DANIEL WEBSTER’S SPEECH stunned the Senate and outraged New England. A defense of slaveholders’ interests was expected of John Calhoun and even Henry Clay, but a defense of those interests by Daniel Webster? It was too much to bear. Webster’s supporters in Massachusetts were appalled; one of Webster’s staunchest backers was reported to have required a week of bed rest to recover. The Massachusetts legislature felt betrayed; a Whig leader there who had been proud to call Webster a friend and a model declared, “We are now on the opposite sides of the moral universe.” Poet John Greenleaf Whittier set his disappointment to verses that Massachusetts congressman Horace Mann read to the House of Representatives: “Of all we loved and honored, naught / Save power remains,— / A fallen angel’s pride of thought, / Still strong in chains. / All else is gone; from those great eyes / The soul has fled; / When faith is lost, when honor dies / The man is dead.” Ralph Waldo Emerson spat on one to whom he had looked for leadership. “Liberty! Liberty! Pho!” said Emerson. “Let Mr. Webster for decency’s sake shut his lips once and forever on this word. The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan.” The normally meditative Emerson couldn’t contain himself; he went on, “Tell him that he who was their pride in the woods and mountains of New England is now their mortification; that they never name him; they have taken his picture from the wall and torn it—dropped the pieces in the gutter; they have taken his book of speeches from the shelf and put it in the stove.”
Some who had humorously suggested that Webster had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his other-worldly powers of address now declared, with stony seriousness, that he had bartered it a second time, to win the presidency. Why else would he have given up his principles, his constituents, his friends and admirers? Southern Whigs applauded the pragmatism and broad-mindedness of Webster’s speech, and the endorsement was read in the North as corroboration of the presidential-ambition theory. New England’s Whigs, Webster’s natural base, mobilized to deny him the ultimate prize. Faneuil Hall in Boston hosted an anti-Webster protest more vitriolic than many of the antislavery protests common in the Massachusetts capital. John Calhoun was portrayed as honorable compared with Webster; at least Calhoun didn’t stab his supporters in the back.
WHETHER WEBSTER’S ENDORSEMENT of Henry Clay’s compromise did the Clay package any good was difficult to tell for several weeks, during which time the attention of Congress and the country was wrenched in another direction. After his long battle with lung disease, John Calhoun died on March 31.
Clay acknowledged a worthy foe. “He is gone!” he told the Senate. “No more shall we witness from yonder seat the flashes of that keen and penetrating eye of his, darting through this chamber. No more shall we behold that torrent of clear, concise, compact logic poured out from his lips, which, if it did not always carry conviction to our judgment, commanded our great admiration. Those eyes and those lips are closed forever!”
Clay recalled his first encounters with Calhoun, at the time of the War of 1812. “Of all the Congresses with which I have had any acquaintance since my entry into the service of the federal government, in none, in my humble opinion, has been assembled such a galaxy of eminent and able men as were in the House of Representatives of that Congress which declared the war, and in that immediately following the peace. And amongst that splendid assemblage none shone more bright and brilliant than the star which is now set.” Then and for years after, Clay said, he and Calhoun had stood shoulder to shoulder on policy foreign and domestic, and even when domestic issues had drawn them apart, they still shared a vision of America’s importance to the world. In all things, Calhoun was a statesman to admire. “He possessed an elevated genius of the highest order,” Clay said. “In felicity of generalization of the subjects of which his mind treated, I have seen him surpassed by no one. And the charm and captivating influence of his colloquial powers have been felt by all who have conversed with him. I was his senior, Mr. President, in years—in nothing else. According to the course of nature, I ought to have preceded him. It has been decreed otherwise; but I know that I shall linger here only a short time and shall soon follow him.”
Clay adduced a lesson. “How brief, how short is the period of human existence allotted even to the youngest amongst us!” he said. “Sir, ought we not to profit by the contemplation of this melancholy occasion? Ought we not to draw from it the conclusion how unwise it is to indulge in the acerbity of unbridled debate? How unwise to yield ourselves to the sway of the animosities of party feeling?” Clay didn’t pretend to agree with Calhoun on the central issues confronting the nation at this moment. But he hoped to emulate Calhoun in devotion to duty. “I trust we shall all be instructed by the eminent virtues and merits of his exalted character, and be taught, by his bright example, to fulfill our great public duties by the lights of our own judgment and the dictates of our own consciences, as he did, according to his honest and best conceptions of those duties, faithfully and to the last.”
