The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (16 page)

Though Baltimore was a boom town, Webster felt uncomfortable in his new surroundings. The housing stock of Maryland’s commercial center, which had doubled since 1782, was, as Webster would personally determine that fall, approaching two thousand units. And rents near the harbor had risen to a guinea per square foot. However, this town of some ten thousand residents was still run-down and dirty. Only its main thoroughfare, Market Street (today Baltimore Street), was paved. The French politician and writer Jacques Pierre Brissot noted a few years later, “the great quantity of mud after a rain, everything announces that the air must be unhealthful. However, if you ask the inhabitants, they will tell you no.” Despite his uneasiness in Baltimore, Webster would make it his base of operations over the next six months.

Webster was often sad and homesick. Missing the orderliness of Connecticut, he longed for news from his friends and family back in Hartford. That summer, he would write in his diary, “Lament that I am in Baltimore.” To keep up his spirits, Webster would surround himself with fellow New Englanders such as Dr. James Mann, a prominent army surgeon during the Revolution, who accompanied him to Dr. Moyes’ lecture that night.

As Webster well knew, Moyes had a distinguished academic pedigree, despite having lost his sight at three due to smallpox. As a boy in Kirkaldy, Scotland, Moyes had accompanied the economist Adam Smith, then writing his masterpiece,
Wealth of Nations,
during his afternoon walks. Through Smith’s prompting, Moyes had studied under two of the world’s greatest philosophers, those architects of the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh’s David Hume and Glasgow’s Thomas Reid.

As Moyes began to speak, Webster was struck by the clarity of his language and exposition. The doctor divided his lecture into six parts. After discussing ignition and combustion, he moved on to the production of light. With help from his assistant, a Scotsman named Mr. Frasier, he then performed an experiment demonstrating the materiality of light. The professor, who himself could not see the light of day, concluded by discussing sunlight and light particles. Between his scientific points, Moyes interspersed moving anecdotes. Describing his reaction when he was once thrown off a stagecoach, Moyes observed, “I was quite at home in the dark ditch. The inversion of the order of things was amusing. I that was obliged to be led about like a child, in the glaring sun, was now directing eight persons to pull here and haul there.” His cheerful disposition moved Webster. He was not alone. Reviewing Dr. Moyes’ performance,
The Maryland Journal
reported, “Charmed to see a gentleman whom cloud indeed . . . . surrounds, . . . his auditors have expressed the highest satisfaction in his abilities and the agreeable manner in which he delivers himself on these truly admirable and important subjects.”

The next day, May 17, Webster moved into Mrs. Sanderson’s lodging house off of South Street, where Dr. Mann and another New Englander, Josiah Blakely, a Hartford merchant, were also staying. That night, he went back to St. Paul’s to hear Dr. Moyes lecture on phosphorus. A week later, after returning from his overnight stay in Mount Vernon, where he had passed on a copy of his
Sketches of American Policy
to General Washington, Webster caught a few more installments of the professor’s lecture series. On May 24, Webster wrote in his diary, “The Dr. has 190 hearers generally.” Impressed by the size of the crowds, Webster began toying with the idea of emulating Dr. Moyes. To pay for his book tour, he would soon become America’s first homegrown celebrity speaker.

 

 

ON SATURDAY, MAY 28, Webster made provisions to take his copyright campaign to the Deep South. His ultimate destination: the South Carolina port city of Charleston (known as Charles Town until the British evacuation at the end of the war).

Catching the sloop
George
from Baltimore on May 30, Webster stopped off at Norfolk, Virginia, on June 1, where he was delighted to eat cherries for the first time—the fruit would later be a mainstay of his New Haven garden. He was surprised by the fertility of the soil, in which green peas were so plentiful. But after dropping off three dozen spellers with a local bookseller, he couldn’t wait to get out of town, writing in his journal, “Little attention is paid to religion, education, or morals. Gentlemen are obliged to send their children to the northward for education. A shame on Virginia!” Though Webster didn’t complete a count of Norfolk’s houses, he came up with a rough estimate, adding that the town “consisted of two or three hundred houses well built of brick; but it was burnt by the British troops and has not recovered its former elegance.” Squalls alternating with calm seas made sailing on to Charleston trying. This leg of the trip, which was supposed to take a few days, lasted a few weeks. As the boat stalled, Webster’s nerves started to fray. On June 14, he observed, “Wind continues contrary. O how disagreeable! We make but 10 or 12 miles a day.” Whenever a favorable breeze came along, Webster and his fellow passengers would express relief by singing and dancing on the quarterdeck.

Soon after reaching Charleston at 8 a.m. on Sunday, June 26, Webster dashed off to hear Parson Smith’s sermon at St. Michael’s Church. After the services, Webster stayed for a musical performance by Miss Maria Storer, an English opera singer then giving a series of concerts in Charleston. With the local newspaper,
The Columbia Herald,
criticizing her for singing Italian songs, which its correspondent called “at best an exotic entertainment,” she had recently switched to more traditional fare. But even so, Webster objected. “Miss Storer,” he recorded in his journal, “sings part of Handel’s Oratorio—very odd indeed! A woman sings in public after church for her own benefit! I do not like the modern taste in singing!” Slipping a quarter into the plate, Webster grudgingly acknowledged her talent, “She sung
well
in the modern taste, but I cannot admire it.”

Over the next week, Webster met with a host of local dignitaries including General Christopher Gadsden, who had been a delegate to the Continental Congress and a brigadier general in the Continental army, and Charleston’s first mayor, Richard Hutson. The town’s inhabitants appealed to him: “The people in Charleston are very civil and polite. They behave with great decency in church. The slaves are kept in good order, they are remarkably attentive in church.”

Webster was pleased to celebrate America’s ninth birthday in Charleston. Independence Day festivities began precisely at one o’clock in the afternoon as the militia fired thirteen volleys, one for each state in the union. Afterward, Governor William Moultrie hosted a lavish dinner at the City Tavern. Fourteen toasts were drunk, most of which struck a deep chord with Webster, such as number ten, “Unanimity to the American States,” and eleven, “May the arts and sciences flourish in America.” After dinner, Webster and the other celebrants endured a brief scare, as one of the thirteen hot air balloons went up in flames as it headed toward the beef market. The fire was quickly extinguished, and no further balloons were launched. As Webster put it in a letter to his publisher, Hudson and Goodwin, the fire “put an end to this boyish amusement.”

That evening, Webster walked back over to St. Michael’s Church to get a view of the city from its steeple. Modeled on the English churches designed by Christopher Wren, St. Michael’s, completed in 1761, stood on the site of a seventeenth-century Anglican church, the first built south of Virginia. The tower featured an exquisitely wrought clock and eight bells (which the city’s Loyalists had had shipped back to England during the war). “They have,” Webster noted in his diary, “a good chime of the bells.”

After walking up the nearly two hundred steps to the top of the steeple, Webster looked out and was impressed by the town’s orderly layout: “Charleston is very regular; the most regular of any in America, except Philadel and New Haven.”

Charleston would soon return the compliment. The following day, Webster donated three hundred copies of his
Grammatical Institute
to the Mt. Sion Society, which administered South Carolina’s newly created Winnsborough College. Later that summer, the society’s secretary published a letter of thanks to Webster in
The State Gazette of South Carolina,
which included a glowing tribute, “That your exertions for the advancement of useful knowledge may meet with merited success and applause must be the wish of every friend to science in the rising states of America.” The speller would soon be a staple of education throughout South Carolina and, when the state’s copyright law passed a few months later, Webster would reap the profits.

As Webster got ready to leave Charleston, he reported to his publisher that his southern journey, though expensive, was “the most useful and necessary I ever undertook.”

 

 

AT SIX O’CLOCK ON WEDNESDAY, October 19, Webster fought off the rain to make his way to Baltimore’s First Presbyterian Church on Fayette Street.

