Webster's first speech at the bar was listened to by his proud and devoted father, who did not live to hear him a second time. He died in 1806, at sixty-seven, and was buried beneath a tall pine-tree on his own field. Daniel assumed his debts, and for ten years bore the burden, if that may be called a burden which we do willingly for love's sake.
The next year he removed to Portsmouth. He was now twenty-five, pale, slender, and of refined and apparently delicate organization. He had written considerable for the press, made several Fourth of July orations, and published a little pamphlet, "Considerations on the Embargo Laws."
In June, 1808, when he was twenty-six, he made the wisest choice of his life in his marriage to Grace Fletcher, daughter of Rev. Elijah Fletcher of Hopkinton. She was twenty-seven, a rare combination of intellect and sweetness, just the woman to inspire an educated man by her cultivated and sympathetic mind, and to rest him with her gentle and genial presence. She had a quiet dignity which won respect, and her manners were unaffected, frank, and winning. From the first time he saw her she looked "like an angel" to him, and such she ever remained to his vision.
And now began the happiest years of his life. The small, wooden house in which they lived grew into a palace, because love was there. His first child, little Grace, named for her mother, became the idol of his heart. Business increased and friends multiplied during the nine years he lived at Portsmouth. He was fortunate in having for an almost constant opponent in the law the renowned Jeremiah Mason, fourteen years his senior, and the acknowledged head of the legal profession in New Hampshire. Mr. Webster studied him closely. "He had a habit," said Webster, "of standing quite near to the jury, so near that he might have laid his finger on the foreman's nose; and then he talked to them in a plain conversational way, in short sentences, and using no word that was not level to the comprehension of the least educated man on the panel. This led me to examine my own style, and I set about reforming it altogether." Before this his style had been somewhat florid; afterward it was terse, simple, and graphic.
On July 4, 1812, Webster delivered an oration before the "Washington Benevolent Society," in which he stoutly opposed the war then being carried on with England. The address immediately passed through two editions, and led to his appointment as delegate to an assembly of the people of Rockingham County, to express disapproval of the war. The "Rockingham Memorial," which was presented to the President, was written by Mr. Webster, and showed a thorough knowledge of the condition of affairs, and an ardent devotion to the Union, even though the various sections of the country might differ in opinion. The result of this meeting was the sending of Mr. Webster to Congress, where he took his seat May 24, 1813. He was thirty-one; the poverty, the poor clothes in Dartmouth College, the burden of the father's debts had not kept him from success.
Once in Congress, it was but natural that his influence should be felt. He did not speak often, but when he did speak the House listened. He was placed on the committee on Foreign Relations, with Mr. Calhoun as chairman. He helped to repeal the Embargo Laws, spoke on the Tariff, showing that he was a Free Trader in principle, but favored Protection as far as expediency demanded it, and took strong grounds against the war of 1812. He urged the right and necessity of free speech on all questions. He said, "It is the ancient and undoubted prerogative of this people to canvas public measures and the merits of public men. It is a 'home-bred right,' a fireside privilege. It has ever been enjoyed in every house, cottage, and cabin in the nation… It is as undoubted as the right of breathing the air, or walking on the earth. Belonging to private life as a right, it belongs to public life as a duty; and it is the last duty which those whose representative I am shall find me to abandon."
He was active in that almost interminable discussion concerning a United States Bank. The first bank, chartered in 1791, had Hamilton for its defender, and Jefferson for its opponent. In 1811, the bank failed to obtain a renewal of its charter. During the war of 1812, the subject was again urged. The Jeffersonians were opposed to any bank; another party favored a bank which should help the government by heavy loans, and be relieved from paying its notes in specie; still another party, to which Webster belonged, favored a bank with reasonable capital, compelled to redeem its notes in specie, and at liberty to make loans or not to the government. On the subject of the currency he made some remarkable speeches, showing a knowledge of the subject perhaps unequalled since Hamilton.
The bank bill passed in 1816, shorn of some of its objectionable features. On April 26, Mr. Webster presented his resolutions requiring all dues to the government to be paid in coin, or in Treasury notes, or in notes of the Bank of the United States, and by a convincing speech aided in its adoption, thus rendering his country a signal service.
During this session of Congress, Webster received a challenge to a duel from John Randolph of Roanoke, and was brave enough to refuse, saying, "It is enough that I do not feel myself bound, at all times and under any circumstances, to accept from any man, who shall choose to risk his own life, an invitation of this sort."
The time had come now in Mr. Webster's life for a broader sphere; he decided to move to Boston. His law practice had never brought more than two thousand dollars a year, and he needed more than this for his growing family. Besides, his house at Portsmouth, costing him six thousand dollars, had been burned, his library and furniture destroyed, and he must begin the world anew.
The loss of property was small compared with another loss close at hand. Grace, the beautiful, precocious first-born, the sunshine of the home, died in her father's arms, smiling full in his face as she died. He wept like a child, and could never forget that parting look.
After settling in Boston, business flowed in upon him, until he earned twenty thousand dollars a year. He would work hard in the early morning hours, coming home tired from the courts in the afternoon. Says a friend, "After dinner, Mr. Webster would throw himself upon the sofa, and then was seen the truly electrical attraction of his character. Every person in the room was drawn immediately into his sphere. The children squeezing themselves into all possible places and postures upon the sofa, in order to be close to him; Mrs. Webster sitting by his side, and the friend or social visitor only too happy to join in the circle. All this was not from invitation to the children; he did nothing to amuse them, he told them no stories; it was the irresistible attraction of his character, the charm of his illumined countenance, from which beamed indulgence and kindness to every one of his family."
Among the celebrated cases which helped Mr. Webster's renown was the Dartmouth College case in 1817. The college was originally a charity school for the instruction of the Indians in the Christian religion, founded by Rev. Eleazer Wheelock. He solicited and obtained subscriptions in England, the Earl of Dartmouth being a generous giver. A charter was obtained from the Crown in 1769, appointing Dr. Wheelock president, and empowering him to name his successor, subject to the approval of the trustees. In 1815 a quarrel began between two opposite political and religious factions. The Legislature was applied to, which changed the name from college to university, enlarged the number of trustees, and otherwise modified the rights of the corporation under the charter from England. The new trustees took possession of the property. The old board brought action against the new, but the courts of New Hampshire decided that the acts of the Legislature were constitutional. The case was appealed to Washington, and on March 10, 1818, Mr. Webster made his famous speech of over four hours, proving that by the Constitution of the United States the charter of an institution is a contract which a State Legislature cannot annul.
In closing he said to the Chief Justice, "This, sir, is my case. It is the case, not merely of that humble institution, it is the case of every college in our land. It is more. It is the case of every eleemosynary institution throughout our country – of all those great charities founded by the piety of our ancestors, to alleviate human misery and scatter blessings along the pathway of life. It is more! It is, in some sense, the case of every man among us who has property of which he may be stripped, for the question is simply this: Shall our State Legislatures be allowed to take that which is not their own, to turn it from its original use, and apply it to such ends or purposes as they in their discretion shall see fit? Sir, you may destroy this little institution; it is weak; it is in your hands! I know it is one of the lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out. But, if you do so, you must carry through your work! You must extinguish, one after another, all those greater lights of science which, for more than a century, have thrown their radiance over our land!
"It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it – "
Here Mr. Webster broke down, overcome by the recollections of those early days of poverty, and the self-sacrifice of the dead father. The eyes of Chief Justice Marshall were suffused with tears, as were those of nearly all present. When Mr. Webster sat down, for some moments the silence was death-like, and then the people roused themselves as though awaking from a dream. Nearly seventy years after this, when the Hon. Mellen Chamberlain, Librarian of the Boston Public Library, gave his eloquent address at the dedication of Wilson Hall, the library building of Dartmouth College, he held in his hand the very copy of Blackstone from which Webster quoted in his great argument, with his autograph on the fly-leaf. Of Webster he said, "His imagination transformed the soulless body corporate – the fiction of the king's prerogative – into a living personality, the object of his filial devotion, the beloved mother whose protection called forth all his powers, and enkindled in his bosom a quenchless love."
Several years later, Webster won the great case of Gibbons vs. Ogden, which settled that the State of New York had no right, under the Constitution, to grant a monopoly of steam navigation, on its waters, to Fulton and Livingston.
He now took an active part in the revision of the Constitution of Massachusetts, helping to do away with the religious test, that a person holding office must declare his belief in the Christian religion. A believer himself, he was unwilling to force his views upon others. December 22, 1820, he delivered an oration at Plymouth, commemorating the two-hundredth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims. It was a grand theme, and the theme had a master to handle it. He began simply, "Let us rejoice that we behold this day. Let us be thankful that we have lived to see the bright and happy breaking of the auspicious morn which commences the third century of the history of New England… Forever honored be this, the place of our fathers' refuge! Forever remembered the day which saw them, weary and distressed, broken in everything but spirit, poor in all but faith and courage, at last secure from the danger of wintry seas, and impressing this shore with the first footsteps of civilized man!"
