The reconciliation of Daniel Webster

Daniel Webster finally is in the White House. Until Joseph R. Biden Jr. put a bust of him in the Oval Office, Webster never inhabited the executive mansion, though he tried repeatedly between 1832 and 1852 to win the presidency. He was, to be sure, a constant presence there — as secretary of state to three presidents; as one of the towering congressional figures, along with Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, of his time; as a principal in all the important issues of his era. The closest he came to living in the White House was his brick house, right across the street, on a site now occupied by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Presidents make statements with their office furnishings, and for Mr. Biden, Webster is not a whisper but a shout. For decades, the New England lawmaker was the symbol of the Union, and Mr. Biden was quick — on his first day — to seize upon Webster in his national unity effort. At one time, every American schoolchild knew Webster responded to a speech 190 years ago this week by Sen. Robert Hayne of South Carolina advocating state nullification and slavery by bellowing, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”

But Webster’s 1830 speech, one of the most famous ever delivered in the Capitol, illuminates an important nuance in the current debate about national unity in a time as fraught as the one in which Black Dan’l operated.

Mr. Biden surely chose Webster for his hall of fame as a symbol of unity. But Webster was more a symbol of the Union than of unity.

Throughout his life — early as an opponent of slavery, late as the advocate of the Compromise of 1850 that gave succor to slave states — Webster was involved in the most divisive debates in our history. He preferred unity, but his actions sowed division, infuriating the South in the 1830s and 1840s, inflaming the North in the 1850s.

Webster’s greatest speeches were meant to encourage reverence for the Union and counter those who would threaten it, an acknowledgment that national unity was elusive. By 1850 his rhetoric was in service of compromise — at a time, much like our own, when compromise was considered moral surrender.

“Everyone thinks about Webster in light of his ‘Union-forever’ oration, but he was a polarizing figure — not as bad as some, but still a divisive figure,” said Jay Sexton, a University of Missouri historian. “For him and those of his generation, compromise no longer had the traction it once did. It seemed anachronistic.”

In short, in working for the Union, he did not sow unity.

Soon after Webster replied to Hayne, Ralph Waldo Emerson said that Webster possessed a “mind great enough to capture the majesty of moral nature and to apply himself in all his length and breadth to it.” After the Compromise of 1850, which included the reviled Fugitive Slave Act, Emerson described Webster as “a man of the past, not a man of faith or hope,” concluding, “all the drops of his blood have eyes that look downward.” He had, in the assessment of Irving H. Bartlett in his 1978 Webster biography, “fallen irretrievably in the eyes of the New England abolitionists.”

Those were the very people who had praised him, and whose efforts he supported. To Benjamin Silliman, the great Yale chemist and geologist, he spoke of the dangers of compromise with the slave-holding South, writing on Jan. 29, 1838, that it was futile to take steps that would have the effect of “conciliating those whom we can never conciliate.” A year later, on Feb. 14, 1839, the great Massachusetts political figure Edward Everett — later known as the man whose lengthy oration preceded Abraham Lincoln’s short remarks at Gettysburg — wrote Webster as an anti-slavery ally, urging him to criticize Clay’s conciliatory slavery remarks, warning, “your silence [might] be misconstrued into an acquiescence in his views.”

Indeed, Webster had spoken out against Clay (and Calhoun) shortly after a pro-slavery mob murdered the abolitionist editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy and destroyed his presses in 1837, accusing the two of attempting “to make a new constitution.”

But mostly Webster cared about the Union, and as sectional tensions flared in 1850 he was one of the principal architects of the compromise that, like so many such efforts, satisfied no one, though it did put off the Civil War for a decade. For many decades — through the school years of many living Americans — Webster remained a heroic figure.

But Webster provides a case study for my belief, often argued in these pages, that the past is always changing.

“We have a higher sensitivity to the human price of the Union than Webster did,” said Michael Birkner, a Gettysburg College historian who as a young man was one of the editors of the Webster Papers. “A generation ago, the 1850 Compromise was regarded as necessary to save the Union and buy a decade’s time so the North could expand its industrial base and be in a position to prevail when the rupture did come. Today the question is why a pronounced anti-slavery man like Webster would accept something as offensive as the Fugitive Slave Act. We are less empathetic to Webster today than we were in the past.”

Today we see the limits of Webster and, through his life, the limits of talking about unity, a political state that cannot be cajoled, or argued, into being. It grows organically, not merely from oration.

Mr. Biden is giving it a try, just as Webster did in 1850, when a Democratic acquaintance urged the Whig senator from Massachusetts to reconcile North and South: “Do it, Mr. Webster; as you can do it, like a bold and gifted Statesman and Patriot.”

He tried. In the most famous riff from his Seventh of March speech, a three-hour oration from a 68-year-old man weakened by political strife and struggle, he said: “I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American, and a member of the Senate of the United States . ... I speak for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.”

So when Mr. Biden looks across that great oak desk in the Oval Office and sees that Webster bust, he should see caution where he might seek inspiration. Even America’s greatest orator couldn’t talk the country into unity.