Webster's Seventh of March Speech and the Secession Movement, 1850 Part 2

Exaggerated though some of these expressions of approval may have been, they balance the exaggerated vituperation of Webster in the anti-slavery press; and the extremes of approval and disapproval both concur in recognizing the widespread effect of the speech. "No speech ever delivered in Congress produced... so beneficial a change of opinion. The change of, feeling and temperament wrought in Congress by this speech is miraculous." [103]

The contemporary testimony to Webster's checking of disunion is substantiated by the conclusions of Petigru of South Carolina, Cobb of Georgia in 1852, Allen of Pennsylvania in 1853, and by Stephens's mature judgment of "the profound sensation upon the public mind throughout the Union made by Webster's 7th of March speech. The friends of the Union under the Const.i.tution were strengthened in their hopes and inspired with renewed energies." [104] In 1866 Foote wrote, "The speech produced beneficial effects everywhere." "His statement of facts was generally looked upon as unanswerable; his argumentative conclusions appeared to be inevitable; his conciliatory tone.. . softened the sensibilities of all patriots." [105] "He seems to have gauged more accurately [than most] the grave dangers which threatened the republic and... the fearful consequences which must follow its disruption", was Henry Wilson's later and wiser judgment. [106] "The general judgment," said Senator h.o.a.r in 1899, "seems to be coming to the conclusion that Webster differed from the friends of freedom of his time not in a weaker moral sense, but only in a larger, and profounder prophetic vision." "He saw what no other man saw, the certainty of civil war. I was one of those who... judged him severely, but I have learned better." "I think of him now... as the orator who bound fast with indissoluble strength the bonds of union."

[107]

Modern writers, North and South-Garrison, Chadwick, T. C. Smith, Merriam, for instance [108]--now recognize the menace of disunion in 1850 and the service of Webster in defending the Union. Rhodes, though condemning Webster's support of the fugitive slave bill, recognizes that the speech was one of the few that really altered public opinion and won necessary Northern support for the Compromise. "We see now that in the War of the Rebellion his principles were mightier than those of Garrison." "It was not the Liberty or Abolitionist party, but the Union party that won." [109]

Postponement of secession for ten years gave the North preponderance in population, voting power, production, and transportation; new party organization; and convictions which made man-power and economic resources effective. The Northern lead of four million people in 1850 had increased to seven millions by 1860. In 1850, each section had thirty votes in the Senate; in 1860, the North had a majority of six, due to the admission of California, Oregon, and Minnesota. In the House of Representatives, the North had added seven to her majority. The Union states and territories built during the decade 15,000 miles of railroad, to 7,000 or 8,000 in the eleven seceding states. In s.h.i.+pping, the North in 1860 built about 800 vessels to the seceding states' 200. In 1860, in the eleven most important industries for war, Chadwick estimates that the Union states produced $735,500,000; the seceding states $75,250,000, "a manufacturing productivity eleven times as great for the North as for the South". [110] In general, during the decade, the census figures for 1860 show that since 1850 the North had increased its man-power, transportation, and economic production from two to fifty times as fast as the South, and that in 1860 the Union states were from two to twelve times as powerful as the seceding states.

Possibly Southern secessionists and Northern abolitionists had some basis for thinking that the North would let the "erring sisters depart in peace" in 1850. Within the next ten years, however, there came a decisive change. The North, exasperated by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the high-handed acts of Southerners in Kansas in 1856, and the Dred Scott dictum of the Supreme Court in 1857, felt that these things amounted to a repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the opening up of the territory to slavery. In 1860 Northern conviction, backed by an effective, thorough party platform on a Union basis, swept the free states. In 1850, it was a "Const.i.tutional Union" party that accepted the Compromise and arrested secession in the South; and Webster, foreseeing a "remodelling of parties", had prophesied that "there must be a Union party". [111] Webster's spirit and speeches and his strengthening of federal power through Supreme Court cases won by his arguments had helped to furnish the conviction which underlay the Union Party of 1860 and 1964. His consistent opposition to nullification and secession, and his appeal to the Union and to the Const.i.tution during twenty years preceding the Civil War--from his reply to Hayne to his seventh of March speech--had developed a spirit capable of making economic and political power effective.

