Bedeviling Daniel Webster
By Bill Kauffman

Robert Penn Warren called it “one of the most telling poems of personal attack in English.” Vernon Parrington, Oklahoma Sooners football coach cum literary historian, judged it “the highwater mark of lyric indignation” whose author was “a bundle of Yankee nerves, responding only to moral stimuli.”

 

The poem was “Ichabod,” the poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, and the subject of his versy scorn, Daniel Webster—“the Godlike Daniel” or “Black Dan,” depending on whether you were friend or foe.

 

Webster’s finest or most faithless moment was his March 7 speech in support of the Compromise of 1850, a key element of which was the strengthening of the fugitive slave law. Webster regarded his oration as essential to domestic tranquility; abolitionists despised it as the craven betrayal of an unprincipled man.

 

Among the outraged was John Greenleaf Whittier. We remember Whittier as the beloved poet of New England autumns and snowbound winters, but he also sung odes to abolition and called down execrations upon the slavocracy.

 

“Ichabod” communicates disappointment even in its name (which comes from 1 Samuel 4:21: “They named the boy Ichabod, saying, ‘Glory has departed from Israel.’”). Whittier said that his poem was “the outcome of the surprise and grief and forecast of evil consequences which I felt on reading the seventh of March speech of Daniel Webster in support of the...Fugitive Slave Law.” If Webster had his way, Whittier feared, “the whole country” would be “made the huntingground of slave-catchers.”

 

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn

Which once he wore!

The glory from his gray hairs gone

Forevermore!...

Let not the land once proud of him

Insult him now,

Nor brand with deeper shame his dim,

Dishonored brow....

All else is gone; from those great eyes

The soul has fled;

When faith is lost, when honor dies,

The man is dead!

Then, pay the reverence of old days

To his dead fame;

Walk backward, with averted gaze,

And hide the shame!

 

The poem packed a wallop in part for its “Say it Ain’t So!” quality. As the poet explained, “No partisan or personal enmity dictated it. On the contrary, my admiration of the splendid personality and intellectual power of the great senator was never stronger than when I laid down his speech, and, in one of the saddest moments of my life, penned my protest.”

 

But Whittier is disingenuous: He knew well that Black Dan trimmed and temporized as smoothly as any man alive. Whittier had castigated Webster for serving in President Tyler’s cabinet in 1841, and in an 1847 letter he had roasted the statesman as a “colossal coward.”

 

Webster died in 1852, and for all the fulsome eulogies he inspired, the “Godlike Daniel” aura was gone. Whittier, though, “came eventually to feel that Webster was perhaps right,” speculates his biographer George Rice Carpenter. Though Webster’s compromise embraced the cruelty of fugitive slave laws, it might have averted war and achieved emancipation gradually.

 

The poet tried to make amends by honoring Webster posthumously in “The Lost Occasion.” But its verses are long forgotten, while “Ichabod” endures.

 

The moral of this story is: Be careful when you throw mud. It might stick.