The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster by Joshua C. Kendall

is possible for her to find a man who knows her worth, and has a disposition and virtues to reward it, the union of their hearts must secure that unmingled felicity in life, which is reserved for genuine love, a passion inspired by sensibility, and improved by a perpetual intercourse of kind offices.” Juliana was clearly the type of woman Noah Webster—a twenty-six-year-old bachelor when he wrote these words—was looking for in a wife. A decade later, Webster would pay another tribute to this Sharon love by naming his second child Frances Juliana.
    After leaving Sharon in the spring of 1782, Webster also lost touch with Juliana’s brother, John Cotton Smith, who would go on to have a distinguished career in Connecticut politics. From 1812 to 1817, Smith served as the state’s last Federalist governor. Afterward, he became president of the American Bible Society and would dabble as a wordsmith. Surprisingly, after the publication of Webster’s dictionary, the retired lawyer would issue harsh attacks upon the man he once revered as a teenager. In an essay “The Purity of the English Language Defended,” published in The New York Mirror nearly six decades after Webster’s Sharon sojourn, Smith would write, “It is from orthography that language receives its form and pressure; and as ours has been settled by respectable authority, and sanctioned by the best usage, the chief merit of a lexicographer . . . consists in suffering it to remain precisely as he finds it. Unfortunately, our author [Webster] thought otherwise.” Smith was knocking Webster for his unique contribution to American letters—the creation of a distinct language for the new nation. That Webster first formulated this goal while living in Smith’s own house didn’t soften the ex-governor’s stance toward his former literary society colleague. In fact, it had been to the teenage John Cotton Smith that the young Sharon teacher complained about his frustration with the leading British speller, the grumblings that eventually led to Webster’s spectacularly successful school text.
     
     
    IN APRIL 1782, while Webster was winding up his second sojourn in the Smith house, General George Washington moved into Hasbrouck House in Newburgh, a town in upstate New York, just across the Hudson River from Sharon. There Washington set up the new headquarters for the Continental army. While the United States had succeeded in neutralizing British forces, New York City was still in enemy hands and the war was not yet over. Though the new nation faced many challenges, Washington had to focus largely on the disbanding of the Continental army’s seven thousand troops. Under the Articles of Confederation—hastily passed in 1777 and ratified in 1781—the national government had little leverage. It could not, for example, raise tax revenue. Frustrated by this arrangement, some sought quick fixes. On May 22, 1782, Colonel Lewis Nicola wrote to Washington, suggesting that he take matters into his own hands and declare himself king. Washington would have no part of this scheme. “Let me conjure you then,” the General wrote back that same day, “if you have any regard for your country, concern for yourself or posterity, or respect for me, to banish these thoughts from your mind, and never communicate, as from yourself, or any one else, a sentiment of the like nature.” As he waited for Benjamin Franklin and the other diplomats in Paris to complete the peace negotiations, Washington, like most of America’s leaders, wasn’t sure exactly what kind of country he wanted; however, the General knew what traps he wished to avoid.
    After leaving Sharon, Webster spent a day in Newburgh with a friend who was an officer in Washington’s army. He then moved on to the neighboring town of Goshen, located in Orange County, where he opened a classical school for the children of prominent local families. Down to his last seventy-five cents, Webster felt he could no longer afford to