Then the picture was sketched on a glowing canvas; – the noble Pilgrims; the progress of New England during the century; the grand government under which we live and develop, with the Christian religion for our comfort and our hope. In closing he said, "The hours of this day are rapidly flying, and this occasion will soon be passed. Neither we nor our children can expect to behold its return. They are in the distant regions of futurity, they exist only in the all-creating power of God, who shall stand here, a hundred years hence, to trace through us their descent from the Pilgrims, and to survey, as we have now surveyed, the progress of their country during the lapse of a century. We would anticipate their concurrence with us in our sentiments of deep regard for our common ancestors. We would anticipate and partake the pleasure with which they will then recount the steps of New England's advancement. On the morning of that day, although it will not disturb us in our repose, the voice of acclamation and gratitude, commencing on the Rock of Plymouth, shall be transmitted through millions of the sons of the Pilgrims, till it lose itself in the murmurs of the Pacific seas."
The people heard the oration as though entranced. Said Mr. Ticknor, a man of remarkable culture, "I was never so excited by public speaking before in my life. Three or four times I thought my temples would burst with the gush of blood; for, after all, you must know that I am aware it is no connected and compacted whole, but a collection of wonderful fragments of burning eloquence, to which his whole manner gave tenfold force. When I came out I was almost afraid to come near to him. It seemed to me as if he was like the mount that might not be touched, and that burned with fire."
John Adams wrote him, "If there be an American who can read it without tears, I am not that American… Mr. Burke is no longer entitled to the praise – the most consummate orator of modern times… This oration will be read five hundred years hence with as much rapture as it was heard. It ought to be read at the end of every century, and indeed at the end of every year, forever and ever."
From the day he delivered that oration, Mr. Webster was the leading orator of America. From that day he belonged not to Grace Webster alone, not to Massachusetts, not to one political party, but to the people of the United States. Five years after that, he delivered the address at the laying of the corner-stone of Bunker Hill monument. Who does not remember the impassioned words to the survivors of the Revolution, "Venerable men! you have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives that you might behold this joyous day. You are now where you stood fifty years ago, this very hour, with your brothers and your neighbors, shoulder to shoulder, in the strife for your country. Behold, how altered! The same heavens are indeed over your heads; the same ocean rolls at your feet; but all else, how changed! You hear now no roar of hostile cannon, you see no mixed volumes of smoke and flame rising from burning Charlestown. The ground strewed with the dead and the dying; the impetuous charge; the steady and successful repulse; the loud call to repeated assault, the summoning of all that is manly to repeated resistance; a thousand bosoms freely and fearlessly bared in an instant to whatever of terror there may be in war and death, – all these you have witnessed, but you witness them no more… All is peace; and God has granted you this sight of your country's happiness, ere you slumber in the grave forever. He has allowed you to behold and to partake the reward of your patriotic toils, and he has allowed us, your sons and countrymen, to meet you here, and in the name of the present generation, in the name of your country, in the name of liberty, to thank you!
"But, alas! you are not all here! Time and the sword have thinned your ranks. Prescott, Putnam, Stark, Brooks, Read, Pomeroy, Bridge! our eyes seek for you in vain amidst this broken band. You are gathered to your fathers, and live only to your country in her grateful remembrance and your own bright example."
Who has not read that address delivered at Faneuil Hall, Boston, in commemoration of the lives and services of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who died July 4, 1826. Who does not remember that imaginary speech of John Adams, "Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote. It is true, indeed, that in the beginning we aimed not at independence. But there's a Divinity which shapes our ends… Sir, I know the uncertainty of human affairs, but I see, I see clearly through this day's business. You and I, indeed, may rue it. We may not live to see the time when this declaration shall be made good. We may die, – die colonists, – die slaves; – die, it may be, ignominiously and on the scaffold. Be it so. Be it so. If it be the pleasure of Heaven that my country shall require the poor offering of my life, the victim shall be ready at the appointed hour of sacrifice, come when that hour may. But, while I do live, let me have a country, or at least the hope of a country, and that a free country."
Concerning this speech of John Adams, beginning, "Sink or swim, live or die," Mr. Webster said, "I wrote that speech one morning before breakfast, in my library, and when it was finished my paper was wet with my tears." In delivering this oration, his manuscript lay near him on a small table, but he did not once refer to it. As far as possible in his addresses, he preferred Anglo-Saxon words to those with Latin origin; therefore, this great speech is so simple that school-boys the country over can declaim it and understand it.
