Daniel Webster

At his farm in Marshfield, Massachusetts, on the morning of October 23, 1852, Daniel Webster announced that he would die sometime that night. At 2:37 A.M. on October 24 he fulfilled the prophecy. He left instructions to be buried "without the least show or ostentation but in a manner respectful to my neighbors." They laid him out underneath a tree in front of the house in his blue coat with gold buttons and a white neck cloth to set off the most famous head in America.

No American in the first half of the nineteenth century was more visible to the American people than Daniel Webster. For forty years, from 1812 to his death in 1852, he played a dominant national role as lawyer, orator, congressman, senator, secretary of state, leader of two major parties, and perennially unsuccessful presidential candidate. It was his remarkable versatility as well as the length of his political career that helped keep him before the public mind. In an age of great orators, few of Daniel Webster's contemporaries challenged his pre-eminence. He was compared to other distinguished orators as Michelangelo was to Raphael. Men marked the anniverary date of his speeches with a solemnity usually observed for the birthdays of great men, and later generations of American orators were brought up on Daniel Webster's speeches the way writers fed on Shakespeare. In 1900 a distinguished senator observed that whenever debate in Congress turned to large and weighty issues, Webster would be quoted "twenty times as often as any other public man in our history."

Like other men Daniel Webster was capable of ordinary performance. Unlike ordinary men he was frequently called upon to serve the grand occasion, and the opportunities for great oratory offered by the centennial celebration at Plymouth, by the almost simultaneous deaths of Jefferson and John Adams, by the commencement and completion of the Bunker Hill Monument, and, above all, by the question of the durability of the Union have never been surpassed in American history. Although it would be dangerous to argue that Webster could regularly fascinate an audience more completely than other famous orators, it is clear that his eloquence had a unique staying power. Given the state of communications in the mid-nineteenth century, most Americans were introduced to Daniel Webster through reading his speeches. Webster's success as an orator depended only in part on his extraordinary presence and a voice which could carry to the far edges of a crowd of tens of thousands; it was dependent to a degree not generally understood on his ability as a writer. He was not one to rush into print with a major effort, and the published speech was usually a much revised edition of the spoken version. The famous Plymouth address was not published until a year after it was given, and the printed speech was longer than the original presentation. The peroration in the reply to Hayne, which thousands of schoolboys over several generations would commit to memory, was not a verbatim report of what Daniel Webster said in the Senate, but a consciously shaped literary effort which Webster revised afterward. The fact that Webster was read so much more widely than any other public man of his time, that he was looked upon as a literary giant as well as a great lawyer, orator, and statesman contributed heavily to his enormous visibility before the American public.

In Daniel Webster's case the danger was not that he would be ignored, but that his image would be identified too closely with the rich industrialists and great cities of the northeastern states. At a time when Americans still clung tenaciously to the agrarian ideal, but poured their fortunes and their energies into building railroads and factories, such an image was a distinct liability for a politician with presidential aspirations. As a result Webster's supporters attempted to produce an image of "the great farmer."