He Still Lives!

As part of a course about Daniel Webster 1801 given by the Institute for Lifelong Education at Dartmouth (ILEAD), the great man himself appeared on campus, in the person of performer Jim Cooke. Cooke's hour-long lecture in Dartmouth Hall, in an appropriately booming voice, was a quarter the length of historic Webster orations. He touched on well-known Websteriana such as the Dartmouth College Case, but perhaps most interesting were excerpts from the speech 01' Dan'l made at Plymouth Rock in 1820, commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing. Presciently forecasting the nation's battle over slavery, Daniel Webster proclaimed New England's belief in freedom and liberty for all, four decades before Fort Sumter. He died eight years before the Civil War, leaving us with the immortal words, "I still live!"