THE CLASH BETWEEN Henry Clay and John Tyler threw Washington into confusion. “The papers will inform you of the extraordinary state of things here,” Clay told an ally. “The Whigs present the image of a body with its head cut off. Yet that body is powerful, united and indivisible. We have lost a few, but very few, by desertion. The residue are stronger from that fact. In what all this state of things will end, it is difficult to conjecture. The president, I apprehend, will leave us; it is more doubtful where he will go. We have made some sacrifices, may make more, to retain him; but the seeds of mutual distrust are, I fear, so extensively sown that it will be difficult to reunite and harmonize us all again.” Congress had done its part, passing the measures Clay had sought. “If the president had been cordially with us, what a glorious summer this of 1841 would be!”
The summer ended far from gloriously. Clay crafted a modified version of the bank bill and once more brought Congress along. He meanwhile warned Tyler against a second veto, which would amount to apostasy from the Whigs and an embrace of the Democrats. “I do not pretend to know what may be his feelings, but I am sure that were I in his situation, and the possibility of such an act of treachery were affirmed of me, the reproach would fill my heart in its inmost recesses with horror and loathing,” Clay told the Senate. He avowed disbelief that Tyler would actually commit such a heinous crime. “The soil of Virginia is too pure to produce traitors. Small indeed is the number of those who have proved false to their principles and to their party. I knew the father of the president, Judge Tyler of the general court of Virginia, and a purer patriot or more honest man never breathed the breath of life.” Like father, like son, Clay hoped. “I am one of those who hold to the safety which flows from honest ancestors and the purity of blood.” Surely such a heritage would keep the president true. “No, gentlemen, the president never will disgrace himself, disgrace his blood, disgrace his state, disgrace his country, disgrace his children, by abandoning his party,” Clay said. “Never, never. If it were among the possibilities of human turpitude to perpetuate an act like that, I cannot conceive on what principle or for what reason the president could rush upon a deed so atrocious, and deliver himself over to infamy so indelible.” Clay shook his head and furrowed his brow at the mere thought. “No, gentlemen, no. Never will the president of the United States be guilty of such a crime.”
DANIEL WEBSTER WATCHED the storm develop from inside the Tyler cabinet. “I am with the president a good deal,” Webster wrote to his wife. “He seems quite kind, but is evidently much agitated.” Webster owed little more to Tyler than Clay did, but Webster thought the Whig party and the country would suffer from a breach between the president and the party’s leader in Congress. He worked quietly for a compromise. He wrote a letter to a confidant, intending that the letter be published without his name attached. And so it was. The letter urged the two sides to make peace. “While one says he is of Paul, and another that he is of Apollos, not only does time run by, leaving nothing done, but a wily and reckless adversary”—the Democratic party—“is heading in upon our ranks and is very likely to be able to thwart every thing. Union, decision and energy are all indispensable. But UNION is first. If we will but unite, we can form decisive purposes and summon up our energies.” Tyler and Clay must come to some understanding on the bank bill. “There is but one path out of this labyrinth,” the anonymous Webster wrote. “There is but one remedy for the urgent necessities of the country, but one hope of the salvation of the Whig party—it is union, immediate UNION. Let us try such a bank as we can agree upon and can establish.”
Webster also mediated directly between Tyler and Clay, conveying to the latter what the former considered essential in a bank bill. Yet he did so with discretion. “I have done or said nothing as from you by your authority, or implicating you in the slightest degree,” Webster told Tyler. “If any measure pass, you will be perfectly free to exercise your constitutional power wholly uncommitted.”
He found the middle excruciating. “I try to keep cool, and to keep up courage,” he wrote to a friend. “The agony will soon be over. We are on the very point of deciding whether the Whig party and the president shall remain together.” He wished people would calm down. “I am tired to death of the folly of friends.”
Webster’s associates in the cabinet observed his discomfiture. “I called to see Mr. Webster and had a long conversation with him,” wrote Thomas Ewing, the treasury secretary, in his diary. “He expressed great anxiety about the condition of things and seemed to anticipate a dissolution of the cabinet. He said he could not sleep well of nights for thinking of it—said if he were rich he would not mind it personally, but that he felt great unwillingness at his age to return to the bar. We agreed that the situation at the head of a department here was enviable, if the president had intellect and was in harmony with his cabinet and all supported by a good majority in the two houses.” But when these conditions did not apply, as at present, the job lost much of its appeal.
THE STORM BURST in early September. Congress passed the second bank bill, and Tyler vetoed it. Tyler’s cabinet responded by resigning en masse, except for Webster. The Whigs in Congress gathered to condemn Tyler and ended by casting him out of the party. “The conduct of the president has occasioned bitter mortification and deep regret,” the Whig caucus declared. “Those who brought the president into power can be no longer, in any manner or degree, justly held responsible or blamed for the administration of the executive branch of the government.”
Nothing like this had ever happened before. No president had ever been excommunicated by his party. Astonishment suffused the capital.
The casting out of Tyler made Daniel Webster’s position even more uncomfortable. He still liked being secretary of state, and he thought he could do good work in that position. Yet siding with the excommunicant put his own future with the Whigs in peril. Webster’s rivalry with Henry Clay had kept within the bounds of party regularity, but sticking with Tyler might cause it to burst into the open. Webster wasn’t sure he could survive an explicit test of strength.
He decided to remain for a limited period and a specific purpose, a purpose close to the heart of a New England lawyer. For decades the boundary between the United States and British Canada in the vicinity of northern Maine had been in dispute. The matter grew more pressing with the entry of loggers into the area, and in the late 1830s local authorities on both sides of the border huffed and postured and occasionally arrested interlopers from the other side. Things escalated when a British military force entered and occupied a part of the disputed region. The government of Maine responded by calling out the militia and appealing to Congress, which voted ten million dollars toward the defense of American honor and American soil. President Martin Van Buren dispatched General Winfield Scott to Maine. The “Aroostook war,” named for the controverted region, ended in a truce before any shots had been fired, but it left the underlying dispute unresolved. Webster hoped to be the one, on the American side, to resolve it.
His British counterpart, Alexander Baring, was a principal in Baring Brothers bank, one of London’s most powerful financial firms. For his service to Britain and the Tory party he was elevated to the peerage as Lord Ashburton, and as Ashburton he came to the United States in early 1842 to settle the border question.
Webster found Ashburton congenial. “His personal demeanor makes friends,” Webster wrote to Edward Everett, at this point the American minister to Britain. “We all think he has come with an honest and sincere intent of removing all causes of jealousy, disquietude or difference between the two countries.”
The talks went smoothly and, for discussions of this sort, quickly. In four months Webster and Ashburton resolved the border question and additional matters besides. A rebellion in Canada had prompted British officials to seize an American ship engaged by the rebels; in the seizure an American was killed. Authorities in New York state subsequently arrested one of those responsible for the seizure. The British asserted that as an agent of the British government he could not be tried in an American court. He was tried nonetheless, and acquitted, but the question of whose law governed what territory persisted. Similar questions vexed navigation on the Great Lakes and other waters shared by the United States and Canada. A separate boundary issue, resulting from vague language in an earlier treaty, left the border west of Lake Superior uncertain. Finally, Britain wanted the United States to cooperate in suppressing the Atlantic slave trade.
The result of the discussions was the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, signed in August 1842. The treaty resolved the border issues and specified terms of law enforcement and extradition. Webster refused to grant Britain the right to search American vessels on the high seas for slaves, but he approved a provision committing the U.S. navy to assist in patrols off the coast of Africa.
Webster and Ashburton parted as the best of friends. “I must at last run away, or rather sail away, without seeing you,” Ashburton wrote to Webster as he left America. “This is provoking, but I cannot help it. I had indeed little to say, but it is, notwithstanding, a mortification to me to leave these shores without first shaking your hand. The pain would be greater if I did not confidently hope to see you in the old world.” He invited Webster to visit him in England. Yet Webster must make haste. “My taper is burning away fast.” Ashburton closed, “Adieu, my dear Mr. Webster. Let me hear from you if you have leisure, but above all let me see you if you can.”