Daniel Webster Quotes

There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession

The proper function of a government is to make it easy for the people to do good, and difficult for them to do evil.

If all my possessions were taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of communication, for by it I would soon regain all the rest

There is nothing so powerful as truth - and often nothing so strange.

God grants liberty only to those who love it and are always ready to guard and defend it.

If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but if we and our posterity neglect its instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity.

The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions

There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters

A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue.

I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy.

Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.

Let us never forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.

The people's government, made for the people, made by the people and answerable to the people. January 1830

I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.

If religious books are not widely circulated among the masses in this country, I do not know what is going to become of us as a nation. If truth be not diffused, then error will be. If God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendency. If the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will. If the power of the gospel is not felt throughout the length and breadth of this land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without mitigation or end.

A disordered currency is one of the greatest political evils.

I regard it (the Constitution) as the work of the purest patriots and wisest statesman that ever existed, aided by the smiles of a benign Providence; it almost appears a "Divine interposition in our behalf... the hand that destroys our Constitution rends our Union asunder forever.

Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoe makers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.

We are all agents of the same supreme power, the people

Nothing will ruin the country if the people themselves will undertake its safety; and nothing can save it if they leave that safety in any hands but their own.

Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!

There is always room at the top.

Mr. President, I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American. I speak for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.

If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving that upon tablets which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity. ~

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.

The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only remember that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth. —W.E.B. DUBOIS2

It is simple to follow the easy and familiar path of personal ambition and private gain. It is more comfortable to sit content in the easy approval of friends and of neighbours than to risk the friction and the controversy that comes with public affairs. It is easier to fall in step with the slogans of others than to march to the beat of the internal drummer - to make and stand on judgements of your own. And it far easier to accept and to stand on the past, than to fight for the answers of the future

I still live.

Report of Daniel Webster's Speech in the U.S. Senate

And as Daniel Webster put it, “There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.

There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing.

He said, “You are lucky to be traveling in a place where a spring is so handy. In my country you can ride for days and see no ground water. I have lapped filthy water from a hoofprint and was glad to have it. You don’t know what discomfort is until you have nearly perished for water.” Rooster said, “If I ever meet one of you Texas waddies that says he never drank from a horse track I think I will shake his hand and give him a Daniel Webster cigar.

Keep cool; anger is not an argument.

A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent, like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are yet with us.   —Daniel Webster Argument on the Murder of Captain White, APRIL 6, 1830. VOL. VI., P. 105.

Perhaps the twentieth-century Senator is not called upon to risk his entire future on one basic issue in the manner of Edmund Ross or Thomas Hart Benton. Perhaps our modern acts of political courage do not arouse the public in the manner that crushed the career of Sam Houston and John Quincy Adams. Still, when we realize that a newspaper that chooses to denounce a Senator today can reach many thousand times as many voters as could be reached by all of Daniel Webster’s famous and articulate detractors put together, these stories of twentieth-century political courage have a drama, an excitement—and an inspiration—all their own.

It was not long until it became manifest that I would have to either give up the Indians or lose my standing with the white brethren. I chose the natives.

Kebohongan bukan cuma berlawanan dengan kebenaran, tetapi juga sering saling bertentangan di antara mereka sendiri.

Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may

In the most literal sense they are impossible to reform because they have ceased to be human, having been transformed into abstract structures of superb efficiency, independent of lasting human control survival mechanisms. This is not a devil you can wrestle with as Daniel Webster did with Old Scratch, but one that has to be starved to death by depriving it of victims.

His closing promise of survival for “government of the people, by the people, for the people” may have had its origin in Daniel Webster’s 1830 speech calling the American government “made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people,” but more probably he derived it from a sermon of Theodore Parker, to which Herndon had called his attention, defining democracy as “a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.

This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manuscript and wound up with a sermon so destructive of all hope to non-Presbyterians that it took the first prize. This composition was considered to be the very finest effort of the evening. The mayor of the village, in delivering the prize to the author of it, made a warm speech in which he said that it was by far the most "eloquent" thing he had ever listened to, and that Daniel Webster himself might well be proud of it.

