The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster, page 7
After leaving Ellsworth’s house, Webster went back to his father’s farm to regain his stamina. But Webster was no longer an adolescent who could depend on his father for subsistence. To pay for his room and board, he did some teaching at a local parish school. Unfortunately, the winter of 1779-1780 was the coldest in a century and also one of the snowiest. “For a week or ten days past,” The Connecticut Courant reported in early January, “there has been a greater body of snow on the ground than has ever been known, at one time, during the remembrance of the oldest man.” Years later, Webster would vividly recall that commuting to work that winter required walking four miles a day through “drifts of snow which completely covered the adjoining fences.”
33 Miles to Hartford.
102 Miles to New York.
J. STRONG
IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NEW ENGLAND, it was a common practice for affluent citizens to place milestones on major thoroughfares in their community. While most were of red sandstone, the one Jedediah Strong, the register of deeds in Litchfield, erected on Bantam Road near his residence, a half mile west of the courthouse, was of sleek marble.
In the summer of 1780, Webster tried once again to become a lawyer. This time, he selected as his mentor Jedediah Strong, in whose Litchfield home he would live for nearly a year. The son of Supply Strong, who owned an eighth of Litchfield when the town was first settled in 1721, Jedediah Strong had graduated from Yale in 1761. Though trained to be a minister, he switched to law and then to politics. In 1770, Strong was appointed a selectman. The following year, he was elected to the Connecticut state legislature, where he would eventually serve during some thirty sessions. In 1779, Strong was named a delegate to the Continental Congress, but he declined the appointment because of what was called “an inveterate complication of nervous disorders.”
Thus, lawyer and trainee would both be on the mend from mental afflictions at the same time. Strong was then under considerable stress. In 1777, this small man with the unbecoming face and limp had lost his wife of three years. By the time of Webster’s arrival in 1780, the aggrieved widower was raising his five-year-old daughter, Idea, by himself. Strong hired Webster because he needed an assistant to help him with compiling and recording public records. An exacting man with beautiful handwriting, he was good at what he did, but he was also overwhelmed by the demands of daily life.
Webster had heard about the opportunity from Titus Hosmer, a family friend from the West Division who was then serving in both the state senate and the Continental Congress. Webster jumped at the chance to move to Litchfield, then one of Connecticut’s four largest towns, with a population of about four thousand. Two of his Yale classmates, Oliver Wolcott and Uriah Tracy, were already studying law there under Tapping Reeve. Married to Aaron Burr’s sister, Sally, the brilliant but humble Reeve counted the future vice president, whom Webster would soon meet, among his many devoted students. Though Reeve had a genial manner, he was self-absorbed. He once was observed walking around town with a bridle but no horse; not realizing that the animal had run off, he proceeded to tie the bridle to a post. Webster occasionally attended the law lectures that Reeve gave in the basement of his two-story home. To accommodate his growing number of students, Reeve would soon construct an addition to his residence. This building, in turn, became the Litchfield Law School, the nation’s first private law school.
By March 1781, Webster was ready to take the bar exam in Litchfield. Much to the surprise of Webster and his twenty fellow candidates, no one passed. But Webster didn’t give up. In early April in Hartford, he tried again and was successful. Though he was now Noah Webster, Esquire, his new title, which he would soon proudly affix to his byline, wasn’t much use. With the Revolutionary War still in full swing, Webster couldn’t find any work as a lawyer. As he later recalled, “the practice of law was in good measure set aside by the general calamity.”
Webster would forever remain loyal to his Litchfield employer, who met a particularly tragic end. In 1788, Strong got remarried, to Susannah Wyllys, the daughter of Connecticut’s secretary of state, George Wyllys. But just two years later, Strong was arrested for horrific cruelty toward his new wife. Newspapers throughout New England covered his scandalous divorce trial: “It appeared in evidence that the accused had often imposed unreasonable restraints upon his wife, and withheld from her the comforts and conveniences of life; that he had beat her, pulled her hair, kicked her out of bed, and spit in her face times without number.” Presiding over the case in the Litchfield courthouse was Judge Tapping Reeve, who pronounced a fine of a thousand pounds and bound Strong to his good behavior. As the papers also reported, this punishment was satisfactory to his acquaintances “in Litchfield and elsewhere who have long known the infamy of his private character.” But Webster was one of the few who stood by Strong. In fact, a year later, Strong hired Webster, then living in Hartford, as his attorney. On July 12, 1791, Webster wrote in his diary, “Mr. Jedh Strong in town; engages me to negotiate with his wife for a release of all claim to her dower; she declines.” With Webster’s legal maneuvering unsuccessful, Strong sank deeper into debt and drink. A decade later, Strong went mad and a guardian had to take over his affairs. Upon his death in 1802, his remains would be placed in an unmarked grave in a cemetery just west of Litchfield. All that would be left of Strong was his elegant milestone.
IT WAS SEVEN THIRTY on Monday evening, October 1, 1781, and the Sharon Literary Club, America’s first literary society, was in session. Founded in January of 1779 by Cotton Mather Smith, the town’s pastor, who served as chairman, and his son, John Cotton Smith, then a thirteen-year-old preparing for Yale, who became its secretary, the group was designed to “promote a taste of belles lettres and of logic and to gain some skill in the useful freeman’s art of debate.” The weekly meetings, which were suspended from the beginning of May to the end of September so that the townsfolk could attend to pressing agricultural duties, ran for an hour and a half. At precisely nine o’clock, refreshments were served. An hour of dancing typically followed—except on nights such as this one when the meeting, which rotated among more than a dozen local residences, was held at the parson’s large stone house, constructed by a Genoese mason, on the east side of Sharon’s main street. As Parson Smith’s ebullient twenty-year-old daughter, Juliana, editor of the club’s magazine, The Clio, a Literary Miscellany, once explained, “Papa does not think dancing to be wrong in itself, but only that it may be a cause of offending to some.”
That spring, Noah Webster had moved to Sharon. In this western Connecticut town across the border from New York’s Dutchess County, he opened a small private school, in which, as he put it in an advertisement that ran on June 1 in The Connecticut Courant, “young gentlemen and ladies may be instructed in reading, writing, mathematics, the English language, and if desired, the Latin and Greek languages—in geography, vocal music, etc.” An instant success, Webster’s academy had already attracted numerous students from the area’s prominent Whig families such as the children of Mrs. Theodosia Prevost (later Mrs. Aaron Burr) and of the lawyers John Canfield and Zephaniah Platt. Living in one of the perfectly proportioned square rooms in Pastor Smith’s three-story house, he conducted his classes upstairs in the roomy attic with its oak rafters. All summer long, Webster had been toiling away for the three dollars a month that he was clearing from the six and two-thirds dollars he charged each student per quarter. His only break had been a brief trip to New Haven to pick up his master’s degree. With advanced degrees not requiring any additional classes, all Webster had to do was to give a lecture at the September 14 graduation, Yale’s first public ceremony in seven years. On the afternoon of his talk, entitled “Dissertation in English on the universal diffusion of literature as introductory to the universal diffusion of Christianity,” he also handed over another twenty-five dollars to President Stiles.
A man who was fastidious about his appearance, Webster was a natty dresser.
Juliana, her older sister, Elizabeth, and her mother, Temperance, helped the roughly one hundred guests settle in their seats in the three rooms set aside for the occasion—the parson’s study, the parlor and the kitchen—which were all heated by a large fireplace. The granddaughter of William Worthington, one of Oliver Cromwell’s colonels, Temperance Gale had captured Parson Smith’s heart with her sharp intelligence and her stunning beauty. In 1758, right after the death of her first husband, Dr. Moses Gale of Goshen, she was caught in a rainstorm while riding on horseback through Sharon. Finding temporary shelter in Cotton Smith’s magnificent home, she never left.
