Statesmen

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I. Henry Clay, .

II. Daniel Webster,

III. John C. Calhoun, .

II. Daniel Webster

There are three scenes in the life of Daniel Webster which may be regarded as marking three stages in his long and wonderful career :

1. His father's means were limited, and the narrow circumstances of the family seemed to restrict his boyish ambitions to the humblest walk (^f life ; but his father, without saying a word to the boy, had resolved that Daniel should have a college education ; and one day, riding in the farm wagon to the town where the lad was to be put under the tutorship of a competent teacher, the father briefly, almost grimly, communicated his intentions to the bo v. Youn"f Daniel, overcome by the unexpected good fortune opening before his eves, laid his face upon his father's shoulder and burst into tears. The homely homespun country lad saw before him the possibilities of a high career.

2. In January, 1830, while he ^v'as a United States Senator from Massachusetts, it fell to his lot to defend his native New England from the attacks of a representative Southerner, General Hayne, of South Carolina, in the Senate. It was a momentous period in the history of the country. That reply was made at the zenith of Webster's life. It is the place of all others where he grandly stood forth as a parliamentary orator, a master of eloquence. The world even now turns and looks upon that historic scene with aw^e and admiration. At this point doubtless culminated the fame and the intellectual power of Daniel Webster.

House where Webster was Born at Salisbury (now Franklin), N. H.

3. In May, 1852, Webster, now past his manly prime, crippled by an untoward accident, stood on the grand rostrum of Faneuil Hall, in Boston, an entrance to which had been previously denied him by the city authorities. He had not Icjng since lost a part of his great popularity in consequence of his course upon the slavery question, and many of his former friends had fallen away from him. Whittier had written of him that sad, bitter rebuke contained in the poem entitled " Ichabod." Five months later the great Webster was laid to rest by the sea he loved so well.

The condition of the country at the time of Webster's boyhood (he was born in 1782) was one of extreme poverty and bareness of the luxuries of life. In one of his later addresses he said : " It did not happen to me, g-entlemen, to be born in a log cabin, but my elder brothers and sisters were born in a log cabin and raised amidst the snowdrifts of New Hampshire at "a period so early that when the smoke first rose from its rude chimney and curled over the frozen hills there was no similar evidence of a white man's habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada." School facilities were few and far between, and sometimes it was necessary for the lad to follow the schoolmaster from hamlet to hamlet, boarding away from home, in order that he might secure the primitive education thus put within his reach. The hard and barren soil of New Hampshire did not yield rich returns to the farmers who struggled for a living in the region of the " frozen hills " of which he spoke. His school-days were days of privation, and yet he made great advances in acquiring knowledge, and was considered the quickest boy in school. His memory w^as astonishingly retentive, and he seemed to have considered that a book was not merely to be read, but to be committed to memory. He tells in his diary of his gaining the reward of a jackknife offered to

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the boy who should be able to recite the greatest number of verses from the Bible. When his turn came he arose in his place and reeled off verses until the schoolmaster was fain to cry " Hold I enough ! "' A cotton handkcrchiet, on which was printed the Constitution of the I' nited States in colored letters, gave him the means of readinof and tixina; in his mind forever the words of that famous instrument. He was reckoned in the sparsely settled neighborhood as a prodigy of learning, and his delicate frame, big eyes, and musical speech were famed throughout the region. Of that period of his life he says: "1 read what I could get to read, went to school when I could, and when not at school was a farmer's youngest boy, not good for much for want of health and strength, but expected to do something." He tended the saw-mill and " did the chores " of the house and farm.

His brother Ezekiel and himself divided between them the humble labors of the home. Ezekiel, who was Daniel's best-beloved friend and brother, usually took the laboring oar. There is an anecdote of the father calling out to the boys who were playing in the barn, " What are you doing, Daniel ? " His reply was, " Nothing." " And what are you doing, Ezekiel ? " " Helping Daniel." And so through life it was Ezekiel who helped Daniel. On another occasion the two lads were allowed to go to a fair in a neighboring town, each furnished with a little pocket money. When they returned in the evening Daniel was overflowing with animal spirits

DAMKL WKIISTKR and enjoyment. Ezekiel was silent. The mother, inquiring' as to their day's doings, hnally asked Daniel what he liad ch)ne with his money. " Spent it," was the reply. " And what did vou do with yours, Ezekiel? " "Lent it to Daniel," said the elder brother. As one of his bioe:-

Webster when a Young Man.

raphers has said, " thatanswei" sums up the story ol Webster's home life in childhood. Ever3-one was giving or lending to Daniel of their money, of their time, their activity, their love and affection. This petting was [)artially due to Webster's health, but it was also in great measure owing to his nature. He was one of those rare and fortunate beings who without exertion draw to themselves the devotion of other people and are always surrounded by men and women eager to do and suffer for them." In manhood he loved his friends with a love passing that of woman ; his great passionate and affectionate nature knit to him with bands of steel his chosen friends, and up to the day of his death some of these devoted and worshipful ones ministered to his wants and his comfort and his luxury with unstinting hand.

