Daniel Webster’s Desk Switches Hands
By Riley Yates
WASHINGTON, Oct. 10, 2002–From the galleries, it could be any of the desks lining the second row of the Senate floor. But carved inside the drawers of the Daniel Webster desk is a long history of the representatives of New Hampshire.
In recent decades, the senior senator from New Hampshire has used the desk. With Sen. Bob Smith leaving the Senate, the desk will be passed on to Sen. Judd Gregg, who, as the chief deputy whip, will move it to the front row of the Senate floor, alongside desks belonging to other members of the Republican leadership.
Gregg will become the 19th senator to carve his name in the desk’s drawer, joining the likes of fiery Webster, the first known owner of the desk, who was born in New Hampshire but became a senator from Massachusetts; the Massachusetts abolitionist Charles Sumner; and every modern senior New Hampshire senator starting with Sen. Norris Cotton, who served from 1954 to 1975.
It was Cotton who guaranteed that the desk would remain in New Hampshire hands. In 1974, he authored the legislation that made the desk the right of the senior New Hampshire senator.
Others who have sat at the desk include New Hampshire Sens. Warren Rudman, Gordon Humphrey and John Durkin.
There are only two other such desks, Henry Clay’s, which goes to the senior senator from Kentucky, and Jefferson Davis’s, which goes to Mississippi’s senior senator.
The desk meant very much to Smith, its most recent owner. It is “near and dear to [Smith’s] heart,” his spokeswoman, Lisa Harrison, said in a recent e-mail, and in speeches and editorials Smith has often mentioned the desk.
“This desk reminds me every day that we are but temporary stewards of our great nation,” Smith said in a statement.
Much like the nation, the desk is surrounded in legends. Because the Senate Curator’s Office did not record where Senators sat until 1985, the knowledge of who sat in the chair and when lies in the order of the names carved into it.
It may have been the desk where Sumner was beaten by Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina in 1856-an early indicator that the issue of slavery had polarized the nation.
Sumner had given a two-day, 112-page speech opposing the admission of Kansas into the Union as a slave state. Calling it “a crime against Kansas,” Sumner condemned slavery, as well as pro-slavery advocate Sen. Andrew Butler of South Carolina.
Brooks, who was related to Butler, took offense and entered the Senate chamber after adjournment and beat Sumner repeatedly with his cane.
The beating outraged the North, but Brooks’s office quickly was flooded with canes sent from the South. In the House, Southern members refused to vote for a motion to censure Brooks.
The division of the nation over slavery had been made painfully apparent.
Another tale surrounding the desk lies in its lack of a three-to-four inch writing box, which was added to the top of all the Senate desks beginning in the 1830s.
Webster supposedly refused to have the desk altered because he wanted to use the same version that senators before him had used.
“If the desk was good enough for his predecessors, it was good enough for him,” Don Ritchie, associate historian of the Senate Historical Office, said.
Webster’s decision to not to allow the alteration was typical of people born in an independent-leaning state whose motto is “live free or die,” Ritchie said.
He was a maverick figure, Ritchie said, both in the Senate, where he served four terms starting in 1827, and as Secretary of State for Presidents William Henry Harrison, John Tyler and Millard Fillmore.
He was best known for his eloquent speeches, Ritchie said.
“He was the great orator of the Senate,” Ritchie said, perhaps the great orator of his day.
“People would line up for hours to listen to him,” Ritchie said.
And, Rudman wrote in his 1996 memoir, Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate, he was truly a native son of New Hampshire.
“[The] senior senator has the special privilege of carving his name in Daniel Webster’s desk because, although Webster represented Massachusetts, he was a New Hampshireman,” Rudman wrote.
Published in The Manchester Union Leader, in New Hampshire.
