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Daniel Webster

Daniel Webster was a United States Senator and Secretary of State. Famed for his ability as an orator, Webster was one of the most important figures in the Second Party System from the 1820s to the 1850s.

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  • It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it!

  • Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.
    • Speech at Plymouth, MA (December 22, 1820)

  • Labor in this country is independent and proud. It has not to ask the patronage of capital, but capital solicits the aid of labor.
    • Speech (April 2, 1824)


  • It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment — Independence now and Independence forever.
    • Discourse in Commemoration of Adams and Jefferson, Faneuil Hall, Boston (August 2, 1826)

  • Washington is in the clear upper sky.
    • Discourse in Commemoration of Adams and Jefferson, Faneuil Hall, Boston (August 2, 1826)

  • He smote the rock of the national resources, and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead corpse of Public Credit, and it sprung upon its feet.
    • Speech on Hamilton (March 10, 1831)

  • On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they [the Colonies] raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome in the height of her glory is not to be compared — a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drumbeat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.
    • Speech (May 7, 1834)

  • God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.
    • Speech (June 3, 1834)

  • One country, one constitution, one destiny.
    • Speech (March 15, 1837)

  • There are persons who constantly clamor. They complain of oppression, speculation, and pernicious influence of wealth. They cry out loudly against all banks and corporations, and a means by which small capitalists become united in order to produce important and beneficial results. They carry on mad hostility against all established institutions. They would choke the fountain of industry and dry all streams.
    • Speech in the Senate (March 12, 1838)

  • When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization.
    • On Agriculture (January 13, 1840)

  • America has furnished to the world the character of Washington. And if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind.
    • On the Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument (June 17, 1843)

  • Thank God! I — I also — am an American!
    • On the Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument (June 17, 1843)

  • Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on Earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.
    • On Mr. Justice Story (September 12, 1845)

  • Inconsistencies of opinion, arising from changes of circumstances, are often justifiable.
    • Speech (July 25 and 27, 1846)

  • Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.
    • Speech at the Charleston Bar Dinner (May 10, 1847)

  • The law: It has honored us; may we honor it.
    • Speech at the Charleston Bar Dinner (May 10, 1847)

  • I have read their platform, and though I think there are some unsound places in it, I can stand upon it pretty well. But I see nothing in it both new and valuable. "What is valuable is not new, and what is new is not valuable."
    • Speech at Marshfield, MA (September 1, 1848)

  • I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.
    • Speech (July 17, 1850)

  • Faneuil Hall, the cradle of American liberty.
    • Letter (April 1851)

  • Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades: shoemakers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers, a monster watch; and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.
    • On the Old Man of the Mountain

  • The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form.

  • I still live.
    • Last words (October 24, 1852)

Address on Laying of the Cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument (June 17, 1825)

  • We wish that this column, rising towards heaven among the pointed spires of so many temples dedicated to God, may contribute also to reproduce in all minds a pious feeling of dependence and gratitude. We wish, finally, that the last object to the sight of him who leaves his native shore, and the first to gladden his who revisits it, may be something which shall remind him of the liberty and the glory of his country.

  • Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered.

  • Knowldege, in truth, is the great sun in the firmament. Life and power are scattered with all its beams.

  • Let our object be our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country.

  • Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interestss, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.

Second Reply to Hayne (January 26-27, 1830)

  • The gentleman has not seen how to reply to this, otherwise than by supposing me to have advanced the doctrine that a national debt is a national blessing.

  • I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none. There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever.

  • The people's government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.

  • When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the glorious ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in the original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as 'What is all this worth?' nor those words of delusion and folly, 'Liberty first and Union afterward,'; but everywhere, spread over all the characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart, -- Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!

Argument on the murder of Captain White (April 6, 1830)

  • There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession.

  • There is nothing so powerful as truth — and often nothing so strange.

  • Fearful concatenation of circumstances.

  • A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent, like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are yet with us.

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  • Let us not be pygmies in a case that calls for men.
    • In reference to the Compromise of 1850

  • The Administration asserts the right to fill the ranks of the regular army by compulsion...Is this, sir, consistent with the character of a free government? Is this civil liberty? Is this the real character of our Constitution? No sire, indeed it is not. The Constitution is libeled...Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and bailful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest rights of personal liberty? Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life itself, not when the safety of their country and its liberties may demand the sacrifice, but whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it?

  • If religious books are not widely circulated among the masses in this country, I do not know what is going to become of us as a nation. If truth be not diffused, error will be; If God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendancy, If the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will; If the power of the Gospel is not felt throughout the length and breadth of the land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without mitigation or end.

  • The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.

  • If there is anything in my thoughts or style to commend, the credit is due to my parents for instilling in me an early love of the Scriptures. If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but if we and our posterity neglect its instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity.

Quotes about Webster

  • It's a story they tell in the border country, where Massachusetts joins Vermont and New Hampshire.
    Yes, Dan'l Webster's dead — or, at least, they buried him. But every time there's a thunderstorm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky. And they say that if you go to his grave and speak loud and clear, "Dan'l Webster — Dan'l Webster!" the ground'll begin to shiver and the trees begin to shake. And after a while you'll hear a deep voice saying, "Neighbor, how stands the Union?" Then you better answer the Union stands as she stood, rock-bottomed and copper-sheathed, one and indivisible, or he's liable to rear right out of the ground. At least, that's what I was told when I was a youngster.
    • Stephen Vincent Benét, in The Devil and Daniel Webster (1937)
 
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