The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (3 page)

Both of Noah’s parents came from pure Yankee stock. The first Webster to come to the New World was John Webster, a native of Warwickshire, England. In 1636, as one of the hundred members of Thomas Hooker’s Puritan congregation, John Webster traveled from Boston to Hartford where he helped found Connecticut. Twenty years later, he was selected as the new colony’s governor. John’s eldest son, Robert, inherited the vast majority of his father’s property and settled in Middletown, where his eldest son, John Webster II, was born. The youngest son of this John Webster was Noah’s grandfather, Daniel Webster, born in the West Division in 1693. A captain in the Connecticut army, Daniel Webster fathered seven children, including Noah’s father, his second son, who was born in 1722. Daniel Webster died in 1765, and as a boy of seven, Noah would attend the funeral, an event he would never forget. Eager to preserve the history of the Websters, in 1836, at the age of seventy-eight, Noah would print a family genealogy, one of the first ever by an American.

Webster’s boyhood home drawn in 1849, a century after the newlyweds Noah Webster, Sr., and Mercy Steele moved in. After Webster left for Yale, three additional rooms were added. He made his last visit there in 1789.

Noah also had a direct tie to the founders of another New England colony. His mother, Mercy Steele, was the great-great-granddaughter of William Bradford, a native of a small village in Yorkshire, who sailed over on the
Mayflower
in 1620 and became the second governor of Plymouth Colony. Noah, who later also showed a keen interest in early Massachusetts history—in 1790, he would edit the journal of the Bay State’s first governor, John Winthrop—was particularly proud of Bradford, who orchestrated the first Thanksgiving in 1621 and late in life mastered Latin, Greek and Hebrew. (As a writer, Noah would take after Bradford; the governor’s prose, one nineteenth-century historian has noted, was far superior to his “inelegant” verses.) Bradford’s granddaughter Meletiah married Samuel Steele of Hartford, and their seventh son, Eliphalet, born in the West Division in 1700, went on to marry Catharine Marshfield. Noah’s mother, Mercy, born in 1727, was the fourth of this couple’s eleven children. Upon Eliphalet Steele’s death in 1773, Noah’s grandmother Catharine would move into the farmhouse. Possessing a delicate constitution, “Mother Steele,” as she was known in Noah’s family, would lapse into psychosis in the last few years of her life.

Though he did not attend college—which for Connecticut residents of the mid-eighteenth century was synonymous with Yale, then the colony’s only institution of higher learning—Noah Webster, Sr., turned out to be both intellectually curious and a highly respected member of the community. A few years before Noah’s birth, he had helped to establish the West Division’s first Book Society, the precursor to its public library. A longtime deacon at the nearby Fourth Church of Christ, Noah Sr. would read from the King James Bible every evening, stressing to his children the values of hard work, personal responsibility and piety. During the Revolution, he became known as Captain Webster for his service in the town’s militia. After independence from Britain, Noah Sr. would also serve for many years as a justice of the peace in Hartford—then a civic official appointed by the state legislature and charged with making such administrative decisions as whether to send criminals to the stocks.

Mercy Webster, too, possessed a keen mind. She would spend long hours instructing the children in spelling, mathematics and music. From his mother, Noah would pick up a love of the flute, which, along with books, would forever be a source of solace. In the diary that he began keeping in his mid-twenties, he described his delight that “a little hollow tube of wood should dispel in a few moments, or at least alleviate, the heaviest cares of life!” The boy could never find, however, such comfort in other people, as both his mother and father were emotionally distant. But rather than lamenting this lack of nurturing, Noah would end up idealizing both parents as all-knowing authority figures. In turn, he, too, would become wedded to authoritarian principles. “All government,” Webster would later write in an essay on pedagogy, “originates in families, and if neglected there, it will hardly exist in society. . . . The government both of families and schools should be absolute.”

Noah Sr. and Mercy burdened their children with a strong sense of obligation. In a letter addressed simply “Dutiful Son,” written to the twenty-four-year-old Noah, they expressed their expectation that he would “do good in the world and be useful and . . . so behave as to gain the esteem of all virtuous people that are acquainted with you and . . . especially that you may so live as to obtain the favor of Almighty God and his grace in this world.” Self-esteem in the Webster family was derived not from feeling comfortable in one’s own skin, but from adhering to the moral injunctions of others. Noah never developed a sense of his own intrinsic self-worth. Acutely self-critical, he didn’t even like the sound of his own name. As an adult, he would sign his letters “N. Webster” (and forbid his children from naming any male heirs “Noah”). He would forever define himself solely by his achievements. Though the intense desire for fame and recognition would lead to excessive vanity, it would also fuel his literary immortality. Without his trademark grandiosity, Noah Webster, Jr., would never have even thought of attempting such a mammoth project as the
American Dictionary
.

 

 

AT THE AGE OF SIX, Noah began attending the South Middle School, one of the five primary schools built by the West Division’s Ecclesiastical Society that dotted Main Street at the end of the Colonial era. Connecticut was then one of just two colonies—the other was neighboring Massachusetts—with compulsory schooling, and the community put a premium on education. Under the code of laws established by Edward Hopkins, the seventeenth-century governor of Connecticut whose term preceded John Webster’s, every town of fifty householders had to appoint a teacher. Even so, the colony’s schools were in a dilapidated state. The students sat on rows of benches in the often frigid and rickety one-room schoolhouses. Blackboards were rare. Only the teacher had a desk and a chair. Much of the school day was spent in chopping up wood for the stove, around which the children—up to seventy in a classroom—huddled.

Worse still was the caliber of the teachers, whom Webster would later describe as the “dregs” of humanity. Men (“masters”) ran the schools during the six-month winter term, and women (“dames”) conducted classes during the three-month summer term. Regardless of gender, their manners tended to be rough; what’s more, they could be vicious. Webster had learned how to read at home, and he found their instruction both pointless and terrifying. So, too, did Oliver Wolcott, Jr., a native of nearby Litchfield, who would later attend Yale with Webster. In a memoir, Wolcott recalled his first day of school at the age of six: “[My master] . . . a stout man, probably a foreigner . . . tried me in the Alphabet; and . . . I remained silent. . . . He actually struck me, supposing me to be obstinately mute; my sobs nearly broke my heart, and I was ordered to my seat.” While Webster never recalled being whipped, he did later express his annoyance that five of the six hours in the school day had been “spent in idleness, in cutting tables and benches in pieces, in carrying on pin lotteries, or perhaps in some roguish tricks.” Before the American Revolution, teachers had few books on hand besides a couple of religious texts and
A New Guide to the English Tongue,
a simplified spelling book by the British author Thomas Dilworth. Subjects such as geography, history and literature remained outside the curriculum. Deep frustration with his own early education, which consisted mostly of “the nurture and admonition of the Lord,” would later motivate “America’s pedagogue” to improve the classroom experience for future generations.

Just as Noah was beginning grade school, Hartford, like the rest of New England, was entering a period of economic retrenchment. At the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, the British had wrested control of Canada from the French. However, the burgeoning empire then faced the huge expense of maintaining a permanent military presence on the other side of the Atlantic. Attempting to force the colonies to foot the bill, King George III passed a series of tax laws such as the notorious Stamp Act of 1765. With levies imposed on various goods from coffee to wine, prices rose and the profits for most businesses, including farms, plummeted. These stark economic conditions darkened New England’s mood. “This was a society,” one historian has observed, “in which nobody played.” For Noah Webster and his ilk, life meant sweat and toil. Fun and frolic were rarely on the agenda.

