The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (28 page)

Despite his frantic efforts, Webster wasn’t able to improve the balance sheets of his papers right away. In December 1794, he complained to Hudson and Goodwin, the Hartford publisher of his speller, with his characteristic hyperbole, “I have endured more drudgery and suffered more anxiety on account of the bad execution of the paper, than perhaps ever fell to the lot of man in the same time; partly from the difficulties attending a new business . . . and partly from the inability of Bunce.” But Webster’s persistence eventually paid off. By 1796, he was earning “handsome profits” and was able to hire an assistant editor and clerk. The following year, when
American Minerva
was renamed
The Commercial Advertiser,
circulation was up to seventeen hundred subscribers, some five hundred more than its nearest competitor. His net profit, Webster estimated, was the considerable sum of five thousand dollars a year.

Back in 1794, when his papers were still in the red, Webster was also coping with a series of personal losses. As the “mortuary notice” in the
Courant
on October 13, 1794, put it, “Died at West-Hartford, the 5th instant, the wife of Noah Webster, Esq. aged 67.” Webster was caught off guard because his mother had been in robust health; the cause was a sudden attack of dysentery. A harried Webster didn’t attend the funeral. As he had grown closer to Rebecca’s family, he had grown further and further apart from his own parents. Webster would continue to have only occasional contact with his father, who in 1806, at the age of eighty-four, moved into the West Division farm of a new bride, Sarah Hopkins. Squire Webster, despite his prominent social status, would still have to beseech his son for an occasional twenty-dollar bill until his death in 1813.

That October, Webster’s intimate friendship with James Greenleaf, who had repeatedly provided a financial lifeline, also drew to an abrupt close. A few months earlier, Webster had gotten his first inkling that Greenleaf might not be quite the man he professed to be. On July 26, 1794, Nathaniel Appleton wrote from Washington, where he was helping out with the real estate transactions, “[Brother James] makes large & bold speculations hitherto they have proved successful. . . . I frequently wish however for his sake, as well as my own, that his concerns were not so extensive.” In his visits back to the Queen Street house, Greenleaf, who no longer seemed interested in reuniting with his Dutch wife, would raise a ruckus with his drinking companions. Webster was aghast, and on October 11, he put his foot down, writing in a note to Greenleaf, “When you are at home, the house work is greatly increased, & Becca is compelled to become servant herself. . . . the perpetual run of company, often thrown upon her without notice . . . wounds her pride. . . . You cannot conceive how unhappy you make her.” Greenleaf soon moved out of both Webster’s house and his life. Of the man who had bankrolled him during the first few years of his marriage, Webster would tell Rebecca’s brother Daniel in 1797, “I knew his baseness years ago, and thanks to my good fortune, I quarreled myself out of his clutches.”

By 1797, James Greenleaf also was persona non grata with the rest of the family because of his shady business dealings. In 1795, Greenleaf and his two well-heeled partners, Nicholson and Morris, formed the North American Land Company, which expanded their speculative ventures across the South. But Greenleaf proved dishonest, and the following year, both partners wanted nothing more to do with him. Greenleaf was soon besieged by angry creditors. In July 1796, Greenleaf wrote to Alexander Hamilton, offering a fifth of his net worth—then a staggering $5 million—if the prominent attorney would lend his “name, responsibility and talents in the liquidation of my concerns and payment of my obligations.” Hamilton turned him down. Two years later, a penniless Greenleaf was whisked off to Philadelphia’s Prune Street Debtors’ Prison. In April 1798, the
New London Bee
identified Webster as one of the prominent Federalist editors whom this disgraced “bankrupt speculating nabob” had once bankrolled.

As 1794 wound down, Webster was turning his attention from France to its neighbor across the Channel. In November, President Washington’s special envoy, John Jay, negotiated a commercial treaty with England, which addressed several nagging conflicts dating back to the Revolution. At the time, the British still maintained a strong presence in the Northwest Territories and routinely seized American ships bound for France (along with their cargo, which included slaves). Under the terms of the agreement, the British promised a gradual pull-out from the Northwest, but little else. Though Jay’s Treaty would manage to avert another war with England, it was not popular even among some of Washington’s staunchest supporters. Sensitive to the fervent opposition, which would deepen the divide between the Federalists and Republicans, Washington delayed passing it on to the Senate for six months.

