Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 December 1893 — Ancestry ef Daniel Webster. [ARTICLE]

Ancestry ef Daniel Webster.

Century. A famous anti-slavery orator once publicly thanked God that Daniel Webster was not born in Massachusetts; and this was received with acclaiming shouts by the audience. Nor did they appear to notice any incongruity when the orator proceeded to objurgate Webster, just as though he had been born in Boston and were a recreant descendant of Thomas Dudley. This is the common -mistake—4e--~judge W ebster"“as”a" Puritan in origin, descent, inherited education, and conse?uent responsibilities. He was no ’uritan, nor did he ever pretend to be one. The Massachusetts Puritans, who came to Boston Bay in 1630, were east of England people. Daniel Webster's ancestors were from the north of England, and, coming six years later, entered New Hampshire by the Piscataqua, and for generations were dispersed along the skirmish line of civilization, remote from the Puritans of the Bay, and shared neither in their glory nor in their shame. In Webster was no admixture of nationality, no crossing of p’ebeian with patrician blood. He was a genuine son of the soil, though not, like Burns, of a soil alive with a hundred generations, of the dead, nor of a soil like that about Boston, every sod of which was quickened with associations touching the hearts and molding the characters of those born on it; but of a soil on which his father’s footfall was the fii’st of civilized man ever heard in that silent wilderness. He was a rustic, yet with marks of gentle blood in his shapely hands and feet, his well-propor-tioned limbs, and his high-bred face of no known type/unlike even his own brother, who was of Grecian form and face. Of the Puritans neither by birth nor by circumstances, he possessed few of their virtues, and none of their defects; at least of all their indomitable provinciality of thought and conduct. In this he stands quite alone among the public men of his day in New England. His spirit of nationality appeared so early in life that it indicated character rather than education. And l the depth of the sentiment appears from this, that though born a Federalist, and from early manhood associated professionally and socially with some of the very able men prominent in the “Essex Junto” and in the Hartford Convention, ho neither accepted their principles nor imitated their conduct. At no time was he a Southern man or a Northern man, but to | the end of his life a National Feder- ! alist after the fashion of WashingI ton. •