Daniel Webster Quotation Signed From the Most Famous Speech Ever Given in the U.S. Senate – His Second Reply to Hayne

He warned of adverse consequences to the nation, "If discord and disunion shall wound it, if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it, if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed in separating it…"

The Hayne-Webster Debate was an unplanned series of speeches in the Senate, during which Robert Hayne of South Carolina interpreted the Constitution as little more than a treaty between sovereign states, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts expressed the concept of the United States as one nation.

This, one of the most momentous debates in Senate history, began over a plan to curtail western land sales. Senators from western states viewed this proposal by a Connecticut senator as a cynical scheme to preserve for northeastern manufacturing interests a cheap labor supply that might otherwise be lured away by the beckoning opportunities of plentiful western lands. Webster supported the measure, maintaining that public lands were being sold as fast as they can be settled. Hayne saw in this developing Northeast-West dispute an opportunity to build a political alliance between the South and the West. He shared the view of Southern planters that an agricultural system built on slavery could only survive with an unlimited supply of cheap western lands.

Hayne began the debate in the Senate chamber on January 19, 1830. He contended that states, not the federal government, should control their lands and that states should have the right to set aside certain federal laws if they wished. Webster responded by saying that to sell lands cheaper would simply put them in the hands of speculators, and might well open them to slavery. He challenged the South's apparent willingness to subvert the Union for regional economic gain. In doing so, he broadened the debate beyond land, tariffs, and slavery to a consideration of the very nature of the federal republic. Maintaining that the North had always been the West's ally, Webster successfully shifted the debate to one of states' rights versus national power.

When Hayne argued the following week that a state had the right to openly defy an act of Congress, Webster returned on January 26 and 27 with his immortal "Second Reply to Hayne." The chamber was jammed beyond capacity as Webster, using his organ-like voice to great effect, thundered that the nation was not a mere association of sovereign states, but a "popular government, erected by the people; those who administer it responsible to the people; and itself capable of being amended and modified, just as the people may choose it should be." He described a scenario of the South Carolina militia trying to stop collection of the U.S. customs, and presciently argued that it could lead to civil war. He ended with perhaps the most famous quote in U.S. Senate history, one that electrified his audience: "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!"

Overnight, the Massachusetts senator became a major national figure, respected by his many friends and enemies alike. The Senate shelved the land sales resolution, and chances of an alliance between the South and West evaporated.

Adam J. Glossbrenner was Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Representatives and later James Buchanan's private secretary. He collected autographs and had a passion for history, and was in a position to combine these two pursuits to great effect. He had a practice of writing down key passages from important speeches, and then having the figures who had given the speeches sign them for him. Webster's second reply to Hayne caught his eye, and he wrote down a significant passage from the speech relating to unity over disunity. Daniel Webster signed it for him, and it is the only quotation from that speech signed by Webster that we have ever seen.

"Extract from Webster's second reply to Hayne in the U.S. Senate. I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none. There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain for ever. The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for Independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State from New England to Georgia; and there they will lie for ever. And Sir, where American Liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood, and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it, if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it, if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed in separating it from that Union, by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked; over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin." This piece is not only rare, but may be one-of-a-kind.