Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 8.djvu/71

 Colonel Fletcher Webster.

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��selves in our onward progress, to remember great enterprises, to look forward to a great career."

"We celebrate no single triumph, but the result of a long series of victo- ries; we celebrate the memory of no mere successful battle, but the great triumph of a people ; the victory of liberty over oppression, won by suffer- ing and struggle and death ; the fruit of higlv^entiment, of resolute patriot- ism, of consummate wisdom, of un- shaken faith and trust in God, — a victory and a triumph not for us only, but for all the oppressed, everywhere, and for every age to come, ... a victory whose future results to us and to others no imagination can foresee, and which are yet but commencing to unfold themselves."

"And does any one believe that these results [to wit, the winning of Ameri- can independence, and the building of the American nation] could have been attained in any other method than by arms and successful physical resist- ance."

In 1847, he held the only political office to which he was ever elected by popular suffrage, — that of representa- tive in the Legislature. In 1850, he was appointed surveyor of the port of Boston by President Taylor, and he was reappointed to the same office by Presidents Pierce and Buchanan suc- cessively. There were many who would have been glad to see him in a larger sphere, but " the mark which he made upon his times," as Mr. Hillard observes, was less than his friends had anticipated. Occasionally he appeared as an orator in political campaigns, notably in 1856, at Exeter, in his native State, where he spoke with laud- able pride of having " sat at the feet of a great statesman now no more."

��The son of Martin Van Buren and the son of Levi Woodbury united their voices on that occasion with the voice of the son of Webster. A striking re- mark then made by him is well remem- bered. Referring to the speech of Senator Sumner, which excited the assault of Mr. Brooks, Mr. Webster said, "If I had been going to make such a speech, I should have worn an iron pot upon my head."

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 corre- spondence and Mr. Froude'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 care- fully excised from his father's corre- spondence every passage tending to rekindle the fire of any former personal controversy in which his father had en- gaged. 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, illustrat- ing 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

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