But the hotheads of the south and the fanatical wing of the anti-slavery men at the north rose up, obstructing his way like mountains. At the same time there was lack of vision in even the leaders of each section who could rise to patriotism above prejudice. Polk blundered in not continuing Calhoun as secretary of State, in which place he had made so good a beginning that it soon accomplished the annexation of Texas. In his inaugural Polk asserted that our title to Oregon was good, and to be maintained by arms if need be; and he went further away from “masterly inactivity” in his first annual message. He evoked great popular excitement, and “Fifty-four forty or fight!” and “All of Oregon or none!” came forth in passionate ejaculations in every corner of the land. Calhoun had been called from retirement to take Texas and Oregon in hand, and when Polk made a new secretary he went back into the retirement for which he greatly longed. The record shows that the best men of all parties, north and south, felt that as Tyler’s secretary he was the man of all to manage the two matters so vitally important to the United States, and they deeply regretted that the placewas not continued to him by Polk. And now instead of the happy settlement they had been sure the master would effect, the country was face to face with a war that portended direful disaster to each section. The eyes of patriots turned to Calhoun again; and as he cannot be secretary, he must be in the senate. And a way being made, he was seated in due time. It needs not to go into much detail. The situation had changed greatly. The especial thing to do now was to avoid war. And as a resolution to terminate the joint occupation had been passed by congress, and as the ire of Great Britain had been greatly aroused, there must at once be a settlement of the Oregon controversy. And so the controversy was compromised and averted, this good result being mainly due to the efforts of Calhoun. Even Von Holst calls his speech of March 16, 1846, great. It will live forever. It is paying it gross disrespect to treat it as mere oratory, even if one concede to it the highest eloquence. It voices the ripest wisdom of the ablest practical statesman dealing with a most momentous public affair, in a crisis delicate and perilous in the extreme. The vindication of the true course of action is majestic. But to my mind the great achievement of the speech is his sublime philanthropic deprecation of war between England and America. When the papers told us at the outbreak of our war with Spain that all the British subjects on the warships of the latter had thrown up their places, it seemed to me that nothing else could so fairly omen co-operation of England and America in the near future to democratize and make happy the world. And I believe that that inexpressibly sweet token of Anglo-American brotherhood would have been postponed at least a half-century, if not much longer, had it not been for that speech.
This speech likewise discomfited pro-slavery andanti-slavery fanatics alike, and won the hearty approval of the wisest and best of every part of the country.
Calhoun’s self-education merits the closest attention. Railroaded through school and college, as he was, his tuition was necessarily defective in some important particulars. In the main he spelled accurately, but the Correspondence shows that he wrote “sylable,” “indisoluably,” “weat” for wet, “merical” for miracle, “sperit,” “disappinted,” “abeated,” etc. It is doubtless to be regretted that he did not have larger familiarity with polite literature. Admitting these faults, still we must know he had been uncommonly studious and thoughtful to win his degree in four years after his start to school; but his systematic study, careful observation, and hard thinking really commenced with his entrance of public life, and were kept up to his very death. Note this pertinent excerpt from Webster’s memorial speech, in which I italicize a passage happily describing his studies:
“I have not, in public nor private life, known a more assiduous person in the discharge of his appropriate duties. I have known no man who wasted less of life in what is called recreation, or employed less of it in any 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.”
From his first speech in congress to the end of his life you note that he has always mastered the pertinent facts, literature, and guiding principles of whatever he has to do with, whether in speech or action. This indicates continuous, most industrious, and most wise self-instruction. I believe it was Mr. Parton who saidthat Jefferson was the best educated man of his time. His full equipment from all belonging learning and science was surpassed only by the versatility with which he instantly solved all new questions. But Calhoun’s was more of a special training than Jefferson’s. Having for some years learned by doing,—doing after the best study and reflection, consistent with due promptness, that he could give each thing he had to do,—his capital of knowledge and developed faculty had become all-sufficient. Stephens, a profound student of both Jefferson and Calhoun, makes this comparison:
“Amongst the many great men with whom he associated, Mr. Calhoun was by far the most philosophical statesman of them all. Indeed, with the exception of Mr. Jefferson, it may be questioned if in this respect the United States has ever produced his superior.”[48]
Government—that is, good democratic government—he studied all his life with rare devotion. His two special works,[49]and the parallel parts of his speeches, warmly commended by such a thinker and friend of democracy as John Stuart Mill, are sufficing proof. In all the long tract from Plato and Aristotle down to the popularization of direct legislation, which commences with the publication of Mr. Sullivan’s pamphlet a few years ago, there is to be found nobody who has penetrated so deeply into the secrets of those principles by which alone true democracy must be maintained. With what clear vision does he read us lessons from the unanimous veto of the Roman tribunes; the political history of the twelve tribes of Israel; the balance of interests in the English constitution and our own, intended to guarantee what he calls government of theconcurrent majority. His illustration from the confederacy of Indian Tribes is to be especially emphasized as demonstration of his industry in collecting his materials and of his great insight.[50]
I must give still another example, which I am sure will yet benignly enlighten America.
Ever since Adam Smith fell into my hands in early manhood I have had a strong predilection for political economy. My conviction during the brothers’ war that proper management of the currency of the confederacy was indispensable to the success of our cause initiated me into an earnest study of the science of money. And later intense interest in the greenback question, and afterwards the silver question, added to the impetus. The longer I observed the more plainly I saw a few private persons controlling the coinage, the greenbacks, and the national bank currency of purpose to monopolize government credit, and also fix the interest rate and the price level, at any particular time, as suited their selfish interests. The remedy became clear,—government must retake and fulfil all its money functions. Especially must it keep the country supplied with a volume of money which never becomes either redundant or contracted. How to do this properly brought up the question, What is money? What is it that makes a sheep, or cow, or coin, or piece of paper, money? For the true answer to this question is the very beginning and foundation of all monetary science. I took up Ricardo again, who, with a solitary exception mentioned a little farther on, had, from the time I turned into him during my study of the confederate currency, of all the economists by profession, showed to me the best understanding of the real nature of money; and of course John Stuart Mill, Jevons, Carl Marx, andothers of less note, were examined. The result confirmed Ricardo in his primacy; although I felt that the true nature of money was assumed—rather vaguely—by him, and not clearly expressed as it ought to be. I believed myself familiar with all the important work of Calhoun. Somehow I had overlooked his contributions to this subject. A few brief quotations from the more unimportant of these I found in certain American books, which made me read the pertinent speeches.[51]It was a most inexpressible surprise to me to find that he had perfected Ricardo. Briefly stated, this is the true doctrine according to Calhoun. It is not legal-tender laws, nor is it intrinsic value, which makes even gold go as money. Well, what is it? Calhoun was not the first to answer it, for others had given the true answer; but they ran away from it as soon as they made it. He divined the full satisfactoriness of the true answer, which he demonstrated to be true by a method as nearly mathematical as the case admits of. And he lightens up what was dark before by showing that that is money, and good money, whatever it may be,—gold, silver, paper, property, what not,—which the government receives in payment of its dues. The practice of the government,—not laws, nor the market value of different materials of money,—this is the great thing. If the United States should refuse to receive gold for its dues, that would so greatly lessen the demand for gold as money that the coin would depreciate and drop out of circulation. Nothing—not the precious metals, not diamonds of the first water, not radium, not the bills of the best bank, not greenbacks, not treasury notes can maintain themselves as money ifthe government will not receive it. This is the first half of the subject. Calhoun adds the other by showing that whatever the government makes money, its volume can always be kept of the proper quantity,—which proper quantity varies with the needs of commerce,—so as to avoid the too much or too little. His illustration from the treasury notes of North Carolina, which could not be a legal tender under the federal constitution, but which circulated briskly and buoyantly and stayed at par for many years, because they were received without discount by the State, and also because their volume was kept within bounds, will yet greatly help the cause of honest money.
