i'm bill petrocelli lee, one of the owners of book passage and my pleasure today a real pleasure to you introduce joe

paul, one of my one of my favorite writers and favorite people. this is this is the kind of book i like and a kind of person who author i like it. i'll tell you why. it's. he's, you know, a very, very good professor of law and he's taught at uc, i think the name of it now is u.s. college of law at san francisco. now that he sees are no longer the no no, no longer the official name, i don't know how that that long that's going to last, but but he teaches con law and he's very, very good and very well respected by everyone who's had a class with him. and we know firsthand here at book passage just how good he is because he co-host of a panel on a several week panel in our class class program on constitution, on the power of the presidency and various things. and then taught another class on the first amendment, which got a good reception among our our

customers. and then he actually, you know, went above and beyond it. and and who was my interlocutor on a on a video event that we did during the height of the pandemic about a book i wrote about the electoral college. and he was terrific and bring it out all of the information about that. so he's really good as a law professor. but the thing that's really i find charming and charming and endearing about him is that he's basically developed a second career. i don't know if you would call it that or not, but he's a career as a writer and a writer of not of legal stuff because legal stuff can sometimes be a little, little boring and a little dense, not exactly the kind of page turner you want to have on your nightstand at night. somebody he's learned the technique of writing both in in again and a dual capacity here, both as biography and as history and as managed to put the two genres together in a very, very

compelling way. i find it very, very nice, very, very fun to read because i know it's articulate, it's compelling, and i know it well researched it, wrote a book on john marshall, probably our most important chief justice, our our first, but very close to being the first chief justice and it's the definitive work on john marshall. he wrote a book, a unlikely allies, about a couple of of american patriots who worked together to during the revolution or a war to basically bring the french in on our side. and now he's got the book called indivisible about daniel webster. and this book i wrote him is a jewel. i've learned more in the first 50 pages of the book about american history. i did in all the american history classes i took because he just takes a period in history which i thought i knew and and and explains it through

the point of view and not the point of view. but that but with a with daniel webster in the background and what he meant to the development of america as a as a country, you know, when we think of ourselves as americans, not as north carolinians or something like that, and that's, you know, that's something kind of new and that didn't exist before. webster and he managed to bring together the political will and the oratorical oratorical skills to to make americans kind of see themselves as a as a country and as a as a single people. so with great pleasure that oh, by the way, they're all on camera. this is going to be on camera tonight. fortunately not my spiel. but joel, when he gets up here and we're really looking forward to that. so it's with great pleasure that i introduce joel richard paul, the author of indivisible.

joel, come on out. here he is. i thank you, bill, and thank you all very much for being here. i, i mean that very sincerely. it's it's a kind of bittersweet occasion for me because i, uh, much of this book was made possible with the care and support of my partner charles erkki, who edited every page of this book and proofread everything and spell checked. i am a terrible speller. i cannot spell to save my life. and charles was was very much a part of this project. and unfortunately he passed away

last month and so i feel that he really should be with us today to celebrate this event. and i'm sorry that he's not here, but he should certainly share in the in the success of this book. so i. some of you may have read last week in the new york times that more than 70% of americans now believe that our democracy is under threat and the problems of race and national identity that affects us today. also of course, were the problems that were confronted by people like daniel webster in the period before the civil war.

many of us today fear that some kind of violent insurrection may soon take place and it was with those concerns that i decided to write this book to talk about. how the people in the period leading up to the civil war tried to wrestle with the question of of national identity. in 1782, the french writer clive, her famous lee, asks the question, what is an american? then? and it was a it was a legitimate question to ask, because at the start of our republic, people didn't really identify as americans. they thought of themselves as virginians or south carolinians or new yorkers, but not really as americans. and it really took about a half a century for people to begin to think about themselves as

americans when thomas kuchar, who was a famous president of the college of south carolina, was asked the question, are you an american? he said, if you ask me if i'm an american, my answer is no, sir. i am a south carolinian. and that was typical of what most people thought at the time. so what happens is that there's all of these competing ideas about what it means to be an american that begin to develop in the period after the american revolution. and you have, for example, john c calhoun. who is a strong believer in states rights and the idea that the states have the power to nullify federal law and that the states have the option of seceding that will from the union. and he believes in a kind of regional nationalism. and then you have john quincy adams, who has this idea that

the continent is a territory the united states itself somehow defines us, that that we are defined by our land. and he has this notion that we have to expand from ocean to ocean in order to kind of realize our full nationhood. and then there's henry clay, and henry clay thinks that to define the nation, you have to build a national market and you build a national market by building roads and canals and bridges and that is what ties us together, that that's what knits us together. the formation of a national market. and you have a people who are at the same time talking about cultural nationalism. writers like john o'sullivan, faneuil, hawthorne, walt whitman, who imagine that the problem really is that we haven't defined for ourselves.

