Daniel Webster
Daniel Webster, by (2 vols.) [Atlantic Monthly Press & Little, Brown, $10.00]
Is it perhaps a paradox of efficiency that, in a day when the radio has made it possible to speak before millions, no orators are to be found? The golden tongue has given way to the ’squawkies,’the vocal power with which Webster used to sway his audience has been reduced to the hysteria of Billy Sunday or the wise cracks of a popular announcer. To read one of the recent biographies of Daniel Webster is to realize what oratory once meant in the world.
HERE is an American who died nearly eighty years ago — a statesman who attained no office higher than that of Secretary of State: a Representative and a Senator who originated no great constructive piece of legislation; an orator only one of whose orations is familiar to this generation; a lawyer whose arguments dealt chiefly with constitutional law, a branch unfamiliar to the great mass of lawyers; whose personal letters are not notable and whose diplomatic dispatches are read only by scholars. And yet here is an American whose name, proposed in 1900 for a place in the Hall of Fame in New York, received the same number of votes as Abraham Lincoln and only one less than George Washington — a man regarding whom seventeen books have been written in the past thirty years (including three in the year 1930).
Three things account for this tenacious hold upon the American consciousness, and each is emphasized in Dr. Claude M. Fuess’s biography of Daniel Webster.
In the first place, Webster was a very human person. He loved his farm and his cattle (he was an early ‘dirt farmer’ in politics); he loved fishing; he loved liquor (sometimes too well); he was careless in money matters; he understood and was understood by the average man. With these foibles and personal characteristics, he was an appealing character; he had none of the forbidding aspects of the reformer in politics; while people knew that he was great, they knew also that he was human and that he did not assume to be a superman.
In the second place, he was a distinctly romantic figure in politics, a rare thing in our political history. With all his human qualities, there was in him something that touched the imagination of the American people. The term ‘the Godlike Daniel’ was applied to him not without reason; for his massive head, his deepsunken eyes, his organ-like voice, his dignity of bearing, marked him out as an exceptional character. He thrilled the American people. To Sydney Smith, in England, he seemed ‘a small cathedral all by himself’; to Carlyle he appeared ‘a magnificent specimen.'
In the third place, he was for twenty years to hundreds of thousands of Americans the living symbol of the desire for national unity. It was just one hundred years ago, on January ‘26-27, 1830, that Webster delivered his famous Reply to Hayne in the United States Senate. In that oration he developed the idea that a government called into being by the people of the United States could never and must never be dissolved by action of some of the States. Whether Webster’s doctrine had historical foundation or not, it struck a responsive chord throughout the country. It sounded the clarion call in the struggle to maintain the Union of the States which culminated at Appomattox. It was that doctrine, supplemented by Webster’s Seventh of March speech, which inspired Lincoln’s policy.
Only by appreciating the potency of the influence of Webster’s words can one understand the history of this country between 1830 and 1860. One must realize that not only were the men of that period familiar with those words, but that every school child, boy or girl, read and learned them by heart in McGuffey’s and other school readers. Professor Fuess has done well, therefore, to emphasize in his book the part which Webster’s two great Union speeches played; and in no other book can there be found so adequate and picturesque an account and an appraisal. In fact, the term ‘adequate’ is a very exact one as applied to this whole biography. Dramatic it is not; penetrating it is not; but candid and thorough it is.
Professor Fuess’s previous researches in connection with the lives of Rufus Choate and Caleb Cushing have particularly fitted him to deal with the politics and the social and economic backgrounds of Webster’s career. While his views of the political moves of some of Webster’s contemporaries may not be fully accepted, the picture which he draws of Webster in politics is fair and without omission of his vacillations and weaknesses in that field. In his description of the qualities and ambitions of the man himself, great and weak, noble and practical, there is also a candor of treatment which does not blink, but which also does not overemphasize. Professor Fuess pays more attention to Webster as a lawyer than many previous writers have done. Webster’s preeminence in court, even in cases which he lost, was due to his intellect and his reasoning powers rather than to his research among precedents, and in the present era of lack of profound thought it is well that this aspect of Webster’s genius should be emphasized.
Possibly Webster’s influence on our constitutional law might have been more thoroughly discussed; possibly also Webster’s career in Congress might have been more dwelt upon; for the chief source of his success and influence as a statesman is found in his transcendent powers of speech. Again, Webster’s work as Secretary of State has been treated more carefully by other writers. These are few shortcomings, however, in an extremely satisfying book; and one may justly write of it, as Henry Adams did regarding Henry Cabot Lodge’s biography of Webster in 1883: ‘I have but one test fora popular book. Is it interesting? ... I did not expect Webster to be so, for all Whigs were bores. In reading it, I find myself mistaken; it reads well.’
CHARLES WARREN