It was under these highly critical circumstances that Webster, on Sunday, February 24, the day on which he was accustomed to dine with his unusually well-informed friends, Stephens, Toombs, Clay and Hale, wrote to his only surviving son:
I am nearly broken down with labor and anxiety. I know not how to meet the present emergency, or with what weapons to beat down the Northern and Southern follies, now raging in equal extremes. If you can possibly leave home, I want you to be here, a day or two before I speak... I have poor spirits and little courage. Non sum qualis eram.62
Mr. Lodge's account of this critical February period shows ignorance not only of the letter of February 24, but of the real situation. He relies upon von Holst instead of the documents, then misquotes him on a point of essential chronology, and from unwarranted assumptions and erroneous and incomplete data draws unreliable conclusions. Before this letter of February 24 and the new cumulative evidence of the crisis, there falls to the ground the sneer in Mr. Lodge's question, "if [Webster's] anxiety was solely of a public nature, why did it date from March 7 when, prior to that time, there was much greater cause for alarm than afterwards?" Webster was anxious before the 7th of March, as so many others were, North and South, and his extreme anxiety appears in the letter of February 24, as well as in repeated later utterances. No one can read through the letters of Webster without recognizing that he had a genuine anxiety for the safety of the Union; and that neither in his letters nor elsewhere is there evidence that in his conscience he was "ill at ease" or "his mind not at peace". Here as elsewhere, Mr. Lodge's biography, written over forty years ago, reproduces anti-slavery bitterness and ignorance of facts (pardonable in 1850) and seriously misrepresents Webster's character and the situation in that year.63
By the last week in February and the first in March, the peak of the secession movement was reached. Never an alarmist, Webster, like others who loved the Union, become convinced during this critical last week in February of an "emergency". He determined "to make a Union Speech and discharge a clear conscience." "I made up my mind to risk myself on a proposition for a general pacification. I resolved to push my skiff from the shore alone." "We are in a crisis," he wrote June 2, "if conciliation makes no progress." "It is a great emergency, a great exigency, that the country is placed in", he said in the Senate, June 17. "We have," he wrote in October, "gone through the most important crisis which has occurred since the foundation of the government." A year later he added at Buffalo, "if we had not settled these agitating questions [by the Compromise]... in my opinion, there would have been civil war". In Virginia, where he had known the situation even better, he declared, "I believed in my conscience that a crisis was at hand, a dangerous, a fearful crisis."64
Rhodes's conclusion that there was "little danger of an overt act of secession while General Taylor was in the presidential chair" was based on evidence then incomplete and is abandoned by more recent historians. It is moreover significant that, of the speeches cited by Rhodes, ridiculing the danger of secession, not one was delivered before Webster's speech. All were uttered after the danger had been lessened by the speeches and attitude of Clay and Webster. Even such Northern anti-slavery speeches illustrated danger of another sort. Hale of New Hampshire "would let them go" rather than surrender the rights threatened by the fugitive slave bill.65Giddings in the very speech ridiculing the danger of disunion said, "when they see fit to leave the Union, I would say to them 'Go in peace'".66Such utterances played into the hands of secessionists, strengthening their convictions that the North despised the South and would not fight to keep her in the Union.
