2

Noah Webster

“The Wildest Innovator”

As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline. . . . However they [the Americans] may boast of Independence, and the freedom of their government, yet their opinions are not sufficiently independent; an astonishing respect for the arts and literature of their parent country, and a blind imitation of its manners, are still prevalent among the Americans. . . . Now is the time, and this the country. . . . Let us then seize the present moment, and establish a national language as well as a national government. . . . Delay, in the plan here proposed, may be fatal.

—Noah Webster

That is what Noah Webster wrote in 1789 at the age of thirty-one, long before he had compiled the nation’s first major dictionary.¹ It is a clarion call for American linguistic unity and independence in his Dissertations on the English Language—a 409-page treatise remarkable for its boldness and length as much as for its sweeping generalized history of the language. John Adams had said much the same thing in 1780: “England will never have any more honor, excepting now and then that of imitating the Americans.” Webster, however, was echoing his own lecture delivered in Boston in 1786, combatively titled “Some Differences between the English and Americans Considered. Corruption of Language in England. Reasons Why the English Should Not Be Our Standard, Either in Language or Manners.” These are intensely patriotic words from a young man caught up in a wave of nationalism in the early years of independence. He never really outgrew them. With such language he moved on to denigrate England and especially Samuel Johnson, whom he regarded as the most popular (and therefore damaging) embodiment of the corruption, as he put it, of the English language from which he wished America, before it was too late, to declare its independence. The English language in England was in a progressive state of decay, he announced. Although his militantly missionary brand of language reform won him few friends, his extraordinary persistence, resilience, confidence, stubbornness, and industry led him early in his career to publishing success with his spelling reforms and, later on, to international fame with his much-debated and embattled dictionary. He became known as the “savior” of the American language, the “schoolmaster” of the country.²

The defiant Webster was not alone among Americans in attacking British English. Johnson (and his dictionary) came in for a licking also from critics who accused him of an exclusive, pompous, artificial, and formal regularity of style. They preferred instead a natural form of democratic expression more in keeping with the surging American romantic spirit of freedom, simplicity, and individuality in a revolutionary society. “The English language has not been as well written in England since the time of that literary dunce, Samuel Johnson, who was totally destitute of taste for the vrai naturelle, or simplicity of nature,” wrote Hugh Henry Brackenridge, author and Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice, in 1792. Those were strong words but not as revolutionary as those before 1786 (though not published until 1832) of Joseph Brown Ladd, an impatient, aspiring poet who was killed in a duel at the age of twenty-two: “Dr. Johnson was a writer of rather more genius, and a greater share of popularity. He was on that account the most dangerous; . . . . of all modern perversions of taste, the works of Johnson have done the greatest mischief.” The emulation of Johnson’s style and language would divide America, not unify it as Webster proclaimed “Federal English” would do—that is, the English of the common “yeoman” of his native state of Connecticut, for example. There were no American dictionaries that might stop the insidious flow of Johnson’s influence, but Brackenridge argued that a book urging an American style to match American life “might do more to effect so desirable an end, than can be accomplished by all the dictionaries and institutes, that were ever made.”³

2

Judging from the remarks of several contemporary witnesses, Webster made his progress through life more difficult and tempestuous than it might have been had he not been so cranky, irritable, and arrogant, unloading in print his politically and linguistically charged opinions, whipping himself up into polemical frenzies, and refusing to temper his language when dealing with people who disagreed with him or with whom he disagreed. He was not an easy man to like. Annoyed by the American provincialism of such preaching, Thomas Jefferson, who had an aversion to Webster’s Federalist politics and the “Federal English” he championed, disliked the man, once describing him in a letter to President James Madison as a political “busybody” and nuisance: “I view Webster as a mere pedagogue of very limited understanding and very strong prejudices and party passions.”⁴ John Pickering, a contemporary of Webster’s, well-known to him, who wrote a book on the contentious subject of the American vocabulary, called him “a pusillanimous, half-begotten, self-dubbed patriot.” Jill Lepore has put not too fine a point on it, calling him “a failed schoolmaster, a passionate flutist . . . . an intriguing essayist, an inexhaustible lobbyist, a shrill editor, a pompous lecturer”; “an arrogant, self-promoting pedagogue”; and “a tight-lipped, supercilious, embittered patriarch.” Nevertheless, Webster was the sort of truculent man whom many of his contemporaries may well not have liked but had to admire for his pugnacity, perseverance, seemingly boundless energy and courage—and thick skin.⁵

Webster was born in 1758 into a relatively poor farming family in a small agricultural hamlet (now known as West Hartford) on the outskirts of Hartford, Connecticut. Seeing young Noah around the farm with a book in his hands far more often than a pitchfork, his father realized there were other than agricultural currents stirring in his son’s mind, but the son’s college ambitions posed difficult problems for the father. There was little money in the family for anything except the necessities for keeping the farm going, especially during troubled times when the colonies seemed on the verge of revolution. The father hesitated to comply but finally consented. As Noah’s daughter, Eliza, put it many years later, “When my Father was a boy of fourteen he showed a decided love for study and books. . . . My Grandfather was a wise man, and, finding Noah stretched on the grass forgetful of his tasks, he decided to permit him to follow his inclinations. . . . The father was deeply interested in his son’s career, for he mortgaged the farm to pay his college expenses. . . .” With that money in hand, the boy, not quite sixteen, entered Yale College in September 1774.⁶

In some respects it was an unfortunate time to attend Yale, or any college in the American colonies, for with the outbreak of the Revolution during Webster’s freshman year, campus life was disrupted and remained so the entire time he was there. Because of food shortages in the impoverished country-side, Yale had insufficient provisions for students and was forced to close briefly in December 1776. When the students returned in January 1777 from Christmas recess they found there was still not enough to eat; there was also little wood, and they had to burn straw in their fireplaces. Then the fear of a British invasion of New Haven Harbor forced the college to close briefly in March. When it reopened, classes were resumed in Glastonbury, Connecticut, well away from endangered New Haven. That summer of 1777, Noah and his two brothers even joined a small militia commanded by their father, “shouldered a musket,” and marched two days to the Hudson River to join the resistance to General Burgoyne’s advance into southern New England. News of Burgoyne’s defeat spared them from any fighting, however, and they returned home safely, physically exhausted and emotionally drained.

Yale was then a small campus with 150 students; two professors (one of whom was the President Naphtali Daggett); and three tutors, including Timothy Dwight, later president of Yale, who remained a lifelong friend of Webster’s. For a young man with a keen curiosity and quick intellect, it was a good place to be. Students were made to feel they could and should do much to ameliorate society’s problems: “Remember that you are to act for the empire of America,” Dwight stirringly told the 1776 graduating class: “You should by no means consider yourselves as members of a small neighborhood, town, or colony only, but as being concerned in laying the foundations of American greatness. Your wishes, your designs, your labors, are not to be confined by the narrow bounds of the present age, but are to comprehend succeeding generations, and be pointed to immortality.” They debated current social and political issues, wrote papers on them, and formed intense friendships shaped by the common conviction that a new age of promise and hope was dawning in America. Webster kept company at Yale with fellow students who went on to distinguish themselves nationally in politics, diplomacy, the legal world, literature, education, and religion. Among them were Joel Barlow (later ambassador at the Court of St. Cloud in France), Oliver Wolcott (who became secretary of the treasury under President John Adams and whose father was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence), and Zephaniah Swift (who would rise to become chief justice of the Supreme Court of Connecticut).⁷

Webster ended the last weeks of his undergraduate career on a few sour notes when his already well-known capacity for reckless outspokenness and indiscreet activism showed itself. One such incident involved his tutor Rev. Joseph Buckminster, with whom for some reason he fell out just before his graduation in September 1778. In a letter to Webster about a year later, Buckminster regretted his former student’s overly strident “independent spirit” and predicted that unless it was tamed, it would in the future expose him dangerously to “errors and mortifications.” “Had you listened to the advice of one who had from his first acquaintance studied your interest,” he wrote, “I am persuaded you would have closed your academic studies with . . . . reputation. . . . [Y]ou must endeavor not to be forward in applying . . . . to persons with whom you have but a slight acquaintance, nor be too frank in opening your heart to them. Such is the perverseness of human nature [that] they will be disposed to ridicule you and perhaps set you down among those who have too high an opinion of their own importance.” Buckminster was prophetic, envisaging all too clearly that in his life Webster would often find he had dealt “treacherously” with himself.⁸

When Webster returned to his farming home with his degree, he hoped to be able to study law, but there was little family money for that. Nor did he have any prospects of a job. He wrote of being “cast out upon the world, at the age of twenty, without patrons, in the midst of a war which had disturbed all occupation, had impoverished the country; and the termination of which could not be foreseen.” He fell into a depression out of which he tried to lift himself by keeping to his room and reading. Considering how much and how soon he would disparage Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, it is surprising that the work he says rescued him from his melancholia was Johnson’s famous Rambler moral essays. Thirty years later, in the middle of a life-changing religious conversion in 1808, he remembered how Johnson had helped him through those dark days: “Being set afloat in the world at the inexperienced age of twenty, without a father’s aid which had before supported me, my mind was . . . . overwhelmed with gloomy apprehensions. In this situation I read Johnson’s Rambler, with unusual interest and with a visible effect upon my moral opinions, for when I closed the last volume, I formed a firm resolution to pursue a course of virtue through life, and to perform all moral and social duties with a scrupulous exactness.” Until the end of his life he remained grateful to Johnson for this lifeline, while attacking him relentlessly for the damage he said his dictionary was wreaking on the English language, especially (but not exclusively) in America.⁹

