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Daniel Webster was born on January 18, 1782, in Salisbury, New Hampshire. (Today the city is known as Franklin.) He and his nine siblings grew up on their parents' farm there. Webster attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a preparatory school in Exeter, New Hampshire, before attending Dartmouth College. After graduating from Dartmouth, Webster apprenticed to lawyer Thomas W. Thompson in Salisbury, but he resigned from the law office and worked as a schoolteacher to provide for the support of his brother's education. In 1802 Webster began as the headmaster of the Fryeburg Academy, Maine, where he served for one year. He later returned to the study of law and in 1804 in Boston under the prominent attorney Christopher Gore. It was there that Webster honed his interest in politics.
In 1805 Webster was admitted to the bar and he returned to New Hampshire to set up a practice in Boscawen, to be close to his ailing father. Webster's father as an ardent Federalist and he followed in his father's political leanings, like many New Englanders. After his father's death in 1806, Webster moved to the larger town of Portsmouth in 1807, and opened a law practice there. When the War of 1812 broke out, Webster gave an address to the Washington Benevolent Society condemning the war. The speech was widely circulated throughout New Hampshire, and it led to Webster's 1812 appointment to the Rockingham Convention, an assembly that sought to declare formally the state's grievances with President James Madison and the federal government. He was chosen to write the Rockingham Memorial to be sent to Madison. The report included the threat of secession saying, "If a separation of the states shall ever take place, it will be, on some occasion, when one portion of the country undertakes to control, to regulate, and to sacrifice the interest of another."
Webster was elected to the House of Representatives in 1812, where he served two terms ending March 1817. He was an outspoken critic of the Madison administration and its wartime policies. After his second term, Webster did not seek a third, returning to his law practice instead. He had married Grace Fletcher in 1808, and the couple had four children together. He moved his practice from Portsmouth to Boston.
Webster became known as the leading constitutional scholar of his generation and appeared regularly before the powerful Marshall Supreme Court. He argued 223 cases before the Supreme Court, including many of the most important constitutional cases decided by the Court between 1801 and 1824. These included McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). He became known as "the Great Expounder of the Constitution."
Webster's growing prominence as a constitutional lawyer led to his election as a delegate to the 1820 Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, where he spoke in opposition to universal suffrage (for men), on the Federalist grounds that power naturally follows property. The state constitution was amended against his wishes.
Webster also spoke at Plymouth commemorating the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620; his oration was widely circulated and read throughout New England. He was elected to the Eighteenth Congress in 1822, from Boston.
In his second term, Speaker Henry Clay made Webster chairman of the Judiciary Committee in an attempt to win his support. Webster enjoyed legislative success at reforming the United States criminal code, but failed in his effort to expand the size of the Supreme Court. He supported the National Republican administration of John Quincy Adams. As a Representative, Webster spoke at the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1825, where the visiting Marquis de Lafayette laid the cornerstone of the new monument. Webster also delivered eulogies of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1826. In June 1827 he was elected to the Senate from Massachusetts. His first wife, Grace, died in January 1828, and he married Caroline LeRoy in December 1829.
The passage of the tariff of 1828 (called "the Tariff of Abomination" by its critics) increased sectional tensions that were agitated by then Vice President John C. Calhoun. Calhoun espoused the idea of nullification which held that states could "nullify" any act of the federal government they deemed unconstitutional. Webster criticized Nullification, and famously stated "Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!"
In 1832 when South Carolina passed the Ordinance of Nullification, Webster supported President Andrew Jackson's sending of U.S. troops to the borders of South Carolina. He opposed the Tariff of 1833, a compromise designed largely by Clay, which managed to help diffuse the crisis. Webster thought Clay's concessions would further embolden the Southern secessionists and create sympathy for their tactics. However Webster, like Clay, opposed the economic policies of Andrew Jackson, the most famous of those being Jackson's campaign against the Second Bank of the United States in 1832, an institution that held Webster on retainer as legal counsel. Webster was a director of the bank's Boston Branch. Clay, Webster, and a number of other former Federalists and National Republicans united as the Whig Party, in defense of the Bank against Jackson's intention to replace it. The economic panic that followed in 1837, converted Webster's speculation in midwestern property into a personal debt from which he never recovered. Webster was said to have a propensity for living beyond his means and for indulging excessively in gambling and alcohol.
In 1836, Webster was one of four Whig Party candidates to run for the office of President. The idea was for four Whig candidates to run against Martin Van Buren, one from each region of the country, to prevent Van Buren from gaining a majority in the electoral college, and throwing the election to the Whig controlled House of Representative. Webster managed to gain the support only of Massachusetts. This was the first of his three unsuccessful attempts to win the presidency.
In 1839, the Whig Party nominated William Henry Harrison for president. Webster was offered the vice presidency, but declined. Harrison died one month after his inauguration. If Webster had accepted the offer, he would have become president after all.
Following his victory in 1840, Harrison appointed Webster to his cabinet as Secretary of State, a post he retained under President John Tyler. In September 1841, an internal division amongst the Whigs over the question of the National Bank caused all the Whigs (except Webster who was in Europe at the time) to resign from Tyler's cabinet. In 1842, Webster successfully negotiated the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which established the definitive Eastern border between the United States and Canada (Maine and New Brunswick), and signaled a definite and lasting peace between the United States and Britain. With the treaty concluded, Webster resigned from Tyler's cabinet in May of 1843.
In 1845, Webster was re-elected to the Senate, where he opposed both the Texas Annexation and the resulting Mexican–American War. In the 1848 presidential election, he sought the Whig Party's nomination for the President but was beaten by the General Zachary Taylor, a popular hero of the Mexican–American War. Webster was once again offered the Vice-Presidency, and once again he declined saying, "I do not propose to be buried until I am really dead and in my coffin." The Whig ticket won the election. However, Taylor died 16 months after the inauguration. This was the second time a President who offered Webster the chance to be Vice President died.
The Compromise of 1850, was a Congressional effort led by Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas to compromise on the sectional disputes involving slavery. On March 7, 1850, Webster gave one of his most famous speeches, in which he gave his support to the compromise, which included the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 that required federal officials to recapture and return runaway slaves. Webster was severely criticized by abolitionists in New England who felt betrayed by his compromises. Webster never recovered the loss of popularity he suffered for his position on the compromise.
When President Taylor died on July 9, Millard Fillmore became president. Taylor had opposed the Compromise, but Fillmore supported it. Taylor's cabinet resigned shortly thereafter and Webster was once again appointed Secretary of State, taking office on July 23. Each individual element of the Compromise of 1850 passed the Congress and was then signed into law by President Fillmore. As Secretary of State Webster continued to strongly uphold the Compromise of 1850 and specifically the Fugitive Slave Law.
In 1852, he made his run for the Presidency. His critics asserted that his support of the compromise was an attempt to win southern support for his candidacy. He finished a distant third behind General Winfield Scott, who received the nomination, with Fillmore finishing second. The American Party, or Know-Nothings, an anti-immigration party made up mostly of former Whigs, put his name on the ballot without permission and he collected a few thousand votes.
Webster died on October 24, 1852, at his home in Marshfield, Massachusetts, after falling from his horse and suffering a crushing blow to the head. His condition was complicated by cirrhosis of the liver, which resulted in a cerebral hemorrhage. He is buried in the "Old Winslow Burial Ground" section of the Winslow Cemetery, near Marshfield.