The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (25 page)

And once the warm weather came, Webster also enjoyed tilling the soil. As he noted in a short article, published that June, “The Farmer’s Catechism,” he considered farming “the most necessary, the most healthy, the most innocent and the most agreeable employment of men.” In the garden behind his kitchen, he planted potatoes, beets, carrots, parsnips and cucumbers. Webster loved classifying and arranging potatoes as much as words. On June 25, he performed the following experiment: “Lay 3 square yards of mellow earth with seed potatoes about 8 inches apart, cover them with half rotten hay and straw, cover 1 yard with shoots broken off from the potatoes.” Webster’s passion for the potato would work its way into his dictionary, where he defined it as “one of the cheapest and most nourishing species of vegetable food. . . . In the British dominions and in the United States, it has proved one of the greatest blessings bestowed on man by the Creator.”

On Saturday, July 24, 1790, William and Mary Greenleaf arrived in Hartford. The reason for this visit, as Rebecca’s brother Daniel explained to Webster, was their hope of “being present at a grand
launching
on Monday [the 26th] . . . which day completes nine months since your marriage.” The Websters’ first child was indeed on its way, but the baby arrived slightly behind schedule. On Monday, August 2, Rebecca became ill and for the next two days, was incapacitated by crippling pain. Finally, at half past four on the fourth, as Webster noted in his diary, his daughter came into the world. The difficult birth would force him to hire a nurse for the month that Rebecca remained bedridden. The Websters called the baby Emily Scholten (adding the middle name in homage to the Dutch wife of James Greenleaf). The following Monday, “Papa and Mama,” as Webster referred to the Greenleafs in his diary, went back to Boston. By the middle of 1790, Webster was feeling closer to his in-laws than to his own parents, who were undergoing a new round of misfortunes. In April, they were forced to sell the West Division farm and move into a house in Hartford with Webster’s sister Mercy and her husband, John Belding. Though occasionally sending his father money, Webster was as financially strapped as ever. In late August, he was reduced to borrowing eighty-five dollars from a friend, Benjamin West, to cover living expenses.

While Webster wasn’t a successful attorney, he was a prominent one. On Friday, October 22, 1790, the U.S. Supreme Court came to Hartford—for its first century, its justices would “ride circuit”—and a few days later, in a ceremony presided over by Chief Justice John Jay, Webster was one of about ten local attorneys admitted to practice in the district court. Webster and Jay were destined to become lifelong friends. That Sunday, Webster also enjoyed socializing with Associate Justice William Cushing (known in history books as the last American jurist to wear a wig).

On Tuesday, October 26, Webster celebrated his first wedding anniversary: “One year past, and no quarelling.” This domestic peace would endure, but Rebecca would usually be the one doing the compromising. As one of the couple’s children would later note in a memoir, “I never knew my mother [to] argue a point with my father. She would express an opinion and defer to him as the best judge of matters.”

In December, Webster began a new writing project, which he kept secret from his family and friends. In a series of twenty anonymous essays, published weekly in
The Connecticut Courant,
he would address the frustrations of everyday life. Like a stage prompter who helps actors remember their lines, Webster was hoping to “prompt the numerous actors upon the great theater of life.” As he asserted in the introduction to the book version,
The Prompter; or A Commentary on Common Sayings and Subjects,
released in October of 1791, “He [the writer] cast about to find the method of writing calculated to do the most general good. He wanted to whip vice and folly out of the country.” Patterning himself after Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard, Webster eschewed “a pompous elegance of diction.” This anonymous alter ego bore little relation to Webster’s everyday personality; in one essay, he even mocked “learned word-mongers.” He would talk directly to the common man. “Vulgar sayings and proverbs, so much despised by the literary epicures are . . . the pith and marrow of science.” With his speller teaching America’s children how to read, and his
Prompter
its uneducated masses how to live, few Americans could now escape Webster’s pedagogical influence.

The Prompter
was motivated by the same internal pressures that would drive all his literary efforts. This lover of order relished the challenge of organizing information in a clear and useful way. Noting that “there is nothing new in the field of knowledge” and that everything has been said before, the expert compiler and arranger dispensed homespun advice by making “common things appear new.” While in his various books on language he aimed to fix the wrongs of previous lexicographers and grammarians, here he sought to set all of humanity aright, choosing as his epigraph a verse from Pope’s
Essay on Man
: “To see all others’ faults and feel our own.”

Claiming to be an objective purveyor of truth, Webster concluded his anonymous introduction by assuring his readers that “there is not in this book one personal reflection.” But this volume was actually overflowing with his own feelings and experiences. Consider “Prompter No. II,” published on December 13, 1790, and called “The Fidgets.” The chronically nervous Webster embodied the concept, which he would define in 1828 as a “vulgar” term for restlessness. In this uncharacteristically amusing essay, Webster argued that the disorder was not uncommon: “A man who is fairly hyp’d and a histericky woman are remarkable for fidgets. . . . But those who think these are the only people who have the fidgets think wide of the truth.” Webster went on to identify its various subspecies: domestic fidgets, political fidgets and the purse fidgets, which he called “the most laughable.” He noted that lawyers often manifested symptoms of this particular malady when they shouted out “adjournment—continuance—false—my client is wronged—I’ll have a new trial.” This comic aside reflected his concerns about whether his day job would ever pay his bills.

Despite the pressing need to unburden himself of his own obsessions, in
The Prompter,
as in the speller and, later, in the dictionary, Webster still connected with the reader. Americans liked his mixture of satire and practical advice. Though a razor-sharp analytic thinker, Webster also had a common touch. No uppity aristocrat, this pugnacious Federalist had a knack for distilling human experience. In the article “When a Man is going down hill, everyone gives him a kick,” Webster captured the anxiety felt by legions of Americans: “While a man is
doing very well
, that is, while his credit is good, every one helps him—the moment he is pressed for money, however honest and able he may be, he gets kicks from all quarters.” In January 1796, Webster finally revealed himself as the author. Several months later, the Harvard-educated journalist Joseph Dennie, later dubbed the “father of American Belles-Lettres” by Timothy Dwight, sent him a copy of his own influential collection of essays,
The Lay Preacher,
enclosing the tribute, “I have been amused by
The Prompter
. The simplicity and ease of style of that little volume taught me the value of the Franklin Style. . . . consider the author as your debtor.” Two years later, a British edition appeared with the following editor’s note: “Americanisms have been retained, as it would have been uncandid to cover American ground with English leaves.” Of its success across the pond, Webster was particularly proud. “In an English notice of the little book,” he wrote in his memoir, “it was said to be a very good shilling-worth publication.” Webster’s book would remain popular for decades; by the mid-nineteenth century, millions of readers would devour a total of one hundred editions.

SO RAN THE AD that Noah Webster, Jr., attorney and counselor at law, placed a couple of times in
The New York Daily Advertiser
in August 1791. With his Hartford shingle not drawing in enough clients, Webster felt compelled to cast a wider net. And a month earlier, he had personally met with Connecticut’s Governor Samuel Huntington in Norwich, who had helped him add “notary public” to his titles. But despite his tenacious efforts, business would not pick up. Fantasizing about a magical solution to his financial woes, Webster would continue to buy the occasional lottery ticket.

He also took recourse in a source of comfort that he had first discovered as a preadolescent, pouring out his frustrations in letters to the editor. In September 1791, one of his alter egos dashed off a jeremiad to
The New York Daily Advertiser,
which was reprinted in various New England papers later that fall. Purporting to be from New York, “P.Q.” addressed a series of unrelated pet peeves that had cropped up during his recent travels in three “sister states”—Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut (Webster himself had hopped around New England that summer). While Newport irked him because “the houses are falling to pieces and deserted,” he was surprised that Bay Sate residents were allowed to sue one another in any county: “How the wise state of Massachusetts can indulge such laws, I leave others to conjecture.” But “P.Q.” reserved his harshest words for Connecticut’s chief justice, Colonel Eliphalet Dyer (whom Webster knew socially): “He had such confusion of ideas or of language that I thought no mortal could understand him; and I found the by-standers were all as much puzzled to understand him as myself.” For Webster, the realization that having a way with words wouldn’t necessarily help him rise in his new profession was devastating. “P.Q.” also expressed frustration with other aspects of Connecticut life: the pews in its churches tended to be just four feet long, requiring ten people to crowd on top of one another. “All must sit like statues,” he complained. Likewise, writing as “Peter Puzzle” in the
Courant
a few months later, Webster unleashed his fury on other parts of the nation besides New England. He attacked the Senate as “an aristocratic junto,” Southerners for their “microscopic minds” and Washington’s would-be successors, predicting that “nine tenths of our future Presidents will be clear devils.”

