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.