The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (38 page)

Surprisingly, Webster turned to Barlow as a confidant, as if nothing had ever come between them. On April 1, 1811, after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, he wrote his Yale classmate, “My prospects depress my spirits and impair my health—while there is danger that some of my family who have less fortitude will sink under the pressure of anxiety. Still I have hope and while life and health remain, I shall prosecute my studies.” Webster also complained about the “measures of government, which have deranged business,” even though as he well knew, Barlow himself had just joined the Madison administration as the new ambassador to France. In another startling act of brazenness, Webster asked the departing Barlow to buy some reference works for him, for which he offered no compensation but copies of his dictionary. Summing up his predicament, he added in his last letter to Barlow, who would die suddenly a few months later in Europe, “I wish to have all the help that
books
can furnish—for I have no aid from
man
.”

Amidst his despair about running out of money, Webster also experienced moments of deep intellectual satisfaction. In a letter in early 1811 to Josiah Quincy—the future president of Harvard, who was then a Federalist congressman from Massachusetts—Webster captured the divided nature of his existence:

Quincy, too, didn’t respond to Webster’s request for a handout. Unable to find donors, Webster formulated a new plan: He would downsize.

But selling the Arnold House was not easy. With the economy in freefall on account of the ongoing conflict with Britain, which would soon escalate into war, there were few takers. The waiting heightened his anxiety. On June 29, 1812, he wrote another Yale classmate, Oliver Wolcott, “If I can find persons to take my property here at anything resembling a reasonable price, I may yet proceed with my studies. At present, I am compelled to throw aside my pen—the agitations of my mind disqualifying me for business.” A few days later, a resigned Webster agreed to settle for about a third less than he had paid fourteen years earlier. On July 13, he bought a half-finished double house in the Massachusetts wilderness. Though the price was steep—$2,700—and he had to take out a mortgage, the cost of living would be much less. “The principal motive of this change of residence,” he later wrote, “was to enable me to subsist my family at less expense.”

 

 

IN THE FIRST WEEK of the cold but dry September of 1812, Webster stepped into a carriage with his wife, seven children and all their belongings, including the all-important circular table upon which he would continue to toil on the dictionary.

Their destination was Amherst, Massachusetts, then a tiny farm town with two hundred houses and a population of just fifteen hundred, still more than a decade away from sporting its first piano. Webster was heading back to the land of his ancestors. In 1659, in response to a relaxing of church rules by the pastor at the First Congregational Church of Hartford, Connecticut’s governor John Webster had made a similar trek up the Connecticut River Valley. Webster’s great-grandfather was buried in nearby Hadley, the town he founded, which had originally included Amherst.

Webster had also learned about the inviting hills of western Massachusetts from Timothy Dwight, who often rhapsodized about his hometown, Northampton, just eight miles from Amherst. Of Hampshire County, whose county seat remains Northampton, Dwight once wrote, “No county in the state has uniformly discovered so firm an adherence to order and good government, or a higher regard to learning, morals and religion.” Amherst would remind Webster of his native Hartford.

But despite Amherst’s appeal, the move was still a sacrifice born out of economic necessity, which some family members resented. Just as his father had once forced him out of his boyhood home, Webster was now displacing his wife and children from the beloved Arnold House. Emily and Julia were particularly upset because they were also leaving behind their beaus. The twenty-two-year-old Emily was already betrothed to William Ellsworth, the son of jurist Oliver Ellsworth, at whose house Webster had boarded in 1779. Like Ellsworth, Chauncey Goodrich, whom Julia, then nineteen, would wed in 1816, was both a member of the Yale class of 1810 and connected to Webster’s past; his grandfather, the Reverend Elizur Goodrich, had first suggested the idea of the dictionary three decades before. Rebecca was also sad to be moving. Webster’s wife would miss her tight-knit circle of New Haven friends with whom she experienced “the pleasures of religious converse without restraint.”

The first night, the Websters stopped at a small hotel in Hartford, the halfway point of the eighty-mile journey. Along with his two eldest daughters, Webster met with Nathan Strong, pastor of the same First Congregational Church that a century and a half earlier had driven away John Webster. The venerable clergyman gave his visitors a tour of its recently constructed building.

A couple of days later, as the stagecoach reached the woods of South Hadley, the heartsick Emily and Julia burst into tears. As Eliza, then just nine, later wrote, “They realized the great change coming.” In contrast, Eliza and eleven-year-old William were excited by the rustic surroundings and eagerly grabbed the boughs that hovered above their heads as the horses sped along. Eliza also noted, “It was all new to us.”

Amherst had just two streets, one running north-south and the other east-west, which intersected near the large common at its center. Webster’s new residence was located at the northeast corner of this pasture where the town’s cows grazed. Though not as sumptuous as the Arnold House, it contained eight large rooms in addition to the kitchen. (After they moved away in 1822, “the Mansion house” was converted into a hotel; in 1838, it was destroyed in a fire.) From his study window on the second floor, Webster could glimpse the stone steps of the First Congregational Church located on the hills to the south. Through a series of transactions, Webster soon amassed ten acres of adjacent farmland, where he built a barn and chaise house and planted an exquisite garden. The orchard, known as the “best in town,” featured pear, peach and apple trees as well as a vine of large, sweet white grapes, imported from his father’s farm.

Rebecca Greenleaf Webster (1766-1847) was deeply religious, even more so than her husband. During his trip to Washington in the winter of 1831, Webster felt compelled to remind her, “I caution you against venturing to evening meetings in this severe season. I sincerely hope your zeal will be kept under the control of prudence.”

The Websters soon formed close bonds with their neighbors, who included Samuel Fowler Dickinson, the town clerk dubbed “Esq. Fowler” by the locals; Hezekiah Wright Strong, the owner of a general store; and David Parsons, pastor of the First Congregational Church. (Dickinson’s house is now the site of the Emily Dickinson Museum; his granddaughter, the famous poet, was born there in 1830.) Parsons, who had served as pastor since 1782, lived in a gambrel-roofed house on the other side of the green, where he and his wife, Harriet, raised their eleven children. To amuse themselves on cold winter evenings, the Webster girls would team up with the Parsons’ six daughters to perform the simple religious plays of the eighteenth-century British writer Hannah More. A Harvard man, Parsons had turned down a professorship in divinity at Yale to serve the community he loved. Like Webster, the pastor also had pedagogy in his bones; he would educate wayward Harvard students in his home. In 1812, Parsons donated the land for Amherst Academy, a new private school, which, thanks to the fund-raising efforts of his neighbors Webster, Dickinson and Strong, opened in 1814.

Upon settling in Amherst, Webster, in contrast to the rest of his family, felt neither sadness nor excitement but relief. From his perspective, the change in venue meant only one thing—that he could stay in business, the business of dictionary-making.

But Amherst would grow on him. Shortly after his arrival, Webster discovered that he couldn’t just work nonstop on his dictionary. He became a gentleman farmer who baled his own hay and milked his cows, Gentle, Comfort and Crick. In a series of articles for the
Hampshire Gazette
on agriculture, which he called “the first, the best and the noblest temporal business of man,” he freely dispensed various trade secrets, such as how to kill worms and how to increase the quantity of manure per acre. As in New Haven, Webster also took time out for civic affairs. In February 1814, he was appointed a justice of the peace. That same year, he was also elected to the first of three one-year terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. In April 1820, the pedagogue became chairman of the board of managers of the town’s first Sunday school. And that summer, he helped to found Amherst College. Of his decade in Amherst, Webster would later write, “The interruption of his sedentary labors was probably favorable to his health.” In the quiet of Amherst, where he immersed himself in both his dream job as well as his favorite avocations, Webster attained a level of well-being that he had never before enjoyed.

For Webster, purposeful activity was a cure-all for both mental and social ills. If he spotted boys loitering near his garden, he would ask, “Are you needed at home?” If the lad happened to be idling, Webster was likely to suggest, “Pick the stones up from the road in front of my house.” For this temporary employment, he paid the generous wage of twelve and a half cents an hour.

 

 

BY THE TIME HE REINSTALLED his circular table in his roomy study in Amherst, Webster had already developed a systematic protocol for working on his etymology, entitled
Synopsis of Words in Twenty Languages
. Having put aside his manuscript of A and B, as well as most of the reference books that he had initially consulted back in 1807, Webster would spend his workdays perusing a couple dozen foreign language dictionaries, which he had arranged in an orderly fashion. Working from right to left, he would fix upon a word and trace it through each of the twenty languages.

While Webster had initially been inspired by his religious conversion, his interest in uniting all languages was also in synch with the intellectual ferment of the day; with the birth of modern linguistics came the uncovering of heretofore hidden links between languages. In 1786, the Welsh orientalist Sir William Jones had observed that the Hindu language, Sanskrit, bore an affinity to both Latin and Greek, which he characterized as “so strong . . . that no philologer could examine all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source.” This insight was the basis of the famous Indo-European hypothesis, which maintained that a common ancestor language was the origin of Latin, Greek, Persian, German, the Romance languages and Celtic. But Webster distanced himself from Jones, whom he disparaged: “it is obvious that Sir William Jones had given little attention to the subject [etymology], and that some of its most common and obvious principles had escaped his observation.” He also flat out ignored his contemporaries, such as the Germans Friedrich Schlegel and Franz Bopp, who expanded on Jones’ work in Sanskrit and comparative philology.

According to Webster’s working hypothesis, until the construction of the Tower of Babel, human beings all spoke the same ur-language, which he labeled Chaldee. To trace all twenty languages back to this ur-language, he created classes of words based on “primary elements”—namely, consonant pairs such as “bn,” “br,” “dl” and “sd.” For each class, he listed numerous words in all twenty languages. Thus, under “bn,” for example, he included the English “bone,” “bin” and “ebony”; the German “
Bein,
” “
Bahn
” and “
eben
”; the French “
bon,
” “
bien
” and “
abonne
”; and the Latin “
bene,
” “
bini
” and “
ubinam
.” (For the purposes of his etymological research, he considered vowels irrelevant.) Whenever he found words in the same class that meant the same thing, he would see this as “proof” that they were etymologically linked. While these connections were true in a few instances—the French
bon
is indeed related to the Latin
bene
—as a rule, similarities in consonant structure don’t typically translate into similarities in meaning. But that didn’t stop Webster from reaching his desired conclusion; he would just devise some far-fetched explanation. He would then “discover” links between these words in European languages—“bone,” “ebony,” “
bene,
” “
bini
” and the like—and the Semitic words containing “bn,” which he had numbered and placed at the beginning of the class.