Men inclined to sneer at Webster for his interest in manufacturing, farming, and material prosperity, may well remember that in his mind, and more slowly in the minds of the North, economic progress went hand in hand with the development of union and of liberty secured by law.

Misunderstandings regarding both the political crisis and the personal character of the man are already disappearing as fact replaces fiction, as "truth gets a hearing", in the fine phrase of Wendell Phillips. There is nothing about Daniel Webster to be hidden. Not moral blindness but moral insight and sound political principles reveal themselves to the reader of Webster's own words in public speech and unguarded private letter. One of those great men who disdained to vindicate himself, he does not need us but we need him and his vision that Liberty comes through Union, and healing through cooperation, not through hate.

Whether we look to the material progress of the North from 1850 to 1860 or to its development in "imponderables", Webster's policy and his power over men's thoughts and deeds were essential factors in the ultimate triumph of the Union, which would have been at least dubious had secession been attempted in 1850. It was a soldier, not the modern orator, who first said that "Webster shotted our guns". A letter to Senator h.o.a.r from another Union soldier says that he kept up his heart as he paced up and down as sentinel in an exposed place by repeating over and over, "Liberty and Union now and forever, one and inseparable".

[112] Hosmer tells us that he and his boyhood friends of the North in 1861 "did not argue much the question of the right of secession", but that it was the words of Webster's speeches, "as familiar to us as the sentences of the Lord's prayer and scarcely less consecrated,... with which we sprang to battle". Those boys were not ready in 1850. The decisive human factors in the Civil War were the men bred on the profound devotion to the Union which Webster shared with others equally patriotic, but less profoundly logical, less able to mould public opinion. Webster not only saw the vision himself; he had the genius to make the plain American citizen see that liberty could come through union and not through disunion. Moreover, there was in Webster and the Compromise of 1850 a spirit of conciliation, and therefore there was on the part of the North a belief that they had given the South a "square deal", and a corresponding indignation at the attempts in the next decade to expand slavery by violating the Compromises of 1820 and 1850.

So, by 1860, the decisive border states and Northwest were ready to stand behind the Union.

When Lincoln, born in a border state, coming to manhood in the Northwest, and bred on Webster's doctrine,--"the Union is paramount",--accepted for the second time the Republican nomination and platform, he summed up the issues of the war, as he had done before, in Webster's words. Lincoln, who had grown as masterly in his choice of words as he had become profound in his vision of issues, used in 1864 not the more familiar and rhetorical phrases of the reply to Hayne, but the briefer, more incisive form, "Liberty and Union", of Webster's "honest, truth-telling, Union speech" on the 7th of March, 1850. [113]

HERBERT DARLING FOSTER.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Cf. Parton with Lodge on intellect, morals, indolence, drinking, 7th of March speech, Webster's favorite things in England; references, note 63, below.]

[Footnote 2: In the preparation of this article, ma.n.u.scripts have been used from the following collections: the Greenough, Hammond, and Clayton (Library of Congress); Winthrop and Appleton (Ma.s.s. Hist. Soc.); Garrison (Boston Public Library); N.H. Hist. Soc.; Dartmouth College; Middletown (Conn.) Hist. Soc.; Mrs. Alfred E. Wyman.]

[Footnote 3: Bennett, Dec. 1, 1848, to Partridge, Norwich University.

MS. Dartmouth.]

[Footnote 4: Houston, Nullification in South Carolina, p. 141. Further evidence of Webster's thesis that abolitionists had developed Southern reaction in Phillips, South in the Building of the Nation, IV, 401-403; and unpublished letters approving Webster's speech.]

[Footnote 5: Calhoun, Corr., Amer. Hist. a.s.soc., Annual Report (1899, vol 11.), pp. 1193-1194.]

[Footnote 6: To Crittenden, Dec. 20, 1849, Smith, polit. Hist. Slavery, I. 122; Winthrop MSS., Jan. 6, 1850.]

[Footnote 7: Calhoun, Corr., p. 781; cf. 764-766, 778, 780, 783-784.]

