Only a week ago, in
overhauling old pamphlets, a part of my patrimony, I found the actual memorial
to Congress1 reported by the committee of which Mr. Webster was
chairman, and I determined to send it to you, on reading your article this
morning. I have also examined the files of Boston papers at the Athenæum, and
enclose a memorandum from them which may be interesting. The memorial is
reputed to be the work of Mr. Webster. The close is marked by his clear and
cogent statement. Why it was not preserved in the collection of his “Opera,”
which was first published ten or fifteen years later, I know not. Perhaps he
had already seen that he might be obliged, in the pursuit of his ambition, to
tread some steps backward, and did not wish to have a document like this,
accessible to all, in perpetual memory of his early professions. If you follow
him up on this point, read in this connection the latter part of his Plymouth
address, the earliest of his orations in the published volume. At this time he
seemed to have high purposes. I wonder that the noble passage about the
Ordinance, in his first speech in the Hayne controversy, has not been used
against his present tergiversation. There is another document which might be
used effectively against him, the address of the Massachusetts Anti-Texas State
convention in January, 1845, the first half of which was actually composed by
Mr. Webster, partly written and partly dictated. In this he takes the strongest
ground against the constitutionality of the resolutions of annexation. Then
followed his speech, Dec. 22, 1845, in the Senate, against the admission of
Texas with a slaveholding constitution. If the faith of the country was
pledged, as he now says it was, by these resolutions when they were accepted by
Texas, he was obliged, according to his present argument about the four States,
to vote for her admission with or without slavery; but his vote stands nay. But
it would be a long work to expose his shiftless course,— “everything by starts,
and nothing long.” Mr. Leavitt, of the “Independent,” talks of taking him in
hand, and exposing the double-dealings of his life. I wish he might do it
through the “Post.” When you have done with the pamphlet, please return it. Of
the committee who reported it were George Blake, now dead, who was a leading
Republican; Josiah Quincy, Federalist, late President of Harvard College; James
T. Austin, Republican, late Attorney-General of Massachusetts; and John
Gallison, a lawyer, who died soon after, but of whom there are most grateful
traditions in the profession, admired particularly the article on Webster,
written shortly after the speech. It must have been done by Mr. Dix.2
Aut Erasmus aut Diabolus. I cannot forbear expressing the sincere delight with
which I read your paper. Its politics have such a temper from literature that
they fascinate as well as convince.
_______________
1 of the citizens of Boston in 1819 in favor
of the prohibition of slavery in territories and new States. Sumner's letter
was the basis of a leader by Mr. Bigelow in the New York "Evening
Post," May 23, 1850.
2 John A. Dix. Sumner was probably at fault in
this conjecture.
SOURCE: Edward L.
Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Vol. 3, p. 215-6
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