The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (13 page)

Throughout the fall of 1783, Webster cast aspersions on Connecticut’s rebels. In November, he published an unsigned letter to the editor of the
Courant
, addressed “To Mr. Respondent, Probus, Agricola, & c.” His purpose, he claimed, was to protect “Honorius” from an “ambuscade” by these myriad writers, whom he assumed to be the same person. However, Webster’s missive was more offense than defense. He maintained that the writing of his enemy lacked “some little degree of respectability.” While Webster charged his interlocutor with hiding behind “different garbs,” he also went on to assume a variety of different identities. On December 30, two weeks after the third Middletown Convention, Webster took to an anonymous poem to ridicule his foes as Tories eager to destroy the fruits of the Revolution:

Putting “Honorius” to rest after a final send-off in January 1784, Webster resurfaced as the officers’ prime defender in two editorials signed “A.Z.” published that January and February.

But early in 1784, Webster suddenly changed his tack. Steering clear of polemical prose, he began making broad appeals for American unity in a series of unsigned essays entitled “Policy of Connecticut” that would run both in the
Courant
and in New London’s
Connecticut Gazette
throughout the first half of 1784. Few of Webster’s contemporaries realized that these sober assessments of Connecticut affairs were written by the same person who had penned the vituperative “Honorius” essays. In fact, many assumed that Jonathan Trumbull, the outgoing governor of Connecticut (and father of the celebrated painter John Trumbull), was the anonymous author. Nicknamed “Brother Jonathan,” the popular Trumbull, who was the only Colonial governor to stay in power after the Revolution, firmly backed the officers’ pension. In March, sounding much like Connecticut’s seventy-three-year-old sage, who was also known for his discriminating way with words, Webster conceded that the national impost was a necessary evil: “And I have no doubt that after people become acquainted with the utter impossibility of opposing the whole continent, they will ultimately close those wild schemes with this rational reflection; that of the two evils, they ought to choose the least. . . .” Calm reason had also come over Webster himself.

As the debate began in the Lower House, Webster was feeling hopeful. After all, the fourth meeting of the Middletown Convention in mid-March had been a bust. Likewise, the results of the statewide election, held on May 11, augured well. Of the new Assembly delegates, some three-quarters now expressed support for the government. At the same time, Webster had some cause for concern. In February, the impost had been defeated by a vote of 69 to 37, with only delegates from the commercial centers such as New London and Norwich showing much enthusiasm. Likewise, in the election the previous week, Trumbull’s loyal longtime lieutenant governor, Matthew Griswold, had received just 2,192 out of the 6,853 votes cast by the freemen. While the Assembly voted Griswold into the governor’s office a few days later, his failure to attain a majority suggested lukewarm support for Trumbull’s policies. Though both the Upper House and new governor were squarely behind the measure, there was no guarantee that the Lower House would come through.

And when Erastus Wolcott, who had served as brigadier general during the Revolution, took to the floor to argue for a state impost rather than a national impost, Webster became anxious. One of fourteen children of the Colonial governor Roger Wolcott, Erastus Wolcott was a well-to-do farmer from East Windsor. But unlike his brother, Oliver Wolcott, Sr., and his nephew, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., Webster’s college classmate, Erastus Wolcott had only a grade-school education. However, the general was skilled in representing the interests of Connecticut’s agrarian majority and its small manufacturers. As Wolcott argued, the state impost, by taxing articles made abroad such as hats and clocks, would shift more of the financial burden to the state’s growing professional and commercial class.

The debate pitted both the rural inland communities against the coastal towns and Noah Webster’s past against his present. While Webster was of the land, he was now a proud hat-wearing Connecticut professional. Leading the other side was General Samuel Holden Parsons, a New London native who had also emerged as a celebrity due to his war record. A Harvard graduate and respected lawyer, Parsons had served on the board of officers that had condemned to death Benedict Arnold’s accomplice in treason, Major John André. The nephew of the new governor, Parsons, who would later endorse Webster’s speller, countered Wolcott by emphasizing the importance of national unity.

