This is directed against the African slave-trade, the most hideous feature, perhaps, in the system.  But there was no real distinction between slavers plying from one American port to another and those which crossed the ocean for the same purpose.  There was no essential difference between slaves raised for the market in Virginia—­whence they were exported and sold—­and those kidnapped for the same object on the Guinea coast.  The physical suffering of a land journey might be less than that of a long sea-voyage, but the anguish of separation between mother and child was the same in all cases.  The chains which clanked on the limbs of the wretched creatures, driven from the auction block along the road which passed beneath the national capitol, and the fetters of the captured fugitive were no softer or lighter than those forged for the cargo of the slave-ships.  Yet the man who so magnificently denounced the one in 1820, found no cause to repeat the denunciation in 1850, when only domestic traffic was in question.  The memorial of 1819 and the oration of 1820 place the African slave-trade and the domestic branch of the business on precisely the same ground of infamy and cruelty.  In 1850 Mr. Webster seems to have discovered that there was a wide gulf fixed between them, for the latter wholly failed to excite the stern condemnation poured forth by the memorialist of 1819 and the orator of 1820.  The Fugitive Slave Law, more inhuman than either of the forms of traffic, was defended in 1850 on good constitutional grounds; but the eloquent invective of the early days against an evil which constitutions might necessitate but could not alter or justify, does not go hand in hand with the legal argument.

The next occasion after the Missouri Compromise, on which slavery made its influence strongly felt at Washington, was when Mr. Adams’s scheme of the Panama mission aroused such bitter and unexpected resistance in Congress.  Mr. Webster defended the policy of the President with great ability, but he confined himself to the international and constitutional questions which it involved, and did not discuss the underlying motive and true source of the opposition.  The debate on Foote’s resolution in 1830, in the wide range which it took, of course included slavery, and Mr. Hayne had a good deal to say on that subject, which lay at the bottom of the tariff agitation, as it did at that of every Southern movement of any real importance.  In his reply, Mr. Webster said that he had made no attack upon this sensitive institution, that he had simply stated that the Northwest had been greatly benefited by the exclusion of slavery, and that it would have been better for Kentucky if she had come within the scope of the ordinance of 1787.  The weight of his remarks was directed to showing that the complaint of Northern attacks on slavery as existing in the Southern States, or of Northern schemes to compel the abolition of slavery, was utterly groundless and fallacious.  At the same time he pointed out the way in which slavery was continually used to unite the South against the North.