Daniel Webster echoed Clay. “I have not, in public nor in private life, known a more assiduous person in the discharge of his appropriate duties,” Webster said of Calhoun. “I have known no man who wasted less of his life in what is called recreation, or employed less of it in pursuits not connected with the immediate discharge of his duty. He seemed to have no recreation but the pleasure of conversation with his friends. Out of the chambers of Congress, he was either devoting himself to the acquisition of knowledge pertaining to the immediate subject of the duty before him, or else he was indulging in those social interviews in which he so much delighted.”
Calhoun’s eloquence was of the first order, Webster said. “It grew out of the qualities of his mind. It was plain, strong, terse, condensed, concise; sometimes impassioned—still always severe. Rejecting ornament, not often seeking far for illustration, his power consisted in the plainness of his propositions, in the closeness of his logic, and in the earnestness and energy of his manner.” Calhoun was the model of the gentleman and statesman. “No man was more respectful to others; no man carried himself with greater decorum, no man with superior dignity.” His accomplishments made him a man for the ages. “He has lived long enough, he has done enough, and he has done it so well, so successfully, so honorably, as to connect himself for all time with the records of his country.” Webster concluded, “He is now a historical character. Those of us who have known him here will find that he has left upon our minds and our hearts a strong and lasting impression of his person, his character and his public performances, which, while we live, will never be obliterated.”
CALHOUN’S DEATH DEPRIVED the opposition to Clay’s compromise of its most powerful voice. A second death removed another foe. Zachary Taylor didn’t like Clay’s package, and he didn’t like Clay. Taylor’s record as a soldier had won him nomination by the Whig party in 1848 and election by the American people, and he harbored the soldier’s skepticism of career politicians. He fancied himself the leader of the Whig party and objected to Clay’s failure to defer to him on party matters. He had his own ideas about dealing with the California question, preferring to admit California as a free state without reference to the other issues that roiled sectional politics. He felt upstaged by Clay’s comprehensive approach.
But Taylor took abruptly ill in the summer of 1850. A sweltering Independence Day ceremony was followed by severe gastrointestinal distress. Some friends and physicians blamed the cherries and iced milk he consumed at the ceremony’s end; others suggested one of the fevers that afflicted Washington during hot weather. Taylor suffered for several days before dying of what the doctors called cholera morbus, a vague term that merely summarized his symptoms. The nation was shocked; Old Rough and Ready had seemed hale and strong.
Taylor’s death left Clay as the unchallenged head of the Whig party, and it rendered his compromise package the only viable solution to the California crisis. At the suggestion of Henry Foote, a Democrat from Mississippi, Clay had agreed to roll his several resolutions into a single bill, but the omnibus approach had stalled as opponents of one part of the big bill linked arms with opponents of other parts to subvert the whole thing. Taylor’s death, and his replacement by Millard Fillmore, a Clay ally, essentially eliminated the chance of a presidential veto at the end of the legislative process and gave supporters of the compromise new energy.
They needed all the energy they could muster—more energy than Clay himself could sustain. The summer’s heat drove him from the capital to the seacoast at Newport. An ambitious first-term Democrat from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas, quietly took charge of the several parts of the compromise and found separate majorities for each. By the time Clay returned at the end of August, the grand compromise he had laid out in January awaited little more than the president’s signature, which Fillmore duly furnished. The deal was done.
Washington sighed with relief. No one thought the Compromise of 1850, as it was soon dubbed, had spiked sectionalism forever. But Henry Clay understood that forever was a concept foreign to politics. The compromise had bought years, perhaps even a decade or two. The South would not secede during that time; civil war would not rend the country. In politics such an outcome was as much as any statesman could ask. Clay, suddenly feeling the full weight of his seventy-three years, celebrated the passage of the compromise in comparative silence. He left to Daniel Webster to summarize the meaning of the achievement. “We have gone through the most important crisis which has occurred since the foundation of the government,” Webster said. “Whatever party may prevail hereafter, the Union stands firm. Faction, disunion and the love of mischief are put under, at least for the present, and I hope for a long time.”