The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (20 page)

In New York, Webster ended up giving just one lecture. Attracting much less interest than before, he spoke not at city hall, but at the Queen Street studio of one of the nation’s leading dancing masters, John Hulett, with whom Webster would develop close ties. During his next sojourn in New York a year later, Webster would “take a few steps in dancing under Mr. Hulett” and participate in an occasional “heelkicking” at his studio.

On Christmas Day, Webster set off for Philadelphia. He first saw Franklin on the twenty-eighth, and two days later, they dined together. During Webster’s ten months in Philadelphia, Franklin would regularly take time out of his busy schedule to meet with him. “The doctor,” Webster proudly recalled later, “treated N.W. with much politeness.” Though their friendship blossomed—Webster would on occasion accompany “the ladies” to Dr. Franklin’s Market Street house—their proposed literary collaboration foundered. Webster soon realized that he didn’t see eye to eye with the Doctor, who remained wedded to his old ideas about spelling reform. Speaking in his famous aphoristic style, Franklin told Webster that “those people spell best who do not know how to spell.” What the Doctor meant was that the formal rules of spelling are arbitrary, and that a purely phonetic system would make it easier for most people to read and write. Back in 1768, Franklin had drafted a treatise,
A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling,
in which he proposed substituting the letters—c, j, q, w, x, and y—for six new ones of his own making. The seasoned publisher had also come up with types for printing his new characters. After careful consideration, Webster politely informed Franklin that he wasn’t willing to dust off his types in order to create a new alphabet. Reflecting back on this parting of the ways in his memoir, he wrote, “N.W. . . . was then . . . of the opinion that any scheme for introduction of a new alphabet or new characters is and will be impracticable.” That account, however, doesn’t quite jibe with the facts, for as late as February 23, 1787, Webster was still lecturing about “reforming the English alphabet.” A perpetual self-promoter, Webster would not shy away from rewriting history when it suited his purposes.

While sometime during the spring of 1787, Webster lost interest in tinkering with the alphabet, he remained committed to spelling reform. In 1790, he would make the case for a new phonetic system relying on existing letters in a volume entitled
A Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings
. Webster’s proposals involved, for example, eliminating silent letters such as the “e” in “fugitive” and changing “is” to “iz.” Webster took his characteristic strong stand, arguing that “if a gradual reform should not be made in our language, it will proov that we are less under the influence of reezon than our ancestors.” But critics found his scheme incoherent, if not absurd. Jeremy Belknap, the Boston pastor who founded the Massachusetts Historical Society, quipped that he objected to “the new mode of spelling recommended and exemplified in the fugitiv Essays ov No-ur Webster eskwier junier, critick and coxcomb general of the United States.” In response to such attacks, Webster soon gave up his ambitious plan to revamp the spelling of American English. However, he would never stop pressing for less sweeping changes.

Once Webster settled in at Mrs. Ford’s rooming house on Walnut Street in early January 1787, he had to figure out how to stay afloat financially. He first tried going back to the lectern. On January 3, he met with James Sproat, the pastor at the Second Presbyterian Church at Third and Arch. Sproat was also a trustee at the University of the State of Pennsylvania, and he helped Webster gain access to a room at the university. On January 6, Webster announced in
The Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser
that he would be giving a series of seven lectures on language, education and government. But subscription sales were anemic. With the Federal Convention slated to come to town in May, Webster’s call for national unity, which had generated so much excitement over the past two years, was now old news. Scaling back his plans, he decided to give just two lectures.

But the public was no longer interested in even a small dose of Webster the celebrity speaker. And Webster’s social obtuseness compounded the problem. On Tuesday, January 20, the day scheduled for his first lecture, he posted an announcement in
The Pennsylvania Herald and General Advertiser,
in which he further alienated his potential audience by defining it very narrowly: “The public are most respectfully informed that this and another lecture are . . . not designed for
amusement. . . .
They are . . . for people who have leisure and inclination to devote an hour to
serious
study.” At the same time, Webster made a feeble attempt to extend his appeal beyond just “thinking men of every denomination,” adding, “The first [lecture] is particularly calculated for ladies of sentiment, who are very influential in manners.” But his remarks on how fashion had thwarted the purposes of the Revolution didn’t endear him to anyone: “This same dress which adorns a miss of fifteen will be frightful on a venerable lady of 70. . . . But the passive disposition of Americans of receiving every mode that is offered them sometimes reduces all ages, shapes and complexions to a level. . . . So long therefore as we look abroad for models, our taste must be entirely subject to the caprice and interest of other nations.” Little did Webster realize that Americans were unlikely to embrace his call for independence in sartorial matters.

On the evening of January 20, a hard rain pelted Philadelphia, and with few people showing up, Webster abruptly canceled his first lecture. He tried again a week later, and though the weather was better, he nevertheless drew a small audience. An item in
The New Hampshire Spy
dated January 31—probably written by Webster himself—captured his frustration: “A [Philadelphia] correspondent laments the depraved taste of a number of his fellow citizens, in their neglect of the course of lectures, now delivering by Mr. Webster, from which a useful portion of both instruction and improvement might be derived—whilst the pantomimes . . . appear to be sanctioned by crowded audiences.” As Webster would later note in his dictionary, pantomimes (such as “Harlequin in the Moon” playing that month at Philadelphia’s South Street Theater) then referred to “a species of musical entertainment.” That he was losing potential customers to stage actors—whom he despised—was particularly galling. On February 6, before another disappointing turnout, he recycled the idea from his Connecticut editorial about the pressing need to reduce the number of lawyers. His lecturing days were about over.

Webster was feeling not only angry but bored. Not sure what to do with himself, he whiled away the hours playing whist. The frequent attacks on his integrity in the local press infuriated him still further. In early February, alluding to Webster’s “insufferable arrogance,” an anonymous writer calling himself “Juvenis” also challenged his business model: “I wish Mr. Webster would publish his observations; . . . I among others cannot afford half a dollar every evening to hear his lectures.” On February 17, Webster got into a brawl with a businessman named Mr. Blanchard, in which a chair was broken. Embarrassed by his lack of emotional control, he conceded in his diary, “Folly in little boys is excuse-able, but in great boys, it is odious.”

In April, a rattled Webster returned to his former line of work, taking a position as an English instructor at the Episcopal Church’s Academy for Boys. (The school, founded in 1785, still stands, though it has been transplanted to Devon, a suburb of Philadelphia.) But he was further humiliated when a disgruntled former teacher at the school, identifying himself only as “Seth” in
The Freeman’s Journal,
publicized just how far he had fallen: “This learned man . . . is now obliged to accept of two hundred pounds a year of paper money, what at present, allowing for a discount, is scarcely one hundred pounds sterling.” Never one to shy away from a verbal smackdown, Webster took to his own defense. Using the alter ego “Adam”—Seth’s father in the Book of Genesis—Webster fired back “that the gentleman who is so degraded by his acceptance of a place in the Academy . . . has received as good an education as America can afford and improved it by a personal acquaintance with the greater part of the principal literary gentlemen in the United States.” But despite the imprimatur of the literati, Webster now had a grueling day job. On April 30, he observed, “Busy enough with the Boys of the Academy, they have been managed, or rather not managed by poor low Irish masters.” This backslide in his professional life might well have led to a crippling depression were it not for an exciting new development in his personal life.

 

 

THOUGH IT WASN’T QUITE LOVE at first sight, it took only a couple of weeks for Rebecca Greenleaf to sweep Webster off his feet. Then just twenty, the petite Bostonian with the dark complexion was a head-turner, whose “fine eyes and amiable deportment have made,” one contemporary put it, “so much havoc among the beaux.” While most schoolteachers wouldn’t have had a chance at winning her heart, Webster held out some hope. The twenty-eight-year-old was a nationally known author who was himself dashing; and persistence was his forte.

They met by accident on March 1, 1787, when Webster was escorting Miss Sally Hopkins to visit Pastor James Sproat. During the course of the evening, Webster met Duncan Ingraham, a local importer of European goods, and his family. Rebecca and her brother James were both in town to visit their older sister, Suzanna (Sukey), who had married Ingraham about a decade earlier.