that's what our national culture is, and that we have to define that through our literature. and then along comes andrew jackson. mr. trump's hero, and andrew jackson has this idea that we are defined by our race, that ultimately this is this is a country for white europeans. and this country belongs to white europeans. and these other people, these so-called native american tribes, these african-americans who are enslaved, they're just sort of like in the way of our progress. and we need to just sort of push them aside. this mexicans, they don't really belong here. they may have lived this territory before, but they really don't belong in this country. and and that idea begins to take hold during the jack sonia era. and it's against that idea that we are a white christian nation, that webster is pushing, and he challenges that idea by insisting that it's the

constitution that made us americans and it made all of us americans, regardless of our race or our faith or our region of the country, our ethnicity doesn't define us. we are defined by the constitution itself as americans. and he's not necessarily the originator of the idea, but he is the guy. he's the guy who really makes that idea sort of stick in the public mind. so who is daniel webster? i mean, when i first started writing this book, people asked me, is he the guy who wrote the dictionary or is he the one with the coonskin cap? and he's neither of those people are. although noah webster was a distant relative of daniel webster's and they lived at the same time and they knew each other in new england. but daniel webster was, first of all, the most famous advocate before the supreme court in his

day, he he probably won more cases before the supreme court than anyone before, since he argued about 150 cases before the supreme court while he was a senator. some of the most important decisions of the john marshall court were were cases that were argued by john by daniel webster and daniel webster clearly had an impact on what the court wrote because a lot of john marshall's opinions, he lifted the language from webster's briefs. so, for example, mcculloch versus maryland, the case about the establishment of a national bank, that was that was that was webster's words that got stuck in marshall's opinions or the great steamship case, or gibbons versus ogden. and that established the principle that that all intercourse, all all economic intercourse in the country could be regulated by the federal government, whether it was

economy activity inside the states or economic activity across state lines. he was known as the defender of the constitution because of his role in the supreme court. he was also a congressman, a congressman who'd been elected in new hampshire, originally as a strong opponent of the war of 1812, the war of 1812, which was known as madison's war. but madison waged the war, allegedly to help the the mercantile industry, because the shipping industry was being interrupted by the seizure of u.s. ships on the high seas by the french, by the by the british at that point. but the but the bostonians themselves opposed the war because it resulted in the non intercourse acts that prevented shipping and caused enormous economic recession in the new

england states. and it was webster who sort of led the fight in opposition to the war of 1812. and then it goes on. he becomes a senator from massachusetts and also twice secretary of state and four times presidential candidate. but what he's most famous for is his oratory, and he's most famous for his oratory because. no one before or since has had the kind of impact that webster had. people describe how webster could get up and speak for 4 to 6 hours extemporaneously without notes. and his audience would sit there mesmerized, and people would walk out after word and describe themselves as feeling transported by his words or his eloquence. when you read his words on the page, his speeches sometimes run

60 or 70 published pages. believe me, i read them, and the language is like that of shakespeare and you just can't believe that this man could possibly pull this off in person. and he was also physically a very impressive looking guy. he wasn't especially tall, but he had an oversize head and enormous features and people described him as looking like a cathedral. i don't quite sure how you could look like a cathedral. they even could have had, you know, buttresses or something. but he he looked like a cathedral that he and his voice was described sounding like a huge church organ. he could not just fill a room with his voice without electronics, but he could he could speak in the open air to audiences of ten, 20, 30, even 40,000 people and everyone in the crowd swore they heard every word that he said. i don't know how that's possible, but that's what the

published reports describe when he went to england on a sabbatical at one time, all of the great british writers and thinkers of the day like elbowed each other to meet him. william wordsworth. samuel rodgers. hartley, coleridge. kenyon. john kenyon. george tickner. richard milnes. charles babbage. henry. sergeant charles dickens. henry hallam. lord melbourne. the duke of wellington. thomas carlyle. all these people fought just to be in his presence. the queen victoria herself invited him to dinner twice, and then, not to be outdone, the king louis-philippe in france invited him to come to vici for dinner, and the king was so impressed with him that the king had a life size mural painted of him, which now hangs in federal

hall and actually is a detail of which is on the cover of my book. another reason to buy this book, i the that the painting is i think 15 by 20 feet and it was commissioned by the king because he was showing webster here is being is shown giving his most famous speech which is known as the second reply to senator hain not a catchy title admittedly, but still it is the most famous speech ever given on the floor of congress. and thomas carlyle said that webster was the notable list of all your note abilities. and because webster really shaped the way americans began to think about themselves through his speeches, his speeches would be transcribed and published all and sent all over the nation. newspapers all over the country would would print excerpts of his speeches. he was more famous than the president of the united states when the president of the united

states in the 1800s would walk down the street. people might not recognize who he was, but because webster was such an unusual looking person and because his face was so familiar, it was reprinted everywhere. people recognized webster on the street. and the way in which the way in which his words became impact ful and shaping the way people thought. his speeches would be included in excerpts of his speeches would be included in the readers that children read in school. so some of you are familiar with some of the names. mike mcduffie reader or the pierpont reader. these were like the books that everybody in america read by. day 1850. there were 50 million copies of the mcduffie reader distributed

around the country. there were far an excess of our population at the time, and all of these readers contained in them. excerpts of webster's most famous speeches extolling the virtues of american nationalism and american identity under the constitution and children would be routinely required to memorize the speeches and stand up in school and recite them. so the whole generation of men who went to fight in the civil war were people who were raised on mcguffey reader and completely indoctrinated into webster's ideas about the constitution. and i wanted to give you some sort of taste of the kind of things that webster said and and webster's. webster initially was known as a as an opponent of of the war of 1812. but he later emerged as one of the leading spokesmen, persons

in new england in opposition often to slavery. and he gave a very famous speech and plymouth, massachusetts, on the 200th anniversary of the arrival of the of the pilgrims in america. and webster was not the kind of guy who like minced words. he he he spoke from the heart and he spoke like a like a old biblical prophet. and he said it was inexcusable, though, for the pilgrims to sentence to tolerate any law that was inconsistent with justice and humanity and the country had been polluted by the contamination of a traffic at which every feeling of humanity must forever revolt. i mean, the african slave trade. and he goes on to say that he denounced not just the slaveholder and the slave trader. he said that he described them as pirates and felons, but in the sight of heaven and a sense

far beyond the ordinary depth of human guilt. but although he said all those who did business with them were also condemned, and he said to a crowd of new englanders, he said, i hear the sound of the hammer. i see the smoke of the furnaces where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs. i see the vestiges of those who, by stealth and at midnight labor in this work of hell, fowl and dark as may become the art of art officers of such instruments of misery and torture and he went on to say, let that spot be purified or let it cease to be of new england. let it be put out of the circle of human sympathies and human regards and the civilized man henceforth have no communion with it. what he's speaking of there is is the the industrialists in new england who profited from building ships and creating manacles and doing all the things that were in support of

the slave trade and afterward, george tickner, who was a professor at harvard, wrote that i was never so excited by public speaking before in my life. three or four times i thought my temples would burst with a gush of blood. when i came out, i was almost afraid to come near him. it seemed to me as if he was like the mount that might not be touched and burned with fire. i was besides myself and i am so still. so that was the kind of power that webster had and some would describe hotspur. i'm sure that wasn't a word he used, but in terms of just sort of telling people like it is and people really respected him for it and he was known as many of you know, as god like daniel. he was known as god like daniel, both because of the power of his words and his and his speech and

his and his presence. and also because he was also seen as the conscience of new england, as the person who represented to the world what people in new england thought was right. another of his most famous speeches was this was his second reply to senator hain probably the most famous speech, as i said, that had ever been argued before. a on the house of on on the floor of the senate and in then the second reply to hate senator hain this was a speech that. basically senator hain was a southern south carolinian polity ocean who was arguing in favor of the power of states to nullify federal law.

