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Noah Webster (October 16, 1758 – May 28, 1843) was an American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and prolific author. He has been called the "Father of American Scholarship and Education." His blue-backed speller books taught five generations of children in the United States how to spell and read, and made elementary education more secular and less religious. In the U.S. his name became synonymous with "dictionary," especially the modern Merriam - Webster dictionary that was first published in 1828 as An American Dictionary of the English Language. Noah Webster was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, to an established Yankee family. His father Noah Sr. (1722 – 1813) farmed 90 acres (360,000 m2), was justice of the peace and deacon of the local Congregational church, and was captain on the "alarm list" of the local militia. Noah's father was a descendant of Connecticut Governor John Webster; his mother Mercy (née Steele; d. 1794) was a descendant of Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony. In 1774, at the age of 16, he matriculated at Yale College in New Haven, studying with the learned Ezra Stiles, Yale's president. His four years at Yale overlapped with the American Revolutionary War,
and because of food shortages, many of his college classes were held in
other towns. He served in the Connecticut Militia. His father had
mortgaged the farm to send Webster to Yale, but the son was now on his
own and had no more to do with his family. After
graduating Yale in 1778, he taught school in Glastonbury, Hartford, and
West Hartford. He was admitted to the bar in 1781 and practiced after
1789. Discovering that law was not to his liking, he tried teaching,
setting up several very small schools that did not thrive. Webster
was by nature a revolutionary, seeking American independence from the
cultural thralldom to Britain. To replace it he sought to create a
utopian America, cleansed of luxury and ostentation and the champion of
freedom. By
1781, Webster had an expansive view of the new nation. American
nationalism was superior to Europe because American values were
superior, he claimed. America
sees the absurdities -- she sees the kingdoms of Europe, disturbed by
wrangling sectaries, or their commerce, population and improvements of
every kind cramped and retarded, because the human mind like the body
is fettered 'and bound fast by the chords of policy and superstition':
She laughs at their folly and shuns their errors: She founds her empire
upon the idea of universal toleration: She admits all religions into
her bosom; She secures the sacred rights of every individual; and
(astonishing absurdity to Europeans!) she sees a thousand discordant
opinions live in the strictest harmony ... it will finally raise her to
a pitch of greatness and lustre, before which the glory of ancient
Greece and Rome shall dwindle to a point, and the splendor of modern
Empires fade into obscurity. Webster dedicated his Speller and Dictionary to
providing an intellectual foundation for American nationalism. In
1787 - 89 Webster was an outspoken supporter of the new Constitution. In
terms of political theory, he deemphasized virtue (a core value of republicanism) and emphasized widespread ownership of property (a key element of
liberalism). He was one of the few Americans who paid much attention to
the French theorist Jean Jacques Rousseau. Webster married well and had joined the elite in Hartford but did not have much money. In 1793, Alexander Hamilton lent him $1500 to move to New York City to edit the leading Federalist Party newspaper. In December, he founded New York's first daily newspaper, American Minerva (later known as The Commercial Advertiser),
and edited it for four years, writing the equivalent of 20 volumes of
articles and editorials. He also published the semi-weekly publication, The Herald, A Gazette for the country (later known as The New York Spectator). As a Federalist spokesman, he was repeatedly denounced by the Jeffersonian Republicans as
"a pusillanimous, half-begotten, self-dubbed patriot," "an incurable
lunatic," and "a deceitful newsmonger ... Pedagogue and Quack." Rival
Federalist pamphleteer "Peter Porcupine" (William Cobbett)
said Webster's pro-French views made him "a traitor to the cause of
Federalism", calling him "a toad in the service of sans-cullottism," "a
prostitute wretch," "a great fool, and a barefaced liar," "a spiteful
viper," and "a maniacal pedant." Webster, the consummate master of
words, was distressed. Even the use of words like "the people,"
"democracy," and "equality" in public debate bothered him, for such
words were "metaphysical abstractions that either have no meaning, or
at least none that mere mortals can comprehend." Webster followed French radical thought and was one of the few Americans who admired Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He urged a neutral foreign policy when France and Britain went to war in 1793. But when French minister Citizen Genêt set up a network of pro-Jacobin "Democratic - Republican Societies"
that entered American politics and attacked President Washington,
Webster condemned them. He called on fellow Federalist editors to "all
agree to let the clubs alone — publish nothing for or against them.
