The Devil And Daniel Webster Author

Stephen Vincent Benét wrote the story in 1936. He was thirty-eight years old, already a Pulitzer winner, and fighting a tuberculosis diagnosis that would kill him seven years later. The piece appeared in The Saturday Evening Post* that October, paid him four thousand dollars — serious money in the Depression — and became the thing people remembered him for.

Not John Brown's Body*, his epic Civil War poem. Not his novels. Not even his other short stories, several of which are better crafted. A Faustian courtroom drama set in a New Hampshire barn, argued before a jury of the damned, with Daniel Webster himself delivering the closing statement that saves a farmer's soul.

Benét didn't invent the deal-with-the-devil trope. He didn't invent Daniel Webster as a larger-than-life orator. What he did was mash them together in a way that felt inevitable, like the story had always been there waiting in the folklore, and he just wrote it down.

Who Was Stephen Vincent Benét

Born in 1898 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Even so, army family — his father was a career officer, which meant moving around, growing up on posts, absorbing a certain kind of American rhythm. Benét published his first book of poems at seventeen. Practically speaking, yale, class of 1919. Same circle as Thornton Wilder and Archibald MacLeish. He tried to enlist in World War I but failed the physical — poor eyesight, the tuberculosis already seeding itself — so he worked as a cipher clerk in Washington instead.

That detail matters. Consider this: he didn't see combat. He saw the machinery behind it. The paperwork. The codes. The way language gets weaponized and bureaucratized. You hear it in his writing: a precision, a lawyerly care with words, even when he's writing verse.

He won the Pulitzer in 1929 for John Brown's Body*. Fourteen thousand lines of blank verse covering the Civil War from every angle — Lincoln, Lee, a Confederate private, a Union nurse, John Brown himself. And it's ambitious, uneven, and genuinely moving in patches. Critics called it the American Iliad*. Benét himself later said he'd written it "with my heart in my mouth.

By the mid-thirties, he was a known quantity. But the tuberculosis was advancing. Respected. Anthologized. He spent winters in Arizona, summers in New England. He wrote The Devil and Daniel Webster* during a productive stretch in 1936, alongside The Sobbin' Women* (which became the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers*) and Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer*.

He died in 1943, age forty-four. A heart attack, brought on by the TB. His wife, Rosemary Carr Benét — a poet and editor in her own right — lived another fifty years, guarding his legacy.

Why This Story Stuck

Most American Faust stories go one of two ways. The protagonist outsmarts the devil through cleverness — a loophole, a technicality, a riddle. Or they're damned, a cautionary tale about pride. Benét chose a third path: collective identity.

Jabez Stone doesn't win because he's clever. Even so, he wins because Daniel Webster argues that the jury — twelve notorious villains from American history: Blackbeard, Walter Butler, Simon Girty, King Philip, the rest — are Americans. That the devil has no jurisdiction over an American soul because the very concept of American citizenship, flawed and bloody as it is, supersedes any infernal contract.

It's a nationalist argument. A little jingoistic, honestly. But in 1936, with fascism rising in Europe and the Depression grinding at home, the idea that American-ness itself — messy, contradictory, violent, but ours* — could stand up to the Prince of Darkness resonated. Still does, in a different way.

The story also works because Benét knew his Webster. Now, the real Daniel Webster did argue before the Supreme Court. He did have a reputation for stem-winding oratory that could move juries to tears. Benét didn't just borrow the name; he borrowed the voice. The rhythm of Webster's speech in the story — those long, rolling, biblical-cadenced sentences — mimics the historical record.

And the devil. Mr. Scratch. That said, not a horned monster. A soft-spoken New Englander in a black suit who carries a box of souls like a traveling salesman carries samples. "I am merely an honest businessman," he says. "I hold a mortgage on this man's soul." That banality — evil as contract law, as paperwork — is more chilling than any pitchfork.

The Story's Architecture

Benét structures it like a legal brief. Three acts.

Act One: The Bargain. Jabez Stone, down on his luck, plow broken, crops failing, wife sick, kicks his horse and says "I vow it's enough to make a man want to sell his soul to the devil!" Midnight. A knock. Mr. Scratch appears. The contract is signed in blood — or so Jabez thinks; it's actually just a pinprick. Seven years of prosperity. The farm thrives. Jabez becomes a selectman, a pillar of the community. But the shadow grows.