But this latest string of disappointments might not have led to so much anger had his own future looked brighter. Webster, who had hardly enjoyed a moment of financial stability since his abrupt exit from his father’s farmhouse, was feeling despondent. He confided his troubles to James Greenleaf, who responded the following January from Amsterdam: “I am sorry to observe in your last something that borders on a depression of spirits. . . . If you are not so rich as you wish to be or even as you are conscious of deserving, you have on the other hand such domestic happiness as falls to the lot of but few.” Unable to find much gainful employment for himself, Webster turned his attention to the welfare of others. On January 2, 1792, the
Courant
published Webster’s “New Year’s Gift”—the first of a new series of eight weekly essays called “The Patriot” and subtitled “On the means of improving the natural advantages of Connecticut and promoting the prosperity of its inhabitants.” Webster addressed a wide range of pressing economic issues including trade, transportation and global warming, a subject he would come back to in a treatise a half-dozen years later. And in a front-page column on January 23, Webster highlighted the need for his hometown to have its own bank: “For want of specie, articles in market must be bartered—and barter is a public and private calamity.” Webster’s thesis was well taken; after all, the cash-strapped lawyer was himself prone to rely on “this instrument of knavery.” (Several years earlier, when Hartford’s First Episcopal Church was raising capital, Webster had contributed three pounds in the form of seven dozen of his spellers.) Soon after publishing this influential article on the utility of banks, Webster—along with John Trumbull and Chauncey Goodrich—drafted the petition to establish the Hartford Bank, which was approved by the state legislature in May.

Webster’s increasing civic commitment manifested itself in other ways as well. In late March, he was elected to be a member of Hartford’s governing body, its Common Council. He also began to take a keen interest in the plight of the city’s underclass. “But there are in every town, more especially in Hartford, great numbers of mechanics and other laborers . . . who . . . have no means of subsistence but their daily earnings,” he wrote in an anonymous piece published in December 1791 in the
Courant,
in which he proposed establishing a Charitable Society of Hartford. Webster would devote considerable energy to realizing this vision. The following year, he helped draft the group’s constitution and became its secretary. By 1793, the Charitable Society, which relied on small contributions—a dollar or more—from employers for each worker, was up and running. Thanks to Webster, his hometown established a social insurance system for the poor, sick and disabled some hundred and forty years before Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Webster also took up the cause of another segment of the downtrodden—slaves. In May 1791, he became a charter member of Connecticut’s abolitionist society. On May 9, 1793, he gave the third annual address at the state’s Society for the Promotion of Freedom, which he expanded into a fifty-page treatise,
Effects of Slavery on Morals and Industry,
published later that year. As he noted in his preface, Webster had wanted to put together his thoughts on slavery for years. As befit his sensibility, Webster’s critique hinged on a utilitarian argument: “The exercise of uncontrolled power, always gives a peculiar complexion to the manners, passion and conversation both of the oppressor and the oppressed.” As a result, this “barbarous and wicked” institution, he asserted, was bound to exert pernicious effects not only on “the blacks in the United States,” but also on the nation as a whole. To buttress his claim that slavery’s stupefying influence can be traced back to the far reaches of history, Webster put forth a philological analysis: “It is remarkable that the word
lazzi,
which among our Saxon ancestors was the denomination or the lowest order of bondmen or servants, is the origin of our English word lazy. . . . If slavery had this effect upon our own ancestors . . . surely modern philosophers need not resort to an original difference of race for the cause of that . . . want of mental vigor. . . . in the enslaved. . . .” According to Webster, etymology cast “a flood of light” not only on language but also on history. Yet Webster’s etymological investigations, to which he would later devote an entire decade of his life, would be the weakest link in his oeuvre. The rigorous definer had a penchant for making wild guesses about the roots of words; in fact, there is no such word as “lazzi” in Anglo-Saxon, a language which has no “z’s.”
³
Nevertheless, the supremely self-confident Webster was convinced that his linguistic backtracking supplied definitive proof of his sociological assumptions.