In the spring of 1851, the residents of Marshfield, Massachusetts met in their annual town meeting and passed a set of resolutions that were a stinging rebuke to their most famous neighbor: Daniel Webster. Webster had been a long-serving senator from Massachusetts and one of" the Triumvirate" of American statesmen who shaped the course of American politics in the decades leading up to the Civil War. 1 For the better part of the first half of the nineteenth century, Webster had been a political hero at home in Marshfield and across the North. But by 1850, he had become a villain across the increasingly anti-slavery North for his role in the" Great Compromise" of 1850-the centerpiece of which was the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Across the North, antislavery activists gathered to revile and reject the new law as a craven capitulation to the slave power. Webster, as a primary architect of the compromise and one of its staunchest defenders from his post as Millard Fillmore's Secretary of State, became one of the principal villains for these protestors. Writing in his journal, Ralph Waldo Emerson summed up the feelings of much of the anti-slavery North:" Liberty! Liberty! Pho! Let Mr. Webster for decency's sake shut his lips once & forever on this word. The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan [sic]." 2 Webster was not a passive target. As a vocal and prominent proponent of the compromise in general and of the Fugitive Slave Law in particular, Webster saw the protests against the law as dangerous to the public peace and as a potential threat to the fragile union. 3 He also