The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (9 page)

 

 

EAGER TO INCREASE HIS EARNING POWER, Webster decided to leave Glastonbury at the end of the winter term and become a lawyer. During the Revolution, for a young man with a bachelor’s degree, admission to the Connecticut bar required two years of study with a practicing attorney. In the spring of 1779, Webster moved into the Hartford home of Oliver Ellsworth, then serving as both the state’s attorney from Hartford County and as a delegate to the Continental Congress. Having also started a private practice, the thirty-four-year-old Ellsworth had already established himself as one of the state’s busiest and richest lawyers. His docket consisted of between a thousand and fifteen hundred cases. Though Ellsworth could be gruff in both his speech and his manner—if he tired during an oral argument, he might resort to wiping his trousers with a handkerchief—he had a knack for driving his points home in the court-room. Webster would later describe Ellsworth, who in 1796 became chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, as “a mighty” of the Connecticut bar.

While in Hartford, Webster was burdened by a grueling schedule. Unlike his well-to-do classmate Oliver Wolcott, who could afford to study law full-time, Webster had to take on a day job. From Monday through Saturday, he instructed students at the elite Brick School. During the evening, he struggled both to help Ellsworth with his cases and to make his way through his host’s vast law library. Within a few months, the strain led to acute depression and anxiety. He couldn’t sleep nor could he concentrate. With considerable shame and embarrassment, Webster told Ellsworth that he had to quit.

The breakdown of the twenty-year-old Webster in the summer of 1779 closely parallels the plight of the twenty-year-old Samuel Johnson a half century earlier. In 1729, Webster’s hero had to leave Oxford after just one year because his father could no longer foot the bill. That winter, according to his biographer James Boswell, Johnson “felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterward was perfectly relieved; and all his labours, and all his enjoyments were but temporary interruptions of its baleful influence.” Though Johnson bounced back from this lapse into incapacitating mental illness several years later, he was never again the same. Immersing himself in monumental literary works such as his
Dictionary of the English Language
and
Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets
could mitigate his depression, but not cure it. “My health,” Johnson observed at seventy-two, “has been from my twentieth year such as has seldom afforded me a single day of ease.”

Webster, too, wouldn’t feel quite right after the age of twenty. While his descendants have maintained that Webster would soon overcome his early bout with depression, this conventional wisdom is not accurate. Of Webster’s aborted first stab at legal training, his granddaughter wrote, “At this time and for two years he was troubled with a distressing nervous affection, which he eventually outgrew.” But in fact, Webster, like Johnson, waged a lifelong battle with mental illness. In a letter to one of his adult children dated June 26, 1818, the fifty-nine-year-old Webster wrote that “my nervous affections . . . which I have had for
forty
years seem to increase with age” (italics mine). Like Johnson, Webster would have to learn how to live with his nervous condition. And Webster would stumble upon the same creative solution: He, too, would make use of his legendary capacity for nonstop intellectual labor, which he could perform with an obsessive exactitude.

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.”

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.”