They are a plant of exotic and forced birth: the sunshine of peace will
destroy them." For
decades, he was one of the most prolific authors in the new nation,
publishing textbooks, political essays, a report on infectious
diseases, and newspaper articles for his Federalist party. He wrote so
much that a modern bibliography of his published works required 655
pages. He moved back to New Haven in 1798; he was elected as a
Federalist to the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1800 and 1802 - 1807.
Politician Daniel Webster was Noah Webster’s cousin. As a senator, Daniel sponsored Noah’s proposed copyright bill. The
first major statutory revision of U.S. copyright law, the 1831 Act was
a result of intensive lobbying by Noah Webster and his agents in
Congress. As
a teacher, he had come to dislike American elementary schools. They
could be overcrowded, with up to seventy children of all ages crammed
into one-room schoolhouses.
They had poor underpaid staff, no desks, and unsatisfactory textbooks
that came from England. The heating system was also a problem with one
side of the room that was too cold and the other side that was too hot.
Webster thought that Americans should learn from American books, so he
began writing a three volume compendium, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language.
The work consisted of a speller (published in 1783), a grammar
(published in 1784), and a reader (published in 1785). His goal was to
provide a uniquely American approach to training children. His most
important improvement, he claimed, was to rescue "our native tongue"
from "the clamour of
pedantry" that surrounded English grammar and pronunciation. He
complained that the English language had been corrupted by the British
aristocracy, which set its own standard for proper spelling and
pronunciation. Webster rejected the notion that the study of Greek and
Latin must precede the study of English grammar. The appropriate
standard for the American language, argued Webster, was, "the same
republican principles as American civil and ecclesiastical
constitutions", which meant that the people-at-large must control the
language; popular sovereignty in government must be accompanied by
popular usage in language. The Speller was
arranged so that it could be easily taught to students, and it
progressed by age. From his own experiences as a teacher, Webster
thought the Speller should
be simple and gave an orderly presentation of words and the rules of
spelling and pronunciation. He believed students learned most readily
when he broke a complex problem into its component parts and had each
pupil master one part before moving to the next. Ellis argues that
Webster anticipated some of the insights currently associated with Jean Piaget's theory
of cognitive development. Webster said that children pass through
distinctive learning phases in which they master increasingly complex
or abstract tasks. Therefore, teachers must not try to teach a
three-year-old how to read; they could not do it until age five. He
organized his speller accordingly, beginning with the alphabet and
moving systematically through the different sounds of vowels and
consonants, then syllables, then simple words, then more complex words,
then sentences. The speller was originally titled The First Part of the Grammatical Institute of the English Language. Over the course of 385 editions in his lifetime, the title was changed in 1786 to The American Spelling Book, and again in 1829 to The Elementary Spelling Book.
Most people called it the "Blue-Backed Speller" because of its blue
cover, and for the next one hundred years, Webster's book taught
children how to read, spell, and pronounce words. It was the most
popular American book of its time; by 1837 it had sold 15 million
copies, and some 60 million by 1890 — reaching the majority of young
students in the nation's first century. Its royalty of a half-cent per
copy was enough to sustain Webster in his other endeavors. It also
helped create the popular contests known as spelling bees. Slowly, edition by edition, Webster changed the spelling of words, making them "Americanized." He chose s over c in words like defense, he changed the re to er in words like center, and he dropped one of the Ls in traveler. At first he kept the u in words like colour or favour but dropped it in later editions. He also changed "tongue" to "tung," an innovation that never caught on. Part three of his Grammatical Institute (1785) was a reader designed to uplift the mind and "diffuse the principles of virtue and patriotism.": Students received the usual quota of Plutarch, Shakespeare, Swift, and Addison, as well as such Americans as Joel Barlow's Vision of Columbus, Timothy Dwight's Conquest of Canaan, and John Trumbull's poem M'Fingal. He included excerpts from Tom Paine's The Crisis and an essay by Thomas Day calling for the abolition of slavery in accord with the Declaration of Independence. Webster's Speller was
entirely secular. It ended with two pages of important dates in
American history, beginning with Columbus's in 1492 and ending with the
battle of Yorktown in 1781. There was no mention of God, the Bible, or
sacred events. "Let sacred things be appropriated for sacred purposes,"
wrote Webster. As Ellis explains, "Webster began to construct a secular
catechism to the nation-state. Here was the first appearance of
'civics' in American schoolbooks. In this sense, Webster's speller
becoming what was to be the secular successor to The New England Primer with its explicitly biblical injunctions." In turn after 1840 Webster's books lost market share to the McGuffey Eclectic Readers of William Holmes McGuffey, which sold over 120 million copies. Bynack (1984) examines Webster in relation to his commitment to the idea of a
unified American national culture that would stave off the decline of
republican virtues and solidarity. Webster acquired his perspective on
language from such theorists as Mauertuis, Michaelis, and Herder. There
he found the belief that a nation's linguistic forms and the thoughts
correlated with them shaped individuals' behavior. Thus the
etymological clarification and reform of American English promised to
improve citizens' manners and thereby preserve republican purity and
social stability. This presupposition animated Webster's Speller and Grammar. In 1806, Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. In 1807 Webster began compiling an expanded and fully comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language; it took twenty-seven years to complete. To evaluate the etymology of words, Webster learned twenty-six languages, including Old English (Anglo - Saxon), German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit.
