CHAPTER XXVII.
DANIEL WEBSTER.
Darkest of the dark omens for the slave, in that dark day, was the defalcation of Daniel Webster.

He whose eloquence had secured in name the great Northwest to freedom, and who had so long been dreaded by the slave-power, had laid his crown in the dust; had counseled the people of the North to conquer their prejudices against catching slaves, and by his vote would open every sanctuary to the bloodhound.

The prestige of his great name and the power of his great intellect were turned over to slavery, and the friends of freedom deplored and trembled for the result.
There was some general knowledge through the country of the immorality of Southern men in our national capital.

Serious charges had been made by abolitionists against Henry Clay, but Webster was supposed to be a moral as well as an intellectual giant.

Brought up in Puritan New England, he was accredited with all the New England virtues; and when a Southern woman said to me, in answer to my strictures on Southern men: "Oh, you need not say anything! Look at your own Daniel Webster!" I wondered and began to look at and inquire about him, and soon discovered that his whole panoply of moral power was a shell--that his life was full of rottenness.