1830

 

January 26-27: Daniel Webster and Robert Hayne engage in debate over the future of the country. Webster’s reply to Hayne is called “the most famous Senate speech” on the U.S. Senate’s own website. Hayne stirred Webster to respond, after insisting that the nation was a collection of sovereign states, and, as such, each sovereign state retained the right to “nullify” laws passed by the federal government if they infringed on state interests. 

The senator from Massachusetts offers his rebuttal: 

“I hold it to be a popular government, erected by the people.” 

…It is, Sir, the people’s Constitution, the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people. The people of the United States have declared that the Constitution shall be the supreme law. We must either admit the proposition, or dispute their authority. The States are, unquestionably, sovereign, so far as their sovereignty is not affected by this supreme law. But the State legislatures, as political bodies, however sovereign, are yet not sovereign over the people. So far as the people have given the power to the general government, so far the grant is unquestionably good, and the government holds of the people, and not of the State governments. We are all agents of the same supreme power, the people. The general government and the State governments derive their authority from the same source. Neither can, in relation to the other, be called primary, though one is definite and restricted, and the other general and residuary. The national government possesses those powers which it will be shown the people have conferred upon it, and no more. All the rest belongs to the State governments, or to the people themselves. So far as the people have restrained State sovereignty, by the expression of their will, in the Constitution of the United States, so far, it must be admitted. State sovereignty is effectively controlled….the Constitution has ordered the matter differently. To make war, for instance, is an exercise of sovereignty; but the Constitution declares that no State shall make war. To coin money is another exercise of sovereign power, but no State is at liberty to coin money. Again, the Constitution says that no sovereign State shall be so sovereign as to make a treaty… I must now beg to ask, Sir, Whence is this supposed right of the States derived? Where do they find the power to interfere with the laws of the Union? Sir the opinion which the honorable gentleman maintains is a notion founded in a total misapprehension, in my judgment, of the origin of this government, and of the foundation on which it stands. I hold it to be a popular government, erected by the people; those who administer it, responsible to the people; and itself capable of being amended and modified, just as the people may choose it should be. It is as popular, just as truly emanating from the people, as the State governments. It is created for one purpose; the State governments for another. It has its own powers; they have theirs. There is no more authority with them to arrest the operation of a law of Congress, than with Congress to arrest the operation of their laws. We are here to administer a Constitution emanating immediately from the people, and trusted by them to our administration. It is not the creature of the State governments. It is of no moment to the argument, that certain acts of the State legislatures are necessary to fill our seats in this body. That is not one of their original State powers, a part of the sovereignty of the State. It is a duty which the people, by the Constitution itself, have imposed on the State legislatures; and which they might have left to be performed elsewhere, if they had seen fit. So they have left the choice of President with electors; but all this does not affect the proposition that this whole government, President, Senate, and House of Representatives, is a popular government. ... The people, then, Sir, erected this government. They gave it a Constitution, and in that Constitution they have enumerated the powers which they bestow on it…They have made it a limited government. They have defined its authority. They have restrained it to the exercise of such powers as are granted; and all others, they declare, are reserved to the States or the people. But, Sir, they have not stopped here. If they had, they would have accomplished but half their work. No definition can be so clear, as to avoid possibility of doubt; no limitation so precise, as to exclude all uncertainty. Who, then, shall construe this grant of the people? Who shall interpret their will, where it may be supposed they have left it doubtful? ... This, Sir, was the first great step. By this the supremacy of the Constitution and laws of the United States is declared. The people so will it. No State law is to be valid which comes in conflict with the Constitution, or any law of the United States passed in pursuance of it. But who shall decide this question of interference? To whom lies the last appeal? This, Sir, the Constitution itself decides also, by declaring, “That the judicial power shall extend to all cases arising under the Constitution and laws of the United States.” These two provisions cover the whole ground.

 

McMaster notes that there was a time when the schoolboys (as least in the North) could recite many o Webster’s lines from speeches: 

“Our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country.” 

“Thank God. I, I also, am an American.” 

“Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”

 

* 

The high-crowned fur hat had long been a status symbol in Europe; and there was an enormous demand for beaver pelts. The Mountain Men filled the demand. “It was,” Time-Life explains, “an incredibly hard life, lonely and perilous, and it demanded a degree of self-reliance rarely found even among Indians. Its appeal was its independence.”

 

*

McMaster also has this to say, as Americans continue their westward advance:

[The Great Plains] were not entirely uninhabited. Over them wandered bands of Indians mounted on fleet ponies; white hunters and trappers, some trapping for themselves, some for the great fur companies; and immense herds of buffalo, and in the south herds of wild horses. The streams still abounded with beaver. Game was everywhere, dear, elk, antelope, bears, wild turkeys, prairie chickens, and on the streams wild ducks and geese. Here and there were villages of savage and merciless Indians. (97-344)

The Native Americans of the Great Plains have no idea what's coming.

A tidal wave of white settlers - and a few blacks.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: McMaster’s last sentence passes as history in 1907. Typing this in the era of “critical race theory,” one wonders if history is ever entirely real, since historians have their own biases.