Act Two: The Reckoning. The seven years end. Jabez tries to weasel out of it. He hires lawyers. They quit. He tries to flee. Mr. Scratch catches him at the state line. "You're a slippery customer, Jabez," the devil says. "But I've got a long reach." The trial is set. Midnight. A barn. The jury arrives on the wind.

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Act Three: The Defense. Webster enters. He doesn't deny the contract. He doesn't argue technicalities. He argues identity*. He tells the jury of killers and traitors: "You were fooled, like the rest of us. But you were Americans*." He speaks of the Mayflower, the Constitution, the frontier, the Civil War, the "long, long trail" of American becoming. He admits the sins — slavery, genocide, greed — but claims them as our sins, to be answered for by us*, not collected by an outsider.

The jury deliberates. Because of that, webster sends him home. Plus, " Mr. On the flip side, returns a verdict: "We find for the defendant, Jabez Stone. Think about it: scratch vanishes. The last line: "And that's the story of how Dan'l Webster beat the devil, as told up in the border country.

Simple. Mythic. Deceptively so.

The Jury of the Damned

Benét's choice of jurors is deliberate. Not random villains. Each represents a specific American betrayal:

• Walter Butler — Loyalist commander, orchestrated the Cherry Valley massacre during the Revolution
• Simon Girty — "The White Savage," frontiersman who fought for the British and Native allies against American settlers
• King Philip (Metacom) — Wampanoag leader who led the last major Native resistance in New England
• Blackbeard — The pirate, symbol of lawless frontier capitalism
• Reverend John Smeet — Fictional, a "witch-hanging judge" type
• Others —

Others — including figures like Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, and Adolf Hitler, drawn from the broader Western imagination of treachery and evil. These aren't historical New England figures but archetypal villains, summoned to represent the universal capacity for moral bankruptcy that transcends time and geography.

The brilliance lies in how Benét weaponizes this assembled court. Now, rather than hiding America's sins, Webster drags them into the barn himself, placing them among the very judges meant to condemn him. When he calls these monsters to testify against their own kind, he transforms the jury into a mirror reflecting America's original sin of foundational violence — the violence of displacement, conquest, and betrayal that stains the nation's birth certificate.

The prosecution's case rests on the assumption that evil can be neatly categorized, that there are clear agents of damnation and victims of divine justice. But Webster exposes this as a fiction. In real terms, if America's greatest crimes were committed by its own children, then Scratch cannot claim ownership of Jabez's soul through some metaphysical loophole. The contract becomes not a transaction between equals but a usurpation of property that rightfully belongs to the community that produced both the buyer and the sellers.

This is why the verdict feels inevitable once Webster begins his defense. In practice, he doesn't argue against the terms of the agreement; he argues against the premise that any individual soul can be owned by a force external to the American project itself. The devil, for all his medieval gravitas, is revealed as a corporate raider, swooping in during America's moment of vulnerability to acquire assets that were never truly his to claim.

The story's architecture mirrors the structure of American mythmaking itself — the promise, the fall, the redemption through self-knowledge. But Benét's genius lies in making the redemption not spiritual but civic. There's no angelic intervention, no miraculous divine pardon. Instead, there's the hard-won recognition that justice must be administered by the community that shares in both the sinning and the suffering.

In its final analysis, "The Devil and Daniel Webster" functions as a parable about American exceptionalism turned inward — a story about how a nation might preserve its humanity not by denying its capacity for evil, but by refusing to let that capacity be harvested by forces that would commodify its souls. The border country where this trial takes place isn't just a geographical location but a metaphorical space where American identity confronts its own dark reflection.

The tale succeeds precisely because it understands that the most terrifying version of hell isn't fire and brimstone, but the bureaucratic machinery of eternal damnation — the soul as asset, the human heart as collateral, and evil as just another form of contractual obligation. In defeating Scratch, Webster doesn't prove the superiority of good over evil; he proves that collective self-examination can outlast any individual bargain with darkness.