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,