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Rumors are afloat concerning the supposed terms of adjustment of the Northeastern Boundary question which we rather think—indeed, we may almost say we know—are calculated to mislead the public mind.… It is not unlikely, we learn, that the line which the Dutch arbiter decided for … will be agreed to. But then Maine gets what the Dutch king did not give her, the navigation of the [St. John] River, and this trebles the value of all her tall pine trees.

The editorial went on to detail other trade-offs, including:

England takes a tract of mountain land, untimbered and of no earthly value but as a boundary, and she relinquishes to the United States Rouse’s Point, the key of Lake Champlain, and a large territory heretofore supposed to belong to New York and Vermont, but which turns out to lie north of the 45th degree of latitude and is therefore a part of Canada.

From the newspaper’s point of view, it got a scoop. Webster got to dish it out.

In time, even Maine’s Augusta Age, while remaining ardently opposed to any boundary compromise, was now conceding, “We do not deny that very many candid and honest men are numbered among the friends of the treaty; men, too, of the highest intelligence, and every way entitled to respect.”

To persuade Maine itself, Webster employed a different approach: cartographic blackmail. Webster learned of two maps on which red lines had been drawn that conformed to the British interpretation of the Treaty of Paris. The lines had purportedly been drawn by Benjamin Franklin and John Jay, two of the key American negotiators. While questions could be raised as to whether Franklin and Jay had personally drawn the red lines, there was no question as to the maps’ authenticity. One had belonged to Friedrich von Steuben, the Prussian general who had provided invaluable assistance to the Americans in the Revolutionary War; the other was in a French archive, also a nation allied with the Americans in that war.9 Webster secretly sent word of the maps to Maine’s governor, threatening that their existence would be made public if Maine did not accede to a compromise. Soon papers were reporting, along with the New York Spectator, “It is satisfactory to learn that the legislature of Maine is proceeding rapidly and judiciously in measures … that will enable the general Government to effect an arrangement with Lord Ashburton.”

Judiciously, perhaps. Rapidly for sure. Four months after Lord Ashburton arrived in the United States, the Senate ratified the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, establishing the boundaries of Maine at their present-day location.10

Webster went on to make yet another bid for the presidency, this time in 1852. Because of the treaty he had managed to secure, he had reason to hope this election would be the one to put him in the White House. But he now had an additional liability: he was seventy, older than any first-term president ever elected. He lost the Whig nomination to Winfield Scott, who in turn lost in November to Franklin Pierce. By then, however, Webster was dead. In May 1852 he had sustained a head injury in a carriage accident. His recovery was hindered by cirrhosis of the liver.11 Daniel Webster died in late October, nine days before the election.

Upon his death, the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, visiting the site of one of Webster’s greatest speeches, wrote in his journal:

Last Sunday I was at Plymouth.… I supposed Webster must have passed, as indeed he had died at three in the morning. The sea, the rocks, the woods, gave no sign that America and the world had lost the completest man.

Yet, on another occasion, Emerson had said of Webster:

It was for his defect in moral perceptions, for the inequality of his moral to his intellectual faculty … that hence came the sterility of thought.… It is a curious fact that though he wrote and spoke with an ability that impresses the world, there is not a single remarkable sentence, not a single valuable aphorism which can pass into literature from his writing.12

Both observations were true.