IT WAS DANIEL Webster’s turn, as his colleagues understood. Webster had never faced a more daunting task. John Calhoun’s stunning demands—starting with repeal of the Missouri Compromise and apparently including the suspension of the First Amendment rights of abolitionists—threw profound doubt on the prospects of a compromise. Indeed, many in Washington concluded that the South Carolinian had already chosen secession. His conditions were simply an effort to shift the blame for the Union’s demise to the North. Daniel Webster had given great speeches in the past, but if the Union would be saved, he would have to outdo himself.
He wasn’t ready to reply to Calhoun at once. “As soon as may be, perhaps Wednesday or Thursday next”—this was Monday—“I shall be very glad to have an opportunity to address the Senate,” he told the members.
Robert Winthrop was Massachusetts’s other senator, a Whig like Webster. He had been in Boston and arrived back in Washington on March 6. “The evening of my return, I pulled Mr. Webster’s doorbell, thinking he might be glad to see some one fresh from Boston before making his speech the next day,” Winthrop recorded in his diary. “His servant said he was very busy, but added that he knew he would see me, and insisted upon showing me up to his study. I found him in the last agonies of preparation, and in the act of dictating passages to his son Fletcher. I apologized for disturbing him and was making off, when he called out, ‘What say our friends in Boston?’ ”
Winthrop replied that he didn’t think Boston would insist on the Wilmot proviso. This was somewhat surprising, because the proposed ban on slavery in territory taken from Mexico had received a great deal of support in New England.
Webster nodded, pleased. “I have not told a human being what I am going to say tomorrow,” he said. “But as you are here at the last moment, I will say to you that I don’t mean to have anything to do with the proviso.”
Webster revealed no more to Winthrop, and when he rose to speak on March 7, the Senate had little idea what he would say. The senators supposed they had heard Henry Clay’s finest speech ever, a few weeks before; they had heard John Calhoun’s likely final speech, just days ago. At least the equal was expected of Webster. America’s preeminent orator would address America’s gravest crisis; the air in the chamber sizzled with anticipation.
An additional element piqued the collective interest. Webster, alone of the three, might yet be America’s president. The shadows grew longer over Clay and Calhoun; as they did, the shade they cast upon the path of Webster diminished. A Whig general, Zachary Taylor, sat in the White House; he might be succeeded by a Whig senator, the one on whom every eye in the upper house now focused.
“Mr. President, 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,” Webster commenced. “We live in the midst of strong agitations and are surrounded by very considerable dangers to our institutions of government. The imprisoned winds are let loose. The East, the West, the North and the stormy South all combine to throw the whole ocean into commotion, to toss its billows to the skies and to disclose its profoundest depths.” Precisely because he could still be considered for president, Webster disclaimed personal ambition. He said he thought of the public interest only. “I have a part to act, not for my own security or safety, for I am looking out for no fragment upon which to float away from the wreck, if wreck there must be, but for the good of the whole, and the preservation of the whole; and there is that which will keep me to my duty during this struggle, whether the sun and stars shall appear, or shall not appear, for many days.” He let the image linger for a moment. Then to his point: “I speak today for the Union. Hear me for my cause.”
He rehearsed the events that had delivered the new territories of the West to the Union. He recounted the gold discovery and the sudden peopling of California. He described how the Californians, desperate for some government to provide order and stability, had convened to draft a constitution, and how their convention had chosen to bar slavery from California, with the sixteen delegates from slave states joining the others in the unanimous vote.
Here Webster was interrupted by the noise of new people trying to squeeze into the already packed chamber. Vice President Millard Fillmore, in the Senate chair, ordered the sergeant at arms to restore order and to allow no more visitors to enter. The doors were forcibly closed, but the hubbub beyond the doors only increased.
Webster raised his voice and carried on. He observed that slavery was an ancient institution, as old as humanity itself. The Greeks and Romans had practiced it; the Hebrew Bible allowed it; the Christian gospel accepted it. Of late, divisions had arisen among sects of Christians in America, with some Northern denominations condemning slavery as violating the spirit of Christianity if not the quoted words of Jesus, and Southern denominations defending it on religious, historical and practical grounds. Webster conceded the sincerity and conscientiousness of both the Northern and the Southern groups; such was human nature and the complicated issue of slavery. He wished others would share his tolerance. Those who didn’t had caused much of the anguish that afflicted America at present. “They deal with morals as with mathematics, and they think what is right may be distinguished from what is wrong with the precision of an algebraic equation. They have, therefore, none too much charity toward others who differ with them. They are apt, too, to think that nothing is good but what is perfect, and that there are no compromises or modifications to be made in submission to difference of opinion or in deference to other men’s judgment.”
