the secession movement was reached. Never an alarmist, Webster,
like others who loved the Union, become convinced during this
critical last week in February of an "emergency". He determined
"to make a Union Speech and discharge a clear conscience." "I
made up my mind to risk myself on a proposition for a general
pacification. I resolved to push my skiff from the shore alone."
"We are in a crisis," he wrote June 2, "if conciliation makes no
progress." "It is a great emergency, a great exigency, that the
country is placed in", he said in the Senate, June 17. "We have,"
he wrote in October, "gone through the most important crisis
which has occurred since the foundation of the government." A
year later he added at Buffalo, "if we had not settled these
agitating questions [by the Compromise] . . . in my opinion,
there would have been civil war". In Virginia, where he had known
the situation even better, he declared, "I believed in my
conscience that a crisis was at hand, a dangerous, a fearful
crisis."[64]

[64] Writings and Speeches, XVIII. 356, 387; XVI. 542, W; X.
116; Curtis, Life II. 596; XIII. 434.


Rhodes's conclusion that there was "little danger of an overt act
of secession while General Taylor was in the presidential chair"
was based on evidence then incomplete and is abandoned by more
recent historians. It is moreover significant that, of the
speeches cited by Rhodes, ridiculing the danger of secession, not
one was delivered before Webster's speech. All were uttered after
the danger had been lessened by the speeches and attitude ' of
Clay and Webster. Even such Northern anti-slavery speeches