The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (46 page)

 

 

THE DATE WAS TUESDAY, April 21, 1840. The place was the Center Church in Hartford, and the time, as Webster noticed on his gold watch, was eleven o’clock. The Connecticut Historical Society was celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the state’s first written constitution, and the eighty-one-year-old lexicographer was about to give its keynote address. Though Webster was supposed to provide a “historical discourse,” he chose to focus on “the prevalent errors of our people.”

Webster was staying at the Hartford home of his son-in-law William Ellsworth, then the state’s governor, who that month would be reelected to a second two-year term. Webster skipped the festivities the night before, hosted by the society’s head, Thomas Day (the brother of Webster’s good friend, Jeremiah Day, who had succeeded Timothy Dwight as Yale’s president in 1817). At this masquerade party, which Webster’s former paper,
The New York Commercial Advertiser,
speculated was “perhaps the first ever in the land of steady habits,” dozens of young men and women donned the Puritan garb of their great-grandparents.

Webster had been nervous about taking center stage. A few weeks earlier, he confided his fears to his daughter Emily: “And then only think how many people are expecting great things from your father! How can such an old man as I am gratify such an audience as will be present. But I must encounter the task.” With his lower legs sore, it pained him to stand. And on account of his hoarseness, Webster had to shout out his words in order to be heard in every corner of the church.

Webster started by dipping into Hartford’s history, but this part of his speech wasn’t entirely flattering to his hometown. He talked of how his ancestor, John Webster, “wearied with dissension,” set off for Amherst to seek a new settlement. From this preamble, he moved on to the degenerate state of America, the main subject of what turned out to be a ninety-minute speech. “Let us attend,” the lexicographer stated, “to the public evils which may result from the use of indefinite words, and the errors, which may proceed from vague ideas.” Webster was horrified by what he saw as a misreading of America’s most hallowed text:

Inequality, an embittered Webster had come to believe, was inherently good. While, as the papers reported, he still “retained the full power of his faculties,” Webster had lost touch with the promise of America, which he himself had championed a half century earlier. It was the expert definer rather than his fellow countrymen who could no longer appreciate the true meaning of “liberty” and “equality.”

 

 

ON THE AFTERNOON of Wednesday, May 24, 1843, Eliza Jones knocked on the door of her father’s study. Upon entering, she saw something that she had never seen before. Wrapped in a cloak, Webster was lying down.

That spring, though bothered by a lame foot which had been crushed by his rocking chair, Webster had been carrying on as usual. In early April, while New Haven was overwhelmed by four feet of snow, he had finished a new book,
A Collection of Papers on Political, Literary and Moral Subjects,
which gathered together essays from the past fifty years. On April 11, he reported to Fowler, “We are all in pretty good health. . . . The state of our country, in point of government, is gloomy. . . . we have no remedy but in industry and economy.”

On Monday, May 22, Webster had twice gone to the post office, as he continued to monitor his business activities through an active correspondence. That afternoon, he received a visit from Yale president Jeremiah Day, before retiring to his study. Suddenly feeling a chill, Webster asked Lucy to start a fire. Alarmed that he was gulping down large amounts of water—Webster never drank between meals—Lucy notified Rebecca, who called in both Julia and Dr. Ives. As the doctor soon determined, Webster was suffering from pleurisy (a lung inflammation) and needed to rest.

On Friday night, Eliza slept in the study with her father, giving him medicine every half hour to treat his constant coughing. The next morning at eight, Eliza sent a note to her husband, Henry Jones: “Our solicitude for dear father is very
great
. He is
very sick
. Dr. Ives tells us frankly his apprehensions. . . . It was the first time he had permitted any of the family to be with him at night—so accustomed is he to do every thing for himself.”

On Sunday, May 28, the entire family gathered around Webster, with William and Emily Ellsworth arriving from Hartford and his son, William, returning from Manhattan where he had been away on business. Moses Stuart, Webster’s spiritual father, who happened to be in New Haven from Andover, also paid a visit. To Stuart, Webster declared, “I have confidence in God. I know in whom I have trusted. I am wholly submissive.”

At ten minutes before eight, Webster breathed a final sigh.

Two hours later, Eliza wrote another letter to her husband, “All is over. Father, dear father, has gone to rest. . . . He said his work was
done,
and he was
ready
.”

A year after Webster’s death, the Amherst publisher J. S. and C. Adams published his final work,
An American Dictionary of the English Language, containing the whole vocabulary of the quarto, with corrections
. (A copy of this lexicon soon made it into the hands of a teenage Emily Dickinson, who later called it her “only companion.”) This update of the 1841 edition of his “great book,” completed by William, featured fifteen pages of new addenda, including “aerodynamics,” “agronomy” and “puritanically.” Though the octogenarian had soured on American politics, he never lost his passion for defining with his characteristic precision American English. For this task, the cantankerous, driven and indomitable New Englander had always been ideally suited. And nobody, before or since, has ever done it any better.

A
t first, there’s this moment of anxiety when you realize that you’re actually writing the dictionary. It’s very intimidating,” says Stephen J. Perrault, the director of defining at Merriam-Webster, Inc. Despite three decades of experience and the authority conveyed by his own imposing title, the wiry and soft-spoken wordsmith admits, “You never quite get over it.”

This modern-day Noah Webster supervises forty full-time lexicographers at the Springfield, Massachusetts-based company, which bought the rights to the Connecticut Yankee’s words shortly after his death in 1843. Started by the brothers George and Charles Merriam in 1831, the G. & C. Merriam Company, as the firm was originally known, released its first
American Dictionary
in 1847. This revision of Webster’s 1841 dictionary, compiled by his son-in-law Chauncey Goodrich, cost just six dollars. Sales were robust, and the Webster family would reap more than $250,000 in royalties. In 1859, under Goodrich’s editorship, the firm published another edition, which featured pictorial illustrations and a section on synonyms.

That same year, Dr. C. A. Mahn was brought over from Berlin to clean up Webster’s fanciful etymologies. Published in 1864, “the Webster-Mahn,” as the first contemporary-looking
Webster’s
was commonly called, was edited by Yale philosophy professor Noah Porter. This was the first edition to rely on a team of lexicographers; among the distinguished contributors was William C. Minor, then a New Havenite who had just finished his surgery training at Yale Medical School. In his preface, Porter praised Dr. Minor, who had worked primarily on terms pertaining to natural history and geology, for his “great ability and zeal.” As readers familiar with Simon Winchester’s compelling narrative,
The Professor and the Madman,
know, Dr. Minor would later send James Murray thousands of quotations from his cell in England’s Broadmoor insane asylum. (Thus, as Winchester neglects to mention, the man who did so much to shape the
Oxford English Dictionary
actually received his training in lexicography from Porter.) Later a Yale president, Porter also edited the 1890 revision,
Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language—
the word “American” would no longer appear in the title of the unabridged—which contained 175,000 entries, one and a half times as many as in the previous edition.

When the Merriams’ copyright ran out in 1889, other companies began slapping the name “Webster” on the cover of their dictionaries. Today, “Webster’s” is a virtual synonym for a dictionary of American English. However, according to a district court ruling nearly a century ago, all publishers except Merriam-Webster—as the company has been called since 1982—must add the disclaimer, “This dictionary is not published by the original publishers of Webster’s dictionary or their successors.”

William Chester Minor (1834-1920), the most famous of the thousands of volunteers who gathered the OED’s illustrative quotations, was no amateur lexicographer, as historians have long assumed. In fact, two decades before he began working on the OED, Minor was paid $500 to define a wide range of scientific and medical terms for
Webster’s
. While James Murray was greatly impressed by Minor’s skills as a lexicographer—the editor would often ask the Broadmoor mental patient to review his complete notes for a given word—the eminent American naturalist and wordsmith Samuel Haldeman had grave doubts. In 1865, the professor complained to the publishers of
Webster’s
that the natural history section was the weakest part of the book and that Dr. Minor was incompetent.

The headquarters of Merriam-Webster in downtown Springfield—just a stone’s throw from the courthouse where Daniel Shays waged his rebellion a little more than two centuries ago—is a shrine to Noah Webster, Jr. When erecting the building shortly before World War II, its president selected its address—47 Federal Street—in order to pay homage to its first edition of
Webster’s
a century earlier. The lobby is filled with glass cases containing original dictionary pages in Webster’s hand, as well as early editions of his books, including his 1806 “compend.” Sitting in a conference room, the only area where words are permitted to be uttered in the otherwise phoneless workplace, the shy Perrault opens up about his craft. Echoing the hypercritical Webster, Perrault defines a good definition by “the absence of error. It can’t be too broad or too narrow. And it doesn’t strike you as wrong or stupid.” As an example of a clunker, he brings up the case of “fish stick,” which
Webster’s
once defined as “a stick of fish” before moving on to the current “small, elongated, breaded filet of fish.” That entry broke a cardinal rule, which forbids using a related word in a definition. “Clarity is my obsession,” Perrault adds, citing the credo of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Everything that can be said can be said clearly.” The lexicographer is rarely entirely satisfied with his own work: “The perfect definition is hard to come by. There are almost always shortcomings. But every once in a while, I jump up on my desk because I sense that I got it exactly right.”

Like his recent predecessors in Springfield, Perrault adheres to Noah Webster’s firm conviction that lexicographers should codify the language that people actually use. While this position is no longer hotly contested, that was not the case a generation ago. Upon its release in 1961,
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged,
edited by Philip Gove, met with fierce opposition. In sharp contrast to Webster’s
Second International Edition
of 1934, “W3,” as it is known in the trade, assumed that correctness rests upon usage. Just as Noah Webster once faced a barrage of assaults for his purported attempt to destabilize the cosmic order with his “innovations,” so, too, did Gove. In a review scattered over twenty-five pages in the March 10, 1962 edition of
The New Yorker,
Dwight Macdonald could hardly contain his outrage: