The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (24 page)

ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1789, at about two o’clock in the afternoon, President George Washington made his entrance into Boston. Washington, who had taken the oath of office on April 30 on the steps of Federal Hall in New York City, was touring New England for the first time as president. The previous week, he had visited Hartford, where he had spent a day in the company of Webster’s social circle, meeting with both Wadsworth and Ellsworth. Upon crossing the Charles River from Cambridge, Washington was whisked to the balcony of the state house. There he was serenaded by an ode that began:

Washington reviewed a procession of Boston’s artisans, tradesmen and manufacturers that took place on the street below. That evening, the city’s main public houses (such as the Coffee House on State Street) were illuminated, and there was also a fireworks display. The roughly twenty-five thousand spectators who saw the president behaved with “good order and regularity,” according to
The Boston Gazette
.

“All the world is collected to see [Washington],” Webster wrote in his diary. One of the few people then in Boston not in attendance was Webster himself; he was incapacitated by nausea.

Webster had been a nervous wreck for weeks. Financial concerns were gnawing at him. On October 12, he wrote James Greenleaf from Hartford:

Five days later, on October 17, 1789, the day after turning thirty-one, Webster headed to Boston for his wedding. In his diary, he couldn’t quite face this fact head-on, alluding instead to “an important errand” (a word he would define in 1828 as “a mandate” or “order”). Though Webster had longed for this day for years, he was suddenly filled with dread.

Webster contracted the flu on Wednesday, October 21. For the next four days, he could barely move. On the night of Washington’s visit, he was reduced to using the third person to describe his symptoms. “The head appears,” he wrote in his diary, “to be fastened with chains, and the disorder is attended with a cough. The best remedy is hot liquors to produce perspiration. . . . But if the stomach is disordered & refuses diet, a puke is necessary.”

On Sunday, October 25, Webster was still confined to his room: “My disorder has come to its crisis.” Crisis was then primarily a medical term referring to a change in a disease state—toward either recovery or death. Fortunately, for Webster, it would mean the former.

The following day, Webster felt well enough to assume his role as bridegroom. Presiding over the ceremony at the Greenleafs’ Dorchester home was Pastor Peter Thatcher of Boston’s exclusive Brattle Street Church. (George Washington himself had visited Thatcher’s congregation the day before.) The wedding proceeded, he noted in his diary, without incident: “Much better. This day I became a husband. I have lived a long time a bachelor, something more than 31 years. But I had no person to form a plan for me in early life & direct me to a profession. . . . I am united to an amiable woman, & if I am not happy, shall be much disappointed.” As Webster the expert definer well knew, he hadn’t really been a “bachelor”—a term reserved exclusively for adults—for three decades, but that’s how he felt. Unlike Rebecca, he hadn’t experienced a deep sense of connection with either of his parents as a child. Remarkably, despite his outsize expectations, Rebecca would never let him down. For the next half century, she would provide the emotional anchor that he so desperately needed. Patient and self-controlled, Rebecca, whom her brother Daniel called “an angel,” would nurture her husband with the same dedication as she would the couple’s seven children. Once described by a family member as “neatness and order itself,” she was the perfect match.

On November 7, Webster and his bride moved into Colonel Wadsworth’s house in Hartford. Accompanying the newlyweds was Rebecca’s older sister Priscilla, who would stay for a few months.

The fifth of the fifteen Greenleaf children, “Sister Priscy,” as Webster called her, was as attractive as her seven sisters, but more discriminating about prospective suitors. According to a joke then circulating in Boston, after young clergymen got their license, they typically proposed to Prissy Greenleaf. Before marrying at nearly forty in 1794, she would receive thirty proposals, twenty-three from pastors.

That first month in Hartford was nerve-wracking. The day after their move, Rebecca was stricken with the flu, and Priscilla the next day. On Sunday the fifteenth, Webster had to stay home from church to tend to them. The following Sunday, he went with Priscilla because Rebecca hadn’t yet recovered. Rebecca soon improved, and despite violent storms, Webster and the two Greenleaf sisters managed to travel back and forth to his parents’ home for a Thanksgiving meal on Thursday, November 26 (the first federal celebration). As Rebecca put it in a letter to her brother John, Webster enjoyed “demolishing” the eleven pumpkin puddings she baked. Webster’s mother was initially standoffish with his new bride; the farmer’s wife didn’t know what to make of the sophisticated city girl’s elegant outfits, such as her green brocade featuring pink and red roses. But as Mercy Webster taught her new daughter-in-law how to knit, the two women began to warm up to each other.

Rebecca missed the familiar surroundings of Boston. On December 4, she wrote to her brother John, “Yesterday, I was terrible homesick, and did nothing but bawl the whole day . . . & husband was out almost the whole time. Today the sun shines clear and the world wears a different appearance.” While Rebecca continued to have occasional bouts of gloominess, Webster was in a state of wedded bliss. “[Your sister Becca] is all that is kind and amiable,” he observed to her brother James on Christmas Day, “and you may rest assured that I now realize all my former ideas of her worth. I may safely say that our happiness is not exceeded in the world; for so far as our hearts are concerned, our happiness is without alloy.” However, Webster was still dogged by financial anxiety. In that Christmas letter, he also asked James for another infusion of money. According to his account, the newlyweds were experiencing a sudden two-hundred-dollar shortfall because Rebecca had insisted on buying some extravagances such as chintz furniture: “The deficiency however was to me wholly unexpected, till a short time before our union, and when I informed your sister, she cried as if to break her little heart.” Webster may well have been embellishing (or creating) the drama to plead his case; Rebecca’s version of this incident doesn’t exist.

Webster’s Yale mentor John Trumbull offers a more plausible explanation for the source of his money troubles. In a letter that December to Webster’s classmate Oliver Wolcott, then Connecticut’s comptroller, Trumbull observed, “Webster has returned, and brought with him a very pretty wife. I wish him success; but I doubt, in the present decay of business in our profession [law], whether his profits will enable him to keep up the style he sets out with. I fear he will breakfast upon Institutes, dine upon Dissertations and go to bed supperless.” While Webster’s descendants have long denied that his law practice in Hartford in the early 1790s was anything but lucrative, he would indeed struggle to provide for his new wife. As he acknowledged in his memoir, “[NW] began housekeeping with very unfavorable prospects.” In the end, he would never be able to make a living as a lawyer.

In addition to financial stress, Webster also was experiencing a surge in existential angst. Though Webster had assured the Greenleafs that he would stop writing, just a few weeks after his wedding he realized that he couldn’t keep this pledge. After all, literary activity was what made him feel most alive. For the next few years, Webster the lawyer and family man would be in constant conflict with Webster the scribe. But he typically kept this tension to himself. In a letter to George Washington written less than a year after his marriage, he noted: “I have written much more than any other man of my age in favor of the Revolution and my country. . . . [However], I wish now to attend solely to my profession and to be unknown in any other sphere of life.” While Webster would stop drawing attention to himself as a writer, he wouldn’t stop writing. To resolve his dilemma, he ceased putting his own name on his new literary projects.

 

 

IN LATE 1789, Webster joined a legal club whose members included such friends as Trumbull, Wadsworth, Chauncey Goodrich, later a U.S. senator, and Peter Colt, the state treasurer. At weekly dinners, the group would discuss the pressing policy issues of the day. In a December meeting at Trumbull’s house, the question was whether the state’s excise tax on the retail sale or use of imported goods was consistent with the Constitution. As in the 1784 debate over taxes, while the state’s agrarian elements supported the excise tax, its shopkeepers were up in arms. With neighboring states levying no such tax, Connecticut’s consumers had an incentive to shop elsewhere. The area’s leading merchants such as Wadsworth soon petitioned Webster to take up his pen to articulate their concerns.

A week after the dinner at Trumbull’s, Webster spent two nights working on an eighteen-page pamphlet, “Attention! Or New Thoughts on a Serious Subject: Being an Inquiry into the Excise Laws of Connecticut,” which he published in late December under the pseudonym “A Private Citizen.” Addressed to “the Freemen of Connecticut,” Webster’s anonymous article also circulated widely in Connecticut and Massachusetts newspapers over the next few months.

The future lexicographer was in full view. At the heart of the matter was the interpretation of a single sentence in the tenth section of Article I of the Constitution, which stated that “No state shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing its inspecting laws.” The bulk of Webster’s essay focused on defining these key terms. To frame the debate, he began by alluding to “the best compilers of dictionaries” who “explain impost to be any tax, toll or tribute.” Webster noted that Malachi Postlethwaite (author of the mid-eighteenth-century British classic
Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce
) “defines
impost
to be ‘a tax or duty laid by the sovereign authority.’ . . . It does not appear by this definition that a particular mode of levying and collecting a tax is necessary to constitute it as an
impost
.” He then elaborated on the true meaning of the words “imports” and “exports.” For example, he asked hypothetical questions about when exactly goods shipped from abroad lose the name of “imports”: “Is it when they are landed? When they are opened? Or when they are sold to the retailer?” Webster continued to split such hairs for another ten pages before concluding that Connecticut’s excise tax was inconsistent with both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. As in the 1784 impost debate, Webster again identified himself with the cause of national unity. This tax, he contended, ran the risk of “defeating the commerce of America, and perpetuates the life of the monster with thirteen heads.” Thanks to Webster’s fierce advocacy, the state legislature repealed this statute by a nearly unanimous vote in late May.

As 1790 began, Webster’s mood remained upbeat. He published an anonymous New Year’s poem, in which he celebrated the dawn of a new era in America, but he issued the following proviso:

According to Webster, what America now needed was to get organized. While astronomers, he wrote, had to churn out their almanacs, pedagogues had to teach and parsons had to preach. But Webster didn’t yet have his own niche. While he took on occasional legal assignments, such as drafting writs for clients, his new profession was hardly keeping him busy. “Little business done,” his summary of May 14, was a typical journal entry. Better than expected sales from his books were keeping him afloat. His initial predictions for the arc of his legal career had been overly optimistic. As he reported to James Greenleaf, “The business of lawyers is at a lower ebb than was ever known before . . . some who have been in business ten years scarcely maintain their families.” Webster hoped to get by on his royalties and to wait it out until “we can push off some of the old lawyers.”

That spring and summer, Webster managed to find a variety of new outlets for his compulsive energy. Shortly after Benjamin Franklin’s death on April 17, 1790, he returned to the cause of spelling reform, authoring a series of fourteen editorials for
The American Mercury
(six initialed and the other eight anonymous). These front-page pieces, entitled “Remarks on the English Language,” also alluded to those fine distinctions so dear to Webster’s heart. “One half of the world,” he griped in his second installment, “use words without annexing cleer [
sic
] ideas to them.” Here he distinguished between “genius” (“the power of invention”) and “great capacity” (“a power of receiving the ideas communicated by others”). In June, he also published his
Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings,
a volume of his old articles, in which he fleshed out his ill-fated scheme to revamp spelling. And at the same time, he took on another concern dear to Franklin—street paving. Back in 1757, concerned about the dirt and mud on Philadelphia’s Market Street, Franklin had backed an elaborate bill to bring order to the entire city. Completed in early May, Webster’s plan for covering Hartford’s streets with hard stone would prove, as he proudly noted in his diary, “pleasing to many.” For the next few years, a local tax of fourpence on the pound supported Webster’s measure.