Webster didn’t have to identify these perfectionists, but all knew of whom he spoke. He urged the abolitionists to heed the words of Saint Paul: “We are not to do evil that good may come.” He reminded them of the slow pace of moral progress. “The doctrines and the miracles of Jesus Christ have, in eighteen hundred years, converted only a small portion of the human race.” Even among the converted, great vices—including vices in the affairs of state—persisted. “Thus wars are waged, and unjust wars.”
Webster noted that at the time of the writing of the Constitution, the North and the South saw slavery in much the same light. “Both parts of the country held it equally an evil, a moral and political evil.” The greater objection to it was as a political evil. It undermined republican values and contradicted the egalitarian message of the Declaration of Independence. Strikingly, the condemnations of slavery came more frequently and more stridently from the South than from the North. “The North was not so much excited against it as the South,” said Webster. “The reason is, I suppose, because there was much less at the North; and the people did not see, or think they saw, the evils so prominently as they were seen, or thought to be seen, at the South.”
The framers of the Constitution had been willing to tolerate slavery because they deemed it a dying institution. They gave its end an assist by allowing a ban on the import of slaves after twenty years. “They thought that slavery could not be continued in the country if the importation of slaves were made to cease,” Webster said. He reminded the Senate that the words “slave” and “slavery” appeared nowhere in the Constitution. This was the idea of James Madison, a slaveholder besides being the chief author of the document. “He said that he did not wish to see it recognized by the Constitution of the United States of America that there could be property in men.” Webster remarked that at the same time that the Constitutional Convention was meeting in Philadelphia, the Confederation Congress was meeting in New York. And in the very month when the former was projecting a ban on the importation of slaves, the latter was imposing a ban, via the Northwest Ordinance, on the introduction of slaves into the Ohio country. “And so far as we can now learn, there was a perfect concurrence of opinion between these respective bodies.” Both saw slavery as a blight; both looked and worked toward its end.
To this point in his remarks Webster had not mentioned John Calhoun by name or directly addressed his arguments. He didn’t see Calhoun among the crowd in the Senate chamber when he said, “An honorable member whose health does not allow him to be here today—”
“He is here,” interrupted a senator sitting near Calhoun, who himself said nothing.
“I am very happy to hear that he is,” said Webster, without missing a beat. “May he long be in health and the enjoyment of it to serve his country.” He resumed his thought, that Calhoun had cited the Northwest Ordinance as the first of the depredations of the North against the South. This was quite wrong, Webster said. “It was done with the entire and unanimous concurrence of the whole South. Why, there it stands! The vote of every state in the Union was unanimous in favor of the ordinance.”
The unanimity didn’t last. “Soon a change began at the North and the South, and a severance of opinion showed itself—the North growing much more warm and strong against slavery, and the South growing much more warm and strong in its support.” Webster didn’t assign blame in this. “I impute to the South no particularly selfish view, in the change which has come over her. I impute to her certainly no dishonest view. All that has happened has been natural. It has followed those causes which always influence the human mind and operate upon it.” Chief among the causes was the unexpected expansion of cotton cultivation. “It was the cotton interest that gave a new desire to promote slavery, to spread it and to use its labor,” Webster said. “The age of cotton became a golden age for our Southern brethren. It gratified their desire for improvement and cultivation, at the same time that it excited it. The desire grew by what it fed upon, and there soon came to be an eagerness for other territory—a new area or areas for the cultivation of the cotton crop; and measures leading to this result were brought about somewhat rapidly, one after another, under the lead of Southern men at the head of the government, they having a majority in both branches, to accomplish their ends.”
Webster again contradicted Calhoun, citing Calhoun’s assertion that the North had dominated the national government all along. “If that be true, sir, the North has acted either very liberally and kindly, or very weakly,” Webster said, “for they never exercised that majority five times in the history of the government. Never.” Calhoun had things just backward. It was the South that had dominated. “No man acquainted with the history of the country can deny that the general lead in the politics of the country, for three-fourths of the period that has elapsed since the adoption of the Constitution, has been a Southern lead.” The South, acting through the national government, had repeatedly secured the admission of new slave states: nine since the ratification of the Constitution, with Texas likely to spawn more.
