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."