Daniel Webster: January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852 

---

✪ Daniel Webster was an American lawyer, statesman, and diplomat who represented New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the U.S. Congress and also served as the 14th and 19th U.S. Secretary of State under presidents William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and Millard Fillmore. Webster was one of the most prominent American lawyers of the 19th Century; arguing over 200 cases before the United States Supreme Court during his career. Throughout his life, Webster was a member of the Federalist Party, the National Republican Party, and the Whig Party. He was among the three members of the Great Triumvirate along with Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun.

Daniel Webster was born on January 18, 1782, in Salisbury, New Hampshire, at a location within the present-day city of Franklin. His parents were Abigail (née Eastman) and Ebenezer Webster, a farmer and local official who served in the French and Indian War and the American Revolutionary War. Ebenezer had three children from a previous marriage who survived to maturity, as well as five children from his marriage to Abigail. Webster was the second-youngest of the eight siblings. As a youth, he helped work the family farm but was frequently in poor health. With the encouragement of his parents and tutors, he often read works by authors such as Alexander Pope and Isaac Watts.

In 1796, Webster attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a preparatory school in Exeter, New Hampshire. After studying the classics and other subjects for several months under a clergyman, Webster was admitted to Dartmouth College in 1797. During his time at Dartmouth, he managed the school newspaper and emerged as a strong public speaker. He was chosen as the Fourth of July orator in the college town of Hanover in 1800, and his speech contained the substance of the political principles which he would later become famous for developing. Like his father, and like many other New England farmers, Webster was firmly devoted to the Federalist Party and favored a strong central government. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1801 and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.

After graduating from Dartmouth, Webster apprenticed under Salisbury lawyer Thomas W. Thompson. Though originally unenthusiastic about studying the law, he believed becoming a lawyer would allow him to “live comfortably” and avoid the bouts of poverty which had afflicted his father.

In 1804, he obtained a legal position in Boston under the prominent attorney Christopher Gore. Clerking for Gore; who was involved in international, national, and state politics, Webster learned about many legal and political subjects and met numerous New England politicians. He grew to love Boston; and in 1805, was admitted to the New Hampshire Bar.

Immediately after winning admission to the bar, Webster set up a legal practice in Boscawen, New Hampshire, where he became increasingly involved in politics and began speaking locally in support of Federalist causes and candidates. After his father’s death in 1806, Webster handed over his practice to his brother, Ezekiel, and opened a new practice in the larger town of Portsmouth. Over the decade-long period he lived in Portsmouth, he handled over 1700 cases, becoming one of the most prominent attorneys in New Hampshire. Along with two other lawyers, he was appointed to revise the New Hampshire criminal code and devise regulations for state prisons.

In 1808, Webster married Grace Fletcher, a schoolteacher and the daughter of a New Hampshire clergyman. Between 1810 and 1822, Daniel and Grace had five children. Grace, died in January 1828 due to a cancerous tumor. Webster suffered another loss when his brother, Ezekiel, died in April 1829. In December 1829, Webster married Caroline LeRoy, the 32-year-old daughter of New York merchant Herman LeRoy. They remained married until Webster’s death, and she lived until 1882. She and Webster had two children together.

Webster and his family lived in Portsmouth until 1816 when they relocated to Boston. In 1831, Webster purchased a 150-acre estate (now known as the Thomas–Webster Estate) in Marshfield, Massachusetts. In the ensuing years, Webster spent much of his earnings making various improvements to his estate, and he made it his primary residence in 1837.

Webster campaigned for various Federalist candidates, including presidential candidate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and gubernatorial candidate Jeremiah Smith. Although Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party dominated national elections, the Federalist Party was competitive throughout the states of New England.

In 1812, the United States declared war on Britain, beginning the War of 1812. On July 4, 1812, Webster was invited to give a speech before the Washington Benevolent Society. His speech, which strongly attacked the war but warned against secession, was reprinted in newspapers throughout New England.

The state Federalist Party eventually nominated him as a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. Though James Madison won re-election in the 1812 U.S. presidential election, the Federalist-backed presidential candidate won New England, and Federalists swept the New Hampshire elections for the House of Representatives.

By May 1813, when Webster arrived in the House of Representatives for the first time, the United States had already seen numerous setbacks in the War of 1812. Nonetheless, Madison’s Democratic-Republican Party dominated the Thirteenth Congress, controlling over three-fifths of the seats in the House of Representatives and over two-thirds of the seats in the Senate. During his term in the House, Webster continued to criticize the war and attacked efforts to impose conscription, wartime taxes, and a new trade embargo. He was appointed to a steering committee which coordinated Federalist actions in the House of Representatives; and by the end of the Thirteenth Congress, had emerged as a respected speaker on the House floor.

After the war, President Madison called for the establishment of the Second Bank of the United States (known as the “National Bank“). Webster favored a national bank in principle, but he voted against the bill which established the national bank because he believed the bank should be required to remove paper banknotes issued by various state-charted banks from circulation. Before the national bank came into operation, he then led the passage of a bill requiring all debts to the government to be paid in specie, Treasury notes, or notes issued by the national bank.

In 1816, Webster declined to seek another term in the House of Representatives, instead establishing a new residence in Boston. In the 1816 elections, the Federalist Party suffered numerous defeats throughout the country and Democratic-Republican candidate James Monroe was elected president.

