When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in Heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance, rather behold the gorgeous Ensign of the Republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured—

It started with a bill to form a committee to recommend whether sales of public lands should be suspended for a time. The bill reached the Senate floor in 1830; the debate should have been a snoozer, and it would have been, if Robert Hayne, the senior Senator from South Carolina, had not risen to speak about the bill’s connection to the nature of the American Union, and had not Daniel Webster risen to rebut him. The passage above comes from Webster’s second speech, delivered, if you can imagine, to the United States Senate, on January 27 of that year.

I like the passage because it is so thoroughly steeped in a sense of the past without actually animating it with detail (say with tales of fallen soldiers, or the Bill of Rights, or landscapes of the republic’s dark fields or purple mountains, or whatever); indeed the only specifics refer to accidents of our national flag’s design.

This sense of history (vague though it might be) comes not just from Webster’s basic conceit of bemoaning his fallen country from his deathbed; it is embroidered in the language itself, in his selected parts of speech. For instance, the two sentences above contain eleven past participles: broken, dishonored, dissevered, rent, drenched, known, honored, advanced, erased, polluted, and obscured.

Why are the parts of speech important? The past participle implies past action, that something was done; it is in its nature more historical than the equivalent adjective. To appreciate the effect, take the last two phrases:

not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured—

A lesser writer might have written, synonymously though less euphoniously:

not a stripe dirty or missing, nor a single star invisible—

dirty and missing tell us what the stripes are, to be sure; but they don’t tell us what happened. (Perhaps someone needed the flag fabric for a wedding dress?) Erased and polluted tell us how things are and how they came to be.

The passage has a hundred other merits, but rather than drone on about them, I’ll leave you with the rest of the passage, which formed the conclusion of Webster’s famous speech. It is a bit bombastic to 21st century, headphone-insulated ears—probably bombastic to 19th century horn-assisted ears as well—but its diction and drama merit study:

…not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single start obscured—bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as, What is all this worth? Nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first, and Union afterwards—but every where, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole Heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseperable!

Further reading: The Webster-Hayne Debate on the Nature of the Union (Daniel Webster, et al)