The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (40 page)

Buoyed by his new financial security, Webster burrowed into his dictionary.

As he was finishing up the
Synopsis,
a surprisingly even-tempered Webster dashed off a sixty-four-page manifesto on the American language. Nearing sixty, he now vowed to debate rather than demolish his opponents: “In controversy with my fellow citizens, on any subject, I will not be engaged. The following remarks . . . are not intended to provoke one; it is my sincere desire that my observations and statements may be marked by . . . candor and moderation.” Though the lexicographer wouldn’t keep this promise for long, the “Letter to the Honorable John Pickering,” published in 1817, lacked his characteristic polemical fury.

Webster was responding to Pickering’s 1816 treatise,
A Vocabulary, or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to Be Peculiar to the United States of America
. A prominent philologist, Pickering had learned how to read from Webster’s speller, which had delighted his father, the former secretary of state Timothy Pickering; however, John Pickering now felt betrayed by America’s foremost pedagogue, whose first dictionary, while not a best seller, was still making its mark. Many of Webster’s ideas about word use and orthography were starting to catch on. For example, about a decade after the publication of his “compend,” an anonymous writer for the
Wilmington Watchman
observed in an article, “To the Last of the Vowels”: “I have not heard from U lately so often as I used to, before U was dismissed from many of your employments by Noah Webster. Though u are not in favor at present, with your superiors or your neighbors, yet u are always in security, and have still a respectable share in the public purse, without any thing to do with labor—by which it would seem that u must be concerned in a sinecure.” Scholars such as Pickering had taken notice. For him, Webster embodied the new direction in American lexicography, which he wanted to stop in its tracks.

Pickering was reviving the old argument that Webster was an innovator guilty of corrupting the King’s English. As he charged, Webster was attempting to “unsettle the whole of our admirable language.” Pickering’s three-hundred-page volume contained a long list of American words, each of which was followed by his objections. For “Americanize,” after citing Webster’s definition, “to render American,” Pickering, a well-respected lawyer who lived in Salem, countered, “I have never met with this verb in any American work, nor in conversation.” Likewise, he protested against “boating” because he did not find the term in the reigning English dictionaries. According to Pickering, who had served as a European diplomat in the Adams administration, Americans should use the same words as their brethren across the ocean.

In his pamphlet, Webster laid out a compelling case for his complete American dictionary. Though his politics kept waxing more and more reactionary, his approach to lexicography remained firmly democratic. In the realm of words, the autocratic and judgmental Webster, who found evidence of human folly nearly everywhere, continued to place his trust in the good sense of the American people. He argued that he was just trying to keep pace with the innovation that was characteristic of his country:

While the Webster of the
Synopsis
was muddled, here he was making fine distinctions in clear, persuasive and even witty prose. While Webster chose not to “animadvert upon” all the words in Pickering’s collection, he provided ingenious defenses for a select few: “For Americanize I can cite no authority—but it seems to be as necessary as
Latinize
and
Anglicize
. Every nation must have its
isms
and its
izes,
to express what is peculiar to it.” Webster closed by repeating a sentiment that he had first used to market the speller a generation earlier: “But I trust the time will come, when the English will be convinced . . . that we can contend with them in LETTERS, with as much success, as upon the OCEAN.”

Having regained his stride after a lost decade, Webster was now poised to make his indelible markup upon the English language.

A
s the fifty-eight-year-old Webster returned to daily defining in 1817, he no longer felt weighed down by the exigencies of life. Not only were his financial woes behind him, so, too, were the bulk of his parental responsibilities; by the end of that year, only Eliza and Louisa were still living at home. And once his daughters, whom he dubbed his “angels,” got married and moved away, he began enjoying their company more than ever. He relished traveling around New England with his wife to spend time with them. As he remarked to his third daughter, Harriet, then living in Portland, Maine, with her new husband, Edward Cobb, “I wish we had wings occasionally that we might fly to our dear children.” However, these visits tended to be much more satisfying to him than to his offspring, whom he never learned how to treat as separate people with their own feelings and aspirations. Shortly after Harriet’s 1816 marriage to Cobb, whose father, Matthew, was a wealthy merchant from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he wrote to his daughter, then close to twenty, “I present my respects to the elder Mr. Cobb and his lady—tell them that if you are not a
good girl
, they must write to me.” While Webster was writing a generation before Seneca Falls and the birth of modern feminism, such obtuse remarks had more to do with him than with his times.

But as Webster made his way across the alphabet, he was leveled by a few family tragedies. In early 1818, Harriet and her husband traveled to the West Indies, where they both contracted yellow fever. Harriet would survive, but her husband did not. And upon her return to New England, Harriet discovered that her infant daughter, who had remained at home, had also died. In a letter dated February 25, 1818, Webster had trouble empathizing with his daughter’s grief: “Often, my dear Harriet, have I found in the course of my life, that frustrated hopes have been beneficial to me.” At Webster’s suggestion, Harriet would move back to Amherst. About a year later, Webster’s fourth daughter, Mary, who had met her husband, the widower Horatio Southgate, while visiting Harriet in Portland, died in childbirth. Webster was devastated. A poetry lover, Mary had been his favorite; as a teenager, she had helped him edit his essays and Fourth of July orations. The alluring fair-skinned Mary had blue eyes and light brown hair (in contrast to his other daughters, who were all brunettes). Though he prided himself on his emotional control, Webster couldn’t stop crying. On March 8, 1819, he wrote his daughter Emily and her husband, William Ellsworth: “Submit we must and I hope we shall all submit with the patience and humility of Christians. In
theory,
I indulge no desire to have my own condition regulated by my own wishes or supposed interests or pleasure. Yet the dissolution of the most tender ties in nature touches all the sensibilities of my heart. I must weep—it is a pleasure to weep. O what would I give for a portrait of my dear Mary!”

To cope with his despair, Webster took recourse in words: he published a long obituary in the
Panoplist
. While he had not been able to travel to Mary’s deathbed, he provided a detailed account of her final moments, surrounded by family and friends, “she fell asleep in Jesus without a struggle or a groan. . . . It seemed as if her soul drank at the fountain of bliss in that dark hour.” Mary’s infant daughter—also named Mary—survived, and Webster would raise her as his own. He didn’t trust Southgate, because the country lawyer was reported to be having an affair with a housekeeper.

 

 

IT RESEMBLED AN EPISODE out of the Old Testament. Like the Israelites, the townsfolk of Amherst were uniting to build a shrine to the Lord: a new institution of higher learning for seminary students.

At two in the afternoon on Wednesday, August 9, 1820, Amherst Academy’s board of trustees gathered at the three-story white-brick schoolhouse on Amity Street. Just a few minutes later, the fifteen-member board, of which Pastor Parsons was president and Webster vice president, voted to “proceed immediately to lay the corner-stone of the edifice for the charitable institution.” Descending back into the street, the board then joined a huge procession, which included academy students and preceptors, financial backers and workmen. Marching along the west side of the common, the throng headed to a hillside across from the First Church, where Webster was to make the ceremonial address.

Though Webster was eager to move ahead with the dictionary as fast as possible, he couldn’t help but embrace this “common cause.” Like his forefather Governor Webster, he would be bringing Connecticut Congregationalism to the Commonwealth. Equally important, this Yale man was also taking a stand against his enemies—namely, Harvard and Unitarianism. For Webster, these forces of darkness posed a threat not only to his dictionary-making—the harsh reviews of a decade earlier still stung—but to the moral fiber of New England. Amherst College, he observed, was needed “to check the progress of errors which are propagated from Cambridge. The influence of the University of Cambridge [Harvard], supported by great wealth and talents, seems to call on all the friends of truth to unite in circumscribing it.”

Two years earlier, when Webster first joined the board, Amherst Academy was already thriving. It had 152 students, evenly divided between masters and misses, which included his children Eliza and William (who would be “fitted for college” after he ran afoul of his Hartford employer). About half were locals, but a few came from as far away as Virginia and Canada. Its rigorous curriculum featured chemistry, astronomy, natural philosophy, Latin and French, all taught by top-notch instructors. Eager to promote this bastion of Christian education, Webster was a frequent presence, attending the declamations held on Wednesday afternoons and opening his house for school receptions.

In the wake of the private school’s meteoric rise, by 1818 its board had also set its sights on a new goal—a college. The prime mover was Colonel Rufus Graves, a devout chemistry instructor who had formerly taught at the Dartmouth Medical School. In establishing this institution, Graves turned the federal blueprint upside down; first came the constitution and then came the convention. In May 1818, Graves finished the fourteen-article founding document, which he showed to Webster’s cousin Daniel to make sure that it was legally sound. Convinced that “the education of pious young men of the first talents in community, is the most sure method of . . . civilizing and evangelizing the world,” Graves sought to raise fifty thousand dollars. A few months later, he organized a convention of sixty-nine clergymen from Hampshire and three surrounding counties, at which Noah Webster presented the new constitution. Webster was also appointed to head a committee to persuade Williams College, then languishing in desolate Williamstown, to merge with the new college and move to Amherst. By July 1819, enough subscribers had been found to meet the fund-raising goal, but the corporation of Williams College refused to go along with the plan. Undaunted, in May 1820, Graves, Webster and the other trustees secured a site in Amherst and began designing the first building, which was to be exactly one hundred feet in length and called South College.

As the crowd walked up the hill to hear Webster’s speech that August afternoon, pride was the predominating emotion. With the charitable fund of fifty thousand dollars earmarked solely for students and faculty, the building committee had asked area residents to donate materials and labor. And the response from Amherst as well as from neighboring towns such as Hadley and Pelham—then best known as the birthplace of the rebel leader Daniel Shays—had been nothing short of miraculous. In just three months, thanks to contributions from a bevy of volunteers, a remarkable transformation had taken place. Working nonstop, those camping out at the site had finished preparing the ground and had dug the trenches. The Virginia fence—so-called because it was crooked—and the horse shed were gone. In their stead now stood a bounty of evidence testifying to the community’s generosity—granite, lime, sand and lumber, flanked by pickaxes, hoes and shovels. The new temple was ready to be constructed.

All eyes were suddenly on Webster, who, stepping onto the ceremonial cornerstone laid down by Pastor Parsons, launched into his prepared remarks: “The object of this institution, that of educating for the gospel ministry young men in indigent circumstances, but of hopeful piety and promising talents, is one of the noblest which can occupy the attention and claim the contributions of the Christian public.” Thinking of the new college as an extension of Yale, Webster harked back to the 1776 valedictory speech of Timothy Dwight. Webster applied Dwight’s words—“The period, in which your lot is cast, is possibly the happiest in the roll of time”—to the conditions Americans faced a half century later: “Blessed be our lot! We live to see a new era in the history of man—an era when reason and religion begin to resume their sway, and to impress the heavenly truth, that the appropriate business of men is to imitate the Savior; to serve their God; and bless their fellow men.” After Webster finished, he made a call for contributions. One man came forward whom no one recognized; he put down a silver dollar and declared, “Here is my beam, God bless it.”