Webster hoped to standardize American speech, since Americans in
different parts of the country used different languages. They also
spelled, pronounced, and used English words differently. Webster
completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris,
France, and at the University of Cambridge. His book contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared in a published dictionary before. As a spelling reformer, Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex, so his dictionary introduced American English spellings,
replacing "colour" with "color", substituting "wagon" for "waggon", and
printing "center" instead of "centre". He also added American words,
like "skunk" and "squash", that did not appear in British dictionaries.
At the age of seventy, Webster published his dictionary in 1828. Though
it now has an honored place in the history of American English,
Webster's first dictionary only sold 2,500 copies. He was forced to
mortgage his home to bring out a second edition, and his life from then
on was plagued with debt. In
1840, the second edition was published in two volumes. On May 28, 1843,
a few days after he had completed revising an appendix to the second
edition, and with much of his efforts with the dictionary still
unrecognized, Noah Webster died.
Austin
(2005) explores the intersection of lexicographical and poetic
practices in American literature, and attempts to map out a "lexical poetics" using Webster's dictionaries. He shows the ways in
which American poetry has inherited Webster, has drawn upon his
lexicography in order to reinvent it. Austin explicates key definitions
from both the Compendious (1806) and American (1828)
dictionaries, and brings into its discourse a range of concerns,
including the politics of American English, the question of national
identity and culture in the early moments of American independence, and
the poetics of citation and of definition. Webster's dictionaries were
a redefinition of Americanism within the context of an emergent and
unstable American socio - political and cultural identity. Webster's
identification of his project as a "federal language" shows his
competing impulses towards regularity and innovation in historical
terms. Perhaps the contradictions of Webster's project comprised part
of a larger dialectical play between liberty and order within
Revolutionary and post Revolutionary political debates. Webster
in early life was something of a freethinker, but in 1808 he became a
convert to Calvinistic orthodoxy, and thereafter became a devout Congregationalist who preached the need to Christianize the nation. Webster grew increasingly authoritarian and elitist, fighting against the prevailing grain of Jacksonian Democracy. Webster viewed language as a tool to control unruly thoughts. His American Dictionary emphasized
the virtues of social control over human passions and individualism,
submission to authority, and fear of God; they were necessary for the
maintenance of the American social order. As he grew older, Webster's
attitudes changed from those of an optimistic revolutionary in the
1780s to those of a pessimistic critic of man and society by the 1820s. His 1828 American Dictionary contained
the greatest number of Biblical definitions given in any reference
volume. Webster considered education "useless without the Bible".
Webster released his own edition of the Bible in 1833, called the Common Version. He used the King James Version (KJV)
as a base and consulted the Hebrew and Greek along with various other
versions and commentaries. Webster molded the KJV to correct grammar,
replaced words that were no longer used, and did away with words and
phrases that could be seen as offensive.
Webster helped found the Connecticut Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1791, but by the 1830s rejected the new tone among abolitionists that
emphasized Americans who tolerated slavery were themselves sinners. In
1837, Webster warned his daughter about her fervent support of the
abolitionist cause. "Webster wrote, "slavery is a great sin and a
general calamity – but it is not our sin, though it may prove to be a terrible calamity to us in the north. But
we cannot legally interfere with the South on this subject." He added,
"To come north to preach and thus disturb our peace,
when we can legally do nothing to effect this object, is, in my view,
highly criminal and the preachers of abolitionism deserve the
penitentiary." Webster married Rebecca Greenleaf (1766 – 1847) on October 26, 1789, New Haven, Connecticut. They had eight children. He moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1812, where Webster helped to found Amherst College.
In 1822, the family moved back to New Haven, and Webster was awarded an
honorary degree from Yale the following year. He is buried in New
Haven's Grove Street Cemetery. |