The Enduring Legacy Of Noah Webster

by Dennis L. Peterson

The following article appeared in the January/February 2003 issue of Homeschooling Today.
All Rights Reserved

Few individuals make such significant contributions to society that their influence surpasses their own generation and affects people for centuries beyond their own. But, Noah Webster was just such a man, and this year marks the 175th anniversary of the dictionary that brought him fame.

HIS LIFE
Webster was born on October 16, 1758, in West Hartford, Connecticut. He was a direct descendant of John Webster, an early governor of Connecticut, and William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony.

In 1774, when Webster was only sixteen, he entered Yale College, from which he graduated in 1778. Although he wanted to study law, he couldn't afford the extra schooling and became a schoolmaster instead.

While teaching in overcrowded, ill-equipped one-room schoolhouses, Webster became burdened for American students. Noah Webster observed the fact that the American colonists spoke numerous languages, and even those who spoke English often spelled and pronounced words differently. If the nation was to survive, he believed, its people had to have a common language and set of moral values. Furthermore, he thought that the schools should teach from American, not British, textbooks.

Although he was concerned that children learn to read and write, Webster was also burdened for them to learn ethics, morality, and Christianity, without which, even the most scholarly person cannot be considered successful. An advertisement for his school stated, "The strictest attention will be paid to the studies, the manners and the morals of youth..." His concern for the students' moral development was always strong, but it became even stronger following his religious conversion during the "Second Great Awakening" when he was about fifty years old.

"The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities, and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head."
~Noah Webster

To accomplish his twin goals of developing the students' minds and enriching their souls, Webster wrote spelling books and dictionaries. Although he was also at various times a lawyer, a lobbyist, and a magazine editor, people most remember his work as an educator, author, and lexicographer.

In 1783, Webster published A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. He visited imminent scholars, "literary characters," and respected statesmen, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, seeking letters of support for his efforts to standardize the American language. He gave copies of his book to schools, which then ordered copies for their students. The book, known popularly as "the Blue-Backed Speller," was immensely successful. More than 100 million copies of it have been sold, and it has never gone out of print.

Webster used the revenue from sales of his spellers to support his family while he compiled A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806). This task was the forerunner of his magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), which took more than twenty-seven years to complete. It was an exhaustive effort to set the standard for a truly American language, different from British English, and unique to the new nation. To produce a high-quality product that traced the etymology of each of the 70,000 entries and communicated their precise meanings, Webster studied twenty-six languages.

Webster's dictionary, however, carried a steep price tag - $20. When that price proved too high, he published abridged editions in 1841 and 1847 (posthumously) that sold for $15 and $6, respectively. At that price, his dictionary, along with the Bible, became a staple of every home, private, and public school in the nation.

With literary success, however, came competition. To protect his works from dishonest and unscrupulous opportunists, Webster began lobbying for copyright legislation. Although his immediate concern was to protect his own works, he also thought of the rights of all future American authors. Over time?but not without enduring personal attacks and numerous lawsuits?such legislation passed. His lobbying of legislators at both the state and national levels gained him the moniker "the father of copyright legislation in America."

After Webster's death in 1843, rights to his works passed to his heirs. Eventually, brothers George and Charles Merriam purchased those rights and in 1847 published the first Merriam-Webster dictionary. It became "America's most trusted authority on the English language."

HIS WORKS
The earliest and best known of Webster's writings were designed to work together as a unified "program" of instruction. He originally planned for the program to include a speller and a grammar, the goals of which were "reducing the pronunciation of our language to an easy standard" and "to extirpate the improprieties & vulgarisms which are necessarily introduced" by European immigrants. Exercises in the program were "such as to inspire youth with a contempt of the unmanly vices of mankind & a love of virtue, patriotism, & religion." Webster had so many "morally uplifting readings," however, that he was compelled to produce an additional volume called a reader.

The "Blue-Backed Speller"
This nickname for Webster's spelling books came from the color of their covers. Inexpensive books of the time were printed on poor-quality paper "held together by two broad strips of cloth, between thin wooden boards covered in plain blue paper." Because the early editions were easily recognizable by this feature, Webster continued producing them that way even after he began using better-quality materials.

Webster's spellers taught three things: dividing words into syllables, pronouncing words properly, and spelling correctly. He introduced some common-sense changes in spelling. For example, musick became music, and honour became honor. So popular were his spellers that the first run of five thousand copies sold in a matter of months. Their success made Webster the first American author to make a living from having written a book. He published periodic new and improved editions of the speller, which were used throughout the nation as late as the early-middle 1900s.
Perhaps the feature for which the spellers are best remembered is their sentence examples that teach moral and spiritual truths. Following are but a few samples from the 1908 version.

"The Holy Bible is the book of God."
"Good men obey the laws of God."
"Wise men employ their time in doing good to all around them."
"God created the heavens and the earth in six days, and all that was made was very good."
"God will bless those who do his will."
"History is an account of past events. A great part of history is an account of men's crimes and wickedness."

In addition to Bible and religion, Webster's example sentences included every other imaginable subject from astronomy and biology to economics, etiquette, and government.

The Dictionary
Webster's dictionary was a conscious effort to Americanize the nation's language and to improve upon the then-current standard, Englishman Samuel Johnson's dictionary. Webster purposely omitted some of the words that Johnson listed, improved upon the definitions, and added words that Johnson did not list. Perhaps the most important new words were uniquely American terms such as chowder, hickory, skunk, and squash.

Webster's religious world view also was apparent in his dictionary. According to the Foundation for American Christian Education, "Unmistakably it reveals the degree to which the Bible was America's textbook and how it related to all fields."

Biographer David Micklethwait, by no means a defender of Webster's religious views, admits, "Christianity is to be found in the dictionary in meanings and definitions, in quotations from the Bible and in Webster's own sentences illustrating the use of words."

The depth of Webster's conviction that he must produce his books is revealed by the fact that he paid for the printing of the original dictionary himself and then mortgaged his home to print the second edition. Micklethwait wrote that "only the certain knowledge that he was right . . . kept [Webster] going through years of discouragement and adversity. In his favor, it cannot be denied that he was painstaking, methodical, and an extraordinarily hard worker."

Other Works
Webster also engaged in numerous other endeavors. He taught students to sing. He developed lectures on education, government, and language and traversed the nation delivering them. He founded and edited a short-lived publication called The American Magazine. He wrote essays and letters to the editors of numerous newspapers. He pressed for general formal education of youth and was ahead of his time in advocating the education of women

HIS INFLUENCE
Enemies and supporters alike recognize the positive influence that Webster's life and work have had on our nation. William Cullen Bryant, one of Webster's contemporary detractors, hailed him as "the Connecticut schoolmaster 'who taught millions to read but not one to sin.'"

In Lester's History of the United States (1883), Charles Edwards Lester wrote, "[Webster's] principles of language have tinged every sentence that is now, or will ever be uttered by an American tongue. His genius has presided over every scene in the Nation. It is universal, omnipotent, omnipresent. No man can breathe the air of the continent, and escape it. . . ."

Mr. Webster probably would not like the dictionary that carries his name today. Christianity is no longer central to modern dictionaries. Political correctness, multiculturalism, and moral relativism reign. Yet, Noah Webster's influence is still felt throughout the English-speaking world in our rules of spelling, pronunciation, and usage. His work and life are indeed models for our youth and are worthy of our attention.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

Why do you think Noah Webster was so concerned about the education of all young Americans? Why did he think that education was so important for girls? Do you agree or disagree, and why?
What modern trends work against Webster's vision of a people united around a common language, culture, and set of moral values? What steps can be taken to ensure the success of his vision?
Why did Webster believe that without an education in the principles of Christianity, no person, no matter how scholarly, could be considered successful? Do you agree or disagree, and why?
How did Webster's religious conversion strengthen his views on education, culture, and moral values?
What effects do we see in education today as a result of the de-emphasis on religious and moral values? What steps can be taken to reverse those trends?
What did Webster mean when he said that "the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head," and how does one do that?
Which work of Webster's do you think had a greater impact on the nation-his spellers or his dictionary? Why?
Why would Noah Webster probably not like most dictionaries of American English today?
In his efforts to market his books, why did Webster solicit letters from famous and respected scholars and statesmen? Do you think that this was a wise marketing strategy? Why or why not?
Defend Lester's assessment that Webster's principles "have tinged every sentence that is now, or will ever be uttered by an American tongue."
Name and discuss other early Americans who had a positive, long-lasting impact on American culture.

For additional information on Noah Webster and his legacy, investigate the following sources.
Collins, David. Master of Words: Noah Webster (Milford, Mich.: Mott Media). (See review of this source at http://www.mottmedia.com.)
Micklethwait, David. Noah Webster and the American Dictionary (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2000).
Snyder, K. Alan. Defining Noah Webster (Fairfax, Vir.: Allegiance Press, Inc., 2002). (This source includes a foreword by Michael P. Farris of Patrick Henry College and the Home School Legal Defense Association.)

Web sources:
www.m-w.com ("Inkwell to Internet," the Merriam-Webster home page with links to pages on various aspects of Webster's life and work)
www.m-w.com/about/wordin.htm ("How Does a Word Get into the Dictionary?")
www.noahwebsterhouse.org (The Noah Webster House, Museum of West Hartford History)
www.chalcedon.edu/report/2000oct/schultz.shtml (Review of Noah Webster and the Formation of the American Nation)

Other interesting related topics include the following:

Hornbooks
Battledores
"The Old Deluder Satan Law"
The New England Primer
Copyright laws (also trademarks, service marks, and patents)

Noah Webster's preferred curriculum:
According to Noah Webster, education should be:

Interesting
Nationalistic (patriotic)
Pragmatic (practical, useful)
Open to all.

To achieve these goals, Webster believed that a desirable curriculum should include instruction in the following subjects:

History: primarily of one's own nation.
Government: specifically, the principles of freedom and representative rule.
Biographical studies: primarily of the lives of heroes and statesmen.
Bible: consisting of Christian History, biblical morality and ethics.
Geography: especially of one's own country.
Economics: particularly the importance of private property.

Seven Uses of the Dictionary

To look up the meanings of words.
To check the spelling of words.
To learn the proper pronunciation of words.
To discover the etymology of words (i.e., where they originated and what their original meanings were.)
To learn rules for using words properly.
To learn how to alphabetize words.
To learn synonyms for and antonyms for words.

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