The
Minerva
immediately rallied to Washington’s defense. Soon after hammering out the treaty, Jay, who was by now Webster’s close friend, began forwarding exclusive materials from London for publication. In July 1795, Webster followed up by writing the first of ten pro-treaty editorials. Using the pen name “Curtius,” Webster was responding to a writer posing as “Decius,” who was attacking the Washington administration in the
Argus,
a competing New York paper. Webster’s position was pragmatic. To his Yale classmate Oliver Wolcott, who had recently replaced Hamilton as secretary of the treasury, he acknowledged that while “the Treaty, as modified by the Senate, makes no sacrifices which are dishonorable to us as a nation . . . my own hopes are in some measure disappointed.” After reading the first installment, Thomas Jefferson, who, like many readers, assumed that “Curtius” was Alexander Hamilton, realized that the Republicans were facing a formidable opponent. To his fellow Virginian James Madison, Jefferson wrote, “Hamilton is really a Colossus to the anti-republican party. . . . In truth, when he [“Curtius”] comes forward, there is nobody but yourself who can meet him.” In fact, Hamilton himself would soon enter into the debate, writing three dozen essays in support of Washington’s second administration under the pseudonym “Camillus.” But Webster would succeed, as he proudly noted in his memoir, in out-Hamiltoning Hamilton. After the treaty was funded in April 1796, Webster overheard Senator Rufus King telling Jay, then New York’s governor, that “Webster’s writings had done more to quiet the public mind and reconcile people to the treaty than the writings of Mr. Hamilton . . . [due to his] style and manner of treating the subject.” Webster, who would have a dramatic falling-out with Hamilton in 1800, was delighted by the idea that posterity might consider him the more articulate Federalist scribe.

In the wake of the Jay Treaty, Webster’s papers became required reading for the nation’s elite. He was now at the pinnacle of American journalism. On February 9, 1795, his brother-in-law Thomas Dawes reported from Boston, “I am highly gratified by the success of your paper. It is my duty to tell you that I hear it spoken of in the most flattering terms in all companies. I suppose, tho’ you can tell the best, it has the greatest currency of any composition of the kind on the Continent.” On February 13, a proud Webster reported to his Hartford friend Josiah Blakely, who had undertaken new business ventures in the Caribbean, “My family are generally well—my business not ill and growing better. . . . Our country enjoys peace and unexampled [
sic
] prosperity.”

But his calm didn’t last long. By the end of July, New York City came face-to-face with one of the most serious public health crises in its history. Yellow fever—so called because its victims looked as “yellow as gold”—was back. The viral disease, which had literally decimated New York in 1702, was now working its way across the entire eastern seaboard. For the next four months, the specter of imminent death would hang over every New Yorker.

 

 

TWO YEARS EARLIER, when Webster first heard of the “raging malady” in Philadelphia, he was deeply shaken. On September 26, 1793, he wrote Oliver Wolcott, then still working under Hamilton at Treasury, “The melancholy accounts received from you and others of the progress of a fatal disease . . . excite commiseration in every breast. An alarm is spread over the country.” In fact, that fall, President Washington was whisked away from the capital, and the entire U.S. government was nearly shut down. While other cities remained largely unaffected, Webster immediately became interested in the many scientific questions surrounding what the Philadelphia College of Physicians initially termed “the plague.” He was eager to classify the menace as quickly as possible. On October 10, 1793, as he was preparing to leave Hartford, he wrote Wolcott, “I am not acquainted with diseases of this kind; but I have an idea that the plague of the Levant, the yellow fever of the West Indies and the malignant fevers of our country are all diseases of the same genus.” He also tried to keep track of the body count. “Fever in Philadelphia carries off 159 in a day,” ran the entry the following day in his diary. Though by November the disorder in Philadelphia abated, it had felled five thousand city residents in just a few months.