Within a matter of days, Webster was turning his attention away from Miss Hopkins and toward “the agreeable Miss Greenleaf,” whom he soon began seeing a couple of times a week. Every minute he spent with “the lovely Becca” was sheer delight. On March 15, Webster had dinner with Dr. Franklin, but discussions about spelling reform suddenly were no longer at the top of his agenda. The highlight of that evening, he noted in his diary, was his visit with “Miss Greenleaf, the black-eyed beauty.”

Webster was Rebecca’s constant companion at teas and concerts until she left Philadelphia in early summer. A few days before her departure, Webster wrote her a note, in which he enclosed a lock of his hair and revealed his intentions: “Permit me to assure you that your esteem—your friendship is now my only happiness and your happiness the great object of my pursuit. And if I am permitted to indulge a hope of mutual attachment, your inclinations will always be consulted in my future determinations. . . . You must go, and I must be separated from all that is dear to me.”

For the first time in his life, Webster was madly in love. He would pursue this object of his affection with the same intensity that he would pour into defeating his political and literary opponents. But with Rebecca, the combative Webster would lay down his arms. Taking on a new persona, he did his utmost to be pleasing and agreeable. “Among other instances of my readiness to obey your wishes,” he wrote while courting her, “you may rank the mode of dressing my hair. I have turned it back, and I think I look like a witch. . . . You know I do not dispute against the taste of ladies.”

By the summer of 1787, the couple had reached “an understanding” that they would eventually be married. On June 20, 1787, as Rebecca was about to go back to New England, with tears streaming down his cheeks, Webster wrote her, “
Without you
the world is all alike to me; and with you any part will be agreeable.” While Rebecca returned Webster’s affection, she insisted on delaying the wedding because of his lack of a steady income. The disappointed Webster raised no objections. Though he would continue to socialize with other women, including “the pretty Miss Hopkins,” he couldn’t stop thinking about his fiancée. As he wrote to Rebecca once she was back in Boston, “I sometimes go to dances and other parties, where I see ladies and good girls, too, they are. But there is not a Becca Greenleaf among them; no such tenderness, such delicacy, such sentiment and unaffected goodness.”

Rebecca’s appeal went beyond her beauty and kind disposition. Webster was also entranced by the rest of the Greenleafs (derived from the French, “Feuillevert”), a distinguished Huguenot family whose roots in Massachusetts dated back to 1635. As Webster would later advise his daughter Eliza, “When you marry, look out for the stock.” Rebecca was the thirteenth of fifteen children of William Greenleaf and Mary Brown, whose ancestor, John Browne, had been a magistrate of Plymouth Colony (and in 1654 had met Webster’s forefather, John Webster, at a gathering of key Colonial leaders). Impressed by the Greenleafs’ genealogy, that summer Webster first developed what would be a lifelong interest in his own family heritage. Initially he hoped his father might supply some answers, but he soon learned that he would have to do his own digging. “As to the history of our family,” Noah Webster, Sr., wrote from Hartford on July 28, 1787, “I have made some inquiry of old people, but cannot be very particular. . . . my desire is you may rise superiour in whatever is excellent and praiseworthy to your ancestors.”

Rebecca’s father, William Greenleaf, possessed the worldly sophistication that Webster’s own father sorely lacked. A tall, slim man, fond of his single-breasted coat and gold cane, Greenleaf was a successful Boston merchant who could easily afford to send his sons to Harvard. An avid Whig, Greenleaf was appointed sheriff of Suffolk by the Colonial governor of Massachusetts on October 31, 1775. The following year, he was at the center of a seminal moment in American history. On July 18, 1776, it fell to Greenleaf to read the Declaration of Independence from the balcony of the old State House on State Street (then called King Street) to the swirling throng below. (But the mild-mannered Greenleaf was soft-spoken, and upon hearing the insistent cries of “Read louder!,” he gave way to Colonel Thomas Crafts, another county sheriff who happened to have a booming voice.) During the war, the British ransacked Greenleaf’s elegant Hanover Street home, and the family eventually resettled in Dorchester. As children, Rebecca and her sisters all felt close to their kind-hearted father, whom they would shower with kisses upon his comings and goings. An endless supply of paternal affection would transform the Greenleaf girls into easygoing and devoted wives.