Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII - John Lord
In order to arrive at this coveted office,--although its duties probably
would have been irksome,--it is possible that he sought to conciliate
the South and win the favor of Southern leaders. But I do not believe he
ever sought to win their favor by any abandonment of his former
principles, or by any treachery to the cause he had espoused. Yet it is
this of which he has been accused by his enemies,--many of those enemies
his former friends. The real cause of this estrangement, and of all the
accusations against him, was this,--he did not sympathize with the
Abolition party; he was not prepared to embark in a crusade against
slavery, the basal institution of the South. He did not like slavery;
but he knew it to be an institution which the Constitution, of which he
was the great defender, had accepted,--accepted as a compromise, in
those dark days which tried men's souls. Many of the famous statesmen
who deliberated in that venerated hall in Philadelphia also disliked and
detested slavery; but they could not have had a constitution, they could
not have had a united country, unless that institution was acknowledged
and guaranteed. So they accepted it as the lesser evil. They made a
compromise, and the Constitution was signed. Now, everybody knows that
the Abolitionists of the North, about the year 1833, attacked slavery,
although it was guaranteed by the Constitution; attacked it, not as an
evil merely, but as a sin; attacked it, by virtue of a higher law than
constitutional provision. And as an evil, as a stain on our country, as
an insult to the virtue and intelligence of the age, as a crime against
humanity, these people of the North declared that slavery ought to be
swept away. Mr. Webster, as well as Mr. Fillmore, Mr. Lincoln, Mr.
Everett, and many other acknowledged patriots, was for letting slavery
alone, as an evil too great to be removed without war; which, moreover,
could not be removed without an infringement on what the South
considered as its rights. He was for conciliation, in order to preserve
the Constitution as well as the Union. The Abolitionists were violent in
their denunciations. And although it took many years to permeate the
North with their leaven, they were in earnest; and under persecutions
and mobs and ostracism and contempt they persevered until they created
a terrible public opinion. The South had early taken the alarm, and in
order to protect their peculiar and favorite institution, had at various
times attempted to extend it into newly acquired territories where it
did not exist, claiming the protection of the Constitution. Mr. Webster
was one of their foremost opponents in this, contesting their right to
do it under the Constitution. But in 1848 the Antislavery opinion at the
North crystallized in a political organization,--the Free-Soil Party;
and on the other hand the South proposed to abrogate the Missouri
Compromise of 1820 as an offset to the admission of California as a free
State, and at the same time asked in further concession the passage of
the Fugitive Slave Bill; and, in anticipation of failing to get these,
threatened secession, which of course meant war.
It was at this crisis that Mr. Webster delivered his celebrated 7th of
March speech,--in many respects his greatest,--in which he advocated
conciliation and adherence to the Constitution, but which was
represented to support Southern interests, which all his life he had
opposed; and more, to advocate these interests, in order to secure
Southern votes for the presidency. Some of the rich and influential men
of Boston who disliked Webster for other reasons,--for he used to snub
them, even after they had lent him money,--made the most they could of
that speech, to alienate the people. The Abolitionists, at last hostile
to Mr. Webster, who stood in their way and would not adopt their
dictation or advice, also bitterly denounced this speech, until it
finally came to be regarded by the common people, few of whom ever read
it, as a very unpatriotic production, entirely at variance with the
views that Webster formerly advanced; and they forsook him.
Now, what is the real gist and spirit of that speech? The passions which
agitated the country when it was delivered have passed away, and not
only can we now calmly criticise it, but people will listen to the
criticism with all the attention it deserves.
It is my opinion, shared by Peter Harvey and other friends of Mr.
Webster, that in no speech he ever made are patriotic and Union
sentiments more fully avowed. Said he, with fiery emphasis:--
"I hear with distress and anguish the word 'secession.' Secession!
peaceable secession! Sir, your eyes and mine are never destined to see
that miracle. The dismemberment of this great country without
convulsion! The breaking up the fountains of the great deep without
ruffling the surface! There can be no such thing as peaceable secession.
It is an utter impossibility. Is this great Constitution, under which we
live, to be melted and thawed away by secession, as the snows on the
mountains are melted away under the influence of the vernal sun? No,
sir; I see as plainly as the sun in the heavens what that disruption
must produce. I see it must produce war."
"Peaceable secession! peaceable secession! What would be the result?
Where is the line to be drawn? What States are to secede? What is to
remain American? What am I to be? Am I to be an American no longer,--a
sectional man, a local man, a separatist, with no country in common?
Heaven forbid! Where is the flag of the Union to remain? Where is the
eagle still to tower? What is to become of the army? What is to become
of the navy? What is to become of the public lands? How is each of the
thirty States to defend itself? Will you cut the Mississippi in two,
leaving free States on its branches and slave States at its mouth? Can
any one suppose that this population on its banks can be severed by a
line that divides them from the territory of a foreign and alien
government, down somewhere,--the Lord knows where,--upon the lower
branches of the Mississippi? Sir, I dislike to pursue this subject. I
have utter disgust for it. I would rather hear of national blasts and
mildews and pestilence and famine, than hear gentlemen talk about
secession. To break up this great government! To dismember this glorious
country! To astonish Europe with an act of folly, such as Europe for two
centuries has never beheld in any government! No, sir; such talk is
enough to make the bones of Andrew Jackson turn round in his coffin."
Now, what are we to think of these sentiments, drawn from the 7th of
March speech, so disgracefully misrepresented by the politicians and
the fanatics? Do they sound like bidding for Southern votes? Can any
Union sentiments be stronger? Can anything be more decided or more
patriotic? He warns, he entreats, he predicts like a prophet. He proves
that secession is incompatible with national existence; he sees nothing
in it but war. And of all things he dreaded and hated, it was war. He
knew what war meant. He knew that a civil war would be the direst
calamity. He would ward it off. He would be conciliating. He would take
away the excuse of war, by adhering to the Constitution,--the written
Constitution which our fathers framed, and which has been the admiration
of the world, under which we have advanced to prosperity and glory as no
nation ever before advanced.
But a large class regarded the Constitution as unsound, in some respects
a wicked Constitution, since it recognized slavery as an institution. By
"the higher law," they would sweep slavery away, perhaps by moral means,
but by endless agitations, until it was destroyed. Mr. Webster, I
confess, did not like those agitations, since he knew they would end in
war. He had a great insight, such as few people had at that time. But
his prophetic insight was just what a large class of people did not
like, especially in his own State. He uttered disagreeable truths,--as
all prophets do,--and they took up stones to stone him,--to stone him
for the bravest act of his whole life, in which a transcendent wisdom
appeared, and which will be duly honored when the truth shall be seen.
The fact was, at that time Mr. Webster seemed to be a croaker, a
Jeremiah, as Burke at one time seemed to his generation, when he
denounced the recklessness of the French Revolution. Very few people at
the North dreamed of war. It was never supposed that the Southern
leaders would actually become rebels. And they, on the other hand, never
dreamed that the North would rise up solidly and put them down. And if
war were to happen, it was supposed that it would be brief. Even so
great and sagacious a statesman as Seward thought this. The South
thought that it could easily whip the Yankees; and the North thought
that it could suppress a Southern rebellion in six weeks. Both sides
miscalculated. And so, in spite of warnings, the nation drifted into
war; but as it turned out in the end it seems a providential event,
--the way God took to break up slavery, the root and source of all our
sectional animosities; a terrible but apparently necessary catastrophe,
since more than a million of brave men perished, and more than five
thousand millions of dollars were spent. Had the North been wise, it
would have compensated the South for its slaves. Had the South been
wise, it would have accepted the compensation and set them free, But it
was not to be. That issue could only be settled by the most terrible
contest of modern times.
I will not dwell on that war, which Webster predicted and dreaded. I
only wish to show that it was not for want of patriotism that he became
unpopular, but because he did not fall in with the prevailing passions
of the day, or with the public sentiment of the North in reference to
slavery, not as to its evils and wickedness, but as to the way in which
it was to be opposed. The great reforms of England, since the accession
of William III., have been effected by using constitutional means,--not
violence, not revolution, not war; but by an appeal to reason and
intelligence and justice. No reforms in any nation have been greater and
more glorious than those of the nineteenth century,--all effected by
constitutional methods. Mr. Webster vainly attempted constitutional
means. He was a lawyer. He reverenced the Constitution, with all its
compromises. He would observe the law of contracts. Yet no man in the
nation was more impatient than he at the threats of secession. He
foretold that secession would lead to war. And if Mr. Webster had lived
to see the war of which he had such anxious prescience, I firmly believe
that he would have marched under the banner of the North with patriotism
equal to any man. He would have been where Mr. Everett was. One of his
own sons was slain in that war. He was not a Northern man with Southern
principles; his whole life attested his Northern principles. There never
was a time when he was not hated and mistrusted by the Southern leaders.
