Websters March 7th Speech/Secession | Page 4

materialist. Nor did he have primarily a crusading interest in the condition of the blacks. He was introspective. He wanted the responsibility for slavery taken off his own soul. As later events were to prove, he was also pretty nearly a pacifist; war for the Union, pure and simple, made no appeal to him. It was part of Webster's insight that he divined this, that he saw there was more pacifism than natural ardor in the North of 1850, saw that the precipitation of a war issue might spell the end of the United Republic. Therefore, it was to circumvent the Northern pacifists quite as much as to undermine the Southern expansionists that he offered compromise and avoided war.
But what of those other detractors of Webster, those who were for the Union and yet believed he had sold out? Their one slim defense is the conviction that the South did not mean what it said, that Webster, had he dared offend the South, could have saved the day--from their point of view--without making concessions. Professor Foster, always ready to do scrupulous justice, points out the dense ignorance in each section of the other, and there lets the matter rest. But what shall we say of a frame of mind, which in that moment of crisis, either did not read the Southern newspapers, or reading them and finding that the whole South was netted over by a systematically organized secession propaganda made no attempt to gauge its strength, scoffed at it all as buncombe! Even later historians have done the same thing. In too many cases they have assumed that because the compromise was followed by an apparent collapse of the secession propaganda, the propaganda all along was without reality. We know today that the propaganda did not collapse. For strategic reasons it changed its policy. But it went on steadily growing and gaining ground until it triumphed in 1861. Webster, not his foolish opponents, gauged its strength correctly in 1850.
The clew to what actually happened in 1850 lies in the course of such an ardent Southerner as, for example, Langdon Cheeves. Early in the year, he was a leading secessionist, but at the close of the year a leading anti-secessionist. His change of front, forced upon him by his own thinking about the situation was a bitter disappointment to himself. What animated him was a deep desire to take the whole South out of the Union. When, at the opening of the year, the North seemed unwilling to compromise, he, and many another, thought their time had come. At the first Nashville Convention he advised a general secession, assuming that Virginia, "our premier state," would lead the movement and when Virginia later in the year swung over from secession to anti-secession, Cheeves reluctantly changed his policy. The compromise had not altered his views--broadly speaking it had not satisfied the Lower South--but it had done something still more eventful, it had so affected the Upper South that a united secession became for a while impossible. Therefore, Cheeves and all like him--and they were the determining factor of the hour--resolved to bide their time, to wait until their propaganda had done its work, until the entire South should agree to go out together. Their argument, all preserved in print, but ignored by historians for sixty years thereafter, was perfectly frank. As one of them put it, in the face of the changed attitude of Virginia, "to secede now would be to secede from the South."
Here is the aspect of Webster's great stroke that was so long ignored. He did not satisfy the whole South. He did not make friends for himself of Southerners generally. What he did do was to drive a wedge into the South, to divide it temporarily against itself. He arrayed the Upper South against the Lower and thus because of the ultimate purposes of men like Cheeves, with their ambition to weld the South into a genuine unit, he forced them all to stand still, and thus to give Northern pacifism a chance to ebb, Northern nationalism a chance to develop. A comprehensive brief for the defense on this crucial point in the interpretation of American history, is Professor Foster's contribution.
NATHANIEL WRIGHT STEPHENSON

WEBSTER'S SEVENTH OF MARCH SPEECH AND THE SECESSION MOVEMENT, 1850
The moral earnestness and literary skill of Whittier, Lowell, Garrison, Phillips, and Parker, have fixed in many minds the antislavery doctrine that Webster's 7th of March speech was "scandalous, treachery", and Webster a man of little or no "moral sense", courage, or statesmanship. That bitter atmosphere, reproduced by Parton and von Holst, was perpetuated a generation later by Lodge.[1]
[1] Cf. Parton with Lodge on intellect, morals, indolence, drinking, 7th of March speech, Webster's favorite things in England; references, note 63, below.
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