One of the great leaders of America was Daniel Webster. That great bulging brow of his and those blazing eyes used to hold the Senate spellbound as he stood there and talked to them not with silly quips or funny remarks. The Senate in those days was not composed of half-baked comedians but of strong, noble statesmen who carried the weight of the nation on their shoulders. Someone said, “Mr. Webster, what do you consider the most serious thought that has ever entered your mind?” He said, “The most solemn thought that has ever entered my mind is the accountability to my Maker.

I shall stand by the Union, and by all who stand by it. I shall do justice to the whole country...in all I say, and act for the good of the whole country in all I do. I mean to stand upon the Constitution. I need no other platform. I shall know but one country. The ends I aim at shall be my country's, my God's, and Truth's. I was born an American; I live an American; I shall die an American; and I intend to perform the duties incumbent upon me in that character to the end of my career. I mean to do this with absolute disregard of personal consequences. What are the personal consequences? What is the individual man, with all the good or evil that may betide him, in comparison with the good or evil which may befall a great country, and in the midst of great transactions which concern that country's fate? Let the consequences be what they will, I am careless. No man can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he suffer, or if he fall, in the defense of the liberties and constitution of his country.

Hey, hi, um, we know you can’t do that. Call the police, I mean. No cell service out here, right? My phone hasn’t worked since somewhere way out on the Daniel Webster Highway. I’m sorry but I had to cut your landline. I’m, um, I’m Sabrina, by the way.” The awkwardness of her introduction is as chilling as the cutting of the landline admission.

I told them I did not intend to try to prove my innocence, but would help him prove my guilt if possible, for if guilty I wanted to ind it out and quit it.

It is time to think differently about gun violence as a public health problem. From that perspective, a fair and effective policy should start with risk, not mental illness.

A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Where tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization.

History is God's providence in human affairs.

We may be tossed upon an ocean where we can see no land – not, perhaps, the sun or stars. But there is a chart and a compass for us to study, to consult, and to obey. The chart is the Constitution.

So I can only conclude that American democracy inherently does not want good leadership. We always passed over the very great men we had like Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, Henry Clay, John Fremont, and the people after the Civil War like Carl Shurz. We pass them up because we don’t want first-class men in that position, we want somebody who is a stupid bum like us. We’re afraid of good leadership until a time of crisis,

I took no part in the ceremony. Many declared we were angels from heaven. I told them I thought we were better than angels for this occasion, as we were good strong men come to help them into the valley . . . " p. 45

The Bowery b'hoys were delighted ... to observe a pair of their favorites in league against their natural enemy, for Clancey detests our democracy, finds even the Whigs radical, the Adams family vulgar, Daniel Webster a sans-culotte. He fills the pages of his magazine America with libellous comments on all things American. Despite a rich wife and five children, he is a compulsive sodomite, forever preying on country boys new to the city.

When the U.S. Senate was first conceived by the Founders, it was meant to be a forum for civilized debate. And for a long time it was, with scholars like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan among its ranks. These were people of ideas who relished a good give-and-take, the clash of intellects, and the possibility of finding common ground. This is not the modern U.S. Senate, where debate is often confused with authoritative Ted Kennedy–style yelling.

In perhaps the strangest statement published on the issue of arming slaves, the Mercury charged Robert E. Lee (who had not yet made his views public but was privately known to be a supporter) with being a Federalist-like Alexander Hamilton-someone who had always evidenced a "profound disbelief in the institution of slavery." This comparison was drawn in contrast to South Carolina's great Democratic/states' rights standard-bearer John C. Calhoun, and the paper put the question starkly as "JOHN C. CALHOUN VS. DANIEL WEBSTER and ROBERT E. LEE.

Good intentions will always be pleaded for any assumption of power. The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good master, but they mean to be master.

On August 25, she hiked to Lafayette Campground, then walked back a little ways on the highway for a good view of the Old Man of the Mountain, a set of granite outcroppings on a mountainside in the shape of a man’s face. The great orator and statesman Daniel Webster once said about the outcropping, “Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoe makers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.” The

One reason to keep going is that the country was given to us as a sacred charge. It is, as Stephen Vincent Benet says in 'the Devil and Daniel Webster,' not the only place that created free man- but... Read More its a place that demands that we decide what to do with out freedom. You can only punish yourself, That's the existential view. I don't think there's any reward beyond participating, beyond being here. And the antithesis of reward is punishment, and the only punishment that can come is self-inflicted. I remain optimistic. Whether or not the optimism is justified, I don't know. I want to stay around for the third act.

If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving that upon tablets which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity.

Go on and finish your studies,” Gore said. “You are poor enough, but there are greater evils than poverty. Live on no man’s favor. What bread you do eat, let it be the bread of independence. Pursue your profession. Make yourself useful to your friends and a little formidable to your enemies, and you have nothing to fear.

At the end of Stephen Vincent Benét’s famous short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” the Prince of Darkness is forced to promise that he will never again show his face in the state of New Hampshire. It is nowhere recorded that any such promise was made about Massachusetts. The Bay State’s history is rife with documented cases of devil worship, witchcraft, and black magic. The state that is known for producing presidents and scholars is also known for Lizzie Borden, who “took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks/Then when she was good and done/Gave her father forty-one,” and for being the home of Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler.

What Homer could never have foreseen is the double idiocy into which we now educate our children. We have what look like our equivalent to the Greek “assemblies”; we can watch them on cable television, as long as one can endure them. For they are charades of political action. They concern themselves constantly, insufferably, about every tiniest feature of human existence, but without slow deliberation, without balance, without any commitment to the difficult virtues. We do not have men locked in intellectual battle with other men, worthy opponents both, as Thomas Paine battled with John Dickinson, or Daniel Webster with Robert Hayne. We have men strutting and mugging for women nagging and bickering. We have the sputters of what used to be language, “tweets,” expressions of something less than opinion. It is the urge to join—something, anything—while remaining aloof from the people who live next door, whose names we do not know. Aristotle once wrote that youths should not study politics, because they had not the wealth of human experience to allow for it; all would become for them abstract and theoretical, like mathematics, which the philosopher said was more suitable for them. He concluded that men should begin to study politics at around the age of forty. Whether that wisdom would help us now, I don’t know.

An estimated 3.5 million people with serious mental illnesses are going without treatment (Kessler et al. 2001). That is scandalous. But mentally ill people are not the cause of the violence problem. If schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression were cured, our society’s problem of violence would diminish by only about 4% (Swanson 1994).

I counseled with those who presided over me, and though the advice I received was contrary to my ideas of justice and right, I followed it, though it was at the complete sacrifice of my home acquired by years of toil and hardship. I was determined to retain my standing in the Church at any cost, and leave judgment with the Lord, who will eventually deal out strict justice to all men.

I was now so exhausted and sleepy that I could scarcely keep awake, although it was mid-day. So I told the Indians I was tired and would lie down and go to sleep, and if they were determined to kill me to wait till I was asleep, then put their guns close to my head, so I would not suffer much, telling them I as their friend. I spread my blankets on the ground, laid down and I am sure it was no more than two minutes till I was sound asleep.

We get a lot of goormies in Libby’s,” said Mr. Murchison. “I can spot a goormy right off. Moment he sits down he wants to know do we have any boolybooze.” “Bouillabaisse,” said Mr. Flood. “Yes,” said Mr. Murchison, “and I tell him, ‘Quit showing off! We don’t carry no boolybooze. Never did. There’s a time and a place for everything. If you was to go into a restaurant in France,’ I ask him, ‘would you call for some Daniel Webster fish chowder?’ I love a hearty eater, but I do despise a goormy. All they know is boolybooze and pompano and something that’s out of season, nothing else will do. And when they get through eating they don’t settle their check and go on about their business. No, they sit there and deliver you a lecture on what they et, how good it was, how it was almost as good as a piece of fish they had in the Caffy dee lah Pooty-doo in Paris, France, on January 16, 1928; they remember every meal they ever et, or make out they do. And every goormy I ever saw is an expert on herbs. Herbs, herbs, herbs! If you let one get started on the subject of herbs he’ll talk you deef, dumb, and blind. Way I feel about herbs, on any fish I ever saw, pepper and salt and a spoon of melted butter is herbs aplenty.

