Statesmen . narrowing labors of that smalloffice could not have long crippled or hedged inthe genuis of Daniel Webster. His first great legal argument was that in thecelebrated Dartmouth College case which wasargued in 1818 before the United States SupremeCourt. As a lawyer, he had a certain divine in-stinct to seize upon the points of any case whichwas committed to him. On one occasion an im-portant lawsuit was put in his hands by a firmof lawyers to argue before the United StatesSupreme Court. The briefs in the case weresent to him in Washington by the hand of a DANTKL WKIiHTKIi 53 junior me
Statesmen . narrowing labors of that smalloffice could not have long crippled or hedged inthe genuis of Daniel Webster. His first great legal argument was that in thecelebrated Dartmouth College case which wasargued in 1818 before the United States SupremeCourt. As a lawyer, he had a certain divine in-stinct to seize upon the points of any case whichwas committed to him. On one occasion an im-portant lawsuit was put in his hands by a firmof lawyers to argue before the United StatesSupreme Court. The briefs in the case weresent to him in Washington by the hand of a DANTKL WKIiHTKIi 53 junior member of the law firm, and when Web-ster looked the papers over he said : And is thisall? The younger man said timidly: Thereis another point which I have presented to thefirm, but which they thought not material, andthen he stated the case. Websters eyes glowedand he said: My dear sir, that is the point; andon this he won the case. The Dartmouth Col-lege case was one in which the Legislature of the Websters Home at Marshfield, Mass. State of New Hampshire had interfered withthe interior government of the college and hadattempted to change its course of contention was that the principle inour constitutional jurisprudence which regardsa charter of a private corporation as a contractand places it under the protection of the Consti-tution of the United States debarred the Legisla-ture from interfering. The decision in the case,which was made February, 1819, affirmed theground taken by Webster and established a prec-edent in law which was of the highest importance 54 STATESMEN It cannot be said that as a jury lawyer Web-ster always relied upon the law in the case. Ina celebrated murder trial in which he appearedfor the prosecution in Salem, Mass., in 1830,he was said to have fairly terrified the jury in-to conviction. Captain White, a retired andwealthy sea-captain of Salem, had been mur-dered in his bed. J. F. Knapp and others as ac-cessories were accus
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