Webster's Compromise Speech: Averting Civil War

Daniel Webster destroyed his presidential ambitions and his reputation with New England abolitionists in a single afternoon. His "Seventh of March" speech on the floor of the United States Senate in 1850 endorsed the Compromise of 1850, including its most reviled provision: a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act that required Northern citizens to assist in capturing and returning escaped enslaved people. Webster argued that preserving the Union was worth the moral cost. His constituents disagreed violently. The crisis of 1850 centered on whether territories acquired from Mexico in 1848 would enter the Union as free or slave states. California's application for admission as a free state threatened to tip the Senate's balance, and Southern firebrands openly discussed secession. Henry Clay, the aging Kentucky senator known as the "Great Compromiser," proposed a package deal: California enters free, the slave trade is abolished in Washington DC, the territories of New Mexico and Utah decide slavery for themselves through popular sovereignty, and the Fugitive Slave Act is dramatically strengthened. Webster, a Massachusetts senator and one of the most celebrated orators in American history, rose on March 7 to endorse Clay's compromise. "I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American," he began. For three hours, he argued that the Union's preservation outweighed all other considerations and that the North should accept the Fugitive Slave Act as a constitutional obligation. The reaction was volcanic. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that Webster's speech was "the darkest passage in the history of the American Senate." John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a scathing poem, "Ichabod," declaring Webster's glory departed. Theodore Parker called him "a man who has deserted the cause he once seemed to serve." Abolitionist newspapers across New England burned him in effigy. The Compromise of 1850 passed, and Webster was rewarded with appointment as Secretary of State under President Millard Fillmore. He died in 1852, politically broken. Webster's speech delayed secession by a decade, buying time that allowed the North to industrialize sufficiently to win the war that came in 1861. Whether the delay justified the moral compromise remains one of American history's unanswerable questions.