The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (34 page)

On June 6, 1804, Webster placed an anonymous article in
The Connecticut Courant,
in which he updated the public about his literary activity. After announcing that his new
American Spelling Book
—about to become the valuable annuity that would support his family for the rest of his life—was to be published in a few weeks, he described the status of the next project on his assembly line:

Webster, an inveterate self-promoter, here attempted to gloss over the widespread abuse heaped on his initial announcement four years earlier. In fact, few people were clamoring for his name to appear on yet another pedagogical text; the impetus for his first dictionary came largely from within. A warm-up exercise to his complete dictionary, Webster’s
Compendious Dictionary
—compendious means concise—was a rewriting of the
New Spelling Dictionary of the English Language
by John Entick, which had been reissued numerous times since its initial publication in 1764. “This work,” Webster declared, “will be put to press in a short time, and an elegant edition may be expected in the course of the summer.” But Webster’s first foray into lexicography wouldn’t actually appear for another two years. Writing a dictionary, Webster would learn, typically takes longer than expected.

One reason for the delay was that Webster was also engaged in compiling another massive reference work,
Elements of Useful Knowledge,
an encyclopedia for children. The first two volumes, which concerned the history and geography of the United States, appeared in 1802 and 1804, respectively; the third volume, on Europe, Asia and Africa, came out in 1806; and the fourth volume, on animal history and classification, in 1812. He relished documenting the inherent order in the universe. “Nature, in all her works,” he wrote in the preface to volume, “proceeds according to established laws, and it is by following her order, distribution and arrangement, that the human mind is led to understand her laws, with their principles and connection.” Thus, at the same time as Webster was defining words for adults, he was also defining places, people and animals for children. According to his master plan, he would become the pedagogue for all Americans: “My views comprehend a whole system of education—from a spelling book through geography and various other subjects—to a complete dictionary—beginning with children and ending with men.”

Webster’s encyclopedia read like a dictionary. The text consisted of short paragraphs, given numbers in the last two volumes, each of which clarified a particular term. (He hoped that this format would enable children to commit his words to memory, but this fantasy was never realized.) Though Webster believed he was transmitting only hard facts, his personal prejudices were much in evidence. Consider, for example, paragraph 224 in volume 3, describing the “character and morals” of his least favorite nation, France: “Ancient authors all agree that the Gauls were a fickle, perfidious people, prompt to action, but impatient of toil, and ever studious of change. The present French are remarkable for their vivacity, gayety and politeness; fond of show and pleasure, but not cleanly in their houses. The sanguinary scenes of the late revolution manifested a ferociousness of character, rarely found among civilized men, and impress the mind with horror.”

The reclusive scholar was now obsessed with categorizing and describing everything in the external world, which he no longer had much interest in exploring in the flesh. He preferred to live among the thoughts percolating inside his own mind. Though teachers in Connecticut ordered this text, it didn’t have much of a market outside his home state.

After selling his papers, Webster stopped commenting on national politics. In occasional freelance articles, he explored his various avocations, such as tending to his fruit trees and making cider. In October 1804, he wrote a couple of columns for the
Courant
devoted to “the diffusion of agricultural knowledge”—the ultimate utilitarian, Webster never could do anything entirely for the fun of it. He prefaced both “Farmer’s Repository” pieces with an epigraph from Jonathan Swift that conveyed his disgust with the Jefferson administration: “Whoever can make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, deserves better of mankind and does more essential service than the whole race of politicians put together.” In the first one, dated October 24, he began by describing himself as a member of a small breed of “philosophical agriculturalists”: “I possess not a farm on which to indulge my inclination for experiments, my experience is limited to a small garden; but even this experience may have offered a few useful truths, to spread the knowledge of which this is the sole motive for this communication.” Webster went on to dispense some advice for coping with insects that preyed on Connecticut homes during winter: “I make it a practice to scrape off these lodgers to expose them to bad weather and destroy as many as possible.”

Another of Webster’s favorite pastimes was monitoring the weather with a mathematical precision. He tracked these observations in his diary, which, after his move to New Haven, contained information about little else. The odd meteorological patterns in the first half of 1805 piqued his intellectual curiosity. “The snow in January of 1805,” he wrote in his “diary of the weather”—to cite a phrase he himself embedded within the definition of “diary” in his 1828 dictionary—“was about 3 feet deep. This was the severest winter since 1780. But the snow left the earth in March in good season & spring was early. I cut asparagus on the 14th of April, 9 days earlier than last year.” That spring, in an article, “Meteorological,” published in
The Connecticut Herald,
Webster tried to “throw together a few facts” to put this stretch of turbulent weather in historical context. After rank-ordering the most severe winters in America’s two-hundred-year history, he offered a head-to-head comparison between 1805 and the record-breaking 1780: “The present winter did not begin so early as that of 1780 by three weeks—nor has the cold been so intense and continued. In January and February 1780, the mercury fell below 0 twelve days; and seven days to seven degrees under 0. . . . But in the present year, it has fallen only once to 16 degrees in the same place; and one other time to 9 degrees.” Noting that “winters of the utmost severity . . . do not exceed three, four or five in a century,” Webster encouraged his fellow citizens not to despair.