 

* 

Halleck gives us a good view of Daniel Webster. We place his story in 1830, when he gave one of his greatest speeches: 

In Webster’s youth, a stilted, unnatural style was popular for set speeches. He was himself influenced by the prevailing fashion, and we find him writing to a friend:

 

“In my melancholy moments I presage the most dire calamities. I already see in my imagination the time when the banner of civil war shall be unfurled; when Discord’s hydra form shall set up her hideous yell, and from her hundred mouths shall howl destruction through our empire.”

 

Such unnatural prose impresses us to-day as merely an insincere play with words, but in those days many thought a stilted, ornate style as necessary for an impressive occasion as Sunday clothes for church. An Oratorical Dictionary for the use of public speakers, was actually published in the first part of the nineteenth century. This contained a liberal amount of sonorous words derived from the Latin, such as “campestral,” “lapidescent,” “obnubilate,” and “adventitious.” Such words were supposed to give dignity to spoken utterance. …

 

Webster was cured of such tendencies by an older lawyer, Jeremiah Mason, who graduated at Yale about the time Webster was born. Mason, who was frequently Webster’s opponent, took pleasure in ridiculing all ornate efforts and in pricking rhetorical bubbles. Webster says that Mason talked to the jury “in a plain conversational way, in short sentences, and using no word that was not level to the comprehension of the least educated man on the panel. This led me to examine my own style, and I set about reforming it altogether.” Note the simplicity in the following sentences from Webster’s speech on The Murder of Captain Joseph White:

 

“Deep sleep had fallen on the destined victim, and on all beneath his roof. A healthful old man, to whom sleep was sweet, and the first sound slumbers of the night held him in their soft but strong embrace. ... The face of the innocent sleeper is turned from the murderer, and the beams of the moon, resting on the gray locks of his aged temple, show him where to strike.”

 

In his speech on The Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument, we find the following paragraph, containing two sentences which present in simple language one of the great facts in human history:

 

 “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.”

 

He knew when illustrations and figures of rhetoric could be used to
advantage to impress his hearers. In discussing the claim made by Senator
Calhoun of South Carolina that a state could nullify a national law,
Webster said:

 

  “To begin with nullification, with the avowed intent, nevertheless, not
  to proceed to secession, dismemberment, and general revolution, is as if
  one were to take the plunge of Niagara, and cry out that he would stop
  half way down.”

 

To show the moral bravery of our forefathers and the comparative greatness of England, at that time, he said: 

“On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they 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.”

 

For nearly a generation prior to the Civil War, schoolboys had been declaiming the peroration of his greatest speech, his Reply to Hayne (1830): 

“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!”

 

This peroration brought Webster as an invisible presence into thousands of homes in the North. The hearts of the listeners would beat faster as the declaimer continued: 

“Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured….”

 

When the irrepressible conflict came, it would be difficult to estimate how many this great oration influenced to join the army to save the Union. The closing words of that speech, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” kept sounding like the voice of many thunders in the ear of the young men, until they shouldered their muskets.

 

* 

As New York City grows, it is decided that a line of omnibuses should be started.

Uber - before Uber was invented.

 

* 

August 28: With the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad now in operation, proponents of the new form of transportation stage a race between a horse pulling a car and a locomotive pulling the same load. 

The horse loses.

 * 

McMaster describes the state of transportation in the United States at that time, including the battle between advocates of canal vs. rail travel: 

Passengers traveled on the canal in packet boats, as they were called. The hull of such a craft was eighty feet long and eleven feet wide, and carried on its deck a long, low house with flat roof and sloping sides. In each side were a dozen or more windows with green blinds and red curtains. When the weather was fine, passengers sat on the roof, reading, talking, or sewing, till the man at the helm called “Low bridge!” when everybody would rush down the steps and into the cabin, to come forth once more when the bridge was passed. Walking on the roof when the packet was crowded was impossible. Those who wished such exercise had to take it on the towpath. Three horses abreast could drag a packet boat some four miles an hour.

 

While the means of travel were improving, the inns and towns even along the great stage routes had not improved. “When you alight at a country tavern,” said a traveler, it is ten to one you stand holding your horse, bawling for the hostler while the landlord looks on. Once inside the tavern every man, woman, and child plies you with questions. To get a dinner is the work of hours. At night you are put into a room with a dozen others and sleep two or three in a bed. In the morning you go outside to wash your face and then repair to the barroom to see your face in the only looking glass the tavern contains.”

 

These early railroads were made of wooden beams resting on stone blocks set in the ground. The upper surface of the beams, where the wheels rested, was protected by long trips or straps of iron spiked to the beam. The spikes often worked loose, and, as the car passed over, the strap would curl up and come through the bottom of the car, making what was called a “snake head.” …

 

Locomotives could not climb steep grades. When a hill was met with, the road had to go around it, or if this was not possible, the engine had to be taken off and the cars pulled up or let down an inclined plane by means of a rope and stationary engine. … When all the cars of the train had been pulled up in this way, they would be coupled together and made fast to a little puffing, wheezing locomotive without cab or brake, whose tall smokestack sent forth volumes of wood smoke and red-hot cinders.

 

The friends of canals [attacked the new railroads]. Snow, it was said, would block them for weeks. If locomotives were used, the sparks would make it impossible to carry hay or other things combustible. The boilers would blow up as they did on steamboats. Canals were therefore safer and cheaper. (97/304-307)