Did they believe their own fiction? The question is a large one
and involves this other, did they know what was going on in the
South? Did they realize that the Union on March 6, 1850, was
actually at a parting of the ways,--that destruction or Civil War
formed an imminent issue?

Many of those who condemned compromise may be absolved from the
charge of insincerity on the ground that they did not care
whether the Union was preserved or riot. Your true blue
Abolitionist was very little of a materialist. Nor did he have
primarily a crusading interest in the condition of the blacks. He
was introspective. He wanted the responsibility for slavery taken
off his own soul. As later events were to prove, he was also
pretty nearly a pacifist; war for the Union, pure and simple,
made no appeal to him. It was part of Webster's insight that he
divined this, that he saw there was more pacifism than natural
ardor in the North of 1850, saw that the precipitation of a war
issue might spell the end of the United Republic. Therefore, it
was to circumvent the Northern pacifists quite as much as to
undermine the Southern expansionists that he offered compromise
and avoided war.

But what of those other detractors of Webster, those who were for
the Union and yet believed he had sold out? Their one slim
defense is the conviction that the South did not mean what
it said, that Webster, had he dared offend the South, could have
saved the day--from their point of view--without making
concessions. Professor Foster, always ready to do scrupulous
justice, points out the dense ignorance in each section of the
other, and there lets the matter rest. But what shall we say of a