COLONEL FLETCHER WEBSTER.
By Charles Cowley, LL.D.
Fletcher Webster, son of Daniel and Grace (Fletcher) Webster, was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, July 23, 1813. He was but three years old when his father removed to Boston, where he was fitted for college in the Public Latin School,—the nursery of so many eminent men.
On the seventeenth of June, 1825, when Lafayette laid the cornerstone of the monument on Bunker Hill, when Daniel Webster delivered one of the most famous of his orations, Fletcher Webster, then twelve years old, was present. "The vast procession, impatient of unavoidable delay, broke the line of march, and, in a tumultuous crowd, rushed towards the orator's platform," which was in imminent danger of being crushed to the earth. Fletcher Webster was only saved from being trampled under foot, by the thoughtful care of George Sullivan, who lifted the boy upon his own shoulders, shouting, "Don't kill the orator's son!" and bore him through the crowd, and placed him upon the staging at his father's feet. It required the utmost efforts of Daniel Webster to control that multitudinous throng. "Stand back, gentlemen!" he repeatedly shouted with his double-bass voice; "you must stand back!" "We can't stand back, Mr. Webster; it is impossible!" cried a voice in the crowd. Mr. Webster replied, in tones of thunder: "On Bunker Hill nothing is impossible." And the crowd stood back.
At the age of sixteen, he lost his mother by death. This was the greatest of all the calamities that happened to his father, and it was not less unfortunate for himself, for it deprived him of the best influence that ever contributed to mould his career.
In 1829, Fletcher Webster entered Harvard College, and was graduated in the class of 1833, when he delivered the class oration, which Charles Sumner, who was present, said "was characterized by judgment, sense, and great directness and plainness of speech."
While at college, he was distinguished for his fine social qualities, for his exquisite humor, and peculiar "Yankee wit." When participating in amateur theatrical exhibitions, he always preferred to play the role of the typical Yankee,—a character now extinct,—which he played to perfection.
As the son of Daniel Webster, he might almost be said to have inherited the profession of the law, and in 1836 he was admitted to the bar. In the same year he married the wife who survives him—a grandniece of Captain White, who was so atrociously murdered at Salem, six years before, and whose murderers might have escaped the gallows but for the genius and astuteness of Daniel Webster.
The Western States, which are now Central States, were then attracting millions of the young and the enterprising from New England; and Fletcher Webster began the practice of the law at Detroit, Michigan. But at the close of the year 1837, he removed to Peru, Illinois, where he remained three years. During that period, he made the acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln, then a struggling lawyer at the Sangamon County bar. No man upon this planet had then less thought of becoming President of the United States than Abraham Lincoln; and no man had greater expectations of attaining that distinction than Mr. Webster's father; yet a master-stroke of the irony of destiny lifted the obscure Western attorney, not into the presidency merely, but into the highest place in the pantheon of American history, while it balked and mocked all the aspirations of New England's greatest son. Pondering on events like these, well did Horace Greeley exclaim: "Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; riches take wings: the only thing certain is oblivion."
In 1841, when his father became Secretary of State under President Harrison, Fletcher Webster relinquished his professional prospects in the West, and removed to Washington, where he acted as his father's assistant. From his father's verbal suggestions, he prepared diplomatic papers of the first importance; and no man could perform that delicate service more satisfactorily to his father than he. It is understood that the famous Hulseman Letter, which, more than anything else, distinguished Daniel Webster's second term of service in the department of State, was thus prepared.
Whether he or some one else prepared that extraordinary letter which was to introduce Caleb Cushing to the Emperor of China, which assumed that the Chinese were a nation of children, and which Chinese scholars treated as conclusive evidence that the Americans had not emerged from barbarism,—we know not. But if he did, he doubtless laughed at it afterward as a childish performance.
On the seventeenth of June, 1843, Fletcher Webster witnessed the laying of the capstone of the monument on Bunker Hill, and listened, with affectionate interest, to the oration which was then delivered by his father,—an oration which, if inferior to that delivered at the laying of the cornerstone, was nevertheless every way worthy of the man and the occasion,—simple, massive, and splendid. A few weeks later, he sailed from Boston for China, and watched, as he tells us, "while light and eyesight lasted, till the summit of that monument faded, at last, from view." Many a departing, many a returning, sailor and traveler, has given his "last, long, lingering look" to that towering obelisk, but none with deeper feeling than Fletcher Webster.
As secretary to Commissioner Cushing, he assisted in negotiating the first treaty between the United States and China, which involved an absence of eighteen months from the United States. Neither the outward nor the homeward voyage was made in company with Mr. Cushing. Mr. Webster left Boston, August 8, 1843, in the brig Antelope, built by Captain R.B. Forbes, touched at Bombay, November 12, 1843, and arrived at Canton, February 4, 1844. He returned in the ship Paul Jones, in January, 1845, the voyage from Canton to New York being made in one hundred and eleven days. It deserves to be stated, as illustrating the admiration with which the merchant princes of Boston regarded Daniel Webster, that the house of Russell and Company, which owned both the Antelope and the Paul Jones, refused to accept any passage-money from his son, who was entertained, not as a passenger, but as an honored guest.
By his voyage to China and by his experiences there, Mr. Webster, acquired, not only rich stores of curious information and a great enlargement of his intellectual horizon, but—what is particularly to be noted—a better appreciation of the splendid destiny of his native land. Unlike many foolish Americans, who waste their time in foreign capitals, he never harbored the slightest regret that he had not been born something other than an American; he never desired to be anything but a free citizen of the great republic of the West.
He prepared a lecture on China, which he delivered in many of the cities and large towns. Mr. Cushing had already entered the lecture field with a discourse on China, and some thought Mr. Webster presumptuous in thus inviting comparison between his own discourse and Mr. Cushing's. But competent critics, who heard both these efforts, expressed a preference for that of Mr. Webster. Vast as was Mr. Cushing's learning, his oratorical style was never one of the best; while Fletcher Webster's style, for clearness, simplicity, strength, and majesty, was little inferior to that of his illustrious father. He afterward expanded this lecture to the dimensions of a book, but never published it; and, in 1878, this manuscript, and all others left by him, perished by the fire which destroyed the Webster House at Marshfield. One of the few scraps which have survived this fire is a Latin epitaph which he wrote for his father's horse, Steamboat,—a horse of great speed and endurance,—and which seldom lay down at night unless he had been overdriven. In English, it ran thus: "Stop, traveler, for a greater traveler than thou stops here."
On the Fourth of July, 1845, Charles Sumner delivered, before the municipal authorities of Boston, an oration on Peace, which provoked much hostile criticism; and on the next succeeding anniversary of American Independence, Fletcher Webster delivered an oration on War, which was designed to show that there are cases "where war, with all its woes, must be endured."
It is probably the only elaborate discourse of his, which has been preserved entire. It contains many quotable passages; but we must content ourselves with the following, which are quite in his father's style:—
"We meet to brighten the memories of a glorious past, to strengthen ourselves in our onward progress, to remember great enterprises, to look forward to a great career."
"We celebrate no single triumph, but the result of a long series of victories; we celebrate the memory of no mere successful battle, but the great triumph of a people; the victory of liberty over oppression, won by suffering and struggle and death; the fruit of high sentiment, of resolute patriotism, of consummate wisdom, of unshaken faith and trust in God,—a victory and a triumph not for us only, but for all the oppressed, everywhere, and for every age to come, ... a victory whose future results to us and to others no imagination can foresee, and which are yet but commencing to unfold themselves."
"And does any one believe that these results [to wit, the winning of American independence, and the building of the American nation] could have been attained in any other method than by arms and successful physical resistance."
In 1847, he held the only political office to which he was ever elected by popular suffrage,—that of representative in the Legislature. In 1850, he was appointed surveyor of the port of Boston by President Taylor, and he was reappointed to the same office by Presidents Pierce and Buchanan successively. There were many who would have been glad to see him in a larger sphere, but "the mark which he made upon his times," as Mr. Hillard observes, was less than his friends had anticipated. Occasionally he appeared as an orator in political campaigns, notably in 1856, at Exeter, in his native State, where he spoke with laudable pride of having "sat at the feet of a great statesman now no more."
