The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (12 page)

While Webster’s speller was well suited to curry the favor of a struggling new nation, it would have not sold so well were its author not also a marketing genius. As would often be the case, Noah Webster’s personal failings would be instrumental to his literary success. Precisely because of his shaky self-esteem, Webster turned out to be a natural at self-promotion; after all, talking (or writing) himself up was his way of being in the world. The first book printed in the new United States of America would benefit from the publicity tools that later became the staples of the publishing industry, including blurbs from prominent people (many of which Webster wrote himself), prepublication buzz, heated media controversy and the book tour. In the late eighteenth century, authors—not publishers—typically arranged for the financing, printing and distribution of books, and Webster would handle these practical challenges with remarkable aplomb. Over the next century, only the Bible would sell more copies in America than Webster’s speller.

However, the soon-to-be literary sensation would continue to struggle with intense feelings of anxiety and alienation.

A
lready a seasoned networker by his early twenties, Webster tried to cash in on his connections with the well-heeled. In the fall of 1782, he headed south from Goshen to the nation’s capital, Philadelphia, armed with a letter of introduction by Henry Wisner, then a prominent member of the New York State Senate, which began, “Mr. Noah Webster has taught a grammar school for some time past in this place, much to the satisfaction of his employers. He is now doing some business in the literary way, which will, in the opinion of good judges, be of great service to posterity.” Webster had just completed a draft of his book, and the purpose of his business trip was twofold: “showing my manuscripts to gentlemen of influence and obtaining a law for securing to authors the copy-right of their publications.” From scholars and statesmen, Webster sought both advice and endorsements as well as help in protecting his intellectual property. Piracy was then common. As Joel Barlow had warned him that summer, “The printers make large impressions of it [Dilworth] and afford it very cheap.” To become America’s first self-sustaining freelance writer, Webster would take it upon himself to become the father of American copyright law.

In Philadelphia, he briefly intersected with such luminaries as the Virginia delegates Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, from whom he learned that the Congress of the Confederation lacked the authority to pass a national copyright law. Webster then tried to take his campaign to the state legislatures of both Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but neither was in session. But though he had ready access to the corridors of power—in Trenton, he met personally with Governor William Livingston—he came up empty-handed. Upon his return to Goshen in October, all he had to show for his travels was an endorsement from Dr. Samuel Smith, a professor of theology in Princeton, who wrote of “the many useful improvements” in his speller. That month, he turned his attention to the state legislature in his native Connecticut. To make the case to his friend John Canfield, a state representative, Webster solicited a recommendation from the Litchfield legal scholar, Tapping Reeve, who characterized the work as “well conceived and judiciously executed.” In January, he confessed to Canfield that his trilogy was leaving him close to another breakdown: “I have been indefatigable this winter; I have sacrificed ease, pleasure and health to the execution of it, and have nearly completed it. But such close application is too much for my constitution.” But public acceptance soon came. Later that month, Connecticut passed America’s first copyright law. By the end of the year, with additional prodding by Webster, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Rhode Island all fell into line.

Giving up his teaching post, the twenty-four-year-old Webster moved back to Hartford, then still a farming village of just three hundred houses and twenty-five hundred residents, to arrange for publication of his speller. He initially stayed with John Trumbull, who had recently completed the transition from poet to high-powered attorney. In Connecticut’s co-capital, Webster was pleased to reconnect with his Yale classmates Oliver Wolcott, then beginning his legal career, and Joel Barlow, who continued to write poetry while working as a publisher. Webster’s first order of business was to negotiate a deal for his speller with Hudson and Goodwin, the firm that published
The Connecticut Courant
. To pay the printing costs, Webster relied on the largesse of his friends. Showing what Webster later called “generosity [that] far exceeded his means,” Barlow helped out with five hundred dollars; Trumbull made an even more substantial donation. For the rest, Webster submitted a promissory note, which the company agreed to accept in return for the author’s promise to let them print subsequent editions. On September 16, 1783, just two weeks after the Treaty of Paris, which officially ended the American Revolution, Webster placed an ad in the
Courant,
highlighting the distinguishing features of his forthcoming text: “The sounds of our vowels which are various and capricious are ascertained by the help of figures . . . . words are so divided as to lead to a just pronunciation . . . the irregular and difficult words are collected in an alphabetical table with the true spelling in one and the true pronunciation in another.” While individual copies cost fourteen pence, to promote sales to schools, Webster offered a bulk discount of fourteen shillings per dozen—a marketing strategy that would work splendidly.

But Webster was just beginning his media campaign. On October 14, 1783, a week after the official publication date, his
Grammatical Institute
commandeered the front page of the
Courant
. Webster had placed a long endorsement signed by several key local officials, including George Wyllys, Connecticut’s secretary of state; his brother Samuel Wyllys, the major general of the Connecticut militia; Thomas Seymour, soon to become Hartford’s first mayor; and Nathan Strong, the influential pastor at the First Church of Hartford. Also lending their names to Webster’s cause were Trumbull and Barlow, as well as his former tutor, Nathan Perkins. And next to this ad, under the byline N.W., appeared an essay on the state of language in America which began, “It is surprising to consider how much the English language has been neglected and how little understood by those who have undertaken to compile dictionaries, grammars and spelling books.” Though Webster was still two days removed from his twenty-fifth birthday, he was already comparing himself to the greats in the history of English lexicography. Then finishing up the second part of the trilogy, Webster here focused on some of the key points in that volume such as the faults of prior grammars such as Dilworth’s. But he concluded with his sweeping vision: “The author’s design is to publish a general system of English education . . . . we should remember that unless the Greeks and Romans had taken more pains with their language than we do with ours they would not have been so celebrated by modern nations.” With his trilogy, which would bring order to his native tongue through rules and standards, Webster hoped to help America become a worthy successor to the Roman Empire.

Webster’s promotional campaign oscillated between invoking such lofty goals and issuing harsh critiques of his predecessors. Though Webster raised many valid objections to works such as Dilworth’s, his tone was contemptuous. While partisan attack was the lifeblood of late eighteenth-century American journalism, Noah Webster fell into vilifying his opponents more easily than most. A by-product of his tempestuous temperament, ad hominem assault worked its way into nearly all his writing, not just his newspaper editorials. With his speller, as with his dictionary, the man whose father had emotionally abandoned him at twenty would attempt to slay his literary forefathers. In the preface, Webster shredded Dilworth: “In short, though his spelling book was a great improvement upon former methods of education, yet almost every part of it was originally defective.” Webster was no more respectful toward his other sources. At the back of his speller, he inserted “The Story of Tommy and Harry” from Fenning’s
Universal Spelling-Book,
adding in a footnote, “In the original, the language is flat, puerile and ungrammatical; for which reason I have taken the liberty to make material alterations.” Noting such zealousness, Webster’s supporters gently chided him. Writing from New Hampshire a month after the speller’s publication, Buckminster opined, “I am pleased with the spirit and stile of your introduction, think however you are a little too severe upon our friend, Mr. Dilworth . . . . it is a wonder if an ill natured world does not ascribe some of the observations not so much to his deficiencies as to a desire to give a currency to your Institute.” As Buckminster predicted, critics would soon jump on Webster for his arrogance. But once again, Webster’s character flaw came in handy. The charged attacks on Webster created a media frenzy, which, in turn, put the spotlight on his books and boosted their sales still further.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 19, 1784, was to be a day of reckoning for both Webster’s state and his country. The Lower House of Connecticut’s General Assembly was slated to consider the subject of the national impost. And Noah Webster was eager to witness both the dramatic debate and the ensuing vote, which would also be a referendum on the power of his own words.

That afternoon, Webster walked out of his rented room at the house of Captain John Skinner and headed up the recently renamed Main Street (formerly King’s Highway), which was still all there was to Hartford. As the Marquis de Chastellux reported during his visit in the early 1780s, Hartford “did not merit much attention” because the whole town was then little more than this “long street parallel with the river.” Webster’s destination was the state house, located on Main Street’s north end. Built in 1720, when Connecticut’s steadily growing legislative bodies could no longer fit snugly into taverns, the two-story structure was just seventy feet long and thirty feet wide. Dubbed the “Court House” by locals, it was divided into two equal-sized chambers—the Lower House and the Upper House. As Webster made his way through the side door up to the gallery, already filled with anxious spectators, he could not help but notice that the building was in ill repair. A year earlier, during a celebration that marked the end of the Revolution, a fire had coursed through the balcony and singed most of the cupola. Settling back in his seat, Webster began to replay in his mind the key moments in the yearlong controversy—one in which he had been a central participant—that had led up to this fateful moment. In his memoir, he described the backstory:

Though the Middletown Convention, as Webster also noted, “ended in smoke” early that spring, opposition to the officers’ pension, which was to be funded by a national impost—a value-added tax of five percent—still ran high among Connecticut denizens. Under the Articles of Confederation, the passage of any amendment required unanimous approval by all thirteen state legislatures; thus, Connecticut’s final verdict on this new national tax had vast repercussions. As James Madison and other members of the Continental Congress warned, should Connecticut succeed in thwarting the will of the other twelve states that supported the measure, anarchy could well result across the new country.

Siding with Madison, Webster had been busy firing off dozens of editorials since the previous August. His mission, he later wrote, was “enlightening and tranquilizing the minds of his fellow citizens.” His first piece, “An Address to the discontented people of America,” published in
The Connecticut Courant
on August 26, 1783, began with the disclaimer, “I am not fond of scribling [
sic
] in public papers. It is a business by which little good is to be done and less reputation to be acquired.” But Webster the writer often denied what Webster the man was thinking and feeling. In fact, Noah Webster, Jr., loved nothing more than to voice his opinion in the newspaper, and he never failed to aim high.

For the petulant Webster, by defending the actions of Congress, he was standing up against both chaos and evil itself. Going into his natural attack mode, he identified those he disagreed with as enemies to his country. Failing to express any empathy for the protesters who met at Middletown, he portrayed them all as violent thugs. In one of several pieces written under the pseudonym “Honorius,”
²
(the name of the Whig protagonist, modeled on John Adams, in the 1775 mock-epic poem “McFingal” by John Trumbull), Webster declared in September that “the resolves of some towns in this state . . . amount to high treason against the United States and render the leaders liable to an impeachment.” But though Webster’s vitriol may have been unwarranted, his political judgment proved remarkably astute. He was way ahead of the curve in understanding that the Articles of Confederation hadn’t created a strong enough central government. In “An Address to the
thinking judicious
inhabitants of Connecticut,” published on September 30, 1783, “Honorius” attempted to win over the unthinking and foolish: “There is one consolation, however, that must ease the mind of a well wisher to his country—which is that these convulsions will terminate in a general conviction of the necessity of a supreme power and a more peaceable acquiescence in their decrees.”