After a period of private study, he managed to pass his bar exams in Hartford in April 1781 but found he could not make a living by practicing law. Over the next few years, he took to teaching, twice starting his own schools, both of which failed. It was during this period that, exasperated by the schoolbooks available for children in America, he made the bold decision to write two “small elementary books for the teaching of the English language.”¹⁰

3

He sat down in his rented rooms to write a spelling book that might replace the persistent imposition of spelling and grammar books from England, chiefly Rev. Thomas Dilworth’s elementary grammar, A New Guide to the English Tongue (1740), which had reigned supreme in American schoolrooms since the mid-eighteenth century: editions were published in America and continued to be used there well into the nineteenth century. Writing of Dilworth’s book that “one half of the work is totally useless, and the other half defective and erroneous,” Webster mainly objected to it because it was English. Dilworth’s prescriptive Short Introduction to English Grammar in 1762 ignited outbursts of Webster’s inflammatory words of anti-British abuse. His friend Joel Barlow cautioned him: “You know our country is prejudiced in favor of old Dilworth, the nurse of us all, and it will be difficult to turn their attention from it; you know, too, that the printers make large impressions of it and afford it very cheap.” Ignoring such warnings, Webster went on to complete the first draft of the speller in the summer of 1782, which was published the following year as The First Part of the Grammatical Institute of the English Language. In a revised edition in 1786, he changed the title of the speller to The American Spelling Book, more in keeping (he thought) with the simplicity of his method. It became known thereafter as the “Blue Back Speller” because of its distinctive blue paper cover.¹¹

By the time he completed the speller, he had decided on a more ambitious, three-part plan: a speller, a grammar, and a reader, which at that point he was calling The American Instructor but later, at the suggestion of his mentor Ezra Stiles at Yale, he awkwardly renamed A Grammatical Institute, of the English Language, Comprising, an Easy, Concise, and Systematic Method of Education, Designed for the Use of English Schools in America. His scheme was to replace Dilworth’s difficult (for children) British explanations and illustrations of spelling, pronunciation, and grammar with a more accessible, distinctly American “local” approach—although, puzzlingly, he admits he has based his spelling on Johnson’s dictionary. Under the existing system of education, he asks, “How would a child or a foreigner learn the different sound of o in these words, rove, move, dove, or of oo in poor, door? Or that a, ai, ei, and e have precisely the same sound in these words, bare, laid, vein, there? Yet these and fifty other irregularities have passed unnoticed by authors of Spelling Books and Dictionaries.” He took pity on children and foreigners by arranging his word lists into subjects and orders that smoothly and practically took them from the easy to the more difficult. The book was also illustrated with coarse woodcuts of stories from Aesop’s fables and such scenes as a rude boy who stole apples and a country maid with her milk pail. He replaced Dilworth’s British references, of which few American children could ever have been expected to make much or any sense, with American proper names, geography, and history. His book, he wrote in the introduction, was a “mite [thrown] into the common treasure of patriotic exertions.” It was the first step in his lifelong journey toward fostering an American language. The book also scorned what he called “those odious distinctions of provincial dialects” in American speech, and he cautioned boys and girls against slovenly and provincial pronunciation.¹² To that end, he composed short dialogues that students, depending on their age, were asked to read aloud, as well as tables of graduated lessons, inviting students to repeat vertical columns of words such as this one:

glade	snake	tract	clank	clamp	black
grade	glaze	pact	crank	champ	crack
shave	craze	plant	shank	cramp	match
wave	prate	sang	plank	spasm	patch
quake	slate	fang	clump	splash	fetch
stage	shape	rang	thump	crash	vetch13

Webster was never modest. His spelling book, he maintained rather grandly, “does more to form the language of a nation than all other books,” and he hoped it would “promote the interest of literature and the harmony of the United States” by “purifying” its language. The word “purifying” played up Webster’s obsession that there was an urgent need both to unify pronunciation seamlessly across the nation and reject England’s “corruption” of the language. He bore down on this “corruption” in an essay, “English Corruption of the American Language,” which was later printed in his Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings (1790). One wonders how he came to such defiant observations never having been to England nor having had much of an opportunity by then to converse with the classes of English people he cites. What jumps out in the following passage is its resolute linguistic patriotism rather than any close study of England’s speech habits:

Our language was spoken in purity about eighty years ago; since which time, great numbers of faults have crept into practice about the theater and court of London. An affected erroneous pronunciation has in many instances taken place of the true; and new words or modes of speech have succeeded the ancient correct English phrases.

