reafter, was perfectly frank. As one of them put it, in
the face of the changed attitude of Virginia, "to secede now would be to
secede from the South."

Here is the aspect of Webster's great stroke that was so long ignored.
He did not satisfy the whole South. He did not make friends for himself
of Southerners generally. What he did do was to drive a wedge into the
South, to divide it temporarily against itself. He arrayed the Upper
South against the Lower and thus because of the ultimate purposes of men
like Cheeves, with their ambition to weld the South into a genuine unit,
he forced them all to stand still, and thus to give Northern pacifism a
chance to ebb, Northern nationalism a chance to develop. A comprehensive
brief for the defense on this crucial point in the interpretation of
American history, is Professor Foster's contribution.

NATHANIEL WRIGHT STEPHENSON

WEBSTER'S SEVENTH OF MARCH SPEECH AND THE SECESSION MOVEMENT, 1850

The moral earnestness and literary skill of Whittier, Lowell, Garrison,
Phillips, and Parker, have fixed in many minds the antislavery doctrine
that Webster's 7th of March speech was "scandalous, treachery", and
Webster a man of little or no "moral sense", courage, or statesmanship.
That bitter atmosphere, reproduced by Parton and von Holst, was
perpetuated a generation later by Lodge. [1]

Since 1900, over fifty publications throwing light on Webster and the
Secession movement of 1850 have appeared, nearly a score
containing fresh contemporary evidence. These twentieth-century
historians--Garrison of Texas, Smith of Williams, Stephenson of
Charleston and Yale, Van Tyne, Phillips, Fisher in his True Daniel
Webster, or Ames, Hearon, and Cole in their monographs on Southern
conditions--many of them born in one section and educated in
another, brought into broadening relations with Northern and Southern
investigators, trained in the modern historical spirit and freed by the
mere lapse of time from much of the passion of slavery and civil
war, have written with less emotion and more knowledge than the
abolitionists, secessionists, or their disciples who preceded Rhodes.

Under the auspices of the American Historical Association have appeared
the correspondence of Calhoun, of Chase, of Toombs, Stephens, and
Cobb, and of Hunter of Virginia. Van Tyne's Letters of Webster (1902),
including hundreds hitherto unpublished, was further supplemented in
the sixteenth volume of the "National