In Defense of Daniel Webster
To build on Rob’s post below, Quiggin’s argument is extremely lazy. It’s one thing to blame Calhoun for contributing to the Civil War, but Clay and Webster? Rob took care of the Clay argument. Webster’s a complicated guy and I’m not going to defend much of what he did, particularly laying the groundwork for the rise of the Gilded Age plutocrats. But Webster also at least softly opposed slavery. Webster took the lead in fighting South Carolina’s nullification efforts in the late 1820 and early 1830s, most notably in the 1830 Webster-Hayne debate, where he defended Massachusetts interests against nullification and the growing slave power. His interests were New England-centric to be sure, even if he used nationalist language. Webster opposed the annexation of Texas and the slave power supported Mexican War. Abolitionists were furious with Webster for supporting the Compromise of 1850, but it’s not like Webster wanted to compromise with southern interests and, as Rob said below, trying to prevent the nation from falling apart is not something I want to criticize Webster for. He does deserve criticism for enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act while Secretary of State, but he was trying to keep the union together.
And as an aside, one huge thing in favor of the Compromise of 1850 is that the Union would have had much more difficulty defeating the Confederacy in 1850 than a decade later. Another decade of industrialization, railroad building, and immigration probably made an enormous difference against a South that was changing at a much slower pace. It’s also possible that the Confederacy would have had a more difficult time pulling the upper South. On the other hand, Abraham Lincoln was president in 1861 and Millard Fillmore in 1851.
Quiggin’s argument is obviously a throw-away, made precisely to elicit outraged remarks. Nonetheless, it’s also kind of dumb and shows little understanding of the times and the individuals involved. This is like blaming all leading political figures in 2003 for the Iraq War, even Democrats who voted against the war. You can trash the political class of entire generation, but reality is more complicated, both in 2003 and 1850.
Plus, Daniel Webster was such a great orator that he did battle against Satan in a court of law – and won!
And in winning, he made the Devil promise he was going to stay out of New Hampshire forever.
But I think that tricky old Devil has broken his promise many a time, especially recently.
And the evidence that Satan broke his promise is this:
How could the spawns of Satan, like Nixon, Ronnie, Daddy Bush, and his boy Little Boots, campaign up there if they weren’t in the state up there to campaign?
They had to be there. It’s the law!
Ipso facto – promise broken!
So, I think it’s time for Daniel Webster to come back, take him to court, and sue Satan for breaking his promise, and stop Devils from coming up to New Hampshire forever!
Just maybe hold off until after Ron Paul wins up there.
I just want to see Mitt 3.0 start to sweat. That should set off some circuit fires in that cyborg, and we can all laugh as we watch every Republican member of the base do whatever they can to not help put out the fire, including not even pissing on him.
Let us not forget that jury of pure evil: the 1976 Philadelphia Flyers.
With that immortal asshole, the truly evil, Bobby Clarke, who, whenever he was really, really pissed-off, used to gnash his tooth at opponents.
And, that was a lot of tooth gnashing, since that boy was pissed-off a whole lot of the time!
Richard Nixon: But I’m not dead yet!
Devil Flanders: Hey, I did a favor for you!
Trivia: in syndication, they cut that exchange for time. Once Nixon actually DID die, it turned out to make that whole sequence flow better.
Were we to have the impertinence to comment on Australian politics; I might be inclined to listen to Mr. Quiggin.
The Compromise of 1850 was exactly that; a compromise. Very few in the North wanted the Fugitive Slave law to be enforced. Southerners on the other hand did not want their “property” to be lost crossing a State Line. Southerners on the other hand were not eager to see California added as a Free State & thus giving the Free States a Senate majority. Neither side was particularly happy with the compromise, but both could live with it.
Applying the Left/Right values of the 21st Century to President Wilson or Sens. Calhoun, Clay, or Webster is an exercise in futility. The issues of their time were different.
Even by the standards of his time, Wilson was a particularly odious segregationist and authoritarian.
Perhaps (although I’ve never seen anyone really argue that his segregationism was particularly bad for a white man in that era who had grown up in Virginia.) But I’m not sure why we should only look at those areas where Wilson was at his worst when assessing him.
I’m fine with not judging people solely by the worst things they’ve ever done. But there’s a kind of counter-presentism where people in the past who don’t live up to contemporary moral or political norms are given an automatic pass even if those norms were easily available in their piece of the past, and that’s not historically appropriate either. Even if a governor of New Jersey and president of Princeton grew up in Virginia, it wasn’t impossible for him to have some critical distance on his Virginia upbringing, especially if he thought he was fit to be president of the United States almost fifty years after the end of the Civil War.
I’m not giving Wilson a pass. He shared in the racism common to Southern white men of his era, and this was certainly a failing. But it wasn’t a remarkable departure from even the mores of the time. It would be fair to say, for instance, that, even though imperialism was a sin common to many Europeans (and Americans) at the turn of the last century, that even by the standards of the time King Leopold of Belgium was a particularly odious imperialist.
But I’m not really convinced that this is a fair criticism of Wilson. He was certainly distinctly worse than his Republican predecessors and successors on race issues, and he was a disappointment to those African Americans who had mistakenly supported him in 1912. That being said, the actual odiously racist types of the era, like Tom Watson, were not particularly happy with Wilson’s civil rights policies, either. Wilson was bad on segregation, but I’ve not seen much evidence he was all that much worse than the median Democrat of the day would have been. One doesn’t imagine Champ Clark would have been much better, certainly.
I feel that you should take on the nickname “The Ad Hominator.”
I think the strike against Webster is that, after proclaiming Liberty and Union in 1830, he picked Union over Liberty in 1850 after having denounced just the same thing so eloquently.
By contrast, Clay’s support for the compromise is less a betrayal of principle or character – he had based much of his career on the principle of compromise, after all.
This seems wrong. 1830 Webster denounces those who would say “Liberty first and Union afterwards” but says nothing about the reverse. The Second Reply to Hayne was already a defense of the Union.
“Were we to have the impertinence to comment on Australian politics”
That’s the problem with us Australians – we’re always poking our nose into other people’s business. It’s a particularly egregious sin when we do it to Americans, who never make judgements about what is good for other countries, let alone take any action that might be seen as interfering in their affairs.
Australia is quite happy to intervene in other peoples business – it’s just mostly lacks the power. So in the time of the Howard government it played instead sidekick to the american bully.
As far as I know it is bullying East Timor about exploration rights at the sea border right now.
Not only that, we get very snarky when East Timorese have the impertinence to comment on our political leaders :-)
Seriously, IM is right that Australia mostly does what the US wants, only with very small neighbours is their any real capacity for bullying. Our treatment of East Timor was both disgraceful and shortsighted, since the costs of keeping ET poor far outweigh any gains that might have been made from oil and gas revenues. The present govt is a bit better than Howard’s but far from perfect
Where did Quiggin accuse Clay and Webster of contributing to the Civil War? I missed that.
I think in any case the larger point is valid – US History, more than the history of other countries, is used – even by tenured Historians – as a morality play in which we are supposed to cheer heroes and boo the villains, even if they lived in the remote past.