Daniel Webster and the Voice That Held the Union

He was born in a log cabin in Salisbury, New Hampshire, in seventeen eighty-two, the son of a farmer who had fought in the Revolution. By the time he died, Daniel Webster was the most famous orator in the English-speaking world, a United States senator from Massachusetts, twice secretary of state, and the man many historians credit with shaping the intellectual argument that the American Union was perpetual and indivisible, an argument that Lincoln would later carry into war. Webster's early career was built in Concord, where he practiced law and developed the courtroom style that would eventually make him a national figure.

He moved to Boston in eighteen sixteen, but New Hampshire never fully released him. The granite hills, the hardscrabble farming, the self-reliance of a state where the soil was thin and the winters long, those qualities shaped the way he thought about national character. His greatest moment came on the floor of the United States Senate in January of eighteen thirty, during a debate over federal land policy that transformed, without warning, into the central constitutional argument of the century.

Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina argued that states could nullify federal law. Webster replied over two days in a speech that ended with words that became perhaps the most famous peroration in American political rhetoric: Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable. Stephen Vincent Benet later imagined Webster debating the Devil himself on behalf of a New Hampshire farmer's soul, in a story called The Devil and Daniel Webster, first published in nineteen thirty-six.

It became so widely read that many people today know the fictional version better than the historical one. Both versions end the same way: Webster wins.