Harrison early selected Mr. Webster for one of his Cabinet, and offered
him the choice between the Treasury and the State Department. Mr.
Webster chose the latter, and during the short month of General
Harrison's life, laid out the ground plan of that important work which
kept him so busily employed for the next two years, and which under no
circumstances during the contest between Mr. Tyler, the succeeding
President, and the Whig party, did he feel willing to leave to the
chances of a settlement by a successor less familiar and perhaps less
skilled in National affairs with foreign governments than himself.
Although Mr. Webster was generally sustained by the party friends in
Congress, and in part by the whole country, the shortsighted, less
skilful, and more selfish of Whig partisans denounced him in unmeasured
terms through the press and upon the stump, for not forsaking his post
and leaving the President with the rest of the Cabinet. It was here, at
the great pivotal turn of the Whig party, so far as Mr. Webster was
concerned, and not at a later period, while in the Senate where he
delivered his seventh of March speech, or in the Cabinet of President
Fillmore, that the great coalition of radical partisans was made against
him. The most bitter denunciations were launched by this premeditated
alliance of selfish politicians, who, not having been able to bit,
bridle, and drive Mr. Webster, were determined to rule or ruin, through
his political disfranchisement, from the great party he was virtually
the father of. All this, too, by false pretence; for a cool review of
Mr. Webster's course has satisfied the country that the great depth of
motive, prescience of danger to the Union and in fact, purpose of that
speech, was, in the highest sense, proper and patriotic, and in no way
at variance with the interpretation of either the old or new
Constitution as now understood. The occasion was seized upon, having
failed in their first effort to denounce and defame him, in the hope of
thus building up an influence with some candidate for President, whom
they could control for their own selfish purposes. It will be remembered
that some of Mr. Webster's friends, or, at least, those who claimed to
be such, took occasion to forsake him at that time. He, however, went
into the Cabinet of President Fillmore after the death of General
Taylor, where he remained until his death. The bill pending before
Congress when he left it, was altered af