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

teach in a public school. Fortunately, his new pupils—the scions of well-to-do parents such as the pastor Nathaniel Kerr and Henry Wisner, New York’s lone signer of the Declaration of Independence who would later help found the State University of New York—paid not in paper currency, but in silver dollars. This arrangement gave Webster, he later noted, “an advantage rarely enjoyed in any business at this time.”
    Yet Webster still longed to earn a better living in his chosen profession—law. He was also feeling lonely in this strange town outside of his native Connecticut. “In this situation of things,” Webster recalled in his memoir, “his spirits failed, and for some months, he suffered extreme depression and gloomy forebodings.” With the nation’s overall economic picture bleak, Webster was not alone in feeling desperate. But he managed to shake himself out of despair through a creative solution. “In this state of mind,” Webster added, “he formed the design of composing books for the instruction of children; and began by compiling a spelling book on a plan which he supposed to be better adapted to assist the learner, than that of Dilworth.”
    The Reverend Thomas Dilworth was the author of the eighteenth century’s most widely used speller. Until about 1700, English spelling was all a jumble, particularly in the New World. As late as 1716, “general” was spelled “jinerll” in official Hartford documents. But soon after the first standards began to be set, a series of spellers appeared. Dilworth’s A New Guide to the English Tongue was first published in London in 1740. Seven years later, Benjamin Franklin printed the first American edition. Focusing more on pronunciation than on orthography (correct spelling), Dilworth explained to children how to divide words into syllables. As noted in the preface, he sought to give “each letter its proper place, each syllable its right division and true accent and each word its natural sound.” This was the alphabet method of teaching reading. By 1782, Dilworth’s speller had reared the vast majority of English speakers on both sides of the Atlantic. As Joel Barlow once observed, Dilworth’s was “the nurse of us all.” Though the cleric had died in 1780, sales showed no signs of slowing down; a new edition consisting of tens of thousands of books continued to come out every year.
    Having used Dilworth as a school instructor, Webster was keenly aware of its shortcomings and inconsistencies. But in revising Dilworth, Webster would grapple not only with pedagogy but also with cultural politics. During his sojourn in Goshen, the new nation’s identity remained a huge question mark. Just as Americans were debating what kind of ruler they should have, they were also debating what language they should speak. After all, the English of King George III was now the language of the oppressor. Some proposed replacing it with German, then the country’s unofficial second language, spoken by nearly ten percent of the population. Others advocated even more radical ideas. As the Marquis de Chastellux, a member of the French Academy and a major-general in the French army, reported on the chatter among some Bostonians in 1782, “They have gone even further, and have seriously proposed introducing a new language; and some people, for the convenience of the public, wanted Hebrew to take the place of English, it would have been taught in the schools and made use of for all public documents.” And if nothing else, perhaps a name change was in order. “Let our language . . . be called the Columbian language,” stated a letter that ran in newspapers across the country that year. “Let us make it as familiar to our ears to say that a foreigner speaks good Columbian, as it is to say that he speaks good English. The dignity and habits of independence can only be acquired by a total emancipation of our country from the fashions and manners of Great Britain.” A new