It is very curious that much of the history of the United States in the Forties and Fifties of the last century has vanished from the general memory. When a skilled historian reopens the study of Webster's "Seventh of March speech" it is more than likely that nine out of ten Americans will have to cudgel their wits endeavoring to make quite sure just where among our political adventures that famous oration fits in. How many of us could pass a satisfactory examination on the antecedent train of events—the introduction in Congress of that Wilmot Proviso designed to make free soil of all the territory to be acquired in the Mexican War; the instant and bitter reaction of the South; the various demands for some sort of partition of the conquered area between the sections, between slave labor and free labor; the unforeseen intrusion of the gold seekers of California in 1849, and their unauthorized formation of a new state based on free labor; the flaming up of Southern alarm, due not to one cause but to many, chiefly to the obvious fact that the free states were acquiring preponderance in Congress; the southern threats of secession; the fury of the Abolitionists demanding no concessions to the South, come what might; and then, just when a rupture seemed inevitable, when Northern extremists and Southern extremists seemed about to snatch control of their sections, Webster's bold play to the moderates on both sides, his scheme of compromise, announced in that famous speech on the seventh of March, 1850?

Most people are still aware that Webster was harshly criticized for making that speech. It is dimly remembered that the Abolitionists called him "Traitor", refusing to attribute to him any motive except the gaining of Southern support which might land him in the Presidency. At the time—so bitter was factional suspicion!—this view gained many adherents. It has not lost them all, even now.

This false interpretation of Webster turns on two questions—was there a real danger of secession in 1850? Was Webster sincere in deriving his policy from a sense of national peril, not from self-interest? In the study which follows Professor Foster makes an adequate case for Webster, answering the latter question. The former he deals with in a general way establishing two things, the fact of Southern readiness to secede, the attendant fact that the South changed its attitude after the Seventh of March. His limits prevent his going on to weigh and appraise the sincerity of those fanatics who so furiously maligned Webster, who created the tradition that he had cynically sold out to the Southerners. Did they believe their own fiction? The question is a large one and involves this other, did they know what was going on in the South? Did they realize that the Union on March 6, 1850, was actually at a parting of the ways,—that destruction or Civil War formed an imminent issue?

Many of those who condemned compromise may be absolved from the charge of insincerity on the ground that they did not care whether the Union was preserved or riot. Your true blue Abolitionist was very little of a materialist. Nor did he have primarily a crusading interest in the condition of the blacks. He was introspective. He wanted the responsibility for slavery taken off his own soul. As later events were to prove, he was also pretty nearly a pacifist; war for the Union, pure and simple, made no appeal to him. It was part of Webster's insight that he divined this, that he saw there was more pacifism than natural ardor in the North of 1850, saw that the precipitation of a war issue might spell the end of the United Republic. Therefore, it was to circumvent the Northern pacifists quite as much as to undermine the Southern expansionists that he offered compromise and avoided war.

But what of those other detractors of Webster, those who were for the Union and yet believed he had sold out? Their one slim defense is the conviction that the South did not mean what it said, that Webster, had he dared offend the South, could have saved the day—from their point of view—without making concessions. Professor Foster, always ready to do scrupulous justice, points out the dense ignorance in each section of the other, and there lets the matter rest. But what shall we say of a frame of mind, which in that moment of crisis, either did not read the Southern newspapers, or reading them and finding that the whole South was netted over by a systematically organized secession propaganda made no attempt to gauge its strength, scoffed at it all as buncombe! Even later historians have done the same thing. In too many cases they have assumed that because the compromise was followed by an apparent collapse of the secession propaganda, the propaganda all along was without reality. We know today that the propaganda did not collapse. For strategic reasons it changed its policy. But it went on steadily growing and gaining ground until it triumphed in 1861. Webster, not his foolish opponents, gauged its strength correctly in 1850.

The clew to what actually happened in 1850 lies in the course of such an ardent Southerner as, for example, Langdon Cheeves. Early in the year, he was a leading secessionist, but at the close of the year a leading anti-secessionist. His change of front, forced upon him by his own thinking about the situation was a bitter disappointment to himself. What animated him was a deep desire to take the whole South out of the Union. When, at the opening of the year, the North seemed unwilling to compromise, he, and many another, thought their time had come. At the first Nashville Convention he advised a general secession, assuming that Virginia, "our premier state," would lead the movement and when Virginia later in the year swung over from secession to anti-secession, Cheeves reluctantly changed his policy. The compromise had not altered his views—broadly speaking it had not satisfied the Lower South—but it had done something still more eventful, it had so affected the Upper South that a united secession became for a while impossible. Therefore, Cheeves and all like him—and they were the determining factor of the hour—resolved to bide their time, to wait until their propaganda had done its work, until the entire South should agree to go out together. Their argument, all preserved in print, but ignored by historians for sixty years thereafter, was perfectly frank. As one of them put it, in the face of the changed attitude of Virginia, "to secede now would be to secede from the South."

Here is the aspect of Webster's great stroke that was so long ignored. He did not satisfy the whole South. He did not make friends for himself of Southerners generally. What he did do was to drive a wedge into the South, to divide it temporarily against itself. He arrayed the Upper South against the Lower and thus because of the ultimate purposes of men like Cheeves, with their ambition to weld the South into a genuine unit, he forced them all to stand still, and thus to give Northern pacifism a chance to ebb, Northern nationalism a chance to develop. A comprehensive brief for the defense on this crucial point in the interpretation of American history, is Professor Foster's contribution.

NATHANIEL WRIGHT STEPHENSON