Fayetteville Observer

Clay. Calhoun, Webster
The "National Democrat" speaking of the great American trio, Calhoun, Clay and Webster--in connection with the Presidency, says:

"Neither of these men, pre-eminent as were their qualifications for the office, reached the Presidential station. It was not necessary for their fame. Lord Chatham, when he yielded the rank of the 'great Commoner,' and accepted an Earldom expressed his regret that he had hidden his head in a coronet.' The place of President would have equally obscured the names of either of these extraordinary men. Had they taken the office they must have stepped down, not up, to the office."

The "Charleston Standard" remarks:

"How quickly he has followed his noble compeers, Calhoun and Clay.-- With him, the race of giant statesmen is for a time extinct. Whatever else we may boast of in our living statesmen, even their flatterers would blush to speak of them as equals of the three mighty men. To say that for thirty years they were a part of the history of our country, would be truth half concealed. They were the makers, the human instruments, of that history, and but for them it never had been. It were as easy to imagine a history of the French empire without a Napoleon, a Waterloo without a Wellington, as to conceive of the triumphs of our Senate, without a Calhoun, Clay, and Webster.-- But their wars and triumphs are ended, and all of Daniel Webster, which the human eye now sees is the dull, senseless body, pleading for earth to cover it."