It is now clear that in 1850 as in 1860 the average Northern senator or anti-slavery minister or poet was ill-informed or careless as to the danger of secession, and that Webster and the Southern Unionists were well-informed and rightly anxious. Theodore Parker illustrated the bitterness that befogs the mind. He concluded that there was no danger of dissolution because "the public funds of the United States did not go down one mill." The stock market might, of course, change from many causes, but Parker was wrong as to the facts. An examination of the daily sales of United States bonds in New York, 1849-1850, shows that the change, instead of being, "not one mill," as Parker asserted, was four or five dollars during this period; and what change there was, was downward before Webster's speech and upward thereafter.67
We now realize what Webster knew and feared in 1849-1850. "If this strife between the South and the North goes on, we shall have war, and who is ready for that?" "There would have been a Civil War if the Compromise had not passed." The evidence confirms Thurlow Weed's mature judgment: "the country had every appearance of being on the eve of a Revolution."68On February 28, Everett recognized that "the radicals at the South have made up their minds to separate, the catastrophe seems to be inevitable".69
On March 1, Webster recorded his determination "to make an honest, truth-telling speech, and a Union speech"691The Washington correspondent of the Advertiser, March 4, reported that Webster will "take a large view of the state of things and advocate a straightforward course of legislation essentially such as the President has recommended". "To this point public sentiment has been gradually converging." "It will tend greatly to confirm opinion in favor of this course should it meet with the decided concurrence of Mr. Webster." The attitude of the plain citizen is expressed by Barker, of Beaver, Pennsylvania, on the same day: "do it, Mr. Webster, as you can, do it as a bold and gifted statesman and patriot; reconcile the North and South and PRESERVE the UNION". "Offer, Mr. Webster, a liberal compromise to the South." On March 4 and 5, Calhoun's Senate speech reasserted that the South, no longer safe in the Union, possessed the right of peaceable secession. On the 6th of March, Webster went over the proposed speech of the next morning with his son, Fletcher, Edward Curtis, and Peter Harvey.70
It was under the cumulative stress of such convincing evidence, public and private utterances, and acts in Southern legislatures and in Congress, that Webster made his Union speech on the 7th of March. The purpose and character of the speech are rightly indicated by its title, "The Constitution and the Union", and by the significant dedication to the people of Massachusetts: "Necessity compels me to speak true rather than pleasing things." "I should indeed like to please you; but I prefer to save you, whatever be your attitude toward me."71The malignant charge that this speech was "a bid for the presidency" was long ago discarded, even by Lodge. It unfortunately survives in text-books more concerned with "atmosphere" than with truth. The modern investigator finds no evidence for it and every evidence against it. Webster was both too proud and too familiar with the political situation, North and South, to make such a monstrous mistake. The printed or manuscript letters to or from Webster in 1850 and 1851 show him and his friends deeply concerned over the danger to the Union, but not about the presidency. There is rarest mention of the matter in letters by personal or political friends; none by Webster, so far as the writer has observed.
If one comes to the speech familiar with both the situation in 1850 as now known, and with Webster's earlier and later speeches and private letters, one finds his position and arguments on the 7th of March in harmony with his attitude toward Union and slavery, and with the law and the facts. Frankly reiterating both his earlier view of slavery "as a great moral, political and social evil" and his lifelong devotion to the Union and its constitutional obligations, Webster took national, practical, courageous grounds. On the fugitive slave bill and the Wilmot Proviso, where cautious Whigs like Winthrop and Everett were inclined to keep quiet in view of Northern popular feeling, Webster "took a large view of things" and resolved, as Foote saw, to risk his reputation in advocating the only practicable solution. Not only was Webster thoroughly familiar with the facts, but he was pre-eminently logical and, as Calhoun had admitted, once convinced, "he cannot look truth in the face and oppose it by arguments".72He therefore boldly faced the truth that the Wilmot Proviso (as it proved later) was needless, and would irritate Southern Union men and play into hands of disunionists who frankly desired to exploit this "insult" to excite secession sentiment. In a like case ten years later, "the Republican party took precisely the same ground held by Mr. Webster in 1850 and acted from the motives that inspired the 7th of March speech".73
Webster's anxiety for a conciliatory settlement of the highly dangerous Texas boundary situation (which incidentally narrowed slave territory) was as consistent with his national Union policy, as his desires for California's admission as a free state and for prohibition of the slave-trade in the District of Columbia were in accord with his opposition to slavery. Seeing both abolitionists and secessionists threatening the Union, he rebuked both severely for disloyalty to their "constitutional obligations", while he pleaded for a more conciliatory attitude, for faith and charity rather than "heated imaginations". The only logical alternative to the union policy was disunion, advocated alike by Garrisonian abolitionists and Southern secessionists. "The Union... was thought to be in danger, and devotion to the Union rightfully inclined men to yield... where nothing else could have so inclined them", was Lincoln's luminous defense of the Compromise in his debate with Douglas.74
