DANIEL WEBSTER SHOOK his head, disbelieving that Calhoun and the Republicans could cling to the policies that had been shown so wanting by the course of the war. The administration appeared to have learned nothing from the country’s humiliation. “It continues to go on in its old party path, to revolve around its party center and to draw all its heat and its light, its animation and its being, from party sources,” he said. “The measure of ability with which the war has been conducted is about equal to the measure of prudence with which it was declared, and the success of the issue, without a change of auspices, will probably be proportionate to both.” The burning of Washington made undeniable the administration’s ineptness. “It invited the enemy to the conflict. It is attacked, two years after, in the center of the nation, on the very threshold of the Capitol, and even there is found unarmed and unprepared.”
Webster predicted that the Republicans, having sown the wind, would reap the whirlwind. “We are here on the eve of great events,” he told Ezekiel in November 1814. “I expect a blow up soon. My opinion is that within sixty days the government will cease to pay even secretaries, clerks and members of Congress. This I expect, and when it comes, we are wound up. Every thing is in confusion here.” The administration was weighing a conscription bill, to bolster the army. The mere mention had raised hackles and fears, and the bill hadn’t come before the full House. “If it does, it will cause a storm such as was never witnessed here,” Webster said. “In short, if peace does not come this winter, the government will die in its own weakness.”
The prospect grew worse. A British force of hardened veterans of the Napoleonic wars was being transported to New Orleans to commence a drive up the Mississippi. If successful, the campaign would split the United States in two along the great river and possibly dispossess America of upper Louisiana.
Or the fault might open where New England abutted New York. While the British invading force neared New Orleans, a group of New England Federalists gathered at Hartford, Connecticut. Bitter, alienated and convinced that the government that demanded their loyalty was failing to serve their interests, they reprised the mood of the Continental Congress in 1776. Webster and others, by their characterization of the Constitution as a revocable compact, furnished the philosophical basis for a New England declaration of independence; the misery described by Webster’s constituents supplied the emotional impetus for a secessionist bolt. No agenda had been published for the Hartford convention, and even after the meetings began, no one outside knew what was happening within, for the sessions were closed and secret. But friends of the Union expected nothing good.
The government’s war policy was caught in a vicious downward spiral. Popular enthusiasm for the war hadn’t survived the early reverses; the burning of Washington depressed morale to levels that reminded old-timers of the winter of Valley Forge. The army dwindled as enlistments expired, and the government, unable to persuade lenders to put more of their money at risk, lacked funds to entice new recruits. The shrinking of the army caused morale to plummet further. The British would surely capture New Orleans and the Mississippi River. Lenders grew still leerier; recruitments fell the more.
In its extremity the administration did turn to a military draft. If young men wouldn’t volunteer to defend the country, they could be compelled to do so. The administration sent a conscription bill to Congress. The Senate approved the measure, but with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. Even the Republicans in the upper house understood how unpopular conscription was.
In the House the bill ran into Daniel Webster. John Randolph had lost his seat in the 1812 elections, causing Clay and Calhoun to think that the opposition would be weakened. But Webster proved a more formidable antagonist than the Virginian. In the first place, Webster was a Federalist, with an opposition party behind him. In the second, he spoke for New England, the Federalist stronghold. In the third, he spoke with power, unlike Randolph, who could cut and thrust but rarely compel. When Webster rose, his colleagues listened not out of self-defense, as they did with Randolph, but for self-improvement. They might learn something. Their beliefs might be challenged, their emotions stirred. And they might witness a heavy blow landed against the Republican leadership.
Webster threw haymakers from the start of his speech against the conscription bill. “It is an attempt to exercise the power of forcing the free men of this country into the ranks of an army for the general purposes of war,” he said. As such it was tyrannical and unconstitutional. Never had the national government attempted such a thing, for the good reason that it was beyond the bounds of the authority conferred on Congress by the Constitution. The Constitution gave Congress the power to raise armies but not to dragoon the unwilling. If a war was so unpopular that honest men refused to enlist—as the present war was—Congress could not make them do so. Webster offered an analogy. “Congress has the power to borrow money. How is it to exercise this power? Is it confined to voluntary loans?” By the reasoning behind the conscription bill, it was not. “Congress might resort to a forced loan. It might take the money of any man by force and give him in exchange exchequer notes or certificates of stock.” This was absurd, as even the Republicans would admit. But it was no more absurd than their logic behind conscription. Indeed it was less absurd, for it dealt with inanimate money rather than actual lives. “A compulsory loan is not to be compared, in point of enormity, with a compulsory military service,” Webster said.
Conscription orders would rend the heart of the country. “Who shall describe the distress and anguish which they will spread over those hills and valleys where men have heretofore been accustomed to labor and to rest in security and happiness?” The administration’s bill proposed a lottery among the eligible. Webster asked the House to envision its operation. “Anticipate the scene, sir, when the class shall assemble to stand its draft, and to throw the dice for blood. What a group of wives and mothers and sisters, of helpless age and helpless infancy, shall gather round the theatre of this horrible lottery, as if the stroke of death were to fall from heaven before their eyes on a father, a brother, a son or a husband.” And the stroke of death it would be, given the administration’s incompetence. “Under present prospects of the continuance of the war, not one half of them on whom your conscription shall fall will ever return to tell the tale of their sufferings. They will perish of disease and pestilence, or they will leave their bones to whiten in fields beyond the frontier.”
WEBSTER’S SPEECH BROUGHT the conscription bill to a clattering halt. Members imagined having to answer to those wives and mothers when they returned to their districts, having to defend this self-inflicted form of impressment when they sought reelection. Senators were shielded from popular wrath by their six-year terms of office and especially by the state legislatures, which in that era chose them. For Republican senators, party discipline counted more heavily than popular sentiments. Hence the bill’s success in the Senate. But members of the House stood before voters every other year and directly. For them the unpopularity of a draft mattered more. Hence the bill’s failure in the House when rank-and-file Republicans abandoned the party leadership.
Webster was pleased with his victory. He valued the respect in which he had come to be regarded by his allies and his opponents. He didn’t deny that the Republicans’ mishandling of the war created opportunities for Federalists like himself.
But as the new year began, reports from the West were so disturbing as to give even him pause. “We hear that the British are near New Orleans,” he wrote to Ezekiel in early January 1815. “I have no doubt the British will take it.” Webster couldn’t tell what would become of the country. “The present state of things cannot last long,” he said. “When or where or what the change will be, is known only to the all-seeing eye of heaven.”