The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (8 page)

That next day, Friday, October 17, would mark a watershed in the brief history of the new nation. As one Saratoga-based Connecticut soldier recorded in his journal, “The hand of providence worked wonderfully in favour of America this day . . . . At three o’clock [Burgoyne and his army] marches through our army . . . with a guard for Boston.” Within a few hours, Webster received word. He later recalled, “Before the regiment reached Albany, it was met by an express upon a full gallup brandishing a drawn sword exclaiming as he passed the regiment, ‘Burgoyne is taken, Burgoyne is taken!’ ” With “the chief cut-throat” subdued, the militiamen were no longer needed, and Webster returned home. America’s first major victory would soon convince France to join the fight against the British. Keenly aware that his brief tour of duty had helped to turn the tide of the war, the adult Webster would be moved to tears whenever he reminisced about the courier’s shouts. On his list of the forty most “remarkable events” in America’s history, which he appended to the back of his speller, Webster would include both the Battle at Bemis Heights and Burgoyne’s surrender.

 

 

AT THREE THIRTY ON THE AFTERNOON of Thursday, July 23, 1778, the College Chapel bell tolled. This was the signal that Ezra Stiles had been waiting for. Yale’s new president was now ready to convene the Presentation Day (today Class Day) exercises for the graduating seniors.

That morning, Webster and the rest of the class of 1778 had all passed two sets of public examinations. First came a grilling in Latin and Greek; and then, after a recess of half an hour, came a barrage of questions about the sciences. Those were the final requirements for the bachelor’s degree and the honorific “Sir” that went with it. All that now stood between Webster and his Yale diploma was the cliosophic (on the arts and sciences) oration that he was slated to deliver that afternoon.

After being closed all spring, Yale had reopened on June 23, with Stiles at the helm. Back in March, Stiles had accepted the Yale Corporation’s offer of a hundred sixty pounds—only forty of which were to be paid in cash; the rest were to come in the form of corn, pork and wheat—for his services, but the imminent threat of capture by the British had delayed his relocation to New Haven for three months. With Buckminster in Portsmouth where he had replaced Stiles as pastor, the new president personally supervised the instruction of the seniors. As with Buckminster, who considered Stiles “an honor to mankind,” Webster and his classmates took an immediate liking to the eminent biblical scholar, who impressed them with both his vitality and his command of Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic. On June 30, the seniors engaged in their first forensic disputation under Stiles, discussing the question of whether “learning increaseth happiness.” So much did they enjoy his tutelage that the next day they asked Stiles to double their dose to two disputations a day until graduation.

Focusing his penetrating dark gray eyes on the seniors and guests gathered in the chapel auditorium, the short and compact Stiles began in his mild yet energetic voice, “
Ut nostra cura Gradibus academis conferendis innotescat
[As our concern for those taking academic steps becomes known]. . . .” After finishing his Latin introduction, Stiles ceded the floor to the ten top-ranking seniors. At exactly 3:47, as Stiles would later note in his factoid-filled diary, Sir Meigs began his cliosophic oration in Latin. Twelve minutes later, Sir Barlow delivered the commencement poem, “The Prospect of Peace,” which concluded with his utopian vision:

Barlow was expressing the millennial thinking that had first gained wide currency with the publication
Of Plymouth Plantation,
the journal of Webster’s ancestor, the early Massachusetts governor William Bradford. For the optimistic Barlow, the American Revolution was the signature event that signified the end of Satan’s nefarious influence. Having inspired his Calvinist listeners with his dream of a glorious future for America, Barlow sat down to a round of applause. Barlow’s patriotic composition, published later that year, would make a lasting impression. “Your poem does you honor in this part of the country,” Buckminster wrote Barlow from New Hampshire that fall, “and every person that has seen it speaks very highly of it.”

Though Webster’s remarks weren’t as heralded as Barlow’s, they do reveal something about the arc of his own intellectual career. The sixth student orator that afternoon, Webster addressed the state of natural philosophy (the objective study of nature) in his sixteen-minute address. “There are few subjects,” he began, “in the whole circle of literature that present a larger field for the exercise of genius or furnish more sublime and rational satisfaction for a speculative mind.” Webster proceeded to cover the discipline’s history, starting with the Egyptians and the Greeks. Classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, he argued, were stuck in “a maze of irregular discoveries which their own strength of genius was insufficient to understand, much less to explain.” But then came the Dark Ages during which all learning declined. In the Renaissance, scientific progress resumed and Isaac Newton managed to put the field on a solid empirical footing.

While Webster had initially toyed with the idea of becoming a poet like Barlow, by the end of his senior year at Yale, he saw himself as a budding philosopher. The “immortal” Newton, who had discovered “the nice order and regularity observed by those stupendous bodies that compose the solar system,” was the intellectual hero whose example he wished to emulate. Webster’s literary ambition now focused on acquiring and organizing knowledge: “Those who design to distinguish themselves in the literary world may, by a proper degree of application, make themselves masters of the arts and sciences, which during the earlier ages of civilization, were scarce known to mankind, and which have been advancing, with some interruption, to their present degree of perfection for more than 4000 years.” Like Dwight in his valedictory address two years earlier, Webster also reminded his fellow graduates of the need for “uncommon acquisitions of knowledge.” Having completed his “liberal education,” Webster was thoroughly steeped in the ideals of the Enlightenment. He was committed to bringing order to the world through his intellectual labors, though he hadn’t yet figured out exactly what those labors might be.

Sir Tracy gave the last speech of the day, the valedictory address. The class tutor typically addressed the seniors, but Buckminster did not wish to return to Yale. In a letter to Barlow sent from Portsmouth, Buckminster had mentioned the difficulty of traveling to New Haven, adding, “I am really disconnected from College.” Sir Tracy finished his remarks at 5:28. How Webster and his classmates celebrated the end of their undergraduate days is not known. Ezra Stiles’ diary—the only surviving account of the festivities—is vague: “Decency in amusements recommended & observed in the day and evening.”