It is not a proof that he was Southern in his sympathies because he was
not an Abolitionist; and by an Abolitionist I mean what was meant thirty
years ago,--one who was unscrupulously bent on removing slavery by any
means, good or bad; since slavery, in his eyes, was a _malum per se_,
not a misfortune, an evil, a sin, but a crime to be washed out by the
besom of destruction.
Mr. Webster did not sympathize with these extreme views. He was not a
reformer; but that does not show that he was unpatriotic, or a Southern
man in his heart. "The higher law," to him, was the fulfilment of a
contract; the maintenance of promises made in good faith, whether those
promises were wise or foolish; the observance of laws so long as they
were laws. There was, undeniably, a great evil and shame to be removed,
but he was not responsible for it; and he left that evil in the hands of
Him who said, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay,"--as He did repay in
four years' devastations, miseries, and calamities, and these so awful,
so unexpected, so ill-prepared for, that a thoughtful and kind-hearted
person, in view of them, will weep rather than rejoice; for it is not
pleasant to witness chastisements and punishments, even if necessary
and just, unless the people who suffer are fiends and incarnate devils,
as very few men are. Human nature is about the same everywhere, and
individuals and nations peculiarly sinful are generally made so by their
surroundings and circumstances. The reckless people of frontier mining
districts are not naturally worse than adventurers in New York or
Philadelphia; nor is any vulgar and ignorant man, in any part of the
country, suddenly made rich, probably any coarser in his pleasures, or
more sensual in his appearance, or more profane in his language, than
was Vitellius, or Heliogabalus, or Otho, on an imperial throne.
But even suppose Mr. Webster, in the decline of his life, intoxicated by
his magnificent position or led astray by ambition, made serious
political errors. What then? All great men have made errors, both in
judgment and in morals,--Caesar, when he crossed the Rubicon;
Theodosius, when he slaughtered the citizens of Thessalonica; Luther,
when he quarrelled with Zwingli; Henry IV., when he stooped at Canossa;
Elizabeth, when she executed Mary Stuart; Cromwell, when he bequeathed
absolute power to his son; Bacon, when he took bribes; Napoleon, when he
divorced Josephine; Hamilton, when he fought Burr. The sun itself passes
through eclipses, as it gives light to the bodies which revolve around
it. Even David and Peter stumbled. Because Webster professed to know as
much of the interests of the country as the shoemakers of Lynn, and
refused to be instructed in his political duties by Garrison and Wendell
Phillips, does he deserve eternal reprobation? Because he opposed the
public sentiments of his constituents on one point, when perhaps they
were right, is he to be hurled from his lofty pedestal? Are all his
services to be forgotten because he did not lift up his trumpet voice in
favor of immediate emancipation? And even suppose he sought to
conciliate the South when the South was preparing for rebellion,--is
peace-making such a dreadful thing? Go still farther: suppose he wished
to conciliate the South in order to get Southern support for the
presidency--which I grant he wanted, and possibly sought,--is he to be
unforgiven, and his name to be blasted, and he held up to the rising
generation as a fallen man? Does a man fall hopelessly because he
stumbles? Is a man to be dethroned because he is not perfect? When was
Webster's vote ever bought and sold? Who ever sat with more dignity in
the councils of the nation? Would he have voted for "back pay"? Would he
have bought a seat in the Senate, even if he had been as rich as a
bonanza king?
Consider how few errors Webster really committed in a public career of
nearly forty years. Consider the beneficence and wisdom of the measures
which he generally advocated, and which would have been lost but for
his eloquence and power. Consider the greatness and lustre of his
congressional career on the whole. Who has proved a greater benefactor
to this nation, on the floor of Congress, than he? I do not wish to
eulogize, still less to whitewash, so great a man, but only to render
simple justice to his memory and deeds. The time has come to lift the
veil which for thirty years has concealed his noble political services.
