The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (19 page)

Webster completed his tallying by the early evening, leaving him enough time to have tea with Peter Vandervoort, the sheriff of Kings County.

That night, Webster wrote in his diary, “Take the number of houses—3500 nearly.” In his 1788 article, in which he included his house count data from across the country along with a host of other demographic information about the city, he would publish an exact figure: 3,340.

In his published account of New York, Webster would also supplement his raw data with some general comments about its citizens. Webster cited William Smith’s 1757
History of the Province of New York,
which carried the following assessment: “The people, both in town and country, are sober, industrious, and hospitable, though intent on gain.” While noting that many changes had taken place since the Revolution, Webster concurred: “Notwithstanding, in point of sociability and hospitality, New York is hardly exceeded by any town in the United States.” Webster remarked how in New York, the members of the principal families mingle freely with other well-bred citizens. He contrasted this warmth, which he himself had experienced, to the “affectation of superiority” that governs the behavior of the leading families in Philadelphia. Webster attributed this difference to the manners of each town’s prevailing sect; while America’s largest city took after the reserved Quakers, its capital adopted the personality of the neat and parsimonious Dutch.

Webster’s 1788 urban portrait would forever define Manhattan during the early days of the Republic.

 

 

WHILE WEBSTER WOULD ALWAYS ENJOY keeping track of facts and figures, a chance meeting the following year would reduce his reliance on this particular means to manage his anxiety. Falling in love would bring to an end his days as an aimless wanderer.

A
fter finishing a series of lectures in Albany, Webster returned to Connecticut, arriving back in Hartford on May 27. Two days later, he dined with Joel Barlow. On May 30, he rode on to the West Division and was reunited with his family. That evening, he wrote in his diary, “Meet my friends with joy.”

Webster immediately made arrangements to take his lecture tour around his native New England. His primary objective was to raise the funds needed to print new editions of
The Grammatical Institute
. And by fraternizing with the community leaders and school officials who attended his talks, as well as the booksellers who sold the tickets, he also hoped to boost sales. While Webster would still focus on the future of American education, he would now also share the experiences and factoids that he had gathered during his visits to other parts of the country. He decided to start in his hometown. On June 5, he placed the following ad in
The Connecticut Courant
: “Mr Webster will read some remarks on the government, the population, agriculture, literature, slavery, climate and commerce of the United States; exhibiting a comparative view of each of those views in the eastern, the middle and the southern states; with some observations of manners.” At the North Meeting House the following evening, Webster was rudely interrupted. Angry that he had provided free tickets to members of the state legislature, but charged an admission fee to everyone else, a contingent of local farmers mobbed the Presbyterian church, breaking a few windows. Having climbed to the top of the social ladder, Noah Webster, Jr., was now viewed with envy and contempt by those who, like his father and two brothers, spent their lives toiling in the fields. The antipathy went in both directions. “Let it be remembered,” Webster wrote in his diary, “that in the year 1786, there are people in Hartford so illiberal, that they will not permit public lectures to be read in a church because they cannot be admitted without paying two shillings.” Over the next two nights, he completed this brief lecture series in more friendly confines—Mr. Collier’s dance studio. But only a few friends showed up.

Webster fared better in New Haven, where he was also pleased to reconnect with Ezra Stiles and Josiah Meigs. After counting New Haven’s four hundred houses on Saturday, June 17, he gave the first of his six well-attended lectures at the state house the following Monday. On June 30, he delivered his last lecture “avec éclat.” That same day, in a letter to Pickering, he quantified exactly how this reception compared with what he had experienced elsewhere: “In New Haven, I have about 70 hearers . . . a greater number in proportion to the size of the town than I have had before.”

Though publicly Webster was animated, in private he was feeling despondent. Upon his return to Hartford in early July, he reported being “oppressed with
vis inertiae
” [the force of inertia]. Caught in what he perceived to be a never-ending search for a wife, he was also spiritually adrift. While attending a Quaker meeting during his next round of touring, he recorded the following mental meanderings: “Not a word spoken . . . a whisper or two among the Ladies excepted, I was very attentive to the silent exhortations of a pretty girl of sixteen. Such blushes, such lips made one feel devotion.” And summing up another silent meeting a day later, he reported, “Saw a sweet girl.”

Over the next four months, Webster’s barnstorming took him to Boston (twice), Salem, Portsmouth, Newburyport, Providence and Newport. Webster was disappointed with the typically low turnouts. The one bright spot was a subscription lecture before ninety literary men—including the revolutionary journalist turned state senator, Samuel Adams—at Faneuil Hall on his second trip to Boston. And Webster was honored that Franklin himself had acknowledged the importance of his efforts. In response to Webster’s June 23 letter, the Doctor wrote back on July 9: “I think with you that your lecturing on the language will be of great use in preparing the minds of people for the improvements proposed, and therefore would not advise your omitting any of the engagements you have made, for the sake of being here sooner than your business requires, that is in September or October next. I shall then be glad to see and confer with you on the subject.”

Webster’s lectures, which had started out as supplements to his own
Grammatical Institute,
had evolved into a prologue for his upcoming collaboration with Franklin. But with Franklin at the height of his national fame, Webster didn’t mind second billing.

In Salem, Webster crossed paths with John Gardner, a South Carolina businessman who had accompanied him on his first house-count in Baltimore back in September 1785. The two statistically obsessed men pooled their data on America’s housing stock. A nephew of Timothy Pickering, Gardner was proving to be a dedicated sidekick. On June 16, as a wave of fires ravaged Charleston, Gardner had exhorted Webster, “I am much obliged to you for the return of the houses of the several towns in your letter. . . . I must request you to persevere in counting houses wherever you have leasure [
sic
].” In that same letter, Gardner, whose family’s fortune would be funneled into Boston’s Gardner Museum a century later, also offered his immediate assessment of the conflagration’s impact on his Charleston tally: “The number stood 1560 but was yesterday reduced 19 by a terrible Fire which broke out near Broad Street.” Buoyed by their meeting in mid-August, Webster was more dedicated than ever to completing this national survey.

As he traveled around Massachusetts that summer, the discontent of the state’s farmers reached a fever pitch. The previous year, the Bay State had enacted a new tax of a pound per poll (head), which was roughly four times the rate of its New England neighbors. Also burdened by declining land prices, the aggrieved denizens of rural Massachusetts demanded that the state government print paper money. Considering the rebels morally reprehensible, Webster repeatedly mocked their so-called grievances. On August 14, Webster wrote Pickering from Salem, “The best way to redress grievances is for every man when he gets a sixpence, instead of purchasing a pint of rum or two ounces of tea, to deposit his pence in a desk, till he has accumulated enough to answer the calls of the collector.”

A couple of weeks later, a band of farmers in western Massachusetts, led by Daniel Shays, took up arms. The next month, the movement that later became known as “Shays’ Rebellion” shut down the state supreme court in Springfield, which had been sending scores of debt-ridden farmers to prison. Webster the businessman would have to start making concessions to the economically distressed rural New Englanders. In its ads for his books at the end of that summer, his publisher Hudson and Goodwin noted that in lieu of cash, it would also accept “grain of any kind, bees-wax or flax.”

However, the popular unrest was making Webster so uncomfortable that he now felt it necessary to abandon New England. On September 14, as he was winding up his second visit to Boston, he wrote a friend, the New York merchant James Watson, “In the course of autumn, I shall take up my bed and walk out of Connecticut. . . . These eastern states are in tumult.” Noting that “I am the son of a New England farmer—an honest man,” Webster stressed that the disposition of the current generation of New Englanders is “not natural—it is all habit and the effect of credit.” Waxing nostalgic for a past that never was, he argued that repayment of debts should be simply a matter of honor. Webster’s moralistic stance heaped the blame solely on the victims of America’s struggling economy.

