Calhoun had many of the elements of high statesmanship--clear views, strong convictions, forcible speech. He was ambitious, but in no ign.o.ble fashion; he often served his country well, as in his efficient administration of the war department under Munroe, his protest against the spoils system and the personal government of Jackson, and his influence in averting war with England over the Oregon boundary in 1845-46. After the Presidency was clearly out of his reach--from 1832--he was growingly identified with and devoted to the interests of his own section, yet always with a patriotic regard for the Union as a whole. He had that fondness for theories and abstractions which was characteristic of the Southern statesmen, fostered perhaps by the isolated life of the plantation. With this went a kind of provincialism of thought, bred from the wide difference which slavery made from the life of the world at large. When Calhoun, in one of his Senate orations was magnifying the advantage of slave over free labor, Wade of Ohio, who sat listening intently, turned to a neighbor and exclaimed: "That man lives off of all traveled roads!" He had neither the arts nor the magnetism of the popular politician; he won no such personal following as Clay and Jackson; but the South more and more accepted him as the most logical and far-seeing champion of its peculiar interests.
His personality had much in common with Jonathan Edwards. There was in both the same inflexible logic and devotion to ideas, the same personal purity and austerity. The place of the mystic"s fire which burned in Edwards was taken in Calhoun by a pa.s.sionate devotion to the commonwealth. In both there was a certain moral callousness which made the one view with complacence a universe including a perpetual h.e.l.l of unspeakable torments; while the other accepted as the ideal society a system in which the lowest cla.s.s was permanently debased. Each was the champion of a cause destined to defeat because condemned by the moral sentiment of the world,--Edwards the advocate of Calvinism, and Calhoun of slavery.
Calhoun is to be regarded as a typical slave-holder of the better cla.s.s.
He owned and cultivated a plantation with several hundred slaves; spent much time upon it; made it profitable, and dispensed a generous hospitality. Such a plantation was a little community, organized and administered with no small labor and skill; with house servants, often holding a friendly and intimate relation with the family; with a few trained mechanics and a mult.i.tude of field hands. As to physical comfort the slaves were probably as well or better provided than the bulk of European peasantry,--this on the testimony of witnesses as unfriendly to slavery as f.a.n.n.y Kemble and Dr. Channing. Order and some degree of morality were enforced, and religion, largely of the emotional type, prevailed widely. So much may be said, perhaps, for the average plantation, certainly for the better cla.s.s, and a very large cla.s.s.
Joseph Le Conte, the eminent scientist, a writer of the highest credit, in his pleasing autobiography describes his boyhood on a Georgia plantation, and characterizes his father as a man of rare excellence to whom he owed the best of his mental inheritance. He writes of him: "The best qualities of character were constantly exercised in the just, wise, and kindly management of his 200 slaves. The negroes were strongly attached to him, and proud of calling him master.... There never was a more orderly, nor apparently a happier working cla.s.s than the negroes of Liberty county as I knew them in my boyhood."
Against this description are to be set such statements as this made by Frederick Law Olmsted, after many months of travel in the South: "The field hand negro is on an average a very poor and a very bad creature, much worse than I had supposed before I had seen him and grown familiar with his stupidity, indolence, duplicity, and sensuality. He seems to be but an imperfect man, incapable of taking care of himself in a civilized manner, and his presence in large numbers must be considered a dangerous circ.u.mstance to a civilized people." Olmsted saw no resource but gradual emanc.i.p.ation with suitable training. A resident of this same Liberty county, Rev. C. C. Jones, himself a staunch supporter of slavery, but urgent for giving better religious instruction to the slaves, wrote in 1842; "That the negroes are in a degraded state is a fact, so far as my knowledge extends, universally conceded.... Negro marriages are neither recognized nor protected by law. Uncleanness--this sin may be considered as universal.... They are proverbial thieves." But how could "religious instruction" produce chast.i.ty in those for whom the law did not recognize marriage, or honesty in those who themselves were stolen?
But the bright side of the medal, which had so dark an obverse, was the interpretation on which Calhoun and the slave-holding cla.s.s took their stand. They resolutely ignored the frequent abuses and the essential degradation of manhood. They fashioned the theory--it was the old familiar theory of past ages, but had fallen out of sight in the enthusiasm of the revolutionary period--that society rightly and properly is const.i.tuted with a servile cla.s.s as its base. Calhoun declared: "I hold that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other." And generally, he adds, the condition of the laborer has been worse than it now is in the South.
In advance of civilization, he declares, there always comes a conflict between capital and labor; and this conflict the South avoids by unflinchingly holding the laborer in his subject condition.
Calhoun is dead, and slavery is dead, but the ideas he then avowed are still powerfully, if more latently, a.s.serting themselves in our social order.
For these theories the slave-holders now found justification from the ministers of religion. The South held more tenaciously than any other section to the old-fashioned type of Christianity. In earlier days, religious teachers--as in the unanimous vote of the Presbyterian General a.s.sembly in 1818--had held slavery to be "utterly inconsistent with the law of G.o.d, which requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves." But now the Southern ministers of all denominations appealed for ample justification to slavery as it was permitted under the Jewish law, and as it existed in the time of Christ and the Apostles, and was unrebuked by them. They went further back, and in the curse p.r.o.nounced by Noah upon the unfilial Ham and his posterity, they found warrant for holding the African in perpetual bondage. So the South closed up its ranks, in Church and State, and answered its critics with self-justification, and with counterattack on what it declared to be their unconst.i.tutional, anarchic, and infidel teachings.
The agitation against slavery took on a new phase with the appearance of Garrison and his founding of the _Liberator_ and the New England Anti-slavery Society in 1831. Garrison was filled and possessed with one idea--the wrongs of the slave, and the instant, pressing, universal duty of giving him freedom. It was in him an unselfish and heroic pa.s.sion.
For it he cheerfully accepted hardship, obloquy, peril. He saw no difficulties except in the sin of wrongdoers and their allies; the only course he admitted was immediate emanc.i.p.ation by the master of his human property, and the instant cooperation and urgency of all others to this end. His words were charged with pa.s.sion; they kindled sympathetic souls with their own flame; they roused to a like heat those whom they a.s.sailed; and they sent thrills of alarm, wonder, and wrath, through the community. Wherever the _Liberator_ went, or the lecturers of the new anti-slavery societies were heard, there could be no indifference or forgetfulness as to slavery. Hitherto, to the immense ma.s.s of people throughout the North, it had been a far-away and unimportant matter. Now it was sent home to the business and bosoms of all men.
The anti-slavery movement changed its character. Garrison entered on a very active campaign, lecturing and establishing local societies.
Prominent among his a.s.sistants was George Thompson, one of the English Abolitionists, who, after the emanc.i.p.ation of the West India slaves by the British government at a cost of 20,000,000, came to this country and acted as Garrison"s ally, winning some converts by his eloquence, but heightening the unpopularity of the movement through the general hostility to foreign interference. The early societies had been largely in the border States, and their efforts had an immediate object in the political action of their own communities. Now, the resentment and fear of the slave-holding interest soon drove them out of those communities.
They spread faster than ever,--in a few years it was said that they were 1300,--but were confined to the free States. What immediate and practical aim could they pursue? It was the question of practical action that brought Garrison"s views to a sharp test, and soon divided him from the great body of anti-slavery people.
In Garrison"s mind there was room for only one idea at a time. Slavery was a crime, a sin, an abomination,--that to him was the first, the last, the whole truth of the matter. He had little education, and he had not in the least a judicial or an open mind. It was to him clear and certain that the blacks were in every way the equal of the whites. Of the complexity of human society; of the vital necessity of a political bond uniting communities, and of the inevitable imperfections and compromises which are the price of an established social order; of the process of evolution by which humanity slowly grows from one stage into another; of the fact that the negro was in some ways better as a slave in America than as a savage in Africa, and that there must be other intermediate stages in his development; of the consideration due to honest differences of opinion and to deeply-rooted habits--of all this Garrison was as ignorant as a six-years-old child. When facts came in his way, he denied them; when inst.i.tutions stood across his path, he denounced them; when men differed from him, he a.s.sailed them.
As to a practical course of action by Northern people, he was absolutely without resource. How were they to free the slaves? Not by force--force was to Garrison as wicked as slavery itself. By their votes? That was only possible under the government as ordained by the Const.i.tution; and the Const.i.tution allowed no action against slavery except by each State for itself. The worse then for the Const.i.tution! Ere many years Garrison declared, and put as a standing heading to the _Liberator_: "The United States Const.i.tution Is a Covenant with Death and an Agreement with h.e.l.l." He went further; for a time at least he held that all human governments, as resting on force, were sinful, and to be ignored, or pa.s.sively submitted to, without taking active part. He declared the Union, as a compact with slave-holders, was worthy only to be dissolved.
But how even dissolve it, since he counselled his followers not to vote?
And if it were dissolved, how would the slaves be any nearer freedom?
Was there any possible good outcome to non-voting and dissolution of the Union, except that there would then be no complicity with slave-holders?
And would such escape from complicity be any help to the slave, any service to humanity, anything more than an egotistic separation from political society, a mere refined selfishness?
Such questions never troubled Garrison. Instead of answering them, he found something else to denounce. The churches he thought were derelict, in that they did not bear testimony against slavery. True, most of the great religious bodies of the country were soon rent asunder on the question: Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, were divided between North and South, because neither side could tolerate the other"s position on slavery. But nothing satisfied Mr. Garrison. To him the churches were "cages of unclean birds and synagogues of Satan."
But if the gun was ill-aimed, at least the recoil was prodigious. It is unreasonable to attribute princ.i.p.ally to the violence of the _Liberator_ the new and determined rally of the South in defense of slavery,--Calhoun and his followers had far wider grounds for their action than that,--but undoubtedly that violence helped to consolidate and intensify the Southern resistance. The Abolitionist papers were at first sent all over the South. The Southerners saw little difference between such papers as the _Liberator_ and such direct incitements to insurrection as Walker"s _Appeal_; and the horrors of Nat Turner"s rising were fresh in mind. They put all Abolitionist teaching under a common ban. At the North, the anti-slavery cause became a.s.sociated in the popular mind with hostility to the government, to the churches, to the established usages of society. It was Charles Sumner who said: "An omnibus load of Boston Abolitionists had done more harm to the anti-slavery cause than all its enemies."
Garrison"s own following was soon divided, and a large part drew away from him. The most important division came on the question of political action, when, in the Presidential election of 1840, the practical wing entered into the political field, as the inevitable and only arena for effective action; nominated a candidate, and laid the foundation for the election of Lincoln twenty years later. In the American Anti-slavery Society there came a contest; Garrison triumphed by a narrow vote, but a secession followed. Of his immediate and permanent allies the most important was Wendell Phillips. He threw himself heart and soul into the cause; he gave to it an educated and brilliant mind, and a fascinating oratory; he was as uncompromising and censorious as Garrison.
Garrison always held a place of honor and friendship among the Abolitionists, even those who refused to follow his leadership. In private life his genial and winning traits were as marked as was his fierceness on the platform. The term "Abolitionist" is somewhat indefinite, but it may best be defined as denoting a person to whom the supreme interest in public affairs was the extinction of slavery. It included not only those who shared Garrison"s ideas of non-voting and peaceable disunion, but those, too, like Birney and Whittier, who respected the Const.i.tution and worked for their cause through a political party. The term also applied to the few who, like John Brown, would attack slavery by force of arms. On the other hand, the name Abolitionist did not properly belong to those who were opposed to slavery, but held that opposition along with other political tenets and not as a supreme article of faith. These were best included under the general term of "anti-slavery men," a designation accepted by many of the Free Soil, Whig and Democratic parties, and later by the Republican party. The cla.s.sification cannot be made exact, but the word "Abolitionists" generally designated the men and women to whom the extinction of slavery was a primary interest, and who gave to it their habitual and earnest attention, through the anti-slavery societies and otherwise. In this broader sense, the Abolitionists were a notable company. They were bound together by a disinterested and n.o.ble sentiment, and by sacrifices to the cause. The hostility aroused by Garrison, Phillips, Pilsbury, and a few like-minded a.s.sociates, extended to many who went to no such extremes. The anti-slavery speakers were sometimes mobbed: once in Boston a rope was round Garrison"s neck and his life was in peril; meetings were broken up; and the respectable part of the community sometimes encouraged or tolerated these a.s.saults.
Actual physical injury was very rare, but a hostile social atmosphere was the frequent price of fidelity to conscience.
Among the most notable of the leaders was Gerritt Smith. He took active part in politics, and was for a time in Congress. He is finely characterized by Andrew D. White:
"Of all tribunes of the people I have ever known he dwells in my memory as possessing the greatest variety of gifts. He had the prestige given by great wealth, by lavish generosity, by transparent honesty, by earnestness of purpose, by advocacy of every good cause, by a superb presence, and by natural eloquence of a very high order. He was very tall and large, with a n.o.ble head, an earnest yet kindly face, and of all human voices I have ever heard his was the most remarkable for its richness, depth, and strength."
Women took a prominent and honorable part; the venerable and beautiful Lucretia Mott gave her benign presence to the gatherings; Lydia Maria Child made heavy sacrifices in the good cause. In the common ardor, and with a Quaker precedent, women took part as speakers. Women"s rights was closely united with anti-slavery; and hence came a fresh odium from conservative quarters, while the admirable bearing of the leading women won growing favor for both lines of emanc.i.p.ation. The makers of the new American literature were friends of the anti-slavery cause. Emerson gave to it his words of serene inspiration. Whittier was among its ardent apostles, shared in its political activity, and sang lyrics of freedom.
Bryant was its strong advocate in journalism. Lowell, drawn by his n.o.ble wife, came as a strong ally, and the Biglow Papers gave what had been greatly lacking,--the salt of humor.
The Abolitionists might be compared to a comet,--a body with a bright head and a nebulous tail. Like all radicals and reformers they had a fringe of unbalanced and crotchety folk. It must be said, too, that absorption in a topic remote from the concerns of one"s daily life is apt to be somewhat distracting and demoralizing. Dr. Joseph Henry Allen--an admirable and too little known writer--has in an eloquent and beautiful pa.s.sage described the Abolitionists (though he was not one of them) as the devotees of a genuine and heroic religion. But any adequate religion must find its main application in the duties and services of the immediate present; and the men and women who were possessed day and night by the wrongs of those to whom they could render little service, were apt to be thrown out of touch with near and homely relations, and become what are now called "cranks."
But to appreciate the service of the Abolitionists we must remember that up to the birth of the Republican party in 1854 almost all of the political leaders and men of public affairs, as well as most of the churches, colleges, and professional educators, held aloof from the anti-slavery cause. With a few exceptions, they left the work of educating public sentiment, and shaping some policy on the supreme question, to be done by this little company,--of lecturers, ministers, literary men and women. These did loyally and bravely according to their lights; and they had their reward, outwardly in unpopularity and sometimes persecution, but inwardly in a social atmosphere within their own body, warm, joyful, and religious; and the sense of alliance with the Divine Force in the universe. Said Wendell Phillips: "One man with G.o.d is a majority."
CHAPTER VI
BIRNEY, CHANNING, AND WEBSTER
Of the moderate wing of the anti-slavery men, a good representative was James G. Birney. With the fine physical presence and genial manhood of the typical Kentuckian, he had a well-balanced mind and a thorough loyalty to the sense of duty, which broadened as he grew. Removing to Alabama, he became anti-slavery in his sentiments, and he was a friend not only of the negro, but of all who were oppressed. As the legal representative of the Cherokee nation he stood for years between the Indians and those who would wrong them. He identified himself for a time with the colonization cause; and, finding himself growing powerless in Southern communities, he removed to Ohio, where there was a strong and vigorous anti-slavery propaganda. One incident of his life in Cincinnati ill.u.s.trates the concrete form which slavery sometimes took. A Missourian owned a slave girl who was his own daughter, a cultivated and refined woman. He took her to the East for a visit, treated her habitually as one of his own family, but refused her prayers for freedom. Dreading the possibilities of her lot, she made her escape in Cincinnati; and, concealing her ident.i.ty and history, she got a situation as a servant in Mr. Birney"s family. One day when he was absent from the city she came home in terror; she had been recognized on the street by two professional slave-catchers; now she told her story and implored protection. In vain,--the officers of the law dragged her from the house; a judge gave speedy sentence that she was a slave; she was taken sobbing to jail; and the next day she was carried down the river to New Orleans, where she was sold on the auction block,--and never heard of again.
Birney took part in the work of the new anti-slavery societies, but he did not follow Garrison"s no-government theories. He favored for a while the policy of throwing the anti-slavery strength for such congressional nominees of the regular parties as favored their views, and several candidates were chosen in this way. But when Clay became p.r.o.nounced against the Abolitionists, and even John Quincy Adams, after championing the right of pet.i.tion, voted against the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, Birney and his sympathizers gave up hope of help from existing parties, and organized their own party for the election of 1840. Its principles were resistance to slavery extension, and opposition to slavery so far as was practicable under the Const.i.tution,--the principles later of the Republican party. Birney was nominated for President, and this handful of voters was the seed of the harvest twenty years later. He was again the candidate in 1844, with an increased support, and the party now was named "The Liberty Party."
A leader and type of the moderate anti-slavery sentiment was William Ellery Channing. In Channing was a blending of high moral ideals, intelligent views of human nature and society, an apostle"s earnestness wedded with "sweet reasonableness," and a personal character of rare symmetry and beauty. He was an evolutionist and not a revolutionist.
Foremost among the group of New England ministers who broadened and ripened out of the orthodoxy of their day, and were ostracized by their former brethren, he was forced into the position of leader of a new sect, but his utterances and spirit were always those of a minister of the church universal. He was the early advocate of most of the religious and social reforms which have since come to the front. By preference, he always used the methods of peace and persuasion. He had made early acquaintance with slavery in a two-years" residence in Richmond while a young man. He was always opposed to it, but his attention was long absorbed by the immediate needs of his own people. He spent half a year in Santa Cruz, for his health, in 1830-1,--just when Garrison was starting the _Liberator_,--and slavery came home to him with new force. The plantation on which he lived was one of the best in the West Indies. The proprietor had taken a pride in the character and condition of his slaves. But he had fallen into bankruptcy, his estate had been sold, and the new proprietor left it in charge of an overseer who was a pa.s.sionate and licentious man, under whom the slaves suffered a very different treatment. Most pathetic incidents came under Dr.
Channing"s notice. But from all he saw about him he concluded that the physical sufferings of the slaves had been exaggerated by report; that, with occasional cruelties, they were better off as to physical comfort than most of the European peasantry. He writes to an English correspondent, "I suspect that a gang of negroes receive fewer stripes than a company of soldiers of the same number in your army"; that they are under a less iron discipline and suffer incomparably less than soldiers in a campaign. But he adds, and always insists, that their condition degrades them intellectually and morally, lowers them toward the brutes, and in this respect the misery of slavery cannot be expressed too strongly. Marriage is almost unknown; family life, with its mutual dependence and the resulting tenderness, scarcely exists; and thus "the poor negro is excluded from Nature"s primary school for the affections and the whole character." "The like causes are fatal to energy, foresight, self-control."
The inspiration of Channing"s creed, the soul of the new movement in religion, was the potential n.o.bility of human nature--a n.o.bility to be made real by utmost effort of the individual, and by all wisest appliances of society. It was from this standpoint that he judged slavery, and in this spirit that while still in Santa Cruz he began to write his treatise upon it.
Returning to Boston, he spoke with clearness and weight to his congregation: "I think no power of conception can do justice to the evils of slavery. They are chiefly moral, they act on the mind, and through the mind bring intense suffering to the body. As far as the human soul can be destroyed, slavery is that destroyer." Having borne his testimony, he devoted himself to the general work of his ministry.
The violence of the men who had come to the front in Abolitionism was not only against his taste and feeling, but against his deep convictions; as he had written years before to Webster, he saw in these denunciations of the slave-holder seeds of a harvest of sectional hate and national disaster.
A characteristic conversation with him is recorded by Rev. Samuel J.
May, himself in full alliance with the Abolitionists, but a man of great sweetness and sanity, never diverted from his religious ministry or losing his mental balance. Dr. Channing dwelt on the excesses of the Abolitionists until Mr. May was aroused, and broke out: "Dr. Channing, I am tired of these complaints! The cause of suffering humanity, the cause of our oppressed, crushed, colored countrymen, has called as loudly upon others as upon us, who are known as the Abolitionists. But the others have done nothing. The wise and prudent saw the wrong, but did nothing to remove it. The priest and Levite pa.s.sed by on the other side; the children of Abraham held their peace, until "the very stones have cried out" against this tremendous wickedness. The people who have taken up the cause may lack the calmness and discretion of scholars, clergy, and statesmen,--but the scholars, clergy, and statesmen, have done nothing.
We Abolitionists are just what we are,--babes and sucklings, obscure men, silly women, publicans, sinners; and we shall manage the matter we have taken in hand just as might be expected of such persons as we are.
It is unbecoming in able men, who stood by and would do nothing, to complain of us because we manage this matter no better."
And so the torrent of words dashed upon the silent listener, until the speaker suddenly bethought himself and stopped in abashment,--this man he was rebuking had been to him as a father in G.o.d, his kind friend from childhood, and first among the great and good. Almost overwhelmed by his own temerity, he watched the agitated face of his hearer and waited in painful suspense for the reply. At last, in a very subdued manner and in his kindest tones of voice, he said, "Brother May, I acknowledge the justice of your reproof; I have been silent too long."
May"s appeal had only quickened a little the sure work of Channing"s conscience. A few months later, in December, 1835, he published his short treatise on _Slavery_. No weightier word on the subject was ever spoken. If mankind were moved by their higher reason the North would not have waited twenty years to be converted to anti-slavery by _Uncle Tom"s Cabin_. And if the South had been wise in her day, she would have listened to this n.o.ble and persuasive utterance. No pa.s.sion sullied its temper; slave and slave-holder were held in equal regard; the case was pleaded on irresistible grounds--of facts beyond question and rooted in the very const.i.tution of human nature. The needed, the righteous, the inevitable reform, was shown as part of the upward movement of humanity, and as appealing to every consideration of practical wisdom and of justice. The little book of 150 pages deserves to be held as a cla.s.sic in American history.
Channing never lost the sense of proportion in his own work. He went on giving inspiration and leadership to religious thought and to social advance. It was neither necessary nor possible for him to be in close sympathy or habitual alliance with the extreme Abolitionists. But he vindicated the right of free speech when it was denied them, and he was recognized by the best of their number as a friend of the cause. Mrs.
Lydia Maria Child,--like Mr. May, one of the finest spirits among the Abolitionists--wrote: "He constantly grew upon my respect, until I came to regard him as the wisest as well as the gentlest apostle of humanity.
I owe him thanks for preserving me from the one-sidedness to which zealous reformers are so apt to run. He never sought to undervalue the importance of anti-slavery, but he said many things to prevent me from looking upon it as the only question interesting to humanity."
