The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (6 page)

Ever since first meeting Dwight during their freshman year, Webster, Barlow and the rest of the class of 1778 were all convinced that he would evolve into an American hero. So enamored were they of Dwight that in September 1777, they petitioned the administration to have him replace Buckminster as their tutor for their final year. The plan fell through, and the next month, the Continental Congress came calling, appointing Dwight chaplain for the Connecticut brigade headed by General Samuel Parsons. In 1795, Dwight would return to Yale as president.

Another reason that Webster’s class preferred Dwight over Buckminster is that their tutor’s soul was slowly coming undone. Buckminster’s distress was partly rooted in a constitutional depression, which would plague him for the rest of his life. He was also racked by a deep sense of his own sinfulness. During his stint as a Yale tutor, Buckminster would traipse around New England, giving dozens of fast-day sermons, in which he gave voice to his obsession with his own personal failings. “Sin is an abominable thing,” the pastor intoned, “which God’s soul hates and it is no less offensive in his children than in others. Was there no such thing as sin in the world, suffering would be a stranger.” Buckminster’s spiritual affliction was also partly related to matters of the flesh. In early 1778, he became engaged to the beautiful Elizabeth Whitman, the daughter of Elnathan Whitman, the Hartford pastor who had preached at Perkins’ ordination—a romance which he sealed with a ring of amethyst set in diamonds. However, Elizabeth, an aspiring poet, was tiring of her suitor’s depression and hypochondria and ended the courtship. She soon changed her mind, but Buckminster, having assumed a position as a pastor in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that spring, would not have her back. In the year after his Yale graduation, Webster would continue to socialize with Whitman, by then smitten with Joel Barlow who, as she noted, put her “in mind of Buckminster.”

During the breakdown at the end of his Yale career, Buckminster, who didn’t fully appreciate the impact of his instability on others, leaned on his students for emotional support—and they felt that they had no choice but to provide it. A few months after his move, the pastor wrote to Webster, his pet: “The long acquaintance I have had with your class, the many favors I have received from them, the particular tenderness and respect with which most of them have treated me, joined to the peculiar share of genius and merit with which as a class, they were distinguished, have begotten and cherished such feelings in me as time can never totally remove and as I shall never feel for any other members of society.”

Buckminster’s assessment of his students’ intellectual prowess would be echoed by historians, who would call Webster’s class Yale’s most distinguished until the Civil War. And of the class of 1778, Webster would be the most celebrated. In 1823, he received an honorary doctorate of laws from his alma mater, which, a century later, placed his statue atop Harkness Tower along with seven other “Yale worthies,” such as its founder, Elihu Yale, and the novelist James Fenimore Cooper.

 

 

AMERICA’S STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE would shape every aspect of Webster’s Yale career. With cataclysmic national events swirling around them, Webster and his classmates lived in a constant state of high anxiety. As Joel Barlow wrote to his mother their freshman year, “The students are sensibly affected by the unhappy situation of public affairs, which is a great hindrance to their studies.” In the fall of 1774, just as Webster was acclimating himself to New Haven, the First Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia. Before adjourning at the end of October, the delegates had imposed a boycott on the importation of all British goods, which was slated to go into effect by December 1. That winter, Yale’s student body, composed mostly of Patriots, did its part, ceasing its consumption of British tea.

By early 1775, the drums of war could already be heard in New Haven. In February, the undergraduates formed their own militia that began practicing and marching on the Green; so, too, did the Second Company of the Governor’s Foot Guard, a sixty-man unit of New Havenites headed by Captain Benedict Arnold, then a local pharmacist and merchant. In March, a Yale senior reported to Nathan Hale, the 1773 Yale graduate who would be executed as America’s first spy the following year, that “the Military Art just begins to dawn in the generous breasts of the Sons of Yale. . . . College Yard constantly sounds with
poise your firelock, cock your firelock, etc
.”

The war’s first skirmish in April caused a near frenzy among Yale students. Though the “shot heard round the world” by the farmers on Concord’s North Bridge took two days to reach New Haven, its impact was dramatic. On Friday, April 21, sophomore Ebenezer Fitch, later the first president of Williams College, wrote in his diary, “Today tidings of the battle of Lexington . . . filled the country with alarm and rendered it impossible for us to pursue our studies.” That same afternoon, a handful of Yale upperclassmen joined the graying, thirty-four-year-old Benedict Arnold as he raided New Haven’s powderhouse to seize the British ammunition held there. Arnold’s cadets then dashed off to Boston to “assist their bleeding countrymen,” as the
New York Journal
reported. The following day—two weeks before spring break was supposed to begin—classes were halted. Students didn’t return to New Haven until the end of May. This was to be the first of many war-induced interruptions in Webster’s Yale education.

The backdrop of war wreaked havoc upon Webster’s psyche. Whatever tendency he had toward melancholy was greatly exacerbated. With the British ensconced in nearby New York City after the Battle of Long Island in the summer of 1776, the threat of a direct attack loomed large. In fact, a year after Webster’s graduation, some three thousand British forces did descend on New Haven, burning and destroying property and mortally wounding “Old Tunker.” Feelings of dread, coupled with thoughts of death and dying, would be frequent companions for Webster and his college chums. Elijah Backus, a member of the class of 1777, wrote the year of his graduation:

To manage his dark moods and anxiety, Webster would disconnect from his innermost thoughts—a coping strategy he had begun in childhood and would use for the rest of his life. This man of words never cared much for introspection. Webster would always prefer doing—whether it be rushing off to war or compiling a massive reference work—to feeling.

 

 

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 1775, was a radiant morning in New Haven, and Webster, finishing up his freshman year, was up at the crack of dawn in his room at the New College. At the time, Yale was also in session during the humid New Haven summers. Webster’s morning routine had him waking up at 5:30 a.m., then heading over to the chapel for an hour and a half of prayers and recitations. And afterward, when the butler rang the chapel bell as he did before every meal, Webster would sit down for his usual breakfast of beer and bread. But today would be different. A special guest was in town, and Webster had to rush off to another kind of early morning engagement, one which required that he don his long coat, knee breeches and cocked hat. Grabbing both his flute and flint-lock musket, Webster marched down College Street toward the Beers Tavern on Chapel Street, just a few hundred yards away.

Isaac Beers’ elegant hostelry, located in a wing of his spacious home, was a center of New Haven’s cultural life. A bibliophile, Beers ran the largest imported-book shop in North America on the College Street side of the ground floor, where students would congregate and talk about ideas. He also kept a general store, selling everything from pewter to balloon hats. Ever the conversationalist, Beers would personally entertain his distinguished out-of-town guests such as John Adams and other delegates to the Continental Congress. His current guest of honor was George Washington, who just ten days earlier had been appointed general and commander-in-chief of the Continental army. On June 23, Washington had left Philadelphia accompanied by his chief aides, Major General Charles Lee and Major Thomas Mifflin; on the evening of the twenty-eighth, they had all reached Beers’ inn. On the following morning, Washington and his entourage would be setting out for Cambridge, where they were to be stationed. But before leaving town, Washington and Lee had a promise to keep. As soldiers-in-residence at Yale, they had agreed to inspect the college’s troops.

Arriving in front of the Beers Tavern, Webster fell in line with his schoolmates. Soon, with Webster playing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on his flute, the entire Yale militia—a contingent of nearly a hundred students, forty of whom would later serve in the war—began marching in unison. Smiling, Washington looked over at the students and expressed his approval at the precision with which they carried out these military exercises.

And then up College Street came two other military units. One was a company of Minutemen and the other was the illustrious Second Company of the Governor’s Foot Guard, led by Lieutenant Hezekiah Sabin, Jr., just back from Boston where he had been serving under Captain Benedict Arnold. Widely considered the best-equipped soldiers in the whole Continental army, the Second Company was also the best dressed. Despite the heat, Sabin and his men wore their complete uniforms, consisting of white breeches and vests along with scarlet coats, topped off with collars of buff. And on their heads sat fur headdresses.

But these three groups of soldiers weren’t the only ones to escort Washington and Lee out of town. Suddenly, a throng of local residents eager to express their support for the war effort started trailing them, too. As New Haven’s weekly paper,
The Connecticut Journal,
later described this procession, Washington “set out for the provincial camp near Boston attended by great numbers of inhabitants of the town. . . . by two companies dress’d in their uniforms and by a company of young gentlemen belonging to the seminary of this place, who made a very handsome appearance.”

For the rest of his life, Webster would remain immensely proud of his presence at the Beers Tavern that fateful day, which forever linked him with America’s resolve to take up arms against British tyranny. Sixty-five years later, in a July Fourth oration before a Sunday school class in New Haven, he spoke of that June morning in 1775 when “a company of students of Yale College” escorted Washington out of New Haven to the nearby Neck Bridge. Webster concluded this account, which fails to mention that the Yale militia was just one part of the cavalcade, with the line, “It fell to my humble lot to lead this company with music.” But in fact, Webster never was at the head of the pack. The motivation for this embellishment remains unclear. While Webster’s first biographer attributed it to “a pardonable little vanity,” his granddaughter Emily Ford countered that Webster “inserted his own ‘humble’ share in the scene to make it more real to his auditors.”

 

 

IT WAS FRIDAY, MAY 3, 1776, and it was sophomore Noah Webster’s turn to step up to the podium. Public speaking then formed a key part of a Yale education, and the chapel galleries contained three raised platforms precisely because its undergraduates were expected to engage in frequent disputing and declaiming. While disputations (debates between students) could be done in either Latin or English, declamations (short speeches) could be given in either of those languages or in Greek or Hebrew (no modern languages were yet taught). Every Tuesday and Friday, eight students were chosen to address declamations to the faculty, and Webster’s number had come up.

Webster’s Latin speech, which he delivered from memory, focused on the relationship between youth and old age. Looking over at Buckminster, Webster began in his high-pitched voice: “We have all the arguments that it is necessary to use in proving that a well spent youth prepares for a happy old age. Young men of tender years who are averse to serious matters and those which pertain to the mind as if they were beyond all law are borne headlong to the enjoyment of passions and the gratification of earthly desires.” Webster was arguing that a youth devoted to rigorous intellectual labors rather than sensual experience would pave the way for a peaceful adult life. He also made the case for the corollary, contending that the pursuit of pleasure in adolescence could later lead to regret and unhappiness. “But what foolishness, what madness it is,” he declared, “to purchase youthful pleasure with the sorrow of Old Age!”

Though Buckminster and the other tutors were typically bowled over by Webster’s ingenious compositions, not so on this occasion. His attempt to impress the faculty with his eloquence had come up short. Buckminster would later characterize his star pupil’s effort that day as “second-rank.”

Webster’s remarks were uninspired because he himself didn’t truly believe them. Unbeknownst to Buckminster, Webster had not been speaking from the heart. Over the past two years, a funny thing had happened to the Congregationalist farmboy; he had discovered the joy of letting go of his inhibitions.

Under the influence of the suave Barlow, Webster had been circulating with the fast crowd that chased women, drank and swore. And on account of this free-spirited behavior, he was the envy of his classmates. As the shy Zephaniah Swift, who was a year younger, noted in a letter written early in their junior year: “it appears that to be solely a man of Letters or a man of the world is not sufficient, for one pleases the learned, and the other the unlearned. . . . Your opportunities and the time you spend with the Ladies will enable you to reach both, but as for myself I fear I shall reach neither.” Few documents remain from Webster’s college years, so it’s hard to determine exactly what pleasures he indulged in at Yale. However, at the age of fifty, in a piece published in a religious periodical, Webster would make some general allusions to these youthful indiscretions: “Being educated in a religious family under pious parents, I had in early life some religious impressions, but being too young to understand fully the doctrines of the Christian religion and falling into vicious company at college, I lost those impressions and contracted a habit of using profane language.”