Webster himself says that two thousand dollars a year was
all that the best practice in New Hampshire could be made to yield;
and that that was inadequate to the support of his family of a wife
and three little children. Two thousand dollars in Portsmouth, in
1812, was certainly equal, in purchasing power, to six thousand of the
ineffectual things that now pass by the name of dollars; and upon such
an income large families in a country town contrive to live, ride, and
save.
He was a strenuous Federalist at Portsmouth, took a leading part in
the public meetings of the party, and won great distinction as its
frequent Fourth-of-July orator. All those mild and economical measures
by which Mr. Jefferson sought to keep the United States from being
drawn into the roaring vortex of the great wars in Europe, he opposed,
and favored the policy of preparing the country for defence, not by
gunboats and embargoes, but by a powerful navy of frigates and ships
of the line. His Fourth-of-July orations, if we may judge of them by
the fragments that have been found, show that his mind had
strengthened more than it had advanced.
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