The spirit of the whites was really devilish; they seemed determined to drive the Indians to the wall, not one had spoken a word in their behalf. . . I told the whites that they demanded of the natives, what none of them could do; that if they were required to make all their wrongs right that they had committed for the last two years, it would bankrupt them morally and financially. . . I referred to the virtue and honesty of the Pimas when the whites first came among them, showing that all their vile degradation and dishonesty was copied from the white man. Also, that many now present were corrupt and immoral, much more so than the average Indian.

When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the glorious ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in the original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as 'What is all this worth?' nor those words of delusion and folly, 'Liberty first and Union afterward,'; but everywhere, spread over all the characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart, -- Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!

Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty. “[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably [sic] very small,” he observed. “ . . . I could wish their Numbers were increased.” James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the problem of racial friction was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public lands in order to raise the money to buy the entire slave population and transport it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After two terms in office, Madison served as chief executive of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy. At the inaugural meeting of the society in 1816, Henry Clay described its purpose: to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of the population.” The following prominent Americans were not merely members but served as officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. All opposed the presence of blacks in the United States and thought expatriation was the only long-term solution. James Monroe was such an ardent champion of colonization that the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his efforts. As for Roger Taney, as chief justice he wrote in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 what may be the harshest federal government pronouncement on blacks ever written: Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the White race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they have no rights which a White man is bound to respect.” Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be—in his words—“a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he expressed himself unambiguously: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” His opponent, Stephen Douglas, was even more outspoken, and made his position clear in the very first debate: “For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any form. I believe that this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men—men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes and Indians, and other inferior races.

I shall know but one country. The ends I aim at shall be my country, my God & Truth. I was born an American; I live an American; I shall die an American.

When the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course,” Senator Daniel Webster said in 1830. “Let us imitate this prudence, and before we float farther on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to conjecture where we now are.

Whatever makes men good christians, makes them good citizens.

Commercial credit is the creation of modern times, and belongs, in its highest perfection, only to the most enlightened and best governed nations. It has raised armies, equipped navies, and, triumphing over the gross power of mere numbers, it has established national superiority on the foundation of intelligence, wealth, and well-directed industry. —Daniel Webster, US Senate speech, March 18, 1834*

In Clay’s time the federal government issued only metal money: gold and silver coins, called specie. Paper currency was the responsibility of banks, which promised to redeem their notes in specie.

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner... and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect man and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.

Daniel Webster, one of America’s most famous statesmen, once said: “If we work on marble, it will perish; if on brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work on immortal souls and imbue them with principles, with the just fear of God and love of our fellowmen, we engrave on those tablets something that will brighten to all eternity.

Inconsistencies of opinion, arising from changes of circumstances, are often justifiable.

The Union is a Union of States founded upon Compact. How is it to be supposed that when different parties enter into a compact for certain purposes either can disregard one provision of it and expect others to observe the rest?... A bargain broken on one side is broken on all sides." (Daniel Webster, Capon Springs, 1851)

By formal declaration the Northern American states had abolished slavery; but the shovel gangs of the Irish and Chinese immigrants who built the railroads were, during their working span, hardly to be distinguished from slaves, if only temporary slaves. Republican government had promoted civil justice, along with law and order, to such an extent that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts showed such a low rate of violence or crime that Daniel Webster could boast without exaggeration that no one had to lock the door of his house at night. But these democratic communities were nevertheless part of a National State that waged merciless war all through the nineteenth century upon the rightful original occupants of the soil, the American Indians; that still shamelessly robs and mistreats their descendants; and that had despoiled Mexico of millions of acres of land in an infamous war.

If you’re in the exorcism business, you must know a lot about demons.” “Qliphoth,” he says. “What?” “It’s the proper word for what you call a demon. A demon is a bogeyman, an irrational entity representing fear in the collective unconscious. The Qliphoth are the castoffs of a greater entity. The old gods. They’re dumb and their lack of intelligence makes them pure evil.” “Okay, Daniel Webster. What happened at the exorcism?” Traven takes a breath and stares at his hands for a minute. “You should know that I don’t follow the Church’s standard exorcism rites. For instance, I seldom speak Latin. If Qliphoth really are lost fragments of the Angra Om Ya, the older dark gods, they’re part of creatures millions of years old. Why would Latin have any effect on them?

