The first was his extraordinary memory. At age 15, ordered by his tutor to memorize 100 lines from Virgil by the following day as punishment for shirking his studies, Webster repeated the lines word for word and then offered to recite another 100 lines. This incredible capacity for memorization would prove crucial in an age when a speech might last hours.
Webster’s rhetorical skills also put him head and shoulders above most of his fellow senators. Today, we might regard his speeches as over the top, their language too ornate and ostentatious, but in a culture built from the King James Bible and the plays of Shakespeare, they were a perfect fit.
At age 18, invited to speak at a Fourth of July gathering, Webster’s speech lauding the republic and those who had founded it was a smashing success. “Shall we pronounce the sad valediction to freedom, and immolate liberty on the altars our fathers have raised to her? No! The response of a nation is, ‘No!’ Let it be registered in the archives of Heaven!”
The War of Words
The first half of the 19th century saw the new republic split by sectional disagreements.The Northeast was a region of small farms and rapid industrial growth. The South remained agrarian, with its chief moneymaking exports—cotton and tobacco—largely produced by slave labor. The West pushed the American frontier from the hills of Tennessee and the Ohio Valley across the continent to California.
The two great issues of the time were slavery and tariffs. Northern abolitionists detested the chains and manacles of bondage found in the South, and Northern manufacturers called repeatedly for tariffs on foreign imports to protect and grow their infant industries. The South rankled at these calls for emancipation, and both the South and the West regarded the tariffs as penalties, raising their cost of living while benefiting Northern industrial barons.
Nullification Denied
The Tariff of 1828 roiled the nation’s uneasy spirit. Northern industrialists were delighted, but the South, facing enormous increases in the cost of goods, called it “the Tariff of Abominations.” Then-Vice President John C. Calhoun spoke and wrote against the tariff, believing it to be “unconstitutional, unequal, and oppressive.” He further suggested that individual states call a convention and declare such a law “null and void.”In a subsequent exchange of speeches with Webster on the Senate floor, South Carolina senator Robert Hayne attacked the tariff and stoutly defended the idea of nullification. Scheduled to deliver the following day what became known as his “Second Reply to Hayne,” Webster spent the intermittent time preparing what some consider his finest piece of oratory, and one of the greatest speeches heard on the floor of the Senate up to that point.
‘The Seventh of March Speech’
Webster’s reply to Hayne solidified his reputation as one of America’s great orators, but his speech in 1850, which was equally brilliant and bright with the fires of his rhetoric, brought about his political demise.Thirty years had passed since the Missouri Compromise, and the divisions, particularly between the North and the South, had only worsened. The acquisition of territories from the war with Mexico only added to this mess, by raising the question of whether these new lands would be slave or free. Henry Clay offered his Compromise of 1850, the provisions of which included such measures as admitting California as a free state, allowing other territories to determine their policies regarding slavery, and abolishing the slave trade, but not slavery itself, in Washington.
In the three-hour speech that followed—not especially long for Webster—it becomes clear that he had little hope of slavery being eradicated anytime in the near future. He attempted an approach to Clay’s Compromise by addressing some of the sectional differences and grievances of both the North and South.
Had he stopped there, he might have retained goodwill among his fellow New Englanders, but he then spoke in support of the fugitive slave laws, arguing that these escaped bondsmen were property and should rightly be returned to their owners. He ended his speech with a series of rhetorical flourishes, such as “instead of speaking of the possibility or utility of secession, instead of dwelling in those 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; … let our comprehension be as broad as the country for which we act, our aspirations as high as its certain destiny; let us not be pigmies in a case that calls for men.”
Webster, who had spent so much of his life in politics, had misjudged his own base of voters. He had once again promoted union, but at the price of principle.
The Compromise became law, but Webster lost the support of many of his fellow Whigs. He soon resigned from the Senate to become secretary of state in the Millard Fillmore administration. He died soon afterward, suffering a fall from a horse and from cirrhosis. By that time, both Clay and Calhoun were gone as well.
With the outbreak of the Civil War less than 10 years later, Webster’s longtime efforts to preserve the states from a sectional war had come to naught.
Webster remains one of America’s greatest orators, whose patriotic speeches, despite having some unintended consequences, possibly resonated with President Abraham Lincoln, who struggled to maintain “liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable” during America’s internal strife. Those same words live on today as the state motto of North Dakota.