 

 

TWO MONTHS LATER, on Wednesday, September 9, in a brief private ceremony in the Yale chapel, Stiles handed out diplomas to Webster and the other seniors. (Commencement services, as the term implies, were initially held at the beginning of the academic year.) Like most of his classmates, Sir Webster gave President Stiles a gratuity of ten dollars, while the impoverished Sir Barlow could manage only eight. But the total of $351 contributed by the thirty-five new graduates wasn’t worth much. As Stiles noted in his diary next to this tally, five dollars in paper currency was then equal to just one silver dollar.

In September 1778, rampant inflation was blanketing the colonies. The price of a subscription to the
Courant
had nearly tripled since early 1777, shooting up to eighteen shillings per year.
¹
To help finance the war, the Continental Congress had authorized the states to print their own money, and the economically devastated Connecticut had been the first to do so. By October, the state would be printing its first set of fifty-dollar bills; by early 1779, it would have to introduce sixty-five-, seventy-and eighty-dollar bills as well. But printing additional denominations of currency just exacerbated the problem. “The depreciation of [our money] has got to so alarming a point,” wrote George Washington in April 1779, “that a wagon load of money will scarcely purchase a wagon load of provisions.”

Looking for his first job in a period of hyperinflation, when many Americans were resorting to barter, Noah Webster was feeling lost and confused. And he was suddenly separated from the beloved classmates with whom he had shared his hopes and dreams. As he contemplated his future back at the family farm, all he knew was that he had to keep reading and writing. As a Yale undergraduate, Webster had developed a love of intellectual discovery; exploring the ideas running around inside his own head made him feel thoroughly alive. The thought of going into business repelled him. “What is now called a liberal education,” he later wrote, “disqualifies a man for business.” According to Webster, business required mechanical thinking, and once a young man was exposed to books, there was no turning back.

But Webster had no idea how he could earn a living. Barlow found himself in a similar predicament, writing Webster from New Haven shortly after their graduation, “We are now citizens of the world . . . no longer in circumstances of warming the soul and refining the sensibility by those nameless incidents that attend college connection . . . . I am yet at a loss for an employment for life and unhappy in this state of suspense.” While Barlow and Webster both held fast to their literary ambitions, they felt hopeless about ever achieving them. As the two Yale men well knew, war-ravaged America did not yet harbor any professional writers.

Webster had hoped that his father might provide some wise counsel, but that’s not what he got. One day that fall, while he was pacing up and down the pine-planked floor of the family parlor, Noah Sr. pulled out one of those hardly inflation-proof eighty-dollar Connecticut bills and told him, “Take this; you must now seek your living; I can do no more for you.”

The twenty-year-old was stunned. He felt, as he later wrote, “cast upon the world.” Webster promptly raced up the stairs to the second floor and threw himself headfirst onto the straw mattress in his boyhood bedroom. For the next three days, he hardly came out—even for meals. He did little but read
The Rambler,
the collection of moral essays penned a generation earlier by his idol, Samuel Johnson (then still living in London off the special pension granted by King George III). “This book,” Webster would later note in his third-person memoir, “produced no inconsiderable effect on his mind.” In Johnson’s maxims—such as the one that would grace the title page of his dictionary a half century later, “He that wishes to be counted among the benefactors of posterity must add, by his own toil, to the acquisitions of his ancestors”—the new graduate found the fatherly advice he longed for. Johnson advocated approaching life with a scrupulous exactness, and that’s the path that Webster resolved to take.

Graduation from Yale unmoored Webster, separating him from everything he held dear. As he later recalled, “Having neither property nor powerful friends to aid me, I knew not . . . by what way to obtain subsistence. Being set afloat in the world at the inexperienced age of 20, without a father’s aid which had before supported me, my mind was embarrassed with solicitude and gloomy apprehensions.” To avoid lapsing into abject despair, Webster would turn to his favorite companions—words.

O
n Saturday, February 20, 1779, a distraught Webster placed an advertisement in New Haven’s newspaper,
The Connecticut Journal
: “Lost on the road between New Haven and Wallingford a neat pair of men’s shoes almost new. Whoever shall find them and give information to the printers either of New Haven or Hartford will be handsomely rewarded, and much oblige their humble servant.” That winter, Webster was working as a schoolteacher in Glastonbury and making occasional weekend visits to New Haven to visit Joel Barlow, who had stayed on at Yale to pursue graduate studies. Nothing seemed to be going right. He couldn’t even manage to keep his belongings from falling off his horse.

Though Webster was pleased to be back in Glastonbury, where he had spent the second half of his junior year, his first job was far from satisfying. Then a lowly occupation often held by alcoholics and former convicts, teaching paid less than two pounds per month. The working conditions were also harsh, as schoolmasters typically had to stare down rambunctious students in dilapidated and overcrowded classrooms. Webster complained of his unhappiness in frequent letters to Barlow. While Webster’s half of the correspondence does not remain, Barlow’s responses provide a picture of his mounting angst. On December 31, 1778, he wrote, “It appears by your letter that you indulge yourself much in serious contemplation upon the disorderly jumble of human events and are at a loss how you shall make your course from the college to the grave.” Barlow continued to offer encouragement. “I have too much confidence in your merits,” he reassured Webster a month later, “both as to greatness of genius and goodness of heart, to suppose that your actions are not to be conspicuous.” While Webster would languish in dead-end jobs for a couple of years, Barlow’s prediction turned out to be true long before either man expected. Soon after the publication of his speller in 1783, Webster would become a household name across New England.