Part 3

The filibuster of the 18th of February, Mann described as "a revolutionary proceeding". Its alarming effect on the members of the Cabinet was commented upon by the Boston Advertiser, February 19. The New York Tribune, February 20, recognized the determination of the South to secede unless the Missouri Compromise line were extended to the Pacific. February 22, the Springfield Republican declared that "if the Union cannot be preserved" without the extension of slavery, "we allow the tie of Union to be severed". It was on this day, that Webster decided "to make a Union speech and discharge a clear conscience".

That same week (apparently February 23) occurred the famous interview of Stephens and Toombs with Taylor which convinced the President that the Southern movement "means disunion". This was Taylor's judgment expressed to Weed and Hamlin, "ten minutes after the interview". A week later the President seemed to Horace Mann to be talking like a child about his plans to levy an embargo and blockade the Southern harbors and "save the Union". Taylor was ready to appeal to arms against "these Southern men in Congress are trying to bring on civil war" in connection with the critical Texas boundary question.

On this 23d of February, Greeley, converted from his earlier and characteristic optimism, wrote in his leading editorial: "instead of scouting or ridiculing as chimerical the idea of a Dissolution of the Union, we firmly believe that there are sixty members of Congress who this day desire it and are plotting to effect it. We have no doubt the Nashville Convention will be held and that the leading purpose of its authors is the separation of the slave states... with the formation of an independent Confederacy." "This plot... is formidable." He warned against "needless provocation which would supply weapons to the Disunionists". A private letter to Greeley from Washington, the same day, says: "H---- is alarmed and confident that blood will be spilt on the floor of the House. Many members go to the House armed every day. W---- is confident that Disunionism is now inevitable. He knows intimately nearly all the Southern members, is familiar with their views and sees the letters that reach them from their constituents. He says the most ultra are well backed up in their advices from home."

The same February 23, the Boston Advertiser quoted the Washington correspondence of the Journal of Commerce: "excitement pervades the whole South, and Southern members say that it has gone beyond their control, that their tone is moderate in comparison with that of their people". "Persons who condemn Mr. Clay's resolutions now trust to some vague idea that Mr. Webster can do something better." "If Mr. Webster has any charm by the magic influence of which he can control the ultraism, of the North and of the South, he cannot too soon try its effects." "If Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri go for the Southern movement, we shall have disunion and as much of war as may answer the purposes either of Northern or Southern fanaticism." On this Saturday, February 23, also, "several Southern members of Congress had a long and interesting interview with Mr. Webster". "The whole subject was discussed and the result is, that the limitations of a compromise have been examined, which are satisfactory to our Southern brethren. This is good news, and will surround Mr. Webster's position with an uncommon interest."

"Webster is the only man in the Senate who has a position which would enable him to present a plan which would be carried", said Pratt of Maryland. The National Intelligencer, which had hitherto maintained the safety of the Union, confessed by February 21 that "the integrity of the Union is at some hazard", quoting Southern evidence of this. On February 25, Foote, in proposing to the Senate a committee of thirteen to report some scheme of compromise, gave it as his conclusion from consultation with both houses, that unless something were done at once, power would pass from Congress.

II.

It was under these highly critical circumstances that Webster, on Sunday, February 24, the day on which he was accustomed to dine with his unusually well-informed friends, Stephens, Toombs, Clay and Hale, wrote to his only surviving son:

I am nearly broken down with labor and anxiety. I know not how to meet the present emergency, or with what weapons to beat down the Northern and Southern follies, now raging in equal extremes. If you can possibly leave home, I want you to be here, a day or two before I speak... I have poor spirits and little courage. Non sum qualis eram.

Mr. Lodge's account of this critical February period shows ignorance not only of the letter of February 24, but of the real situation. He relies upon von Holst instead of the documents, then misquotes him on a point of essential chronology, and from unwarranted assumptions and erroneous and incomplete data draws unreliable conclusions. Before this letter of February 24 and the new cumulative evidence of the crisis, there falls to the ground the sneer in Mr. Lodge's question, "if [Webster's] anxiety was solely of a public nature, why did it date from March 7 when, prior to that time, there was much greater cause for alarm than afterwards?" Webster was anxious before the 7th of March, as so many others were, North and South, and his extreme anxiety appears in the letter of February 24, as well as in repeated later utterances. No one can read through the letters of Webster without recognizing that he had a genuine anxiety for the safety of the Union; and that neither in his letters nor elsewhere is there evidence that in his conscience he was "ill at ease" or "his mind not at peace". Here as elsewhere, Mr. Lodge's biography, written over forty years ago, reproduces anti-slavery bitterness and ignorance of facts (pardonable in 1850) and seriously misrepresents Webster's character and the situation in that year.

By the last week in February and the first in March, the peak of the secession movement was reached. Never an alarmist, Webster, like others who loved the Union, become convinced during this critical last week in February of an "emergency". He determined "to make a Union Speech and discharge a clear conscience." "I made up my mind to risk myself on a proposition for a general pacification. I resolved to push my skiff from the shore alone." "We are in a crisis," he wrote June 2, "if conciliation makes no progress." "It is a great emergency, a great exigency, that the country is placed in", he said in the Senate, June 17. "We have," he wrote in October, "gone through the most important crisis which has occurred since the foundation of the government." A year later he added at Buffalo, "if we had not settled these agitating questions [by the Compromise]... in my opinion, there would have been civil war". In Virginia, where he had known the situation even better, he declared, "I believed in my conscience that a crisis was at hand, a dangerous, a fearful crisis."

Rhodes's conclusion that there was "little danger of an overt act of secession while General Taylor was in the presidential chair" was based on evidence then incomplete and is abandoned by more recent historians. It is moreover significant that, of the speeches cited by Rhodes, ridiculing the danger of secession, not one was delivered before Webster's speech. All were uttered after the danger had been lessened by the speeches and attitude of Clay and Webster. Even such Northern anti-slavery speeches illustrated danger of another sort. Hale of New Hampshire "would let them go" rather than surrender the rights threatened by the fugitive slave bill. Giddings in the very speech ridiculing the danger of disunion said, "when they see fit to leave the Union, I would say to them 'Go in peace'". Such utterances played into the hands of secessionists, strengthening their convictions that the North despised the South and would not fight to keep her in the Union.

It is now clear that in 1850 as in 1860 the average Northern senator or anti-slavery minister or poet was ill-informed or careless as to the danger of secession, and that Webster and the Southern Unionists were well-informed and rightly anxious. Theodore Parker illustrated the bitterness that befogs the mind. He concluded that there was no danger of dissolution because "the public funds of the United States did not go down one mill." The stock market might, of course, change from many causes, but Parker was wrong as to the facts. An examination of the daily sales of United States bonds in New York, 1849-1850, shows that the change, instead of being, "not one mill," as Parker asserted, was four or five dollars during this period; and what change there was, was downward before Webster's speech and upward thereafter.

We now realize what Webster knew and feared in 1849-1850. "If this strife between the South and the North goes on, we shall have war, and who is ready for that?" "There would have been a Civil War if the Compromise had not passed." The evidence confirms Thurlow Weed's mature judgment: "the country had every appearance of being on the eve of a Revolution." On February 28, Everett recognized that "the radicals at the South have made up their minds to separate, the catastrophe seems to be inevitable".

On March 1, Webster recorded his determination "to make an honest, truth-telling speech, and a Union speech" The Washington correspondent of the Advertiser, March 4, reported that Webster will "take a large view of the state of things and advocate a straightforward course of legislation essentially such as the President has recommended". "To this point public sentiment has been gradually converging." "It will tend greatly to confirm opinion in favor of this course should it meet with the decided concurrence of Mr. Webster." The attitude of the plain citizen is expressed by Barker, of Beaver, Pennsylvania, on the same day: "do it, Mr. Webster, as you can, do it as a bold and gifted statesman and patriot; reconcile the North and South and PRESERVE the UNION". "Offer, Mr. Webster, a liberal compromise to the South." On March 4 and 5, Calhoun's Senate speech reasserted that the South, no longer safe in the Union, possessed the right of peaceable secession. On the 6th of March, Webster went over the proposed speech of the next morning with his son, Fletcher, Edward Curtis, and Peter Harvey.

III.

It was under the cumulative stress of such convincing evidence, public and private utterances, and acts in Southern legislatures and in Congress, that Webster made his Union speech on the 7th of March. The purpose and character of the speech are rightly indicated by its title, "The Constitution and the Union", and by the significant dedication to the people of Massachusetts: "Necessity compels me to speak true rather than pleasing things." "I should indeed like to please you; but I prefer to save you, whatever be your attitude toward me." The malignant charge that this speech was "a bid for the presidency" was long ago discarded, even by Lodge. It unfortunately survives in text-books more concerned with "atmosphere" than with truth. The modern investigator finds no evidence for it and every evidence against it. Webster was both too proud and too familiar with the political situation, North and South, to make such a monstrous mistake. The printed or manuscript letters to or from Webster in 1850 and 1851 show him and his friends deeply concerned over the danger to the Union, but not about the presidency. There is rarest mention of the matter in letters by personal or political friends; none by Webster, so far as the writer has observed.

If one comes to the speech familiar with both the situation in 1850 as now known, and with Webster's earlier and later speeches and private letters, one finds his position and arguments on the 7th of March in harmony with his attitude toward Union and slavery, and with the law and the facts. Frankly reiterating both his earlier view of slavery "as a great moral, political and social evil" and his lifelong devotion to the Union and its constitutional obligations, Webster took national, practical, courageous grounds. On the fugitive slave bill and the Wilmot Proviso, where cautious Whigs like Winthrop and Everett were inclined to keep quiet in view of Northern popular feeling, Webster "took a large view of things" and resolved, as Foote saw, to risk his reputation in advocating the only practicable solution. Not only was Webster thoroughly familiar with the facts, but he was pre-eminently logical and, as Calhoun had admitted, once convinced, "he cannot look truth in the face and oppose it by arguments". He therefore boldly faced the truth that the Wilmot Proviso (as it proved later) was needless, and would irritate Southern Union men and play into hands of disunionists who frankly desired to exploit this "insult" to excite secession sentiment. In a like case ten years later, "the Republican party took precisely the same ground held by Mr. Webster in 1850 and acted from the motives that inspired the 7th of March speech".

Webster's anxiety for a conciliatory settlement of the highly dangerous Texas boundary situation (which incidentally narrowed slave territory) was as consistent with his national Union policy, as his desires for California's admission as a free state and for prohibition of the slave-trade in the District of Columbia were in accord with his opposition to slavery. Seeing both abolitionists and secessionists threatening the Union, he rebuked both severely for disloyalty to their "constitutional obligations", while he pleaded for a more conciliatory attitude, for faith and charity rather than "heated imaginations". The only logical alternative to the union policy was disunion, advocated alike by Garrisonian abolitionists and Southern secessionists. "The Union... was thought to be in danger, and devotion to the Union rightfully inclined men to yield... where nothing else could have so inclined them", was Lincoln's luminous defense of the Compromise in his debate with Douglas.

Webster's support of the constitutional provision for "return of persons held to service" was not merely that of a lawyer. It was in accord with a deep and statesmanlike conviction that "obedience to established government... is a Christian duty", the seat of law is "the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the universe". Offensive as this law was to the North, the only logical alternatives were to fulfil or to annul the Constitution. Webster chose to risk his reputation; the extreme abolitionists, to risk the Union. Webster felt, as his opponents later recognized, that "the habitual cherishing of the principle", "resistance to unjust laws is obedience to God", threatened the Constitution. "He... addressed himself, therefore, to the duty of calling the American people back from revolutionary theories to... submission to authority." As in 1830 against Haynes, so in 1850 against Calhoun and disunion, Webster stood not as "a Massachusetts man, but as an American", for "the preservation of the Union". In both speeches he held that he was acting not for Massachusetts, but for the "whole country" (1830), "the good of the whole" (1850). His devotion to the Union and his intellectual balance led him to reject the impatience, bitterness, and disunion sentiments of abolitionists and secessionists, and to work on longer lines. "We must wait for the slow progress of moral causes", a doctrine already announced in 1840, he reiterated in 1850,--"the effect of moral causes, though sure is slow."

IV.

