The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (17 page)

Webster was no affable crowd-pleaser like Dr. Moyes. Unskilled in forging human connections, he acted as if he were the only person in the room. Paradoxically, though he wasn’t sensitive to the perspective—or even presence—of his auditors, Webster would seek from them validation of his own worthiness. Admiration, he could never get enough of.

Not only was Webster’s manner overbearing, but he also didn’t have much of a stage presence. Speaking in a high-pitched monotone, his body language betrayed his inner turmoil. As one correspondent noted in
The New York Packet
in April 1786, “[Mr. Webster] appears to be enraptured when he speaks, but his raptures seem forced. The motions of his hands are rather unpleasing.” Though mortified by such observations, Webster would eventually acknowledge that his critics had a point: “That my delivery was ungraceful may be true. I was never taught to speak with grace. I know of no institution in America where speaking is taught with accuracy.” But to those who found fault with his use of language, he would not back down. For Webster, words were much more means than ends. He no longer had any poetic aspirations. To the New York writer who charged that his style was “divested of what are commonly called the flowers of rhetoric,” Webster shot back, “My design is of more importance. I wish to express my sentiments with clearness.” The accurate definer also poked holes in the phrasing of this reviewer, “How, Sir, can a style be
divested
of what it never possessed? I suppose the correspondent meant
destitute
.”

Back at the First Presbyterian Church two nights later, before a slightly larger audience, Webster addressed errors in pronunciation in various local communities. While he professed not to play favorites, he tended to find fewer faults with the practices of New Englanders than with those of other Americans. As in his speller, so, too, in his lectures, Webster was obsessed with creating linguistic order in America. In a report back to his Baltimore landlady, Mrs. Coxe, a few months after this first round of lectures, Webster wrote that his plan was to “effect a uniformity of language and education throughout the continent.”

In his fourth Baltimore lecture, delivered on Monday, October 24, he took on poetry, discussing the rules of poetic verse such as line breaks and pauses. Ever the critic, Webster could not resist commenting on the slip-ups committed by the world’s greatest poets: “Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton are incorrect in regard to these pauses, but they are great geniuses; their souls were engaged upon sublimer subjects, which occasioned them frequently to overlook these minutiae.” In his last Baltimore lecture on October 26, Webster formulated his thoughts on education. Once again, he aimed to instill national pride: “The tour of America is more necessary to an American youth than the tour of Europe. Let it be remembered that a Washington, a Franklin, a Jay, an Adams and many other Americans of distinction were educated at home.” Webster was here talking as much about himself as about any hypothetical youngster, since he was then rounding out his own education by circling around America. In a rare moment of introspection, Webster later acknowledged that the lecture series first begun at Dr. Allison’s church may well have served his own emotional needs above all. “The readings were,” he acknowledged in 1789, “probably more useful to myself than to my hearers.”

While many listeners were irked by Webster’s style (or lack of it), few opposed his message. The night of his final Baltimore lecture, a relieved Webster wrote in his diary, “The lectures have received so much applause that I am induced to revise and continue reading them in other towns.” He would end up delivering them in a total of twenty towns. The substance was mostly the same, but as he moved back North, he sneaked into his literary musings some of the demographic information that he had unearthed while down South. On July 1, 1786, the day after Webster’s sixth lecture on English at the Connecticut State House in New Haven, Yale president Ezra Stiles recorded in his journal, “Last evening I attended Mr. Webster’s . . . last lecture. From him [Webster] I learn. Virginia: 650 thousands souls whites and blacks: ratio 10 to 11, i.e. ten Blacks to eleven Whites. Maryland: 90 thousand taxables, 150 thousand souls black, 200 thousand souls whites.”

An expansion of the ideas Webster first laid out in his
Grammatical Institute,
Webster’s lectures would form the basis of his 1789 book,
Dissertations on the English Language
. To Benjamin Franklin, then the recently retired president (governor) of Pennsylvania, Webster dedicated this volume, citing both the Doctor’s greatness as a scholar, but also his “plain and elegantly neat” prose. Franklin was the paragon of clarity Webster hoped to emulate. As in the speller and in his
Sketches,
here, too, Webster sought to unite Americans:

To combat local “pride and prejudice”—Webster lifted the phrase not from Jane Austen, then just entering her teens, but from novelist Fanny Burney—Webster recommended the adoption of national pronunciation standards. While not dictating specific norms, Webster urged Americans to eschew the lead of British authors who looked to the “stage.” Rather than relying on those versed in the dramatic arts, whom he abhorred, Webster suggested turning to the common man, since “the general practice of a nation is the rule of propriety.”

But Webster’s framing of this debate as one pitting the experts against the people was slightly disingenuous. After all, a principal objective of his
Dissertations
(and the lectures upon which the volume was based) was to promote his textbooks. And Webster also made a direct appeal to his fellow Americans to spend more money on his pedagogical tools: “Nothing but the establishment of schools and some uniformity in the use of books can annihilate differences in speaking and preserve the purity of the American tongue.”

 

 

LESS THAN TWO WEEKS after his final Baltimore lecture, Webster set off for Richmond to take his copyright campaign to Virginia’s state legislature. But he first stopped off at Mount Vernon, where he spent another night as Washington’s houseguest. As Webster left on November 6, Washington handed him letters of introduction to Virginia’s governor and the speakers of its two houses, which included the following remarks: “[Mr. Webster] is author of a Grammatical Institute of the English Language—to which there are very honorable testimonials of its excellence and its usefulness. The work must speak for itself; & he better than I, can explain his wishes.” Missing among those testimonials was one from Washington himself. In a letter dated July 18, Webster had asked Washington for “the addition of your name, Sir, to the catalogue of patrons.” The perennial straight shooter, Washington had declined, explaining that “I do not think myself a competent judge.” On purely literary matters, Washington preferred to remain outside the fray. Even so, the General understood the political implications of Webster’s textbooks and was eager to lend a hand.

Washington’s clout proved to be considerable. In Richmond, Webster renewed his acquaintance with James Madison and dined with Benjamin Harrison V, the longtime state legislator who had just ceded the governor’s office to Patrick Henry. (Harrison’s son, William, and his great-grandson, Benjamin, would both grow up to be U.S. presidents.) At Harrison’s suggestion, Webster gave his lecture series in the capitol building. In December, Webster reported back to Washington that he had succeeded in registering his books for copyright in Virginia, adding, “For this success I acknowledge myself indebted . . . to your politeness.” During this legislative session, as Webster later recorded in his memoir, Virginia’s delegates issued an invitation to all the other states to meet in Annapolis to “form some plan for investing Congress with the regulation and taxation of commerce.” The Annapolis Convention the following September, which consisted of twelve delegates from five states, was the forerunner to the Constitutional Convention. As an elder statesman, Webster took fierce pride in recalling even his tangential connections with such seminal events in America’s founding.

Having completed his business in Richmond, Webster crisscrossed the state, moving on to Petersburg, Williamsburg and Alexandria. The layout of Virginia’s principal towns, which placed theaters rather than churches at the center, left him dismayed. He described Petersburg as an “unhealthy place” with some three hundred houses, the same number as in Richmond. Only Williamsburg appeared tolerable. As he wrote in his diary, the former state capital, though decaying, “consists of 230 houses well built and regular.” But a small turnout for his readings at the “large and elegant” College of William and Mary soured him on all the state’s inhabitants. On December 7, he observed, “Read my second lecture to the same number. . . . the Virginians have little money & great pride, contempt of Northern men & great fondness for dissipated life. They do not understand grammar.” In an effort to combat sagging attendance, Webster dashed off reviews of his own lectures. In an “Extract of a letter from a Gentleman in Virginia to a friend in this town,” which appeared in Baltimore’s
Maryland Journal
on January 3, 1786, an “anonymous” reporter noted, “Mr. Webster has paid us a visit—his lectures in support of his plan were delivered and much approved by the first characters . . . I think it is high time to dispossess ourselves of prejudice in favour of Britain so far as to act ourselves.”

On January 20, a lame Webster—he had hurt his leg when his horse slipped on an icy road—was back in Baltimore, catching up on his correspondence. Since the New Year, he had lectured in both Annapolis and Frederick as he attempted to curry favor with Maryland legislators. Webster took a liking to Annapolis, whose 260 houses he considered “more elegant . . . in proportion than in any town in America.” Maryland’s state capital also offered ample opportunities for dancing with “a brilliant circle of ladies.” On January 11, his last night in town, Webster noted in his diary, “Visit the ladies; tell them pretty stories.”

After a week of meetings and lectures in Frederick, Webster had reached Baltimore on the nineteenth. The following day, he explained the purpose of his trip to Timothy Pickering, who had introduced himself to Webster a few months earlier in a letter praising his
Grammatical Institute
. To the recently retired quartermaster general, whom he was looking forward to meeting soon in Philadelphia, Webster wrote, “I shall make one
general
effort to deliver literature and my countrymen from the errors that fashion and ignorance are palming upon Englishmen.” For Webster, his personal quest to sell more books was synonymous with the heroic effort to rescue America and its language from the clutches of the fashion-loving, theater-addicted British. Though this stance was self-serving, it also had a ring of truth. By 1786, America’s union was in a state of disarray. As David Ramsay, the South Carolina delegate who was the acting president of the Continental Congress, put it that February, “There is a languor in the states that forbodes ruin. . . . In 1775 there was more patriotism in a village than is now in the 13 states.” His language reforms, Webster sensed, could be instrumental in restoring national pride.

However, the usually confident Webster wasn’t convinced that he could pull off this daunting feat. Aware that he lacked the charisma of more dynamic speakers such as Moyes, who attracted as many as a thousand listeners to his talks, he confided his fears to Pickering: “Two circumstances will operate against me. I am not a
foreigner
; I am a
New Englandman
. A foreigner ushered in with titles and letters, with half my abilities, would have the whole city in his train.” But Webster’s cri de coeur to Pickering had little to do with the precise nature of the challenge he faced. A foreigner could never have succeeded in his mission, which was to reshape America’s language. In fact, now that Webster had left the South, his distinguished New England pedigree was bound to open doors. Yet Webster tended to see himself as a beleaguered outsider even when he was a respected insider.

Before heading to the big stage of Philadelphia, then America’s largest city with some forty-five hundred houses (as he himself would soon determine), Webster stopped off in Delaware. Unfortunately, he arrived in Dover just as the legislature was ending its session. However, his visit to the capital would not be in vain, as a committee was appointed to look into a copyright law, and a bill was passed during the next session. Webster was greatly relieved to be out of the South, which he would never visit again. Of the response to his lectures in the four-hundred-house town of Wilmington, he observed, “More taste for science in these states than below.” In Wilmington, Webster also hobnobbed with John Dickinson, who had just finished a term as governor of both Delaware and Pennsylvania, and would later represent Delaware at the Constitutional Convention. Using his favorite encomium, in his diary Webster described the so-called Penman of the Revolution—before the war, Dickinson had authored the influential essay “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania”—as “a very sensible man.”

Webster’s month in Philadelphia was memorable. On February 15, his second night in town, he enjoyed the first of several dinners with Pickering, whom he characterized as “one of the best of men.” The following evening, from his perch at Mrs. Ford’s lodging house on Walnut Street, he wrote a letter, introducing himself to Benjamin Franklin: