It should be borne in mind that the Daniel Webster who emerged from the debate was not the same public character who had entered it. By that epochal utterance he obliterated the one vulnerable point in his career--for the Daniel Webster of 1829 was vulnerable. He entered politics in New Hampshire as a Federalist--“liberal Federalist,” to use the phrase of his biographer.[246] Notwithstanding this “liberality,” he was to become considerably smirched by party loyalty during the war with England. This war was the occasion for his first public utterance, when, on July 4, 1812, he bitterly denounced the war with true Federalistic fervor at Portsmouth. This speech, printed and circulated for propaganda purposes against the war, ran into two editions, and led to his selection as a delegate to the notorious Rockingham County mass meeting. Here it fell to him to prepare the address known to history as the “Rockingham Memorial” to which the advocates of the sinister doctrine of Nullification pointed approvingly up to the Civil War. The notoriety of this document resulted in his election to Congress, where his record was everything it should not have been. His first move was to heckle the President by calling upon him for information as to the time and manner of the repeal of the French decrees--which was in line with his previous denunciation of France. The enemies of the War of 1812 were bitter against the French, just as the enemies of the World War, over a century later, were bitter against the English. And while his country was at war with a powerful foe, he voted against taxes necessary for the waging of it; fought the compulsory draft of men for the miserable little army on the ground that the States alone had the right to resort to conscription; and even threatened the dissolution of the Union with the suggestion that “it would be the solemn duty of the State Governments to protect their authority over their own State militia, and to interpose between their citizens and arbitrary power.” He stubbornly resisted the attempt to extend martial law to all citizens suspected of treason; actually declaimed against the bill to encourage enlistments; opposed the war policy of the war Administration and urged a defensive warfare. And, of course, he intemperately denounced the embargo. This course made him by long odds the most conspicuous Federalist in the House, and while he opposed the Hartford Convention, he does not appear to have looked upon it as seditious or treasonable, and as late as 1820, in his Boston speech, utterly ignored by his biographers, he practically proclaimed the right of secession. In brief, throughout the second war against England he was found just on the safe side of the line of sedition. His position at the time was notorious, and Isaac Hill, in the “New Hampshire Patriot,” was openly accusing him of trying to dissolve the Union and to array the North against the South.