The harsh winter of 1805 also led Webster to expand his talk, “On the Supposed Change in the Temperature of Winter,” initially given before the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1799. Webster had first taken a systematic look at climate change while researching his book on plagues. Ever since the Revolution, numerous writers had taken the position that American winters were becoming milder. These advocates for the eighteenth-century version of “global warming” included Thomas Jefferson, who had addressed the question in his
Notes on Virginia
; Benjamin Rush; and Samuel Williams, a Harvard historian. The man-made cause was allegedly the rapid deforestation of states such as Vermont. Webster challenged his predecessors on the basis of their lack of evidence. Noting Jefferson’s reliance on personal testimony rather than hard data, Webster wrote disparagingly, “Mr. Jefferson seems to have no authority for his opinions but the observations of elderly and middle-aged people
.”
Though Williams, in contrast, did engage in some statistical analysis, Webster convincingly argued that he had misconstrued the facts at hand. While Webster acknowledged that winter conditions had become more variable, he maintained that America’s climate had essentially remained stable: “there is, in modern times, [no] . . . actual diminution of the aggregate amount of cold in winter.” Webster completed this additional section in 1806, and he would eventually publish both papers, which one modern-day geographer has called “a tour de force,” in the Connecticut Academy’s flagship journal in 1810.

 

 

ABOUT TWO WEEKS before the publication of his
Compendious Dictionary,
Webster launched his own publicity campaign. On January 21, 1806, under the pen name “Americus,” Webster placed a front-page essay, “American Literature,” in
The Connecticut Herald.
To garner enthusiasm for his idea that America was ready for a language of its own, Webster challenged the conventional wisdom that harped on “the inferiority of the writings of our citizens.” Though America, he acknowledged, had yet to produce writers of the stature of Milton, Johnson and Pope, Britain, he stressed, had benefited from a four-century head start: “The comparison, to be just, should be instituted between the great body of respectable writers in the two countries; and in such a comparison, the writings of American citizens will not appear to a disadvantage.” Looking back over the last thirty years, Webster concluded that Americans in every genre—from political theory to poetry—matched up well against their British counterparts. Webster lauded a number of American writers such as his Connecticut chums Dwight, Trumbull and Barlow, as well as Jeremy Belknap of the Massachusetts Historical Society. He also wrote favorably of Alexander Hamilton; now that his bitter rival was dead, Webster didn’t mind praising the “style, argument, arrangement and accurate knowledge” of the author of
The Federalist
. Webster did, however, acknowledge one major roadblock to American literary greatness: the existence of “only three or four tolerable libraries.” The net result, he asserted, was that “no American undertakes . . . any work of great magnitude. We shall never have authors of great celebrity in the literary world, till our citizens execute works on a large scale, which will be interesting to foreign literati.”

Webster would be the exception. Having just finished what he called his “compend,” his “convenient manual,” he was now dedicating his life to his complete dictionary, which would indeed force foreigners to stop and take notice of American literary achievement.

On February 11, 1806, Americans first learned about “Webster’s Dictionary.”

The now-familiar phrase appeared as the headline of the advertisement that Webster placed in
The Connecticut Herald
on publication day
. The Compendious Dictionary,
with its 432 large duodecimo pages, cost a dollar fifty. The book contained roughly forty thousand words. While Webster added five thousand new scientific terms from diverse fields including chemistry, mineralogy and botany, he eliminated many vulgar words found in Johnson (and Johnson Jr.) such as the irksome “foutra.” The text resembled a contemporary thesaurus because most entries consisted of just one or two quick definitions. For example, he defined “author” as “one who makes or causes, a writer.” As this announcement mentioned, in the back of the book Webster appended seventeen tables “for the merchant, the seaman, the classical student and the traveler.” While Entick’s
Spelling Dictionary
had featured a few addenda such as alphabetical lists of “Heathen Gods and Goddesses,” “Heroes and Heroines” and the most common Christian names of men and women, this hefty supplement was largely a Websterian touch. The tables covered such diverse topics as currencies, weights and measures, demographic data, the location of post offices, historical events and inventions. The statistician, the census taker and the encyclopedist were thus all merged into the lexicographer. “These tables,” Webster noted proudly, “are all new, and compiled with great labor and minute attention to correctness.”

In his “compend,” Webster first made his famous tweaks to British English. “In omitting
u
in
honor
and a few words of that class,” he wrote in the introduction, “I have pursued a common practice in this country, authorized by the principle of uniformity and by etymology.”

In his twenty-four-page, single-spaced preface, which went way over the head of most readers, Webster explained his method for revising “our present dictionaries” to arrive at “a correct knowledge of the language.” Since Webster had already begun planning the sequel, this conceptual overview actually referred as much to the massive book he was about to write as to the small book he had just written. The future of the English language, Webster insisted, was to be found in its past; a generation after the Revolution, he was talking up a different version of American linguistic identity. Americans, he now believed, should be at least as British as the British—if not more so. For this reason, Webster argued, all Americans should start sounding like New Englanders: “It is . . . to be remarked that the common unadulterated pronunciation of the New England gentlemen [
sic
] is uniformly the pronunciation which prevailed in England anterior to Sheridan’s time
⁵
and which I am assured by English gentlemen is still the pronunciation of the body of the English nation.” Likewise, for spelling, Webster insisted that Americans should go still further back in time—to Anglo-Saxon (a language of which Johnson had known little). Thus Webster turned the charge of “innovation” upon its head; according to his new analysis, he was rescuing his fellow Americans from the corruptions wrought by Johnson and his contemporaries.