* Adams and Jefferson^ paragraph 62.

^ Second Bunker Hill Oration, paragraph 23.

* Character of Washington, paragraph 26.

INTRODUCTION xxiii

determined largely by the demands of rhythm. There is no ambiguity in the sentences quoted above. A more serious fault is the use of ^^but which/' " and which/' when there is no relative preceding, as in the following example : ^^ You see the lines of the redoubt thrown up by the incredible diligence of Prescott ; defended to the last extremity by his lion-hearted valor ; and within which the corner-stone of our monument has now taken its position." ^ Yet in these cases it is clear that the words *^ thrown up *' and " defended '^ are equivalent to the clause "which were thrown up/' and " which were defended ; '' nor is there any evidence that to a hearer or reader not consciously on the strain to detect formal errors of construction, this passage has ever given the least offence.