The blizzardy night of January 21, 1850, was no night in Washington for an ailing old man to be out. But wheezing and coughing fitfully, Henry Clay made his way through the snowdrifts to the home of Daniel Webster. He had a plan—a plan to save the Union—and he knew he must have the support of the North’s most renowned orator and statesman. He knew that he had no time to lose, for that very afternoon President Taylor, in a message to Congress asking California’s admission as a free state, had only thrown fuel on the raging fire that threatened to consume the Union. Why had the President failed to mention New Mexico, asked the North? What about the Fugitive Slave Law being enforced, said the South? What about the District of Columbia slave trade, Utah, Texas boundaries? Tempers mounted, plots unfolded, disunity was abroad in the land.
But Henry Clay had a plan—a plan for another Great Compromise to preserve the nation. For an hour he outlined its contents to Daniel Webster in the warmth of the latter’s comfortable home, and together they talked of saving the Union. Few meetings in American history have ever been so productive or so ironic in their consequences. For the Compromise of 1850 added to Henry Clay’s garlands as the great Pacificator; but Daniel Webster’s support, which insured its success, resulted in his political crucifixion, and, for half a century or more, his historical condemnation.
The man upon whom Henry Clay called that wintry night was one of the most extraordinary figures in American political history. Daniel Webster is familiar to many of us today as the battler for Jabez Stone’s soul against the devil in Stephen Vincent Benét’s story. But in his own lifetime, he had many battles against the devil for his own soul—and some he lost. Webster, wrote one of his intimate friends, was “a compound of strength and weakness, dust and divinity,” or in Emerson’s words “a great man with a small ambition.”
There could be no mistaking he was a great man—he looked like one, talked like one, was treated like one and insisted he was one. With all his faults and failings, Daniel Webster was undoubtedly the most talented figure in our Congressional history: not in his ability to win men to a cause—he was no match in that with Henry Clay; not in his ability to hammer out a philosophy of government—Calhoun outshone him there; but in his ability to make alive and supreme the latent sense of oneness, of Union, that all Americans felt but which few could express.
But how Daniel Webster could express it! How he could express almost any sentiments! Ever since his first speech in Congress—attacking the War of 1812—had riveted the attention of the House of Representatives as no freshman had ever held it before, he was the outstanding orator of his day—indeed, of all time—in Congress, before hushed throngs in Massachusetts and as an advocate before the Supreme Court. Stern Chief Justice Marshall was said to have been visibly moved by Webster’s famous defense in the Dartmouth College case—“It is, sir, as I have said, a small college—and yet there are those who love it.” After his oration on the two hundredth founding of Plymouth Colony, a young Harvard scholar wrote:
I was never so excited by public speaking before in my life. Three or four times I thought my temple would burst with the rush of blood. . . . I was beside myself and I am still so.
And the peroration of his reply to Senator Hayne of South Carolina, when secession had threatened twenty years earlier, was a national rallying cry memorized by every schoolboy—“Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”
A very slow speaker, hardly averaging a hundred words a minute, Webster combined the musical charm of his deep organ-like voice, a vivid imagination, an ability to crush his opponents with a barrage of facts, a confident and deliberate manner of speaking and a striking appearance to make his orations a magnet that drew crowds hurrying to the Senate chamber. He prepared his speeches with the utmost care, but seldom wrote them out in a prepared text. It has been said that he could think out a speech sentence by sentence, correct the sentences in his mind without the use of a pencil and then deliver it exactly as he thought it out.
Certainly that striking appearance was half the secret of his power, and convinced all who looked upon his face that he was one born to rule men. Although less than six feet tall, Webster’s slender frame when contrasted with the magnificent sweep of his shoulders gave him a theatrical but formidable presence. But it was his extraordinary head that contemporaries found so memorable, with the features Carlyle described for all to remember: “The tanned complexion, the amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under the precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown; the mastiff mouth accurately closed.” One contemporary called Webster “a living lie, because no man on earth could be so great as he looked.”
