San Antonio College Library

Suggested by Stephen Vincent Benet's short story "The devil and Daniel Webster."

A biography of the charismatic early 19th-century American orator and legislator who stood for American nationalism and the concepts of the Constitution.

Webster, a staunch nationalist and firm protector of property rights, exerted a strong influence on the U.S. Supreme Court, as the Court began its historic function of interpreting the Constitution.

"Enormously powerful, intensely ambitious, the very personifications of their respective regions--Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun represented the foremost statesmen of their age. In the decades preceding the Civil War, they dominated American congressional politics as no other figures have. Now Merrill D. Peterson, one of our most gifted historians, brilliantly re-creates the lives and times of these great men in this monumental collective...