In the achievement just told Calhoun not only excelled the economists of his day, but he is yet in advance of all of the present except Del Mar,[52]—the only economist who has excelled Ricardo in divining the essence of money. These two alone explain clearly and fully why it is that bankers keep such tenacious grip upon the money function of government—they thereby so shape its practice that their wares shall be money, with all the incidents of profit therefrom, and no others shall. Del Mar never quotes him; and I almost know he has never studied his views upon this subject.
America will yet have a “rational money,” a term which Prof. Frank Parsons has happily chosen as the name of his invaluable book.[53]To win it she must fightmany battles with the money power. When this war of the people is waging by the people for the people, the doctrine of Calhoun will be the banner of the right. After the sordid money oligarchy is overthrown and the United States is blessed with a people’s money, that benign deliverance will add prodigiously to the fame of Calhoun.
My space does not admit of telling you how deeply Calhoun loathed the spoils system. That must be borne in mind, and taken into account in any true estimate of him as a statesman.
I deem it especially important to have you consider his standing with the people of his State. Literally his word was law in South Carolina. Hayne in 1832, and Huger in 1845, resigned their seats in the national senate to give place to him. Everybody in his State always wanted him to lead, and everybody always wanted him to lead according to his own will. This unwonted influence, utterly without precedent, was due to the accurate measure which the masses had taken of him. As he lived and aged among them they knew him better and better to be irreproachable in private and public life, the ablest of the able, the most diligent of the diligent, and the truest of the true as a representative or official, and of that severe and lofty virtue which scorns all popularity that is not the reward of righteousness. And so he became example, model, worship, to all classes. The forty years political ascendency of Pericles in the Athenian democracy is the only befitting historical parallel which I can think of. Familiar with the State from boyhood, I have long thought itspeople the most advanced of the south. In spite of the revenge wreaked upon her in war, and in spite of the direr devastation of the twelve years of negro rule following the fall of the Confederate States, that little community, with her dispensary and her system of really direct nomination,[54]to say nothing of her wisemanagement of all her material resources, is teaching the nation lessons of the highest wisdom. These are the people from whom Calhoun won a crown more resplendent than any other of our States has ever bestowed upon a loved son. How eloquent were her last offices. Read Mr. Pinkney’s extracts from the “Carolina Tribute,” narrating the reception of his mortal remains in Charleston:[55]the novel procession of vessels, displaying emblems of mourning, the solemn landing at noon, an imposing train moving amid houses hung with black, “a Sabbath-like stillness” resting on the city, “The solemn minute gun, the wail of the distant bell, the far-off spires shrouded in the display of grief, the hearse and its attendant mourners waiting on the spot, alone bore witness that the pulse of life still beat within the city, that a whole people in voiceless woe were about to receive and consign to earth all that was mortal of a great and good citizen.”
Appropriately and impressively Mr. Pinkney closes his description of this forever memorable demonstration by quoting Carlyle’s “How touching is the loyalty of men to their sovereign man.”[56]
Some men reserve out of the pillage of their fellows a great fund to signalize their graves. Stronger cars must be made, bridges strengthened, and too narrow passages avoided by long circuits in order that their huge piles be transported to the conspicuous spot selected in a fashionable cemetery. How the funerals which a weeping people give a Calhoun, Liebknecht, Pingree, Altgeld, and other true ones dwindle such monuments into smallness and contempt!
I must add something here to what has been said in the foregoing of Calhoun’s speeches. Somebody must after a while do for him what the compilation called“The Great Speeches and Orations” has done so well for Webster. His very greatest effort is that against the force bill, delivered in the United States senate February 15 and 16, 1833. As an appeal in behalf of the rights of the minority against the oppressive majority it is unequalled. All through it, from its most befitting exordium to the righteous indignation of the closing sentence, there are passages which “the world will not willingly let die.” No one who has ever given it attention can forget the paragraph defending Carolina against the charge of passion and delusion; that demolishing as by a tornado the assertion of a senator that the bill was a measure of peace; the far-famed one as to metaphysical reasoning; what is said as to the nature of the contest between Persia and Greece; the rupture in the tribes of Israel graphically expounded; the first mention of the government of “the concurring majority” as distinct from and far better than that of the absolute majority; the lesson to us of the Roman tribunes. To read this speech becomingly, purge yourself of all prejudice; by an adequate effort of the historical imagination see all the main things of the then situation, and put yourself fully in Calhoun’s place; so that you cannot fail to feel all of his deep earnestness. You will have succeeded when you can rightly appreciate this outburst:
“Will you collect money when it is acknowledged that it is not wanted? He who earns the money, who digs it from the earth with the sweat of his brow, has a just title to it against the universe. No one has a right to touch it without his consent except his government, and this only to the extent of its legitimate wants. To take more is robbery; and you propose by this bill to enforce robbery by murder.”
When I pronounced that against the force bill, the greatest of his speeches, I was not unmindful of his last,that of March 4, 1850, not four weeks before his death. I can hardly class it as a speech. It was a revelation of the woe in store for America if the abolition movement was not checked. Its analysis and demonstration of the preponderant power of the north, and its retrospection over the progressive stages by which the former equilibrium of the sections had been destroyed, are as clear-sighted as its prediction. Never in all history has an actor in a revolution described its course behind him so understandingly, nor its future course with such true prophecy.
Let us give you the fewest possible selected brief passages that will do something towards possessing you of the core of Calhoun’s valedictory to the United States and the South.
This is first in order: “How can the union be saved? There is but one way by which it can with any certainty; and that is by a full and final settlement, on the principles of justice, of all the questions at issue between the two sections. The south asks for justice, simple justice, and less she ought not to take. She has no compromise to offer but the constitution, and no concession or surrender to make.”
The vital concern of his section against abolition, and what it must do to avoid it, he tells in these passages:
“[The South] regards the relation [of master and slave] as one which cannot be destroyed without subjecting the two races to the greatest calamity, and the section to poverty, desolation, and wretchedness, and accordingly she feels bound, by every consideration of interest and safety, to defend it.”“Is it not certain that if something is not done to arrest it [the abolition movement], the south will be forced to choose between abolition and secession?”
