face; the dull black eyes under the precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be blown; the mastiff mouth accurately closed; I have not traced so much of silent Berserkir rage that I remember in any man.”
In 1820 Webster took an important part in the convention called to revise the constitution of Massachusetts, his arguments in favour of removing the religious test, in favour of retaining property representation in the Senate, and in favour of increasing the independence of the judiciary, being especially notable. He was a member of the National House of Representatives from 1823 to 1827 and of the Senate from 1827 to 1841. Soon after returning to the House he supported in a notable speech a resolution to send a commissioner to Greece, then in insurrection.
The tariff was to him a distasteful subject, and he was governed in his attitude toward it largely by the wishes of the majority of his constituents. He opposed the tariff bill of 1816 and in 1824, and he repudiated the name of “American system,” claimed by Clay for his system of protection. When, however, the tariff bill of 1828, which was still more protective, came up for discussion, Webster had ceased to oppose protection; but he did not attempt to argue in favour of it. He stated that his people, after giving warning in 1824 that they would consider protection the policy of the Government, had gone into protected manufactures, and he now asked that that policy be not reversed to the injury of his constituents. In later speeches, too, he defended protection rather as a policy under which industries had been called into being than as advisable if the stage had been clear for the adoption of a new policy.
The tariff of 1828 aroused bitter opposition in South Carolina, and called from Vice-President Calhoun the statement of the doctrine of nullification which was adopted by the South Carolina legislature at the close of the year and is known as the South Carolina Exposition. Senator Robert Y. Hayne, from the same state, voiced this doctrine in the Senate, and Webster’s reply was his most powerful exposition of the national conception of the Union. The occasion of this famous Webster-Hayne debate was the introduction by Senator Samuel A. Foote (1780–1846) of Connecticut of a resolution of inquiry into the expediency of restricting the sales of the Western lands. This was on the 29th of December 1829, and after Senator Benton of Missouri had denounced the resolution as one inspired by hatred of the East for the West, Hayne, on the 19th of January 1830, made a vigorous attack on New England, and declared his opposition to a permanent revenue from the public lands or any other source on the ground that it would promote corruption and the consolidation of the government and “be fatal to the sovereignty and independence of the states.” Webster’s brief reply drew from Hayne a second speech, in which he entered into a full exposition of the doctrine of nullification, and the important part of Webster’s second reply to Hayne on the 26th and 27th of January is a masterly exposition of the Constitution as in his opinion it had come to be after a development of more than forty years. He showed the revolutionary and unpractical character of any doctrine such as nullification (q.v.) based on the assumption that the general government was the agent of the state legislatures. It placed the general government, he said, in the absurd position of a “servant of four-and-twenty masters, of different wills and different purposes, and yet bound to obey all.” He then argued at length that the correct assumption was that both the general government and the state government were “all agents of the same supreme power, the people,” that the people had established the Constitution of the United States and that in the Supreme Court, established under that Constitution, was vested the final decision on all constitutional questions. Whatever may be said of the original creation of the Constitution, whether by the states or by the people, its development under the influences of a growing nationalism was a strong support to Webster’s argument, and no other speech so strengthened Union sentiment throughout the North; its keynote was “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” South Carolina, however, insisted that its doctrine was sound, and in November 1832 passed an ordinance declaring the revenue laws of the United States null and void. President Jackson responded with a proclamation denying the right of nullification, and asked Congress for authority to collect the revenue in South Carolina by force if necessary. A bill, known as the Force Bill, was introduced in the Senate, and in the debate upon it Webster had an encounter with Calhoun. His reply to Calhoun, printed as “The Constitution not a compact between sovereign States,” is one of his closest legal arguments, but somewhat overmatched by the keen logic of his adversary.
Webster’s support of President Jackson in the South Carolina trouble helped to drive Calhoun into an alliance with Clay; and Clay, whose plan of preserving the Union was by compromise, came forward with a bill for greatly reducing the tariff. Webster, strongly opposed to yielding in this way, made a vigorous speech against the bill, but it passed and South Carolina claimed a victory. In the same year (1833) the Whig party began to take definite form under the leadership of Clay, in opposition, chiefly, to President Jackson’s bank policy, and Webster joined the ranks behind Clay with an aspiration for the presidency. He was formally nominated for that office by the Massachusetts legislature in 1835, and received the electoral vote of that state, but of that state only. Four years later his party passed him by for William Henry Harrison, the hero of Tippecanoe, and Webster refused the proffered nomination for vice-president.
President Harrison appointed Webster secretary of state but died one month after taking office. John Tyler, who succeeded to the presidency, was soon “read out of his party,” and all his cabinet except Webster resigned. Webster hesitated, but after consultation with a delegation of Massachusetts Whigs decided to remain. Although he was severely criticized there were good reasons for his decision. When he entered office the relations between the United States and Great Britain were critical. The M‘Leod case[1] in which the state of New York insisted on trying a British subject, with whose trial the Federal government had no power to interfere, while the British government had declared that it would consider conviction and execution a casus belli; the exercise of the hateful right of search by British vessels on the coast of Africa; the Maine boundary, as to which the action of a state might at any time bring the Federal government into armed collision with Great Britain — all these at once met the new secretary, and he felt that he had no right to abandon his work for party reasons. With the special commissioner from Great Britain, Lord Ashburton, he concluded the treaty of 1842 known as the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. Differences arising out of the M‘Leod case were adjusted by extending the principle of extradition. The question of the suppression of the African slave trade, with which was connected the right of search, was settled by an agreement that each nation should keep in service off the coast of Africa a squadron carrying not fewer than eighty guns, and that the two squadrons should act in concert when necessary. The North-east boundary dispute was settled by a compromise which allowed Maine about 5500 sq. m. less than she had claimed, and allowed Great Britain about as much less on her claim, and by an agreement on the part of the government of the United States to pay to Maine and Massachusetts “in equal moieties” the sum of $300,000 for their assent (see Maine).
Immediately after the treaty had been concluded the Whigs insisted that Webster should leave the cabinet. He refused, for a time, to be driven, but because of their continued attacks, together with his ambition to become president, and because Tyler favoured the annexation of Texas while he was opposed to it, he resigned in May 1843. He was forgiven by his party in the following year, but not until the opposition, provoked by the retention of his position under Tyler, had ruined whatever
- ↑ This case grew out of the Canadian rebellion of 1837. Alexander M‘Leod boasted in November 1840 that he was one of a Canadian party who, on the 29th of December 1837, had captured and burned a small American steamboat, the “Caroline,” and in the course of the attack had shot Amos Durfee. The Canadian commander had regarded the “Caroline” as being in the service of the insurgents and had asked for volunteers to destroy her (see Seward, W. H.).
