The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (18 page)

This consummate compiler didn’t actually need Franklin’s help in putting together a new edition of his reader. But having won over America’s most influential citizen a year earlier over dinner in Mount Vernon, Webster was now eager to move on to number two. While he lacked the social skills necessary to form intimate friendships, he was adept at ingratiating himself with the powerful. Flattery he knew. And Franklin, who, as the newly elected president of Pennsylvania, also headed the board of trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, quickly grew fond of Webster. As a fellow polymath who was also obsessed with education, Franklin, then eighty, would anoint Webster his intellectual heir. For the remaining four years of his life, Franklin would prove to be Webster’s steadfast colleague.

The day after composing his note, Webster met Franklin for the first time. The elder statesman immediately gave Webster permission to use a room in the university for his lectures. Franklin also talked about one of his pet projects, his plan for spelling reform. For years, the former printer and publisher, who had recently returned from France, had been interested in establishing a new English alphabet based on phonetic principles. Webster, too, was intrigued by aligning spelling more closely with pronunciation. Under a purely phonetic system, Webster would later note in his diary, “every man, woman and child, who knows his alphabet, can spell words . . . without ever seeing them.”

Shortly after those initial meetings with Franklin, Webster reported back to George Washington: “I am encouraged by the prospect of rendering my country some service, to proceed in my design of refining the language and improving our general system of education. Dr. Franklin has extended my views to a very simple plan of reducing the language to perfect regularity. Should I ever attempt it, I have no doubt that I should be patronized by many distinguished characters.”

Webster was thrilled by the possibility of collaborating with Franklin. He hoped thereby both to serve his country and to improve his chances of finding more support (“patrons”) for his own work. Webster was keenly aware of what the ability to drop such big names as both Washington and Franklin could mean for his future. On May 24, after he had left Philadelphia for New York, he shared with Franklin some thoughts on the latter’s proposed orthographic changes, noting that Washington was likely to be supportive of their efforts. “Could he be,” Webster stressed, “acquainted with the new alphabet proposed, [the General] would undoubtedly commence its advocate.” In a postscript to this letter, Webster asked Franklin to endorse his
Grammatical Institute
. By the summer of 1786, Webster and Franklin were making plans to confer on spelling reform in Philadelphia in the fall.

Webster’s trip to Philadelphia in early 1786 proved fruitful in other ways as well. Shortly after his arrival, he enjoyed another round of discussions with both Pelatiah Webster and Dr. Moyes, who was winding up his American tour. Webster also met Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence then settling in as a physician at Pennsylvania Hospital. A social activist, Rush hoped to “remake America” by revamping both education and medicine, and he would develop into one of Webster’s favorite correspondents. Though Rush respected Webster’s intelligence, he had some qualms about his character. Rush would enjoy repeating to friends what Webster said to him after he had congratulated him upon his arrival in Philadelphia: “Sir, you may congratulate Philadelphia upon the occasion!”

On February 27, Webster was introduced to Rush’s old friend Thomas Paine, the author of the famous Revolutionary pamphlet, whose title, thanks to Rush, had been changed from
Plain Truth
to
Common Sense
. Paine was then soliciting comments on his engineering prowess, as he had just completed a design for a new suspension bridge. Examining Paine’s model, Webster rendered the following verdict in his diary, “Executed, in miniature, with success.”

Webster’s language lectures at university hall on Fourth Street, which he considered “a large clumsy building,” drew consistently good crowds; the hundred and fifty “mostly literary characters” in attendance at his sixth and final lecture on March 11 expressed their approval with “great applause.” But while Webster achieved many of his objectives—he also registered his speller under the state’s new copyright law—his sojourn in Philadelphia was not without disappointment. In late February, he noted in his diary, “Go to the Assembly; the ladies will not dance with strangers if they can avoid it—polite indeed!” Though Webster was running in elite circles, his failure to find dancing partners that night made him feel like a social outcast. “People in high life,” he added, “suppose that they have a right to dispense with the rules of civility.” A month later, after hosting a farewell Sunday dinner for his newfound Philadelphia friends, he was gone.

From Philadelphia, Webster moved on to Princeton, where he stayed at the home of Samuel Stanhope Smith, the president of the College of New Jersey, whom he had first met nearly four years earlier. Discovering that most of the students, then busy preparing for exams, were too impoverished to pay for tickets, Webster nixed his plan to deliver lectures. On March 24, he scurried out of town after just three days. He did have time for a quick house count: The small college town had just ninety. Of this stop, his diary mentions a couple of dinners with Dr. Smith, a tea at the home of the local parson and some scattered data, “48 rooms in College, 70 students, Presidents salary £ 400. Professor of moral philosophy £ 200. Tutors £ 150 currency.”

With anxiety about pounds and pence racing through his mind, Webster began thinking about how to garner some solid gate receipts in the nation’s capital.

 

 

UPON ARRIVING IN NEW YORK on Saturday, March 25, Webster found a room at Mrs. Ferrari’s lodging house at 56 Maiden Lane—then a string of small shops and elegant houses. (A few years later, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson would live at 57 Maiden Lane). He was residing down the street from Aaron Burr and his family, whom he visited on his first day in town, just as he had the year before. On Monday the twenty-seventh, Webster met New York’s mayor, James Duane, who personally procured the use of city hall for his lectures. This was a major coup because the three-story building, located at the corner of Wall and Nassau Street, where Federal Hall now stands, had since 1785 doubled as the halls of Congress. Following in the footsteps of other distinguished guests such as Dr. Moyes, Webster would give his series of six lectures in its second-floor assembly chamber, whose walls were adorned with paintings of Columbus, Washington and France’s King Louis XVI, then America’s closest foreign ally.

Despite some severe snowstorms in early April, Webster maintained an active social schedule. He enjoyed numerous teas and dinners with several national leaders, including Dr. David Ramsay, who presided over Congress during John Hancock’s illness, and the New York delegate Judge Zephaniah Platt, the father of Jonas Platt, the future congressman whom he had taught in Goshen. Webster’s mood was largely buoyant, even when attending the theater. After seeing
The Provoked Husband,
a Restoration comedy by John Vanbrugh, Webster reported in his diary that the actors performed well. However, he also alluded to some irritation, adding, “Some low scenes and indelicate ideas interspersed here and there are very exceptionable [objectionable]. Every exhibition of vice weakens our aversion for it.” In point of fact, Vanbrugh’s farce, which featured characters such as the simpleton Sir Francis Wronghead, contained nothing racy. But Webster never did take to social satire. A decade later, beneath a newspaper clipping of an eighteenth-century poem, “The Bunter’s Wedding,” which spoofed the dregs of London society, he would pencil in the following comments, “Too low for the sublimity of my genius and the elegant taste of N. Webster.”

On the morning of April 27, at the invitation of Dr. Ramsay, Webster attended a special breakfast in honor of Captain O’Beal, the Seneca Indian chief, who was then negotiating with federal authorities. “The Seneca Chief & five others,” Webster wrote in his diary, “. . . behave with great civility, & took tea and coffee with decency and some appearance of breeding. When they left the house they shook hands with men & women, without any bow, wearing strong marks of native independence and dignity.” Webster, who donated one sixth of the receipts from his New York lectures to the poor, would forever be concerned about the plight of the downtrodden.

That evening, Webster gave his final lecture before an appreciative crowd of two hundred, which included Dr. Ramsay as well as many other congressional delegates.

As Webster awoke on Friday the twenty-eighth, he was filled with pride. His twice-weekly lectures at city hall, in which he had advocated purifying America from “the principles and effects of a modern corruption of language in Great Britain,” had been a resounding success.

Having decided to move on to Albany on Monday, May 1, he had just one final weekend in New York. This was the morning, he decided, when he would begin his count. With his broad hat and walking stick, the impeccably dressed Webster marched out onto Maiden Lane.

The entire city was then confined to today’s financial district, so Webster figured he needed only a day to complete his task. Along the East River, the city ran a total of about two miles; Grand Street was at its northern tip, above which began a highway called “Road to Boston.” Along the Hudson (or North) River stood just a mile of paved roads. From the city’s west bank to its east, the distance was on average three-quarters of a mile; its entire circumference was thus about four miles.

The New York that Webster was about to circumnavigate was still suffering from the aftereffects of the seven-year British occupation, which had ended just two and a half years earlier. The rubbish and detritus from the Great Fire of 1776, which had destroyed some five hundred houses as well as Trinity Church, the city’s first Episcopal church, were still evident. As Webster headed down from Maiden Lane to the Battery, he noticed that many of the brick buildings with tiled roofs could use a coat of fresh paint, and that vacant lots were everywhere. The city wouldn’t get its much-needed face-lift until the following year when its population—about twenty-four thousand at the time of Webster’s walk—would begin to swell. The pavements upon which Webster trod on that spring day were also by and large not yet mended.

This 1789 map was by John McComb, Jr., Manhattan’s most prominent architect, who later designed both Gracie Mansion and The Grange, Alexander Hamilton’s retreat.

Two years later, Webster wrote up what he saw on that spring day. In the March 1788 issue of
The American Magazine,
a New York literary journal that he began editing in late 1787, Webster published an article, “General Description of New York.” In this twenty-page piece, Webster provided a complete inventory of New York, which was so admired by historians that it was republished a century later as the preface to a facsimile edition of David Franks’
New York Directory for 1786
. New York’s first directory, Franks’ eighty-page volume consists primarily of the street addresses of the city’s residents and businesses (e.g., under “Lawyers, Attornies and Notaries Publics &c” are listed about forty names, including “Aaron Burr, Esq., 10 Little Queen Street, and “Alexander Hamilton, Esq., 57 Wall-st.”) While Franks’ lists of individuals provide a micro-level view of New York’s contents, Webster’s prose furnishes the macro-level view.

As Webster examined the houses on Broadway, he basked in the street’s grandeur. As he put it in the 1788 article: “But the most convenient and agreeable part of the city is Broadway. This street runs upon the height of land between the two rivers, beginning at the fort, near the south of the city and extending to the hospital in front of which it opens into an extensive plain or common.” The hospital just north of Chambers Street marked the end of the developed area on New York’s west side. On the fields in front, Webster spotted about two hundred horses and cows that were grazing. Behind the hospital was an out-of-the-way orchard where a week earlier, Webster had witnessed a duel that fatally wounded George Curson, an Englishman accused of seducing a woman from a prominent Old New York family. While Webster also considered Wall Street “elegant,” he lamented that “most of [the other streets] are irregular and narrow.” New York would never appeal to Webster as much as the orderly New Haven and Philadelphia.

As Webster walked, he also paid close attention to New York’s churches, which then constituted its skyline. He was impressed by the neatness of its Protestant edifices—namely, the three Dutch, three Episcopal and four Presbyterian churches. In his article, he included detailed descriptions of all ten, which highlight their precise dimensions. “The Third Presbyterian Church,” he remarked, “was erected in the year 1768, is a genteel stone building, sixty-five and a half feet long and fifty-five and a half feet wide; and stands in Little Queen-street.” Of the city’s other churches, his article would note just his count: