The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (36 page)

The attacks on his “compend” kept pouring in. In November 1806, the second president’s son, John Quincy Adams, a newly appointed U.S. senator from Massachusetts, issued a polite but pointed rebuke. Adams was a family friend—Dawes had personally passed on a copy—who served as a trustee at Harvard. Siding with the reviewer in the
Albany Centinel,
Adams wrote to Webster: “Where we have invented new words or adopted new senses to old words, it appears but reasonable that our dictionaries should contain them. Yet there are always a multitude of words current within particular neighborhoods, or during short periods of time, which ought never to be admitted into the legitimate vocabulary of a language. A very large proportion of words of American origin are of this description, and I prefer to see them systematically excluded.” Adams added that he suspected that Harvard’s president, Samuel Webber, was unlikely to support “your system of spelling, pronunciation or of departure from the English language.”

Undaunted, Webster hatched a new plan to drum up support for his dictionary. In February 1807, he drafted a circular asking for financial contributors, which he addressed to “the Friends of Literature in the United States.” To counteract the rejection from Harvard, he appended recommendations by academics at several of America’s other leading colleges, including Yale, the College of New Jersey, Dartmouth, Williams and Middlebury. But he ended up enlisting only a dozen donors, most of whom were old friends such as Timothy Dwight and Oliver Wolcott. His net proceeds were about a thousand dollars, and he was hoping to raise a full third of the fifteen thousand he estimated the book would cost (the actual figure turned out to be twice that amount). In August of 1807, he sent around a second circular asking for just ten dollars per subscriber, but that didn’t generate much of a response, either. Armed with a specimen of his dictionary, Webster then traveled to New York, Philadelphia, Newburyport, Boston and Salem in the hope of soliciting a large number of ten-dollar contributions in person. This direct appeal also failed. That summer, he met with more frustration when David Ramsay of South Carolina, who two decades earlier had championed his pamphlet on the Constitution, reported that “prejudices against any American attempts to improve Dr. Johnson are very strong” in Charleston.

Though Webster was no longer surprised by all the hostility, he was still upset. To cope with his disappointment, he did what he often did—he put pen to paper. The result was a twenty-eight-page pamphlet, “A Letter to Dr. Ramsay . . . Respecting the Errors in Johnson’s Dictionary,” published that October, in which he attempted to justify the need for his complete dictionary. Comparing himself to Galileo, who was imprisoned for disseminating information about the Copernican revolution, the grandiose Webster argued that he, too, was being persecuted for uttering new scientific truths. Webster identified seven principal errors in Johnson’s dictionary. While most were familiar objections which he had raised earlier such as Johnson’s penchant for including vulgar words and his lack of attention to etymology, Webster did cover some new ground.

Webster vilified Johnson for his reliance on “authors who did not write the language with purity” as authorities on word usage. This charge, however, reflected little more than Webster’s own prejudices. The authority Johnson most often cited was Shakespeare, and ever since his Yale days—when attending plays was frowned upon—Webster hadn’t thought much of the Bard of Avon: “Shakespeare was a man of little learning; and altho, when he wrote the popular language of his day, his use of words was tolerably correct, yet whenever he attempted a style beyond that, he often fell into the grossest improprieties. . . . Whatever admiration the world may bestow on the Genius of Shakespeare, his language is full of errors, and ought not to be offered as a model for imitation.”

Webster just didn’t get it. Concerned only with putting the English language in order, he had no interest in literary elegance. In fact, he considered the “low language” of Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights toxic. “I . . . shall proceed,” he wrote to Thomas Dawes in 1809, “as far as propriety requires in cleansing the Augean stable.” And he was true to his word. As his copy of Johnson’s 1799 dictionary, held in the New York Public Library, reveals, he put little black marks next to most Shakespeare quotations. And in his 1828 dictionary, Webster would rarely cite the immortal bard’s actual words. Instead he would insert the occasional “Shak.”—typically in definitions of derogatory terms such as “bastard,” “bastardize,” “characterless,” “drunken,” “drunkenly,” “strumpet” (the rarely seen adjective defined as “false”), “stubborn,” “unrightful” (“not just”) and “whoreson” (“bastard”).

But Webster’s “Letter to Dr. Ramsay” wasn’t just an angry rant. Buried within the contemptuous prose was a compelling reason to revise Johnson. In a particularly perspicacious observation, Webster alluded to Johnson’s “want of just discrimination in his definitions.” To illustrate this objection, Webster complained about Johnson’s characterization of “mutiny” as “insurrection, sedition,” countering that “it is neither one nor the other, except among soldiers or mariners.” This was Webster’s brilliant analytic mind at its best, and here he was identifying a key contribution that he could make to English lexicography. His definitions would indeed possess a precision missing in Johnson. In the case of “mutiny,” his 1828 dictionary would fix the problem by redefining the word as “an insurrection of soldiers or seamen against the authority of their commanders.” If his pamphlet had focused solely on the added rigor he was bringing to the table, it might well have inspired his countrymen to rally around him. Instead, his sweeping denunciations—“not a single page of Johnson’s Dictionary is correct—every page requires amendment or admits of material improvement”—alienated many potential supporters.

Webster’s salvo against Johnson did little to help his cause. Calling Webster “a man of ordinary talents and attainments” who was trying to “palm himself on the public as a nonpareil . . . and destroy the well earned and long established celebrity of his predecessors,” an anonymous reviewer in the
Norfolk Register
expressed the widely held sentiment, “There is a time to write and a time to cease from writing; and fortunate would it be for authors did they know when to terminate their labours.”

