"
He knew when illustrations and figures of rhetoric could be used to
advantage to impress his hearers. In discussing the claim made by Senator
Calhoun of South Carolina that a state could nullify a national law,
Webster said:--
"To begin with nullification, with the avowed intent, nevertheless, not
to proceed to secession, dismemberment, and general revolution, is as if
one were to take the plunge of Niagara, and cry out that he would stop
half way down."
To show the moral bravery of our forefathers and the comparative greatness
of England, at that time, he said:--
"On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off,
they raised their flag against a power, to which, for purposes of foreign
conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be
compared; a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe
with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drumbeat,
following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth
with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."
For nearly a generation prior to the Civil War, schoolboys had been
declaiming the peroration of his greatest speech, his _Reply to Hayne_
(1830):--
"When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in
heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments
of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent;
on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal
blood!"
This peroration brought Webster as an invisible presence into thousands of
homes in the North.
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