Congressional Giants. J. Michael Martinez
Webster frequently wrote out a short outline of the points he sought to make and constructed his arguments as he went along. He was not above adding rhetorical flourishes, classical allusions, and appeals to sentiment, sometimes drawing tears from the justices and members of the crowd. At the same time, Webster’s arguments were grounded in logic and legal maxims of the day.59
Few listeners could forget Webster’s brilliant 1818 peroration in a case involving his alma mater, Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward. In a four-hour argument about the sanctity of contracts, Webster engaged his rapt audience as he spoke with heartfelt emotion: “Sir, you may destroy this little institution,” he said of Dartmouth College, the passion evident in his voice. “It is weak; it is in your hands! I know it is one of the lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out! But if you do so, you must carry through your work! You must extinguish, one after another, all those great lights of science which for more than a century have thrown their radiance over our land!” To modern sensibilities, such appeals sound maudlin, but they struck a great many denizens of the nineteenth century as profound and touching. “It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it!” Struggling with his emotions, Webster strove to finish his plea. “Sir, I know not how others may feel, but, for myself, and when I see my alma mater surrounded, like Caesar in the Senate-House, by those who are reiterating stab upon stab, I would not, for this right hand, have her turn to me, and say, Et tu quoque mi filii! And thou too, my son!”60
By the 1820s, Webster’s legal career flourished even as his political career reached a crossroads. The Federalist Party was in its death throes everywhere except New England. Recognizing the precarious state of the party, New England Federalists urged Webster, one of the few living bright lights of the dwindling organization, to stand again for election to the House. He agreed to do so. In 1822, he won his election, and took his seat the following year. Although he and Speaker Henry Clay had seldom seen eye to eye, that did not stop Clay from appointing Webster chair of the House Judiciary Committee in recognition of the Massachusetts representative’s reputation as an accomplished lawyer. From that position, Webster pushed to relieve Supreme Court justices from circuit-riding duties—a common practice at the time where the justices would go on the road to hear cases in addition to their duties listening to appeals in the nation’s capital—and he supported measures to fund internal improvements.61
As the 1824 presidential election approached, Webster surveyed the field of candidates and pondered his choices. He saw General Andrew Jackson, the uneducated, uncouth frontiersman, as unqualified. William H. Crawford, another leading candidate, had suffered a stroke. Webster eventually endorsed John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts. Although the two men hailed from the same state, they were hardly allies. Webster believed that Adams had deserted the Federalist Party and harmed its viability years earlier. Yet, when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives following an electoral stalemate, Webster’s support helped Adams eke out a victory.62
Following Adams’s inauguration in 1825, Webster became a leading administration supporter in the House. His party now traveled under the name “National Republicans,” while their opponents, the Democrats, rallied around Andrew Jackson. The Democrats bitterly charged that Adams, with assistance from Henry Clay, had stolen the 1824 election, and they vowed to resist all measures proposed by the new administration. Adams urged Congress to adopt a system of internal improvements modeled on Clay’s American system, but the opposition was firm and well organized. Webster, now inextricably aligned with the Adams forces despite his earlier reservations, even became a vocal proponent of the protective tariff, ignoring his long-standing ambivalence.63
While some public men, notably John C. Calhoun, began their careers as nationalists and gravitated toward state rights as they grew older, Webster experienced the opposite. He had been first and foremost a New Englander during his early years. Although he had stopped short of embracing calls for secession, he had been willing to defend a state’s right to resist federal encroachments. By the time he moved into the U.S. Senate in 1827, he was known as a fierce advocate of national interests. Having amassed seniority and mastered the procedures and rules of the House, Webster did not want to leave, but the state legislature believed he would be a powerful voice in the Senate. He acquiesced. As a senator, Webster, always ambivalent, wrestled with the issue but eventually supported the Tariff of 1828, which raised tariff rates and infuriated southerners. He also opposed Jackson’s election to the presidency in 1828, to no avail. Jackson overwhelmed Adams, sweeping into office and promising to reform government and rein in his predecessor’s nationalist policies.64
Webster looked on in horror as Jackson initiated his promised reforms. Infuriated, he argued against the administration’s support for the Indian Removal Act, which forced Native American tribes to leave their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States, and recoiled from the spoils system instituted by Jackson to reward his friends and loyal supporters with federal patronage. On one matter, though, he agreed with the president. During these years, state rights advocates bandied about the doctrine of nullification, which would allow states dissatisfied with federal policies to “nullify,” or render such policies null and void. Jackson would not tolerate nullification threats. Webster, too, thought that this loose talk was dangerous, and he embarked on a public campaign to defend the Union.65
Webster’s most famous defense of the Union occurred in January 1830. South Carolina Senator Robert Y. Hayne, a proxy for Jackson’s vice president, John C. Calhoun, stood in the well of the Senate during a debate over land policy and charged that northern men, in advocating high tariff rates, were deliberately harming western as well as southern interests. In his response, Webster objected to Hayne’s characterization of the North as antagonistic to the South, although Webster simultaneously denigrated the institution of slavery. The New Englander also blanched at the southerner’s state rights defense.
Hayne offered a rebuttal to Webster, reiterating his belief that the North in general, and Webster in particular, were “making war upon the unoffending South.” In his reply, Hayne suggested that nullification was an acceptable remedy for states aggrieved by oppressive federal policies. He refused to recognize the value of the Union as paramount, contending that the states were superior to the federal government.66
This challenge could not go unanswered. In his second reply to Hayne, delivered on January 26, Webster argued that the U.S. Constitution, as the supreme law of the land, had established “we, the people” as the ultimate source of authority, not the states. The doctrine of nullification threatened to undermine the delicate balance of power established in the Constitution, thereby effectively returning the nation to the Articles of Confederation, the first national constitution, or to anarchy. The Articles had failed precisely because that document had allowed the states to be sovereign, producing a government that was too weak and ineffective to rule the nation, or its citizens. For Webster, nullification was logically and practically unworkable as well as tantamount to treason.
Hayne and his southern brethren had argued that they prized liberty over Union, and they would fight to preserve their right to live free of an obdurate government. Webster believed that liberty and Union must coexist. He also sought to snuff out the talk of possible Civil War. As he concluded his second reply to Hayne, Webster uttered some of the most famous words ever spoken in the Senate:
When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as “What is all this worth?” nor those other words of delusion and folly, “Liberty first and Union afterwards”; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all it sample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!67