I do not mean to underrate the ability or eloquence of Col. Hayne. Upon this point it is sufficient to quote the opinion of Mr. Everett, the tried and intimate friend of Daniel Webster, who says: “It is unnecessary to state, except to those who have come forward quite recently, that Col. Hayne was a gentleman of ability very far above the average, a highly accomplished debater, an experienced politician, a person possessing the full confidence of his friends, and entirely familiar with the argument on which the theory controverted in Mr. Webster’s speech rests.” Mr. March, in his “Reminiscences of Congress,” a book from which I have received valuable help in the composition of this chapter, describes Hayne’s oratory in these terms: “Hayne dashed into debate like the Mameluke cavalry upon a charge. There was a gallant air about him that could not but win admiration. He never provided for retreat; he never imagined it. He had an invincible confidence in himself, which arose partly from constitutional temperament, partly from previous success. His was the Napoleonic warfare: to strike at once for the capital of the enemy, heedless of danger or cost to his own forces. Not doubting to overcome all odds, he feared none, however seemingly superior. Of great fluency and no little force of expression, his speech never halted, and seldom fatigued.” Mr. Webster swept on to the close of his speech with power unabated. Some of his friends had feared he could not sustain his elevated flight, that he would mar the effect of his great passages by dropping to the commonplace. They had no need to fear. He thoroughly understood his own powers. At length he reached the peroration—that famous peroration, so well known, yet, in spite of its familiarity, so impossible to omit here. “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 fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory, ‘What is all this worth?’ nor those other words of delusion and folly, ‘Liberty first and Union afterwards:’ but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the seas and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”