The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (48 page)

I also immersed myself in Webster’s own published words. As the first Webster biographer of the digital age, I could do much of this reading on my own laptop. The online resource The Archive of Americana, now features scanned copies of most American newspapers between 1690 and 1922. By searching Webster’s name, I was able to find countless newspaper articles by and about this prolific journalist, including some not mentioned in the six-hundred-page tome
A Bibliography of the Writings of Noah Webster,
edited by Edwin H. Carpenter (New York, 1958). Likewise, the early American imprints section of this database includes the full text of many of Webster’s books and speeches, such as his various Independence Day orations and his 1806 “compend.” (I was also able to download other key works of the era, such as the dictionaries of America’s first lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, Jr.) While this digital archive does not contain the first edition of
The American Dictionary,
that book is now available both in a free online version (
http://1828.mshaffer.com
) as well as in an inexpensive facsimile edition (Chesapeake, Virginia, 1967). All the chapter epigraphs are culled from Webster’s “great book.”

I list below some additional sources—along with a few explanatory notes—by chapter:

 

Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds.,
The Diaries of George Washington,
vol. 4, 1784-June 1786 (Charlottesville, Va., 1978).

Howard Lamar, “Revolutionary Patriot, Outspoken Federalist, Connecticut and Yale Loyalist, Abolitionist, Epidemiologist, Public School Reformer and Intellectual Nationalist” (lecture, Noah Webster’s 250th Birthday Celebration, New Haven, October 16, 2008).

Joseph Ellis,
After the Revolution: Profiles in Early American Culture
(New York, 1979), pp. 161-212.

Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,”
Journal of American History
(June 2001), pp. 129-44.

Jill Lepore,
A Is for American
(New York, 2002), pp. 3-42.

Jill Lepore’s
New Yorker
article on the two hundredth anniversary of Webster’s “compend” is reprinted as the introduction to a recent sampling from the 1828 dictionary, Arthur Schulman, ed.,
Websterisms
(New York, 2008).

Peter Martin,
Samuel Johnson: A Biography
(Cambridge, Mass., 2008).

Joshua Kendall, “Field Guide to the Obsessive-Compulsive,”
Psychology Today
(March/April 2008), pp. 43-44. This piece describes the benefits of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder for people in various professions, including home design and lexicography.

 

William Love,
Colonial History of Hartford
(Hartford, 1914).

The multivolume reference book
Annals of the American Pulpit
(New York, 1857-1869), edited by William Sprague, provides useful biographical sketches of influential pastors such as Nathan Perkins, Joseph Buckminster, Timothy Dwight and Ezra Stiles.

The Massachusetts Historical Society holds the unpublished manuscripts of a few of Joseph Buckminster’s fast-day sermons.

Elizabeth Whitman’s doomed relationship with Joseph Buckminster was the raw material for the 1797 best-selling novel
The Coquette,
by Hannah Foster.

Brooks Kelly,
Yale: A History
(New Haven, 1974).

The Laws of Yale-College in New-Haven in Connecticut, Enacted by the President and Fellows
(New Haven, 1774).

Rollin G. Osterweis,
Three Centuries of New Haven, 1638-1939
(New Haven, 1953).

Theodore Zunder,
The Early Days of Joel Barlow
(New Haven, 1934).

Theodore Zunder, “Noah Webster as a Student Orator,”
Yale Alumni Weekly
(November 19, 1926), p. 225.

Earle Havens,
Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century
(New Haven, 2001).

Moses Coit Taylor,
Three Men of Letters: George Berkeley, Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow
(New York, 1895) .

Franklin Dexter, ed.,
The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles,
vols. 2 and 3 (New York, 1901).

 

Alain C. White,
The History of the Town of Litchfield, Connecticut, 1720-1920
(Litchfield, 1920).

William Brown,
The Life of Oliver Ellsworth
(New York, 1902).

The Noah Webster House has recently published a facsimile edition—a tiny 120-page paperback with a blue cover—of Webster’s speller,
A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, Part I
(West Hartford, Conn., no date). This is a reprint of the original version released by the Hartford firm Hudson and Goodwin in 1783.

Helen Everston Smith,
Colonial Days and Ways as Gathered from Family Papers
(New York, 1900).

Joel Benton, “An Unpublished Chapter in Noah Webster’s Life. Love and the Spelling Book,”
Magazine of American History
(July 1883), pp. 52-56.

 

James Hammond Trumbull,
The Memorial History of Hartford County, 1663-1884
(Hartford, 1886).

Allen Walker Read, “The Spelling Bee: A Linguistic Institution of the American Folk,”
PMLA
(June 1941), pp. 495-512.

The June 25, 1788, letter to publisher Isaiah Thomas is held at the American Antiquarian Society, the repository of Americana founded by Thomas.

Kate Keller,
Dance and Its Music in America 1528-1789
(Hillsdale, N.Y., 2007).

 

I read George Washington’s personal copy of Webster’s
American Magazine
at the Boston Athenaeum. Washington wasn’t an underliner, and the only marks on the volume are his printed signature, “G. Washington.” Washington also stuck in a bookplate containing the family’s coat of arms and the quotation “Exitus acta probat” [The outcome justifies the deeds], a line from the Roman poet Ovid.

Webster’s words in his Baltimore speech are taken from the notes of M. I. Warren, which are held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Raphael Semmes,
Baltimore as Seen by Visitors, 1783-1860
(Baltimore, 1953).

David Franks,
The New York Directory for 1786, Illustrated with a Plan for the City, Also Changes in the Names of the Streets, Prefaced by a General Description by Noah Webster
(New York, 1905 facsimile edition).

 

Frank D. Prager, ed.
The Autobiography of John Fitch
(Philadelphia, 1976).

Massachusetts Historical Society. Collections.
The Jeremy Belknap Papers; Correspondence between Jeremy Belknap and Ebenezer Hazard, Fifth Series,
vol. 3 (Boston, 1877).

 

Allen Walker Read, “The Philological Society of New York, 1788,”
American Speech
(April 1934), pp. 131-36.

Regarding the family’s spin on Webster’s floundering legal career in the early 1790s, Chauncey Goodrich wrote in his memoir, “Mr. Webster found his business profitable and continually increasing, during his residence . . . in Hartford.” Likewise, in her biography, Emily Ford noted, “his profession . . . was interesting and fairly remunerative to him.”

 

On September 26, 1793, Webster summed up his dinner with Genet in an affidavit, which he sent to Oliver Wolcott. This document is now housed at the Connecticut Historical Society.

Bryan Waterman,
Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature
(Baltimore, 2007).

James Cronin, ed.,
The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith (1771-1798)
(Philadelphia, 1973).

Allen Clark,
Greenleaf and Law in the Federal City
(Washington, D.C., 1901).

Gary Coll, “Noah Webster Journalist, 1783-1803” (dissertation, Southern Illinois University, 1971).

Marcus Daniel,
Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy
(New York, 2009).

John Blake, “Yellow Fever in 18th Century America,”
Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine
(June 1968), pp. 673-86.

John Duffy, “Yellow Fever in the Continental United States During the Nineteenth Century,”
Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine
(June 1968), pp. 687-701.

Robert Lawson Peebles,
Language and Written Expression in Revolutionary America
(Cambridge, Eng., 1998). Chapter 2, “A Republic of Dreams,” has an illuminating discussion of Webster and his two fellow architects of “republican culture,” Benjamin Rush and Jedidiah Morse.

 

Allen Walker Read, “Noah Webster’s Project in 1801 for a History of American Newspapers,”
Journalism Quarterly
(September 1934), pp. 258-75.

Christopher Bickford, Carolyn Cooper and Sandra Rux, eds.,
Voices of the New Republic: Connecticut Towns, 1800-1832
(New Haven, 2003), vol. 1,
What They Said
.

