A short life of the author
Daniel Webster was the greatest orator in American history — a judgment that was nearly unanimous among his contemporaries and that has never been seriously challenged. For three decades, from the Plymouth Oration of 1820 to the Seventh of March speech of 1850, Webster dominated American public discourse with a combination of intellectual power, emotional force, and rhetorical grandeur that made his speeches into national events and his name into a synonym for eloquence itself. He served as a congressman from New Hampshire, a senator from Massachusetts, and twice as Secretary of State, but his enduring significance lies less in his political career than in the speeches and legal arguments through which he articulated the constitutional case for the American Union in the decades before the Civil War.
Life and Career
Webster was born in Salisbury, New Hampshire, in 1782, the son of a frontier farmer who had fought in the Revolution. He attended Dartmouth College, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1805. His early career as a lawyer in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, brought him into constitutional cases that would establish foundational precedents.
His argument before the Supreme Court in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) — in which he defended his alma mater’s charter against legislative interference — produced the famous peroration “It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it,” which reportedly brought Chief Justice John Marshall to tears. More substantively, the decision established the constitutional protection of private contracts from state interference, a principle that shaped American corporate law for the next century.
Webster’s arguments in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) helped establish the broad construction of federal power that Marshall’s Court adopted. These were not merely legal victories; they were acts of constitutional architecture.
The Great Orations
Webster’s reputation rests on a handful of speeches that were, in their time, national literary events — printed in pamphlet form, memorised by schoolchildren, and quoted for decades afterward.
The Plymouth Oration (1820), delivered on the bicentennial of the Pilgrims’ landing, established Webster’s public voice: a style that combined historical sweep with emotional intensity and constitutional argument with moral passion. The Bunker Hill Monument orations (1825, 1843) were exercises in democratic nationalism, celebrations of the Revolutionary generation that simultaneously argued for the permanence of the Union.
The Second Reply to Hayne (1830) was the speech that made Webster a legend. Responding to Senator Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina, who had argued for states’ rights and the doctrine of nullification, Webster delivered a two-day defence of the Union and the Constitution that culminated in the famous peroration: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” The speech was the most widely reprinted and most frequently memorised piece of American oratory in the nineteenth century.
The Seventh of March speech (1850), in which Webster supported the Compromise of 1850 — including the Fugitive Slave Act — in the name of preserving the Union, was his most controversial. Abolitionists, including John Greenleaf Whittier (in the poem “Ichabod”) and Ralph Waldo Emerson, denounced Webster as a traitor to principle. The speech destroyed his standing with antislavery New England but expressed the tragic logic of Webster’s constitutionalism: that the Union was the precondition of liberty, and that its preservation justified terrible moral compromises.
The Literary Afterlife
Webster’s speeches were collected and reprinted throughout the nineteenth century. Edwin P. Whipple’s The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster (1879) was the standard edition for decades. The National Edition of The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster (18 volumes, 1903) remains the most comprehensive collection. The Papers of Daniel Webster, published by the University Press of New England beginning in 1974, is the scholarly edition.
Webster’s cultural significance extended beyond his actual speeches. Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story The Devil and Daniel Webster (1936) — in which Webster argues a case before a jury of the damned and defeats the Devil himself — became one of the most famous American short stories and was adapted into an opera, a play, and a film. The story transformed Webster from a historical figure into an American folk hero, the embodiment of Yankee wit and democratic eloquence.
Critical Standing
Webster’s reputation has risen and fallen with changing attitudes toward the Union, compromise, and slavery. In the nineteenth century, he was revered as the Defender of the Constitution. The abolitionist critique — that he sacrificed moral principle for political expediency — damaged his reputation in the Progressive era. Modern historians have tended toward a more nuanced view, acknowledging both the moral failure of his position on slavery and the genuine constitutional crisis he was attempting to avert.
As an orator, Webster remains unmatched. His speeches, while not read as widely as they once were, remain the standard against which American political eloquence is measured.
Collecting Webster
The primary collecting targets are nineteenth-century pamphlet printings of individual speeches, particularly the Second Reply to Hayne (1830) and the Plymouth Oration (1820). Whipple’s The Great Speeches and Orations (Little, Brown, 1879) is the most collected anthology. Benét’s The Devil and Daniel Webster (Farrar & Rinehart, 1937) is a separate and highly active collecting area. The National Edition of the Writings and Speeches (1903, 18 volumes) commands significant prices when found complete in good condition.