Thus we have, in the modern English pronunciation, their “natshures,” “conjunctshures,” “constitshutions,” and “tshumultshous legislatshures;” and a long catalogue of fashionable improprieties. These . . . . offend the ear, and embarrass the language.¹⁴

As he set about writing his school grammar books teaching spelling, syntax, and pronunciation, he realized the formidable competition he faced with the well-established eighteenth-century British grammar books that had taken root in the American classroom. It almost overwhelmed him. In addition to Dilworth, Webster excoriated another highly influential author of an English grammar textbook, Robert Lowth. Lowth was the bishop of London and a professor of poetry at Oxford. His Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) was among those most maligned by Webster. Other less popular grammars, like James Buchanan’s The British Grammar (1760) and Joseph Priestley’s The Rudiments of English Grammar (1761), found their way onto the schoolroom desks of American children. They were soon followed by more general works on language, such as George Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) and Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), which remained popular in America until the late nineteenth century. It has been estimated that in the last forty years of the eighteenth century in Britain some 157 different grammars were in circulation.¹⁵

Webster, however, had tapped into a market for homegrown American grammars and spellers that was about to swell beyond anyone’s expectations. A British journalist and grammarian, Samuel Kirkham, who lectured on grammar across America for some thirty years in the early nineteenth century and published his own English Grammar in Familiar Lessons (1829), explained the social importance grammar had assumed in America by 1820: “As grammar opens the door to every department of learning, a knowledge of it is indispensable; and should you not aspire at distinction in the republick of letters, this knowledge cannot fail of being serviceable to you, even if you are destined to pass through the humblest walks of life.”¹⁶

Two popular American grammars that followed Webster’s were Caleb Bingham’s The Young Ladies’ Accidence: Or, a Short and Easy Introduction to English Grammar (1785) and Caleb Alexander’s A Grammatical System of the English Language (1814). Alexander also published one of the earliest dictionaries in America, the Columbian Dictionary (1800). Between 1820 and 1850, schoolbooks available in America, mostly grammars, grew from 30 to 44 percent of all copies of books published in the country. According to one estimate, some 250 separate American grammars were published in the first half of the nineteenth century. Kirkham himself was selling some sixty thousand copies of his English Grammar every year in the 1830s. Nonetheless, the British competition was fierce and actually grew instead of diminished. The most famous grammar book to become a close companion of American life, published near the end of the eighteenth century, was Lindley Murray’s English Grammar, Adapted to Different Classes of Learners (1795). It was far more popular in America than any American rival, with more than three hundred editions published before 1850. By then, more copies of it had been sold than any of Webster’s schoolbooks except his speller. Murray’s book stayed in print until the 1880s, selling in the millions. For all social classes, it was thought to be, and was used as, a lifeline to success and an improved social status.¹⁷

In his preface to the speller, Webster styles himself from the start as “the prophet of language to the American people.” His combative language is surprising for someone only twenty-four, so self-defining in its stridency. Americans, he maintains, now see England’s vices “with abhorrence, their errors with pity, and their follies with contempt.” How could Americans tolerate British educational methods any longer when “Europe is grown old in folly, corruption and tyranny”? In an early example of the doctrine of American exceptionalism, he writes: “In that country laws are perverted, manners are licentious, literature is declining and human nature debased. For America in her infancy to adopt the present maxims of the old world would be to stamp the wrinkles of decrepid age upon the bloom of youth and to plant the seeds of decay in a vigorous constitution.”¹⁸

By the time he finished writing his speller in 1782, Webster knew it was perfectly suited to exploit the rush of rising patriotic fervor in the nation. But there was the problem of how to get it published. He also worried about literary piracy in a nation where there was neither national copyright law nor copyright laws for any of the individual states.

4

Copyright law had existed in England since 1710 (“The Statute of Anne”) to protect British authors, as well as Americans who had either published previously in Britain or resided there. That law, the first copyright statute in the world, protected authors for fourteen years, with an optional renewal of another fourteen years. But in America there was no such protection. As Webster’s friend Joel Barlow put it in an imploring letter to Congress in 1783, “the rights of authors should be secured by law. . . . We are not to expect any works of considerable magnitude . . . . offered to the public till such security be given.”¹⁹

