The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (10 page)

According to protocol, the main event of the evening was a reading of the complete contents from the latest issue of
Clio
. Juliana was an enterprising editor who managed to garner literary forays from a wide variety of contributors. Chief among them were her brother’s Yale classmates such as Abiel Holmes (later a pastor whose son was the writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.); James Kent (a future chancellor of New York State); and David Daggett (later a U.S. senator from Connecticut). As a critic, Juliana was hard to please. Just because she printed something, it didn’t necessarily follow that she liked it. As she once wrote her brother, “Oh my dear Jack, I fear me there is very little promise that any of your friends will prove to be Shakespeares or Miltons.”

As the evening wore on, Webster stepped into the kitchen, which, situated behind the two other rooms, gave speakers a view of the entire assemblage. He then read his latest, a moral essay, which took the form of a dream. The full text no longer remains, but the acerbic Juliana did bequeath to posterity a blanket assessment of Webster’s writings for
Clio,
comparing them unfavorably to the imagined cogitations of the family’s horse, Jack:

Despite her sharp edge, Juliana Smith was touching on what would emerge as a central feature of Webster’s literary activity. Over the course of his long career, Noah Webster, Jr., would rarely dazzle his readers with breathtaking originality. He would, indeed, make his mark on posterity but not so much for his writing as for his rewriting. His monumental contribution to American letters would be to redo the leading British works on language for a native audience. Lexicography was a perfect fit for Webster’s personal tics, as it required collecting and examining ideas that were not one’s own (of all the entries in his dictionary, only “demoralize” would be of his own coinage). And no one could analyze the words of others more scrupulously or with greater élan than Webster.

That night was the last time Webster would address the Sharon literary society. A week later, just as the fall term was beginning, he suddenly closed up his school and skipped town. While Webster didn’t explain his surprising decision in his memoir, it appears that he was distraught over a failed romance. That summer, in addition to his full load of teaching duties, the musically accomplished Webster also directed a choir one evening a week. And before long, he fell in love with one of his students, Rebecca Pardee, a local beauty to whom he proposed marriage. At the time, Rebecca was unattached, but in the fall, her former beau, Major Patchin, who had been serving abroad in the army, returned to Sharon. With Rebecca unable to choose between the two appealing bachelors, she deferred to the wishes of the local clergy—a rare move even for the times. The church elders decided in favor of the major because he had first won her affection. Webster never wrote about this loss, but it must have devastated him. Commenting on Webster’s “pretty love romance” with Rebecca Pardee a century later,
The Saturday Evening Post
quipped, “Unlike most disappointed swains, he did not turn to puerile poetry for relief. It took a whole dictionary to express his feelings.”

 

 

AFTER WANDERING ACROSS Connecticut in a fruitless search for employment, Webster returned to Sharon early the following year. Back at the Smith house, he soon began a lively correspondence with the pastor’s son, John Cotton Smith, then finishing up his junior year at Yale. A half-dozen years younger than Webster, Smith was honored by Webster’s “condescension in writing.” Perhaps attempting to soften the blow of the rejection by Pardee, in January 1782 Smith reported on the negative impact of marriage on Josiah Meigs, Webster’s Yale classmate, who was now his tutor: “he appears no more possessed of that vigour, sprightliness and vivacity, but on the contrary anxieties and solicitudes seem to brood upon him . . . . if this be the effect marriage produces . . . may I get the wrong side of thirty before I put on its shackles.” Steering the dialogue away from personal concerns, Webster wrote Smith of his dreams for himself, his friends and his nation:

For Webster, emotional setbacks resulted not in mourning, but in a ratcheting up of his fierce ambition. Doing something noteworthy, he felt, could help him regain his self-esteem. And fortunately for Webster, his grandiose fantasies surfaced at a crossroads in world history. With the Revolutionary War now winding down—that October, Lord General Cornwallis had surrendered to Washington at Yorktown—and a new nation needing to be built, Webster would soon have ample opportunity to satisfy his itch for fame and glory.

In fact, that January Noah Webster, the scribe of American identity, made his debut and, by the end of the month, had emerged as a public figure with a significant following. In late 1781,
Rivington’s Royal Gazette
tried to do what British might had failed do—convince Americans to renounce their independence. The loyalist New York City newspaper carried a series of letters by Silas Deane, a former Connecticut delegate to the Continental Congress, which leaned on a recent pamphlet by Abbe Raynal, a French philosopher, to make the case for reconciling with the British. Hearing of this attempt to, in his words, “twist the meaning of the Abbe . . . in order more effectually to disunite the Americans,” Webster was apoplectic. He immediately shot back with an editorial, “Observations on the Revolution,” first published on January 17 in
The New York Packet
and republished two weeks later in the prominent New England paper,
The Salem Gazette
. Webster offered a different reading of Raynal’s work: “A philosopher like the Abbe . . . must see that the astonishing opposition of America to the attacks of Great Britain cannot be the fortuitous ebullition of popular frenzy; but the effect of design—the calm result of daring zeal, tempered with reason and deliberation.” Over the next couple of months, Webster published three more articles, stressing that the break with Britain was permanent. “America,” he emphasized, “is now an independent empire. She acknowledges no sovereign on earth, and will avow no connexions but those of friend and allies.”

In the spring of 1782, Webster considered giving teaching another try in Sharon. On April 16, he distributed a prospectus, announcing his plan to open another school on May 1 in which “any young gentlemen and ladies, who wish to acquaint themselves with the English language, geography, vocal music, etc. may be waited upon for that purpose.” A couple of days later, the Smith family suffered a huge loss. Thomas Mather Smith, the brother of Juliana and John Cotton Smith, died of consumption at age nineteen. And then, for the second time, Webster abandoned both his plans to teach school and his room in the Smith household under mysterious circumstances.

Webster didn’t account for this hasty retreat from Sharon in his memoir, either. Though the death of Thomas Smith was not sudden—as Webster put it in a touching poem to Pastor Smith, the youth’s family and friends had suffered “the pangs of six months’ slow decay”—its finality may have jolted the Smiths, who perhaps no longer felt prepared to put up a houseguest. But another failed romance may also have played a role. Toward the end of his stay in Sharon, Webster had fallen for Juliana Smith, and she, too, would reject his advances. While Webster soon gave up his pursuit of the discerning editor, who, in 1784, would marry Jacob Radcliff, later the mayor of New York City, he never forgot about her. When putting together his reader a couple of years later, Webster included a brief moral essay, “Juliana: A Real Character,” which reads like a love letter to the real Juliana Smith. In fact, composing these few pages made him ill. In his diary on November 1, 1784, he noted, “Writing the character of Juliana. PM very sick with a headache.” “Juliana,” the piece begins, “is one of those rare women whose personal attractions have no rivals.” Webster goes on to heap twenty-seven paragraphs of lavish praise upon this “elegant person.” Juliana possesses all those qualities that Webster holds most dear. She has “engaging manners . . . . to her superiors she shows the utmost deference and respect. To her equals . . . the most modest civility.” Juliana, Webster adds, also “pays constant and sincere attention to the duties of religion” and has a “strong desire for useful information” (an attribute that was particularly enticing to the future lexicographer). In the last paragraph, Webster uncharacteristically expresses abject romantic longing: “If it is possible for her to find a man who knows her worth, and has a disposition and virtues to reward it, the union of their hearts must secure that unmingled felicity in life, which is reserved for genuine love, a passion inspired by sensibility, and improved by a perpetual intercourse of kind offices.” Juliana was clearly the type of woman Noah Webster—a twenty-six-year-old bachelor when he wrote these words—was looking for in a wife. A decade later, Webster would pay another tribute to this Sharon love by naming his second child Frances Juliana.

After leaving Sharon in the spring of 1782, Webster also lost touch with Juliana’s brother, John Cotton Smith, who would go on to have a distinguished career in Connecticut politics. From 1812 to 1817, Smith served as the state’s last Federalist governor. Afterward, he became president of the American Bible Society and would dabble as a wordsmith. Surprisingly, after the publication of Webster’s dictionary, the retired lawyer would issue harsh attacks upon the man he once revered as a teenager. In an essay “The Purity of the English Language Defended,” published in
The New York Mirror
nearly six decades after Webster’s Sharon sojourn, Smith would write, “It is from orthography that language receives its form and pressure; and as ours has been settled by respectable authority, and sanctioned by the best usage, the chief merit of a lexicographer . . . consists in suffering it to remain precisely as he finds it. Unfortunately, our author [Webster] thought otherwise.” Smith was knocking Webster for his unique contribution to American letters—the creation of a distinct language for the new nation. That Webster first formulated this goal while living in Smith’s own house didn’t soften the ex-governor’s stance toward his former literary society colleague. In fact, it had been to the teenage John Cotton Smith that the young Sharon teacher complained about his frustration with the leading British speller, the grumblings that eventually led to Webster’s spectacularly successful school text.

 

 

IN APRIL 1782, while Webster was winding up his second sojourn in the Smith house, General George Washington moved into Hasbrouck House in Newburgh, a town in upstate New York, just across the Hudson River from Sharon. There Washington set up the new headquarters for the Continental army. While the United States had succeeded in neutralizing British forces, New York City was still in enemy hands and the war was not yet over. Though the new nation faced many challenges, Washington had to focus largely on the disbanding of the Continental army’s seven thousand troops. Under the Articles of Confederation—hastily passed in 1777 and ratified in 1781—the national government had little leverage. It could not, for example, raise tax revenue. Frustrated by this arrangement, some sought quick fixes. On May 22, 1782, Colonel Lewis Nicola wrote to Washington, suggesting that he take matters into his own hands and declare himself king. Washington would have no part of this scheme. “Let me conjure you then,” the General wrote back that same day, “if you have any regard for your country, concern for yourself or posterity, or respect for me, to banish these thoughts from your mind, and never communicate, as from yourself, or any one else, a sentiment of the like nature.” As he waited for Benjamin Franklin and the other diplomats in Paris to complete the peace negotiations, Washington, like most of America’s leaders, wasn’t sure exactly what kind of country he wanted; however, the General knew what traps he wished to avoid.

After leaving Sharon, Webster spent a day in Newburgh with a friend who was an officer in Washington’s army. He then moved on to the neighboring town of Goshen, located in Orange County, where he opened a classical school for the children of prominent local families. Down to his last seventy-five cents, Webster felt he could no longer afford to teach in a public school. Fortunately, his new pupils—the scions of well-to-do parents such as the pastor Nathaniel Kerr and Henry Wisner, New York’s lone signer of the Declaration of Independence who would later help found the State University of New York—paid not in paper currency, but in silver dollars. This arrangement gave Webster, he later noted, “an advantage rarely enjoyed in any business at this time.”

Yet Webster still longed to earn a better living in his chosen profession—law. He was also feeling lonely in this strange town outside of his native Connecticut. “In this situation of things,” Webster recalled in his memoir, “his spirits failed, and for some months, he suffered extreme depression and gloomy forebodings.” With the nation’s overall economic picture bleak, Webster was not alone in feeling desperate. But he managed to shake himself out of despair through a creative solution. “In this state of mind,” Webster added, “he formed the design of composing books for the instruction of children; and began by compiling a spelling book on a plan which he supposed to be better adapted to assist the learner, than that of Dilworth.”