WEBSTER PARISH, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – Fifty-one years before Webster Parish existed, the man the parish would one day be named after spoke before a crowd at Plymouth Rock.
The occasion was the 200-year anniversary of the Mayflower’s landing. The speaker was named Daniel Webster.
Webster stood before the crowd and said he hardly knew what would give an enlightened mind a stronger sense of obligation than a conscious alliance with the sentiments and thoughts of those who have already lived and died while pursuing the happiness of the next generations.
“It is a noble faculty of our nature which enables us to connect our thoughts, our sympathies, and our happiness with what is distant in place or time; and, looking before and after, to hold communion at once with our ancestors and our posterity,” Webster said.
But who the heck was Daniel Webster, and why do his “big words” matter? And why was Webster Parish later named after him, when he was from an entirely different region of the country?
Daniel Webster was born in 1872 in New Hampshire and graduated from Dartmouth College. He was a lawyer and a politician, serving as the U.S. Secretary of State under three different U.S. Presidents. He also served as Congressman from two both New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
Webster was a prolific writer. In fact, his speeches were so profound that one of them is actually considered the best speech ever delivered in Congress.
Here’s an excerpt: “Sir, the gentleman seems to forget where and what we are. This is a Senate, a Senate of equals, of men of individual honor and personal character, and of absolute independence. We know no masters, we acknowledge no dictators. This is a hall for mutual consultation and discussion; not an arena for the exhibition of champions. I offer myself, sir, as a match for no man; I throw the challenge of debate at no man’s feet.”
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In those days, many politicians were educated in literature, and philosophy, and reveled in the sciences and theology. Politicians were often considered Renaissance men and, thereby, knew much about many things. This was long before the Cold War caused a separation of STEM from the humanities, before the rush for mankind to escape the planet where our species was conceived. Instead, there was a purposeful intent to be familiar with all manner of subjects concerning humankind’s potential to achieve things like life, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness.
“It was not, I think the friends, but the enemies of the murderer of Banquo, at whose bidding his spirit would not down,” said Webster in his response to a congressional speech that was causing division amongst U.S. Congressmen in 1880. Webster said the ghost of Banquo, from Shakespear’s Macbeth, was focused exclusively on those who had begun with caresses and ended with foul and treacherous murder.
Banquo’s ghost, according to Webster, “was an honest ghost. It disturbed no innocent man. It knew where its appearance would strike terror, and who would cry out, A ghost! It made itself visible in the right quarter, and compelled the guilty and the conscience-smitten… Those who murdered Banquo, what did they win by it? Substantial good? Permanent power? Or disappointment, rather, and some mortification; dust and ashes, the common fate of vaulting ambition overlapping itself?”
In Webster Parish today, Webster is referred to as a statesman.
Here’s why.
Daniel Webster gave his law office to his brother and moved to Plymouth after the death of their father. Once in New Hampshire, Webster penned an article that opposed the War of 1812 and the draft, and the article was so appreciated by his contemporaries it was distributed in print across much of New England.
Webster became a member of Congress, argued many cases before the Supreme Court, and earned himself the nickname Great Expounder and Defender of the Constitution.
By the time Webster gave the 200-year anniversary speech at Plymouth Rock in 1820, he had decided it is not false, nor vain, to relate to mankind through all time because we are but links in the great chain of being.
This dude understood that history isn’t something removed from us, but rather something we are a part of in this moment.
He said the links of that great chain of being began with our origin and run onward through successive generations, binding together the past, present, and future, and leading to the Creator of the universe.
But he didn’t stop there. The practical character of the government, Webster said, depends on, besides the frame of the constitution, the degree of general intelligence.
To Webster, general intelligence included the understanding of one’s place in time.
Webster was an even-tempered, northern wordsmith in the years leading up to the Civil War. Yet his name would live on in the most unexpected of places after the war’s end: The American South.
Here’s how it happened.
Why would a southern parish be named after a politician from the northeast?
The Civil War had ended and the first of the Reconstruction-Era Louisiana Governors was sitting in the Capitol. Henry Clay Warmoth was the youngest governor in our state’s history (still is), a Union Army veteran, an Illinois-born “Yankee,” and a lawyer to boot. These qualities made him unpopular amongst former Confederates.
Warmoth became governor in 1868 at age 26 and was sworn in quickly after the state was admitted into the Union again. Black suffrage, railroads, increased taxes, and a massive state budget deficit were a few of the issues that led to Warmoth’s negative political reputation. It got so bad, in fact, that he was almost impeached.
Unifying citizens just after the end of a civil war was not easy for a politician in his twenties. But under Warmoth’s leadership, Bossier, Claiborne, and Bienville Parishes were divided and Webster Parish was created from portions of the three.
Tangipahoa, a native word that means ‘people of the corn’, and Grant, named for the former president were added to Louisiana’s roster of places in 1869. Cameron Parish, named for President Lincoln’s first Secretary of War, Simon Cameron was established in 1870. Red River, Vernon, and Webster were recognized as parishes in 1871.
Lincoln Parish became the ninth Reconstruction-era parish.
Prior to the Civil War, Daniel Webster believed the country could work through political differences. Webster died almost a decade before the start of the Civil War, but the words he spoke while alive still had implications for post-Civil War Americans.
His words still have implications for Americans of today, too.
The naming of Webster Parish, and other Reconstruction-era parishes, was a Reconstruction-era political statement about a man who once said we should have moral and philosophical respect for our ancestors. Webster’s own father was a Revolutionary War veteran.
“To break up this great government!’ stated Webster before the Civil War. “To dismember this glorious country! To astonish Europe with an act of folly such as Europe for two centuries has never beheld in any government or any people! No, Sir! No, Sir!”
He called our short lives the narrow compass of our earthly existence, then Daniel Webster died after falling out of a carriage in 1852.
He had just lost his bid for the Whig Party’s nomination to the U.S. Presidency.
And as the saying goes, the rest is history.
