Senator Daniel Webster, an eloquent advocate for preserving the Union and a political giant in pre-Civil War America, lived and worked here in home and office buildings that are now demolished. His unmatched speaking ability helped bring about the Compromise of 1850, which helped delay the Civil War for about ten years and ended the slave trade in the District of Columbia, while also strengthening the fugitive slave law that compelled citizens to help capture and return people fleeing slavery. In 1850, at age 69 and near the end of his life, Webster delivered his last great Senate speech in defense of the Union, filling the galleries with spectators, and he likely developed his arguments here in his office. In the mid-19th century, this was a fashionable neighborhood of fine homes and magnificent churches within walking distance of the Capitol and near Washington’s City Hall/Courthouse. Among the dignitaries who lived nearby were Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, John C. Calhoun, vice president under President John Quincy Adams, and Salmon P. Chase, President Lincoln’s secretary of the Treasury. In Webster’s day, the First Unitarian Church of Washington stood at the corner of Sixth and D, and its members were among the city’s loudest anti-slavery voices; when they tolled the bell endlessly on the day abolitionist John Brown was executed in 1859, the city ordered the bell silenced permanently.
