His speeches were already in
the schoolbooks, and for twenty years boys had been declaiming
his arguments against nullification. He had helped to teach
America to think and to feel. Indeed it was through his oratory
that many of his fellow-citizens had gained their highest
conception of the beauty, the potency, and the dignity of human
speech. And in truth he never exhibited his logical power and
demonstrative skill more superbly than in the plea of the seventh
of March for the preservation of the status quo, for the
avoidance of mutual recrimination between North and South, for
obedience to the law of the land. It was his supreme effort to
reconcile an irreconcilable situation.
It failed, as we know. Whittier, Emerson, Theodore Parker, and
indeed most of the voters of New England, believed that Webster
had bartered his private convictions in the hope of securing the
Presidential nomination in 1852. They assailed him savagely, and
Webster died, a broken man, in the autumn of the Presidential
year. "I have given my life to law and politics," he wrote to
Professor Silliman.
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