That speech (Daniel Webster's) “raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.

Every unpunished murder takes away something from the security of every man's life.

James’s general position on the difference between the sexes, which was that woman is “by nature inferior to man. She is man’s inferior in passion, his inferior in intellect, and his inferior in physical strength”; she is, very properly, her husband’s “patient and unrepining drudge, his beast of burden, his toilsome ox, his dejected ass, his cook, his tailor, his own cheerful nurse and the sleepless guardian of his children.” But their inferiority, James thought, is precisely what makes women attractive to men, so that any “great development of passion or intellect in woman is sure to prejudice” male attention. “Would any man fancy a woman after the pattern of Daniel Webster?”33 He consequently opposed serious education for women, a doctrine that had disastrous consequences in the case of his youngest child and only daughter, Alice.

May not such events raise the suggestion that they are not undesigned? Daniel Webster

Daniel Webster picked up rhetoric at Dartmouth by joining a debating society, the United Fraternity, which had an impressive classical library and held weekly debates. Years later, the club changed its name to Alpha Delta and partied its way to immortality by inspiring the movie Animal House. To the brothers’ credit, they didn’t forget their classical heritage entirely; hence the toga party.

Adams disagreed. “I told Calhoun I could not see things in the same light.” And as he later reflected on the day’s discussion, he realized how thoroughly he disagreed with nearly everything Calhoun and the other Southerners said by way of defense of slavery. “It is, in truth, all perverted sentiment—mistaking labor for slavery, and dominion for freedom. The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls. In the abstract, they admit that slavery is an evil, they disclaim all participation in the introduction of it, and cast it all upon the shoulders of our old Grandam Britain. But when probed to the quick upon it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. They fancy themselves more generous and noble-hearted than the plain freemen who labor for subsistence. They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee’s manners, because he has no habit of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat negroes like dogs. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice; for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin? It perverts human reason, and reduces man endowed with logical powers to maintain that slavery is sanctioned by the Christian religion, that slaves are happy and contented in their condition, that between master and slave there are ties of mutual attachment and affection, that the virtues of the master are refined and exalted by the degradation of the slave; while at the same they vent execrations upon the slave-trade, curse Britain for having given them slaves, burn at the stake negroes convicted of crimes for the terror of the example, and write in agonies of fear at the very mention of human rights as applicable to men of color.” Adams had never pondered slavery at such length, and the experience made him fear for the future of the republic. “The impression produced upon my mind by the progress of this discussion is that the bargain between freedom and slavery contained in the Constitution of the United States is morally and politically vicious, inconsistent with the principles upon which alone our Revolution can be justified; cruel and oppressive, by riveting the chains of slavery, by pledging the faith of freedom to maintain and perpetuate the tyranny of the master; and grossly unequal and impolitic, by admitting that slaves are at once enemies to be kept in subjection, property to be secured or restored to their owners, and persons not to be represented themselves, but for whom their masters are privileged with nearly a double share of representation. The consequence has been that this slave representation has governed the Union.

Gibbons then sued Ogden in federal court with the help of another lawyer of considerable oratorical skill experienced in such matters: Daniel Webster. Webster’s argument was that the steamboat monopolies granted by the individual states violated the commerce clause of the Constitution. In 1824 Gibbons v. Ogden was decided by the Supreme Court in the aging Gibbons’s favor. Gibbons v. Ogden went on to become the landmark case affirming that only the federal government had the right to regulate interstate commerce. Waterways and roads connecting states all fell within the framework, as ruled by the court: The era of monopoly grants was over. Indeed, it fell upon the native southerner Gibbons, a plantation owner from Savannah, to affirm the superiority of federal rights over the states’ rights in matters of interstate commerce. •

(On March 4, 1849, Lincoln told John Cook, son of the deceased U.S. Senator Daniel Cook: “I want you to go with me to the Senate Chamber. I want to introduce you to one of the greatest men of the Nation and a warm personal friend of your father,” Daniel Webster.)