And Daniel Webster was not as great as he looked. The flaw in the granite was the failure of his moral senses to develop as acutely as his other faculties. He could see nothing improper in writing to the President of the Bank of the United States—at the very time when the Senate was engaged in debate over a renewal of the Bank’s charter—noting that “my retainer has not been received or refreshed as usual.” But Webster accepted favors not as gifts but as services which he believed were rightly due him. When he tried to resign from the Senate in 1836 to recoup speculative losses through his law practice, his Massachusetts businessmen friends joined to pay his debts to retain him in office. Even at his deathbed, legend tells us, there was a knock at his door, and a large roll of bills was thrust in by an old gentleman, who said that “At such a time as this, there should be no shortage of money in the house.”
Webster took it all and more. What is difficult to comprehend is that he saw no wrong in it—morally or otherwise. He probably believed that he was greatly underpaid, and it never occurred to him that by his own free choice he had sold his services and his talents, however extraordinary they might have been, to the people of the United States, and no one else, when he drew his salary as United States Senator. But Webster’s support of the business interests of New England was not the result of the money he obtained, but of his personal convictions. Money meant little to him except as a means to gratify his peculiar tastes. He never accumulated a fortune. He never was out of debt. And he never was troubled by his debtor status. Sometimes he paid, and he always did so when it was convenient, but as Gerald W. Johnson says, “Unfortunately he sometimes paid in the wrong coin—not in legal tender—but in the confidence that the people reposed in him.”
But whatever his faults, Daniel Webster remained the greatest orator of his day, the leading member of the American Bar, one of the most renowned leaders of the Whig party, and the only Senator capable of checking Calhoun. And thus Henry Clay knew he must enlist these extraordinary talents on behalf of his Great Compromise. Time and events proved he was right.
As the God-like Daniel listened in thoughtful silence, the sickly Clay unfolded his last great effort to hold the Union together. Its key features were five in number: (1) California was to be admitted as a free (non-slaveholding) state; (2) New Mexico and Utah were to be organized as territories without legislation either for or against slavery, thus running directly contrary to the hotly debated Wilmot Proviso which was intended to prohibit slavery in the new territories; (3) Texas was to be compensated for some territory to be ceded to New Mexico; (4) the slave trade would be abolished in the District of Columbia; and (5) a more stringent and enforceable Fugitive Slave Law was to be enacted to guarantee return to their masters of runaway slaves captured in Northern states. The Compromise would be condemned by the Southern extremists as appeasement, chiefly on its first and fourth provisions; and by the Northern abolitionists as 90 per cent concessions to the South with a meaningless 10 per cent sop thrown to the North, particularly because of the second and fifth provisions. Few Northerners could stomach any strengthening of the Fugitive Slave Act, the most bitterly hated measure—and until Prohibition, the most flagrantly disobeyed—ever passed by Congress. Massachusetts had even enacted a law making it a crime for anyone to enforce the provisions of the Act in that state!
How could Henry Clay then hope to win approval to such a plan from Daniel Webster of Massachusetts? Was he not specifically on record as a consistent foe of slavery and a supporter of the Wilmot Proviso? Had he not told the Senate in the Oregon Debate:
I shall oppose all slavery extension and all increase of slave representation in all places, at all times, under all circumstances, even against all inducements, against all supposed limitation of great interests, against all combinations, against all compromises.
That very week he had written a friend: “From my earliest youth, I have regarded slavery as a great moral and political evil. . . . You need not fear that I shall vote for any compromise or do anything inconsistent with the past.”
But Daniel Webster feared that civil violence “would only rivet the chains of slavery the more strongly.” And the preservation of the Union was far dearer to his heart than his opposition to slavery.
And thus on that fateful January night, Daniel Webster promised Henry Clay his conditional support, and took inventory of the crisis about him. At first he shared the views of those critics and historians who scoffed at the possibility of secession in 1850. But as he talked with Southern leaders and observed “the condition of the country, I thought the inevitable consequences of leaving the existing controversies unadjusted would be Civil War.” “I am nearly broken down with labor and anxiety,” he wrote his son. “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. . . . I have poor spirits and little courage.”
Two groups were threatening in 1850 to break away from the United States of America. In New England, Garrison was publicly proclaiming, “I am an Abolitionist and, therefore, for the dissolution of the Union.” And a mass meeting of Northern Abolitionists declared that “the Constitution is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” In the South, Calhoun was writing to a friend in February of 1850, “Disunion is the only alternative that is left for us.” And in his last great address to the Senate, read for him on March 4, only a few short weeks before his death, while he sat by too feeble to speak, he declared, “The South will be forced to choose between abolition and secession.”