Never one to doubt his ability or to back down from a fight, Webster decided that it was just the right time to begin.

W
hen Webster turned forty-nine in October 1807, he had found his true calling. His one-track mind was obsessed with creating the mother of all dictionaries, which would do more than just cement the linguistic identity of the nation he loved. His interest in Anglo-Saxon having piqued his curiosity about etymology, he now planned to cover “the origin and history not only of the English, but also of the Greek, Latin and other European languages” in a supplement. Webster’s estimate that he would need eight to ten years to finish this labor would undershoot the mark by more than a decade.

To complete his own daunting assignment, Webster was willing to pay any price, bear any burden. As he wrote at the end of the preface to his “compend”:

In contrast to Johnson, who once famously opined, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Webster wasn’t motivated by financial gain. For Webster, the payoff was in the daily compiling and arranging, which both mitigated his existential angst and gave him a sense of purpose. Like Martin Luther, reaffirming his faith at the Diet of Worms, he could do no other. Dictionary-making was now his raison d’être.

Though Webster claimed in his “Letter to Dr. Ramsay” that his “herculean undertaking . . . is of far less consequence to me than to my country,” the opposite was true. Its completion was a matter of life and death—but only to Webster. In contrast, few of his fellow citizens cared about its progress. Initially, Webster was confident that the public—or at least the literati—would soon come around. But as he moved ahead with his defining, he received hardly any encouragement. Particularly during the first few years, when he was also burdened with the responsibility of raising his brood of seven, he would be repeatedly immobilized by despair. The prospect of not having the means to go on terrified him. Webster would continue to face steep hurdles right up until the publication of the book’s first edition in 1828.

 

 

IN CONTRAST TO WEBSTER’S “compend,” the origin of
The American Dictionary
can be traced back to a precise moment in time.

The date was Tuesday, November 3, 1807. The Great Comet of 1807, that “illustrious stranger” which had intrigued Webster ever since its first appearance on September 25, was still visible in the sky. That morning, Webster walked up to his second floor study and put on the spectacles, which he had recently begun wearing. Opening an 8½-by-11-inch notebook, he picked up his quill pen—he would continue to use this eighteenth-century implement long after the birth of the fountain pen. After putting the date in the top right-hand corner of the first page, he moved on to the task at hand—defining A.
⁶

To compose his complete dictionary, Webster would follow a strict routine. He liked to get up half an hour before dawn to make the most of the sunlight. He would stop at four in the afternoon, as candlelight didn’t appeal to him.

Webster worked at a large circular table, about two feet in diameter, upon which all his reference books were spread. Chief among them were Johnson’s dictionary, the Latin-English dictionary compiled by British author Robert Ainsworth and the third edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica
. Other key sources were contemporary scientific texts such as Thomas Martyn’s
The Language of Botany: Being a Dictionary of the Terms Made Use of in that Science
and John Quincy’s
Lexicon Physico-Medicum
.

For Webster, dictionary-making involved as much physical as mental exertion. He wrote standing up and paced back and forth as he consulted a particular volume. Sitting at a desk, he once wrote, is “an indolent habit . . . which always weakens and sometimes disfigures the body.” The inveterate counter would keep track of his pulse. As he once noted, whenever he made an important philological discovery, it typically jumped up from its normal rate of sixty beats per minute to eighty or eighty-five. To make sure that he wouldn’t be disturbed by the children, he packed the walls of his second-floor study with sand.

Though Webster would borrow heavily from Johnson, Ainsworth’s Latin dictionary was his true starting point. By 1807, he aimed not just to update and Americanize Johnson, but also to do a more thorough job of connecting English to its roots than his predecessor. The Webster papers at the Morgan Library include cutout pages of Ainsworth pasted onto blank sheets, upon which Webster added definitions. Webster saw himself not so much revising Johnson as starting a new English dictionary from scratch.

Webster’s working definition of “adultery,” also from a manuscript fragment housed at the Morgan, provides a window into his modus operandi. Carefully consulting Ainsworth and Johnson, Webster added a host of new meanings and distinctions absent in both. Johnson listed just one generic definition (“the act of violating the bed of a married person”), and Ainsworth, under the related Latin word “adulterium,” listed three: “adultery,” “whoredom” and “falsifying.” In contrast, in his draft, Webster provided five, each of which carried his characteristic precision. In his first definition, “the incontinence of a married person,” Webster was careful to add a qualifier, gathered from his legal training: “The commerce of a married person with an unmarried is adultery in the former and fornication in the latter.” While Webster’s next three definitions came from other sources such as the Bible and the
Encyclopedia Britannica,
his last definition, though attributed to Pliny (“Among ancient naturalists, the grafting of trees”), was actually lifted from Ainsworth, who cited this passage in the original Latin.

While Webster would mine Ainsworth’s Latin dictionary for its wealth of definitions and allusions, he wasn’t attempting to make the English language more Latinate. In fact, he was trying to do exactly the opposite. Ever the pragmatist, in his “Letter to Dr. Ramsay,” Webster asserted that “Language consists of words uttered by the tongue; or written in books for the purpose of being read.” He thus faulted Johnson for “inserting words that do not belong to the language” such as “adversable,” “advestierate,” “adjugate,” “agriculation” and “abstrude.” But Webster did add an occasional Latinate term when it described a new scientific development such as “adustion” (“the act of burning, scorching or heating to dryness”).