(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
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Richard Fletcher was born on January 8, 1788, at Cavendish, Vermont, the son of Sarah Green and Asaph Fletcher, a physician and prominent local politician of Leicester, Massachusetts, and Cavendish, Vermont.
Fletcher was the sixth in line of descent from Robert Fletcher, a Yorkshireman, who settled at Concord, Massachusetts, in 1630.
Fletcher spent his boyhood at Cavendish, obtaining his early education at the local schools.
Proceeding to Dartmouth College, he graduated in 1806 with the highest honors.
He then became principal of the academy at Salisbury, New Hampshire, but in 1809 took up the study of law at Portsmouth with Daniel Webster.
On being admitted to the New Hampshire bar in Rockingham County in 1811 Fletcher commenced practise at Salisbury, removing later to Portsmouth, where he quickly established a reputation for reliability which combined with a natural instinct for circuit work to attract an ever-increasing professional connection.
In 1819, seeking a larger sphere he moved to Boston, was admitted to the Suffolk County bar in 1820, and at once took his place with the leading Massachusetts practitioners. Always a student, his wide reading gave him a comprehensive command of the law and his devotion to his clients’ interests made him an admirable advisor. Though never erudite in the academic sense his knowledge of mercantile and maritime law was profound. It was as a jury lawyer that he was most successful. Not eloquent, he was master of a straightforward, almost conversational style of speaking which by its very simplicity favorably impressed a jury, and his marshalling of the facts of a case compelled conviction. No advocate of his time was more skilful in the conduct of a trial.
His greatest triumph, however, was obtained in the Charles River Bridge Case, in which, against the almost unanimous opinion of the Boston bar, Fletcher successfully contested before the Massachusetts supreme court the claim of Harvard University to an exclusive franchise of bridging the Charles River between Charlestown and Boston. Decided by a bare majority in the Supreme Court of the United States, it was "one of the most noted and historic cases ever argued before that tribunal".
In 1836 Fletcher was elected to the Twenty-fifth Congress as a Whig representative. At Washington his "enforced contact and daily association with men whose profanity and immorality shocked him beyond measure, " was, he said, unbearable, and he declined a renomination.
He was appointed a judge of the Massachusetts supreme court, October 24, 1848, but resigned January 18, 1853, giving as his reason that he found his judicial duties so unremitting as to leave no time for reading or thinking on any other subject.
Fletcher returned to the bar for a short time, but retired from practise in 1858. Richard Fletcher died on June 21, 1869, in Boston, Massachusetts.
(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
Throughout his life Richard Fletcher was a devout member of the Baptist Church, and an unusually acute sense of religious responsibility pervaded all his social and professional contacts.
In 1836, Richard Fletcher was elected as a Whig to the Twenty-fifth Congress, serving until 1839. Not a candidate for re-nomination, he served as a judge of the supreme court of Massachusetts, (1848 - 1853).
Richard Fletcher never married.
Ryland Fletcher was an American farmer, politician, the 19th Lieutenant Governor of Vermont from 1854 to 1856, and then was the 24th Governor of Vermont from October 10, 1856 to October 10, 1858.
