https://www.wsj.com/articles/indivisible-book-review-daniel-webster-one-and-inseparable-11668182673?mod=article_inline
On March 7, 1850, Daniel Webster rose on the floor of the U.S. Senate and thunderously declared his support for the Fugitive Slave Act—the linchpin of a package of measures known as the Compromise of 1850. He unsparingly blamed abolitionists for agitating public feeling and accused the North of failing to do its constitutional duty by returning escaped freedom-seekers to their owners. Calling for a strong law that would give the South what it wanted, he boomed: “Let us not be pigmies in a case that calls for men!”
The South, not surprisingly, loved Webster’s speech, but the opponents of slavery were appalled. Thirty years earlier, standing on Plymouth Rock on the bicentenary of the Pilgrims’ landing, Webster had denounced slavery as an “odious and abominable” disgrace to Christianity and civilized values. Although never an abolitionist, he had long declared himself an enemy of human bondage.
In the wake of Webster’s support for the Compromise of 1850, the abolitionist Theodore Parker likened Webster to Benedict Arnold, while Ralph Waldo Emerson, a longtime admirer, wrote: “The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.” In this case, Webster’s effort to keep the country unified—in the face of bitter divisions that threatened to break it apart—led him away from his often-proclaimed concern for the enslaved. He defended his support for the Fugitive Slave Act as not only principled but imperative, given the exigencies of the time.
In “Indivisible,” Joel Richard Paul, a historian of the early republic and a law professor at the Hastings College in San Francisco, describes the extraordinary political ascent of the man who was known as the “Godlike Daniel” and widely hailed as America’s greatest orator. Webster’s career also serves as the armature for Mr. Paul’s analysis of the forces that shaped American nationalism during the first half of the 19th century.
