Websters March 7th Speech/Secession | Page 3

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WEBSTER'S SEVENTH OF MARCH SPEECH AND THE
SECESSION MOVEMENT, 1850
By Herbert Darling Foster
With foreword by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
American Historical Review Vol. XXVII., No. 2
January, 1922

FOREWORD
It is very curious that much of the history of the United States in the
Forties and Fifties of the last century has vanished from the general
memory. When a skilled historian reopens the study of Webster's
"Seventh of March speech" it is more than likely that nine out of ten
Americans will have to cudgel their wits endeavoring to make quite
sure just where among our political adventures that famous oration fits
in. How many of us could pass a satisfactory examination on the
antecedent train of events--the introduction in Congress of that Wilmot
Proviso designed to make free soil of all the territory to be acquired in
the Mexican War; the instant and bitter reaction of the South; the
various demands for some sort of partition of the conquered area
between the sections, between slave labor and free labor; the
unforeseen intrusion of the gold seekers of California in 1849, and their
unauthorized formation of a new state based on free labor; the flaming
up of Southern alarm, due not to one cause but to many, chiefly to the
obvious fact that the free states were acquiring preponderance in
Congress; the southern threats of secession; the fury of the
Abolitionists demanding no concessions to the South, come what might;
and then, just when a rupture seemed inevitable, when Northern
extremists and Southern extremists seemed about to snatch control of
their sections, Webster's bold play to the moderates on both sides, his
scheme of compromise, announced in that famous speech on the

seventh of March, 1850?
Most people are still aware that Webster was harshly criticized for
making that speech. It is dimly remembered that the Abolitionists
called him "Traitor", refusing to attribute to him any motive except the
gaining of Southern support which might land him in the Presidency.
At the time--so bitter was factional suspicion!--this view gained many
adherents. It has not lost them all, even now.
This false interpretation of Webster turns on two questions--was there a
real danger of secession in 1850? Was Webster sincere in deriving his
policy from a sense of national peril, not from self-interest? In the
study which follows Professor Foster makes an adequate case for
Webster, answering the latter question. The former he deals with in a
general way establishing two things, the fact of Southern readiness to
secede, the attendant fact that the South changed its attitude after the
Seventh of March. His limits prevent his going on to weigh and
appraise the sincerity of those fanatics who so furiously maligned
Webster, who created the tradition that he had cynically sold out to the
Southerners. Did they believe their own fiction? The question is a