Legislators -- United States -- Biography; United States -- Politics and government -- 1815-1861; Webster, Daniel, 1782-1852
Webster roused up, pushed back
his thick hair, shook himself, and glanced about him with the look of a
caged lion. When the judge paused, he turned again to the jury, his eyes no
longer half shut but wide open and glowing with excitement. Raising his
voice, he said, in tones which made every one start: "If my client could
recover under the law as I stated it, how much more is he entitled to
recover under the law as laid down by the court;" and then, the jury now
being thoroughly awake, he poured forth a flood of eloquent argument and
won his case. In his latter days Mr. Webster made many careless and dull
speeches and carried them through by the power of his look and manner, but
the time never came when, if fairly aroused, he failed to sway the hearts
and understandings of men by a grand and splendid eloquence. The lion slept
very often, but it never became safe to rouse him from his slumber.
It was soon after the reply to Hayne that Mr. Webster made his great
argument for the government in the White murder case. One other address to
a jury in the Goodridge case, and the defence of Judge Prescott before the
Massachusetts Senate, which is of similar character, have been preserved to
us. The speech for Prescott is a strong, dignified appeal to the sober, and
yet sympathetic, judgment of his hearers, but wholly free from any attempt
to confuse or mislead, or to sway the decision by unwholesome pathos. Under
the circumstances, which were very adverse to his client, the argument was
a model of its kind, and contains some very fine passages full of the
solemn force so characteristic of its author. The Goodridge speech is
chiefly remarkable for the ease with which Mr. Webster unravelled a
complicated set of facts, demonstrated that the accuser was in reality the
guilty party, and carried irresistible conviction to the minds of the
jurors. It was connected with a remarkable exhibition of his power of
cross-examination, which was not only acute and penetrating, but extremely
terrifying to a recalcitrant witness. The argument in the White case, as a
specimen of eloquence, stands on far higher ground than either of the other
two, and, apart from the nature of the subject, ranks with the very best of
Mr. Webster's oratorical triumphs. The opening of the speech, comprising
the account of the murder and the analysis of the workings of a mind seared
with the remembrance of a horrid crime, must be placed among the very
finest masterpieces of modern oratory. The description of the feelings of
the murderer has a touch of the creative power, but, taken in conjunction
with the wonderful picture of the deed itself, the whole exhibits the
highest imaginative excellence, and displays the possession of an
extraordinary dramatic force such as Mr. Webster rarely exerted. It has the
same power of exciting a kind of horror and of making us shudder with a
creeping, nameless terror as the scene after the murder of Duncan, when
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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