Aldred Scott Laird, “Noah Webster as Epidemiologist,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
(March 17, 1923), pp. 755-64.

Martha Gibson, “America’s First Lexicographer: Samuel Johnson, Jr.,”
American Speech
(December 1936) pp. 283-92.

Martha Gibson, “Identifying Samuel Johnson, Jr.,”
New England Quarterly
(December 1936), pp. 688-89.

Charles Brockden Brown, “On the Scheme of an American Language,”
Monthly Magazine and American Review
(July 1800), pp. 1-4. Though Brown doesn’t mention Webster by name, he is clearly referring to his particular plan, which received wide press coverage a month earlier.

 

Kenneth Thompson, “The question of climate stability in America before 1900,”
Climatic Change
(September 1981), pp. 227-41.

Charlton Laird, “Etymology, Anglo-Saxon and Noah Webster,”
American Speech
(February 1946), pp. 3-15.

 

Fred Robinson, “Noah Webster’s ‘Synopsis of Words in Twenty Languages’ ” (unpublished manuscript, 2008). Dr. Robinson, a professor emeritus of English at Yale, has deposited this useful overview of Webster’s etymology in the Webster papers at the New York Public Library to assist researchers combing through this nearly incomprehensible work. Dr. Robinson has reworked this manuscript into the article “Noah Webster as Etymologist,”
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen
(April 2010), 167-74.

James Murray,
The Evolution of English Lexicography
(Oxford, 1900).

Jonathon Green,
Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made
(New York, 1996).

Everett Thompson, “Noah Webster and Amherst College,”
Amherst Graduates Quarterly
(August 1933), pp. 289-99.

W. S. Tyler,
History of Amherst College During Its First Half Century, 1821-1871
(Springfield, Mass., 1873).

Edward Carpenter,
The History of the Town of Amherst, Massachusetts
(Amherst, 1896).

Noah Webster, “Origin of Amherst College,”
A Collection of Papers on Political, Literary and Moral Subjects
(New York, 1843), pp. 222-54.

William Webster’s European diary is held at the New York Public Library.

Julius Ward,
The Life and Letters of James Gates Percival
(Boston, 1866).

Harry R. Warfel, ed.,
Uncollected Letters of James Gates Percival, Poet and Geologist, 1795-1856
(Gainesville, 1959).

Joseph Reed, “Noah Webster’s Debt to Samuel Johnson,”
American Speech
(May 1962), pp. 95-105.

According to the Samuel Johnson scholar, Jack Lynch of Rutgers University, charges of plagiarism have dogged nearly all one-man lexicographers. Even Robert Cawdrey, the author of the first English-language dictionary,
Table Alphabeticall
, published in 1604, was not immune. Critics were furious that Cawdrey lifted half of the head words directly from the 1596 textbook,
English Schoole-Maister
, written by Edmund Coote. (Jack Lynch, “Disgraced by Miscarriage: Four and a Half Centuries of Lexicographical Belligerence” (lecture, opening the exhibition “Everything from A to Z: The Edward J. Bloustein Dictionary Collection,” Alexander Library, New Brunswick, N.J., February 6, 2007).

 

Brooks Swett, “A Portrait of the Webster Family During the Civil War” (unpublished manuscript, 2008).

The 1855 petition filed by the family concerning Louisa Webster’s mental competence is located at the Connecticut State Library.

The author of the 1936 biography contests the scholarly consensus on Webster’s translation of the Bible, arguing that it was his “crowning achievement.” Harry Warfel, “The Centenary of Noah Webster’s Bible,”
New England Quarterly
(September 1934), pp. 578-82.

Webster intended to publish his 1840 speech commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of Connecticut’s constitution, but never did. I read a typed version of the manuscript at the Connecticut Historical Society.

 

Herbert Morton,
The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics
(New York, 1994).