Noah
Webster’s Story
(Part
of educational pages for adults)
Adapted from a lecture by Dr. Freeman Meyer,
October 1987.
The
Noah Webster House in West Hartford is the birthplace
of one of the most unappreciated men in American
history. Our great military heroes and statesmen
we remember. Even our writers if they write novels.
But an author of a speller? A dictionary? Noah
Webster belongs in the American Hall of Fame.
Webster’s life span of some 85 years is
intensely interesting. Webster was sometimes pompous,
often just plain pig-headed and stubborn; he grew
increasingly conservative in both politics and
religion. He was a complex man, with both
virtues and vices. But one virtue he had above
all others: a love of country, which was apparent
throughout the entire 65 years of his adult life.
Noah’s
Family
Noah
Webster’s forebearers migrated to America
in the seventeenth century. The name Webster, English
in origin, means female weaver. There is a lot
of confusion between Noah and Daniel Webster, but
there was no relationship between them. Daniel
Webster is best known as a lawyer, a member of
congress, a secretary of state, and perhaps the
greatest orator of the first half of the nineteenth
century. Noah Webster’s fame is quite different:
it rests on his pen.
Noah
Webster was in the sixth generation of his family
in America. Noah Webster, Senior, Noah’s
father, was born in Hartford in 1722 and settled
early in what was then called the West Division
of Hartford (now known as West Hartford), and he
lived to the ripe old age of 91. He held many posts
in the local government and married Mercy Steele
in 1749. She was descendent of Governor William
Bradford, so Noah Webster, Jr. had a distinguished
background with two governors in his past. Noah
and Mercy Webster had five children: Mercy, Abraham,
Jerusha, Noah and Charles. Longevity was common
in this family. The five children lived until the
ages of 70, 80, 70, 85 and 55, an average life
span of 72 years.
The Noah Webster House on South Main Street.
We
don’t know who built the house, or exactly
when, but it was probably built by Noah, Senior.
It was part of a farm of about 90 acres. At the
time of Noah Junior’s birth, the house had
only four rooms. The lean-to addition was
added in 1787 and in the nineteenth century, a
series of ells were built. An ell used to be where
the main gallery is now.
Noah
Webster, Sr. sold the house to the Hurlburts
in 1790. They held it through the nineteenth
century. In 1899 they sold it to the Tilletsons,
and they sold it to the Hamiltons in 1909. The
Hamiltons were the last ones to live in the house.
Fred, who was a member of the Noah Webster Board
of Trustees, remembers looking out back and being
able to see right to Ridge Road. Only pasture
lay between this house and that road. The Hamiltons
gave the house to the town in 1962, and at that
point the house literally began to die, and continued
to deteriorate until the Noah Webster Foundation
formed in 1965 and began restoring the
house.
This
is a modest center chimney house that Webster
lived in: four rooms, two above and two below.
Eight people lived in the house most of that
time: five children, two parents and Grandmother
Steele. Family meant a lot to people and they
lived very close together. Think about Mercy
Webster in 1763: Charles is one year of age,
Noah is five, Jerusha is seven, Abraham is 12,
Mercy is 14.
Noah’s
Schooling
We
know little about Noah’s early life.
He probably began school at the age of seven, which
was typical. This schooling would continue as long
as the father would permit it. For most common
people, boys were expected to work full-time on
the farm at the age of about 10 or 11. When Noah
reached the age of 14, in 1772, we have the first
recorded evidence of his scholarly potential. In
the eighteenth century the best educated man in
a community would be the Congregational minister,
who had usually gone to Yale or Harvard. He frequently
used his knowledge to train boys who might aspire
to attend college. Such a minister was the Reverend
Nathan Perkins, minister of the West Division’s
Congregational Church. (Perkins went to what is
now Princeton). We don’t know whether Perkins
found Webster or if Webster applied to Perkins,
but they found each other. Webster requested that
the pastor help him in preparing for entrance to
Yale. From the moment that Webster began to learn
Latin (and you couldn't be educated without knowing
Latin), he was a scholar. He was taken to books;
he loved to read and exhibited this throughout
the rest of his life. Noah was the only one in
his family who went beyond a grammar school education.
After
two years of tutoring by Perkins, at the age
of 16, Noah went off to Yale. Sixteen was the
typical college age at that time. Noah started
college at an exciting time in 1774. The Boston
Tea Party had just occurred, the Coercive
Acts had been passed and it was clear that we were
headed toward a war. Before he was well into his
first classes, the shots heard round the world
had been fired at Lexington.
Webster’s class of 1778 was a very distinguished
one, with Noah himself, Joel Barlow and Oliver
Wolcott. Nathan Hale was a senior when Noah’s
class entered Yale.
On
June 15, 1775 the Continental Congress appointed
George Washington Commander in Chief of the American
Army, which was laying siege to Boston. He was
sent up to Boston to take command, and as he passed
through New Haven, Webster got his first glimpse
of Washington. Webster later boasted that
the Yale students serenaded the Commander in Chief,
and Noah played the flute.
Noah Webster did not see active duty during the
war. The one chance he had was the Battle of Saratoga
in 1777. Burgoyne was surrounded by American troops;
the call went to New England that he was trapped,
and that New England should send all of the men
that they could. Webster, his two brothers and
his father set out for Saratoga to join that battle,
but as they were approaching, they got the word
that Burgoyne had been taken and that the Americans
had captured about 5,000 redcoats.
Webster
graduated from Yale in 1778 and decided to take
up the law. This was a very controversial time
in his life. According to his diary, he went
to his father to ask for financial assistance,
and his father, in effect, turned him down. He
gave him some worthless Continental Currency and
said, “This is all I can do for you; I can
do no more.” Then Noah went to his room for
several days to try to figure this thing out.
Noah the Married Man
Noah
Webster married Rebecca Greenleaf, whom he always
called Becca. His diary offers a running account
of his romance with Becca in the spring of 1787.
They had a normal two year courtship and were
married in 1789. They spent Thanksgiving of that
year at this house, and that may well have been
their last visit to Noah’s birthplace,
since Noah Senior sold the house in 1790.
Romantic
letters from Noah to Rebecca, attesting to their
loving relationship, are part of the historical
collections at the Noah Webster House, as well
as the Webster ring. The center of this ring
contains hair, believed to be that of Noah and
Rebecca. On the back an inscription reads:
Noah
Webster
Rebecca
Webster
Noah the Teacher
Since
he could not go into law immediately, Webster
went into teaching. He possibly taught first in
Glastonbury and then taught in Hartford for a while
and lived with Oliver Ellsworth, one of the state’s
most distinguished jurists. In those days most
potential lawyers did not go to law school. Instead
they “read law,” residing with a lawyer
and learning from him, his books and records. Webster
did this with Ellsworth.
In
1779-1780, he taught in the West Division and
lived in this house. During that winter, we get
the first glimpse of the Noah Webster to be.
Elementary education was in a deplorable state.
The one room school house was a very poor system
of education. The school houses were usually
ill-heated, ill-lit, the textbooks were poorly
written and scarce, the teachers were ill-paid,
and the guiding rule of the school house was “spare the rod and spoil
the child.” A class might have 50-70 students
aged 6-16.
Most
teachers were discouraged by the situation and
so was Webster, but unlike most others, he sat
down and wrote an essay. Throughout his life,
whenever he saw something that he felt needed correction,
he wrote something about it in the form of an essay.
He saw this as a challenge. Webster felt that Americans
should have their own text books, and that they
should not rely on English textbooks. He also felt
that Americans should have copyright laws to protect
authors. He believed that Americans should have
their own dictionary. Webster wrote, “People
never misapply their economy so much as when they
make mean provisions for the education of children.” He
went on to say that teachers should spare the rod
and encourage students to learn. “The pupil
should have nothing to discourage him.”
He
continued to study law, passed the bar in 1781
and returned to teaching, this time in Sharon,
CT and later in Goshen, NY. He started to
draft the Blue-backed Speller and completed it
in 1783. After he published the Blue-backed
Speller, he opened a law office in Hartford but
spent most of his time petitioning legislatures
for adoption of copyright law and promoting the
speller.
Noah’s
Writings and Publications
Webster planned to call his speller the American
Instructor, but the president of Yale, Ezra
Stiles, suggested a more grandiose title, and
unfortunately, Webster adopted it: A Grammatical
Institute of the English Language. Why was
the speller so important? Between 50,000,000
and 100,000,000 copies were sold (though he never
made much money on it) and more people learned
to read and spell out of this book, than out
of any other book that has ever been printed.
It lasted all the way down to the end of the
nineteenth century, when it was gradually replaced
by the McGuffy reader.
The speller is important for another reason. It
was an American speller, not an English speller.
Webster meant it to be American because he was
very patriotic. He said that America had won its
political independence and now needed to win its
cultural independence. We needed our own books,
dictionaries and spellers. He scoffed at English
textbooks which did not contain words that were
purely American, or American geography.
The
speller is also important because it was used
all over the country and therefore helped to standardize
pronunciation in America. As a result, our
country is most homogeneous in terms of spelling
and pronunciation.
The Blue-Backed Speller
Spellers were text books that taught students
how to read, spell and pronounce words. Most educators
believed that children did not need to understand
what they were reading, so teaching was done using
recitation and memorization. Most spellers used
in America were from England and taught English
pronunciations, geography and historical facts.
Noah thought that Americans needed their own speller
that would teach American ways and instill a sense
of pride in the new nation. He also made changes
that helped to improve the teaching of pronunciation,
spelling and reading.
