ow and deliberate. I have been told by persons who heard
him in the Supreme Court in his later years that the same
characteristic marked his arguments there, and that some of
his passages made very little impression upon the auditors,
although they seemed eloquent and powerful when they came
to be read afterward.

His is frequently spoken of as a nervous Saxon style. That
is a great mistake, except as to a few passages where he rose
to a white heat. If any person will open a volume of his
speeches at random, it will be found that the characteristic
of his sentences is a somewhat ponderous Latinity.

A considerable number of Democrats joined the Free Soil movement
in 1848. Conspicuous among them was Marcus Morton, who had
been Governor and one of our ablest Supreme Court judges,
and his son, afterward Chief Justice, then just rising into
distinction as a lawyer. The members of the Liberty Party
also, who had cast votes for Birney in 1844, were ready for
the new movement. But the Free Soil Party derived its chief
strength, both of numbers and influence, from the Whigs. The
Anti-Slavery Whigs clung to Webster almost to the last. He
had disappointed them by opposing the resolution they offered
at the Whig State Convention, pledging the party to support
no candidate not known by his acts or declared opinions to
be opposed to the extension of slavery. But he had coupled
his opposition with a declaration of his own unalterable opposition
to that extension, and had said, speaking of those who were
in favor of the declaration: "It is not their thunder."

He declared in the Senate, as late as 1848: "My opposition
to the increase of slavery in the country, or to the increase
of slave representation in Congress, is general and universal.
It has no reference to lines of latitude or points of the
compass. I shall oppose all such extension, and all such
increase, at all times, under all circumstances, even against
all inducements, against all combinations, against all compromises."

So the Anti-Slavery Whigs eagerly supported him as their
candidate for the Whig nomination in 1848.

If Mr. Webster had been nominated for the Presidency in 1848,
the Free Soil Party would not have come into existence that
year. There would have been probably some increase in the
numbers of the Liberty Party; yet the Anti-Slavery Whigs of
Massachusetts would have trusted him. But the nomination
of General Taylor, a Southerner, one of