[Footnote 8: Cong. Globe, XXI. 451-455, 463; Corr., p. 784. On Calhoun's att.i.tude, Ames, Calhoun, pp. 6-7; Stephenson, in Yale Review, 1919, p. 216; Newbury in South Atlantic Quarterly, XI. 259; Hamer, Secession Movement in South Carolina, 1847-1852, pp. 49-54.]

[Footnote 9: Calhoun, Corr., Amer. Hist. a.s.soc., Annual Report (1899, vol. II), pp. 1210-1212; Toombs, Corr., (id., 1911, vol. II), pp. 188, 217; Coleman, Crittenden, I. 363; Hamer, pp. 55-56, 46-48, 54, 82-83; Ames, Calhoun, pp. 21-22, 29; Claiborne, Quitman, H. 36-39.]

[Footnote 10: Hearon, Miss. and the Compromise of 1850, p. 209.]

[Footnote 11: A letter to Webster, Oct. 22, 1851, Greenough MSS., shows the strength of Calhoun's secession ideas. Hamer, p. 125, quotes part.]

[Footnote 12: Hamer, p. 142; Hearon, p. 220.]

[Footnote 13: Mar. 6, 1850. Laws (Miss.), pp. 521-526.]

[Footnote 14: Claiborne, Quitman, IL 37; Hearon, p. 161 n.]

[Footnote 15: Hearon, pp. 180-181; Claiborne, Quitman, II. 51-52.]

[Footnote 16: Nov. 10, 1850, Hearon, pp. 178-180; 1851, pp. 209-212.]

[Footnote 17: Dec. 10, Southern Rights a.s.soc. Hearon, pp. 183-187.]

[Footnote 18: Claiborne, Quitman, II. 52.]

[Footnote 19: July 1, 1849. Corr., p. 170 (Amer. Hist. a.s.soc., Annual Report, 1911, vol. II.).]

[Footnote 20: Johnston, Stephens, pp. 238-239, 244; Smith, Political History of Slavery, 1. 121.]

[Footnote 21: Laws (Ga.), 1850, pp. 122, 405-410.]

[Footnote 22: Johnston, Stephens, p. 247.]

[Footnote 23: Corr., pp. 184,193-195, 206-208, July 21. Newspapers, see Brooks, in Miss. Valley Hist. Review, IX. 289.]

[Footnote 24: Phillips, Georgia and State Rights, pp. 163-166.]

[Footnote 25: Ames, Doc.u.ments, pp. 271-272; Hearon, p. 190.]

[Footnote 26: 1854, Amer. Hist. Review, VIII. 92-97; 1857, Johnston, Stephens, pp. 321-322; infra, pp. 267, 268.]

[Footnote 27: Hammond MSS., Jan. 27, Feb. 8; Virginia Resolves, Feb. 12; Ambler, Sectionalism in Virginia, p. 246; N. Y. Tribune, June 14; M. R.

H. Garnett, Union Past and Future, published between Jan. 24 and Mar. 7.

Alabama: Hodgson, Cradle of the Confederacy, p. 281; Dubose, Yancey, pp.

247-249, 481; Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, p. 13; Cobb, Corr., pp. 193-195, 207. President Tyler of the College of William and Mary kindly furnished evidence of Garnett's authors.h.i.+p; see J. M.

Garnett, in Southern Literary Messenger, I. 255.]

[Footnote 28: Resolutions, Feb. 12, 1850; Acts, 1850, pp. 223-224; 1851, p. 201.]

[Footnote 29: Stephens, Corr., p. 192; Globe, XXII. II. 1208.]

[Footnote 30: Boston Daily Advertiser, Feb. 23.]

[Footnote 31: South Carolina, Acts, 1849, p, 240, and the following Laws or Acts, all 1850: Georgia, pp. 418, 405-410, 122; Texas, pp. 93-94, 171; Tennessee, p. 572 (Globe, XXI. I. 417. Cole, Whig Party in the South, p. 161); Mississippi, pp. 526-528; Virginia, p. 233; Alabama, Weekly Tribune, Feb. 23, Daily, Feb. 25.]

[Footnote 32: White, Miss. Valley Hist. a.s.soc., III. 283.]

[Footnote 33: Senate Miscellaneous, 1849-1850, no. 24.]