The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (7 page)

The split between Webster’s morally upright public self and his pleasure-seeking private self would continue until his marriage in 1789. For the next decade, as he would acknowledge in the diary that he began keeping in 1784, he would divide his “time between the Ladies and books.” But Webster would also at times feel ashamed of his keen interest in attractive young women. In a letter to Buckminster in 1779, he described his resolution to make himself “master of every evil passion and propensity.”

Once married, Webster would stay faithful to his wife, but his youthful adventures would continue to haunt him. A year after his wedding, when endowing a Yale prize to the author of the best English composition, as judged by the faculty, he specifically excluded any person with a “well founded reputation of having been guilty of seduction.” By thus sanctioning Yale essay writers of the future, Webster may well have been trying to atone for what he perceived to be his own wayward past. Likewise, thirty years later, Webster planned to compile an anthology of expurgated English poetry. Though he would abandon this project, he continued to feel that many canonical writers were too smutty. “It is mortifying,” he wrote in 1823, “that [the seventeenth-century poet John] Dryden . . . should . . . regale the libidinous with his translations of Theocritus and Lucretius which I read when at college and which are vade mecums for a brothel.” Just as Webster the sophomore had warned, Webster the old man would be tinged with sorrow about his adolescent flirtations with pleasure.

 

 

IN AUGUST 1776, Yale suddenly dismissed its students because a typhoid epidemic had swept over New Haven. And a few weeks after taking another trip back home with his father and the family horse, Webster found himself traveling once again. This time, there were two Websters and two horses, and Noah’s companion was not his father but his older brother, Abraham, then nearly twenty-five. Abraham had to return to his army company, stationed in Skenesborough (today Whitehall), a small town on the eastern edge of New York State near the Vermont border. Noah needed to trail along so that he could bring his brother’s horse back to the West Division. For the first time, the seventeen-year-old Noah would observe war from close range.

His brother’s harsh existence represented the road Noah had not taken. Without a Yale degree, Abraham had no choice but to become a farmer. In 1774, Abraham moved into his own house in the West Division, but with the price of land shooting up, Noah Sr. could manage to provide his eldest son with only half an acre. The following year, Abraham married Rachel Merrill. But in January 1776, tragedy struck. On the nineteenth, Rachel died in childbirth; a week later, their son, also named Abraham, was dead as well. In early February, the despondent Abraham attempted to bury his grief in a noble cause, signing up with Captain John Stevens’ company in the Continental army, a decision that would soon bring on further hardship. For the rest of his life, Abraham, who would eventually settle on a farm in New York State, would struggle with loss, poverty and despair.

When Noah first saw his brother that summer, Abraham had just escaped a close brush with death. He had spent the spring in Quebec, where he had joined Benedict Arnold’s forces. Initially, Abraham met with few difficulties. As he wrote Noah back on April 14, “I am through Goodness of God in good health, and tolerably contented with a soldier’s life.” Abraham was at first more anxious about the welfare of his family back home than about himself. Fiercely religious, he managed to keep calm by attending local church services, even though in Connecticut he had never been exposed to Catholicism. But in May, Abraham was captured by the enemy and thrown into a prison on the outskirts of Montreal. Paradoxically, he would then be saved by an illness that almost killed him. Concerned about the spread of the smallpox that Abraham had contracted, the British were forced to release him. Yet for a while, Abraham still feared for his life. As Noah later recalled, “It seemed to him his flesh would leave his bones.” But after finding refuge in the cabin of a French woman who could offer him nothing but milk, Abraham somehow summoned up the strength to make it back to the West Division.

Now that he had regained his health, Abraham was ready to go back into battle.

From Hartford, the brothers rode to Bennington, Vermont, and then crossed over into forest land in New York State. Over the last twelve miles of their journey to Skenesborough—the New York town between Lake George and Lake Champlain—the Websters had to rely on marked trees as their guide.

After depositing Abraham with his unit, Webster faced a new round of travails. He needed to find a place to lay his head. Fortunately, he ran into Ashbel Wells, a classmate from his West Division schooldays, then serving in the army. He slept one night in Wells’ tent. But Webster could hardly rest easy, as Wells had to fill the tent with smoke to fight off swarms of mosquitoes. The next night, Webster spent on a boat in South Bay, an inlet on the western shore of Lake Champlain. Webster then headed off to Mount Independence, where the army had built a fort. But he soon noticed that about half of the soldiers were suffering from dysentery. Terrified about having to breathe infected air, Webster made his way back to the Vermont forest, which was lined with tall pines and hemlocks. He hunkered down the following night on the floor of a farmhouse owned by a hospitable young stranger.

The next morning, Webster was greatly relieved to reach Wallingford, a Vermont town which had been settled just three years earlier by a former Connecticut pastor, Abraham Jackson, Sr. There Webster stayed with his aunt Jerusha—Mercy Steele’s youngest sister—and her husband Abraham Jackson, Jr., the son of the venerable Deacon Jackson. The floor of the Jacksons’ log cabin was nothing but bare earth sprinkled with a few sticks, and the walls were mud-plastered. The crude windows were placed high up so as to prevent wolves, bears or any other wild animals from jumping inside. But when compared with his previous Vermont rest stops, Webster’s new quarters were sumptuous. “Here I was very comfortable,” he would later write.

Though Jerusha Jackson was then busy raising several young children and in poor health, she accompanied Webster all the way back to Hartford, riding one of the horses herself. She would die of consumption not long afterward.

 

 

IF YALE WAS IN A STATE of disarray when Webster first set foot in New Haven, it was literally crumbling when he came back to start his junior year. By the fall of 1776, two-thirds of the Old College had been torn down, leaving just its south end with the dining hall and kitchen. Now that the New College was the only dormitory, up to four students could be piled on top of one another in one of its dingy rooms. And that year, with wood in short supply, the undergraduates began relying on straw, causing some fire damage to their residence. By the beginning of December, with food prices also soaring, the campus was no longer inhabitable. On December 10, President Daggett had to call off classes because, as Webster later reported, “the steward . . . could not procure enough for the students to eat.” Due to the various hardships caused by the war, Webster and his classmates would be denied the full benefits of a Yale education. “The advantages then enjoyed by the students, during the four years of college life,” Webster would recall in his 1832 memoir, “were much inferior to those enjoyed before and since the Revolution, in the same institution.”

Webster returned to Yale at the end of the extended winter break in early January 1777, but did not stay long. With the British threatening to attack New Haven, the college was forced to take drastic action. On March 29, Daggett shut Yale down. He then promptly resigned. At a meeting on April 1, the Yale Corporation decreed, “That in the opinion of this board, it is necessary to provide some other place or places, where the classes may reside under their respective tutors until God in His kind providence shall open a door for their return to this fixed and ancient seat of learning.” Webster returned to his father’s house, where he was briefly sidelined by smallpox, a disease that was then blanketing New England—often with lethal consequences. But he soon recovered, and in mid-May, he wrote his classmate Ichabod Wetmore about the possibility of rooming together during the summer term. Fond of Webster, Wetmore responded immediately, “Nothing can be more agreeable to me.” Wetmore then set up the arrangements in Glastonbury, where the junior class was to be relocated. Continuing his course work under Buckminster, Webster stayed in Glastonbury, which was only a few miles from Hartford, until the fall recess began on September 10.

As Webster was packing up his belongings in Glastonbury, the Yale Corporation was still deliberating about how to keep the college running during the 1777-1778 academic year. Webster liked Glastonbury and would be disappointed when they finally made their decision in early November. As he later recalled, “The senior class to which N. W. belonged was ordered to repair to New Haven, although the other classes were permitted to remain in the country. This gave offense.” But Webster ended up not having to spend much more time in the besieged New Haven. Classes didn’t start until the end of November, and were suspended between the end of February and the end of June.

 

 

AND FOR A WHILE IT LOOKED as if Webster might never make it back to New Haven for his senior year. As soon as he returned to the West Division in September 1777, he was forced to confront some terrifying news. Lieutenant General John Burgoyne, described by
The Connecticut Courant
as “the chief and director of the King of Great Britain’s band of thieves, robbers, cut-throats . . . and murderers” was on the march. In Canada, Burgoyne had been squaring off against the American general Horatio Gates and, in early July, had taken Fort Ticonderoga. Coming down from Lake Champlain, Burgoyne’s force of 7,700 troops was now plundering northern New York State and Vermont. Even worse, despite Burgoyne’s protestations to the contrary, the Indians under his command were murdering and scalping American women.

Horrified by British aggression, Patriots such as Noah Webster, Sr., then fifty-five, felt compelled to enter the fray. A captain of the alarm list—the emergency forces of the local militia, consisting of men over forty-five—Noah Sr. organized a band of soldiers from the West Division to head off Burgoyne’s troops. Accompanying Noah Sr. were all three of his sons: Abraham, recently returned to Connecticut; Noah Jr.; and Charles, who had just turned fifteen. As Noah Jr. later wrote, “In the fall of the year 1777, when the British army under Gen. Burgoyne was marching toward Albany, all able-bodied men were summoned into the field. . . . I shouldered a musket and marched, a volunteer. . . . Leaving at home no person but my mother and a sister [Jerusha] to take charge of the farm.” This time around, Noah Jr. would not just be trailing along, but he, too, would be marching off to war.

In late September, the quartet of Websters, along with the other Connecticut militiamen under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Hezekiah Wyllys, reached the east bank of the Hudson River near Kingston, New York State’s new capital. The mission of the American troops was to prevent General Henry Clinton, then sailing north out of New York City (the former capital), from joining forces with Burgoyne. If the British could establish a line of posts along the Hudson, they could perhaps isolate New England from the rest of the colonies and bring a quick end to the war. The fate of the new nation hung in the balance—and so did Webster’s. As he recalled some sixty years later, “In the most critical period of the Revolutionary War . . . when the companions of my youth were sinking into the grave, I offered to hazard my life.”

As Webster scrambled to find a bed of straw to rest his head each night, Clinton’s troops continued to advance. At dusk on October 6, on the left bank of the Hudson, the 2,100 men under Clinton achieved a major military victory, overcoming American resistance at Forts Clinton and Montgomery. While almost two hundred British soldiers were either killed or wounded, the American casualties were nearly twice as high. Hearing news of this defeat, Webster was rattled. In contrast, Clinton could smell victory and sought to encourage the embattled Burgoyne. From Fort Montgomery on October 8, Clinton dashed off a quick note on tissue paper, which he wrapped in a silver bullet, “
Nous y voici
[Here we are], and nothing between us and General Gates. I sincerely hope this little success of ours will facilitate your operations.” But the Americans captured Clinton’s messenger, and after being administered an emetic, he vomited up the missive, which thus never reached its destination.

Unaware of Clinton’s success, the increasingly desperate Burgoyne, now in Saratoga, could no longer continue. In early October, Burgoyne had had to put his men on half rations. This want of provisions caused a sudden flurry of deserters. And at around noon on October 7, he had conducted a risky attack upon the Americans at Bemis Heights, a battle which was over in just a couple of hours. Benedict Arnold, wounded in the fray, had mounted a heroic charge. A worn-down Burgoyne was forced to abandon hundreds of sick and wounded soldiers in the field. Surrounded, Burgoyne retreated to Saratoga, where he would soon begin negotiating his surrender with General Gates.

When he heard these developments, Webster was greatly relieved. But just as he started to relax, he had to witness a frightening barrage of British terror from across the Hudson. With Burgoyne defeated, Clinton decided to sail back to New York City. To distract the enemy, he assigned Major General John Vaughan and his seventeen hundred troops the task of burning down Kingston. Calling the capital “a nursery for almost every villain in the country,” Vaughan torched nearly all three hundred of its homes on October 16. This humiliating defeat turned Kingston into an ash heap. (New York would soon have to move its capital fifty miles further north to Albany.) As the British fleet retreated, Colonel Wyllys’ regiment exchanged fire with a British sloop. The shots whisked right past the ears of Webster and his comrades, then beginning their march toward Albany.