of Northern resistance, to show the South that a too violent insistence upon their constitutional rights would be fatal, and to endeavor to obtain such concessions as would allay excited feelings.  Mr. Webster’s strong argument in favor of the Fugitive Slave Law pleased the South, of course; but it irritated and angered the North.  It promoted the very struggle which it proposed to allay, for it admitted the existence of only one side to the question.  The consciences of men cannot be coerced; and when Mr. Webster undertook to do it he dashed himself against the rocks.  People did not stop to distinguish between a legal argument and a defence of the merits of catching runaway slaves.  To refer to the original law of 1793 was idle.  Public opinion had changed in half a century; and what had seemed reasonable at the close of the eighteenth century was monstrous in the middle of the nineteenth.

All this Mr. Webster declined to recognize.  He upheld without diminution or modification the constitutional duty of sending escaping slaves back to bondage; and from the legal soundness of this position there is no escape.  The trouble was that he had no word to say against the cruelty and barbarity of the system.  To insist upon the necessity of submitting to the hard and repulsive duty imposed by the Constitution was one thing.  To urge submission without a word of sorrow or regret was another.  The North felt, and felt rightly, that while Mr. Webster could not avoid admitting the force of the constitutional provisions about fugitive slaves, and was obliged to bow to their behest, yet to defend them without reservation, to attack those who opposed them, and to urge the rigid enforcement of a Fugitive Slave Law, was not in consonance with his past, his conscience, and his duty to his constituents.  The constitutionality of a Fugitive Slave Law may be urged and admitted over and over again, but this could not make the North believe that advocacy of slave-catching was a task suited to Daniel Webster.  The simple fact was that he did not treat the general question of slavery as he always had treated it.  Instead of denouncing and deploring it, and striking at it whenever the Constitution permitted, he apologized for its existence, and urged the enforcement of its most obnoxious laws.  This was not his attitude in 1820; this was not what the people of the North expected of him in 1850.

In regard to the policy of compromise there is a much stronger contrast between Mr. Webster’s attitude in 1850 and his earlier course than in the case of his views on the general subject of slavery.  In 1819, although not in public life, Mr. Webster, as is clear from the tone of the Boston memorial, was opposed to any compromise involving an extension of slavery.  In 1832-33 he was the most conspicuous and unyielding enemy of the principle of compromise in the country.  He then took the ground that the time had come to test the strength of the Constitution