“[The South] regards the relation [of master and slave] as one which cannot be destroyed without subjecting the two races to the greatest calamity, and the section to poverty, desolation, and wretchedness, and accordingly she feels bound, by every consideration of interest and safety, to defend it.”
“Is it not certain that if something is not done to arrest it [the abolition movement], the south will be forced to choose between abolition and secession?”
If the south must choose secession, he justifies her by the example of Washington, with a calm and reposethat prove his deepest conviction of its rightfulness, and with a power that cannot be confuted. He says:
[“The Union cannot] be saved by invoking the name of the illustrious southerner whose mortal remains repose on the western bank of the Potomac. He was one of us—a slaveholder and a planter. We have studied his history, and find nothing in it to justify submission to wrong. On the contrary, his great fame rests on the solid foundation that, while he was careful to avoid doing wrong to others, he was prompt and decided in repelling wrong. I trust that, in this respect, we have profited by his example.Nor can we find anything in his history to deter us from seceding from the union should it fail to fulfil the objects for which it was instituted, by being permanently and hopelessly converted into a means of oppressing instead of protecting us. On the contrary, we find much in his example to encourage us should we be forced to the extremity of deciding between submission and disunion.There existed then as well as now a union,—that between the parent country and her then colonies. It was a union that had much to endear it to the people of the colonies. Under its protecting and superintending care the colonies were planted, and grew up and prospered, through a long course of years, until they became populous and wealthy. Its benefits were not limited to them. Their extensive agricultural and other productions gave birth to a flourishing commerce which richly rewarded the parent country for the trouble and expense of establishing and protecting them. Washington was born and grew up to manhood under that union. He acquired his early distinction in its service; and there is every reason to believe that he was devotedly attached to it. But his devotion was a rational one. He was attached to it, not as an end, but as a means to an end. When it failed to fulfil its end, and, instead of affording protection, was converted into the means of oppressing the colonies, he did not hesitate to draw his sword and head the great movement by which that union was foreversevered, and the independence of these States established. This was the great and crowning glory of his life, which has spread his fame over the whole globe, and will transmit it to the latest posterity.”
[“The Union cannot] be saved by invoking the name of the illustrious southerner whose mortal remains repose on the western bank of the Potomac. He was one of us—a slaveholder and a planter. We have studied his history, and find nothing in it to justify submission to wrong. On the contrary, his great fame rests on the solid foundation that, while he was careful to avoid doing wrong to others, he was prompt and decided in repelling wrong. I trust that, in this respect, we have profited by his example.
Nor can we find anything in his history to deter us from seceding from the union should it fail to fulfil the objects for which it was instituted, by being permanently and hopelessly converted into a means of oppressing instead of protecting us. On the contrary, we find much in his example to encourage us should we be forced to the extremity of deciding between submission and disunion.
There existed then as well as now a union,—that between the parent country and her then colonies. It was a union that had much to endear it to the people of the colonies. Under its protecting and superintending care the colonies were planted, and grew up and prospered, through a long course of years, until they became populous and wealthy. Its benefits were not limited to them. Their extensive agricultural and other productions gave birth to a flourishing commerce which richly rewarded the parent country for the trouble and expense of establishing and protecting them. Washington was born and grew up to manhood under that union. He acquired his early distinction in its service; and there is every reason to believe that he was devotedly attached to it. But his devotion was a rational one. He was attached to it, not as an end, but as a means to an end. When it failed to fulfil its end, and, instead of affording protection, was converted into the means of oppressing the colonies, he did not hesitate to draw his sword and head the great movement by which that union was foreversevered, and the independence of these States established. This was the great and crowning glory of his life, which has spread his fame over the whole globe, and will transmit it to the latest posterity.”
With what moving entreaty does he thus adjure the victorious north:
The north “has only to wish it to accomplish it—to do justice by conceding to the south an equal right in the acquired territory, and to do her duty by causing the stipulations relative to fugitive slaves to be faithfully fulfilled, to cease the agitation of the slavery question, and to provide for the insertion of a provision in the constitution, by an amendment, which will restore to the south, in substance, the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium between the sections was destroyed by the action of the government. There will be no difficulty in devising such a provision—one that will protect the south and which at the same time will improve and strengthen the government instead of impairing and weakening it.”“The responsibility of saving the union rests on the north, and not on the south. The south cannot save it by any act of hers, and the north may save it without any sacrifice whatever, unless to do justice and to perform her duties under the constitution should be regarded by her as a sacrifice.”
The north “has only to wish it to accomplish it—to do justice by conceding to the south an equal right in the acquired territory, and to do her duty by causing the stipulations relative to fugitive slaves to be faithfully fulfilled, to cease the agitation of the slavery question, and to provide for the insertion of a provision in the constitution, by an amendment, which will restore to the south, in substance, the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium between the sections was destroyed by the action of the government. There will be no difficulty in devising such a provision—one that will protect the south and which at the same time will improve and strengthen the government instead of impairing and weakening it.”
“The responsibility of saving the union rests on the north, and not on the south. The south cannot save it by any act of hers, and the north may save it without any sacrifice whatever, unless to do justice and to perform her duties under the constitution should be regarded by her as a sacrifice.”
This sleepless watchman since 1835 had again and again blown the trumpet as the sword of disunion was coming upon the land. Now, the grave yawning before him, he sees that sword nearer and sharper, and conscious that it is his last public duty he sends forth to all his country a blast of warning more earnest and more solemn than ever. Warning that the bloodiest of all wars is coming, and that between brothers. Warning—it is the whole of this dread deliverance. Here is the first paragraph:
“I have, senators, believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion. Entertaining this opinion, I have on all proper occasions endeavored to call the attention of both the two great parties which divide the country to adopt some measure to prevent so great a disaster, but without success. The agitation has been permitted to proceed, with almost no attempt to resist it, until it has reached a point where it can no longer be disguised or denied that the union is in danger. You have thus had forced upon you the greatest and the gravest question that can ever come under your consideration,—How can the union be preserved?”
And this is the last paragraph:
“I have now, senators, done my duty in expressing my opinions fully and candidly on this solemn occasion. In doing so, I have been governed by the motives which have governed me in all stages of the agitation of the slavery question since its commencement. I have exerted myself during the whole period to arrest it with the intention of saving the union, if it could be done, and if it could not, to save the section where it has pleased providence to cast my lot, and which I sincerely believe has justice and the constitution on its side. Having faithfully done my duty to the best of my ability both to the union and my section, throughout this agitation, I shall have the consolation, let what will come, that I am free from all responsibility.”