and he argued, senator hain argued that the north was impoverishing the south, that they were stealing from the south, and that the reason the south was backward and poor was because of the north and the north's aggression against the south. and webster gave this very famous speech where he he completely devastated senator hain. and the speech goes on for 17 published pages. i'm not going to read it to you in its entirety, but it it's an unbelievable speech. and senator hain afterward said that this was the greatest speech ever made on the floor of the senate. so, you know, it was an incredible speech. and at the end of the speech, he gave one of probably the most famous peroration in the history of the united states congress, where he said that.

when my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time, the son in heaven may i not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious union on states discovered discordant, belligerent on a land rent with civil feuds or drenched. it may be in fraternal blood. and he goes on to say that he prayed that his last and lingering glance may behold instead the gorgeous and sin of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full and advanced its arms and trophies streaming and their original luster, not a striper, raised or polluted, not a single star obscured bearing all over, and characters of living light blazing in all its ample folds as they float over the sea and over the land and in every wind unto the whole heavens. that sentiment dear to every true american heart, liberty and union. now and forever, one and inseparable ble and that was his

that was his tagline that that was his epigram. liberty and union. now and forever. one an inseparable. and he did not think that we had a union with liberty. he understood that many americans were enslaved at that time. but what he thought was that the union was the only vehicle for ending slavery and that therefore the union had to be kept at all cost. and of course, it became more and more difficult to argue this position as the country was being ripped apart, stresses it was by the differences in the regions economy, as well as the questions about slavery and the expansion westward. after the mexican-american war and the concerns about what to do about this western territory. it was us in california who

really started the trouble because it was when california decided to enter the union in 1850 that the question was really put to congress as to what would become of the western territory, with the western territory be kept free over the western territory, be open to slaveholders. and obviously. webster and other and new englanders strongly opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territory. and the south said that they would secede if the western territories were allowed to remain free from slavery because from their perspective, the north already had a majority in the house of representatives and the only thing that maintained the balance between the north and the south with the number of senators there were equal numbers of senators from free states and slave states.

at that point in time. but if california and other states were allowed to enter the union, it would change the balance in the senate. so it was it was a question for southerners that that that felt like an existential threat to the existence of the slave ocracy, as indeed it was. a and the question. henry clay decided on a wintry night to go to webster's home in washington and to sit down with him and to try to come up with some kind of a compromise solution to this problem. when the compromise. the compromise was that henry clay proposed, was that. we would allow california to

enter the union as a free state, and we would we would leave open the question about the rest of the western territory with the assumption that it would not become a slave. states, but that. and in addition, we would restrict slavery in the district of columbia if people if slaveholders in the district of columbia agreed to that, which of course, they wouldn't have agreed to, but in in but the slave trade itself wouldn't take place any longer in the district of columbia and in addition, the north would have to agree to enforce the fugitive slave acts, which the you know, which the north had never really enforced. to make that work. what they did was to establish a process by which federal magistrates would be appointed, who would have the power to send

suspected slave boys back to slavery without any due process. so if you were an african american on the streets of boston, you could be literally just kidnaped, taken before a magistrate, and the magistrate could say, yep, she's a she's slave. we'll send her back and that was the end of it. there's no appeal process that was possible that was the fugitive slave law. and basically clay and webster were convinced that if they didn't accept this possibility, that that there would the union would fall apart, that the south, in fact, would secede. so they agreed to this. and it was obviously an extremely difficult choice for webster to make, having made his career as an opponent of slavery. but when it came down to the choice between either ending

slavery, i'm sorry, between either supporting the fugitive slave act or ending the union, he felt there was no choice because the union was the only vehicle for ending slavery. and so webster decides to endorse this line. and everybody understands that at this point in time. if webster hadn't endorsed the fugitive slave law, other northerners would not have done so either. he gave them all cover. he gave them the the ability to support the law because he was in support of the law. and so he gives this speech on the floor of congress. in 1850, and his speech in 1850 oh, is his most controversial speech. and he makes the point that i think is relevant today, that we have to hold our truths slightly

and that we have to be willing to hear the other side of the argument and he points to his colleagues from the north and he says they deal with morals as with mathematics, and they think that what is right may be distinguished from what is wrong with all the precision of an algebraic equation. if they detect a spot on the sun, they think that's a good reason why the sun should be struck down from heaven. they prefer the chance of running into utter darkness. it's still living in heavenly light. if that heavenly light be not absolutely without any imperfection. and so his endorsement of the fugitive slave act, he knows, is the end of his political career. i mean, he's completely demolished after this. he's ruined.