A preliminary convention of Southerners, also instigated by Calhoun, urged a full-scale convention of the South at Nashville for June of that fateful year to popularize the idea of dissolution.
The time was ripe for secession, and few were prepared to speak for union. Even Alexander Stephens of Georgia, anxious to preserve the Union, wrote friends in the South who were sympathetic with his views that “the feeling among the Southern members for a dissolution of the Union . . . is becoming much more general. Men are now beginning to talk of it seriously who twelve months ago hardly permitted themselves to think of it. . . . the crisis is not far ahead. . . . A dismemberment of this Republic I now consider inevitable.” During the critical month preceding Webster’s speech, six Southern states, each to secede ten years later, approved the aims of the Nashville Convention and appointed delegates. Horace Greeley wrote on February 23:
There are sixty members of Congress who this day desire and are plotting to effect the idea of a dissolution of the Union. 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.
Such was the perilous state of the nation in the early months of 1850.
By the end of February, the Senator from Massachusetts had determined upon his course. Only the Clay Compromise, Daniel Webster decided, could avert secession and civil war; and he wrote a friend that he planned “to make an honest truth-telling speech and a Union speech, and discharge a clear conscience.” As he set to work preparing his notes, he received abundant warning of the attacks his message would provoke. His constituents and Massachusetts newspapers admonished him strongly not to waver in his consistent anti-slavery stand, and many urged him to employ still tougher tones against the South. But the Senator from Massachusetts had made up his mind, as he told his friends on March 6, “to push my skiff from the shore alone.” He would act according to the creed with which he had challenged the Senate several years earlier:
Inconsistencies of opinion arising from changes of circumstances are often justifiable. But there is one sort of inconsistency that is culpable: it is the inconsistency between a man’s conviction and his vote, between his conscience and his conduct. No man shall ever charge me with an inconsistency of that kind.
And so came the 7th of March, 1850, the only day in history which would become the title of a speech delivered on the Senate floor. No one recalls today—no one even recalled in 1851—the formal title Webster gave his address, for it had become the “Seventh of March” speech as much as Independence Day is known as the Fourth of July.
Realizing after months of insomnia that this might be the last great effort his health would permit, Webster stimulated his strength for the speech by oxide of arsenic and other drugs, and devoted the morning to polishing up his notes. He was excitedly interrupted by the Sergeant at Arms, who told him that even then—two hours before the Senate was to meet—the chamber, the galleries, the anterooms and even the corridors of the Capitol were filled with those who had been traveling for days from all parts of the nation to hear Daniel Webster. Many foreign diplomats and most of the House of Representatives were among those vying for standing room. As the Senate met, members could scarcely walk to their seats through the crowd of spectators and temporary seats made of public documents stacked on top of each other. Most Senators gave up their seats to ladies, and stood in the aisles awaiting Webster’s opening blast.
As the Vice President’s gavel commenced the session, Senator Walker of Wisconsin, who held the floor to finish a speech begun the day before, told the Chair that “this vast audience has not come to hear me, and there is but one man who can assemble such an audience. They expect to hear him, and I feel it is my duty, as it is my pleasure, to give the floor to the Senator from Massachusetts.”
The crowd fell silent as Daniel Webster rose slowly to his feet, all the impressive powers of his extraordinary physical appearance—the great, dark, brooding eyes, the wonderfully bronzed complexion, the majestic domed forehead—commanding the same awe they had commanded for more than thirty years. Garbed in his familiar blue tailed coat with brass buttons, and a buff waistcoat and breeches, he deliberately paused a moment as he gazed about at the greatest assemblage of Senators ever to gather in that chamber—Clay, Benton, Houston, Jefferson Davis, Hale, Bell, Cass, Seward, Chase, Stephen A. Douglas and others. But one face was missing—that of the ailing John C. Calhoun.
All eyes were fixed on the speaker; no spectator save his own son knew what he would say. “I have never before,” wrote a newspaper correspondent, “witnessed an occasion on which there was deeper feeling enlisted or more universal anxiety to catch the most distinct echo of the speaker’s voice.”
