But of such detachable passages there are happily many in Webster's
orations. One great thought underlay all his public life, the thought
of the Union--of American nationality. What in Hamilton had been a
principle of political philosophy had become in Webster a passionate
conviction. The Union was his idol, and he was intolerant of any
faction which threatened it from any quarter, whether the Nullifiers of
South Carolina or the Abolitionists of the North. It is this thought
which gives grandeur and elevation to all his utterances, and
especially to the wonderful peroration of his _Reply to Hayne_, on Mr.
Foot's resolution touching the sale of the public lands, delivered in
the Senate on January 26, 1830, whose closing words, "Liberty and
union, now and forever, one and inseparable," became the rallying cry
of a great cause. Similar in sentiment was his famous speech of March
7, 1850, _On the Constitution and the Union_, which gave so much
offense to the extreme Antislavery party, who held with Garrison that a
Constitution which protected slavery "was a league with death and a
covenant with hell." It is not claiming too much for Webster to assert
that the sentences of these and other speeches, memorized and declaimed
by thousands of school-boys throughout the North, did as much as any
single influence to train up a generation in hatred of secession, and
to send into the fields of the civil war armies of men animated with
the stern resolution to fight till the last drop of blood was shed,
rather than allow the Union to be dissolved.

The figure of this great senator is one of the most imposing in
American annals. The masculine force of his personality impressed
itself upon men of a very different stamp--upon the unworldly Emerson,
and upon the captious Carlyle, whose respect was not willingly accorded
to any contemporary, much less to a representative of American
democracy. Webster's looks and manner were characteristic. His form