Side by side with the anti-slavery sentiment was growing another sentiment--distinct from it, at first often in practical hostility to it, but at last blending with it for a common triumph. It was the sentiment of American nationality--the love of the Union. The separate colonies were brought together in the Revolution by a common peril and a common struggle. Then their tendency to fall apart was counteracted by the strong bond of the Const.i.tution and the Federal government. Diverse interests and mutual distrust still tended to draw them asunder. With the continuance of the Union, the strengthening of the tie by use, the hallowing of old a.s.sociations under the glamour of memory, and the growth of the new bonds of commerce and travel, the sense of a common country and destiny began to take root in the hearts of men, and on occasion disclosed itself with the strength and n.o.bility of a heroic pa.s.sion. True, a new rift was appearing, in the doctrine of nullification and the question of slavery, but this evoked at times a more militant and again a more appealing aspect in the sentiment of union. Jackson seemed to rise from the rough frontiersman to the guardian of the nation when he gave the word, "The Federal Union--it must be preserved!" Clay found the n.o.blest exercise of his eloquence and his diplomacy in evoking the national spirit and in harmonizing the differences which threatened it. But the most stirring voice and effective leadership was that of Daniel Webster.
As Webster is judged in the retrospect, we see that he was not so much a statesman, still less a moral idealist, as an advocate. His lucidity of statement and emotional power were not matched by constructive ability.
His name is a.s.sociated with no great measure of administration, no large and definite policy. He was luminous in statement rather than sagacious in judgment, an advocate rather than a judge. On the platform or in the Senate he was still pre-eminently the lawyer, in that, like a lawyer, he was the representative and exponent of established interests,--not the projector of new social adjustments. Civil law represents a vast acc.u.mulated experience and tradition of mankind; it has been slowly wrought out, as a regulation and adjustment of existing interests; with an effort toward equity, as understood by the best intelligence of each period, but always with immense regard for precedent and previous usage.
It was in this spirit, highly conservative of what has already been secured, and extremely cautious toward radical change, that Webster habitually dealt with political inst.i.tutions. It was characteristic of him that in the Ma.s.sachusetts const.i.tutional convention in 1820 he pleaded strongly for the retention of the property qualification of voters for State senators. But when the tide moved irresistibly toward manhood suffrage, he acquiesced.
But conservative as he was by nature, he was in profound sympathy with a sentiment which while rooted in the past was yet in the "20s and "30s a young, plastic, growing idea,--the idea of American Union, indissoluble, perpetual. No voice was so powerful as Webster"s to fill the minds and hearts of man with this lofty pa.s.sion. His orations at Plymouth Rock, at Bunker Hill, and upon the simultaneous deaths of Adams and Jefferson, his vindication of the national idea against the localism of Hayne and Calhoun,--were organ-voices of patriotism. They thrilled the souls of those who listened; they went over the country and printed themselves on the minds of men; school-boys declaimed pa.s.sages from them; they became part of the gospel of the American people.
We may quote a single pa.s.sage from the address inspired by that dramatic circ.u.mstance, the death at once of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: "It cannot be denied, but by those who would dispute against the sun, that with America and in America a new era commences in human affairs. This era is distinguished by free representative governments, by entire religious liberty, by improved systems of national intercourse, by a newly awakened and an unconquerable spirit of free inquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge through the community, such as has been before altogether unknown and unheard of. America, America, our country, fellow-countrymen, our own dear and native land, is inseparably connected, fast bound up, in fortune and by fate, with these great interests. If they fall, we fall with them; if they stand, it will be because we have maintained them.... If we cherish the virtues and the principles of our fathers, heaven will a.s.sist us to carry on the work of human liberty and human happiness. Auspicious omens cheer us. Great examples are before us. Our own firmament now shines brightly upon our paths. Washington is in the upper sky. These other stars have now joined the American constellation; they circle round their center, and the heavens beam with new light. Beneath this illumination let us walk the course of life, and at its close devoutly commend our beloved country, the common parent of us all, to the Divine Benignity."