Websters March 7th Speech/Secession | Page 5

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.
Since 1900, over fifty publications throwing light on Webster and the
Secession movement of 1850 have appeared, nearly a score containing
fresh contemporary evidence. These twentieth-century
historians--Garrison of Texas, Smith of Williams, Stephenson of
Charleston and Yale, Van Tyne, Phillips, Fisher in his True Daniel
Webster, or Ames, Hearon, and Cole in their monographs on Southern
conditions--many of them born in one section and educated in another,
brought into broadening relations with Northern and Southern
investigators, trained in the modern historical spirit and freed by the
mere lapse of time from much of the passion of slavery and civil war,
have written with less emotion and more knowledge than the

abolitionists, secessionists, or their disciples who preceded Rhodes.
Under the auspices of the American Historical Association have
appeared the correspondence of Calhoun, of Chase, of Toombs,
Stephens, and Cobb, and of Hunter of Virginia. Van Tyne's Letters of
Webster (1902), including hundreds hitherto unpublished, was further
supplemented in the sixteenth volume of the "National Edition" of
Webster's Writings and Speeches (1903). These two editions contain,
for 1850 alone, 57 inedited letters.
Manuscript collections and newspapers, comparatively unknown to
earlier writers, have been utilized in monographs dealing with the
situation in 1850 in South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama,
North Carolina, Louisiana, and Tennessee, published by. universities or
historical societies.
The cooler and matured judgments of men who knew Webster
personally--Foote, Stephens, Wilson, Seward, and Whittier, in the last
century; Hoar, Hale, Fisher, Hosmer, and Wheeler in recent
years-modify their partizan political judgments of 1850. The new
printed evidence is confirmed by manuscript material: 2,500 letters of
the Greenough Collection available since the publication of the recent
editions of Webster's letters and apparently unused by Webster's
biographers; and Hundreds of still inedited Webster Papers in the New
Hampshire Historical Society, and scattered in minor collections.[2]
This mass of new material makes possible and desirable a
re-examination of the evidence as to (1) the danger from the secession
movement in 1850; (2) Webster's change in attitude toward the
disunion danger in February, 1850; (3) the purpose and character of his
7th of March speech; (4) the effects of his speech and attitude upon the
secession movement.
[2] In the preparation of this article, manuscripts have been used from
the following collections: the Greenough, Hammond, and Clayton
(Library of Congress); Winthrop and Appleton (Mass. Hist. Soc.);
Garrison (Boston Public Library); N.H. Hist. Soc.; Dartmouth College;
Middletown (Conn.) Hist. Soc.; Mrs. Alfred E. Wyman.
I.
During the session of Congress of 1849-1850, the peace of the Union
was threatened by problems centering around slavery and the territory
acquired as a result of the Mexican War: California's demand for

admission with a constitution prohibiting slavery; the Wilmot Proviso
excluding slavery from the rest of the Mexican acquisitions (Utah and
New Mexico); the boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico;
the abolition of slave trade in the District of Columbia; and an effective
fugitive slave law to replace that of 1793.
The evidence for the steadily growing danger of secession until March,
1850, is no longer to be sought in Congressional speeches, but rather in
the private letters of those men, Northern and Southern, who were the
shrewdest political advisers of the South, and in the official acts of
representative bodies of Southerners in local or state meetings, state
legislatures, and the Nashville Convention. Even after the compromise
was accepted in the South and the secessionists defeated in 1850-1851,
the Southern states generally adopted the Georgia platform or its
equivalent declaring that the Wilmot Proviso or the repeal of the
fugitive- slave law would lead the South to "resist even (as a last resort)
to a disruption of every tie which binds her to the Union". Southern
disunion sentiment was not sporadic or a party matter; it was endemic.
The disunion sentiment in the North was not general; but Garrison,
publicly proclaiming "I am an abolitionist and therefore for the
dissolution of the Union", and his followers who pronounced "the
Constitution a covenant with death and an agreement with hell",
exercised a twofold effect far in excess of their numbers. In the North,
abolitionists aroused bitter antagonism to slavery; in the South they
strengthened the conviction of the lawfulness of slavery and the
desirability of secession in preference to abolition. "The abolition
question must soon divide us", a South