It was under the cumulative stress of such convincing evidence, public and private utterances, and acts in Southern legislatures and in Congress, that Webster made his Union speech on the 7th of March. The purpose and character of the speech are rightly indicated by its title, "The Constitution and the Union", and by the significant dedication to the people of Massachusetts: "Necessity compels me to speak true rather than pleasing things." "I should indeed like to please you; but I prefer to save you, whatever be your attitude toward me." 71 The malignant charge that this speech was "a bid for the presidency" was long ago discarded, even by Lodge. It unfortunately survives in text-books more concerned with "atmosphere" than with truth. The modern investigator finds no evidence for it and every evidence against it. Webster was both too proud and too familiar with the political situation, North and South, to make such a monstrous mistake. The printed or manuscript letters to or from Webster in 1850 and 1851 show him and his friends deeply concerned over the danger to the Union, but not about the presidency. There is rarest mention of the matter in letters by personal or political friends; none by Webster, so far as the writer has observed.

If one comes to the speech familiar with both the situation in 1850 as now known, and with Webster's earlier and later speeches and private letters, one finds his position and arguments on the 7th of March in harmony with his attitude toward Union and slavery, and with the law and the facts. Frankly reiterating both his earlier view of slavery "as a great moral, political and social evil" and his lifelong devotion to the Union and its constitutional obligations, Webster took national, practical, courageous grounds. On the fugitive slave bill and the Wilmot Proviso, where cautious Whigs like Winthrop and Everett were inclined to keep quiet in view of Northern popular feeling, Webster "took a large view of things" and resolved, as Foote saw, to risk his reputation in advocating the only practicable solution. Not only was Webster thoroughly familiar with the facts, but he was pre-eminently logical and, as Calhoun had admitted, once convinced, "he cannot look truth in the face and oppose it by arguments". 72 He therefore boldly faced the truth that the Wilmot Proviso (as it proved later) was needless, and would irritate Southern Union men and play into hands of disunionists who frankly desired to exploit this "insult" to excite secession sentiment. In a like case ten years later, "the Republican party took precisely the same ground held by Mr. Webster in 1850 and acted from the motives that inspired the 7th of March speech". 73

Webster's anxiety for a conciliatory settlement of the highly dangerous Texas boundary situation (which incidentally narrowed slave territory) was as consistent with his national Union policy, as his desires for California's admission as a free state and for prohibition of the slave-trade in the District of Columbia were in accord with his opposition to slavery. Seeing both abolitionists and secessionists threatening the Union, he rebuked both severely for disloyalty to their "constitutional obligations", while he pleaded for a more conciliatory attitude, for faith and charity rather than "heated imaginations". The only logical alternative to the union policy was disunion, advocated alike by Garrisonian abolitionists and Southern secessionists. "The Union... was thought to be in danger, and devotion to the Union rightfully inclined men to yield... where nothing else could have so inclined them", was Lincoln's luminous defense of the Compromise in his debate with Douglas. 74

Webster's support of the constitutional provision for "return of persons held to service" was not merely that of a lawyer. It was in accord with a deep and statesmanlike conviction that "obedience to established government... is a Christian duty", the seat of law is "the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the universe". 75 Offensive as this law was to the North, the only logical alternatives were to fulfil or to annul the Constitution. Webster chose to risk his reputation; the extreme abolitionists, to risk the Union. Webster felt, as his opponents later recognized, that "the habitual cherishing of the principle", "resistance to unjust laws is obedience to God", threatened the Constitution. "He... addressed himself, therefore, to the duty of calling the American people back from revolutionary theories to... submission to authority." 76 As in 1830 against Haynes, so in 1850 against Calhoun and disunion, Webster stood not as "a Massachusetts man, but as an American", for "the preservation of the Union". 77 In both speeches he held that he was acting not for Massachusetts, but for the "whole country" (1830), "the good of the whole" (1850). His devotion to the Union and his intellectual balance led him to reject the impatience, bitterness, and disunion sentiments of abolitionists and secessionists, and to work on longer lines. "We must wait for the slow progress of moral causes", a doctrine already announced in 1840, he reiterated in 1850,—"the effect of moral causes, though sure is slow." 78