Daniel Webster: A Conservative in a Democratic Age.

Daniel Webster: A Conservative in a Democratic Age, by Robert V. Remini (Norton, 850 pp., $39.95)

Mr. McDonald teaches history at the University of Alabama.

RECENTLY, my seminar students were engaged in a vigorous discussion apropos of David Hume's dictum that there is no ne- cessary connection between private morality and public virtue or disinterested service to the common good. As long as they focused upon the present, the students tended to disagree with Hume, maintaining that the scumbags in Washington today are both personally immoral and heedless of the best interests of the country. But as they looked back to the Founding generation and its nineteenth-century successors, they were able to name many men whose private lives could not stand close scrutiny but who in their political capacity were dedicated to the public weal.

A case in point is Daniel Webster, the subject of a new biography by the eminent political historian Robert V. Remini. In his personal affairs, Webster was far from a paragon. He deceived and betrayed his friends and admirers shamelessly. He was an inveterate womanizer, and, given what Henry Kissinger has called the aphrodisiac of power and celebrity, he had abundant opportunities for dalliance. He was a heavy boozer, and his drinking so increased during his second, unhappy marriage that he developed cirrhosis of the liver, which would have killed him except that a blow to the head suffered in a carriage accident beat cirrhosis to it.

His most serious shortcomings had to do with money. He earned enormous fees as a lawyer, being probably the ablest practitioner of his time, but he never had enough and he was perpetually in debt. His impecuniosity stemmed partly from generosity: he gave to the deserving poor, and on a number of occasions he bought slaves in order to free them, usually providing them employment in his household. Many of his financial woes arose from ill-conceived speculations in Western lands and other investments. But mostly he got into trouble through profligacy, spending lavishly on his country estate and buying expensive things with the addictive abandon of a modern credit-card junkie. He often neglected to repay his debts, even to friends who themselves were strapped. He made ends meet, more or less, by being a kept politician: groups of wealthy merchants and manufacturers, in whose interests he toiled diligently, regularly gave him large sums to keep up the good work. One critical historian has written that he asked "no particular quid pro quo other than a bribe." That is putting it too harshly, but it is true that as Secretary of State Webster did sell diplomatic appointments.

So much for the Webster who, according to Remini, was commonly known as "Black Dan." But there was another Webster, whom Remini describes perceptively, who was known to conservatives in New England as the "God-like Daniel," a great man who served his country well in several capacities. One was as a constitutional lawyer: in five of the eight most celebrated cases decided by the Supreme Court under John Marshall, including Dartmouth College v. Woodward and McCulloch v. Maryland, the opinion was drawn largely from Webster's pleadings. Another was as a leader in the Senate. Repeatedly, in times of strain, Webster rose as the voice of reason, moderation, and patriotism, and so persuasive was he that all but the dogmatically radical followed his lead. The most renowned occasions were during the nullification crisis of 1830 (the Webster - Hayne debates: "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable") and during the sectional crisis that preceded the Compromise of 1850. Still another role in which he served admirably was as Secretary of State. Under John Tyler, he negotiated the Webster - Ashburton Treaty (1842), which avoided what seemed certain to be a war between the United States and Great Britain. During the same Administration he became the architect of what would long be America's policy toward China, and later, under Millard Fillmore, he oversaw Commodore Matthew Perry's expedition which opened Japan.

His achievements as statesman, however, were overshadowed by his accomplishments as orator. His voice was a natural gift that enabled him to address audiences of five, ten, twenty thousand -- without amplification, of course -- and convey to them subtle nuances whether in whispers or in thunder. But he also worked hard on his orations, developing and polishing them weeks in advance. For his more famous performances, such as the Plymouth speech (1820), the Bunker Hill Commemorative Oration (1825), the Second Reply to Hayne (1830), and the Seventh of March speech (1850), he made copious notes but never had to use them. He had a phenomenal memory.

One might think oratory an ephemeral means of influencing the course of a nation's destiny. But Webster saw to it that his every major address was published and widely disseminated; no fewer than 200,000 copies of the Seventh of March speech were circulated. A measure of their influence is that schoolboys the nation over were memorizing and reciting Webster's orations for generations after he was dead.

Webster's message to his audiences was a set of variations on a few related themes: that America was a thrice-blessed land, that Americans owed a debt of gratitude to God and to their forebears who gave them free institutions, and that they must honor, preserve, and cherish those institutions -- the Union, a government of laws, and the Constitution. My favorite lines of Webster's come from an early speech that I first heard quoted by Ed Meese:

We live under the only government that ever existed, which was formed by the deliberate consultations of the people. Miracles do not cluster. That which has happened but once in six thousand years, cannot be expected to happen often. Such a government, once destroyed, would leave a void to be filled, perhaps for centuries, with evolution and tumult, riot and despotism.

The intellectual force of Webster's orations was powerful, but when he spoke like that, he made men's hearts sing.