The annexation of Texas particularly showed the ability of the South to have its way. And it demonstrated that the North did not oppose the South as Calhoun had claimed. Texas—“this immense territory over which a bird can not fly in a week”—might still become five states, and Northern votes had made it possible. “New England, with some of her votes, supported this measure. Three-fourth of the votes of liberty-loving Connecticut went for it in the other house, and one-half here. There was one vote for it in Maine.” Massachusetts, that hotbed of abolition, had provided a vote. Representatives and senators from other Northern states added their support, to the sum of fifty free-state votes in the House for annexation and thirteen in the Senate. Without these votes, annexation would not have occurred.
Webster again cited Calhoun, this time in the South Carolinian’s capacity as secretary of state, the office he held in the period leading to Texas annexation. Calhoun’s correspondence with the American chargé d’affaires in Texas had been published. “The secretary had the boldness and candor to avow in that correspondence that the great object sought by the annexation of Texas was to strengthen the slave interest of the South,” Webster said.
Calhoun broke in. “Will the honorable senator permit me to interrupt him for a moment?” he said.
“Certainly,” Webster replied.
“I did not put it on the ground assumed by the senator,” Calhoun said. “I put it upon this ground: that Great Britain had announced to this country, in so many words, that her object was to abolish slavery in Texas, and through Texas to accomplish the abolishment of slavery in the United States and the world. The ground I put it on was that it would make an exposed frontier, and if Great Britain succeeded in her object, it would be impossible that that frontier could be secured against the aggression of the abolitionists; and that this government was bound, under the guarantees of the Constitution, to protect us against such a state of things.”
Webster yielded nothing. “That comes, I suppose, sir, to exactly the same thing. It was that Texas must be obtained for the security of the slave interest in the South.” Yet he credited Calhoun with forthrightness. “The honorable member did avow this object himself, openly, boldly and manfully. He did not disguise his conduct or his motives.”
“Never, never,” said Calhoun.
“What he means he is very apt to say,” Webster continued.
“Always, always,” said Calhoun.
“And I honor him for it,” Webster declared.
He turned to the other territories acquired from Mexico, and here echoed Henry Clay. “As to California and New Mexico, I hold slavery to be excluded from those territories by a law even superior to that which admits and sanctions it in Texas. I mean the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth. That law settles forever, with a strength beyond all terms of human enactment, that slavery cannot exist in California or New Mexico.” Webster granted that personal servants could be taken to California; nothing of climate or geology prevented this. He understood that a form of peonage had existed under Spanish and Mexican rule. But the kind of slavery practiced in the plantation South—“slaves in gross, of the colored race, transferable by sale and delivery like other property”—was impossible. So it would forever be, regardless of what the Congress of the United States declared.
For this reason, congressional declarations on slavery there were idle. The Californians had already acknowledged the reality of nature; their decision should stand. As for New Mexico, Congress should keep silent. It might pass a law creating a territorial government for New Mexico, but in such a law it should say nothing about slavery. “I would not take pains to reaffirm an ordinance of nature nor to reenact the will of God,” Webster said. “And I would put in no Wilmot proviso for the purpose of a taunt or a reproach. I would put into it no evidence of the votes of a superior power, to wound the pride—even whether a just pride, a rational pride or an irrational pride—to wound the pride of the gentlemen who belong to the Southern states.”
A STIR SUDDENLY rippled through Webster’s audience. The senator from Massachusetts had defied the legislature that had sent him to Washington! He had contradicted his own earlier vote for the Wilmot proviso. He had broken ranks with the North and with most of the Whig party. Members and visitors looked at one another wonderingly. Only Robert Winthrop wasn’t surprised.
Webster ignored the fuss. He turned to the question of fugitive slaves. On this he agreed with Calhoun, and with Clay. He disagreed—again—with the people in his own state and, by much evidence, most of the people in the North. “It is my judgment that the South is right,” he said of the complaints about the obstructions thrown in the path of the slave catchers. “And the North is wrong.”
The gasps in the Senate chamber were audible now. Members stared at Webster, then back at one another.
Webster observed the commotion but once more gave no sign. In his addresses he sometimes spoke like a prophet or a preacher; now he spoke like a lawyer. Article IV of the Constitution stated a clear obligation, he said. “Every member of every northern legislature is bound, by oath, like every other officer in the country, to support the Constitution of the United States; and this article of the Constitution, which says to these states they shall deliver up fugitives from service, is as binding in honor and conscience as any other article. No man fulfills his duty in any legislature who sets himself up to find excuses, evasions, escapes from this constitutional obligation.”
Webster offered that he had long thought that the obligation to return the slaves lay with the states individually. “That is my judgment. I have always entertained that opinion, and I entertain it now.” But the Supreme Court had ruled, some years earlier, that Congress might intervene if the states did not do their part. Webster wasn’t sure this was a wise opinion. Yet it was the law. “As it now stands, the business of seeing that these fugitives are delivered up resides in the power of Congress.” Webster intended to assist in the exercise of that power. “My friend at the head of the judiciary committee has a bill on the subject, now before the Senate, with some amendments, which I propose to support, with all its provisions, to the fullest extent.”
More gasps. Daniel Webster had joined the slave catchers! Could it be?
He continued, unmoved. “I desire to call the attention of all sober-minded men, of all conscientious men, in the North, of all men who are not carried away by any fanatical idea or by any false idea whatever, to their constitutional obligations. I put it to all these sober and sound minds at the North, as a question of morals and a question of conscience: What right have they, in all their legislative capacity, or any other, to endeavor to get round this Constitution, to embarrass the free exercise of the rights secured by the Constitution, to the persons whose slaves escape from them? None at all—none at all. Neither in the forum of conscience, nor before the face of the Constitution, are they justified, in my opinion.”
Behind the opposition to the return of slaves were the abolitionist societies. “I do not think them useful,” Webster said. “I think their operations for the last twenty years have produced nothing good or valuable.” He didn’t impugn the motives of the members of the societies. “I know thousands of them are honest and good men, perfectly well-meaning men. They have excited feelings; they think they must do something for the cause of liberty; and in their sphere of action they do not see what else they can do than to contribute to an abolition press or an abolition society or to pay an abolition lecturer.” These were understandable sentiments. “But I am not blind to the consequences. I cannot but see what mischiefs their interference with the South has produced. And is it not plain to every man?” Webster reminded the Senate that in the early 1830s the legislature of Virginia had held an open and searching debate on slavery. All sides of the question were aired. Not much later the abolitionist societies began their campaign of vilification. “They created great agitation in the North against Southern slavery. Well, what was the result? The bonds of the slaves were bound more firmly than before; their rivets were more strongly fastened. Public opinion, which in Virginia had begun to be exhibited against slavery and was opening out for the discussion of the question, drew back and shut itself up in its castle.”
Webster conceded that the South had grievances against the North, just as the North had grievances against the South. But while these grievances must be acknowledged, they should not be encouraged. And under no circumstances should they be employed to justify disunion. Here Webster took dead aim at Calhoun. “I should much prefer to have heard from every member on this floor declarations of opinion that this Union should never be dissolved, than the declaration of opinion that in any case, under the pressure of circumstances, such a dissolution was possible. I hear with pain and anguish and distress the word secession, especially when it falls from the lips of those who are eminently patriotic and known to the country, and known all over the world, for their political services.”
Webster’s tone assumed the pain and anguish he described. “Secession! Peaceable secession! Sir, your eyes and mine are never destined to see that miracle. The dismemberment of this vast country without convulsion! The breaking up of the fountains of the great deep without ruffling the surface! Who is so foolish—I beg everybody’s pardon—as to expect to see any such thing?”
“Peaceable secession!” Webster repeated. “Peaceable secession! The concurrent agreement of all the members of this great republic to separate! A voluntary separation, with alimony on one side and on the other. Why, what would be the result? Where is the line to be drawn? What states are to secede? What is to remain American? What am I to be—an American no longer? Where is the flag of the republic to remain? Where is the eagle still to tower? Or is he to cower? And shrink and fall to the ground?” The fathers of the current generation would rebuke those who let the Union crumble. Their children and grandchildren would point the finger of blame.
Webster caught his breath and calmed his voice. He refused to end on a grim note. “Instead of speaking of the possibility or utility of secession, instead of dwelling in these caverns of darkness, instead of groping with those ideas so full of all that is horrid and horrible, let us come out into the light of day. Let us enjoy the fresh air of liberty and Union.” The country had reached a turning point. “Never did there devolve on any generation of men higher trusts than now devolve upon us for the preservation of this Constitution and the harmony and peace of all who are destined to live under it.” The Union was a wondrous thing. “No monarchical throne presses these states together; no iron chain of despotic power encircles them. They live and stand upon a government popular in its form, representative in its character, founded upon principles of equality and calculated, we hope, to last forever.”
Webster promised to do his part to preserve this inheritance from the founders. He urged the other senators to do theirs.