hich would be carried", said Pratt of
Maryland. [61] The National Intelligencer, which had hitherto maintained
the safety of the Union, confessed by February 21 that "the integrity
of the Union is at some hazard", quoting Southern evidence of this. On
February 25, Foote, in proposing to the Senate a committee of thirteen
to report some scheme of compromise, gave it as his conclusion from
consultation with both houses, that unless something were done at once,
power would pass from Congress.

II.

It was under these highly critical circumstances that Webster, on
Sunday, February 24, the day on which he was accustomed to dine with his
unusually well-informed friends, Stephens, Toombs, Clay and Hale, wrote
to his only surviving son:

I am nearly broken down with labor and anxiety. I know not how to meet
the present emergency, or with what weapons to beat down the Northern
and Southern follies, now raging in equal extremes. If you can possibly
leave home, I want you to be here, a day or two before I speak... I have
poor spirits and little courage. Non sum qualis eram. [62]

Mr. Lodge's account of this critical February period shows ignorance not
only of the letter of February 24, but of the real situation. He relies
upon von Holst instead of the documents, then misquotes him on a point
of essential chronology, and from unwarranted assumptions and erroneous
and incomplete data draws unreliable conclusions. Before this letter of
February 24 and the new cumulative evidence of the crisis, there falls
to the ground the sneer in Mr. Lodge's question, "if [Webster's] anxiety
was solely of a public nature, why did it date from March 7 when, prior
to that time, there was much greater cause for alarm than afterwards?"
Webster was anxious before the 7th of March, as so many others were,
North and South, and his extreme anxiety appears in the letter of
February 24, as well as in repeated later utterances. No one can read
through the letters of Webster without recognizing that he had a genuine
anxiety for the safety of the Union; and that neither in his letters nor
elsewhere is there evidence that in his conscience he was "ill at ease"
or "his mind not at peace". Here as elsewhere, Mr. Lodge's biography,
written over forty years ago, reproduces anti-slavery bitterness and
ignorance of facts (pardonable in 1850) and seriously misrepresents
Webster's character and the situation in that year. [63]

By the last week in February an