r
than pleasing things." "I should indeed like to please you; but I prefer
to save you, whatever be your attitude toward me." [71] The malignant
charge that this speech was "a bid for the presidency" was long ago
discarded, even by Lodge. It unfortunately survives in text-books more
concerned with "atmosphere" than with truth. The modern investigator
finds no evidence for it and every evidence against it. Webster was
both too proud and too familiar with the political situation, North
and South, to make such a monstrous mistake. The printed or manuscript
letters to or from Webster in 1850 and 1851 show him and his friends
deeply concerned over the danger to the Union, but not about the
presidency. There is rarest mention of the matter in letters by
personal or political friends; none by Webster, so far as the writer has
observed.

If one comes to the speech familiar with both the situation in 1850 as
now known, and with Webster's earlier and later speeches and private
letters, one finds his position and arguments on the 7th of March in
harmony with his attitude toward Union and slavery, and with the law and
the facts. Frankly reiterating both his earlier view of slavery "as a
great moral, political and social evil" and his lifelong devotion to
the Union and its constitutional obligations, Webster took national,
practical, courageous grounds. On the fugitive slave bill and the Wilmot
Proviso, where cautious Whigs like Winthrop and Everett were inclined
to keep quiet in view of Northern popular feeling, Webster "took a large
view of things" and resolved, as Foote saw, to risk his reputation
in advocating the only practicable solution. Not only was Webster
thoroughly familiar with the facts, but he was pre-eminently logical
and, as Calhoun had admitted, once convinced, "he cannot look truth in
the face and oppose it by arguments". [72] He therefore boldly faced
the truth that the Wilmot Proviso (as it proved later) was needless, and
would irritate Southern Union men and play into hands of disunionists
who frankly desired to exploit this "insult" to excite secession
sentiment. In a like case ten years later, "the Republican party took
precisely the same ground held by Mr. Webster in 1850 and acted from the
motives that inspired the 7th of March speech". [73]

Webster's anxiety for a conciliatory settlement of the highly dangerous
Texas boundary situation (which incidentally narrowed slave territory)
was as consistent with