The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (15 page)

Webster later admitted that the first three sections contained “chimerical notions” and were “general.” The first sketch borrowed heavily from Rousseau’s
Social Contract,
which he had just read and whose “visionary ideas” he would later reject. In the second, Webster lamented that most European governments were despotic and relied on superstition and military force to command their subjects. The third highlighted the unique opportunity possessed by Americans to design a new government during “the most enlightened period of the world.” In contrast, Webster would consider the fourth, which advocated handing over more power to the federal government, one of his crowning achievements. Reflecting back on all his political writings on American unity during the mid-1780s, Webster would later contend that he played a pivotal role in designing the Constitution. “I know of no other person,” he wrote in 1804, “who took the same active part in or who devoted half the time to the subject [proving the necessity of a new federal compact] as I did.”

In that final sketch, Webster offered his prescriptions for his struggling and fragmented nation. The centerpiece of his plan to ward off anarchy was to transform the “Policy in Connecticut”—the title of his anonymously authored series in the
Courant
published the preceding year—into “American policy.” If the country as a whole could be run like his Congregationalist haven, Webster argued, it could be just as harmonious, “like nature in the planetary system.” For Webster, Connecticut’s particular nexus of executive, legislative and judicial authority, in which his father had served proudly (albeit in a small role), was a model of peaceful governance. “The state,” he wrote, “elects a governor or supreme magistrate and cloaths him with the whole power to make the laws . . . . Thus the whole power of the state is brought to a single point—united in a single person.” While a new executive called a “president” did make it into the Constitution, not so for some of Webster’s other recommendations—namely, his pleas for the abolition of slavery and “a general diffusion of knowledge among all classes of men.”

Most leaders of the early Republic would later concede that Webster’s efforts were instrumental in shaping the contours of the new central government. In 1804, James Madison, then Jefferson’s secretary of state, wrote to Webster:

Besides Madison and Hamilton, the two chief authors of
The Federalist,
other key advocates for a stronger union were Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry and Pelatiah Webster, Noah’s older cousin, a Pennsylvania merchant who had authored an influential but little-read 1783 essay,
Dissertation of the Political Union and Constitution of the Thirteen United States of North America
. But while Webster had not produced something entirely original, he had made his singular contribution by his thoughtful compiling and arranging, as well as his clear articulation of critical points.

Webster’s highly regarded fourth sketch also argued for cultural unity—to wit, a uniformity of manners between North and South. He professed to take a neutral stance toward all cultural practices. “Particular districts,” he wrote, “have local peculiarities, but custom gives all an equal degree of propriety.” But this claim, like his allegedly nonjudgmental approach toward southern pronunciation in the speller, didn’t come from the heart. By maintaining that improvements in education would ultimately produce national standards, Webster was suggesting that Southerners should do the accommodating. As he stressed in a footnote, little learning in America occurred outside of New England. “In the southern states, gaming, fox hunting and horse-racing are the height of ambition; industry is reserved for slaves. In the northern states, industry and the cultivation of the arts and sciences distinguish the people.” While Webster hadn’t yet been any further south than New York, he still felt he knew enough to offer these generalizations.

But south was where Noah Webster was now headed. In April 1785, as New England, after enduring a brutally cold winter, was still shrouded by two-foot snowdrifts, Webster began making preparations for an extended tour of the southern states. Over the next thirteen months, he would take his copyright campaign to the remaining state legislatures. Steady book sales, he figured, could provide him with the financial stability that he sorely lacked. Assuming he could find a suitable bride, his sporadic legal work wasn’t bringing in enough money for him to marry. Though Webster was often lonely, he was proud of his literary accomplishments. As he observed on the fast day of April 20, he felt neither “plunged in calamities nor overwhelmed with the blessings of heaven.” A week and a half later, the twenty-six-year-old New England celebrity left Hartford to seek renown all across the new nation, which he had already helped to define.

O
n Monday morning, May 2, 1785, as the melting snow pushed the water in the Connecticut River to dangerous heights, Webster headed off to the other end of America.

By midafternoon, he had completed the first leg of his southern journey, the familiar forty-mile trek to New Haven. Upon his arrival, Webster headed directly for Chapel Street, where he spotted Yale president Ezra Stiles. Webster’s former classmate, Josiah Meigs, who had recently completed a stint as Stiles’ science tutor, was about to inaugurate the age of American air travel. Like Stiles and the rest of the crowd gathered on the Green, Webster, too, was eager with anticipation.

Webster looked over at the eleven-foot-wide sphere that was destined for the sky. Made of paper, the balloon was decorated with a figure of an angel, which in one hand bore a trumpet and in the other, an American flag and the motto “
Nil intentatum nostri liquere poetae
” [There is no theme that our poets have not tried]. The immortal words from Horace’s
Ars Poetica
were also painted in seven other languages, including Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee and English.

