Political leadership, for good and for ill, is one of the messages I receive from today’s #stampoftheday, a 10-cent stamp picturing Daniel Webster, who in the first half of the 19th century was one of the nation’s leading politicians and one of its best lawyers as well.
Webster, who was known as one his era’s greatest orators, served two stints as U.S. Secretary of State, two separate stints as a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, and two stints as a U.S. Representative (from Massachusetts and New Hampshire) was known as one of the day’s greatest orators. As a lawyer he argued more than 200 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning about half of them, including several especially seminal cases decided by the court between 1814 and 1824. Among these was a case involving Dartmouth College that laid the foundation for the rise of American business corporations. In his argument, Webster famously said, “It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it!”
His legacy is complicated, to say the least. Strongly allied with Boston’s business elite, he was an ardent and active supporter of efforts to create a strong and active national government that invested in internal improvements (the era’s term for infrastructure). He also defended their interests in seminal court cases.
To his credit, Webster had been a long-standing opponent of slavery, which in 1837 he called a “great moral, social, and political evil.” He added that he would vote against “any hing that shall extend the slavery of the African race on this continent, or add other slaveholding states to the Union.” However, (perhaps because his strong ties with northern business interests) he did not believe that Congress should interfere with slavery in the states, and he placed less emphasis on preventing the spread of slavery into the territories.
He also was one of the most ardent defenders of the union and strongly opposed southern officials’ increasingly common arguments that states could “nullify” federal laws if they didn’t like them. He was particularly well known for a widely reprinted 1837 speech on the Senate floor (considered to be one of greatest speeches of its era). That speech ended with flowery but still powerful words: “When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see [it] 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!”
He went on to say let the sun’s last ways instead illuminate “the gorgeous ensign of the republic…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!'”
Yet Webster’s legacy was tarnished in part by his ties to the business elite and charges that his public stances often were driven by his private interests. And his reputation truly suffered when he decided that since his support for both the Union and business interests outweighed his distaste for slavery he would support what became the Compromise of 1850 (the subject of a different #stampoftheday posting) which, among other provisions, made possible the expansion of slavery and strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act.
Speaking in favor of an early version of the compromise, Webster attacked Northerners and Southerners alike for stirring up tensions over slavery, admonished Northerners for obstructing the return of fugitive slaves, and attacked Southern leaders for openly contemplating secession. After the speech, Webster was bitterly attacked by New England abolitionists, such as Theodore Parker, who complained, “No living man has done so much to debauch the conscience of the nation,” and Horace Mann, who described Webster as “a fallen star! Lucifer descending from Heaven!”
Writing several decades later, Henry Cabot Lodge (who would go on to be a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts) wrote that while Webster was “brave and true and wise in 1833, in 1850 he was not only inconsistent, but that he erred deeply in policy and statesmanship.” Lodge added, that Webster’s efforts “made war inevitable by encouraging slave-holders to believe that they could always obtain anything they wanted by a sufficient show of violence.”
In contrast, John. F. Kennedy—yet another Massachusetts author turned politician – argued in Profiles in Courage – that Webster’s defense of the Compromise of 1850, despite the risk to his presidential ambitions and the denunciations he faced from the north, one of the “greatest acts of courageous principle” in the history of the Senate.
In recent decades, historian and others have been mixed in their assessments of Webster. It is clear that he was an important and talented attorney, orator, and politician, who, as Kennedy wrote had a unique “ability to make alive and supreme the latent sense of oneness, of union, that all Americans felt but few could express.”
On the other hand, his record is badly tarnished by the choice he made in 1850, his willingness to compromise, and his tendency, particularly in his legal work, to favor the affluent and powerful. Moreover, as many have noted, for all his fame as an orator, Webster rarely prevailed when it came time to vote.
What then to make of the fact that he appeared on several stamps issued in the latter part of the 19th century, including today’s #stampoftheday?
The fact that most those stamps were portraits of presidents, indicates that Webster was, for a time, a central figure in the “official” American pantheon. And it clear that he played a major role in the country and his support for the Union may have helped lay the groundwork needed to fight for the Union during the Civil War. In addition, while he’s known for his speeches, perhaps his most lasting impacts came from his legal work. The Dartmouth case, which involved the state of New Hampshire’s efforts to alter the college’s charter, is generally seen as a landmark decision in corporate law that helped fuel the rise of American business corporations.
Looking back, what strikes me most is the moral choice that Webster made in 1850 as tensions of slavery were increasing. I wonder if when his eyes “turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven” he felt any regrets about the choices he had made.
I suspect he did.
Stay safe, be well, fight for justice and work for peace.