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Speeches and Orations
of
Daniel Webster
With an Essay on
Daniel Webster as a Master of English Style
By
Edwin P. Whipple
Boston Little, Brown, and Company
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1879, by
LITTLE, BROWN, & Co., In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.
prfntetf ABEHIU A Co,, BOSTON, TT.8.A.
PREFACE.
THE object of the present volume is not to supersede the standard edition of Daniel Webster's Works, in six octavo vol- umes, edited by Edward Everett, and originally issued in the year 1851, by the publishers of this volume of Selections. It is rather the purpose of the present publication to call atten- tion anew to the genius and character of Daniel Webster, as a lawyer, statesman, diplomatist, patriot, and citizen, and, by republishing some of his prominent orations and speeches of universally acknowledged excellence, to revive public interest in the great body of his works. In the task of selection, it has been impossible to do full justice to his powers ; for among the speeches omitted in this collection are to be found passages of superlative eloquence, maxims of political and moral wisdom which might be taken as mottoes for elaborate treatises on the philosophy of law and legislation, and impor- tant facts and principles which no student of history of the United States can overlook without betraying an ignorance of the great forces which influenced the legislation of the two Houses of Congress, from the time Mr. Webster first entered public life to the day of his death.
It is to be supposed that, when Mr. Everett consented to edit the six volumes of his works, Mr. Webster indicated to him the orations, speeches, and diplomatic despatches which he really thought might be of service to the public, and that
IV JPKEFACE.
he intended them as a kind of legacy, — a bequest to his coun- trymen.
The publishers of this volume believe that a study of Mr. Webster's mind, heart, and character, as exhibited in the selections contained in the present volume, will inevitably direct all sympathetic readers to the great body of Mr. Web- ster's works. Among the eminent men who have influenced legislative assemblies in Great Britain and the United States, during the past hundred and twenty years, it is curious that only two have established themselves as men of the first dbss in Ikiglish and American literature. These two men are Edmund Burke and Daniel Webster; and it is only by the complete study of every thing which they authorized to be published under their names, that we can adequately com- prehend either their position among the political forces of their tone, or their rank among the great masters of English eloquence and style*
CONTENTS.
DANIEL WEBSTEB AS A MASTEB OF ENGLISH STTOB
THLB DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE ......... 1
Argument before the Supreme Court of the United States, at Wash- ington, on the 10th of March, 1818.
FIRST SETTLEMENT OF NEW ENGLAND 25
A Discourse delivered at Plymouth, on the 22d of December, 1820.
DEFENCE OF JUDGE JAMES PEESCOTT 55
The closing Appeal to the Senate of Massachusetts, in Mr. Webster's " Argument on the Impeachment of James Prescott," April 24th, 1821.
THE REVOLUTION IN GREECE . 5T
A Speech delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, on the 19th of January, 1824.
THE TARIFF 77
A Speech delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, on the 1st and 2d of April, 1824.
THE CASE OF GIBBONS AND OGDEN Ill
An Argument made in the Case of Gibbons and Ogden, in the Su- preme Court of the United States, February Term, 1 824.
THE BUNKER HILL MONUMENT 123
An Address delivered at the Laying of the Corner-Stone of the Bunker Hill Monument at Charlestown, Massachusetts, on the 17th of June, 1825.
THE COMPLETION OF THE BUNKER HILL MONUMENT . . 136 An Address delivered on Bunker Hill, on the 17th of June, 1843, on Occasion of the Completion of the Monument.
Vi CONTENTS.
OUR RELATIONS TO THE SOUTH AMERICAN REPUBLICS . . 152 Extracts from the Speech on **The Panama Mission," delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, on the 14th of April, 1826.
ADAMS AND JEFKERSON „ 156
A Discourse in Commemoration of the Lives and Services of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, delivered in Faneuil Hall, Boston, on the 2d of August, 1826.
Tm CASE OF OGDEN AND SAUNDERS 179
An Argument made in the Case of Ogden and Saunders, in the Su- preme Court of the United States, January Term, 1827.
THE MURDER OF CAPTAIN JOSEPH WHITE 189
An Argument on the Trial of John Francis Knapp, for the Murder of Joseph White* of Salem, in Essex County, Massachusetts, on the Night of the 6th of April, 1880.
THE REPLY TO HAYNB 227
Second Speech on " Foot's Resolution," delivered in the Senate of the United State®, on the 26th and 27th of January, 1830.
THE CONSTITUTION NOT A COMPACT BETWEEN SOVEREIGN
STATES 273
A Speech delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the 16th of February, 1833, in Reply to Mr. Calhoun's Speech on the .Bill * Further to Provide for the Collection of Duties on Imports."
PUBLIC DINNER AT NEW YORK 807
A Speech delivered at a Public Dinner given by a large Number of Gtizens of New York, in Honor of Mr. Webster, on March 10th, 1831.
THE PRESIDENTIAL VETO OF THE UNITED STATES BANK
Bl1^ 320
A Speech delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the llth of July, 1832, on the President's Veto of the Bank Bill.
THE CHARACTER OF WASHINGTON 339
A Speech delivered at a Public Dinner in the City of Washington, on the 22d of February, 1832, the Centennial Anniversary of Washington's Birthday.
ExECUTiVB PATRONAGE AND EEMOTALS FROM OFFICE . . 84T
From a Speech delivered at the National Republican Convention, held at Worcester (Mass,), on the 12th of October, 1832.
CONTENTS vii
EXECUTIVE USUBPATION 358
From the same Speech at Worcester.
THE NATTJBAL HATBED OF THE POOR TO THE RICH , . . 359
From a Speech in the Senate of the United States, January 31st,
1834, on "The Removal of the Deposits."
A REDEEMABLE PAPER CURRENCY . * . « 802
From a Speech delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the 22d of February, 1834
THE PRESIDENTIAL PROTEST . . . * 367
A Speech delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the 7th of May, 1834, on the subject of the President's Protest against the Resolution of the Senate of the 28th of March.
THE APPOINTING AND REMOVING POWER 394
Delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the 16th of February,
1835, on the Passage of the Bill entitled " An Act to Repeal the First and Second Sections of the Act to limit the Term of Service of certain Officers therein named."
OK THE LOSS OF THE FOBTIFICATION BlLL IN 1835 . . . 407
A Speech delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the 14th of January, 1836, on Mr. Benton's Resolutions for Appropriating the Surplus Revenue to National Defence.
RECEPTION AT NEW YOBK 422
A Speech delivered at Niblo's Saloon, in New York, on the 15th of March, 1837.
SLAVERY IN THE DISTBIOT OF COLUMBIA 44(>
Remarks made in the Senate of the United States, on the 10th of January, 1838, upon a Resolution moved by Mr. Clay as a Sub- stitute for the Resolution offered by Mr. Calhoun on the Subject of Slavery in the District of Columbia.
THE CREDIT SYSTEM AND THE LABOB OF THE UNITED
STATES 449
From the Second Speech on the Sub-Treasury, delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the 12th of March, 1838.
CONTENTS
OH THE POLOTCAL CoiJESK OF MB. CALHOUN, IN
1888 .............. . . . . 453
From tlie same Speech.
REPLY TO ME, CAJLHOUN ... ......... 458
A Speech delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the 22d of March, 1888t in Answer to Mr. Calhoun.
A UNIFOBH SYSTEM OF BANKRUPTCY . . . ..... 4T1
From a Speech delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the 18th ol May, 1840, on the proposed Amendment to the Bill estab- lishing a Uniform System of Bankruptcy.
**THB Loo CABIN CANDID ATE" ........ . . 476
From a Speech delivered at the great Mass Meeting at Saratoga, New York, on the 12th of August, 1840.
ADDBBSS TO THE LADIES OF RICHMOND ....... 478
Remarks at a Public Reception by the Ladies of Richmond, Virginia, on the 5th of October, 1840.
RECEPTION AT BOSTON ........ ..... 481
A Speech made in Faneuil Hall, ©n the 30th of September, 1842, at a Public Reception given to Mr. Webster, on his Return to Boston, after the Negotiation of the Treaty of Washington.
IHB LANDING AT PLYMOUTH . . ...... ... 496
A Speech delivered on the 22d of December, 1843, at the Public Dinner of the New England Society of New York, in Commemo- ration of the Landing of the Pilgrims.
THE CHRISTIAN MINISTBY AND THE RELIGIOUS INSTRUC- TION OF THE YOUNG .... ......... 505
A Speech delivered in the Supreme Court at Washington, on the 20£h of February, 1844, in the Girard Will Case.
MB. JUSTICE STOBY ....... . ...... 533
THE RHODE ISLAND GOVEBNMENT ......... 585
An Argument made in the Supreme Court of the United States, on the 27th of January, 1848, in the Dorr Rebellion Cases.
OBJECTS OF THE MEXICAN WAB .......... 551
A Speech delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the 23d of March, 1848, on the Bill from the House of Representatives for raising a Loan of Sixteen Millions of Dollars.
CONTENTS, ix
EXCLUSION OF SLAVERY FROM THE TERRITORIES . . . . 56&
Remarks made In the Senate of the United States, on tlie 12th of August, 1S48.
SPEECH AT MARSHFIELD 5TS
Delivered at a Meeting of the Citizens of Marghfield, Mass., on the 1st of September, 1848.
JEREMIAH MASON . . . . 589
KOSSUTH 698
From a Speech delivered in Boston, on the 7th of November, 1849, at a Festival of the Natives of New Hampshire established in Massachusetts.
THE CONSTITUTION AND THE UNION 600
A Speech delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the 7th of March, 1850.
RECEPTION AT BUFFALO ............. 626
A Speech delivered before a large Assembly of the Citizens of Buffalo and the County of Erie, at a Public Reception, on the 22d of May, 1851.
THE ADDITION TO THE CAPITOL
An Address delivered at the Laying of the Corner-Stone of tihe Addi- tion to the Capitol, on the 4th of July, 1851.
APPENDIX.
IMPRESSMENT 656
THE RIGHT OF SEARCH ^660
LETTERS TO GENERAL CABS ON THE TREATY OF WASH- INGTON 666
THE HULSEMANN LETTER 67s
DANIEL WEBSTER AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE.
"C^ROM my own experience and observation I should say that every **- boy, who is ready enough in spelling, grammar, geography, and arithmetic, is appalled when he is commanded to write what is termed 44 a composition." When he enters college the same fear follows him - and the Professor of Rhetoric is a more terrible personage to his imag- ination than the Professors of Greek, Latin, Mathematics, and Moral and Intellectual Philosophy. Both boys at school and young men in college show no lack of power in speaking their native language with a vehemence and fluency which almost stuns the ears of their seniors. Why, then, should they find such difficulty in writing it? When you listen to the animated talk of a bright school-boy or college student, full of a subject which really interests him, you say at once that such command of racy and idiomatic English words must of course be exhibited in his " compositions " or his u themes " ; but when the latter are examined, they are commonly found to be feeble and lifeless, with hardly a thought or a word which bears any stamp of freshness or originality, and which are so inferior to his ordinary con* versation, that we can hardly believe they came from the same mind. The first quality which strikes an examiner of these exercises in English composition is their falseness. No boy or youth writes what he personally thinks and feels, but writes what a good boy or youth is expected to think or feel. This hypocrisy vitiates his writing from first to last, and is not absent in his "Class Oiation," or in his " Speech at Commencement." I have a vivid memory of the first time the boys of my class, in a public school, were called upon to write " composition." The themes selected were the prominent moral virtues or vices. How we poor innocent urchins were tormented by the task imposed upon us ! How we put more ink on our hands and faces than we shed upon the white paper on our desks ! Our conclu- sions generally agreed with those announced by the greatest moralists
Xii DANIEL WEBSTER
of the world. Socrates and Plato, Cicero and Seneca, Cudwortli and Butler, could not have been more austerely moral than were we little rogues, as we relieved the immense exertion involved in completing a single short baby-like sentence, by shying at one companion a rule, or hurling at another a paper pellet intended to light plump on his forehead or nose. Our custom was to begin every composition with the proposition that such or such a virtue " was one of the greatest blessings we enjoy " ; and this triumph of accurate statement was not discovered by our teacher to be purely mechanical, until one juvenile thinker, having avarice to deal with, declared it to be " one of the greatest evils we enjoy.n The whole thing was such a piece of monstrous hypocrisy, that I once timidly suggested to the school- master that it would be well to allow me to select my own subject. The request was granted ; and, as narrative is the natural form of com position which a boy adopts when he has his own way, I filled, in lesa than half the time heretofore consumed in writing a quarter of a page, four pages of letter-paper with an account of my being in a ship taken by a pirate ; of the heroic defiance I launched at the pirate captain ; and the sagacity I evinced in escaping the fate of my fellow-passen- gers, in not being ordered to " walk the plank." The story, though trashy enough, was so much better than any of the moral essays of the other pupils, that the teacher commanded me to read it before the whole school, as an evidence of the rapid strides I had made in the art of "composition.'*
This falseness of thought and feeling is but too apt to characterize the writing of the student, after he has passed from the common school to the academy or the college. The term " Sophomorical " is used to describe speeches which are full of emotion which the speaker does not feel, full of words in four or five syllables that mean nothing, and, in respect to imagery and illustrations, blazing with the cheap jewelry of rhetoric, — with those rubies and diamonds that can be pur- chased for a few pennies an ounce. The danger is that this ' ' Soph- omorical " style may continue to afflict the student after he has be- come a clergyman, a lawyer, or a legislator.
Practical men who may not be " college educated " still have the great virtue of using the few words they employ as identical with facts* When they meet a man who has half the dictionary at his disposal, and yet gives no evidence of apprehending the real import and mean- ing of one word wnong the many thousands he glibly pours forth, they naturally distrust him, as a person who does not know the vital connection of all gcrd words with the real things they represent.
AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE. XUI
Indeed, the L*st rule that a Professor of Rhetoric could adopt would be to insist that no student under his care should use an unusual word until he had earned the right to me it by making It the verbal sign of some new advance in his thinking, in his acquirements, or in his feelings. Shakspeare, the greatest of English writers, and per- haps the greatest of all writers, required fifteen thousand words to embody all that his vast exceptional intelligence acquired, thought, imagined, and discovered ; and he had earned the right to use every one of them. Milton found that eight thousand words could fairly ; and fully represent all the power, grandeur, and creativeness of his almost seraphic soul, when he attempted to express his whole nature in a literary form. All the words used by Shakspeare and Milton are alive ; " cut them and they will bleed" But it is ridiculous for a college student to claim that he has the mighty resources of the Eng- lish language at his supreme disposal, when he has not verified, by his own thought, knowledge, and experience, one in a hundred of the words he presumptuously employs.
Now Daniel Webster passed safely through all the stages of the u Sophomoric " disease of the mind, as he passed safely through the measles, the chicken-pox, and other eruptive maladies incident to childhood and youth. The process, however, by which he purified his style from this taint, and made his diction at last as robust and as manly, as simple and as majestic, as the nature it expressed, will reward a little study.
The mature style of Webster is perfect of its kind, being in words the express image of his mind and character, — plain, terse, clear, forcible ; and rising from the level of lucid statement and argument into passages of superlative eloquence only when his whole nature is stirred by some grand sentiment of freedom, patriotism, justice, humanity, or religion, which absolutely lifts him, by its own inherent force and inspiration, to a region above that in which his mind habit- ually lives and moves. At the same time it will be observed that these thrilling passages, which the boys of two generations have ever Ijeen delighted to declaim in their shrillest tones, are strictly illustra- tive of the main purpose of the speech in which they appear. They are not mere purple patches of rhetoric, loosely stitched on the home- spun gray of the reasoning, but they seem to be inwoven with it and to be a vital part of it. Indeed we can hardly decide, in reading these magnificent bursts of eloquence in connection with what precedes and follows them, whether the effect is due to the logic of the orator becoming suddenly morally impassioned, or to his moral passion
Xiv DANIEL WEBSTER
becoming suddenly logical. What gave Webster Ms immense influ- ence over the opinions of the people of New England was, first, his power of so " potting things n that everybody could understand his statements ; secondly, his power of so framing his arguments that all the steps, from one point to another, in a logical series, could be clearly apprehended by every intelligent farmer or mechanic who had a thoughtful interest in the affairs of the country ; and thirdly, Ms power of inflaming the sentiment of patriotism in all honest and well-intentioned men by overwhelming appeals to that sentiment, so that, after convincing their understandings, he clinched the matter by sweeping away their wills.
Perhaps to these sources of influence may be added another wMch many eminent statesmen have lacked. With all his great superiority to average men in force and breadth of mind, he had a genuine respect for the intellect, as well as for the manhood, of average men. He disdained the ignoble office of misleading the voters he aimed to instruct ; and the farmers and mechanics who read his speeches felt ennobled when they found that the greatest statesman of the country frankly addressed them, as man to man, without pluming himself on his exceptional talents and accomplishments. Up to the crisis of 1850, he succeeded in domesticating himself at most of the pious, moral, and in- telligent firesides of New England. Through his speeches he seemed to be almost bodily present wherever the family, gathered in the evening around the blazing hearth, discussed the questions of the day. It was not the great Mr. Webster, " the godlike Daniel," who had a seat by the fire. It was a person who talked to them, and argued with them, as though he was " one of the folks," — a neighbor dropping in to make an evening call ; there was not the slightest trace of assumption in his manner ; but suddenly, after the discussion had become a little tire- some, certain fiery words would leap from his lips and make the whole household spring to their feet, ready to sacrifice life and property for " the Constitution and the Union." That Webster was thus a kind of invisible presence in thousands of homes where his face was never seen, shows that his rhetoric had caught an element of power from his early recollections of the independent, hard-headed farmers whom he met when a boy in his father's house. The bodies of these men had become tough and strong in their constant struggle to force scanty harvests from an unfruitful soil, which only persistent toil could com- pel to yield any thing ; and their brains, though forcible and clear, were still not stored wfth the important facts and principles which it was his delight to state and expound. In truth, he ran a race with
AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE. XV
the demagogues of Ms time in an attempt to capture such men as these, thinking them the very backbone of the country. Whether he succeeded or failed, it would be vain to hunt through his works to find a single epithet in which he mentioned them with contempt. He was as incapable of insulting one member of this landed democracy, — sterile as most of their acres were, — as of insulting the memory of his father, who belonged to this class.
The late Mr. Peter Harvey used to tell with much zest a story illustrating the hold which these early associations retained on Web- ater's mind throughout his life. Some months after his removal from Portsmouth to Boston, a servant knocked at his chamber door late in an April afternoon in the year 1817, with the announcement that three men were in the drawing-room who insisted on seeing him. Web* ster was overwhelmed with fatigue, the result of Ms Congressional labors and his attendance on courts of law ; and he had determined, after a night's sleep, to steal a vacation in order to recruit his ener- gies by a fortnight's fishing and hunting. He suspected that the persons below were expectant clients ; and he resolved, in descending the stairs, not to accept their offer. He found in the parlor three plain, country-bred, honest-looking men, who were believers in the innocence of Levi and Laban Kenniston, accused of robbing a certain Major Goodridge on the highway, and whose trial would take place at Ipswich the next day. They could find, they said, no member of the Essex bar who would undertake the defence of the Kennistons, and they had come to Boston to engage the services of Mr, Webster. Would he go down to Ipswich and defend the accused ? Mr. Webster stated that he could not and would not go. He had made arrange- ments for an excursion to the sea-side ; the state of his health abso- lutely demanded a short withdrawal from all business cares ; and that no fee could tempt him to abandon his purpose. u Well," was the reply of one of the delegation, "it isn't the fee that we think of at all, though we are willing to pay what you may charge ; but it's justice. Here are two New Hampshire men who are believed in Exeter, and Newbury, and Newburyport, and Salem to be rascals ; but we in New- market believe, in spite of all evidence against them, that they are the victims of some conspiracy. We think you are the man to unravel it, though it seems a good deal tangled even to us. Still we suppose that men whom we know to have been honest all their lives can't have become such desperate rogues all of a sudden." " But I cannot take the case," persisted Mr. Webster ; " I am worn to death with over-work I have not had any real sleep for forty-eight hours.
xvl DANIEL WEBSTER
Besides, I know nothing of the case.'* ** It's hard, I can see,'5 con- tinued the leader of the delegation ; ** but you're a New Hampshire man, and the nnffkb®r$ thought that you would not allow two innocent New Hampshire men, however humble they may be in their circum- stances, to suffer for lack of your skill in exposing the wiles of thii scoundrel Goodridge. The neighbor $ all desire you to take the case.'* That phrase " the neighbors " settled the question. No resident of a city knows what the phrase means. But Webster knew it in all the intense significance of its meaning. His imagination flew back to the «cattered homesteads of a New England village, where mutual sympa- thy and assistance are the necessities, as they are the commonplaces, of village life. The phrase remotely meant to him the combination of neighbors to resist an assault of Indian savages, or to send volun- teers to the war which wrought the independence of the nation. It specially meant to him the help of neighbor to neighbor, in times of sickness, distress, sorrow, and calamity. In his childhood and boy- hood the Christian question, " Who is my neighbor ? " was instantly »olved the moment a matron in good health heard that the wife of Farmer A, or Farmer B, was stricken down by fever, and needed a friendly nurse to sit by her bedside all night, though she had herself been toiling hard all day. Every thing philanthropists mean when they talk of brotherhood and sisterhood among men and women was con- densed in that homely phrase, " the neighbors," " Oh ! " said Web- ster, ruefully, " if the neighbors think I may be of service, of course I must go" ; — and, with his three companions, he was soon seated in the stage for Ipswich, where he arrived at about midnight. The court met the next morning ; and his management of the case is still" con- sidered one of his masterpieces of legal acumen and eloquence. His cross-examination of Groodridge rivalled, in mental torture, every thing martyrologists tell us of the physical agony endured by the victim of the inquisitor, when roasted before slow fires or stretched upon the rack. Still it seemed impossible to assign any motive for the self-robbery and the self-maiming of Goodridge, which any judge or jury would accept as reasonable. The real motive has never been discovered. Webster argued that the motive might have originated in a desire to escape from the payment of his debts, or in a whimsical ambition to have his name sounded all over Maine and Massachusetts as the heroic tradesman who had parted with his money only when over- powered by superior force. It is impossible to say what motives may impel men who are half-crazed by vanity, or half-demonized by malice. Coleridge describes lago's hatred of Othello as the hatred which a
AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE. XTO
base nature instinctively feels for a noble one, and his assignment of motives for his acts as the mere u motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity.*'
Whatever may have been Goodridge^s motive in his attempt to ruin the innocent men he falsely accused, it is certain that Webster saved these men from the unjust punishment of an imputed crime. Only the skeleton of his argument before the jury has been preserved ; but what we have of it evidently passed under his revision. He kBew that the plot of Goodridge had been so cunningly contrived, that every iaan of the twelve before him, whose verdict was to determine the fate of his clients, was inwardly persuaded of their guilt. Some small marked portions of the money which Goodridge swore he had on his person on the night of the pretended robbery were found in their house. Circumstantial evidence brought their guilt with a seemingly irre- sistible force literally " home " to them. It was the conviction of the leaders of the Essex bar that no respectable lawyer could appear in their defence without becoming, in some degree, their accomplice. But Webster, after damaging the character of the prosecutor by his stern cross-examination, addressed the jury, not as an advocate bear- ing down upon them with his arguments and appeals, but rather as a thirteenth juryman, who had cosily introduced himself into their com- pany, and was arguing the case with them after they had retired for consultation among themselves. The simplicity of the language em* ployed is not more notable than the power evinced in seizing the main points on which the question of guilt or innocence turned. At every quiet but deadly stab aimed at the theory of the prosecution, he is careful to remark, that " it is for the jury to say under their oaths " whether such inconsistencies or improbabilities should have any effect on their minds. Every strong argument closes with the ever-recurring phrase, "It is for the jury to say"; and, at the end, the jury, thor- oughly convinced, said, " Not guilty." The Kennistons were vindi- cated ; and the public, which had been almost unanimous in declaring them fit tenants for the State prison, soon blamed the infatuation which had made them the accomplices of a villain in hunting down two unoffending citizens, and of denouncing every lawyer who should undertake their defence as a legal rogue.
The detected scoundrel fled from the place where his rascality had been exposed, to seek some other locality, where the mingled jeers and curses of his dupes would be unheard. Some twenty years after the trial, Mr. Webster, while travelling in Western New York, stopped at an obscure village tavern to get a glass of water. The hand of the
XYIll DANIEL WEBSTER
man behind the bar, who gave it to him, trembled violently; an<! Webster, wondering at the cause, looked the fellow steadily in the eye, He recognized Goodridge, and understood at once that Goodridge had just before recognized him. Not a word passed between the felon and the Intrepid advocate who had stripped his villany of all its plausible? disguises ; but what immense meaning must there have been in the^ swift interchange of feeling as their eyes met! Mr. Webster entered his carriage and proceeded on his journey ; but Goodridge, — who has since ever heard of him?
This story is a slight digression, but it illustrates that hold on reality, that truth to fact, which was one of the sources of the force and simplicity of Mr. Webster's mature style. He, however, only obtained these good qualities of rhetoric by long struggles with con- stant temptations, in his early life, to use resounding expressions and flaring images which he had not earned the right to use. His Fourth of July oration at Hanover, when he was only eighteen, and his college- addresses, must have been very bad in their diction if we can judge of them by the style of his private correspondence at the time. The verses he incorporates in his letters are deformed by all the faults of false thinking and borrowed expression which characterized contem- porary American imitators of English imitators of Pope and Gray. Think of the future orator, lawyer, and senator writing, even at the age of twenty, such balderdash as this !
" And Heaven grant me, whatever luck betide, Be fame or fortune given or denied, Some cordial friend to meet my warm desire, Honest as John and good as Kehemiah."
In reading such couplets we are reminded of the noted local poet of New Hampshire (or was it Maine?) who wrote "The Shepherd's Songs," and some of whose rustic lines still linger in the memory to be laughed at, such, for instance, as these : —
" This child who perished in the fire, — > His father's name was Nehemiah."
Or these : —
" Napoleon, that great extte, Who scoured all Europe like a file. "
And "Webster's prose was then almost as bad as his verse, though it was modelled on what was considered fine writing at the opening of the present century. He writes to his dearest student friends in a style which is profoundly insincere, though the thoughts are often
AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE. XUK
good, and the fart of Ins love for his friends cannot be doubted. He had committed to memory Fisher Ames's noble speech on the British Treaty, and had probably read some of Burke's great pamphlets on the French Revolution, The stripling statesman aimed to talk in their high tone and in their richly ornamented language, before he had earned the right even to mimic their style of expression. There is a certain swell in some of his long sentences, and a kind of good sense in seme of Ms short ones, which suggest that the writer is a youth endowed with elevation as well as strength of nature, and is only making a fool of himself because he thinks he must make a fool of himself In order that he may impress his correspondents with the idea that lie is a master of the horrible jargon which all bright young fellows at that time innocently supposed to constitute eloquence* Thus, in February, 1800, he writes thus to his friend Bingham : " In my melancholy moments I presage the most dire calamities. I already see in my imagination the time when the banner of civil war shall be unfurled ; when Discord's hydra form shall set up her hideous yell, and from her hundred mouths shall howl destruction through our empire ; and when American blood shall be made to flow in rivers by American swords! But propitious Heaven prevent such dreadful calamities ! Internally secure, we have nothing to fear. Let Europe pour her embattled millions around us, let her thronged cohorts cover our shores, from St. Lawrence to St. Marie's, yet United Columbia shall stand unmoved ; the manes of her deceased Washington shall guard the liberties of his country, and direct the sword of freedom in the day of battle." And think of this, not in a Fourth of July ora- tion, but in a private letter to an intimate acquaintance ! The bones of Daniel Webster might be supposed to have moved in their coffin at the thought that this miserable trash — so regretted and so amply atoned for — should have ever seen the light; but it is from such youthful follies that we measure the vigor of the man who outgrows them.
It was fortunate that Webster, after he was admitted to the bar, came into constant collision, in the courts of New Hampshire, with one of the greatest masters of the common law that the country has ever produced, Jeremiah Mason. It has been said that Mr. Mason educated Webster intp a lawyer by opposing him. He did more than this ; he cured Webster of all the florid foolery of his early rhetorical style. Of all men that ever appeared before a jury, Mason was the most pitiless realist, the most terrible enemy of what is — in a slang term as vile almost as itself — called u Hifalutin " ; and woe to the opposing
XX DANIEL WEBSTER
lawyer who indulged in it! He relentlessly pricked all rhetorical bubbles, reducing them at once to the small amount of ignominious suds, which the orator's breath had converted into colored globes, having some appearance of stability as well as splendor. Six feet and seven inches high, and corpulent in proportion, this inexorable repre- sentative of good sense and sound law stood, while he was arguing a case, " quite near to the jury," says Webster, — "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," he adds, " to examine my own style, and I set about reforming it altogether.'
Mr. Mason was what the lawyers call a u cause-getting man," like Sir James Scarlett, Brougham's great opponent at the English bar. It was said of Scarlett, that he gained his verdicts because there were twelve Scarletts in the jury-box ; and Mason so contrived to blend his stronger mind with the minds of the jurymen, that his thoughts appeared to be theirs, expressed in the same simple words and quaint illustrations which they would have used if asked to give their opin- ions on the case. It is to be added, that Mason's almost cynical dis- regard of ornament in his addresses to the jury gave to an opponent like Webster the advantage of availing himself of those real orna- ments of speech which spring directly from a great heart and imagination. Webster, without ever becoming so supremely plain and simple in style as Mason, still strove to emulate, in his legal statements and arguments, the homely, robust common-sense of his antagonist; but, wherever the case allowed of it, he brought into the discussion an element of ww-common sense, the gift of his own genius and individuality, which Mason could hardly comprehend sufficiently to controvert, but which was surely not without its effect in deciding the verdicts of juries.
It is probable that Webster was one of the few lawyers and statesmen that Mason respected. Mason's curt, sharp, "vitriolic" sarcasms on many men who enjoyed a national reputation, and who were popularly considered the lights of their time, still remain in the memories of his surviving associates, as things which may be quoted in conversation, .but which it would be cruel to put into print. Of Webster, however, he never seems to have spoken a contemptuous word. Indeed, Mason, though fourteen years older than Webster, and fighting him at the Portsmouth bar with all the formidable force of his logic and learning, was from the first his cordial friend. That friendship, early estab-
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listed between strong natures so opposite in character, was never dis- turbed by any collision in the courts. In a letter written, I think, a few weeks after he had made that " Reply to Hayne " which is con- ceded to be one of the great masterpieces of eloquence in the recorded oratory of the world, Webster wrote jocularly to Mason : "I have been written to, to go to New Hampshire, to try a cause against you next August. ... If it were an easy and plain case on our side, I might be willing to go ; but I have some of your pounding in mu bones yet, and I don't care about any more till that wears out."
It may be said that Webster's argument in the celebrated " Dart- mouth College Case," before the Supreme Court of the United States, placed him, at the age of thirty-six, in the foremost rank of the con- stitutional lawyers of the country. For the main points of the reason- ing, and for the exhaustive citation of authorities by which the reasoning was sustained, he was probably indebted to Mason, who had previously argued the case before the Superior Court of New Hamp- shire ; but his superiority to Mason was show-n in the eloquence, the moral power, he infused into his reasoning, so as to make the dullest citation of legal authority tell on the minds he addressed.
There is one incident connected with this speech which proves what immense force is given to simple words when a great man — great in his emotional nature as well as great in logical power — is behind the words. "It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it." At this point the orator's lips quivered, his voice choked, his eyes filled with tears, — all the memories of sacrifices endured by his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, in order that he might enjoy its rather scanty advantages of a liberal educa- tion, and by means of which he was there to plead its cause before the supreme tribunal of the nation, rushed suddenly upon his mind in an overwhelming flood. The justices of the Supreme Court — great lawyers, tried and toughened by experience into a certain obdurate sense of justice, and insensible to any common appeal to their hearts — melted into unwonted tenderness, as, in broken words, the advocate proceeded to state his own indebtedness to the " small college," whose rights and privileges he was there to defend. Chief Justice Marshall's eyes were filled with tears ; and the eyes of the other justices were suffused with a moisture similar to that which afflicted the eyes of the Chief, As the orator gradually recovered his accustomed stern composure of manner, he turned to the counsel on the other side, — one of whom, at least, was a graduate of Dartmouth, — and in his deepest and most thrilling tones, thus concluded his argument: " Sir
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I know not how others may feel ; bufc for myself, when I see my Alma Mater surrounded, like Caesar in the senate-house, by those who are reiterating stab after stab, I would not, for this right hand, have her turn to me and say, ]$t tu quoque^ mi fill ! — • And thou too, my son/' The effect was overwhelming; yet by what simple means was it pro- duced, and with what small expenditure of words ! The eloquence was plainly u in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion/' but most emphatically was it in the MAH.
Webster's extreme solicitude to make his style thoroughly TTei- sterian — a style unimitated because it is in itself inimitable — is observable in the care he took in revising all his speeches and addresses which were published under his own authority. His great Plymouth oration of 1820 did not appear in a pamphlet form until a year after its delivery. The chief reason of this delay was probably •due to his desire of stating the main political idea of the oration, that government is founded on property, so clearly that it could not be misconceived by any honest mind, and could only be perverted from its plain democratic meaning by the ingenious malignity of such minds as are deliberately dishonest, and consider lying as justifiable when •lying will serve a party purpose. It is probable that Webster would have been President of the United States had it not -been for one short sentence in this oration, — "Government is founded on prop- erty." It was of no use for his political friends to prove that he founded on this general proposition the most democratic views as to the distribution of property, and advised the enactment of laws calcu- lated to frustrate the accumulation of large fortunes in a few hands. There were the words, words horrible to the democratic imagination, and Webster was proclaimed an aristocrat, and an enemy to the common people. But the delay in the publication of the oration may also be supposed to have been due to his desire to prune all its grand passages of eloquence of every epithet and image which should not be rigor- ously exact as expressions of hie genuine sentiments and principles. It is probable that the Plymouth oration, as we possess it in print, is a better oration, in respect to composition, than that which was heacJ by the applauding crowd before which it was originally delivered. It is certain that the largeness, the grandeur, the weight of Webster's whole nature, were first made manifest to the intelligent portion of his countrymen by this noble commemorative address.
Yet it is also certain that he was not himself altogether satisfied with this oration ; and his dissatisfaction with some succeeding pop- ular speeches, memorable in the annals of .American eloquence, was
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expressed privately to liis friends In the most emphatic terms. On the day lie completed his magnificent Bunker Hill oration, delivered on the 17th of June, 1825, he wrote to Mr. George Ticknor: "I did the deed this morning, L e. I finished my speech ; and I am pretty well persuaded that it will finish me as far as reputation is concerned. There is no more tone in it than in the weather in which it has been written; it is perpetual dissolution and thaw." Every critic will understand the force of that word " tone." He seemed to feel that it had not enough robust manliness, — that the ribs and backbone, the facts, thoughts, and real substance of the address, were not sufficiently prominent, owing to the frequency of those outbursts of magnetic elo- quence, which made the immense audience that listened to it half <jrazy with the vehemence of their applause. On the morning after he had delivered his eulogy on Adams and Jefferson, he entered hia office with his manuscript in his hand, and threw It down on the desk of a young student at law whom he specially esteemed, with the request, " There, Tom, please to take that discourse, and weed out all the Latin words."
Webster's liking for the Saxon element of our composite language was, however, subordinate to his main purpose of self-expression. Every word was good, whether of Saxon or Latin derivation, which aided him to embody the mood of mind dominant at the time he was speaking or writing. No man had less of what has been called " the ceremonial cleanliness of academidal pharisees ; " and the purity of -expression he aimed at was to put into a form, at once intelligible and tasteful, his exact thoughts and emotions. He tormented reporters, proof-readers, and the printers who had the misfortune to be engaged In putting one of his performances into type, not because this or that word was or was not Saxon or Latin, but because it was inadequate to convey perfectly his meaning. Mr. Kemble, a great Anglo-Saxon scholar, once, in a company of educated gentlemen, defied anybody present to mention a single Latin phrase in our language for which 'he could not furnish a more f< rcible Saxon equivalent. " The impen- etrability of matter " was sugg ^sted; and Kemble, after half a minute's reflection, answered, " The un-thorough-fareableness of stuff." Still, no English writer would think of discarding such an abstract, but convenient and accurate, term as " impenetrability," for the coarsely concrete and terribly ponderous word which declares that there is no possible thoroughfare, no road, by which we can penetrate that substance which we call " matter," and which our Saxon forefathers called " stuff," Wherever the Latin element in our language cornea
DANIEL WEBSTER
m to express ideas and sentiments which were absent from tte Anglo Saxon mind, Webster uses it without stint; and some of the most resounding passages of his eloquence owe to it their strange power to suggest a certain vastness in his intellect and sensibility, which the quaint, idiomatic, homely prose of his friend, Mason, would have been? utterly incompetent to convey. Still, he preferred a plain, plump, simple verb or noun to any learned phrase, whenever he could employ it without limiting his opulent nature to a meagre vocabulary, in- competent fully to express it.
Yet he never departed from simplicity ; that is, he rigidly confined himsdf to the use of such words as he had earned the right to use. Whenever the report of one of his extemporaneous speeches came before him for revision, he had an instinctive sagacity in detecting every word that had slipped unguardedly from his tongue, which he felt, on reflection, did not belong to Mm. Among the reporters of his speeches, he had a particular esteem for Henry J. Raymond, after- wards so well known as the editor of the New York Times. Mr» Raymond told me that, after he had made a report of one of Webster's speeches, and had presented it to him for revision* his conversation with him was always a lesson in rhetoric. u Did I use that phrase ? I hope not. At any rate, substitute for it this more accurate definition."" And then again : " That word does not express my meaning. Wait a moment, and I will give you a better one. That sentence is slovenly* — that image is imperfect and confused. I believe, my young friendt that you have a remarkable power of reporting what I say ; but, if I said that, and that, and that, it must have been owing to the fact that I caught, in the hurry of the moment, such expressions as I coiild command at the moment; and you see they do not accurately represent the idea that was in my mind." And thus, Mr. Raymond said, the orator's criticism upon his own speech would go on, — correction fol- lowing correction, — until the reporter feared he would not have it ready for the morning edition of his journal,
Webster had so much confidence in R tymond's power of reporting him accurately, that, when he intended o make an important speech in the Senate, he would send a note to him, asking him to come to Washington as a personal favor ; for he knew that the accomplished editor had a rare power of apprehending a long train of reasoning, and of so reporting it that the separate thoughts would not only be- exactly stated, but the relations of the thoughts to each other — & much more difficult task — would be preserved throughout, and that the argument would be presented in the symmetrical form in which
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It existed in the speaker's mind. Then would follow, as of old, the severe scrutiny of the phraseology of the speech ; and Webster would give, as of old, a new lesson in rhetoric to the accomplished reporter who was so capable of following the processes of his mind.
The great difficulty with speakers who may be sufficiently clear in statement and cogent in argument is that turn in their discourse when their language labors to become figurative. Imagery makes palpable to the bodily eye the abstract thought seen only by the eye of the mind ; and all orators aim at giving vividness to their thinking by thus making their thoughts visible. The investigation of the process of imagination by which this end is reached is an interesting study. Woe to the speaker who is ambitious to rise into the region of imagination without possessing the faculty ! Everybody remembers the remark of Sheridan, when Tierney, the prosaic Whig leader of the English House of Commons, ventured to bring in, as an illustration of his argument, the fabulous but favorite bird of untrained orators, the phoenix, which is supposed always to spring up alive out of its own ashes. 46 It was," said Sheridan, "a poulterer's description of a phoenix." That is, Tierney, from defect of imagination, could not lift his poetic bird above the rank of a common hen or chicken.
