nomination was a bitter disappointment to Mr. Webster. It
was the fashion in certain quarters to declare that it killed him, but this
was manifestly absurd. The most that can be said in this respect was, that
the excitement and depression caused by his defeat preyed upon his mind and
thereby facilitated the inroads of disease, while it added to the clouds
which darkened round him in those last days. But his course of action after
the convention cannot be passed over without comment. He refused to give
his adhesion to General Scott's nomination, and he advised his friends to
vote for Mr. Pierce, because the Whigs were divided, while the Democrats
were unanimously determined to resist all attempts to renew the slavery
agitation. This course was absolutely indefensible. If the Whig party was
so divided on the slavery question that Mr. Webster could not support their
nominee, then he had no business to seek a nomination at their hands, for
they were as much divided before the convention as afterwards. He chose to
come before that convention, knowing perfectly well the divisions of the
party, and that the nomination might fall to General Scott. He saw fit to
play the game, and was in honor bound to abide by the rules. He had no
right to say "it is heads I win, and tails you lose." If he had been
nominated he would have indignantly and justly denounced a refusal on the
part of General Scott and his friends to support him. It is the merest
sophistry to say that Mr. Webster was too great a man to be bound by party
usages, and that he owed it to himself to rise above them, and refuse his
support to a poor nomination and to a wrangling party. If Mr. Webster could
no longer act with the Whigs, then his name had no business in that
convention at Baltimore, for the conditions were the same before its
meeting as afterward. Great man as he was, he was not too great to behave
honorably; and his refusal to support Scott, after having been his rival
for a nomination at the hands of their common party, was neither honorable
nor just. If Mr. Webster had decided to leave the Whigs and act
independently, he was in honor bound to do so before the Baltimore
convention assembled, or to have warned the delegates that such was his
intention in the event of General Scott's nomination. He had no right to
stand the hazard of the die, and then refuse to abide by the result. The
Whig party, in its best estate, was not calculated to excite a very warm
ent