The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (29 page)

In mid-1796, Webster published these reports in his book
A Collection of Papers on the Subject of Bilious Fevers, prevalent in the United States for a Few Years Past
. Webster’s 250-page volume consisted of ten chapters, the first eight of which contained contributions by leading physicians such as his New York neighbors, Elihu Smith and Samuel Mitchill. Their accounts were short on hard data. For example, noting that poor immigrants constituted a significant percentage of the dead, Smith postulated that “the sudden intermingling of people of various and discordant habits [was] a circumstance favoring the production of disease.” Smith also agreed with the conventional wisdom, first articulated by Philadelphia’s Benjamin Rush, that blood-letting was the most effective form of treatment. In the last two chapters, Webster—who repeatedly referred to himself as the “compiler”—presented his own observations and conclusions. While Webster was unable to prove his hypothesis, which posited that the fever’s spread had something to do with the city’s grime, he nevertheless saw this scourge as a vindication of the virtues he lived by. In the book’s last lines, he implored his fellow countrymen “to pay a double regard to the duties of order, temperance and cleanliness. The most fatal effects follow from neglect in these particulars.”

Webster soon became a fierce advocate for tidying up America. Over the next year, in frequent editorials in his paper, Webster put pressure on city officials to step up efforts to water and sweep New York’s streets. In the fall of 1797, Webster followed up with a series of twenty-five letters to the Philadelphia physician William Currie, challenging his view that the disease was of foreign origin. As Webster argued, since “plagues are children of cities, camps and unwholesome places,” America was what needed to be fixed. For Webster, eliminating this public health menace required changing the “structure and arrangement” of all cities across the nation. In Webster’s utopian vision, urban planners would unite “the utility of the town with the salubrious air of the country.” “All populous towns in the United States,” he predicted in his last letter to Currie, published on December 20, 1797, “will hereafter be afflicted with malignant fevers and plague, unless a speedy and effectual stop should be put to 30 feet streets, 20 feet lots and contiguous homes.” While Webster’s letters to Currie received plaudits from many eminent medical men, including Benjamin Rush, his doomsday scenario didn’t spur anyone to action.

Though Webster couldn’t reorder America, he could change his own place of residence. In the first half of 1796, he moved his family into Corlear’s Hook, a section a mile north of downtown—near Grand Street today—which came close to his urban paradise. His detached villa, which jutted out into the East River, featured an elegant garden. The Connecticut farmboy could once again keep a horse, and he enjoyed commuting to his office at 40 Pine Street on horseback. Webster’s spacious home also became a haven for numerous stray cats that had been displaced by the pestilence. On April 6, 1797, about a year after the move, Webster’s third child, a daughter named Harriet, was born there. Elihu Smith provided medical care to the three Webster girls, and also frequently walked up from downtown for tea and lively conversation. In his diary, Smith described Webster’s “country house” as “a pleasant place.”

Smith, who remained Webster’s closest New York friend, shared both his thirst for knowledge and some of his eccentricities. The doctor’s copious diaries include “Tables of Industry,” in which he tallied up the number (and size) of the pages he read and wrote each month. Smith was the founder of a conversation society called the Friendly Club, a successor to Webster’s own Philological Society. Though not a member himself, Webster fraternized with the major figures, who included William Dunlap and Samuel Mitchill, both active in his earlier group; the lawyer James Kent; Charles Adams, the dissolute son of President John Adams; and Charles Brockden Brown, later dubbed “the father of the American novel.” The British artist James Sharples, who painted the last sitting portrait of Washington in 1796, also hovered around these literati and created pastels of most of them.

Once he moved to Corlear’s Hook, Webster’s daily life was much less harried. Though his pen still churned out copy at a furious pace—the equivalent of about five octavo volumes of prose a year, according to his own estimate—with the help of his small staff, he could often return home by late afternoon. Nevertheless, the numbness of his first few years in New York gave way to a gnawing unhappiness. The intense partisan wrangling was proving too much even for the perpetually argumentative Webster. William Cobbett, the editor of the Philadelphia newspaper
Porcupine’s Gazette,
repeatedly heaped abuse on him, flinging around epithets such as “a most gross calumniator, a great fool and a barefaced liar.” Moreover, Webster’s heart just wasn’t in the newspaper business any longer. He missed more probing scholarly investigations.

Artist James Sharples charged fifteen dollars for a profile and twenty dollars for a portrait. Webster chose the more expensive option, which required two hours of sitting.

Though editing kept him immersed in words, he was “growing weary of the drudgery,” using the term that his idol Samuel Johnson had famously applied to lexicography. For Johnson, the writer of dictionaries was “an unhappy mortal” who toiled “at the lower employments of life.” Not so for Webster. What had once been a chore for Johnson remained Webster’s overriding fantasy, his dream job. A decade earlier, after he had completed his tripartite
Grammatical Institute,
the Reverend Elizur Goodrich of Durham, a friend and Yale trustee, had suggested that Webster round out his pedagogical legacy by compiling a dictionary. Other friends and colleagues also planted this seed, such as the Maine writer Daniel George, who, after reading two of Webster’s books on language, wrote in 1790, “But, Sir, we must . . . have a Dictionary, and to YOU we must look for this necessary work.” Webster heartily agreed with such sentiments, but as long as he was struggling financially, he was forced to dismiss this massive project as impractical. In late 1796, he confided his frustration to fellow author Joseph Dennie: “I once intended to have devoted my life to literary pursuits. The cold hand of poverty
chilled
my hopes, but has not wholly
blasted
them. The necessity of attending to business to procure a living for my little family
retards
my projects, but they are not
abandoned
. My plan of education is barely begun. When I shall complete it is uncertain.” His true talent, Webster felt, was “buried.”

But not for much longer. Two years later, buoyed by a steady stream of income from his papers and books, Webster plotted his return to the literary obsessions that gave meaning to his existence. In the spring of 1798, the thirty-nine-year-old father of three handed off the management of his Pine Street office to George Hopkins, the publisher who had replaced Bunce, and moved to New Haven. Of his newspapers, he “would have no care . . . farther than to give them their political complexion.” Now free to spend his days compiling and organizing words, Webster would suddenly come smack up against a more intimidating adversary than polemical journalists: his own inner demons.

I
t was a house that defined grandeur.

Back in 1771, its original owner built the mansion to make a statement. The two pillars on either side of the front door were meant to demonstrate that someone important lived there. So, too, were the other trappings—the white picket fence, the louvered windows, the mahogany paneling and the second outhouse. The West Indian trader, who had recently amassed a fortune, was eager to gain entrance into the upper echelons of New Haven society.

The one-acre, eighteen-perch (rod) estate at 155 Water Street, overlooking Long Island Sound where the merchant’s three ships were docked, would eventually become the most famous piece of real estate in New Haven. But not entirely for the reasons that the man—Benedict Arnold—had hoped. His infamy also helped to create its legend.

In 1782, shortly after Arnold was discovered to have “joined the enemies of the United States,” the State of Connecticut confiscated the property and sold it to the Revolutionary War hero Captain John Prout Sloan. After Sloan died in 1786, his widow, Mary, stayed on.

That was, until April 1, 1798, when the Websters moved in. The price: $2,066.66, which Webster paid in full to Mrs. Sloan a month and a half later.

For Webster, as opposed to Arnold, the two-story Georgian house represented not his entrance into society but his retreat from it. Escaping New York, Webster sought insulation from “the bustl of commerce & the taste of people perpetually inquiring for news and making bargains.” As he also noted in his diary, he was taking refuge in the familiar: “the State of Connecticut, my acquaintances, [and] my [literary] habits.” The site of his college triumphs did indeed prove welcoming to Webster, who would become a local celebrity. As one neighbor later put it, Noah and Rebecca Webster “were the most noticeable people who walked the streets [of New Haven] both for their beauty of face and elegance of carriage.”

Webster relished what stood behind the house—the stable (he would never again live without a horse) and the garden. Webster was proud of his peach and cherry trees, as well as his neatly arranged flower beds. And his neighbors in what one contemporary writer called “the Eden of the Union” were of a like mind. “The neatness of [New Haven’s] houses,” wrote Timothy Dwight, who had succeeded Ezra Stiles as Yale’s president in 1795, “is extended to everything around them. Little that is old or unrepaired meets the eye. The courts, and garden, which exist almost everywhere are prettily enclosed. Fruit trees, and ornamental trees and shrubs, abound every where.”

Over the next decade and a half, Webster would raise his rapidly expanding family in this “lovely home,” as his fifth daughter, Eliza, born there in 1803, later observed. A stickler for symmetry, Webster had hoped for ten children. “Let units be tens,” he would blurt out at the family dinner table. But he had to settle for seven. The other additions were Mary, born in 1799; William, his sole male heir, born two years later; and his last child, Louisa, who would be saddled with an unidentified mental handicap, born in 1808. Another son, Henry, born in 1806, lived just nine weeks.

The Benedict Arnold House, as Webster himself referred to the first home he ever owned, was shrouded in mystery until the day it was torn down in 1917. The large attic, which was used as a children’s playroom, contained an old scabbard said to have once covered one of Arnold’s swords. To head up the wooden stairs to play with their dolls, the Webster girls had to turn a big key, which, according to rumor, once opened a jail cell. Likewise, legend had it that Arnold built the basement vaults as a hideaway either for himself or for goods “that had not paid an entrance fee to the country.”