The immediate result to Mr. Webster of the ability and tact which he displayed at the Rockingham Convention was his election to the thirteenth Congress, where he took his seat in May, 1813. There were then many able men in the House. Mr. Clay was Speaker, and on the floor were John C. Calhoun, Langdon Cheves and William Lowndes of South Carolina, Forsyth and Troup of Georgia, Ingersoll of Pennsylvania, Grundy of Tennessee, and McLean of Ohio, all conspicuous in the young nationalist war party. Macon and Eppes were representatives of the old Jeffersonian Republicans, while the Federalists were strong in the possession of such leaders as Pickering of Massachusetts, Pitkin of Connecticut, Grosvenor and Benson of New York, Hanson of Maryland, and William Gaston of North Carolina. It was a House in which any one might have been glad to win distinction. That Mr. Webster was considered, at the outset, to be a man of great promise is shown by the fact that he was placed on the Committee on Foreign Relations, of which Mr. Calhoun was the head, and which, in the war time, was the most important committee of the House.
Mr. Webster's first act was a characteristic one. Early in June he introduced a set of resolutions calling upon the President for information as to the time and mode in which the repeal of the French decrees had been communicated to our government. His unerring sagacity in singling out the weak point in his enemy's armor and in choosing his own keenest weapon, was never better illustrated than on this occasion. We know now that in the negotiations for the repeal of the decrees, the French government tricked us into war with England by most profligate lying. It was apparent then that there was something wrong, and that either our government had been deceived, or had withheld the publication of the repealing decree until war was declared, so that England might not have a pretext for rescinding the obnoxious orders. Either horn of the dilemma, therefore, was disagreeable to the administration, and a disclosure could hardly fail to benefit the Federalists. Mr. Webster supported his resolutions with a terse and simple speech of explanation, so far as we can judge from the meagre abstract which has come down to us. The resolutions, however, were a firebrand, and lighted up an angry and protracted debate, but the ruling party, as Mr. Webster probably foresaw, did not dare to vote them down, and they passed by large majorities. Mr. Webster spoke but once, and then very briefly, during the progress of the debate, and soon after returned to New Hampshire. With the exception of these resolutions, he took no active part whatever in the business of the House beyond voting steadily with his party, a fact of which we may be sure because he was always on the same side as that staunch old partisan, Timothy Pickering.
After a summer passed in the performance of his professional duties, Mr. Webster returned to Washington. He was late in his coming, Congress having been in session nearly three weeks when he arrived to find that he had been dropped from the Committee on Foreign Relations. The dominant party probably discovered that he was a young man of rather too much promise and too formidable an opponent for such an important post. His resolutions had been answered at the previous session, after his departure, and the report, which consisted of a lame explanation of the main point, and an elaborate defence of the war, had been quietly laid aside. Mr. Webster desired debate on this subject, and succeeded in carrying a reference of the report to a committee of the whole, but his opponents prevented its ever coming to discussion. In the long session which ensued, Mr. Webster again took comparatively little part in general business, but he spoke oftener than before. He seems to have been reserving his strength and making sure of his ground. He defended the Federalists as the true friends of the navy, and he resisted with great power the extravagant attempt to extend martial law to all citizens suspected of treason. On January 14, 1814, he made a long and well reported speech against a bill to encourage enlistments. This is the first example of the eloquence which Mr. Webster afterwards carried to such high perfection. Some of his subsequent speeches far surpass this one, but they differ from it in degree, not in kind. He was now master of the style at which he aimed. The vehicle was perfected and his natural talent gave that vehicle abundance of thought to be conveyed. The whole speech is simple in form, direct and forcible. It has the elasticity and vigor of great strength, and glows with eloquence in some passages. Here, too, we see for the first time that power of deliberate and measured sarcasm which was destined to become in his hands such a formidable weapon. The florid rhetoric of the early days is utterly gone, and the thought comes to us in those short and pregnant sentences and in the choice and effective words which were afterwards so typical of the speaker. The speech itself was a party speech and a presentation of party arguments. It offered nothing new, but the familiar principles had hardly ever been stated in such a striking and impressive fashion. Mr. Webster attacked the war policy and the conduct of the war, and advocated defensive warfare, a navy, and the abandonment of the restrictive laws that were ruining our commerce, which had been the main cause of the adoption of the Constitution. The conclusion of this speech is not far from the level of Mr. Webster's best work. It is too long for quotation, but a few sentences will show its quality:—
"Give up your futile projects of invasion. Extinguish the fires that blaze on your inland frontier. Establish perfect safety and defence there by adequate force. Let every man that sleeps on your soil sleep in security. Stop the blood that flows from the veins of unarmed yeomanry and women and children. Give to the living time to bury and lament their dead in the quietness of private sorrow. Having performed this work of beneficence and mercy on your inland border, turn, and look with the eye of justice and compassion on your vast population along the coast. Unclench the iron grasp of your embargo. Take measures for that end before another sun sets…. Let it no longer be said that not one ship of force, built by your hands, yet floats upon the ocean…. If then the war must be continued, go to the ocean. If you are seriously contending for maritime rights, go to the theatre where alone those rights can be defended. Thither every indication of your fortune points you. There the united wishes and exertions of the nation will go with you. Even our party divisions, acrimonious as they are, cease at the water's edge."
Events soon forced the policy urged by Mr. Webster upon the administration, whose friends carried first a modification of the embargo, and before the close of the session introduced a bill for its total repeal. The difficult task of advocating this measure devolved upon Mr. Calhoun, who sustained his cause more ingeniously than ingenuously. He frankly admitted that restriction was a failure as a war measure, but he defended the repeal on the ground that the condition of affairs in Europe had changed since the restrictive policy was adopted. It had indeed changed since the embargo of 1807, but not since the imposition of that of 1813, which was the one under discussion.
Mr. Calhoun laid himself open to most unmerciful retorts, which was his misfortune, not his fault, for the embargo had been utterly and hopelessly wrong from the beginning. Mr. Webster, however, took full advantage of the opportunity thus presented. His opening congratulations are in his best vein of stately sarcasm, and are admirably put. He followed this up by a new argument of great force, showing the colonial spirit of the restrictive policy. He also dwelt with fresh vigor on the identification with France necessitated by the restrictive laws, a reproach which stung Mr. Calhoun and his followers more than anything else. He then took up the embargo policy and tore it to pieces,—no very difficult undertaking, but well performed. The shifty and shifting policy of the government was especially distasteful to Mr. Webster, with his lofty conception of consistent and steady statesmanship, a point which is well brought out in the following passage:—
"In a commercial country, nothing can be more objectionable than frequent and violent changes. The concerns of private business do not endure such rude shocks but with extreme inconvenience and great loss. It would seem, however, that there is a class of politicians to whose taste all change is suited, to whom whatever is unnatural seems wise, and all that is violent appears great…. The Embargo Act, the Non-Importation Act, and all the crowd of additions and supplements, together with all their garniture of messages, reports, and resolutions, are tumbling undistinguished into one common grave. But yesterday this policy had a thousand friends and supporters; to-day it is fallen and prostrate, and few 'so poor as to do it reverence.' Sir, a government which cannot administer the affairs of a nation without so frequent and such violent alterations in the ordinary occupations and pursuits of private life, has, in my opinion, little claim to the regard of the community."
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