The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (14 page)

Much to Webster’s delight, over the next nine months, other critics took up the Ghost’s mantle and kept attacking the
Grammatical Institute
in the Connecticut papers. In its first issue published on November 21, 1784,
The Litchfield Monitor
ran letters signed “A Learner of English Grammar” and “Entity” that also challenged Webster’s ideas about pronunciation. Undaunted, Webster gleefully responded a couple of months later, “The Ghost has now appeared in a different shape. From a substantial spectre in a state of probation, he has transmigrated into an Entity, a mere physical existence . . . . But under whatever shape or name my enemies are introduced to notice, they will answer all my purposes if they will rail at the Institute as much as possible.” An anonymous poet would have the final word about the controversy in March 1785:

With Dilworth’s Ghost and his allied spirits improving his visibility throughout New England, Webster also had to combat charges that he himself had composed their invectives.

The net result of the Ghost’s efforts to smear Webster was that sales of the speller doubled, from five hundred to a thousand copies a week. By early 1785, as the public wrangling was starting to die down, Webster had sold some twelve thousand books—an astounding number in a country of just three million. He then began selling new publishers the rights to market his book in other states, and the sales figures began to rise exponentially. But the impoverished Webster was forced to ask for cash up front—a move that would cost him dearly in the long run. If he had been able to hold out for a decent royalty rate, he would have become inordinately wealthy. As Webster lamented several years later, “Could I have kept my copyright in my own hands . . . I might now have rid in a chariot.” In 1786, Benjamin Edes of Boston paid five pounds, ten shillings per every thousand copies. Two years later, Philadelphia’s William Young and New York’s Samuel Campbell also finalized contracts with Webster. While Young published the speller in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, Campbell took over operations in New York, New Jersey, North Carolina and South Carolina. Campbell got a bargain, paying just eighty pounds (two hundred dollars) for a five-year period, during which he would sell nearly two hundred thousand copies.

A few other regional deals for the speller ensued, but in June of 1788, New Hampshire made the Constitution the law of the land, and as Webster was quick to observe, he was suddenly confronting an entirely new marketplace. On June 25, 1788, Webster, putting all patriotic sentiment aside, wrote Isaiah Thomas, the Worcester printer and publisher: “This day we have received the intelligence that the
ninth
state has ratified the federal constitution. This constitution will place the regulation of literary property in the power of Congress and of course the existing laws of the several states will be superseded by a federal law. This will enable me to enter into new contracts with regard to the publication of the Institute.” As it turned out, the U.S. Congress didn’t pass the national copyright law until 1790. From that time on, authors held the rights to their books for fourteen years. In 1804, after the initial term for his speller expired, Webster began working out new contracts with his publishers for an updated edition,
The American Spelling Book, Revised
. Between 1783 and 1804, Webster managed to sell some eighty-eight different editions of his speller. Sifting through all the contracts with various publishers, one historian has estimated that a typical edition translated into about twelve thousand copies, meaning that Webster sold about a million books by the time he filed for that second national copyright. During his lifetime, Webster would peddle nearly thirteen million copies.

But after his death in 1843,
The Elementary Spelling Book
(the title for all editions published after 1829) would enter its heyday, with sales averaging more than a million a year. By the 1840s, the publisher, George Cooledge, was so concerned that he wasn’t printing Webster’s book fast enough that he constructed a new steam press. Cooledge eventually bumped up his rate to 525 copies an hour or 5,250 a day. Summing up the career of Webster’s 1783 creation, H. L. Mencken wrote in the early twentieth century, “The influence of his Speller was really stupendous. It took the place in the schools of Dilworth’s . . . [book], the favorite of the Revolutionary generation, and maintained its authority for nearly a century.”

Along with the speller’s wide circulation came enormous cultural influence across the nation. Speaking at a hundredth birthday celebration for Webster in September 1858, Jefferson Davis, then a Mississippi senator, declared, “Above all other people we are one, and above all books which have united us in the bond of a common language, I place the good-old spelling book of Noah Webster. We have a unity of language which no other people possess and we owe this unity above all to Noah Webster’s Yankee spelling book.” And even when the North and South started slaughtering each other on the battlefield a few years later, southern leaders such as Davis, later the president of the Confederate States of America, never wavered in their attachment to this cornerstone of Yankee culture. During the Civil War, Confederate publishers such as the Macon, Georgia, house of Burke, Boykin and Co. put out their own versions of
The Elementary Spelling Book,
which were virtual reprints except for a few minor changes “to suit the present condition of affairs.” This Georgia rendering of “the cheapest, the best and the most extensively used spelling book ever published” sold so briskly that by 1865, it was already in its third printing.

Webster’s speller also gave rise to America’s first national pastime, the spelling bee. Before there was baseball or college football or even horse racing, there was the spectator sport that Webster put on the map. Though “the spelling match” first became a popular community event shortly after Webster’s textbook became a runaway best seller, its origins date back to the classroom in Elizabethan England. In his speller,
The English Schoole-Maister,
published in 1596, the British pedagogue Edmund Coote described a method of “how the teacher shall direct his schollers to oppose one another” in spelling competitions. A century and a half later, in his essay, “Idea of the English School,” Benjamin Franklin wrote of putting “two of those [scholars] nearest equal in their spelling” and “let[ting] these strive for victory each propounding ten words every day to the other to be spelt.” Webster’s speller transformed these “wars of words” from classroom skirmishes into community events. By 1800, evening “spelldowns” in New England were common. As one early twentieth-century historian has observed:

From New England, “spelling schools” migrated to the Midwest. As Edward Eggleston wrote in his 1871 novel,
The Hoosier Schoolmaster,
“In fact, spelling is the ‘national game’ in Hoopole County. Baseball and croquet matches are as unknown as Olympian chariot races. Spelling and shucking are the only competitions.” This regional interest fed into today’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, established in 1925. In a tribute to the prime mover behind the tournament,
Webster’s
has always served as its dictionary of record.

