“Extinguish the fires that blaze on your inland borders.”  “Unclench the iron grasp of your embargo.”  “With all the war of the enemy on your commerce, if you would cease to make war upon it yourselves, you would still have some commerce.  That commerce would give you some revenue.  Apply that revenue to the augmentation of your navy.  That navy, in turn, will protect your commerce.”

In war time, however, there are two powers that have to do with the course of events; and very soon the enemy, by his own great scheme of invasion, decided the policy of the United States.  Every port was blockaded so effectively that a pilot-boat could not safely go out of sight of land, and a frigate was captured within sight of it.  These vigilant blockaders, together with the threatening armament which finally attacked New Orleans, compelled every harbor to prepare for defence, and most effectually refuted Mr. Webster’s speech.  The “blaze of glory” with which the war ended at New Orleans consumed all the remaining prestige of the Federalist party, once so powerful, so respectable, and so arrogant.

A member of the anti-war party during the existence of a war occupies a position which can only cease to be insignificant by the misfortunes of his country.  But when we turn from the partisan to the man, we perceive that Daniel Webster was a great presence in the House, and took rank immediately with the half-dozen ablest debaters.  His self-possession was perfect at all times, and at thirty-three he was still in the spring and first lustre of his powers.  His weighty and deliberate manner, the brevity, force, and point of his sentences, and the moderation of his gestures, were all in strong contrast to the flowing, loose, impassioned manner of the Southern orators, who ruled the House.  It was something like coming upon a stray number of the old Edinburgh Review in a heap of novels and Ladies’ Magazines.  Chief-Justice Marshall, who heard his first speech, being himself a Federalist, was so much delighted to hear his own opinions expressed with such power and dignity, that he left the House, believing that this stranger from far-off New Hampshire was destined to become, as he said, “one of the very first statesmen of America, and perhaps the very first.”  His Washington fame gave him new eclat at home.  He was re-elected, and came back to Congress in 1815, to aid the Federalists in preventing the young Republicans from being too Federal.

This last sentence slipped from the pen unawares; but, ridiculous as it looks, it does actually express the position and vocation of the Federalists after the peace of 1815.  Clay, Calhoun, Story, Adams, and the Republican majority in Congress, taught by the disasters of the war, as they supposed, had embraced the ideas of the old Federalist party, and were preparing to carry some of them to an extreme.  The navy had no longer an enemy.  The strict constructionists had dwindled to a few impracticables, headed by John