Congressional Giants. J. Michael Martinez

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СКАЧАТЬ a report attacking Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans. It made his reputation as a leading administration critic. Afterward, Massachusetts voters elected him to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Reflecting the majority of his constituents’ sentiments, he continued to oppose the war, and his public stature grew with each battlefield reversal, of which there were many. All the while, his graceful, elegant oratory, declaimed on the House floor, suggested that here was a man destined for greatness in the life of the republic. His supporters believed it, and Daniel Webster believed it.⁵⁶

      Unfortunately, for Webster, after the war ended with the Treaty of Ghent, President Madison and his party enjoyed a political resurgence as a grateful public basked in the afterglow of a quasi-victory. Although the war might properly be labeled a draw, the United States could take pride in having fought one of the greatest powers on earth to a draw. Andrew Jackson’s victory in the Battle of New Orleans also reinforced the American myth of a special providence. By 1815, a vocal critic of the war such as Webster seemed out of touch with most Americans. He still enjoyed popularity in New England, but Webster’s broader appeal—crucial to a man who already harbored presidential ambitions—was sorely lacking.

      In the postwar era, Madison championed the need for the Second National Bank of America as well as a protective tariff and the infrastructure program that Henry Clay urged on the administration. Webster knew the bank was much needed, but he voted against it in the House because he thought the bank should remove paper banknotes issued by state banks from circulation. On the tariff, he adopted a middle-of-the-road approach, generally supporting protective measures, provided the rates were not so high that they hurt New England manufacturers. When the rates increased, he opposed the tariff because it was too expensive for his constituents. He would change his opinion of the tariff during his long public career.⁵⁷

      Outside of high tariff rates, Webster knew something about expensive tastes. For much of his adult life, he lived beyond his means, and he was always anxious to earn additional income. It was not unheard of for members of Congress during his era to continue practicing a vocation while serving as a legislator, especially when Congress was out of session. Thus, Webster earned a handsome income accepting legal cases, especially appellate cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He continued to argue leading cases after he left the House in 1817. During the first quarter century of the 1800s, Webster appeared before the high court in an astonishing 168 cases.⁵⁸

      He had been an advocate of the first rank even before he appeared regularly in the Supreme Court, but he perfected his oratorical style during those years. Spectators crowded into the courtroom on days when Webster appeared before the bar. He knew that he was a featured attraction, and he often played to the audience as well as to the justices. With few court rules as to style or time limits on speaking, Webster and his contemporaries held court for hours. Always confident of his ability to extemporize, Webster frequently wrote out a short outline of the points he sought to make and constructed his arguments as he went along. He was not above adding rhetorical flourishes, classical allusions, and appeals to sentiment, sometimes drawing tears from the justices and members of the crowd. At the same time, Webster’s arguments were grounded in logic and legal maxims of the day.⁵⁹

      Few listeners could forget Webster’s brilliant 1818 peroration in a case involving his alma mater, Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward. In a four-hour argument about the sanctity of contracts, Webster engaged his rapt audience as he spoke with heartfelt emotion: “Sir, you may destroy this little institution,” he said of Dartmouth College, the passion evident in his voice. “It is weak; it is in your hands! I know it is one of the lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out! But if you do so, you must carry through your work! You must extinguish, one after another, all those great lights of science which for more than a century have thrown their radiance over our land!” To modern sensibilities, such appeals sound maudlin, but they struck a great many denizens of the nineteenth century as profound and touching. “It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it!” Struggling with his emotions, Webster strove to finish his plea. “Sir, I know not how others may feel, but, for myself, and when I see my alma mater surrounded, like Caesar in the Senate-House, by those who are reiterating stab upon stab, I would not, for this right hand, have her turn to me, and say, Et tu quoque mi filii! And thou too, my son!”⁶⁰

      By the 1820s, Webster’s legal career flourished even as his political career reached a crossroads. The Federalist Party was in its death throes everywhere except New England. Recognizing the precarious state of the party, New England Federalists urged Webster, one of the few living bright lights of the dwindling organization, to stand again for election to the House. He agreed to do so. In 1822, he won his election, and took his seat the following year. Although he and Speaker Henry Clay had seldom seen eye to eye, that did not stop Clay from appointing Webster chair of the House Judiciary Committee in recognition of the Massachusetts representative’s reputation as an accomplished lawyer. From that position, Webster pushed to relieve Supreme Court justices from circuit-riding duties—a common practice at the time where the justices would go on the road to hear cases in addition to their duties listening to appeals in the nation’s capital—and he supported measures to fund internal improvements.⁶¹

      As the 1824 presidential election approached, Webster surveyed the field of candidates and pondered his choices. He saw General Andrew Jackson, the uneducated, uncouth frontiersman, as unqualified. William H. Crawford, another leading candidate, had suffered a stroke. Webster eventually endorsed John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts. Although the two men hailed from the same state, they were hardly allies. Webster believed that Adams had deserted the Federalist Party and harmed its viability years earlier. Yet, when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives following an electoral stalemate, Webster’s support helped Adams eke out a victory.⁶²

      Following Adams’s inauguration in 1825, Webster became a leading administration supporter in the House. His party now traveled under the name “National Republicans,” while their opponents, the Democrats, rallied around Andrew Jackson. The Democrats bitterly charged that Adams, with assistance from Henry Clay, had stolen the 1824 election, and they vowed to resist all measures proposed by the new administration. Adams urged Congress to adopt a system of internal improvements modeled on Clay’s American system, but the opposition was firm and well organized. Webster, now inextricably aligned with the Adams forces despite his earlier reservations, even became a vocal proponent of the protective tariff, ignoring his long-standing ambivalence.⁶³

      While some public men, notably John C. Calhoun, began their careers as nationalists and gravitated toward state rights as they grew older, Webster experienced the opposite. He had been first and foremost a New Englander during his early years. Although he had stopped short of embracing calls for secession, he had been willing to defend a state’s right to resist federal encroachments. By the time he moved into the U.S. Senate in 1827, he was known as a fierce advocate of national interests. Having amassed seniority and mastered the procedures and rules of the House, Webster did not want to leave, but the state legislature believed he would be a powerful voice in the Senate. He acquiesced. As a senator, Webster, always ambivalent, wrestled with the issue but eventually supported the Tariff of 1828, which raised tariff rates and infuriated southerners. He also opposed Jackson’s election to the presidency in 1828, to no avail. Jackson overwhelmed Adams, sweeping into office and promising to reform government and rein in his predecessor’s nationalist policies.⁶⁴

      Webster looked on in horror as Jackson initiated his promised reforms. Infuriated, he argued against the administration’s support for the Indian Removal Act, which forced Native American tribes to leave their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States, and recoiled from the spoils system instituted by Jackson to reward his friends and loyal supporters with federal patronage. On one matter, though, he agreed with the president. During these years, state rights advocates bandied about the doctrine of nullification, which would allow states dissatisfied with federal policies to “nullify,” or render such policies null and void. Jackson would not tolerate nullification threats. Webster, СКАЧАТЬ