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.