The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (2 page)

About six months later, Webster, who spent the summer of 1785 running a singing school in Baltimore, traveled back down to Mount Vernon before heading on to Richmond to discuss his
Sketches
with Madison. On the evening of November 5, he once again gave the General a civics lesson. At dinner, Washington happened to mention that he was looking to hire a young man to tutor his two step-grandchildren—Nelly and Wash Custis, then living at Mount Vernon. He told Webster that he had asked a colleague in Scotland to offer recommendations. A stunned Webster shot back, “What would European nations think of this country if, after the exhibition of great talents and achievements in the war for independence, we should send to Europe for men to teach the first rudiments of learning?” Immediately grasping Webster’s point, a humbled Washington asked, “What shall I do?” But even before he had finished his question, the General himself knew the answer. Out of respect for the emerging new nation, he would restrict his job search to Americans. Washington initially considered Webster for the post, but Webster soon took himself out of the running. On December 18, 1785, Webster wrote that his desire to marry and start a family precluded his moving to Mount Vernon. In that same letter, Webster also confided to the man, who was quickly evolving into a surrogate father, his true aspirations: “I wish to enjoy life, but books and business will ever be my principal pleasure. I must write; it is a happiness I cannot sacrifice.”

Together, Noah Webster, Jr., the man of words, and George Washington, the man of action, would continue to work to unify America. Recognizing Webster’s remarkable knack for getting Americans to think of themselves as Americans, Washington relied time and time again on his trusted policy advisor. In May 1787, right after he was appointed the head of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Washington would knock at the door of Webster’s hotel room. Though bedridden with a headache, Webster—derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for “female weaver,” the family name is a synonym for “uniter”—was honored to offer strategic assistance. And in the fall of 1793, Washington, who during his first term as president had found the time to exchange missives with Webster about such mundane concerns as “the theory of vegetable manure,” would once again turn to this savvy wordsmith to combat divisions among the American people. At Washington’s behest, Webster would assume the helm of
American Minerva,
New York City’s first daily newspaper. For the next several years, his incisive editorials would help quiet the furor of those Republicans eager to join the French in their rapidly expanding war against England. Washington’s heroic stewardship of the young nation would, in turn, have a lasting impact on Webster, whose dictionary would be replete with references to America’s first president. To illustrate the meaning of “surpass,” Webster would note, “Perhaps no man has ever
surpassed
Washington in genuine patriotism and integrity of life.”

Shortly after Washington’s death in December 1799, Webster petitioned for access to the family papers so that he could become America’s first presidential biographer. Only when he failed to land this plum assignment did the freelance writer begin work on what would eventually become his most illustrious monument to our national identity—his
American Dictionary of the English Language
. Beginning in the spring of 1800, Webster would throw caution to the wind and immerse himself in this massive undertaking, which would turn out to be nearly twice the heft of Samuel Johnson’s 1755
Dictionary of the English Language
. With his 1828 masterpiece, Webster, whom James Murray, the first editor of the
Oxford English Dictionary,
would later describe as a “born definer of words,” would succeed in forever unifying the world’s most ethnically diverse nation with a common language. Webster’s insistence that his work, published at a time when America’s population totaled about 13 million, would “furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue . . . to the three hundred millions of people, who are destined . . . to adorn the vast territory within our jurisdiction” has proved remarkably prescient.

But Webster’s vast legacy extends far beyond lexicography. As the eminent American historian and former Yale president Howard Lamar recently put it at a 250th birthday celebration, “He was far more than the distinguished writer of the first dictionary of the American language. . . . [Webster was] a multiple American founding father.” This polymath wrote extensive treatises on epidemiology, which helped usher in both America’s first medical journal and the field of public health. The man whose nervous tic compelled him to conduct his own personal tally of all the houses in America’s major cities in the 1780s also helped give rise to America’s first census in 1790. A mover and shaker in the publishing world, Webster invented the modern book tour and drafted America’s first copyright laws. A progressive pedagogue who championed both female education and public schools, he helped found Amherst College. A political activist who served numerous terms in the state legislatures of both Connecticut and Massachusetts, Webster was an early champion of workman’s compensation and unemployment insurance. In short, Webster shaped American culture (or “civilization,” to use the term of his era) as a whole. When Americans were groping for a way to carve out their own identity vis-à-vis Great Britain, Webster proved an able guide. “America must be as independent in
literature,
” he observed at the beginning of his literary career, “as she is in
politics
—as famous for
arts
as for
arms
.”

Webster’s reputation was at its height in the decades immediately following his death in 1843. In 1878, renowned historian Charles Lester maintained that Webster stood side by side with Columbus and Washington himself in America’s “Trinity of Fame.” However, as his speller, which would sell a staggering hundred million copies by the end of the nineteenth century, fell out of favor, this pure-bred New Englander, whom his distant cousin, the eloquent Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster, once called the
vera effigies
[true likeness] of the Webster clan, suddenly lost his prominent place in the history books. When remembered at all, Noah Webster was often ridiculed. In the early twentieth century, he made a cameo in Ambrose Bierce’s
The Devil’s Dictionary
; the satirist stuck the phlegmatic lexicographer under the definition for “hell,” which was presumed to be his eternal resting place. H. L. Mencken was one notable exception. “[Webster’s]
American Dictionary,
” the sage of Baltimore raved in his 1919 classic,
The American Language,
“was not only thoroughly American: it was superior to any of the current dictionaries of the English, so much so that for a good many years it remained ‘a sort of mine for British lexicography to exploit.’” Still, by 1942, when
Saturday Review
dubbed this Connecticut Yankee “the United States’ least-known, best-known man,” most Americans were convinced that his cousin Daniel had written the dictionary.