Shortly before three o’clock, Meigs, now publisher of the new newspaper
The New Haven Gazette,
began stuffing the kindling shavings into the one-foot hole at the base of the balloon. A few minutes later, the flaming metal basket took off.

Craning their necks, Webster and the rest of the spectators looked straight up.

The balloon traveled just over the weathervane of the Brick Church on the Green, falling down on Mr. Marshfield’s house nearby. But soon Meigs was gearing up for a second launch. This time, the pyramid of fire rose a few hundred feet higher, but its descent was much more rapid; sensing that New Haven was under attack, some militiamen accidentally shot three balls right through it.

In his diary, Webster accentuated the positive, “See a balloon ascend ingenuity of Mr. Meigs. It rises several hundred feet.”

New Haven was just a one-night stopover. Within a few weeks, Webster was zigzagging across the South, where his daily life would be filled with uncertainty. To finance his travels, he would have to find work as he went along. A foreigner in his own country, he would battle headaches, boredom and despair. He would miss his native New England. Early in 1786, he noted in his diary, “An eminent merchant in Alexandria informed me that of 50 planters in Virginia who sold him tobacco, only 4 or 5 could write their names but made a mark on the receipts. O New England! How superior are thy inhabitants in morals, literature, civility and industry.” Though Webster rarely mingled with the hoi polloi—he met the most prominent people in nearly every town he visited—the feelings of alienation persisted.

After completing his southern tour in mid-1786, Webster went back on the road to give another round of talks on the English language in the Middle (mid-Atlantic) and New England states. While he would dutifully record his thoughts about his two-year trans-American odyssey in his diary, in his public writing he said little—with one exception. In 1788, at the end of one of his articles, Webster appended the list:

As he traveled across America in 1785 and 1786, Webster would personally count every house in its major towns and he wanted the world to know his final tallies.

Webster reexamined his house counts before publishing the final list in his 1788 article in
The American Magazine
. While here he records a total of 4,600 houses in Philadelphia—including an additional eighty-two “allowed for mistakes”—in his final tally, he reported 4,500.

This compulsion to count links Webster with his lexicographical brethren. As a teenage medical student in Edinburgh in the early 1790s, Peter Mark Roget of
Thesaurus
fame would count all the steps he took to class every day. Likewise, Webster’s hero, Samuel Johnson, once remarked that he took recourse in “the study of arithmetic” whenever he felt “disordered.” While heading toward his breakdown at Oxford, Johnson produced a chart in his journal listing the total number of lines of Latin poetry he would translate in a week, month and year, if he did a certain number per day (say, ten, thirty or sixty). For Webster, too, counting could help mitigate the angst that lurked within. In the mid-1780s, most of America’s biggest metropolitan areas were still small enough that he could count all the houses during one leisurely walk. But this one-man data collection agency didn’t focus just on America’s residential real estate. For the next few years, an often nervous and distraught Webster kept track of a wide range of data, including demographic information, temperature readings, wind currents and voting records.

 

 

THE MAN WAS BLIND, yet he was an international authority on optics.

His name was Dr. Henry Moyes. At a few minutes before seven on the evening of Monday, May 16, 1785, the professor was standing before a packed house of nearly two hundred at Baltimore’s St. Paul’s Church, located in the center of town, about a mile north of the harbor. The eminent scientist was then barnstorming across America’s major cities, giving lectures four nights a week. His twenty-one-lecture course in Baltimore, for which he charged gentlemen a guinea and ladies a half guinea, covered “all those astonishing discoveries which must forever distinguish the 18th century.”

Seated in a pew at the front, Webster was eager to hear Moyes talk about light, the subject of his remarks that night. A year earlier in Boston, Webster had attended Moyes’ lecture on electricity, which he found instructive. And having been introduced to the professor the day before, Webster was most impressed, characterizing America’s newest celebrity as “blind, but sensible.”

Webster had arrived in Baltimore just two days earlier. From New Haven, he had sailed to New York City, where he stopped off just long enough to have tea with Colonel Aaron Burr, then a young trial lawyer, at his town house on Maiden Lane. At the time, Webster knew Burr’s new wife, Theodosia Prevost, better than the colonel himself, as back in Sharon, Webster had taught the two boys from her former marriage. En route to Baltimore, Webster also passed through Philadelphia, where he enjoyed a lively dinner with his cousin, the author and merchant Pelatiah Webster, who commented favorably on his
Sketches.
Webster also considered his older relative, a 1746 Yale graduate, “very sensible,” and the two writers would remain close until the Philadelphian’s death a decade later.