Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [95]
“I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a northern man, but as an American,” Webster began. “I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union. ‘Hear me for my cause.’” He proceeded to stun many in the North by castigating abolitionists, vowing never to support the Wilmot Proviso, and coming out in favor of every one of Clay’s resolutions—including the provision to strengthen the hateful Fugitive Slave Law. Many in New England found Webster’s new stand particularly abhorrent. “Mr Webster has deliberately taken out his name from all the files of honour,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “He has undone all that he spent his years in doing.”
Frances found the speech greatly disappointing. The word “compromise,” she told her sister, “is becoming hateful to me.” Acknowledging that Webster was “a forcible speaker,” particularly when he extolled the Union, she found him “much less eloquent than Henry Clay because his heart is decidedly colder—people must have feeling themselves to touch others.” Despite such criticisms, the speech won nationwide approval from moderates who desperately wanted a peaceful settlement of the situation. A few antislavery Whigs expressed a fear that Seward might hesitate when the time came to deliver his own speech, scheduled three days later. “How little they know his nature,” Frances wrote. “Every concession of Mr. Webster to Southern principles only makes Henry advocate more strongly the cause which he thinks just.”
Frances was right. Antislavery advocates had no need to worry about her husband. For weeks, Seward had been working hard on his maiden address to the Senate, delivered on March 11, 1850. He had talked at length with Weed and rehearsed various drafts before Frances. The Capitol of the 1850s offered no private office space, so Seward wrote at home, rising early in the morning and working long past the midnight hour.
As he began his Senate oration, Seward spoke somewhat hesitantly. Reading from his manuscript without dramatic gestures, he quoted Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and the ancient philosophers in a voice so low that it seemed he was talking to himself rather than addressing the chamber and the galleries. His words were so powerful, however, that Webster was riveted; while John Calhoun, attending one of his final sessions in the chamber, was “restless at first” but “soon sat still.”
Seward began by maintaining flatly that he was opposed to compromise, “in any and all the forms in which it has been proposed.” He refused to strengthen the Fugitive Slave Law. “We are not slaveholders. We cannot…be either true Christians or real freemen,” he continued, “if we impose on another a chain that we defy all human power to fasten on ourselves.” He declared that a ban on the slave trade in the District was insufficient: slavery itself must be abolished in the capital. Finally, staunchly affirming the Wilmot Proviso, he refused to accept the introduction of slavery anywhere in the new territories.
As he moved into the second hour of his speech, his conviction gave him ease and confidence. Step by step, he laid the foundation for the “higher law” doctrine that would be forever associated with his name. Not only did the Constitution bind the American people to goals incompatible with slavery, he asserted, “but there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes. The territory is a part…of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe. We are his stewards.”
With this single speech, his first national address, Seward became the principal antislavery voice in the Senate. Tens of thousands of copies of the speech were printed and distributed throughout the North. The