The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (4 page)

 

 

A LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR LATER, on Wednesday, October 14, 1772, Noah, then just two days shy of fourteen, headed down Main Street with his family to attend a special service at the Fourth Church of Christ. It was a day of fasting and humiliation, then a common occurrence in Puritan New England, particularly on momentous occasions when God’s aid was sought. The twenty-four-year-old Nathan Perkins was to be ordained as the new pastor, just the third in the church’s sixty-year history. The West Division had gone without a full-time minister since the untimely death of the much beloved Nathaniel Hooker, Jr., two and a half years earlier. (The great-great-grandson of Connecticut’s founder and the man who had baptized Noah, Hooker was just thirty-two when he died.) After auditioning sixteen local candidates and engaging in a fierce debate that caused deep divisions among the typically united townsfolk, the Ecclesiastical Society had finally issued an invitation to Perkins, an outsider, who had recently graduated from the College of New Jersey (today Princeton University). While the First Church of Hartford had offered nearly twice as much as the seventy pounds in base pay, Perkins, who came from a family of wealthy landowners, was convinced that the “good farms of West Hartford would be a better security . . . than the trade of Hartford town.”

The short and stocky Perkins had already made a highly favorable impression with his thoughtful sermons, delivered entirely from memory, which he had been preaching as pastor-elect since the first Sabbath of the year. Perkins’ theological views were strongly influenced by Jonathan Edwards, the Connecticut cleric who had ushered in the Great Awakening, a period of religious revival that lasted from 1730 to 1760. Edwards had combined a harsh Calvinism, which emphasized the depravity of human beings, with a belief in the need for deep religious feeling. Called New Lights, Edwards’ followers, such as Perkins, advocated an intense engagement with spiritual concerns through personal Bible study.

On that bright October afternoon, the Fourth Church, which had been rebuilt in 1744 to accommodate the West Division’s growing population, was packed. The service drew not only local congregants but also visitors from towns throughout Hartford County—then the colony’s largest, housing about a quarter of its two hundred thousand inhabitants—and from other neighboring towns as well. According to church custom, on this day the preaching was to be done not by the minister-elect, but by the church elders, the presbytery. The most influential clergymen from across Connecticut coordinated the service. Nearly all had close ties to Yale. Farmington’s Reverend Timothy Pitkin, whose late father-in-law, Thomas Clap, had been Yale’s first president, said the prayer before the sermon, which was given by the Reverend Andrew Lee, a recent Yale graduate from Perkins’ hometown of Norwich. Lee read from the first book of Corinthians, “For the word of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us who are saved it is the power of God.” The distinguished Reverend Elnathan Whitman, pastor of the Second Church of Hartford—the eldest of the elders, he was losing his hearing and spoke in a booming voice—delivered the charge, in which he highlighted the accountability of pastors both to God and to their parishioners. The Reverend Joseph Perry of Windsor concluded the service by giving the right hand of fellowship, officially welcoming Reverend Perkins into the fold. Summing up the day’s events,
The Connecticut Courant
would report the following week, “The whole was conducted with decency and propriety.” But few were more impressed by both the orderliness of the proceedings and the eloquence of the speakers than the impressionable adolescent Noah Webster.

As the crowd exited the church, its excitement was palpable. The new minister was partly responsible for this buoyant mood, but so, too, was the prospect of feasting, which was to follow the day of fasting. As the Websters dispersed to one of the celebratory meals prepared by the dozen householders whom the West Division’s Ecclesiastical Society had appointed to keep “publick houses,” Noah’s mind wasn’t focused on the sumptuous food he was to eat. The adolescent remained awe-struck by the spectacle that he had just witnessed. This gathering of so many learned men in one place had inspired him. Though he wasn’t sure he wanted to go into the ministry, these were the men whose ranks he wished to join. He suddenly began to envision a different sort of future for himself. Noah no longer saw himself spending the rest of his life engaged in manual labor on a farm, like his father or older brother, Abraham. Noah now wanted to follow in the footsteps of his mother’s younger brother, Eliphalet, whom the late Nathaniel Hooker had fitted for Yale. Noah’s uncle, who would be saddled with a nervous condition throughout his life, later became known for his bluntness and eccentricity—he would marry a woman he had never met. At the time, Eliphalet Steele was serving as a pastor in Egremont, Massachusetts (where, as Webster grew into adulthood, he would periodically visit him).

Shortly after Perkins’ ordination, Noah approached his father, expressing a desire to study with the new pastor so that he could also attend Yale. Initially, Noah Webster, Sr., opposed his son’s request for “more learning.” Though Noah’s father, too, revered education, he had one major reservation: the cost. College was not cheap. Tuition, room and board for a year at Yale in the 1770s—about twenty-five pounds—was more than half the annual salary of a skilled worker. But Noah Sr. soon gave in. With land suddenly at a premium in Connecticut, he realized that not all of his sons could go into farming. Additionally, Noah Sr. figured that in an emergency, he could mortgage the family farm (a measure that he would eventually take to pay for his son’s education).

That autumn, Noah began meeting regularly with Nathan Perkins at either his house or the pastor’s capacious quarters, also located on Main Street, which had originally been built for Reverend Hooker back in 1758. (Like Noah Webster’s birthplace, this residence still stands; it is now the parish house of St. James’s Episcopal Church.) To prepare Webster for Yale, Perkins would steep the adolescent in Latin and Greek, as Yale’s rules then specified that “no person may expect to be admitted into this College, unless . . . he shall be found able . . . to read accurately . . . Tully [Cicero], Virgil and the Greek Testament and shall be able to write true Latin in prose.” For this task, Perkins was eminently qualified. At the College of New Jersey, on account of his remarkable facility in translating those two canonical Latin authors, he had been selected as the class salutatorian, the top-ranking senior charged with giving a Latin oration at graduation.

