Mr. Webster’s great achievements at the bar, but it has been rightly praised on mistaken grounds.  Mr. Webster made a very fine presentation of the arguments mainly prepared by Mason and Smith.  He transcended the usual legal limits with a burst of eloquent appeal which stands high among the famous passages of his oratory.  In what may be called the strategy of the case he showed the best generalship and the most skilful management.  He also proved himself to be possessed of great tact and to be versed in the knowledge of men, qualities not usually attributed to him because their exercise involved an amount of care and painstaking foreign to his indolent and royal temperament, which almost always relied on weight and force for victory.

Mr. Webster no doubt improved in details, and made better arguments at the bar than he did upon this occasion, but the Dartmouth College case, on the whole, shows his legal talents so nearly at their best, and in such unusual variety, that it is a fit point at which to pause in order to consider some of his other great legal arguments and his position and abilities as a lawyer.  For this purpose it is quite sufficient to confine ourselves to the cases mentioned by Mr. Curtis, and to the legal arguments preserved in the collection of Mr. Webster’s speeches.

Five years after the Dartmouth College decision, Mr. Webster made his famous argument in the case of Gibbons vs.  Ogden.  The case was called suddenly, and Mr. Webster prepared his argument in a single night of intense labor.  The facts were all before him, but he showed a readiness in arrangement only equalled by its force.  The question was whether the State of New York had a right under the Constitution to grant a monopoly of steam navigation in its waters to Fulton and Livingston.  Mr. Webster contended that the acts making such a grant were unconstitutional, because the power of Congress to regulate commerce was, within certain limitations, exclusive.  He won his cause, and the decision, from its importance, probably enhanced the contemporary estimate of his effort.  The argument was badly reported, but it shows all its author’s strongest qualities of close reasoning and effective statement.  The point in issue was neither difficult nor obscure, and afforded no opportunity for a display of learning.  It was purely a matter of constitutional interpretation, and could be discussed chiefly in a historical manner and from the standpoint of public interests.  This was particularly fitted to Mr. Webster’s cast of mind, and he did his subject full justice.  It was pure argument on general principles.  Mr. Webster does not reach that point of intense clearness and condensation which characterized Marshall and Hamilton, in whose writings we are fascinated by the beauty of the intellectual display, and are held fast by each succeeding line, which always comes charged with fresh meaning.  Nevertheless, Mr. Webster touches a very high point in this most difficult form of argument, and the impressiveness of his manner and voice carried all that he said to its mark with a direct force in which he stood unrivalled.