Whig leadership of Daniel Webster

After the Nullification Crisis had been settled, Webster made overtures for a political alliance with Jackson, an alliance that presumably would have brought Webster to the presidency as Jackson’s successor. But the two men disagreed on many issues, especially on the question of the Bank of the United States, which Jackson attacked as a dangerous and undemocratic monopoly and which Webster served in the capacities of legal counsel, director of the Boston branch, and Senate champion, along with Henry Clay of Kentucky. Clay and Webster emerged as leaders of the Whig Party, a rather heterogeneous group opposed to Jackson and the Democrats. The Whigs failed to get the bank rechartered and thus lost the “Bank War.”

Identified with the unpopular bank and stigmatized as a friend of the rich, Webster carried only his own state when he ran as one of three Whig presidential candidates in 1836. In 1841, however, he was appointed secretary of state after the Whigs had won the election with an Ohio war hero, William Henry Harrison, and a renegade Virginia Democrat, John Tyler, as vice president. After Harrison’s death, Webster remained in Tyler’s cabinet, even though Clay induced the other members to resign in protest against Tyler’s antibank and antitariff stand.

Webster again had hopes of forming a new political combination, this time with Tyler. He also hoped to arrange a settlement of the Maine boundary dispute and other controversies with Great Britain. This he succeeded in doing by means of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842), for which he gained popular approval with newspaper propaganda he paid for with secret State Department funds. But he had no chance to realize the dream of a Tyler-Webster party, and he left the cabinet in 1843.

To persuade Webster to go back to the Senate in 1845, the businessmen of Boston and New York raised a fund to supplement his income, as they had done on previous occasions. House Democrats charged that he was “the pensioned agent of the manufacturing interest.” Along with other Whigs in Congress, he accused Pres. James K. Polk of maneuvering the country into war with Mexico, and he demanded that the war (in which one of his sons died) be brought to an early end. Some of his colleagues supported the Wilmot Proviso—to prohibit slavery in all lands acquired from Mexico—but he went even further and opposed the acquisition of any territory.

Advocate of sectional compromise

During the postwar sectional crisis Webster nevertheless spoke out, March 7, 1850, in favor of Clay’s compromise proposals, one of which would organize territories in the Mexican cession with no prohibition of slavery. His argument that such a prohibition was unnecessary because the West was geographically unsuitable for the plantation system pleased businessmen but infuriated antislavery Whigs. As secretary of state in Pres. Millard Fillmore’s cabinet, 1850–52, he used all the influence at his disposal in trying to enforce the provision of the Compromise of 1850 that was most unpopular in the North—the new law for the return of fugitive slaves. He was prompted by the belief that conservatives in both the North and the South might combine in a “Union” Party to make him president in 1852, and he could not restrain his bitterness when his presidential ambition was again thwarted.

For years it had been Webster’s custom, when frustrated in politics, to seek refuge in the avocation of gentleman farmer, an expensive hobby that helped to keep his personal finances precarious. He owned farms in several states, but his favourite was the one located at Marshfield on the Massachusetts coast. And there, in 1852, he died.

Legacy

During the first generation after his death, former abolitionists and their sympathizers, remembering Webster’s support of the Compromise of 1850, often pictured him as a man whose career had come to ruin because of his character defects. The memoirs of Pres. John Quincy Adams, published in the 1870s, contained a reference to “the gigantic intellect, the envious temper, the ravenous ambition, and the rotten heart of Daniel Webster.” Meanwhile, his former intimates recalled him as the “godlike Daniel,” a man of irresistible charm as well as surpassing statesmanship. Some writers said his patriotic phrases inspirited the Union during the Civil War, and certainly Abraham Lincoln echoed a number of those phrases.

During the second generation after Webster’s death, his fame as a nationalist came to prevail over his disrepute as a compromiser. School-children recited his second reply to Hayne, and most Americans considered him the greatest of the “great triumvirate”—Webster, Calhoun, and Clay.

By the second half of the 20th century Webster had ceased to be as well known or as highly rated. Still, he remained a timely figure on account of his conservative philosophy. Like him, the later spokesmen for business assumed that government could promote the general welfare by aiding corporate enterprise. They could have invoked his authority, but they seldom quoted or even mentioned him.