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 the world that the patriotism of ’61 is not less than that of ’76; that the noble impulses of those patriot hearts have descended to us.”

On the eighteenth of July, 1861, Edward Everett presented to Colonel Webster a splendid regimental flag, the gift of the ladies of Boston to the Twelfth Regiment.[1] It need not be said that the presentation speech of Mr. Everett, and the reception speech of Colonel Webster, were of the first order.  But not even the words of a Webster or an Everett could adequately express the profound emotion of the vast concourse of people then assembled.  For it was one of those occasions when, as the elder Webster said, “Words have lost their power, rhetoric is vain, and all elaborate oratory contemptible.”

History will transmit the fact that on that day the simple, homely, stirring, and inspiring melody of Old John Brown was heard for the first time by the people of Boston.  It was a surprising and a gladsome spectacle—­a regiment bearing Daniel Webster’s talismanic name, commanded by his only surviving son, carrying a banner prepared by the fairest daughters of Massachusetts, carrying also the benediction of Edward Everett, and of “the solid men of Boston,” and marching to the tune of Old John Brown!  Did the weird prophet-orator who spoke of “carrying the flag and keeping step to the music of the Union” ever dream of such a strange combination?

On the seventeenth of June, 1861, by invitation of Governor Andrew, Colonel Webster spoke on Bunker Hill:  “From this spot I take my departure, like the mariner commencing his voyage, and wherever my eyes close, they will be turned hitherward towards this North; and, in whatever event, grateful will be the reflection, that this monument still stands—­still, still is glided by the earliest beams of the rising sun, and that still departing day lingers and plays upon its summit.”