At five o’clock, the question was finally put to all the delegates. Webster and the other spectators all held their breath. And then just like that, the controversy was all over. Yeas were 93. Nays were 42.

Of this vote, Webster, who was rarely jubilant, noted in his journal, “A happy event!”

As Webster returned home from the state house, he came across Stephen Mix Mitchell, then a newly elected member of the governor’s twelve-man Council of Assistants and later the chief justice of the state supreme court. “You Sir,” Mitchell told him, “have done more to appease public discontent and produce a favorable change, than any other person.” Two days later, at a retirement ceremony in which a vast retinue accompanied “Brother Jonathan” back to his family home in Lebanon, the governor also personally thanked Webster for his service to his state and his country.

Webster the public scribe would have the last word on this historic vote. In an anonymous article published the following Tuesday in the
Courant
, he wrote, “Never did people in general feel more satisfaction at any public measure than in consequence of this act.”

 

 

LESS THAN TWO WEEKS LATER, on June 1, 1784, the very day that the second printing of the speller was released, Webster rode from Hartford to the small Connecticut town of Canterbury. He was off on a promotional tour around New England to meet with scholars, publishers and booksellers. Over the next week, he would weave back and forth between Providence, Worcester, Newport and Boston. To mark his arrival in a new venue, he would place an ad in the local newspaper, in which he mentioned where his book was to be sold. News of the speller appeared in several papers that month, including
The Massachusetts Spy: Or Worcester Gazette, The Providence Gazette and Country Journal
and
The Newport Mercury.
In Boston, he drank an evening tea with James Bowdoin, then a Massachusetts state legislator. The future Bay State governor held considerable influence among the literati, as he was also the first president of the newly established American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In Cambridge, Webster’s after-dinner host was Joseph Willard, the president of Harvard, who had recently penned an endorsement of the speller. After a brief stop in Newburyport, Webster rode on to New Hampshire. On Sunday, June 13, he saw his former Yale tutor, Joseph Buckminster, give a sermon at the North Church in Portsmouth.

During his week in Portsmouth, Webster’s quest for a bride was often on his mind. Throughout his twenties, Webster was constantly surveying the landscape for attractive women, and it didn’t take long for him to be smitten. But he wasn’t winning over too many hearts. Shortly before leaving Hartford, he had written in his diary, “If there were but one pretty girl in town, a man could make a choice, but among so many, one’s heart is pulled in twenty ways at once. The greatest difficulty, however, is that after a man has made
his
choice, it remains for the lady to make
hers
.” Of his second night in Portsmouth, he was filled with more romantic longing: “Took a view of the town. Drank tea at Dr. [Joshua] Bracketts. At evening attended a ball and was agreeably entertained; had a fine partner, but she is engaged.” A couple of days later, Webster was also wistful after spending an evening in the elegantly wainscoted home of Colonel John Langdon and his striking wife, Elizabeth. As a commander of light horse volunteers at Saratoga, Langdon had personally witnessed Burgoyne’s surrender; then a leading member of the New Hampshire state senate, Langdon would later take a turn as both the state’s senator and governor. Of Mrs. Langdon, whom the Marquis de Chastellux had described a couple of years earlier as “young, fair and tolerably handsome,” Webster jotted down in his diary, “a most beautiful woman, 20 years younger than her husband.”

Webster returned home to Hartford on July 3. The following week, he moved into his new Main Street lodgings, the home of Dr. Eliakim Fish, an eminent physician who later became the first president of the Hartford County Medical Society. Though he apprenticed himself to his Yale mentor, John Trumbull, he found little legal work. His only gainful employment was promoting his own books. Webster spent most of his time reading. But the lack of purposeful activity left him feeling anxious and depressed. On Saturday, August 7, he lamented in his diary, “Did nothing worthy of particular notice.” Without a new literary project, he soldiered on as best he could. A few days later, he noted, “Read a little law and some poetry, if a man lays up a few ideas every day and arranges them, it is enough.” The following day, he added, “
Ibidem
” [the same]. His taste in books extended to history, politics and literary criticism. Fiction, which in the late eighteenth century was not to be confused with literature—that term was reserved for the classics or scientific writing—rarely made much of an impression. After finishing
Betsy Thoughtless,
a popular Bildungsroman by Eliza Haywood about an independent woman who leaves her abusive husband, he observed, “Novels will not bear reading but once. It would be well if people would not permit children to read romances, till they were arrived to maturity of judgement.”

Unlike his idol Samuel Johnson, Webster did not have a literary sensibility. Stories rarely captivated him. His commonplace book illustrates the analytic detachment with which he read fiction. This notebook, to which he added for about two decades after his Yale graduation, includes a few passages from Henry Fielding’s bawdy 1749 novel,
The History of Tom Jones
. What Webster found worth recording was not any moving adventure, but the author’s definitions. At the beginning of the sprawling novel, one character dies of “a broken heart,” an affliction which Fielding describes as “a distemper which kills many more than is generally imagined, and would have a fair title to a place in the bills of mortality, did it not differ in one instance from all other diseases, viz., that no physician can cure it.” Above this passage, Webster superimposed in big, block letters the word that Fielding has just defined—“DESPAIR.” For Webster, reading great works of literature could prove relaxing to the extent that it gave him a chance to classify and arrange concepts. He would follow his own dictum, mentioned in a 1790 essay, to “always endeavor to read with some particular object.”

The one activity that Webster relished during the summer of 1784 was responding to the speller’s most vociferous critic, a man who called himself “Dilworth’s Ghost.” Though the Ghost, who sometimes went by D.G., never revealed his true identity, he appears to have been a retired schoolteacher from Dutchess County named Hughes. He first surfaced in a letter addressed to “Mr. N—W——, A.M. alias Esq.” that was published in
The Freeman’s Chronicle
on June 24, 1784. The Ghost mounted a vigorous campaign to assassinate Webster’s character. Standing up for the author of Dilworth’s speller, his supposed bodily incarnation, the Ghost accused Webster of engaging in a sleight of hand: “You accuse me very invidiously and without sufficient cause of absurdity and falsity, and afterward adopt what you had censured in me.” While the Ghost’s first piece rambled, it kept coming back to the charge of plagiarism. In addition, the Ghost was incensed by Webster’s lack of modesty. Mocking Webster’s pride in his titles, the Ghost wondered: “As from A. M. in part the first, you have risen to Esquire in part the second, may it not be expected that you will appear benighted in the third part and dub yourself Sir N—h &c. or perhaps, from ‘We’ to ‘We ourself,’ which must undoubtedly entitle you to all the respect that can be due to an imperial despot.” On account of his New England peregrinations, Webster didn’t see the Ghost’s handiwork when it was first published. In his absence, Barlow, calling himself “Thomas Dilworth,” fired back a widely circulated letter that characterized the Ghost “as abusive a scribbler as ever disgraced the annals of literature.”

Not known for his playfulness, Webster nevertheless had some fun when he finally got around to his own rebuttals. Quickly realizing that every manifestation of the Ghost would help to move his product, he encouraged “his Ghostship” to keep writing. Webster also came up with a few choice barbs of his own. “That the publication referred to is the publication of a Ghost,” he wrote in early July, “I have no doubt for no being on this earth is capable of such a ghostly performance.” On July 22, Webster penned a long letter to
The New York Journal
in which he went point by point through all of the Ghost’s attacks. Regarding the Ghost’s chief complaint, he mused: “I am accused of compiling and transcribing. The accuser ought, however, to remember that every grammar that was ever written was a compilation. The materials of all English grammars are the same, and that man who arranges the principles of the languages in the best form and reduces the ideas to the easiest method compiles the
best
grammar.” Here, Webster was not only fending off the Ghost, but he was also saying something fundamental about the obsession that would drive his literary output for the remaining six decades of his life. His grammar, like his dictionary, required that he be a compiler, arranger and organizer. For Webster, this vocation was no shame—far from it. In fact, he considered bringing order to the raw materials of others a divine calling.