emerson and ralph waldo emerson, who was a good friend and and great admirer of webster's, where emerson had called webster the completist man. emerson comes back after the speech and says that liberty in the mouth of daniel webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan. and john greenleaf, whittier writes a poem called icarus, where he says, i find it here. he says, so fallen, so lost, the light withdrawn, which once he wore the glory from his gray hairs gone forevermore, 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, free fame fall backwards, walk backwards with averted gaze and hide the shame. and that was typical of the kind of reaction that webster got from people who had previously been his admirers, supporters in the north. and he he he basically died a very unhappy and lonely drunk as a consequence of that. but he saved the union. and we may think that's a good thing or a bad thing. we may think that maybe the country would have been better off if we had seceded. but you have to remember this, that if secession had taken place in 1850, millard fillmore was the president of the united states. it's hard to imagine millard fillmore playing the role that abraham lincoln played and the country in 1850 was by no means

ready to win or fight a civil war to restore the union. it was webster's words and and and the continuing influence that webster had on that generation of people that ultimately won the war. abraham lincoln, for example, was deeply affected by webster. he considered webster his role model. and abraham lincoln. in many of the phrases that we think of as great lincoln quotes. that's actually daniel webster speaking when daniel when abraham lincoln says a government of the people, by the people and for the people. everybody in his audience understood because they'd all read the speech themselves. that was daniel webster speech that wasn't abraham lincoln talking. so he had an enormous impact on lincoln, who also supported the compromise of 1850 and who was

not attacked and excoriated the way that daniel webster was for his support of that law. now, how is all of this relevant today? i mean. the parallels between andrew jackson and donald trump are hard to miss. andrew jackson was elected by a white, rural, populist wave of resentment aimed at the cultural elite and the financial elite. he promised to come to washington and clean out what he called the augean stables, that the swamp. he said that he had been cheated out of the presidency in 1824 by a corrupt bargain that never took place. he tried concentrate the power of the presidency in one office and had complete disregard for

the role of congress and the courts. he opposed the government bureaucrats. he he fired hundreds of government bureaucrats who were perfectly honest, competent people and replaced them with incompetent cronies who were often corrupt. and then a at a personal level, andrew jackson was incurious, impulsive, insecure pure, autocratic, and he had a violent temper. sound familiar? and it was against that man and what he stood for, that webster pushed back and appealed to people's better angels by talking about our history, about the intentions of our of our framers, however imperfect they were, the intentions of our framers and our history and what

it meant and what it should mean to people and the promises that we made in our constitution and our declaration of independence and by some some how he summoned up the better angels and people. i think that's the kind of statesmanship that we need today to try to bring us together again as a nation and remind us that the constitution did, in fact, make us all one nation. thank you. so. a question. i'm sure. absolutely. if you have any questions for joel, but raise your hand. we'll have to go up to you. yes. thank you so much. i appreciate that you just brought it to the present day and i'm so curious about nullification as it was. what's happening now in terms of

the concept of nullification and states rights and the right to life kind of legislatures in texas and other states? and where does nullification still live as a possibility? right. well, i think we now have a supreme court that seems committed to nullification as far as i can tell. i mean, the supreme court of the united states seems to be systematically taking apart so much of federal law and constitutional rights, as well as making it much more difficult for the regulatory state to do its business. and that's, you know, very troubling that there's a case the court decided last year involving west virginia against the environmental protection agency in which. basically the court has made it impossible for the environmental protection agency to address the

very real problem of carbon emissions by power plants and as justice kagan says in her dissent, in that in that case, this she can imagine nothing she said in her narrow dissent that she could imagine nothing more frightening than having the supreme court of the united stakes take control of. the future of planet earth. and and, in fact, you know, that's the kind of thing the court has been doing recently, which is which is deeply, deeply troubling. and, of course, the answer is that we have to act at the state level to try to change laws in ways that will enshrine of women's right to terminate her pregnancy. and i try to address issues like climate change on those things can be addressed at the state issue now. and in a way, the court has left open for us the possibility of trying to do that at a state

