2 Early political career

From this point on his reputation as a lawyer grew quickly and he also became a Federalist party leader. In 1812 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives on the strength of his opposition to the War of 1812. He served two terms in the House before leaving Congress in 1816 and moving to Boston.

In 1816, Webster was asked to help in a legal matter representing Dartmouth College. In the wake of the Jeffersonian Republicans' success in the New Hampshire elections (they gained the governorship and a majority in the state legislature) the state decided to declare Dartmouth a public institution. They altered the constitution and size of the College's trustee body and then added a further board of overseers, which they put into the hands of the state senate. In essence they seized control of a private body without consultation or any offer of compensation. Webster assisted his friend Jeremiah Smith in fighting the action all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, where he personally argued the case. The peroration of his speech [1] was both emotional and well-reasoned. Due in large part to Webster's efforts, the court decided five to one in Dartmouth's favor.

In 1822, Webster was returned to Congress from Boston, and in 1827 he was elected to the Senate from the state of Massachusetts. Shortly after that, in 1828, his first wife, Grace, died. He later married Caroline LeRoy.

Throughout his life Webster championed American nationalism and after the demise of the Federalist party he joined the National Republican party. Here he chose to ally himself with Henry Clay, endorsing federal aid for projects to build roads in the West (see Internal improvements). In 1828, in response to the changing economic landscape in Massachusetts (there was a shift towards the manufacturing sector), he backed the high-tariff bill. This angered Southern leaders and brought Webster into dispute with South Carolina's Robert Young Hayne , who argued that his state had the right to overturn this particular piece of legislation. Webster, however, was successful in defending his stance in a Senate debate of 1830, which culminated in his second reply to Hayne [2], possibly one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in the U.S. Senate.

In 1833 he joined forces with President Andrew Jackson to defeat South Carolina's continued attempts at nullifying the tariff. At the same time Webster and his fellow Whigs battled Jackson over other matters, most notably what they saw as Jackson's attack on the National Bank. In 1836 Webster was one of three Whig party candidates to run for the office of President, but he only managed to gain the support of Massachusetts. This was the first of several unsuccessful attempts at gaining the presidency.

3 As Secretary of State

President William Henry Harrison appointed Webster to the prestigious post of United States Secretary of State in 1841, a post he retained under John Tyler after the untimely death of Harrison only a month after his inauguration. In September 1841 there was an internal division amongst the Whigs over the question of the National Bank. This caused all the Whigs barring Webster to resign from Tyler's cabinet.

In 1842 he was the architect of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty which resolved the Caroline Affair and also established the definitive Eastern border between the United States and Canada and sealed the final peace between the United States and Britain. But despite this great success he succumbed to Whig pressure in May 1842 and finally left the cabinet.

4 Later career and death

In 1845 he was re-elected to the Senate where he opposed both the annexation of Texas and the resulting war with Mexico. However the country was becoming more polarized on the issue of the expansion of slavery and, despite opposing such expansion, Webster found himself faced with the prospect of the breakup of the Union. On March 7, 1850, in one of his most memorable speeches before the Senate, he supported the Compromise of 1850, thereby repulsing Southern threats of secession while urging Northern support for a stronger law for the recovery of fugitive slaves. In July 1850, Webster was once again named Secretary of State under President Millard Fillmore and he supervised the strict enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. This made him massively unpopular with the anti-slavery lobby but his action in preventing southern secession is considered to have saved the Union.

Daniel Webster died on October 24, 1852 at his home in Marshfield as a result of a brain hemorrhage after he fell from his horse and took a crushing blow to the head.

After his death, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

Last Sunday I was at Plymouth on the beach....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. Nature had not in our days, or not since Napoleon, cut out such a masterpiece. He brought the strength of a savage into the height of culture. He was a man in equilibrio; a man within and without, the strong and perfect body of the first ages, with the civility and thought of the last.

The USS Daniel Webster (SSBN-626) and Daniel Webster College in Nashua, New Hampshire are named for the statesman.

5 See also

• History of the United States (1789-1861)
• Origins of the American Civil War (2/4)

6 External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about .

• In-dept Dartmouth College page on their most famous alumnus
• The Daniel Webster Birthplace Living History Project
• Congressional biography
• Full text of Daniel Webster by Henry Cabot Lodge from Project Gutenberg

Preceded in first service (1841-1843): John Forsyth	United States Secretary of State	Succeeded in first service (1841-1843): Abel P. Upshur
Preceded in second service (1850-1852): John Clayton		Succeeded in second service (1850-1852): Edward Everett

Webster, Daniel Webster, Daniel Webster, Daniel Webster, Daniel Webster, Daniel Webster, Daniel Webster, Daniel

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