America’s amnesia about Noah Webster can be traced back to doubts about his character rather than his achievement. His arrogance was hard to miss. After hearing him lecture, one contemporary remarked, “The capital defect is the sheer unbounded vanity of the man . . . which is so great as to excite ridicule.” His political opponents went further, with one rival newspaper editor calling him “an incurable lunatic” and another “a spiteful viper.” We might prefer not to have among our Founding Fathers such a self-aggrandizing man who was prone to lash out—not only at ideological adversaries, but also at friends and family. In a profile written a generation ago, award-winning biographer Joseph Ellis described Webster as “an irascible and stubborn fellow,” who is “not the stuff of American mythology.” Likewise, in a recent discussion of Webster’s obnoxious personality,
New Yorker
contributor Jill Lepore launched into an extended aside about a murderous dictator before catching herself: “Noah Webster is, of course, no Joseph Stalin. He was an unlikable man, not a dangerous one.” Only a handful of full-length biographies exist, and most whitewash Webster’s glaring faults, painting him as a selfless patriot. But by skipping over his essence, such hagiography turns him into a lifeless statue.

A full appreciation of what Aristotle might have labeled Webster’s “tragic flaw” actually makes him a more sympathetic figure. A close examination of the diaries and letters, including those long suppressed by the family, reveals that his willfulness was not something over which he ever exercised any control. Like his predecessor, Samuel Johnson, who, it is now widely believed, suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, the lexicographer battled an intractable form of mental illness. Webster’s was what contemporary psychiatrists call obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Saddled with nearly crippling interpersonal anxiety from childhood, he had difficulty connecting with other people. “I suspect,” he wrote to Rebecca Greenleaf, then his fiancée, in 1788, “I am not formed for society; and I wait only to be convinced that people wish to get rid of my company, and I would instantly leave them for better companions: the reflections of my own mind.” While Webster and Greenleaf would stay married for more than half a century and raise seven children, words would always be his best friends. For this order lover, who came close to a complete breakdown on several occasions, defining became his ruling obsession. The thirty-year quest to complete the dictionary was inextricably linked to the fight to maintain his own sanity. If the personal stakes hadn’t been so high, he would surely have given up. Thus, in contrast to Achilles, whose hubris resulted in his downfall, Webster’s pathology was instrumental to his success.

Remarkably, the man who did so much to help America establish its cultural identity lacked a stable sense of self. As an old man, Webster heartily agreed with the sentiment that the eighty-year-old Benjamin Franklin, upon whom he modeled his career, once expressed to him: “I have been all my life changing my opinions.” The tempestuous polemicist was often at war with himself. Webster’s body housed a host of contradictory identities: revolutionary, reactionary, fighter, peacemaker, intellectual, commonsense philosopher, ladies’ man, prig, slick networker, and loner. In the attempt to give voice to all these distinct selves, this fragmented man felt compelled to write and to keep on writing. In the end, he would publish more words than any other member of the founding generation. While Webster was never quite able to render himself whole, nearly two centuries after his death his words still unite the nation that he loved.

T
he farming community with the fertile soil three miles west of Hartford that Noah Webster would always be proud to call his birthplace owes its strong identity to the fervent Congregationalism of its early inhabitants.

Religious expression was the raison d’être for the incorporation of the West Division of Hartford in the early eighteenth century. Without a church of its own, the settlement’s hundred and fifty souls, who had begun migrating over from Hartford in the 1680s, were feeling uneasy. On October 12, 1710, its twenty-eight families sent a petition to the General Assembly in New Haven, requesting a minister. Frustrated that a “good part of God’s time [was] spent traveling backward and forwards” to the three churches in Hartford, the petitioners were concerned lest their “children [might not] be present at the public worship of God.”

Though Hartford protested—a new independent community would mean the loss of tax revenue—in 1711, the General Assembly of the Colony of Connecticut set up the new parish. And two years later, the Fourth Church of Christ in Hartford was up and running. Located in the epicenter of the West Division, the barnlike meetinghouse with the steep roof, situated on the west side of the town’s major north-south artery, would, as one of its longtime ministers later observed, ensure that its residents remain a “united people.”

On a ninety-acre farm bordering that same north-south thoroughfare—later named Main Street—the future lexicographer would spend his entire childhood. The farm, which Noah’s father, Noah Webster, Sr., acquired soon after his marriage to Mercy Steele in 1749, featured sloping fields of corn, wheat, oats and tobacco. A long fence hemmed in the animals—cows, sheep and chickens—as well as the family horse, which the Websters would use to ride into town. Next to the white clap-board house stood the weaving shed where Noah Sr. could often be found when he wasn’t tending the crops.

Noah Webster, Jr., was born on October 16, 1758, in the “best room” of the four-room farmhouse. This sparsely furnished parlor, which doubled as the master bedroom, contained little more than a few straight-backed chairs, a four-poster bed and a writing desk, upon which sat a black Bible. On the other side of the stone chimney, which sliced the pine-walled house in two, was the kitchen with its huge brick oven. The fourth of five children, Noah would share the more rustic of the two upstairs bedrooms with his brothers, Abraham and Charles, born in 1751 and 1762, respectively. His older sisters, Mercy, born in 1749, and Jerusha, born in 1756, were stationed across the hall. The children all slept on straw mattresses, which they would have to tighten from time to time with a large bed key.