In the spring of 1795, upon hearing reports of a new outbreak of yellow fever in the West Indies, New York City health officials issued an edict requiring ships originating from that destination to be anchored at least a quarter mile from the city’s shores. New York’s first casualty was a man named Thomas Foster, who initially sought medical help from Dr. Malachi Treat, the health officer to the city’s port, on July 6, 1795. According to the account of Dr. Treat’s assistant, Dr. Valentine Seaman, Foster’s bright yellow skin was “covered with purple spots, his mind deranged, his tongue covered with a dry black sordes, with hemorrhages from his gums and nose, and a discharge of black and very offensive matter from his stomach and bowels.” Foster died on July 9. Two weeks later, Dr. Treat himself was stricken, and by the end of the month, he, too, was gone. In mid-August, as two New Yorkers a day were dying, the city’s physicians were ordered to quarantine all afflicted patients at Bellevue Hospital.

Soon Webster, like the rest of his fellow New Yorkers, could think of little else. On the evening of September 16, the young doctor Elihu Hubbard Smith, upon returning home from a visit to Webster’s home, wrote in his diary, “This whole city is in a violent state of alarm on account of the fever. It is the subject of every conversation, at every hour, and in every company; and each circumstance of terror acquires redoubled horror, from every new relation. In reality there is reason to be alarmed. I am told that 24 persons died yesterday.”

Even more frightening, the epidemic was no longer confined to the harbor. As Dr. Seaman would also report, “For in every . . . situation, favoring the accumulation of filth and stagnation of putrefactive materials, there it [the fever] was no stranger.” And with few sanitation measures yet in place, Manhattan was a virtual garbage dump. Rotten cabbage along with dead rats and pigs could be found in the middle of just about every street, alley and bylane. Elegant Pearl Street, where Elihu Smith (who had learned music from Webster as a Connecticut schoolboy) also lived in a rented room, was no exception. In fact, its stench, as Webster reported in the
Minerva,
was so overpowering that he often felt a need to keep the windows closed—even on hot days—to avoid vomiting. Webster feared that the sink right in front of his house, which contained the kitchen refuse and yard wash of the surrounding lots, was a breeding ground for the deadly disease. By mid-October, New York was already mourning its five hundredth casualty.

On October 27, the day after returning to New York from a brief trip to Philadelphia, the Websters hosted Smith and a couple of other guests for tea. While Webster fulminated about the treachery of Edmond Randolph, who had recently resigned as secretary of state when Washington learned of his secret negotiations with the French, politics weren’t the primary focus of the evening. “Much talk about the fever,” noted Smith.

Once again, high anxiety pushed Webster to new creative heights. Feeling compelled to do something, he took the only kind of decisive action of which he was capable—he began compiling and arranging the facts of the epidemic.

In the October 31 edition of his paper, Webster printed a circular addressed to the physicians of Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Norfolk and New Haven, the cities hardest hit over the past three years. “To decide on the nature and origin of the yellow fever,” he asserted, “we want the evidence of facts; and it is not improbable that facts have occurred in the U. States, sufficient in number and clearness to furnish . . . universal conviction, shall those facts [be] . . . ordered to the public in a mass.” Webster asked the physicians to pass on whatever information they had gathered from their own practice. This questionnaire, which he designed in an attempt to restore “happiness” and “prosperity” to his country, was the world’s first scientific survey; it also helped give birth to modern medical research. Inspired by Webster, Elihu Smith released a similar circular a year later, in which he solicited research on the fever from physicians across the country. Smith soon found a home for these articles by starting
The Medical Repository,
America’s first medical journal.

Despite the gravity of this crisis, Webster’s Republican counterparts could not resist the temptation to pounce on him. On November 6, Dr. Franklin’s grandson, the editor Benjamin Franklin Bache, mocked “Noah Webster, Esq., Author and Physician General of the United States” in a letter published in his Philadelphia paper, the
Aurora
. Accusing Webster of venturing into an arena he knew nothing about, Bache stated, “It is to be deplored, sapient sir. . . . that not a physician, no not one can be found to investigate its origin. . . . To the author of the
Institutes,
the Editor of the
Minerva
. . . is reserved the honor and the glory to triumph over a malady.” (In a cruel irony, a few years later, the disease would level Bache at the age of twenty-nine.) But Webster was undeterred. After the fever dissipated in late November—New York’s final death toll was 730 people, the equivalent of about two hundred thousand today—he kept up his furious correspondence with the numerous physicians who responded to his query.