In his moments of magnificent inspiration, as Emerson once described him, Webster was truly “the great cannon loaded to the lips.” Summoning for the last time that spellbinding oratorical ability, he abandoned his previous opposition to slavery in the territories, abandoned his constituents’ abhorrence of the Fugitive Slave Law, abandoned his own place in the history and hearts of his countrymen and abandoned his last chance for the goal that had eluded him for over twenty years—the Presidency. Daniel Webster preferred to risk his career and his reputation rather than risk the Union.
“Mr. President,” he began, “I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American and a Member of the Senate of the United States. . . . I speak today for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.”
He had spoken but for a short time when the gaunt, bent form of Calhoun, wrapped in a black cloak, was dramatically assisted into his seat, where he sat trembling, scarcely able to move, and unnoticed by the speaker. After several expressions of regret by Webster that illness prevented the distinguished Senator from South Carolina from being present, Calhoun struggled up, grasping the arms of his chair, and in a clear and ghostly voice proudly announced, “The Senator from South Carolina is in his seat.” Webster was touched, and with tears in his eyes he extended a bow toward Calhoun, who sank back exhausted and feeble, eyeing the Massachusetts orator with a sphinx-like expression which disclosed no hint of either approval or disapproval.
For three hours and eleven minutes, with only a few references to his extensive notes, Daniel Webster pleaded the Union’s cause. Relating the grievances of each side, he asked for conciliation and understanding in the name of patriotism. The Senate’s main concern, he insisted, was neither to promote slavery nor to abolish it, but to preserve the United States of America. And with telling logic and remarkable foresight he bitterly attacked the idea of “peaceable secession”:
Sir, your eyes and mine are never destined to see that miracle. The dismemberment of this vast country without convulsion! Who is so foolish . . . as to expect to see any such thing? . . . Instead of speaking of the possibility or utility of secession, instead of dwelling in those caverns of darkness, . . . let us enjoy the fresh air of liberty and union. . . . Let us make our generation one of the strongest and brightest links in that golden chain which is destined, I fondly believe, to grapple the people of all the states to this Constitution for ages to come.
There was no applause. Buzzing and astonished whispering, yes, but no applause. Perhaps his hearers were too intent—or too astonished. A reporter rushed to the telegraph office. “Mr. Webster has assumed a great responsibility,” he wired his paper, “and whether he succeeds or fails, the courage with which he has come forth at least entitles him to the respect of the country.”
Daniel Webster did succeed. Even though his speech was repudiated by many in the North, the very fact that one who represented such a belligerent constituency would appeal for understanding in the name of unity and patriotism was recognized in Washington and throughout the South as a bona fide assurance of Southern rights. Despite Calhoun’s own intransigence, his Charleston Mercury praised Webster’s address as “noble in language, generous and conciliatory in tone. Mr. Calhoun’s clear and powerful exposition would have had something of a decisive effect if it had not been so soon followed by Mr. Webster’s masterly playing.” And the New Orleans Picayune hailed Webster for “the moral courage to do what he believes to be just in itself and necessary for the peace and safety of the country.”
And so the danger of immediate secession and bloodshed passed. As Senator Winthrop remarked, Webster’s speech had “disarmed and quieted the South [and] knocked the Nashville Convention into a cocked hat.” The Journal of Commerce was to remark in later months that “Webster did more than any other man in the whole country, and at a greater hazard of personal popularity, to stem and roll back the torrent of sectionalism which in 1850 threatened to overthrow the pillars of the Constitution and the Union.”
Some historians—particularly those who wrote in the latter half of the nineteenth century under the influence of the moral earnestness of Webster’s articulate Abolitionist foes—do not agree with Allan Nevins, Henry Steele Commager, Gerald Johnson and others who have praised the Seventh of March speech as “the highest statesmanship . . . Webster’s last great service to the nation.” Many deny that secession would have occurred in 1850 without such compromises; and others maintain that subsequent events proved eventual secession was inevitable regardless of what compromises were made. But still others insist that delaying war for ten years narrowed the issues between North and South and in the long run helped preserve the Union. The spirit of conciliation in Webster’s speech gave the North the righteous feeling that it had made every attempt to treat the South with fairness, and the defenders of the Union were thus united more strongly against what they felt to be Southern violations of those compromises ten years later. Even from the military point of view of the North, postponement of the battle for ten years enabled the Northern states to increase tremendously their lead in population, voting power, production and railroads.
