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Woody Wood on July 11, 2021

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July 8 - White History Month - 24th Most Iconic White American

Though Noah Webster belongs in the American Hall of Fame, he is one of the most unappreciated men in American history. His love of country, was apparent throughout his adult life.

Noah Webster accomplished many things in his life. Not only did he fight for an American language, he also fought for copyright laws, a strong federal government, universal education, and the abolition of slavery. In between fighting for these causes, he wrote textbooks, edited magazines, corresponded with men like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, helped found Amherst College, created his own version of an “American” Bible, raised eight children, and celebrated 54 anniversaries with his beloved wife. When Noah Webster died in 1843, he was an American hero.

Noah Webster Jr. (October 16, 1758 – May 28, 1843) is the Father of American Scholarship and Education. His "Blue-backed Speller" books taught five generations of American children how to spell and read. Webster's name has become synonymous with "dictionary" in the United States.

He was an American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English language spelling and reformer, political writer, editor, and author.

He was also a lawyer, schoolmaster, newspaper editor, and outspoken politician.

He loved music and dancing. In his younger years he would socialize and “paint the town Red” with his friend, Benjamin Franklin.

A strong supporter of the American Revolution and the ratification of the United States Constitution, Webster later criticized American society for being in need of an intellectual foundation and dedicated his Speller and Dictionary to providing an intellectual foundation for American nationalism. He believed that American nationalism was superior to Europe because American values were superior.

He was a very committed family man.

Noah Webster grew up in an average colonial family – his father farmed and worked as a weaver, while his mother worked at home. At the time, few people went to college, but Webster enjoyed learning so much that his parents sent him to Yale, Connecticut’s first college.

At age fourteen, his church pastor began tutoring him in Latin and Greek to prepare him for entering Yale College. Webster enrolled at Yale just before his 16th birthday in 1774, interrupted his studies to serve briefly in the Connecticut Militia during the American Revolution, and graduated in 1778, studying during his senior year with Ezra Stiles, Yale's president. Because of food shortages and the possibility of British invasion, many of his classes had to be held in other towns.

Webster lacked career plans after graduating from Yale in 1779 (age 20), later writing that a liberal arts education "disqualifies a man for business", so Webster taught school while he studied law, being admitted to the bar in 1781.

Webster was by nature a revolutionary, seeking American independence from the cultural thralldom to Europe. 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.

In 1781 (age 22), he was studying law under future U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth,

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 with no desks, poor untrained underpaid teachers, and unsatisfactory textbooks that came from England often pledging their allegiance to King George, totally ignoring American culture. Webster believed that Americans should learn from American books, so he began writing the three volume compendium A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, thus beginning his lifelong efforts to promote a distinctively American education.

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.

Webster planned to call his “Speller” the American Instructor, but the president of Yale, Ezra Stiles, suggested the more grandiose title: A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. In the book Noah implemented changes that helped to improve the teaching of pronunciation, spelling and reading. The “Speller” 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.

To promote the “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 Speller was arranged so that it could be easily taught to students, and it progressed by age.

He believed in cognitive development. 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.

As time went on, Webster changed the spellings in the book to more phonetic ones. Most of them already existed as alternative spellings. He chose spellings such as defense, color, and traveler, and changed the re to er in words such as center.

Webster's Speller 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.

The textbook earned its nickname, the “Blue-Backed Speller”, because of its characteristic blue cover. This book has never been out of print. For over 100 years, Webster’s book taught children to read, spell and pronounce words. It was the most popular American book of its time, selling by 1837 15 million copies, by 1890 60 million, eventually 100 million copies.

This book reached the majority of young students in the nation's first century. The speller was the number one used school book in America until the end of the 19th century when it was slowly replaced by the McGuffy reader.

Its royalty of a half-cent per copy was enough to sustain Webster in his other endeavors for the rest of his life.

It also helped create the popular contests known as spelling bees.

The grammar was based on Webster’s principle (enunciated later in his dictionary) that “grammar is formed on language, and not language on grammar.”

Part three of his Grammatical Institute (1785) was a reader designed to uplift the mind and "diffuse the principles of virtue and patriotism", to promote responsible moral and political conduct.

"In the choice of pieces", he explained, "I have not been inattentive to the political interests of America. Several of those masterly addresses of Congress, written at the commencement of the late Revolution, contain such noble, just, and independent sentiments of liberty and patriotism, that I cannot help wishing to transfuse them into the breasts of the rising generation."

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.

When he was ready to publish his speller, 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. Webster played a critical role lobbying individual states throughout the country to pass the first American copyright laws. Webster’s letters to various state legislatures reflect his activity on his own behalf, and he traveled widely, lobbying for uniform copyright laws and teaching, lecturing, and giving singing lessons to help support himself.