In 1823, when Webster was forty-one, Boston elected him to Congress. He was, of course, widely known and observed; courtly in physique, impassioned yet calm, easy yet dignified, comprehensive in thought, a lover of and expounder of the Constitution.
The following year he visited Marshfield, on the south-east shore of Massachusetts, and saw the home which he afterward purchased, and which, with its eighteen hundred acres, became the joy of his later years. Here he planted flowers and trees. He would often say to others, "Plant trees, adorn your grounds, live for the benefit of those who shall come after you." Here he watched every sunrise and sunset, every moonrise from new to full, and grew rested and refreshed by these ever recurring glimpses of divine power. He said, "I know the morning; I am acquainted with it, and I love it, fresh and sweet as it is, a daily creation, breaking forth and calling all that have life, and breath, and being, to new adoration, new enjoyments, and new gratitude."
Here he enjoyed the ocean as he had enjoyed it in his boyhood, and years later, when his brain was tired from overwork, he would exclaim, plaintively, "Oh, Marshfield! the Sea! the Sea!"
This year also Webster paid a visit to Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. In his conversation with the ex-President, he told this story of himself, which well illustrates the fact that all the knowledge which we can acquire becomes of use to us at one time or another in life. When a young lawyer in Portsmouth, a blacksmith brought him a case under a will. As the case was a difficult one, he spent one month in the study of it, buying fifty dollars' worth of books to help him in the matter. He argued the case, won it, and received a fee of fifteen dollars. Years after, Aaron Burr sent for him to consult with him on a legal question of consequence. The case was so similar to that of the blacksmith that Webster could cite all the points bearing upon it from the time of Charles II. Mr. Burr was astonished, and suspected he was the counsel for the opposite side. Webster received enough compensation from Burr to cover the loss of time and money in the former case, and gained, besides, Burr's admiration and respect.
In the winter of 1824, Webster's youngest child, Charles, died, at the age of two years. Mrs. Webster wrote her absent husband, "I have dreaded the hour which should destroy your hopes, but trust you will not let this event afflict you too much, and that we both shall be able to resign him without a murmur, happy in the reflection that he has returned to his Heavenly Father pure as I received him… Do not, my dear husband, talk of your own 'final abode;' that is a subject I never can dwell on for a moment. With you here, my dear, I can never be desolate. Oh, may Heaven, in its mercy, long preserve you!"
Four years later, "the blessed wife," as he called her, went to her "final abode." Mr. Webster watched by her side till death took her. Then at the funeral, in the wet and cold of that January day, he walked close behind the hearse, holding Julia and Fletcher, his two children, by the hand. Her body was placed beneath St. Paul's Church, Boston, beside her children. All were removed afterward to Marshfield.
Webster went back to Washington, having been made United States senator, but he seemed broken-hearted, and unable to perform his duties. He wrote to a friend, "Like an angel of God, indeed. I hope she is in purity, in happiness, and in immortality; but I would fain hope that, in kind remembrance of those she has left, in a lingering human sympathy and human love, she may yet be, as God originally created her, a 'little lower than the angels.' I cannot pursue these thoughts, nor turn back to see what I have written." Again he wrote, "I feel a vacuum, an indifference, a want of motive, which I cannot describe. I hope my children, and the society of my best friends, may rouse me; but I can never see such days as I have seen. Yet I should not repine; I have enjoyed much, very much; and, if I were to die to-night, I should bless God most fervently that I have lived."
Judge Story spoke of Mrs. Webster as a sister with "her kindness of heart, her generous feelings, her mild and conciliatory temper, her warm and elevated affections, her constancy, purity, and piety, her noble disinterestedness, and her excellent sense."
Later, Mr. Webster married Caroline Le Roy, the daughter of a New York merchant, but no affection ever effaced from his heart the memory of Grace Webster, whom he always spoke of as "the mother of his children."
The next year, 1829, his idolized brother Ezekiel died suddenly at forty-nine, while he was addressing a jury in the court-house at Concord, New Hampshire.
Daniel Webster said of this shock, "I have felt but one such in life; and this follows so soon that it requires more fortitude than I possess to bear it with firmness, and, perhaps, as I ought. I am aware that the case admits no remedy, nor any present relief; and endeavor to console myself with reflecting that I have had much happiness with lost connections, and that they must expect to lose beloved objects in this world who have beloved objects to lose."
Recently, at the home of Kate Sanborn in New York, the grand-niece of Daniel Webster, I met the sweet-faced wife of Ezekiel, young in her feelings and young in face despite her four-score years. Here I saw a picture of the great orator in his youth, the desk on which he wrote, and scores of mementos of Marshfield and "Elms Farms," treasured by the cultivated woman who bears token of her renowned kinship.
With all these sorrows crowded into Mr. Webster's life, he could not cease his pressing work in Congress. Andrew Jackson had become President, and John C. Calhoun had preached his Nullification doctrines till South Carolina was ready to separate herself from the Union, because of her dissatisfaction with the tariff laws. Webster had somewhat changed his views, and had become a supporter of the "American System" of Henry Clay, the system of "protection," because he thought the interests of his constituents demanded it. For himself, he loved agriculture, but he saw the need of fostering manufactures if we would have a great and prosperous country.
On December 29, 1829, Mr. Foote, a senator from Connecticut, introduced a resolution to inquire respecting the sales and surveys of western lands. In a long debate which followed, General Hayne of South Carolina took occasion to chastise New England, in no tender words, for her desire to build up herself in wealth at the expense of the West and South. On January 20, Webster made his first reply to the General, having only a night in which to prepare his speech. The notes filled three pages of ordinary letter paper, while the speech, as reported, filled twenty pages.
Again General Hayne spoke in an able yet personal manner, asserting the doctrines of nullification, and attempting to justify the position of his State in seceding. Mr. Webster took notes while he was speaking, but, as the Senate adjourned, his speech did not come till the following day. Again he had but a night in which to prepare.
When the morning of January 26 came, the galleries, floor, and staircase were crowded with eager men and women. "It is a critical moment," said Mr. Bell, of New Hampshire, to Mr. Webster, "and it is time, it is high time, that the people of this country should know what this Constitution is." "Then," answered Webster, "by the blessing of Heaven they shall learn, this day, before the sun goes down, what I understand it to be."
When Webster began speaking his words were slowly uttered. "Mr. President, – When the mariner has been tossed, for many days, in thick weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course. Let us imitate this prudence, and before we float farther on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to conjecture where we now are. I ask for the reading of the resolution."
And then with trenchant sarcasm, unanswerable logic, and the intense feeling which belongs to true oratory, Mr. Webster taught the American people the strength and holding power of the Constitution, which a civil war, thirty years later, was to prove unalterably. The speech, which filled seventy printed pages, came from only five pages of notes. When asked how long he was in preparation for the reply to Hayne, he answered, his "whole life."
How often his loving defence of Massachusetts has been quoted! "Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomiums upon Massachusetts. She needs none. There she is – behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history: the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill, – and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for Independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State, from New England to Georgia; and there they will lie forever. And, sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it – if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it – if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed to separate it from that union, by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked: it will stretch forth its arm, with whatever of vigor it may still retain, over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin.
"When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! – Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured – bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as What is all this worth? Nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first, and Union afterwards – but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart – Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!"
Of course, this reply to Hayne electrified the country, and Webster began to be mentioned for the presidential chair. No one who ever heard him speak, with his wonderful magnetism, his majestic enthusiasm, his rich, full voice, and his unsurpassed physique, could ever forget the man, his words, or his presence. When he visited Europe, some said, "There goes a king." When Sydney Smith saw him, he exclaimed, "Good Heavens! he is a small cathedral by himself."
Through Jackson's administration Webster was his courteous opponent in most measures, but in the nullification scheme he was heart and hand with the fearless, self-willed general. When Henry Clay brought forward his compromise tariff bill, which pacified the nullifiers, Webster opposed it, believing that, in the face of this opposition to the Constitution, concession was unwise.
In 1833, the famous statesman made an extended journey through the West, and was everywhere honored and fêted. Church-bells were rung, cannon fired, and houses decorated at his coming. Great crowds gathered everywhere to hear him speak.
By this time a party was developing in opposition to the unusual powers exercised by General Jackson, whose great victory at New Orleans had made him the idol of the people. The party was the more easily formed from the financial troubles under Van Buren, he having reaped the harvest of which Jackson had sown the seed. Naturally, Mr. Webster became the leader of this Whig party, so called from the Whig party in England, formed to resist the ultra demands of the king. Massachusetts favored him for the presidency. Boston presented him with a massive silver vase, before an audience of four thousand persons. Philadelphia and Baltimore gave him public dinners. Letters came from various States urging his name upon the National Convention, which met at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, December 4, 1839. But Mr. Webster had been so prominent that his views upon all public questions were too well known, therefore General William Henry Harrison, of Ohio, an honored soldier of the War of 1812, was chosen, as being a more "available" candidate.