Websters March 7th Speech/Secession | Page 4

large
one and involves this other, did they know what was going on in the
South? Did they realize that the Union on March 6, 1850, was actually
at a parting of the ways,--that destruction or Civil War formed an
imminent issue?
Many of those who condemned compromise may be absolved from the
charge of insincerity on the ground that they did not care whether the
Union was preserved or riot. Your true blue Abolitionist was very little
of a 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