Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 79.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this on July 3rd, 2022 in New Orleans.

If you are new to the podcast, we are telling the history of the lands

now encompassed by the United States

from the beginning without presentism.

This episode is a sidebar,

which is our term for an episode

that is off the timeline

of the history of the Americans,

really my way of signaling

that the episode need not be listened to in sequence.

As longstanding and attentive listeners know, I like digging up and talking about obscure or at least not famous speeches by presidents and other luminaries in American history.

Last year for the fourth, I did a sidebar on a speech by Woodrow Wilson before he was president,

in which he smuggled an argument for regulation of big business into a speech about the Declaration of Independence.

This year's episode is about 18-year-old Daniel Webster's first public speech on the 4th of July 1800 in front of an audience of good citizens in Hanover, New Hampshire.

The speech is interesting for a number of reasons, including that it shows how early in

our history the 4th of July

became the national holiday for ordinary Americans, and also that it is an early indicator

that Webster would go on to become perhaps the greatest orator in American history.

The ugly truth is that I knew almost nothing about Daniel Webster until I read the first

60 pages of Robert Romini's biography of him to prepare for this episode.

In Romini's words, Webster was a statesman, one of the five greatest senators in the

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