1833
Fletcher Webster
Colonel 12th Mass. Vols. (Infantry), June 26, 1861; killed at the battle of Bull Run, Va., August 30, 1862.Fletcher Webster, son of Daniel and Grace (Fletcher) Webster, was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, July 23, 1813. He was fitted for college at the Public Latin School in Boston, his father having removed to that city in 1816. He entered Harvard College in 1829, and graduated in 1833. Though not of studious habits, he held a respectable rank as a scholar. His generous character and cordial manners made him a general favorite with his classmates, and he was selected by them to deliver the class oration at the close of their collegiate life,—a distinction more gratifying to a social and sympathetic nature like his than the highest honors of scholarship would have been. After leaving college he studied law, partly with Mr. Samuel B. Walcott, at Hopkinton, Mass., and partly with his father, in Boston, and was in due time admitted to the Suffolk bar, and began the practice of his profession in Boston. In the autumn of 1836 he was married to Miss Caroline Story White, daughter of Stephen White, Esq., of Salem, and immediately after his marriage put in execution a plan he had previously formed of trying his professional fortunes at the West,—a change which at that time required more enterprise and involved greater sacrifices than now. He went first to Detroit, where he remained till the close of 1837 in the practice of his profession, and then removed to La Salle, in Illinois, where he remained till 1840. During his residence in Illinois, he made the acquaintance of Mr. Abraham Lincoln, who immediately recognized Colonel Webster when they met in Washington in 1861, and recalled their former intercourse to his memory. Colonel Webster met with fair success in the practice of the
