THE NATION AND DAN’L WEBSTER

Webster, born in 1782, grew up in the frozen north of New Hampshire, the son of a farmer who put all his savings into sending his boy to Dartmouth College. With total recall and a thirst for history, Webster quickly developed into an orator of searing intensity and scrambled ahead in the law. Soon he was in Portsmouth, suing everyone in sight and collecting good fees, though never quite enough: His luxurious tastes and penchant for bad investments saddled him with debt his entire life.

Before long, he entered politics, winning election to the House in 1812, when he was thirty. A staunch Federalist, he admired George Washington, believed fervently in the Constitution, and preferred Britain to revolutionary and Napoleonic France, convinced that commerce would benefit the farmer and mechanic as well as the money-wise capitalist. In 1816, he transplanted himself to Boston (even while noting that New York was growing faster), where he found plentiful legal business and a supply of rich men willing to supplement his officeholder’s salary.

Webster is today remembered as one of our greatest members of Congress, but he shaped little legislation — certainly far less than Clay. He did not found a political party, as both Clay and Van Buren did. Nor was he a political philosopher in the class of, for instance, John C. Calhoun. And, as we all know, he never became president. (He ran once, in 1836, as one of several Whigs trying to maximize the party’s vote against the Democrat Van Buren, and carried only Massachusetts. Four years later, he turned down a chance to be the Whig vice-presidential nominee. Had he accepted, he would have succeeded William Henry Harrison as president a scant month after Harrison was sworn in.)

Rather, Webster shaped the nation in other ways — first, as a lawyer. He was the earliest of our significant politicians to make his career primarily as a lawyer, thus serving as a prototype for many to come. A favorite advocate of Chief Justice John Marshall and Justice Joseph Story, he argued two-hundred and twenty-three cases before the Supreme Court, and his persuasiveness in several of those cases helped free-market capitalism thrive.

His most famous case involved his alma mater, Dartmouth, in 1819. The New Hampshire legislature had passed a law changing the school’s colonial charter, ousting its trustees, and transforming it from a private to a state institution. The aggrieved trustees turned to Webster, who was able to persuade Marshall and the court that the legislature had violated the Constitution’s ban on the infringement of contracts. As Webster anticipated, the court’s decision insulated corporations from government interference and made possible the use of the corporate form, which shielded entrepreneurs from personal liability for corporate debt and encouraged risk-taking.

Webster also argued McCulloch v. Maryland, in which Marshall ruled that the state of Maryland could not tax a branch of the Bank of the United States. Webster played as large a role as anyone in creating a rule of law that nurtured private enterprise and made possible the enviably successful American economy. (When we hear today that Russia still needs a reliable rule of law to foster its economy, we hear that Russia needs what Webster helped bequeath to America.)

Webster’s oratorical power attracted national attention, and visitors streamed to the Supreme Court chamber whenever he left the House or Senate to argue a case. Among his chestnuts: “It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it.” (This, of course, was the Dartmouth case.) And, in McCulloch, “The power to tax is the power to destroy.” Webster’s rhetoric was more than fustian. He took care to publish and preserve (and slightly clean up) most of his major speeches, and, unlike much nineteenth-century oratory, they read well today.

They have serious intellectual content as well, and here we get to another of his contributions: his role in shaping Americans’ views of their own history. Even before he went to the Senate, Webster was renowned for orations commemorating Plymouth Rock and the Battle of Bunker Hill. Webster was an American exceptionalist, with a New England accent; he maintained that the Constitution was a magnificent and unique achievement, always to be cherished, and he stressed the contributions of New England Yankees, from Plymouth Rock to the battles of Lexington and Concord and beyond.

Webster was thus an exponent of strong federal government, and one that would promote New England values (much like the government that took form after the Civil War).

He avoided his region’s flirtation with secession during the War of 1812 and battled shrewdly against Jackson’s and Calhoun’s various attempts to unite the South and West against the Northeast. Though he did not live to see it, he was a forebear of the Republican party, which found its greatest strength in New England and among the Yankee diaspora that ran west from upstate New York through the Great Lakes to Iowa and toward California. (In 1820, he predicted that Americans would be on the Pacific in 1850.) In the 1860s, the Republican party prevailed in what might be called the Yankee conquest of North America.

Webster, who died in 1852, dreaded the idea of secession, which occurred despite the Compromise of 1850, which he backed. In many respects, his political career was unsatisfactory. He opposed Jackson’s crackpot schemes to destroy the Bank of the United States and to ban paper money. He backed Jackson’s assertion of national power over Calhoun’s argument that states could nullify federal laws. He failed to stop the annexation of Texas or the Mexican War. And he regarded slavery as an evil, for years opposing its expansion into the territories (though he turned partly around in 1850).

Personally, too, Webster’s life was less than gleaming. John Quincy Adams, whose presidential administration Webster had supported, soured on him in later years, writing of “the gigantic intellect, the envious temper, the ravenous ambition, and the rotten heart of Daniel Webster.” And Webster suffered misfortunes: His first wife died; his second marriage turned out badly; his two sons were unsuccessful, and both died in battle; all of his daughters predeceased him — in other words, the typical lot of nineteenth- century families. He was almost laughably corrupt as well, asking Nicholas Biddle of the Bank of the United States to “refresh my retainer” and perpetually soliciting additions to his salary.

But for all of his failings and offenses, the legal framework of our capitalist economy and our overview of our national history are not so different from those that Webster spoke for — which is not all bad for a guy who never got to be president.

By Michael Barone; Michael Barone is senior staff editor for Reader’s Digest and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics The Great Orator’s Giant Intellect and Ravenous Ambition