The College's Hero: Daniel Webster '01

By Kale S. Bongers | Friday, March 3, 2006

Few of Dartmouth’s campus icons have a stronger following than Daniel Webster 1801, no doubt because he, perhaps more than any other alumnus, serves as the archetype for all that the College inspires: rugged self-reliance, a distinguished career in his chosen profession, and a never-failing devotion to his alma mater. Webster has acquired unto himself a peculiar cult: adulating crowds still trek to Rauner Special Collections Library to touch the grand old man’s socks and hat and view his copy of Audobon’s famed Birds of America . A portrait of Webster, uttering his famous line of devotion to Dartmouth to an attentive Supreme Court proudly hangs in Thayer Dining Hall. Over a century after his death at the age of seventy, Webster remains in vogue.

Born to poor parents in the small New Hampshire town of Salisbury, Webster seemed unlikely to achieve fame; indeed, before coming to Dartmouth, he had dropped out of Phillips Exeter Academy and was mortified of oratory. Yet at the College he exorcised his inner demons, graduating both a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a renowned public speaker.

Still, it was onlya control-feud of epic proportions which turned Dartmouth against itself and quite nearly destroyed the institution, that allowed Webster to garner his revered status. Late in his nearly forty-year presidency, College president John Wheelock, son and successor of Eleazar, became embroiled in a petty spat with Dartmouth’s board of trustees over the naming of the new pastor of Hanover’s Church of Christ. Wheelock claimed the right to name the new pastor; the parishioners and the board disagreed; Wheelock escalated the situation when he took to writing anonymous letters defaming the trustees. The disagreement became so fierce that Wheelock, after being sacked by the board in 1815, called on the New Hampshire legislature to take control of Dartmouth and make it a public institution. The legislature, buoyed by Jeffersonian principles, happily obliged, passing an act in June 1816 “to amend the charter, and enlarge and improve the corporation of Dartmouth College.” The actions gave the state complete control of the College; as Chief Justice John Marshall would later write in his majority opinion:

Among other alterations in the charter, this act increases the number of Trustees to twenty-one, gives the appointment of the additional members to the executive of the State, and creates a Board of Overseers with power to inspect and control the most important acts of the Trustees. This Board consists of twenty-five persons. The President of the Senate, the speaker of the house of representatives of New Hampshire, and the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Vermont, for the time being, are to be members ex officio. The Board is to be completed by the Governor and Council of New Hampshire, who are also empowered to fill all vacancies which may occur.

The takeover was, by most accounts, quite popular; no less a figure than Thomas Jefferson himself wrote in to the New Hampshire governor offering congratulations. However, eight of the original private board of trustees, understandably incensed at the hostile takeover, raised over six thousand dollars (including one thousand from an Orford shopkeeper named John Wheeler), a huge sum at the time, to file a lawsuit arguing three points: “that the act of the Legislature setting up the University was not within the general scope of the legislative power; second, that it violated the Constitution of the State of New Hampshire; and, third, that it violated the Constitution of the United States.” In 1817, the private trustees filed their suit over the abrogation of the charter in the New Hampshire Superior Court, and promptly lost. Dartmouth College v. Woodward , (the defendant, William Woodward, was the head of the newly-appointed board of trustees) better known as the Dartmouth College Case, was then appealed (on the basis of the third point) to the United States Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case in March 1818.

Daniel Webster, who by that time had already served two terms in Congress, and Joseph Hopkinson, a prominent Philadelphia barrister and Congressman, were the College’s attorneys. Webster’s mere presence at the trial was almost providential: brought into the state trial almost as an afterthought as the third chair, months after the first two attorneys had been hired, he was elevated to primary counsel for the Supreme Court hearings because the two other lawyers, Jeremiah Mason and Jeremiah Smith, were not able to travel to Washington. William Wirt, recently appointed as Attorney General of the United States, and John Holmes, a Massachusetts Congressman, were counsel for the University.

Webster, who had been paid one thousand dollars for the hearings, was dubious about his chances of success. The section of the case claiming a violation of the United States Constitution was, in his opinion, their weakest claim. As he wrote to Jeremiah Smith, “It is our misfortune that our case goes to Washington on a single point.” In fact, Webster was so worried about the case that he commenced three new proceedings in the U.S. Circuit Court that then, upon appeal, could raise all of the original case’s facets before the Supreme Court. However, the cases failed to move forward quickly, leaving Webster to argue his case before the Supreme Court with the weakest of his constitutional points.

The oral arguments were expected to be an excellent show, and the observers were not disappointed. As observer Chauncey Goodrich noted:

Mr. Webster entered upon his argument in the calm tone of easy and dignified conversation. His matter was so completely at his command that he scarcely looked at his brief, but went on for more than four hours with a statement so luminous, and a chain of reasoning so easy to be understood, and yet approaching so nearly to absolute demonstration, that he seemed to carry with him every man of his audience, without the slightest effort or uneasiness on either side. It was hardly eloquence in the strict sense of the term: it was pure reason. Now and then for a sentence or two, his eye flashed and his voice swelled into a bolder note as he uttered some emphatic thought, but he instantly fell back into the tone of earnest conversation, which ran throughout the great body of his speech.

Webster closed his enrapturing, four-hour, extemporaneous address to the court with an emotional plea that, according to legend, left Chief Justice John Marshall (and Webster himself) choking back tears: “when I see my alma mater surrounded like Caesar in the senate house, by those who are reiterating stab upon stab, I would not for this right hand have her say to me, ‘ Et tu quoque, mi fili. ’” Webster was aided by the actions of the opposing counsel: Wirt was unable to devote much time to the case, and Holmes, though an experienced orator, was a middling attorney. Though Webster’s oratory far surpassed that of his opposition, at the end of the hearings the decision remained very much in doubt.

Chief Justice Marshall, months later, would make Webster’s victory complete, issuing the majority opinion (the decision was 5-1), which proclaimed: “On the judges of this Court, then, is imposed the high and solemn duty of protecting, from even legislative violation, those contracts which the Constitution of our country has placed beyond legislative control; and however irksome the task may be, this is a duty from which we dare not shrink.” The victory was somewhat unexpected, despite Webster’s eloquence; his co-counsel, Joseph Hopkinson, wrote the following day to College president Francis Brown, “I would have an inscription over the door of your building: Founded by Eleazar Wheelock—refounded by Daniel Webster.” Such a plaque currently rests in the entrance to Webster Hall, home of Rauner Special Collections Library. Webster was not immune to the emotion and drama surrounding the case; in his later years, he would claim that, of all the cases he had argued in his stellar career, the Dartmouth College Case was his greatest victory.

By the time the decision was released in February 1819, much had changed: Wheelock and Woodward were dead, soon to be followed by Francis Brown in 1820. As a result, Webster became, by default, the most prominent figure connected with the case. As it was in 1820, so it remains today: Webster, the son of Dartmouth who returned at the institution’s most desperate time to become its savior, remains a hero of the College. He speaks from beyond the grave as the voice of countless Dartmouth alums through the ages: “It is, sir, as I have said, a small College. And yet there are those who love it.”

The College's Hero: Daniel Webster '01

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