The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (22 page)

After spending a few weeks in Hartford and New Haven visiting family and friends, Webster relocated to New York City on November 29. The following week, he announced his new publication in
The New York Packet
: “This work will . . . will consist principally of original essays in prose and verse upon a variety of subjects. . . . The editor . . . has ever been fond of books, and has leisure to devote most of his time to a publication which, if well conducted, will contribute to the amusement and improvement of his enlightened countrymen.” Having learned a lesson from the lukewarm response to his last round of lectures, which were not designed for “amusement,” Webster would try, despite himself, to add a touch of levity. In his ad, Webster also solicited contributions from “men of genius.”

But with few writers responding to his query, Webster would have to scramble for copy. In the first issue, dated December 1, 1787, but published a month later—at the time, it was common for magazines to appear after the issue date rather than before—he recycled the work of old Yale friends, inserting an excerpt from the Trumbull poem, “The Rare Adventures of Tom Brainless,” the first part of “The Progress of Dulness,” and the first half of Dwight’s valedictory address from July 25, 1776. He would save further installments of both works for future issues. Likewise, Webster reprinted literary efforts by his British heroes, such as “The Fountains,” a fairy tale by the recently deceased Samuel Johnson. He also featured the first of what would be fourteen original essays on education, in which he reiterated his pet peeve that American schools had neglected the study of the English language, noting that “the high estimation in which the dead languages have been held, has discouraged a due attention to our own.” Finally, that inaugural issue included an editorial on the Bill of Rights, which Webster called “absurd.” The reason: “no constitutions in a free government can be unalterable.”

To fill up those sixty-four octavo pages each month, Webster also composed numerous lighthearted pieces, which he published under pseudonyms. Writing at a feverish clip, he didn’t hesitate to put his own internal preoccupations to paper. Picking up a thread from his nearly empty Philadelphia lectures, “Titus Blunt” railed against the long tails of ladies’ gowns as an example of “fashion that besides its inconvenience and the expense it incurs can hardly be reconciled with neatness.” Both “Philander” and “Guy Grumbleton” touched on Webster’s own anxiety about his upcoming marriage, with the former stating that “all objections to matrimony, arising from an apprehension of the expense, will be removed as soon as a man is heartily in love” and the latter, an unhappy newlywed, carping that “either I was blind or the lady was deceitful.” Likewise, in a satiric essay entitled “The Art of Pushing into Business and Making Way in the World” (an eighteenth-century version of
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
), “Peter Pickpenny” gave voice to Webster’s frustrations with his chosen vocations. Of law, he quipped, “the success (or profit, which is the same thing) of the
profession
depends much on a free use of words, and a man’s sense is measured by the number of unintelligible terms he employs.” His advice: “remember that the pence are multiplied with the words in the writing.” “Pickpenny” also revealed the magic formula that sparked the staggering sales of Webster’s own speller: “the first thing to be attended to is to prepare a blustering advertisement, recommending the work before it appears. People are caught with promises that a work shall be the best that ever was seen altho no one expects it; and who more fit to recommend a publication than the author or compiler?” Webster also turned advice columnist and amateur psychologist. Besieged by those same sexual fantasies that Webster had heretofore confined to his diary, an anxious “Curio-sus” wrote to the editor: “I was at a ball a few evenings ago, and my eyes, wandering over a circle of beautiful young ladies, fixed upon a Miss—to whom I am a stranger. Her regular features—fine complexion—persuasive eyes—coral lips—graceful deportment and I know not what attractions, charmed me into admiration and made me commit twenty blunders in dancing.” Webster’s recommended course of action was simple: “become acquainted with the charming girl.” Of Webster’s multiple aliases, Ebenezer Hazard, a fellow New York publisher, observed that spring, “NW goes on publishing letters to himself.”

Webster’s attempts to be entertaining didn’t grab too many readers. With sales of the first two issues slow, Webster began flirting with another novel idea, driven by his two major obsessions: American unity and statistics. According to a plan he hatched in early February, ten correspondents scattered across the country would funnel him mountains of descriptive data about America. As he explained to Benjamin Rush, whom he hoped to enlist as his Philadelphia reporter, “I have begun . . . a magazine in this city; but I wish to extend the publication and comprehend all the original and valuable matter in the United States and communicate it to the whole. The business of the proprietors should be to collect [materials on] . . . the state of government, finance, commerce, manufacturers, populations, sciences and every species of arithmetic information and communicate it to the editor.” As proprietors, his colleagues would also share in the magazine’s profits. Webster was convinced that this “useful intelligence” would both result in a sixfold increase in circulation—then stuck at about five hundred copies a month—and “gradually cement our union.” Besides Rush, Webster also reached out to his Yale friends Barlow, Trumbull and Dwight in Connecticut, as well as James Madison in Virginia, and Jeremy Belknap, whom he barely knew, in Boston.

Unfortunately, this new direction for the magazine didn’t make sense to anyone but Webster. Typical was the reaction of Belknap, who took four months to write back. Unsure what to make of Webster’s interest in “returns of deaths, burials &c., entries at custom-houses, philosophical observations on the weather, the degrees of heat & cold, celestial phenomena, state of civil and ecclesiastical polity, colleges, ancient records & curious anecdotes, &c &c,” Belknap decided to consult with his friend Ebenezer Hazard, then America’s postmaster general. Though Belknap already had some reservations about Webster the man, whom he nicknamed “the Monarch,” he wanted an insider’s assessment of the business plan. Hazard recommended that Belknap steer clear of Webster: “I think the Monarch a literary puppy, from what little I have seen of him. He certainly does not want understanding, and yet there is a mixture of self-sufficiency, all-sufficiency and at the same time a degree of insufficiency about him, which is (to me) intolerable.” Summing up, Hazard quipped, “The Monarch (I think) ought to reign alone.” By late June, when Belknap politely declined Webster’s offer, Webster’s scheme was already dead. But Webster did manage to sprinkle some data in his pages, which also included his famous description of New York as well as a similar piece about Philadelphia. And without any correspondents supplying him with statistics from New England, he gathered a few from England himself. In the April 1788 issue, he devoted a page to “The London General Bill of Christenings and Burials From Dec 12, 1786 to December 11, 1787.” After noting that 8,929 males and 8,579 females were christened and 9,821 males and 9,528 females were buried during this period, he reprinted the causes of all these deaths—a three-column list of diseases followed by a one-column list of casualties (accidents). Under the former were such entries as “Grief, 1” “Headach, 1”; under the latter was a particularly curious entry, “Bit by a mad dog, 0.”

The statistical impulses run amok reflected Webster’s sadness and loneliness. The months he had spent with Rebecca the previous spring had given him a taste of a whole new way of being in the world, which he sorely missed. As he wrote to her in February, “I sometimes enjoy your company in dreams; a few nights past, I was with you and passt a few happy hours with your smiles and your conversation. Would to heaven every night might be so happy.” With Rebecca back in Boston, his courtship had to take place exclusively through the mail. In New York, he did, however, see a lot of her brother James, whom he soon considered a trusted friend. And James Greenleaf was, in turn, grateful to Webster for introducing him to his new business partner, James Watson. The prospect of a future with the Greenleafs kept him from disintegrating. In early 1788, he wrote Rebecca: “You will see by the tenor of this letter that I am in the dumps a little. . . . Well, I wish everybody were as good as James Greenleaf and his sister, Becca. I should then be a much happier man, but as it is, I shall not be unhappy. I am as patient as possible waiting for the sun to disperse the clouds that hang over the head of your cordial friend and admirer.” But the wait to marry his beloved Becca would repeatedly try his patience. Over the next year and a half, an overworked and anxious Webster would come close to a nervous breakdown. In the words of Ebenezer Hazard, he was as “unstable as water.” And as his magazine faltered, Webster was prepared to do whatever it took to marry Rebecca—even renounce all his literary activities. Summing up his first three decades in 1788, Webster confided to his diary, “I have read much, written much. . . . I will now leave writing & do more lucrative business. . . . But I am a bachelor and want the happiness of a friend whose interest and feelings should be mine.”

I
n the summer of 1788, as Webster worried about whether his marriage with Rebecca Greenleaf would ever take place, there was another union that he could celebrate. On June 25, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution. Webster’s dream of a Federalist United States of America was now a reality. That night, he wrote in his diary, “Great joy at the ninth.”

Webster had just returned to New York City after attending the opening of the New York State ratifying convention in its capital, Poughkeepsie. While upstate, he took a brief excursion to see Cohoes Falls, the waterfall on the Mohawk River, where he couldn’t resist doing a little quantifying. “I measure,” he recorded in his diary, “the banks of the river, 100 feet, the falls more than half that distance.” By the time he left Poughkeepsie on June 20, the anti-Federalists, led by Governor George Clinton of Albany, still outnumbered the Federalists—mostly based in the city—by a margin of more than two to one.

To mark the ratification of the Constitution, New York had hoped to join other cities such as Philadelphia and New Haven that were scheduling parades for July Fourth. But with the state convention still deadlocked, the city put its plans on hold. After a series of postponements, the Revolutionary War hero Colonel Richard Platt, the chairman of the Committee of Arrangements for the New York Procession, settled on Wednesday, July 23. This majestic display of support for America’s founding document, Platt figured, could perhaps sway the votes of some upstate delegates.

A fierce advocate of national unity and an arranger extraordinaire, Noah Webster, Jr., quickly became Platt’s right-hand man. On July 17, Webster wrote in his diary, “Meet the Committee of Arrangement . . . and order the procession for the 23rd.” In the end, Webster would not only organize the parade, he would also become its chief chronicler. Generations of historians have turned to the definitive account, which he “arranged for the public,” published under Richard Platt’s byline in New York’s leading paper,
The Daily Advertiser
. Four decades later, to illustrate the verb “witness” in his dictionary, Webster would note, “I
witnessed
the ceremonies in New York, with which the ratification of the constitution was celebrated, in 1788.” But this statement downplays the full extent of his involvement.

Platt recruited Webster because he was the driving force behind the New York Philological Society, an influential coterie of literary scholars, which would be one of roughly seventy trade associations marching in the parade. Besides Webster, who was officially its secretary, this group included the lawyer Josiah Hoffmann, its titular president; the play-wright William Dunlap, its treasurer; and the naturalist Samuel Latham Mitchill, then a newly minted doctor. (A future congressman, Mitchill, who shared Webster’s obsession with classifying and arranging, was later nicknamed “the Congressional Dictionary” by Thomas Jefferson.) In April, Webster had written the Philological Society’s constitution; dedicated “to the investigation upon which language is founded,” the organization aimed “to ascertain and improve the American tongue.” And to achieve this goal, as Webster confided to publisher Isaiah Thomas in June, the society initially planned to produce a dictionary. Though this massive undertaking never got underway, that spring Webster gave a series of lectures during the group’s Monday night meetings in which he put his stamp on all its activities. As Ebenezer Hazard observed, “I do not know all the members of the Philological Society, though I have understood that they are not numerous. The Monarch reigns supreme . . . [over] . . . his subjects.”

However, Webster’s decision to shepherd the Philological Society wasn’t motivated purely by patriotism. He was also looking for more publicity for his speller. On July Fourth, President Hoffmann wrote an endorsement on behalf of the society, in which he stated that Webster’s book was “calculated to destroy the various false dialects in the several states . . . an object very desirable in a federal republic.” By establishing the norms of a new federal language, the group could also, so Webster hoped, give his textbooks a virtual monopoly in the nation’s school systems. That summer, he wrote to his publisher: “When you advertise the improved editions of the
Institute,
something like the following may be published. . . . The Philological Society in New York recommend this work with a view to make it the
federal school book
. The University of Georgia, preferring this to Dilworth . . . or any other . . . have determined that this alone shall be used in all the schools in that state. The publishers flatter themselves that the northern states will heartily concur in the design of a
federal language.
”