Young Webster, like any other author, craved to be able to protect his exclusive right to publish and sell his book in every state. Over the next five years, he dedicated himself to achieving this goal with whatever money he could scrape together from teaching and loans from friends. In the autumn of 1782, he mounted a horse and set off on an ambitious journey to curry support for his book, promote the idea of copyright legislation with influential people and state legislatures, and find a publisher. He traveled, manuscript in hand, to Philadelphia, Princeton, New Jersey, and New York State; wrote letters to authorities in other states; persisted with his more personal contacts in Hartford; and took his cause to some state legislatures. After he returned from his circuit of advertising and petitioning in behalf of his speller, he composed a letter on October 24, “To the General Assembly of Connecticut,” urging legislators in his own state to pass a law granting to him “the exclusive right of printing, publishing, and vending” of his speller (which he was then calling The American Instructor) “for the term of thirteen years.” At first, legislators shied away from meddling with the status quo because there existed few books by Americans who had a personal stake in the copyright issue. Another impediment was the republican insistence on the unregulated, unhampered circulation of books as a democratic right. Webster managed to obtain a testimonial here and there, though, such as one in September 1782 from Samuel Stanhope Smith, professor of moral philosophy and future president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), to whom he personally showed the manuscript and who judged that the book was “very proper for young persons in the country. . . . And it is my opinion that it can be of no evil consequence to the state, and may be of benefit to it, to vest, by a law, the sole right of publishing and vending such works in the authors of them.” Congress at last, in May 1783, recommended that the individual states grant copyrights to authors of new books in their states for at least fourteen years. After that, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island promptly passed such legislation. After his speller was published in October 1783, Webster rode off again, this time to “middle and southern states,” to promote his book in Charleston, Baltimore, Delaware, and Richmond, Virginia, and to urge copyright legislation as well. Congress took bolder action in 1790, finally passing a Copyright Act, the first federal copyright law, virtually a duplicate of the British Act of 1710, which had never applied to the United States, granting authors copyright for fourteen years with a further fourteen if the author survived the first period.²⁰

Some sixty years later (1843), as Webster rounded up a few of his fugitive papers for publication before he died, he published “Origin of the Copy-right Laws in the United States,” in which he made a case for himself as the driving force behind those regulations. As David Micklethwait, however, makes clear in his book, Noah Webster and the American Dictionary, these early copyright efforts by Webster in 1782 were aimed at protecting only his speller and any other schoolbooks he might write; he was not then motivated chiefly to promote copyright law to protect all authors. While it is therefore a bit of a stretch to call Webster “the father of copyright legislation in America,” as his biographer Harry Warfel has done, Webster certainly played his part, along with Barlow and others, to raise the consciousness of legislators in individual states about the need for some sort of copyright law.²¹

5

As for getting his speller published, Webster claimed it met with “general approbation” from those he asked to read it, but it ran into stiff opposition because of its staunch rejection of Dilworth and its “visionary” reforms of American pronunciation and spelling. In a letter to a friend in January 1783, Webster complained of a “popular prejudice” for Dilworth and that “people are apt to slumber in the opinion that he is incapable of improvement.” Appealing to patriotism, his overarching theme was the vital need to break free of Europe’s “mouldering pillars of antiquity.” Still, initially no printer or bookseller he approached would answer the call and touch his manuscript—there were no publishers as we know them today—unless Webster was willing to pay for the labor, ink, and paper. Friends came to his aid, however, and the first part of the Grammatical Institute was finally published in October 1783 by Barzillai Hudson and George Goodwin, the printers of the Connecticut Courant in Hartford. Webster’s contract with his publishers stipulated that he sign over to them all publishing rights for new editions, which turned out to be a horrible mistake.²²

The speller had 120 pages and was small, only three and a half by six and a quarter inches; it quickly became an astonishing success. Five thousand copies were printed and quickly sold. By January 1785, the book was selling at the rate of five hundred to one thousand per week, and the printers planned to print twenty thousand to thirty thousand more. By 1804, more than one million copies of the 1787 edition had been printed, most of them in Hartford and Boston. From 1804 to 1818, more than three million were licensed for sale; and between 1818 and 1832, an estimated three million more were printed. This success story did not end there: almost four million copies of Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book, Being an Improvement on the American Spelling Book, published in 1829 to counteract the falling sales of The American Spelling Book, were licensed for sale between 1829 and 1843. The little book continued to sell well throughout the nineteenth century, making it one of the best sellers in American publishing history.

In 1784 and 1785, Webster published parts 2 and 3 of his three-part scheme, the “grammar” and “reader.” Not for the last time, unfortunately, his reformist zeal led him astray. He made wild claims for American prose at a time when it was generally acknowledged to be unspectacular: “The people are right. . . . I have been attentive to the political interests of America. I consider it as a capital fault in all our schools, that the books generally used contain subjects wholly uninteresting to our youth; while the writings that marked the Revolution . . . are perhaps not inferior to the orations of Cicero and Demosthenes.” “I have begun a reformation in the Language, and my plan is but yet in embryo,” he told Timothy Pickering in 1785, with not a little exaggeration.²³

Predictably, the Grammatical Institute ran into a torrent of scorn from critics because of the appendix Webster attached to the speller titled, “An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to the Pronunciation.” In that short piece he boldly (and recklessly) proposed reforms of English orthography so as “to render the orthography sufficiently regular and easy.” He was not advocating a fine-tuning of spelling to reflect, for example, American pronunciation, but nothing less than a major revolution. His and other reformers’ (including Benjamin Franklin) idea was to make spelling more phonetic and logically analogous with related forms. But Webster’s overhaul of orthography was so idiosyncratic and extreme that it tended to make spelling more, not less, complicated, multiplying possible spellings so much that they were difficult to grasp and follow. Much of the public ridiculed him and continued to do so for the rest of his life.

Ridiculed or not, several of his reforms caught on, while others did not. Modern readers can identify easily which of the following examples had no future at all. He proposed the “omission of all superfluous or silent letters,” such as a in bread; therefore, henceforth bread, breast, built, friend, give, head, meant, and realm would be spelled instead as bred, brest, bilt, frend, giv, hed, ment, and relm. He would substitute “a character that has a certain definite sound for one that is more vague and indeterminate,” so that grieve, mean, near, speak, and zeal would become greev, meen, neer, speek, and zeel; and believe, blood, daughter, draught, grief, key, laugh, and tough would become beleev, blud, dawter, draft, greef, kee, laf, and tuf. In addition, ch should become k, making architecture, character, cholic, and chorus become arkitecture, karacter, kolic, and korus; and ch should also be changed to sh in chaise, chevalier, and machine, making shaze, shevaleer, and masheen. He also dictated in the speller itself that numerous other silent letters had to be banished: for example, the s in island, and b in thumb; one of the double consonants in the likes of jeweller, traveller, waggon; the u in colour, endeavour, odour; and the final k in such as frolick and publick. The re in words like calibre, centre, and theatre also had to be changed to er; and the c in defence, offence, pretence, and so on would be spelled with an s—defense, offense, pretense. And there was a long list of sundry other radical proposals that never got off the ground, such as acre to aker, crowd to croud, soot to sut, woe to wo, and women to wimmen. Others, like gaol to jail and plough to plow, did stand the test of time.²⁴

It would not be long before Webster laid out at length the principles and philosophy behind these and other linguistic reforms. But for the time being, in spite of the radical nature of his reforms, he was still guided by the same rationale in the teaching of spelling that had impelled it since the sixteenth century: the reason behind it was the more important goal of teaching a pupil how to read. As Jennifer Monaghan puts it in her book A Common Heritage, “a spelling book presupposed that reading involved pronouncing and that reading was therefore oral, not silent. The purpose of a speller was to teach children how to pronounce hundreds of words, most of which were not already in their oral vocabulary. The question of comprehension was deferred for other texts. . . . [T]o teach children to read was in some sense to teach them to speak.”²⁵

6

For the next several years, Webster continued to travel from one state to another, visiting politicians and college presidents, trying to win endorsements for his schoolbooks and continuing to push for copyright protection. In 1785, he ventured into politics with his Sketches of American Policy, advocating as a Federalist a much stronger central government to exist side-by-side with (but able to control) personal freedoms. He gave copies of it to George Washington when he visited Mount Vernon in November 1785, who in turn passed it on approvingly to James Madison in Philadelphia. He made a point of visiting Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Aaron Burr, and virtually all the presidents of the leading American colleges in his travels, pushing his opinions on politics and language and promoting himself in a series of lectures in Baltimore, Wilmington (Delaware), Annapolis, and Philadelphia in 1786. Not everyone approved of his ideas or his ardor, as in the case of Rev. John Ewing, president of the University of the State of Pennsylvania (now the University of Pennsylvania), who was suspicious, calling him a “retailer of nouns and pronouns” and “fomenter of rebellion.”²⁶

In November 1787, he moved to New York City to start a monthly literary periodical that he called the American Magazine. To finance it, he agreed with his publisher that in exchange for a quick bulk payment he would sacrifice royalties in New York State for five years—the second huge financial mistake that he made in behalf of his speller. The magazine failed while sales of the speller in New York soared.