level. if we can't do it at the federal level. all right. just wait for a second. yeah, joe, i love the idea of these speeches and these mcguffey readers and their sort of creation of a national ideas of nationalism through that mechanism and and just the broad reading of of webster's speechifying. i found myself wondering, though, how were received regionally and whether southerners were hearing them differently in the sort of political culture they were in, as opposed to folks in the in the north. yeah, that's a really interesting question and i'm especially appreciative a rule that you didn't ask the question you were going to ask about millard fillmore. i was asked recently in a broad cast about millard to talk about millard fillmore and i kept wanting to say, you know, my

book is about daniel webster. but anyway, so yeah, so, so the interesting thing is that from the southern perspective, they didn't see those things as being necessarily at odds. they thought that what they were doing was following the constitution and it was the north that was that was abusing the constitution. that's what the constitution that the northern states were supposed to return slaves. they weren't returning the slaves. the constitution says that, you know, a man has a right to his property. what do you mean? you know, i can't take my property to another state if i own this slave, why can't i take the slave to another state? that was the southern perspective. so from their point of view, they basically thought that they were the true followers of the constitution. and in fact, if you look at the constitution of the confederacy, it's amazing. but it's basically almost word for word. the u.s. constitution.

i mean they basically took the u.s. constitution and they duplicated it. they said after all, you know, james monroe was one of us. so we don't have a problem with with the notion that the constitution is our founding document or anything else. they just thought that african-americans that were enslaved were what made us all equal, because white men couldn't be equal in a country in which white men had to do menial labor. so if black men were doing the menial labor, well, then that made white men equal. that was the notion. that was the idea that john c calhoun promulgated. and if you actually if you read some of calhoun's writing, it's amazing how he sounds like karl marx. he has this whole idea about underclass and this notion that the way to prevent class warfare, the way to stop the problems that marx identifies in terms of an underclass, is to have an underclass of people of

a different race that that that that settles a problem, then we're all equal. and so southerners thought that they were being the the the the real followers of the constitution and of the bill and of the declaration of independence. any other questions. go ahead. joel. thanks for doing this. the book, as well as being us today. so two questions. take your pick. oh, first off, i'm going to defend millard fillmore was the good boy from buffalo. i have to defend millard fillmore. right. grover cleveland and millard are guys. so watch out. but two questions. so one was i always thought that benjamin franklin maybe was the epitome of the person who made us american. and i wondered if you might compare his contribution to webster's contribution in moving us in that direction. and the other question is, could you tell us a little bit about

why webster wasn't more successful in all those attempts to become president. all right. yeah, i'm not sure that i'm competent to talk about. ben franklin. you know, my first book, i didn't have a whole lot of nice things to say about him, but you know ben franklin. yes. you're right, david. that that benjamin was to many people, the epitome of what an american was. and part of that was, as a kind of a masquerade. so when ben franklin went to europe, he presented himself in a way that he thought europeans thought america was dressed. so he went around with the coonskin cap at the. isn't that daniel webster? i don't know what for the coonskin cap, but he he had a coonskin cap. he wore old clothes. he dressed like a farmer because he thought that's what europeans thought americans looked like. so even though he was a rich

man, franklin sort of played on this idea. and to many europeans, he definitely represented what an american was. and what the difference i think, between what franklin was versus what webster was is that franklin was still a pennsylvanian. he was still a quaker. he was a quaker. he was not quaker. but he he was thought of as a quaker. and he was a pennsylvanian and, you know, he had represented pennsylvania to the europeans. he he was still very much a part of a system in which we identified ourselves by our state. and your second question was about why daniel webster never became president. yeah, that's i think, a really interesting question.

because he was enormously popular and even among people, even among people who had who admired webster or they didn't vote for him, they didn't support him. and the explanation, the best explanation that i have for that is that people felt that god like daniel, was too godlike. they didn't want someone who was god like they wanted someone they could have a beer with. you know, they wanted someone who they could identify with. they wanted someone who was more like them. and webster was too highfalutin for maybe for a lot of americans. he was also, in some ways not godlike enough. so webster was was not a man who was above sinning. he liked wine. and women and money, maybe a little too much. and he was. there were a lot of accusations

of all sorts of sexual improprieties that he was involved with, one of which is hanging in the metropolitan museum of art. there's a portrait in the metropolitan museum of art called beauty revealed. and it was painted by a woman, sarah goodrich, who was the who was who is a portrait painter who had had come to webster to paint his portrait. and they proceeded to have an affair over a long period of time. and she painted this painting for him. it was a self-portrait of her breasts called beauty revealed. so it was a lot of stuff around about webster. he was. i liked like this in my books because people read them for the sex, you know?