In his biography of Webster, Mr. George T. Curtis, speaking of his own return to Boston for a few hours, while Webster's life was slowly ebbing away, says : " A gentleman rang at my door and called me out. As I met him he placed in my hand a thick roll of bank-notes, desiring me to convey it to Mr. Webster. When I asked him from whom it came, he mentioned the name of a venerable and wealthy citizen of Boston, who had learned that Mr. Webster was dying, and who had said that at such a time there ought to be no want of money in Mr. Webster's house." While we applaud the generosity of the giver, it is impossible to restrain a feeling of profound regret that anything should have made this charity even apparentlv needful.

In due course of time he went to Dartmouth College, where his rustic dress and manners provoked the ridicule of his new associates. He found it dihicult, if not impossible, to take part in some of the exercises of the school, such as

DANIEL WKBSTEil 45

declamation aiul so on, in which he was expected to engage; but he speedily developed a rare faculty tor absorbing knowledge, and not only became proficient in Latin and Greek, but readily acquired ancient and modern histor}-, and became familiar with the drift of public events in this country and in Europe. So great was his reputation in the college and its neighborhood as a speaker and writer, that the people of the town of Hanover invited him to deliver an oration on July 4, 1800. He was then eighteen years old. This was his first public performance which was printed. It is characterized by the high-flown language of the sophomore, and was doubtless received with every demonstration of admiration and applause. He denounced France, then unfriendly to the United States and under the domination of Bonaparte, whom the young orator styled " the gasconading pilgrim of Egypt." He was graduated in due course in August, 1 80 1, without either special credit or special mention. The straitened circumstances of the family made it necessary that he should at once begin to support himself. While in college he had added to his slender income in every possible way, and he now accepted the post of school-teacher in the town of Fryeburg, Me., considering himself a lucky young fellow to have secured the job.

Ezekiel Webster, who appears to have been a man of extraordinary parts, manifested a disposition to follow in his younger brother's footsteps. After many anxious family councils, it

^ I

was dccitlccl Ihat this step might be taken, the good mother oi tiie house saying, in answer to the remonstrances of the father, " I will trust the boys." Daniel's life at Fryeburg was a hard one. The home farm was heavily mortgaged, and Ezekiel, who was now in college, was no longer the prop and stay as he had been of the house. Daniel manfully carried his share of the burdens, and out of school-hours copied deeds and other legal papers, an occupation which he detested, in order that he might give all his salary to his brother preparing for college.

Ezekiel Webster lived to attain eminence in the profession of the law. He was a man of high talent and much professional learning ; he \vas in person and physique not unlike his brother, the " godlike Daniel." He died very suddenly in the court-room, at Concord, N. H., wdiile addressing a jury. He was then only forty-nine years old, and had he lived would have doubtless reached great fame as a lawyer. Years later, when time had so assuaged his bitter grief that he could speak tranquilly of his brother's death, Daniel Webster said of him who was gone : " He appeared to me the finest human form that I ever laid eyes on. I saw him in his coffin — a tinged cheek, a complexion clear as the heavenly light."

Daniel Webster was a good teacher. His dignity, even temper, and firmness commanded the respect of his jiupils, and wherever he went he produced an impression upon those whom he met. Those who could in later years recall his yoiino;- manhood in Fryeburg, invai^iably spoke ot his inijiosing i)resence and his wonderful eyes. He was known in the vilhige as "All- Eyes." He devoured with keen zest every book upon which he could lay his hands, and in a single winter exhausted the resources of the little circulating library of Fryeburg. His memory seems to have been like iron ; an impression once made was ineradicable. On his death-bed he quoted a phrase, " The Jackdaw in the Steeple," from a poem of Cowper's, which none about him could recall, and the strangeness of which led some of them to suppose his mind w^as wandering.

It is impossible to think of Webster at any period of his life as other than the grand, imposing figure that looms up in history and in the memory of the few who survive him. His form in his manhood was tall, massive, and commanding ; his face was rugged, and his overhanging brows were projected over deep and cavernous eyes in which gloomed and glowed a wonderful tropical light. There was, indeed, about his presence and in his habit of thought a certain Oriental flavor that seemed strangely foreign to New England and to the cold and inhospitable climate in which he was reared.

The costume in which he generally appeared on public occasions has become historic. He wore a dress-coat of blue cloth, with brass buttons ; a buff waistcoat cut low and showing an expanse c^f white shirt-bosom, and on his nether limbs trousers of black cloth. On these occasions, too, he wore low-cut shoes and white stockings, and about his neck was swathed a white lawn tie in many folds, as was the custom of the time, and over this was turned his high collar. In this garb his portrait has been painted many times, and this is the outward Webster that comes to the mental vision of every man who ever saw him in public. It is impossible to conceive of him as being at any time and under any circumstances a trivial or undignified person. He always was on dress-parade. He was always statuesque, and his was always a figure to compel respect. It was said of him that when a stranger he passed through the streets of Liverpool, England, casual wayfarers looked after him and said, " That must be a king ; " and on one occasion when with a friend he had had sudden occasion to enter a New Haven bar-room, the keeper of the place, startled and astonished by the grandeur of Webster's appearance, said breathlessly, " That man ought to be President at the very least."

Yet the testimony of his intimates shows that his disposition was playful, and we know that he took great delight in the smallest details of house and home keeping. He had an immense fund of humor. He was fond of the pleasures of the table and chose his viands and his wines with anxious and appreciative care. While he was Secretary of State, and an important treaty — that which settled the Northeastern boundary question — was coming to a vote in the Senate, he paused in the midst of the burdens of State and wrote a letter to his farmer in New England, giving ex- 4

|)li(il directions about the care ol certain sail lia\ , the buildinj^ ol a pii^i^ci}', and other similar matters.

There are extant many letters giving- charming glimpses of the man in undress, as we may say. One of these is addressed to John Taylor, who had charge of his farm in Franklin, N. H. It was written just after Webster's famous 7th of March speech, delivered in 1852, when the great Senator was overwhelmed with the bitterness of the political contest then raging, not only about him in Washington, but all over the country. Thus he begins : " John Taylor. Go ahead. The heart of the winter is broken and before the first day of April all your land may be plowed. Buy the oxen of Captain INIarston if you think the price fair. Pay for the hay. I send you a check for $160 for these two objects. Put the great oxen in a condition to l)e turned out to be fattened. You have a good horse team and I think in addition to this four oxen and a pair of foiu"-y ear-old steers will do vour work."

After giving directions of this kind with great minuteness and admonishing Taylor that he wants " no pennxroyal crops," and that his mother's garden must be kept in the best ordeiat any cost, he turns to politics, as if it were impossible to keep his thoughts out of the commotion going on about him, and savs :

" There are some animals that live best in the fire, and there are some men who delight in heat, smoke, combustion and even general conflagrati(jn. They do not value the things which make

DANIEL WEBSTEIi 51

peace; lhc\' cnjoN- onh' conlroxci'sv, contention, and strife. IIa\c no communion witli such [)crsons either as neighbors or politicians. ^ On hd\c no more right to say that slavery ought not to exist in Virginia than a Virginian has to sav that slavery ought to exist in New Hampshire. This is a question left to every State to decide for itself, and if we mean to keep the States together we must leave to every State this power of deciding for itself. . . . John Taylor, you are a free man ; 3'ou possess good principles, you have a large family to rear and provide for by your labor. Be thankful for the government which does not oppress you, which does not bear vou down by excessive taxation, but which holds out to you and to yours the hope of all the blessings which liberty, industry, and security may give. John Tavlor, thank God morning and evening that vou are born in such a coiuitry. John Tavlor, never write me another word u])on politics."

Webster, through all his life, was easily influenced by others, especially when those others had won his confidence and affection. His conduct in the matter of the lucrative court-clerkship offered him in 1804, when he most needed money, was a good example of this trait. His brother Ezekiel was then manfully fighting his way to college ; Daniel was occasionally earning a little money in the law office of Mr. Christopher Gore, of Boston, when the judges of the Court of Common Pleas, in which his father practised in New Hampshire, offered Daniel the place of

52 STATES M EX

clerk at a salary of $1,500 a year. To the 3^ouni^ law student this was a princely income ; it would be equal to five or ten thousand dollars in these days. That income would enable him to smooth Ezekiel's road to the hill of learning, lift the home mortgage and lighten the labors of his father's last years. He joyfully prepared to return to New Hampshire and enter upon his profitable and welcome duties. To his intense astonishment and disappointment, Mr. Gore coldly expressed his disapproval of the change. He pointed out the danger that he might be removed at any time by the favor of the judges, that the salary might be reduced, and that it led to nothing, and would block any great career that might open before him. Dazed and dumbfounded by this unexpected presentation of the case, Webster reluctantly admitted its justness, and, much to the amazement of his father, declined the post. It was well. Nevertheless, even the narrowing labors of that small office could not have long crippled or hedged in the genuis of Daniel Webster.

