“The war for the Union was a vindication of that theory of its nature which Webster had maintained in a memorably impregnable and conclusive manner. His second speech on Foot’s resolution—the reply to Hayne—was the most famous and effective speech ever delivered in this country. It stated clearly and fixed firmly in the American mind the theory of the government, which was not, indeed, original with Webster, but which is nowhere else presented with such complete and inexorable reason as in this speech. If the poet be the man who is so consummate a master of expression that he only says perfectly what everybody thinks, upon this great occasion the orator was the poet. He spoke the profound but often obscured and dimly conceived conviction of a nation. He made the whole argument of the civil war a generation before the war occurred, and it has remained unanswered and unanswerable. Mr. Everett, in his discourse at the dedication of the statute of Webster, in the State-House grounds in Boston in 1859, described the orator at the delivery of this great speech. The evening before he seemed to be so careless that Mr. Everett feared that he might not be fully aware of the gravity of the occasion. But when the hour came, the man was there. ‘As I saw him in the evening, if I may borrow an illustration from his favorite amusement,’ said Mr. Everett, ‘he was as unconcerned and as free of spirit as some here have often seen him while floating in his fishing-boat along a hazy shore, gently rocking on the tranquil tide, dropping his line here and there with the varying fortune of the sport. The next morning he was like some mighty admiral, dark and terrible, casting the long shadow of his frowning tiers far over the sea, that seemed to sink beneath him; his broad pennant streaming at the main, the Stars and Stripes at the fore, the mizzen, and the peak, and bearing down like a tempest upon his antagonist, with all his canvas strained to the wind, and all his thunders roaring from his broadsides.’ This passage well suggests that indescribable impression of great oratory which Rufus Choate, in his eulogy of Webster at Dartmouth College, conveys by a felicitous citation of what Quintilian says of Hortensius, that there was some spell in the spoken word which the reader misses.”