Daniel Webster’s Famed Oratory Does Not Move Everyone
In his infamous March 7th “Plea for Harmony and Peace” speech before the U.S. Senate, Daniel Webster called upon his great talent as an orator to urge support for the Compromise of 1850. However, his words did not convince everyone that the U.S. Constitution protected the rights of slave owners to capture fugitive slaves. Four days later, on March 11, New York Senator William H. Seward sardonically remarked to the Senate the following statement, as printed in the March 15, 1850, issue of the Daily Atlas (Boston, Massachusetts):
Argument, ingenious and subtle; declamation, earnest and bold; and persuasion, gentle and winning as the voice of the turtle dove when it is heard in the land, all alike and all together have failed to convince me of the soundness of this principle of the proposed Compromise, or of any one of the propositions on which it is attempted to be established.
Click here for more articles about Slavery: Precursor to the Civil War.
I understand that when writing a blog, it’s necessary to show a picture and say a few words about yourself, so that people don’t think a nameless, faceless committee or advisory board is running the show. Here I am, a real person. My name is Tony Pettinato, and I live in Deerfield, Mass. I did my undergraduate studies in English at Oberlin College, my graduate work in Journalism at UC Berkeley, and have been a reporter for six newspapers. For the past fourteen years I have worked at NewsBank, six of those as a managing editor for the U.S. Congressional Serial Set project – NewsBank’s acclaimed effort that digitized and indexed twelve million pages of primary source documents – that gratified my lifelong interest in American history. And that led me to editing this history blog!
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