tion to nullification and secession,
and his appeal to the Union and to the Constitution during twenty years
preceding the Civil War--from his reply to Hayne to his seventh of March
speech--had developed a spirit capable of making economic and political
power effective.

Men inclined to sneer at Webster for his interest in manufacturing,
farming, and material prosperity, may well remember that in his mind,
and more slowly in the minds of the North, economic progress went hand
in hand with the development of union and of liberty secured by law.

Misunderstandings regarding both the political crisis and the personal
character of the man are already disappearing as fact replaces fiction,
as "truth gets a hearing", in the fine phrase of Wendell Phillips. There
is nothing about Daniel Webster to be hidden. Not moral blindness but
moral insight and sound political principles reveal themselves to the
reader of Webster's own words in public speech and unguarded private
letter. One of those great men who disdained to vindicate himself,
he does not need us but we need him and his vision that Liberty comes
through Union, and healing through cooperation, not through hate.

Whether we look to the material progress of the North from 1850 to 1860
or to its development in "imponderables", Webster's policy and his power
over men's thoughts and deeds were essential factors in the ultimate
triumph of the Union, which would have been at least dubious had
secession been attempted in 1850. It was a soldier, not the modern
orator, who first said that "Webster shotted our guns". A letter to
Senator Hoar from another Union soldier says that he kept up his heart
as he paced up and down as sentinel in an exposed place by repeating
over and over, "Liberty and Union now and forever, one and inseparable".
[112] Hosmer tells us that he and his boyhood friends of the North in
1861 "did not argue much the question of the right of secession", but
that it was the words of Webster's speeches, "as familiar to us as the
sentences of the Lord's prayer and scarcely less consecrated,... with
which we sprang to battle". Those boys were not ready in 1850. The
decisive human factors in the Civil War were the men bred on the
profound devotion to the Union which Webster shared with others equally
patriotic, but less profoundly logical, less able to mould public
opinion. Webster not only saw the vision himself; he had the genius
to make the plain American citizen