his national Union policy, as his desires for
California's admission as a free state and for prohibition of the
slave-trade in the District of Columbia were in accord with his
opposition to slavery. Seeing both abolitionists and secessionists
threatening the Union, he rebuked both severely for disloyalty to their
"constitutional obligations", while he pleaded for a more conciliatory
attitude, for faith and charity rather than "heated imaginations". The
only logical alternative to the union policy was disunion, advocated
alike by Garrisonian abolitionists and Southern secessionists. "The
Union... was thought to be in danger, and devotion to the Union
rightfully inclined men to yield... where nothing else could have so
inclined them", was Lincoln's luminous defense of the Compromise in his
debate with Douglas. [74]

Webster's support of the constitutional provision for "return of persons
held to service" was not merely that of a lawyer. It was in accord
with a deep and statesmanlike conviction that "obedience to established
government... is a Christian duty", the seat of law is "the bosom of
God, her voice the harmony of the universe". [75] Offensive as this law
was to the North, the only logical alternatives were to fulfil or
to annul the Constitution. Webster chose to risk his reputation; the
extreme abolitionists, to risk the Union. Webster felt, as his opponents
later recognized, that "the habitual cherishing of the principle",
"resistance to unjust laws is obedience to God", threatened the
Constitution. "He... addressed himself, therefore, to the duty of
calling the American people back from revolutionary theories to...
submission to authority." [76] As in 1830 against Haynes, so in 1850
against Calhoun and disunion, Webster stood not as "a Massachusetts man,
but as an American", for "the preservation of the Union". [77] In both
speeches he held that he was acting not for Massachusetts, but for the
"whole country" (1830), "the good of the whole" (1850). His devotion to
the Union and his intellectual balance led him to reject the impatience,
bitterness, and disunion sentiments of abolitionists and secessionists,
and to work on longer lines. "We must wait for the slow progress of
moral causes", a doctrine already announced in 1840, he reiterated in
1850,--"the effect of moral causes, though sure is slow." [78]

IV.

The earlier accounts of Webster's losing his friends as a result of his
speech are at variance