The most important thought that ever occupied my mind is that of my individual responsibility to God.

God took religion from the realm of the external and made it internal. Our trouble is that we are trying to confirm the truth of Christianity by an appeal to external evidence. We are saying, “Well, look at this fellow. He can throw a baseball farther than anybody else and he is a Christian, therefore Christianity must be true.” “Here is a great statesman who believes the Bible. Therefore, the Bible must be true.” We quote Daniel Webster or Roger Bacon. We write books to show that some scientist believed in Christianity: therefore, Christianity must be true. We are all the way out on the wrong track, brother! That is not New Testament Christianity at all. That is a pitiful, whimpering, drooling appeal to the flesh. That never was the testimony of the New Testament, never the way God did things—never! You might satisfy the intellects of men by external evidences, and Christ did, I say, point to external evidence when He was here on earth.

As the American Aryan’s desire to expand across the Pacific grew, Christian ministers observed that heathen Japan needed salvation and that Japan’s seclusion policy was not God’s way. The missionary Samuel Wells Williams wrote, “I have a full conviction that the seclusion policy of the nations of Eastern Asia is not according to God’s plan of mercy to these peoples, and their government must change them through fear or force, that his people may be free.”13 In 1852, the secretary of the Navy, John Kennedy, wrote that Japan must recognize “its Christian obligation to join the family of Christendom.”14 Echoing similar arguments made earlier about Native American gold mines, the secretary of state, Daniel Webster, argued that Japan had “no right” to refuse the U.S. Navy’s “reasonable” request to commandeer Japanese sovereign soil for its coaling stations because the coal at issue was “but a gift of Providence, deposited, by the Creator of all things, in the depths of the Japanese islands for the benefit of the human family.

God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it,” said Daniel Webster.

Uncle Daniel may have died a very wealthy man, one of the wealthiest of his generation, but what I liked best was the description I read several days after his death: “His busy life as a banker and man of affairs

Daniel Webster prefirió arriesgar su carrera y su reputación en lugar de poner en riesgo a la Unión.

Accuracy and diligence are much more necessary to a Lawyer, than great comprehension of mind, or brilliancy of talents,” Daniel Webster argued, for the lawyer's “business is to refine, define, and split hairs…. A man can never gallop over the fields of Law on Pegasus, nor fly across them on the wing of oratory. If he would stand on terra firma he must descend.”25

The Devil and Daniel Webster.

If mutual decimation of the McLaughlins and the McLeans marked the end of Charlestown’s “gangster era,” a host of gangs endured in the Town. These were less criminal bands than expressions of territorial allegiance. Every street and alley, every park and pier had its own ragged troop which hung on the corner, played football, baseball, and street hockey, and defended its turf against all comers. The Wildcats hung at the corner of Frothingham and Lincoln streets, the Bearcats at Walker and Russell streets, the Falcons outside the Edwards School, the Cobras on Elm Street, the Jokers in Hayes Square, the Highlanders on High Street, the Crusaders at the Training Field. Each had its distinctive football jersey (on which members wore their street addresses), its own legends and traditions. The Highlanders, for example, took their identity from the Bunker Hill Monument, which towered over their hangout at the top of Monument Avenue. On weekends and summer afternoons, they gathered there to wait for out-of-town tourists visiting the revolutionary battleground. When one approached, an eager boy would step forward and launch his spiel, learned by rote from other Highlanders: “The Monument is 221 feet high, has 294 winding stairs and no elevators. They say the quickest way up is to walk, the quickest way down is to fall. The Monument is fifteen feet square. Its cornerstone was laid in 1825 by Daniel Webster. The statue you see in the foreground is that of Colonel William Prescott standing in the same position as when he gave that brave and famous command, ‘Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes.’ The British made three attempts to gain the hill …” And so forth. An engaging raconteur could parlay this patter into a fifty-cent tip.

Yes, Dan’l Webster is dead — or, at least, they buried him.