l recrimination between North and
South, for obedience to the law of the land. It was his supreme effort
to reconcile an irreconcilable situation.

It failed, as we know. Whittier, Emerson, Theodore Parker, and indeed
most of the voters of New England, believed that Webster had bartered
his private convictions in the hope of securing the Presidential
nomination in 1852. They assailed him savagely, and Webster died, a
broken man, in the autumn of the Presidential year. "I have given my
life to law and politics," he wrote to Professor Silliman. "Law is
uncertain and politics are utterly vain." The dispassionate judgment
of the present hour frees him from the charge of conscious treachery
to principle. He was rather a martyr to his own conception of the
obligations imposed by nationality. When these obligations run counter
to human realities, the theories of statesmen must give way. Emerson
could not refute that logic of Webster's argument for the Fugitive Slave
Law, but he could at least record in his private Journal: "I WILL NOT
OBEY IT, BY GOD!" So said hundreds of thousands of obscure men in the
North, but Webster did not or could not hear them.

While no other orator of that period was so richly endowed as Daniel
Webster, the struggle for Union and Liberty enlisted on both sides many
eloquent men. John C. Calhoun's acute, ingenious, masterly political
theorizing can still be studied in speeches that have lost little of
their effectiveness through the lapse of time. The years have dealt
roughly with Edward Everett, once thought to be the pattern of
oratorical gifts and graces. In commemorative oratory, indeed, he ranked
with Webster, but the dust is settling upon his learned and ornate
pages. Rufus Choate, another conservative Whig in politics, and a
leader, like Wirt and Pinkney, at the bar, had an exotic, almost
Oriental fancy, a gorgeousness of diction, and an intensity of emotion
unrivaled among his contemporaries. His Dartmouth College eulogy of
Webster in 1853 shows him at his best. The Anti-Slavery orators, on the
other hand, had the advantage of a specific moral issue in which
they led the attack. Wendell Phillips was the most polished, the most
consummate in his air of informality, and his example did much to
puncture the American tradition of high-flown oratory. He was an expert
in virulent denunciation, passionately unfair beneath his mask
of conversational decorum, an aristocratic demagogue. He is still
d