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Noah Webster (October 16, 1758 – May 28, 1843) was an American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and author. He has been called the "Father of American Scholarship and Education". He authored a large number of "Blue-Backed Speller" books which were used to teach American children how to spell and read. He is also the author for the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary that was first published in 1828 as An American Dictionary of the English Language.
Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, Webster graduated from Yale College in 1778. He passed the bar examination after studying law under Oliver Ellsworth and others but was unable to find work as a lawyer. He found some financial success by opening a private school and writing a series of educational books, including the "Blue-Backed Speller". A strong supporter of the American Revolution and the ratification of the United States Constitution, Webster later criticized American society as being in need of an intellectual foundation. He believed American nationalism had distinctive qualities that differed from European values.American Reformers: Early/Mid 1800s: Noah Webster. "[1] " accessed July 31, 2019.
In 1793, Alexander Hamilton recruited Webster to move to New York City and become an editor for a Federalist Party newspaper. He became a prolific author, publishing newspaper articles, political essays, and textbooks. He returned to Connecticut in 1798 and served in the Connecticut House of Representatives. Webster founded the Connecticut Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1791 but later became somewhat disillusioned with the abolitionist movement.
In 1806, Webster published his first dictionary, . The following year, he started working on an expanded and comprehensive dictionary, finally publishing it in 1828. He was influential in popularizing certain American spellings. He played a role in advocating for copyright reform, contributing to the Copyright Act of 1831, the first major statutory revision of U.S. copyright law. While working on a second volume of his dictionary, Webster died in 1843, and the rights to the dictionary were acquired by George Merriam.
Webster's father never attended college, but placed a strong emphasis on education. Webster's mother spent long hours teaching her children spelling, mathematics, and music.Kendall, pp. 21–23. At age six, Webster began attending a dilapidated one-room primary school built by West Hartford's Ecclesiastical Society. Years later, he described the teachers as the "dregs of humanity" and complained that the instruction was mainly in religion.Kendall, pp. 22–24. Webster's experiences there motivated him to improve the educational experience of future generations.Kendall, p. 24.
At age fourteen, he received tutoring from his church pastor in Latin and Greek to prepare him for entering Yale College.Kendall, pp. 29–30. Webster enrolled at Yale just before his 16th birthday, and during his senior year studied with Ezra Stiles, Yale's president. He was also a member of Brothers in Unity, a secret society at Yale. His four years at Yale overlapped the American Revolutionary War and, because of food shortages and the possibility of a British invasion, many classes were held in other towns. Webster served in the Connecticut Militia. His father mortgaged the farm to send Webster to Yale, but after graduating, Webster had little contact with his family.Richard Rollins, The Long Journey of Noah Webster (1980) p. 19.
With the American Revolutionary War still ongoing, Webster was unable to find work as a lawyer. He received a master's degree from Yale by delivering an oral dissertation to the graduating class. Later that year, he opened a small private school in western Connecticut, which initially succeeded but was eventually closed, possibly due to a failed romance.Kendall, p. 59-64 Turning to literary work as a way to overcome his losses and channel his ambitions,Kendall, p. 65. he began writing a series of well-received articles for a prominent New England newspaper justifying and praising the American Revolution and arguing that the separation from Britain would be a permanent state of affairs.Kendall, pp. 65–66. He then founded a private school catering to wealthy parents in Goshen, New York and, by 1785, he had written his speller, a grammar book and a reader for elementary schools.Kendall, pp. 69–71. Proceeds from continuing sales of the popular blue-backed speller enabled Webster to spend many years working on his famous dictionary.Kendall, pp. 71–74.
Webster was by nature a revolutionary, seeking American independence from the cultural thralldom to Europe. He aimed to create a utopian America, free from luxury and ostentation, and a champion of freedom.Rollins (1980) p. 24 By 1781, Webster had an expansive view of the new nation. American nationalism was superior to European nationalism due to the perceived superiority of American values.Ellis 170
Webster dedicated his Speller and Dictionary to providing an intellectual foundation for American nationalism. From 1787 to 1789, Webster was an outspoken supporter of the new Constitution. In October 1787, he wrote a pamphlet entitled "An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution Proposed by the Late Convention Held at Philadelphia", published under the pen name "A Citizen of America".Kendall, Joshua, The Forgotten Founding Father, pp. 147–49 The pamphlet was influential, particularly outside New York State.
In political theory, Webster emphasized widespread property ownership, a key element of Federalism. He was also one of the few early American thinkers who applied the theories of the French theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau in America. He relied heavily on Rousseau's Social Contract while writing Sketches of American Policy, one of the earliest, widely-published arguments for a strong central government in America. He also wrote two "fan fiction" sequels to Rousseau's Emile, or On Education (1762) and included them in his Reader for schoolchildren. Webster's Reader also contains an idealized word portrait of Sophie, the girl in Rousseau's Emile, and Webster used Rousseau's theories in Emile to argue for the civic necessity of broad-based female education.
Webster joined the elite in Hartford, Connecticut, but did not have substantial financial resources. In 1793, Alexander Hamilton lent him $1,500 (~$ in ) 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 renamed the Commercial Advertiser, which he edited 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, Webster defended the administrations of George Washington and John Adams, especially their policy of neutrality between Britain and France, and he especially criticized the excesses of the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror. When French ambassador Citizen Genêt set up a network of pro-Jacobin "Democratic-Republican Societies" that entered American politics and attacked President Washington, he condemned them. He later defended Jay's Treaty between the United States and Britain. As a result, 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."Ellis 199.
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.
In 1799 Webster wrote two massive volumes on the causes of "epidemics and pestilential diseases". Medical historians have considered him as "America's first epidemiologist". He was so prolific that a modern bibliography of his works spans 655 pages. He moved back to New Haven in 1798 and was elected as a Federalist to the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1800 and 1802–1807.
Webster was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1799. He moved to Amherst, Massachusetts in 1812, where he helped to found Amherst College. In 1822, his family moved back to New Haven, where Webster was awarded an honorary degree from Yale the following year. In 1827, Webster was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
The Speller was designed to be easily taught to students, progressing according to age. From his own experiences as a teacher, Webster thought that the Speller should be simple and give an orderly presentation of words and the rules of spelling and pronunciation. He believed that 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.Ellis 174.
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 .
As time went on, Webster changed the spellings in the book to more phonetic ones. Most of them already existed as alternative spellings.Algeo, John. "The Effects of the Revolution on Language," in A Companion to the American Revolution. John Wiley & Sons, 2008. p. 599 He chose spellings such as defense, color, and traveler, and changed the re to er in words such as center. He also changed tongue to the older spelling tung, but this did not catch on.Scudder 1881, pp. 245–52.
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, Jonathan Swift, and Joseph Addison, as well as such Americans as Joel Barlow's The Columbiad, Timothy Dwight's Conquest of Canaan, and John Trumbull's poem M'Fingal. The Reader included two, original, fan-fiction sequels to Emile or On Education by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a portrait of Rousseau's character, Sophie, and a tribute to Juliana Smith who had recently rejected Webster's romantic advances.
Webster also 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 relatively secular.Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (1979) p. 175 It ended with two pages of important dates in American history, beginning with Columbus's discovery of America in 1492 and ending with the battle of Yorktown in 1781. "Let sacred things be appropriated for sacred purposes," Webster wrote. 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 became what was to be the secular successor to The New England Primer with its explicitly biblical injunctions."Ellis 175.
Later in life, Webster became more religious and incorporated religious themes into his work. However, after 1840, Webster's books lost market share to the McGuffey Eclectic Readers of William Holmes McGuffey, which sold over 120 million copies.
Vincent P. 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 Maupertuis, 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.
Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in January 1825 in a boarding house in Cambridge, England.
His book contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared in a published dictionary before. As a , Webster preferred spellings that matched pronunciation better. In A Companion to the American Revolution (2008), John Algeo notes: "It is often assumed that characteristically American spellings were invented by Noah Webster. He was very influential in popularizing certain spellings in America, but he did not originate them. Rather ... he chose already existing options such as center, color and check on such grounds as simplicity, analogy or etymology." He also added American words, like "skunk", that did not appear in British dictionaries. At the age of seventy, Webster published his dictionary in 1828, registering the copyright on April 14.Despite its significant place in the history of American English, Webster's first dictionary sold only 2,500 copies. He was forced to mortgage his home to develop a second edition, and for the rest of his life, he had debt problems.
In 1840, the second edition was published in two volumes. On May 28, 1843, a few days after he had completed making more specific definitions to the second edition, and with much of his efforts with the dictionary still unrecognized, Noah Webster died. The rights to his dictionary were acquired by Charles and George Merriam in 1843 from Webster's estate and all contemporary Merriam-Webster dictionaries trace their lineage to that of Webster, although many others have adopted his name, attempting to share in the popularity. He is buried in New Haven's Grove Street Cemetery.
Scholars have long seen Webster's 1844 dictionary to be an important resource for reading poet Emily Dickinson's life and work; she once commented that the "Lexicon" was her "only companion" for years. One biographer said, "The dictionary was no mere reference book to her; she read it as a priest his breviary—over and over, page by page, with utter absorption." Martha Dickinson Bianchi, The life and letters of Emily Dickinson (1924) p. 80 for quote
Nathan Austin has explored the intersection of lexicographical and poetic practices in American literature, and attempts to map out a "lexical poetics" using Webster's definitions as his base. Poets mined his dictionaries, often drawing upon the lexicography in order to express word play. Austin explicates key definitions from both the Compendious (1806) and American (1828) dictionaries, and finds a range of themes such as the politics of "American" versus "British" English and issues of national identity and independent culture. Austin argues that Webster's dictionaries helped redefine Americanism in an era of highly flexible cultural identity. Webster himself saw the dictionaries as a nationalizing device to separate America from Britain, calling his project a "federal language", with competing forces towards regularity on the one hand and innovation on the other. Austin suggests that the contradictions of Webster's lexicography were part of a larger play between liberty and order within American intellectual discourse, with some pulled toward Europe and the past, and others pulled toward America and the new future.Nathan W. Austin, "Lost in the Maze of Words: Reading and Re-reading Noah Webster's Dictionaries", Dissertation Abstracts International, 2005, Vol. 65 Issue 12, p. 4561
In 1850 Blackie and Son in Glasgow published the first general dictionary of English that relied heavily upon pictorial illustrations integrated with the text. Its The Imperial Dictionary, English, Technological, and Scientific, Adapted to the Present State of Literature, Science, and Art; On the Basis of Webster's English Dictionary used Webster's for most of their text, adding some additional technical words that went with illustrations of machinery.
His 1828 American Dictionary contained the greatest number of Biblical definitions given in any reference volume. Webster said of education,
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 removed words and phrases that could be seen as offensive.
In 1834, he published Value of the Bible and Excellence of the Christian Religion, an apologetic book in defense of the Bible and Christianity itself.
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