The son of Martin Van Buren and the son of Levi Woodbury united their voices on that occasion with the voice of the son of Webster. A striking remark then made by him is well remembered. Referring to the speech of Senator Sumner, which excited the assault of Mr. Brooks, Mr. Webster said, "If I had been going to make such a speech, I should have worn an iron pot upon my head."
In 1857, he published two volumes of the Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster. In editing the papers of such a man, it is not difficult to make a "spicy" book. Witness McVey Napier's Edinburgh Review correspondence and Mr. Fronde's Carlyle correspondence. They have spared no one's feelings. They have paraded hasty expressions of transient spleen, which the authors would blush to read, except, perhaps, at the moment of writing. Mr. Webster has shown us a more excellent way, though it may be less profitable. "With charity for all, with malice for none," he carefully excised from his father's correspondence every passage tending to rekindle the fire of any former personal controversy in which his father had engaged. In this, perhaps, he followed the behests of his father, who evinced, as he approached the tomb, an earnest desire for reconciliation with all with whom he had had differences, illustrating the Scottish proverb, "The evening brings all home."
When the disruption of the Union came to be attempted, none of us who knew Fletcher Webster doubted for a moment what position he would take. The same "passionate and exultant nationality," which had nerved him to bear the loss of friends at the North, and to forego the chance of a public career, rather than countenance any measure calculated to excite ill-will at the South, now prompted him to advocate military coercion for the preservation of the Union. Notwithstanding President Lincoln had just deprived him of the office upon which he depended for the maintenance of his family, he did not hesitate to tender to the administration his personal support in the field.
In the oration already quoted, he had said: "There are certain ultimate rights which must be maintained; and when force is brought to overthrow them, it must be resisted by force." Among the rights which must thus be maintained, in his view, was the right of the United States to maintain, forever, the union of these States. The policy of coercion, bitterly as he bewailed its necessity, was not new to him. His father had advocated the Force Bill almost thirty years before. The time had come, when, in the words of Jefferson (words spoken when only the Articles of Confederation held the States in union): "Some of the States must see the rod; perhaps some of them must feel it." Accordingly, on the twentieth of April, 1861, while the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the attack on the Sixth Regiment were firing the Northern heart, Fletcher Webster called that memorable Sunday-morning meeting in State Street, which resulted in the organization of the Twelfth Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry. Referring to that occasion, George S, Hillard said it recalled to the minds of those present, Colonel Webster's father, who had then been but nine years in the grave. "To the mind's eye, that majestic form and grand countenance seemed standing by the side of his son; and in the mind's ear, they heard again the deep music of that voice which had so often charmed and instructed them."
Colonel Webster said: "He whose name I bear had the good fortune to defend the Union and the Constitution in the forum. That I cannot do, but I am ready to defend them in the field." Like other national men, he refused to listen to the "sixty-day" prattle by which others were deceived. He saw that by no "summer excursion to Moscow" could the Southern Confederacy be suppressed; that immense forces would be marshalled in aid of that Confederacy; and that the war for the Union, like the war for Independence, would be won only by 'suffering, and struggle, and death.
Ten years earlier, it seemed to Rufus Choate as if the hoarded-up resentments and revenges of a thousand years were about to unsheath the sword for a conflict, "in which the blood should flow, as in the Apocalyptic vision, to the bridles of the horses; in which a whole age of men should pass away; in which the great bell of time should sound out another hour; in which society itself should be tried by fire and steel, whether it were of Nature and of Nature's God, or not."
Such a conflict was indeed impending, and Fletcher Webster appreciated its extreme gravity, when, from the balcony of the Old State House, on that Sunday morning, he made his stirring appeal: "Let us show the world that the patriotism of '61 is not less than that of '76; that the noble impulses of those patriot hearts have descended to us."
On the eighteenth of July, 1861, Edward Everett presented to Colonel Webster a splendid regimental flag, the gift of the ladies of Boston to the Twelfth Regiment.[1] It need not be said that the presentation speech of Mr. Everett, and the reception speech of Colonel Webster, were of the first order. But not even the words of a Webster or an Everett could adequately express the profound emotion of the vast concourse of people then assembled. For it was one of those occasions when, as the elder Webster said, "Words have lost their power, rhetoric is vain, and all elaborate oratory contemptible."
History will transmit the fact that on that day the simple, homely, stirring, and inspiring melody of Old John Brown was heard for the first time by the people of Boston. It was a surprising and a gladsome spectacle—a regiment bearing Daniel Webster's talismanic name, commanded by his only surviving son, carrying a banner prepared by the fairest daughters of Massachusetts, carrying also the benediction of Edward Everett, and of "the solid men of Boston," and marching to the tune of Old John Brown! Did the weird prophet-orator who spoke of "carrying the flag and keeping step to the music of the Union" ever dream of such a strange combination?
On the seventeenth of June, 1861, by invitation of Governor Andrew, Colonel Webster spoke on Bunker Hill: "From this spot I take my departure, like the mariner commencing his voyage, and wherever my eyes close, they will be turned hitherward towards this North; and, in whatever event, grateful will be the reflection, that this monument still stands—still, still is glided by the earliest beams of the rising sun, and that still departing day lingers and plays upon its summit."
After referring to the two former occasions when he had visited that historic shaft, when his father had spoken there, he added, "I now stand again at its base, and renew once more, on this national altar, vows, not for the first time made, of devotion to my country, its Constitution and Union."
With these words upon his lips, with these sentiments in his heart, and in the hearts of the thousand brave men of his command, Colonel Webster went forth, the dauntless champion and willing martyr of the Union. Except that the death of a beloved daughter brought him back for a few days to his family in the following summer, the people of Massachusetts saw his living face no more.
On the thirtieth of August, 1862, the second day of the second battle of Bull Run, late in the afternoon, while gallantly directing the movements of his regiment, and giving his orders in those clear, firm, ringing tones, which, in the tumult of battle, fall so gratefully on the soldier's ear, Colonel Webster was shot through the body; and the Federal forces being closely pressed at the time, he was left to die on the field in Confederate hands. As the event became known through the country, thousands of generous hearts, in the South as well as in the North, recalled the peroration of his father's reply to Hayne, and bitterly regretted that, when his eyes were turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, it had been his unhappy lot to "see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union, on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent, on a land rent with internal feuds, and drenched [as then it was] with fraternal blood."
In the time-honored song of Roland, we are told, "Count Roland lay under a pine-tree dying, and many things came to his remembrance." As it was with Count Roland in Spain, so it was with Colonel Webster in Virginia. In the multitude of memories which rushed upon him as he lay dying on that ill-starred battle-field, we may be sure that Boston, Bunker Hill, and the home and grave of Marshfield, were not forgotten.
The body of Colonel Webster was willingly given up by the Confederates, and after lying in state in Faneuil Hall, and adding another to the immortal recollections which ennoble "the cradle of liberty," it was buried near his father's grave by the sea.
The Grand Army Post at Brockton, containing survivors of the Webster Regiment, has adopted Colonel Webster's name; and on each Memorial Day, members of this Post make a pilgrimage to Marshfield to decorate his grave. His life is remarkable for its apparent possibilities rather than for its actual achievements,—for the capabilities which were recognized in him, rather than for what he accomplished, either in public or professional life. His military career was cut short by a Confederate bullet before opportunity demonstrated that capacity for high command, which his superior officers, as well as his soldiers, believed him to possess. The instincts of the soldier are often as trustworthy as the judgment of the commander. All his soldiers loved him,—
—"honored him, followed him,
Dwelt in his mild and magnificent eye,
Heard his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him their pattern to do and to die."
While the regret still lingers, that he was not permitted to witness, and to contribute further effort to secure, the triumph, which he predicted, of the cause for which he died—that regret is mitigated by the reflection, that he could never have died more honorably than in a war which could only have been avoided by the sacrifice of the Constitution and the Union.
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This banner now hangs in the Doric Hall at the State House, where its mute eloquence has often started tears, and "thoughts too deep for tears," in many a casual visitor.