Webster's support of the constitutional provision for "return of persons held to service" was not merely that of a lawyer. It was in accord with a deep and statesmanlike conviction that "obedience to established government... is a Christian duty", the seat of law is "the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the universe".75Offensive as this law was to the North, the only logical alternatives were to fulfil or to annul the Constitution. Webster chose to risk his reputation; the extreme abolitionists, to risk the Union. Webster felt, as his opponents later recognized, that "the habitual cherishing of the principle", "resistance to unjust laws is obedience to God", threatened the Constitution. "He... addressed himself, therefore, to the duty of calling the American people back from revolutionary theories to... submission to authority."76As in 1830 against Haynes, so in 1850 against Calhoun and disunion, Webster stood not as "a Massachusetts man, but as an American", for "the preservation of the Union".77In both speeches he held that he was acting not for Massachusetts, but for the "whole country" (1830), "the good of the whole" (1850). His devotion to the Union and his intellectual balance led him to reject the impatience, bitterness, and disunion sentiments of abolitionists and secessionists, and to work on longer lines. "We must wait for the slow progress of moral causes", a doctrine already announced in 1840, he reiterated in 1850,—"the effect of moral causes, though sure is slow."78
The earlier accounts of Webster's losing his friends as a result of his speech are at variance with the facts. Cautious Northerners naturally hesitated to support him and face both the popular convictions on fugitive slaves and the rasping vituperation that exhausted sacred and profane history in the epithets current in that "era of warm journalistic manners"; Abolitionists and Free Soilers congratulated one another that they had "killed Webster". In Congress no Northern man save Ashmun of Massachusetts supported him in any speech for months. On the other hand, Webster did retain the friendship and confidence of leaders and common men North and South, and the tremendous influence of his personality and "unanswerable" arguments eventually swung the North for the Compromise. From Boston came prompt expressions of "entire concurrence" in his speech by 800 representative men, including George Ticknor, William H. Prescott, Rufus Choate, Josiah Quincy, President Sparks and Professor Felton of Harvard, Professors Woods, Stuart, and Emerson of Andover, and other leading professional, literary, and business men. Similar addresses were sent to him from about the same number of men in New York, from supporters in Newburyport, Medford, Kennebeck River, Philadelphia, the Detroit Common Council, Manchester, New Hampshire, and "the neighbors" in Salisbury. His old Boston Congressional district triumphantly elected Eliot, one of Webster's most loyal supporters, by a vote of 2,355 against 473 for Charles Sumner.781The Massachusetts legislature overwhelmingly defeated a proposal to instruct Webster to vote for the Wilmot Proviso. Scores of unpublished letters in the New Hampshire Historical Society and the Library of Congress reveal hearty approval from both parties and all sections. Winthrop of Massachusetts, too cautious to endorse Webster's entire position, wrote to the governor of Massachusetts that as a result of the speech, "disunion stock is already below par".79"You have performed the responsible duties of, a national Senator", wrote General Dearborn. "I thank you because you did not speak upon the subject as a Massachusetts man", said Reverend Thomas Worcester of Boston, an overseer of Harvard. "Your speech has saved the Union", was the verdict of Barker of Pennsylvania, a man not of Webster's party.80"The Union threatened... you have come to the rescue, and all disinterested lovers of that Union must rally round you", wrote Wainwright of New York. In Alabama, Reverend J. W. Allen recognized the "comprehensive and self-forgetting spirit of patriotism" in Webster, "which, if followed, would save the Union, unite the country and prevent the danger in the Nashville Convention". Like approval of Webster's "patriotic stand for the preservation of the Union" was sent from Green County and Greensboro in Alabama and from Tennessee and Virginia.81"The preservation of the Union is the only safety-valve. On Webster depends the tranquility of the country", says an anonymous writer from Charleston, a native of Massachusetts and former pupil of Webster.82Poinsett and Francis Lieber, South Carolina Unionists, expressed like views.83The growing influence of the speech is testified to in letters from all sections. Linus Child of Lowell finds it modifying his own previous opinions and believes that "shortly if not at this moment, it will be approved by a large majority of the people of Massachusetts".84"Upon sober second thought, our people will generally coincide with your views", wrote ex-Governor and ex-Mayor Armstrong of Boston.85"Every day adds to the number of those who agree with you", is the confirmatory testimony of Dana, trustee of Andover and former president of Dartmouth.86"The effect of your speech begins to be felt", wrote ex-Mayor Eliot of Boston.87Mayor Huntington of Salem at first felt the speech to be too Southern; but "subsequent events at North and South have entirely satisfied me that you were right... and vast numbers of others here in Massachusetts were wrong." "The change going on in me has been going on all around me." "You saw farther ahead than the rest or most of us and had the courage and patriotism to stand upon the true ground."88This significant inedited letter is but a specimen of the change of attitude manifested in hundreds of letters from "slow and cautious Whigs".89One of these, Edward Everett, unable to accept Webster's attitude on Texas and the fugitive slave bill, could not "entirely concur" in the Boston letter of approval. "I think our friend will be able to carry the weight of it at home, but as much as ever." "It would, as you justly said," he wrote Winthrop, "have ruined any other man." This probably gives the position taken at first by a good many moderate anti-slavery then. Everett's later attitude is likewise typical of a change in New England. He wrote in 1851 that Webster's speech "more than any other cause, contributed to avert the catastrophe", and was "a practical basis for the adjustment of controversies, which had already gone far to dissolve the Union".90
Isaac Hill, a bitter New Hampshire political opponent, confesses that Webster's "kindly answer" to Calhoun was wiser than his own might have been. Hill, an experienced political observer, had feared in the month preceding Webster's speech a "disruption of the Union" with "no chance of escaping a conflict of blood". He felt that the censures of Webster were undeserved, that Webster was not merely right, but had "power he can exercise at the North, beyond any other man", and that "all that is of value will declare in favor of the great principles of your late Union speech". "Its tranquilizing effect upon public opinion has been wonderful"; "it has almost the unanimous support of this community", wrote the New York philanthropist Minturn. "The speech made a powerful impression in this state... Men feel they can stand on it with security."93In Cincinnati, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Pittsfield (with only one exception) the speech was found "wise and patriotic".94The sender of a resolution of approval from the grand jury of the United States court at Indianapolis says that such judgment is almost universal.95"It is thought you may save the country.. . you may keep us still united", wrote Thornton of Memphis, who soberly records the feeling of thoughtful men that the Southern purpose of disunion was stronger than appeared in either newspapers or political gatherings.96"Your speech has disarmed-has, quieted the South;97has rendered invaluable service to the harmony and union of the South and the North".98"I am confident of the higher approbation, not of a single section of the Union, but of all sections", wrote a political opponent in Washington.99
The influence of Webster in checking the radical purposes of the Nashville Convention has been shown above.100
All classes of men from all sections show a substantial and growing backing of Webster's 7th of March speech as "the only statesmanlike and practicable way to save the Union". "To you, more than to any other statesman of modern times, do the people of this country owe their national feeling which we trust is to save this Union in this its hour of trial", was the judgment of "the neighbors", the plain farmers of Webster's old New Hampshire home.101Outside of the Abolition and Free Soil press, the growing tendency in newspapers, like that of their readers, was to support Webster's logical position.102
Exaggerated though some of these expressions of approval may have been, they balance the exaggerated vituperation of Webster in the anti-slavery press; and the extremes of approval and disapproval both concur in recognizing the widespread effect of the speech. "No speech ever delivered in Congress produced... so beneficial a change of opinion. The change of, feeling and temperament wrought in Congress by this speech is miraculous."103
The contemporary testimony to Webster's checking of disunion is substantiated by the conclusions of Petigru of South Carolina, Cobb of Georgia in 1852, Allen of Pennsylvania in 1853, and by Stephens's mature judgment of "the profound sensation upon the public mind throughout the Union made by Webster's 7th of March speech. The friends of the Union under the Constitution were strengthened in their hopes and inspired with renewed energies."104In 1866 Foote wrote, "The speech produced beneficial effects everywhere." "His statement of facts was generally looked upon as unanswerable; his argumentative conclusions appeared to be inevitable; his conciliatory tone.. . softened the sensibilities of all patriots."105"He seems to have gauged more accurately [than most] the grave dangers which threatened the republic and... the fearful consequences which must follow its disruption", was Henry Wilson's later and wiser judgment.106"The general judgment," said Senator Hoar in 1899, "seems to be coming to the conclusion that Webster differed from the friends of freedom of his time not in a weaker moral sense, but only in a larger, and profounder prophetic vision." "He saw what no other man saw, the certainty of civil war. I was one of those who... judged him severely, but I have learned better." "I think of him now... as the orator who bound fast with indissoluble strength the bonds of union."107
Modern writers, North and South-Garrison, Chadwick, T. C. Smith, Merriam, for instance108—now recognize the menace of disunion in 1850 and the service of Webster in defending the Union. Rhodes, though condemning Webster's support of the fugitive slave bill, recognizes that the speech was one of the few that really altered public opinion and won necessary Northern support for the Compromise. "We see now that in the War of the Rebellion his principles were mightier than those of Garrison." "It was not the Liberty or Abolitionist party, but the Union party that won."109
Postponement of secession for ten years gave the North preponderance in population, voting power, production, and transportation; new party organization; and convictions which made man-power and economic resources effective. The Northern lead of four million people in 1850 had increased to seven millions by 1860. In 1850, each section had thirty votes in the Senate; in 1860, the North had a majority of six, due to the admission of California, Oregon, and Minnesota. In the House of Representatives, the North had added seven to her majority. The Union states and territories built during the decade 15,000 miles of railroad, to 7,000 or 8,000 in the eleven seceding states. In shipping, the North in 1860 built about 800 vessels to the seceding states' 200. In 1860, in the eleven most important industries for war, Chadwick estimates that the Union states produced $735,500,000; the seceding states $75,250,000, "a manufacturing productivity eleven times as great for the North as for the South".110In general, during the decade, the census figures for 1860 show that since 1850 the North had increased its man-power, transportation, and economic production from two to fifty times as fast as the South, and that in 1860 the Union states were from two to twelve times as powerful as the seceding states.
Possibly Southern secessionists and Northern abolitionists had some basis for thinking that the North would let the "erring sisters depart in peace" in 1850. Within the next ten years, however, there came a decisive change. The North, exasperated by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the high-handed acts of Southerners in Kansas in 1856, and the Dred Scott dictum of the Supreme Court in 1857, felt that these things amounted to a repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the opening up of the territory to slavery. In 1860 Northern conviction, backed by an effective, thorough party platform on a Union basis, swept the free states. In 1850, it was a "Constitutional Union" party that accepted the Compromise and arrested secession in the South; and Webster, foreseeing a "remodelling of parties", had prophesied that "there must be a Union party".111Webster's spirit and speeches and his strengthening of federal power through Supreme Court cases won by his arguments had helped to furnish the conviction which underlay the Union Party of 1860 and 1964. His consistent opposition to nullification and secession, and his appeal to the Union and to the Constitution during twenty years preceding the Civil War—from his reply to Hayne to his seventh of March speech—had developed a spirit capable of making economic and political power effective.
Men inclined to sneer at Webster for his interest in manufacturing, farming, and material prosperity, may well remember that in his mind, and more slowly in the minds of the North, economic progress went hand in hand with the development of union and of liberty secured by law.
Misunderstandings regarding both the political crisis and the personal character of the man are already disappearing as fact replaces fiction, as "truth gets a hearing", in the fine phrase of Wendell Phillips. There is nothing about Daniel Webster to be hidden. Not moral blindness but moral insight and sound political principles reveal themselves to the reader of Webster's own words in public speech and unguarded private letter. One of those great men who disdained to vindicate himself, he does not need us but we need him and his vision that Liberty comes through Union, and healing through cooperation, not through hate.
Whether we look to the material progress of the North from 1850 to 1860 or to its development in "imponderables", Webster's policy and his power over men's thoughts and deeds were essential factors in the ultimate triumph of the Union, which would have been at least dubious had secession been attempted in 1850. It was a soldier, not the modern orator, who first said that "Webster shotted our guns". A letter to Senator Hoar from another Union soldier says that he kept up his heart as he paced up and down as sentinel in an exposed place by repeating over and over, "Liberty and Union now and forever, one and inseparable".112Hosmer tells us that he and his boyhood friends of the North in 1861 "did not argue much the question of the right of secession", but that it was the words of Webster's speeches, "as familiar to us as the sentences of the Lord's prayer and scarcely less consecrated,... with which we sprang to battle". Those boys were not ready in 1850. The decisive human factors in the Civil War were the men bred on the profound devotion to the Union which Webster shared with others equally patriotic, but less profoundly logical, less able to mould public opinion. Webster not only saw the vision himself; he had the genius to make the plain American citizen see that liberty could come through union and not through disunion. Moreover, there was in Webster and the Compromise of 1850 a spirit of conciliation, and therefore there was on the part of the North a belief that they had given the South a "square deal", and a corresponding indignation at the attempts in the next decade to expand slavery by violating the Compromises of 1820 and 1850. So, by 1860, the decisive border states and Northwest were ready to stand behind the Union.
When Lincoln, born in a border state, coming to manhood in the Northwest, and bred on Webster's doctrine,—"the Union is paramount",—accepted for the second time the Republican nomination and platform, he summed up the issues of the war, as he had done before, in Webster's words. Lincoln, who had grown as masterly in his choice of words as he had become profound in his vision of issues, used in 1864 not the more familiar and rhetorical phrases of the reply to Hayne, but the briefer, more incisive form, "Liberty and Union", of Webster's "honest, truth-telling, Union speech" on the 7th of March, 1850.113
HERBERT DARLING FOSTER.
1 (return)[ Cf. Parton with Lodge on intellect, morals, indolence, drinking, 7th of March speech, Webster's favorite things in England; references, note 63, below.]
