: Noah Webster American Men of Letters by Scudder Horace Elisha Warner Charles Dudley Editor - Educators United States Biography; Webster Noah 1758-1843; Lexicographers United States Biography

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Acknowledgment is due to Mr. Gordon L. Ford, of Brooklyn, N. Y., for the valuable assistance which he has rendered by permitting the author to make use of his admirable collection of printed and manuscript material relating to Noah Webster.

NOAH WEBSTER.

EARLY LIFE.

The village of West Hartford lies about three miles from the centre of Hartford and is mainly grouped about two cross-roads, one leading from the city west to Farmington, the other, the village street, following the line of the Connecticut River and rambling from Bloomfield, the next village north, to Newington and New Britain on the south. The changes in the place for the last hundred and fifty years have not been great; the Farmington road, to be sure, as it leaves Hartford, keeps a city character and shows trim villas at intervals nearly all the way to the village, but the village has not moved to meet the city, and its houses and one or two churches and post-office have admitted new-comers so slowly that the general air of the place can scarcely be different from what it was in 1758, when Noah Webster was born there, October 16. The house in which he was born is still standing, about a mile from the corners, on the road leading south; it is upon a broad table-land, and the wide fields which lie below it, stretching away to Talcott Mountain, where the western view ends, are the fields which Webster's father planted.

The ancestral stock was substantial. Noah Webster remembered the funeral of his grandfather Daniel, and Daniel was five years old when his grandfather died, who was one of the first settlers in Hartford and Governor of Connecticut. The family had lived thus in this district for five generations, as farmers, long lived and good citizens. The place where Webster was born was sold by his father in 1790 to the family whose representatives now live there; it covered eighty acres then, but has been broken in upon from time to time. The senior Webster sold it because he was poor. He lived his life of ninety-one years in a Connecticut village, leaving it only when he led a company for one campaign in the Revolutionary War. His square, upright tombstone stands in the village graveyard, and commemorates the stocky virtues of integrity and piety. He was Deacon Webster and Squire Webster, and reached thus the highest offices in state and church which a little New England village could offer.

Upon the senior Webster's stone is the name of his wife Mercy, who is comprehensively disposed of as "his consort, equally respected for her piety and virtues." She was a descendant of William Bradford, the Plymouth governor, and thus the two lives which met in Noah Webster were Pilgrim and Puritan, without, it appears, any quartering from other sources. All the Websters were a sturdy race. Noah Webster, senior, died in his ninety-second year; Noah the son in his eighty-fifth; his two brothers lived for eighty years or more, and his two sisters for seventy. Out of the scanty memoranda of the family genealogy little more is to be gleaned, but it is enough for our purpose to know that the man, whose fortunes we are to follow, inherited the Puritan mind and the New England constitution.

He had, what every New England family wished to give a boy who had any quickness of intellect, the education that was at the door. He worked on his father's farm and went to the village school where rarely a book was used except a spelling-book, a psalter, a Testament or a Bible. When he was fourteen years old he had shown that he was of the college kind, and studying for two years with Dr. Perkins, the village minister, and in the Hopkins Grammar School at Hartford, he entered Yale College in 1774. There were about a hundred and fifty students in New Haven at that time, with a faculty consisting of a Professor of Divinity, who performed the duties of President, a Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, and three tutors. Joel Barlow was a classmate, and so were Oliver Wolcott, Zephaniah Smith, Ashur Miller, and others who occupied high judicial positions afterward in the young republic. In Dr. Stiles's Diary there is an entry June 14, 1778, Webster's senior year. "The students disputed forensically this day a twofold question; whether the destruction of the Alexandrian Library and the ignorance of the Middle Ages, caused by the inundation of the Goths and Vandals, were events unfortunate to literature. They disputed inimitably well, particularly Barlow, Swift, and Webster."

There is something peculiarly felicitous in this grave record. It was a rotund kind of learning which was cherished by Dr. Stiles and similar guardians of the old traditions of scholarship, and in the absence of much commerce with their intellectual peers beyond the limits of the colonies, each college made believe very hard that its students were scholars, and its scholastic life the counterpart of historic universities. But it is easy to believe that the fate of the Alexandrian Library and the performances of the notorious Goths and Vandals, those favorite and dimly understood barbarians, had no such power in determining the education of the young Yale student as had the events of the war then going on. Webster had entered college in the fall of 1774; in the spring of 1775, while he was still a Freshman, he had his little initiation into Revolutionary society. General Washington was on his way to Cambridge, to take command of the American army, and with him was General Charles Lee. They passed through New Haven, and Webster has left a little sketch of the scene.

"These gentlemen lodged in New Haven, at the house of the late Isaac Beers, and in the morning they were invited to see a military company of students of Yale College perform their manual exercises. They expressed their surprise and gratification at the precision with which the students performed the customary exercises then in use. This company then escorted the generals as far as Neck Bridge, and this was the first instance of that honor conferred on General Washington in New England. It fell to my humble lot to lead this company with music."

Webster, in one of his reminiscences, recalls the wretched condition of affairs when he was in college: "So impoverished was the country at one time," he writes, "that the steward of the college could not supply the necessary provisions of the table, and the students were compelled to return to spend several months at home. At one time goods were so scarce that the farmers cut corn-stalks and crushed them in cider-mills, and then boiled the juice down to a syrup as a substitute for sugar." The years which followed his graduation were, if anything, still more discouraging. When he went home, after Commencement, his father gave him an eight-dollar bill of the Continental currency, worth then about fifty cents on the dollar, and left him to his own resources. His plan was to study law, but his first business was to maintain himself, and he took up school-teaching, spending the winter of 1778 in Glastonbury, where he had gone with his class the year before. In the summer of 1779 he returned to Hartford and taught there, living in the family of Mr., afterward Chief Justice, Oliver Ellsworth, and picking up a little law. In the hard winter of 1780 he taught in his native village, and in the next summer he lived with and assisted Jedediah Strong, register of deeds in Litchfield, where he read law, and then was admitted to the bar in Hartford.

There was, however, no business. People were too poor to go to law, and the whole country was depressed by its condition. The struggle for independence had not been a short, sharp one, marked by an intense flame of enthusiasm; the end was reached less by heroic endeavor than by heroic patience and the wisdom of a few. The depths of ignominy into which Continental currency had sunk measured the hopelessness with which those who lived by wits rather than by manual labor surveyed the field. So, relinquishing the law, Webster resumed teaching, this time in Sharon. An advertisement gives notice of what he expected to do in his school:--

"On the first of May will be opened, at Sharon in Connecticut, a school, in which children may be instructed, not only in the common arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but in any branch of academical literature. The little regard that is paid to the literary improvement of females, even among people of rank and fortune, and the general inattention to the grammatical purity and elegance of our native language, are faults in the education of youth that more gentlemen have taken pains to censure than correct. Any young gentlemen and ladies, who wish to acquaint themselves with the English language, geography, vocal music, &c., may be waited on at particular hours for that purpose. The price of board and tuition will be from six to nine shillings lawful money per week, according to the age and studies of the scholar; no pains will be spared to render the school useful. NOAH WEBSTER.

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