The three Smith women remained mostly silent while, as Juliana later put it in her diary, “the slower half of creation was laying down the law.” As the hostesses picked up their knitting needles, they noticed that Webster, Parson Smith and Dr. Joseph Bellamy, a cleric from neighboring Bethlehem, were having a heated discussion regarding the proper translation of Plutarch’s Life of Hannibal. The animus, they assumed, came from the large and stout Bellamy, an eminence grise with a reputation for terrorizing his interlocutors with sharp words. Mrs. Smith herself had recently had her own run-in with her mild-mannered husband’s mentor, which required her, as she later wrote, to show “pretty plainly that I was not beholden to him for his opinions or permission.” However, the precise nature of the dispute between the two pastors and the future lexicographer has been lost to history. Of this encounter, all that remains is Juliana’s report that “they became as heated over a Greek word as if it were a forge fire.”
According to protocol, the main event of the evening was a reading of the complete contents from the latest issue of Clio. Juliana was an enterprising editor who managed to garner literary forays from a wide variety of contributors. Chief among them were her brother’s Yale classmates such as Abiel Holmes (later a pastor whose son was the writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.); James Kent (a future chancellor of New York State); and David Daggett (later a U.S. senator from Connecticut). As a critic, Juliana was hard to please. Just because she printed something, it didn’t necessarily follow that she liked it. As she once wrote her brother, “Oh my dear Jack, I fear me there is very little promise that any of your friends will prove to be Shakespeares or Miltons.”
As the evening wore on, Webster stepped into the kitchen, which, situated behind the two other rooms, gave speakers a view of the entire assemblage. He then read his latest, a moral essay, which took the form of a dream. The full text no longer remains, but the acerbic Juliana did bequeath to posterity a blanket assessment of Webster’s writings for Clio, comparing them unfavorably to the imagined cogitations of the family’s horse, Jack:
Mr. Webster has not the excuse of youth (I think he must be fully twenty two or three), but his essays—don’t be angry, Jack—are as young as yours or brother Tommy’s, while his reflections are as prosy as those of our horse, your namesake, would be if they were written out. Perhaps more so, for I truly believe, judging from the way Jack Horse looks around at me sometimes, when I am on his back, that his thoughts of the human race and their conduct towards his own, might be well worth reading. At least they would be all his own and that is more than can be said of N. W.’s. In conversation, he is even duller than in writing, if that be possible, but he is a painstaking man and a hard student. Papa says he will make his mark.
Despite her sharp edge, Juliana Smith was touching on what would emerge as a central feature of Webster’s literary activity. Over the course of his long career, Noah Webster, Jr., would rarely dazzle his readers with breathtaking originality. He would, indeed, make his mark on posterity but not so much for his writing as for his rewriting. His monumental contribution to American letters would be to redo the leading British works on language for a native audience. Lexicography was a perfect fit for Webster’s personal tics, as it required collecting and examining ideas that were not one’s own (of all the entries in his dictionary, only “demoralize” would be of his own coinage). And no one could analyze the words of others more scrupulously or with greater élan than Webster.
That night was the last time Webster would address the Sharon literary society. A week later, just as the fall term was beginning, he suddenly closed up his school and skipped town. While Webster didn’t explain his surprising decision in his memoir, it appears that he was distraught over a failed romance. That summer, in addition to his full load of teaching duties, the musically accomplished Webster also directed a choir one evening a week. And before long, he fell in love with one of his students, Rebecca Pardee, a local beauty to whom he proposed marriage. At the time, Rebecca was unattached, but in the fall, her former beau, Major Patchin, who had been serving abroad in the army, returned to Sharon. With Rebecca unable to choose between the two appealing bachelors, she deferred to the wishes of the local clergy—a rare move even for the times. The church elders decided in favor of the major because he had first won her affection. Webster never wrote about this loss, but it must have devastated him. Commenting on Webster’s “pretty love romance” with Rebecca Pardee a century later, The Saturday Evening Post quipped, “Unlike most disappointed swains, he did not turn to puerile poetry for relief. It took a whole dictionary to express his feelings.”
AFTER WANDERING ACROSS Connecticut in a fruitless search for employment, Webster returned to Sharon early the following year. Back at the Smith house, he soon began a lively correspondence with the pastor’s son, John Cotton Smith, then finishing up his junior year at Yale. A half-dozen years younger than Webster, Smith was honored by Webster’s “condescension in writing.” Perhaps attempting to soften the blow of the rejection by Pardee, in January 1782 Smith reported on the negative impact of marriage on Josiah Meigs, Webster’s Yale classmate, who was now his tutor: “he appears no more possessed of that vigour, sprightliness and vivacity, but on the contrary anxieties and solicitudes seem to brood upon him . . . . if this be the effect marriage produces . . . may I get the wrong side of thirty before I put on its shackles.” Steering the dialogue away from personal concerns, Webster wrote Smith of his dreams for himself, his friends and his nation:
American empire will be the theatre on which the last scene of the stupendous drama of nature shall be exhibited. Here the numerous and complicated parts of the actors shall be brought to a conclusion; here the impenetrable mysteries of the Divine system shall be disclosed to the view of the intelligent creation . . . . You and I may have considerable parts to act in this plan, and it is a matter of consequence to furnish the mind with enlarged ideas of men and things, to extend our wishes beyond ourselves, our friends, or our country, and include the whole system in the expanded grasp of benevolence.
For Webster, emotional setbacks resulted not in mourning, but in a ratcheting up of his fierce ambition. Doing something noteworthy, he felt, could help him regain his self-esteem. And fortunately for Webster, his grandiose fantasies surfaced at a crossroads in world history. With the Revolutionary War now winding down—that October, Lord General Cornwallis had surrendered to Washington at Yorktown—and a new nation needing to be built, Webster would soon have ample opportunity to satisfy his itch for fame and glory.
In fact, that January Noah Webster, the scribe of American identity, made his debut and, by the end of the month, had emerged as a public figure with a significant following. In late 1781, Rivington’s Royal Gazette tried to do what British might had failed do—convince Americans to renounce their independence. The loyalist New York City newspaper carried a series of letters by Silas Deane, a former Connecticut delegate to the Continental Congress, which leaned on a recent pamphlet by Abbe Raynal, a French philosopher, to make the case for reconciling with the British. Hearing of this attempt to, in his words, “twist the meaning of the Abbe . . . in order more effectually to disunite the Americans,” Webster was apoplectic. He immediately shot back with an editorial, “Observations on the Revolution,” first published on January 17 in The New York Packet and republished two weeks later in the prominent New England paper, The Salem Gazette. Webster offered a different reading of Raynal’s work: “A philosopher like the Abbe . . . must see that the astonishing opposition of America to the attacks of Great Britain cannot be the fortuitous ebullition of popular frenzy; but the effect of design—the calm result of daring zeal, tempered with reason and deliberation.” Over the next couple of months, Webster published three more articles, stressing that the break with Britain was permanent. “America,” he emphasized, “is now an independent empire. She acknowledges no sovereign on earth, and will avow no connexions but those of friend and allies.”
In the spring of 1782, Webster considered giving teaching another try in Sharon. On April 16, he distributed a prospectus, announcing his plan to open another school on May 1 in which “any young gentlemen and ladies, who wish to acquaint themselves with the English language, geography, vocal music, etc. may be waited upon for that purpose.” A couple of days later, the Smith family suffered a huge loss. Thomas Mather Smith, the brother of Juliana and John Cotton Smith, died of consumption at age nineteen. And then, for the second time, Webster abandoned both his plans to teach school and his room in the Smith household under mysterious circumstances.