2 (return)[ In the preparation of this article, manuscripts have been used from the following collections: the Greenough, Hammond, and Clayton (Library of Congress); Winthrop and Appleton (Mass. Hist. Soc.); Garrison (Boston Public Library); N.H. Hist. Soc.; Dartmouth College; Middletown (Conn.) Hist. Soc.; Mrs. Alfred E. Wyman.]
3 (return)[ Bennett, Dec. 1, 1848, to Partridge, Norwich University. MS. Dartmouth.]
4 (return)[ Houston, Nullification in South Carolina, p. 141. Further evidence of Webster's thesis that abolitionists had developed Southern reaction in Phillips, South in the Building of the Nation, IV, 401-403; and unpublished letters approving Webster's speech.]
5 (return)[ Calhoun, Corr., Amer. Hist. Assoc., Annual Report (1899, vol 11.), pp. 1193-1194.]
6 (return)[ To Crittenden, Dec. 20, 1849, Smith, polit. Hist. Slavery, I. 122; Winthrop MSS., Jan. 6, 1850.]
7 (return)[ Calhoun, Corr., p. 781; cf. 764-766, 778, 780, 783-784.]
8 (return)[ Cong. Globe, XXI. 451-455, 463; Corr., p. 784. On Calhoun's attitude, Ames, Calhoun, pp. 6-7; Stephenson, in Yale Review, 1919, p. 216; Newbury in South Atlantic Quarterly, XI. 259; Hamer, Secession Movement in South Carolina, 1847-1852, pp. 49-54.]
9 (return)[ Calhoun, Corr., Amer. Hist. Assoc., Annual Report (1899, vol. II), pp. 1210-1212; Toombs, Corr., (id., 1911, vol. II), pp. 188, 217; Coleman, Crittenden, I. 363; Hamer, pp. 55-56, 46-48, 54, 82-83; Ames, Calhoun, pp. 21-22, 29; Claiborne, Quitman, H. 36-39.]
10 (return)[ Hearon, Miss. and the Compromise of 1850, p. 209.]
11 (return)[ A letter to Webster, Oct. 22, 1851, Greenough MSS., shows the strength of Calhoun's secession ideas. Hamer, p. 125, quotes part.]
12 (return)[ Hamer, p. 142; Hearon, p. 220.]
13 (return)[ Mar. 6, 1850. Laws (Miss.), pp. 521-526.]
14 (return)[ Claiborne, Quitman, IL 37; Hearon, p. 161 n.]
15 (return)[ Hearon, pp. 180-181; Claiborne, Quitman, II. 51-52.]
16 (return)[ Nov. 10, 1850, Hearon, pp. 178-180; 1851, pp. 209-212.]
17 (return)[ Dec. 10, Southern Rights Assoc. Hearon, pp. 183-187.]
18 (return)[ Claiborne, Quitman, II. 52.]
19 (return)[ July 1, 1849. Corr., p. 170 (Amer. Hist. Assoc., Annual Report, 1911, vol. II.).]
20 (return)[ Johnston, Stephens, pp. 238-239, 244; Smith, Political History of Slavery, 1. 121.]
21 (return)[ Laws (Ga.), 1850, pp. 122, 405-410.]
22 (return)[ Johnston, Stephens, p. 247.]
23 (return)[ Corr., pp. 184,193-195, 206-208, July 21. Newspapers, see Brooks, in Miss. Valley Hist. Review, IX. 289.]
24 (return)[ Phillips, Georgia and State Rights, pp. 163-166.]
25 (return)[ Ames, Documents, pp. 271-272; Hearon, p. 190.]
26 (return)[ 1854, Amer. Hist. Review, VIII. 92-97; 1857, Johnston, Stephens, pp. 321-322; infra, pp. 267, 268.]
27 (return)[ Hammond MSS., Jan. 27, Feb. 8; Virginia Resolves, Feb. 12; Ambler, Sectionalism in Virginia, p. 246; N. Y. Tribune, June 14; M. R. H. Garnett, Union Past and Future, published between Jan. 24 and Mar. 7. Alabama: Hodgson, Cradle of the Confederacy, p. 281; Dubose, Yancey, pp. 247-249, 481; Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, p. 13; Cobb, Corr., pp. 193-195, 207. President Tyler of the College of William and Mary kindly furnished evidence of Garnett's authorship; see J. M. Garnett, in Southern Literary Messenger, I. 255.]
28 (return)[ Resolutions, Feb. 12, 1850; Acts, 1850, pp. 223-224; 1851, p. 201.]
29 (return)[ Stephens, Corr., p. 192; Globe, XXII. II. 1208.]
30 (return)[ Boston Daily Advertiser, Feb. 23.]
31 (return)[ South Carolina, Acts, 1849, p, 240, and the following Laws or Acts, all 1850: Georgia, pp. 418, 405-410, 122; Texas, pp. 93-94, 171; Tennessee, p. 572 (Globe, XXI. I. 417. Cole, Whig Party in the South, p. 161); Mississippi, pp. 526-528; Virginia, p. 233; Alabama, Weekly Tribune, Feb. 23, Daily, Feb. 25.]
32 (return)[ White, Miss. Valley Hist. Assoc., III. 283.]
33 (return)[ Senate Miscellaneous, 1849-1850, no. 24.]
34 (return)[ Hamer, p. 40; cf. Cole, Whig Party in the South, p. 162; Cong. Globe, Mar. 5.]
35 (return)[ Coleman, Crittenden, I. 333, 350.]
36 (return)[ Clayton MSS., Apr. 6; cf. Coleman, Crittenden, I. 369.]
37 (return)[ Smith, History of Slavery, 1. 121; Clay, Oct., 1851, letter, in Curtis, Webster, II, 584-585.]
38 (return)[ Clingman, and Wilmington Resolutions, Globe, XXI. I. 200-205, 311; National Intelligencer, Feb. 25; Cobb, Corr., pp. 217-218; Boyd, "North Carolina on the Eve of Secession," in Amer. Hist. Assoc., Annual Report (1910), pp. 167-177.]
39 (return)[ Hearndon, Nashville Convention, p. 283.]
40 (return)[ Johnston, Stephens, p. 247; Corr., pp. 186, 193, 194, 206-207; Hammond MSS., Jan. 27, Feb. 8.]
41 (return)[ Ames, Calhoun, p. 26.]
42 (return)[ Webster, Writings and Speeches, X. 161-162.]
43 (return)[ Cyclopedia Miss. Hist., art. "Sharkey."]
44 (return)[ Hearon, pp. 124, 171-174. Davis to Clayton (Clayton MSS.), Nov. 22, 1851.]
45 (return)[ Globe, XXI. I. 418, 124, 712; infra, p. 268.]
46 (return)[ MSS., Mar. 10. AM. HIST. REV., voL. xxvii.—18.]
47 (return)[ Anstell, Bethlehem, May 21, Greenough Collection.]
48 (return)[ Anderson, Tenn., Apr. 8, ibid.]
49 (return)[ Goode, Hunter Corr., Amer. Hist. Assoc., Annual Report (1916, vol. II.), p. 111.]
50 (return)[ Ames, Calhoun, pp. 24-27.]
51 (return)[ Hearon, pp. 120-123; Anonymous, Letter on Southern Wrongs. .. in Reply to Grayson (Charleston, 1850).]
52 (return)[ Letters, II. 111, 121, 127.]
53 (return)[ Winthrop MSS., Jan. 16, Feb. 7.]
54 (return)[ Philadelphia Bulletin, in McMaster, VIII. 15.]
55 (return)[ Winthrop MSS., Feb. 10, 6.]
56 (return)[ Writings and Speeches, XVI. 533; XVIII. 355.]
57 (return)[ Stephens, War between the States, II. 201-205, 232; Cong. Globe, XXI. I. 375-384.]
58 (return)[ Thurlow Weed, Life, II. 177-178, 180-181 (Gen. Pleasanton's confirmatory letter). Wilson, Slave Power, II. 249. Both corroborated by Hamline letter Rhodes, I. 134. Stephens's letters, N. Y. Herald, July 13, Aug, 8, 1876, denying threatening language used by Taylor "in my presence," do not nullify evidence of Taylor's attitude. Mann, Life, p. 292. Private Washington letter, Feb. 23, reporting interview, N. Y. Tribune, Feb. 25.]
59 (return)[ Weekly Tribune, Mar. 2, reprinted from Daily, Feb. 27. Cf. Washington National Intelligencer, Feb. 21, quoting: Richmond Enquirer; Wilmington Commercial; Columbia Telegraph.]
60 (return)[ New York Herald, Feb. 25; Boston Daily Advertiser, Feb. 26.]
61 (return)[ Tribune, Feb. 25.]
62 (return)[ Writings and Speeches, XVI. 534.]
63 (return)[ Lodge's reproduction of Parton, pp. 16-17, 98, 195, 325-326, 349, 353, 356, 360. Other errors in Lodge's Webster, pp. 45, 314, 322, 328, 329-330, 352.]