It is no surprise that he began to feel like a failure. In spite of his tireless, some might say frenetic, correspondence with friends and men of influence in behalf of “the gospel of nationalism in language and politics,” he felt neglected by people of influence and power. He was also taking a beating from anti-Federalists. Lonely and dejected, he took stock of himself. “I sometimes think of retiring from society and devoting myself to reading and contemplation, for I labor incessantly and reap very little fruit from my toils,” he complained to his fiancée, Rebecca Greenleaf (whom he called Becca), a vivacious young woman from a prosperous Boston family with whom he fell hopelessly in love in 1787. “I suspect I am not formed for society. . . .” Perhaps he should moderate his behavior, he thought: “I suspect that I have elevated my views too high, that I have mistaken my own character and ought to contract my wishes to a smaller compass.” That was a more realistic and sober self-assessment than what he wrote to Rebecca a few days later: “The eyes of America are upon me. . . .” They were indeed, at least in certain circles, but not always in the way he imagined or hoped for.²⁷

John Pickering, who several years later would be on the receiving end of Webster’s artillery over the current status of the American language, spread it around that Webster had too high an opinion of himself. That, at least, is what he told his nephew: “[W]ith a competent share of good sense, he possessed a quantum sufficit of vanity, so that he really overrated his own talents.” Ebenezer Hazard, postmaster general of the United States, on March 5, 1788, described Webster to the clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap, one of the overseers of Harvard College: “He certainly does not want understanding, and yet there is a mixture of self-sufficiency, all-sufficiency, and at the same time a degree of insufficiency about him, which is (to me) intolerable.” Hazard called him a “literary puppy.” Between themselves they referred to him deprecatingly as “the Monarch.”²⁸

At thirty-one, tired of bachelorhood and eager to “be known as an established resident and citizen,” Webster married twenty-three-year-old Rebecca in October 1789 and retreated to his hometown of Hartford, where he was confident he could make a living as a lawyer. Endlessly patient and enduring, Rebecca turned out to be a huge comfort and stabilizing influence for him. Although he was happy enough in his family life—over the next eighteen years, he and his wife would have six daughters and two sons (one son died within a few months of birth)—pangs of alienation continued. He could make no headway as a lawyer. In any case, he did not really like the law. He involved himself in local civic life and was elected to the Hartford Common Council, but his overwhelming passion was still for American language reform. With only a small income from his schoolbooks, because he had negotiated himself out of most of his royalties, he turned to writing a treatise that he must have known would rouse a storm of protest against him.²⁹

When Webster published his Dissertations on the English Language in 1789, he dedicated it to Benjamin Franklin, for a while a kindred spirit on the matter of spelling reform—“a great Philosopher and a warm Patriot,” Webster writes, who never assumed a “dictatorial authority.” But the book’s main argument goes something like this: there is to be no elite in America, no linguistic differentiation between classes and regions. He might as well be preaching from a pulpit: “Now is the time. . . . Delay, in the plan here proposed, may be fatal.” The note of urgency in these phrases is an example of Websterian hyperbole, but for him a national language was as vital as a national government, and new nationhood provided unique opportunities for reform of the language. These were opportunities that would fade quickly, he warns, if not grabbed before America’s language, like Britain’s, deteriorated owing to homegrown “corruptions” such as regional dialects, affectation, nostalgia for English manners and customs, class divisions, and innumerable other evils. At least America did not have to cope with the deleterious effects of “superfluous ornament” in prose like Edward Gibbon’s and Samuel Johnson’s, the language of nobility and the British Court, and “the influence of men, learned in Greek and Latin, but ignorant of their own tongue; who have laboured to reject much good English, because they have not understood the original construction of the language.” Johnson is his prime target. He is “mischievous,” “stupid,” the dispenser of “erroneous opinion,” and the promulgator of “pedantic orthography”; he had done more with his dictionary to damage the language than anyone else. His “principles would in time destroy all agreement between the spelling and pronunciation of words.” Webster had begun sounding off in this way about Johnson in the 1780s and was still at it when he died more than half a century later.³⁰

The Dissertations illustrates, at a young age, Webster’s copious memory and tireless and detailed attention to what would become self-defining themes in his efforts to reform the profile of the English language in America: hundreds of sounds and numerous examples of classes of letters and words that complicate English pronunciation, orthography that confounds consistent pronunciation, irregularity of orthography that bedevils young people and adults alike, and etymology to which few people paid much attention but would, if handled his way, clarify and help solve a good many problems in the way the language is learned and used. The sheer effort is impressive. The most distinctive character of the Dissertations, however, relates to his assessment of flaws in American culture; his antipathy toward foreign influences; his strident plea for the banishment of local dialect and pronunciation; the establishment of a national “standard” of language; his assertions that all languages descend from “a common stock”; his elaborate scheme to reform spelling in America; and, especially, a distrust of a variety of so-called authorities in matters of language usage that, if unchecked, he is adamant would threaten national unity. His tone of urgency often comes across as “overturn, overturn.” If, as he says in his dedication, Benjamin Franklin never assumed “dictatorial authority,” it is less clear that he himself avoids it. Here are a few examples:

when a particular set of men, in exalted stations, undertake to say “we are the standards of propriety and elegance, and if all men do not conform to our practice, they shall be accounted vulgar and ignorant,” they take a very great liberty with the rules of the language and the rights of civility.

if language must vary, like fashions, at the caprice of a court, we must have our standard dictionaries republished, with the fashionable pronunciation, at least once in five years; otherwise a gentleman in the country will become intolerably vulgar. . . . [These are] generally corruptions.

The two points . . . which I conceive to be the basis of a standard in speaking, are these; universal undisputed practice, and the principle of analogy.

As a nation, we have a very great interest in opposing the introduction of an plan of uniformity with the British language.

Customs, habits, and language, as well as government should be national. America should have her own distinct from all the world.³¹

In his Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings (he spells fugitive provokingly without the e) published the following year, Webster exhibits his proposals with an ardor that became the butt of jokes for years to come. He was mocked, for example, for parading his spelling reforms in his preface with a warning to his readers that amounts to a self-parody: “In the essays, ritten within the last yeer, a considerable change in spelling iz introduced by way of experiment. This liberty waz taken by the writers before the age of queen Elizabeth, and to this we are indeted for the preference of modern spelling over that of [John] Gower and [Geoffrey] Chaucer. . . . There iz no alternativ. Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds, stil exists in full force. . . .” Getting into the swing of it and explaining why he concealed his name in many of his early essays, he continues: “MOST of thoze peeces, which hav appeered before in periodical papers and Magazeens, were published with fictitious signatures; for I very erly discuvered, that altho the name of an old and respectable karacter givs credit and consequence to hiz ritings, yet the name of a yung man iz often prejudicial to hiz performances. By conceeling my name, the opinions of men hav been prezerved from an undu bias arizing from personal prejudices, the faults of the ritings hav been detected, and their merit in public estimation ascertained.”³²

He lost a good $400 (about $10,000 today) from the Dissertations, which added to his money worries. More than anything else, he wanted to write, but he thought he might try the business world, perhaps as a book merchant in Boston: “To renounce all my literary pursuits, which are now very congenial with my habits, would not . . . make me unhappy.” He decided instead to take up an offer to edit and write a new Federalist newspaper, the American Minerva, in New York, which failed after five exhausting years. He had succeeded mainly in making enemies. William Cobbett, the successful editor of Porcupine’s Gazette in Philadelphia, who had endured just about enough of what he regarded as Webster’s self-proclaimed and bombastic authority, called him “a most gross calumniator,” “a great fool,” and a “bare-faced liar.” Many others also taunted Webster in print.³³

Embittered and deeply in debt, Webster mourned that America had begun to “crumble,” that mankind was innately perverse and selfish: “From the date of Adam, to this moment,” he ranted in the July 12, 1797, issue of the Minerva, “no country was ever so infested with corrupt and wicked men, as the United States. . . . [B]ankrupt speculators, rich bankrupts, ‘patriotic’ Atheists . . . are spread over the United States . . . deceiving the people with lies. . . . We see in our new Republic, the decrepitude of Vice, and a free government hastening to ruin, with a rapidity without example.”³⁴

Webster was certainly not alone with his Jeremiah-like lamentations. There was widespread dismay among Americans, including the Founders, that they were quickly losing the plot, that the social and intellectual foundations of the new nation had been corrupted by the lack of unifying authority in an undisciplined democracy, whether in politics, social customs and manners, religion, or language. What set Webster apart from most others was that he took to writing and lecturing prolifically and angrily about this apparent slide into “barbarism.” In his essay Revolution in France (1794), he urges his readers again to believe that mankind is inherently depraved and evil. It must be saved from itself. He writes: “If the word aristocracy is applicable to anything, it is to that personal influence which men derive from . . . age, talents, wealth, education, virtue”—in other words, an elite. Natural aristocracy exists “universally among men,” but society has to ensure that its influence flourishes. The nation’s early years, however, had shown him that it was failing to do that.³⁵

The “natural aristocracy,” however, in which Webster and others placed their hopes displayed an altogether different sort of gentility from the British aristocratic class he scorned for corrupting the English language. He blamed the British ruling classes for most of the problems he identified in early American childhood education and the American language. He regarded this as part of the malaise of a new nation that was failing to declare its cultural independence from Britain. In Webster’s mind, the heart and soul of this problem was linguistic subservience. It turned him into what some have called the nation’s first language strategist. Having read essays by German philosophers on how a national language could determine the moral behavior of a country’s populace, he became convinced that a national language could be an integral part of a comprehensive American cultural revolution. Such a revolution would ensure the preservation of a distinctly American republican culture with far-reaching effects on the country’s institutions as well as on the moral standards and behavior of its citizens. Webster’s revolution was just beginning.³⁶