Henry Cabot Lodge - Daniel Webster стр 9.

"With respect to the war in which we are now involved, the course which our principles require us to pursue cannot be doubtful. It is now the law of the land, and as such we are bound to regard it. Resistance and insurrection form no part of our creed. The disciples of Washington are neither tyrants in power nor rebels out. If we are taxed to carry on this war we shall disregard certain distinguished examples and shall pay. If our personal services are required we shall yield them to the precise extent of our constitutional liability. At the same time the world may be assured that we know our rights and shall exercise them. We shall express our opinions on this, as on every measure of the government,I trust without passion, I am certain without fear. By the exercise of our constitutional right of suffrage, by the peaceable remedy of election, we shall seek to restore wisdom to our councils, and peace to our country."

This was a sensible and patriotic opposition. It represented the views of the moderate Federalists, and traced the lines which Mr. Webster consistently followed during the first years of his public life. The address concluded by pointing out the French trickery which had provoked the war, and by denouncing an alliance with French despotism and ambition.

This oration was printed, and ran at once through two editions. It led to the selection of Mr. Webster as a delegate to an assembly of the people of the county of Rockingham, a sort of mass convention, held in August, 1812. There he was placed on the committee to prepare the address, and was chosen to write their report, which was adopted and published. This important document, widely known at the time as the "Rockingham Memorial," was a careful argument against the war, and a vigorous and able presentation of the Federalist views. It was addressed to the President, whom it treated with respectful severity. With much skill it turned Mr. Madison's own arguments against himself, and appealed to public opinion by its clear and convincing reasoning. In one point the memorial differed curiously from the oration of a month before. The latter pointed to the suffrage as the mode of redress; the former distinctly hinted at and almost threatened secession even while it deplored a dissolution of the Union as a possible result of the administration's policy. In the one case Mr. Webster was expressing his own views, in the other he was giving utterance to the opinions of the members of his party among whom he stood. This little incident shows the susceptibility to outside influences which formed such an odd trait in the character of a man so imperious by nature. When acting alone, he spoke his own opinions. When in a situation where public opinion was concentrated against him, he submitted to modifications of his views with a curious and indolent indifference.

The immediate result to Mr. Webster of the ability and tact which he displayed at the Rockingham Convention was his election to the thirteenth Congress, where he took his seat in May, 1813. There were then many able men in the House. Mr. Clay was Speaker, and on the floor were John C. Calhoun, Langdon Cheves and William Lowndes of South Carolina, Forsyth and Troup of Georgia, Ingersoll of Pennsylvania, Grundy of Tennessee, and McLean of Ohio, all conspicuous in the young nationalist war party. Macon and Eppes were representatives of the old Jeffersonian Republicans, while the Federalists were strong in the possession of such leaders as Pickering of Massachusetts, Pitkin of Connecticut, Grosvenor and Benson of New York, Hanson of Maryland, and William Gaston of North Carolina. It was a House in which any one might have been glad to win distinction. That Mr. Webster was considered, at the outset, to be a man of great promise is shown by the fact that he was placed on the Committee on Foreign Relations, of which Mr. Calhoun was the head, and which, in the war time, was the most important committee of the House.

Mr. Webster's first act was a characteristic one. Early in June he introduced a set of resolutions calling upon the President for information as to the time and mode in which the repeal of the French decrees had been communicated to our government. His unerring sagacity in singling out the weak point in his enemy's armor and in choosing his own keenest weapon, was never better illustrated than on this occasion. We know now that in the negotiations for the repeal of the decrees, the French government tricked us into war with England by most profligate lying. It was apparent then that there was something wrong, and that either our government had been deceived, or had withheld the publication of the repealing decree until war was declared, so that England might not have a pretext for rescinding the obnoxious orders. Either horn of the dilemma, therefore, was disagreeable to the administration, and a disclosure could hardly fail to benefit the Federalists. Mr. Webster supported his resolutions with a terse and simple speech of explanation, so far as we can judge from the meagre abstract which has come down to us. The resolutions, however, were a firebrand, and lighted up an angry and protracted debate, but the ruling party, as Mr. Webster probably foresaw, did not dare to vote them down, and they passed by large majorities. Mr. Webster spoke but once, and then very briefly, during the progress of the debate, and soon after returned to New Hampshire. With the exception of these resolutions, he took no active part whatever in the business of the House beyond voting steadily with his party, a fact of which we may be sure because he was always on the same side as that staunch old partisan, Timothy Pickering.

After a summer passed in the performance of his professional duties, Mr. Webster returned to Washington. He was late in his coming, Congress having been in session nearly three weeks when he arrived to find that he had been dropped from the Committee on Foreign Relations. The dominant party probably discovered that he was a young man of rather too much promise and too formidable an opponent for such an important post. His resolutions had been answered at the previous session, after his departure, and the report, which consisted of a lame explanation of the main point, and an elaborate defence of the war, had been quietly laid aside. Mr. Webster desired debate on this subject, and succeeded in carrying a reference of the report to a committee of the whole, but his opponents prevented its ever coming to discussion. In the long session which ensued, Mr. Webster again took comparatively little part in general business, but he spoke oftener than before. He seems to have been reserving his strength and making sure of his ground. He defended the Federalists as the true friends of the navy, and he resisted with great power the extravagant attempt to extend martial law to all citizens suspected of treason. On January 14, 1814, he made a long and well reported speech against a bill to encourage enlistments. This is the first example of the eloquence which Mr. Webster afterwards carried to such high perfection. Some of his subsequent speeches far surpass this one, but they differ from it in degree, not in kind. He was now master of the style at which he aimed. The vehicle was perfected and his natural talent gave that vehicle abundance of thought to be conveyed. The whole speech is simple in form, direct and forcible. It has the elasticity and vigor of great strength, and glows with eloquence in some passages. Here, too, we see for the first time that power of deliberate and measured sarcasm which was destined to become in his hands such a formidable weapon. The florid rhetoric of the early days is utterly gone, and the thought comes to us in those short and pregnant sentences and in the choice and effective words which were afterwards so typical of the speaker. The speech itself was a party speech and a presentation of party arguments. It offered nothing new, but the familiar principles had hardly ever been stated in such a striking and impressive fashion. Mr. Webster attacked the war policy and the conduct of the war, and advocated defensive warfare, a navy, and the abandonment of the restrictive laws that were ruining our commerce, which had been the main cause of the adoption of the Constitution. The conclusion of this speech is not far from the level of Mr. Webster's best work. It is too long for quotation, but a few sentences will show its quality: