"A fallen angel," Whittier called him. This substantial, accessible
biography by a 19th-century specialist accomplishes its aim of
showing both the grounds for the stunning popular esteem Daniel
Webster gained early on, and the flaws that skewed his ambition and
weakened his stature even before he shocked New England by
supporting the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. More fully than other
recent writers, who have focused on Webster's years in the Senate
and State Department, Bartlett examines his youth. A tavernkeeping
father gave the New Hampshire farm boy an education at Phillips
Exeter (where he was too shy for public speaking) and Dartmouth
(where he first displayed his Olympian style and penchant for
luxurious debt). Bartlett thinks Webster developed a psychological
dependency on his father which kept him from full use of his
undoubted brilliance and bears on what his enemies called his "very
elastic moral principles." By the standard of the age, however,
Webster's political and financial conflicts of interest were
striking in degree, not in kind, as Bartlett underscores. And it
was a principled conservatism that restrained him on the slavery
issue, the same conservatism that made him the embodiment of the
Union and the Constitution for two still centrifugally disposed
generations. Bartlett's animated review of Webster's public career
shows that, however embroiled in narrow disputes, Webster was a
prime creator of American nationalism; rather glibly, he adds that
Webster's Haws, his quest for power and wealth, were America's
flaws. More significant is the book's emphasis that Webster was
idolized for his simplicity, dignity, and majestic serenity, not
simply his dynamism; and most striking, perhaps, after Bartlett's
scrutiny of the inner and outer man, is Webster's own apparently
total lack of self-examination. A broadly aimed, many-sided,
satisfying contribution. (Kirkus Reviews)
For forty years, until his death in 1852, Daniel Webster played a
dominant national role as a lawyer, orator, congressman, senator,
secretary of state, leader of two major parties, and perennial
presidential candidate. This new biography, drawing on the recently
collected Webster papers, explains the Webster phenomenon in terms
of the powerful positive and negative images he projected for
nineteenth-century Americans.
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