The test that may be most easily applied to all efforts of the im- agination is sincerity; for, like other qualities of the mind, it acts strictly within the limits of a man's character and experience. The meaning of the word " experience," however, must not be confined to what he has personally seen and felt, but is also to be extended to every thing he has seen and felt through vital sympathy with facts, scenes, events, and characters, which he has learned by conversation with other men and through books. Webster laid great emphasis on conversation as one of the most important sources of imagery as well as of positive knowledge. " In my education," he once remarked to Charles Sumner, UI have found that conversation with the intelli- gent men I have had the good fortune to meet has done more for me than books ever did ; for I learn more from them in a talk of half an hour than I could possibly learn from their books. Their minds, in conversation, come into intimate contact with my own mind ; and I absorb certain secrets of their power, whatever may be its quality, which I could not have detected in their works. Converse, con- verse, CONVERSE with living men, face to face, and mind to mind, — that is one of the best sources of knowledge."
But my present object is simply to give what may be called the natural history of metaphor, comparison, image, trope, and the like
DANIEL WEBSTER
whether imagery be employed by an uneducated husbandman, or by a great orator and writer. Many readers may recollect the anecdoue of the New Hampshire farmer, who was once complimented on the extremely handsome appearance of a horse which he was somewhat sullenly urging on to perform its work. « Yaas," was the churlish reply, *4 the critter looks well enough, but then he is as slow as — as — as — well, as slow as cold molasses." This perfectly answers to Bacon's definition of imagination, as " thought immersed in matter." The comparison is exactly on a level with the experience of the per- son who used it. He had seen his good wife, on so many bitter winter mornings, when he was eager for his breakfast, turn the molasses-jug upside down, and had noted so often the reluctance of the congealed sweetness to assume its liquid nature, that the thing had become to him the visible image of the abstract notion of slowness of movement* An imaginative dramatist or novelist, priding himself on the exactness with which he represented character, could not have invented a more appropriate comparison to be put into the mouth of an imagined New England farmer.
The only objection to such rustic poets is, that a comparatively few images serve them for a lifetime ; and one tires of such " originals " after a few days' conversation has shown the extremely limited num- ber of apt illustrations they have added to the homely poetry of agricultural life. The only person, belonging to this class, that I ever met, who possessed an imagination which was continually creative in quaint images, was a farmer by the name of Knowlton, who had spent fifty years in forcing some few acres of the rocky soil of Cape Ann to produce grass, oats, potatoes, and, it may be added, those ugly stone walls which carefully distinguish, at the cape, one patch of miserable sterile land from another. He was equal, in quickness of imaginative illustration, to the whole crowd of clergymen, lawyers, poets, and artists, who filled the boarding-houses of " Pigeon Cove"; and he was absolutely inexhaustible in fresh and original imagery. On one hot summer day, the continuation of fourteen hot summer days, when there was fear all over Cape Ann that the usual scanty crops would be withered up by the intense heat, and the prayer for rain was in almost every farmer's heart, I met Mr. Knowlton, as he was looking philo- sophically over one of his own sun-smitten fields of grass. Thinking that I was in full sympathy with his own feeling at the dolorous pros- pect before his eyes, I said, in accosting him, that it was bad weather for the farmers. He paused for half a minute ; and then his mind flashed back on an incident of his weekly experience, — that of his
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wife " ironing " the somewhat damp clothes of the Monday's " wash ing," — and he replied: "I see youVe been talking with our farmers, who are too stupid to know what's for their good. Ye see the spring here was uncommonly rainy, and the ground became wet and cold ; but now, for the last fortnight, Grod has been putting his flat-iron ovef it, and 'twill all come out right in the end."
Thus Mr. Knowlton went on, year after year, speaking poetry without knowing it, as Molidre's Monsieur Jourdain found he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. But the concep- tion of the sun as God's flat-iron, smoothing out and warming the moist earth, as a housewife smooths and warms the yet damp shirts, stockings, and bed-linen brought into the house from the clothes-lines in the yard, is an astounding illustration of that "familiar grasp of things divine," which obtains in so many of our rustic households. Dante or Chaucer, two of the greatest poets of the world, would, had they happened to be " uneducated " men, have seized on just such an. image to express their idea of the Divine beneficence.
This natural, this instinctive operation of the imaginative faculty, is often observed in children. Numberless are the stories told by fond mothers of the wonderful things uttered by their babies, shortly after they have left their cradles. The most striking peculiarity running through them all is the astonishing audacity with which the child treats the most sacred things. He or she seems to have no sense of awe. All children are taught to believe that God resides above them in the sky ; and I shall never forget the shock of surprise I felt at the answer of a boy of five years — whom I found glorying over the treasures of his first paint-box — to my question: "Which color do you like best ? " " Oh," he carelessly replied, " I like best sky-blue, — God's color." And the little rogue went on, daubing the paper before him with a mixture of all colors, utterly unconscious that he had said any thing remarkable; and yet what Mrs. Browning specially distinguishes as the characteristic of the first and one of the greatest of English poets, Chaucer, namely, his "familiar grasp of things Divine," could not have found a moi?e appropriate illustration than in this chance remark of a mere child, expressing the fearlessness of his faith in the Almighty Father above him.
Now in all these instinctive operations of the imagination, whether in the mind of a child or in that of a grown man, it is easy to discern the mark of sincerity. If the child is petted, and urged by his mother to display his brightness before a company of other mothers and other babios, he is in danger of learning early that trick of falsehood, which
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clings to "him when he goes to school, when he leaves tae school for the college, and when he leaves the college for the pursuits of profes- sional life. The farmer or mechanic, not endowed with "college lamin'," is sure to become a bad declaimer, perhaps a demagogue,, when he abandons those natural illustrations and ornaments of his speech which spring from his individual experience, and strives to emulate the grandiloquence of those graduates of colleges who have the heathen mythology at the ends of their fingers and tongues, and :*an refer to Jove, Juno, Minerva, Diana, Venus, Vulcan, and Neptune, as though they were resident deities and deesses of the college halls. The trouble with most "uneducated" orators is, that they become enamored of these shining gods and goddesses, after they have lost, through repetition, all of their old power to give point or force to any good sentence of modern oratory. During the times when, to be a speaker at Abolitionist meetings, the speaker ran the risk of •being pelted with rotten eggs, I happened to be present, as one of a small antislavery audience, gathered in an equally small hall. Among the speakers was an honest, strong-minded, warm-hearted young mechanic,, who,, as long as he was true to his theme, spoke earnestly, manfully, and well ; but alas ! he thought he could not close without calling in some god or goddess to give emphasis — after the method of college students — to his previous statements. He selected, of course, that un- fortunate phantom whom h^ called the Goddess of Liberty. " Here, in Boston," he thundered, " where she was cradled in Faneuil Hall, can it be that Liberty should be trampled under foot, when, after two genera- tions have passed, — yes, sir, have elapsed, — she has grown — yes, sir, f repeat it, has grown — grown up, sir, into a great man ? " The change in sez was, in this case, more violent than usual ; but how many instances occur to everybody's recollection, where that poor Goddess has been almost equally outraged, through a puerile ambition on the part of the orator to endow her with an exceptional distinction by senseless rhodomontade, manufactured by the word-machine which he presumes to call his imagination I All imitative imagery is the grave of common-sense.
Now let us pass to an imagination which is, perhaps, the grandest in American oratory, but which was as perfectly natural as that of the " cold molasses," or " God's flat-iron," of the New England farmer, — as natural, indeed, as the " sky-blue, God's color," of the New England boy. Daniel Webster, standing on the heights of Quebec at an early hour of a summer morning, heard the ordinary morning drum-beat which called the garrison to their duty. Knowing that the British
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possessions belted the globe, tlie thought occurred to him that the morning drum would go on beating in some English post to the time when it would sound again in Quebec. Afterwards, in a speech on President Jackson's Protest, he dwelt on the fact that our Revolu tionary forefathers engaged in a war with Great Britain on a strict question of principle, " while actual suffering was still afar off." How could he give most effect to this statement ? It would have been easj for linn LU have presented statistical tables, showing the wealth* population, and resources of England, followed by an enumeration of her colonies and military stations, all gorn*? to prove the enormous strength of the nation against which the United American colonies raised their improvised flag. But the thought which had heretofore occurred to him at Quebec happily recurred to liis mind the moment it was needed ; and he flashed on the imagination an image of British power which no statistics could have conveyed to the understanding, — " a Power," he said, " which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airg of England." Perhaps a mere rhetorician might consider superfluous the word " whole," as applied to " globe," and " unbroken," as follow- ing " continuous"; yet they really add to the force and majesty of the •expression. It is curious that, in Great Britain, this magnificent im- personation of the power of England is so little known. It is certain that it is unrivalled in British patriotic oratory. Not Chatham, not •even Burke, ever approached it in the noblest passages in which they celebrated the greatness and glory of their country. "Webster, it is to be noted, introduced it in his speech, not for the purpose of exalt- ing England, but of exalting our Revolutionary forefathers, whose victory, after a seven years' war of terrible severity, waged in vin- dication of a principle, was made all the more glorious from having •been won over an adversary so formidable and so vast.
It is reported that, at the conclusion of this speech on the Presi- dent's Protest, John Sergeant, of Philadelphia, came up to the oiator, and, after cordially shaking hands with him, eagerly asked, " Where, Webster, did you get that idea of the morning drum-beat? " Like other public men, accustomed to address legislative assemblies, he was naturally desirous of knowing the place, if place there was, where such images and illustrations were to be found. The truth was that, if Webster had ever read Goethe's Faust,: — which he of course never bad done, — he might have referred his old friend to that passage
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where Faust, gazing at the setting sun, aches to follow it in its course for ever. tk See," he exclaims, " how the green-girt cottages shimmer in the setting sun. He bends and sinks, — the day is outlived. Yonder he hurries off, and quietens other life. Oh, that I have no wing to lift me from the ground, to struggle after — for ever after — him ! I should see, in everlasting evening beams, the stilly world at my feet, every height on fire, every vale in repose, the silver brook flowing into golden streams. The rugged mountain, with all its dark defiles, would not then break my godlike course. Already the sea, with its 'heated bays, opens on my enraptured sight. Yet the god seems at last to sink away* But the new impulse wakes. I hurry on to drink his everlasting light, — the day before me and the night behind , — and under me the waves. "" In Faust, the wings of the mind follow the setting sun ; in Webster, they follow the rising sun ; but the thought of each circumnavigates the globe, in joyous companionship with the same centre of life, light, and heat, — though the suggestion which prompts the sublime idea is widely different. The sentiment of Webster, calmly meditating on the heights of Quebec, contrasts strangely with the fiery feeling of J^aust, raging against the limitations of his mortal existence. A humorist, Charles Dickens, who never read either Goethe or Webster, has oddly seized on the same general idea: "The British empire,"
he says, in one of his novels, — " on which the sun never sets, and where the tax-gatherer never goes to bed."
This celebrated image of the British "drum-beat" is here cited sim- ply to indicate the natural way in which all the faculties of Webster are brought into harmonious co-operation, whenever he seriously discusses any great question. His understanding and imagination, when both are roused into action, always cordially join hands. His statement of facts is so combined with the argument founded on them, that they are interchangeable ; his statement having the force of argument, and his argument having the " substantiality " which properly belongs to statement ; and to these he commonly adds an imaginative illustration, • which gives increased reality to both statement and argument. In rapidly turning over the leaves of the six volumes of his Works, one can easily find numerous instances of this instinctive operation of his mind. In his first Bunker Hill oration, he announces that "the prin- ciple of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains." Again he says: "A call for the representative system, wherever it is not enjoyed, and where there is already intelligence enough to estimate its value, is perseveringly made. Where men may speak out, they demand it * where the bavoret
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Is at their throats, they pray for it." And yet again : " If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn. Human agency cannot extinguish it. Like the earth's central fire, it may be smothered for a time ; the ocean may overwhelm it ; mountains may press it down ; but its inherent and unconquerable force will heave both the ocean and the land, and at some time or other, in some place or other, the volcano will break out, and flame up to heaven." It would be difficult to find in any European literature a similar embodiment of an elemental sentiment of humanity, in an image which is as elemental as the sentiment to which it gives vivid expression.
And then with what majesty, with what energy, and with what simplicity, can he denounce a political transaction which, had it not attracted his ire, would hardly have survived in the memory of his countrymen ! Thus, in his Protest against Mr. Benton's Expunging Resolution, speaking for himself and his Senatorial colleague, he says : " We rescue our own names, character, and honor from all participation in this matter ; and, whatever the wayward character of the times, the headlong and plunging spirit of party devotion, or the fear or the love of power, may have been able to bring about elsewhere, we desire to thank God that they have not, as yet, overcome the love of liberty, fidelity to true republican principles, and a sacred regard for the Constitution in that State whose soil was drenched to a mire by the first and best blood of the Revolution." Perhaps the peculiar power of Webster in condemning a measure by a felicitous epithet, such as that he employs in describing " the plunging spirit of party devotion," was never more happily exercised. In that word, "plun- ging," he intended to condense all his horror and hatred of a transaction which he supposed calculated to throw the true principles of constitu- tional government into a bottomless abyss of personal government, where right constitutional principles would cease to have existence, as well as cease to have authority.
There is one passage in his oration at the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument, which may be quoted as an illustration of his power 0f compact statement, and which, at the same time, may save readers from the trouble of reading many excellent histories of the origin and progress of the Spanish dominion in America, condensing, as it does, all which such histories can tell us in a few smiting sentences. " Spain," he says, " stooped on South America, like a vulture on its prey. Every thing was force. Territories were acquired by fire and sword. Cities were destroyed by fire and sword. Hundreds of thou- sands . of human beings fell by fire and sword. Even conversion to
DANIEL WEBSTER
Christianity was attempted by fire and sword." One is reminded, in this passage, of Macaulay's method of giving vividness to his confident generalization of facts by emphatic repetitions of the same form of words. The repetition of " fire and sword," in this series of short, sharp sentences, ends in forcing the reality of what the words mean on the dullest imagination ; and the climax is capped by affirming that " fire and sword " were the means by which the religion of peace was recommended to idolaters, whose heathenism was more benignant, and more intrinsically Christian, than the military Christianity which was forced upon them.
And then, again, how easily Webster's imagination slips in, at the end of a comparatively bald enumeration of the benefits of a good government, to vitalize the statements of his understanding ! " Every- where," he says, " there is order, everywhere there is security. Every- where the law reaches to the highest, and reaches to the lowest, to protect all in their rights, and to restrain all from wrong ; and over all hovers liberty, — that liberty for which our fathers fought and fell on this very spot, with her eye ever watchful, and her eagle wing ever wide outspread." There is something astonishing in the dignity given in the last clause of this sentence to the American eagle, — a bird so degraded by the rhodomontade of fifth-rate declaimers, that it seemed impossible that the highest genius and patriotism could restore it to its primacy among the inhabitants of the air, and its just eminence as a symbol of American liberty. It is also to be noted, that Webster here alludes to " the bird of freedom " only as it appears on the American silver dollar that passes daily from hand to hand, where the watchful eye and the outspread wing are so inartistically repre- sented that the critic is puzzled to account for the grandeur of the image which the orator contrived to evolve from the barbaric picture on the ugliest and clumsiest of civilized coins.
The compactness of Webster's statements occasionally reminds us of the epigrammatic point which characterizes so many of the state- ments of Burke. Thus, in presenting a memorial to Congress, signed by many prominent men of business, against President Jackson's sys- tem of finance, he saw at once that the Democrats would denounce it as another manifesto of the "moneyed aristocracy." Accordingly Webster introduced the paper to the attention of the Senate, with the preliminary remark : " The memorialists are not unaware, that, if rights are attacked, attempts will be made to render odious those whose rights are violated. Power always seeks such subjects on which to try its experiments." It is difficult to resist the impression
AS A MASTEK OF ENGLISH STYLE.
that Webster must have been indebted to Burke for this maxim. Again, we are deluded into the belief that we must be reading Burke, when Webster refers to the minimum principle as the right one to be followed in imposing duties on certain manufactures. " It lays the impost," he says, " exactly where it will do good, and leaves the rest free. It is an intelligent, discerning, discriminating principle ; not a blind, headlong, generalizing, uncalculating operation. Simplicity, undoubtedly, is a great beauty in acts of legislation, as well as in the works of art ; but in both it must be a simplicity resulting from con- gruity of parts and adaptation to the end designed ; not a rude gener- alization, which either leaves the particular object unaccomplished, or, in accomplishing it, accomplishes a dozen others also, which were not •desired. It is a simplicity wrought out by knowledge and skill ; not the rough product of an undistinguishing, sweeping general principle/*
An ingenuous reader, who has not learned from his historical studies that men generally act, not from arguments addressed to their under- standings, but from vehement appeals which rouse their passions to defend their seeming interests, cannot comprehend why Webster's arguments against Nullification and Secession, which were apparently unanswerable, and which were certainly unanswered either by Hayne or Calhoun, should not have settled the question in debate between the North and the South. Such a reader, after patiently following all the turns and twists of the logic, all the processes of the reasoning employed on both sides of the intellectual contest, would naturally conclude that the party defeated in the conflict would gracefully acknowledge the fact of its defeat ; and, as human beings, gifted with the faculty of reason, would cheerfully admit the demonstrated results of its exercise. He would find it difficult to comprehend why the men who were overcome in a fair gladiatorial strife in the open arena of debate, with brain pitted against brain, and manhood against man- hood, should resort to the rough logic of " blood and iron," when the nobler kind of logic, that which is developed in the struggle of mind with mind, had failed to accomplish the purposes which their hearts and wills, independent of their understandings, were bent on accom- plishing.
It may be considered certain that so wise a statesman as Webster — a statesman whose foresight was so palpably the consequence of his insight, and whose piercing intellect was so admirably adapted to read events in their principles — never indulged in such illusions as those which cheered so many of his own adherents, when they supposed his triumph in argumentation was to settle a matter which was really baaed
^ WEBSTER
on organic differences in the institutions of the two sections of the Union. He knew perfectly well that, while the Webster men were glorying in his victory over Calhoun, the Calhoun men were equally jubilant in celebrating Calhoun's victory over him. Which of them had the better in the argument was of little importance in comparison? with the terrible fact that the people of the Southern States were widening, year by year, the distance which separated them from the people of the Northern States. We have no means of judging whether Webster clearly foresaw the frightful civil war between the two- sections, which followed so soon after his own death. We only know that, to him, it was a conflict constantly impending, and which could be averted for the time only by compromises, concessions, and other temporary expedients. If he allowed his mind to pass from the pressing questions of the hour, and to consider the radical division between the two sections of the country which were only formally united, it would seem that he must have felt, as long as the institution of negro slavery existed, that he was only laboring to postpone a con- flict which it was impossible for him to prevent,
But my present purpose is simply to indicate the felicity of Web ster's intrepid assault on the principles which the Southern disunionista put forward in justification of their acts. Mr. Calhoun's favorite idea was this, — that Nullification was a conservative principle, to be exercised within the Union, and in accordance with a just interpreta- tion of the Constitution. "To begin with nullification," Webster retorted, "with the avowed intent, nevertheless, not to proceed to secession, dismemberment, and general revolution, is as if one were to take the plunge of Niagara, and cry out that he would stop half- way down. In the one case, as in the other, the rash adventurer must go to the bottom of the dark abyss below, were it not that the abysa has no discovered bottom."
How admirable also is his exposure of the distinction attempted to be drawn between secession, as a State right to be exercised under the ' provisions of what was called "the Constitutional Compact," and revolution, " Secession," he says, " as a revolutionary right, is intelli- gible ; as a right to be proclaimed in the midst of civil commotions,, and asserted at the head of armies, I can understand it. But a» a practical right, existing under the Constitution, and in conformity with its provisions, it seems to me nothing but a plain absurdity ; for it supposes resistance to government, under the authority of government itself; it supposes dismemberment, without violating the principles of union; it supposes opposition to law, without
AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE. XOIT
crime , it supposes the total overthrow of government, without reTo- lution."
After putting some pertinent interrogatories — which are arguments in themselves — relating to the inevitable results of secession, he adds, that " every man must see that these are all questions which can arise only after a revolution. They presuppose the breaking up of the gov- ernment. While the Constitution lasts, they are repressed"; — and then, with that felicitous use of the imagination as a handmaid of the understanding, which is the peculiar characteristic of Ms eloquence, he closes the sentence by saying, that " they spring up to annoy and startle us only from its grave." A mere reasoner would have stopped at the word "repressed"; the instantaneous conversion of u ques- tions " into spectres, affrighting and annoying us as they spring tip from the grave of the Constitution, — which is also by implication impersonated, — is the work of Webster's ready imagination ; and it thoroughly vitalizes the statements which precede it.
A great test of the sincerity of a statesman's style is his moderation* Now, if we take the whole body of Mr. Webster's speeches, whether delivered in the Senate or before popular assemblies, during the period of his opposition to President Jackson's administration, we may well be surprised at their moderation of tone and statement. Every- body old enough to recollect the singular virulence of political speech at that period must remember it as disgraceful equally to the national conscience and the national understanding. The spirit of party, always sufficiently fierce and unreasonable, was then stimulated into a fury resembling madness. Almost every speaker, Democrat or Whig, was in that state of passion which is represented by the physical sign of • " foaming at the mouth." Few mouths then opened that did not imme- diately begin to " foam." So many fortunes were suddenly wrecked by President Jackson's financial policy, and the business of the country was so disastrously disturbed, that, whether the policy was right or ^rong, those who assailed and those who defended it seemed to be equally devoid of common intellectual honesty. " I do well to be angry," appears to have been the maxim which inspired Democratic and Whig orators alike ; and what reason there was on either side was sub- merged in the lies and libels, in the calumnies and caricatures, in the defamations and execrations, which accompanied the citation of facts and the affirmation of principles. Webster, during all this time, was selected as a shining mark, at which every puny writer or speaker who opposed him hurled his small or large contribution of verbal rotten eggs ; and yet Webster was almost the only Whig statesman
XXXVI DANIEL WEBSTER
who preserved sanity of understanding during the whole progress cf that political riot, in which the passions of men became the masters of their understandings. Pious Whig fathers, who worshipped the " godlike Daniel," went almost to the extent of teaching their chil- dren to curse Jackson in their prayers; equally pious Democratic fathers brought up their sons and daughters to anathematize the fiend- like Daniel as the enemy of human rights ; and yet, in reading Web- ster's speeches, covering the whole space between 1882 and 1836, we can hardly find a statement which an historian of our day would not admit as a candid generalization of facts, or an argument which would not stand the test of logical examination. Such an historian might entirely disagree with the opinions of Webster ; but he would cer* tainly award to him the praise of being an honest reasoner and an honest rhetorician, in a time when reason was used merely as a tool of party passion, and when rhetoric rushed madly into the worst excesses of rhodoinontade.
It is also to be said that Webster rarely indulged in personalities. When we consider how great were his powers of sarcasm and invec- tive, how constant were the provocations to exercise them furnished by his political enemies, and how atrociously and meanly allusions to his private affairs were brought into discussipns which should have been confined to refuting his reasoning, his moderation in this matter is to be ranked as a great virtue. He could not take a glass of wine without the trivial fact being announced all over the country as indis- putable proof that he was an habitual drunkard, though the most remarkable characteristic of his speeches is their temperance, — their 44 total abstinence" from all the intoxicating moral and mental "drinks" which confuse the understanding and mislead the con- science. He could not borrow money on his note of hand, like any other citizen, without the circumstance being trumpeted abroad as incontrovertible evidence that Nick Biddle had paid him that sum to defend his diabolical Bank in the Senate of the United States. The plain fact that his speeches were confined strictly to the exposf tion and defence of sound opinions on trade and finance, and that it was difficult to answer them, only confirmed his opponents in the conviction that old Nick was at the bottom of it all His great intel- lect was admitted ; but on the high, broad brow, which was its mani^ festation to the eye, his enemies pasted the words, " To be let," or, u For sale." The more impersonal he became in his statements and arguments, the more truculently was he assailed by the personalities of the political gossip and scandal-monger. Indeed, from the time ho
AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE. XXXVI*
first came to the front as a great lawyer, statesman, and patriot, he- was fixed upon by the whole crew of party libellers as a man whose- arguments could be answered most efficiently by staining Ms char- acter. He passed through life with his head enveloped " in a cloud of poisonous flies " ; and the head was the grandest-looking head that had ever been seen on the American continent. It was so pre-eminently noble and impressive, and promised so much more than it could possi* bly perform, that only one felicitous sarcasm of party malice, among many thousands of bad jokes, has escaped oblivion ; and that was stolen from Charles Fox's remark on Lord Chancellor Thurlow, as Fox once viewed him sitting on the wool-sack, frowning on the English House of Lords, which he dominated by the terror of his countenance, and by the fear that he might, at any moment, burst forth in one of his short bullying, thundering retorts, should any comparatively weak baron, earl, marquis, or duke dare to oppose him. "Thurlow," said Fox, " must be an impostor, for nobody can be as wise as he looks." The American version of this was, "Webster must be a charlatan, for no one can be as great as he looks."
But during all the time that his antagonists attempted to elude the force of his arguments by hunting up the evidences of his debts, and by trying to show that the most considerate, the most accurate, and the most temperate of his lucid statements were the products of physical stimulants, Webster steadily kept in haughty reserve his power of retaliation. In his speech in reply to Hayne he hinted that, if he were imperatively called upon to meet blows with blows, he might be found fully equal to his antagonists in that ignoble province of intellectual pugilism ; but that he preferred the more civilized struggle of brain with brain, in a contest which was to decide questions of principle. In the Senate, where he could meet his political opponents face to face, few dared to venture to degrade the subject in debate from the discussion of principles to the miserable subterfuge of imputing bad motives as a sufficient answer to good arguments ; but still many of these dignified gentlemen smiled approval on the efforts of the low- minded, small-minded caucus-speakers of their party, when they declared that Webster's logic was unworthy of consideration, because he was bought by the Bank, or bought by the manufacturers of Massa- chusetts, or bought by some other combination of persons who were aupposed to be the deadly enemies of the laboring men of the country. On some rafe occasions Webster's wrath broke out in such smiting words that his adversaries were cowed into silence, and cursed the infatuation which had led them to overlook the fact that the u logic-
DANIEL WEBSTER
machine " had In it invectives more terrible than HA reasonings. But generally he refrained from using the giant's power "like a giant " and it is almost pathetic to remember that, when Mr. Everett un- dertook to edit, in 1851, the standard edition of his woiks, Webster gave directions to expunge all personalities from his speeches, even when those personalities were the just punishment of unprovoked attacks on his integrity as a man. Readers will look in vain, in this edition of his works, for some of the most pungent passages which originally attracted their attention in the first report of the Defence of the Treaty of Washington. At the time these directions were given, Webster was himself the object of innumerable personalities, which were the natural, the inevitable results of his speech of the 7th of March, 1850.
It seems to be a law, that the fame of all public men shall be " half disfame." We are specially warned to beware of the man of whom all inen speak well. Burke, complimenting his friend Fox for risking •every thing, even his "darling popularity," on the success of the East India Bill, nobly says : " He is traduced and abused for his sup- posed motives. He will remember, that obloquy is a necessary ingre- dient in all true glory ; he will remember, that it was not only in the Roman customs, but it is in the nature of human things, that calumny -and abuse are essential parts of triumph."
It may be said, however, that Webster's virtue in this general abstinence from personalities is to be offset by the fact that he could throw into a glance of his eye, a contortion of his face, a tone of his voice, or a simple gesture of his hand, more scorn, contempt, and hatred than ordinary debaters could express by the profuse use of all the scurrilous terms in the English language. Probably many a sen- tence, which we now read with an even pulse, was, as originally deliv- ered, accompanied by such pointing of the finger, or such flashing of the eye, or such raising of the voice, that the seemingly innocent words were poisoned arrows that festered in the souls of those against whom they were directed, and made deadly enemies of a number of persons whom he seems, in his printed speeches, never to have men- tioned without the respect due from one Senator to another. In his speech in defence of the Treaty of Washington, he had to re^el Mr. Ingersoll's indecent attack on his integrity, and his dreadful retort is described by those who heard' it as coming within the rules which condemn cruelty to animals. But the " noble rage " which prompted him to indulge in such unwonted invective subsided with the occasion that called it forth, and he was careful to have it expunged when the
AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE. XXXIX
speech was reprinted. An eminent judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in commending the general dignity and courtesy which characterized Webster's conduct of a case in a court of law, noted one exception. " When," he said, " the opposite counsel had got him into a corner, the way he * trampled out ' was something frightful to behold. The court itself could hardly restrain him in his gigantic efforts to extricate himself from the consequences of a blunder or an oversight." Great writers and orators are commonly economists in the use of words. They compel common words to bear a burden of thought and emotion, which mere rhetoricians, with all the resources of the lan- guage at their disposal, would never dream of imposing upon them. But it is also to be observed, that some writers have the power of giving a new and special significance to a common word, by impressing on it a wealth of meaning which it cannot claim for itself. Three obvious examples of this peculiar power may be cited. Among poets, Chaucer infused into the simple word " green " a poetic ecstasy which no succeeding English poet, not even Wordsworth, has ever rivalled, in -describing an English landscape in the month of May. Jonathan Edwards fixed upon the term " sweetness " as best conveying his loftiest conception of the bliss which the soul of the saint can attain to on earth, or expect to be blessed with in heaven ; but not one of his theological successors has ever caught the secret of using " sweetness " in the sense attached to it by him. Dr. Barrow gave to the word " rest," as embodying his idea of the spiritual repose of the soul fit for heaven, a significance which it bears in the works of no other great English •divine. To descend a little, Webster was fond of certain words, •commonplace enough in themselves, to which he insisted on imparting a more than ordinary import. Two of these, which meet us contin- ually in reading his speeches, are " interesting " and " respectable." The first of these appears to him competent to express that rapture of attention called forth by a thing, an event, or a person, which other writers convey by such a term as " absorbing," or its numerous equivalents. If we should select one passage from his works which, more than any other, indicates his power of seeing and feeling, through a process of purely imaginative vision and sympathy, it is that portion of his Plymouth oration, where he places himself and his audience as spectators on the barren shore, when the Mayflower came into view. He speaks of "the interesting group upon the deck" of the little: vessel. The very word suggests that we are to have a very common- place account of the landing, and the circumstances which followed it. In an instant, however, we are made to "feel the cold which
Xl DANIEL WEBSTER
benumbed, and listen to the winds which pierced " tMs " interesting * group ; and immediately after, the picture is flashed upon the imagi- nation of "chilled and shivering childhood, houseless, hut for a mother's arms, couchless, but for a mother's breast," — an image which shows that the orator had not only transported himself into a spectator of the scene, but had felt his own blood " almost freeze " in intense- sympathy with the physical sufferings of the shelterless mothers and children.
There is no word which the novelists, satirists, philanthropic- reformers, and Bohemians of our day have done so much to discredit* and make dis-respectable to the heart and the imagination, as the* word " respectable." Webster always uses it as a term of eulogy. A respectable man is, to his mind, a person who performs all his du- ties to his family, his country, and his God ; a person who is not only virtuous, but who has a clear perception of the relation which con- nects one virtue with another by " the golden thread " of moderation,, and who, whether he be a man of genius, or a business man of average talent, or an intelligent mechanic, or a farmer of sound moral and mental character, is to be considered " respectable " because he is one of those citizens whose intelligence and integrity constitute the foun- dation on which the Republic rests. As late as 1843, in his noble oration on the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument, he .declared that if our American institutions had done nothing more than to pro- duce the character of Washington, that alone would entitle them to the respect of mankind. "Washington is all our own! ... I would cheerfully put the question to-day to the intelligence of Europe and the world, what character of the century, upon the whole, stands out in the relief of history, most pure, most respectable, most sublime ; and I doubt not, that, by a suffrage approaching to unanimity, the answer would be Washington ! " It is needless to quote other instances of the peculiar meaning he put into the word "respectable," when we thus find him challenging the Europe of the eighteenth century to name a, match for Washington, and placing "most respectable" after "most pure," and immediately preceding " most sublime," in his enumera- tion of the three qualities in which Washington surpassed all men of his century.
It has been often remarked that Webster adapted his style, even his- habits of mind and modes of reasoning, to the particular auditors he desired to influence ; but that, whether he addressed an unorganized crowd of people, or a jury, or a bench of judges, or the Senate of the United States, he ever proved himself an orator of the first class.
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His admirers commonly confine themselves to the admirable sagacity with which he discriminated between the kind of reasoning proper to be employed when he addressed courts and juries, and the kind of reasoning which is most effective in a legislative assembly. The lawyer and the statesman were, in Webster, kept distinct, except so far as he was a lawyer who had argued before the Supreme Court questions of constitutional law. An amusing instance of this abne- gation of the lawyer, while incidentally bringing in a lawyer's knowledge of judicial decisions, occurs in a little episode in his debate with Mr. Calhoun, in 1849, as to the relation of Congress to the Territories. Mr. Calhoun said that he had been told that the Supreme Court of the United States had decided, in one case, that the Constitution did not extend to the Territories, but that he was " incredulous of the fact." "Oh!" replied Mr. Webster, UI can remove the gentleman's incredulity very easily, for I can assure him that the same thing has been decided by the United States courts over and over again for the last thirty years." It will be observed, how- ever, that Mr. Webster, after communicating this important item of information, proceeded to discuss the question as if the Supreme Court had no existence, and bases his argument on the plain terms of the Constitution, and the plain facts recorded in the history of the government established by it.
Macaulay, in his lively way, has shown the difficulty of manufactur- ing English statesmen out of English lawyers, though, as lawyers, their rank in the profession may be very high. " Their arguments," he says, " are intellectual prodigies, abounding with the happiest analogies and the most refined distinctions. The principles of their arbitrary science being once admitted, the statute-books and the reports being once assumed as the foundations of reasoning, these men must be allowed to be perfect masters of logic. But if a question arises as to the pos- tulates on which their whole system rests, if they are called upon to vindicate the fundamental maxims of that system which they have passed their lives in studying, these very men often talk the language of savages or of children. Those who have listened to a man of this class in his own court, and who have witnessed the skill with which he analyzes and digests a vast mass of evidence, or reconciles a crowd of precedents which at first sight seem ^contradictory, scarcely know him again when, a few hours later, they hear him speaking on the other side of Westminster Hall in his capacity of legislator. They can scarcely believe that the paltry quirks which are faintly heard through a storm of coughing, and which do not impose on the plainest
I?AXIEL WEBSTER
country gentleman, can proceed from the same sharp and vigorous intellect which had excited their admiration under the same roof, and on the same day." And to this keen distinction between an English lawyer, and an English lawyer as a member of the House of Commons, may be added the peculiar kind of sturdy manliness which is demanded in any person who aims to take a leading part in Parliamentary debates. Erskine, probably the greatest advocate who ever appeared in the English courts of law, made but a comparatively poor figure in the House of Commons, as a member of the Whig opposition. ** The truth is, Erskine," Sheridan once said to him, " you are afraid of Pitt, and that is the flabby part of your character."
But Macaulay, in another article, makes a point against the leaders of party themselves. His definition of Parliamentary government is "government by speaking"; and he declares that the most effective speakers are commonly ill-informed, shallow in thought, devoid of large ideas of legislation, hazarding the loosest speculations with the utmost intellectual impudence, and depending for success on volubility of speech, rather than on accuracy of knowledge or penetration of intelligence. " The tendency of institutions like those of England," he adds, " is to encourage readiness in public men, at the expense both of fulness and of exactness. The keenest and most vigorous minds of every generation, minds often admirably fitted for the investigation of truth, are habitually employed in producing arguments such as no man of sense would ever put into a treatise intended for publication, arguments which are just good enough to be used once, when aided by fluent delivery and pointed language." And he despairingly closes with the remark, that he " would sooner expect a great original work on political science, such a work, for example, as the Wealth of Nations, from an apothecary in a country town, or from a minister in the Hebrides, than from a statesman who, ever since he was one-and- twenty, had been a distinguished debater in the House of Commons."
Now it is plain that neither of these contemptuous judgments applies to Webster, He was a great lawyer; but as a legislator the precedents of the lawyer did not control the action or supersede the principles of the statesman. He was one of the most formidable debaters that ever appeared in a legislative assembly ; and yet those who most resolutely grappled with him in the duel of debate would be the last to impute to him inaccuracy of knowledge or shallownesa of thought. He carried into the Senate of the United States a trained mind, disciplined by the sternest culture of his faculties, disdaining any plaudits which were not the honest reward of robust reasoning on
AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE. xliil
generalized facts, and " gravitating " in the direction of truth, whether he hit or missed it. In his case, at least, there was nothing in his legal experience, or in his legislative experience, which would have unfitted him for producing a work on the science of politics. The best spe*>:hes in the House of Commons of Lord Palnierston and Lord John Russell appear very weak indeed, as compared with the Reply to Hayne, or the speech on u The Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign States," or the speech on the President's Protest.
In this connection it may be said, when we remember the hot contests between the two men, that there is something plaintive in? Oalhoun's dying testimony to Webster's austere intellectual conscien- tiousness. Mr. Venables, who attended the South Carolina states- man in h:'s dying hours, wrote to Webster : " When your name was- mentioned he remarked that * Mr. Webster has as high a standard of truth as any statesman I have met in debate. Convince him, and he •cannot reply ; he is silenced ; he cannot look truth in the face and oppose it by argument. I think that it can be readily perceived by his manner when he felt the unanswerable force of a reply/ He often spoke of you in my presence, and always kindly and most respectfully." Now it must be considered that, in debate, the minds of Webster and Calhouu had come into actual contact and collision. Each really felt the force of the other. An ordinary duel might be ranked among idle pastimes when compared with the stress and strain and pain of their encounters in the duel of debate, A sword-cut or pistol-bullet, maiming the body, was as nothing in comparison with the wounds they mutually inflicted on that substance which was immortal in both. It was a duel, or series of duels, in which mind was opposed to mind, and will to will, and where the object appeared to be to inflict moral and mental annihilation on one of the comba- tants. There never passed a word between them on which the most ingenious Southern jurists, in their interpretations of the " code " of honor, could have found matter for a personal quarrel ; and yet these two proud and strong personalities knew that they were engaged in a ' mortal contest, in which neither gave quarter nor expected quarter, ( Mr. Calhouirs intellectual egotism was as great as his intellectual' ability. He always supposed that he was the victor in every close logical wrestle with any mind to which his own was opposed. He never wrestled with a mind, until he met Webster's, which in tenacity, grasp, and power was a match for his own. He, of course, thought his antagonist was beaten by his superior strength and amplitude of argumentation ; but it is still to be noted that he, the most redoubtable
DANIEL WEBSTER
opponent that Webster ever encountered, testified, though in equivocal terms, to Webster's intellectual honesty. When he crept, half dead, into the Senate-Chamber to hear Webster's speech of the 7th of March, 1850, he objected emphatically at the end to Webster's decla- ration that the Union could not be dissolved. After declaring that Calhoun's supposed case of justifiable resistance came within the definition of the ultimate right of revolution, which is lodged in all oppressed communities, Webster added that he did not at that time wish to go into a discussion of the nature of the United States- government. " The honorable gentleman and myself," he said, " have broken lances sufficiently often before on that subject." " I have no- desire to do it now," replied Calhoun ; and Webster blandly retorted, " I presume the gentleman has not, and I have quite as little." One ia reminded here of Dr. Johnson's remark, when he was stretched on a sick-bed, with his gladiatorial powers of argument suspended by physi- cal exhaustion. "If that fellow Burke were now present," the Doctor humorously murmured, "he would certainly kill me."
But to Webster's eminence as a lawyer and a statesman, it is proper to add, that he has never been excelled as a writer of state papers among the public men of the United States. Mr. Emerson has a phrase which is exactly applicable to these efforts of Webster's mind. That phrase is, " superb propriety." Throughout his despatches, he always seems to feel that he impersonates his country ; and the gravity and weight of his style are as admirable as its simplicity and majestic ease. " Daniel Webster, his mark," is indelibly stamped on them alL When the Treaty of Washington was criticised by the Whigs in the English Parliament, Macaulay specially noticed the difference in the style of the two negotiators. Lord Ashburton, he said, had compro- mised the honor of his country by " the humble, caressing, wheedling tone " of 'his letters, a tone which contrasted strangely with " the firm* resolute, vigilant, and unyielding manner " of the American Secretary of State. It is to be noticed that no other opponent of Sir Robert Peel's administration, not even Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, struck at the essential weakness of Lord Ashburton's despatches with the force and sagacity which characterized Macaulay's assault on the treaty. Indeed, a rhetorician and critic less skilful than Macaulay can easily detect that " America " is represented fully in Webster's despatches, while " Britannia " has a very amiable, but not very forci- ble, representative in Lord Ashburton. Had Palmerston been the British plenipotentiary, we can easily imagine how different would have been the task imposed on Webster. As the American Secretary
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was generally in tlie right in every position lie assumed, lie would probably have triumphed even over Palmerston ; but the letters of the " pluckiest " of English statesmen would, we may be sure, have never been criticised in the House of Commons as " humble, wheedling, and caressing."
In addition, however, to his legal arguments, his senatorial speeches* and his state papers, Webster is to be considered as the greatest orato* our country has produced in his addresses before miscellaneous assem* blages of the people. In saying this we do not confine the remark to •such noble orations as those on the " First Settlement of New Eng- land," u The Bunker HUl Monument," and " Adams and Jefferson," but extend it so as to include speeches before great masses of people who could be hardly distinguished from a mob, and who were under no restraint but that imposed by their own self-respect and their respect for the orator. On these occasions he was uniformly successful. It is impossible to detect, in any reports of these popular addresses, that he >ever stooped to employ a style of speech or mode of argument com* monly supposed appropriate to a speaker on the " stump"; and yet he was the greatest " stump " orator that our country has ever seen. He seemed to delight in addressing five, or ten, or even twenty thousand people, in the open air, trusting that the penetrating tones of his voice would reach even the ears of those who were on the ragged edges of the swaying crowd before him ; and he would thus speak to the sover- eign people, in their unorganized state as a collection of uneasy and somewhat belligerent individuals, with a dignity and majesty similar to the dignity and fnajesty which characterized his arguments before the Senate of the United States, or before a bench of judges. A large portion of his published works consist of such speeches, and they rank only second among the remarkable productions of his mind.
The question arises, How could he hold the attention of such audiences without condescending to flatter their prejudices, or without occasionally acting the part of the sophist and the buffoon ? Much may be said, in accounting for this phenomenon, about his widely extended reputation, his imposing presence, the vulgar curiosity to see a man whom even the smallest country newspaper thought of sufficient importance to defame, his power of giving vitality to simple words which the most ignorant of his auditors could easily understand, and the instinctive respect which the rudest kind of men feel for a grand specimen of robust manhood. But the real, the substantial source of his power over such audiences proceeded from his respect for them ; and their respect for him was more or less consciously founded on the perception of this fact.
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Indeed, a close scrutiny of his speeches will show how conscien- tiously he regards the rights of other minds, however inferior they may be to his own ; and this virtue, for it is a virtue, is never more apparent than in his arguments and appeals addressed to popular assemblies. No working-man, whether farmer, mechanic, factory 44 hand," or day-laborer, ever deemed himself insulted by a word from the lips of Daniel Webster ; he felt himself rather exalted in his own esteem, for the time, by coming in contact with that beneficent and comprehensive intelligence, which cherished among its favorite ideas a scheme for lifting up the American laborer to a height of comfort and respectability which the European laborer could hardly hope to attain. Prominent politicians, men of wealth and influence, statesmen of high social and political rank, may, at times, have considered Webster as arrogant and bad-tempered, and may, at times, have felt disposed to fasten a quarrel upon him; even in Massachusetts this disposition broke out in conventions of the party to which he belonged ; but it would be in vain to find a single laboring-man, whether he met Web- ster in private, or half pushed and half fought his way into a masa meeting, in order to get his ears into communication with the orator's voice, who ever heard a word from him which did not exalt the dignity of labor, or which was not full of sympathy for the laborer's occasional sorrows and privations. Webster seemed to have ever present to his mind the poverty of the humble home of his youth. His father, his brothers, he himself, had all been brought up to consider manual toil a dignified occupation, and as consistent with the exercise of all the virtues which flourish under the domestic roof. More than this, it may be said that, with the exception of a few intimate friends, hia sympathies to the last were most warmly with common laborers. Indeed, if we closely study the private correspondence of this states* man, who was necessarily brought into relations, more or less friendly, with the conventionally great men of the world, European as well aa American, we shall find that, after all, he took more real interest in Seth Peterson, and John Taylor, and Porter Wright, men connected with him in fishing and farming, than he did in the ambassadors of foreign states whom he met as Senator or as Secretary of State, or in all the members of the polite society of Washington, New York, and Boston. He was very near to Nature himself ; and the nearer a man was to Nature, the more he esteemed him. Thus persons who super- intended his farms and cattle, or who pulled an oar in his boat when he ventured out in search of cod and halibut, thought " Squire Web- ster " a man who realized their ideal and perfection of good-fellowship
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while ii may confidently be said that many of his closest friends among men of culture, including lawyers, men of letters, and states- men of the first rank, must have occasionally resented the " anfractu- osities " of his mood and temper. But Seth Peterson, and Portei Wright, and John Taylor, never complained of these "anfrac- tuosities." Webster, in fact, is one of the few public men of the country in whose championship of the rights and sympathy with the wrongs of labor there is not the slightest trace of the arts of the demagogue ; and in this fact we may find the reason why even the " roughs," who are present in every mass meeting, always treated him with respect. Perhaps it would not be out of place to remark here* that, in his Speech of the 7th of March, he missed a grand opportunity to vindicate Northern labor, in the reference he made to a foolish tirade of a Senator from Louisiana, who " took pains to run a con- trast between the slaves of the South and the laboring people of the North, giving the preference, in all points of condition, of comfort, and happiness, to the slaves of the South." Webster made a complete reply to this aspersion on Northern labor ; but, as his purpose was to conciliate, he did not blast the libeller by quoting the most eminent example that could be named demonstrating the falsehood of the slave-holding Senator's assertion. Without deviating from the con- ciliatory attitude he had assumed, one could easily imagine him as lift- ing his large frame to its full height, flashing from his rebuking eyes a glance of scorn at the " amiable Senator," and simply saying, " / belong to the class which the Senator from Louisiana stigmatizes as more degraded than the slaves of the South." There was not at the time any Senator from the South, except Mr. Calhoun, that the most prejudiced Southern man would have thought of comparing with Web- ster in respect to intellectual eminence ; and, if Webster had then and there placed himself squarely on his position as the son of a Northern laborer, we should have been spared all the rhetoric about Northern " mud-sills," with which the Senate was afterwards afflicted. Web- ster was our man of men ; and it would seem that he should have crushed such talk at the outset, by proudly assuming that Northern labor was embodied and impersonated in him, — that HE had sprung from its ranks, and was proud of his ancestry.
An ingenious and powerful, but paradoxical thinker, once told me tiiat I was mistaken in calling Jonathan Edwards and Daniel Webster great reasoners. " They were bad reasoners," he added, "but great poets." Without questioning the right of the author of " An Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notion of that Freedom of the Will, which
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is supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency," to be ranked among the most eminent of modern logicians, I could still understand why he was classed among poets; for whether Edwards paints the torments of hell or the bliss of heaven, his imagination almost rivals that of Dante in intensity of realization. But it was at first puzzling to comprehend why Webster should be depressed as a reasoner in order to be exalted as a poet. The images and metaphors scattered over his speeches are BO evidently brought in to illustrate and enforce his statements and arguments, that, grand as they often are, the imagination displayed in them is still a faculty strictly subsidiary to the reasoning power. It was only after reflecting patiently for some time on the seeming paradox that I caught a glimpse of my friend's meaning ; and it led me at once to consider an entirely novel question, not heretofore mooted by any of Webster's critics, whether friendly or unfriendly, in their endeavors to explain the reason of his influence over the best minds of the generation to which he belonged. In declaring that, as a poet, he far exceeded any capacity he evinced as a reasoner, my paradoxical friend must have meant that Webster had the poet's power of so organizing a speech, that it stood out to the eye of the mind as a palpable intellectual product and fact, possessing, not merely that vague reality which comes from erecting a plausible mental structure of deductive argumentation, based on strictly limited prem- ises, but a positive reality, akin to the products of Nature herself, when she tries her hand in constructing a ledge of rocks or rearing a chain of hills.
In illustration, it may be well to cite the example of poets with whom Webster, of course, cannot be compared. Among the great mental facts, palpable to the eyes of all men interested in literature, are such creations as. the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, the great Shakspearian dramas, the Paradise Lost, and Faust. The commen- taries and criticisms on these are numerous enough to occupy the shelves of a large library; some of them attempt to show that Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, and Goethe were all wrong in their methods of creation ; but they still cannot obscure, to ordinary vision, the lustre of these luminaries as they placidly shine in the intellectual firmament, which is literally over our heads. They are as palpable, to the eye of the mind, as Sinus, Arcturus, the Southern Cross, and the planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, are to the bodily sense. M. Taine has recently assailed the Paradise Lost with the happiest of French epigrams; he tries to prove that, in construc- tion, it is the most ridiculously inartistic monstrosity that the imagi-
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nation of a great niind ever framed out of chaos ; but, after we have thoroughly enjoyed the play of his wit, there the- Paradise Lost remains, an undisturbed object in the intellectual heavens, disdaining to justify its right to exist on any other grounds than the mere fact of its existence ; and, certainly, not more ridiculous than Saturn himself, as we look at him through a great equatorial telescope, swinging through space encumbered with his clumsy ring, and his wrangling family of satellites, but still, in spite of peculiarities on which M., Taine might exercise his wit until doomsday, one of the most beauti ful and sublime objects which the astronomer can behold in the whole phenomena of the heavens.
Indeed, in reading criticisms on such durable poetic creations and organizations as we have named, one is reminded of Sydney Smith's* delicious chaffing of his friend Jeffrey, on account of Jeffrey's sensi- tiveness of literary taste, and his inward rage that events, men, and books, outside of him, do not correspond to the exacting rules which are the products of his own subjective and somewhat peevish intelligence. " I like," says Sydney, " to tell you these things, because you never do so well as when you are humbled and frightened, and, if you could be alarmed into the semblance of modesty, you would charm everybody ; but remember my joke against you about the moon : 4 D — n the solar system! bad light — planets too distant — pestered with comets — feeble contrivance ; could make a better with great ease/ "
Now when a man, in whatever department or direction of thought his activity is engaged, succeeds in organizing, or even welding together, the materials on which he works, so that the product, as a whole, is visible to the mental eye, as a new creation or construction, he has an immense advantage over all critics of his performance. Refined reasonings are impotent to overthrow it ; epigrams glance off from it, as rifle-bullets rebound when aimed at a granite wall ; and it stands erect long after the reasonings and the epigrams are forgotten. Even when its symmetry is destroyed by a long and destructive siege, a pile of stones still remains, as at Fort Sumter, to attest what power of resistance it opposed to all the resources of modern artillery.
If we look at Webster's greatest speeches, as, for instance, " The Reply to Hayne," " The Constitution not a Compact between Sover- eign States," "The President's Protest," and others that might be mentioned, we shall find that they partake of the character of organic formations, or at least of skilful engineering or architectural construc- tions. Even Mr. Calhoun never approached him in this art of giving objective reality to a speech, which, after all, is found, on analysis, to
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consist only of a Happy collocation and combination of words » but m Webster the words are either all alive with the creative spirit of the poet, or, at the worst, resemble the blocks of granite or marble which the artisan piles, one on the other, and the result of which, though it may represent a poor style of architecture, is still a rude specimen of a Gothic edifice. The artist and artificer are both observable in Web- ster's work ; but the reality and solidity of the construction cannot be questioned. At the present time, an educated reader would be specially interested in the mental processes by which Webster thus succeeded in giving objective existence and validity to the operations of his mind ; and, whether sympathizing with his opinions or not, would as little think of refusing to read them because of their Whiggism, as he would think of refusing to read Homer because of his heathenism, or Dante because of his Catholicism, or Milton because of his compound of Arianism and Calvinism, or Goethe because of his Pantheism. The fact which would most interest such a reader would be, that Webster had, in some mysterious way, translated and transformed his abstract propositions into concrete substance and form. The form might offend his reason, his taste, or his conscience ; but he could not avoid admitting that it had a form!, while most speeches, even those made by able men, are comparatively formless, however lucid they may be in the array of facts, and plausible in the order and connection of argu- ments.
In trying to explain this power, the most obvious comparison which would arise in the mind of an intelligent reader would be, that Webster, as a rhetorician, resembled Vauban and Cohorn as military engineers. In the war of debate, he so fortified the propositions he maintained, that they could not be carried by direct assault, but must be patiently besieged. The words he employed were simple enough,, and fell short of including the vocabulary of even fifth-rate declaimers ; but he had the art of so disposing them that, to an honest reasoner, the position he took appeared to be impregnable. To assail it by the ordinary method of passionate protest and illogical reasoning, was as futile as a dash of light cavalry would have been against the defences of such cities as Namur and Lille. Indeed, in his speech, " The Consti- tution not a Compact between Sovereign States," he erected a whole Torres Vedras line of fortifications, on which legislative MassenaS' dashed themselves in vain, and, however strong in numbers in respect to the power of voting him down, recoiled defeated in every attempt to reason him down.
In further illustration of this peculiar power of Webster* the Speed*
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of the 7th of March, 1850, may be cited, for Its delivery is to be ranked with the most important historical events. For some years it was the object of the extremes of panegyric and the extremes of execration. But this effort is really the most loosely constructed of all the great pro- ductions of Webster's mind. In force, compactness, and completeness, in closeness of thought to things, in closeness of imagery to the reason- ing it illustrates, and in general intellectual fibre, muscle, and bone, it Cannot be compared to such an oration as that on the " First Settlement of New England," or such a speech as that which had for its theme* 44 The Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign "States " ; but, after all deductions have been made, it was still a speech which frowned upon its opponents as a kind of verbal fortress constructed both for the purpose of defence and aggression. Its fame is due, in a great degree, to its resistance to a storm of assaults, such as had rarely before been concentrated on any speech delivered in either branch of the Congress of the United States. Indeed, a very large portion of the intellect, the moral sentiment, and the moral passion of the free States was directed against it. There was not a weapon in the armory of the dialectician or the rhetorician which was not employed with the intent of demolish- ing it. Contempt of Webster was vehemently taught as the beginning of political wisdom. That a speech, thus assailed, should survive the attacks made upon it, appeared to be impossible. And yet it did survive, and is alive now, while better speeches, or what the present writer thought, at the time, to be more convincing speeches, have not retained individual existence, however deeply they may have influ enced that public opinion which, in the end, determines political events. " I still live," was Webster's declaration on his death-bed, when the friends gathered around it imagined he had breathed his last ; and the same words might be uttered by the Speech of the 7th of March, could it possess the vocal organ which announces personal existence. Between the time it was originally delivered and the present year there runs a great and broad stream of blood, shed from the reins of Northern and Southern men alike ; the whole political and moral constitution of the country has practically suffered an abrupt change; new problems engage the attention of thoughtful statesmen ; much is forgotten which was once considered of the first importance ; but the 7th of March Speech, battered as it is by innu- merable attacks, is still remembered at least as one which called forth more power than it embodied in itself. This persistence of life is due to the fact that it was " organized."
Is this power of organization common among orators? It seems to
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t»e that, on the contrary, It is very rare. In some of Burke's speeches, in which his sensibility and imagination were thoroughly under the control of his judgment, as, for instance, his speech on Conciliation with America, that on Economical Reform, and that to the Elec- tors of Bristol, we find the orator to be a consummate master of the urt of so constructing a speech that it serves the immediate object which prompted its delivery, while at the same time it has in it a principle of vitality which makes it survive the occasion that sailed it forth. But the greatest of Burke's speeches, if we look merely at the richness and variety of mental power and the force and depth of moral passion displayed in it, is his speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts. No speech ever delivered before any assembly, legislative, judicial, or popular, can rank with this in respect to the abundance of its facts, reasonings, and imagery, and the ferocity of its moral wrath. It resembles the El Dorado that Voltaire's Candide visited, where the boys played with precious stones of inestimable value, as our boys play with ordinary marbles; for to the inhabitants of El Dorado diamonds and pearls were as common as pebbles are with us.
But the defect of this speech, which must still be considered, on the whole, the most inspired product of Burke's great nature, was this, — that it did not strike its hearers or readers as having reality for its basis or the superstructure raised upon it. Englishmen could not believe then, and most of them probably do not believe now, that it had any solid foundation in incontrovertible facts. It did not *' fit in " to their ordinary modes of thought ; and it has never been ranked with Burke's "organized" orations; it has never come home to what Bacon called the " business and bosoms " of his countrymen. They have generally dismissed it from their imaginations as u a phantasmagoria and a hideous dream " created by Burke under the Impulse of the intense hatred he felt for the administration which succeeded the overthrow of the government, which was founded on the coalition of Fox and North.
Now, in simple truth, the speech is the most masterly statement of facts, relating to the oppression of millions of the people of India, which was ever forced on the attention of the House of Commons, — a legislative assembly which, it may be incidentally remarked, was practically responsible for the just government of the immense Indian •empire of Great Britain. It is curious that the main facts on which the argument of Burke rests have been confirmed by James Mill, the coldest-blooded historian that ever narrated the enormous crimes which attended the rise and progress of the British power in Hindos-
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tan, and a man who also had a strong intellectual antipathy to the mind of Burke. In making the speech, Burke had documentary evidence of a large portion of the transactions he denounced, and had divined the rest. Mill supports him both as regards the facts of which Burke had positive knowledge, and the facts which he dediio- tively inferred from the facts he knew. Having thus a strong founda- tion for his argument, he exerted every faculty of his mind, and every impulse of his moral sentiment and moral passion, to overwhelm the leading members of the administration of Pitt, by attempting to make them accomplices in crimes which would disgrace even slave-traders on the Guinea coast. The merely intellectual force of his reasoning is crushing ; his analysis seems to be sharpened by his hatred ; and there is no device of contempt, scorn, derision, and 'direct personal attack, which he does not unsparingly use. In the midst of all this mental tumult, inestimable maxims of moral and political wisdom are shot forth in short sentences, which have so much of the sting and bril- liancy of epigram, that at first we do not appreciate their depth of thought; and through all there burns such a pitiless fierceness of moral reprobation of cruelty, injustice, and wrong, that all the accred- ited courtesies of debate are violated, once, at least, in every five minutes. In any American legislative assembly he would have been called to order at least once in five minutes. The images which the orator brings in to give vividness to his argument are sometimes coarse ; but, coarse as they are, they admirably reflect the moral tur- pitude of the men against whom he inveighs. Among these is the image with which he covers Dundas, the special friend of Pitt, with a ridicule which promises to be immortal. Dundas, on the occasion when Fox and Burke called for papers by the aid of which they pro- posed to demonstrate the iniquity of the scheme by which the minis* try proposed to settle the debts of the Nabob of Arcot, pretended that the production of such papers would be indelicate, — " that this inquiry is of a delicate nature, and that the state will suffer detriment by th® exposure of this transaction." As Dundas had previously brought out six volumes of Eeports, generally confirming Burke's own views of the corruption and oppression which marked the administration of affairs in India, he laid himself open to Burke's celebrated assault. Dundas and delicacy, he said, were " a rare and singular coalition." And then> follows an image of colossal coarseness, such as might be supposed capable of rousing thunder-peals of laughter from a company of fes- tive giants, — an image which Lord Brougham declared offended hi* sensitive taste, — the sensitive taste of one of the most formidable
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legal and legislative bullies that ever appeared before the juries or Parliament of Great Britain, and who never hesitated to use any illustration, however vulgar, which he thought would be effective to degrade his opponents.
