The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (27 page)

The new editor of New York’s first daily newspaper would never work as a lawyer again.

 

 

ON AUGUST 30, the day after Webster arrived back home in Hartford, he finalized an agreement with George Bunce of 37 Wall Street to begin printing his newspaper by the end of the year. Four days later, he sold off his law library for $300. Needing every cent he could lay his hands on, he also put a couple of ads in the
Courant
for his chaise (a two-wheeled carriage), for which he hoped to receive as much as a hundred and thirty dollars. But there were no takers, and it would go with him to New York.

On October 9, Webster heard from Greenleaf, who had completed all the preparations for the move. “I have just returned from the southward,” wrote his brother-in-law from New York on October 7, “my first object since my return has been to look out for a home for you, & I have happily succeeded. Our Dear Becca . . . will be lodged like a little queen. . . . I shall have a good deal of my own furniture put into it.” Missing the joke, Webster assumed that Greenleaf had neglected to mention where the house was located. But Greenleaf’s largesse, he soon learned, would enable his family to live in style in a large rented house at 168 Queen Street.

In a postscript to his letter, Greenleaf asked Webster to insert in Connecticut newspapers an announcement that the city of Washington was looking to hire mechanics and brickmakers “on a large scale.” This remark related to Greenleaf’s own new venture. While traveling down South in September, the speculator clinched the biggest real estate deal in the history of the young country. His charge: to build from scratch America’s new federal city. On September 18, Greenleaf joined a crowd of thousands that witnessed the Masonic ceremony at which George Washington laid the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol. During the day-long festivities, which culminated in the consumption of a five-hundred-pound ox, the city’s commissioners offered for sale lots for America’s newest city. But though President Washington himself bought a few to spur interest, most went unsold. The enterprising Greenleaf immediately sprang into action. Five days later, he bought three thousand lots for a pittance—a mere $66.50 each (the going rate had recently been as high as three hundred dollars). As part of the deal, Greenleaf was supposed to build ten brick houses a year and loan the commissioners $2,660 a month. Washington had high expectations. On September 25, the president wrote Tobias Lear, his former secretary (who had taken on the tutoring job declined by Webster a decade earlier), “You will learn from Mr. Greenleaf that he has dipped deeply, in the concerns of the Federal City. I think he has done so on very advantageous terms for himself, and I am pleased with it notwithstanding on public ground; as it may give facility to the operations at that place.” Two months later, Greenleaf formed a partnership with the Philadelphia businessmen Robert Morris (then America’s richest man) and John Nicholson, and managed to wrest away another three thousand lots from the city’s commissioners at a bargain-basement price. Greenleaf now controlled about half of the government’s salable land in the new capital.

On October 31, Webster, his wife and two young daughters, along with the black maid who had lived with them in Hartford, set out for Middletown to wait for the sailing vessel. Though travel by water was more comfortable than by coach, it could take much longer. Due to unfavorable wind conditions, the family didn’t arrive in New York Harbor until November 13. The delay upset eight-month-old Frances, and Webster was frequently called upon to calm the crying baby.

The Websters spent their first two nights at the home of James Watson, now Greenleaf’s former business partner, as the two men had just dissolved their firm. On November 15, the Websters settled into their new quarters on Queen Street (renamed Pearl Street the following year, as New York attempted to shed its remaining British trappings). Four days later, Greenleaf and his friend Charles Lagarenne, a Royalist exile from France, moved into the Webster household, which would soon also include a nurse and manservant. America’s “first capitalist” would be using Webster’s home as a base of operations while he traveled around the country meeting potential investors.

On December 9, 1793, Webster published the first issue of
American Minerva,
which he subtitled “Patroness of Peace, Commerce and the Liberal Arts.” The four-page paper would come out every day but Sunday, at four in the afternoon. An annual subscription cost six dollars. Webster envisioned that the city’s first daily—Alexander Hamilton’s
New York Post
would not begin its run until nearly a decade later—could be instrumental in exporting American democracy to the rest of the world. In his editor’s note in that first issue, he wrote, “It is the singular felicity of Americans and a circumstance that distinguishes this country from all others that the means of information are accessible to all descriptions of people.” An informed citizenry, Webster believed, could help Americans tackle all the political and economic challenges that they faced.

Minerva is the Roman name for Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, wit and war. As was common in the early Republic, Webster often looked to ancient Rome for inspiration.

Webster’s Federalist organ quickly made a mark. A few weeks after its launch, Vice President John Adams wrote from Philadelphia to his wife, Abigail, of New York’s new publishing phenomenon, “Mr. Noah Webster who is lately removed from Hartford to that city . . . is said to conduct his gazette with judgment and spirit upon good principles.”

One of Webster’s first tasks was to bring down his old nemesis, Genet, whose fortunes were already tumbling. On December 5, when Washington attacked Genet on the floor of Congress, most congressmen sided with the president. Webster kept up the pressure. In an editorial addressed to Genet a few weeks later, he insisted that the American people were too savvy to fall for his duplicity: “Had you passed a few weeks only in acquiring a slight knowledge of the American yeomanry, you would have discovered real people, as little known to Europeans as the fabled Amazons of antiquity. A people in short who are not found in any other region of the globe, a people who know their rights and will neither suffer you or any other man to invade them.” Genet soon also lost the support of his own countrymen. The following month, the new Jacobin government issued an arrest notice, demanding his return to France. Fearing the guillotine, Genet immediately appealed for political asylum, which Washington approved. In a strange twist, Genet married Cordelia Clinton, the daughter of New York’s governor, in November 1794, and the newlyweds settled on a Long Island farm.

