The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (37 page)

In his 1828 dictionary, Webster expanded on this working definition of “adultery.” Realizing that many Americans didn’t make the same fine distinctions he did, under the first sense Webster added: “In
common usage,
adultery means the unfaithfulness of any married person to the marriage bed.”

In these early pages, Webster was interested in tracing English back to its roots in other European languages. Thus, for example, in his copy of Johnson’s dictionary, next to “bread” he jotted down the French “pain,” the German “Brot,” as well as the cognate in a half-dozen other European languages including Danish, Icelandic, Finnish and Norwegian. But after finishing the Bs, he also began exploring the relation between English and numerous non-European languages including Arabic, Hebrew and Ethiopian. Enthralled by his own findings, Webster now aimed to set forth a comprehensive theory of language in his etymological supplement. To attend to this massive undertaking, Webster would put all further definitions on hold. C would have to wait another decade.

This change in direction was tied to a “change of heart,” which is how Webster would define “conversion” in his 1828 dictionary. In 1808, Webster became a devout Calvinist; from then on, all his literary efforts would be in the service of God.

 

 

THE NEW PASTOR of New Haven’s First Congregational Church, Moses Stuart, was the complete package. The salutatorian of the Yale class of 1799, he was tall, lean and muscular. Stuart also had an amazing capacity for study—mastering the four conjugations of Latin verbs took him just one night. Dubbing the eloquent Stuart “the man of the short sentence,” Connecticut’s governor Roger Griswold rarely missed a sermon. A noted Hebrew scholar, Stuart would later earn the sobriquet “the father of biblical literature” for his pioneering contributions to American theology.

Soon after his ordination in March 1806, Stuart began electrifying the entire town. While his predecessor brought five new members into the church each year, Stuart brought fifty. Holding services by candlelight—a practice once considered scandalous—he helped usher in the period of religious revival later dubbed the Second Great Awakening.

Though twenty years Webster’s junior, Stuart would also have a huge impact on the lexicographer’s heart and mind.

But it was Webster’s teenage daughters who were drawn to the pastor first. In the winter of 1807, under Stuart’s tutelage, Emily and Julia discovered the hand of God. Rebecca soon followed.

Fearful of “being misled by the passions,” Webster initially opposed this religious turn. Though a lifelong Congregationalist, Webster had never been particularly devout. In fact, upon settling in New Haven, he did not—in contrast to his wife—become a member of the Center Church. And in early 1808, he encouraged Rebecca and the girls to switch to Trinity Church, the local Episcopal church, where he applied for a pew. But the possibility of leading a separate religious existence from the rest of his family unnerved him. In deference to their fervor, he agreed to renew his study of the scriptures. Webster also had several conversations with Pastor Stuart about matters of faith. This soul-searching left him uncomfortable and barely able to concentrate: “I continued for some weeks, in this situation, unable to quiet my mind. . . . Instead of obtaining peace, my mind was more and more disturbed.” His existential dilemma also affected his body. To a close friend, he described his health as “very indifferent.”

But one morning that April, as he settled into his study, everything changed. He later recalled, “A sudden impulse upon my mind arrested me. . . . I instantly fell on my knees and confessed my sins to God, implored his pardon and made my vows to him that I would live in entire obedience to his commands.”

The day after his personal encounter with God, Webster called a family meeting. Trembling, he spoke of his new religious convictions, adding, “While I have aimed for the faithful discharge of parental duty, there is one sign and token of headship, which I have neglected—family prayer.” Bowing down, he then led his family in prayer—a practice he would engage in three times a day for the rest of his life.

While Webster’s conversion was part of a broad social movement—it would be common among New England intellectuals during the first half of the nineteenth century—it also had roots in his personal circumstances. As the dictionary, his retirement project, began to heighten rather than reduce his inner turmoil, Webster lapsed into a midlife crisis. Weighed down by financial worries and the frosty reception to his “compend,” he often felt confused about which way to turn. He was also shaken by the death of his infant son, Henry, in 1806. But whatever the underlying reasons behind his newfound religious faith, its calming effect on his nervous system was clear. “From that time,” he later observed, “I have had perfect tranquility of mind.” Webster also believed that his reconciliation to the “doctrines of scriptures” was responsible for permanently removing nagging bodily aches and pains.

Soon after his conversion, Webster ran for the U.S. House of Representatives. In the preliminary election in May, he received 212 votes, enough to emerge as a viable Federalist candidate. However, he lost in the fall. He would try again without success in 1810, 1812 and 1816. The highest political office this founding father would ever hold is state rep.

In the fall of 1808, Webster informed his extended family about his conversion. His older brother, Abraham, expressed support, remarking, “It has given me great joy to hear that God is carrying on a glorious work in New Haven.” In contrast, his brother-in-law Thomas Dawes could barely digest the news. On October 25, 1808, the Boston lawyer wrote to him, asking “whether it be true that N.W. has lately received some impressions from above, not in the ordinary way of ratiocination.” In response, Webster fired back a long missive explaining how he could be a man of both faith and reason, “I had for almost fifty years exercised my talents such as they are, to obtain knowledge and to abide by its dictates, but without arriving at the truth, or what now appears to me to be the truth of the gospel. . . . I now look, my dear friend, with regret on the largest portion of life of man, spent ‘without hope, and without God in the world.’” Over the next year, Webster’s remarks to Dawes, published both in the
Panoplist
and as a separate tract,
Peculiar Doctrines of the Gospel, Explained and Defended,
circulated widely.