The earlier accounts of Webster's losing his friends as a result of his speech are at variance with the facts. Cautious Northerners naturally hesitated to support him and face both the popular convictions on fugitive slaves and the rasping vituperation that exhausted sacred and profane history in the epithets current in that "era of warm journalistic manners"; Abolitionists and Free Soilers congratulated one another that they had "killed Webster". In Congress no Northern man save Ashmun of Massachusetts supported him in any speech for months. On the other hand, Webster did retain the friendship and confidence of leaders and common men North and South, and the tremendous influence of his personality and "unanswerable" arguments eventually swung the North for the Compromise. From Boston came prompt expressions of "entire concurrence" in his speech by 800 representative men, including George Ticknor, William H. Prescott, Rufus Choate, Josiah Quincy, President Sparks and Professor Felton of Harvard, Professors Woods, Stuart, and Emerson of Andover, and other leading professional, literary, and business men. Similar addresses were sent to him from about the same number of men in New York, from supporters in Newburyport, Medford, Kennebeck River, Philadelphia, the Detroit Common Council, Manchester, New Hampshire, and "the neighbors" in Salisbury. His old Boston Congressional district triumphantly elected Eliot, one of Webster's most loyal supporters, by a vote of 2,355 against 473 for Charles Sumner. The Massachusetts legislature overwhelmingly defeated a proposal to instruct Webster to vote for the Wilmot Proviso. Scores of unpublished letters in the New Hampshire Historical Society and the Library of Congress reveal hearty approval from both parties and all sections. Winthrop of Massachusetts, too cautious to endorse Webster's entire position, wrote to the governor of Massachusetts that as a result of the speech, "disunion stock is already below par". "You have performed the responsible duties of, a national Senator", wrote General Dearborn. "I thank you because you did not speak upon the subject as a Massachusetts man", said Reverend Thomas Worcester of Boston, an overseer of Harvard. "Your speech has saved the Union", was the verdict of Barker of Pennsylvania, a man not of Webster's party. "The Union threatened... you have come to the rescue, and all disinterested lovers of that Union must rally round you", wrote Wainwright of New York. In Alabama, Reverend J. W. Allen recognized the "comprehensive and self-forgetting spirit of patriotism" in Webster, "which, if followed, would save the Union, unite the country and prevent the danger in the Nashville Convention". Like approval of Webster's "patriotic stand for the preservation of the Union" was sent from Green County and Greensboro in Alabama and from Tennessee and Virginia. "The preservation of the Union is the only safety-valve. On Webster depends the tranquility of the country", says an anonymous writer from Charleston, a native of Massachusetts and former pupil of Webster. Poinsett and Francis Lieber, South Carolina Unionists, expressed like views. The growing influence of the speech is testified to in letters from all sections. Linus Child of Lowell finds it modifying his own previous opinions and believes that "shortly if not at this moment, it will be approved by a large majority of the people of Massachusetts". "Upon sober second thought, our people will generally coincide with your views", wrote ex-Governor and ex-Mayor Armstrong of Boston. "Every day adds to the number of those who agree with you", is the confirmatory testimony of Dana, trustee of Andover and former president of Dartmouth. "The effect of your speech begins to be felt", wrote ex-Mayor Eliot of Boston. Mayor Huntington of Salem at first felt the speech to be too Southern; but "subsequent events at North and South have entirely satisfied me that you were right... and vast numbers of others here in Massachusetts were wrong." "The change going on in me has been going on all around me." "You saw farther ahead than the rest or most of us and had the courage and patriotism to stand upon the true ground." This significant inedited letter is but a specimen of the change of attitude manifested in hundreds of letters from "slow and cautious Whigs". One of these, Edward Everett, unable to accept Webster's attitude on Texas and the fugitive slave bill, could not "entirely concur" in the Boston letter of approval. "I think our friend will be able to carry the weight of it at home, but as much as ever." "It would, as you justly said," he wrote Winthrop, "have ruined any other man." This probably gives the position taken at first by a good many moderate anti-slavery then. Everett's later attitude is likewise typical of a change in New England. He wrote in 1851 that Webster's speech "more than any other cause, contributed to avert the catastrophe", and was "a practical basis for the adjustment of controversies, which had already gone far to dissolve the Union".

Isaac Hill, a bitter New Hampshire political opponent, confesses that Webster's "kindly answer" to Calhoun was wiser than his own might have been. Hill, an experienced political observer, had feared in the month preceding Webster's speech a "disruption of the Union" with "no chance of escaping a conflict of blood". He felt that the censures of Webster were undeserved, that Webster was not merely right, but had "power he can exercise at the North, beyond any other man", and that "all that is of value will declare in favor of the great principles of your late Union speech". "Its tranquilizing effect upon public opinion has been wonderful"; "it has almost the unanimous support of this community", wrote the New York philanthropist Minturn. "The speech made a powerful impression in this state... Men feel they can stand on it with security." In Cincinnati, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Pittsfield (with only one exception) the speech was found "wise and patriotic". The sender of a resolution of approval from the grand jury of the United States court at Indianapolis says that such judgment is almost universal. "It is thought you may save the country.. . you may keep us still united", wrote Thornton of Memphis, who soberly records the feeling of thoughtful men that the Southern purpose of disunion was stronger than appeared in either newspapers or political gatherings. "Your speech has disarmed-has, quieted the South; has rendered invaluable service to the harmony and union of the South and the North". "I am confident of the higher approbation, not of a single section of the Union, but of all sections", wrote a political opponent in Washington.

The influence of Webster in checking the radical purposes of the Nashville Convention has been shown above.

All classes of men from all sections show a substantial and growing backing of Webster's 7th of March speech as "the only statesmanlike and practicable way to save the Union". "To you, more than to any other statesman of modern times, do the people of this country owe their national feeling which we trust is to save this Union in this its hour of trial", was the judgment of "the neighbors", the plain farmers of Webster's old New Hampshire home. Outside of the Abolition and Free Soil press, the growing tendency in newspapers, like that of their readers, was to support Webster's logical position.

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."

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 Constitution were strengthened in their hopes and inspired with renewed energies." 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." "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. "The general judgment," said Senator Hoar 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."

Modern writers, North and South-Garrison, Chadwick, T. C. Smith, Merriam, for instance --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."

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 shipping, 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". 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.