Daniel Webster

Front matter

Qass Book

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT

AMERICAN CRISIS BIOGRAPHIES

Preface

Although in truth one of the most human of men, Daniel Webster is, and must remain, for students of American history primarily the orator, jurist, and statesman; and while in this brief biography an attempt has been made to convey some impression of the personal characteristics of the man, and especially of the conditions surrounding his earlier life, space has been devoted principally to the multifold public activities by which his ultimate distinction was attained. The subject is old, and yet ever fresh. The shelves of our libraries groan under the masses of books relating to it. Yet neglected or largely unused materials are still being brought to light j and so intricately do the life and work of the man enter into the very texture of the nation's history that they are very nearly as incapable of full and final interpretation as is that history itself.

In the preparation of the present sketch liberal use has been made of the earlier biographies, especially of the two excellent ones by Curtis and Lodge, of the standard histories, and of monographs. The very abundant source materials, however, — chiefly the writings of Webster and of his contemporaries, — have been the principal reliance. Since the publication, in 1902, of Professor Van Tyne's " Letters of Daniel Webster," and, in 1903, of the eighteen -volume " National Edition" of Webster's " Writings and Speeches," these sources have been almost entirely available in print. In the bibliography which is appended there is an «mju-

6 PEEFACE

meration of the most useful materials of various kinds. Iu the foot-notes the title " Works of Webster " is employed to denote the six-volume edition published originally in 1851, that of " Writings and Speeches " to denote the more recent and complete edition. The smaller set is likely to be found in many places where the larger one is not available, and for this reason it has been deemed desirable to give references to both.

To Professor Van Tyne, who, according to original plans, was to have written this volume, I am indebted for a number of helpful suggestions and for the use of transcripts and other materials gathered by him during the preparation of his admirable collection of the " Letters." My thanks should be expressed, also, for courtesies received from the authorities of the Library of Congress, the New Hampshire Historical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Boston Athenaeum.

Frederic Austin Ogg.

Cambridge, Mass., January 10, 1914.

Contents

I. Parentage and Youth ... 15

II. Preparation for the Law ... 35

III. The Young Practitioner ... 60

Chapter I

In the history of New England, hardly less than in that of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, the termination of French dominion in America in 1763 was an epoch-marking event. In the one region as in the other the tension which through a century had been growing ever more threatening between the westward pressure of the seaboard, English-speaking population, and the stubbornly resisting powers of French and Indian allies was brought definitely to an end, and vast stretches of virgin territory, hitherto largely inaccessible, were thrown open for uncontested and profitable exploitation. At the beginning, in 1754, of the last and greatest phase of the Anglo-French combat in America an aggregate area not much in excess of a third of the 66,424 square miles now comprised in the six states of New England was occupied, in even the smallest measure, by English colonists, and everywhere the frontier line still hovered very near the Atlantic. The regions still awaiting population included virtually the whole of Vermont ; all of New Hampshire save a strip along the coast, the Merrimac valley northward to New Hampton, and a bit of the Connecticut valley in the southwest; all of Maine except an irregular coastal strip from the Piscataqua to

Penobscot Bay ; and broad areas in western and northern Massachusetts. 1 The aggregate population of the New England colonies was approximately 400,000.

At the close of the war there came an outburst of expansive enterprise in consequence of which there was wrought a remarkable sectional transformation. Although within the settled portions of every one of the colonies, with the possible exception of Ehode Island, there was still an abundance of vacant and tillable land, men of rugged fibre and restless spirit, accustomed to pioneer conditions and impatient with the restraints of a rapidly conventionalizing society, cut loose by the hundreds from their uncongenial or unpromising surroundings and went off with their families and possessions into the mountains and valleys of the interior in quest of land, livelihood, and larger opportunity. The passing and repassing of colonial troops through the disputed northern territory during the course of the war had served to familiarize many people with the resources of the back country, and the upshot was that, long in advance of the formal signature of peace, the royal governors of New York and New Hampshire were driving a lucrative business in the granting of land tracts to thrifty speculators and settlers. In the single year, 1761, not fewer than sixty townships were granted on the western side of the Connecticut and eighteen on the eastern. The grantees begau forthwith the quest of purchasers and tenants and thereby stimulated substantially an influx which was already setting in from the adjacent province of Massachusetts, and from remoter Connecticut and Ehode Island. All fear of French attack and, for the moment, of Indian outbreak, was removed. The task 1 Matthews, " The Expansion of New England," chap. 4.

