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.

These lines come from Daniel Webster’s celebrated “Second Reply to Hayne” in the U.S. Senate (January 26–27, 1830), delivered during the Webster–Hayne debate over federal authority, tariffs, and the doctrine of state “nullification” advanced by South Carolina. Webster, speaking as a nationalist defender of the Constitution and the permanence of the Union, framed disunion as a moral and political catastrophe. The passage is part of his peroration, in which he imagines his own deathbed and prays never to witness the Union shattered into hostile states and civil bloodshed—an image that later readers found hauntingly prophetic in light of the Civil War.

Webster uses a solemn, almost testamentary voice to dramatize the stakes of constitutional conflict: the Union is not merely an administrative arrangement but the condition for national honor, peace, and shared destiny. By picturing the “sun in heaven” shining on “broken and dishonored fragments,” he contrasts the permanence and impartiality of nature with the self-inflicted ruin of political fracture. The catalog—“dissevered, discordant, belligerent”—presents secession as a slide from disagreement into armed hostility, culminating in “fraternal blood.” The passage functions as both warning and appeal, urging listeners to reject doctrines that treat the Union as dissolvable at will.