Noah would frequently hear his father, who had nearly lost his life in 1757 while fighting against the French, rail against British perfidy. The Websters’ hometown paper,
The Connecticut Courant,
the oldest American paper still in business, was established in 1764 to give voice to these grievances. In the spring of 1766, the various Connecticut chapters of the Sons of Liberty—the protest organization that was then cropping up in all thirteen colonies—met in Hartford. As the
Courant
reported, “[they] . . . declare their respectful Approbation of . . . the . . . spirited Declarations and Resolves of the honorable House of Representatives of this Colony relative to the unconstitutional nature and destructive tendency of the late American Stamp-Act.” Though Parliament soon repealed this dreaded piece of legislation, the local economy didn’t improve. To fight for a better future, Noah Webster, Sr., would intensify his affiliations with neighbors oppressed by the same tyranny—British rule.

Noah would attend school just a few months a year, as work on the family farm—particularly during autumn harvests—took precedence. But even as a boy spending long hours in the fields, he showed a love of language. Ignoring his farm chores, he would often sit under the trees with his books, thinking about words and their origins. He was curious about exactly what they meant and how they related to one another. However, Noah’s literary pursuits did not please his father, who would occasionally scold him, insisting that he get back to work.

In the summer of 1771, when Noah was twelve, he organized a singing group. After meeting with some success in a few performances, Noah and his friends began to sit together in church on Sunday to practice their craft. But much to his surprise and dismay, those in nearby pews didn’t appreciate their efforts. Feeling humiliated, Noah knew not what to do nor where to turn. While another child might have sought out a parent, not so Noah, as he didn’t have a close relationship with either his mother or father. However, the boy soon stumbled upon the next best thing: he would put his plight into words. This incident was the impetus for Noah’s first publication, an anonymous letter to the editor that ran in
The Connecticut Courant
on August 21, 1771.

This turn to words was to be a lifelong pattern. Time and time again, emotional distress would compel Noah Webster to pick up his pen. His own words, he found, could both mitigate his anxiety and help him keep his mental equilibrium. To battle what the adult Webster called his “nervous affections,” the socially awkward loner would take on a series of monumental intellectual labors. Through his flood of public communications, including his dictionary, America’s most prolific freelance writer would express parts of himself that might not otherwise surface—his fears and his frustrations as well as his hopes and his dreams.

With no family letters or diaries surviving from his childhood, this compact missive of roughly four hundred words provides a unique window into Noah’s developing mind. Many hallmark features of his adult personality are already in evidence—the arrogance, the obsequiousness and the hypersensitivity to perceived slights. Addressed to “Mr. Printer,” the letter starts off like a legal brief: “After I have stated my case to you truly, I may then hope thro’ your means for a redress of my grievance; the which if I obtain, will oblige several of your young friends as well as myself.” Throughout his sixty-year literary career, Webster would look to his reader as a vital ally, who could both provide the empathy that he had never received at home and help him right what was wrong with the world. To convince the printer of his worthiness as an object of concern, Noah spends the first third of the letter boasting of his accomplishments. The boy touts his “natural good genius” and his “considerable degree of knowledge in the art of music.” He then goes on to list the “advantages . . . flowing from this pleasant art,” which include a “dutiful obedience to our parents” and “good manners.” Finally, in his coda, he highlights the various injustices that have been heaped upon him and his fellow musicians. “But alas! There are but few comparatively,” he concludes, “that openly encourage us. Some only deride us, and others are so silent or passive, as that we are greatly at a loss whether we please or displease the greater part, since the opposition we meet with from the envious and ill-natured cannot have passed unobserved, and yet no means have been used to prevent the growing mischief.” Webster’s complaint of both cold indifference and malevolence in his fellow churchgoers seems a bit far-fetched. Apparently, the boy was avidly seeking praise for his musical efforts and was crestfallen when it was nowhere to be found. Throughout his life, Webster’s mercurial temperament would frequently leave him feeling like an aggrieved outsider. This persistent sense of outrage, which often had its roots merely in the battle going on inside his own head, would spark an equally persistent desire to be heard.