18th of January 1782. He was a descendant of Thomas Webster, of Scottish ancestry, who settled in New Hampshire about 1636. His father, Ebenezer Webster (1730–1806), was a sturdy frontiersman; when, in 1763, he built his log cabin in the town of Salisbury there was no habitation between him and Canada. He was a member of Rogers' Rangers in the Seven Years' War, served in the War of Independence, was for several years a member of the New Hampshire legislature, was a delegate to the New Hampshire convention which ratified the Federal constitution, and was a justice of the court of common pleas for his county. Daniel was a frail but clever child, and his family made great sacrifices to give him and his elder brother Ezekiel a good education. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy about nine months in 1794, was further prepared for college by Dr Samuel Wood, the minister at Boscawen, and graduated at Dartmouth College in 1801. He was chosen Fourth of July orator in Hanover, the college town, in 1800, and in his speech appears the substance of the political principles for the development of which he is chiefly famous. After graduation he began the study of law in his native town. When in the following winter money had to be earned to enable Ezekiel to remain in college, Daniel accepted the principalship of the academy at Fryeburg, Maine; but he resumed his law studies in the following year, and in 1804, with Ezekiel’s assistance, he was enabled to go to Boston and conclude his studies under Christopher Gore (1758–1827), later governor of Massachusetts (1809–1810) and a U.S. senator (1813–1816). Admitted to the bar in Boston in 1805, Webster began the practice of law at Boscawen, but his father died a year later, and Webster removed in the autumn of 1807 to Portsmouth, then one of the leading commercial cities of New England. Here he rose rapidly to eminence both at the bar and in politics.
His political career began in earnest at the opening of the War of 1812. He led the opposition in his state to the policy of Madison’s administration, was elected by the Federalists a member of the National House of Representatives, and took his seat in May 1813. Henry Clay, the speaker, appointed him a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations, of which John C. Calhoun was chairman, and for some forty years these three constituted a great triumvirate in American politics. Webster had been in the House less than three weeks when he greatly embarrassed the administration by introducing a set of resolutions asking for information relating to the immediate cause of the war. In January 1814, when a bill to encourage enlistments was before the House, he attacked the conduct of the war in his first great speech. An even more forcible speech, delivered later in the same session, in support of a bill for repealing the embargo and non-importation acts, marked him as one of the foremost men in Congress. He successfully opposed a bill providing for what would have been practically an irredeemable currency, and he voted against the bill for chartering the second United States bank, although it provided for the redemption of bank notes in specie, because he objected to permitting the government to have so large a share in its management. Webster removed to Boston in June 1816. This cost him his seat in Congress after the 4th of March 1817, and for the next six years he was engaged chiefly in the practice of law in the courts of Massachusetts and before the U.S. Supreme Court.
His first leading case before the Supreme Court was the Dartmouth College Case. In 1815, when the Dartmouth board of trustees was rent by factions, the majority, who were Federalists and Congregationalists, removed the president, John Wheelock, who was a Presbyterian, and appointed Francis Brown in his place. Wheelock appealed to the legislature in the following year, when it was strongly Republican, and that body responded by passing acts which virtually repealed the charter received from George III., created a state university, placed Wheelock at its head, and transferred to it the property of the college. The case came before the Supreme Court of New Hampshire in May 1817. Jeremiah Mason (1768–1848), a lawyer of the first rank, Jeremiah Smith and Webster appeared for the college, and argued that these acts were invalid because they were not within the general scope of the legislature’s power, because they violated provisions of the state constitution and because they violated the clause of the Federal Constitution which prohibits a state from impairing the obligation of contracts but the court decided against them. On the last point, however, the case was carried to the Supreme Court of the United States, and there Webster, presenting principally arguments of his colleagues at the state trial and making a powerful appeal to the emotions of the court, won the case for the college and for himself the front rank at the American bar. The result, too, vindicating as it did the supremacy of the Constitution of the United States, was a substantial gain for that nationalism which Webster advocated in his first Fourth of July oration at Hanover, and the promotion of which was for the remainder of his career his principal service to his country. His next great case was that of M‘Culloch v. Maryland. Maryland had imposed a tax upon the Baltimore branch of the Bank of the United States. The Maryland Court of Appeals sustained the validity of this act. Webster, supported by William Pinkney and William Wirt, argued in February 1819, (1) that the power to establish a bank was to be implied from the general power given to Congress to administer the financial affairs of the nation, and was a means of administering the finances which was appropriate and within the discretion of Congress; (2) that “the power to tax is the power to destroy,” and that a state had not the constitutional power to impose a tax upon any instrumentality of the government of the United States. The Supreme Court sustained these arguments and the act of Maryland was held to be void. Four years later (1823) Webster argued the case of Gibbons v. Ogden. The state of New York, in order to reward the enterprise of Robert R. Livingston and the inventive genius of Robert Fulton in the application of the steam engine to traffic on the water, had given to them a monopoly of all transportation by steam within the waters of New York. The highest court of that state sustained the validity of the monopoly. Gibbons, who had begun to run a steamboat from New Jersey, appealed to the Supreme Court. Webster argued that the Federal Constitution gave to Congress control over interstate commerce, and that any interference by the legislature of a state with this commerce was unconstitutional and void. The Supreme Court so held; its opinion, written by Chief Justice Marshall, being little else than a recital of Webster’s argument. In the case of Ogden v. Saunders, heard in 1824 and reheard in 1827, in which the question was the validity or invalidity of the insolvent laws of the several states, Webster argued that the clause prohibiting a state from impairing the obligation of contracts applied to future as well as to past contracts, but the court decided against him.
Meanwhile Webster had come to be recognized as the first American orator. His oration at Plymouth, on the 22nd of December 1820, on the second centennial anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, placed him in this rank. No man mastered more thoroughly the fundamental principles of government and the currents of feeling which influence the destiny of nations. His oration in 1825 at the laying of the corner stone of the Bunker Hill monument contained perhaps the clearest statement to be found anywhere of the principles underlying the American War of Independence. In the following year Webster delivered his oration in commemoration of the second and third presidents of the United States—John Adams and Thomas Jefferson—who died on the 4th of July 1826; it is particularly remarkable for Adams’s imaginary reply in the Continental Congress to the arguments against a Declaration of Independence, beginning with the familiar quotation: “Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I gave my hand and my heart to this vote.” Webster’s physical endowments as an orator were extraordinary. Thomas Carlyle thus describes him as he appeared in London in 1839.
“Not many days ago I saw at breakfast the notablest of your notabilities, Daniel Webster. He is a magnificent specimen. You might say to all the world, ‘This is our Yankee Englishman; such limbs we make in Yankee land!’ As a logic fencer, or parliamentary Hercules, one would be inclined to back him at first sight against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like