Webster’s pamphlet received plaudits from Trinitarian clergy, who urged him to turn his scholarly attention to theology—a suggestion which he declined. But his strict Calvinism, embracing both predestination and the inherent depravity of man, alienated leading Unitarians. At the time, New England was divided by a fierce religious rivalry that pitted the Trinitarians against the Unitarians, or Connecticut against Massachusetts. Boston clerics such as Joseph Stevens Buckminster—the son of Webster’s Yale tutor was then pastor at the Brattle Street Church—took a more optimistic view of human nature. The Bostonians ended up voicing their displeasure not in a direct critique of Webster’s theological tract but in a belated assault upon his first dictionary. Webster became the favorite whipping boy of the Anthology Club, the Boston literary society located in the new subscription library called the Boston Athenaeum. As was noted in the society’s proceedings on August 29, 1809, “The conversation of the evening was chiefly at the expense of Noah Webster, as long as the Secretary kept awake.” A few months later, the group’s periodical,
The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review,
published a scathing review of his “compend:” “We have marked with candour the most prominent faults in this work; and if it be asked why so little is said in commendation of it, we shall desire every one to compare it to Johnson . . . so many dangerous novelties are inserted, that no man can safely consult it without comparisons with others.” As if that wasn’t enough, the following year this journal devoted forty pages spread across three issues to further attacks. Attempting to comfort Webster, Moses Stuart noted, “The Anthology is outrageous against you. . . . Be assured, the object of their vengeance is more against your religion than against you.”

Besides leading to more abuse for his “compend,” Webster’s conversion also brought about a permanent rift with Joel Barlow, who had been a steadfast champion of his work for more than thirty years. In 1803, after spending a decade and a half as a businessman and diplomat in Europe, Barlow returned to American soil. The former classmates then resumed a lively correspondence, sharing information about their respective literary projects. From his perch in the nation’s capital, Barlow expanded his 1787 epic,
Visions of Columbus,
which he republished as the
Columbiad
in 1807. Though initially supportive, on October, 13, 1808, Webster stunned Barlow by announcing that he would abandon his promised review because of the poem’s “atheistical principles.” Referring to his correspondent in the third person, Webster added, “No man on earth not allied to me by nature or by marriage had so large a share in my affections as Joel Barlow until you renounced the religion which you once preached. But with my views of the principles you have introduced into the Columbiad, I apprehend my silence will be most agreeable to you and most expedient for your old friend and obedient servant.” The self-righteous Webster had no idea of the emotional valence of this missive. Near the end of his life, on the back of his copy, he would note, “Mr. Barlow never wrote me a letter,” indicating his sense that he—not Barlow—was the aggrieved party. Webster had succeeded in antagonizing his most enthusiastic supporter. In fact, on the same day that Webster excommunicated Barlow, this financial contributor to the dictionary wrote him a letter, passing along heartfelt encouragement: “I am anxious that your philological researches should be the best that have yet appeared in any age or nation.”

 

 

AS A BORN-AGAIN CHRISTIAN, Webster felt a need to merge his scholarly pursuits with his religious beliefs. Convinced of the literal truth of the Book of Genesis, which declared that all human beings once spoke the same language, Webster began searching for the common “radical” words that linked all languages (a term he now used interchangeably with “dialects”). In 1809, he explained his new assumptions to Thomas Dawes: “That whatever differences of dialect might have been introduced at Babel, languages entirely different were not formed, as the radical words in the principal languages of Asia, Africa, and Europe are still the same.” Webster was now focusing not just on English words and their sources but on the “origin and structure of language” per se. The completion of both his dictionary and his etymological supplement, he conceded to Dawes, would take longer than he had initially predicted: “The labor requisite to accomplish the work upon my plan is certainly double to that [the nine years] which Dr. Johnson bestowed upon his dictionary.” With much work still to be done, Webster stepped up his fund-raising efforts.

Today the best-known work of Joel Barlow (1754-1812) is the mock-heroic poem “Hasty Pudding,” written in 1793.

But once again, hampered by a lack of tact, he came up empty-handed. Whatever networking skills he had formerly possessed were long gone. In early 1809, Webster wrote to James Madison, requesting that the president-elect send him to Europe on government business so that he could procure rare books there. Remarkably, in that same missive, he offered his damning opinion of Madison’s idol, the outgoing president, Thomas Jefferson: “If the next administration shall pursue,” Webster warned, “a system substantially the same, I must be opposed to it on principle.” Like his White House predecessor, Madison saw no reason to maintain a correspondence with the emotionally tone-deaf Federalist pedagogue. Observing Webster in a Salem lecture hall later that year, Simeon Colton, then a recent Yale graduate, also was taken aback by his arrogance: “I wish . . . he were not so confident in his own merit, but would be content to address the public as though there were some equal to himself.”

The self-absorbed scholar was an easy target for satirists. In 1810, a North Carolina paper ran an article by “Tom Tinker Esq” which humbly proposed a new dictionary to none other than Noah Webster, Jr., himself. To remedy a “defect in English literature,” Tinker claimed to have compiled his own glossary “intended as a supplement to a large and more solemn dictionary.” The faux lexicographer observed, “It is easy to foresee that the idle and illiterate will complain that I have encreased [
sic
] their labours by endeavouring to diminish them.” Among the entries included in his specimen were “tit for tat” (“adequate retaliation”) and “shilly-shally” (“hesitation and irresolution”). Mocking Webster, “Tinker” also offered the prediction that “the whole . . . will appear sometime within the ensuing twenty years.”

By 1811, Webster felt “cast upon the world,” just as he had upon graduation from Yale in 1778. Once again, he was depressed and isolated and lacked the funds to continue his literary career. But on this occasion, the crisis was entirely of Webster’s own making. Now a nationally recognized writer with the power to shape his own destiny, he had gone out of his way to alienate just about everyone he had ever known.