This convinced Webster that the American central government, the Articles of Confederation, was too weak. He felt 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.

In 1787 a Constitutional Convention was called, and a new Constitution was written.

From 1787 to 1789, Webster was an outspoken influential supporter of the new Constitution which was ratified and took effect in 1789.

In 1790, the 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, the result of this intensive lobbying by Noah Webster and his friends in Congress, was passed into law. The Copyright Act of 1831 (at age 72) was the first major statutory revision of U.S. copyright law. The new law granted protection of the author or his heirs for 28 years, with the right of renewal for another 14 years.

In 1787 (age 28) he founded the short-lived American Magazine in New York City. This publication combined literary criticism with essays on education, government, agriculture, and a variety of other subjects.

In 1791 (age 32), Webster founded the Connecticut Society for the Abolition of Slavery. He later became disillusioned with the abolitionist movement. By the 1830s, he rejected the new tone among abolitionists that emphasized that Americans who tolerated slavery were themselves sinners. In 1837 (age 78), he wrote a letter to his daughter Eliza warning of perils of the abolitionist movement. He opposed the North American 19th-century Black activist movement, writing that the its members had no business telling the South what to do.

In 1793, Alexander Hamilton lent him $1,500 to move to New York City to edit the leading Federalist Party newspaper. In December, he founded New York's first daily newspaper 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). He sold both papers in 1803.

As a Federalist spokesman, he 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.

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.

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. In 1800 he published his intentions of writing a dictionary.

In 1801, Webster started working on defining the words that Americans use. He did this because Americans spoke and used words differently than the English, and to help people who lived in different parts of the country to speak and spell the same way.

In 1806 (age 47), Webster published his first dictionary, a shortened, concise but comprehensive, version. This book offered brief definitions of about 37,000 words. In 1807, he began working on an even more comprehensive edition that was finished in 1825 and published in 1828 (age 70). In total it took twenty-eight years to complete and now contained 70,000 words.

This was Webster’s greatest achievement. 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. This dictionary helped Americans to feel pride in their new country, and enabled everyone across the new nation to have a standard vocabulary.

Webster subscribed to the biblical account of the origin of language, believing that all languages derived from Chaldee, an Aramaic dialect.

To evaluate the etymology of words, Webster learned twenty-eight languages, including Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Gothic, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, Welsh, Russian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. His book contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared in a published dictionary before.

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 was very influential in popularizing certain spellings in the United States. Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex and preferred spellings that matched pronunciation better, so his dictionary introduced American English spellings, replacing colour with color, musick with music, waggon with wagon, centre with center. He also added American words, like skunk and squash, that did not appear in British dictionaries. Webster saw the dictionaries as a nationalizing device to separate America from Britain.

Webster continued to update his dictionary until the day he died, and the rights to the dictionary were acquired by George and Charles Merriam.

In 1808 (age 49), Noah had a personal salvation conversion experience. His wife and children brought him to an evangelistic meeting. He gave his life to Jesus and this had a profound affect on his thinking in a lot of areas. He became a devout Congregationalist, believed Calvinistic orthodoxy, and preached the need to evangelize the nation. Because of this, he became much more politically conservative.

Noah Webster famously said "Education is useless without the Bible. The Bible was America's basic text book in all fields. God's Word, contained in the Bible, has furnished all necessary rules to direct our conduct."

His dictionary contains seventy thousand words and over six thousand Bible references and remains one of the only mainstream dictionaries to use Bible references to demonstrate the meaning of words. His dictionary is an essential tool for anyone studying the Bible.

Christian readers will find it rewarding to compare his definitions of such words as "marriage", "education", "sin", "law", "faith", "prayer", etc., with those given in any modern dictionary. They will no doubt be surprised at the great differences.

In 1810, he published a booklet on global warming titled “Are Our Winters Getting Warmer?” He was opposed in this debate by Jefferson, who believed that global warming was happening a more radical and dangerous rate. Webster, on the other hand, insisted that the weather and climate changes were much more subtle and less threatening than Jefferson's data suggested. (History repeats itself hahahahaha)

In 1812 he moved from New Haven to Amherst, Massachusetts and helped to found Amherst College.

In 1833 (age 74), Webster released his own edition of the Bible, 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.

In 1834 (age 75), he published Value of the Bible and Excellence of the Christian Religion, an apologetic book explaining and defending the Bible and the Christian faith overall.

In 1843 (age 84), he died and was buried in a cemetery adjacent to the Yale campus.