I am choosing the oral speech given by Massachusetts’ Senator Daniel Webster in defense of the Union and in response to South Carolina’s Senator Robert Hayne on January 26th and 27th, 1830, his second reply to Senator Hayne, in particular the section thereof subtitled “There is no disposition in the North to interfere with slavery in the South”. So, with that oration, Senator Webster extended a laurel rift of appeasement the Southern States, provided evidence that the Northern political class opted to let slavery stand rather than risk civil war, and that enslavement of Africans is a State’s rights. It is believed to be the most famous speech made by a US Senator.
Background:
This speech by Senator Daniel Webster was made during the great debate in the US Senate during the 1830s regarding State’s rights, nullification, the South peculiar institution, namely enslavement of African blacks. Nullification is the doctrine that promotes the ideology that States have the constitutional right to annul or invalidate an Act of Congress that they disagree with even though it may be constitutional. On the nullifier side, John C. Calhoun a prominent member of the House of Representatives and South Carolina Senator Robert Hayne led the charge. On the unionist side, the eloquent Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster stood in the way of the nullifiers in Congress. The Southern aristocrats and slave owners have become weary of the North’s disposition toward slavery as a national question. Daniel Webster was born in N.H. and practiced law in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts[1]. In 1983, Harlow Sheidley argued that not only Senator Webster was a nationalist, an ardent unionist so to speak, but also an eloquent orator and a statesman eager to put the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in a leadership position among the States again[2]. In a way, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has lost some of its hegemony it had during the revolutionary years and under the leadership of Samuel Adams.
Content:
Senator Webster made clear that the Northern political elite had no plan to interfere with the institution of slavery in the South (or wherever in the North it may still exist for that matter). This revelation by Webster carries some weight especially coming from a respected member of Congress of a State that has seen the abolition of slavery of Africans by the Massachusetts State Supreme Court since 1783 in its own neck of the woods.
Senator Webster confirmed that the Northern elite chose the lesser of the two evils: slavery versus disunion. It was clear by 1830 that civil war was a real possibility, and the Northern elite spared no effort to avert it, avoid it, or at the very least to delay it. In that regard, Daniel Webster’s oratory speech on January 27th, 1830 achieved all three goals mentioned above.
Webster claimed that slavery is a State’s right. And that Congress had no authority to end it nor that it ever attempted to. He cleverly pointed out that Northern elected men who served in Congress had never questioned the right of the South to own slaves. This doctrine is of course debatable since enslaved people of African descent were imported to the United States – they are in that regard immigrants of the most unfortunate circumstances forcefully brought to the United States provide free labor – and immigration is the prerogative of the federal government.
[1] Harlow Sheidley, ‘The Webster-Hayne Debate: Recasting New England’s Sectionalism’, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Mar., 1994 pp. 5-29)
[2] Harlow Sheidley, ‘The Webster-Hayne Debate: Recasting New England’s Sectionalism’, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Mar., 1994 pp. 5-29)