To
promote this speller, Noah systematically traveled
from state to state, meeting with politicians
and war heroes, asking each to attest to the
greatness of his book. He would ask each
to introduce him to someone else, thereby getting
introduced to all the important people of that
time. His used this huge list to influence the
publisher to take on his project.
The Dictionary
Noah realized that England and the new United
States had different forms of government, institutions,
customs and laws. Because of this, he believed
that they needed different vocabularies. He also
knew that science and technology were developing
rapidly, and new words were being introduced just
as quickly. So, he spent over 25 years researching
words and their origins and writing the first American
dictionary. This dictionary helped Americans to
feel pride in their new country, and enabled everyone
across the new nation to have a standard vocabulary.
Webster’s greatest achievement was the dictionary. In
1800 he published his intentions of writing a dictionary. He
published a shortened, concise but comprehensive,
version in 1806. The final version was finished
in 1825 and published in 1828. It contained 70,000
words. It is no exaggeration to say that it was
immediately accepted as the greatest dictionary
of the English language on both sides of the Atlantic.
Webster had an absolute genius for defining words.
Dining with President Andrew Jackson in
the White House
When
he was ready to publish the book, he found that
there were no federal copyright laws. Any
one could make copies, and he would get no income
from it. This was because the Federation
Government that existed then did not have the power
to pass a copyright law. Therefore, if he wanted
protection of his books, Webster would have to
go to every state and get every state legislature
to grant him a copyright. Under the new Constitution
of 1789, that was changed, partially as a result
of Webster’s work. In 1790 our congress
passed the first federal copyright law, which granted
14 years of protection.
Webster
continued to work for better copyright legislation
for the rest of his life. His efforts were rewarded
in the 1830-1831 congressional session, when
congress seemed ready to improve the law. Webster
was a distinguished man of letters, and people
listened to him. He received three honors in Washington:
he was allowed to address Congress in person on
the copyright question, he was invited to dine
at the White House with President Andrew Jackson,
and he watched as the new bill was passed into
law. The new law granted protection of the
author or his heirs for 28 years, with the right
of renewal for another 14 years.
Webster
described his dinner at the White House in uncomplimentary
ways. “The president asked
me to dine with him and I could not well avoid
it. We sat down at 6:00 and rose at 8:00. The president
was very sociable and placed me, as a stranger,
at his right hand. The party, mostly members of
the two houses, consisted of about 30. The table
was garnished with artificial flowers placed in
gilt urns, supported by female figures on gilt
waiters. We had a great variety of dishes, French
and Italian cooking. I do not know the names of
one of them. I wonder at our great men who introduce
foreign customs to the great annoyance of American
guests. To avoid annoyance as much as possible,
the practice is to dine at home and go to the president’s
to see and be seen, to talk and to nibble fruit
and to drink very good wine. As to dining at the
president's table, in the true sense of the word,
there is no such thing.”
Meeting George Washington
Webster felt that the American central government,
the Articles of Confederation, was too weak. He
found with his copyright experiences that a weak
central government, granted few powers by the states,
was dangerous. In his 1785 publication, Sketches
of American Policy, Webster tried to convince
people to call another convention to draft an amended
form of the confederation, or a new plan of government.
Webster showed the sketches to George Washington
at Mount Vernon, and Washington showed them to
James Madison. So clearly, the Sketches had something
to do with the calling of the convention and the
framing of the constitution.
A Founder
of Amherst College
In
1808, Noah had a religious conversion experience.
His wife and children brought him to an evangelistic
meeting. He was “saved” and this had
a profound affect on his thinking in a lot of areas.
He became much more conservative as a result of
this experience. In 1812 he moved from New Haven
to Amherst, Massachusetts and helped to found Amherst
College.
A Man of Varied Predictability
As
successful as Noah Webster was, he had notable
weaknesses. He was arrogant. When he went to
Philadelphia for the first time Dr. Benjamin
Rush met him and said, “I congratulate you on your arrival
at Philadelphia,” to which Webster replied, “Sir,
you may congratulate Philadelphia on the occasion.”
He was against the Bill of Rights, as were many
people. He felt that freedom of the press would
be abused. He argued that women should be educated
enough to raise children, but no further. They
should never go above their station and should
never read novels. He felt that female education
should be in support of the husband, the family
and caring for the house.
In
the early nineteenth century, he stated that
no one should vote until he turned 45 and that
no one should hold office until the age of 50.
He was 50 at the time. He supported the church
tax in Connecticut, while most opposed it. He
also supported the Anti-War of 1812 Hartford
Convention. He translated the Bible because he
thought it was dirty and felt that “a woman
couldn't read it without blushing.”
While
he was often thought of as “stiff” and
a “curmudgeon”, he also had a fun-loving
side. In his younger years he would socialize
and “paint the town Red” with his friend,
Benjamin Franklin. He was known to love music
and dancing and was a very committed family man.
The Noah Webster House &