Webster, Daniel (1782-1852)

Daniel Webster (1782-1852)

Source

Lawyer and senator

Studious Youth. Daniel Webster was born in 1782 in New Hampshire. His father, Ebenezer, was uneducated but had risen to distinction in the militia during the American Revolution and hoped to give Daniel the education he never received. Webster was a sickly youth who avoided farm labor and devoted himself to studying. He attended several local schools and at fourteen went to Phillips Exeter Academy, then returned home and was educated by a private teacher until 1797 when he enrolled at Dartmouth College. He graduated near the top of his class and began studying law. He was admitted to the bar in Boston in 1805 and returned to Portsmouth in 1807. He married Grace Fletcher in May 1808 and spent the next decade creating a profitable legal practice.

Supreme Court. Webster was elected to two terms in Congress starting in 1812, as a Federalist opponent of the war with Britain. His national reputation did not arise until after the war, when he represented his alma mater before the United States Supreme Court in the Dartmouth College v. Woodward case in 1819. Webster defended the college’s charter against the New Hampshire legislature’s attempted revisions. As counsel for the college’s trustees, Webster argued that the school’s charter was a contract that could not be altered. According to legend, Webster brought Chief Justice John Marshall to tears with his appeal that Dartmouth was only a small school but dear to those associated with it. Marshall held that the charter was indeed a contract, free from unilateral amendment. Webster appeared before the Court in several other important cases, including McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824).

“Liberty and Union.” Between 1819 and 1827 Webster served in a variety of political offices. He was a delegate to the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1820, returned to Congress for two more terms starting in 1822, and continued to participate in public events such as the dedication of the Bunker Hill monument in 1825 that provided a spotlight for his remarkable oratory. In 1827 he was elected to the United States Senate, where in 1830 Webster distinguished himself in his debate with Robert Hayne of South Carolina as a leading defender of the Constitution and the Union. In response to South Carolina’s claim that it could nullify the federal tariff, Webster argued that sovereignty rested with the people, not the individual states. Nullification, Webster argued, was absurd; no state could nullify the laws of the land without provoking civil war. He ended with the plea “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” and voted against the 1833 compromise tariff.

Whig Candidate. Though Webster sided with Democrat Andrew Jackson against nullification, his devotion to New England’s commercial interests led him naturally into the Whig Party. He voted for the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States, for which he also remained on retainer as a lawyer. Seeing in Jackson’s removal of federal deposits from the bank an issue that might lead him to the White House, Webster became one of three Whig presidential candidates in 1836. The strategy of running multiple candidates, intended to prevent anyone from receiving a majority of the electoral vote and to throw the election into the House, was unsuccessful. Martin Van Buren won, and Webster carried only the state of Massachusetts.

Compromise. After his defeat in 1836, Webster considered retiring from politics and rebuilding his lucrative law practice but was persuaded to remain in Washington. In 1840 he became William Henry Harrison’s secretary of state. He remained in the cabinet after Harrison’s death, even after every other Whig resigned in protest over President John Tyler’s veto of a new national bank. In 1842 he negotiated the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, fixing the northeastern boundary between the United States and Canada. He then resigned and returned to the Senate in time to oppose the annexation of Texas, the extension of slavery, and the Mexican-American War. In 1850, sensing that the Union was again threatened, he supported Henry Clay’s compromise with his famous “Seventh of March” address. Rising to speak, “not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American,” Webster denounced both secession and abolition. The speech cemented his reputation as the era’s greatest orator, but his willingness to put abolition second to the Union offended many northern antislavery Whigs; the poet John Greenleaf Whittier called the address “A fallen angel’s pride of thought, still strong in chains.” Discredited, he returned to a cabinet position as Millard Fillmore’s secretary of state. He again aspired to the presidency but was rejected by the Whigs in 1852. The nomination would have been to no avail: he became seriously ill and died of cirrhosis of the liver on 24 October 1852.

Source

Robert V. Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (New York: Norton, 1997).