mous speech on the
seventh of March, 1850?

Most people are still aware that Webster was harshly criticized for
making that speech. It is dimly remembered that the Abolitionists
called him "Traitor", refusing to attribute to him any motive except the
gaining of Southern support which might land him in the Presidency.
At the time--so bitter was factional suspicion!--this view gained many
adherents. It has not lost them all, even now.

This false interpretation of Webster turns on two questions--was there
a real danger of secession in 1850? Was Webster sincere in deriving his
policy from a sense of national peril, not from self-interest? In the
study which follows Professor Foster makes an adequate case for Webster,
answering the latter question. The former he deals with in a general way
establishing two things, the fact of Southern readiness to secede, the
attendant fact that the South changed its attitude after the Seventh
of March. His limits prevent his going on to weigh and appraise the
sincerity of those fanatics who so furiously maligned Webster, who
created the tradition that he had cynically sold out to the Southerners.
Did they believe their own fiction? The question is a large one and
involves this other, did they know what was going on in the South? Did
they realize that the Union on March 6, 1850, was actually at a parting
of the ways,--that destruction or Civil War formed an imminent issue?

Many of those who condemned compromise may be absolved from the charge
of insincerity on the ground that they did not care whether the Union
was preserved or riot. Your true blue Abolitionist was very little of
a materialist. Nor did he have primarily a crusading interest in
the condition of the blacks. He was introspective. He wanted the
responsibility for slavery taken off his own soul. As later events were
to prove, he was also pretty nearly a pacifist; war for the Union, pure
and simple, made no appeal to him. It was part of Webster's insight that
he divined this, that he saw there was more pacifism than natural ardor
in the North of 1850, saw that the precipitation of a war issue might
spell the end of the United Republic. Therefore, it was to circumvent
the Northern pacifists quite as much as to undermine the Southern
expansionists that he offered compromise and avoided war.

But what of those other detractors of Webster, those who were for the
Union and yet believed he had sold out? Their one slim defense is th