The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (21 page)

By contrast, Rebecca was wary of her mother, described by family members as “cold” and “haughty.” Mary Greenleaf banished several of her infant children to the country, where they were cared for by a wet nurse until they reached three or four. Rebecca’s stern mother was the parent to whom Webster would have to prove his dependability as a breadwinner.

Webster was intrigued by the prospect of having so many prominent new relatives. In Philadelphia that summer, he cemented his ties with both the wealthy and savvy Duncan Ingraham and with Rebecca’s brother James, then an up-and-coming speculator. Webster would soon become close to the Boston lawyer Thomas Dawes, who had married Rebecca’s sister Peggy, and Dr. Nathaniel Appleton, also of Boston, the husband of her sister Sarah. Over the next couple of years, Webster would enlist the help of several members of the extended Greenleaf family in solidifying his finances.

William and Mary Greenleaf, who left behind some eighty-nine grandchildren, would spawn a bevy of distinguished descendants. Their fifteenth child, Nancy, would marry William Cranch—who as a schoolboy, accompanied by his cousin John Quincy Adams, had seen Greenleaf on the balcony of the State House that July afternoon in 1776. Cranch, who became close to Webster, later served as a chief judge of the circuit court of the District of Columbia. One of the Cranches’ thirteen children, Abigail Adams Cranch, married William Greenleaf Eliot, the Unitarian clergyman who founded Washington University in St. Louis; among the grandchildren of William and Abigail Eliot was the St. Louis-born Nobel laureate, the poet T. S. Eliot.

 

 

ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 22, 1787, Webster marched over to the banks of the Schuylkill River to see if the strange invention could, in fact, “walk the waters like a thing of life.”

The invention was the steamboat, and its inventor was a tall, thin man with jet black hair and a fiery temper named John Fitch. In the forty-four-year-old Fitch, whom he had first met that winter, Webster found a kindred spirit. A farmboy from Windsor, Connecticut, seven and a half miles north of Hartford, Fitch had stopped attending school not long after his fifth birthday. But Fitch was “nearly crazey after learning” and despite a lack of support from his father, he devoured books such as Thomas Salmon’s
Geographical and Astronomical Grammar
in the hope of gathering “information of the whole world.” Apprenticed to a clock-maker, Fitch had worked as a brass founder, clock mender and surveyor until 1785 when he could no longer think of anything else but “propelling a conveyance without keeping a horse.”

As Webster well understood, inventors faced some of the same challenges as authors. Like Webster, Fitch had recently mounted a copyright campaign to protect the fruits of his labor. By that summer, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York had passed special laws (analogous to those Webster had requested for his speller) under which Fitch retained exclusive rights to his invention for a period of fourteen years. To gather recommendations from the biggest names in America, Fitch had set up this experimental trial for the “Convention Men.” He first invited William Samuel Johnson, a Connecticut delegate, who agreed to ride with him in the boat. And Dr. Johnson—the 1744 Yale graduate and future president of Columbia had received an honorary doctorate from Oxford—had alerted the rest of the delegates. While Webster and a couple of dozen “Convention Men” watched from the shore, about twenty others were on deck for the test run. That afternoon, Fitch’s experiment actually took precedence over the nation’s business as the delegates adjourned the convention early. “There was very few,” Fitch later wrote in his autobiography, “of the convention but called to see it.”

Throughout that summer, Webster was spending a lot of time with “Convention Men,” particularly those with Connecticut ties. On Independence Day, he had called on Dr. Johnson, as well as on Abraham Baldwin, a Yale tutor during his undergraduate days, who was representing Georgia. In early August, Webster spent an evening with Connecticut’s two other delegates, Oliver Ellsworth, his former boss, and Roger Sherman; a few weeks earlier, the pair had fashioned the “Connecticut Compromise,” which set up America’s dual system of representation in its two houses of Congress. And Webster also socialized with the Virginia delegates, James Madison and John Marshall, at whose house he would spend the evening of August 23.

Some forty-five feet long, the boat was powered by a 12-inch cylinder that sat above a small furnace. A crank over the stern propelled the half-dozen paddles, resembling snow shovels, that lined each side. Though it went just two and a half miles an hour, the vessel completed its journey from the Delaware River to Gray’s Ferry in the Schuylkill River without a hitch.

Webster, like the delegates, was impressed. Their unanimous verdict was summed up in a note passed on to the inventor by a servant the following day that began, “Dr. Johnson presents his compliments to Mr. Fitch and assures him that the exhibition yesterday gave the gentlemen present much satisfaction.” All of Connecticut would soon be immensely proud of this stunning feat by its ingenious native son. When meeting Ezra Stiles a few days later in New Haven, a beaming Ellsworth, who hailed from Fitch’s hometown of Windsor, was as eager to share this exciting news as he was to report on the progress of the convention.

Though the experiment was an unqualified success, Fitch still had lots more work to do. He needed to build a bigger motor and increase the speed. In 1791, he obtained the first federal patent for a steamboat, but he never could raise the funds to proceed any further. Fitch’s talents were as an inventor, not a venture capitalist. He soon lapsed into drink and despair, exclaiming, “The day will come when some more powerful man will get fame and riches from MY invention; but nobody will believe that poor John Fitch can do anything worthy of attention.” In 1798, he downed a dozen opium pills and died in his sleep. True to Fitch’s prophecy, in 1807, Robert Fulton, who had been working as a miniature portrait painter in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention, would emerge as “the father of the steamboat” and reap all the financial benefits.

Webster would forever be obsessed with Fitch. A half century later, he wrote to a friend, “A biography of John Fitch is a desideratum yet to be supplied.” And in 1842, upon hearing that the writer Eliza Leslie was getting ready to publish her life of the inventor, Webster wrote a long letter to
Graham’s Magazine,
the Philadelphia literary journal then edited by a budding writer named Edgar Allan Poe, in which he recalled his first visit aboard Fitch’s boat in February 1787. Of Fitch, Webster also noted, “His . . . papers . . . were . . . found to contain a minute account of his perplexities and disappointments. The memoir of such a man . . . cannot help but present the deepest interest.” Reflecting back on his own successful literary career, Webster felt that he had narrowly escaped Fitch’s tragic fate.

 

 

ON MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1787, in the capacious east room of the Pennsylvania State House on Fifth and Chestnut, which Webster considered “magnificent rather than elegant,” the final draft of the Constitution was read aloud. Before the vote, Benjamin Franklin handed Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson a few remarks that he had prepared for the occasion. Reading from Franklin’s notes, Wilson stated, “On the whole I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it . . . doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to the instrument.” Franklin’s insistence on the pressing need to approve an imperfect document carried the day. Late that afternoon, the Great Convention adjourned. That night, the members dined together for the last time at the City Tavern. Before going to bed, George Washington, who would leave town the next day, wrote in his diary that he “[meditated] on the momentous work which had been executed, after not less than five, and for a large part of the time six and sometimes 7 hours sitting every day . . . for more than four months.”

On Tuesday the eighteenth, Webster was in the Pennsylvania State House as President Franklin presented the Speaker of the House of Assembly—Thomas Mifflin—with the plan of the new federal government. Bells then rang throughout the city. Though Americans could now celebrate that a steamy summer of wrangling had resulted in a founding document, another round of fierce debate remained. Before it could become the law of the land, nine states would have to vote for ratification. Recording the historic events that night, Webster noted, “All America waits anxiously for the Plan of Government.”

But Webster would be no mere bystander. He would immediately get back to work on behalf of the national unity that he had long desired. And his country urgently needed his pen. On September 15, Thomas Fitzsimmons, a Pennsylvania delegate, had sent a personal note seeking his assistance: “It is already too evident that there are people prepared to oppose it [the Constitution]. . . . From a conviction that your abilities may be eminently useful on the present occasion, I am induced to call your attention to the subject. If as a friend to your country, you can support the act of the convention, I hope you will exert yourself to that purpose.” The savvy publicist jumped at the chance to extol what Washington, Franklin, Madison and Hamilton had wrought. Barricading himself in his room for two full days in early October, Webster completed a pamphlet, “An Examination into the Leading Principles of the New Federal Constitution Proposed by the Late Convention Held at Philadelphia,” which he dedicated to “his Excellency Benjamin Franklin, Esq.” Having been recently vilified in the popular press, Webster signed it “A Citizen of America.” This pen name, he felt, was likely to improve his chances of getting a fair hearing.

Published as soon as the ink was dry and excerpted in
The New Hampshire Gazette
later that fall, Webster’s essay took Franklin’s core argument directly to the American people: “It is absurd for a man to oppose the adoption of the constitution, because he thinks some part of it defective or exceptionable. . . . Perfection is not the lot of humanity.” In simple language, Webster explained how America’s founding document stacked up against its predecessors created by rulers such as Confucius, Moses and Peter the Great, describing it as “an improvement on the best constitutions the world ever saw.” He also emphasized the danger of a reversion to Hobbesian chaos should it not be ratified: “The present situation of our states is very little better than a state of nature.”

Though aware of the Constitution’s shortcomings, Webster didn’t stint in his praise. The future lexicographer found the work of the “Convention Men” eminently clear: “The constitution defines the powers of Congress; and every power not expressly delegated to that body, remains in the several state legislatures. The sovereignty and the republican form of government of each state is guaranteed by the constitution; and the bounds of jurisdiction between the federal and state Governments are marked with precision.” His hastily conceived tract, Webster later acknowledged in his memoir, lacked the theoretical sophistication of the Federalist Papers
,
the series of eighty-five newspaper articles defending the Constitution, which began appearing a couple of weeks later in New York newspapers. As an admiring Webster would put it in 1788, these seminal writings of Hamilton, Jay and Madison passed muster for the same reason as the Constitution itself: “It would be difficult to find a treatise . . . in which the true principles of republican government are unfolded with such precision.” Though the Federalist Papers are much better known to history, at the time Webster’s pamphlet may well have exerted even more influence, particularly outside New York State. That November, South Carolina’s David Ramsay thanked Webster for sending his “ingenious pamphlet,” adding that “it is now in brisk circulation among my friends. . . . It will doubtless be of singular significance in recommending the adoption of the new Constitution.”

 

 

ON OCTOBER 16, 1787, the day before his remarks on the Constitution were published, Webster celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday. “I have been industrious—endeavored to do some good,” he confided to his diary, “and hope I shall be able to correct my faults and yet do more good. Put my trunk abroad for New York.” His self-esteem was in tatters because, once again, his financial future was up in the air. Two weeks earlier, he had resigned from the Episcopal Academy, and his only source of income was now the trifling three hundred pounds in royalties that he could expect from his books. No longer having any business in Philadelphia, he began making preparations to head north. But where would he go and what would he do to earn the money he needed to be reunited with his beloved Becca?

At the suggestion of Franklin, with whom he spent a couple of evenings before leaving Philadelphia at the end of October, Webster decided to start a new literary magazine. Though the new nation’s overall economy was still fragile, this sliver of the publishing industry was booming. Between 1776 and 1800, some forty new magazines would crop up in America, nearly two and a half times as many as had appeared in all the years prior to the Revolution. The reigning king of the genre was Philadelphia’s
Columbian Magazine or Monthly Miscellany,
edited by Matthew Carey, which had been modeled on Britain’s
Gentleman’s Magazine.
With Carey also launching a similar publication,
The American Museum,
in 1787, Webster set his sights on America’s second city. As he explained to Benjamin Rush, “The place I have chosen for publishing it is not the seat of literature, but . . . to begin another [in Philadelphia] would be neither generous nor eligible. New York will always be the destination of the packets, and the facility of the intercourse with all parts of America gives it a preference which can never be rivaled.” To highlight his continuing interest in shaping his country’s identity, Webster resuscitated a title—
The American Magazine—
that had graced the covers of a half-dozen short-lived Colonial periodicals.