to 1860 or to its development in "imponderables", Webster's
policy and his power over men's thoughts and deeds were essential
factors in the ultimate triumph of the Union, which would have
been at least dubious had secession been attempted in 1850. It
was a soldier, not the modern orator, who first said that
"Webster shotted our guns". A letter to Senator Hoar from another
Union soldier says that he kept up his heart as he paced up and
down as sentinel in an exposed place by repeating over and over,
"Liberty and Union now and forever, one and inseparable".[112]
Hosmer tells us that he and his boyhood friends of the North in
1861 "did not argue much the question of the right of secession",
but that it was the words of Webster's speeches, "as familiar to
us as the sentences of the Lord's prayer and scarcely less
consecrated, . . . with which we sprang to battle". Those
boys were not ready in 1850. The decisive human factors in the
Civil War were the men bred on the profound devotion to the Union
which Webster shared with others equally patriotic, but less
profoundly logical, less able to mould public opinion. Webster
not only saw the vision himself; he had the genius to make the
plain American citizen see that liberty could come through union
and not through disunion. Moreover, there was in Webster and the
Compromise of 1850 a spirit of conciliation, and therefore there
was on the part of the North a belief that they had given the
South a "square deal", and a corresponding indignation at the
attempts in the next decade to expand slavery by violating the
Compromises of 1820 and 1850. So, by 1860, the decisive border
states and Northwest were ready to stand behind the Union.

[112] Scribner, XXVI. 84; American Law Review, XXXV. 804.