Had abolition been in charge of men, Calhoun, claiming, as appeared to them, the most palpable rights under current views of justice, under the constitution, under the law, and under patriotic duty, would have prevailed. He never understood, no more than the abolitionists themselves did, that providence was making an instrument of abolition to remove the only danger to the American union, and that providence was not under human constitutions, laws, and convictions of duty. Asyou meditate this superhuman achievement of the true citizen in his last stand for his doomed section, does it not help you to appreciate better the high saying of the Greeks, that the struggle of a good man against fate is the most elevating of all spectacles?
The speeches that will find place in the selection suggested above will not enrapture the reader with the proud diction, learning, ornateness, and exquisite finish of Webster, but he will find them everywhere to be proofs of the dictum of Faust:
“Es trägt Verstand and rechter SinnMit wenig Kunst sich selber vor;Und wenn’s euch Ernst ist, was zu sagen,Ist’s nöthig, Worten nachzujagen?”[57]
He will also note that many of the wisest and most eloquent passages are almost the extreme of choice, but chaste and severe, expression. Here read aloud the passage as to Washington quoted above from the speech of March 4, 1850, and you will hardly dissent.
America owes it to Calhoun to publish a cheap edition of his best speeches, and also of his “Dissertation on Government.”
A word as to the “Dissertation” and the “Discourse on the Constitution of the United States.” The project of these two books lay close to his heart for many years. He intended them as his last admonitions to the people of the great republic. Doubtless the special object of his retirement was to finish them, but he had to return to the senate. What we have of the books was written in the little leisure which he snatched from the pressure of public duties, domestic affairs, and ill-health. The resoluteness with which, in the midst of these difficulties,he worked at the self-imposed task proves a lofty and unselfish love. He did not finish them to his satisfaction. Darwin did not do that with his epoch-making “Origin of Species,” for he found there was no need to do so. I believe that, as the essentials of the belonging part of evolution are all to be found in the “Origin of Species,” so all the essentials of Calhoun’s great doctrine of government are fully set forth in his two books. To me the “Dissertation” seems complete. I note with pleasure that, though slowly, it is steadily climbing to the lofty height which is its due place in the world’s estimation. And the “Discourse”—of which he did not live to finish the final draft—surely leads all the productions of the State sovereignty school. The providence which opposed his wishes was kind to his country, to the world, and to himself in calling him from his desk; for it allowed him to get Texas and Oregon for us, to give mankind his Oregon speech, and his last, and thus to finish his good work and make his fame full.
The foregoing is intended to influence my readers to turn away from Von Holst, who wrote Calhoun’s life, with the smoke and dust of the brothers’ war still in his eyes, and from Trent, who merely says ditto to Mr. Burke, to Stephens, to the great Webster, to the touching “Carolina Tribute,” to the happy and appreciative sketch of Pinkney, to the man himself and his grand career, in order to find the facts and principles by which one of America’s very greatest ought to be judged. And I do hope that they now begin to discern that Calhoun was nothing at all of a doctrinaire, nor chop-logic, nor fanatic, nor professional politician, nor ignorant and over-zealous partisan, but was the very height of practical talent and an extraordinarily successful man of affairs, of more than Roman integrity, conscientious and diligent beyond almost all others in the duties ofhis place, and a foremost statesman of wide and profound culture. Whether I have accomplished my design or not, let me beg you to read for yourself with careful attention what Webster said of him in the United States senate just after his death. Remember two things as you read: (1) The speaker and the dead had been opposed to one another in politics for more than twenty years, the former being the great exponent of free-labor nationalization and the other the great exponent of slave-labor nationalization; (2) nobody ever weighed his public utterances more carefully than did Webster, and that he would not say anything which he did not believe, even as a politeness.
Let us now try to follow with proper discernment this man whom we hope we have proved to be good and wise through his titanic defence of the cause which fate had decreed must fail. As our explanation of how evolution, and not the north on one side nor the south on the other, brought forward the crisis in which slavery, the sole menace of American dismemberment, was to perish, is so nearly complete, we can be much briefer in the rest of the chapter.
The true beginning here is with the proposition that everything which Calhoun did as the southern leader was prompted by a righteous conscience and the highest and most unselfish patriotism. He was the very first to discern the full menace of abolition to the welfare of the people he represented. And when years afterwards the situation became darker and more serious, and more and more importunately put to him the question, If abolition can be avoided only by leaving the union, what ought the south to do? he answered to himself, with the fullest approval of his conscience, she must go out; for manifestly it is her paramount duty to protect her citizens against any such invasion of their rights asabolition. But he had no illusion as to peaceable secession; and he likewise worshipped the union, believing with deepest conviction that it is far better for neighboring communities to be federated than independent. And the memories of the great American history were as sweet to him as they were to Webster. To sum up, only one thing in his opinion could justify secession. That was control of the federal government by the abolitionists. If that comes, the south must seek her independence, even if it is beyond a sea of blood.
Abolition was on its way then to overturn the supports of comfort and domestic peace in the south, as it afterwards did. Suppose Webster had seen the imminence of such a dreadful evil to New England, would he not have felt that his duty to his section was now the great thing? My brother who wore the blue, ought he not to have so felt? If the union had been turned into a course which would not only impoverish and beggar the people of New England, but would for long years actually deprive the masses of those modes of business and labor by which they were subsisting themselves and their families, can it be thought that Webster, with his exalted admiration of the fathers, who endured all privations to win liberty from their oppressors, would not have been heart and soul for secession?
The only actual difference between the two great patriots was that to Calhoun the dread alternative of looking outside the union for defence and protection of home and fireside was commended by a cruel fate, while a kind fate withheld it from Webster.