His first great legal argument was that in the celebrated Dartmouth College case which was argued in 181 8 before the United States Supreme Court. As a lawyer, he had a certain divine instinct to seize upon the points of any case which was committed to him. On one occasion an important lawsuit was put in his hands by a firm of lawyers to argue before the United States Supreme Court. The briefs in the case were sent to him in Washington by the hand of a

DANIKL M'EBSTEll junior member of the law firm, and when Webster looked the papers over he said : "And is this all?" The younger man said timidly: "There is another point which I have presented to the firm, but which they thought not material," and then he stated the case. Webster's eyes glowed and he said : " My dear sir, that is the point ; " and on this he won the case. The Dartmouth College case was one in which the Legislature of the

Webster's Home at Marshfield, Mass.

State of New Hampshire had interfered with the interior government of the college and had attempted to change its course of direction. Webster's contention was that " the principle in our constitutional jurisprudence which regards a charter of a private corporation as a contract and places it under the protection of the Constitution of the United States debarred the Legislature from interfering." The decision in the case, which was made February, 1819, affirmed the ground taken by Webster and established a precedent in law which was of the highest importance.

54 ,S7'J TKSMKX

Tt cannot be said that as a jury lawyer Webster alwaws relied iijjon the law in the case. In a celebrated nuirder trial in \\ hich he appeared loi" the prosecution in Salem, Mass., in 1830 he was said to have lairl\- terrihed the jury into conyiction. Ca})tain White, a retired and wealthy sea-captain of Salem, had been murdered in his bed. J. F. Kna})p and others as accessories were accused oi the crime. It was in this trial that he made a wonderful argument iri which he described the circumstances af a murder, the inmost feelings of the slayer and his stealthy escape. In his address to the jury occurs the celebrated passage, when, speaking of the crime of murder, he said : " It betrays his discretion, it breaks down his courage, it conquers his prudence. When suspicions from without begin to embarrass him and the net of circimistance to entangle him the fatal secret struggles with still greater yiolence to burst fortli. It must be confessed, it will be confessed ; there is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession."

So, in the Dartmouth College case, although that was not, as one might well suppose, a cause with which to moyc an audience profoundly, it is true ol Webster that those who heard his closing sentences listened with faces wet with tears. Protessor Chauncey Goodrich, ol Vale College, who heard this remarkable speech and wrote an account of it, says that Webster closed with these words: "Sir, nou ina\' (lesti-o\- this little institution; it is weak; it is in \our luuids. I know

it is one of the lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out. But if you do so, you must carry through your work, ^'ou must extinguish, one after another, all those greater lights of science which lor more than a century have thrown their radiance over our land. It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it." " Here," says Professor Goodrich, " the feelings he had thus far succeeded in keeping down broke forth. His lips quivered ; his firm cheeks trembled with emotion ; his eyes were filled with tears ; his voice choked, and he seemed struggling to the utmost to gain that mastery over himself which might save him from an unmanly burst of feeling. The whole seemed mingled throughout with the recollection of father, mother, brother, and all the privations and trials through which he had made his way into life. Everyone saw that it was wholly unpremeditated, a pressure on his heart, which sought relief in words and tears." It was then that the great loving heart of Webster spoke in most moving eloquence.

It was as an occasional orator that Webster achieved his greatest fame, possibly with the single exception of his celebrated reply to Hayne. The oration at Plymouth, Mass., delivered on the two hundreth anniversary ol its settlement, December 22, 1820, was perhaps the first of his greatest oratorical discourses. The first Bunker Hill oration, delivered in June, 1825, was a work of the greatest splendor. Magnificent in conception, luminous with the grandest imagery, flowing like the full volume of a river, it at once commanded the attention of the entire nation. It was spoken, it would appear, not so much to the few thousands that clustered around the foundations of Bunker Hill monument as to the republic, to posterity. This was one of the first, if not the first, of the great orations of Webster that took their place in the literature of the country and were embodied in the text-books of the schools for the inspiration of the youth of the republic. The passage beginning " Venerable men, you have come down to us from a former generation," it is said, so thrilled the audience that one could see the play of light and shade as it swept over the sea of upturned faces before the speaker. The impression which this speech made upon those who heard it was probably more vivid than that left by any other of his later occasional orations.

Another splendid display of his eloquence was the eulogy on Adams and Jefferson, delivered in Faneuil Hall, Boston, 1826. Of that speech, the passage which purports to be a speech delivered by John Adams when the signing of the Declaration of Independence was under discussion, it is explained that Webster deliberately invented the whole. Many school-boys have declaimed the immortal words beginning " Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish," under the impression that these were the real words of John Adams ; but Webster never pretended that they were. In a letter to an inquiring friend, written in 1846, Webster said: "The Congress of the Revolution sat with closed doors; its proceedings were made known to the public from time to time by printing its journal, but the debates were not published. So far as I know, there is not existing in print or manuscript the speech or any part or fragment of the speech delivered by Mr. Adams on the question of the Declaration of Independence." Webster goes on to say : " The speech was written by me in my house in Boston the day before the delivery of the discourse in Faneuil Hall. A poor substitute I am sure it would appear to be if we could now see the speech actually made by Mr. Adams on that transcendentally important occasion."

It has been said by some of the indiscreet and intemperate admirers of Webster's genius that many if not all of his greatest orations were composed upon the spur of the moment and that his greatest efforts were purely extemporaneous and suggested by the circumstances immediately about him. I have somewhere seen an anecdote to this effect : His oration on Alexander Hamilton was delivered at a public dinner in New York, and when he approached that passage in which he used the memorable words applied to Hamilton, " He smote the rock of the national resources and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth," etc., in making a gesture, the orator broke a drinking-glass and cut his finger, and as he slowly wrapped a napkin about the bleeding wound, the figure of the gushing stream was suggested by the incident. This is clearly a misconception, as Webster had in his mind the figure of Moses smiting the rock in the wilderness. And we have the assurance of those who knew him best, Mr. George T.

Curtis and Mr. Peter Harvey, that all his great forensic and oratorical efforts were the result of careful preparation. Webster himself said of his reply to Hayne, that as a matter of fact that speech had been lying in his mind and in the pigeon-holes of his desk for more than a year. It was prepared for another occasion, but was not delivered ; and Webster declared that if Mr. Hayne had intended to make a speech to fit that which Webster had already, he could not have come nearer to it than he did. Once when asked if certain of his speeches were delivered at brief notice, he opened his great eyes with an. expression of astonishment and said : " Young man, there is no such thing as extemporaneous acquisition." Webster spoke extemporaneously constantly while he was in the Senate, and he intended to C(jnvey by this remark that knowledge could not be acquired without study, and that study was necessarv to acquire the knowledge which informed all of his speeches.

It has been said, too, that in oratory Webster was a sculptor rather than a painter. This seems a too subtile definition. Certainly many of his orations glow with light and color, and his powers of description were often simply pictorial. In his reply to Hayne he pictures the patriots of Massachusetts and South Carolina marching shoulder to shoulder as they went through the Revolution, or standing hand in hand around the administration of Washington, and in the wonderful peroration of that great address, as he raised his eyes to the glass skylight of the Senate chamber and saw the colors of the Republic waving from the flagstaff, he exclaimed : " Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold 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 lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured," This was full of color.

Webster loved color and bigness and vastness. Among all his creatures on his farm none were so dear to him as his great oxen, and in his last days he had- these slow-moving animals driven up to his window where he could look at them, hear their breathings and gaze into their great eyes as he reclined within. The illimitable sea with its mysterious vagueness, Niagara with its terrific downpour and its resounding roar, and the great peaks of the White Mountains, all moved him profoundly. The cathedrals of Europe and the enormous bulks of masonry that he saw in England seemed to have impressed him more than anything else he beheld. These appealed to his sense of grandeur ; their mere greatness may be said to be akin to the somewhat grandiose quality of his own disposition. He was always monumental ; even his familiar talk was pervaded with a certain unexpectedness of illustration that was most original.

On one occasion when the Senate had had an all-night session and the Senators were dozing in their chairs, one who sat near Webster, aroused by the noise of the janitor opening the shutters in the upper part of the great room, said : " What is that — are they letting in the day-light?" "They are letting out the darkness," was Webster's reply in his deepest, grummest, bass voice, as he nodded in his chair.