I have called this biography “From Farm-boy to Senator,” because it is as a senator that Daniel Webster especially distinguished himself. At different times he filled the position of Secretary of State, but it was in the Senate Chamber, where he was associated with other great leaders, in especial Clay, Calhoun and Hayne, that he became a great central object of attention and admiration.

Mr. Webster was not elected to the Senate till he had reached the age of forty-five. For him it was a late preferment, and when it came he accepted it reluctantly. Mr. Clay was not yet thirty when he entered the Senate, and Mr. Calhoun was Vice-President before he attained the age of forty-five. But there was this advantage in Mr. Webster’s case, that when he joined the highest legislative body in the United States he joined it as a giant, fully armed and equipped not only by nature but by long experience in the lower House of Congress, where he was a leader.

The preferment came to him unsought. Mr. Mills, one of the senators from Massachusetts, who had filled his position acceptably, was drawing near the close of his term, and his failing health rendered his re-election impolitic. Naturally Mr. Webster was thought of as his successor, but he felt that he could hardly be spared from the lower House, where he was the leading supporter of the administration of John Quincy Adams. Levi Lincoln was at that time Governor of Massachusetts, and he too had been urged to become a candidate. Mr. Webster wrote him an urgent letter, in the hope of persuading him to favor this step. From that letter I quote:

“I take it for granted that Mr. E. H. Mills will be no longer a candidate. The question then will be, Who is to succeed him? I need not say to you that you yourself will doubtless be a prominent object of consideration in relation to the vacant place, and the purpose of this communication requires me also to acknowledge that I deem it possible that my name also should be mentioned, more or less generally, as one who may be thought of, among others, for the same situation.... There are many strong personal reasons, and, as friends think, and as I think too, some public reasons why I should decline the offer of a seat in the Senate if it should be made to me. Without entering at present into a detail of those reasons, I will say that the latter class of them grow out of the public station which I at present fill, and out of the necessity of increasing rather than of diminishing, in both branches of the National Legislature, the strength that may be reckoned on as friendly to the present administration.... To come, therefore, to the main point, I beg to say that I see no way in which the public good can be so well promoted as by your consenting to go into the Senate.

“This is my own clear and decided opinion; it is the opinion, equally clear and decided, of intelligent and patriotic friends here, and I am able to add that it is also the decided opinion of all those friends elsewhere whose judgment in such matters we should naturally regard. I believe I may say, without violating confidence, that it is the wish, entertained with some earnestness, of our friends at Washington that you should consent to be Mr. Mills’s successor.”

No one certainly can doubt the absolute sincerity of these utterances. It was, and is, unusual for a representative to resist so earnestly what is considered a high promotion. Mr. Webster was an ambitious man, but he thought that the interests of the country required him to stay where he was, and hence his urgency.

But Gov. Lincoln was no less patriotic. In an elaborate reply to Mr. Webster’s letter, from which I have quoted above, he urges that “the deficiency of power in the Senate is the weak point in the citadel” of the administration party. “No individual should be placed there but who was now in armor for the conflict, who understood the proper mode of resistance, who personally knew and had measured strength with the opposition, who was familiar with the political interests and foreign relations of the country, with the course of policy of the administration, and who would be prepared at once to meet and decide upon the charter of measures which should be proposed. This, I undertake to say, no novice in the national council could do. At least I would not p............