Daniel Webster

Statesman, lawyer, and famed orator, Daniel Webster served both New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the U.S. Congress. Webster was also twice secretary of state, first under William Henry Harrison and later under Millard Fillmore. During his latter term as secretary of state, he meticulously oversaw the implementation of the Fugitive Slave Act, incurring the wrath of New England's many vocal abolitionists, such as Henry David Thoreau and William Lloyd Garrison. Like many members of the Whig Party, Webster opposed the westward expansion of slavery, supporting the Compromise of 1850 that admitted California into the Union as a free state but radically reformed the existing Fugitive Slave Act to target individuals who assisted runaways along with the fugitives themselves. In his famous speech of March 7, 1850, before the U.S. Congress, excerpted in the following selection, Webster urges the North...