Originalism: Webster Over Calhoun?

Law & Liberty: The Legal U-Turn by Ilan Wurman

What’s more, I would say that on the rare occasion when the public meaning diverges from the legal meaning, the public meaning probably ought to prevail. Consider the following example. In 1840, Congress debated whether its power to make uniform bankruptcy laws included the power to provide for debtor relief. The problem was that in England, bankruptcy and insolvency were legal terms of art—and the former referred only to the body of law existing for the protection of creditors, the latter to the body of law existing for the relief of debtors. The U.S. Constitution, of course, confers power on Congress only over bankruptcy and not insolvency. Thus Senators John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and Richard Henry Bayard of Delaware argued that federal lawmakers did not have the power to enact debtor relief because the sense of the term “bankruptcy” was to be taken from its legal history.

Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts disagreed. The ordinary public understanding is what counts. The term in question is, said Webster, to be taken in its “common and popular sense—in that sense in which the people may be supposed to have understood it when they ratified the Constitution.”[5] Congress agreed and enacted the insolvency provisions. Although the statute was soon repealed, when Congress subsequently enacted bankruptcy laws, its power over insolvency was never again questioned.

Webster’s point makes intuitive sense, and is in line with what several Framers thought when it came to interpreting the Constitution. As James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson: “The legitimate meaning of the [Constitution] must be derived from the text itself,” and external evidence “must be not in the opinions or intentions of the Body which planned and proposed the Constitution, but in the sense attached to it by the people in their respective State Conventions where it received all the authority which it possesses.”[6]

Wurman is just advancing a POV that has been held by other "scholars" of the Constitution: Webster over Calhoun. But was Webster  a better "originalist"?

To be fair: was the division between the legal meaning and public meaning of bankruptcy already evident during the drafting of the Constitution? We're not talking about what was understood in 1840, we're talking about what was understood in 1787 to 1790. What historical or linguistic evidence did Webster have to make that claim?