Clement Webster
Clement Webster was born around 1817 in Kennebunk, Maine, to Stephen Webster and Lydia Kimball. He grew up and attended school in Kennebunk, and he apprenticed at a newspaper office in the 1830s. He and his brother Stephen established the York County Herald in Saco, Maine. He married Catherine Littlefield on May 15, 1839, and they had at least two children: Benjamin, born around 1840; and George, born around 1843.
He supported the Whig Party, and he helped organize an Association of the Whig Young Men of the County of York in 1840. In 1841, he began publishing the Washingtonian Banner, a newspaper “devoted to the advancement of…temperance reform.” The family moved to Providence, Rhode Island, around 1842, and he earned a living as a printer and postal worker there. He edited the Providence Post until March 1852, when he resigned in order to “advocate [temperance] free from the trammels of party.”
He edited the Providence Tribune and spent the 1850s delivering lectures on the temperance movement. He resumed editing the Post in 1856. His wife probably died in the 1850s, and he married Mariah P. Littlefield on October 21, 1858. By 1860, they owned $300 of personal property.
In October 1862, he received a commission as a 1st lieutenant in Battery H of the 1st Rhode Island Light Artillery. He fell ill soon afterward, and he resigned on February 7, 1863. He died of paralysis in Providence on October 16, 1864.
DATABASE CONTENT
| (4710) | Webster, Clement | 1817 | 1864-10-16 |
- Conflict Side: Union
- Role: Soldier
- Rank in: 1st Lieutenant
- Rank out: 1st Lieutenant
- Rank highest: 1st Lieutenant
- Gender: Male
- Race: White
Documents - Records: 1
- (13225) [writer] ~ Clement Webster to Edwin Metcalf, 17 March 186X
Places - Records: 2
Regiments - Records: 1
- (1228) [officer] [H] ~ 1st Rhode Island Light Artillery
Groups - Records: 1
- (2) [member/supporter] ~ Whig Party
SOURCES
1850 and 1860 United States Federal Censuses, available from Ancestry.com; Rhode Island Marriage Registrations, 1853-1922, available from Ancestry.com; Bangor (ME) Daily Whig and Courier, 22 May 1839, 2 December 1841, 2 March 1852; Lincoln Telegraph (Bath, ME), 27 February 1840 and 2 December 1841; The Portland (ME) Daily Press, 20 October 1864; Earl Fenner, The History of Battery H, First Regiment Rhode Island Light Artillery, in the War to Preserve the Union, 1861-1865 (Providence, RI: Snow & Farnham, 1894)