Three days earlier, Webster had celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday. With his efforts to burnish his national reputation proceeding slowly, the fiercely ambitious author was feeling that life was passing him by. In his diary, he articulated his fears: “The revolution of a few years sweeps us away . . . . a few revolutions more with accelerated motion will turn me off the stage.”

Webster’s last few months in Baltimore had been rocky. The May advertisement in
The Maryland Journal
announcing his intention of opening a language school had attracted little interest. Forced to find another means of support, he taught singing according to a “regular scientific method.” And with the locals short of cash, he was forced to accept articles of clothing—gloves, shoes, slippers and silk stockings—for his tutelage. Though Webster managed to “astonish all Baltimore with ten scholars,” his heart wasn’t in his singing school. In early October, he got into a nasty “miff” with a singer by the name of Mr. Hall. “People in Baltimore,” he lamented in his diary, “have not been accustomed to my rigid discipline.” What’s more, his voice was losing its timbre. Regarding his instruction at his school on October 15, he was forced to acknowledge, “Sing bad this evening.”

In early October, the ever resourceful Webster sought to become the “American Dr. Moyes.” He, too, would now try to fill up lecture halls night after night.

Fortunately, Webster had recently gathered some new material on which he could draw. During a lonely weekend in late August, when he was feeling bored and disgusted with Baltimore, he had picked up his pen. As was often the case, emotional distress prompted a burst of creativity. As he later recalled, “While I was waiting for the regular sessions of the legislatures in those states which had not passed laws for protecting literary property, I amused myself in writing remarks on the English Language, without knowing to which purpose they would be applied.” Now, nearly two months later, he had figured out a way to make use of these musings.

Webster got to the church at six thirty, just as the doors opened. The five lectures that he was slated to give over the next week would all begin at seven. For the entire series, he charged seven shillings, sixpence. The fee for one lecture was a quarter.

Over the last few months, Baltimore’s First Presbyterian Church, a brick building recently expanded to accommodate fifty pews, had become like a second home. Using the space for his singing school, Webster had forged a cordial relationship with its pastor, the Reverend Patrick Allison. Called “a man of substance” by his peers, the erudite Allison had a taste for belles lettres, championing the work of British writers such as Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison. A personal friend of George Washington, Allison had served as chaplain for both the Continental Congress (during its brief tenure in Baltimore) and the Continental army. Webster and Allison were frequent breakfast companions, and a few days earlier over tea, Webster had given Allison a preview of his remarks.

Due to the inclement weather, the church was less full than he had hoped. Surveying the crowd of about thirty, Webster launched into his introduction: “The principal design of this lecture is to point out the origin of the English language. It begins, however, with general remarks on the importance of the subject—finds fault with the mode of education, which leads us to study the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French and German languages, to the almost entire neglect of our own.” National pride would be Webster’s central theme. Americans, he argued, needed to devote more attention to one of their prized possessions, their own language. After giving a brief history of America’s tongue, Webster stressed its richness: “The English language is exceedingly copious; it is said to contain about 20,000 words. For the most part, the same idea, or nearly the same, may be expressed by two different words.”

While his listeners found Webster’s ideas engaging, if not enthralling, something about his manner rubbed them the wrong way. A veteran of the classroom, Webster was used to teaching children, not adults. Appearing to talk down to his audience, Webster came across as an annoying “know-it-all.” Catching Webster’s road show several months later in Philadelphia, the future secretary of state Timothy Pickering, who had been so moved by Webster’s speller, observed: “In truth there was so much of egotism, especially in a young man, apparent in his communications, as to prevent his hearers, receiving the satisfaction which might otherwise have been derived from many ingenious observations. . . . diffidence in a public lecturer, especially in a young man, [is] essential to the art of pleasing.” Diffident, Noah Webster would never be. To counteract his deep-seated social anxiety, he projected an unbecoming arrogance. A few years later, the writer William Dunlap, then Webster’s colleague in a New York literary society, satirized his awkwardness at the podium in
Cuttgrisingwoldes,
a play in which a character named Noah Cobweb exclaims: