The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

ALSO BY JOSHUA KENDALL

The Man Who Made Lists:
Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of
Roget’s Thesaurus

 

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Copyright © 2010 by Joshua Kendall

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Kendall, Joshua C., date.
The forgotten founding father : Noah Webster’s obsession and the creation of an
American culture / Joshua Kendall.
p. cm.
Includes index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-48654-2

1. Webster, Noah, 1758-1843. 2. Lexicographers—United States—Biography.
3. English language—United States—Lexicography. 4. Social reformers—
United States—Biography. Title.
PE64.W5K
423.092—dc22
[B]

 

 

 

 

 

 

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For word lovers everywhere

 

“Words have a longer life than deeds.”

—Pindar

“If any material good is ever to proceed from my attempts to correct certain
disorders and errors in our language, it must be from the influence of my
writing on the rising generations.”

T
he morning of Friday, May 20, 1785, was bright and sunny, though there was a slight chill in the air. In the early afternoon, just as the mercury hit 68 degrees, the brisk southerly wind began to calm down. But not so Noah Webster, Jr. He kept beating his horse with a cane as he traipsed across the rocky roads just south of Alexandria. A young man in a hurry, the gangly six-footer with the flaming red hair, square jaw and gray eyes was dashing off to keep an important appointment. The world-famous General, the man considered by most of America’s three million denizens to be “the greatest on earth,” had invited
him—
the son of a poor Hartford farmer—to the elegant four-thousand-acre estate known as Mount Vernon. Webster’s latest work,
Sketches of American Policy,
offered a series of proposals for the country’s malaise, and George Washington, who, upon retirement from the military at the end of the American Revolution, had become America’s “first farmer,” was eagerly awaiting his arrival.

The twenty-six-year-old writer with the remarkably erect bearing, who had burst onto the national stage two years earlier with the publication of his instant best seller, a spelling text for schoolchildren, had crossed Washington’s path once before. In June 1775, as a freshman member of the Yale militia, he had escorted the General out of New Haven as he was about to take up command of the Continental army in Cambridge. But this was to be the first time they would meet man to man. And it was a dinner Webster would never forget. Nearly sixty years later, Webster would record the details in a letter written in “a sturdy, awkward hand very fit for a lexicographer” (according to novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who later acquired the document for his personal collection of Colonial memorabilia).

After passing the white picket fence some three hundred yards to the back of Washington’s house, Webster dismounted. Washington’s secretary, Mr. Shaw, then ushered the visitor into the elegant central passage where Washington greeted Webster. Dressed in a white waistcoat and white silk stockings, the six-foot-two General had to look down ever so slightly to meet Webster’s gaze. Washington motioned toward the wood-paneled west parlor, where the two men soon sat down on mahogany chairs near the card table. Designed a generation earlier, the cozy room that Washington called “the best place in my house” still evinced a distinctly British sensibility. The carved overmantel was patterned after a plate in Abraham Swan’s
British Architect
and the Palladian detailing on the door frames was lifted from another popular British manual,
Ancient Masonry
by Batty Langley.

Washington was a stickler for routine—he liked to eat dinner promptly at three and go to bed at nine—and before long, it was time to eat. The table was set for four. Dining that afternoon were also the General’s wife, Martha, and another houseguest, Richard Boulton, a building contractor from Charles County, Maryland, recently hired to make additions to the mansion.

Sipping a glass of Madeira, Webster got a chance to explain the crucial fourth and final sketch of his pamphlet. The Articles of Confederation, passed in haste by the Second Continental Congress in the summer of 1777, had, according to Webster, failed to unite the thirteen colonies sufficiently. In this political tract, as in his speller, the first school-book to substitute the names of America’s cities and towns for their British counterparts, Webster urged Americans to celebrate their new national identity. Summarizing his main concern, he told Washington that since each state retained the power to defeat the will of the other twelve states, “our union is but a name and our confederation a cobweb.” Webster argued that it was time for the citizens of the new nation to redefine themselves: “We ought not to consider ourselves as inhabitants of a particular state only, but as
Americans,
as the common subjects of a great empire. We cannot and ought not wholly to divest ourselves of provincial views and attachments, but we should subordinate them to the general interests of the continent.” A stronger federal government, Webster emphasized, could improve the advantages of the American states, as
provincial interest
would become inseparable from
national interest
. Washington nodded his assent, promising Webster that he would ask his friend the Virginia legislator James Madison to read the entire work as soon as possible.

Over dessert, the conversation turned to less pressing matters, enabling Washington and Webster to cement their emerging bond. As the pancakes were passed around, Webster refused molasses, complaining that as a New Englander, he tended to eat more than his fair share. The typically dour Washington startled his dinner companions by emitting an uncharacteristically loud laugh, stating, “I didn’t know about your eating molasses in New England.” Then looking over at Boulton, the guest from Charles County, the General proceeded to tell the following anecdote: “During the Revolution, a hogshead of molasses was stove in at the town of Westchester by the oversetting of a wagon, and a body of Maryland troops being near, the soldiers ran hastily and saved all they could by filling their hats and cups with molasses.” After dinner, the Connecticut visitor and George and Martha Washington, whom Webster would later describe as “very social,” settled down to a game of whist. Summing up that overnight stay with the Washingtons, he gleefully recorded in his diary: “treated with great attention.”