Daniel Webster argued over 200 Supreme Court cases and never won the presidency
A farmer's son from New Hampshire who studied law mainly to escape his father's poverty, Daniel Webster became the most celebrated American orator of his age, delivering what many rank as the finest speech ever given in Congress. He twice served as secretary of state, yet the Compromise of 1850 cost him dearly at home.
Webster was born in 1782 in Salisbury, New Hampshire, the second-youngest of eight children of Ebenezer Webster, a farmer and veteran of the French and Indian War and the Revolution. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, whose debate society named after him is considered the oldest in any American secondary school, then Dartmouth, where he ran the student newspaper and gave the town's Fourth of July oration in 1800. He took time off from legal training to teach at Fryeburg Academy in Maine and help pay for his brother Ezekiel's education, then clerked in Boston for the attorney Christopher Gore.
In Portsmouth he handled more than 1,700 cases in about a decade. Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807 hammered New England's trade, and Webster attacked it in an anonymous pamphlet. He largely wrote the Rockingham Memorial, which challenged Madison's case for the War of 1812 and floated the prospect of secession, and he rode that opposition into the House as a Federalist leader.
After two terms he moved to Boston and became a formidable Supreme Court advocate, winning landmark cases such as McCulloch v. Maryland and Gibbons v. Ogden. Returning to Congress, he helped Henry Clay build the National Republican Party and denounced John C. Calhoun's nullification theory in his Second Reply to Hayne in 1830. He broke with Andrew Jackson over the Second Bank, helped found the Whigs, and lost a presidential bid in 1836.
As secretary of state under Harrison and then Tyler, he negotiated the Webster-Ashburton Treaty with Britain. Back in the Senate he led the Cotton Whigs, who put good relations with the South ahead of opposing slavery. Returning as secretary of state under Fillmore in 1850, he helped pass the Compromise with its new fugitive slave law, a deal so unpopular in the North that it damaged his standing in Massachusetts. He died in 1852.
Source: Daniel Webster
