The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (30 page)

The second-floor study—right over the east parlor (which served as the family dining room)—with its big window seat was Webster’s sanctum sanctorum, where he found the peace he urgently sought. By the time he arrived in New Haven, Webster had difficulty coping with the stresses of daily life; and nothing was more unsettling to him than having to relate to other people. “Either from the structure of my mind or from my modes of investigation,” he would acknowledge a few years later, “I am led very often to differ in opinion from many of my respectable fellow citizens. . . . it [is] necessary for me to withdraw myself from every public concern and confine my attention to private affairs and the education of my children.”

Twenty years after finishing Yale, Webster was no longer an adventurous youth, but a chronically anxious middle-aged man who felt, as he wrote to Benjamin Rush in 1801, a need to “husband my health with the utmost care.” From his second-floor cocoon, Webster would attempt to preserve his mental equilibrium by taking on a series of scholarly projects, which all involved organizing vast amounts of information.

 

 

AFTER CAPTAIN JOHN MILES’ BOAT dropped the family off in New Haven, Webster first spent a week and a half arranging the furniture in the Arnold House; then, on April 10, 1798, as he noted in his diary, he dug in: “Begin to write my History of Epidemic Diseases, from materials which I have been three months collecting.”

In late 1797, just as he was finishing up the last of his twenty-five letters to Dr. Currie, Webster had started to write the definitive work on epidemics. Eager to uncover the root causes of yellow fever, Webster felt it necessary to “trace back the history of such diseases as far as the records of history extend.” In early 1798, he scoured the new nation’s major research libraries in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and New Haven. On March 17, as he was preparing to leave New York, he issued a circular in his paper seeking subscribers for his new book. “The facts collected,” Webster insisted, “will enable me to demonstrate that many of the common ideas respecting pestilential epidemics are unfounded or extremely incorrect.” With few readers willing to shell out the two dollars he requested, Webster wasn’t able to publish the volume that summer as originally intended. But though the public balked, Webster did continue to receive encouragement from fellow scholars. In late April, Benjamin Rush wrote from Philadelphia, “Go on—go on with your inquiries. Cause physicians to blush, and instruct mankind to throw off their allegiance to them. Posterity will do you justice. The man who . . . persuades the world to conform to it [the truth], will deserve more of the human race than all the heroes, or statesmen that ever lived.” The challenge appealed to Webster’s grandiosity. This die-hard contrarian relished the chance to contradict—if not demolish—the authorities behind the conventional wisdom.

That spring, Webster also started compiling facts of another kind. Delighted to be back in his home state, he suddenly felt a compelling need to do a complete inventory. On May 7, 1798, he drafted yet another circular, which he addressed to the state’s clergymen: “Gentlemen . . . I have some leisure and great inclination to be instrumental in bringing forward a correct view of the civil and domestic economy of this state, and if you will furnish me with the materials, I will arrange and publish them in a form that will . . . supply the present defect of such a work.” Webster was seeking factoids that he had monitored before, such as house and church counts as well as death statistics. His questionnaire also asked about “mode of cultivation, as to order of crops; species of manure used; produce of crops by the acre.” To prepare for this undertaking, Webster himself began tallying various bits of statistical information about Connecticut—its number of oxen, horses, coaches, chaises and the like.

But few of the clergymen seemed to share Webster’s passion for number-crunching. Only Reverend Frederick William Hotchkiss of Saybrook responded, and his remarks were often imprecise. Next to climate, for example, Reverend Hotchkiss wrote “good.” A frustrated Webster had no choice but to give up. But, as he later noted on his copy of this 1798 questionnaire, “This project was never carried into effect, but it may have had an influence in exciting other gentlemen to form the Connecticut Academy.” In fact, in 1799, Timothy Dwight became the founding president of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, a literary and scientific group. And in early 1800, with the help of its corresponding secretary, Noah Webster, Jr., the CAAS sent off its own thirty-item questionnaire, a reworking of Webster’s 1798 version, to all of Connecticut’s 107 towns. The so-called statistical account project resulted in several detailed town histories—replete with statistics—such as a hundred-page one by Dwight on New Haven, published in 1811.

 

 

ON JULY 4, 1798, Webster was the featured speaker of New Haven’s Independence Day celebration at the Brick Meeting House. This honor bestowed by the town’s elders signified that Webster had arrived. The following year, Webster would become a member of New Haven’s Common Council; and within a few years, he was also serving both as a justice of the peace and as a representative in the Connecticut state legislature.

However, it was not Webster’s official Independence Day oration but rather his second set of remarks that afternoon, a short impromptu speech given on top of a banquet table, that had the bigger impact on his new neighbors.

On the morning of the Fourth, all New Havenites were roused out of bed at precisely 4 a.m., when bells were rung and cannon balls discharged. But the break in the heat wave made getting up less of a chore; for the first time in days, the thermometer wouldn’t reach the mid-90s. At nine, Webster joined a long and well-choreographed procession that moved from the “new township” (near today’s Wooster Square) up Chapel Street, before snaking its way over to the Green, which, like the Yale chapel, was draped in red, white and blue. At the head marched the Governor’s Guard and several artillery companies. Webster paraded near the front along with Timothy Dwight. Right behind the two speakers trailed the state’s judges and New Haven’s mayor.

After a military review, Webster and the other marchers walked into Center Church. Soon New Haven’s inhabitants filed in; while men found spots on the ground floor, the ladies, wearing cockades in their hats, headed to the galleries. In the pews of the 75-by-55-foot church, filled to its capacity of nine hundred, were also seated both clergymen and residents from neighboring towns.

Dwight gave his sermon first. He began by reading from the sixteenth chapter of the Book of Revelation (“Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame.”) and then advised his fellow citizens to avoid France’s slide into atheism. Noting that “Sin is the nakedness and shame of the scriptures and righteousness the garment which covers it,” Dwight moved many to tears. As the reporter for
The New York Gazette
put it, Dwight’s sentiments merited “being written in letters of gold and affixed to every conspicuous place.”

After Dwight finished leading a series of prayers, Webster stepped toward the pulpit at the west side of the church. In his prepared remarks, Webster, too, would focus on the most pressing political issue of the day—the growing tension between America and France, then close to the boiling point. Since the passage of the Jay Treaty, which had strengthened America’s bond with England, the French had cast a wary eye across the Atlantic. Routinely seizing American trading ships, the French refused to seat the American ambassador. The “XYZ Affair,” revealed by President John Adams a few months earlier, in which French agents had demanded a substantial bribe in return for resuming negotiations, was just the latest in a long string of overtly hostile acts toward America.

While most Americans shared Webster’s frustration with French perfidy—in fact, just three days later Congress would officially rescind existing treaties and gird the nation for war—Webster’s sense of outrage knew no bounds. He launched into an assault on all things French, including those very ideas that had helped launch the American Revolution. “Such are the inevitable consequences,” Webster asserted, “of that false philosophy which has been preached by Rousseau, Condorcet, Godwin and other visionaries who sit down in their closets to frame systems of government, which are as unfit for practice, as a vessel of paper for the transportation of men on the troubled ocean.”

But Webster didn’t stop there. Included in his rebuke were all Americans who expressed opposition to Federalist policies, and no one more so than their ringleader, Jefferson, whom he compared unfavorably to the subject of his current book project—the yellow fever. As he stated, “In all ages of the world, a political projector or system-monger of popular talents has been a greater scourge to society than a pestilence.” Webster refused to let go of his outdated concept of American unity, which saw political parties as inherently dangerous. Equating open debate with chaos, Webster preached obedience to authority: “Let us never forget that the cornerstone of all republican governments is that the will of every citizen is controlled by the laws or the supreme will of the state.” Like Dwight, within just two decades this veteran of the Battle of Saratoga had gone from revolutionary to counterrevolutionary.

After Webster concluded, the procession regrouped and headed next door to the state house. In the open hall on the third floor, Webster was among the three hundred and fifty gentlemen who feasted on a sumptuous dinner. The President of the Day, Isaac Beers the bookseller, led a total of sixteen toasts, beginning with “the United States” and ending with “the Day.” The town’s ladies congregated separately for tea under a bower in the New Gardens, where the men joined them later that afternoon.

The whole crowd sang “Hail, Columbia,” America’s unofficial national anthem, whose lyrics Joseph Hopkinson had penned earlier that year. Then suddenly Webster’s former classmate Josiah Meigs, who had recently returned to Yale as a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy, jumped up on a table. A firm supporter of the French Revolution, Meigs was outside of the political mainstream in Federalist Connecticut. His words silenced the crowd: “In 1793, the bones of multitudes of our fellow citizens lay unburied on Long Island exposed to the summer’s sun. I insisted that they ought to be buried.” By harking back to British atrocities committed during the Revolution, Meigs was underlining the distastefulness of allying with Britain against France. Beers then remarked as to how the social mirth of the day had been interrupted.

Seizing the opportunity, Webster himself leaped up onto the table and passed by Meigs. “True it is,” he shouted, “many of our fellow citizens perished in the revolution and their bones might have been exposed. No man regrets or honors the brave men more than I. But I pledge my word to lay my own bones with them sooner than surrender the independence of my country to the French!” A thunderous applause rang out, along with calls for Webster to drop his hat. Removing the flowers that hung on their breasts, the ladies created a garland, which they placed around Webster’s hat. The “Presidente” [
sic
] of the ladies, Mary Clap Wooster, the wife of the Revolutionary War hero Major General David Wooster, then had the great pleasure to crown Webster. After proposing a toast to General Wooster, Webster led the crowd in another chorus of “Hail, Columbia”:

Though not typically exuberant, on this occasion Webster had filled the hearts of those around him with joy. “The spirits of the company which had been damped by the first intrusion were,”
The New York Gazette
reported, “re-animated and the evening passed off with great mirth and social glee.”

 

 

THE HEAT WAVE resumed shortly after Independence Day and lasted through the end of September. One day in August, when Webster stuck his trusted thermometer (which he used to make daily calculations of the temperature in his garden) into the sand on the highway near his house, it registered a sweltering 118 degrees.

Just as Webster returned to his research on yellow fever, the fever itself came back with a vengeance. “The disease assumes,” Webster wrote in his diary, “this year, in Philadelphia and New York more of the characteristics of the plague, is contagious and fatal beyond what has been known in America for a century.” By September, Webster’s paper reported, New York was losing nearly sixty people a day. In his diary, Webster kept close track of the epidemic, which ended abruptly with the arrival of a severe frost and some snow in early November:

Included in those disturbing totals were some familiar faces, such as his former New York neighbor, Dr. Elihu Smith, who died in late September. Webster feared that he, too, might be reduced to a statistic. On August 20, as he was finishing up a short stay in New York, during which he saw Smith for the last time, Webster himself was struck down with the same bilious fever that ended up killing several other Connecticut visitors. The cause, he assumed, was breathing poison from the New York air. Miraculously, in Webster’s case, the symptoms were not severe, and by November, he was fully cured. Still, this close call left him shaken. Webster later recorded in his memoir, “From this he recovered; but he had two or three relapses in which the disease took the form of a regular tertian [parasite]. These left him in terrible health, which continued several months. This was the only instance of his being affected with severe disease, after the age of twenty years.” Though physically he was drained, Webster’s mind remained as sharp as ever. On September 26, he published a notice in
The Connecticut Journal
expressing dissatisfaction with the responses to his query about disease statistics: “But I am sorry to say that the communications do not answer to my views, for want of more precision. The statements will be useless to me unless they specify the year when a particular epidemic prevailed.”