But whatever may be thought of the indelicacy of Burke's image, it was one eminently adapted to penetrate through the thick hide of the minister of state at whom it was aimed, and it shamed him as far as a profligate politician like Dundas was capable of feeling the sen- sation of shame. But there are also flashes, or rather flames, of impas- sioned imagination, in the same speech, which rush up from the main body of its statements and arguments, and remind us of nothing so much as of those jets of incandescent gas which, we are told by astronomers, occasionally leap, from the extreme outer covering of the sun, to the height of a hundred or a hundred and sixty thousand miles, and testify to the terrible forces raging within it. After read- ing this speech for the fiftieth time, the critic cannot free himself from the rapture of admiration and amazement which he experienced in his first fresh acquaintance with it. Yet its delivery in the House of Commons (February 28, 1785) produced an effect so slight, that Pitt, after a few minutes' consultation with Grenville, concluded that it was not worth the trouble of being answered ; and the House of Commons, obedient to the Prime Minister's direction, negatived, by a large majority, the motion in advocating which Burke poured out the wonderful treasures of his intellect and imagination. To be sure, the House was tired to death with the discussion, was probably very sleepy, and the orator spoke five hours after the members had already shouted, " Question ! Question I "
The truth is, that this speech, unmatched though it is in the litera- ture of eloquence, had not, as has been previously stated, the air of reality. It struck the House as a magnificent Oriental dream, as an Arabian Nights' Entertainment, as a tale told by an inspired madman, " fall of sound and fury, signifying nothing " ; and the evident par- tisan intention of the orator to blast Pitt's administration by exhibit- ing its complicity in one of the most enormous frauds recorded in history, confirmed the dandies, the cockneys, the bankers, and the country gentlemen, who, as members of the House of Commons, stood by Pitt with all the combined force of their levity, their venality, and their stupidity, in the propriety of voting Burke down. And even now, when the substantial truth of all the facts he alleged is established on evidence which convinces historians, the admiring reader oan understand why it failed to convince Burke's contempo-
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raries, and why it still appears to lack the characteristics of a speech thoroughly organized. Indeed, the mind of Burke, when it was de- livered, can only be compared to a volcanic mountain in eruption ; — not merely a volcano like that of Vesuvius, visited by scientists and •amateurs in crowds, when it deigns to pour forth its flames and lava, for the entertainment of the multitude ; but a lonely volcano, like that of Etna, rising far above Vesuvius in height, far removed from all the vulgar curiosity of a body of tourists, but rending the earth on which it stands with the mighty earthquake throes of its fiery centre and heart. The moral passion, — perhaps it would be more just to say the moral fury, — displayed in the speech, is elemental, and can he •compared to nothing less intense than the earth's interior fire and heat.
Now in Webster's great legislative efforts, his mind is never exhib I ted in a state of eruption. In the most excited debates in which he bore a prominent part, nothing strikes us more than the admirable self-possession, than the majestic inward calm, which presides over all the operations of his mind and the impulses of his sensibility, so that, in building up the fabric of his speech, he has his reason, imagination, and passion under full control, — using each faculty and feeling as the occasion may demand, but never allowing himself to be used by it, — and always therefore conveying the impression of power in reserve, while he may, in fact, be exercising all the power he has to the utmost. In laboriously erecting his edifice of reasoning he also studi- ously regards the intellects and the passions of ordinary men ; strives to bring his mind into cordial relations with theirs ; employs every faculty he possesses to give reality, to give even visibility, to his thoughts ; and though he never made a speech which rivals that of Burke on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts, in respect to grasp of under- standing, astounding wealth of imagination and depth of moral passion, he always so contrived to organize his materials into a complete whole, that the result stood out clearly to the sight of the mind, as a structure resting on strong foundations, and reared to due height by the mingled still of the artisan and the artist. When he does little more than weld his materials together, he is still an artificer of the old school of giant workmen, the school that dates its pedigree from Tubal Cain.
After all this wearisome detail and dilution of the idea attempted to be expressed, it may be that I have failed to convey an adequate impression of what constitutes Webster's distinction among orators, as far as orators have left speeches which are considered an invaluable addition to the literature of the language in which they were origi*
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nally delivered. Everybody understands why any one of the great sermons of Jeremy Taylor, or the sermon of Dr. South on "Man created in the Image of God," or the sermon of Dr. Barrow on " Heavenly Rest," differs from the millions on millions of doubtless edifying sermons that have been preached and printed during the last two centuries and a half ; but everybody does not understand the distinction between one brilliant oration and another, when both made a great sensation at the time, while only one survived in litera- ture. Probably Charles James Fox was a more effective speaker in the House of Commons than Edmund Burke , probably Henry Clay was a more effective speaker in Congress than Daniel Webster ; -but when tha occasions on which their speeches were made are found gradually to fade from the memory of men, why is it that the speeches of Pox and Clay have no recognized position in literature* while those of Burke and Webster are ranked with literary produc- tions of the first class? The reason is as really obvious as that which explains the exceptional value of some of the efforts of the great orators of the pulpit. Jeremy Taylor, Dr. South, and Dr. Barrow, different as they were in temper and disposition, succeeded in " organ- izing " some masterpieces in their special department of intellectual and moral activity ; and the same is true of Burke and Webster in the departments of legislation and political science. The " occasion " was merely an opportunity for the consolidation into a speech of the rare powers and attainments, the large personality and affluent thought, which were the spiritual possessions of the man who made it, — a speech which represented the whole intellectual manhood of the speaker, — a manhood in which knowledge, reason, imagination, and sensibility were all consolidated under the directing power of will
A pertinent example of the difference we have attempted to in- dicate may be easily found in contrasting Fox's closing speech on the East India Bill with Burke's on the same subject. For imme- diate effect on the House of Commons, it ranks with the most mas- terly of Fox's Parliamentary efforts. The hits on his opponents were all " telling. " The argumentum ad hominem, embodied in short, sharp statements, or startling interrogatories, was never employed with more brilliant success. The reasoning was rapid, compact, en- cumbered by BO long enumeration of facts, and, though somewhat unscrupulous here and there, was driven home upon his adversaries* with a skill that equalled its audacity. It may be said that there is not a sentence in the whole speech which was not calculated to sting
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a sleepy audience into attention, or to give delight to a fatigued audience wMclx still managed to keep its eyes and minds wide open. Even in respect to the principles of liberty and justice, which were the animating life oi the bill, Fox's terse sentences contrast strangely with the somewhat more lumbering and elaborate paragraphs of Burke. " What," he exclaims, putting his argument in his favorite- interrogative form, — "what is the most odious species of tyranny? Precisely that which this bill is meant to annihilate. That a hand- ful of men, free themselves, should exercise the most base and abomi- nable despotism over millions of their fellow-creatures ; that innocence should be the victim of oppression ; that industry should toil for rapine ; that the harmless laborer should sweat, not for his own bene- fit, but for the luxury and rapacity of tyrannic depredation; — in a word, that thirty millions of men, gifted by Providence with the ordinary endowments of humanity, should groan under a system of despotism unmatched in all the histories of the world ? What is th« end of all government ? Certainly, the happiness of the governed Others may hold different opinions ; but this is mine, and I proclaim it. What, then, are we to think of a government whose good fortune is supposed to spring from the calamities of its subjects, whose aggran- dizement grows out of the miseries of mankind ? This is the kind of government exercised under the East Indian Company upon the natives of Hindostan; and the subversion of that infamous govern ment is the main object of the bill in question." And afterwards he says, with admirable point and pungency of statement : " Every line in both the bills which I have had the honor to introduce, presumes the possibility of bad administration ; for every word breathes sus- picion. This bill supposes that men are but men. It confides in no integrity ; it trusts no character ; it inculcates the wisdom of a jealousy of power, and annexes responsibility, not only to every action, but even to the inaction of those who are to dispense it. The necessity of these provisions must be evident, when it is known that the different misfortunes of the company have resulted not more from what their servants did, than from what the masters did not."
There is a directness in such sentences as these which we do not find in Burke's speech on the East India Bill ; but Burke's remains as a part of English literature, and in form and substance, especially in substance, is so immensely superior to that of Fox, that, in quoting sentences from the latter, one may almost be supposed to rescue them from that neglect which attends all speeches which do not reach beyond the occasion which calls them forth. In Bacon's phrase, the
DANIEL WEBSTER
speech of Fox shows "small matter, and infinite agitation of wit" in Burke's, we discern large matter with an abundance of "wit" proper to the discussion of the matter, but nothing which suggests the idea of mere " agitation." Fox, in his speeches, subordinated every thing to the immediate impression he might make on the House oi Commons. He deliberately gave it as his opinion, that a speech that read well must be a bad speech ; and, in a literary sense, the flou.se of Commons, which he entered before he was twenty, may be called both the cradle and the grave of his fame. It has been said that he was a debater whose speeches should be studied by every man who wishes " to learn the science of logical defence " ; that he alone, among English orators, resembles Demosthenes, inasmuch as his reasoning is " penetrated and made red-hot by passion " ; and that nothing could excel the effect of his delivery when " he was in the full paroxysm of inspiration, foaming, screaming, choked by the rushing multitude of his words." But not one of his speeches, not even that on the East India Bill, or on the Westminster Scrutiny, or on the Russian Armament, or on Parliamentary Reform, or on Mr. Pitt's Rejection of Bonaparte's Overtures for Peace, has obtained an abiding place in the literature of Great Britain. It would be no disparage- ment to an educated man, if it were said that he had never read these speeches ; but it would be a serious bar to hk claim to be considered an English scholar, if he confessed to be ignorant of the great speeches of Burke; for such a confession would be like admitting that he had never read the first book of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, Bacon's Essays and Advancement of Learning, Milton's Areopagitica, Butler's Analogy, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
When we reflect on the enormous number of American speeches which, when they were first delivered, were confidently predicted, by appreciating friends, to insure to the orators a fame which would be immortal, one wonders a little at the quiet persistence of the speeches of Webster in refusing to die with the abrupt suddenness of other orations, which, at the time of their delivery, seemed to have an equal chance of renown. The lifeless remains of such unfortunate failures are now entombed in that dreariest of all mausoleums, the dingy quarto volumes, hateful to all human eyes, which are lettered on the back with the title of "Congressional Debates," — a collection oi printed matter which members of Congress are wont to send to a favored few among their constituents, and which* are immediately consigned tc the dust-barrel or sold to pedlers in waste paper, according as the rag€ of the recipients takes a scornful or an economical direction. It would
AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE. llx
seem thai; tlie speeches of Webster are saved from this fate, by the fact that, in them, the mental and moral life of a great man, and of a great master of the English language, are organized in a palpable intel- lectual form. The reader feels that they have some of the substantial qualities which he recognizes in looking at the gigantic constructions of the master workmen among the crowd of the world's engineers and architects, in looking at the organic products of Nature herself, and in surveying, through the eye of his imagination, those novel repro- ductions of Nature which great poets have embodied in works which are indelibly stamped with the character of deathlessness.
But Webster is even more obviously a poet — subordinating u the shows of things to the desires of the mind" — in his magnificent ideal ization, or idolization, of the Constitution and the Union. By the magic of his imagination and sensibility he contrived to impress on the minds of a majority of the people of the free States a vague, grand idea that the Constitution was a sacred instrument of government, — a holy shrine of fundamental law, which no unhallowed hands could touch without profanation, — a digested system of rights and duties, resembling those institutes which were, in early times, devised by the immortal gods for the guidance of infirm mortal man; and the mysterious creatures, half divine and half human, who framed this remarkable document, were always reverently referred to as "the Fathers," — as persons who excelled all succeeding generations in sagacity and wis- dom ; as inspired prophets, who were specially selected by Divine Providence to frame the political scriptures on which our political faith was to be based, and by which our political reason was to be limited. The splendor of the glamour thus cast over the imagi- nations and sentiments of the people was all the more effective be- cause it was an effluence from the mind of a statesman who, of all other statesmen of the country, was deemed the most practical, and the least deluded by any misguiding lights of fancy and abstract speculation.
There can be little doubt that Webster's impressive idealization of the Constitution gave a certain narrowness to American thinking on constitutional government and the science of politics and legislation. Foreigners, of the most liberal views, could not sometimes restrain an expression of wonder, when they found that our most intelligent men, even our jurists and publicists, hardly condescended to notice the eminent European thinkers on the philosophy of government, so absorbed were they in the contemplation of the perfection of their own. When the great civil war broke out, hundreds of thousands of
be DAKIEL WEBSTER
American citizens marched to tlie battle-field with the grand passages of Webster glowing in their hearts. They met death cheerfully in the cause of the " Constitution and Union," as by him expounded and idealized ; and if they were so unfortunate as not to be killed, but to be taken captive, they still rotted to death in Southern prisons, sustained by sentences of Webster's speeches which they had de- claimed as boys in their country schools. Of all the triujmphs of Webster as a leader of public opinion, the most remarkable was his infusing into the minds of the people of the free States the belief that the Constitution as it existed in his time was an organic fact, springing from the intelligence, hearts, and wills of the people of the United States, and not, as it really was, an ingenious mechanical con- trivance of wise men, to which the people, at the time, gave their assent.
The constitutions of the separate States of the Union were doubt- less rooted in the habits, sentiments, and ideas of their inhabitants. But the Constitution of the United States could not possess this advantage, however felicitously it may have been framed for the pur- pose of keeping, for a considerable period, peace between the different sections of the country. As long, therefore, as the institution of negro slavery lasted, it could not be called a Constitution of States organi- cally " United " ; for it lacked the principle of growth, which charac- terizes all constitutions of government which are really adapted to the progressive needs of a people, if the people have in them any impulse which stimulates them to advance. The unwritten constitution -of Great Britain has this advantage, that a decree of Parliament can alter the whole representative system, annihilating by a vote of the two houses all laws which the Parliament had enacted in former yearj . In Great Britain, therefore, a measure which any Imperial Parliament passes becomes at once the supreme law of the land, though it may nullify a great number of laws which previous Parliaments had passed under different conditions of the sentiment of the nation. Our Con- stitution, on the other hand, provides for the contingencies of growth in the public sentiment only by amendments to the Constitution. These amendments require more than a majority of all the political forces represented in Congress ; and Mr. Calhoun, foreseeing that a collision must eventually occur between the two sections, carried with him, not only the South, but a considerable minority of the North, in resisting any attempt to limit the extension of slavery. On this point the passions and principles of the people of the slave-holding and the majority of the people of the non-slave-holding States came into violent
AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE. Ill
opposition ; and there was no possibility that any amendment to tie Constitution could be ratified, which would represent either the growth of the Southern people in their ever-increasing belief that negro slavery was not only a good in itself, but a good which ought to be extended, or the growth of the Northern people in their ever- increasing hostility both to slavery and its extension. Thus two principles, each organic in its nature, and demanding indefinite devel- ; opment, came into deadly conflict under the mechanical forms of a Constitution which was not organic.
A considerable portion of the speeches in this volume is devoted to denunciations of violations of the Constitution perpetrated by Web ster's political opponents. These violations, again, would seem to prove that written constitutions follow practically the same law of development which marks the progress of the unwritten. By a strained system of Congressional interpretation, the Constitution has been repeatedly compelled to yield to the necessities of the party dominant, for the time, in the government ; and has, if we may believe Webster, been repeatedly changed without being con- stitutionally " amended." The causes which led to the most terri- ble civil war recorded in history were silently working beneath the forms of the Constitution, — both parties, by the way, appeal- ing to its provisions, — while Webster was idealizing it as the utmost which humanity could come to in the way of civil government. In 1848, when nearly all Europe was in insurrection against its rulers, he proudly said that our Constitution promised to be the oldest, as well as the best, in civilized states. Meanwhile the institution of negro slavery was undermining the whole fabric of the Union. The moral division between the South and North was widening into a division between the religion of the two sections. The Southern statesmen, •economists, jurists, publicists, and ethical writers had adapted their opinions to the demands which the defenders of the institution of slavery imposed on the action of the human intellect and conscience ; but it was rather startling to discover that the Christian religion, as taught in the Southern States, was a religion which had no vital con- nection with the Christianity taught in the Northern States. There is nothing more astounding, to a patient explorer of the causes which led to the final explosion, than this opposition of religions. The mere form of the dogmas common to the religion of both sections might be verbally identical ; but a volume of sermons by a Southern doctor of divinity, as far as he touched on the matter of slavery, was as different from one published by his Northern brother, in the essen
Ixii DANIEL WEBSTER
tial moral and humane elements of Christianity, as though they were divided from each other by a gulf as wide as that which yawns between a Druid priest and a Christian clergyman.
The politicians of the South, whether they were the mouthpieces of the ideas and passions of their constituents, or were, as Webster probably thought, more or less responsible for their foolishness and bitterness, were ever eager to precipitate a conflict, which Webster was as eager to prevent, or at least to postpone. It was fortunate for the North, that the inevitable conflict did not come in 1850, when the free States were unprepared for it. Ten years of discussion and prep- aration were allowed ; when the war broke out, it found the North in a position to meet and eventually to overcome the enemies of the Union ; and the Constitution, not as it was, but as it is, now represents a form of government which promises to be permanent; for after passing through its baptism of fire and bloojl, the Constitution con- tains nothing which is not in harmony with any State government founded on the principle of equal rights which it guarantees, and is proof against all attacks but those which may proceed from the extremes of human folly and wickedness. But that, before the civil war, it was preserved so long under conditions which constantly threatened it with destruction, is due in a considerable degree to the circumstance that it found in Daniel Webster its poet as well as its " expounder.' '
In conclusion it may be said that the style of Webster is pre-emi- nently distinguished by manliness. Nothing little, weak, whining, or sentimental can be detected in any page of the six volumes of his works. A certain strength and grandeur of personality is prominent in all his speeches. When he says " I," or " my," he never appears to indulge in the bravado of self-assertion, because the words are felt to express a posi- tive, stalwart, almost colossal manhood, which had already been implied in the close-knit sentences in which he embodied his statements and arguments. He is an eminent instance of the power which character communicates to style. Though evidently proud, self-respecting, and high-spirited, he is ever above mere vanity and egotism. Whenever he gives emphasis to the personal pronoun the reader feels that he had as much earned the right to make his opinion an authority, as he had earned the right to use the words he employs to express his ideas and sentiments. Thus, in the celebrated Smith Will trial, his antagonist, Mr. Choate, quoted a decision of Lord Chancellor Camden. In bis reply, Webster argued against its validity as though it were merely a proposition laid down by Mr. Choate. " But it is not mine, it is Lord
AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE.
Camden's," was the instant retort. Webster paused for half a minnte, and then, with his eye fixed on the presiding judge, he replied : u Lord Camden was a great judge ; he is respected by every American, for he was on our side in the Revolution ; but, may it please your honor, I differ from my Lord Camden." There was hardly a lawyer in the United States who could have made such a statement without exposing himself to ridicule ; but it did not seem at all ridiculous, when the " 1 " stood for Daniel Webster. In his early career as a lawyer, his mode of reasoning was such as to make him practically a thirteenth juror in the panel ; when his fame was fully established, he contrived, in some mysterious way, to seat himself by the side of the judges on the bench, and appear to be consulting with them as a jurist, rather than addressing them as an advocate. The personality of the man was always suppressed until there seemed to be need of asserting it ; and then it was proudly pushed into prominence, though rarely passing beyond the limits which his acknowledged eminence as a statesman and lawyer did not justify him in asserting it. Among the selections in the present volume where his individuality becomes somewhat aggressive, and breaks loose from the restraints ordinarily self-imposed on it, may be mentioned his speech on his Reception at Boston (1842), his Marshfield Speech (1848), and his speech at his Reception at Buffalo (1851). Whatever may be thought of the course of argument pursued in these, they are at least thoroughly penetrated with a manly spirit, — a manliness somewhat haughty and defiant, but still consciously strong in its power to return blow for blow, from whatever quarter the assault may come.
But the real intellectual and moral manliness of Webster underlies all his great orations and speeches, even those where the animating life which gives them the power to persuade, convince, and uplift the reader's mind, seems to be altogether impersonal ; and this plain force of manhood, this sturdy grapple with every question that comes before his understanding for settlement, leads him contemptuously to reject fill the meretricious aids and ornaments of mere rhetoric, and is prominent, among the many exceptional qualities of his large nature, which have given him a high position among the prose-writers of his country as a consummate master of English style.
THE GREAT ORATIONS AND SPEECHES
OF
DANIEL WEBSTER.
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.
* *
ARGUMENT BEFORE THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, AT WASHINGTON, ON THE lOrn OF MARCH, 1818.
[THE action, The Trustees of Dartmouth College v. William H. Woodward, was com- menced in the Court of Common Pleas, Graf ton County, State of New Hampshire, February term, 1817. The declaration was trover for the books of record, original charter, common seal, and other corporate property of the College. The conversion was alleged to have been made on the 7th day of October, 1816. The proper pleas were filed, and by consent the cause was carried directly to the Superior Court of New Hampshire, by appeal, and entered at the May term, 1817. The general issue was pleaded by the defendant, and joined by the plaintiffs. The facts in the case were then agreed upon by the parties, and drawn up in the form of a special verdict, reciting the charter of the College and the acts of the legislature of the State, passed June and December, 1816, by which the said corporation of Dartmouth College was enlarged and improved, and the said charter amended.
The question made in the case was, whether those acts of the legislature were valid and binding upon the corporation, without their acceptance or assent, and not repugnant to the Constitution of the United States. If so, the verdict found for the defendants ; otherwise, it found for the plaintiffs.
The cause was continued to the Sep- tember term of the court in Rockingham County, where it was argued; and at the November term of the same year, in Graf ton County, the opinion of the court was deliv- ered by CJiief Justice Richardson, in favor of the validity and constitutionality of the acts of the legislature; and judgment was accordingly entered for the defendant on the special verdict
Thereupon a writ of error was sued out by the original plaintiffs, to remove the cause to the Supreme Court of the United States ; where it was entered at the term of the 'court holden at Washington on the first Monday of February, 1818.
The cause came on for argument on the 10th day of March, 1818, before all the judges. It was argued by Mr. Webster and Mr. Hopkinson for the plaintiffs in error, and by Mr. Holmes and the Attorney-Gen eral (Wirt) for the defendant in error.
At the term of the court holden in 3Tebni ary, 1819, the opinion of the judges was de- livered by Chief Justice Marshall, declaring the acts of the legislature unconstitutional and invalid, and reversing the judgment of the State Court. The court, with the ex- ception of Mr. Justice Duvall, were unani- mous.
The following was the argument of Mr. Webster for the plaintiffs in error.]
THE general question is, whether the acts of the legislature of New Hamp- shire of the 27th of June, and of the 18th and 26th of December, 1816, are valid and binding on the plaintiffs, with- out their acceptance or assent.
The charter of 1769 created and estab- lished a corporation, to consist of twelve persons, and no more; to be called the " Trustees of Dartmouth College." The preamble to the charter recites, that it ia granted on the application and request of the Rev. Eleazer Wheelbck: That Dr. Wheelock, about the year 1754, estab- lished a charity school, at his own ex>
Sfi
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.
pense, and on his own estate and plan- tation : That for several years, through the assistance of well-disposed persons in America, granted at his solicitation, he had clothed, maintained, and edu- cated a number of native Indians, and employed them afterwards as mission- aries and schoolmasters among the sav- age tribes : That, his design promising to "be useful, he had constituted the Rev. Mr. WMtaker to be his attorney, with power to solicit contributions, in Eng- land, for the further extension, and car- rying on of his undertaking ; and that he had requested the Earl of Dartmouth, Baron Smith, Mr. Thornton, and other gentlemen, to receive such sums as might be contributed, in England, towards supporting his school, "and to be trustees thereof, for his charity ; which these persons had agreed to do : That there- upon Dr. Wheelock had executed to them a deed of trust, in pursuance of such agreement between him and them, and, for divers good reasons, had re- ferred it to these persons to determine the place in which the school should be finally established : And4 to enable them to form a proper decision on tnTs subject, had laid before them the several offers which had been made to him by the sev- eral governments in America, in order to induce him to settle and establish his school within the limits of such govern- ments for their own emolument, and the increase of learning in their respective places, as well as for the furtherance of his general original design : And inas- much as a number of the proprietors of lands in New Hampshire, animated by the example of the Governor himself and others, and in consideration that, without any impediment to its original design, the school might be enlarged and improved, to promote learning among the English, and to supply ministers to the people of that Province, had prom- ised large tracts of land, provided the school should be established in that Province, the persons before mentioned, haling weighed the reasons in favor of the several places proposed, had given. the preference to this Province, and these offers : That Dr. Wheelock therefore
represented the necessity of a legal in- corporation., and proposed that certain* gentlemen in America, whom he had already named and appointed in his will to be trustees of his charity after his de- cease, should compose the corporation. Upon this recital, and in consideration of the laudable original design of Dr. Wheelock, and willing that the best- means of education be established in New Hampshire, for the benefit of the- Province, the king granted the charterv by the advice of his Provincial Council.
The substance of the facts thus re- cited is, that Dr. Wheelock had founded a charity, on funds owned and procured by himself; that he was at that time* the sole dispenser and sole administra- tor, as well as the legal owner, of these funds ; that he had made his will, de- vising this property in trust, to continue- the existence and uses of the school, and appointed trustees ; that, in this state of things, he had been invited to fix his- school permanently in New Hampshire, and to extend the design of it to the education of the youth of that Province; that before he removed his school, or ac- cepted this invitation, which his friends- in England had advised him to accept,, he applied for a charter, to be granted,, not to whomsoever the king or govern- ment of the Province should please, but to such persons as he named and ap- pointed, namely, the persons whom he had already appointed to be the future trustees of his charity by his will.
The charter, or letters patent, then proceed to create such a corporation, and to appoint twelve persons to constitute it, by the name of the *' Trustees of Dartmouth College"; to have perpetual existence as such corporation, and with power to hold and dispose of lands and goods, for the use of the college, with all the ordinary powers of corporations. They are in their discretion to apply the funds and property of the college to the support of the president, tutors, minis- ters, and other officers of the college, and such missionaries and schoolmasters- as they may see fit to employ among the- Indians. There are to be twelve trasteea for ever, and no more ; and they are to have
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.
the right of filling vacancies occurring in their own body. The Rev. Mr. AVheelock is declared to be the founder of the col- lege, and is, by the charter, appointed first president, with power to appoint a successor by his last will. All proper powers of government, superintendence, and visitation are vested in the trustees. They are to appoint and remove all officers at their discretion; to fix their salaries, and assign their duties; and to make all ordinances, orders, and laws for the government of the students. To the end that the persons who had acted as depositaries of the contributions in England, and who had also been con- tributors themselves, might be satisfied of the good use of their contributions, the president was annually, or when re- quired, to transmit to them an account of the progress of the institution and the disbursements of its funds, so long as they should continue to act in that trust. These letters patent are to be good and effectual, in law, against the king, his heirs and successors for ever, without further grant or confirmation; and the trustees are to hold all and singular these privileges, advantages, liberties, and immunities to them and to their successors for ever.
No funds are given to the college by this charter. A corporate existence and capacity are given to the trustees, with the privileges and immunities which have been mentioned, to enable the founder and his associates the better to manage the funds which they themselves had contributed, and such others as they might afterwards obtain.
After the institution thus created and constituted had existed, uninterruptedly and usefully, nearly fifty years, the legis- lature of New Hampshire passed the acts in question.
The first act makes the twelve trustees under the charter, and nine other indi- viduals, to be appointed by the Governor and Council, a corporation, by a new name ; and to this new corporation trans- fers all the property, rights, powers, liber- ties, and privileges of the old corporation ; with further power to establish new colleges and an institute, and to apply
all or any part of the funds to these purposes; subject to the power and con- trol of a board of twenty-five overseers* to be appointed by the Governor and Council.
The second act makes further pro- visions for executing tiie objects of the first, and the last act authorizes the de- fendant, the treasurer of the plaintiffs, to retain and hold their property, against their will.
If these acts are valid, the old corpora • tion is abolished, and a new one created. The first act does, in fact, if it can have any effect, create a new corporation, and transfer to it all the property and fran- chises of the old. The two corporations, are not the same in anything which es- sentially belongs to the existence of a corporation. They have different names,, and different powers, rights, and duties. Their organization is wholly different. The powers of the corporation are not vested in the same, or similar hands. In one, the trustees are twelve, and no- more. In the other, they are twenty- one. In one, the power is in a single board. In the other, it is divided be- tween two boards. Although the act professes to include the old trustees in the new corporation, yet that was with- out their assent, and against their re- monstrance; and no person can be com- pelled to be a member of such a corpora- tion against his will.- It was neither expected nor intended that they should be members of the new corporation. The act itself treats the old corporation as at an end, and, going on the ground that all its functions have ceased, it pro- vides for the first meeting and organiza- tion of the new corporation. It express- ly provides, also, that the new corpora- tion shall have and hold all the property of the old; a provision which would be quite unnecessary upon any other ground, than that the old corporation was dis- solved. But if it could be contended that the effect of these acts was not en- tirely to abolish the old corporation, yet it is manifest that they impair and in- vade the rights, property, and powers of the trustees under the charter, as a cor- poration, and the legal rights, privileges,
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.
and immunities which belong to them, AS individual members of the corporation.
The twelve trustees were the sole legal owners of all the property acquired un- der the charter. By the acts, others are admitted, against their will, to be joint owners. The twelve individuals who are trustees were possessed of all the fran- chises and immunities conferred by the charter. By the acts, nine other trustees sand twenty-Jive overseers are admitted, against their will, to divide these fran- chises and immunities with them.
If, either as a corporation or as indi- viduals, they have any legal rights, this forcible intrusion of others violates those rights, as manifestly as an entire and complete ouster and dispossession. These acts alter the whole constitution of the corporation. They affect the rights of the whole body as a corporation, and the rights of the individuals who compose !tt. They revoke corporate powers and, franchises. They alienate and transfer the property of the college to others. By fche charter, the trustees had a right to fill vacancies in their own number. This is now taken away. They were to con- sist of twelve, and, by express provision, -*>f no more. This is altered. They and »their successors, appointed by them- selves, were for ever to hold the prop- erty- The legislature has found suc- cessors for them, before their seats are vacant. The powers and privileges •which the twelve were to exercise exclu- sively, are now to be exercised by others. By one of the acts, they are subjected to Jheavy penalties if they exercise their •offices, or any of those powers and privi- leges granted them by charter, and which *hey had exercised for fifty years. They are to be punished for not accepting the mew grant and taking its benefits. This, it must be confessed, is rather a sum- mary mode of settling a question of con- stitutional right. Not only are new •trustees forced into the corporation, but aaew trusts and uses are created. The college is turned into a university. Power is given, to create new colleges, and, to authorize any diversion of the funds •wnich may be agreeable to the new $x>ards, sufficient latitude is given by
the undefined power of establishing an institute. To these new colleges, and this institute, the funds contributed by the founder, Dr. "Wheelock, and by the original donors, the Earl of Dartmouth and others, are to be applied, in plain and manifest disregard of the uses to which they were given.
The president, one of the old trustees , had a right to his office, salary, and emoluments, subject to the twelve trus- tees alone. His title to these is now changed, and he is made accountable to new masters. So also all the professors and tutors. If the legislature can at pleasure make these alterations and changes in the rights and privileges of the plaintiffs, it may, with equal pro- priety, abolish these rights and privi- leges altogether. The same power which can do any part of this work can accom- plish the whole. And, indeed, the ar- gument on which these acts have been hitherto defended goes altogether on the ground, that this is such a corporation as the legislature may abolish at pleas- ure ; and that its members have no rights, liberties, franchises, property, or privileges , which the legislature may not revoke, annul, alienate, or transfer to others, whenever it sees fit.
It will be contended by the plaintiffs, that these acts are not valid and binding on them without their assent, —
1. Because they are against common right, and the Constitution of New Hampshire.
2. Because they are repugnant to the Constitution of the United States.
I am aware of the limits which bound the jurisdiction of the court in this case, and that on this record nothing can be decided but the single question, whether these acts are repugnant to the Consti- tution of the United States. Yet it may assist in forming an opinion of their true nature and character to compare them with those fundamental principles introduced into the State governments t for the purpose of limiting the exercise of the legislative power, and which the Constitution of Sew Hampshire ex- presses with great fulness and occu* racy.
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.
It is not too much to assert, that the legislature of New Hampshire would not have been competent to pass the acts in question, and to make them binding on the plaintiffs without their assent, even if there had been, in the Constitution of Kew Hampshire, or of the United States, no special restriction on their power, be- cause these acts are not the exercise of a power properly legislative.1 Their effect and object are to take away, from one, rights, property, and franchises, and to grant them to another. This is not the exercise of a legislative power. To jus- tify the taking away of vested rights there must be a forfeiture, to adjudge upon and declare which is the proper province of the judiciary. Attainder and confiscation are acts of sovereign power, not acts of legislation. The British Par- liament, among other unlimited pow- ers, claims that of altering and vacating charters ; not as an act of ordinary legis- lation, but of uncontrolled authority. It is theoretically omnipotent. Yet, in modern times, it has very rarely at- tempted the exercise of this power. In a celebrated instance, those who asserted this power in Parliament vindicated its exercise only in a case in which it could be shown, 1st. That the charter in ques- tion was a charter of political power; 2d. That there was a great and over- ruling state necessity, justifying the vio- lation of the charter ; 3d. That the char- ter had been abused and justly forfeited.2 The bill affecting this charter did not pass. Its history is well known. The act which afterwards did pass, passed with the assent of the corporation. Even in the worst times, this power of Parlia- ment to repeal and rescind charters has not often been exercised. The illegal proceedings in the reign of Charles the Second were under color of law. Judg- ments of forfeiture were obtained in the courts. Such was the case of the quo warranto against the city of London, and
1 Calder et ux. v. Bull, 3 Dallas, 38G.
2 Annual Register, 1784, p. 160; Parl. Reg. 1783 ; Mr. Burke's Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill, Burke's Works, Vol. II. pp. 414, 417, 467, 468, 486.
8 1 Black. 472, 473,
the proceedings by which the charter of Massachusetts was vacated.
The legislature of ^ew Hampshire lia* no more power over the rights of thfe plaintiffs than existed somewhere, im some department of government, before the Revolution. The British Parliament could not have annulled or revoked tMs- grant as an act of ordinary legislation. If it had done it at all, it could only have been in virtue of that sovereign power, called omnipotent, which does- not belong to any legislature in the- United States. The legislature of New Hampshire has the same power over this charter which belonged to the king who granted it, and no more. By the law of England, the power to create cor- porations is a part of the royal preroga- tive.8 By the Revolution, this power may be considered as having devolved on the legislature of the State, and it has accordingly been exercised by the- legislature. But the king cannot abol- ish a corporation, or new-model it, or alter its powers, without its assent. This is the acknowledged and well-knowi* doctrine of the common law. u What- ever might have been the notion in for- mer times," says Lord Mansfield, " it i» most certain now that the corporation* of the universities are lay corporations; and that the crown cannot take away from them any rights that have bee» formerly subsisting in them under old charters or prescriptive usage. ' ' 4 After forfeiture duly found, the king may re- grant the franchises ; but a grant of franchises already granted, and of which no forfeiture has been found, is void.
Corporate franchises can only be for- feited by trial and judgment.5 In cast of a new charter or grant to an existing corporation, it may accept or reject it as- it pleases.6 It may accept such part of the grant as it chooses, and reject the rest.7 In the very nature of things, a charter cannot be forced upon anybody*.
4 3 Burr. 1656.
6 King u. Pasmore, 3 Term Rep. 244.
6 Bang v. Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, $ Burr. 1656 ; 3 Term Rep. 240, — Lord Kenyon.
7 3 Burr. 1661, and King i?, Pasmore, «&»• wpra.
6
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.
No one can be compelled to accept a grant; and without acceptance the grant is necessarily void.1 It cannot be pre- tended that the legislative, as successor to the king in this part of his preroga- tive, has any power to revoke, vacate, or alter this charter. If, therefore, the legislature has not this power by any specific grant contained in the Constitu- tion; nor as included in its ordinary legislative powers ; nor by reason of its succession to the prerogatives of the crown in this particular, on what ground would the authority to pass these acts rest, even if there were no prohibitory clauses in the Constitution and the Bill of Bights ?
But there are prohibitions in the Con- stitution and Bill of Rights of ISTew Hampshire, introduced for the purpose of limiting the legislative power and pro- tecting the rights and property of the citizens. One prohibition is, "that no person shall be deprived of his property, immunities, or privileges, put out of the protection of the law, or deprived of Ms life, liberty, or estate, but by judg- ment of his peers or the law of the land."
In the opinion, however, which was given in the court below, it is denied that the trustees under the charter had any property, immunity, liberty, or privilege in this corporation, within the meaning of this prohibition in the Bill of Bights. It is said that it is a public corporation and public property; that the trustees have no greater interest in it than any other individuals ; that it is not private property, which they can sell or transmit to their heirs, and that there- fore they have no interest in it; that their office is a public trust, like that of the Governor or a judge, and that they have no more concern in the property of the college than the Governor in the property of the State, or than the judges in the fines which they impose on the culprits at their bar ; that it is nothing to them whether their powers shall be extended or lessened, any more than it is to their honors whether their jurisdic-
i Ellis i?. Marshall, 2 Mass. Rep. 277; 1 Kyd an Corporations, 65, 66.
tion shall be enlarged or diminished. It is necessary, therefore, to inquire into the true nature and character of the cor- poration which was created by the char- ter of 1769.
There are divers sorts of corporations ; and it may be safely admitted that the legislature has more power over some than others.2 Some corporations are for government and political arrangement; such, for example, as cities, counties, and towns in New England. These may be changed and modified as public convenience may require, due regard be- ing always had to the rights of property. Of such corporations, all who live with- in the limits are of course obliged to be members, and to submit to the duties which the law imposes on them as such. Other civil corporations are for the ad- vancement of trade and business, such as banks, insurance companies, and the like. These are created, not by general law, but usually by grant. Their con- stitution is special. It is such as the legislature sees fit to give, and the gran- tees to accept.
The corporation in question is not a civil, although it is a lay corporation. It is an eleemosynary corporation. It is a private charity, originally founded and endowed by an individual, with a char- ter obtained for it at his request, for the better administration of his charity. " The eleemosynary sort of corporations are such as are constituted for the per- petual distributions of the free alms or bounty of the founder of them, to such persons as he has directed. Of this are all hospitals for the maintenance of the poor, sick, and impotent; and all col- leges both in our universities and out of them. ' J 8 Eleemosynary corporations are for the management of private property, according to the will of the donors They are private corporations. A col- lege is as much a private corporation a.s a hospital; especially a college founded, as this was, by private bounty. A col- lege is a charity. " The establishment of learning," says Lord Hardwicke, u in a charity, and so considered in the stafc*
2 1 Wooddeson, 474; 1 Black. 467.
s 1 Black. 471.
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.
•ate of Elizabeth. A devise to a college, for their benefit, is a laudable charity, and deserves encouragement." l
The legal signification of a charity is •derived chiefly from the statute 43 Eliz. ch. 4. " Those purposes," says Sir Wil- liam Grant, " are considered charitable which that statute enumerates." 2 Col- leges are enumerated as charities in that statute. The government, in these cases, lends its aid to perpetuate the be- neficent intention of the donor, by grant- ing a charter under which his private -charity shall continue to be dispensed after his death. This is done either by incorporating the objects of the charity, &s, for instance, the scholars in a college or the poor in a hospital, or by incorpo- rating those who are to be governors or trustees of the charity.8 In cases of the first sort, the founder is, by the common law, visitor. In early times it became a maxim, that he who gave the property might regulate it in future. " Cujus est dare, ejus est disponere." This right of visitation descended from the founder to his heir as a right of property, and pre- cisely as his other property went to his heir ; and in default of heirs it went to the king, as all other property goes to the king for the want of heirs. The right of visitation arises from the prop- erty. It grows out of the endowment. The founder may, if he please, part with it at the time when he establishes the charity, and may vest it in others. Therefore, if he chooses that governors, trustees, or overseers should be appointed in the charter, he may cause it to be -done, and his power of visitation may be transferred to them, instead of descend- ing to his heirs. The persons thus as- signed or appointed by the founder will be visitors, with all the powers of the founder, in exclusion of his heir.4 The right of visitation, then, accrues to them, as a matter of property, by the gift, transfer, or appointment of the founder. This is a private right, which they can •assert in all legal modes, and in. which they have the same protection of the law
i 1 Ves. 537. 2 9 Ves. Jim. 405.