I shall corroborate the foregoing by some pertinent excerpts from Calhoun’s speeches in the United States senate. And as my purpose is to build everywhere in this book, as far as possible, upon only the most obvious facts and to vouch therefor the most accessibleauthorities, I take the excerpts from quotations made by Von Holst:
“It is to us a vital question. It involves not only our liberty, but, what is greater (if to freeman anything can be), existence itself. The relation which now exists between the two races in the slaveholding States has existed for two centuries. It has grown with our growth, and strengthened with our strength. It has entered into and modified all our institutions, civil and political. None other can be substituted. We will not, cannot, permit it to be destroyed.... Come what will, should it cost every drop of blood and every cent of property, we must defend ourselves; and if compelled, we should stand justified by all laws, human and divine; ... we would act under an imperious necessity. There would be to us but one alternative,—to triumph or perish as a people.”[58]“To destroy the existing relations would be to destroy this prosperity [of the southern States] and to place the two races in a state of conflict, which must end in the expulsion or extirpation of one or the other. No other can be substituted compatible with their peace or security. The difficulty is in the diversity of the races.... Social and political equality between them is impossible. The causes lie too deep in the principles of our nature to be surmounted. But, without such equality, to change the present condition of the African race, were it possible, would be but to change the form of slavery.”[59]“He must be blind, indeed, who does not perceive that the subversion of a relation which must be followed with such disastrous consequences can be effected only by convulsions that would devastate the country, burst asunder the bonds of union, and engulf in a sea of blood the institutions of the country. It is madness to suppose that the slaveholding States would quietly submit to be sacrificed. Every consideration—interest, duty, and humanity, the love of country, the sense of wrong, hatred of oppressors and treacherous and faithless confederates, and, finally, despair—would impel them to the most daringand desperate resistance in defence of property, family, country, liberty, and existence.”[60]
“It is to us a vital question. It involves not only our liberty, but, what is greater (if to freeman anything can be), existence itself. The relation which now exists between the two races in the slaveholding States has existed for two centuries. It has grown with our growth, and strengthened with our strength. It has entered into and modified all our institutions, civil and political. None other can be substituted. We will not, cannot, permit it to be destroyed.... Come what will, should it cost every drop of blood and every cent of property, we must defend ourselves; and if compelled, we should stand justified by all laws, human and divine; ... we would act under an imperious necessity. There would be to us but one alternative,—to triumph or perish as a people.”[58]
“To destroy the existing relations would be to destroy this prosperity [of the southern States] and to place the two races in a state of conflict, which must end in the expulsion or extirpation of one or the other. No other can be substituted compatible with their peace or security. The difficulty is in the diversity of the races.... Social and political equality between them is impossible. The causes lie too deep in the principles of our nature to be surmounted. But, without such equality, to change the present condition of the African race, were it possible, would be but to change the form of slavery.”[59]
“He must be blind, indeed, who does not perceive that the subversion of a relation which must be followed with such disastrous consequences can be effected only by convulsions that would devastate the country, burst asunder the bonds of union, and engulf in a sea of blood the institutions of the country. It is madness to suppose that the slaveholding States would quietly submit to be sacrificed. Every consideration—interest, duty, and humanity, the love of country, the sense of wrong, hatred of oppressors and treacherous and faithless confederates, and, finally, despair—would impel them to the most daringand desperate resistance in defence of property, family, country, liberty, and existence.”[60]
The student unfamiliar with the confederate side of the brothers’ war can find the whole of it clearly stated in these short passages re-enforced by the cognate ones quoted above from the speech of March 4, 1850. The maintenance of the then existing relations between white and black was vital both to liberty and existence. Because of the world-wide diversity of the two races they cannot be socially or politically equal (a subject which we will deal with specially after a while). And it was the duty of the south to fight to the bitter end “in defence of property, family, country, liberty, and existence.” This is the marrow of the quotations. They convincingly show not only the grasp of the statesman, but the prescience of the prophet, as has been plainly proved by the brothers’ war and what followed in its track.
Opposition to the tariff, which in his judgment favored the manufacturing at the expense of the staple States, seems to have been the first thing that led Calhoun to take a pro-Southern stand in politics.[61]It finally produced the famous nullification episode, which we have already somewhat discussed. In this his platform was simply anti-tariff. But the current, without his being aware of it, was carrying him resistlessly and rapidly on into the anti-abolition career in which his life ended. It was the petition presented in 1835 to congress against slavery in the District of Columbia which,it seems, was the first thing that opened his eyes to the menace of abolition. Note his wonderful foresight. Compare him with Cicero just before the outbreak of the war between Pompey and Cæsar; or with Demosthenes before Philip discloses his purpose towards Greece; or with Carl Marx, predicting the future of co-operative enterprise. Cicero almost foresees nothing—he mostly fears; Marx is utterly mistaken. The divination of Demosthenes is far superior, and it is clear; yet it is belated when it comes. But Calhoun sees with “appalling clearness,” as Von Holst says, all the storm-cloud from which tempest and tornado will ravage the entire land, just as its first speck shows on the horizon; and nobody else will see that. If this abolition movement is not stopped in its incipiency, it will soon get beyond all control. This he says over and over in his public place. What a horrible spectre of the future haunted him for the rest of his life! The south in her self-defence forced out of the union, and then perhaps overcome in war. After her braves have perished, and their dear ones at home have been plunged in the depths of want, the triumphant abolitionists will have the former slaves to lord it over them.
His conscience commanded him to stand by slavery as the fundamental condition of his people’s well-being; it also at the same time commanded him to strain all his energies to save the union by making it the protector instead of the assailant of slavery. This was the insuperable task which the powers in the unseen put him in the treadmill to do. From the time he commenced the discussion of the anti-slavery petitions until his exclamation over the “poor south,” on his death-bed, life was to him but a deepening agony of solicitude and utmost effort,—solicitude for his country and section, effort to avert the danger that became greater and moreawful to him every day. He strove after remedies under the constitution. The more he recalled the success of the single stand of South Carolina against the tariff, the prouder he became of being the author of nullification. Its dearness to him was that it was peaceable as well as efficient. The better opinion of the State-rights school is that nullification is an absurdity, and that South Carolina’s only true remedy against the tariff was to secede if it were not repealed. But he knew better than everybody else that secession meant internecine war between the sections, and this influenced him to exalt peaceable nullification above bloody secession.
It needs not to consider each barrier, whether party combinations, admission of new slave States, legislation, etc., that he tried to erect against the incoming oceanic wave. But we must briefly consider the amendment of the constitution which he proposed. He wanted the north and the south each to have a president, as he said, “to be so elected, as that the two should be constituted the special organs and representatives of the respective sections in the executive department of the government; and requiring each to approve all the acts of congress before they shall become laws.”[62]Do this, he urged, and neither section can use the powers of government to injure the other, for whatever proposed law menaces a section will be vetoed by its president. It profits the student of the science of government to consider the historical examples which Calhoun adduced here. They are indeed so apt that the hearing which has ever been denied him should be granted him at least academically. He says: “The two most distinguished constitutional governments of antiquity both in respect to permanenceand power had a dual executive. I refer to those of Sparta and Rome.”[63]
It is interesting to be informed that those same wise Iroquois from whom our fathers probably got the precedent of the old confederation, put in practice something very like what Calhoun advises. We append both the account and instructive comment of Morgan:
“When the Iroquois confederacy was formed, or soon after that event, two permanent war-chiefships were created and named.... As general commanders they had charge of the military affairs of the confederacy, and the command of its joint forces when united in a general expedition.... The creation of two principal war-chiefs instead of one, and with equal power, argues a subtle and calculating policy to prevent the domination of a single man even in their military affairs. They did without experience precisely as the Romans did in creating two consuls instead of one, after they had abolished the office ofrex. Two consuls would balance the military power between them, and prevent either from becoming supreme. Among the Iroquois this office never became influential.”[64]
But Calhoun lays much more stress upon another example,—that of the protection which the Roman plebeians got in tribunes elected from their own order alone, which tribunes could veto any act of the lawmaking organs, all of which were then actually in the hands of their oppressors, that is, the order of patricians; the result being that in course of time the plebeians achieved equality.[65]
Of course the inevitable could not be put off. Andyet ought we not to admire the inventive genius of the statesman who of all proposed the remedy that promised the best? And ought we not also to cherish in affectionate memory this last and high effort of Calhoun to avert a dreadful brothers’ war at hand, the end and consequences of which nobody could then forecast?
The situation of Rome granting tribunes to the plebs was widely different from ours. That was a case of giving a veto to one class only, and to a class which belonged to the entire body politic. Calhoun proposed not a single veto, but two; neither one to be given such a class as we have just mentioned, but a veto to each one of two geographical divisions, in one of which there was a developed, and in the other a nascent and almost complete, nationality, these two nationalities already closed with each other in a life and death grapple. His hope must have been to confine the combatants to an arena which could be effectually policed by the civil power, and in which all fighting except with buttoned foils be prevented. We may be almost sure that his heart broke when that presentiment which often comes to the dying as clear as sunlight revealed the bloody war that was quickening its approach.
O the unutterable pathos of his life from 1835 to 1850! During this time he was like the mother of a boy whom consumption has marked for its own. In advance of all others she reads the first symptom, nay, she anticipates it. All those who believe that they know him as well as she does, laugh at her fears with unsympathetic incredulity. But her eyes never fail to see grim death at the door, although bravely she hopes against hope, and fights, fights, fights. Inexorably, relentlessly the end, which others now begin to discern, comes on, but until the last breath of her darling she has ever some suggestion of change of place or climate,of a new remedy, of something else to be done. It is the supreme tragedy of her trial that while outwardly she is all self-gratifying love, inwardly she is all self-consuming misery. We say the love of a mother is greater than all other. But we know that she loves her country better than she does her child. Patriotism is as yet the strongest love of all. Realize that our exalted patriot was tending and nursing the cause of his country. Think of the noble Lee, his career of victory over, wearing away the winter at Petersburg, hourly expecting his line, so tensely stretched in order to face overwhelming odds, to break; think of him after it does break, on the retreat, when he has discovered that his supplies have gone wrong; and think of him when he must yield the sword as ever memorable as Hannibal’s. The world has given Lee, and will long give him, rains of gracious tears. But he was never plagued with Calhoun’s sharpened eyes to future disaster, and he was confident that he would reach the mountains almost until the very moment of surrender. Think rather of the great sufferers for high causes,—Bonnivard, wearing a pathway over the stone floor of his prison; Lear, of all of Shakspeare’s heroes, in the deepest gulf of misfortune; and especially of Calvary and the crucifixion, for Jesus travailed for his brothers and sisters. It is here you must look for the like of Calhoun. For fifteen years that “mass of moan” which was coming to his dear ones pierced his ears plainer and plainer and made his heart sicker and sicker, and during this long bloody sweat he gave the rarest devotion and self-sacrifice to his country which he feared more and more was to plunge over the precipice. As we recall the scene of his death it makes us rejoice to know that the cross he had borne so long has at last been cast off and he has entered into the rest of the martyr-patriot. Then itoccurs to us that he carried with him his affections,—too lofty not to be immortal,—and we cannot believe that the sad spirit ever smiled until Wade Hampton, twenty-six years afterwards, re-erected white domination in South Carolina.
Dixie will never forget that one who of all her sons loved her best and suffered for her the most. And it is my conviction that each noblest soul of the north will after a while revere in Calhoun the American parallel to the moral grandeur of Dante, of whom Michaelangelo said he would cheerfully endure his exile and all his misfortunes for his glory.
WEBSTER
Calhounwas the pre-eminent champion of the southern cause in the union, while Toombs was that of southern nationalization seeking independence. Webster was the pre-eminent champion of American nationalization seeking continental union. Toombs and Webster are therefore in antithesis; and it will be well for me to begin the chapter by anticipating some of the characteristics of the former, who will be treated at large later on, and briefly contrasting the two.
By nature Toombs was so prone to action that even in his daily recreation—talk with the nearest to him was by far the most of it—his immense and tireless outpouring of fine phrase, wisdom, and wit was the increasing wonder of all who knew him. Webster’s proneness was to repose, almost indolence. He often seemed lethargic. His activity could be excited only by the pressure of necessity. This difference between the two showed itself very markedly in their several careers. Toombs, coming to the bar in the last year of his nonage, took the profession at once to his heart, settled in his native county, in a lucrative field of practice, overcame all hindrances of natural defects and insufficient training seemingly by a mere act of will, and in four or five years his collecting a thousand-dollar fee in an adjoining county was no very uncommon thing. When he was twenty-eight he was a fully developed lawyerand advocate on every side—law, equity, and criminal—of the courts of that prosperous planting community, then overrunning with cases of importance, and his annual income from practice was $15,000. Webster went up much more slowly. He read long and industriously; was not called until he was twenty-three; for the next two and a half years was content with an income of $600 or $700; and then for nine years at Portsmouth his average income was $2,000 yearly. Even when Webster at thirty-four removed to Boston he was hardly as a lawyer the equal of Toombs at twenty-eight; and I believe that the latter was always the superior lawyer. The greater reputation of Webster is due to the greater reputation of his cases, and of the tribunal wherein he long held the lead.
We see a like difference between the two in congress. Webster shirks the routine duties of his place to gain opportunity for practice in the United States supreme court. Toombs stays away from all courts during the session, and gives every measure before the body to which he belongs its proper attention, study, and labor. But the performance by him of all the many duties of representative or senator, whether little or great, with unparalleled diligence, ability, and splendor, has been so completely obscured by the few of Webster’s great congressional exploits, that it is not now cared for by anybody.
The greater lawyer and the greater congressman has been accorded the lesser renown. This is because of the relation which each one bore to the two publics which I have tried to make you understand,—the southern public and the northern public. Toombs’s legal career was mainly in the courts of his own State. It was not much heard of outside, in even the southern public, until his extraordinarily meritorious discharge ofcongressional duties involving a mastery of law was observed. Although some of Webster’s cases in State courts were celebrated, his greatest ones, to be considered in a moment, were won in the United States supreme court, in the eyes of both publics watching intently. The highest accomplishments of Toombs in the non-sectional parts of his congressional career were almost matters of indifference at the time to both publics, becoming steadily more absorbed in pro- and anti-slavery politics; and what he did in the other part of it excited the hostility of the northern public, and brought him obloquy instead of good name. The few memorable deeds of Webster in congress were victorious vindications of the cause clearest of all to the northern, that is, the free-labor, public. That public has at last not only conquered, but it has annexed the other as a part of itself. And so Toombs’s fame as a lawyer and statesman has been left so far behind that it can hardly hope ever to have impartial and fair comparison with that of Webster.
Just one more parallel, and I shall proceed with my sketch. Each one of the two, in order to accept his mission of leadership, was plainly made by his destiny to abandon a previously cherished doctrine for a new and contrary one. Toombs was once an ardent union man, Webster was once almost a secessionist. In his Taylor speech, made in the United States house of representatives July 1, 1848, speaking of the then expected acquisition of territory, Toombs said:
“All the rest of this continent is not worth our glorious union, much less these contemptible provinces which now threaten us with such evils. It were better that we should throw back the worthless boon, and let the inhabitants work out their own destiny, than that we should endanger our peace, our safety, and our nationality by their incorporation in our union.”