The time has come to cry shame on those boys who mocked a prophet, and
said, "Go up, thou bald-head!"--although no bears were found to devour
them. The time has come for this nation to bury the old slanders of an
exciting political warfare, and render thanks for the services performed
by the greatest intellectual giant of the past generation,--services
rendered not on the floor of the Senate alone, not in the national
legislature for thirty years, but in one of the great offices of State,
when he made a treaty with England which saved us from an entangling
war. The Ashburton treaty is the brightest gem in the coronet with which
he should be crowned. It was the proudest day in Webster's life when
Rufus Choate announced to him one evening that the Senate had confirmed
the treaty. It was not when he closed his magnificent argument in behalf
of Dartmouth College, not when he addressed the intelligence of New
England at Bunker Hill, not when he demolished Governor Hayne, not when
he sat on the woolsack with Lord Brougham, not when he was entertained
by Louis Philippe, that the proudest emotions swelled in his bosom, but
when he learned that he had prevented a war with England,--for he knew
that England and America could not afford to fight; that it would be a
fight where gain is loss and glory is shame.
At last, worn out with labor and disease, and perhaps embittered by
disappointment, and saddened to see the increasing tendency to elevate
little men to power,--the "grasshoppers, who make the field ring with
their importunate chinks, while the great cattle chew the cud and are
silent,"--Webster died at Marshfield, Oct. 24, 1852, at seventy years of
age. At the time he was Secretary of State. He died in the consolations
of a religion in which he believed, surrounded with loving friends; and
even his enemies felt that a great man in Israel had fallen. Nothing
then was said of his defects, for great defects he had,--a towering
intellectual pride like Chatham, an austerity like Gladstone, passions
like those of Mirabeau, extravagance like that of Cicero, indifference
to pecuniary obligations, like Pitt and Fox and Sheridan; but these were
overbalanced by the warmth of his affections for his faithful friends,
simplicity of manners and taste, courteous treatment of opponents,
dignity of character, kindness to the poor, hospitality, enjoyment of
rural scenes and sports, profound religious instincts, devotion to what
he deemed the welfare of his country, independence of opinions and
boldness in asserting them at any hazard and against all opposition, and
unbounded contempt of all lies and shams and tricks. These traits will
make his memory dear to all who knew him. And as Florence, too late,
repented of her ingratitude to Dante, and appointed her most learned men
to expound the "Divine Comedy" when he was dead, so will the writings of
Webster be more and more a study among lawyers and statesmen. His fame
will spread, and grow wider and greater, like that of Bacon and Burke,
and of other benefactors of mankind; and his ideas will not pass away
until the glorious fabric of American institutions, whose foundations
were laid by God-fearing people, shall be utterly destroyed, and the
Capitol, where his noblest efforts were made, shall become a mass of
broken and prostrate columns beneath the debris of the nation's ruin!
No, not then shall they perish, even if such gloomy changes are
possible, any more than the genius of Cicero has faded among the ruins
of the Eternal City; but they shall shine upon the most distant works of
man, since they are drawn from the wisdom of all preceding generations,
and are based on those principles which underlie all possible
civilizations!
AUTHORITIES.
The Works of Daniel Webster, in eight octavo volumes, including his
speeches, addresses, orations, and legal arguments; Life of Daniel
Webster, by G.T. Curtis; Private Correspondence, edited by F. Webster;
Private Life, by C. Lanman; C.W. March's Reminiscences of Congress;
Peter Harvey's Reminiscences and Anecdotes; Edward Everett's Oration on
the Unveiling of the Statue in Boston; R.C. Winthrop and Evarts, on the
same occasion in New York; Contemporaneous Lives of Clay, Calhoun, and
Benton; the great Oration on Webster by Rufus Choate at Dartmouth
College; J. Barnard's Life and Character of Daniel Webster; E.P.
Whipple's Essay on Webster; Eulogies on the Death of Webster, especially
those by G.S. Hillard, L. Woods, A. Taft, R.D. Hitchcock, and Theodore
Parker, also Addresses and Orations on the One Hundredth Anniversary of
Webster's Birth, too numerous to mention,---especially the address of
Senator Bayard at Dartmouth College. The complete and exhaustive Life of
Webster is yet to be written, although the most prominent of his
contemporaries have had something to say.
JOHN C. CALHOUN.
1782-1850.
THE SLAVERY QUESTION.
The extraordinary abilities of John C. Calhoun, the great influence he
exerted as the representative of Southern interests in the National
Legislature, and especially his connection with the Slavery Question,
make it necessary to include him among the statesmen who, for evil or
good, have powerfully affected the destinies of the United States. He is
a great historical character,--the peer of Webster and Clay in
congressional history, and more unsullied than either of them in the
virtues of private life. In South Carolina he was regarded as little
less than a demigod, and until the antislavery agitation began he was
viewed as among the foremost statesmen of the land. His elevation to
commanding influence in Congress was very rapid, and but for his
identification with partisan interests and a bad institution, there was
no office in the gift of the nation to which he could not reasonably
have aspired.
John Caldwell Calhoun was born in 1782, of highly respectable
Protestant-Irish descent, in the Abbeville District in South Carolina.
He was not a patrician, according to the ideas of rich planters. He had
but a slender school education in boyhood, but was prepared for college
by a Presbyterian clergyman, entered the Junior Class of Yale College in
1802, and was graduated with high honors. He chose the law for his
profession, studied laboriously for three years, spending eighteen
months at the then famous law school at Litchfield, Connecticut, and
gave great promise, in his remarkable logical powers, of becoming an
eminent lawyer.
Whatever abilities Mr. Calhoun may have had for the law, it does not
appear that he practised it long, or to any great extent. His taste and
his genius inclined him to politics. And, having married a lady with
some fortune, he had sufficient means to live without professional
drudgery. After serving a short time in the State Legislature of South
Carolina, he was elected a member of Congress, and took his seat in the
House of Representatives in 1811, at the age of twenty-nine. From the
very first his voice was heard. He made a speech in favor of raising ten
thousand additional men to our army to resist the encroachments of Great
Britain and prepare for hostilities should the country drift into war.
It was an able speech for a young man, and its scornful repudiation of
reckoning the costs of war against insult and violated rights had a
chivalric ring about it: "Sir, I here enter my solemn protest against a
low and calculating avarice entering this hall of legislation. It is
only fit for shops and counting-houses.... It is a compromising spirit,
always ready to yield a part to save the residue." Here at an early date
we hear the key-note of his life,--hatred of compromises and
half-measures. If it were necessary to go to war at all, he would fight
regardless of expense.
Thus Calhoun began his public career as an advocate of war with Great
Britain. The old Revolutionary sores had not yet had time to heal, and
there was general hostility to England, except among the Virginia
aristocrats and the Federalists of the North. Although a young man,
Calhoun was placed upon the important committee of Foreign Affairs, of
which he was soon made chairman.
Calhoun's early speeches in Congress gave promise of rare abilities. The
most able of them were those on the repeal of the Embargo, in 1814; on
the commercial convention with Great Britain in 1816; on the United
States Bank Bill and the tariff the same year; and on the Internal
Improvement Bill in 1817. The main subject which occupied Congress from
1812 to 1814 was the war with Great Britain, during the administration
of Madison; and afterwards, till 1817, the great questions at issue were
in reference to tariffs and internal improvements.
In the discussion of these subjects Calhoun took broad and patriotic
ground. At that time we see no sectional interests predominating in his
mind. He favored internal improvements, great permanent roads, and even
the protection of manufactures, and a National Bank. On all these
questions his sectional interests at a later day led him to support the
exact opposite of these early national views. Says Von Holst: "His
speech on the new tariff bill (April 6, 1816) was a long and carefully
prepared argument in favor of the whole economical platform on which the
Whig party stood to the last day of its existence.... Even Henry Clay
and Horace Greeley have not been able to put their favorite doctrine
into stronger language.... His final aim was the industrial independence
of the United States from Europe; and this, he thought, could be
obtained by protective duties."
Calhoun's speeches, during the six years that he was a member of the
House of Representatives, were so able as to attract the attention of
the nation, and in 1817 Monroe selected him as his Secretary of War. And
he made a good executive officer in this branch of the public service,
putting things to rights, and bringing order out of confusion, living on
terms of friendship with John Quincy Adams and other members of the
cabinet, planning military roads, introducing a system of strict economy
in his department, and making salutary reforms. He tolerated no abuses.
He was disposed to do justice to the Indians, and raise them from their
degradation, even seeking to educate them, when it was more than
probable that they would return to their barbaric habits,--a race, as it
would seem from experience, very difficult to civilize. Adams thus spoke
of his young colleague: "Mr. Calhoun is a man of fair and candid mind,
of honorable principles, of quick and clear understanding, of cool
self-possession, of enlarged philosophical views, and of ardent
patriotism. He is above all sectional and factious prejudices more than
any other statesman of this Union with whom I have ever acted,"--a very
different verdict from what he wrote in his diary in 1831. Judge Story
wrote of him in 1823 in these terms: "I have great admiration for Mr.
Calhoun, and think few men have more enlarged and liberal views of the
true policy of the national government."