Douglas.[74]

[74] Works, II. 202-203.


Webster's support of the constitutional provision for "return of
persons held to service" was not merely that of a lawyer. It was
in accord with a deep and statesmanlike conviction that
"obedience to established government . . . is a Christian duty",
the seat of law is "the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of
the universe".[75] Offensive as this law was to the North, the
only logical alternatives were to fulfil or to annul the
Constitution. Webster chose to risk his reputation; the extreme
abolitionists, to risk the Union. Webster felt, as his opponents
later recognized, that "the habitual cherishing of the
principle", "resistance to unjust laws is obedience to God",
threatened the Constitution. "He . . . addressed himself,
therefore, to the duty of calling the American people back from
revolutionary theories to . . . submission to authority."[76] As
in 1830 against Haynes, so in 1850 against Calhoun and disunion,
Webster stood not as "a Massachusetts man, but as an American",
for "the preservation of the Union".[77] In both speeches he held
that he was acting nof for Massachusetts, but for the "whole
country" (1830), "the good of the whole" (1850). His devotion to
the Union and his intellectual balance led him to reject the
impatience, bitterness, and disunion sentiments of abolitionists
and secessionists, and to work on longer lines. "We must wait for
the slow progress of moral causes", a doctrine already announced
in 1840, he reiterated in 1850,--"the effect of moral causes,
though sure is slow."[78]