as it presented itself to the prospective settler was one simply of occupying cheap lauds and wresting from a niggardly soil the means of a plain but comfortable existence — a task from which the average New Enelander of the eighteenth century was in no wise disposed to shrink. Only with the northward and westward rush of settlers after 1760, so the historian of New Hampshire tells us, began the prosperity of the later Granite State ; 1 and one would hardly go far wrong in making the same affirmation concerning New England as a whole.

In 1749 a band of pioneer farmers of Kingston, in southeastern New Hampshire, had obtained from Governor Benning Wentworth the grant of a township near the centre of the province, so located that it included the spot where the Merrimac River is formed by the confluence of the Pemigewasset and the Winnipiseogee, some eighteen miles north of the present town of Concord. The leader of the group was a certain Colonel Ebenezer Stevens, in whose honor the first settlement established, Stevenstown (incorporated under the name of Salisbury in 1767), was named ; and among the settlers who after a few years were attracted thither was a stalwart frontiersman who, it appears, when a child had been bound to Stevens as an apprentice, Captain Ebenezer Webster. Ebenezer Webster was a typical eighteenth-century New England soldier- farmer. Born in Kingston in 1739, already by 1763 he had crowded into his twenty-four years more adventure than is allotted the ordinary man of three score and ten. His father was a farmer and freeholder of the same name, and his remoter ancestry can still be traced back, in the town records of Hamp- 1 Belknap, 4< History of New Hampshire," Vol. II, p. 312.

ton, Kingston (now East Kingston), and Salisbury, to a Thomas Webster, who settled at Hampton, on the New Hampshire coast, only sixteen years after the coming of the Mayflower. The family, although resident in England some generations before emigration, was apparently of Lowland Scotch origin.

The boyhood of Ebenezer Webster fell in an exciting period — the years when all New England was aroused by King George's War, and, in particular, by the exploit of Pepperell and his men at Louisburg. There was little time, and less opportunity, for the acquirement of an education. The boy, as a pupil, never saw the inside of a schoolroom. He none the less picked up a good deal of knowledge of a homely and practical sort, and even became in a limited degree a reader and student of books. Some of the earliest records of the town of Salisbury are in his handwriting. After the age of twelve or fifteen he lived for several years in the family of Colonel Stevens, until, apparently in 1760, at the age of twenty-one, he enlisted in one of the famous companies of " rangers " commanded by Robert Rogers, which accompanied Sir Jeffrey Amherst on his invasion of Canada. Upon the conclusion of the war the young man, now a captain, returned to Kingston, where he married, in 1761, Mehitable Smith. Some months later, accompanied by his wife, and by several fellow- townsmen — most of them, like himself, but lately thrown out of military employment — he traversed the almost unbroken way to his patron's wilderness settlement, Stevenstown. The new township, as originally laid out, comprised a tract four miles in width along the west bank of the Merrimac, and extended to the southwest a distance of some nine miles, almost to the summit of Kearsarge Mountain.

PAKENTAGE AND YOUTH 19

To Webster fell the northernmost portion of it, — so that after he had erected his log cabin on a hill three miles west of the Merrimac and lighted his fire, "his smoke ascended nearer to the North Star than that of any other of his Majesty's New England subjects." ' His nearest civilized neighbor on the north was at Montreal.

