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Love of Gold and Other Ruling Passions: The Legal Papers of Daniel Webster

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Stephen Botein
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Type
Review Essays
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American Bar Foundation Research Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Winter 1985 , pp. 217 - 229
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1985 

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References

1 See Current, Richard N., Daniel Webster and the Rise of National Conservatism, ed. Oscar Handlin, 188 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1955). George Washington came in first.Google Scholar

2 Lincoln's professional self-estimate, from approximately 1850, is available in 2 Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln 81–82 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953).Google Scholar

3 Citations to the two volumes will be to 1 WLP and 2 WLP throughout the essay, parenthetically within the text for the most part.Google Scholar

4 3 The Law Practice of Alexander Hamilton: Documents and Commentary, ed. Julius Goebel, Jr., & Joseph H. Smith, viii (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

5 Parker, Joel, Daniel Webster as a Jurist 70–71 (Cambridge, Mass., 1853).Google Scholar

6 Everett Pepperrell Wheeler, Daniel Webster: The Expounder of the Constitution 6 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1905).Google Scholar

7 I Claude M. Fuess, Daniel Webster 267 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1930).Google Scholar

8 Quoted in Richard B. Morris, The Current Statesmen's Papers Publication Program: An Appraisal from the Point of View of the Legal Historian, 11 Am. J. Legal Hist. 95–96 (1967).Google Scholar

9 See Botein, Stephen, What We Shall Meet Afterwards in Heaven: Judgeship as a Symbol for Modern American Lawyers, in Gerald L. Geison, ed., Professions and Professional Ideologies in America 49, 53–54 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983) (quoting Joseph Story, Address Delivered Before the Members of the Suffolk Bar, 1821, in Perry Miller, ed., The Legal Mind in America: From Independence to the Civil War (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Anchor Books, 1962)).Google Scholar

10 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey N. Smith, 5–14 (New York: International Publishers Co., 1971).Google Scholar

11 See Botein, , supra note 9, at 52.Google Scholar

12 Fuess, supra note 7, vol. 2, at 318–19; 2 WLP 29.Google Scholar

13 Baxter, Maurice G., Daniel Webster and the Supreme Court (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966). Baxter has just made a massive new contribution to Webster biography, One and Inseparable: Daniel Webster and the Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), which unfortunately appeared too late for consideration in this article.Google Scholar

14 Fuess, supra note 7, vol. 2, at 298.Google Scholar

15 These and other attacks on Webster are well summarized in Irving H. Bartlett, Daniel Webster ch. 19, espec. at 268, 265, 254 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978).Google Scholar

16 Henry Cabot Lodge, Daniel Webster (Boston, Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1883). On the politicization of early Webster biography, see Sydney George Fisher, The True Daniel Webster xiv (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott Co., 1911).Google Scholar

17 Wheeler, supra note 6, at 159–60.Google Scholar

18 Id. at iv, 17–18.Google Scholar

19 Gramsci, supra note 10, at 5–14.Google Scholar

20 Current, supra note 1, at 192–93.Google Scholar

21 R. Kent Newmyer, Daniel Webster as Tocqueville's Lawyer: The Dartmouth College Case Again, 11 Am. J. Legal Hist. 127 (1967).Google Scholar

22 Gawalt, Gerard W., The Promise of Power: The Emergence of the Legal Profession in Massachusetts 1760–1840 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979).Google Scholar

23 Horwitz, Morton J., The Relation Between the Bar and Commercial Interests, in Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860, at 140 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

24 Fuess, supra note 7, vol 1, at 246.Google Scholar

25 For a full explanation of editorial policy, see 1 WLP xvii-xxii.Google Scholar

26 1 L. Kinvin Wroth & Hiller B. Zobel, eds., Legal Papers of John Adam xxx-xxxvii (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1965).Google Scholar

27 1 WLP ch. 12 runs almost 250 pages; 2 WLP ch. 6, more than 300 pages.Google Scholar

28 1 The Law Practice of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Julius Goebel, Jr., ix-xi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964).Google Scholar

29 Bloomfield, Maxwell, American Lawyers in a Changing Society, 1776–1876, at 151 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

30 See Botein, Stephen W., Biography in Legal History, 69 Law Libr. J. 456, 458 (quoting Lewis Namier), 457–58 (1976).Google Scholar

31 1 WLP 530–42 (the Pickering libel suit).Google Scholar

32 Miller, Perry, The Legal Mentality, in Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War 97, 109, 104–6 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).Google Scholar

33 See, e.g., Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

34 Parker, Edward G., The Golden Age of American Oratory 51, 64 (Boston: Whittemore, Niles, & Hall, 1857).Google Scholar

35 See, e.g., E. L. Magoon, Living Orators in America 1–64 (New York, 1849).Google Scholar

36 Parker, supra note 5, at 39.Google Scholar

37 Parker, supra note 34, at 55–56, 72–73, 94–95.Google Scholar

38 Magoon, supra note 35, at 58; David A. Harsha, The Most Eminent Orators and Statesmen of Ancient and Modern Times 441 (New York, 1855).Google Scholar

39 Miller, supra note 32, at 112–13, 152–54.Google Scholar

40 Oratory, American, or Selections from the Speeches of Eminent Americans 490 (Philadelphia, 1841). This volume was compiled “by a Member of the Philadelphia Bar.”Google Scholar

41 See, e.g., 2 S. P. Lyman, The Public and Private Life of Daniel Webster 285–86 (Philadelphia, 1852).Google Scholar

42 Oratory, American, supra note 40, at 488–89.Google Scholar

43 From a rather different perspective, Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture ch. 8 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), presents an interesting discussion of Webster's literary output. After 1830, as American jurisprudence became “increasingly technical,” Ferguson sees a “breakdown” in Webster's “configuration” of law and literature. According to the chronology of Konefsky and King, however, Webster had made a transition to the new professional expertise almost a quarter century earlier. Whether or not Ferguson is persuasive regarding Webster's final decades, which were devoted so considerably to public affairs, some further explanation is needed of what literature (romantic stirrings included) meant to a successful practitioner in the business environment of Boston following the War of 1812.Google Scholar

44 The Papers of Daniel Webster, ed. Charles M. Wiltse, frames 776,782 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1971).Google Scholar

45 See 1 George Ticknor Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster 74 and generally chs. 3–4 (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1870) for a very sympathetic and therefore peculiarly revealing portrait of the young Webster by one of his literary executors.Google Scholar

46 Bloomfield, supra note 29, at 143.Google Scholar

47 Nathans, Sydney, Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

48 Dalzell, Robert F., Jr., The Rise of the Waltham-Lowell System and Some Thoughts on the Political Economy of Modernization in Ante-Hellum Massachusetts, 9 Persps. Am. Hist. 257–61 (1975). Dalzell's biography is Daniel Webster and the Trial of American Nationalism, 1843–1852 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1973).Google Scholar

49 See, e.g., Newmyer, supra note 21, at 146–47.Google Scholar

50 Lyman, supra note 41, vol. 1, at 198–99.Google Scholar