Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded. On Thursday, March 7, 1850, the Senate’s all-time greatest orator delivered the most controversial speech of his life. Daniel Webster’s voice “rang out like a trumpet … with a roll of thunder in it,” the historian Robert Remini has written; it was “powered by a massive chest that sent it hurtling great distances.” The “Godlike Daniel” mesmerized audiences with his “large, deep-socketed black eyes … [that] glowed like coals in a furnace.”
Library of Congress Daniel Webster
But Webster’s unique attributes could not appease the growing numbers of people in the free states who considered slavery a grave moral problem. Insisting that Union mattered more than slavery, Webster crossed swords with many of his Massachusetts constituents — and his admirers across the North — on the two big issues of the moment. Webster contended that slavery would never spread to the territories — so that there was no need to prohibit it there — and that white Southerners were entitled to a strengthened fugitive slave law.
The antislavery North erupted in fury. The most devastating rebuke to Webster’s Seventh of March speech was penned by the poet John Greenleaf Whittier:
So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore!
The glory from his gray hairs gone
Forevermore! . . .
Of all we loved and honored, naught
Save power remains; . . .
All else is gone; from those great eyes
The soul has fled: . . .
Walk backward, with averted gaze,
And hide the shame!
Fast forward 11 years to Saturday, Jan. 12, 1861. The Capitol was “thronged like an inauguration day.” People swarmed toward the Senate’s handsome new quarters, opened just two years earlier. Natural light suffused through its “colored glass roof.” Its 66 polished mahogany desks, two for each of the 33 states in the Union, perched on a striking floral-patterned purple carpet. The original desks dated from 1819, when the Capitol was reopened after having been burned by the British during the War of 1812. (Almost two centuries later, those same desks — along with newer ones built to mark the admission of new states — remain in use, as does the 1859 Senate chamber.)
By midday thousands of people had reportedly packed the Senate’s galleries. The section reserved for women was “radiant with beauty and fashion.” Reporters congregated behind the presiding officer’s desk. The overflow crowd spilled into the hallways. A persistent undertone of anxious whispering suddenly hushed at 20 minutes before 1 p.m., as New York’s William Henry Seward rose to speak.
Library of Congress William Henry Seward
Slight in stature and lacking all of the long-dead Webster’s oratorical prowess, Seward nonetheless had a gift for memorable phraseology and an expansive, optimistic view of the future. No other senator could match his ability to articulate the free-labor case. For the past decade he had confidently predicted that the retrograde system of American slavery would not endure, that “ultimate emancipation” was predestined, and that it would unfold without violence or convulsion. He anticipated that slaveholders would willingly yield to the “beneficent” values of the age, just as snow melts away in the warm springtime sun.
Thanks to such optimism, the events of November and December had startled Seward. Sooner than most Republicans, he realized that the whirlwind sweeping the Deep South was not just play-acting. Just three days before he spoke, the Star of the West had been deterred by hostile cannon fire from reaching Fort Sumter. The unimaginable was on the verge of happening — the United States stood on the brink of civil war. Could anything be done to move the country back from the precipice?
“It has been my fortune to have witnessed nearly all the great occasions in Congress during the last twenty years,” wrote James E. Harvey, the elite Washington correspondent for the Philadelphia North American. “No recent event, even among the many startling ones which have exercised the public mind, has excited more comment, or produced a profounder sensation, than Mr. Seward’s speech.” Even “radical secessionists, who professed an unwillingness to hear any terms,” listened intently.
Seward especially commanded attention because many assumed he spoke for the incoming Republican administration. A year before he was the odds-on favorite to head that administration himself, but the great prize went instead to the lesser-known Abraham Lincoln. The announcement in early January that Seward would become Lincoln’s secretary of state thus created an intense atmosphere of anticipation for the New Yorker’s speech.
We now know that Seward was only most uncomfortably the spokesman for Lincoln, who was still in Springfield, Ill. For the previous six weeks, the two had secretly jousted. The hard-line Lincoln continued to rule out any compromise regarding slavery in the territories — it must be opposed, he told his lieutenants, “as with a chain of steel.” Stopping the spread of slavery, he believed, was the glue that held Republicans together. For Lincoln, considerations of principle and politics coincided: it would be “the end of us” — that is, the Republican Party — to “surrender to those we have beaten.”
As Seward stood before the Senate and the nation, he therefore faced a seemingly impossible dilemma. He had to heed Lincoln’s views, yet he was eager to reach out to Southern anti-secessionists. And they kept insisting that disunion could be averted only if Republicans offered the South a territorial compromise. And so, in his speech, Seward tried to change the subject, pleading for a truce to the endless “dogmatical” debates regarding slavery in the territories. Instead, the western territories could be admitted into the Union as two big states, he suggested, thereby bypassing the territorial phase. To counter the South’s other primary complaint, Seward proposed amending the Constitution to prohibit any interference with slavery in the states where it already existed. Finally, he reminded white Southerners that their rights within the Union were secure, whereas “the horrors of civil war” would make any of their perceived grievances look trivial by comparison.
Related Civil War Timeline An unfolding history of the Civil War with photos and articles from the Times archive and ongoing commentary from Disunion contributors.
Underlying Seward’s speech was the hope that secession could be confined to the cotton states in the Deep South. After all, two-thirds of white Southerners lived in the Upper South. If these eight states held fast against secession, Seward reasoned, the frenzy in the Deep South might be contained and ultimately reversed. His political manager, Thurlow Weed, editor of the Albany Evening Journal, lauded the “bold, true-hearted Union men” in the Upper South, who were “standing firmly and nobly against the madness which seeks to involve the whole South in the treason of South Carolina.” Lincoln even quietly gave Seward and Weed permission to offer a seat in the cabinet to North Carolina Congressman John A. Gilmer, a leading Unionist.
Seward’s speech elicited a bewildering array of responses. Moderates both North and South voiced at least qualified approval, but secessionists and Southern rights advocates howled in protest. Seward hadn’t offered any compromise worth considering, they insisted. His empty posturing showed instead that Black Republicans planned to ride roughshod over the slave South.
Northern antislavery ideologues were equally miffed. “I deplore Seward’s speech,” Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner fumed. Abolitionist Wendell PhillipsFrances Seward, feared that her husband stood “in danger of taking the path that led Daniel Webster to an unhonored grave.” sneered that Daniel Webster’s support for the Compromise of 1850 had been “outdone,” and that “Massachusetts yields to New York the post of infamy which her great Senator has hitherto filled.” Even Seward’s wife,
Webster’s ghost plainly lurked. But attitudes had changed, and not the least that of John Greenleaf Whittier, whose poem had criticized Webster so harshly. An abolitionist but also a Quaker, Whittier dreaded the possibility of war. In the face of armed conflict with the South, he preferred compromise. He thanked Seward “in the sweet and holy name of peace, for wise calm words that put to shame passion and party,” adding:
If, without damage to the sacred cause
Of Freedom and the safeguard of its laws —
If, without yielding that for which alone
We prize the Union, thou canst save it now
From a baptism of blood, upon thy brow
A wreath whose flowers no earthly soil have known,
Woven of the beatitudes, shall rest,
And the peacemaker be forever blest!
Although some abolitionists continued to grumble that the pacifist Whittier gave higher priority to preventing war than to opposing slavery, his verse effectively silenced those who reviled Seward as a second Webster. Young Henry Adams, who closely observed Seward during the secession winter, witnessed only one moment when the normally “immovable” New Yorker “felt what was said of him” — and that was when “he opened the envelope and read the sonnet which the poet Whittier sent to him from Amesbury.” But could the “baptism of blood” be averted? That dread question hung over everything in early 1861, its answer inscrutable.
References: Robert Vincent Remini, “Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time“; Hyatt H. Waggoner, ed., “The Poetical Works of Whittier”; Congressional Globe, 35th Congress, First Session, 36th Congress, Second Session; Philadelphia North American, Jan. 14, 1861; Daniel W. Crofts, “Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis“; David M. Potter, “Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis.”
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Daniel W. Crofts is a professor at the College of New Jersey and author of “A Secession Crisis Enigma: William Henry Hurlbert and ‘The Diary of a Public Man.’”
