...tual recrimination between North and South, for obedience to the law of the land. It was his supreme effort to reconcile an irreconcilable situation. It failed, as we know. Whittier, Emerson, Theodore Parker , and indeed most of the voters of New England, believed that Webster had bartered his private convictions in the hope of securing the Presidential nomination in 1852. They assailed him savagely, an...