Life in most parts of rural New England in the eighteenth century was hard and prosaic. Nowhere, perhaps, was it more so than among the hills of central New Hampshire. The soil was shallow and unproductive. Eoads and bridges scarcely existed. The winters were long and forbidding. Of newspapers, books, schools, and other agencies of entertainment and information, there were few or none. There was not even entire security, for although the French no longer threatened from Montreal or Quebec, in the woods lurked savages ready to steal and destroy, if not actually to burn and kill. As late as 1775 a frontiersman's wife was slain by marauding redskins within three miles of the Webster homestead. Unceasing toil, recurring hardship, and not infrequent danger — conditions which only men and women of the toughest fibre could hope to meet and overcome — were the certain lot of every commonwealth -builder of northern and western New England a hundred and fifty years ago.

"My first clear and distinct recollection of my father's appearance," wrote Daniel Webster in 1829, " was when he was at the age of fifty. I think it was rather striking ; he was tall, six feet, or six feet within half an inch, erect, with a broad and full chest, hair still of an unchanged black, features rather large and prominent. He had a decisive air and bearing, partly

1 " Autobiography of Daniel Webster." Webster, " Private Correspondence, " Vol. I, p. 5.

the effect, I suppose, of early soldiership. . . . The last time I ever saw General Stark, he paid me the compliment of saying that my complexion was like that of my father, and that his was of that cast, so convenient for a soldier, that burnt gunpowder did not change it." 1 Writing in 1846, Webster said of his father : ' ' He had in him what I collect to have been the character of some of the old Puritans. He was deeply religious, but not sour. On the contrary, goodhumored, facetious, showing even in his age, with a contagious laugh, teeth all as white as alabaster, gentle, soft, playful, and yet having a heart in him that he seemed to have borrowed from a lion. He could frown ; a frown it was ; but cheerfulness, goodhumor, and smiles composed his most usual aspect." 2 As a man of sound common sense, of correct judgment, and of resolute character, a patriotic, devout, high-minded citizen, the elder Webster early achieved a solid reputation throughout the section of the country in which he lived. In 1768 he was chosen by his neighbors moderator of the Salisbury town-meeting, an office to which he was thereafter elected forty-three times, serving for the last time in 1803. In March, 1774, after ten years of backwoods existence, Mrs. Webster died. Of the five children she had borne, two — a son and a daughter — had died young, while three — a daughter, Susannah, and two sons, David and Joseph — survived. Within the year (in August) the father married again, the second wife being Abigail Eastman, a woman, according to all accounts, of more than ordinary force of will and loftiness of soul.

1 " Autobiography of Daniel Webster.' 1 Webster, "Private Correspondence," Vol. I, pp. 4-6.

2 Webster to Blatchford, May 3, 1846. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 229.

PABENTAGE AND YOUTH 21

Early in 1775 the storm of war broke upon the colonies. Among the first patriots to respond to the call to arms which followed Concord and Lexington was Captain Ebenezer Webster. The town of Salisbury had so grown that it was now able to muster a company of two hundred men, and throughout the larger portion of the war this company, raised by the eftbrts of Webster from among his neighbors and kindred, marched and bivouacked and fought under his command. At the operations about Boston in 1775-1776, at White Plains in 1776, with General Stark at Bennington in 1777, and at West Point on the occasion of the discovery of Arnold's treason in 1780 — not to mention a fruitless expedition to aid in the relief of Ticonderoga in 1777 — Captain Webster rendered services of an intrepid and highly honorable character. The proudest moment of his career came when, on the night following the exposure of Arnold's treachery, he was selected to stand guard in front of General Washington's headquarters, and when, if tradition is to be accredited, the general declared to him, " Captain Webster, I believe I can trust you." In the New Hampshire militia he rose, by 1785, to the rank of colonel.

Interspersed with military services were not only hurried intervals of farming but labors of a civic nature. By his neighbors Webster was sent as a delegate to the convention which framed the first New Hampshire constitution. More than once he sat as a member of committees having charge of the regulation of prices, the prevention of forestalling, and the raising of the town's quota of troops. Three times, in all, he was chosen first selectman, and three times town clerk. And with the establishment of a state government the range of his political activities was broadened. During and after the war he served four terms in the lower house of the state legislature and four in the upper one. In 1788 he was a member of the Exeter convention called to consider the ratification of the proposed Constitution of the United States, and in the adjourned session of that convention, at Concord, in the following June, he is reputed to have given material assistance in carrying the day for the new frame of government. In 1789 he served as a presidential elector, and from 1791 until his death, in April, 1806, he was continued by the suffrage of his neighbors in the office of judge of the court of common pleas for the county of Hillsborough.

Meanwhile certain changes had come about in the economy of the Webster household. With the growth of the family a larger and better dwelling became a necessity, and shortly before the close of the war a " frame ' ' house was built, not far from the old structure of logs. The new building was a typical New England farmhouse of the old days — " one story high, clapboarded, with the chimney in the centre, the door in the middle of the south side, four rooms on the ground floor, and a lean-to in the rear for a kitchen." ! The evidence is not entirely conclusive, but it would appear that, of the five children borne by Captain Webster's second wife, two first saw the light in the old log house, two others in the frame dwelling, and the fifth in a house three miles to the eastward to which the family

1 McMaster, " Daniel Webster," p. 6. The house, still standing, is located four miles from the centre of the town of Franklin on the Salisbury road. In recent years it has been leased to various persons by a building and loan association by which it is owned. In 1912 an organization was formed, under the presidency of Ex- Senator William E. Chandler, for the purchase and preservation of the homestead.

PAKENTAGE AND YOUTH

removed in 1783. Of the five, three were daughters — Mehitable, Abigail, and Sarah. Of the two suns, Ezekiel was born in the log house, April 11, 1780 ; Daniel, in the frame structure, January 18, 1782.

The piece of ground to which Captain Webster removed during the year following Daniel's birth was known in later days as " Elms Farm." It was situated in a valley two and a half miles to the south of the head of the Merrimac. At the time when the Wei >st ers made it their homestead, it was included within the township of Salisbury, although subsequently it fell within that part of the parent township which, in 1828, was set off under the name of Franklin. From a sheeppasture, which commanded the most extensive outlook from the farm, Ascutney Mountain, to the northwest, in Vermont, was plainly visible, as, to the northeast, was the snow-capped summit of Mount Washington. Altogether, with hills and valleys and distant mountain stretches, the physical environment amidst which it was the fortune of the boy Daniel to grow up contained much that was impressive, even awe-inspiring. That his earliest recollection, recorded in his autobiography, should have been one of those spectacular visitations of Nature— a devastating Hood— to which the New England hills are liable, is hardly surprising. The spell cast over him by rugged, relentless Nature as he studied her and wondered at her subtle power, never left him, and perhaps it is not too much to fancy that to its influence he owed something of that ruggedness and force which were to make of hi in a veritable giant among men.

Ezekiel Webster was the common sort of New England boy, sturdy, self-reliant, ready at the age of ten or twelve to bear a hand in the rough task of maintaining the family group. But the younger Daniel seemed distinctly less fortunate and less promising. Delicate, even sickly, in his infancy, as a boy he was altogether incapable of manual labor. He accordingly was allowed, and encouraged, to spend his time in the fields and woods at play. Racing over the meadows, stealing among the trees to watch the habits of animals and birds, fishing, and occasionally riding horseback up and down the corn rows which his father was ploughing, he gradually accumulated a larger vitality than fond parents had dared hope for him, and at the same time he filled his mind with a lore not then, or at any time, satisfactorily to be had from books. As an almost inseparable companion, the boy had, through many years, a curious old character by the name of Robert Wise— an unlettered adventurer who had fought in several European wars, had served with the New Hampshire levies in the Revolution, and had at last settled for the remainder of his days in a little cottage located on a corner of Elms Farm. Between the two a bargain was quickly struck whereby the old soldier was to instruct the boy in angling and other outdoor, sports, as well as to entertain him from an apparently inexhaustible fund of experiences and anecdotes, in return for which young Daniel was to read to his companion, " still a true Briton," such accounts of British affairs and deeds of valor as could be wrung from the meagre newspapers of the day. "Alas, poor Robert," runs a passage in the autobiography of later years, "I have never so attained the narrative art as to hold the attention of others as thou, with thy Yorkshire tongue, hast held

mine." * But all was not mere play and entertainment. There

1 Webster, "Private Correspondence," Vol. I, p. 16.

was the problem of an education. In his autobiography Webster tells us that he was unable to remember when or by whom he was taught to read, and that he never could recollect a time when he was not able to read the Bible. His supposition was that he was taught by his mother or his elder sisters, and the instruction must have begun at the tender age of three or four. Of opportunity for further education there was none save such as was afforded by the extremely inadequate town schools of the vicinity. Ambitious, even as a child, to extend his range of information, and given every encouragement by the members of his family, the boy attended these schools as regularly as health and weather permitted. That district of the town of Salisbury in which the Webster family lived contained, indeed, three log schoolhouses. The itinerant masters, however, who elsewhere came from time to time into such communities and dispensed learning in its simpler forms seldom penetrated so far as the Webster community, so that the keeping of schools fell almost exclusively to various small farmers or storekeepers who sought thereby to eke out their precarious livelihood. One may well believe that such teachers, to employ Webster's own phrase, were " sufficiently indifferent." In these schools, he says, "nothing was taught but reading and writing ; and, as to these, the first I generally could perform better than the teacher, and the last a good master could hardly instruct me in ; writing was so laborious, irksome, and repulsive an occupation to me always. My masters used to tell me that they feared, after all, my fingers were destined for the plough-tail." 1 The first of these masters, Thomas Chase, is said to have been able to read and write with

1 Webster, "Private Correspondence, " Vol. I, p. 7.

fair facility, but to have floundered hopelessly with his spelling. Another, James Tappan, who occasionally " boarded " with the Websters, was more proficient.

For most children attendance at school was restricted to the eight or ten weeks of the year during which instruction was being offered in the immediate neighborhood. While still but six or eight years of age, however, Daniel persisted in walking, even in the depth of winter, to and from a school two and a half or three miles distant. And when no opportunity was to be had within even this distance, the boy's indulgent father sometimes made arrangements for him to board for a few weeks with a family living in the vicinity of a school that was more remote. ' ' A good deal of this, ' ; the autobiography records, ' ' was an extra care, more than had been bestowed on my elder brothers, and originating in a conviction of the slenderness and frailty of my constitution, which was thought not likely ever to allow me to pursue robust occupation." l

The sacrifice was well repaid. The boy was not a prodigy, but he learned rapidly and remembered unfailingly all that he had been taught. When, upon one occasion, a master, as a special inducement to industry, made an offer of a jack-knife to the pupil who at a specified time should be able to recite the largest number of verses of Scripture, Daniel easily carried off the prize, and without being allowed, so we are assured, to reel off the full quota of passages which he had tucked away in his mind for the occasion. Outside of school he read as widely as the restricted opportunities of the frontier permitted. His father and certain other men of standing in the community established a small circulating library, and from this Daniel 1 Webster, "Private Correspondence," Vol. I, p. 7.

obtained a variety of books, most of them of fair quality and readableness. Among them was Addison's " Spectator," which, by reason of the boy's decided taste for poetry, was a godsend, although he tells us that it perplexed him not a little that the essayist should have taken so great pains to demoustrate the beauty of Chevy Chase, a thing which was so perfectly self-evident. At the age of ten or twelve he could repeat from memory the greater portion of the psalms and hymns of Dr. Watts, and not seldom in his later life did he draw upon them for apt quotation. " I remember," he records in the autobiography, " that my father brought home from some of the lower towns Pope's ' Essay on Man,' published in a sort of pamphlet. I took it, and very soon could repeat it, from the beginning to end. We had so few books that to read them once or twice was nothing. We thought they were all to be got by heart." ' Even the arrival of the yearly almanac was an event, and upon one occasion it came near being attended witli disastrous consequences. Rising by candle-light at two o'clock one morning to ascertain a word in the third line of the quatrain set down at the top of the page devoted to April, young Daniel accidentally set the house on fire, and it was only by his father's presence of mind that the property, and perhaps the family, was saved. The boy's chagrin was not lessened by tindiscovery that in the dispute in which he and Ezekiel had been engaged relative to the April quatrain he had been in the wrong.

When Daniel was not more than eight years of age

there fell into his hands a copy of the recently adopted

Constitution of the United States. From his father,

whose hard-headed reasoning in the Concord oonven-

1 Webster, " Private Correspondence," Vol. I, p. 8.

lion of two years before had helped turn the tide in favor of a ratification of the instrument, the boy must have picked up a good deal of information concerning the pressing political problems of the time. He had never seen the text of the new frame of government, however, until one day, in a little store kept by William Hoyt, he bought for a few cents a small cotton pockethandkerchief, on the two sides of which was printed the Constitution, embellished with crude cuts of flags and other emblems. It was a gaudy affair, proudly exhibited by the owner, but roundly complained of by the good housewife on the ground that it " wouldn't wash." The printed matter was painstakingly spelled out and studied, and from it the boy learned, as was laughingly remarked in later years, " that there was a constitution, — or that there were thirteen states." Relating the incident, in 1850, Webster testified that this was his earliest acquaintance with the Constitution, adding naively that he had "known more or less of it ever since." ■

Until his fourteenth year the life of the boy flowed in its accustomed channels. " A great deal of the time," he records, u I was sick, and when well was exceedingly slender, and apparently of feeble system. I 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 was expected to do something." 2 There appeared no hope of an education beyond such as might be afforded by the agendas that have been described. In 1791, however, there had come an improvement in the affairs of the elder Webster which eventually opened

1 Webster, " Private Correspondence," Vol. II, p. 398. * Webster, Ibid., Vol. I, p. 9.

PAEENTAGE AND YOUTH 29

the way to a wider opportunity for the son. Possessed in ever increasing measure of the confidence and favor of his neighbors, Ebeuezer Webster was elevated in 1791 to a ''side," i. e., an associate, justiceship in the court of common pleas for the county in which he resided. There was attached to the office a salary of three or four hundred dollars a year. This acquisition made a world of difference in the economy of the Webster household, and gradually there took shape in the Judge's mind a plan for the further education of his youngest son. All of the sons save Daniel and Ezekiel were long since settled in life. As between the two who remained, Daniel seemed perhaps the more promising ; at any rate, his obvious lack of adaptation to the life of the farmer pointed him out as the natural recipient of a paternal encouragement which could not be stretched to cover both.

In July, 1795, the father gave to Daniel his first intimation of the special opportunities that were to be offered him. The circumstances attending the incident left an impression which never faded from Webster's memory. It was a hot July day and the boy was in the field with his father, giving such assistance as he could in the haying. " About the middle of the forenoon," he records, "the Honorable Abie! Foster, M. C, who lived in Canterbury, six miles off, called at the house, and came into the field to see my father. He was a worthy man, college-learned, and had been a minister, but was not a person of any considerable natural power. My father was his friend and supporter. He talked awhile in the field, and went on his way. When he was gone, my father called me to him, and we sat down beneath the elm, on a haycock. He said, ' My son, that is a worthy man ; he is a member of Congress ; he goes to Philadelphia and gets six dollars a day, while I toil here. It is because he had an education, which I never had. If I had had his early education, I should have been in Philadelphia in his place. I came near it as it was. But I missed it, and now I must work here/ ' My dear father,' said I, ' you shall not work. Brother and I will work for you, and will wear our hands out, and you shall rest.' And I remember to have cried, and I cry now at the recollection. i My child,' said he, ' it is of no importance to me. I now live but for my children. I could not give your elder brothers the advantages of knowledge, but I can do something for you. Exert yourself, improve your opportunities, learn, learn, and, when I am gone, you will not need to go through the hardships which I have undergone, and which have made me an old man before my time." 1