 

 

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 1793, was a normal business day for Webster. He went ahead with the publication of his paper that afternoon. The Christmas edition featured an article on Genet; some death statistics from Philadelphia, recently hit by an outbreak of yellow fever; and a rental ad for the front room of his Queen Street home (which he figured could be used as a hardware store). Webster also stuck in an item praising his
Prompter,
which claimed that “many householders deem it so useful as to purchase a copy for every adult in their families.” Webster wasn’t celebrating Christmas—then dismissed as “a popish holiday” by Congregationalists; he was thinking about how to define America.

Webster put his musings in a letter to his friend Jedidiah Morse, who was seeking help with a geographical dictionary that would include a “description of all the places in America.” A few years earlier, Webster had contributed a twenty-page review of U.S. history after the Revolution to Morse’s
American Geography,
a textbook for schoolchildren. (Nearly as successful as Webster’s speller, this frequently reprinted book later earned Morse the sobriquet “Father of American Geography.”) A recent Yale graduate (whose first child, Samuel, the inventor of the telegraph, would later paint a celebrated portrait of Webster), Jedidiah Morse was then serving as pastor in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Webster was eager to pitch in. After all, Morse’s project bore a close resemblance to the elaborate fantasy that he had hatched five years earlier, in which proprietors scattered across the nation would funnel information about America back to him. However, one obstacle remained. “Indeed it appears to me,” Webster had written Morse on September 20, “very difficult to ascertain what I have to do or what will be the portion of labor each of us must bestow. This is my great objection to undertaking such a work with others.”

Having settled in New York, Webster was now ready to address the thorny matter of exactly how they might collaborate. In his Christmas Day letter, he suggested the following protocol: “My idea is that each of us take a state—give the best account of each town, river, &c in that state that we can; each place on a
detached sheet of paper
—all which papers may be easily stitched together. When I have finished that state, I will forward the MSS to you—and you may supply all you know, in addition to my account and & so vice versa. . . . After the description of each place is completed, the separate sheets can be arranged alphabetically and numbered.”

Morse eagerly embraced Webster’s ideas. In fact, in his response in early January, he insisted on adding a few more touches to the already elaborate protocol. The two men, Morse wrote, should also be sure to fold the paper in quarto so that the margins could be a quarter of an inch all around. In addition, they might also put the first letters of the place described on a given sheet in the top left corner—say, BOS for Boston. Though Webster couldn’t wait to get started on this massive task of compiling and arranging, his newspaper work intruded. Three years later, he would concede defeat, writing Morse, “My own labors require all the nerves I have.” While Morse went on to complete the book by himself,
The American Gazetteer,
published in 1797, showed signs of Webster’s influence. To describe Lower Manhattan, Morse recycled Webster’s “Description of New York”—an essay that ended up serving as a model for Morse’s own entries, many of which included precise house counts.

Webster’s first three years as editor were trying. Unable to afford an assistant, he had to do everything himself, including correcting proofs and paying the bills. He would later recall, “My labors in writing and editing and translating from the French papers were very severe.” His body started to register the stress almost immediately. On two occasions that first winter, Webster was terrified to discover that his pulse was barely perceptible. Once again, financial aid from James Greenleaf (and the promise of more if needed) proved life-saving. In a letter dated Sunday, March 2, 1794, Webster wrote to Greenleaf, who was away on business, “My resources are exhausted. . . . I hope to receive more money from some gentlemen in this city, but I am not certain of it. . . . Becca & myself have sometimes hard struggles to keep our spirits up, but we have dismissed one servant & we endeavor to retrench every unnecessary expense.” Time also became a precious commodity. On April 23, he noted in his diary, “It is too much trouble to make particular remarks every day.”

During his first six months at the helm of his paper, Webster provided constant coverage of the major international story of the day: the emergence of the “Reign of Terror” in France. Besides posting extracts from the French papers, Webster wrote a series of editorials which he republished that spring as the pamphlet “The Revolution in France Considered in Respect to Its Progress and Effects.” As in his slavery essay, here, too, Webster showed little patience for abstract theorizing. Results were all that counted. Though he was supportive of the ideals of the Revolution, he was horrified by the attendant chaos. To capture his sentiments, for the only time in his life the future lexicographer felt compelled to coin a neologism: “All wars have, if I may use a new, but emphatic word, a
demoralizing
tendency; but the revolution in France, in addition to the usual influence of war, is attended with a total change in the minds of the people.” Webster was convinced that the rejection of religion promoted violence and lawlessness. With Jeffersonian Democrats continuing to look to France for guidance, Webster was concerned that the mayhem might spill over into America. On April 20, 1794, he sent a copy to President Washington: “The enclosed is intended to aid the cause of government and peace. . . . Be pleased to accept it as a proof of my attachment to you and the Constitution of the United States.” On May 9, 1794, the president issued a warm response, noting that “your motives in writing it are highly laudable, and I sincerely wish they may meet the reward which is due to them.”

In June, with the
Minerva
down to just 250 subscribers—half the number needed to remain viable—Webster was despondent. Though he was enraged with his partner, the printer George Bunce, whom he considered incompetent, he wasn’t about to give up. He started a semi-weekly offshoot called
The Herald: A Gazette for the Country
. He tailored this paper, also a four-pager and consisting entirely of previously published
Minerva
articles, to readers outside of New York. He would exclude the advertising to save on the hefty postage costs and cut the price in half. On launch day, June 4, 1794, Webster promised his readers, “The compiler will spare no pains to render it respectable in regard to the purity, authenticity, variety and value of its materials.” As a newspaper man, Webster considered himself less an editor than a compiler, which he would define in 1828 as “one who forms . . . a composition from various authors or separate papers.” Organizing information would be central to most of his literary labors.