* 1 Wood. 474 * 1 Black. 471.
« 2 Term Rep. 350, 351.
as in all other rights. As visitors they may make rules, ordinances, and stat- utes, and alter and repeal them, as far as permitted so to do by the charter. Although the charter proceeds from tha crown or the government, it is considered as the will of the donor. It is obtained at his request. He imposes it as the rule which is to prevail in the dispensa- tion of his bounty in all future times. The king or government which grants the charter is not thereby the founder, but he who furnishes the funds. The gift of the revenues is the founda- tion.6
The leading case on this subject is Phillips v. Bury.1 This was an eject- ment brought to recover the rectory- house, &c. of Exeter College in Oxford. The question was whether the plaintiff or defendant was legal rector. Exeter College was founded by an individual, and incorporated by a charter granted by Queen Elizabeth. The controversy turned upon the power of the visitor, and, in the discussion of the cause, the nature of college charters and corpora- tions was very fully considered. Lord Holt's judgment, copied from his own manuscript, is found in 2 Term Reports. 346. The following is an extract: —
"That we may the better apprehend the nature of a visitor, we are to consider that there are in law two sorts of corpora- tions aggregate ; such as are for public gov- ernment, and such as are for private charity. Those that are for the public government of a town, city, mystery, or the like, being for public advantage, are to be governed according to the laws of the land. If they make any particular private laws and con- stitutions, the validity and justice of them is examinable in the king's courts. Of these there are no particular private founders, and consequently no particular visitor; there are no patrons of these ; therefore, if no provision be in the charter how the suc- cession shall continue, the law supplieth the defect of that constitution, and saith it shall be by election ; as mayor, aldermen, com- mon council, and the like. But private and particular corporations for charity, founded and endowed by private persons, are sub- ject to the private government of those who erect them ; and therefore, if there be
« 1 Black. 480.
7 ILord Eaymond, 5; Comb. 265; Holt.
715; 1 Shower, 360; 4 Mod. 106; Skinn. 44?
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.
no visitor appointed by the founder, the law appoints the founder and his heirs to be visitors, who are to act and proceed accord- ing to the particular laws and constitutions assigned them by the founder. It is now admitted on all hands that the founder is patron, and, as founder, is visitor, if no par- ticular visitor be assigned ; so that patron- age and visitation are necessary consequents one upon another. For this visitatorial power was not introduced by any canons or constitutions ecclesiastical (as was said by a learned gentleman whom I have in my eye, in his argument of this case) ; it is an appointment of law. It ariseth from the property which the founder had in the lands assigned to support the charity ; and as he is the author of the charity, the law gives him and his heirs a visitatorial power, that is, an authority to inspect the actions and regulate the behavior of the members that partake of the charity. For it is fit the members that are endowed, and that have the charity bestowed upon them, should not be left to themselves, but pursue the intent and design of him that bestowed it upon them. Now, indeed, where the poor, or those that receive the charity, are not incorpo- rated, but there are certain trustees who dispose of the charity, there is no visitor , because the in- terest of the revenue is not vested in the poor that have the benefit of the chanty, but they are sub- ject to the orders and directions of the trustees. But where they who are *o enjoy the ben- efit of the charity are incorporated, there to prevent all perverting of the charity, or to compose differences that may happen among them, there is by law a visitatorial power ; and it being a creature of the founder's own, it is reason that he and his heirs should have that power, unless by the founder it is vested in some other. Now there is no manner of difference between a college and a hospital, except only in de- gree. A hospital is for those that are poor, and mean, and low, and sickly ,• a college is for another sort of indigent persons ; but it hath another intent, to study in and breed up persons in the world that have no other- wise to live ; but still it is as much within the reasons as hospitals. And if in a hos- pital the master and poor are incorporated, it is a college having a common seal to act by, although it hath not the name of a col- lege (which always supposeth a corpora- tion), because it is of an inferior degree; and in the one case and in the other there must be a visitor, either the founder and his heirs or one appointed by him ; and both are eleemosynary."
Lord Holt concludes his whole argu- ment by again repeating, that that col- lege was a private corporation, and that the founder had a right to appoint a vis- 1 1 Lord Raymond,. 9.
itor, and to give him such power as he saw fit.1
The learned Bishop Stillingfleet's ar- gument in the same cause, as a member of the House of Lords, when it was there heard, exhibits very clearly the nature of colleges and similar corpora- tions. It is to the following effect 44 That this absolute and conclusive power of visitors is no more than the law hath appointed in other cases, upon commissions of charitable uses : that the common law, and not any ecclesiastical canons, do place the power of visitation in the founder and his heirs, unless he settle it upon others: that although cor- porations for public government be sub- ject to the courts of Westminster Hall, which have no particular or special visitors, yet corporations for charity, founded and endowed by private per- sons, are subject to the rule and govern- ment of those that erect them; but where the persons to whom the charity is given are not incorporated, there is no- such visitatorial power, because the in- terest of the revenue is not invested in them ; but where they are, the right of visitation ariseth from the foundation, and the founder may convey it to whom and in what manner he pleases; and the visitor acts as founder, and by the same authority which he had, and consequently is no more accountable than he had been : that the king by his charter can make a society to be incorporated so as to have the rights belonging to persons, as to legal capacities: that colleges, although founded by private persons, are yet in- corporated by the king's charter; but al- though the kings by their charter made the colleges to be such in law, that is, to be legal corporations, yet they left to the particular founders authority to appoint what statutes they thought fit for the regulation of them. And not only the statutes, but the appointment of visitors, was left to them, and the manner of gov- ernment, and the several conditions on which any persons were to be made or continue partakers of their bounty." 2
These opinions received the sanction
2 1 Burn's Eccles. Law, 443. Appendix, No. 3
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.
of tiie House of Lords, and they seem to be settled and undoubted law. Where there is a charter, vesting proper powers in trustees, or governors, they are visit- ors ; and there is no control in any body else; except only that the courts of equity or of law will interfere so far as to preserve the revenues and prevent the perversion of the funds, and to keep the visitors within their prescribed bounds. "If there be a charter with proper powers, the charity must be regulated in the manner prescribed by the charter. There is no ground for the controlling interposition of the courts of chancery. The interposition of the courts, there- fore, in those instances in which the charities were founded on charters or by act of Parliament, and a visitor or gov- ernor and trustees appointed, must be referred to the general jurisdiction of the courts in all cases in which a trust conferred appears to have been abused, and not to an original right to direct the management of the charity, or the con- duct of the governors or trustees." l 41 i The original of all visitatorial power is the property of the donor, and the power every one has to dispose, direct, and reg- ulate his own property ; like the case of patronage; cujus est dare-) &c. There- fore, if either the crown or the subject creates an eleemosynary foundation, and vests the charity in the persons who are to receive the benefit of it, since a con- test might arise about the government of it, the law allows the founder or his heirs, or the person specially appointed by him to be visitor, to determine con- cerning his own creature. If the charity is not vested in the persons who are to partake, but in trustees for their benefit, no visitor can arise by implication, but the trustees have that power." 2
' ' There is nothing better established," says Lord Commissioner Eyre, uthan that this court does not entertain a general jurisdiction, or regulate and
1 2 Forb. 205, 206.
2 Green » Rutherforth, 1 Ves. 472, per Lord Hardwicke.
8 Attorney -General v. Foundling Hospital, 2 Ves. Jun. 47. See also 2 Kyd on Corpora- tions, 195 ; Cooper's Equity Pleading, 292.
control charities established "by charter. There the establishment is fixed, and determined; and the court has no power to vary it. If the governors established for the regulation of it are not those who have the management of the rev- enue, this court has no jurisdiction, and if it is ever so much abused, as far as it respects the jurisdiction of thia court it is without remedy; but if those established as governors have also the management of the revenues, this court does assume a jurisdiction of necessity, so far as they are to be considered as trustees of the revenue."8
"The foundations of colleges," says Lord Mansfield, "are to be considered in two views ; namely, as they are cw- porations and as they are eleemosynary. As eleemosynary, they are the creatures of the founder; he may delegate Ms power, either generally or specially; he may prescribe particular modes and man- ners, as to the exercise of part of it. If he makes a general visitor (as by the general words visitator szV), the person so constituted has all incidental power ; but he may be restrained as to particular in- stances. The founder may appoint a special visitor for a particular purpose, and no f urther. The founder may make a general visitor; and yet appoint an in- ferior particular power, to be executed without going to the visitor in the first instance."4 And even if the king be founder, if he grant a charter, incorpo- rating trustees and governors, they are visitors, and the king cannot visit.5 A subsequent donation, or ingrafted fel- lowship, falls under the same general visitatorial power, if not otherwise spe- cially provided.6
In New England, and perhaps through- out the United States, eleemosynary cor- porations have been generally established in the latter mode; that is, by incorpo- rating governors, or trustees, and vesting in them the right of visitation. Small
4 St. John's College, Cambridge, u. Toding- ton, 1 Burr. 200.
5 Attorney-General w. Middleton, 2 Ves. 328.
6 Green v, Rutherforth, ubi supra, St. John'* College v, Todington, ubi supra.
10
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.
variations may have been In some In- stances adopted; as in the case of Har- vard College, where some power of inspection is given to the overseers, but not, strictly speaking, a visitatorial power, which still belongs, it is appre- hended, to the fellows or members of the corporation. In general, there are IB any donors. A charter is obtained, comprising them all, or some of them, and such others as they choose to include, with the right of appointing successors. They are thus the visitors of their own •charity, and appoint others, such as they may see fit, to exercise the same office in time to come. All such corporations Are private. The case before the court is clearly that of an eleemosynary cor- poration. It is, in the strictest legal sense, a private charity. In King v. Si. Catherine's Hall,1 that college is called a private eleemosynary lay cor- poration. It was endowed by a private founder, and incorporated by letters patent. And in the same manner was Dartmouth College founded and incor- porated. Dr. Wheelock is declared by the charter to be its founder. It was established by him, on funds contributed and collected by himself.
As such founder, he had a right of visitation, which he assigned to the trus- tees, and they received it by his consent and appointment, and held it under the •charter.2 He appointed these trustees visitors, and in that respect to take place of his heir ; as he might have appointed devisees, to take his estate instead of his heir. Little, probably, did he think, at that time, that the legislature would ever take away this property and these privi- leges, and give them to others. Little did he suppose that this charter secured to him and his successors no legal rights. Little did the other donors think so. If they had, the college would have been, what the university is now, a thing upon paper, existing only in name.
The numerous academies in New England have been established substan- tially in the same manner. They hold their property by the same tenure, and
* 4 Term Rep. 233.
no other. Nor has Harvard College any surer title than Dartmouth College. It may to-day have more friends ; but to- morrow it may have more enemies. Its legal rights are the same. So also of Yale College; and, indeed, of all the others. When the legislature gives to these institutions, it may and does ac- company its grants with such conditions as it pleases. The grant of lands by the legislature of New Hampshire to Dartmouth College, in 1789, was accom- panied with various conditions. When donations are made, by the legislature or others, to a charity already existing, without any condition, or the specifica- tion of any new use, the donation fol- lows the nature of the charity. Hence the doctrine, that all eleemosynary cor- porations are private bodies. They are founded by private persons, and on pri- vate property. The public cannot be charitable in these institutions. It is not the money of the public, but of pri- vate persons, which is dispensed. It may be public, that is general, in its uses and advantages ; and the State may very laudably add contributions of its own to the funds ; but it is still private in the tenure of the property, and in the right of administering the funds.
If the doctrine laid down by Lord Holt, and the House of Lords, in Phillips v. Bury, and recognized and es- tablished in all the other cases, be cor- rect, the property of this college was private property; it was vested in the trustees by the charter, and to be ad- ministered by them, according to the will of the founder and donors, as ex- pressed in the charter. They were also visitors of the charity, in the most ample sense. They had, therefore, as they contend, privileges, property, and im- munities, within the true meaning of the BiU of Rights. They had rights, and still have them, which they "can assert against the legislature, as well as against other wrong-doers. It makes no difference, that the estate is holder? for certain trusts. The legal estate is still theirs. They have a right in tha
2 Black, ubi supra
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.
property, and they have a right of visit- ing and superintending the trust; and this is an object of legal protection, as much as any other right. The charter declares that the powers conferred on the trustees are " privileges, advantages, liberties, and immunities"; and that they shall be for ever holden by them and their successors. The Itfew Hamp- shire Bill of Rights declares that no one shall be deprived of his " property, priv- ileges, or immunities," but by judg- ment of his peers, or the law of the land. The argument on the other side is, that, although these terms may mean some- thing in the Bill of Eights, they mean nothing in this charter. But they are terms of legal signification, and very properly used in the charter. They are equivalent with franchises. Blackstone says that franchise and liberty are used as synonymous terms. And after enu- merating other liberties and franchises, he says: " It is likewise a franchise for a number of persons to be incorporated and subsist as a body politic, with a power to maintain perpetual succession and do other corporate acts; and each individual member of such a corporation is also said to have a franchise or free- dom."1
Liberties is the term used in Magna Charta as including franchises, privi- leges, immunities, and all the rights which belong to that class. Professor Sullivan says, the term signifies the "privileges that some of the subjects, whether single persons or bodies cor- porate, have above others by the lawful grant of the king; as the chattels of felons or outlaws, and the lands and privileges of corporations." 2
The privilege, then, of being a mem- ber of a corporation, under a lawful grant, and of exercising the rights and powers of such member, is such a privi- lege, liberty i or franchise, as has been the object of legal protection, and the subject of a legal interest, from the time of Magna Charta to the present moment. The plaintiffs have such an interest in
i 2 Black. Com. 37. * Sull. 41st Lect.
this corporation, individually, as they could assert and maintain in a court of law, not as agents of the public, but ;n their own right. Each trustee has a franchise, and if he be disturbed in the enjoyment of it, he would have redress, on appealing to the law, as promptly as for any other injury. If the other trus- tees should conspire against any one of them to prevent his equal right and voice in the appointment of a president or professor, or in the passing of any statute or ordinance of the college, he would be entitled to his action, for de- priving him of his franchise. It makes no difference, that this property is to be holden and administered, and these franchises exercised, for the purpose of diffusing learning. ISTo principle and no case establishes any such distinction. The public may be benefited by the use of this property. But this does not change the nature of the property, or the rights of the owners. The object of the charter may be public good; so it is in all other corporations ; and this would as well justify the resumption or viola- tion of the grant in any other case as in this. In the case of an advowson, the use is public, and the right cannot be turned to any private benefit or emolu- ment. It is nevertheless a legal private right, and the property of the owner, as emphatically as his freehold. The rights and privileges of trustees, visit- ors, or governors of incorporated col- leges, stand on the same foundation. They are so considered, both by Lord Holt and Lord Hardwicke.8
To contend that the rights of the plaintiffs may be taken away, because they derive from them, no pecuniary benefit or private emolument, or be- cause they cannot be transmitted to their heirs, or would not be assets to pay their debts, is taking an extremely narrow view of the subject. According to this notion, the case would be differ- ent, if, in the charter, they had stipu- lated for a commission on the disburse- ment of the funds ; and they have ceased
8 Phillips v. Bury, and Green v. Kuther forth, ubi supra. See also 2 Black. 21.
12
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.
to have any interest in the property, because they have undertaken to ad- minister it gratuitously.
It cannot be necessary to say much in refnt ation of the idea, that there cannot be a legal interest, or ownership, in any thing which does not yield a pecuniary profit; as if the law regarded no rights but the rights of money, and of visible, tangible property. Of what nature are all rights of suffrage? No elector has a particular personal interest; but each has a legal right, to be exercised at his own discretion, and it cannot be taken away from. him. The exercise of this right directly and very materially affects the public ; much more so than the ex- ercise of the privileges of a trustee of this college. Consequences of the ut- most magnitude may sometimes depend on the exercise of the right of suffrage by one or a few electors. Nobody was ever yet heard to contend, however, that on that account the public might take away the right, or impair it. This notion appears to be borrowed from no better source than the repudiated doc- trine of the three judges in the Ayles- bury case.1 That was an action against a returning officer for refusing the plain- tiff's vote, in the election of a member of Parliament. Three of the judges of the King's Bench held, that the action could not be maintained, because, among other objections, " it was not any mat- ter of profit, either in presently or in futuro." It would not enrich the plain- tiff in presenti^ nor would it in futuro go to his heirs, or answer to pay his debts. But Lord Holt and the House of Lords were of another opinion. The judg- ment of the three judges was reversed, aid the doctrine they held, having been exploded for a century, seems now for the first time to be revived.
Individuals have a right to use their own property for purposes of benevo- lence, either towards the public, or towards other individuals. They have a right to exercise this benevolence in such lawful manner as they may choose ; arid when the government has induced
i Artxby v. White, 2 Lord Raymond, 938.
and excited it, by contracting to give perpetuity to the stipulated manner ot exercising it, it is not law, but violence, to rescind this contract, and seize on the property. Whether the State will grant these franchises, and under what condi- tions it will grant them, it decides for itself. But when once granted, the con- stitution holds them to be sacred, till forfeited for just cause.
That all property, of which the use may be beneficial to the public, belongs therefore to the public, is quite a new doctrine. It has no precedent, and is supported by no known principle. Dr. Wheelock might have answered his pur- poses, in this case, by executing a pri- vate deed of trust. He might have conveyed his property to trustees, for precisely such uses as are described in this charter. Indeed, it appears that he had contemplated the establishing of his school in that manner, and had made his will, and devised the property to the same persons who were after- wards appointed trustees in the charter. Many literary and other charitable in- stitutions are founded in that manner, and the trust is renewed, and conferred on other persons, from tune to time, as occasion may require. In such a case, no lawyer would or could say, that the legislature might divest the trustees, constituted by deed or will, seize upon the property, and give it to other per- sons, for other purposes. And does the granting of a charter, which is only done to perpetuate the trust in a more convenient manner, make any differ- ence? Does or can this change the nature of the charity, and turn it into a public political corporation V Happily, we are not without authority on this point. It has been considered and ad- judged. Lord Hardwicke says, in so many words, " The charter of the crown cannot make a charity more or less pub- lic, but only more permanent than it would otherwise be."2
The granting of the corporation is but making the trust perpetual, and does not alter the nature of the charity. The
2 Attorney-General v. Pearce, 3 Atk. 87.
THE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CASE.
very object sought in obtaining such, charter, and in giving property to such a corporation, is to make and keep it private property, and to clothe it with all the security and inviolability of pri- vate property. -The intent is, that there shall be a legal private ownership, and that the legal owners shall maintain and protect the property, for the benefit of those for whose use it was designed. Who ever endowed the public? Who ever appointed a legislature to adminis- ter his charity? Or who ever heard, before, that a gift to a college, or a hos- pital, or an asylum, was, in reality, nothing but a gift to the State?
The State of Vermont is a principal donor to Dartmouth College. The lands given lie in that State. This appears in the special verdict. Is Vermont to be considered as having intended a gift to the State of New Hampshire in this case, as, it has been said, is to be the reasonable construction of all donations to the college? The legislature of New Hampshire affects to represent the pub- lic, and therefore claims a right to con- trol all property destined to public use. What hinders Vermont from consider- ing herself equally the representative of the public, and from resuming her grants, at her own pleasure? Her right to do so is less doubtful than the power of New Hampshire to pass the laws in question.
" In University v. Foy^ the Supreme Court of North Carolina pronounced un- constitutional and void a law repealing a grant to the University of North Caro- lina, "although that university was origi- nally erected and endowed by a statute of the State. That case was a grant of lands, and the court decided that it could not be resumed. This is the grant of a power and capacity to hold lands. Where is the difference of the cases, upon principle?
In Terrett v. Taylor* this court de- cided that a legislative grant or confir- mation of lands, for the purposes of moral and religious instruction, could mo more be rescinded than other grants.
2 Haywnod's Rep.
2 9 Oanch. 43.
The nature of the use was not holden fxi make any difference. A grant to a par- ish or church, for