THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES /'nun thr portroit by Anifx. The Proceeding's of THE WEBST ER Commemoration by Dartmouth College of the vServices of DANIEL WEBSTER to the College and the State <& j& Held upon the occasion of ?5he One Hundredth Anni versary of t5he Gradua tion of Mr. Webster j& Edited by Ernest Martin Hopkins Secretary to the Presidents and printed tinder tne supervision of Homer Eaton Keyes-^? Instructor in ILnglisH 4 6/>e Introduction \ 652778 W Introduction. ITH the approach of the year 1901 the senti- ment found general expression among the alumni and friends of Dartmouth that the Col- lege ought to celebrate in some fitting manner the centennial of the graduation of Daniel Webster. At a meeting held on January iQth, 1900, the trustees passed the following vote : "In view of the fact that the Commencement of 1901 will be the one-hundredth Anniversary of the graduation of Daniel Webster, whose supreme service to the College in recovering and re-establishing its char- tered rights calls for grateful recognition on the part of the Sons of Dartmouth : "Be it voted that the Centennial of Mr. Webster's graduation be observed at Hanover, at such time in the year 1901, and in such manner, as may be appropriate, to be participated in by the faculty, students, alumni and friends of the College." If Mr. Webster's only service to the College had been that of recovering and re-establishing her chartered rights, recognition would still have been called for, but it is possible that such recognition might have taken a different form from that which was given, and the anniversary have been made strictly an academic occa- sion. As it was, Mr. Webster's services to the nation added such lustre to the name of Dartmouth, and his 5 Introduction personal fame so directly increased the fame of the Col- lege that it did not seem as feasible to acknowledge the debt due to the great statesman, the loyal alumnus, in an academic as in a civic occasion. Thus the event was unique, the observance by a college of the anniversary of the graduation of one of her sons through a civic celebration. The preparation for the Centennial was entrusted to two general committees, one of the trustees, consist- ing of the Honorable James B.Richardson, the Honorable Benjamin A. Kimball, and Doctor Cecil F. P. Bancroft, and one of the faculty, consisting of Professors Justin H. Smith, Louis H. Dow, and Frank G. Moore. The committee of the trustees made the arrange- ment for the speakers at the different exercises, and issued the invitations bearing the fac-simile of the auto- graph of Mr. Webster, but the chief burden of prepara- tion fell upon the local committee. Sub-committees were appointed from the faculty to take charge of the details incident to the celebration the design of the program and the oversight of the printing, the decora- tion of the grounds and the buildings, the electrical dis- play, the athletic events, the equipment of the torch-light procession, and the entertainment of guests, visitors and alumni. The co-operation of the students was inval- uable. Special recognition is due Colonel Charles K. Darl- ing for his services as Marshal throughout the exercises. The completion of College Hall gave the requisite facilities for the social observance of the occasion. The club rooms of the building proved to be exactly fitted for the reception of guests and the uses of the various com- mittees ; the dormitory section added greatly to the con- 6 venience of entertaining guests, and the large and stately Introduction dining hall, hung with portraits of Mr. Webster, and of many of the alumni and benefactors of the College, fur- nished a most appropriate setting for the brilliant assem- blage gathered at the banquet. With the exception of one or two of the earlier classes, every class from 1841 was represented. Judge Cross, of the class of 1841 was the oldest, and by no means the least active, of the graduates present. There were present from the class of 1851, attending the exer- cises and observing their fiftieth anniversary, Samuel H. Folsom, Esq., Mr. Gilbert E. Hood, Enoch G. Hooke, Esq., Senator Redfield Proctor, Mr. Daniel Putnam, Chief Justice Jonathan Ross, and Professor Henry E. Sawyer. The occasion was made memorable by the presence of many guests of personal and official distinction who came to do honor to the memory of Mr. Webster. The tribute which was paid by their presence and their words, representing so great a variety of political opin- ions, may be assumed to express the general estimation in which the services of Mr. Webster are held after the lapse of one hundred years from the beginning and forty- nine years from the close of his career. The enjoyment of the occasion was greatly enhanced by the weather, unusual even in the rich and mellow days of September, which not only made the carrying out of the whole program possible, but also gave exhila- ration to each event. Program as issued Changes will be noted in tne introduction to each section Prog'ram j& of WEBSTER CENTENNIAL of Dartmouth College Celebrating j& the One j& Hundredth Anniversary j& j& of ?5hQ Graduation of DANIEL & j& j& j& j& WEBSTER September 24tH (Si 25tH, 19O1 Hanover -? Ne\v HampsHire TUESDAY ^ ^ ^ j& vSeptember 24th 2.30 O'CLOCK & The faculty and students will assemble in the College Yard to form in procession ^ * ^ 3 O'CLOCK & EXERCISES IN THE COLLEGE CHURCH jt jt j Organ Prelude Chorus Prayer by the Reverend Samuel Penniman Leeds, D. D. Chorus Address by Professor Charles Francis Richard- son, Ph. D., '71 Mr. Webster's College Life Address by Professor John King Lord, Ph. D., '68 The Development of the College Since the Dartmouth College Case Chorus The Choral music during the week of the Webster Centennial will be rendered by students under the direction of Professor Charles Henry Morse, Mus. Bac. ^*j*^*j*jtjtjtjt J* ^ jfc 5 O'CLOCK ^ A short game of foot ball will be played on Alumni Oval by the 'Varsity Eleven and an Alumni Eleven & ^ j> & jfc Jt, jt, TUESDAY j& ^September 24th 8 O'CLOCK "DARTMOUTH NIGHT" In view of the occasion, Dartmouth Night will take the form of an out-door celebration, which will open with a torchlight parade, in costume, led by the College band and com- manded by Colonel Charles Kimball Darling, '85. The faculty will wear black academic gowns and mortar-board caps ; the students, a similar dress, except that each class will be distinguished by a particular color white for the Seniors, blue for the Juniors, scarlet for the Sophomores, and yellow for the Freshmen. Members of the graduate departments will wear the same costume in still different colors. The alumni will appear in a Webster cos- tume of blue coat, buff waistcoat, stock, dicky and tall hat. A feature of the parade will be a number of transparencies together with several floats, among which will be Webster's carriage and his huge plough J* & & & & After completing its line of march, the proces- sion will assemble in the College Yard, where there will be brief speeches, music by the Glee Club and the exhibition of a series of stereop- ticon views illustrating Webster's life and career. Immediately following, the campus will be illuminated with electric lights, fire- works and a bonfire. A number of prize athletic contests will be held, the evening closing with the singing of Dartmouth songs by the entire assemblage ^ J> o* ^ J> jfr WEDNESDAY & j& j& ^September 25tH 9.3O O'CLOCK ASSEMBLAGE IN COLLEGE YARD A procession made up of students, alumni, faculty, trustees and invited guests will form in the College Yard in charge of the Marshal, Colonel Charles Kimball Darling, '85 j J* 10 O'CLOCK & EXERCISES IN THE COLLEGE CHURCH jfc jfc j Processional "Priest's March from Athalie" Mendelssohn Chorus "Sanctus in E flat" Osgood Prayer by the Reverend Alvah Hovey, D. D., '44, Ex-President Newton Theological Seminary jt^^tjt^t^fc jfcjtjtjt Chorus "Prayer of Thanksgiving" Old Netherlands (J626) Address by the President of the College Oration by the Honorable Samuel Walker McCall, 74, of Massachusetts J* .* & Chorus "Ein Feste Burg" Old German Conferring of Honorary Degrees The singing by chorus and congregation of Milton s pharaphrase of Psalm cxxxvi Benediction WEDNESDAY & & <& ^September 25tK PSALM cxxxvi Let us with a gladsome mind Praise the Lord, for He is kind ; For His mercies aye endure, Ever faithful, ever sure Let us blaze His name abroad, -For of Gods He is the God j For His mercies aye endure, Ever faithful, ever sure* He with all-commanding might Filled the new-made world with light ; For His mercies aye endure, Ever faithful, ever sure. He His chosen race did bless In the wasteful wilderness ; For His mercies aye endure, Ever faithful, ever sure* All things living He doth feed, His full hand supplies their need ; For His mercies aye endure, Ever faithful, ever sure. Let us therefore chorus forth His high majesty and worth ; For His mercies aye endure, Ever faithful, ever sure. Amen. WEDNESDAY j& j& j& September 25tK 2.30 O'CLOCK CEREMONIES ATTENDING THE LAYING OF THE CORNER-STONE OF WEBSTER HALL * .* S The corner-stone will be laid by Samuel Ap- pleton, Esq., the only living grandson of Daniel Webster .* jtjtjtjkjfijtjtjt The prayer of dedication will Jbe offered by the Right Reverend Abiel Leonard, D. D., 70, Bishop of Utah j* ^ j* * j* .* > Address by the Honorable Frank Swett Black, 75, Ex-Governor of New York Selections of Music will be rendered by a chorus of students jtotjfcjfcjfc^tjfc> 4 O'CLOCK ^ EXERCISES IN THE OLD CHAPEL jt Reminiscences of Mr. Webster by some of the Older Graduates and Guests 6.3O O'CLOCK Out-of-door Concert by the Salem Cadet Band WEDNESDAY j& ^September 25tH 7 O'CLOCK BANQUET IN COLLEGE HALL On occasion of this, the first public use of the Dining Hall, the walls will be hung with portraits of Mr. Webster in possession of The Honorable Alfred Russell, LL. D., '50, will preside j&j&j&jfcjfcj&j&jfcjfc,jfc Responses will be made by the President of the College, and by His Excellency the Governor of New Hampshire & jfi J* & & Chief- Justice Isaac Newton Blodgett, LL. D., of the Supreme Court of the State, will speak on Mr. Webster's training at the New Hamp- shire Bar ?* The Honorable Frank Palmer Goulding, '63, will speak on Mr. Webster at the Massachusetts Bar J> J> jfi J> j* j* jt Some aspects of Mr. Webster's personal life and associations will be given by Edwin Webster Sanborn, Esquire, '78, the Honorable George Fred Williams, '72, and the Reverend Edward Everett Hale, D. D. & jfi J> jfi & Professor Francis Brown, LL. D., '70, will speak on the relation of President Brown to the Dartmouth College Case & J* & & The Honorable George Frisbie Hoar, LL. D., will speak on Mr. Webster in the Senate & Chief- Justice Melville Weston Fuller, LL. D., (it is expected) will speak of Mr. Webster be- fore the Supreme Court J* J* <& J> & & "I would have an inscription over the door of your building, ^Founded by Eleazar "Wheelock, Refounded by Daniel Webster, ' " Joseph Hopkinson, Esq., to President Francis Brown, after the decision of the Supreme Court of United States in the "Dartmouth College Case." This program was designed, put into type and printed at the office of The Dart- mouth Press, Hanover, New Hamp- shire. ^^Jtjfco^^fctfctfct Exercises of Tuesday Afternoon Program. The opening exercises of the Centennial were held at an early hour on Tuesday afternoon, anticipating the arrival of many of the alumni and guests. The trustees, faculty, and students assembled at J.30 o'clock in the College Yard, and marched in procession to the College Church. Organ Prelude Festival March. Smart Professor Charles Henry Morse, Mus. Bac. Chorus Lift up your Heads, Ye Gates. Luetzel Prayer by the Reverend Samuel Penniman Leeds, D. D. Address by Professor Charles Francis Richardson, Ph. D.,'71. Mr. Webster's College Life. Address by Professor John King Lord, Ph. D., '68. The Development of the College Since the Dartmouth College Case. Chorus Integer Vitae. Fleming Mr. Webster's College Life. Address by Professor Charles Francis Richardson, Ph.*D., '71. NE hundred years ago last winter, at eight o'clock on Wednesday evening, the thirty-first of Decem- ber, a lad of nineteen sat in his college room, probably in old Dartmouth, which he jocosely called Beechnut Hall, and wrote to his friend Bingham : ( 'To- morrow, Hervey, is the first day of the year, and of the cen- tury, which none of us will probably live to see closed." Ten decades have rolled around, and we meet in the first year of another century to celebrate, for the first time in the history of American colleges, the graduation of 21 Charles him whom most we delight to honor at Dartmouth, Francis whose "great stone face" is carved as that of the chief Richardson ora t O r of the new world on the walls of the academic theatre of our oldest university ; and whose name was but lately selected as entitled to rank with those of Washington and Lincoln at the very top of the roll of fame of the nation, as preserved in the stately hall of learning between the Hudson and the sea. Not alone in Dartmouth, therefore, is advanced the claim that Web- ster in some respects stands supreme among the alumni of the colleges of the United States. It is my modest of- fice, in chronological preparation for the more important addresses that are to follow, to try to bring before you some little picture of Webster's four years in what the poet of "Snow-Bound" called "classic Dartmouth's col- lege halls." The student of history soon discovers how infre- quent is the examination of original documents and how common the re-phrasing of familiar statements. There is, in the accounts of Webster's college days, as set forth by his several biographers, a striking similarity of idea and even of word. With minor garnishments of rhetoric, we are told, at greater or less length, that his under- graduate life was industrious ; that he read more than he studied, making, like Shakespeare, greater progress in Latin than Greek ; that he excelled in history, ora- tory, and English acquirements ; and that he once super- intended a " little weekly newspaper." We recognize the slippery phrase "it can easily be believed," in its changing forms of expression ; and at last we are ready to declare the swollen story, as Dr. Ordronaux said of the orations of a living Boanerges of New York politics, 22 a " monstrous compound of tautology, redundancy, ver- Charles bosity and pleonasm." Francis Even the chapter in Mr. George Ticknor Curtis' Richardson indispensable biography is wordy ; three pages are devot- ed to the statement that truth, not exaggeration, should be sought in accounts of a great man's youth, and else- where there is much that is fanciful, superfluous, or irrelevant. I do not propose, in the short time before me, to weary you with iterations so easily to be found on the printed page. The later writers have, according to the fashion of our time, been the more conservative ; but the authorities of chief value, among the many I have diligently examined, are the records of the trustees, the PJii Beta Kappa, and the United Fraternity ; Web- ster's autobiographical notes ; the letters of himself and his college friends, especially those gathered by Professor Sanborn when preparing the eulogy delivered at Phillips Academy in 1853, and later used in several articles by the same hand, on Daniel Webster as a Student ; the reminiscences of Judge Samuel Swift of the class of 1800; the Dartmouth Gazette and reprints therefrom ; Web- ster's two undergraduate orations now in print ; and Professor Colby's thorough account of the evolution of the Dartmouth curriculum in political science and relat- ed subjects. If we begin with a glance at externals, the academic buildings which Webster beheld during his college quad- renniumare brought back to the mind's eye by the water- color sketch made by George Ticknor in 1803, at the age of eleven. This sketch, now one of our most valued memorabilia, represents Dartmouth Hall in its present external appearance ; southwest, substantially on the 23 Charles site of Reed Hall, stands the president's house, long Francis since moved across trie common, and lately restored as Richardson the Howe Library ; in front of the present location of Thornton Hall, and near the street, stands the old chapel, removed in 1828 to the neighborhood of Hubbard House and afterwards pulled to the other side of Main Street and transformed into perhaps I should merely say for the first time called a barn ; while northeast and north- west of Dartmouth Hall, respectively, are the house of Bbenezer Woodward, the site of which is now shown by an abandoned well, and a long two-story wooden struc- ture, which served for divers academic and culinary pur- poses, near the present chapel site. As regards the location of Webster's college rooms, I have spent as much time as that devoted to the entire remainder of my address in trying to reduce the misty stories of a century to something like fact. In Freshman and Sophomore years, 1797-99, he roomed in the house of Humphrey Farrar, with Farrar's son George, class of 1800, and William, class of 1801, and Freeborn Adams, non-graduate. This is the written testimony of George Farrar.* In 1788 Humphrey Farrar had bought of President Wheelock a lot ' ' with a large house and a shop standing thereon," somewhat southeast of the pres- ent corner of Main and Lebanon Streets. In 1793 he added thereto an adjoining lot lying north of the lot and home "owned and occupied" by him, this new pur- chase being the corner at present owned by Mr. E. P. Storrs. As the record of this purchase was filed Oct. 14, 1801 , just prior to Farrar's sale of the whole property, *George Farrar to Prof. E. D. Sanborn, Nov. 25, 1852. Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster, 1 : 53. 24 the inference is clear that Webster roomed in a house Charles situated thereon, during Freshman and Sophomore years. Francis For this interesting discovery I am indebted to the pains- Richardson taking search made for me by George H. Kendall, Esq., Register of Deeds of Graf ton County. It is probable that the fabric of this Farrar house survives, at least in part, as the existing Wainwright house. For Webster's abode in Junior and Senior years three localities are named, none of which can be reduced to accurate time- limits. The late Miss Lucy J. McMurphy was told by William Dewey, about 1850, that to his knowledge Webster roomed in the McMurphy house, time not speci- fied ; and she wrote in 1896 that she thought Dewey said that Webster occupied the south chamber.* In Junior year he continued to room with Freeborn Adams, and for the greater part of some one year he roomed with Aaron Loveland of his own class. Judge Loveland's nephew, Mr. Charles Ensworth, now living in Norwich, thinks they roomed in the house of the father of the William Dewey already named, who, after Webster's col- lege days, built the present home of Mrs. Frederick Chase, but had, perhaps, previously occupied another house on the same site. In Senior year, according to tradition, and the oral statement made to Dean Emerson by Professor Sanborn of the class of 1832, Webster roomed in Dartmouth Hall. A more specific tradition declares that he occupied the room then and now num- bered i, northwest corner of the third story, as was understood by my father, Moses Charles Richardson of the class of 1841, who was its occupant 1840-1, and by * Letter filed in the College library. 25 Charles Dean Emerson of the class of 1868, who was its occu- Francis pant 1865-7. Richardson Webster wrote from Washington, Feb. 5, 1849; to James H. Bingham as "my dear old class-mate, room- mate, and friend," but no such expression as "room- mate" is contained in his letters to Bingham during or immediately after their college course, though the two were intimate associates. It is probable, from this allu- sion, from George Farrar's testimony, and from Aaron L/oveland's recollection, that a somewhat loose system of meum and tuum, in the matter of rooms, was in vogue in the early and simple days of the College. The triennial catalogues of graduates of the College began in 1786, but the first annual list of the officers and students of " Dartmouth University " which term was habitually used by the authorities years before it became the badge of the opposing party in the great contest was issued in October, 1802, a year after Web- ster's graduation. The little company of instructors a president and three men in the College, and one in the medical school given in the general catalogue of 1801, was the same, save as regards two tutors, with which Webster had been familiar in his student days. The extent of the wisdom of the teachers reminds one of Italian versatility in the time of Leonardo. Honorable John Wheelock, L,L,. D., was president and professor of civil and ecclesiastical history; Honorable Bezaleel Woodward, A. M., was professor of mathematics, natur- al philosophy, and ethics, and also trustee and treasurer, and judge of the county court ; Rev. John Smith, A.M., was trustee and librarian and likewise professor of "Lat- in, Greek, Hebrew, and other oriental languages"; and 26 Nathan Smith, M. D., besides being teacher of the Charles theory and practice of medicine and of anatomy and Francis surgery, was professor of chemistry. The tutors had Richardson been John Noyes (afterwards a member of Congress for a single term) from 1797 to 1799; Stephen Bemis (later a minister in Massachusetts) from 1799 to 1800; and Roswell Shirtliff, as he then spelled his name, from 1800. Wheelock, Woodward, John Smith, and the suc- cessive tutors were Webster's instructors ; and it should be said of the last-named down-trodden class that their 'usefulness in personal contact with students, while pur- suing their multifarious duties of teaching everything that the professors left untouched or did not know, was an important factor in the history of American colleges prior to 1850. The reminiscences of some of these men by Judge Samuel Swift of Middlebury, of the class of 1800, who lived to be the oldest graduate of the college, are vivid : ''President Wheelock's instructions were confined to the Senior class, and he was not regarded by them as a popular or profitable teacher. His knowledge and his instructions were mostly confined to the book. He was much of a recluse, and mingled little in public or pri- vate with the world, and seemed to know little of it. He affected a stiff dignity towards the students, and in all his movements ; his walks abroad, across the com- mon or elsewhere, with his three-cornered hat, were in slow and measured steps. The library was kept in one of the rooms of the upper story (of Dartmouth Hall), and was said, on what authority I do not know, to con- tain about 4,000 volumes. A considerable proportion of them were duodecimos, and other small volumes con- 27 Charles tributed, I suppose, by friends who had no further use Francis f or them. The books seemed not to be selected because Richardson ^ Q y were particularly appropriate for a college library. In another upper room was what was called a museum, consisting of curiosities said to be collected by former graduates and others in their travels. The most notice- able, and the only one I recollect, was a stuffed skin of a large fowl, understood to be found in South America. On one occasion the building caught fire. The flames were making decided progress, when President Wheel- ock, appearing in the excited crowd, called to a student to secure 'the Great Bird'. By the vigorous application of snow, however, the fire was at length subdued and the building and most of its contents rescued. John Smith, Professor of Greek and Latin known among the students as Professor Johnny was an amiable man, but of formal manners. He was a critical book-scholar, but an arti- ficial teacher. He preached also on the Sabbath to the students and villagers, but with little animation or force in his composition or delivery. Bezaleel Woodward . . . was in everything the reverse of President Wheelock and Professor Smith . . . There was nothing scholastic about his appearance or manners." The instruction proffered at Dartmouth, at the time, may have deserved the adjective "meagre", so often used by Webster's biographers, but it was at least logically progressive, and some of the teachers were strong men. It is a hasty error to assume that the cur- riculum of American colleges, a century ago, was not much better than that of a good high school of to-day. Latin was taught with some approach to thoroughness ; quotations from classical authors were still heard from 28 undergraduate lips ; and mature young men got sound Charles discipline from the philosophical, the semi-philosophi- Francis cal, or even the theological subjects set before them in Richardson the class-room. The College library was miserably scanty, but the English rhetoricians of the eighteenth century headed by Addison with his poetical prose and Pope with his prosy verse were influential upon the student because so closely connected with the Roman classicism of the daily recitation. If Webster knew less Greek than Latin, it must be remembered that every- where in America, prior to 1800, Greek was viewed through a Latin haze and was much less competently taught. But we naturally ask, with peculiar interest : What instruction did Webster receive in legal and political studies ? Says Professor Colby, in his account of the early curriculum at Dartmouth, aside from ancient languages, mathematics, and religious branches : "The location of the College on the frontier, and the stirring events which followed its founding, the Revolution, the framing of the new constitutions, state and federal, the long struggle over the New Hampshire grants, and the rise of American political parties, aroused liveliest inter- est in law and government throughout all the region where dwelt the natural constituency of the College, and made increasing demand upon it for legal and political training. Evidence of effort to satisfy this demand may be found in the first formal curriculum of the College, which was adopted by its trustees in 1796. This, under the head of 'Public and Classical Exercises', enumerates among the subjects of study for Juniors, 4 natural and moral philosophy', and among those for Seniors, 'natur- 29 Charles al and politic law'. Since moral philosophy, as then Francis denned, treated of the state the subject-matter of polit- Richardson ical science the first formal curriculum of the College appears to have included both the studies of law and government. Neither search in the official records of the College, nor wide gleaning among the graduates of that period, yields much information about the conduct of these courses from 1796 to 1822. Instruction in natural and politic law apparently fell, with the general care of the Senior class, to the President, and so was given to John Wheelockfrom 1796 to 1815 . . . The in- struction in moral philosophy (including political phi- losophy) apparently was assigned, with the general care of the Junior class, to Rev. John Smith, Professor of the Latin and Greek languages from 1796 to 1804 . . . Proba- bly the earliest text-books in each of these subjects were those known to have been in use in 1816. These were the two famous works, Burlamarqui's Principles of Nat- ural and Politic Law, first published in Geneva in 1747 and republished in Boston as early as 1793, and Paley's Moral and Political Philosophy, first published in England in 1785 and republished in Boston as early as 1795. The sixth book of Paley is devoted to what is now called political science the state, its origin, forms of government, civil liberty, and the administration of justice. Both of these books were then coming into use in America, and the former was prescribed, as a text, in the college as late as 1828, and the latter as late as 1838." To the institution thus housed, officered and arranged, Webster came as a Freshman in August, 1797, having studied a little at Exeter and received his final 30 preparation from Rev. Samuel Wood, a graduate of Charles 1779, for fifty-five years pastor at Boscawen. When his Francis father first told him he was to go to college, " the very Richardson idea," he afterwards said, "thrilled my whole frame." He had quickly read the stipulated three or four orations of Cicero and four or five books of Virgil, and spent only three months over the Greek Testament. One writer says that Daniel's admission was due less to his own acquirements than to Mr. Wood's influence as a trustee, which remark does not lead us into an investigation of the potentiality of the trustees, as Mr. Wood did not belong to their honorable body. Webster reached Han- over in a stage with Junior Roswell Shurtleff, who (according to the memory of his daughter, the late Mrs. Susan Brown) showed him attention and escorted him for quarters to the house now occupied by Dr. Leeds, then, like so many country houses of the time, a sort of inn. Dr. Shurtleff, who remembered him well 'in his college days as thin, dark, and pale, slept in the same room with him the first night. Rumor declares that Webster passed his entrance examinations in the same house. In Freshman year he studied Latin (begin- ning with book VII of the Aeneid), Greek (New Testa- ment), arithmetic and algebra. He joined the United Fraternity Nov. 7, 1797, which society met in his room' Nov. 21. He was elected by it u inspector of books" Aug. 12, 1798. In Sophomore year he is said to have delivered an oration on a deceased class-mate, and to have given a poem before the class, every line of which ended in ion\ no very difficult metrical task. In the winter of 1797 and 1798 he taught school in his home town of Salis- Charles bury, the first year for four dollars a month and the Francis second year for six. May 14, 1799, he was elected Fra- Richardson ternity librarian and member of the standing committee. In Junior year and the following he wrote anony- mously, or as " Icarus," for the Dartmouth Gazette, a general, not collegiate, weekly, published in Hanover by Moses Davis, also making selections for the paper. Davis issued the first number of this Gazette, which was at least the third Hanover paper, " on the College plain, west of the Meeting-House, Hanover, Newhamp- shire," on Aug. 27, 1799, and published it until his death in July, 1806, also issuing a small fortnightly called the Literary Tablet, "by Nicholas Orlando," from 1803 to 1806. Webster's contributions were pretty regular, from the initial number, for the first two years of the paper, which were the last of his college course. As far as preserved, they do not differ from the usual newspaper verse and prose of the period ; the pentam- eters are of the one two, three four, five six, seven eight nine ten order ; sentiment is enforced by capitali- zation ; jocosity is rather too roomy ; and the glories of peace are properly commended at the expense of the horrors of war. The cleverest of them is a scheme for a Napoleonic subjugation of the inhabitants of the moon. For his work, which Davis was always glad to get, Webster received some $50 or $75, enough, as he remem- bered, to pay a year's board in those frugal days. Davis wrote from Hanover, Nov. 26, 1802, with a jocose per- sistency which brooked no denial, demanding from Webster a "newsboy's message" for January, 1803. " I want," said he, "a genuinely Federal address, and you are the very man to write it," adding, "some of 32 our most respectable characters join in this request. It Charles is conjectured that ' Icarus ' has flocked with the wild Francis geese and gone South for a warmer climate. It is, Richardson however, expected he will return early in the spring." This " newsboy's message," we are told, was written as his last contribution to the paper. I regret that I have failed to find it. After Davis' death the Gazette passed into the hands of Charles Spear, who conducted it until 1819 as a judicious Federalist organ, and during the college-university contest, as an advocate of the college party. The latest known issue is that for June 23, 1819. To return to Webster as a college Junior : Oct. 15, 1799, the Fraternity voted to u reposite " in its annals an oration delivered by him, the manuscript of which was afterwards stolen. Nov. 26, 1799, Webster gave a voluntary oration, and Dec. 3, an assigned oration, before the Fraternity. Dec. 17, possibly on Webster's suggestion, Printer Moses Davis was elected an honorary member. May 27, 1800, Webster was chosen vice- president. Aug. 19 he was elected orator and "first critic," his place as orator preceding that of other offi- cers, president, etc., chosen at the same time. Aug. 20, 1799, he and Joseph W. Brackett had been asked to write a " dialogue for exhibition at the next Commence- ment." This seems to have been presented at the end of his Junior year, in the College church, then more histrionically hospitable than now. The Fraternity had voted to give a play every year at that period, but a subsequent vote discontinued the custom after one trial; we are not told whether the reason was that the dialogue was inimitable or that it was intolerable. 33 Charles Webster's membership in the Phi Beta Kappa so- Francis c j et y j s ma de interesting by the fact that the records of Richardson our o f ^ ts mee tings are in his handwriting as secretary pro tern. He had been elected, June 5, 1800, and he was initiated, as the only incomer, July 3. This was glory enough for one meeting, so the society "voted to omit the exercises till next week on Thursday.'' Aug. 26, 1800, Rev. Mr. Wood, his former tutor, was elected an honorary member of the Fraternity, doubtless at Webster's suggestion. Oct. 7, Ephraim Simonds gave a Fraternity oration on the Beauties of Friendship, and Webster one on Ambition. Simonds died June 18, 1801, and Webster subsequently delivered a commemorative oration on his class-mate and friend. Nov. 25, Webster was elected president of the Fraternity. On Wednesday, Aug. 27, 1801, he received his bache- lor's degree. Turning from the chronological to the general, we must never forget that in all our consideration of Web- ster's college course, we are concerned with the being and doing of a' boy between fifteen and nineteen years, who left Dartmouth at an age about that of the "average man" of the present incoming Freshman class. On the whole, his career as an undergraduate bore some resem- blance to that of Emerson and Hawthorne at other New England institutions, in that he read much, but did not seek or reach the highest academic honors. This is a common, perhaps the usual , experience of those to whom technical scholarship does not strongly appeal. As an orator he made an unusual mark, as is proved by the common testimony of his associates ; by his selection as Fourth-of-July speaker before the citizens of Hanover in 34 1800 ; and by his appearance as the commemorative eulo- Charles gist of his class-mate Simonds. Says Webster himself, in his fragmentary autobiog- Richardson raphy, " Of my college life I can say but little. I was graduated, in course, in August, 1801. Owing to some difficulties, haec non meminisse juvat, I took no part in the Commencement exercises. I spoke an oration to the Society of the United Fraternity, which I suspect was a sufficiently boyish performance. My college life was not an idle one. Besides the regular attendance of prescribed duties and studies, I read something of English history and English literature. Perhaps my reading was too miscellaneous. I even paid my board for a year by superintending a little weekly newspaper, and making selections for it from books of literature, and from the contemporary publications. I suppose I sometimes wrote a foolish paragraph myself. While in college I delivered two or three occasional addresses, which were published. I trust they are forgotten ; they were in very bad taste, I had not then learned that all true power in writing is in the idea, not in the style, an error into which the ars rhetorica, as it is usually taught, may easily lead stronger heads than mine." Professor Sanborn once said to him at his own table in Franklin : ' ' It is commonly reported . . . that you did not study much in college." He raised his eyebrows very high and replied with spirit : ' ' What fools they must be to suppose that anybody could suc- ceed in college or public life without study ! I studied and read more than all the rest of my class, if they had all been made into one man. And I was as much above them then as I am now." This is the sort of 35 Charles indignant egotism into which the really great man occa- Francis sionally breaks, and we pardon him. But at another Richardson time he wrote : "My scholarship was overestimated. . . . Many other students read more than I did and knew more than I did. But so much as I read I made my own. . . . Thus greater credit was given me for extensive and accurate knowledge than I really pos- sessed." ' To George Ticknor he once remarked : "My Greek and mathematics were not great while I was in college, but I was better read in history and English generally than any of my class, and I was good in com- position. My Latin was pretty strong too." The year before his death he wrote : " My attainments, if I made any, were not such as told for much in the recita- tion room. After leaving college I 'caught up', as the boys say, pretty well in Latin ; but in college, and after- ward, I left Greek to Loveland and mathematics to Shat- tuck. Would that I had pursued my Greek till I could read and understand Demosthenes in his own language." One writer has expressed surprise that the modern Demosthenes did not excel as a Hellenist. I would say that the Demosthenian element in Webster was furnished by his Saxon inwit and the Ciceronian by his Roman studies, did I not remember that Cicero was in some ways a more modern and facile man than Webster him- self. Were Webster and Cicero to re-appear in Ameri- can political life, Webster would be the mightier in dis- cussing the question whether the Constitution follows the flag, but Cicero would be the more serviceable in finding a remedy for municipal maladministration. One of Mr. Webster's most careful biographers thinks that he lacked " close, steady, and disinterested 36 attention." It would seem, however, that his study of Charles history, as a collegian, and his obvious correlation of Francis Hume and Gibbon with his class-room work in L,at in Richardson and practical philosophy, proved the contrary. L/et us not fall into the too prevalent habit of guesswork when we aver that the known productions of Webster, in the years immediately following his graduation, are so close- ly connected with the academic fashions of 1801 as to suggest an inevitable relation of cause to effect. The new work of romanticism, introduced to English readers by Coleridge and Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads" of 1798, was as yet unknown at Dartmouth, where Cole- ridge was soon to be a philosophic power ; and Webster as cojlegian indeed to the end of his days was an exponent of the grandeur that was Rome rather than the glory that was Greece. A full and eloquent expansion of this fact you have read for yourselves in Choate's resplendent eulogy, perhaps the most famous speech ever delivered from this memory- haunted platform. "Black Dan" as a collegian he was mistaken by one of the Hanover Deweys for an Indian entering the Moor School his first Sunday in the College church was impressive as a mighty man in the moulding process ; a potent figure, spare, with high cheek-bones, storm-tossed eyes, a resonant voice, and a dignity of carriage that was not inconsistent with the hearty humor of a certain good-fellowship. But there have come down to us no stories such as those of Hawthorne's mild play- ing for stakes at Bowdoin, Poe's heavier gambling at the University of Virginia, or Emerson's utter incapaci- ty for mathematics at Harvard. If Webster indulged in discreet flirtations, which are the subject of jocose allu- 37 Charles sions in his letters of the time, they evidently left him, Francis an d the young women mentioned, heart-free. You will Richardson a i so ^ e gj a( j to learn that if, as one of his biographers dis- creetly puts it, "there was gaiety in the little town of Hanover in those days," it was, he says, "of that modest and moderate sort which consisted with the habits of learning, and of a religions community." The testimony of his college mates, even when we make allowance for the natural tendency to magnify a great man's early virtues and to minimize his faults, is consistent. Says one of them : "I should as soon have suspected John Wheelock,the President, of improper con- duct as Daniel Webster . . . He was dignified, constant, well-prepared, industrious; read with rapidity; a good general scholar ; unequalled in composition and speaking; a talented debater ; was accustomed to arrange his thoughts in his mind in his room or private walks, and put them upon paper just before the exercise was called for. Once a sudden flaw of wind took away his paper, and it was last seen flying over the meeting-house, but he went in and spoke its contents with remarkable fluency. He always attended public worship," a commendable trait that, with the connivance of the College authorities, has characterized the Dartmouth man ever since. An- other witness avers that he was the "most remarkable young man in College; no one thought of equalling the vigor and glow of his eloquence ; his habits and moral character were entirely unimpeachable. ' ' Said one of his class-mates: "If anything difficult was to be done, the task was laid upon Webster." Another recalls that "the powers of his mind were remarkably displayed by the compass and force of his arguments in extemporaneous 38 debates at the meetings of the literary society. At that Charles early day, the clearness of his reasonings, connected Francis with his aspect and manner, produced an almost irresist- Richardson ible impression upon his hearers. His large, black, pierc- ing eye, peering out under dark, overhanging brows ; his broad, intellectual forehead ; the solemn tones of his voice ; the dignity of his mien, with an earnestness by which he seemed to throw his whole great soul into his subject, evincing the sincerity of his belief that the cause he advocated was that of truth and justice, all these created a power of eloquence which few could resist." George Farrar adds, in Johnsonian style, that " he was pleasant without ostentation." M He was sure," says Hervey Bingham, a lifelong friend, "to understand the subject of his recitation; some- times, I used to think, in a more extended and more comprehensive sense than his teachers . . . He was a favorite with the class generally; interesting and instruct- ive in conversation ; social and very kind in his feel- ings ; not intimate with many." "All his exercises," according to his class-mate Elisha Hotchkiss, "through his whole collegiate course, improved in excellence as time advanced . . . His range of study was more general than that of his class-mates. The ease with which he acquired knowledge afforded him much time for promis- cuous reading." His mode of recitation, according to the recollection of Nathaniel Shattuck, also of the class of 1801, "was prompt and off-hand ; ever standing side by side with the best specimens of scholarship in his class, and in some particulars, especially in composition and oratory, ahead of them all ... He possessed a very clear and comprehensive mind, and on graver subjects 39 Charles was bold and lion-like in language. ' ' A minor but not Francis universally prevalent merit is mentioned by Professor Richardson Sanborn in the remark that "all the early manuscripts of Daniel and Ezekiel Webster are remarkable for their plain, legible chirography, with scarcely a blot or era- sure, and for their accurate spelling and punctuation." Samuel Lorenzo Knapp, of the class of 1804, who was the first to write a history of American literature and a life of Webster, says in the latter that there was "no mannerism or reigning fashion in the democratic Dartmouth of Webster's day, no uniformity of coats, caps, or thoughts," but that, in his rather remarkable phrase, ' 'the alumni exhibited a wilderness of free minds, over whom alma mater had no other control than the exactions of a respectful compliance to a few necessary rules in order to secure the ordinary duties of a student. Mr. Webster was distinguished in his class for a general knowledge of all the branches of learning taught in the College, but much more for a bold, strong, independent manner of thinking and of expressing his opinions. He grappled with authors at that time not simply to make himself master of what they wrote, but to test their merits by a standard of his own. If such a mind is not always right in its conclusions it is certainly on the road to truth . . . The scholars acknowledged his great talents and the faculty sanctioned their opinion of his merits. The professor of natural philosophy, Judge Woodward, who lived but three years after Mr. Webster left College, often spoke of him in high terms, and accompanied his remarks with a confident prophecy of his future emi- nence. 'That man's victory is certain,' said the sage professor, 'who reaches the heart through the medium 40 of the understanding. He gained me by combating my Charles opinions, for I often attacked him merely to try his Francis strength. ' The good old professor, ' ' adds Knapp, "was Richardson then in the wane of life, but if his struggles with his pupils lacked something of his former energy (for he was in the prime of life a strong man, and had but few equals in the field of argument), still there was such a sincerity in his opinion, and so much of his former insight into character remained, that all were prepared to expect and believe his visions of coming days." I fear that Professor Woodward was not the last Dartmouth instructor who had to "struggle" with his pupils as they "exhibited a wilderness of free minds." There is a little more of the sub-acid in the recol- lections of his room-mate Aaron Loveland of Norwich, Vermont, who survived until 1870. A living resident of that town, a nephew of Judge Loveland, says that he often heard his mother or grandmother tell about the Judge's bringing Mr. Webster to the Loveland home- stead, when they were in College, on Saturdays to hunt. Webster was rather rough and awkward in his manners, and troubled the grandmother by so putting his feet upon the soft soapstone around the fireplace as to scratch it ; and so she told Aaron not to bring his friend any more if he was going to scratch her Orford soapstone. On a July afternoon in 1857, thirteen years before his death, Judge Loveland sat down in a hay field west of Norwich and gave to Rev. S. W. Boardman, then the village pastor, some reminiscences of Webster's college days, which Mr. Boardman immediately jotted down. "I roomed with Webster," said he, "about one year. Charles He was very ambitious in college from the first, and Francis took every opportunity to make himself conspicuous. Richardson He had unbounded self-confidence, seemed to feel that a good deal belonged to him, and evidently intended to be a great man in public life. He was rather bombas- tic and always ready for a speech. One day he was reading Addison's 'Cato,' putting it off in great style, when he pronounced 'Utica' as if the first letter was short ; I corrected him, and he said I was right. He did a great deal in his college society, and received al- most unbounded flattery from his fellow-members. They thought he was great. It was common for others to say they overestimated him. He was not very popular with the class, owing to his being so independent and assum- ing. On one occasion, when some matter was discussed before the class, the side which he advocated received but few votes, whereupon he got up and left the room. He would appear rather stuffy if things did not go to suit him, though he took no special pains at electioneer- ing. On the whole, he was regarded as our ablest man ; if anything was to be done he was generally ap- pointed. He never refused ; would always take hold and get off something, and generally did well. His funer- al oration for Simonds was very good, but produced no extraordinary effect. He came to college from a tavern kept by his father, who was in embarrassed circumstances. His father was at our room while we were together. He said that if he had received education in youth, he could have done anything he chose. Dan was rough and awk- ward, very decidedly, and I sometimes doubted whether he would succeed in life on that account. Yet there was something rather assuming and pompous in his 42 bearing as well as his style. He observed things remark- Charles ably, and was quick to see their bearings. He was, and Francis felt himself to be, a kind of oracle. He read the news- Richardson papers and kept himself posted upon political affairs remarkably for a young man. He read a good deal also of general reading. If any distinguished men were about, he would manage to fall in with them ; met more than most students, and was distinguished, in the com- munity around the College, for the extent and readiness of his political knowledge. He was a good, though not a very accurate, scholar. He would occasionally come over here to Norwich, Saturdays, to hunt with me. Dan seldom hit anything. He became precisely the man to be the 'pet of merchants. He was ambitious through life, and did well till the last, when he foolishly sought the Southern vote. He ought to have known that he would never secure it. He had spoken too much and too well against slavery for them ever to forget or for- give. I consider ambition his one fault and weakness." On another occasion, Judge Lovelaud said that he often walked and talked with Webster, and that his con- versation was philosophical or political, far above the ordinary gossip of other young men. Webster got no small amount of practice in speech- making in the United Fraternity, so often mentioned. It was one of the two rival societies among the students, the regular exercises of which consisted of essays, de- bates, and orations of the sort so long common in New England colleges and country "lyceums." Thus Web- ster shared or increased undergraduate wisdom on the following questions, among others (I quote from the records) : "Would it be good policy to treat an individ- 43 Charles ual of the French nation with that respect we should one Francis O f another, in present circumstances?" "Would it be Richardson j ust f or t k e United States to grant letters of Mark and Reprisal against the French Republic?" "Should a scholar attend as much to ancient as modern writings ?" * 'Is the study of the Latin language preferable to Greek?' ' and so on. The records sometimes append "yes" or "no" to perpetuate the opinion of the members as ex- pressed in the subsequent vote. An unhesitating affirm- ative gave the Dartmouth view of the query, "Is mar- riage productive of happiness?" and even, "Is a collegi- ate education conducive to happiness ? " ; but the more guarded word "conditional" was appended to the still- mooted inquiry, "Ought separate schools to be provided for the education of the different sexes?" The books of the society show the usual dreary memorials of insecure undergraduate orthography, lazy secretaries, speakers unprepared, exercises postponed, small attendance, and fines ; but Webster, who gradual- ly became its most important member, was always ready, and once gave a volunteer oration the very week before a regular one was duly delivered by him. Two of Webster's undergraduate speeches survive in print : this eulogy of his class-mate Simonds, and his Fourth of July, 1800, oration before the citizens of Han- over. Of the former, however genuine its feeling and sincere its endeavor, the modern reader shares the au- thor's deprecatory opinion. A funeral oration that is not verbose and platitudinous is rare indeed; great would have been the saving of words and of patience if more of the dead had been allowed to bury their own dead. That the Johnsonian style was still potent is shown by 44 such an aspiration as, "May his virtues ever live in our Charles practice, as his memory ever must in our minds"; while Francis the vogue of Mackenzie, the "Man of Feeling," is sug- Richardson gested by the remark that "little, indeed, is he fitted to cull the flowers of rhetoric, whose bosom still bleeds for the loss of its inmate, whose powers are overwhelmed in the flood of sensibility." But not unworthy was such a phrase as "the dull, funeral toll," or the well- balanced sentence : "He has entered the innermost of the temple of eternity, and left us treading in the vesti- bule." A local touch is : "He walks not the aisles of yonder building" Dartmouth Hall being the only one to be mentioned; and as we stroll in our beautiful grave- yard we may recall that it has been commemorated in such sonorous words as these : "All of him that was mortal now lies in the charnels of yonder cemetery. By the grass that nods over the mounds of Sumner, Merrill, and Cook, now rests a fourth son of Dartmouth, con- stituting another monument of man's mortality. The sun, as it sinks to the ocean [sic], plays its departing beams on his tomb, but they re-animate him not. The cold sod presses on his bosom, his hands hang down in weakness. The bird of evening shouts a melancholy air on the poplar, but her voice is stillness to his ears." The stones of Sumner, Merrill, Cook, andSimonds still stand side by side in the older part of our "dead man's garden"; that of Simonds was set up by the United Fraternity soon after his death. The most salient and illustrating event of Webster's whole college career was the Fourth of July oration de- livered in the closing year of the eighteenth century be- fore the citizens of Hanover. With all its faults, it was, 45 Charles and it remains, an interesting anticipation of the vital Francis belief and life-work of the greatest American orator, Richardson concerning a thing that was destined to be profoundly connected with the struggles of the next seventy-five years : the nature and powers of the Federal Union of states of the western world. In this microcosm we have in a crude form several of the future orator's most prominent qualities : his mingling of Latin derivatives with old English words ; his balanced periods, alter- nating with language of straight-forward simplicity ; and, above all, an occasional suggestion of that power in which he surpasses Demosthenes, Cicero, and Burke, the power of making the very point under discussion seem so axiomatic as to render debate almost superfluous. Webster was afterward ashamed of some of the bathetic passages in this speech, which would certainly be ob- noxious to the blue pencils of our instructors in rhetoric in the Dartmouth of to-day. The ' 'gasconading pilgrim of Egypt" was naturally a bugaboo in the dawning cen- tury, and the embrace of France, which, "not yet sa- tiated with the contortions of expiring republics," had "spouted her fury across the Atlantic," was death; therefore the young orator proffered, as his final question and answer, the startling query : "Shall we pronounce the sad benediction to Freedom, and immolate liberty on the altar our fathers had raised to her ! No ! The response of a nation is, no ! Let it be registered on the archives of Heaven : ere the religion we profess, and the privileges we enjoy, are sacrificed at the shrines of despots and demagogues let the pillars of creation tremble ! Let world be wrecked on world, and sys- tems rush to ruin !" But other parts of the speech are 46 significant in a different way. The eulogist of the Pil- Charles grim Fathers is foreshadowed in this passage : "We be- Francis hold a feeble band of colonists, engaged in the arduous Richardson undertaking of a new settlement in the wilds of North America. Their civil liberty being mutilated, and the enjoyment of their religious sentiments denied them in the land that gave them birth, they fled their country, they braved the dangers of the then almost unnavigated ocean, and sought on the other side the globe an asylum from the iron grasp of tyranny and the more intolerable scourge of ecclesiastical persecution." And the Adams and Jefferson speech seems anticipated in these words of the boy of eighteen : "The solemn Declaration of Inde- pendence is now pronounced, amidst crowds of admir- ing citizens, by the supreme council of our nation, and received with the unbounded plaudits of a grateful peo- ple. That was the hour when patriotism was proved, when the souls of men were tried. It was then, ye ven- erable patriots, it was then you stretched the indignant arm, and unitedly swore to be free. Despising such toys as subjugated empires, you then knew no middle fortune between liberty and death. Firmly relying on the patronage of Heaven, un warped in the resolution you had taken, you then, undaunted, met, engaged, de- feated the gigantic power of Britain, and rose trium- phant over the ruins of your enemies. Trenton, Prince- ton, Bennington, and Saratoga were the successive theatres of your victories, and the utmost bounds of creation are the limits to your fame." This is Web- sterian English ; nor is it too much to say that we also hear the religious note of Lincoln in the solemn sen- tence : "If piety be the rational exercise of the human 47 Charles soul, if religion be not a chimera, and if the vestiges of Francis heavenly assistance are clearly traced in those events Richardson w hich mark the annals of our nation, it becomes us on this day, in consideration of the great things which the Lord has done for us, to render the tribute of unfeigned thanks to God who superintends the universe and holds aloft the scale that weighs the destinies of nations." Passing an interesting illustration of the triplicate form which Webster was so frequently to use "For us they fought, for us they bled, for us they conquered" and an allusion to "Dartmouth, towering majestic above the groves which encircle her," and now inscribing "her glory on the registers of fame," we find the key- note of the speech, the sign of the life-work of Webster the expounder of Constitutional Union, in these words : "No sooner was peace restored with England, the first grand article of which was the acknowledgment of our independence, than the old system of confederation, dictated at first by necessity, and adopted for the pur- poses of the moment, was found inadequate to the gov- ernment of an extensive empire. Under a full convic- tion of this, we then saw the people of these states en- gaged in a transaction which is undoubtedly the great- est approximation toward human perfection the politi- cal world ever yet experienced, and which, perhaps, will forever stand on the history of mankind without a parallel. A great republic, composed of different states, whose interest, in all respects, could not be perfectly compatible, then came deliberately forward, discarded one system of government, and adopted another, with- out the loss of one man's blood. There is not a single government now existing in Europe which is not based 48 in usurpation, and established, if established at all, by Charles the sacrifice of thousands. But, in the adoption of our Francis present system of jurisprudence, we seethe powers nee- Richardson essary for the government voluntarily springing from the people, their only proper origin, and directed to the public good, their only proper object." While an undergraduate, Webster was keenly inter- ested in national politics, being, like most of the faculty and constituency of the College, Federalist in sympathy. From "Beechnut Hall, Hanover, Dec. 28, 1800," he wrote : "Long are the faces of the Hanoverians. Jef- ferson's Presidency, which now seems certain, sits not very well on our stomachs. All the tonics of our politi- cal faculty cannot make it digest readily. Burr, too, nettles us more than any vegetable burr in our fields. However, what cannot be cured must be endured." In the same letter he added, on a more general theme : "I am fully persuaded that our happiness is much at our regulation, and that the 'know thyself of the Greek philosopher meant no more than rightly to attune and soften our appetites and passions till they should sym- phonize like the harp of David. Mr. Stewart has shown us some fine ideas on it. He is an author whom I ad- mire more than any writer I have perused." He who wrote thus had a heart as well as a mind. No episode in Webster's college course meant more to him than the arrival of his brother Ezekiel, accompanied by his father, in March, 1801, to join the Freshman class ; then and for several years to be aided intellect- ually and financially by his loyal predecessor in college life. The Kentucky novelist, James Lane Allen, in his recent picture of the poverty brought upon a hemp- 49 Charles farmer by his son's residence, for a year or two, in an Francis inexpensive college, could present to us nothing more Richardson effective than Webster's own account of the Salisbury household immediately after his graduation : "Return- ing home after Commencement, I found, on considera- tion, that it would be impossible for my father, under ex- isting circumstances, to keep Ezekiel at college. Drained of all his little income by the expenses of my educa- tion thus far, and broken down in his exertions by some family occurrences, I saw he could not afford Ezekiel means to live abroad with ease and independence, and I knew too well the evils of penury to wish him to stay half beggared at college. I thought it, therefore, my duty to suffer some delay in my profession, for the sake of serving my elder brother, and was making a little interest in some places to the eastward for employ- ment." Never has there been a time, from that day to this, as some of you know by your own tender memo- ries, when Dartmouth men have not made a little inter- est for employment, and suffered some delay in their profession, that they might give a brother the power to enjoy the advantages of the college of their love. A lie dies with proverbial procrastination ; like the snapping- turtle's heart, when thrown on the pavement, it persistently beats long after life has left the rest of the sluggish body. But surely, after a hundred years, it is time to give final interment to the venerable mendacity that Webster, on Commencement day, withdrew to the rear of Dartmouth Hall and tore up his diploma. It rests upon no authority ; it is contradicted by common sense ; it is inconsistent with Webster's frequent visits to Hanover within a few years of his graduation, and 50 his affecionate correspondence concerning the town and Charles the College, to which he sent his brother and his son ; Francis and it is explicitly denied by his chief biographer and Kicharoson literary executor, as well as by Professor Shurtleff and other immediate contemporaries or eye-witnesses of his graduation, some of whom never heard of it until a quarter of a century later. His class-mate Smith stood at Webster's side when he "received his degree with a graceful bow"; and the same clergyman adds : "Such was my connection with him in our society affairs that if he had destroyed it afterwards should certainly have known it." Far truer would be the assertion that no graduate of an American college, by the acts and words of a lifetime words culminating in the most famous of tributes to an institution of learning ever gave more distinguished proof of his love for the seminary where he began his work for the world. Let there bepraeterea nihil of Charles Lanman's poor fable of the torn diploma, thrown to the winds on the alleged "green" east of Dartmouth Hall, while Webster shouted, as a valedic- tory oration: "My industry may make me a great man, but this miserable parchment cannot"; or of Theodore Parker's gratuitous inaccuracy that he "scorned his degree, and when the faculty gave him his diploma, he tore it to pieces in the College yard, in the presence of some of his mates, it is said, and trod it under foot." It must have been a matter of regret to these two historical thinkers that a third authority in a published wood-cut portrayed the scene as visible in a third locality, the rear of the College church. The truth concerning his own disappointment, or the keener regret of his class-mates, over his failure to receive a Commence- 5J Charles ment part is probably to be found in the recollections of Francis Judge Samuel Swift, who said that Thomas A. Merrill, Richardson afterwards pastor in Middlebury, Vt. (the judge's own home), was deemed by the faculty the most correct recitation scholar in the class, and thus given the salu- tatory, the first appointment for Commencement, the class being allowed to elect the valedictorian, which they failed to do, because of a Social and Frater quarrel, desiring and expecting, however, that the faculty would appoint Webster, which was not done. In other words, there seems to have been a "class row," after which some of Webster's class-mates blamed the faculty for not doing what they had failed to do themselves. ' { As long as Webster lived," said Professor Sanborn, " he believed society feuds deprived him of his honors," an influen- tial professor having belonged to the Social Friends; but the same authority adds : "I cannot say that Mr. Webster's suspicions were well grounded." The idea of professorial confusion between society prejudices and undergraduate appointments is more prevalent than sound. It seems that the faculty offered Webster the choice between an English poem or an English oration, neither of which he felt at liberty to take, for reasons now obscure, so that he and some others were "excused from speaking," on their own motion. Webster was too large a man to allow a real or fancied grievance to cloud Commencement day or his tender memories of the "small college" he did so much to make famous ; and meanwhile he satisfied the Fraternity division of his class by giving an oration the day before Commence- ment. Caleb Tenney, afterwards a minister in Rhode Island and Connecticut, was the man who got the 52 valedictory appointment. Judge Swift thought Tenney Charles a good scholar and an excellent young man. The same Francis judicial authority, I may add, bore testimony to the Richardson fact that Webster, while not technically "leading the class," had the best all-round mind and the broadest influence, a condition which has very often been repeat- ed in subsequent classes, in the opinion of those of us who, though possibly not Websters, were certainly not valedictorians. Dr. Merrill, the Latin salutatorian and highest scholar, himself, modestly wrote in 1853 that "the Faculty thought it would be almost barbarous to set the best English scholar in the class [Webster] to jabber in Latin." While quoting Dr. Merrill, let me suggest to those of you who may similarly be called upon for reminiscences of famous class-mates, to copy the discreet form elsewhere adopted by him when asked for recollections of Webster : "I presume, confidently, that he was never concerned in any mischief. I suppose that he acted upon the principle of mastering his lessons and attending on all the exercises of the college, both literary and religious." But we must not dwell longer upon the earlier days of one whose later years were to be so rich and full. It is the power of the poet to gather into a few lum- inous words some fadeless picture of memory or imagi- nation. Seldom has a lifetime been more successfully portrayed in four lines than in one stanza of Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem on the birthday of Daniel Web- ster, written four years after the statesman's death. The signer, as well as the subject, had trodden Dartmouth ground and sat within these walls ; and so it was natur- al that one line of this comprehensive stanza should be 53 Charles devoted to Webster's college life. Let me close by re- Francis calling his fitly chosen words, for they must often recur Richardson to our minds during the remaining hours of these memorial days : "A roof beneath the mountain pines ; The cloisters of a hill-girt plain ; The front of life's embattled lines ; A mound beside the heaving main." THe Development of tKe College Since tKe Dartmouth College Case.
*& before the outbreak of the Civil War they had rendered him obnoxious to many, and in June 1863 led an asso- ciation of ministers to question the desirability of.his continuance in the presidency. The trustees in reply to their communication expressed their confidence in the President but dissented strongly from his views. The President immediately resigned on the ground that the action of the trustees imposed a "test" of opinion and that it was "inconsistent with Christian charity and pro- priety to carry on [his] administration while holding and expressing opinions injurious, as they imagine, to the interests of the College." The long presidency of Dr. Lord was marked by the growth of which I have spoken, as well as by the in- crease of the faculty which was doubled between 1828 and 1863, but its prevailing effect was the ideal of man- hood which he impressed upon the College. He was a man of strong nature and effective personality so that few of the 2,675 students who received their degrees at his hands failed to be permanently impressed by him. To his direct and long-continued influence was due in no small degree the development among the graduates of Dartmouth of that independence and force of charac- ter and action, that self-reliance and loyalty to one an- other that we call the "Dartmouth Spirit." The Rev. Asa D. Smith, D. D., of New York City, who was chosen to succeed Dr. L,ord, was inaugurated November 18, 1863. His administration of thirteen years was marked by many changes and much enlarge- 73 John ment. There was a return at once to the system of King prizes and Commencement appointments by rank, and L r ., '41. I do n't think this is fair, Mr. President. I wandered about this building and looked into the door and asked a man if I could get in behind him so that they would not see me, and so that I could hear somebody speak, and I crawled in, thinking and hoping that I should not be called upon. Besides, Mr. President, I have agreed to say something this evening and you ought not to expect me to say anything here, but I am here, and I am not going to back out. You suggested that, perhaps, there were but few that knew Daniel Webster or that saw him. Well, I hope there are some. You thought that I had, perhaps. In 1840 there was a Whig convention or a Whig meet- ing at Orford, and I, a collegian, went with the rest. Daniel \Vebster was announced to speak. He did not come until late and there was no one there to talk. After inquiring around we had a young man in college then that we thought was the smartest speaker that there was in the country, and we all hurrahed for Jim Barrett. And Jim Barrett took the stand. He made a speech from half an hour to an hour in length. Daniel Webster came on afterwards, and we all voted that Jim Barrett beat him. Now, I heard Daniel Webster on that occasion. I heard him in court in Boston. I heard him in Man- chester. I heard him in the Senate of the United J84 States. I heard him on several occasions, but the only Jfatfafaggaf occasion which clings to my memory is that of the o f j^ "Webster completion of Bunker Hill Monument. I was then a student in the Law School of Harvard, and went with the students so that we had a good position not far from the speaker. Mr. Webster stood with his back to the monument, with fifty thousand or more people to the front and on the sides of him. I saw Daniel Webster as he stood upon the platform. I have him in my mind's eye now as he was with his back to the monument with the fifty thousand people before him. I heard him for an hour or more. The words of that speech have gone from me, but yet I remember him most clearly and distinctly as he stood there. I cannot tell the words. I shall not be able to give you an idea of it, perhaps, but as he stood before us he turned his face to the monument, his back to us, and said, apostrophizing that monu- ment, "That is the orator of the day." I will not attempt to give his words, but the thrill that went through that audience, the thrill as I felt it at that hour has been with me from that hour to this. That was a Websterian hour. It was an hour such as was seen in the Dartmouth College Case, in the Knapp Case, and in the other cases alluded to to-day. As I have journeyed through the city of Boston since then, as I have looked at that stone monument, I do not know how it is, but every time I pass that monument it seems to speak to me. I cannot help it. The thrill goes through my veins as it did in 1843. That monument to me is alive. It speaks to me in thoughts that Webster breathed and words that Webster gave us. Friends, (85 Reminiscences that hour was worth a lifetime almost to me. It was a of Mr. Webster thrill such as I never felt before nor since. I have listened to Henry Clay in the United States Senate, to Rufus Choate in his eulogy, and I have heard Choate before the jury, and other men, but never on any other occasion has such a thrill run through me as then. But, fellow alumni, you have heard of Webster's statesmanship, of his great ability as a lawyer. We have heard of them all. They have been talked and printed and preached about, but as I come back here to- day, my thoughts, although I have heard much of Dan- iel Webster, go back to that Salisbury home. I re- member him in thought as a young man. You, most of you, look upon him as a historical person, but let us realize that he was a New Hampshire boy, with New Hampshire affections, that he lived at the parental man- sion in his younger years as a New Hampshire boy. You remember that time when he rode with his father. I don't remember whether it has been told here to-day. Perhaps it has, and perhaps it has not, but you have read of that hour when his father disclosed to him on his way to Rev. Mr. Wood his intention to send him to college. You remember that Daniel Webster then fell upon his father's neck and cried as a child. That was the Webster boy ; that was the Webster man. You remem- ber when his brother Ezekiel wished to go to college and his father had not the means, how he went to Frye- burg and taught school and saved his three hundred dollars and gave it to his brother Ezekiel, and sent him to college. Where is the young man or boy that has done that for a brother? Where among the college students have I found one that has made a sacrifice 186 such as that ? Talk of Daniel Webster as a states- Reminiscences man and a great lawyer. He was also a great brother of Mr. Webster that gave to his brother the means to help him through college. Daniel Webster was great as a statesman, but greater as a New Hampshire man, as a brother, and as a true man. The Chairman : Judge Cross alluded to Mr. Web- ster's kindness of heart and to his affection. That brings to my mind a fact of which I was informed not long since that there is here to-day the original of a letter which he wrote when a member of Congress to the father of a fellow member of Congress, Mr. Cilley, of New Hampshire, who, you remember was killed in a duel at Washington. That letter was written to the father of his deceased fellow member, and it expresses the same kindness and regard for his fellows which you would expect from a boy who grew up from the youth which Judge Cross has pictured to us. Mr. Cilley, Brother Cilley, alumnus of the class of 1863, has that letter in his possession, and I should like to have him produce it and read it to this gathering. Mr. Horatio Gates Cilley, '63 : It is indeed true that my brother and myself have this letter in our pos- session, but on this trip I was obliged to come by way of White River Junction, and I have not the original with me. With your permission I have turned the letter over to Dr. Cilley of Boston, of the class of '68, who will read it to you. Dr. Orren George Cilley, A. M., '68 : We have been hearing for the last two hours about the meritori- ous acts of Daniel Webster, his peculiarities, his habits, his law, his oratory, and, in fact, of everything that is J87 Reminiscences good. Still no one that I have heard has said anything of Mr. Webster j n particular about his large and generous heart. They have not said anything of the time when he was in his home, when his mind recurred to those people, friends who were in trouble, and how he sat down and wrote them letters, the like of which I will read to you. I have in my pocket the original of the letter. It is badly broken and I will with your permission read a copy of it. Dr. Cilley then read a typewritten copy of the original letter. 2>r. Jabez Baxter Upham,cA. cM. t '49. (Prepared for the occasion but not spoken.) Although without any personal acquaintance with Mr. Webster, it has been my good fortune to have seen and heard him in some of his most eloquent and power- ful speeches. The first occasion of this kind which I recall was in the autumn of 1840, at Orford in this state, in the memorable campaign of Harrison and Tyler "Of Tip- pecanoe and Tyler too," as we boys used to phrase it in our college songs. There was great enthusiasm amongst us at that time, for, then as now, a very large majority of the students of the College were on the side of the Whigs, as the party was termed. It would be called the Republican party to-day, I suppose. The morning, as I remember it, dawned fair and clear one of those typical October days of which this favored region has its full complement. The whole College was early astir, and, with appropriate mottoes and banners, prepared themselves to march, by classes, (88 along the dusty road to the scene of action fifteen miles Reminiscences away. The sun waxed hot as the day wore on, and of Mr. Webstet the march was a weary one ; but, in accordance with the spirit of the time, there were plenty of refreshments and hird cider in abundance proffered us by the hospit- able inhabitants on the route for those were the days when "log cabin and hard cider'' was the party cry. I do not know how the faculty and the honored head of the College would regard it now, but it was then deemed the patriotic and proper thing to imbibe freely of that beverage, in order to show our loyalty to the presidential candidate. As to the speech well I must confess that the majority of us were too weary and exhausted by the long march, and its unwonted accompaniments, to have given such heed to it as we ought. As I recall it, it was a masterly exposition of the principles which pervaded and governed the party in whose interest it was pro- nounced. Mr. Everett has said, in his biographical memoir, that, during this canvass of 1840 which he designates as the most strenuous ever witnessed in the United States, Mr. Webster gave himself up for months to what might literally be called the arduous labors of the field Not only in Massachusetts and in New Hampshire, but in distant places, ranging from Albany to Richmond, his voice of encouragement and exhorta- tion was heard. I have sought in vain for any written or printed record of this speech, and of the many others spoken by Mr. Webster during that campaign, but have failed to find them ; and I doubt if they were ever reported by J89 Reminiscences the press. But, whatever may have been the scope and of Mr. Webster substance of this particular speech, I shall never forget the impression made upon me, as I saw and felt, for the first time, the mighty presence of the man. No one, in signifying the speeches of Mr. Webster, can fail to allude to his great argument in reply to Hayne, made in the United States Senate in 1830, wherein he darkly prophesied the approach of the irre- pressible conflict which, thirty years later, involved the country in Civil War. I was not old enough then, if you can credit the assertion, to have taken in understandingly the scope and power of that memorable speech, if I had been present at its delivery, which I was not. I well remember that my honored father, who was a friend and ardent admirer of Mr. Webster, once said to me, in one of my college vacations, "My boy, it has been my custom in every return of the anniversary of that speech, to take down my copy of the National In- telligencer, which contains it, and read it through from beginning to end, and I advise you to do the same as long as you live." I regret to say that, in this as in so many other instances, I have failed to follow his wise counsel. I may be permitted to relate here an incident that befell me personally, having some relation to that speech. When in Charleston, S. C., some twelve or fifteen years ago, I visited the Ancient Church of St. Michael, in that city, and, falling in with the venerable sexton, who had been connected with the church in that capacity for half a century and more, and who seemed to be a part of the structure itself, I strolled out J90 tinder his guidance, into the adjacent churchyard. Reminiscences While wandering about among the old graves, my eye of Mr. Webster rested on a tomb bearing the inscription, u ROBERT Y. HAYNE," with the date of his birth and death. Being struck by the fact that he died at an age when he might be sup- posed to be in the full possession of his powers, I in- quired of my cicerone the cause of his comparatively early death. Drawing himself up, and looking me full in the face, he replied, "He died of Webster's speech, sir." Another opportunity I had of hearing Mr. Webster at his best, was at the dinner given to him by the Asso- ciation of the Sons of New Hampshire resident in Massachusetts, in November, 1849. This took place in the large hall over the Fitchburg R. R. depot in Bos- ton. The vast auditorium was crowded to its utmost capacity. Mr. Webster, who was president of the As- sociation, presided also at the feast. I happened to be one of the marshals on that occasion, and my place was on the floor immediately in front of the speaker. Mr. Webster made two speeches during the evening, one of which has been termed his Kossuth Speech, wherein he arraigned, in scathing words, the then Emperor of Russia for his demand on the Sultan of Turkey that the noble Kossuth and his companions be delivered up to be dealt with at his pleasure. Those who heard him will never forget those burn- ing words, when, rising to the full height of his majes- tic personality, he said, "Gentlemen, there is something on earth greater than arbitrary or despotic powers. The lightning has its power and the whirlwind has its power, J9J Reminiscences and the earthquake has its power ; but there is some- of Mr. Webster thing among men more capable of shaking despotic thrones than lightning, whirlwind, or earthquake, and that is the aroused and excited indignation of the whole civilized world. The Emperor of Russia," he con- tinued, "is the supreme lawgiver in his own realms, and, for aught I know, he is the executor of that law, also. But, thanks be to God, he is not the supreme lawgiver and executor of national law, and every offence against that is an offence against the rights of the civil- ized world." The effect of this impassioned outburst of eloquence was overwhelming. The whole vast audience rose to its feet as one man, and the acclamations and ap- plause which followed, loud and long-continued, seemed as though it would raise the very roof of the building. As to the famous Seventh of March Speech, so- called, I did not hear it, but I have read it many times, and have studied it attentively, and I, for one, do not see how Mr. Webster could consistently with the whole course and conduct of his life, have done otherwise than take just the stand he then did. Commenting on that important speech, an eminent authority has justly said, "It is believed that, by the majority of patriotic and reflecting citizens in every part of the United States it has been regarded as holding out a basis for the adjust- ment of controversies which had already gone far to dissolve the Union, and cculd not much farther be pur- sued without producing that result." Mr. Webster saw the difficulties incident to the step he had adopted, and knew full well the risk to his political fortunes which he incurred by his utterances, but he believed that, 192 unless some such step was taken in the North, the sep- Reminiscences aration of the States was inevitable. What he then of Mr. Webster foresaw, many of those here present have lived to experi- ence and to know. In his speech at his reception on Boston Common in the summer of 1852, in evident allusion to his Seventh of March Speech, which has caused so much discussion, and dissension, and contention, both among his friends and his enemies, Mr. Webster uttered these memorable words, "My manner of political life is known to you all ... I leave it to my country and to the world whether it will or will not stand the test of time and truth." This was spoken on the ninth day of July, 1852, and, so far as I know, it was the last utterance he ever made in public. A little more than three months after- wards he passed away. It was my melancholy privi- lege, at the head of a thousand of the Sons of New Hampshire, to join in the funeral march of that vast concourse of his fellow citizens of the city of Boston, which thronged its streets and crowded its thoroughfares, to manifest their grief and sorrow at his death. Once before, in the century which has just closed, I have been permitted to participate in a great centennial celebration of our beloved Alma Mater. I allude, of course, to the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the College; and I am one of the very few of the sur- vivors of those who were gathered on the platform on that memorable occasion. I am now nearing the time when, in the course of Nature, I may expect to go down into my not unwelcome grave ; but I thank God that I am spared to behold the rising sun of this auspi- cious day, on which the head of our most distinguished J93 Reminiscences alumnus, and greatest among the Sons of New Hamp- of Mr. Webster shire, is encircled with the halo of a hundred years. It is a day never to be forgotten in the annals of the Col- lege ; and when that corner-stone, which has just been laid with so much pomp and ceremony, and the impos- ing structure which is to be reared upon it, shall have crumbled to dust, the memory of this first centennial anniversary of the graduation of our illustrious brother will still be green. The light of this day shall shine along the pathway of the ages, so long as time en- dures. The Chairman : There is another alumnus, I hope, here present to-day, who, I know, is full of in- formation about Mr. Webster, who has been a life- long admirer of him, and who has heard and seen him many times. If Mr. Senter, of the class of '48, is in the Chapel, will he be kind enough to come to the plat- form? The Reverend Oramel Stevens Senter, '48. I could wish, dear brethren and alumni, and invited guests, that I had come before you in a very different state of health. It was very doubtful whether I could come at all, but the attraction was so great once more to meet friends of Dartmouth College on the old camp- ing ground, that my physician said, "I think you can go. It may do you good." My first view of Mr. Webster was in 1840 at the convention that my friend presiding refers to. I formed a very different opinion of Mr. Webster's address at that time. It was a cool day in the last of September or the early days of October, and he kept his hat on. Almost anything was dignified in Mr. Webster, even the big J94 brass buttons and the hat and buff trousers, but you Reminiscences remember it is not every man that can be a Webster, of Mr. Webster He made very few gestures on that occasion. He made a plain, cogent, logical statement of the principles and policy of the great Whig party. A nobler party never existed in this country ; it had m it the brightest minds and the best men that America ever produced ; it was then in its glory. Mr. Webster first stated the princi- ples of the party clearly, and then referred to the Democratic party, and Silas Wright's great feat at Watertown. I remember it as if it were yesterday, as the best authority in regard to the real principles of the Democratic party. Mr. Webster was not a man that wasted powder on any occasion. He suited the charge to the game before him. It was only on great and exciting occasions like the Dartmouth Case, and in the reply to Hayne that he was wrought up to so high a pitch as to indulge in flights of oratory ; but when he did rise, it was like the crest of the wave; you could no more check it than you could check the rising tide in the ocean. The next time I saw him was in 1843, 1 think here in Hanover. There were Webster, Choate, Chase, Amos Kendall, and I think Thaddeus Stevens, while various distinguished gentlemen who were not graduates were invited. I had not entered college then, for I was a sub-freshman, expecting to be a freshman at some time. I said to my companion, "I wish to go and get a look at Daniel Webster"; I had heard him called the Godlike Daniel, and I wanted to see whether .his looks warranted such a designation, and so we went and there we sat. I shall never forget it. There was Choate with his J95 Reminiscences raven black hair and stoop shoulders and eyes that were of Mr. Webstet rather dim, when they looked as if they were dim with thought and genius, shades of grand personal appear- ance and stately head, almost equal to any man's except Webster's; Woodbury, a fine looking man; George P. Marsh, a man of fine personal physique and good bear- ing. Then presently there came along a large man, not very corpulent, but of full habit, with deep chest and broad shoulders and with a high forehead and with such eyes as I have said no man ever had but Daniel Webster. And his step was so firm though dignified, without any affectation with it, that it seemed to me that the earth was not solid enough for that solid man. I turned to my companion and said, "This is the only man in this vast throng containing so much talent and all that is brilliant and honored by the College and the country ; this must be Daniel Webster. ' ' I have felt, gentlemen, that all we could do in re- gard to reminiscences is just to gather up a few frag- ments. And certainly nothing is unimportant pertaining to the great statesman, orator, and forensic and dip- lomatic reasoner, one who possessed, perhaps, the noblest body of all that were ever created on this continent or any other. How much more truly, then, may it be said of him than of the man described by Sheridan, of whom it was said, "God broke the die, the mould, in moulding Webster." No wonder that the citizens of Boston called him the Godlike Daniel. I heard him at another time referred to by Mr. Harvey when Faneuil Hall that had witnessed his most eloquent and most patriotic expressions in favor of liberty, when Faneuil Hall was denied him. The city authorities were afraid J96 that some of those rabid and raving abolitionists would Reminiscences have it, and so they refused it to Daniel Webster, but of M*. Webster the people became so aroused and raised such a hubbub around the ears of the authorities that they went to Mr. Webster and ate humble pie ; and he made them eat it, large doses of it. How unlike Mr. Webster, but he made them eat large doses of it, and then, when they offered him the hall, he curtly declined and stood back on his dignity. Harvey tells us all that, but he does not give us the sequel. He says that Mr. Webster stopped several days at the Revere House. So he did. There he made a very interesting address, which I heard. The people somehow got word of it. I don't know how they were notified of it, but an immense throng filled Bowdoin Square so that they had to have a large squad of police there in order to keep order. They had erected a temporary balcony at the corner of the Revere House. This was on the twenty-second of April, 1851, just one year and a month, or a little more, after the Seventh of March Speech. Of course we all expected to hear some allusion to that, but we went away entirely disappointed on that point. Mr. Webster was in a happy mood. I took down his exordium, about a dozen lines, and, perhaps, I can read them : "Fellow citizens, as I come before you on this bright and beautiful morning, with the glorious sun gilding with his first rays our steeples and housetops and clothing the earth with warmth and cheerfulness, I feel very happy, and if all before me are as happy as the speaker there must be a great amount of happiness in this vast concourse of people. ' ' J97 Reminiscences Now I shall refer to an incident connected with of Mr. Webster t |j e f amous silver vase. In 1835, Mr. Webster made reply to Hayne. He had also made another very im- portant speech in reply to the Calhoun doctrine in 1833, and various other speeches, on the banking question and other topics. Thus it was that the citizens of Boston thought it would be very desirable to call Webster out to make a speech on those topics. They went ahead and gathered funds, no man being allowed to contribute more than one dollar towards the purchase of a silver vase to be presented to Mr. Webster. After having been so secured it was presented to him with interesting formalities. A Mr. Gray made the speech, or address of presentation, and Mr. Webster replied to it very much at length. Later the original donors made a gift of that vase to the Library authorities in Boston on the express condition that it should be kept where the greatest possible num- ber of people could see it, and it was placed in the old Public Library where it could be seen. I recently employed a young man to look the matter up, and it turns out that the vase has been taken to the new Boston Public Library, where it is hidden away where nobody can see it. Now, I hope before this meeting breaks up that it will be resolved that it is the intent and desire of the Dartmouth alumni that that vase shall be brought out of its hiding place and that it shall be suitably inscribed and placed in some public position, where it may be seen, for the admiration of the citizens. There is one comical incident connected with this matter which I will relate. When it was given to Webster, there was an old resident of my native village, Thetford, a first - J98 class business man who grew rich at his trade as a tanner. Reminiscences He came into the village store one day and announced of Mt. Webster with great wonder and emphasis, "What do you think; the citizens of Boston have presented Daniel Webster with a silver vest!" Somebody in the crowd said, "Why, Mr. Ansey, aren't you mistaken? Isn't it a silver vase?" "No doubt," he said, "it must be that. I have no doubt I was mistaken. ' ' This same gentleman came into the store and said that he read that Harry Clay and Theodore Frelinghunter had been nominated. I have said that some resolution should be passed that it is the desire and opinion of the assembly of the alumni of Dartmouth College that that interesting relic and historic article shall be brought out and placed in some conspicuous position where all the citizens of Bos- ton and all the friends of that library can have the best possible opportunity of seeing it, and of seeing the in- scriptions which are upon it. I thank you, gentlemen, for the attention you have given to the very broken remarks I have made. I will not detain you longer. The Chairman : Following down in the order of seniority, I have here on my list the name of a brother classmate, Dr. Foster, of '49. I know that Dr. Foster has at least one reminiscence of Daniel Webster, for he has often recounted it to me. It was of the, I will not say impulse, I don't know that I ought to say inspira- tion, but it was something very positive that he once derived from Daniel Webster's boot. I will ask Dr. Foster, of the class of '49, if he can give us any experi- ence or reminiscence. Reminiscences The Reverend Davis Foster, D. D., '49. of Mr, Webster Bretliren and Frien ds : I have heard specimens of moving oratory, but I think nothing has been quite so moving as the incident which I will relate to you. In 1847, Daniel Webster came up to Lebanon and gave an address at the opening of the Northern Railroad. We college boys went down to hear him as was very natural . We sat on the plat- form, a half dozen of us, with our legs hanging over a not very dignified attitude. There was a great con- gregation present, four or five thousand people, and when Mr. Webster came forward to speak, we whispered among ourselves, "Now, we will touch some part of his clothing, or we will touch something connected with Webster." And we put our hands upon his boots. They were coarse, cowhide boots, such as men wore in those times, not fancy slippers, but simply cowhide boots. Among our number was a Mr. Doe. Well, the Doe happened to be thin leavened at that time. It had not risen, but the touch of Mr. Webster's cowhide boot proved very efficacious in the life of Chief Justice Doe of New Hampshire. Mr. Doe began to rise. He con- tinued to rise and forty years after, when we met at our fortieth anniversary, Mr. Doe was, perhaps, in some re- spects the equal of any citizen of New Hampshire as a jurist and as a judge. His name had been mentioned for the office of Chief Justice of the United States. He was a man of mark. Mr. Doe had risen and he made a full sized loaf of bread. I said to Judge Doe, "Mr. Doe, it did you more good than all the rest of us to touch Mr. Webster's boot." The rest of us never at- tained eminence. We went on doing a common sort of 200 work, and we had good men in the class. My friend, Reminiscences the president of this occasion, did rise. But we, none of Mr. Webster of us, rose as Mr. Doe rose. And none of us have been harmed by it, but it did Doe a wonderful amount of good. From that time he began to rise and continued to rise as long as he lived. The Chairman : We have often been told the power- ful incentive to action there was in an animated pair of boots. Especially if they were, as my old classmate says those boots were, cowhide boots. I can only re- gret that I was not on that platform. I got no touch of them myself. I have been advised that Mr. Joseph Story of Boston, a nephew of Chief Justice Story, is here, and remembers some things personally about Mr. Webster. We shall be very glad to hear from Mr. Story. . Joseph Story. The Chairman has asked me the year of my class. I have been in the habit of visiting Hanover, and happening to be in Hanover I came here to-day. I came to Hanover to visit a friend of mine and to enjoy the two days of celebration in honor of this distinguished American. I have been asked a number of times dur- ing my visit if I were connected with Dartmouth Col- lege, or a graduate of Dartmouth. " Well," I said jocosely, " yes, I have been through Dartmouth. " I took the opportunity one day to go into the front door of, it seems to me, this building and go through the rooms of the College and out of the rear door, so that I may say that I have been through Dart- mouth College and save any further explanations. I do 201 Reminiscences not feel that I have any place here, friends, only as of Mr. Webster one o f the humble American citizens who have delighted to know that Daniel Webster, so distinguished through- out the world, was an American citizen. Reference has been made to the Whig party. I was cradled in that party. My childhood was rocked in the Whig cradle, and of course I began to live hearing of Daniel Webster, and in quite a number of days in my childhood, his name, his labors, and his fame were called to my attention. As a little boy I remember the scenes of the courtroom in the case of the murder of Jo- seph Pike of Salem. He was a connection. The case was much talked of in the family. I remember the ex- citing circumstances, how the vigilance committee was apppinted, and how they labored month after month, and month after month without finding any clue to that terrible tragedy, but at last, I think it was after about two years, it came by accident, revealed by one who had been offered a sum of money two years before to keep to himself his knowledge. He wrote to one of the Knox boys a letter asking them the boys who hired Crowninshield to commit that murder that they should send him money, two or three hundred dollars that had been offered him if he would keep closed lips. It went to Salem to the son. The son had the same name as his father, and he turned it over to his father who was one of the vigilance committee. And that father felt that it was his duty to the people of Salem that he should give to them that letter. The results you know, and the words of Webster in that trial, tracing up from the time the murderer en- tered the house until the transaction was closed. But 202 the orator of the day omitted the statement that during Reminiscences the trial Crowninshield committed suicide in prison, o f M r . Webster and that Mr. Webster, referring to it, uttered that sen- tence that has been so well known in legal quotations ' ' There is no escape but suicide, and suicide is con- fession." There is one thing that I wish I had with me, a little paper, a poem written by Mr. Webster in his younger life over the death of a dear young son of great promise. I haven't it, but it shows that touch of nature, that not only as a great man he mingled with great men, not only as a great man he knew no per- son too humble for his association ; but it brought out from a father's heart, from the heart of that great man, an utterance in language so simple and tender that I know every mother and every father present here to-day would feel that his lament over the loss of a son revealed the same tenderness that they felt when they laid a little boy of promise, upon whom they had set their hearts, away in the grave. During the times that I have been here it has been a pleasure to visit your art gallery. Reference has been made a number of times to the reply of Webster to Hayne. That scene is delineated upon canvas, as you know, in Faneuil Hall in Boston, and Mr. Webster stands there, the prominent person upon the canvas. If any of you wish to know how Mr. Webster looked when he spoke, aside from anything that has been said here, go for yourselves into that gallery and look there at the statue by Thomas Ball, in my judgment the best of any that I have ever seen (his bust and his statue re- veal the lineaments of Mr. Webster as well as they can 203 Reminiscences be portrayed in bronze or clay or plaster) , and then im- of Mr. Webster agine him standing up in the Senate of the United States. Look at that plaster, clothe it with raiment, put into the face the color of the skin and to the eyes, those great lustrous eyes, the elements of life, and then with ears that shall be quick to hear unheard sounds, listen to his voice and imagine that you were there, and you have a picture of Mr. Webster as the orator, the senator, the great man among his fellows. Did he want to be President ? I know something about the campaign, though I was small at the time. Did he want to be President ? Suppose he did. Was n't he fit for it ? Was there ever a man in our country that t had stood before our people, advocating the questions that should bring to our country the highest type of civilization, of industrial interest, of business prosperity and happiness for the people ; was there ever any one who had ever done it to a greater extent than Mr. Web- ster? Well might he wish it. Well might he have wished the Presidency. Men wish to be selectmen, to be common councillors, men wish to be aldermen, or representatives, or senators. He was certainly gifted for the Presidency, and I am thankful to-day that the gentle- man who has spoken so eloquently to us, the Honorable Mr. McCall, has given to us such an oration connected with the life of Mr. Webster and the elements in his character. He covered the same ground that others had covered, but he went a step further, and turned over some of the other pages that had not been so much referred to. I was glad that he did it, because I think that he did it well. I know how bitterly the people felt toward Mr. Webster many who had been his 204 friends when he delivered that March address. But I Reminiscences had heard from some of his associates what the feeling of of Mr. Webster Webster was when he delivered that speech, he who had been the expounder and the defender of the Constitution of the United States, whose sentiments had always been noble, who was the idol, worshiped by a great and prosperous party. I believe that Mr. Webster felt as his friends claimed for him when he said that before them stood the picture of a country rent asunder, one nation at the south, another nation at the north, with no prospect of union; that rather than to carry out any particular policy at that time he would rather bide for the time to come when those questions that had been troublesome should be settled without bloodshed, without war, without a broken and disunited country. All this, I think, has been proved since that time. Ah, from the very ram- parts of Heaven, that man who stood and spoke as he did, with a prophet's eye looking into the future saw signs at that time when the discussion of those questions were uppermost ; he saw signs that we were then on the verge of one of the bloodiest wars the world had ever seen or ever would see, when our sons and fathers and brothers, north and south, should mingle their blood with the mother Earth. It was a prophetic eye, I believe, and I believe it was to guard against that fate that Mr. Webster spoke with prophetic thought, fearing the things that did come to us. But I thank God that that man who has done so much for his country and must have had his heart grieved, if they are conscious in that other world of the things that transpire here in this world, is now looking 205 Reminiscences down upon the nation that he loved, upon the country of Mr. Webster for which he labored, this chain of states from the Gulf to the line of Canada united in an equal bond. It is not proper for me to occupy your time at this hour with my feelings about Mr. Webster, and I thank every man who has said a kind word for him, and I thank you that you have permitted me to say just these few words, coming as I did without the least intention of taking any part in any celebration except to rejoice with you. It has been a grand time. Accept my thanks. The Chairman : The hour grows late, much more time than we have to spare could be given to recalling these interesting reminiscences, but we cannot agree to dissolve this meeting till we have heard of the last lov- ing tribute paid the dead statesman by his friends and neighbors. A brother alumnus is present who was one of the committee of his class to attend Daniel Webster's funeral Mr. Runnels of '53 will tell us his experiences in the performance of that duty a duty which a half century ago this College thought might be the last tribute of respect it would ever have opportunity to pay to the memory of her greatest son. The Reverend cMoses Tharston Runnels, A. cM. t '53. Fellow Alumni and Friends of Dartmouth : I shall take scarcely more than five minutes of your valuable time this afternoon. I trust you will ex- cuse the egotism of an old alumnus who finds himself on this occasion one among the very few who were stu- dents in the College when our immortal Webster breathed his last, and the only one among the students 206 here present who was permitted to attend his funeral at Reminiscences Marshfield. of Mr. Webster I well recall the impression which the not unex- pected intelligence of Mr. Webster's death made upon us as a body of students. We had been having a very heated political campaign for several weeks before that, of Scott versus Pierce in 1852. I remember having climbed the lightning rod to the top of the dome of Dartmouth Hall and to have held my classmate Burnett while standing up on my shoulders so that he might fasten our Scott flag nearer to the weather vane than the Pierce flag had previously been raised. Many were the political gatherings and the political speeches which we had been hearing or trying to make, but when the news of Mr. Webster's demise came to us on or soon after the twenty-fourth day of October, a sudden hush, a deep solemnity fell upon us like a pall. Politics were entirely dropped. The students met as a body in this Chapel. Our revered teachers with the venerable Dr. Lord at their head all now gone to their reward spoke to us fitting words, after which two delegates from each class were chosen to attend the funeral of the departed statesman. Our friend, Alpheus Benning Crosby, the genial Dr. Ben of after years, was selected with me to represent the senior class. The late lamented Dr. Henry R. Hazen was a delegate from the class of 1854, and my impression is, though I am not quite certain, that Walbridge A. Field, afterwards Chief Justice of Massachusetts, and John M. Chamber- lain, a clergyman of later years in Minnesota, represented the class of 1855. 207 Reminiscences Before this I had been a very studious youth. Not of Mr* Webster a mark for three years had been set against my name on the monitor's bills, and I was so anxious not to break the record that I hesitated about accepting the appoint- ment. But my excellent uncle, Dr. Albert Smith, of the medical faculty, charged me by all means to do so. Said he, u You will hereafter look back upon it as one of the highest honors of your life to have attended the funeral of Mr. Webster." I therefore donned my first black stovepipe hat, the only one I have ever worn, and proceeded to Marshfield with the rest. But who can adequately picture that scene ! The people of Massachusetts poured into Marshfield by thou- sands, not only from his own Congressional district, which we are told once gave Mr. Webster every vote but one to return him to Congress, but from all parts of the state and from other portions of New England. Steamboats were carried up from Boston to Duxbury, and other adjacent harbors. Train after train went up to the nearest station on the Old Colony Railroad while all the old neighbors of Mr. Webster, the sturdy farmers of Marshfield and its vicinity, in whose agricultural affairs he had taken so deep an interest, were there in a body. Several of these were his chosen bearers, and I remember to have seen them sitting with tearful eyes beside his bier. Mr. Webster's body was dressed in his citizen's suit just as he used to appear in Boston, and was laid upon a raised open casket. The last picture we saw upon the screen last evening well answered to his face as he appeared in death, only with closed eyes, while the massive forehead and deeply arched eyebrows made 208 us all feel it was the most magnificent face and form Reminiscences that we had ever gazed upon in the embrace of death, of Mr, Webster I had never seen Mr. Webster in life, but his mortal part in death left an impression upon my mind which only the glories of eternity can efface. For an hour or two the masses filed by to take their last lingering look of that Godlike form and countenance. The Reverend Mr. Alden, then the young pastor of the Marshfield church, by Mr. Webster's request, conducted the services and was the only one who spoke at his funeral. The pro- cession which followed his remains was so large that it seemed necessary to take quite a circuitous route to the place of burial. Sadly we marched along to the music of that grand requiem of Beethoven, which has since borne the name of "Webster's Funeral March." As we were thus passing to the tomb, I well remember that the sun for the first time on that day shone out brightly from the dull and mournful clouds which had hung over us during the preceding hours. Behind me in the procession was an elderly gentle- man who quoted, as we slowly wended our way, a para- graph of Webster's phillipic against Hayne. He further said that he himself was present in the Senate chamber when that speech was delivered, and that the sun then beamed into the chamber lighting up the very spot where Mr. Webster was standing near the close of that address, as he uttered those undying words : * ' When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union ; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent ; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched it may be, in 209 Reminiscences fraternal blood ! Let their last feeble and lingering of Mr. Webster glance, rather, behold the gorgeous ensign of the re- public bearing not these words of delu- sion and folly, ' Liberty first and Union afterwards' ; but that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart 'Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable ! ' " The Chairman : Gentlemen, we have now per- formed the last duty, paid the last tribute that the alumni of Dartmouth College can at this time present to the memory of their great fellow alumnus. What shall follow this evening will be rather in the light of hilarity and festivity proper to any centennial celebra- tion, but this meeting for reminiscence this afternoon was forced to take on somewhat of a more sober charac- ter. I congratulate you and myself that we have heard so much that has been of interest and that this descrip- tion of his final laying away has been so graphically told. May the recollections of this occasion be prized in all the future which is before us. Our duty is now ended : as we go hence may we say of our illustrious Webster with bowed heads and with loving, reverent hearts, u Requiescat in pace." 2JO Exercises of Wednesday Evening' Program. The Centennial closed with a banquet, followed by speeches from distinguished alumni and guests of the College* The new and stately dining hall in College Hall was at this time put to its first public use. At 7:30 o'clock the hall was filled to its utmost capacity with trustees, faculty, alumni, and guests of the College* The gallery was re- served for ladies in attendance at the Centennial* Banquet* Following the banquet the President of the College intro- duced the guests of the evening : His Excellency the Governor of New Hampshire* Edwin Webster Sanborn, Esquire, '78. Professor Francis Brown, LL. D., '70, The Honorable David Cross, LL. D., '4J. The Honorable William Everett, LL. D. The Reverend Edward Everett Hale, LL. D. The Honorable George Frisbie Hoar, LL, D. Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller, LL.D. Tne Webster Centennial Banquet. HE dining hall was hung with portraits. At the head of the hall were those of Mr. Webster, with one exception in possession of the College; T the " Black Dan" picture, painted by Francis Alexander and presented to the College by Dr. G. C. Shattuck, 1803 ; the painting by T. A. Lawson, the gift of John Aiken, Esquire, 1814, and others ; the Ames portrait, 2*3 The painted by Joseph Ames and presented to the College Centennial by Dr. J. B. Upham, 1842 ; the Marshfield portrait, Banquet painted at Marshfield in 1848 by Emery Seaman and presented to the College by Lewis G. Farmer, Esquire, 1872 ; and the portrait by Gilbert Stuart, loaned by the Honorable George Fred Williams, 1872. On either side were portraits of some of the counsel who were associated with Mr. Webster in the Dartmouth College Case : Jeremiah Smith and Jeremiah Mason, who appeared with Mr. Webster before the State Court ; Levi Woodbury, of the New Hampshire Bench ; Joseph Hopkinson, who, with Mr. Webster, carried the case before the Supreme Court of the United States ; and Ichabod Bartlett of the opposing counsel. There were also hung about the room portraits of the founder, early presidents, distinguished graduates, and benefactors of the College. Among these there was a draped portrait of the Honorable Frank Palmer Goulding of the class of 1863, who was to have spoken at the banquet, but who died only a few days before the Centennial. When the procession had entered and all had been seated under the direction of the Marshal, divine blessing was asked by Professor Francis Brown, LL. D., '70. During the banquet the College Orchestra furnished music. The speaking which followed was interspersed with selections by the Glee Club. At the close of the banquet Colonel Darling called the assembly to order with a bell, which he stated had been owned and used by Mr. Webster in his home in Franklin. He also announced that through the courtesy of the Boston and Maine railroad the special train for 2J4 Boston would be held until one hour after the close of The the exercises. Centennial Banquet Introductory Words of the Presid- ing Officer. Brethren of the Alumni, Ladies and Gentlemen, and our honored Guests : REGRET that my opening word must be a word of apology. It was far from my intention to preside at this dinner. At the very outset an in- vitation was extended to the Honorable Alfred Russell of the class of 1850, to serve as toastmaster, in recogni- tion of his eminent fitness for this service. He had ac- cepted the invitation, and had confidently expected to be with us until within a few days. A special session of the Supreme Court of Michigan, fixed for this very date, detains him at Detroit. As it falls to me to play the part of host for the College throughout this Centen- nial occasion I have been, impressed by the committee of arrangements into Mr. Russell's place. It is not my duty to make his speech ; only to discharge the more formal functions of his office. There is but one word which I can speak in my capacity as host with perhaps greater fitness than Mr. Russell, the simple word of welcome. I bid you wel- come, brethren of the alumni, you who have come hither in your gratitude and in your pride. I welcome you to the full enjoyment of your honorable and inspir- ing fellowship. I welcome you also to the high task of making the College more worthy of the man and of the event which we celebrate. I bid you welcome, repre- 215 The sentatives of the state of New Hampshire, and you President our neighbors of the state of Massachusetts, who are of the with us on this occasion by virtue of a common in- College heritance and of a common affection. I bid you wel- come, our most distinguished guests, who have graciously counted it an honor to join with us in this re- vival of the fame of Mr. Webster. I have before me letters of regret from many whose presence would have added greatly to the enjoyment and to the distinction of this gathering. The following I will read in full or in part : ESKADALE, BEAULY, SCOTLAND, Aug. 27, 1901. Lord Dartmouth regrets extremely that important engagements in England will prevent his visiting America this autumn. He must therefore regretfully decline the invitation of the President and Trus- tees of Dartmouth College to attend the celebration of the Centennial Anniversary of the graduation of Daniel Webster, a ceremony which had it been possible, he would much have liked to witness. WOOD LEE, VIRGINIA WATER, September 2, 1901. Dear Mr. President : I regret very much that I shall be unable to avail myself of the invitation extended by the President and Trustees of Dartmouth College to be present on so interesting an occasion as that of the cele- bration of the Centennial Anniversary of the graduation of Daniel Webster. With renewed regrets, and all good wishes for the continued suc- cess and usefulness of the College, Believe me, Very faithfully yours, LEVI P. MORTON. The President of Dartmouth College. NEWBURY, N. H., August 3, 1901. Dear Dr. Tucker : I have received your kind letter of the 3oth of July and I am, of course, deeply sensible of the compliment involved in the invitation. It is however out of my power to avail myself of your courtesy. I am engaged at the request of the President in keeping up the current 2(6 business of the State Department, which I can do by dividing my The time between this place and Washington. But I am unable to make p '4 * any engagements for any other purpose. I am most grateful to you for your kind letter and wish that I could answer differently. College Yours faithfully, JOHN HAY. NORTH CONWAY, N. H., September 5, 1901. The President and Faculty of Dartmouth College. Gentlemen : To accept your courteous invitation to join in the September fes- tivities of our venerable and distinguished College would give me very real gratification. And I would certainly be with you then were I in New England. But, unfortunately for me, I must the last week in this month be well on my way to San Francisco. There I have throughout October, duties of a serious nature which I cannot pos- sibly put aside. I am sure that the old College will gather many of her sons ; and what college can rejoice in a body of alumni, at once more loyal than they of Dartmouth, or made up of stronger men ! Not one. To all who value a sound and large education, and who care that New Hampshire do share in all best things, the sound, prosperous condition of the College is a cause of much gladness. And with all warmest good wishes, I am, Gentlemen, With greatest respect, Very truly yours, WILLIAM W. NILES. To the President and Trustees of Dartmouth College. Gentlemen : I have the honor to express my gratification at receiving your in- vitation to participate in the celebration of the Centennial Anniver- sary of the graduation of Daniel Webster. It would afford me the greatest pleasure to be with you on that occasion, did not my age and naturally waning strength forbid. His glorious head inspired me in my first work in clay, the first stroke of my chisel, afforded me the first success in my profession, and therefore is heartily and gratefully remembered by me. I will only add a passing thought, On that sad night, when he departed, Ere his great spirit fled : 2J7 The President of the College Three words he murmured ; then 'twas whispered, "He is dead." Not so ! He's with you in your meeting, His benison to give ; And though you may not hear repeating "I still live!" Respectfully and truly yours, THOMAS BALL. MONTCLAIR, N. J., Aug. 20, IQOI. LAWRENCE PARK, BRONXVILLE, N. Y., September zd, 1901. WILLIAM JEWETT TUCKER, D. D., LL. D., President of Dartmouth College. Dear Sir : My respect and affection for Dartmouth, at whose hands I received my first honorary degree not conferred by my Alma Mater, make me always grateful for her remembrance ; and I am now hon- ored by the invitation of her President and Trustees to attend the cele- bration of the Centennial Anniversary of the graduation of Daniel Webster. It is with more than conventional regret that I find myself unable to visit Dartmouth upon so notable an occasion. With the great names of Webster, Choate, and Chase upon the roll of her graduates, she can indeed in Lowell's words, " cling forever In her grand old mountain rest," and proudly breast the upper air. I am, with much respect, Very truly yours, * EDMUND C. STEDMAN. HARLAKENDEN HOUSE, CORNISH, August 31, 1901. My Dear Dr. Tucker : I regret exceedingly that I shall not be able to attend the Webster Centennial, but I shall not be in this part of the country at the time. I am very much disappointed that this is the case, but I have other engagements of long standing which it is impossible to break. I ex- pect to drive to Dartmouth some time this autumn, and shall call and pay my respects and express my regrets to you then. With many thanks, believe me, Sincerely yours, WINSTON CHURCHILL. 2J8 Letters have also been received from Chief Justice The Isaac Blodgett, Senators Gallinger and Burnham, As- President sistant Secretary Hackett, Representative Sulloway, of the the Honorable Stilson Hutchins, the Honorable John College D. Lyman, Ex-Senator Dawes, Judge Jeremiah Smith, President Lucius T uttle, the Honorable George Fred Williams, Chief Justice Holmes, ex-Secretary Olney, Senator W. P. Dillingham, ex-Judge Hoadly and others. I will read the following letter which lends its own pathos to this occasion. All we have to show for the promise of this letter is an honored memory, and the draped picture which hangs upon the wall. POLAND SPRING HOUSE, SOUTH POLAND, ME. REV. W. J. TUCKER, HANOVER, N. H. My Dear Dr. Tucker: Your invitation to speak at the banquet, September 25th, on Mr. Webster at the Massachusetts bar was forwarded here, and I have just received it. I thank you very much for the honor, and am happy to accept. Hoping that the celebration may be all we desire, I remain, Very sincerely yours, FRANK P. GOULDING. In the absence, however, of many who would have been with us to-night had it been possible, we have a princely gathering. I will not withhold your attention from those whose fame has brought you around these tables. In the letter of Mr. Russell to Judge Richardson explaining his absence he gave this chance definition of a toastmaster, "The toastmaster resembles the whet- stone mentioned by Horace which does no cutting it- self; but brings out the sharpness of the blades of others. ' ' Accepting this definition I proceed at once to touch the edge of the blades around me. 2J9 And first of all I am about to present to you the President Governor of the State of New Hampshire. The relation of the f tne State to the College is very different from that College which obtained at the time which is brought to mind by events which will doubtless be referred to this even- ing. The Dartmouth College Case bore the legal title, "The Trustees of Dartmouth College vs. William H. Woodward," but the defendant in the case was virtually the State of New Hampshire. It would be unjust, however, to recall this ancient controversy from the side of the College without making the frank acknowledgment that the College invited the interference of the State. As I have had occasion to say elsewhere, the State did not take the initiative. It was, perhaps, for this reason that the breach between the State and the College was so quickly healed after the Federal Court had made its decision. In the present relations between the State and the College no one could suspect that there had ever been alienation or controversy. Each recognizes in growing measure its obligation to the other, and from the side of the State no one has expressed with greater frankness or good will the present indebtedness of the State to the College than the honored guest whom I now present to you, His Excellency the Governor of New Hampshire. 220 Speech of His Excellency Chester Chester Bradley Jordan, LL.D. Bradley Jordan Mr. President : KW Hampshire is proud that she was able to give to the nation and the world a character so grand, an intellect so great as to win and hold the admiration of reading, thinking men in all lands for almost a century. Richly endowed by his Creator, for- tunate in being well born of loving, sturdy parents who contributed generously of themselves and of their scant means to the education and the culture that well sup- plemented his massive natural powers, Webster early attracted the attention of our great minds, went to the front rank of lawyers, diplomats, and statesmen, and for half a century in all those fields maintained undisputed primacy. And now at this centennial celebration of his graduation from this renowned seat of learning his work and his name stand forth in matchless brilliancy and in a glory undimrned by the flight of years. His- tory nowhere records greater achievements performed by any man in the civil walks of life than those wrought by this son of the old Granite State as he thought and toiled and wrote and spake to and among his fellow countrymen, unfolding to dim understanding, explain- ing to obtuse intellects, making plain to carping critics not then over loyal to our form of government, the rich- ness, the fullness and completeness of the Constitution, urging upon all the people the great necessity for adher- ing to all its provisions in sunshine and in tempest, in war and in peace. With a logic that was irresistible, a reasoning most convincing, a forecast so unerring as to 22* Chester be prophetic, with appeals eloquent with truth and loy- Bradley alty he did work for the constitution second to none, Jordan and equalled, if equalled at all, only by that of the great Marshall. But standing here among these Judges, Senators, Members of Congress, Presidents and Professors of Col- leges, Doctors of Law, Divinity, and Medicine, grand men in every calling who have spoken and are to speak of him whose virtues we celebrate, in the short time accorded me as Chief Magistrate of Webster's native state, I shall not, must not, undertake to cover any con- siderable part of the broad field of his activities and use- fulness, but rather seek to speak a few words concern- ing what more distinctively belongs to New Hampshire. I realize that he was the nation's, that he was in every large sense an American citizen hemmed in by no state lines : that all our states have a right to share in his lustrous record, his wonderful career, and his ever in- creasing fame. Ours, I have said is the place of his birth, the home of his childhood. Ours, too, his par- ents, his brothers and sisters, his boyhood days, his early struggles in school, his college life, in which he gave abundant promise of the man he became. Ours the deep reverence for father and mother and the loyalty to the interests and wants of all in the old home at Salis- bury ; ours the all-night conference when he laid bare to Ezekiel his plans and purpose for sending him to College, and ours the tears, and the conflict, too, be- tween desire and apparent duty to themselves and the rest of the household, of that father and mother in that next night's conference as they discussed the question of mortgaging the farm to raise money to educate both 222 boys ; ours that bright morning when the sun broke Chester upon that humble home and found a new radiance, a Bradley brighter bow of promise than its inmates had ever before Jordan beheld, for all had heard the words of the fond mother, "Father, I guess we better trust the boys." Ours the inspiring example of that sublime trust in rugged, noble, aspiring youth, and of unsurpassed filial devotion and care in return ; ours the journeys of father and son to Exeter and to Hanover ; of son, on that May day as his quarter's salary was paid him, the first consider- able sum of money he ever earned, when with a thrill of joy he never before felt he set out across the country for Hanover and placed it all in Ezekiel's hands. This giant of giants, this prince of princes, this man who knew no superior among men as he walked the earth, was by his own fireside sweet and tender as a woman. As his children and wife bent before the storms of life he went deep into the valley of affliction. His mighty hand was soft and gentle as he laid it upon the wounds of suffering humanity. His great heart never failed to bleed at the woes and misfortunes of others. He kept green and warm his love for his old New Hampshire home and his New Hampshire friends. Every year he made fond pilgrimages to it and to them. He was pleased beyond measure to receive on his birthday letters from his old neighbors. In public and in private he told of the virtues of those from whose loins he sprang. He sang praises to New Hampshire's beautiful hills, everlasting mountains, to her lakes and her rivers, to the streams that in his boyhood had be- come so dear to him. With the elder Crawford he climbed our highest mountain. As he reached the top 223 Chester he said, u Mt. Washington, I have come a long distance Bradley and toiled hard to reach your summit, and now you Jordan give me a cold reception. I am extremely sorry that I cannot stay to view this grand prospect which lies before me and nothing prevents but the uncomfortable atmosphere in which you reside." His address at the New Hampshire Festival at Boston in November, 1849, is full of affection for home and friends. The keynote of his oration here in Han- over in 1800 was love of country. In his Fourth of July oration at Fryeburg in 1802 he said, "The American Constitution is the purchase of American valor," and from then to the day of his death he did not cease to urge upon all his countrymen the danger of departing from its teachings. He loved his Alma Mater. In the prime of his superb manhood, in the vigor of his imperial intellect, he pleaded for her until spectators, court, and advocate were in tears, and the decision then reached made the life of this College possible and had more sweeping in- fluence upon such institutions and upon the law of contracts than any other our court had ever pronounced. Dartmouth does well to commemorate in this be- coming manner the graduation from her halls one hundred years ago of the greatest man of the many great men the College and New Hampshire have given to the world. Last February we fittingly observed the hundredth anniversary of John Marshall's advent to the bench of our highest court. Young men of New Hampshire, look upon the lives of these two men and take new hope, new courage, new inspiration. 224 President Tucker : In the tribute which we pay Chestct to the memory of Daniel Webster it would be a most Bradley ungracious neglect if we should fail to recall the name Jordan of Ezekiel. Daniel and Ezekiel, brothers indeed, of equal endowment, sharing the same early fortune, and united till death by a love "passing the love of women." I take great pleasure in presenting to you, of direct de- scent in the collateral branch, Edwin Webster Sanborn Esquire, of the class of 1878. Speech of Edwin Webster San- born* E-squire, '78. President Tucker, Ladies and Gentlemen : INCE our people acquired the habit of centen- nial celebrations, it has become usual to analyze the event undergoing observance, and to test its value by the permanent results. The present anniver- sary has thus brought out the service of Mr. Webster to education, which had been overshadowed by the com- mercial importance of the Dartmouth College decision. Growing out of his attachment to this College, and his faith in the type of culture it represented, it is difficult to speak of the results without frequent reference to Dartmouth. There was a distant relative of Mr. Webster, a portly and solemn man, who seized the opportunity, whenever visited by his kindred, to furnish, with much detail, an account of his own personal affairs. This he always prefaced with the remark "I will now do what I seldom do, and talk about myself." This formula, which is said to have appealed to Mr. Webster's sense of 225 Edwin humor, might be used on behalf of the College, which is Webster now receiving its family and friends. Its eminent Sanborn guests have recognized by their presence the responsi- bility laid upon Dartmouth by its second founder, and if the College, through its officers or alumni, persists in speaking of itself, which it does but once in a hundred years, it is hoped that this may be accepted as the due accounting of its stewardship. So many years having passed without producing another Webster, it was doubtless wise to concede that his career was not entirely the result of his college life. Yet the recent parade has proved, after the necessary restorations had been made, that between the sons of Dartmouth, who are the present ornaments of the Bos- ton bar, and their illustrious predecessor, the difference, after all, is only one of headgear. In regard to Mr. Webster himself we have been able to show, at least, that Dartmouth was as naturally the Webster college as Kearsarge was the Webster moun- tain. Kearsarge remains at the old location ; and if the alchemy of nature should give us a second Webster, he would find at Dartmouth the congenial place to develop his genius. This grows out of the fact that Dartmouth has always been a representative institution of northern New England, being shaped by the same persistent forces which in the case of Mr. Webster were concentrated upon an individual. Of these New England influences the first principle is seriousness. The early attempts to hammer a livelihood from the soil of the Granite State could hardly have been other than a serious employ- ment. The young men of those days came to Hanover 226 with feelings of respect for labor and reverence for learn- Edwin ing. Their sentiment was recognized by an early rule Webster which solved the problem of fitting the punishment to Sanborn the crime. "No scholar shall speak diminutively of the practice of labor, under penalty of being obliged to perform that which he endeavored to discredit." The letter of this law died as the College grew in dignity, but its spirit has never ceased to haunt us. A serious rule of conduct, to give the best results, should not be taken too seriously, and it is reassuring to note the robust appearance of our alumni, and to re- call no serious case of injury from overwork. Yet the studious spirit prevails here as far as pos- sible with the male, human animal of collegiate age, and Dartmouth has always remained identified with northern New England. Until recent years, its largest class was that of 1842 ; and as nearly as the date can be fixed, that was the culminating era of the old Puritan New England. After the war, the farmers of this region enjoyed a short return of prosperity. In that era of high prices, they accumulated a little money which they at once began to squander on schools and churches. The effect was seen in the seventies, when the college classes again increased in numbers. In later years as emigration to the West was re- newed, the College began to feel the departure of its patrons and the need of a new departure for itself. It was in those days that a panorama was advertised at Norwich of scenes from Pilgrim's Progress. There was still a strong feeling at Hanover against the influence of the stage ; but this drama was to be presented in a church, and its ethical value was so forcibly urged that 227 Edwin a number of people went over, and were much edified. Webster Toward the close, the slides seemed to move across the Sanborn s ^ a g e slowly, and with some difficulty. The final scene was announced as the Grand Transformation, introduc- ing a view of the land of Beulah over the Delectable Mountains. To give the effect of sudden transforma- tion, this canvas was pushed forward quickly, even be- fore the preceding picture of Giant Despair had been entirely removed. The heavy slide moved a third of the way across the stage and came to a stop. There were sounds of pushing and lifting, and then a pause. In this expectant hush the proprietor was heard to exclaim, behind the scenes, in husky but penetra- ting tones, "The derned thing won't go; it needs greasinV The simile is apt if not elegant. In its eventful pilgrimage Dartmouth had reached a point where it needed the push of an active, constructive policy, lubri- cated by tact and sympathy with affairs. Fortunately this need was supplied. We have kept a section of Maine and the clientage which comes from the easterly watershed of the Green Mountains. Massachusetts there she stood. We have annexed a large part of her. We have reached out to the \Vest for men of the Dart- mouth type. The West is geographically our natural field. In relation to Hanover almost everything is West. As a result, we review the path already trod from the serene heights of the Delectable Mountains. "The past at least is secure." Looking forward to an- other Centennial, there will be no misgivings, if the present management consent to remain in charge throughout the coming century. 228 The most serious criticism of college life is in the Edwin charge now current that it breeds extravagance and un- Webster fitness for self-reliant work. It is, perhaps, a vice inher- Sanborn ent in all liberal culture that it rather fits a man to make the most out of life, than to make the most out of his neighbors. But we may say to the anxious par- ent If it be the fate of your son to go through life with the burden of a liberal education, here is where it can be applied in the most innocuous form. Here is a col- lege of which self-reliance is the chief corner-stone ; which cultivates not only the humanities, but humanity; which aims at developing not only the scholar, but the man ; not only at imparting knowledge, but the power to work it out for one's self, and apply it to the facts of life. A young man who can acquire habits of extrava- gance at Hanover is possessed of rare creative genius. The instinct of wholesome economy is one of the lega- cies from our New England ancestry. Yet it was not their way to grudge expense for true essentials. Look at the list of free public libraries. Of about four hun- dred, dependent on taxation, Massachusetts has one hundred and seventy-nine ; New Hampshire and Illi- nois coming next with thirty-five each. The rest are all in New England states or states with strong New England influence. New Hampshire is, perhaps, best entitled to the motto Every man his own Carnegie. The geographical distribution of libraries confirms the suspicion that people send their sons to Dartmouth in close proportion to the general diffusion of knowledge. For an individual example of the same trait, I would cite Elder Shadrack Spafford, of Beaver Meadow, 229 Edwin who used to visit Hanover. Elder Spafford had been Webster four times married, the amount of household work he Sanborn was accustomed to exact of his wives not being favor- able to conjugal longevity. He happened to be sitting in the store when some one read the statement that in certain benighted parts of India a wife was often offered for sale for a sum equivalent to about fourteen dollars. "Wall," was the comment of the Elder, "wall, if she's a good un, she's wuth it. She's wuth it." Our ancestors wanted the worth of their sacrifice for learning, and followed their ideals in education with great persistence. The continuity essential to all deep and thorough culture is of special value to a college based on New England ideas. To the English mind, the commendable features of Yankee character are the inheritance of pure English blood. Yet the Puritan stock at home has achieved nothing noteworthy and distinctive, of recent years, since the death of Crom- well. The Dutch, with more than their usual mental agility, after the lapse of two hundred and fifty years, are aroused to the discovery that the seeds of New England character were attached to the garments of the Pilgrims in passing through Holland. But we have as yet no far reaching influence, no rich, up- lifting literature, no profound philosophy in spiritual things, from the Pennsylvania Dutch, or those of Sleepy Hollow. We have to conclude that the secret was in the combination of a serious, energetic people, working out the same vital ideas, amid congenial surroundings. If so, it is worth while not to lose this combination. The fathers wanted to get on in the world : to be something. 