Daniel Webster. Henry Cabot Lodge
two thousand dollars a year, and in that hardy and poor community he could not hope to earn more. To a man with such great and productive talents, and with a growing family, a larger field had become an absolute necessity. In June, 1816, therefore, Mr. Webster removed from Portsmouth to Boston. That he gained by the change is apparent from the fact that the first year after his removal his professional income did not fall short of twenty thousand dollars. The first suggestion of the possibilities of wealth offered to his abilities in a suitable field came from his going to Washington. There, in the winter of 1813 and 1814, he was admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States, before which he tried two or three cases, and this opened the vista of a professional career, which he felt would give him verge and room enough, as well as fit remuneration. From this beginning the Supreme Court practice, which soon led to the removal to Boston, rapidly increased, until, in the last session of his term, it occupied most of his time. This withdrawal from the duties of Congress, however, was not due to a sacrifice of his time to his professional engagements, but to the depression caused by his first great grief, which must have rendered the noise and dust of debate most distasteful to him. Mr. and Mrs. Webster had arrived in Washington for this last session, in December, 1816, and were recalled to Boston by the illness of their little daughter Grace, who was their oldest child, singularly bright and precocious, with much of her father's look and talent, and of her mother's sensibility. She was a favorite with her father, and tenderly beloved by him. After her parents' return she sank rapidly, the victim of consumption. When the last hour was at hand, the child, rousing from sleep, asked for her father. He came, raised her upon his arm, and, as he did so, she smiled upon him and died. It is a little incident in the life of a great man, but a child's instinct does not err at such a moment, and her dying smile sheds a flood of soft light upon the deep and warm affections of Mr. Webster's solemn and reserved nature. It was the first great grief. Mr. Webster wept convulsively as he stood beside the dead, and those who saw that stately creature so wrung by anguish of the heart never forgot the sight.
Thus the period which began at Portsmouth in 1807 closed in Boston, in 1817, with the death of the eldest born. In that decade Mr. Webster had advanced with great strides from the position of a raw and youthful lawyer in a back country town of New Hampshire. He had reached the highest professional eminence in his own State, and had removed to a wider sphere, where he at once took rank with the best lawyers. He was a leading practitioner in the highest national court. During his two terms in Congress he had become a leader of his party, and had won a solid national reputation. In those years he had rendered conspicuous service to the business interests of the nation, and had established himself as one of the ablest statesmen of the country in matters of finance. He had defined his position on the tariff as a free-trader in theory and a very moderate protectionist when protection was unavoidable, a true representative of the doctrine of the New England Federalists. He had taken up his ground as the champion of specie payments and of the liberal interpretation of the Constitution, which authorized internal improvements. While he had not shrunk from extreme opposition to the administration during the war, he had kept himself entirely clear from the separatist sentiment of New England in the year 1814. He left Congress with a realizing sense of his own growing powers, and, rejoicing in his strength, he turned to his profession and to his new duties in his new home.
CHAPTER III.
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.—MR. WEBSTER AS A LAWYER
There is a vague tradition that when Mr. Webster took up his residence in Boston, some of the worthies of that ancient Puritan town were disposed at first to treat him rather cavalierly and make him understand that because he was great in New Hampshire it did not follow that he was also great in Massachusetts. They found very quickly, however, that it was worse than useless to attempt anything of this sort with a man who, by his mere look and presence whenever he entered a room, drew all eyes to himself and hushed the murmur of conversation. It is certain that Mr. Webster soon found himself the friend and associate of all the agreeable and distinguished men of the town, and that he rapidly acquired that general popularity which, in those days, went with him everywhere. It is also certain that he at once and without effort assumed the highest position at the bar as the recognized equal of its most eminent leaders. With an income increased tenfold and promising still further enlargement, a practice in which one fee probably surpassed the earnings of three months in New Hampshire, with an agreeable society about him, popular abroad, happy and beloved at home, nothing could have been more auspicious than these opening years of his life in Boston.
The period upon which he then entered, and during which he withdrew from active public service to devote himself to his profession, was a very important one in his career. It was a period marked by a rapid intellectual growth and by the first exhibition of his talents on a large scale. It embraces, moreover, two events, landmarks in the life of Mr. Webster, which placed him before the country as one of the first and the most eloquent of her constitutional lawyers, and as the great master in the art of occasional oratory. The first of these events was the argument in the Dartmouth College case; the second was the delivery of the Plymouth oration.
I do not propose to enter into or discuss the merits or demerits of the constitutional and legal theories and principles involved in the famous "college causes," or in any other of the great cases subsequently argued by Mr. Webster. In a biography of this kind it is sufficient to examine Mr. Webster's connection with the Dartmouth College case, and endeavor, by a study of his arguments in that and in certain other hardly less important causes, to estimate properly the character and quality of his abilities as a lawyer, both in the ordinary acceptation of the term and in dealing with constitutional questions.
The complete history of the Dartmouth College case is very curious and deserves more than a passing notice. Until within three years it is not too much to say that it was quite unknown, and its condition is but little better now. In 1879 Mr. John M. Shirley published a volume entitled the "Dartmouth College Causes," which is a monument of careful study and thorough research. Most persons would conclude that it was a work of merely legal interest, appealing to a limited class of professional readers. Even those into whose hands it chanced to come have probably been deterred from examining it as it deserves by the first chapter, which is very obscure, and by the confusion of the narrative which follows. Yet this monograph, which has so unfortunately suffered from a defective arrangement of material, is of very great value, not only to our legal and constitutional history, but to the political history of the time and to a knowledge of the distinguished actors in a series of events which resulted in the establishment of one of the most far-reaching of constitutional doctrines, one that has been a living question ever since the year 1819, and is at this moment of vast practical importance. Mr. Shirley has drawn forth from the oblivion of manuscript a collection of documents which, taken in conjunction with those already in print, throws a flood of light upon a dark place of the past and gives to a dry constitutional question the vital and human interest of political and personal history.
In his early days, Eleazer Wheelock, the founder of Dartmouth College, had had much religious controversy with Dr. Bellamy of Connecticut, who was like himself a graduate of Yale. Wheelock was a Presbyterian and a liberal, Bellamy a Congregationalist and strictly orthodox. The charter of Dartmouth was free from any kind of religious discrimination. By his will the elder Wheelock provided in such a way that his son succeeded him in the presidency of the college. In 1793 Judge Niles, a pupil of Bellamy, became a trustee of the college, and he and John Wheelock represented the opposite views which they respectively inherited from tutor and father. They were formed for mutual hostility, and the contest began some twelve years before it reached the public. The trustees and the president were then all Federalists, and there would seem to have been no differences of either a political or a religious nature. The trouble arose from the resistance of a minority of the trustees to what they termed the "family dynasty." Wheelock, however, maintained his ascendency until 1809, when his enemies obtained a majority in the board of trustees, and thereafter admitted no friend of the president to the government, and used every effort to subdue the dominant dynasty.
In New Hampshire, at that period, the Federalists were the ruling party, and the Congregationalists formed the state church. The people were, in practice, taxed to support Congregational churches, and the clergy of that denomination were exempted from taxation. All the Congregational ministers were stanch Federalists and most of their parishioners were of the same party. The college,