64 (return)[ Writings and Speeches, XVIII. 356, 387; XVI. 542, W; X. 116; Curtis, Life II. 596; XIII. 434.]
65 (return)[ Mar. 19, Cong. Globe, XXII. II. 1063.]
66 (return)[ Aug. 12, ibid., p. 1562.]
67 (return)[ U. S. Bonds (1867). About 112-113, Dec., Jan., Feb., 1850; "inactive" before Webster's speech; "firmer," Mar. 8; advanced to 117, 119, May; 116-117 after Compromise.]
68 (return)[ E. P. Wheeler, Sixty Years of American Life, p. 6; cf. Webster's Buffalo Speech, Curtis, Life, II. 576; Weed, Autobiography, p. 596.]
69 (return)[ Winthrop MSS.]
691 (return)[ Writings and Speeches, XVI. 534-5.]
70 (return)[ Webster to Harvey, Apr. 7, MS. Middletown (Conn.) Hist. Soc., adds Fletcher's name. Received through the kindness of Professor George M. Dutcher.]
71 (return)[ Writings and Speeches, X. 57; "Notes for the Speech," 281-291; Winthrop MSS., Apr. 3.]
72 (return)[ Writings and Speeches, XVIII. 371-372.]
73 (return)[ Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, I. 269-271.]
74 (return)[ Works, II. 202-203.]
75 (return)[ Writings and Speeches, XVI. 580-581.]
76 (return)[ Seward, Works, III. 111-116.]
77 (return)[ Writings and Speeches, X. 57, 97.]
78 (return)[ Ibid., XIII. 595; X. 65.]
781 (return)[ Garrison childishly printed Eliot's name upside down, and between black lines, Liberator, Sept. 20.]
79 (return)[ Mar. 10. MS., "Private," to Governor Clifford.]
80 (return)[ Mar 11, Apr. 13. Webster papers, N.H. Hist. Soc., cited hereafter as "N.H.".]
81 (return)[ Mar. 11, 25, 22, 17, 26, 28, Greenough Collection, hereafter as "Greenough."]
82 (return)[ May 20. N.H.]
83 (return)[ Apr. 19, May 4. N.H.]
84 (return)[ Apr. 1. Greenough.]
85 (return)[ Writings and Speeches, XVIII. 357.]
86 (return)[ Apr. 19. N.H.]
87 (return)[ June 12. N.H.]
88 (return)[ Dec. 13. N.H.]
89 (return)[ Writings and SPeeches, XVI. 582.]
90 (return)[ Winthrop MSS., Mar. 21 and Apr. 10, 1850, Nov. 1951; Curtis, Life, II. 580; Everett's Memoir; Webster's Works (1851), I. clvii.]
93 (return)[ Barnard, Albany, Apr. 19. N.H.]
94 (return)[ Mar. 15, 28. N.H.]
95 (return)[ June 10. Greenough. ]
96 (return)[ Mar. 28. Greenough.]
97 (return)[ H. L Anderson, Tenn., Apr. 8. Greenough. ]
98 (return)[ Nelson, Va., May 2. N.H.]
99 (return)[ Mar. 8. Greenough.]
100 (return)[ Pp. 17-20.]
101 (return)[ August, 1850; 127 signatures. N.H.]
102 (return)[ Ogg, Webster, p. 379; Rhodes, I. 157-58.]
103 (return)[ New York Journal of Commerce, Boston Advertiser, Richmond Whig Mar. 12; Baltimore Sun, Mar. 18; Ames, Calhoun, p. 25; Boston Watchman and Reflector, in Liberator, Apr. 1.]
104 (return)[ War between the States, II. 211.]
105 (return)[ War of the Rebellion (1866), pp. 130-131.]
106 (return)[ Slave Power, II. 246.]
107 (return)[ Scribner's Magazine XXVI. 84.]
108 (return)[ Garrison, Westward Expansion, pp. 327-332; Chadwick, The Causes of the Civil War, pp. 49-51; Smith, Parties and Slavery, p. 9; Merriam, Life of Bowles, I. 81.]
109 (return)[ Rhodes, I. 157, 161.]
110 (return)[ Preliminary Report, Eighth Census, 1860; Chadwick, Causes of the Civil War, p. 28.]
111 (return)[ Oct. 2, 1950. Writings and Speeches, XVI. 568-569.]
112 (return)[ Scribner, XXVI. 84; American Law Review, XXXV. 804.]
113 (return)[ Nicolay and Hay, IX. 76.]