Daniel Webster Quotes
When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood.
Webster, Daniel. "Second Speech on Foot's Resolution." The Works of Daniel Webster, Vol. 3, Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851, p. 341.
It would be almost 30 years until Jackson would have been proved correct and the Civil War had begun.
3rd Viscount Palmerston
See Mark {606304}; also Matthew {606727}. Lincoln had used the “house divided” biblical metaphor in 1843 when arguing for Whig solidarity. The first political use of the Biblical metaphor and quotation with respect to American slavery appears to have been by Sam Houston in 1850 {603970}. The first use with respect to American slavery was byMassachusetts abolitionist, Edmund Quincy, in 1852. The second sentence of this famous quotation was forsaged earlier. See Lincoln, {619494} & {584918}. Also See Felix Rohatyn who used the Lincoln line to refer to poverty: {70611}.
In this remarkable quotation, the king whose own invasion by Iraq was only stopped by American troops in the Gulf War, tells the Arab world that the American occupation which was endorsed by the Iraqi government was illegal. Many others in the world and even many in the U. S. agreed about the illegality, but the King claims to be one of the major allies and supporters of the United States. What he says for Arab and Islamic consumption is different from what he tells American and other Western diplomats. See {620141} for another example.
At the time sectionalism was extensive in America. Most Iowa and Northern families still remembered a relative who had been “killed by the rebels” in the Civil War. The South still resented the rest of the country. The East and Midwest had much better educated than the rest of the country. Most important, there was very little contact between Americans of different sections. Until the great Eisenhower initiative of a National Highway System sectionalism was common. Presidents were constantly trying to develop a national American spirit.
Some Lincoln critics point to this quotation to illustrate their belief that Lincoln’s emancipation of slaves was not based on deeply held personal moral convictions but was the result of pragmatic political forces pure and simple. Others believe that this statement to Greeley represented a political tactic to hold Maryland and Kentucky—then slave states—in the Union, but that Lincoln was waiting for the right time to adopt a policy of making emancipation paramount.
Crittendon, at the outbreak of the Civil War, had a Governor who wanted Kentucky to secede and join the Confederacy, but he and other leaders thwarted that and the state legislatures defied the governor and forced him to resign. 16 percent of Kentucky men held slaves and keeping Kentucky and Maryland in the Union was a very high priority for President Lincoln. See {633812}.
Abraham Lincoln’s major political opponent in Illinois agreed with Lincoln on the criticality of preserving the Union from a split off of the Southern States. He tended to be more willing to pander to the South than Lincoln, however they were strong allies on the fundamental issue. However, what the slavery forces in the south wanted and needed to forever protect slavery was not in the power of any President to do, short of ending the democracy. Slavery was doomed in the long run if there was no way to enforce the Supreme Court’s Dredd Scott decision upon (Northern) states whose constitutions and laws made any slave who entered the state free and whose people would not use its police and legal powers to return runaway slaves. It was the abolitionists who won the majority in the battle of public opinion on slavery. It was only a matter of time when slavery would become untenable in the South. Lincoln was unwilling to force the Northern states to return fugitive slaves against the constitution, laws and will of the people of those states as Buchanan said he was (but had a hard time doing). Also Lincoln was unwilling to allow new territories to enter the union if they allowed slavery.
This was not an original notion with Abraham Lincoln. Seward and most of the “Radical Republicans” believed that the slavery issue had to be resolved and attempts to compromise were futile.
Daniel Webster was an American lawyer and statesman who represented New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the U.S. Congress and served as the U.S. Secretary of State under Presidents William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and Millard Fillmore. As one of the most prominent American lawyers of the 19th century, he argued over 200 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court between 1814 and his death in 1852. During his life, he was a member of the Federalist Party, the National Republican Party, and the Whig Party.
