By universal consent Webster's reply is our finest example of forensic
eloquence. The essence of the argument was the right of the majority to
control the minority. That one State could nullify and secede whenever
the majority outvoted it, practically destroyed the jury system which is
embedded in Saxon history, destroyed the right of the majority of the
aldermen to control the great city, destroyed the right of the majority
of the supreme justices to make their decision. Webster's argument
crushed the doctrine of secession, and made the Republic a nation. Thus
Calhoun and Webster marked out the line of battle, for when the men in
gray and the men in blue met at Gettysburg and Appomattox it was to
determine whether Calhoun or Webster was right. Grant's final victory
simply stamped with a seal of blood the great charter that Webster's
genius had formulated.

In retrospect the wonderful thing about Webster's reply is that his
notes were confined to a sheet of letter paper. Afterwards Webster said
that it had been carefully prepared, for while there is such a thing as
extemporaneous delivery, there is "no extemporaneous acquisition." Not
until he entered the Senate Chamber and saw the crowds did he feel the
slightest trepidation. "A strange sensation came. My brain was free.
All that I had ever read or thought or acted, in literature, in history,
in law, in politics, seemed to unroll before me in glowing panorama, and
then it was easy, if I wanted a thunderbolt, to reach out and take it,
as it went smoking by." When Lyman Beecher had read Webster's reply to
Hayne, he turned to a friend and exclaimed, "It makes me think of a
red-hot cannon-ball going through a bucket of empty egg-shells."

From that hour patriotism rose like a flood. For two generations the
reply has been to Americans what Demosthenes on the Crown was to the
Athenians. Webster placed the nation above the union, made the Nation,