“It will not be a bright page in our history which relates the total abandonment of all provision for naval defense by the successors of Washington. Not to speak of policy and expediency, it will do no credit to the national faith, stipulated and plighted as it was to that object in every way that could make the engagement solemn and obligatory. So long as our commerce remains unprotected, and our coasts and harbors undefended by naval and maritime means, the essential objects of the Union remain unanswered, and the just expectation of those who assented to it, unanswered.
“A part of our navy has been suffered to go to entire decay; another part has been passed, like an article of useless lumber, under the hammer of the auctioneer. As if the millennium had already commenced, our politicians have beaten their swords into plowshares. They have actually bargained away in the market essential means of national defense, and carried the product to the Treasury. Without loss by accident or by enemies the second commercial nation in the world is reduced to the limitation of being unable to assert the sovereignty of its own seas, or to protect its navigation in sight of its own shores. What war and the waves have sometimes done for others, we have done for ourselves. We have taken the destruction of our marine out of the power of fortune, and richly achieved it by our own counsels.”
This address made a profound impression, voicing as it did the general public feeling in New Hampshire on the subjects of which it treated. It led to an assembly of the people of Rockingham County a few weeks later, called to prepare a memorial to the President protesting against the war. To this convention Mr. Webster was appointed a delegate, and it was he who was selected to draft what has been since known as the “Rockingham Memorial.”
One of the most noteworthy passages in this memorial—noteworthy because it is an early expression of his devotion to the Union—I find quoted by Mr. Curtis, and I shall follow his lead in transferring it to my pages.
“We are, sir, from principle and habit attached to the Union of these States. But our attachment is to the substance, and not to the form. It is to the good which this Union is capable of producing, and not to the evil which is suffered unnaturally to grow out of it. If the time should ever arrive when this Union shall be holden together by nothing but the authority of law; when its incorporating, vital principles shall become extinct; when its principal exercises shall consist in acts of power and authority, not of protection and beneficence; when it shall lose the strong bond which it hath hitherto had in the public affections; and when, consequently, we shall be one, not in interest and mutual regard, but in name and form only—we, sir, shall look on that hour as the closing scene of our country’s prosperity.