The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (39 page)

Webster’s methodology was riddled with a fatal flaw: He was attempting to back up one speculative hypothesis with nothing more than a string of additional speculative hypotheses. Of this glaring problem with the
Synopsis,
the
Oxford English Dictionary
’s James Murray would later write, “Etymology is simply Word-history, and Word-history, like all other history, is a record of facts, which did happen, not a fabric of conjectures as to what may have happened.” And even if Webster had relied solely on verifiable facts, he wouldn’t have gotten very far. His governing assumption turned out to be a fiction, too. Since Webster’s day, linguists have discovered that Semitic languages are not based on the same root words as European languages. The two language families bear no etymological relationship to each other.

Webster’s grandiosity had gotten the better of him. The task that he had assigned himself—of grounding all words in the putative language of his biblical namesake—was impossible. He also lacked the tools to do anything more than grope in the dark. While he tried to convey the impression that he had mastered all twenty languages by 1813, that claim was a myth later spread by the family. He was thoroughly familiar with only a handful of languages—those he had learned as a college student: Latin, Greek, Hebrew and French. For the rest, as with Anglo-Saxon, he had only a dictionary knowledge—not a reading knowledge. In his last letter to Barlow, he described exactly how he learned Oriental languages such as Arabic, Chaldee, Persian and Ethiopian: “I . . . made myself acquainted with the characters and travelled through [them] . . . a labor of ten months or two years.” Language acquisition gets harder as one gets older, and at the age of fifty, Webster wasn’t able to gain much more than a cursory understanding of these additional languages.

In the final analysis, Webster’s
Synopsis,
begun while he was in the throes of an existential crisis, reveals infinitely more about the mind of its creator than about the origin of language. Paradoxically, the search for truth would lead this brilliant polymath to build an alternative universe entirely out of gibberish. Though some scholars have minimized its wrongheadedness—one early biographer alluded to its “worthy results”—the candid assessment of a pair of University of Chicago English professors appears closer to the mark: “The basis of his etymologizing was simple fantasy.” The
Synopsis
was indeed Webster’s private dream world, one over which he exercised complete control. Within its dozens of thin notebooks, each of which contained about ten sheets of paper stitched down the middle and folded neatly in two, he was always right; no matter what bogus claim he came up with—say, that the Hebrew root meaning “pure, clean, shining” is related to the Latin, English and Anglo-Saxon words meaning “rub, scour, open”—no one could challenge him. The isolated scholar had created his desideratum—a monument to harmony, which united all human beings throughout history in a common tongue.

Webster finished the
Synopsis
in 1817. He envisioned it as a third quarto volume to his dictionary, but his publisher would pass. Today this musty text resides in the manuscript archives of the New York Public Library.

In direct contrast to the dictionary, this gargantuan labor that had also entailed hardships for the entire family never had any meaning or use for anyone except Webster; but to him, its value was considerable. This opportunity to let his imagination run wild had grounded the loner during a stressful decade when he faced the daunting challenge of raising seven children. And even though Webster couldn’t get anyone else too interested in the book’s contents, he still felt an enormous sense of accomplishment upon its completion, which would translate into renewed vigor. While a colossal failure as literature, the
Synopsis
succeeded as therapy, helping Webster to both control and exorcise some of his inner demons.

 

 

IN EARLY OCTOBER 1814, Webster jumped on his horse Rolla (a name given by his daughter Mary, who had been reading a play about the conquest of Mexico) and headed back to the Purchase Street mansion of Thomas Dawes, where he stayed during his visits to Boston. Webster hadn’t expected to be back in the state capital so soon, as the two-month legislative session typically ended in late June. But these were no ordinary times. In September, Massachusetts Governor Caleb Strong had called a special session to address the havoc caused by “Mr. Madison’s War” (the War of 1812).

New England’s once-robust economy was in shambles. With the loss of its favorite trading partner, Great Britain, its manufacturers had difficulty shopping their wares. Even more alarming, British forces had recently wrested control of a town in Maine, then still part of Massachusetts. To add insult to injury, the president refused to foot the $1 million tab for the Bay State’s militia unless its soldiers would submit to the authority of the U.S. Army rather than their own commanding officers.

With Webster leading the charge, Massachusetts residents had been clamoring for peace since the beginning of the year. After attending a meeting of civic leaders in Northampton on January 19, Webster helped draft a circular letter to the Massachusetts General Court, calling for a convention among northern states to consider various measures to contest “the multiplied evils . . . of the late and present Administration.” That spring, Webster turned anger against the federal government into the centerpiece of his successful campaign for a House seat. And in his Independence Day oration in Amherst, he again vented his frustration with a decade and a half of Virginians in the White House: “The union of all the states, it was once supposed, would repress the ambition, or restrain the power of the large states and preserve the just rights of each. A few years experience has shown the fallacy of this opinion.” The patriot who had fervently preached American unity for the past thirty years had completed an abrupt about-face. Webster now openly talked about dividing America into three parts—North, South and West.

As the legislators convened, outrage against the Madison administration was widespread. On the first day of this extra session, October 5, a Mr. Low of Lyman suggested that a committee from the New England states personally inform the president “that he must either resign his office or remove those of his ministers . . . who have by their nefarious plans ruined the nation.” Though Mr. Low withdrew his impetuous proposal the following day, legislators were itching to take some definitive action soon.

On October 13, Webster got his chance to stake out his position in a speech at the Massachusetts State House. “Mr. Speaker,” he began, as he looked over at Timothy Bigelow, the House speaker, “The resolution under consideration proposes an extraordinary measure to meet an extraordinary crisis.”

Webster stood in front of about three hundred of his fellow delegates, who sat transfixed in rows of tiered seats in the House chamber (where the state Senate meets today). Webster was staring into the midafternoon sun streaming in from the windows overlooking Beacon Street and the Boston Common. Painted on the wall behind him was the state’s motto,
“Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem”
[By the sword we seek peace but only under liberty]. And above him was architect Charles Bullfinch’s celebrated dome.

Sounding just like the western Massachusetts farmers whom he had excoriated a generation earlier for lining up behind Daniel Shays, the new delegate insisted that the Commonwealth had to do whatever was necessary to protect its interests. The solution, he believed, required nothing less than a radical shake-up of the national political landscape. Arguing that America’s founding document was no longer working, Webster was making the case for a new constitutional convention in Hartford.

Turning his eyes away from the House Speaker and toward his fellow delegates, Webster defined the crisis:

According to Webster, just as the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 was needed to strengthen the federal government, the Hartford Convention was needed to weaken it. He thus exhorted his colleagues, “And our necessities are even more urgent than in 1785; the present constitution has failed to produce the effects intended; it neither protects us, nor promotes the common welfare—indeed for some years past, it has produced nothing but calamity.” Despite—or perhaps because of—its hyperbolic rhetoric, Webster’s speech, soon reprinted in its entirety in numerous papers across New England, swayed his colleagues. On October 16, by a vote of 260 yeas to 90 nays, the Massachusetts House voted to authorize the Hartford Convention.

In the months leading up to the convention, Webster’s pique at the president continued to mount. On November 23, he reported to friends that he had come up with a new definition for the Madison administration—“the madmen of the south.” “I say
madmen
for on
political
and
commercial
subjects,” he emphasized, “I can not give them a better name. . . . the men in power for years past . . . usually have produced effects contrary to what was proposed—an infallible mark of the want of wisdom.”

On December 15, twenty-six delegates from five New England states met in Hartford in closed-door sessions. The convention, which ultimately rejected secession from the Union, lasted three weeks. Webster was not present because Massachusetts required all twelve of its delegates to be native sons. He did, however, help draft its eleven proposed constitutional amendments, such as the one which would have precluded electing a president from the same state two times in a row. And when the Massachusetts legislature reconvened that May, Webster headed the committee charged with distributing five thousand copies of the convention’s resolutions.

Despite all the fanfare, the convention would have little impact. A key reason was that the war with Britain ended before it did. As New Englanders debated among themselves, U.S. and British officials were putting the finishing touches on the Treaty of Ghent, which was signed on December 24, 1814. Though news of this diplomatic settlement didn’t reach American shores until February, on January 8, 1815, General Andrew Jackson effectively ended the war with his stunning victory at the Battle of New Orleans. With peace now a certainty, the sense of urgency that had galvanized New Englanders was gone.

In the run-up to the Hartford Convention, New Englanders of all stripes had championed secession. Thomas Dawes wrote Webster in February 1814, “By the tyrant I mean, not merely Madison, but the Southern Policy. . . . As to a separation, I think of it as old Sam Adams thought of
independence . . ..
said he, ‘the time has come when we ought to part, for we can live together no longer.’ ” But in hindsight, this position seemed extreme. The convention would deal a body blow to Federalism, which became tainted by charges of disloyalty and treason. The party officially disintegrated in 1816, after the failed presidential run of Webster’s old friend, the former New York senator, Rufus King. In a curious turnaround, Southerners, who were the original targets of the Hartford Convention, picked up its threads a couple of decades later when they began championing states’ rights. In response, Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster repeatedly denounced the convention in the halls of Congress, referring to it as “pollution.”

In 1834, Noah Webster wrote to his cousin Daniel to protest the latter’s critical assessment. “I knew most of the members of the Convention . . . and I can affirm with confidence,” he observed to the unmoved senator, “that no body of men . . . ever convened in this country have combined more talents, purer integrity, sounder patriotism, and republican principles or more firm attachment to the Constitution of the United States.”

Webster would forever carry a torch for the Hartford Convention. A month before he died, he published an essay on its origins, in which he declared, “All the reports which have been circulated respecting the evil designs of that convention, I know to be the foulest misrepresentations.”

THUS READ A NOTICE which ran in
The New York Evening Post
and numerous other newspapers across the country in June 1817. Though the press got some of the details wrong, Webster was about to become a rich man. He had indeed landed the first blockbuster book deal in the history of American publishing. Forty thousand dollars then was the equivalent of more than a million dollars today.

The facts were these: In April 1816, Noah Webster—after his father’s death in 1813, he insisted that “Junior” be stricken from his name—signed an agreement with Hudson and Company, not Goodwin and Sons. Under its terms, he would receive forty-two thousand dollars for granting his new publisher the sole right to print his speller for fourteen years, beginning in March 1818. Webster was pleased to find a national distributor; he now would be relieved of the burdensome task of keeping track of the various state editions, which had sold some 286,000 copies the previous year. As part of the contract, Hudson and Company also agreed to hire his son, William. The teenager was to work as an apprentice in the firm’s Hartford office until age twenty-one, at which time he would become a partner.

Both sides later agreed to revise the terms of the deal. In July 1817, a financially strapped Webster received a three-thousand-dollar advance from Hudson and Company. The following April, he accepted a lump-sum payment of twenty thousand dollars (in lieu of thirteen additional three-thousand-dollar annual payments), meaning that his speller brought in a total of twenty-three thousand dollars.