The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (32 page)

But Webster was confusing cause with effect. In truth, his sedentary life hadn’t produced his nervous condition, but was his refuge from it.

Hamilton and Webster now engaged in a vicious circulation war; the first source of contention was which Federalist could lay claim to being the fiercest critic of Jefferson, the new president whom they both detested. Alleging that he wished to give Jefferson a fair hearing, Webster waited five months into the new administration before rendering his predictably harsh verdict. In the fall of 1801, Webster published a series of eighteen anonymous letters in his paper; Hamilton would follow with his own eighteen-article series in the winter. Webster’s first piece, which ran on September 26, 1801, analyzed Jefferson’s inaugural: “Yet after a few sentences, you tell us that ‘every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle; that we are all Republicans—all Federalists.’ It follows from these declarations that in your opinion, the parties have contended not for
principles,
but for
unimportant opinions . . . .
But this concession criminates you and your friends; for unimportant concerns can never justify men in violent and animated exertions to change an administration.”

Webster still equated the opposition of Jefferson and other Democratic-Republicans to the Federalist administration of John Adams with disloyalty to America. Much to Webster’s surprise, the president himself never responded directly to this “candid estimation” of his job performance. But in a letter to Secretary of State James Madison, Jefferson did reveal what he was thinking: “I view Webster as a mere pedagogue of very limited understanding and very strong prejudices and party passions.” The obtuse Webster, however, never did figure out that Jefferson didn’t want anything to do with him. When his first dictionary came out several years later, he sent the president a copy, asking him to “give it such encouragement as you may think it deserves.” Jefferson left that letter unanswered, too.

As Webster ceded more and more editorial control to Bayard, he fought less and less with his two archenemies, Jefferson and Hamilton. But this longtime partisan scribe was not just losing his stomach for heated political debate; he was also losing his feeling for his fellow man. Isolated in the relative tranquility of the Arnold House, Webster turned increasingly antidemocratic. Teetering on paranoia, he saw opponents everywhere. As he wrote to Benjamin Rush, “As to mankind, I believe the mass of them to be ‘copax [
sic
] rationis.’ They are ignorant, or what is worse governed by authority & the authority of men who flatter them instead of boldly telling them the truth.” This harsh view of human nature led Webster to endorse wildly reactionary ideas. “It would be better for the people,” the middle-aged writer continued in this jeremiad to Rush, “they would be more free and more happy, if all were deprived of the right of suffrage until they were 45 years of age, and if no man was eligible to an important government office until he is 50, that is, if all powers of government were vested in our old men.” Apparently, Webster didn’t see anything paradoxical in both inveighing against blind obedience to authority and asking his fellow Americans to place all their trust in their elders. But soon he would give up his fantasy of restoring order to America through political change; he would increasingly focus on organizing words rather than people.

By the second half of 1803, Webster began preparing to unload his papers. The following year, the initial fourteen-year federal copyright for his speller was due to expire, and he sensed that reissuing the book could be a financial bonanza. (He turned out to be right.
The American Spelling Book
would sell a staggering two hundred thousand copies a year—one for every thirty Americans—netting Webster, who earned a penny a copy, an annual revenue stream of two thousand dollars.) Webster could now afford to exit the newspaper business. On October 15, 1803, he published his last article as a newspaper editor, an angry epistle to William Coleman, in which he charged the
Evening Post
editor with twisting the core ideas of his work on the plague. Webster’s sign-off was dramatic: “With a gentleman of candour and fairness, discussion might be attended with pleasure and productive of mutual benefit. With you, sir, I disdain to pursue the controversy.” Two weeks later, Webster and his nephew sold the business to Zachariah Lewis. New York’s first daily paper would live on in various incarnations until 1923, when as
The Globe,
it was folded into
The Sun
.

In the same issue of
The Commercial Advertiser
in which Webster penned that farewell letter to Coleman, he wrote a long article under the pen name “Rusticus”—the Latin word for country-dweller—on a totally different subject, literary history. “It has been a subject of controversy whether
intense application
[italics mine] of mind,” began Webster, repeating the same phrase he had earlier used to describe the putative cause of his enfeebled constitution, “tends to shorten life. Opinions on this point are various; and perhaps we may throw light on it by an appeal to the facts.” This controversy was, of course, largely of interest to “Rusticus” himself; it was the obsession that consumed his mind, not those of his readers. For Webster, understanding the health effects of a sedentary life was a pressing concern, as he was then deciding whether to throw himself into the dictionary.

To arrive at a definitive answer, Webster gathered four sets of data, which he presented in chart form. Each one was a bill of mortality for a famous group of writers—those from ancient Greece, ancient Rome, modern Europe and England. For the Greek and Roman authors, Webster mentioned the age and year of death. While the Greek list featured the great philosophers and scribes of the age—Plato, Socrates, Thales, Euripides and the like—it also included some obscure names such as Xenophilius, who was placed at the top because he supposedly had lived to the age of 169.

For modern writers, Webster’s charts also contained the year of birth. Here are a few of the English writers he selected—all personal heroes since his undergraduate days—listed in the same order as in the newspaper:

Webster didn’t perform any elaborate statistical analysis. For each of the four groups, he just tallied up how many writers died after ninety, eighty, seventy and sixty. (In the case of the English list, which at thirty-one names was the longest, those figures came out to three, eleven, seventeen and twenty-seven, respectively.) Satisfied that this far-from-scientific survey showed a link between literary greatness and longevity, Webster offered these tentative conclusions: “It is probable . . . that the unusual proportion of learned men who live to a great age may be in part ascribed to their temperate habits of life—and to an original firmness of constitution.” Webster was now convinced that he had the right stuff to rank up there with his icons. And in the hope of one day being at the top of a new list—that of American literary immortals—he became a full-time lexicographer.

