The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (45 page)

Though Webster was now being hailed by Americans from across the land, during his last few weeks in the capital, he still “avoided parties . . . except those which are given by N. England people.”

Having personally lobbied the executive and legislative branches of government, Webster did not neglect the judiciary. He was hoping to get the Supreme Court to unite behind a certificate in support of his dictionary. Though Webster once remarked to Justice Story, who had blurbed his “great book” a few years earlier, that he “was not a friend of obtaining recommendations of books,” he had been avidly gathering celebrity endorsements for nearly half a century. On January 14, Chief Justice John Marshall turned down his request, arguing that the justices could engage in such actions only as individuals—not as a group. But the letter, which the chief justice sent over to Webster’s room at the Noah Fletcher house, did not fail to render a positive verdict: “There are few if any of us who do not possess your large dictionary and who do not entertain a just opinion of its merits.”

AS AN IMPATIENT WEBSTER slowly made his way back to New England—the steamboats from Baltimore, where he lectured on February 25, were shut down by ice—chaos was breaking out at 58 Temple Street.

In early March, Rebecca’s thoughts typically turned to the thorough reordering of the house that she conducted every spring. “Her purifications for the season,” as she called them, involved “regulating” drawers and tidying up closets. But this year, on account of the family turmoil, she would get a late start.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, March 1, the nearly twenty-three-year-old Louisa was seated in the parlor near the bust of Washington. With an expression of horror on her face, she suddenly stood up. Walking over to Rebecca and looking directly into her black eyes, Louisa declared, “Mother, hell is a dreadful place!”

Dropping her needlework, Rebecca got up out of her sewing chair by the window and tried her best to stay calm.

Rebecca had noticed that ever since the recent conversion of Lucy Griffin, the family’s black servant, Louisa had become extremely anxious. Lucy, whose jams and preserves placated Webster’s sweet tooth, was an integral part of the family; and Louisa and Lucy, who sometimes slept in the same room, were particularly close. According to her mother, Louisa’s status as the only nonbeliever in the household was wearing on her. Louisa’s “serious impressions,” Rebecca later wrote to her older sister Eliza, had begun on February 27 and had “increased to such a degree that her flesh trembled and the terrors of hell were never out of her mind.”

Wracking her brain, Rebecca desperately sought a cure for what ailed Louisa. Reaching for her Bible, she found passages of scripture that she considered ideally suited to the matter at hand. But over the next few days, as she read numerous hymns out loud, Louisa hardly responded. Anxiety now gripped Rebecca, too, as she fretted over the state of her daughter’s burdened soul.

But by March 7, when Rebecca sent off her update to Eliza, she felt more hopeful:

Nine months later, on December 25, 1831, Webster and his wife arranged for Louisa to be admitted into the First Church of Christ along with the rest of the family. But Louisa’s conversion would not mean the end of her mental suffering.

Ever since her infancy, something had been terribly wrong with the Websters’ seventh child; her central characteristics, as Rebecca once put it, were “her queer speeches and simplicity.” Webster and his wife never expected their last child to build a life of her own like her siblings. She wasn’t able to attend school, nor was she able to maintain normal interactions with her peers. While Louisa has often been described as “mentally retarded,” severe autism is a more likely diagnosis. Repetitive behaviors seemed to soothe her. In a letter to her sister, Eliza, composed two decades after her conversion, she alluded to “rocking back and forth in my chair [for] twenty-four hours at least.” Though Louisa’s thinking could be odd, even delusional, she was no simpleton. In that same January 8, 1854, letter to Eliza, written from the Goodrich house, where she lived after her parents’ death, Louisa made a few subtle jokes at the expense of Chauncey Goodrich, who was then teaching theology—as opposed to classics—at Yale: “You will see at a glance from the formation of my sentences, that I dwell under the roof of a man once professor of rhetoric. Hearing so much criticism gives me great consternation and sometimes the ablative comes in most uproariously.” Louisa signed off by sharing a grandiose fantasy with her sister, “your letters . . . will be printed with the rest of my correspondence when I die because . . . my letters would be very touching and prolific to the people, besides making money.”

Louisa, who was then living off a small annuity contained in her father’s will, would eventually lose her mind. In 1855, when Webster’s last child was forty-seven, the Goodriches and the Ellsworths filed a petition with the probate court for the District of New Haven asking for the appointment of a conservator to intervene in her daily life. Dated May 14, 1855, the document began, “That Louisa Webster . . . of New Haven is by reason of mental incompetency incapable of taking care of herself or of managing her affairs and has been in this condition from her infancy to this time . . . that she . . . has personal estate which needs to be taken care of and managed.” Exactly what specific incidents or developments prompted the family to take this drastic action remains unclear. However, Louisa’s life didn’t seem to change much afterward; she remained with the Goodriches and kept to her usual routine, rarely venturing out of the house except to attend church with the family.

 

 

LOUISA WASN’T WEBSTER’S only child to suffer from a disabling illness. In early 1836, not long after the birth of her fourth child, a son named Webster, Harriet suddenly became bedridden. The family feared the worst—tuberculosis. Her father arranged for Harriet to be examined by Dr. Eli Ives and Dr. Jonathan Knight, two professors at Yale’s new medical school. On July 8, 1836, Webster reported to Harriet’s husband, William Fowler, “Their opinion is that her case is a dangerous one, but not incurable. They think her lungs not ulcerated, but recommend riding & have prescribed two or three medicines. She is cheerful and seems to be better.” However, she continued to suffer from an array of debilitating symptoms—pain, lethargy and stomachaches—for which she often took morphine. Two years later, the lexicographer wrote to Fowler, “Your account of Harriet’s illness gives us no little pain. It seems her complaint is what is called neuralgy; pain of the nerves, if we can judge its symptoms. It is movable from the stomach to the lungs.” That diagnosis didn’t quite fit either, and Harriet would never recover. After her death at the age of forty-six in 1844, Rebecca observed, “I have no doubt that her sufferings, the last eight years of her life, have been far more severe than we apprehended. Nervous affections rendered her irritable. And sometimes unreasonable and unjust.”

Harriet’s mysterious illness brought Webster closer to her first child, Emily Ellsworth Fowler, born in 1826. While Webster was often cold and judgmental with his children, he could be a doting grandparent, and Emily Fowler emerged as his unabashed favorite. “Little Em,” he wrote her father in 1832, “is a book worm, it seems, and she is fairly entitled to be such by hereditary right. Tell her I love her very much, and hope to hear good things of her.” In Emily’s company, Webster’s playful side came out. In June 1834, he mentioned to Harriet, “Emily shall examine my head to see whether I am a good lexicographer. I am no phrenologist myself. I learn what bumps people have by their own conduct.” Webster kept pressing Harriet to have his granddaughter write to him in Latin, which for him was the language of love, and Emily obliged by the age of twelve. With her mother frail, Emily came to live in New Haven for a year, and Webster showered her with affection and caresses. His granddaughter later recalled, “I have never lived with anyone who entered so entirely into my wishes and necessities.” On February 27, 1839, Webster reported to William Fowler, “Your hopping, dancing, waltzing, chattering daughter is quite well; she uses a knife and fork with great dexterity; and says that she has grown this winter an inch, I mean upward, not sidewise.” Two months later, Webster noted, “She often animates us with her vivacity and music and we shall feel a want of her company to enliven the dullness of old age.”

After leaving New Haven, Emily Fowler headed off to Amherst, where her father had just taken a position as a professor of rhetoric at Amherst College. Inspired by Webster’s tutelage, Emily Fowler would grow up to become a significant figure in nineteenth-century American literature. In 1842, Webster’s beloved Emily began studying classics with the eleven-year-old Emily Dickinson at Amherst Academy. The two Emilys participated in the school’s Shakespeare club and discussed the poetry of New England notables such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Dickinson looked up to Fowler, who was four years older, as a fountain of wisdom. In 1849, the shy Dickinson wrote to her friend, “I know I can’t have you always. . . . some day a brave dragoon will be stealing you away and I will have farther to go to discover you at all.” Four years later, when Emily Fowler married Gordon Lester Ford, a prominent New York businessman, Dickinson included a lock of her auburn hair in one of her missives. Emily Ford later became a well-known poet and writer in her own right, whose final project involved compiling her grandfather’s personal papers. The literary line continued with her son, Paul Leicester Ford, who was both a leading Americanist—he edited the complete works of Jefferson—and a best-selling novelist. But Paul, like his grandmother Harriet, would suffer an untimely death. On May 8, 1902, his recently divorced older brother, Malcolm Webster Ford, a journalist who had fallen upon hard times, murdered the thirty-seven-year-old author in his Manhattan townhouse before shooting and killing himself.

 

 

“WITH THIS, I bring my literary labors to a close.”

Noah Webster would write this sentence dozens of times over the last decade of his life, but he would never really mean it.

More disgusted than ever by the disorder in the world, Webster felt he still had much to accomplish. But by the early 1830s, America’s preeminent pedagogue was less interested in gathering and disseminating new knowledge than in rectifying errors. In 1832, Webster took on the Bible, which he considered “the chief moral cause of all that is good, and the best corrector of all that is evil in human society.” In his new version published the following year, Webster fixed what he saw as the flaws of the 1611 King James edition—namely, its use of obsolete and “indelicate words.” Webster sought to eradicate all those Shakespearean locutions which he felt shouldn’t be spoken in mixed company. As part of his cleanup, he also desexualized its terminology, changing “teats” to “breasts” and “fornication” to “lewdness.” Despite Webster’s active marketing campaign, which featured an endorsement from the Yale faculty, the book never caught on. “They don’t want the word of Webster, but the word of God,” commented one pastor about the reluctance of missionaries to purchase it. Four years later, Webster followed with a slender volume entitled simply
Mistakes and Corrections
. In addition to biblical translation, the six essays addressed various philological matters. One concerned Charles Richardson’s recently published
New Dictionary of the English Language
. While the book was eccentric—it often supplied quotations rather than definitions—Webster’s assault on the British lexicographer was merciless, “And now our country is furnished with a fresh supply of mistakes in Richardson’s Dictionary, many of which are so enormous as to deserve nothing but derision.”

Next up was what Webster called the “correction” of his own “great book.” Though this would be the last dictionary authored by one man, Webster reached out to numerous experts for help. As he was getting started in 1835, he wrote to Benjamin Silliman, a professor of chemistry at Yale, “If you know of any corrections which will be proper, I will make them, if you will be good enough to give me a memorandum for my direction; and if there are any words of good authority in the sciences which you teach, which you wish to have added to my vocabulary, I will thank you to make notes of them as they occur to you.” While he relied on others, Webster would have the final say. When Fowler suggested adding “alerity” and “otherness,” he shot back, declaring that such “outrageous anomalies” had no place in the language. In the advertisement, he would thank only Dr. William Tully, Yale’s professor of
materia medica,
for the “correction of definitions in several of the sciences.” The second edition of
The American Dictionary,
a royal octavo, which contained fifteen thousand words more than the original quarto, began coming off the press on October 22, 1839. When the last page of the fifteen-dollar book was printed on January 30, 1841, Webster, who still was fond of tallying seemingly random facts and figures—the number of students enrolled in Yale every fall rarely escaped his notice—made a note to himself that publication had taken a total of “fifteen months and eight days.”