While lecturing in Providence in late September, Webster learned that mobs were also forcing the hand of the Rhode Island legislature, which had recently authorized the printing of a hundred thousand dollars. He was terrified that chaos would reign. In a piece published on September 28 in Providence’s paper,
The United States Chronicle,
under the byline “Tom Thoughtful”—an allusion to “Tom Brainless,” the bumbling protagonist of Trumbull’s “The Progress of Dulness”—Webster released his pent-up anxiety and rage. “My countrymen,” he wrote at the top of this editorial, “the devil is in you”; he then proceeded to use this harsh refrain like a whip. But before doing so, the future lexicographer carefully defined his key term: “the effects ascribed to this prince of evil spirits. . . . I ascribe to the wickedness and ignorance of the human heart. Taking the word ‘Devil’ in this sense, he is in you and among you in a variety of ways.” Webster found evidence of the devil in the farmers’ inability to trust Congress, their thirst for swift action and their love of luxury. But the whole country was also at fault. “The weakness of our federal government,” he insisted, “is the Devil.” As in his
Sketches
, Webster here, too, alluded to the necessity of a “supreme head.” For Webster, a stronger union was necessary to give America the exorcism it desperately needed.

After completing his lecture tour in the eastern states, Webster returned to Hartford on October 27. But he was too broke to head directly to Philadelphia as he had hoped. The following day, he bared his financial soul to Franklin: “I labor under some embarrassments which I take the liberty to mention to your Excellency. The profits on the sale of my books, which amount now to £100 per annum, are all appropriated to reimburse the expense I have incurred in prosecuting my designs, so that I cannot with propriety expect any assistance from them for the coming year. My lectures, which have supported me hitherto, are closed; and I have nothing to depend on for subsistence this year but my further exertions in some business.”

Webster asked Franklin for help in tracking down some prospects in Philadelphia: “I shall wait here a few days for your Excellency’s answer, if an answer will not be too great a trouble; for in my present situation I know not how to act.” Though he never received a response from the Doctor, Webster soon summoned up the courage to head south. Not only was he eager to consult with Franklin, who that November was unanimously reappointed president of Pennsylvania, but the forces of history were also tugging at him. Less than two months earlier, the Annapolis Convention had issued a report, then circulating throughout the country, which recommended that Congress meet on the second Monday in May to strengthen the Articles of Confederation. Once again Webster would trust his own resourcefulness. He spent the next few weeks settling his affairs and saying goodbye to family and friends, including Joel Barlow, John Trumbull and Nathan Perkins. He also dashed off a couple of editorials stressing the need for national unity. In an anonymous piece, which ran in the
Courant
on November 20, he cast his opponents as simpletons: “But the anti-federal men think as they have been bred—their education has been rather indifferent. . . . Besides most of them live remote from the best opportunities of information.” Three days later, on Thanksgiving Day, Webster left Hartford “to seek a living, perhaps for life.”

 

 

WEBSTER WOULD ONCE AGAIN travel to Philadelphia by way of New Haven and New York. In New Haven, he gave two more lectures at the state house. In a series of lively dinners and teas, he also discussed the national crisis with Yale President Stiles and his former classmate Meigs, as well as with Roger Sherman, the longtime congressman recently elected the town’s first mayor, who, according to Thomas Jefferson, “never said a foolish thing in his life.” While his colleagues urged more sympathy for the embattled farmers, Webster held to a hard line. Huddling in his room to avoid the single-digit temperatures and violent snowstorms, he fired off an anonymous editorial, “A Bit of Advice to Connecticut Folks,” published in Meigs’
New Haven Gazette
on December 14. Attempting to solve America’s economic problems with a statistical sleight of hand, he began, “It is hard times—money is scarce—taxes are high—and private debts push us. What shall we do? Why hear a few facts; stubborn facts,—and then take some advice.” Webster’s facts consisted of two sets of numbers: Connecticut’s “necessary expenses” and its “unnecessary expenses.” The big-ticket items in the first category included the salaries of state officials (e.g., the annual hundred pounds for each of its two hundred clergymen), the cost of maintaining its five hundred schools and support of the poor (“very necessary”). In the second category, the once and future attorney placed the eighteen thousand pounds the state spent on lawyers. But by far the biggest waste came from the ninety thousand pounds Connecticut citizens spent on rum. Webster’s cure was simple: avoid lawyers’ fees and drink. “My countrymen,” he concluded, “I am not trifling with you; I am serious. You feel the facts I state.” Confident of the wisdom contained in his balance sheets, Webster would reprint this essay a half-dozen times over the next decade.