antislavery doctrine that Webster's 7th of March speech was
"scandalous, treachery", and Webster a man of little or no "moral
sense", courage, or statesmanship. That bitter atmosphere,
reproduced by Parton and von Holst, was perpetuated a generation
later by Lodge.[1]

[1] Cf. Parton with Lodge on intellect, morals, indolence,
drinking, 7th of March speech, Webster's favorite things in
England; references, note 63, below.


Since 1900, over fifty publications throwing light on Webster
and the Secession movement of 1850 have appeared, nearly a score
containing fresh contemporary evidence. These twentieth-century
historians--Garrison of Texas, Smith of Williams, Stephenson of
Charleston and Yale, Van Tyne, Phillips, Fisher in his True
Daniel Webster, or Ames, Hearon, and Cole in their monographs on
Southern conditions--many of them born in one section and
educated in another, brought into broadening relations with
Northern and Southern investigators, trained in the modern
historical spirit and freed by the mere lapse of time from much
of the passion of slavery and civil war, have written with less
emotion and more knowledge than the abolitionists, secessionists,
or their disciples who preceded Rhodes.

Under the auspices of the American Historical Association have
appeared the correspondence of Calhoun, of Chase, of Toombs,
Stephens, and Cobb, and of Hunter of Virginia. Van Tyne's Letters
of Webster (1902), including hundreds hitherto unpublished, was
further supplemented in the sixteenth volume of the "National