As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the affairs of the national courts were his particular care.  Western expansion demanded an increased number of judges for the circuits, but, unfortunately, decisions in certain recent cases had offended the sensibilities of Virginia and Kentucky, and there was a renewal of the old Jeffersonian efforts to limit the authority of the Supreme Court.  Instead of being able to improve, he was obliged to defend the court, and this he did successfully, defeating all attempts to curtail its power by alterations of the act of 1789.  These duties and that of investigating the charges brought by Ninian Edwards against Mr. Crawford, the Secretary of the Treasury, made the session an unusually laborious one, and detained Mr. Webster in Washington until midsummer.

The short session of the next winter was of course marked by the excitement attendant upon the settlement of the presidential election which resulted in the choice of Mr. John Quincy Adams by the House of Representatives.  The intense agitation in political circles did not, however, prevent Mr. Webster from delivering one very important speech, nor from carrying through successfully one of the most important and practically useful measures of his legislative career.  The speech was delivered in the debate on the bill for continuing the national Cumberland road.  Mr. Webster had already, many years before, defined his position on the constitutional question involved in internal improvements.  He now, in response to Mr. McDuffie of South Carolina, who denounced the measure as partial and sectional, not merely defended the principle of internal improvements, but declared that it was a policy to be pursued only with the purest national feeling.  It was not the business of Congress, he said, to legislate for this State or that, or to balance local interests, and because they helped one region to help another, but to act for the benefit of all the States united, and in making improvements to be guided only by their necessity.  He showed that these roads would open up the West to settlement, and incidentally defended the policy of selling the public lands at a low price as an encouragement to emigration, telling his Southern friends very plainly that they could not expect to coerce the course of population in favor of their own section.  The whole speech was conceived in the broadest and wisest spirit, and marks another step in the development of Mr. Webster as a national statesman.  It increased his reputation, and brought to him a great accession of popularity in the West.

The measure which he carried through was the famous “Crimes Act,” perhaps the best monument that there is of his legislative and constructive ability.  The criminal law of the United States had scarcely been touched since the days of the first Congress, and was very defective and unsatisfactory.  Mr. Webster’s first task, in which he received most essential and valuable though unacknowledged