" 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