 

 

BY 1803, WEBSTER had already cemented his reputation as an obsessive definer. In an 1802 satiric play
, Federalism Triumphant
by Leonard Chester, a character based on his friend John Trumbull thus mocks him, “If he [brother Noah] should get angry, he’ll oppose my favorite scheme of augmenting the number of judges of the superior court and come into the house and spend three days on the word augmentation, as he did on shews.”

After finishing his book on epidemics, Webster had purchased the eighth edition of Samuel Johnson’s 1755 masterpiece, published in London in 1799, and began combing through these two quarto volumes, line by line. (Webster’s copy, complete with all his marginalia, has been preserved in the rare-book room of the New York Public Library.) Curiously, in his memoir, Webster was vague about this bit of personal history: “At what particular time, N.W. began to think seriously of attempting the compilation of a complete dictionary of the English language, is not known. But it appears that soon after leaving New York in 1798, he began to enter particular works and authorities on the margin of
Johnson’s Dictionary
, to be used, if occasion should offer.” This lapse in memory is surprising, given the precision with which Webster recorded so many other key events in his literary career. Regardless of the exact date he began thinking about his magnum opus, by early 1800 Samuel Johnson, the idol whom Webster had worshipped since adolescence, became the father figure whom he sought to slay. It was high time, Webster believed, for Americans to entrust defining to one of their own.

But Webster didn’t get started in time to become America’s first lexicographer. Another Connecticut Federalist—who just happened to have the perfect name for an up-and-coming lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, Jr.—had already beaten him to the punch. No relation to the Dr. Johnson of Lichfield, England, this Samuel Johnson, born a year before Webster, was a teacher in nearby Guilford. In 1798, Johnson Jr. published
A School Dictionary,
which offered “an easy and concise method of teaching children the true meaning and pronunciation of the most useful words in the English language.” In contrast to Webster, the Connecticut Johnson hadn’t attended college and lacked lofty ambitions. He sought to Americanize not the comprehensive work by his British namesake, but rather
The Royal Standard English Dictionary
by William Perry, a Scottish schoolteacher. Johnson’s two-hundred-page text was largely an abridgement of Perry’s pronouncing dictionary, originally published in London in 1775 and in America a decade later. Most of Johnson’s four thousand entries were lifted directly from Perry’s thirty thousand, but this new American product had one twist; in contrast to Perry, Johnson divided up words according to the principles laid out in Webster’s
Grammatical Institute
. In fact, in his introduction, Johnson Jr. fawned over the pedagogical trilogy by “the ingenious Mr. Webster.” Webster was thus a big supporter, and he was one of a half-dozen subscribers listed in the
Connecticut Journal
ads.

Johnson Jr.’s 1798 dictionary sold out within several months, and by the middle of 1799, he resolved to put out a revised version. This time, Johnson enlisted a collaborator, Yale-educated John Elliott, the pastor in neighboring East Guilford (now Madison). In May 1800, Elliott—the reverend was listed as first author—and Johnson published
A Selected Pronouncing and Accented Dictionary
. Webster, who had seen a draft a year earlier, supplied the following endorsement, “I have not time to examine every sheet . . . but have read many sheets in different parts of it; your general plan and execution I approve of.” Also designed for schools, this volume aimed to help students keep up with a changing world: “Custom is daily introducing new words into our language, many of which are frequently used, and their signification important to be known.” Containing about five thousand more words than its predecessor, this dictionary was the first to include Americanisms such as “President,” “federal,” “Capitol” and “freshet.” Elliott and Johnson also added American-Indian words (“tomahawk” and “wampum”) and recently coined scientific terms such as “telegraph.”

Under the stewardship of the devout Reverend Elliott, whom one parishioner described as “a man of upright constancy,” this school dictionary also attempted to purify the English language. “To inspire youth with sentiments of modesty and decency,” the authors wrote in the preface, “is one of the principal objects of early instruction; and this object is totally defeated by the indiscriminate use of vulgar and indecent words.” While the new volume removed “tosspot” (a synonym for drunkard) and “whore,” it also overreached; such supposedly saucy entries as “diabetes” (defined in 1798 as “involuntary discharge of urine”) and “obstetric” were also axed. It also toned down some definitions; for example, “rouge” evolved from “red paint used on the face of prostitutes” to “red paint used on the face,” and “voluptuous” no longer had anything to do with the sensual, but now was defined simply as “extravagant.” Curiously, despite all these moves in the direction of chastity, the authors left in the French F-word, “foutra”—defined as “a scoff, insult or gibe”—which had appeared in both Johnson’s 1755 and Johnson Jr.’s 1798 volumes. Calling this expression “unprintable,” an irate writer in the
American Review and Literary Journal
noted in 1801, “we cannot soil our page with the transcription of it; it is to be found under the letter
F
and is called
French,
but we are sure no French dictionary would admit a word so shockingly indecent and vulgar.”

On Wednesday, June 4, 1800, just a few weeks after the publication of Elliott and Johnson’s school dictionary, Webster announced his ambitions in
The Connecticut Journal
: