the middle of the nineteenth.

All this Mr. Webster declined to recognize. He upheld without diminution or
modification the constitutional duty of sending escaping slaves back to
bondage; and from the legal soundness of this position there is no escape.
The trouble was that he had no word to say against the cruelty and
barbarity of the system. To insist upon the necessity of submitting to the
hard and repulsive duty imposed by the Constitution was one thing. To urge
submission without a word of sorrow or regret was another. The North felt,
and felt rightly, that while Mr. Webster could not avoid admitting the
force of the constitutional provisions about fugitive slaves, and was
obliged to bow to their behest, yet to defend them without reservation, to
attack those who opposed them, and to urge the rigid enforcement of a
Fugitive Slave Law, was not in consonance with his past, his conscience,
and his duty to his constituents. The constitutionality of a Fugitive Slave
Law may be urged and admitted over and over again, but this could not make
the North believe that advocacy of slave-catching was a task suited to
Daniel Webster. The simple fact was that he did not treat the general
question of slavery as he always had treated it. Instead of denouncing and
deploring it, and striking at it whenever the Constitution permitted, he
apologized for its existence, and urged the enforcement of its most
obnoxious laws. This was not his attitude in 1820; this was not what the
people of the North expected of him in 1850.

In regard to the policy of compromise there is a much stronger contrast
between Mr. Webster's attitude in 1850 and his earlier course than in the
case of his views on the general subject of slavery. In 1819, although not
in public life, Mr. Webster, as is clear from the tone of the Boston
memorial, was opposed to any compromise involving an extension of slavery.
In 1832-33 he was the most conspicuous and unyielding enemy of the
principle of compromise in the country. He then took the ground that the
time had come to test the strength of the Constitution and the Union, and
that any concession would have a fatally weakening effect. In 1850 he
supported a compromise which was so one-sided that it hardly deserves the
name. The defence offered by his friends on this subject--and it is the
strongest point they have been able to make--is that these sacrifices, or
compromises, were necessary to save the Union, and that--altho