 

 

IN THE FALL OF 1784, a year after the publication of his speller, Webster had considerable cachet but little cash. He was a well-connected and respected member of the Hartford community, but his professional life was going nowhere. A novice lawyer who wouldn’t plead his first case before a jury until February 1785, Webster would often go to the courthouse just to watch the proceedings. In September, he heard the case of General Erastus Wolcott, who had sued a neighbor for flooding his property. “Verdict for the defent,” Webster wrote in his diary that night. Gradually he picked up a few clients of his own. In November, he represented the West Division’s Stephen Bidwell in a case in which the judge was none other than Noah Webster, Sr. But while he was still trying to get his legal career off the ground, Webster continued to move in elite social circles. On October 12, when the Marquis de Lafayette, then on his nineteen-hundred-mile victory tour around America, came to Hartford, Webster attended the ceremonial dinner held at David Bull’s tavern—known to locals as “Bunch of Grapes”—on the west side of Main Street. Though he enjoyed rubbing elbows with George Washington’s adopted French son, Webster couldn’t shake his financial anxiety. That night, he wrote in his diary, “Money is so scarce that I cannot borrow 30£ for a few weeks, giving 12 pr cent interest and good security.” But the impoverished Webster was not despondent, as he could always fall back on his string of literary successes. Four days later, he summed up where he stood, “My birthday. 26 years are past. I have lived long enough to be good and of some importance.”

What also boosted Webster’s spirits was his favorite hobby—dancing. Though his search for a permanent partner wasn’t proving successful, he kept jumping back out onto the dance floor. On October 26, he arranged a dance at his house, reporting the next morning in his diary, “Much fatigued.” In mid-November, he attended a family dance at the house of Joel Barlow, recently married to his college sweetheart, Ruth Baldwin. A few weeks later, Webster participated in a ball at William Collier’s tavern; “25 Gentlemen and 53 Ladies” was his summary of the evening in his diary. At the end of the year, Webster and Barlow helped put together a subscription assembly, which held biweekly dances through the end of March. On December 31, the day following the first assembly, Webster noted, “Feel exceedingly well after dancing; close the year.” In a 1790 essay, “Address to Young Gentlemen,” Webster described dancing as a necessary outlet for a budding writer: “Its excellence consists in exciting a cheerfulness of the mind, highly essential to health; in bracing the muscles of the body and in producing copious perspiration . . . . The body must perspire, or must be out of order.” While Webster the public scribe would later advise women not to take dancing too seriously—“No man ever marries a woman for her performance on a harpsichord or her figure in a minuet”—Webster the private citizen may well have felt otherwise. He kept an eye out for beauty, grace and talent. During the winter season, his landlord’s daughter, Rebecca Fish, made quite an impression: “At evening attend Assembly, very agreeable. Saw Miss Becca Fish dance a minuet for the first time; of 3 ladies, she did best.”

 

 

ON FEBRUARY 5, 1785, Webster finished going over the page proofs for the third part of his
Grammatical Institute
. Two and a half weeks later, he announced its publication in the
Courant,
stating that his new book contained “the rules of
reading
and
speaking
. . . calculated to form the morals and improve the understanding of youth.” Though Webster briefly alluded to the rules of elocution, this volume was largely a reader, which included selections from both “British writers of eminence” and some American men of letters. With American literature then little more than a concept, Webster had to improvise. He drafted a few short compositions of his own (including “Juliana,” that essay about his former love interest, Juliana Smith) and threw in a few unpublished poems from his Yale friends Joel Barlow and Timothy Dwight. As an inveterate compiler and arranger, Webster was once again not so much creating as revising. In this case, his models were books such as the 1780 text
Exercises in Elocution,
by British minister William Enfield, then in use in several American colleges, and
The New England Primer,
the primary school reader that dated back to the late seventeenth century. The various editions of
The New England Primer
were awash with religious tales and maxims, and as Webster wrote in the preface, he objected to this practice because the “common use of Bible is a kind of prostitution of divine truth to secular purposes.” Webster retooled his reader in 1787 under the title
An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking Calculated to Improve the Minds and Refine the Taste of Youth and also to Instruct Them in the Geography, History and Politics of the United States
. This version included a fiercely patriotic epigraph from the French statesman Mirabeau: “Begin with the infant in his cradle: Let the first word he lisps be Washington.”

Just as Webster was bringing his reader to press, he was starting on another project, a political treatise inspired by discussions with his fellow writers in Hartford, a circle that would soon gain national recognition as “the Connecticut wits.” On December 28, Webster reported in his diary, he “formed regulations for the literary club.” This group, which would distinguish itself by its satire-laced federalism, would eventually include Barlow, Timothy Dwight, John Trumbull and David Humphreys (Washington’s aide-de-camp during the war), as well as the physicians Lemuel Hopkins and Elihu Smith. At the next meeting, the club “converse[d] upon the great question: What are the means of improving and establishing the union of the United States.” Just a month later, Webster dashed off his own pamphlet on the subject that he entitled
Sketches of American Policy
.

As Webster noted in the
Courant
ad of March 8 that announced the publication of his
Sketches,
the fifty-page pamphlet consisted of four “heads”: