The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (31 page)

By the end of 1798, Webster finished his
Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases with the Principal Phenomena of the Physical World Which Precede Them and Accompany Them and Observations Deduced From the Facts Stated
. The title was a misnomer—his two-volume treatise ran to more than seven hundred pages. Due to lackluster interest, Webster delayed publication until the following December. And despite much critical praise in the literary and scientific community, the book never did gain a following among the general public. It sold just a fraction of the thousand copies, leaving Webster out nearly eight hundred dollars.

The first volume traced epidemics throughout history, moving from biblical accounts (namely, chapter five of the Book of Exodus) to medical reports, beginning with the Greeks and going up to the late eighteenth century. In the second volume, Webster provided analysis. Its first chapter, composed entirely of charts, featured bills of mortality for a half-dozen cities (London, Augsburg, Dresden, Paris, Boston and Dublin) over the previous two centuries. After covering this historical turf, Webster tried to explain why his fellow Americans had been dying at such an alarming rate. However, he wasn’t able to refine his thinking beyond the vague environmental causes—dirt, pollution and the like—that he had identified in his earlier book on the subject. Wedded to the empirical method, Webster was forced to acknowledge the tentative nature of his findings: “More materials are necessary to enable us to erect a theory of epidemics which shall deserve full confidence.”

Not sure exactly how to combat this frightening public health menace—he opposed quarantines—Webster looked for a silver lining in the idea that disaster is a necessary tonic, writing, “The natural evils that surround us . . . lay the foundation for the finest feelings of the human heart, compassion and benevolence.” In the long and mostly positive review in his literary journal,
The Monthly Review,
Charles Brockden Brown found this fatalistic turn puzzling: “The work is concluded with certain moral reflections which are indeed of an equivocal and hazardous kind. . . . The tendencies of the universe and the motives of its maker are to this observer extremely evident.” Webster, Brown felt, was being a bit presumptuous when he concluded that God was using the plague to send a message.

While Webster didn’t pinpoint the cause of the disease, he did help fill a gaping hole in the scholarly literature. Few writers, he aptly noted, had ever attempted systematic studies of medical conditions such as the fever: “In respect to useful history . . . modern compilers appear to have written for fame or money. . . . These observations have arisen out of my enquiries, relative to pestilential diseases. I have discovered that many of the histories or rather abridgements and compilations . . . are very incomplete.” In the final analysis, Webster managed to put public health on a scientific footing. The Johns Hopkins professor Dr. William Osler, a giant of late nineteenth-century medicine, later described Webster’s book as “the most important medical work written in this country by a layman.”

Like most of America’s city dwellers, for the next few years Webster would live in constant fear of another outbreak. “We are well; although we have had slight indispositions, especially of the throat,” he reported to his brother-in-law Daniel Greenleaf a few months after publishing his treatise. “Five or six cases of fever have occurred in New Haven with anomalous symptoms and in August, would be called
yellow
. But if you read my books, you will see that I am not surprised at this—Don’t say from this that yellow fever is in New Haven. Names are terrible things.” The fever did return intermittently throughout the nineteenth century, but never again with the same intensity as in 1798. Nearly a century later, scientists finally solved the puzzle; the disease was transmitted by mosquitoes.

 

 

JUST AS WEBSTER RELEASED his
History of Pestilence
(the abbreviated title mentioned in newspaper advertisements), he was leveled by some disturbing news out of Virginia. “On the 14th of December 1799,” he recorded in his diary, “died the Great and Good Washington in the 68th year of his age, of a cynaneche tonsillaris, after 24 hours illness. All America mourns.” Since his retirement two years earlier, “the Hero of the Age” had been enjoying robust health; his sudden death left Webster, like the rest of America, nearly speechless with grief. As Webster’s
Commercial Advertiser
lamented on December 20, “When WASHINGTON IS NO MORE . . . let not the voice of eulogy be heard, lest the weakness of talents, and the deficiency of language do injustice to the lustre and fame of the deceased.” But before too long, Webster sought to become Washington’s biographer. Three months later, he wrote to his longtime friend Timothy Pickering, then secretary of state, for help in currying favor with Judge Bushrod Washington, the late president’s nephew, who held the family papers. “If I had the materials,” Webster stated, “it would be my great pleasure to make the best use of them that my abilities would permit.” In the end, Judge Washington chose John Marshall, the future chief justice, then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

After Washington’s death, Webster’s attitude toward national politics changed markedly. For Webster, the chance to serve Washington, his surrogate father whom he never stopped idealizing, had been a unique pleasure. He didn’t feel the same level of commitment to other Federalists. While Webster was a steadfast supporter of John Adams, he was not in awe of the second president. In the fall of 1800, as Adams faced a tough reelection battle against his vice president, Thomas Jefferson, Webster praised the president for his “pure morals,” “firm attachment to republican government” and “inflexible integrity and patriotism.” He also called Adams “the best read statesman that the late Revolution called into notice.” Family connections played a role in Webster’s emergence as an “Adamite”; after all, his brother-in-law William Cranch was Adams’ nephew, and Webster would spend time in Adams’ hometown of Quincy when visiting the Greenleafs in Massachusetts. But Webster could also acknowledge Adams’ faults, such as his “occasional ill humour at unreasonable opposition and hasty expressions of his opinion.”

Webster’s support for Adams’ reelection put him at loggerheads with his former ally, Alexander Hamilton, who throughout the 1790s penned editorials in Webster’s paper. By the election of 1800—which ran from April until October as states held separate votes—Hamilton, who had recently resigned from his post as a major general in the army, had grown disgruntled with Adams. That fall, Hamilton published a fifty-four-page pamphlet that attacked Adams’ character and conduct. While Hamilton recalled with fondness the president’s service during the early stages of the Revolution and offered a lukewarm endorsement of his candidacy, the tone was harsh. After airing his personal grievances (such as the president’s reluctance to name him commander of the army after Washington’s sudden death), Hamilton went on the attack. Alluding to Adams’ “disgusting egotism” and “eccentric tendencies,” the general painted the sitting president as emotionally unstable: “It is a fact that he is often liable to paroxysms of anger which deprive him of self-command and produce very outrageous behavior.”

Not surprisingly, Hamilton’s tirade about Adams’ peevishness enraged Webster, who feared, as did other Federalists, that Hamilton had just handed Jefferson the presidency. Under the pen name “Aristides,” Webster published a letter to Hamilton that addressed the general’s pamphlet about Adams. Webster stressed the personal over the political: “It avails little that you accuse the President of vanity. . . . were it an issue between Mr. Adams and yourself which has the most, you could not rely on an unanimous verdict in your favor. The same remark is applicable to the charge of self-sufficiency.” “Vanity” and “self-sufficiency” were epithets often hurled at Webster, and the fact was that the two men shared the same combustible temperament. And once they began heaping insults upon each other, their relationship was beyond repair. Saving his biggest dart for last, Webster added that if Adams were to lose the election, “your conduct will be deemed little short of insanity.”

The following year, after Jefferson succeeded Adams as president, the conflict between Webster and Hamilton reached new heights. No longer able to use Webster’s newspaper as his personal mouthpiece, Hamilton decided to start his own. In the spring of 1801, Hamilton met with a group of influential New York Federalists at the “country house” of Scottish merchant Archibald Gracie—today the official residence of New York City’s mayor—to plan this rival paper, which he would call the
New York Evening Post
. Now known simply as the
New York Post,
Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid, America’s longest-running daily has its roots in Hamilton’s falling-out with Noah Webster, Jr., a little more than two centuries ago.

Just as he heard of Hamilton’s intention to launch the
Evening Post
, Webster embarked on another scholarly fact-finding mission. Having attempted an inventory of his state, he now moved on to one of his livelihood, the newspaper business. Webster first got interested in the history of American journalism when John Eliot, a Boston pastor, contacted him in 1799 for assistance with an article for the Massachusetts Historical Society on the emergence of New England newspapers. As Eliot noted in his acknowledgments, Webster provided “a very accurate list of Connecticut newspapers to the present time.” “To collect authentic facts respecting the origin and progress of the public prints in the United States,” Webster drafted another survey, which in mid-June he sent out to newspaper editors in every state except Connecticut. For a given town, his questionnaire included such items as the year the first paper was established, the number of papers and the frequency of their publication. Over the next six months, Webster received only about a dozen replies, and he was forced to abandon this project, too. However, Webster’s efforts were not entirely in vain. Two years later, in a thousand-page tome covering worldwide advances in science and culture, curiously entitled
A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century,
the Reverend Samuel Miller did come up with an official tally—America had two hundred different newspapers (seventeen of which were dailies), approximately thirteen million copies circulated annually—and he appears to have relied at least in part on statistical information supplied by Webster.

By the fall of 1801, Webster turned his full attention to Hamilton’s machinations. In a letter dated September 11, 1801, a nervous Webster confided his fears to Benjamin Rush: “At this time I have more than usual calls on me to counteract the designs of my Federal friends, who are establishing two papers precisely on the principles of mine and calculated to interfere with both in a manner that carries with it strong evidence of a design to ruin mine.” (Hamilton was also planning a second weekly paper, which he called
The New York Herald,
the original name of Webster’s weekly.) In early October, Webster trekked off to New York to find out for himself exactly what was going on. The journey carried some risk, as the yellow fever was back. Though the outbreak wasn’t as serious as in 1798, some residents living near the East River had to be evacuated from their homes. After speaking with his contacts in Manhattan, Webster learned that “a secret enmity to me for the part I took in the controversy between Mr. Adams and General Hamilton” was indeed the reason that Hamilton had appointed William Coleman, an erudite lawyer from Greenfield, Massachusetts, as editor of the
Evening Post
. Upon returning to New Haven on October 13, Webster wrote Oliver Wolcott that he wouldn’t back down from a battle with Hamilton, whom he considered ungrateful: “No man in America has labored so incessantly to oppose anarchy as I have done from the peace of 1783 to this hour. I can show more columns written for this purpose than any twenty men in the United States. I have spent the best portion of my life and with little pecuniary reward, and an attempt to deprive me and my family of subsistence at this period of life, too late to renew my profession, is a proof of an unfeeling heart in any man who can deliberately make the attempt.”

Webster had indeed been America’s most prolific journalist, but Hamilton didn’t owe him anything. The general, too, had a right to publish a paper. This was an ideological battle rather than a purely personal one. But still traumatized by his father’s abandonment twenty-five years earlier, Webster viewed Hamilton as another rejecting authority figure who failed to recognize his self-worth. Webster and his dreaded foe, Jefferson, would end up sharing one common belief—both considered Hamilton “the evil genius of his country.”

Over the next couple of months, Webster kept deliberating about what to do. He initially thought about luring Coleman away from Hamilton—either by hiring him as his editor or selling him his papers outright. But this scheme didn’t pan out, and Coleman would serve as Hamilton’s amanuensis until Aaron Burr’s pistol ended the general’s life in 1804. Coleman never much liked Webster; he once wrote of his wish to give “that pedant . . . Webster . . . a rousing box on the ears. . . . I can never forgive this man for his infamous and unprincipled attack on the great and good Hamilton.” To combat Coleman, Webster hired as his new associate editor Samuel Bayard, a young lawyer from a prominent New York family. Bayard (who later helped found the New-York Historical Society) would work directly with Ebenezer Belden, the son of Webster’s older sister, Mercy, who had replaced George Hopkins as publisher in 1799. After learning of Webster’s appointment of Bayard, another New York paper observed, “It appears that Mr. Coleman’s intended
Evening Post
has given Mr. Webster a little uneasiness. . . . he trembles for its fate.” On November 13, 1801, just three days before the
Evening Post
began its legendary run, Webster published a brief announcement about his new colleague, which began: “The proprietor . . . having by a long course of intense application and sedentary life enfeebled his constitution so as to render some relaxation a duty to himself and those who depend on him for support, has associated himself in the superintendence of his papers a gentleman of known talents and respectability who will by his daily attention contribute to preserve their reputation and acknowledged usefulness.”