Secretary of State to President Fillmore, 1850-1852. Defeat by Whig party in presidential nomination of 1852.1 One of the public buildings of Harvard University is adorned with the sculptured heads of the world's renowned orators. With Demosthenes and Cicero, Bossuet and Burke, Webster finds fair companionship. The skilful jurist, the revered senator, the judicious cabinet officer, the brilliant statesman, are outranked when we recall in him the noble orator, who, like Wallace of Scotland, left his name "like a wild-flower, all over his dear country." Daniel Webster was born at Salisbury, N.H., Jan. 18, 1782, His father, Ebenezer Webster, served his country both in the French and Indian War and the Revolution, thus giving his son a natural inheritance of patriotism. No less was he indebted to his mother for the intellectual strength and childlike simplicity which marked his thought-habit. A delicate infancy and childhood gave no promise of the vigorous physique or stately beauty of his middle and later years, while the gentle care incident to the rearing of the frail boy precluded the possibility of asking "from the season more than its timely produce." Happily, in his wholesome country home the Bible, Shakespeare, Pope, Addison, and Don Quixote made ample amends for the dearth of so-called child-literature. Young Webster's preparation for college, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, was a thing "of shreds and patches." The scant instruction of the village school, with a few months at Phillips Exeter Academy, was supplemented by the private tuition of the Rev. Samuel Wood, a country parson otherwise 1 Webster was three times defeated in his presidential aspirations. 2 Only one son, of five sons and daughters, survived him: Fletcher Webster, born in Portsmouth, 1812, was killed in the battle of Bull Run, 1862. unknown to fame. This preliminary work consisted in a modicum of mathematics, for which he had little taste, a smattering of Greek grammar, six books of Virgil's Æneid, and a few of Cicero's Orations. His best equipment was his indomitable courage, his tireless industry, and an ability for selfdenial which John Stirling rightly says makes the worst education better than the best that omits it. He entered Dartmouth College in August, 1797, taking his degree after the customary four years of study. The education which it cost his parents sacrifice and privation to give was valued to its utmost opportunity. It was a career of genius, but never of idle genius. One of his biographers says of him, "His faculty for labor was something prodigious, his memory disciplined by methods not taught him by others, and his intellect was expanded far beyond his years. He was abstemious, religious, of the highest sense of honor, and of the most elevated deportment. His manners were genial, his affections warm, his conversation brilliant and instructive, his temperament cheerful, his gayety overflowing." Fully believing that his brother possessed the nobler parts, and foreseeing the gulf that would inevitably widen between the brother at college and the brother on the farm, Webster occupied his later college vacations and his early years after graduation by teaching, in order to devote the proceeds to the education of Ezekiel, whose brief but brilliant history fully justified this estimate of his powers. On his admission to the bar, Webster was a tall, vigorous, finely proportioned man, whose massive forehead and thick, black, beetling eyebrows overshadowed a pair of black eyes as solemn-looking as they were searching. His carriage was erect and slow, his manner moderate and reserved; and, indeed, his whole bearing, after forty years of political life, was but the emphasis of this earlier portrait. Secretary of State to President Fillmore, 1850-1852. Defeat by Whig party in presidential nomination of 1852.1 One of the public buildings of Harvard University is adorned with the sculptured heads of the world's renowned orators. With Demosthenes and Cicero, Bossuet and Burke, Webster finds fair companionship. The skilful jurist, the revered senator, the judicious cabinet officer, the brilliant statesman, are outranked when we recall in him the noble orator, who, like Wallace of Scotland, left his name like a wild-flower, all over his dear country." Daniel Webster was born at Salisbury, N.H., Jan. 18, 1782, His father, Ebenezer Webster, served his country both in the French and Indian War and the Revolution, thus giving his son a natural inheritance of patriotism. No less was he indebted to his mother for the intellectual strength and childlike simplicity which marked his thought-habit. A delicate infancy and childhood gave no promise of the vigorous physique or stately beauty of his middle and later years, while the gentle care incident to the rearing of the frail boy precluded the possibility of asking "from the season more than its timely produce." Happily, in his wholesome country home the Bible, Shakespeare, Pope, Addison, and Don Quixote made ample amends for the dearth of so-called child-literature. Young Webster's preparation for college, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, was a thing "of shreds and patches." The scant instruction of the village school, with a few months at Phillips Exeter Academy, was supplemented by the private tuition of the Rev. Samuel Wood, a country parson otherwise 1 Webster was three times defeated in his presidential aspirations. 2 Only one son, of five sons and daughters, survived him: Fletcher Webster, born in Portsmouth, 1812, was killed in the battle of Bull Run, 1862. unknown to fame. This preliminary work consisted in a modicum of mathematics, for which he had little taste, a smattering of Greek grammar, six books of Virgil's Æneid, and a few of Cicero's Orations. His best equipment was his indomitable courage, his tireless industry, and an ability for selfdenial which John Stirling rightly says makes the worst education better than the best that omits it. 66 He entered Dartmouth College in August, 1797, taking his degree after the customary four years of study. The education which it cost his parents sacrifice and privation to give was valued to its utmost opportunity. It was a career of genius, but never of idle genius. One of his biographers says of him, "His faculty for labor was something prodigious, his memory disciplined by methods not taught him by others, and his intellect was expanded far beyond his years. He was abstemious, religious, of the highest sense of honor, and of the most elevated deportment. His manners were genial, his affections warm, his conversation brilliant and instructive, his temperament cheerful, his gayety overflowing." Fully believing that his brother possessed the nobler parts, and foreseeing the gulf that would inevitably widen between the brother at college and the brother on the farm, Webster occupied his later college vacations and his early years after graduation by teaching, in order to devote the proceeds to the education of Ezekiel, whose brief but brilliant history fully justified this estimate of his powers. On his admission to the bar, Webster was a tall, vigorous, finely proportioned man, whose massive forehead and thick, black, beetling eyebrows overshadowed a pair of black eyes as solemn-looking as they were searching. His carriage was erect and slow, his manner moderate and reserved; and, indeed, his whole bearing, after forty years of political life, was but the emphasis of this earlier portrait. His career as a lawyer, after his admission to the bar in 1805, and a brief practice in his native State and in Boston, was soon merged in the larger life of the orator and statesman. It is fitting that a man whose first and last serious thought was "his country, his whole country, and nothing but his country," should have made his first great national speech at Plymouth on the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims. The attention that this, together with former patriotic addresses of local interest, and his interests with the Federal party, called forth, sent him as the representative of that party to the thirteenth Congress in 1815. These were the days of Clay and Calhoun, and the beginning of the great debates on the tariff, of the earliest hints of the great anti-slavery controversies of the middle of the century, of the settling of our strained relations to England, and the proposed independence of the South American republics. From this period his political advancement was without retrogression, though he continued his legal practice, and was admitted to the Supreme Court of the United States, where he won immediate fame by establishing a ruling in the relation of States to corporate bodies in the famous Dartmouth College decision. From 1813, when he took his seat as representative, to the date of his death in 1852, when he filled the office of Secretary of State to President Fillmore, he occupied the positions successively of re-elected representative, member of the Convention to revise the Constitution of Massachusetts, United States senator, and cabinet officer. No brief sketch can enumerate the services that, in these various capacities, were done for the country he served. The boy who could not see himself take privileges and opportunities that were denied his elder brother was father of the man who made the triumphant reply to Senator Hayne of South Carolina, and showed how the larger family constitution was |