In 1857, he published two volumes of the Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster.  In editing the papers of such a man, it is not difficult to make a “spicy” book.  Witness McVey Napier’s Edinburgh Review correspondence and Mr. Fronde’s Carlyle correspondence.  They have spared no one’s feelings.  They have paraded hasty expressions of transient spleen, which the authors would blush to read, except, perhaps, at the moment of writing.  Mr. Webster has shown us a more excellent way, though it may be less profitable.  “With charity for all, with malice for none,” he carefully excised from his father’s correspondence every passage tending to rekindle the fire of any former personal controversy in which his father had engaged.  In this, perhaps, he followed the behests of his father, who evinced, as he approached the tomb, an earnest desire for reconciliation with all with whom he had had differences, illustrating the Scottish proverb, “The evening brings all home.”

When the disruption of the Union came to be attempted, none of us who knew Fletcher Webster doubted for a moment what position he would take.  The same “passionate and exultant nationality,” which had nerved him to bear the loss of friends at the North, and to forego the chance of a public career, rather than countenance any measure calculated to excite ill-will at the South, now prompted him to advocate military coercion for the preservation of the Union.  Notwithstanding President Lincoln had just deprived him of the office upon which he depended for the maintenance of his family, he did not hesitate to tender to the administration his personal support in the field.

In the oration already quoted, he had said:  “There are certain ultimate rights which must be maintained; and when force is brought to overthrow them, it must be resisted by force.”  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.”