Webster continued to practice law while serving in the House of Representatives, and he argued his first case before the Supreme Court of the United States in early 1814. Between 1814 and 1852, he argued at least one case in the vast majority of the sessions of the Supreme Court; he served as counsel in a total of 223 cases, and won approximately half of those cases. He also represented numerous private clients outside of his Supreme Court cases.

Webster remained politically active during his time out of Congress, serving as a presidential elector, meeting with officials like Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, and delivering a well-received speech attacking high tariffs. With the Federalists fading away as a national party, the period of Monroe’s presidency came to be known as the “Era of Good Feelings” due to the lack of any partisan conflict.

At the behest of Federalist leaders and the business elite in Boston, Webster agreed to run for the United States House of Representatives in 1822. He won the election and returned to Congress in December 1823. In recognition of his mastery of legal issues, Speaker of the House Henry Clay assigned him the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee. As a representative, he continued accepting speaking engagements in New England, most notably his oration on the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

In 1827, the Massachusetts legislature elected Webster to the United States Senate. He was initially reluctant to leave the House of Representatives, where he had established seniority and a strong base of power, but ultimately accepted his election to the Senate.

Speaking before the Senate, he articulated his belief in a “perpetual” union and attacked the institution of slavery; baiting other senators into expounding on the doctrine of nullification on the Senate floor. He held that the people, and not the states, held ultimate power, and the people had established the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. He further argued the doctrine of nullification “approached absurdity,” and, by denying power to the Federal Government, would effectively restore the balance of power established under the Articles of Confederation. He argued nullification constituted treason against the United States, and would ultimately lead to civil war as state officials would call out the militia to resist federal laws and actions. He ended his speech with a call for “Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!

In the aftermath of the battle over the national bank, Andrew Jackson’s political opponents coalesced into the Whig Party. By taking a name rooted in American and British history, the Whigs implicitly criticized Jackson as a tyrannical executive. The Whig Party proved more durable than the National Republican Party and, along with the Democrats, the Whigs became one of the two major parties of the Second Party System, which would extend into the 1850s.

Webster was nominated for president by the Massachusetts legislature, but Henry Harrison won the backing of most Whigs outside of the South. Webster’s presidential chances also suffered from his lingering association with the Federalist Party, his close relationship with elite politicians and businessmen, and his lack of appeal among the broad populace, Historian Robert Remini writes the American public “admired and revered him but did not love or trust him.”

Webster served as a prominent campaign surrogate for Harrison in the 1840 presidential election, although he disliked the party’s new, popular style of campaigning which made use of songs and slogans like “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” The Whigs enjoyed great success in the 1840 elections, as Harrison took a majority of the popular and electoral vote and the party won a majority control of Congress.

Webster considered retirement from public office after the 1844 election, but he accepted election to the United States Senate in early 1845. In May 1846, the Mexican–American War began after Congress, responding to a clash instigated by U.S. troops against the Mexican Army at the disputed Texas–Mexico border, declared war on Mexico.

Webster was always a long-standing opponent of slavery. In an 1837 speech he called slavery a “great moral, social, and political evil,” and added he would vote against “any thing that shall extend the slavery of the African race on this continent, or add other slaveholding states to the Union.” Unlike his more strongly anti-slavery constituents, Webster did not believe Congress should interfere with slavery in the states; and he placed less emphasis on preventing the spread of slavery into the territories. Nonetheless, because Webster opposed the acquisition of Mexican territory, he voted against the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which the United States acquired the Mexican Cession.

After Millard Fillmore took office as president, Webster drafted a special message to Congress calling for an end to the crisis over the territories, and he used the power of patronage to woo potential supporters. Soon after, the Congress passed the legislative package, which became known as the Compromise of 1850.

When the New York & Erie Rail Road was completed in May 1851, President Fillmore and several members of his cabinet, including Webster, made a special, two-day excursion run to open the railway. It is reported Webster viewed the entire run from a rocking chair attached to a flatcar, with a steamer rug and jug of high-quality Medfordrum. At stops, he would get down and deliver whistle stop speeches.

Encouraged by Fillmore’s professed lack of desire to pursue the Whig nomination in the 1852 U.S. presidential election, Webster launched another failed campaign for the presidency in 1851. Fillmore only received 133 of the necessary 147 votes.

Conflicting opinions have been voiced as to Webster’s religious affiliation. Remini writes though Webster occasionally attended different churches, he remained closely affiliated with the Congregational Church throughout his life. In an 1807 letter to a Congregational pastor, Webster wrote, “I believe in the utter inability of any human being to work out his own Salvation, without the constant aids of the spirit of all grace …. Although I have great respect for some other forms of worship, I believe the Congregational mode, on the whole, to be preferable to any other.”

By early 1852, Webster began to suffer from cirrhosis of the liver, and his poor health increasingly made it difficult for him to serve as secretary of state. In September 1852, Webster returned to his Marshfield estate, where his health continued to decline due to cirrhosis and a subdural hematoma. Remini writes that “whether men hated or admired Webster, all agreed … on the majesty of his oratory, the immensity of his intellectual powers, and the primacy of his constitutional knowledge.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, who routinely criticized Webster, remarked in the immediate aftermath of his death that Webster was “the completest man,” and that “nature had not in our days, or not since Napoleon, cut out such a masterpiece.”

Webster died in Marshfield, Massachusetts on October 24, 1852, at the age of 70, and is buried in Winslow Cemetery near his estate. His final words were, “I still live.”✪