PHILIP HONE HAD been mayor of New York during the 1820s, but he became more famous for the friends he made and the diary he kept, in which he told of his friends’ faults and foibles, among many other things. Yet he found little to fault in Daniel Webster, who seemed to him the model of the American statesman. Even so, it was the domestic life of Webster that Hone found especially appealing.
He visited Webster at his home in Massachusetts. Webster’s first wife, Grace, had died after twenty years of their marriage, leaving him three children. He married again, to Caroline, and shortly purchased a farm near Marshfield, thirty miles southeast of Boston. Webster fell in love with the place, borrowing money to improve and expand the property. Marshfield became a personal haven from his professional cares; visitors found him more relaxed there than in Washington and no less proud of what he accomplished on his saltwater farm than of what he achieved in politics or law.
“Our reception by the noble master of the mansion and his amiable, kind and ladylike wife was everything that heart could wish,” Hone recorded in his diary in the summer of 1845. “At one moment instructive and eloquent, he delights his guests with the charms of his conversation; then, full of life and glee as a boy escaped from school, he sings snatches of songs, tells entertaining stories, and makes bad puns.” A hearty dinner was followed by blissful slumber in a breeze off the sea. “After breakfast Mr. Webster drove Draper”—another guest—“and me over his extensive grounds down to the beach, where his boats were ready for a fishing excursion, which is one of his greatest enjoyments. Here was this wonderful man, on whose lips unsurpassed eloquence has so often hung, whose pen has directed the most important negotiations, and whose influence has governed Senates, in a loose coat and trousers, with a most picturesque slouched hat, which a Mexican bandit might have coveted, directing his people—whose obedience grows out of affection, and who are governed by the force of kindness—regulating the apparatus, examining the bait, and helping to hoist the sails and hold on to the main sheet.” The wind was brisk and the waves were boisterous. The bouncing was more than Hone could manage. “I don’t wish it made too public, sir,” he told Webster, “nor would I have it put in the newspapers; but I am sick! sick!” Webster smiled weakly. “My case exactly,” he said. “I have tried to keep this unusual circumstance a secret; but it won’t do, and we must go ashore.”
The next day, after Hone visited the historic sites around nearby Plymouth, the tour of Marshfield manor continued. “Farmer Webster showed us his capacious barns, in which many a ton of good Puritan hay is just now being condemned to the rack; fields of oats supporting their heavy heads upon slender but healthy limbs; cattle combining the advantages of foreign and domestic blood; cows whose sleek sides bear the comfortable signs of milk, butter and cheese; every vegetable from the diminutive bean up to the unwieldy pumpkin; while the broad sea lay before him, containing a certain harvest of piscatory enjoyments.”
A second sail proved more productive than the first. “The wind was favorable, the weather fine, and all things propitious. Casting anchor five or six miles from land, we went to work, and the result of our labour was the capture of twenty-six cod and twenty-two haddock, weighing more than three hundred pounds. I had never had such sport and never saw such spoils, and the sail home in our beautiful yacht was delightful. We returned to a late dinner, of which our fish formed an important part, and the cool wine, taken under the shade of the noble lime trees in front of the house, to which the agreeable conversation of our noble host gave a zest of the richest character, closed a day to which there was no alloy but the recollection that it was the last we had to spend at Marshfield.”
WEBSTER ENJOYED MARSHFIELD more than any of his guests did, and the pleasure he found there made it hard for him to leave. It was never harder than in the mid-1840s. Henry Clay’s coup against John Tyler had left Webster hanging, and though some of his fellow Whigs forgave him for remaining in the state department to negotiate the British treaty, many took offense that he didn’t resign immediately thereafter. Webster had no devious plan in remaining; he was not a devious planner in anything he did. Nor did he remain for long. But his continued association with Tyler allowed Clay’s supporters to question his loyalty to the Whig party. Lest possibility persist of his derailing Clay’s 1844 nomination, a pro-Clay paper in Louisville published a story that Webster had sexually assaulted the wife of one of the clerks in the state department. Webster categorically denied the offense, for which no evidence was adduced, and the paper was compelled to retract the allegation. Yet the episode allowed the gossip-prone to recirculate stories of Webster’s amours. Such stories were a staple of Washington life, and they attached at times to Henry Clay and many others, as well as Webster. By themselves the stories rarely disqualified a man from office. James Buchanan would be elected president despite a common belief among his Washington contemporaries that he was homosexual. Yet a candidate weakened on other grounds could find the gossip debilitating.
