the country would
have been pacified and the Civil War avoided. I do not think
so. The forces on both sides who were bringing on that conflict
were too powerful to be subdued by the influence of any individual
statesman. The irrepressible conflict had to be fought out.
But Mr. Webster's attitude not only estranged him from the
supporters of General Taylor in his own party, but, of course,
made an irreparable breach between him and the anti-slavery
men who had founded the Free Soil Party. He was the chief
target for all anti-slavery arrows from March 7, 1850, to his
death.

When I was in the Harvard Law School, Mr. Webster was counsel
in a very interesting divorce case where Choate was upon the
other side. The parties were in high social position and
very well known. Mr. Choate's client, who was the wife, was
charged with adultery. I did not hear the closing argument,
but my classmates who did reported that Mr. Webster spoke
of the woman with great severity and argued the case with
a scriptural plainness of speech. He likened the case of
the husband bound to an adulterous wife to the old Hebrew
punishment of fastening a living man to a corpse. "Who shall
deliver me from the body of this death?" But Judge Fletcher,
who held the court, decided in favor of the wife.

The meeting which gathered at Worcester in pursuance of the
above call, inaugurated for the first time a party for the
sole object of resisting the extension of slavery. The Liberty
Party, which had cast a few votes in the presidential election
of 1840, and which, in 1844, had turned the scale in New York
and so in the nation against Mr. Clay, was willing to support
the candidates of other parties who were personally unobjectionable
to them in this respect. But the Free Soil Party, of which
the present Republican party is but the continuation under
a change of name, determined that no person should receive
its support for any national office, who himself continued
his association with either of the old political organizations.

The Free Soil Party of Massachusetts cast in the presidential
election of 1848 only about 37,000 votes, but it included
among its supporters almost every man in the Commonwealth
old enough to take part in politics who has since acquired
any considerable national reputation. Charles Sumner who
had become known to the public as an orator and scholar by
three or four great orations, was just at the threshold of
his bril