d the first in March, the peak of the
secession movement was reached. Never an alarmist, Webster, like others
who loved the Union, become convinced during this critical last week in
February of an "emergency". He determined "to make a Union Speech and
discharge a clear conscience." "I made up my mind to risk myself on a
proposition for a general pacification. I resolved to push my skiff
from the shore alone." "We are in a crisis," he wrote June 2, "if
conciliation makes no progress." "It is a great emergency, a great
exigency, that the country is placed in", he said in the Senate, June
17. "We have," he wrote in October, "gone through the most important
crisis which has occurred since the foundation of the government." A
year later he added at Buffalo, "if we had not settled these agitating
questions [by the Compromise]... in my opinion, there would have been
civil war". In Virginia, where he had known the situation even better,
he declared, "I believed in my conscience that a crisis was at hand, a
dangerous, a fearful crisis." [64]

Rhodes's conclusion that there was "little danger of an overt act of
secession while General Taylor was in the presidential chair" was based
on evidence then incomplete and is abandoned by more recent historians.
It is moreover significant that, of the speeches cited by Rhodes,
ridiculing the danger of secession, not one was delivered before
Webster's speech. All were uttered after the danger had been lessened
by the speeches and attitude of Clay and Webster. Even such Northern
anti-slavery speeches illustrated danger of another sort. Hale of
New Hampshire "would let them go" rather than surrender the rights
threatened by the fugitive slave bill. [65] Giddings in the very speech
ridiculing the danger of disunion said, "when they see fit to leave the
Union, I would say to them 'Go in peace'". [66] Such utterances played
into the hands of secessionists, strengthening their convictions that
the North despised the South and would not fight to keep her in the
Union.

It is now clear that in 1850 as in 1860 the average Northern senator
or anti-slavery minister or poet was ill-informed or careless as to the
danger of secession, and that Webster and the Southern Unionists were
well-informed and rightly anxious. Theodore Parker illustrated the
bitterness that befogs the mind. He concluded that there was no danger
of dissolution because "the public funds of the United States did not
go down one mil