and. there's i have a cartoon hanging in my house from the new yorker magazine that someone gave me after my first book came out. unlikely allies. which said, if the book is about sex and revenge except for a chapter about the continental congress. and, you know, that may be true of this book to now, you'll read it. so so so he was he was he was also he became a drunk largely because of the public reaction to him after the 1850 compromise. and perhaps more of all he took, i think he he lived extravagantly. he had a huge farm in massachusetts. on your plymouth. that was he had i forget how many buildings on this farm had, like 100 buildings he built

artificial lakes and he had he was growing all kinds of things and had all these animals. and he forbade people to kill any animals on his farm. it was really it was more than a farm. it was like a 4400 acres. it was huge. and he he extravagantly beyond his means. and the way he did that was he kept asking people for money and a lot of the people he asked for money were wealthy industrialists in massachusetts who then asked him for favors. and so webster pushed for more protective tariffs that would favor those industries, the house or his constituents perhaps parts that would be seen as a serious conflict of interest and we would regard that as an ethical today. on the other hand, he probably

would have done the same thing anyway because those were his constituents. so who's to say whether the money did or didn't influence his vote? i don't know. but it was certainly. not proper behavior for a member of congress to take that kind of money. and he lived so extravagantly. other members of congress did this to henry clay, to this as well. but but he was so extravagant. and he lived he lived a life that no one else in congress lived, which perhaps made him more vulnerable to the charge that he was corrupt. so he wasn't as godlike as he appeared. right. thank you very much, professor paul. so i'm having trouble at point at which you talk about emerson as excoriation, which to me makes a lot of sense because someone who as you say, you know, equated union with

liberty, with the end of slavery, he could not i think, possibly have seen the fugitive slave. that position as being right as making sense. so make sense of that for me. sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. i mean, obviously today i have a feeling of i put it to a vote in this room. most of us would probably vote against fugitive slave laws and it was probably not the right position for webster to take. certainly not from a political point of view. it wasn't right position for tips for webster to take, but webster was faced with choice. if i vote against the fugitive slave laws, the union is over. are the slaves better off if the union is over or the slaves better off? if the union hangs together and we find some way in the future to end slavery? i you know, i mean, he couldn't have known the future. that's true. but we're probably all better off having abraham in charge in the civil war than millard

fillmore. with all due respect for buffalo. you know, that's i mean, what happened between 1850, 1860 was the southern arms industry pretty much faded away. there was no arms industry to speak of in the south at all. the arms industry in the north boomed. connecticut in particular, became really the sort of the hub of the arms industry in not just in the united states, but arguably in the western world. it was huge, huge provider of arms to the europeans as well. the economy of the south, you know, stagnated. the. the the the generation of people who were going to fight the war

were not just indoctrinated, in webster's words, but also they were witnessing the slavery in a way they hadn't witnessed slavery before. so so slavery up to this point, up to 1850, slavery was something that happened down in georgia. what do i what do i care about slavery? you know, people like people we of as smart, rich, well-informed, literary figures like nathaniel hawthorne. they didn't care. slavery. it was like happened in a foreign country. but when people started getting seized on the streets of boston and dragged off people who weren't even necessarily ever enslaved, but somebody claimed, oh, that was my property. suddenly the public consciousness began to change in the north dramatically. i mean, people like emerson were not particularly anti-slavery. he had emerson had a lot of very

racist ideas. but when he witnessed this, emerson, zinn and the other transcendentalists, they were they were supporting john brown. i mean, there was they became active in the anti-slavery cause for the first time in 1850, only 10% of americans voted for the free soil party, which was the anti-slapp very party in the election in 1850. by 1860, they elected abraham lincoln. i mean, that's the difference that took place in the country. and and that was necessary, i think, to win the civil war. now, again. many people i know think we might have been better off country if we didn't have the south. right. i'm not sure that african-americans would have been better off. yeah. i just wanted to say thank you for talent. i read your book.

unlikely allies. that was so well done and funny without precedent. i learned so much and i cannot wait to read this. and i hope every american gets a chance to read this. thank you very much. other books? yeah, i hope so too. and my publisher really hope so. a publisher? really? thank you all very much for coming. i really appreciate it.