The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (5 page)

The poet John Trumbull (1750-1831) was six years older than his cousin of the same name, the celebrated painter, who completed this portrait in 1793. In 1773, the precocious Yale tutor—he had graduated from the college at seventeen—moved to Boston, where he spent a year working in the law office of John Adams. John Trumbull returned to New Haven during Webster’s freshman year.

And pre-Revolutionary War Yale wasn’t exactly a hotbed of the En-lightenment. Less intellectually demanding than its British or Scottish counterparts such as the universities at Oxford or Edinburgh, the college resembled a modern-day preparatory school. The emphasis was on giving students a grounding in the classical languages (called “tongues”) rather than on exhorting them to engage in probing scholarship. Freshman year focused on schoolboy Latin (Virgil’s
Aeneid
and Cicero’s
Orations
) and Greek (
The New Testament
). Sophomore and junior year consisted of more classical literature along with a smattering of geography, algebra, logic and natural philosophy. The seniors, in contrast, took courses in metaphysics and ethics, taught by the president, in which they read such cornerstones of Western philosophy as John Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
. For Webster, completing the requirements for his Yale degree would signify not that he was a learned man, but that he had acquired the necessary tools to become one.

Yale in Webster’s day was hierarchical. The man at the left wearing a black robe and a cocked hat is a professor, while the hatless figures dressed in plain clothes are freshmen.

Yale students grumbled about the food, which they washed down with cider served in pewter cans, since the administration felt they could not be trusted with glass. For the midday dinner, the commons fare typically started with “Injun pudding”—cornmeal and broth—followed by a few scraps of beef or chicken on a bone along with a couple of potatoes and some cabbage. Transforming the discarded bones into hair-raising projectiles, Webster and his classmates had their share of food fights—both with one another and with the faculty, who ate on a raised platform so that they could watch their charges’ every move. Served at five, supper was a lighter but less objectionable meal—often just brown bread and milk. Students could find some supplemental nourishment at the buttery, located in a corner room on the ground floor of the New College. Manned by a butler, a recent college graduate, it sold primarily fruit and baked goods. And to discourage students from bringing hard liquor into their rooms, this cozy gathering place also carried beer and cider.

But to curb unruly behavior, the faculty relied much less on carrots than on sticks. Traditionally, the punishment of degradation, which reduced the student’s class ranking, had been a favored tool. However, a decade before Webster’s arrival, the administration began organizing the class lists, which determined seating and various perks, alphabetically rather than by social position. After ending this aristocratic arrangement, which had given the sons of governors and ministers preferential treatment, the faculty began levying fines for standard college pranks. While etching one’s name on the shingles on top of the New College could exact a toll between fourpence and one shilling and sixpence, excessive drinking of spiced wine could cost from two to five shillings. Likewise, the “crime” of traveling to New Haven on the Sabbath could leave a student out twenty pence. And on occasion, physical punishment was still used to keep order. For example, a few years before Webster’s arrival, Yale’s instructors decided that the freshman who “was catched in the act of ringing the bell atop the Old College at 9pm shall have his ears boxed by the president.” Freshmen, whom upperclassmen treated as errand boys, also had to worry about excessive discipline from seniors, assigned the task of teaching them the “laws, usages and customs of the college.”

Though Webster came from a family with a prestigious pedigree, he was a notch behind most of his school chums socially. And he initially felt some embarrassment about his father’s relative lack of sophistication and wealth. In contrast to Webster, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., the Litchfield native who would later replace Alexander Hamilton as secretary of the treasury, didn’t have to worry about paying his tuition each semester. Just as the fourteen-year-old Wolcott arrived in New Haven, his father, Oliver Wolcott, Sr., himself a Yale graduate, headed off to the Continental Congress as a Connecticut delegate. Of Wolcott Jr., who, like both his father and grandfather, would do a stint as the state’s governor, Webster would later write, “He was in college a good scholar, though not brilliant. He possessed the firmness and strong reasoning powers of the Wolcott family, but with some eccentricities in reasoning.” Other prominent members of the class of 1778 included Josiah Meigs, son of Return Meigs, Sr., a major in the Continental army, who became a professor of natural philosophy at Yale and president of the University of Georgia; Zephaniah Swift, a future chief justice of Connecticut; Uriah Tracy, who would serve as a Connecticut senator; and Abraham Bishop, later one of New Haven’s richest men.

For the first time, Webster had companions with whom he could share his thoughts and experiences. Webster’s best friend at Yale was Joel Barlow, whose deprived childhood had also resulted in a burning literary ambition. As Barlow wrote of his harsh early life on a farm in nearby Redding:

The unexpected death of his father in late adolescence left Barlow with an inheritance of a hundred pounds, just enough money to attend Yale. Four years older than Webster, the dashing Barlow took his fellow farmboy under his wing. Following Barlow’s lead, Webster would gain entry to a lively social circle in New Haven, which would include alluring representatives of the fairer sex. In contrast to Webster, Barlow had a keen sense of humor. During his stretch in the Continental army after Yale, in which he served along with the author of “The Progress of Dulness,” Barlow would quip, “Trumbull grows red and fat, and I black and handsome.”

Webster and Barlow were among the thirty-three members of the class of 1778 who joined the Brothers in Unity, a literary society. Its free-lending library had 163 books, which, as its leaders boasted, was a dozen more than could be found in the confines of its older rival, the Linonian Society. A center for debate and intellectual exchange, the Brothers in Unity, founded in 1768, also spiced up campus life every spring with dramatic performances, which had long been considered the devil’s work in Puritan New England. (In fact, until the late 1760s, Yale students were fined three shillings for taking part in a play and one shilling for just attending.) Despite concerns from one Yale faculty member that dramas were “calculated only to warm the imagination,” the upstart Brothers in Unity—a forerunner to Yale’s present-day secret society, Skull and Bones—staged them in the chapel. During Webster’s junior year, the group mounted the comedy
The West Indian
by Richard Cumberland. Webster’s commonplace book—the notebook he began keeping at Yale, which features his favorite passages from literary works—includes dialogue from this play, and Webster presumably took part in this production. While showing occasional interest in the dramatic arts, Webster never strayed too far from the antitheater bias that reigned supreme in pre-Revolutionary New England. In 1823, he wrote, “Very few plays are, however, free from sentiments which are offensive to moral purity.” And tragicomedy and opera he liked even less, labeling them “the inferior species of drama” in his 1828 dictionary.

When Webster matriculated, Yale housed one hundred students. Over the next few years, enrollment would expand by more than thirty percent, as students flocked to colleges to avoid the draft, just as they would during the Vietnam War almost two centuries later. In the mid-1770s, the entire faculty consisted of the president, Naphtali Daggett, who doubled as a professor of divinity; Nathan Strong, a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy; and four tutors, one for each class. Appointed as president
pro tempore
back in 1766, the overweight and clumsy Daggett, nicknamed “Old Tunker” by the students whom he failed to inspire, wasn’t supposed to have remained on the job as long as he did. Daggett’s distinguishing characteristic, which he shared with many clergymen of his day, was a biting sense of humor. When addressed by his official title, Daggett, who, like the rest of the faculty, walked around campus in a black robe, white wig and high-cocked hat, would retort, “But did you ever hear of a President
pro aeternitate
[for eternity]?” Among the tutors were Timothy Dwight, an accomplished poet and scholar, who would guide the class of 1777, and Joseph Buckminster, a renowned classicist, who, as the most recent Yale grad on the faculty, was assigned Webster’s freshman class. Dwight and Buckminster, who would readily lapse into Latin quotation, would each have an immense influence on the intellectual development of the West Division farmboy.

Unfortunately, like Webster’s hometown instructor, Nathan Perkins, both Dwight and Buckminster were tormented scholars who would wage intense internal battles for their own sanity. For the generation that had never learned how to play as boys and would come of age during the late eighteenth century, such emotional crises seemed to be a standard rite of passage. While Dwight had recovered from a nearly fatal attack of anorexia by the time Webster got to know him, Buckminster descended into despair right before his eyes. His tutor’s bout with incapacitating depression would leave Webster shaken in his senior year. While Yale’s professors would dazzle Webster with their intellectual prowess, they were too self-absorbed to provide much personal guidance. Upon graduation, when Webster became anxious about his own uncertain future, he would have no one to whom he could turn; and he, too, would veer toward a breakdown.

Webster and Barlow both learned versification from the precocious Timothy Dwight, a scion of one of New England’s most illustrious families—Thomas Hooker was his great-great-grandfather and the pastor Jonathan Edwards his grandfather—who had taught himself Latin at the age of six and had graduated from Yale at seventeen in 1769. Appointed a tutor in 1771, Dwight considered employment the best antidote to melancholy, and he prided himself on studying fourteen hours a day and sleeping only four hours each night. A couple of years later, he suddenly became concerned that too much food was dulling his mind. He began to reduce his intake to twelve mouthfuls at each meal; after six months of this experiment, he upped the ante, cutting out all meat and eating only vegetables—primarily, potatoes. By the summer of 1774, Dwight was down to ninety-five pounds, and his father whisked him home to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he was expected to die. But under doctor’s orders to avoid all study and to drink a bottle of Madeira per day, Dwight slowly regained his health over the next few months.

After his return to New Haven, Dwight would complete his epic, “The Conquest of Canaan,” a biblical allegory in eleven books that recounted how Connecticut freed itself from British rule. In response, the eighteen-year-old Webster—who, like Barlow, then thought of himself as a poet destined for literary immortality—wrote “To the Author of the Conquest of Canaan,” one of the few surviving examples of his youthful verses. Webster was often obsequious toward authority figures, but was particularly deferential to the instructor, who maintained a lifelong love affair with power, later earning sobriquets such as “the Pope” and “his Loftiness.” Comparing Dwight to the giants Homer, Virgil and Milton, Webster harped on his teacher’s likely impact on succeeding generations:

Webster would eventually realize that Dwight’s epic was too bombastic to have much of a shelf-life. A decade later, when sending a copy to George Washington, to whom Dwight had dedicated the poem, Webster alluded to the “faults . . . found in this performance.”

Dwight’s valedictory address, given to Yale’s senior class in a private graduation ceremony on July 25, 1776, moved Webster deeply. Though America was officially only three weeks old, Dwight was convinced that “the greatest empire the hand of time ever raised up to view” already had a distinct identity. After describing the vast richness of the North American continent—its abundant forests, fields and mountains—Dwight homed in on the remarkable unity among Americans: “I proceed then to observe that this continent is inhabited by a people, who have the same religion, the same manners, the same interests, the same language and the same essential forms and principles of civil government. This is an event, which, since the building of Babel, ’till the present time, the sun never saw.” From Dwight, Webster first began to appreciate how a shared culture could help Americans overcome their ethnic divisions and cement their national ties. Webster would dedicate his life to meeting Dwight’s injunction to Yale men at the end of his address to “inform yourselves with every species of useful knowledge. Remember that you are to act for the empire of America, and for a long succession of ages.” Later, when he became an author and editor, Webster would republish time and time again Dwight’s 1776 speech; excerpts appeared both in the first issue of his literary magazine in 1788 and in the 1835 version of his reader for schoolchildren.