Definition
Want to make a historian mad? Look at this statue and say, "I really love that guy's dictionary."
This is one of several statues standing outside the New Hampshire statehouse, and it depicts Daniel Webster, the most famous New Hampshirian of them all. (The funny thing about that is that he did most of his famous stuff after he moved to Massachusetts.) Webster was a US representative from New Hampshire for most of the 1820s and a US senator from Massachusetts from 1827 to 1841. After that, he did a few stints as US Secretary of State for Presidents William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and Millard Fillmore. The political parties underwent a constant churn in those days, but Webster was aligned with the party that would most closely conform to today's Democratic Party. So, first the Federalists, then the National Republicans (who were a different group from today's Republicans), then the Whigs.
This was in that era immediately after the Founding Fathers left the national stage, in the second generation of American leadership. Those leaders made things convenient for future historians by representing all sides of American politics in a Great Triumvirate of senators -- Webster the abolitionist, John Calhoun the slaver, and Henry Clay the compromiser. Webster was famous as a brilliant orator, and the most frequent dynamic involved him giving brilliant speeches in support of whatever compromise Clay put together to stop Calhoun's worst impulses. Webster was a sort of weak-tea abolitionist, though, and he crafted a policy that emphasized working with the South for peace instead of pushing the slave issue. One of his last great achievements was helping Clay push through the Compromise of 1850, which gave the South things like the Fugitive Slave Law and the reversal of key points of the Missouri Compromise, and for his efforts he and Clay delayed the Civil War by about a decade. He didn't live to see it all come crashing down, though. He died of cirrhosis of the liver and a subdural hematoma in 1852 at the age of 70.
Definition
Want to make a historian mad? Look at this statue and say, "I really love that guy's dictionary."
This is one of several statues standing outside the New Hampshire statehouse, and it depicts Daniel Webster, the most famous New Hampshirian of them all. (The funny thing about that is that he did most of his famous stuff after he moved to Massachusetts.) Webster was a US representative from New Hampshire for most of the 1820s and a US senator from Massachusetts from 1827 to 1841. After that, he did a few stints as US Secretary of State for Presidents William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and Millard Fillmore. The political parties underwent a constant churn in those days, but Webster was aligned with the party that would most closely conform to today's Democratic Party. So, first the Federalists, then the National Republicans (who were a different group from today's Republicans), then the Whigs.
This was in that era immediately after the Founding Fathers left the national stage, in the second generation of American leadership. Those leaders made things convenient for future historians by representing all sides of American politics in a Great Triumvirate of senators -- Webster the abolitionist, John Calhoun the slaver, and Henry Clay the compromiser. Webster was famous as a brilliant orator, and the most frequent dynamic involved him giving brilliant speeches in support of whatever compromise Clay put together to stop Calhoun's worst impulses. Webster was a sort of weak-tea abolitionist, though, and he crafted a policy that emphasized working with the South for peace instead of pushing the slave issue. One of his last great achievements was helping Clay push through the Compromise of 1850, which gave the South things like the Fugitive Slave Law and the reversal of key points of the Missouri Compromise, and for his efforts he and Clay delayed the Civil War by about a decade. He didn't live to see it all come crashing down, though. He died of cirrhosis of the liver and a subdural hematoma in 1852 at the age of 70.