Edition" of Webster's Writings and
Speeches (1903). These two editions contain, for 1850 alone, 57 inedited
letters.

Manuscript collections and newspapers, comparatively unknown to earlier
writers, have been utilized in monographs dealing with the situation in
1850 in South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina,
Louisiana, and Tennessee, published by. universities or historical
societies.

The cooler and matured judgments of men who knew Webster
personally--Foote, Stephens, Wilson, Seward, and Whittier, in the last
century; Hoar, Hale, Fisher, Hosmer, and Wheeler in recent years-modify
their partizan political judgments of 1850. The new printed evidence
is confirmed by manuscript material: 2,500 letters of the Greenough
Collection available since the publication of the recent editions of
Webster's letters and apparently unused by Webster's biographers;
and Hundreds of still inedited Webster Papers in the New Hampshire
Historical Society, and scattered in minor collections. [2] This mass
of new material makes possible and desirable a re-examination of the
evidence as to (1) the danger from the secession movement in 1850; (2)
Webster's change in attitude toward the disunion danger in February,
1850; (3) the purpose and character of his 7th of March speech; (4) the
effects of his speech and attitude upon the secession movement.

I.

During the session of Congress of 1849-1850, the peace of the Union
was threatened by problems centering around slavery and the territory
acquired as a result of the Mexican War: California's demand for
admission with a constitution prohibiting slavery; the Wilmot Proviso
excluding slavery from the rest of the Mexican acquisitions (Utah and
New Mexico); the boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico; the
abolition of slave trade in the District of Columbia; and an effective
fugitive slave law to replace that of 1793.

The evidence for the steadily growing danger of secession until March,
1850, is no longer to be sought in Congressional speeches, but rather
in the private letters of those men, Northern and Southern, who were the
shrewdest political advisers of the South, and in the official acts of
representative bodies of Southerners in local or state meetings, state
legislatures, and the Nashville Convention. Even after the compromise
was accepted in the South and the secessionists defeated in 1850-1851,
the Southern states generally adopted the Georgia platfo