230 To be something they must know something, and to fit Edwin their young men for the highest service of American Webster citizenship, they invented the American college. Sanbom It was the work of Mr. Webster to guard this invention from infringement. In framing their in- stitutions the early Americans showed a marvellous fore- sight into the needs of the people who were to develop the country. Daniel Webster was heir to their in- tuitions. Those who study the Dartmouth College controversy must see that with all its complications, he was guided by an instinctive purpose to save what he believed to be a sacred inheritance. A college of to-day which looked to the eighteenth century for its scholarship would also be looking to the eighteenth century for its scholars. But it is possible, while expanding in size and scope, to keep the practi- cal spirit of the early College, with its individuality, local sentiment, and characteristic mental discipline. The great universities have grown away from the college traditions, and seem to be leaving this field to the country institutions. They can hardly keep pace with the demand for elective, professional, and special- ized training. Such demands are best met near the rich resources of the cities ; their libraries, art treasures, courts, hospitals, asylums and vaudeville entertain- ments. But the universities lack the unity of growth and unity of structure to maintain the democratic sim- plicity of the historic college. There is a point beyond which their facilities fail to facilitate. The young. man, intent upon practical, economical training, not as an accomplishment, but for the accomplishment of the best work in life, should 23J Edwin lift up his eyes unto the hills from whence cometh his Webster help. Sanborn jj- j s a trite saying that our great men came from the hill towns. The rule of Uncle Eben Holden that he "never swore 'less 'twas necessary" applies to the almost equally offensive habit of bragging. It should only be indulged in when occasion demands it. But an anniversary is such an occasion, and candor compels us to admit that of our leading statesmen and educators, men of influence and character, merchant princes and captains of industry, probably ninety per cent come directly or indirectly from rural New England. If a few of the ninety per cent should be traced to other origin, we might use the argument of the Perthshire man who claimed that Shakespeare was a Scotchman. When asked the reason for his persistence, he said, "Wull, mon, his abeelity cairtainly warrants the sup- poseetion." The decay of rural New England threatened the supply of this sort of men. But the making of character and manhood has finally adapted itself to the new order of things. Like other processes, which at first were industries of the farm and household, it is now chiefly centered in large manufacturing establishments. One of these which we are visiting is just now con- cerned in finding storage room for the increasing raw material which comes in the form of freshmen. There is also a new sort of appreciative country life growing up to sustain the centers of education. "Whatever skies above us rise, the hills, the hills are home." 232 That is what they are for. Old Home Week is growing Edwin into an Old Home Year and the Old Home life. "Webster The hills are also a school. As remarked by a Sanborn recent writer, the specializing of every kind of work has gone so far that the real provincial narrowness is found in the cities. Before one enters the narrow, confined avenue of his life work in Boston or in New York, he should lay the foundation of broad, cos- mopolitan culture at Hanover, Amherst or Williams- town. The degree of Master of Arts seems to lack its full meaning in the hands of one who has studied the arts of man, but has learned nothing from nature, which is the art of God. New England forces lose vitality without some reminder of New England hills. The Yankee flourishes only, as expressed by a fervid orator, where he is "sur- rounded on all sides by the nature of the country." In the rolling, diversified country of the Middle West, the Yankee stock maintains a noble civilization, but farther away, on treeless, sunbaked plains, it loses its social and economic bearings and follows the strangest of strange gods, with a devotion which varies with annual rainfall and prevalence of locusts. The place to revive the spirit of the fathers is where it reached its greatest intensity in the rugged scenes and tonic air of northern New England. Not that a college to attain the high- est culture must perch on the summit of Mount Washing- ton. The ideal location is among hills of about the size and contour of Balch's Hill, with mountains at the correct psychological distance, like Ascutney and Moosi- lauke. 233 Edwin In the neighboring cemetery is a stone corn- Webster meliorating one of the many interesting characters who Sanborn nave H v ed at Hanover, named Sally Duget. This woman succumbed more abruptly than most of us to the Hanover climate, and perished in a snow storm. Han- over children were encouraged to wander in the ceme- tery, in gloomy weather, for the improving associations, and committed to memory many of these inscriptions. In the Duget epitaph is one phrase which I have con- verted to my own use "Under the guise of cheerful- ness she hid deep woes." Under the guise of assumed cheerfulness, I have been endeavoring to hide, probably with entire success, a serious proposition : that the twentieth century opens in striking similarity with the nineteenth in the need for educated and educating public spirit. The eighteenth century had been fertile in liberal ideas. The period a hundred years ago was filled with re- joicings over the newly-found rights of man. The nineteenth century has brought an equally wonderful progress in material expansion. We are now rejoicing in great commercial prosperity. But the old New England trait of prudence is not to be neglected. For nice discrimination in the use of caution, no one could surpass the late Horace Frary. Many of you recall the Dartmouth Hotel the unconventional attire of its proprietor ; the grace in dispensing hospitality ; the expressive soprano voice ; the vest, rich with the spoils of time. In case of slight illness Mr. Frary made no objection to a physician. There came a time when he was attacked with a sudden and serious malady. Mrs. Frary saw Dr. Crosby coming down the street, and 234 started to call him in. Mr. Frary raised himself in bed Edwin and cried out in terrified appeal, "Do n't let him in. Webster Do n't let the critter get in. This ain't no time to be Sanborn foolin' with doctors; I tell ye, I'm sick." This seems to betray a lack of confidence in one of the learned professions ; but in its esoteric meaning it breathes the profoundest political philosophy. The time for a nation to take counsel of its physicians is when it is well. The old-time patriot was always ready to prescribe. The Commencement oratory of 1801 was full of heroic sentiment respecting the preservation of our liberties. As read to-day, the language of those young men, without money or influence, on the north- ern frontier of the new nation their talk of saving the Union seems like a huge joke. The point of the joke is that one of them did save the Union, as far as could be done in his day by one human being. The passion for equal rights has now been suc- ceeded by the passion for more equal wealth. Our an- cestors were absorbed with questions of right, appealing to the heart and conscience. The present problems reach more deeply into the ultimate springs of human conduct. They touch the pocket. They call not only for broad-minded, humane statesmanship, but for practical, educated common sense. Poisons brewed in the seething cities of Europe, must be counteracted by old-fashioned, country-bred patriotism made in America. It is not likely that su- preme public service will again be rendered by a single massive and commanding intellect, but men of Dart- mouth can be relied upon to keep the faith of the fathers, and, trained in sympathy with the people, to voice the 235 Edwin sober thought of the nation and hold up the higji stand- Webster ar( j o f American citizenship. Sanborn President Tucker : Among the men whom we inevitably recall as we think of Mr. Webster in his relation to the Dartmouth College Case, there is no stronger nor more prophetic figure than that of the then youthful president of the College, Francis Brown. We know what he wrought in his time, we know what he left as a heritage, not only in his work but in the stock which he planted here. I have the pleasure of present- ing to the audience, Francis Brown of the third genera- tion. Speech of Professor Francis Brown, D.D., LL. D. f '7O. Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : OUR days ago I had no hope of being here this evening. A ship struggling with heavy weather in mid-ocean held out no promise. I had gone so F far as to frame the telegram which I should have the pain of sending from New York this afternoon explaining my absence. And even now that fortune has been kinder to me than I had a right to expect, there are two seri- ous drawbacks to the full satisfaction of the evening for me. One is the deep regret at not having enjoyed with you the feast of good things that has preceded this ban- quet for the last two days. The orations and the choruses and the illuminations have not been for me. I have not even had the opportunity of attiring myself in the festal garments in which so many of my brother 236 alumni have been bravely disporting themselves. But Francis the more serious drawback lies in the difficulty of the Brown subject which has been presented to me. Since the career of Daniel Webster is not complete without the history of the Dartmouth College Case, and since in the Dartmouth College Case the active head of the Col- lege was closely concerned, it has seemed fitting to you, sir, that some reference should be made here to the con- nection of President Brown with that Case. And my problem is, within brief limits of time, and without do- ing substantial injustice to the theme, to discuss it in terms befitting the modesty of the man himself, and not unbecoming in one who bears his name. In this diffi- cult situation it has seemed to me that the path of safety was the path of simplicity. Therefore, without attempt- ing to analyze or weigh the precise service of President Brown, I shall try merely to indicate a few aspects of the Dartmouth College Case as they presented them- selves to him. In the first place, then, the struggle into which he entered was for him a moral issue. It was a moral issue in the sense of not being a mere legal battle, and in the sense also of not being a mere personal concern. In a legal battle, as such, he would have had deep and intel- ligent interest. In personal affairs as such he would have had that concern which becomes every man. But the Case of the College presented itself to him primarily under its moral aspect, as involving great and enduring principles of human life and action. His relation to it cannot be appreciated without remembering that the difficulty did not originate under his administration. He found it when he came upon the stage. It was not 237 Francis of his choice, that, in one aspect of this difficulty, it Brown seemed to bring him into conflict with the authorities of the Commonwealth. He was a native of this state and loved and honored it. He was born, as Webster himself was born, before the Constitution of the United States was adopted. He had that reverence for State- hood which belonged to the time of those beginnings, and which had not begun to be overshadowed as it has been for some minds in recent years, not wholly to our good, by the sole conception of the national life. He had no zeal, therefore, in any contest which opposed him to the authorities of the Commonwealth. But the College Case embodied for him that which he revered with the profoundest forces of his mind and heart. It meant for him the confidence of donors, it meant for him the solemnity of prayers, it meant the consecration of lives, it meant a history already worth commemorat- ing and preserving as men had been trained and fitted for the work of life ; the whole embodiment of the Col- lege in its sacredness and power entered into his con- ception of the Case, and it seemed to him that, standing as he did and representing what he did, a moral impera- tive was upon him which he dared not refuse to follow, and that in fighting for the College he was obeying God. In the next place the struggle appealed to him as a demand upon intellect. He felt that the utmost pow- ers of his mind were claimed by the College in that criti- cal time, in reference to the question of its right to be. The head of a college, placed as Dartmouth College was in those years, he felt must know his ground, must command the situation. Whether or not he appeared be- 238 fore the public eye as a leader in the work, he must Francis be within himself conscious in some degree of the Brown mastery of leadership. The situation, in its many phases, was, of course, discussed privately, a hundred times over, in advance of its public argument before the courts, and I understand that he was not without gifts enabling him to enter into the details of the Case, master them in their somewhat complicated history and relations, and hold them firmly and steadily, keeping their balance and their proportion, and so, from time to time, from month to month, from year to weary year, rendering real service to those who were called to plead, in all the various steps and stages through which the struggle passed till its final and crowning triumph. In the third place, the struggle presented itself to his mind as hopeful because of its great alliances. These alliances involved mutual trust, a common responsibili- ty, the sharing in one great work. The abundance of the allies he found, the trustworthiness and comfort of them, he appreciated and never belittled. The alliance of the students of his time was something which he prized beyond words. I believe that he had personal attractiveness and winning power, and that students were drawn towards him ; that seeing in him, in some sense, an embodiment of the institution, under whose care they were studying and which they were learning to love, they loved it in him. The names of some of those who were undergraduates in his time will suggest the larger company of men, who, as students, held loy- ally to the work of the College through all that trying time. Such names as those of George P. Marsh, Judge Nathan Crosby, Judge Nesmith, Rufus Choate, all 239 Francis graduated during his brief term of service as president, Brown remind us of the choice spirits among the undergraduates of those years, and of the worthy alliance on which he depended when he trusted them. Then there was the faculty, working under difficulties that we can hardly appreciate, and doing faithfully the work that was set them to do. There were the trustees, holding steadfastly on their way, hoping for the light that was to come. There were of course, also, those figures that come back most familiarly to us all as we review the Case, those lawyers of New Hampshire who stood for the College here, those who represented it before the Supreme Court of the nation, and, chief of all, the great advocate to whom the success of the College, by common agreement, was most largely due. It was in alliance with these men and by such alliance alone that he felt success for the right could be gained. Just one aspect more I shall venture to mention. He regarded his concern in the struggle of the College as an addition to the common daily work of the presi- dency, and not as a substitute for it. It seems to me that the ethical power involved in a statement of that kind is no unworthy matter for us to think of to-night. It was not his to devote himself exclusively to repre- senting the College before the legal tribunals of the state and nation, or even before that wider tribunal in which verdicts are given by the agreement of right-minded men. He felt much of the burden of a champion, but this obligation was in a certain sense a mere adjunct to his chief activity. The college life had to go on, the young men who were here had to be taught, all the de- tails of college work had to be managed, and the double 240 strain, it is easy to believe, was that which brought his Francis life to so early an end. And he himself did not grudge Brown it. He gave all he had. He gave himself absolutely. He spent his powers without reserve. The vital force was exhausted at the end of the struggle and he died the year after the decision was given. He had not been called to lead the forces on the battle-field. He was the commander of the garrison, holding on, while the brilliant tactician and general was waging the fight out in the open. The captain of the garrison, whose first duty is within the walls, but whose heart and brain are in the hot battle outside, may have an ethical force in him quite equal to that of the active leader who wins the battle. He may not claim the credit of the victory, but he may have greatly helped to make the victory worth the while. For such reasons as these, it is, perhaps, appropriate that President Brown should be remembered in the Webster Celebration. I have in my possession the autograph letter which Mr. Webster wrote to him just after the decision was rendered in Washington. If it had been accessible to me this morning I should have brought it with me. Not that it is unknown ; it has been published. But there is some interest in the paper itself with Mr. Webster's handwriting and signature upon it. It bears perpetual witness to the close relation between Daniel Webster, the great jurist, and the president of the College, doing his quiet work here, and standing bravely for what he believed the right. I must not say more of him now. He sleeps not far from this spot. His son has been laid to rest beside 24J Francis him. And there some day his son's son hopes also Brown to lie. I have no quarrel with those who in thinking of the rewards of the future dwell upon crowns and golden harps, having some understanding of what these things symbolize, but I should be sorry for the man who was looking forward to the crown without service rendered, or to whom the opportunity for larger service was not the brightest diadem . For noble minds, the greatest reward must lie in the service, and not in the wages of service; work done of which the result lives on after the workman has stopped working, is itself the truest reward. And, in that sense again, it seems not unfitting to join in this place the names of Daniel Webster and President Brown. By faithful service men live and by the fruits of it institutions grow great and endure. If Dartmouth is growing great and shall endure, the ground of it must be sought in the service, great or small, of many faithful ones working to- gether with consecrated purpose, who find a stimulus in the undying hope of making their lives worth while for their College, and for their country, and for the world. President Tucker: When we wish to bring the past and the present of the College together, there is one man amongst us in whom they meet on equal terms, Judge Cross, of the class of 1841. 242 SpeecK of tKe Honorable David David Cross, LL. D., '41. Ooss Mr. President and Brothers and you, so near and yet so far [apostrophizing the ladies in the distant gal- lery]: feel oppressed, Mr. President, as I rise to speak on this occasion, as never before. Voices speak to me that do not to any of you. Sixty-four years ago I came to Hanover a student. The boys that were with me then, where are they ? Echo answers, "Where?'' A few survive. Most are gone. Voices speak to me in happy memory. Voices speak to me in solemn, sad recollection, and it seems as if I must pour out my soul here to-night and talk of things that I have felt and have seen and have known, connected with dear old Dartmouth College. But, brethren, last week I received a summons from our President, whom we all delight to honor and obey, saying, "Come to the Webster Banquet and talk six or eight minutes on Dan- iel Webster's training at the New Hampshire bar." I yield to the proprieties of the occasion, I subdue the joyous thoughts of college life and present simply a lawyer's brief. In 1818, at thirty-six years of age, Mr. Webster made his argument in the Dartmouth College Case before the Supreme Court of the United States. It was addressed, as Rufus Choate has said, "To a tribunal presided over by Marshall, assisted by Washington, Livingston, Johnson, Story, Todd, and Duvall a tribunal unsurpassed on earth of all that gives il- lustration to a bench of law and sustained and venerated 243 David by a noble bar." His opponents were William Wirt, Cross Holmes, and other most illustrious lawyers of the time. The legal argument occupied five hours and the per- oration, as described by Professor Goodrich, was the most brilliant ever heard in that court. The judges and the listeners were moved to tears as Mr. Webster appealed, with eloquent words and trembling lips, for the life of the College. His argument prevailed and a construction of the Constitution of the United States was then given of far-reaching importance, not only for this College, but for every eleemosynary institution in the United States. The reputation of Mr. Webster before, as a lawyer, was local, but it immediately became national, and from that time he was the acknowledged great lawyer. On this one hundredth anniversary of his gradu- ation, his characteristics as student, scholar, lawyer, diplomat and statesman have been presented in fitting eloquent tribute, but the one distinguishing act of his life, the one which comes nearest to our hearts, the one which links his name indissolubly with us and our College is that argument in 1818 which won for him the title of "Refounder of Dartmouth College." Up to the time of this argument nearly all his education and training had been in New Hampshire. Before reviewing his training at the New Hampshire bar I think it desirable to speak briefly of him as a col- lege boy and law student. His college education and preparation for the law was not the result of any special planning by himself or his parents. He went to college because his father, like other New England fathers, wished to give his children the benefit of an 244 education which he had no opportunity of acquiring for David himself, and because his son exhibited a passion for Cross reading and study. He read every book within his reach and committed to memory almost everything he read so that there was no period in his after life when he was not able to repeat verbatim what he had learned in his boyhood. He read Don Quixote at one sitting, or during one night ; he committed to memory much of the Bible, Watts' Hymns, whole books of poetry and many of the great speeches of distinguished men. The story as given in Mr. Webster's autobiography of that ride from his home to the Rev. Mr. Woods' school, when his father first spoke of his intention to give him a college education, is a pathetic revelation of a son's tender reverence and appreciation of a father's self- sacrificing love. It reveals also the desire and ambition of the son for an education. From all that I can learn from his autobiography, his letters published by his son Fletcher, from tradition and biography, I do not believe that Mr. Webster, before he commenced the practice of law, had any idea of his superior ability or the high position he would attain. He was induced to study law by his father's wish, rather than from any well considered thought or plan of his own. There has been a sort of tradition that at one time he contemplated studying for the ministry, but I cannot find any facts to confirm such report. It does seem to me, however, that if he had been urged to the study of theology by his father, as he was urged to the study of law, he would have become a great theologian instead of a great lawyer. 245 David His letters to his brother Ezekiel, his classmates, Gross Bingham, Merrill and others, written while in college and later, are delightful reading and give us a view of Webster such as no one can know who has looked upon him only as the great expounder of the Constitution of the United States. I am tempted to quote extensively from his cor- respondence because these letters bring him before us as a student, as a friend and brother; intensely human, full of joy, poetry, and the humor of life, with a mind of sincere honesty of purpose and devotion to truth, duty, and religion, and a heart of boundless wealth of af- fection for family and friends. Thirty young men graduated in the class of 1801, eleven became lawyers, of whom not one attained dis- tinction in his profession except Webster. He was in Mr. Thompson's office nearly three years and in Christopher Gore's office in Boston a few months ; was admitted to the bar in Suffolk County, Massachu- setts, in June, 1 805; returned to Boscawen and remained about two years, and removed to Portsmouth, in 1807. In a letter to his classmate Bingham, dated at Fryeburg, May, 1802, he wrote, "Now, I will enumerate the in- ducements that draw me towards law. First, and principally, it is my father's wish. He does not dictate, it is true, but how much short of dictation is the mere wish of a parent, whose labors of life are wasted on favors to his children. Even the delicacy with which this wish is expressed, gives it more effect than it would have in the form of a command. Secondly, my friends generally wish it. They are urgent and press- ing. My father even offers me I will sometime tell 246 you what and Mr. Thompson offers my tuition gratis, David and to relinquish his stand to me." Cross May 3, 1802, in a letter to Fuller he says, ' 'The law is certainly, as it seems to me, rather hard study and to mollify it with some literary amusements I should think profitable." In a letter to his classmate, Merrill, January, 1803, he wrote, "This law reading, Thomas, has no tendency to add the embellishments of literature to a student's acquisitions. Our books are written in a hard, didactic style, interspersed on every page with the mangled pieces of murdered Latin." In a letter to Mr. Cook, June, 1803, he wrote, U I am not informed what profession you are determined to study, but if it be law, permit me to tell you a little what you must expect. My experience in the study is indeed short, but I have learnt a little about it. First then, you must bid adieu to all hopes of meeting with a single author who pretends to elegance of style or sweetness of observation." In November, 1803, he wrote to Merrill, "Accuracy and diligence are much more necessary to a lawyer, than great comprehension of mind, or brilliancy of tal- ent. His business is to refine, define, and split hairs, to look into authorities, and compare cases. A man can never gallop over the fields of law on Pegasus, nor fly across them on the wing of oratory. If he would stand on terra firma he must descend ; if he would be a great lawyer, he must first consent to be only a great drudge." In his Autobiography Mr. Webster said, "I read Coke on Littleton through without understanding a 247 David quarter part of it. Why disgust and discourage a boy Cross by telling him that he must break into his profession through such a wall as reading Coke? I really often despaired. I thought I never could make myself a lawyer and was almost going back to the business of school teaching." In 1805 in a letter to Merrill, from Boston, he wrote, "Gifford's Life and Posthumous Works, Moore's Travels in France and Italy, et pauca alia similia, have rescued me from the condemnation of doing nothing. At present, I am in earnest in the study of the French language, and can now translate about as much, for a task, as we could of Tully in our Freshman year." In May, 1805, in a letter to Bingham, written at Boscawen: "You must know that I have opened a shop in this village for the manufacture of justice writs. Other mechanics do pretty well here, and I am deter- mined to try my luck among others." And in one dated January, 1806, "My business has been just about so, so ; its quantity less objectionable than its quality." At the September term, 1805, he entered in the Superior Court of Hillsborough county, at Hopkinton, twenty-two writs and argued two causes before the jury in the presence of his father, one of the judges upon the bench. These causes were Haddock v. Woodward and Corson v. Corson, both of small importance. He won the former and lost tKe latter. Parker Noyes, one of the most skilful practitioners in the state was his oppos- ing counsel. The original writs are on file in the office of the Superior Court at Nashua. The next spring he was assigned by the court to defend a criminal for murder in the Grafton County 248 Court. The murder was of such an atrocious nature David and so unprovoked that Webster could find only one Cross ground for defence that of insanity. The argument of Webster for the defence attracted wide attention at the time and gained him a reputation in all that region of New Hampshire as the most adroit and skilful law- yer of the state. Mr. Webster's real life as a lawyer commenced in 1807 in Portsmouth. The men practising in Rocking- ham County during the nine years he lived and practised there constituted a body of lawyers hardly equalled by the same number at any time in this country. To give their names is sufficient for any lawyer to recall some- thing of the wonderful ability and achievements of these men at the bar in New Hampshire, in Massachusetts, and in Washington. Among them were Joseph Story, Samuel Dexter, Theophilus Parsons, of Massachusetts, Jeremiah Smith, William Plummer, George Sullivan, Ichabod Bartlett and Jeremiah Mason of New Hamp- shire. George Sullivan had then been eleven years at the bar, William Plummer thirteen, and Jeremiah Smith twenty-three years, while Ichabod Bartlett was four years later. The biographer of William Plummer, in speaking of the Rockingham Bar at this time, says, "The bar was well denominated at this period of its greatest strength 'the arena of giants.' It indeed witnessed the strife of Titans. Weak men did not mingle in it ; strong men felt their need of strength." Judge Story charac- terized it as one of "vast law learning and prodigious intellectual power." 249 David Jeremiah Smith was profoundly learned in the Cross common law and a most accomplished scholar, superior in exact scholarship to either Mason or Webster. Mason and Smith had remarkable, and, perhaps, equal industry in the preparation of causes; Smith fortifying his position with accurate authority while Mason trusted more to his native strength and force of reason. The biographer of Theophilus Parsons says that "The reform which Judge Smith began was effectually carried out and the pleading in New Hampshire was probably as accurate and skilful as in any state of the Union." Joel Parker said of Smith that "under him the practice of law was reduced to practical science." George Sullivan and Ichabod Bartlett were both eminent in their profession and would rank at any time among the best lawyers in the state. They, however, were inferior in many points to Mason, and Smith and Webster. Jeremiah Smith by his learning, his industry and great ability, helped Webster. He was aided undoubt- edly by the other eminent men named, but he was trained more by Jeremiah Mason than by all others. I believe that his association with Jeremiah Mason dur- ing his nine years of law practice in New Hampshire, helped train Webster's mind not alone for law and for the exhibition of profound learning as a lawyer, but as well for statesmanship and for conciseness and clear- ness, such as he afterwards exhibited in his Bunker Hill speeches, theGirard Will Case, the reply to Hayne of South Carolina, in the trial of Knapp at Salem, the Dartmouth College and other celebrated cases. 250 Mr. Webster once said, "When I went to Ports- David mouth I was a young man of twenty-four and Mr. Cross Mason forty. He was then at the head of the bar, and was employed in nearly all the great cases. He was a terror to young lawyers, but we traveled together and roomed together and he was one of my earliest, truest, and best friends." Mr. Choate once asked Webster's opinion of Mason, and among other things he said, "I regard Jeremiah Mason as eminently superior to any other lawyer whom I have ever met. I would rather, with my own ex- perience (and I have had some pretty tough experiences with him) , meet them all combined in a case than to meet him .alone and single handed. He was the keenest lawyer I have ever met or read about. If a man had Jeremiah Mason and he did not get his case, no human ingenuity or learning could get it." Mr. Webster, late in life said, "If you were to ask me who was the greatest lawyer in the country I should answer, John Marshall, but if you took me by the throat and pinned me to the wall and demanded my real opinion I should be compelled to say it was Jeremiah Mason." At another time he said, "Mason's method of argument led me to study my own style and set about reform ing it." In November, 1849, Mr. Webster introduced reso- lutions before the United States Court in honor of Jeremiah Mason, then lately deceased, and a part of one of these resolutions was in these words, "In the fact that the state of New Hampshire now possesses such a system of law whose gladsome light has shone in other states, are seen both the product and the monu- 25* David ment of his labors, less conspicuous, if not less real Cross than as if embodied in codes and institutions bearing his name." In his remarks upon that occasion, he said, "I am bound to say that of my own professional discipline and attainments, whatever they may be, I owe much to that close attention to the discharge of my duties which I was compelled to pay for nine succesive years, from day to day by Mr. Mason's efforts and arguments at the bar. 'Fas est ab hoste doceri;^ and I must have been unintelligent, indeed, not to have learned some- thing from the constant display of that power which I had so much occasion to see and feel." It is well authenticated by biographers of Mr. Webster that his style before he had known Mason had been somewhat florid ; afterwards it was terse, simple and graphic. Mr. Lodge says, "Fortune showered many favors upon Mr. Webster, but none more valuable than that of having Jeremiah Mason as his chief opponent at the New Hampshire bar. He gave Mr. Webster his friend- ship, staunch and unfailing, until his death. He gave freely also of his wisdom and experience in advice and counsel. The strong qualities of Mr. Webster's mind fully developed by constant practice and under such influences. In a word, the unequalled power of stating facts or principles which was a predominant quality of Mr. Webster's genius grew steadily with a vigorous vitality, while his eloquence developed in a similar striking fashion. But the best lesson Mr. Webster learned from his wary, yet daring antagonist, was in regard to style." 252 In 1806 Mr. Webster was a country lawyer, twenty- David four years of age, bringing suits for the collection of Cross small debts and other trifling causes of action, trying them before uneducated justices of the peace who, according to custom, decided for the lawyer employing them, and occasionally also contending in the higher courts with sharp practitioners, like Parker Noyes. His annual income at this time did not exceed six hun- dred dollars. To remain there would tend to make him like his contestants, or more likely, drive him from the p rfession. More than most men Mr. Webster needed the spur and excitement of a great cause and a strong opponent to bring out his best mental resources. At Portsmouth, in 1807, he immediately felt the necessity for his utmost effort. Then he began to see the "gladsome light of jurisprudence" and to understand the funda- mental principles of common law and equity. Then he first really discovered himself ; then he put on the giant armor of his knighthood and with exulting heart met men of his own mental strength and of his own high ideals and aspirations. It was his seven years at Portsmouth that developed and trained him to become the "first of American lawyers and the first of American statesmen." From all that I can learn of Mr. Webster and his contemporaries ; from history and biography and his own writings, I arrive at the conclusion that it was during his nine years' practice of law in New Hamp- shire that he was trained and trained himself in his knowledge of the common law, in the preparation of causes for the jury and the court ; in the cross-exami- 253 David nation of witnesses ; in his method and manner of Gross argument ; in simplicity, directness and strength of written and oral speech. President Tucker : There are few occasions of this nature, or of any public intent or concern, complete without the word of Dr. William Everett. But our special claim upon him lies in the fact of his knowledge of Mr. Webster as Secretary of State through his father, the successor of Mr. Webster in the State Department. Speech of tKe Honorable William Everett, PH. D., LL. D. Mr. President : U~^ feel that I might almost say I began life under J the aegis of Mr. Webster as Secretary of State. I had the misfortune, sir, to be born under Van Buren. I admit it. But before I acquired conscious- ness, VanBuren was out of power, and the very first glimmering of consciousness, so far back that when I say I recollect certain things, old friends tell me I do not recollect them, but that they were told me, was under his successor. Mr. Edward Webster was a member of our household, then domiciled in Florence, and I was held in his arms. I had his name breathed in my ears as early as that of any of my family. It was his father's commission that brought us from Florence to London, and my first undoubted, continuous recollections begin in London, when his name was spoken exactly as often in our household as any of our own kindred. I feel, sir, that I have a right to speak of the services of that 254 man whom, indeed, I never heard in public, but whom I "William knew in a better way than in public. Everett " Seen him I have, but in his happier hour Of social pleasure, ill exchanged for power." I saw him in our house. There was no stateliness there, there was no pompousness, there was no draw- ing back, as if he was too great for common persons to look up to, which is the way you would think he was by some of the portraits and descriptions. No, when he came into our house, and my mother, who was afraid of nothing under heaven, held out her hands to him, she took him right off his high horse, and he was the easiest and most affectionate and gentlest of mortals. There is, sir, a touching story in the Arabian legends of how, long after the great reformer had disappeared, the son of his follower was murdered by a tyrant, and as the head of Hassan was brought to him, he struck his staff on the lip, and an old man said, U I have seen those lips pressed to the lips of the prophet of God." No tyrant will ever think it worth while to strike at my head, but these lips have been pressed to the lips of him who was, indeed, to Americans a prophet of God. In the few minutes which it is proper for me to take, sir, I am glad of the opportunity to say a few words of Webster's services as Secretary of State. The country may, perhaps, think of him chiefly in connection with the work of the Senate House, but the permanent work he wrought for our relations with foreign nations is a thing which Americans ought not to forget. Mr. Webster took a stand in the State department which is the one which every American should take, that of perfect dignity, of perfect calmness, of reasoning out 255 "William the quarrels of America in such a way that foreign Everett powers shall be forced to recognize the truth of our position and there will never be any danger of war or even of quarrelling, for such arguments as his will always silence, as his silenced any opposing word among the other nations, if there were any. You know, for instance, that there had been a constant quar- rel between England and America on the subject of the right of search, which had led to a war, and when peace was made at the end of the war which was made for the right of search, nothing was ever said about the right of search in the treaty, and the quarrel remained in spite of the war. Mr. Webster as Secretary of State addressed a letter to Lord Aberdeen on the right of search, and that letter never was answered by the English Govern- ment, but the right of search was never talked about again from the time that letter was written. Webster also as Secretary of State negotiated the first Extradition Treaty the first treaty which en- abled us to feel that those criminals who escaped to foreign nations were still as much in our power as if they had remained within our borders and that other nations might feel the same of us. Just consider, brethren, Dartmouth men are brethren of Harvard men, ain't they ? just consider, brethren ; suppose in this last terrible assassination which has stricken the heart of the country to its depths, perpetrated on the very borders of Canada, the criminal had managed to escape to Canada across the Niagara River, should we have been troubled ? No, because he would have been surrendered by the Government of Canada as completely as if he had escaped to Philadelphia or Detroit. But 256 before Mr. Webster's time he would not have been sur- William rendered. Now, escape would have been as useless to Everett him across the border as it would have been to the edge of the country, and that great blessing we owe to his negotiations as Secretary of State. But he did something greater and better for us. When Mr. Webster came in as General Harrison's Sec- retary, England and America were on the verge of war. There was a quarrel about the northeastern boundary and about the northwestern boundary. There was a quarrel on the border of Niagara about the sympathizers and the arrest of McLeod. The English Foreign office had been in the hands of Lord Palmerston. That man was determined to pick a quarrel with every land which did not submit to his dictation. Happily that govern- ment had gone out of power about the time Gen. Har- rison's government came into power in this country, and Mr. Webster was determined that the causes of quarrels which had existed off and on for half a century should be put an end to. A special envoy was sent from England, and Mr. Webster met Lord Ashburton with open hands, and not with clenched fists. The northeastern boundary apparently could not be settled; it seemed as if there must be a war if each nation held what each considered its rights. Such a war would have been popular in the United States. There was dissatisfaction with Great Britain. Two wars had not let out enough bad blood and there must be a third. Supposing Mr. Webster had said to Lord Ashburton, "We will maintain our rights ; we will maintain that the Highlands, which divide the rivers flowing into the St. Lawrence from the rivers flowing into the Atlantic, are 257 William where we say and not where you say." If he had also Everett said, "We will claim Oregon to 544o', and if you do not like it we will fight for it," how popular that would have been! How all the yeomanry in the North and all the chivalry of the South would have rushed across the St. Lawrence and the St. Croix and the Columbia! Think of the Princeton, which was receiving her arms that proved fatal to Mr. Webster's successor, how she would have been sent out to prey upon the English commerce. Think how he might have floated into the presidency as the great war secretary at the end of Tyler's term. Think how popular he would have be- come with the Whig party that had almost renounced him for staying in the cabinet. He knew better. He was willing to give up what the state of Maine thought were her rights, he was willing to give up everything that might have given him a crown of glory equal to any great war statesman, for the more enduring, the more perfect crown, "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God." He knew that any war, all wars, are sins and crimes and blunders, but he knew that the war between England and the United States for a few square miles near the St. Johns River was a crime, a sin, a blunder beyond comparison, and he was willing to sacrifice what a meaner, a less far- sighted, a more passionate statesman would have held as his glory, in order to make and keep the peace be- tween those who never should be at war. He settled the boundary, and England became friends with us. They said in England that her rights were given up ; we said in America that our rights were given up. What right is more precious than that of living in peace 258 with those with whom war is a sin ? In consequence of William that action of his, settling the northeastern boundary, Everett there followed in the next administration the settlement of the northwestern boundary. That was not entrusted to him, but although it was done by the next administra- tion it was just as much his work as the northeastern boundary, because if he had not settled the northeast- ern boundary as he did the next administration would never have gone on and perfected his work. Upon what he did in his second administration as Secretary of State I will not dwell here. All I can say here is that those who declare that after his Seventh of March Speech he lost all credit with the nation, entirely forget that second administration; they forget that mag- nificent state paper, the Hulsemann L,etter. If any- one fancies that Americans had given up their states- man of 1850, he may see what Mr. Webster did in 1851 and 1852, holding the pen in his hand and signing the papers that were to state the opinion of America in dig- nified terms down to the very moment of his death. When he was lying in that darkened chamber at Marshfield he was thinking of the public business and arranging for its proper transaction to the very last. And while Secre- tary of State the second time he combined the orator with the statesman. Although he was not in a position where oratory is generally looked for, he made his mag- nificent Fourth of July Speech at the laying of the corner-stone of the capitol in 1851, when he uttered one of the most remarkable prophecies ever recorded in po- litical history and raised himself entirely above the level of statesmen who live for the present. The audience was chiefly composed of Virginians. On the fourth of 259 William July in the city of Washington you would not expect to Everett have any but a Virginia and Maryland audience such as gathered on that occasion to listen to hi in. He took up his favorite theme, the sin of abandoning the Union. He talked to the representatives of Virginia, those on the James River, and those beyond the Blue Ridge, and then he spoke to those who live beyond the Allegheny and warned them of the evils of breaking up the Union. He said I have to quote from memory I have not studied it in the book I may say as Lord Mansfield did on a similar occasion, " I have consulted no books, indeed I have no books to consult," but Mr. Webster said, u Do you think, ye men of Western Virginia, that you can remain part and parcel of Virginia a month after Virginia has ceased to be part and parcel of the United States?" Who else in 1851 thought that in 1861 the northwestern counties of Virginia would be cut off and become a separate state in consequence of the secession of old Virginia? It was his vision, but it was his re- vealed vision, his inspired vision, that told him that if the South tried to break from the North the line of cleav- age would run through the Old Dominion itself, and that the North would gain those that the South had held for her own and never could get back after the original and terrible mistake. Here we have him a peacemaker with foreign nations, a prophet to his own, never for- getting to maintain the honor of his country in irresist- ible argument, never forgetting to hold out the hand of peace to our cousins across the water, to our brothers among ourselves; and, surely what greater service than that of the peacemaker and the prophet could any states- 260 man render to the country of his choice? William It is time for me to close, sir, but I wish with your Everett permission to close with offering a sentiment which though not directly appropriate to Mr. Webster is surely never inappropriate in speaking of him and speaking of Dartmouth College. Immediately after Mr. Webster had gone to his grave, Dartmouth College held, in the year 1853, a solemn commemoration of his connection with her, and on that occasion a eulogy was delivered by that son of Dartmouth College who rivalled Mr. Webster as forensic orator and might have rivalled him as senatorial orator if he had not just touched the cup of senatorial greatness and then let it pass from his lips. On that occasion there was a vin- dication of Mr. Webster's position in 1850 which is utterly unanswerable. I offer you as a sentiment, sir, at your Webster commemoration: "The memory of Rufus Choate, the friend, the follower, the eulogist of Daniel Webster ; Dartmouth owes him an incalculable debt and among its items will dwell with peculiar gratitude on that discourse which demonstrated that, as Webster's political sagacity was beyond the criticism of emulous rivals, so his political morality was beyond the cavil of narrow minded cen- sors." President Tucker: In a letter recently received reviving some reminiscences of his boyhood I note this passage: "The first time I ever fired a gun was at Sandwich in September, 1826. The gentlemen of the party had returned from shooting with their fowling pieces loaded and called upon us boys to fire them. I 26* The think on that occasion I fired Mr. Webster's." The President writer of this letter might have added that he has never of the since fired guns of any less calibre. I have the pleasure College t introduce to you the Reverend Doctor Edward Everett Hale. Speech of the Reverend Edward Everett Hale, D.D., LL. D. Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : AM heartily indebted to my hosts for their invi- tation to be present on this occasion. The oc- casion has proved itself not simply one of pride and congratulation among the friends of Mr. Webster and the College, but one of historical importance as well. For myself, my right to speak rests wholly upon the memories which a child, who became a big boy, who became a young man, and who was thirty years old when Mr. Webster died, has of the kindness which a great man can show to a very young friend. From the moment when Mr. Webster removed to Bos- ton in 1817, he and my father were intimate friends. I have a fancy, indeed, that they had first met in the charming society of Exeter. Exeter is a place of which I always speak with tenderness and regard, because if my father had not been the mathematical preceptor at Exeter, he would never have met my mother and in that case I do not know where I should be to-day. Mr. Webster had established his brother, Ezekiel, in a school in Boston while he was himself studying law in Christopher Gore's office. I think 262 that my father and Mr. Edward Everett relieved Mr. Edward Ezekiel Webster in that school at different times when Everett he was not well. I may say in passing that that was the sort of men who were schoolmasters before the in- ventions of modern machinery. Of course their children were intimate friends. Edward Webster, the second son of him whom we celebrate, only six months older than I, was my school- mate till we were twelve years old. We struck with the same bat at the same ball : we drove our hoops side by side : we made the same mistakes over the same fable of Phaedrus. If we were in the house, it was his father's house or my father's house. Almost the earliest thing I remember was a September visit to the Cape in 1826, when Mr. Webster and Judge Story and Judge Fay and my father went down to the Cape for some shooting. The ladies and children of the families went with them, and great was my pride when at the modest age of four years I was permitted to discharge one of the guns at an unoffending shingle. Mr. Web- ster was very fond of children and got along excellently well with them. I am always proud to tell this story of a child's game of speculation or commerce at which at some birthday party we were all playing in his own library. The great library table was cleared for us, and, as it happened, I sat by Mr. Webster's side. In the exigencies of the game, perhaps from my own impru- dent playing, I had lost all my ivory counters, and I cried out, " I have nothing left. Have I no friend who will lend to me ?" With perfectly characteristic gen- erosity, Mr. Webster pushed half his stock in front of me and said, " Edward, as long as I live you shall never 263 Edward sa Y you have not a friend." I was a child, but I Everett treasured the words and they always proved true. Hale Senator Lodge may well express his surprise that any one who knew Mr. Webster at all thought he had no sense of humor. His humor cropped out always when he was at ease. In those days of his younger practice, he was sitting in the Dedham Court House when a murder trial was going on. He may have been one of the counsel, I do not know. He condensed the testimony in these lines, which are gruesome enough, but show his ready and easy tact in versification : " There was blood on the door, There was blood on the floor, There was blood on the kitchen stair, And all in the cracks Of the murderer's axe There was clotted blood and hair." I cannot dissect his contribution, but I have a child's poem which he and some of the other lawyers wrote with my father and mother for me, to entertain me in sickness. It was the trial of the sparrow for the murder of cock robin. I have always guessed that Mr. Webster furnished these lines, because they are the best in the little poem and because they are such good law : "The judge charged the jury For an hour and a quarter ; He spoke first of murder And then of manslaughter. "He stated that malice Was the essence of crime, And that this was too clear To take up their time ; "That if the defendant, When his arrow he hurled, 264 Had acted from malice Edwafd Against the whole world, Everett "And cared not who suffered, Hale So he had his sport, That then he deserved The worst sentence of Court." It has not seemed to me that enough has been said of the wide range of observation, of reading, of conversa- tion, and, therefore, of information which went with the tireless activity of an unequalled mind. He would talk of Greek history, he would discuss the letters of Linnaeus as easily as he might tell an anecdote of John Adams, or laugh at an absurdity of Lord Eldon. He worked very easily, so easily that I have heard men speak of his leisure as if it were affected leisure. This does not seem to me fair. He seemed to be ready to discuss the accuracy of Pope's translation of Homer, and he was ready. He was ready, because that morn- ing at half-past five he had lighted the kindlings in his own grate, had been at his desk at six, and when the family met at breakfast he had already finished the im- portant part of the work of the day. I would gladly speak of the devout and distinctly spiritual element in Mr. Webster's power. I would like to say a word in condemnation of the preposterous imputation that he was intemperate in his appetites. But on these matters I am sure that full justice will be done him by history. President Tucker : If we pass from personal remi- niscences of Mr. Webster to his political inheritance, to whom shall we turn with one accord except to the senior Senator from Massachusetts Senator Hoar. 265 George Speech of tHe Honorable George Frisbie Hoar, LL. D. Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : OW many men have there been in this country whose college would celebrate their taking their degree one hundred years afterward, or fifty years after they died ? It might have been done for Washington and Lincoln. But they were not college men. It might have been done for Hamilton or Jeffer- son. But neither Hamilton or Jefferson got through college, and Jefferson was not in general a favorite with college men. I believe Bowdoin will do it for Long- fellow, and I believe Harvard will do it for Emerson. I cannot think of any other. Yet no man will doubt the absolute fitness of the ceremonial of to-day. Daniel Webster died under a cloud of obloquy. He had deeply offended the North, and he had not won the South. He had offended his own state, which had so honored and loved him. The ordinary political antago- nisms, always bitter, bitter now, were bitter in his time to a degree we can hardly comprehend now. He had pained and grieved the conscience of his country. He was held for a time to be untrue to liberty. I suppose the contemporary judgment when he died was that of Theodore Parker, rather than that of Choate or of Everett. But now few men can be found anywhere who think otherwise than kindly and lovingly of this illustrious son of Dartmouth. We have had fifty years to think of it. If the republic abide, his name and fame will abide with it. If the republic die, his name and fame shall 266 be inseparably intertwined with its memory, as the fame George of Pericles is intertwined with that of Athens. Frisbic The wisest and best men are likely to differ most Hoar sharply in applying what seem the simplest and clearest principles of morals and duty and political liberty to the conduct of states, as they differ most sharply as to the creeds of religious sects, and the man who is most positive is most likely to be wrong. The moral is not that good men should abate in their zeal for righteous- ness or liberty, but only that they should abate in the bitterness of their judgments of others with whom they differ. We have learned, nearly all of us, that the things about which honest and brave and patriotic men are most likely to differ and to impute bad motives and inconsistencies to each other, are those which seem to them the plainest principles and the clearest maxims of public liberty, or the most express and unmistakable mandates of religion. Each man has given to him his own light. He is a laggard or a dastard if he do not follow it. But he is nowhere commanded to sit in judgment on the motives of other men. On the contrary, the divine command is, "Judge not," and the punishment for disobedience to that command is that you are to be treated as you treat other men, and that the measure you mete shall be measured to you again. In doing justice to him, let us do justice to the men who condemned him. Those of us who thought as I thought, and as I now think, the counsel he gave his countrymen in regard to the Compromise Measures, in conflict with the great mandate of justice and of consti- 267 George tutional liberty and in conflict with the doctrine he had Frisbie taught his 'country men throughout his life, may still Hoar bring their tribute of honor to his memory, as Whittier, who had written Ichabod brought his imperishable trib- ute of affection and honor, which, alas ! was never placed on the brow of Webster, but only laid on his grave. I have been asked to speak of Mr. Webster as a Senator. He was, beyond doubt, the foremost of American Senators. When we think of the Senate Chamber, we think of him as its principal figure and or- nament. Yet he did much less than many other men to influence the action of the Senate. In his time, the Senate, more than before or since, might have been de- scribed as a meeting of the Ambassadors of States. Its members met with minds made up and did not expect to convince one another. He spoke, as his successor said he did, "as from a pulpit with a lofty sounding- board," with the whole people for his congregation. His place in history is that of a public teacher, guiding the thought and inspiring the emotions of his countrymen when the issues on which hung the fate of the republic were being determined. For this function he was fitted alike by his intellect and his heart. He was a great reasoner, a great orator, and a great lover. He had the qualities which belong to humanity, by which its hold, half on earth and half on heaven, is maintained. Matthew Arnold said that our American public men lacked distinction. He allowed that quality to Grant, though he could not find it in Abraham Lincoln. If he did not find it in Webster, the cultured and fastidious 268 Englishman would probably have denied it to the Apollo George Belvedere, or the Phidian Jove, or the great god Pan. Frisbie Why, the draymen in London turned to look after him in the streets ! Sidney Smith said he was a steam engine in breeches. He moved to an unwonted admira- tion the bitter cynicism of Carlyle. If ever being walked the earth clad in the panoply of an imperial manhood, it was Daniel Webster. If ever being trod the earth of whom the Greek or Roman fable would have made a demi-god, it was this child of the New Hampshire farm- house. Even when his foes would describe him, at the time when political hatred was most bitter, they had to borrow Milton's lofty imagery, as he pictures the fallen angels gathered in their awful Senate Chamber. He was a great lover. Was there ever a man who loved his country, or who loved his college, or who loved his father and his brother and his children, and his neighbors and friends, who loved the old scenes over which his mother had led his boyish feet, or where he dwelt with his neighbors by mountain or shore, as Daniel Webster loved them ? There was never a child entered his presence that did not remember to his dying day the kindly and tender look that came from the deep eyes, and the win- ning and beautiful smile that lit up the melancholy of the grave face, no matter what care might be weighing upon the brow. His sentences dwell and abide with us like the Psalms of David or the songs of Burns. Bright boys repeat them over and over to themselves. The fisher- man on the boat thinks of them, and the sailor at the helm, and the farmer as he holds the plow. They come 269 George up in the mind of the soldier as he goes into battle, and Frisbie the patriot on his dying bed. Hoar When New Hampshire, a little while ago, placed his statue in the Capitol, I had something to do with the transaction. Just afterward, I got two letters from brave soldiers of the Civil War. One of them says : "In the forlorn hope at Port Hudson, beaten back, we sought the refuge of the scraggy brushes, and then, on that cloudless afternoon, I saw the flag of our regiment, and his undying peroration returned to my mind. Who can say how much that speech shotted our guns?" The other told me that he was stationed one night on picket duty, where two sentinels in succession had just before been shot down. As he marched up and down in the loneliness of the night, thinking that at any time his death-shot might ring out from the thicket, he kept up his courage by repeating to himself, over and over and over again, the closing passage of the reply to Hayne, which he had got by heart in his boyhood. The same thoughts have been uttered before and since by other orators. Other men have appealed to the same emotion. Other men have spoken to the same people, but only to meet the fate of him who tried to rival the inimitable thunderbolt and storm with sound- ing of brass and trampling of the feet of horses. "Qui nimbus et non imitabile fulmen Acre et cornipedum pulsu simularet equorum." It is said that other countries are founded upon force ; that in the end they rest upon the bayonet and the cannon. I am not sure that this theory will bear the light of careful consideration. But however that may be, the Republic is founded upon ideas. When 270 those ideas lose their power over the minds and hearts George of the people, the Republic will come to an end. It is Frisbie the fortune of Daniel Webster, as of no other man ex- Hoar cept Jefferson, that the great ideas which lie at the foun- dation of the Republic clothe themselves to every man's understanding in his language, and rest for their sanc- tion and vindication upon his argument. In general, our knowledge of history is like our memory of a journey in a foreign land. We remember vividly a few great pictures in great galleries. We think of a few landscapes, and, perhaps, the forms and faces of a few famous men. If we met them and talked with them, we remember what they said. Everything else is blurred and indistinct. So history is made up to us of a few memorable scenes, a few human figures, or a few sentences that have fallen from some great actor on a great occasion. We know our own history as well as any people on the face of the earth. Yet still what I have said is true of us. To every American, certainly to every son of New England, to blot out the figure of Daniel Webster from our history, from the day Wash- ington died till the day Lincoln took the oath of office, would be like cutting out the figure of the Virgin Mary from Raphael's great painting at Dresden. How it mingles with every great event and in every historic spot ! To the lover of constitutional liberty, there is nothing like the reply to Hayne since Pericles died, save only the dying speech of Chatham, and that of Patrick Henry at Williamsburg. There is nothing like it since, save Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg. We cannot think of the Senate Chamber without him. We cannot think of the Supreme Court without him. We cannot think 27* George of Dartmouth College without him. We cannot think Frisbie o f Faneuil Hall without him. We cannot think of Bos- ton, or Concord, or Lexington, or Bunker Hill, without him. We cannot think of New Hampshire without him. We cannot think of Massachusetts without him. We cannot think of America without him. We cannot think of the Constitution or of the Union without him. His figure naturally belongs to and mingles with all great scenes and great places which belong to liberty. Emerson said his presence would have been enough, even had he refrained from speech, when the monument at Bunker Hill was dedicated. There was the monu- ment, and there was Webster. There is no judgment of any court, save Marshall's, more weighty, I am afraid there is none more likely to be of permanent authority, than the recorded opinions of Webster on Constitutional Law. There is nothing in our forensic literature more likely to endure than his speeches. He not only seemed to give a new nobility to what is noble and great, but he ennobled and made great the common scenes of common life with which he mingled. I venture to say that every man now living, or every man who ever did live, who saw Webster, if it were but as he passed in the street, remembered it freshly ever afterward, as an indelible memory of life. Whether it were in the schoolroom at Exeter, or the classroom at Dartmouth, or the quiet visit at some neighbor's home, or in some great natural scene, or some great public gathering by the seashore, or on the mountain, or in the college hall, or in the court room, or in the Senate Cham- 272 her, he is still everywhere the foremost figure and is in- George separably blended with the scene. Frisbie Hoar President Tucker : I am told that it is contrary to the traditions of the Supreme Court of the United States that the Chief -Justice should speak in any official or semi-official way on general public occasions. I beg the Chief -Justice of the United States, if hampered by the traditions of the Court, to remember that he is now in his ancestral home and that he is enjoying the privacy of the occasion. SpeecK of CHief-Justice Melville Western Fuller, L,L. D. Mr. President and Brethren : T gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the cor- dial welcome you have extended to me, but in accepting the kind invitation of your committee to be present at this commemoration I had no intention of delivering an address or making any extended re- marks. I adhere in that respect to the general rule, which, as I understand it, has been observed by my il- lustrious predecessors, not meaning by the remark to include my associates on the bench. All will admit that the rule is an exceedingly salutary one to be ob- served at one o'clock at night. But some words I will add, in respect of certain special considerations, which have moved me to be with you. I say special consid- erations, for the desire to participate in this celebration needs no explanation. As the president told you this morning, my father's father and my mother's father were both graduates of 273 Melville Dartmouth, and both in College with Mr. Webster. Weston Chief -Justice Weston graduated two years later. Henry Fuller \v. Fuller was his classmate, or as Mr. Webster him- self put it, his " brother student, brother collegemate brother classmate, brother Prater, brother Adelphian, and friend." Mr. Webster's letters to that classmate are heirlooms in the family and they amply illustrate the charming phase of Mr. Webster's character to which Dr. Hale has referred. In one of them he gives the process of reasoning by which the conclusion is reached that Daniel Webster is the handsomest man in New England. As I remember it, it ran something like this: That Boston was the handsomest town in New England; that Christopher Gore's office was the handsomest office in Boston ; and that Daniel Webster was the handsom- est man in Christopher Gore's office. Argal, that Dan- iel Webster was the handsomest man in New England. In another he writes that he has heard from Davis that everything is going on finely at Hanover, pumpkin pie and professors plenty ; wheat and poetry a good deal blasted ; girls and ginger-bread as sweet as ever ; and in another he compares life to a contra-dance in which he thinks somehow he has " slipped a foot." You can readily understand the influence which such recollec- tions, coupled with traditions of the relations between the two friends, naturally had upon me on receiving the invitation of your committee. But there was another and a weightier cause that impelled me, a sense of duty to testify by my personal attendance to the tie that binds the memory of this great minister of justice to the court, in aid of whose labors some of the most splendid mani- festations of his intellectual power were exhibited. It 274 is impossible to overestimate the support that the court Melville derives from the bar, and in Mr. Webster's arguments Weston fidelity to the court is as conspicuous as fidelity to his Fuller client. It was not client first, and conscience after- wards, but duty to both together, one and inseparable. And this was so notwithstanding that on occasion he departed from the logical line of his contention to in- dulge in outbursts of wonderful and apparently spon- taneous eloquence. I should like to go further and to dwell on the long line of cases in which Mr. Webster's work contributed so much to strengthen and solidify our institutions, and "to clear the foundations, strengthen the pillars, and raise the august dome of the Temple of Justice still higher in the skies." But I for- bear in deference to the precedent to which I have al- luded. Nearly forty-nine years ago, an undergraduate on leave of absence for the purpose, I attended the funeral of Mr. Webster at Marshfield. The beauty of that Octo- ber day ; the majestic aspect of the great lawyer and advocate, statesman and orator, as he lay in his accus- tomed habiliments under the spreading branches of a beautiful tree in front of the mansion ; and the walk of neighbors and friends, distinguished personages, and others, over the fields to the grave, are still vivid in my memory. As a youth I paid that tribute to Daniel Webster, an incident quite unimportant save to the boy himself. And I repeat it now after the lapse of nearly fifty years, with the added significance involved in the office I hold, whose incumbent if another than myself would have been fully justified, as I am, in bearing wit- ness as such, to the immortality of a fame so connected 275 Melville with the administration of justice, and with the vindica- "Weston tion of liberty as the creature of law, that, to use his Fuller own language, it "is and must be as durable as the frame of human society." President Tucker : Brethren, it remains for me only while you are standing on the eve of your going, to return the thanks of Dartmouth College to our dis- tinguished guests who have honored us by their words and by their presence and to announce that the Webster Centennial is closed. 276 Appendix Effect of tHe Dartmouth College Case as a Precedent.* y the Honorable cAlfred Russell LL. D., '50. T was charged, and doubtless firmly believed, by the statesmen and philosophers of the old world, that property would not be safe under a govern- ment like ours, derisively called by Thomas Carlyle "anarchy plus a street constable." But the College Case so construed and applied a provision of our Federal Constitution as to render vested rights, of a corporate character, more secure here than in Europe. In the mother country, where the power of Parlia- ment is not limited by a written constitution, that body has introduced into the universities, and other endowed charities, changes greater than the state sought to im- pose upon the college, and has deprived business cor- porations of their franchises as a matter of mere legisla- tive discretion, as in the noteworthy case of the East India Company, in 1858, which governed millions of people. By the original College charter from the king, granted in 1769, twelve persons therein named were in- *The regret caused by the absence of Mr. Kussell from the ban- quet and the loss of the speech which he would have made is in part compensated for by this article which is inserted by permission. The paper is of special value as presenting an aspect of the Dartmouth College Case not otherwise treated in the addresses or speeches of this volume. 279 The corporated by the name of "The Trustees of Dartmouth Appendix College," and to them and their successors the usual corporate privileges and powers were granted, among which was authority to govern the College and fill all vacancies in their own body. By acts of the Legisla- ture of New Hampshire, passed in 1816, the charter was amended, the number of trustees increased to twenty- one, the appointment of the additional members vested in the executive of the state, and a Board of Overseers, consisting of twenty-five persons, created, with power to inspect and control the most important acts of the trustees. The President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives of New Hampshire, and the Governor and Lieutenant- Governor of Vermont, for the time being, were to be members "ex officio"; and the Board was to be completed by the Governor and Council of New Hampshire, who were also empowered to fill all vacancies which might occur. A majority of the trustees of the College refused to accept this amended charter, and brought suit for the corporate property, which was in the possession of a person hold- ing by authority of the acts of the Legislature. The Superior Court of Judicature of New Hamp- shire sustained the legislation of the State. Upon re- view by the Federal Supreme Court, it was said that the ingredients of a contract are parties, consent, con- sideration and obligation ; that the case presented all these ; that the parties were the king and the donees of the powers and privileges conferred ; that consent was shown by what they did ; that the considerations were the investments of moneys for the purpose of the foun- dation, the public benefits expected to accrue, and the 280 implied undertaking of the corporation faithfully to The fulfill the duties with which it was charged ; that the Appendix obligation was to do the latter under the penalty of forfeiture for non-user or mis-user ; that on the part of the king there was an implied obligation that the life of the compact should be subject to no other contingency. The Court, therefore, declared the charter to possess all the elements of a contract, within the meaning of Article i, Section 10, of the Constitu- tion, ordaining that no state shall pass any law impair- ing the obligations of contracts. It was consequently ruled that the State laws changing the charter without the consent of the corporation were repugnant to the Federal Constitution, the supreme law of the land, bind- ing the judges in every state, and the judgment of the State Court was reversed and annulled. During the eighty years since this decision, made in 1819, the Federal Supreme Court has often said that the question decided in the College Case has been considered as finally settled in the jurisprudence of the entire country ; that murmurs of doubt and dissatisfac- tion are occasionally heard, but that there has been no re-argument in that Court and that none has ever been asked for. The Court has also said that the decision must be regarded as imbedded in the Constitution itself, and that it has been re-affirmed and applied so often as to have become established as a canon of American juris- prudence. The adoption of the fourteenth amendment, in 1868, amounted to a solemn approval of the decision by the states themselves, and extended the guardianship 28J The of the Federal Constitution over all other rights within Appendix t h e states, as well as contracts. Many hundreds of subsequent cases in both Federal and State Courts have established the law, in conform- ity with the College Case, that wherever rights have been acquired by virtue of a corporate charter, such rights, so far as necessary to the complete enjoyment of the main object of the grant, are contracts and beyond the reach of legislation, unless the express power of amendment, alteration or repeal has been reserved by the state granting the charter. The College Case has justly been regarded as a bulwark of private property, and the numerous decis- ions based upon it, setting aside acts of the state legis- latures, have been of inestimable benefit. The aston- ishing inventions which have greatly increased the busi- ness of transportation and interstate commerce have been steadily adjudicated upon according to the prin- ciple of the College Case, and this course of adjudication has been largely the source of the success of the great enterprises which have so much benefited the country. In the intervening time, important modifications of the Case have been made. Our system of judiciary law has the advantage that its elasticity enables those who administer it to adapt it to the varying conditions of the successive generations to whom it is immediately applied. The America of 1901 is very different from the America of 1819. The requirements and habits, wants, usages, and interests of the different stages of time elapsing since the decision have, indeed, led to modifications of the decision, but its principle is ab- sojutely untouched, and always will be. Twenty years 282 after the decision it was determined in. the Charles The River Bridge Case that an exclusive right to enjoy a Appendix franchise can never be presumed, and that, unless the charter contains words of exclusion, it is no impairment of the grant, under the College Case, to permit another to do the same thing, although the value of the franchise to the first grantee may be wholly destroyed. Such is the law to-day. Forty years after the Bridge Case came the so-called Granger Cases, holding that all private property, corporate or not, which is affected with a pub- lic use, is subject to the affirmative right of the State Legislature to fix the charges for the use of such prop- erty ; and this principle was applied to the western grain elevators and grain conveying railroads. These cases were the outgrowth of a widely diffused feeling of apprehension that the accumulation of wealth was too much protected by the principle of the College Case. Twenty years after the Granger Cases the College Case came again under review in the so-called Nebraska Case and kindred cases, establishing that there is implied in the franchise of a carrying corporation a grant of a con- tract right to collect such tolls as will enable the com- pany to operate and return a profit to the investors, and that the reasonableness of rates of carriage, fixed by the Legislature under the Granger Cases, may be re- viewed by the courts. These cases grew out of the portentous fact that the states, acting on the principle of the Granger Cases, were passing laws which were de- stroying the value of railroad property. The Federal Supreme Court has had, perhaps, more frequent occasion to re-affirm the principle of the College Case in cases respecting the power of taxation 283 The than in any other; and, in a long series of decisions, Appendix has held that a provision in a charter imposing certain taxes in lieu of all other taxes or of all taxes, to which the company or stockholders therein would be subject, is impaired by legislation raising the rate of taxation, or imposing taxes other than those specified in the char- ter ; and this doctrine has been strictly adhered to up to the present time. Within the same principle, derived from the Col- lege Case as limited by the Bridge Case, are grants of an exclusive right to supply gas, or water, to a municipal- ity, or to occupy its streets for railway purposes. So we see that the principles of the College Case, arising concerning the privileges of an ancient institu- tion for the preservation of learning and religion, has not only been a shield and buckler for those transcendent interests of our country, but has been carried, in a most unforeseen way, into the domain of the vast business concerns of continental America. The wealth of our corporations equals in value four-fifths of the entire property of the country. They do business with the citizens of every state, and with foreign nations, and in their enormous transactions and litigations, it is the aegis of the College Case which is held over them, a sure protection. It may be said, in conclusion, that the effect of the College Case as a precedent has been the creation of the whole body of American doctrine regarding vested rights, as applied to the charters of corporations. This doc- trine was born of the College Case, and lives, moves, and has its being in it, and always will as long as our government endures. This case has been cited in sub- 284 sequent judicial opinions more times than any other case The in the "American Reports," about nine hundred Appendix and seventy times ! Letter from Daniel Webster to Horatio G. Ciiley, E-sqtzire.* WASHINGTON, Sunday Evening, February 35, 1838. My Dear Sir : EFORE this reaches you, you will probably have heard of the death of your Nephew, the Hon'ble Mr. Cilley, member of the House of Represen- tatives from the State of Maine. This melancholy event was the result of a Duel, fought yesterday afternoon, between him and the Hon- 'ble Mr. Graves, a member of the same House of Congress, from the State of Kentucky. I have no authentic information of the circum- stance which led to the contest, nor of those which accompanied it. The friends of the Parties will no doubt immediately lay before the public statements of such particulars as they may suppose friends may desire naturally to be informed of. The main object of this letter, is to express my commiseration with the numerous branches of your family, with whom I have been more or less acquainted, at this afflicting occur- rence. Mr. Cilley himself I had not known much. He "This letter was read at the meeting in the Old Chapel on "Wednes- day afternoon, and is referred to on page 188 of this volume. As it was received too late for publication in the body of the book, it is in- serted here. 285 The had so recently become a member of Congress, that our Appendix acquaintance was slight. I had heard him speak in his place, once or twice, however, and I thought he spoke with ability. But having known his father, and most of his uncles, either in public or private life, and hav- ing had some little acquaintance with his relatives, of his own generation, I have felt it a kind of duty to ex- press toward them condolence, and commiseration, and I ask you to communicate these sentiments, as you may meet with the members of the family, whom I know. The members of the Delegation from Maine, in both Houses, all of whom are deeply affected by the event, will do all that remains to be done. The funeral will probably be attended to-morrow. How melancholy it is, My Dear Sir, that neither law nor religion, nor both, can check the prevalence, in society, of the practice of private combat! With friendly regard, Yours, DANL. WEBSTER. Horatio G. Cilley, Esq., Deerfield, N. Hamp. 286 HIS book was designed, pot into type and printed for Dartmouth College, at the Dartmouth Press, Hanover, New Hampshire, MCMH j* & o* & jf> UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. DEC 1 3 19 OiC 1 2 RECD JAN 5 1952 JP 1 1953 OCT 1 4 1953 AUG 3 1999 REC'D MLO NIG 3 1959 iY2 $69 V AV O ' Form L9-50m-ll;'io (25541444 MAR15J THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF C V.LIFORNU LOS ~ i i