Undoubtedly this was understood by many of Webster’s supporters, including the business and professional men of Massachusetts who helped distribute hundreds of thousands of copies of the Seventh of March speech throughout the country. It was understood by Daniel Webster, who dedicated the printed copies to the people of Massachusetts with these words: “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.”
But it was not understood by the Abolitionists and Free Soilers of 1850. Few politicians have had the distinction of being scourged by such talented constituents. The Rev. Theodore Parker, heedless of the dangers of secession, who had boasted of harboring a fugitive slave in his cellar and writing his sermons with a sword over his ink stand and a pistol in his desk “loaded and ready for defense,” denounced Webster in merciless fashion from his pulpit, an attack he would continue even after Webster’s death: “No living man has done so much,” he cried, “to debauch the conscience of the nation. . . . I know of no deed in American history done by a son of New England to which I can compare this, but the act of Benedict Arnold.” “Webster,” said Horace Mann, “is a fallen star! Lucifer descending from Heaven!” Longfellow asked the world: “Is it possible? Is this the Titan who hurled mountains at Hayne years ago?” And Emerson proclaimed that “Every drop of blood in that man’s veins has eyes that look downward. . . . Webster’s absence of moral faculty is degrading to the country.” To William Cullen Bryant, Webster was “a man who has deserted the cause which he lately defended, and deserted it under circumstances which force upon him the imputation of a sordid motive.” And to James Russell Lowell he was “the most meanly and foolishly treacherous man I ever heard of.”
Charles Sumner, who would be elevated to the Senate upon his departure, enrolled the name of Webster on “the dark list of apostates. Mr. Webster’s elaborate treason has done more than anything else to break down the North.” Senator William H. Seward, the brilliant “Conscience” Whig, called Webster a “traitor to the cause of freedom.” A mass meeting in Faneuil Hall condemned the speech as “unworthy of a wise statesman and a good man,” and resolved that “Constitution or no Constitution, law or no law, we will not allow a fugitive slave to be taken from the state of Massachusetts.” As the Massachusetts Legislature enacted further resolutions wholly contrary to the spirit of the Seventh of March speech, one member called Webster “a recreant son of Massachusetts who misrepresents her in the Senate”; and another stated that “Daniel Webster will be a fortunate man if God, in his sparing mercy, shall preserve his life long enough for him to repent of this act and efface this stain on his name.”
The Boston Courier pronounced that it was “unable to find that any Northern Whig member of Congress concurs with Mr. Webster”; and his old defender, the Boston Atlas, stated, “His sentiments are not our sentiments nor we venture to say of the Whigs of New England.” The New York Tribune considered it “unequal to the occasion and unworthy of its author”; the New York Evening Post spoke in terms of a “traitorous retreat . . . a man who deserted the cause which he lately defended”; and the Abolitionist press called it “the scarlet infamy of Daniel Webster. . . . An indescribably base and wicked speech.”
Edmund Quincy spoke bitterly of the “ineffable meanness of the lion turned spaniel in his fawnings on the masters whose hands he was licking for the sake of the dirty puddings they might have to toss to him.” And finally, the name of Daniel Webster was humiliated for all time in the literature of our land by the cutting words of the usually gentle John Greenleaf Whittier in his immortal poem “Ichabod”:
So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore!
The glory from his gray hairs gone
Forevermore! . . .
Of all we loved and honored, naught
Save power remains;
A fallen angel’s pride of thought,
Still strong in chains. . . .
Then pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame;
Walk backward, with averted gaze,
And hide the shame!
Years afterward Whittier was to recall that he penned this acid verse “in one of the saddest moments of my life.” And for Daniel Webster, the arrogant, scornful giant of the ages who believed himself above political rancor, Whittier’s attack was especially bitter. To some extent he had attempted to shrug off his attackers, stating that he had expected to be libeled and abused, particularly by the Abolitionists and intellectuals who had previously scorned him, much as George Washington and others before him had been abused. To those who urged a prompt reply, he merely related the story of the old deacon in a similar predicament who told his friends, “I always make it a rule never to clean up the path until the snow is done falling.”
But he was saddened by the failure of a single other New England Whig to rise to his defense, and he remarked that he was
engaged in a controversy in which I have neither a leader nor a follower from among my own immediate friends. . . . I am tired of standing up here, almost alone from Massachusetts, contending for practical measures absolutely essential to the good of the country. . . . For five months . . . no one of my colleagues manifested the slightest concurrence in my sentiments. . . . Since the 7th of March there has not been an hour in which I have not felt a crushing weight of anxiety. I have sat down to no breakfast or dinner to which I have brought an unconcerned and easy mind.
But, although he sought to explain his objectives and reassure his friends of his continued opposition to slavery, he nevertheless insisted he would
stand on the principle of my speech to the end. . . . If necessary I will take the stump in every village in New England. . . . What is to come of the present commotion in men’s minds I cannot foresee; but my own convictions of duty are fixed and strong, and I shall continue to follow those convictions without faltering. . . . In highly excited times it is far easier to fan and feed the flames of discord, than to subdue them; and he who counsels moderation is in danger of being regarded as failing in his duty to his party.
And the following year, despite his seventy years, Webster went on extended speaking tours defending his position: “If the chances had been one in a thousand that Civil War would be the result, I should still have felt that thousandth chance should be guarded against by any reasonable sacrifice.” When his efforts—and those of Clay, Douglas and others—on behalf of compromise were ultimately successful, he noted sarcastically that many of his colleagues were now saying “They always meant to stand by the Union to the last.”
But Daniel Webster was doomed to disappointment in his hopes that this latent support might again enable him to seek the Presidency. For his speech had so thoroughly destroyed those prospects that the recurring popularity of his position could not possibly satisfy the great masses of voters in New England and the North. He could not receive the Presidential nomination he had so long desired; but neither could he ever put to rest the assertion, which was not only expressed by his contemporary critics but subsequently by several nineteenth-century historians, that his real objective in the Seventh of March speech was a bid for Southern support for the Presidency.
But this “profound selfishness,” which Emerson was so certain the speech represented, could not have entered into Daniel Webster’s motivations. “Had he been bidding for the Presidency,” as Professor Nevins points out, “he would have trimmed his phrases and inserted weasel-words upon New Mexico and the fugitive slaves. The first precaution of any aspirant for the Presidency is to make sure of his own state and section; and Webster knew that his speech would send echoes of denunciation leaping from Mount Mansfield to Monamoy Light.” Moreover, Webster was sufficiently acute politically to know that a divided party such as his would turn away from politically controversial figures and move to an uncommitted neutral individual, a principle consistently applied to this day. And the 1852 Whig Convention followed exactly this course. After the procompromise vote had been divided for fifty-two ballots between Webster and President Fillmore, the convention turned to the popular General Winfield Scott. Not a single Southern Whig supported Webster. And when the Boston Whigs urged that the party platform take credit for the Clay Compromise, of which, they said, “Daniel Webster, with the concurrence of Henry Clay and other profound statesmen, was the author,” Senator Corwin of Ohio was reported to have commented sarcastically, “And I, with the concurrence of Moses and some extra help, wrote the Ten Commandments.”
So Daniel Webster, who neither could have intended his speech as an improvement of his political popularity nor permitted his ambitions to weaken his plea for the Union, died a disappointed and discouraged death in 1852, his eyes fixed on the flag flying from the mast of the sailboat he had anchored in view of his bedroom window. But to the very end he was true to character, asking on his deathbed, “Wife, children, doctor, I trust on this occasion I have said nothing unworthy of Daniel Webster.” And to the end he had been true to the Union, and to his greatest act of courageous principle; for in his last words to the Senate, Webster had written his own epitaph:
I shall stand by the Union . . . with absolute disregard of personal consequences. What are personal consequences . . . in comparison with the good or evil which may befall a great country in a crisis like this? . . . Let the consequences be what they will, I am careless. No man can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he suffer or if he fall in defense of the liberties and Constitution of his country.