The silly embargo measures, making war upon our own citizens instead of our enemies, had deeply injured New England interests. On their heel came the second war with England, into which the government of France had, as Mr. Lodge says, “tricked us ... by most profligate lying.”[66]This war paralyzed the production and occupations of Webster’s people.
A speech made by him July 4, 1812, is “a strong, calm statement of the grounds of opposition to the war.”[67]Mr. Lodge quotes and emphasizes a passage as proof that Webster, although a federalist, and the majority of his party in New England were—to use the words of the same author—“prepared to go to the very edge of the narrow legal line which divides constitutional opposition from treasonable resistance,”[68]was then standing by the union with might and main. This quotation, separated from its circumstances and the immediate sequel, strongly supports the contention. The speech being printed, circulated widely among those federalists who were gravitating so strongly towards “treasonable resistance.” By reason of it Webster was chosen as a delegate to a convention, held the next month. This man, whom Mr. Lodge would have us believe to be so fixedly counter to the then uppermost revolutionary sentiment of his party, was chosen to be their mouthpiece. He wrote their report—the “Rockingham Memorial” in the form of a letter to President Madison. Mr. Lodge thus contrasts the report and the speech. “In one point the memorial differed curiously from the oration of the month before. The latter pointed to the suffrage as the mode of redress; the former distinctly hinted at and almost threatened secession, even while it deplored a dissolution of the union as a possible result of the administration’s policy.”[69]Thenthe biographer most confidently states that in the speech Webster was declaring his own views, but in the other document he was declaring those of members of his party.
But the average American will be sure that those familiar with the speech at the time did not strain its counsels as far away from their own as Mr. Lodge does, otherwise they would not have elected him as delegate; and further, he never would have made their report for them unless he had been known to entertain their own sentiments.[70]
The popular wave that he had thus mounted carried the draftsman of the “Rockingham Memorial” into congress, where, while British armies were actually treading our soil, he voted against the taxes proposed for national defence. Mr. Lodge does not go the full length of sustaining this conduct.[71]The severe comment of another biographer will be cordially approved by average readers, northern and southern.[72]
The facts properly considered show that from the speech of July 4, 1812, on, Webster, although he stood aloof from the Hartford convention movement, was in full sympathy with the federalists of New England, whom the national government by its unrighteous oppressions had driven to contemplate disunion as a possible measure of self-protection.
This attitude of Webster towards the union was entirely contrary to that which afterwards became his power and glory among his countrymen. We wish it noted that as he changed with the people of NewEngland from anti-tariff to pro-tariff politics, he likewise changed with them in their principles as to the union; and that Toombs went with the south, in an opposite direction, that is, from embrace to rejection of the union.
Having in the foregoing brought out the prominent characteristics of Webster’s nature and career, and having also impressed you that he, like all other great statesmen, could lead only by following his people, I will cursorily trace him from stage to stage through his development. He was selected in infancy, if not before by providence, to be made not the expounder of the constitution, but the invincible defender of the union. When his activity begins, he is at first to consolidate the union by the management of some great law cases, and delivery of occasional addresses to popular assemblies; and afterwards in his high place as United States senator he is to demonstrate to the northern public its complete guaranty of their highest material interests, and set it in their hearts above all things else. Thus did providence assign to him the preservation of the greatest of all democracies, to the end that there be no break in the future course of human improvement.
Before his activity begins the powers train him. They gave him a long education, and a slow growth as a statesman. He could never remember when he had been unable to read. His feeble physique while a child shielded him from the labor required of the other children, and permitted him to enjoy books. Early he soaked his mind in the King James version of the bible and other good English standards. As he grew apace his opportunities of reading were far better than those of Calhoun, who never saw even a circulating library until he was in his thirteenth year, and soon was taken away from that. These opportunities he used in his leisurely way. His mind was strong and his memorygood, and he digested and kept under command what he read. His schooling and college course were in the main continuous. He got to Dartmouth at fifteen, where he spent four years. Here he made the reputation of being the best speaker and writer of all the students. In his study for the law he took ample time. And in his first years of practice he had much leisure. Besides revelling in the Latin classics, Shakspeare, Milton, Pope, and Cowper, and much history, he was keenly observant of what was going on about him. We know how Jeremiah Mason gave him lessons both in law, rhetoric, and elocution to his great advancement. We know too that his interest in current political questions was vigilant. He took his seat in congress May, 1813, being then a little over thirty-one. His speech against a bill to encourage enlistments made January 14, the next year, shows, as Mr. Lodge says, that “he was now master of the style at which he aimed.”[73]Of this peculiar style I shall say something after a while. Mention of his greatest exploits in consolidating the union is now in order.
The first of these is his conduct of the Dartmouth college case in the United States supreme court. It is entirely out of place for me to give even the briefest notice of the details which fill Mr. Shirley’s unique book.[74]Little more than emphasis of the effect of the decision to knit more closely the bonds of union between the States is required. This effect will be considered more carefully when we comment on Gibbonsv.Ogden, which finishes the important work commenced in the other. It needs only to remind the reader now that the protection of contracts against impairing Statelegislation has contributed probably more than anything else to the prosperous development of American internal trade and commerce,—a most potent factor in consolidating the union,—and that this protection originates in the Dartmouth college decision. But there is something special to be said of Webster as to the case. He did not stress the constitutional point—that upon which the judgment was finally placed—either in his law-brief or argument. The victory is all due to his consummate management of the court, especially of the chief-justice. The latter really found the true ground of the decision. But the powers had Webster in hand, and it suited their purposes to crown theirLieblingwith the credit of the decision. When he found out the reasons given for the ruling he had won, I fancy that a good angel of his destiny whispered in his ear he ought to have discerned that the weal of all classes of his entire country, and not merely that of its colleges, was at stake in his case, and he must never in the future overlook such an opportunity again. In his Hanover fourth of July speech, made when he was only eighteen years old, to quote from the authority we make so much use of, “the boy Webster preached love of country, the grandeur of American nationality, fidelity to the constitution as the bulwark of nationality, and the necessity and the nobility of the union of the States.”[75]Mr. Lodge impressively adds, “and that was the message which the man Webster delivered to his fellow men.”[76]His Fryeburg fourth of July speech, made not long afterwards, was in the same strain. After the powers had thus started him in the way they wanted him to go, we have noted above how he was carried by the federalists of New England into a movement hostile to the union. This brief wandering fromhis destiny, as it were, is to be compared with his neglect to grasp the point in the Dartmouth college case which was in the exact line of that high destiny. This shows how even the greatest genius must stumble and grope before it has found the right road. I think the Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, First Part of Henry VI, and the Sonnets of Shakspeare are like examples.
The Plymouth oration, delivered in 1820, begins a new and very important stage of Webster’s career. As Virginia was the mother of the southern States, so New England was in large measure the mother of the northern. The latter was the very fountain of the free-labor nationalization. And as she was known to be exceptionally advanced in intellectual as well as material development, she was to all the free States both their great example and highest authority. Hardly anybody has even yet fully taken in all the permanent good which New England has done for herself at home and for her children and scholars outside. Of course still less of it was understood in 1820. But in the Plymouth oration Webster set forth so much of it, the effect upon New England was magical. It was as if he had raised a curtain concealing great riches and treasures of her merit and glory, the existence of which had not been suspected. New Englanders all fell in love with him, and accorded him the foremost place among their counsellors.
The anti-slavery spirit of the speech deserves special notice. I do not mean to emphasize the oft-quoted passage denouncing the African slave-trade; for everybody in the south—even the smuggler and the few purchasers who encouraged him—had been against legalizing it, for reasons mentioned above, from a time long before the southern States showed a desire in the constitutional convention to stop the trade at once. I meanhis mention of slavery in the West Indies. I do not think that he had the south in mind, stressing as he does the absenteeism of the masters and the mortgages of their lands for capital borrowed in England. But much else that he says of the evil effects of slavery could be easily applied, at least in some measure, to the system as it then existed in the south, such as, for instance, the backwardness to make permanent improvements or endow colleges. His contrast of New England with the West Indies is intended to show that a free-labor community is far superior to a slave-labor community in the most important elements of a good and progressive civilization. His conviction of this truth is serious and undoubting. And those few words, “the unmitigated toil of slavery,” which show that he erroneously believed that the slave toiled as hard as the wage-earning laborer, evince a strong moral revulsion on his part.
We summarize as to the Plymouth oration. It made Webster really the political leader of New England, which—the animosity excited by the embargo and the late war having become a forgotten thing of the past—is now both in command of and also in the van of the free-labor and anti-slavery nationalization, destined by the powers to perpetuate the union.
We have told you how Webster—being at the time the very antipodes of what he was afterwards when he talked with Bosworth as to the Rhode Island case—missed the true and cardinal point in the Dartmouth college case, and how the powers, after having Marshall to establish it, gave all the glory of the great accomplishment to Webster. We come now to Gibbonsv.Ogden, argued in 1824, in which the latter made far more than ample amends for his shortcoming, and taught even the great Marshall how to decide.
New York State had given Fulton and Livingston for a term exclusive steam navigation of all its waters, and Webster was to maintain that the grant impugned the federal constitution and was therefore invalid. The question wasres integra, without analogies which often help us forlorn advocates who cannot find a precedent and are utterly without any literature suggesting theratio decidendi. I know I cannot explain to a layman how such cases as these bewilder and paralyze the typical Anglo-American judge, who has walked all his life by precedent and not by sight. Further, Webster’s side antagonized prevailing sentiment and, it would be hardly too much to say, the public conscience; either one of which generally sways courts more powerfully than the law-brief, argument, and appeal of complete advocates. The only thing which Webster could oppose to these formidable odds was just a clause of a sentence of the constitution, this clause being only of twelve words when even the belonging context is read into it,[77]and appearing to be, we cannot say surplusage, but neither well-considered nor of any particular force. Out of this he constructed such a perfect and wise doctrine of the immunity of our interstate commerce from local attack and restraint that every succeeding generation has admired its wisdom more, and subsequent additions and extensions of importance are all manifest conclusions from the promises which he made good.
Reading and reflecting for writing my “American Law Studies” familiarized me with a few instances in which a man has left a lasting impress upon the development of the law (some of which instances will be mentioned in a moment). Thus I was led to meditate Webster’s work in this case; and it becomes an increasing wonder tome. Read what his biographer tells of the unfavorable circumstances of the preparation for the argument and how he overcame them by superhuman effort. Read also his own account as given by Harvey, how Wirt, his associate, older and of much more experience in that court, disparaged the ground upon which he said he should stand, and proposed another; and how Marshall drank in every word of Webster’s argument, and afterwards virtually reproduced it in the opinion.
But the great thing is what he did for the law. The current distribution of the common law under its larger heads was made by Hale and Blackstone after that of the contemporary civilians, which is founded upon that of the Institutes of Justinian. This book is but a reproduction of that of Gaius. So we may assert of this last mentioned author that it is his systematization which still obtains both in the English and Roman law, that is to say, the entire law of the enlightened world.[78]A few English chancellors perceptibly moulded equity; Mansfield almost created English commercial law; in our country, Hamilton, in one argument overturned the doctrine of tacking securities, and in another remade the essentials of libel; our great text-author Bishop, with his treatise often worked over in new editions, is really the enacter of the American law of divorce; and Marshall’s additions to our federal law will never be forgotten. By what he did in Gibbonsv.Ogden, Webster has won a proud place in the small company of great law-givers.
And he is entitled to a liberal share of the glory which the Dartmouth college decision has won, for without him Marshall would have had no opportunity.
To estimate the prodigious effect of the rulings inthese two cases, try to realize to yourself what would be the consequences to American trade and commerce if the States were not effectually kept from infringing contracts or granting monopolies of transportation. Try to realize the loss, the inconvenience, the trouble, the vexation, all the evil that would have unavoidably befallen us if these two companion decisions and the subsequent ones following them as precedents or extending them as analogies, had not made practically the whole of American inland business a unit—to use Webster’s word—under the protection everywhere of the same impartial law. The longer you think it over the more confirmed will be your opinion that from no other cause has the evolution away from the old independence of States towards a permanent union and a single organism of perpetually federated communities been more furthered. The unification of production and distribution thus given resistless impulse has almost of itself alone worked the unification of all our States. So looking back from the standpoint of to-day we may be sure that the powers had Webster by his accomplishment in the cases now in mind, to build for perpetual union far better than he knew.
It needs not to dwell upon the Bunker Hill oration, made June 17, 1825. It is, as I believe, the most familiar as a whole of all speeches to Americans. It did not stop with adding greatly to the influence he had won over New England by the Plymouth oration; it revealed him to the whole country as its supreme orator. Bear in mind its theme, remembering how large a part the battle of Bunker Hill was in founding our union.
The plainest manifestation that providence ever made of its favoritism to Webster was its having Adams and Jefferson both to die on the same day of all the year the most commemorative of each. By the eulogy ofthe two patriots which Webster made the next month he attained the height of his popular celebrity. His subject was no longer one that principally concerned New England and the north, but it was the co-operation of both sections in making the United States. Slowly, but surely, he has climbed to the top of authority, whence he ever draws audience and attention from north and south, both in the present and for ages after the brothers’ war.
These three popular speeches just noticed are unique in oratory, not in their general character, but in the nobility of the subjects, the ripeness of the occasion, the profound wisdom of treatment, and the extraordinary elevation and perfection of style.