Amid the snarking, Webster pondered retirement, a definitive retreat to Marshfield. But his creditors wouldn’t let him. Marshfield didn’t pay his debts; instead it increased them. And for all the disappointment and discomfiture politics sometimes occasioned, he couldn’t deny the allure power and celebrity held for him. Finally, and not least important, he still had work to do. The Union and the Constitution needed defending, and he couldn’t think of anyone more capable than himself.
Webster had opposed the annexation of Texas since before Texas asked for it, and he continued to oppose it. He disliked the precedent annexation would set. “I have always wished that this country should exhibit to the nations of this earth the example of a great, rich and powerful republic which is not possessed by the spirit of aggrandizement,” he explained. He joined Henry Clay in fearing that annexation would trigger war with Mexico. And he questioned the constitutionality of annexation. He asserted that the constitutional bargain allowing the original slave states their excess representation—from counting three-fifths of slaves toward apportioning the House of Representatives—didn’t and shouldn’t apply to new slave states. “I never could, and never can, persuade myself to be in favor of the admission of other states into the Union as slave states, with the inequalities which were allowed and accorded by the Constitution to the slave-holding states then in existence. I do not think that the free states ever expected, or could expect, that they would be called on to admit more slave states, having the unequal advantages arising from the mode of apportioning representation under the existing Constitution.”
Webster might have been right about the attitudes that existed when the Constitution was adopted. But he was behind times since then, for the free states had repeatedly acquiesced in the creation of new slave states, which entered the Union with the same representational advantage the original slave states enjoyed. Representatives of the free states had sometimes complained, but not in sufficient numbers to keep the slave South from expanding.
WEBSTER WAS BEHIND times in another regard. The election of James Polk had essentially guaranteed the annexation of Texas. It meanwhile put the final nail in the coffin of John Calhoun’s diminished hopes for the presidency. Calhoun’s Texas play for the presidency had foundered upon the emergence of Polk, who cornered the market on the annexationist vote. It had been a long shot anyway; Calhoun was too identified with nullification and its evil stepsister, secession, to appeal outside the Deep South. When the Democrats united behind Polk, Calhoun saw his last chance for the presidency vanish.
But he still might claim credit for Texas. Polk’s election gave crucial momentum to the Texas cause, prompting lame duck John Tyler to press for annexation before leaving office. The arithmetic of the Constitution precluded another treaty attempt, so Tyler and Calhoun chose the route of a joint resolution of the Senate and the House. The advantage of a joint resolution was that it required simple majorities in the two chambers, rather than the two-thirds of the Senate needed for treaty approval.
The disadvantage of a joint resolution was that no one knew whether it was constitutional. The United States had never annexed an independent country, and certainly not one including many thousands of slaves. The Constitution was silent on the subject. Yet the Constitution had been silent on the purchase of territory from a foreign power, and even a strict constructionist like Thomas Jefferson had found sufficient authority for the acquisition of Louisiana. Surely the Constitution could brook the admission of Texas.
This was what Daniel Webster disputed, too late. The joint resolution on Texas first came up in early 1845; it was approved by Congress just days before Tyler’s term expired. The Texans then had to ratify annexation and write a constitution that passed congressional muster. The process took several months, during which Webster resumed his seat in the Senate. He arrived in time to register his opposition and that of those who sent him. He realized that the bargain had already been struck and was probably irrevocable. But he had to speak out nonetheless. “I agree with the unanimous opinion of the legislature of Massachusetts,” he told the Senate. “I agree with the great mass of her people. I reaffirm what I have said and written during the last eight years, at various times, against this annexation. I here record my own dissent and opposition, and I here express and place on record, also, the dissent and protest of the state of Massachusetts.”
The Senate ignored Webster and Massachusetts and gave its final approval to annexation. The House did likewise, and in December 1845 Texas became the twenty-eighth state of the Union.