While a breakdown would prevent Perkins from delivering that speech—in the spring of his senior year, he was so frail that he had to rely on his classmates for assistance whenever he left his residence—his undergraduate career had been distinguished. In 1770, after an experience of religious ecstasy revived him, Perkins established the Cliosophic Society, a forerunner to today’s Whig-Cliosophic Society, America’s oldest college literary and debating club.

Though no longer unstable by the time he reached Hartford, Perkins possessed some odd quirks. Right after his ordination, he began keeping “a bill of mortality”—detailed records about the cause of death of every parishioner. He also held a rigid, doctrinal mind-set, which would lead him into tirades about “loose morals.” Moreover, as one contemporary observed, Perkins “had little of the imaginative and rarely indulged in sal-lies of wit.” And on those few occasions when he attempted humor, Perkins could be sarcastic. At the time of his ordination, the West Division pastor still received some of his salary in wood. When one parishioner asked Perkins to comment on his contribution, which consisted mostly of crooked scraps from the tops of trees, the pastor, annoyed by his stinginess, shot back, “That is a remarkable fine pair of steers you have on the lead, Colonel.”

But Noah wasn’t bothered by Perkins’ lack of charm. The adolescent was thrilled to have found a father figure who could provide a steady supply of intellectual nourishment. Catholic in his interests, Perkins could discourse on almost any topic. Tutor and student would form a bond that would last a lifetime. As an adult, Webster would continue to rely on Perkins for advice. Commenting on his mentor’s death in a letter to
The Hartford Observer
in 1838, Webster praised his special gifts as a classical scholar, adding, “To his instruction and example . . . I am . . . indebted for my taste for the study of languages.” Webster became the first of more than a hundred students Perkins would prepare for Yale during the sixty-six years that he served as the West Division pastor—still one of the longest tenures of any minister in American history.

 

 

IN SEPTEMBER 1774, the not quite sixteen-year-old Webster, accompanied by his father, was excited to be making the forty-mile trek from Hartford to Yale, which would soon have a huge impact on his emerging identity. New Haven was then a budding commercial center with some 8,022 white residents plus another 273 blacks and Indians, according to a survey by the state legislature, which that fall both incorporated the town and named its streets. First laid out in 1638, New Haven consisted of a grid of nine squares; at the center was the sixteen-acre public square called the Green. Just above the Green—on the other side of College Street—was the square that contained the Yale campus. New Haven made quite an impression upon most visitors. Passing through a month earlier en route to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, John Adams called it “very pleasant.” A lover of symmetry, Webster would go even further in his praise, later describing New Haven as “beautiful” because, along with Philadelphia, it was one of “the regularly built towns in America.” This would be the first of many trips that father and son would take between what were then Connecticut’s co-capitals. When traveling together, one would ride on the family horse, the other would walk. With the hardy Noah Webster, Sr., often feeling that he was more fit to go on foot, the incoming freshman may well have been the one who parked the horse at the Yale president’s mansion, located on the edge of campus across from the surrounding farms.

Callow farmboy goes off to college to get educated: Noah Webster’s coming-of-age journey was then the stuff of popular literature. Like Webster, “Tom Brainless,” the adolescent protagonist of the satiric poem “The Progress of Dulness,” written in 1772 by John Trumbull (at the time a Yale tutor), also exchanges grueling farmwork for books:

In his spoof of Yale, Trumbull, who would also serve as Yale’s treasurer during Webster’s undergraduate career, made fun of the college’s bland curriculum, which had traditionally pivoted around biblical studies. Founded in 1701 for the “upholding and propagating of the Christian Protestant religion,” Yale—called the Collegiate School until 1718—was originally designed to train its students for positions in local Congregational churches. Partly as a result of Trumbull’s spate of satirical poems and essays in the early 1770s, the college was more lively by the beginning of Webster’s freshman year. Believing that Yale students were “condemn’d each day to study, read, recite and pray,” Trumbull had insisted on reducing the emphasis on Latin and Greek and adding English literature and composition to the mix. Trumbull’s reform efforts quickly made their mark. Of the forty students in Webster’s class of 1778, only four would go into the ministry, as law suddenly emerged as the profession of choice. When editing a literary magazine a decade later, Webster would pay homage to Trumbull by reprinting several of his poems, including this mock-epic that recounted the “rare adventures” of the Yale country bumpkin.

Though New Haven was up and coming—in 1763, a new state house had been added to the Green, which already featured two churches—Yale was in the sorriest state of any of the nine colleges then sprinkled across the thirteen colonies. The students referred to its treeless campus as a “Brick Prison” because it featured just three run-down buildings. The Old College, constructed back in 1717 when Yale first moved to New Haven from Old Saybrook, once aspired to grandeur, but this sky-blue, three-story structure, crowned by a cupola, was teetering. (In 1782, it would be demolished; Bingham Hall now occupies this site). The main dormitory was the nearby New College—later renamed Connecticut Hall, this Yale landmark, dating back to 1750, still stands—but it offered few amenities. During the winter, Webster and his fellow Yale men would have to spend their Saturday afternoons chopping wood to keep their dorm rooms warm. Just to the south stood the small chapel—the first on an American college campus—dwarfed by its 125-foot-high steeple, an addition contributed by the citizens of New Haven. This 50-by-40-foot building, where undergraduates congregated every day at sunrise for morning prayers, also housed the library, a collection of three thousand books, which undergraduates could rent for sixpence per folio volume—a fee steep enough to stave off much use.