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

classmates celebrated the end of their undergraduate days is not known. Ezra Stiles’ diary—the only surviving account of the festivities—is vague: “Decency in amusements recommended & observed in the day and evening.”
     
     
    TWO MONTHS LATER, on Wednesday, September 9, in a brief private ceremony in the Yale chapel, Stiles handed out diplomas to Webster and the other seniors. (Commencement services, as the term implies, were initially held at the beginning of the academic year.) Like most of his classmates, Sir Webster gave President Stiles a gratuity of ten dollars, while the impoverished Sir Barlow could manage only eight. But the total of $351 contributed by the thirty-five new graduates wasn’t worth much. As Stiles noted in his diary next to this tally, five dollars in paper currency was then equal to just one silver dollar.
    In September 1778, rampant inflation was blanketing the colonies. The price of a subscription to the Courant had nearly tripled since early 1777, shooting up to eighteen shillings per year. 1 To help finance the war, the Continental Congress had authorized the states to print their own money, and the economically devastated Connecticut had been the first to do so. By October, the state would be printing its first set of fifty-dollar bills; by early 1779, it would have to introduce sixty-five-, seventy-and eighty-dollar bills as well. But printing additional denominations of currency just exacerbated the problem. “The depreciation of [our money] has got to so alarming a point,” wrote George Washington in April 1779, “that a wagon load of money will scarcely purchase a wagon load of provisions.”
    Looking for his first job in a period of hyperinflation, when many Americans were resorting to barter, Noah Webster was feeling lost and confused. And he was suddenly separated from the beloved classmates with whom he had shared his hopes and dreams. As he contemplated his future back at the family farm, all he knew was that he had to keep reading and writing. As a Yale undergraduate, Webster had developed a love of intellectual discovery; exploring the ideas running around inside his own head made him feel thoroughly alive. The thought of going into business repelled him. “What is now called a liberal education,” he later wrote, “disqualifies a man for business.” According to Webster, business required mechanical thinking, and once a young man was exposed to books, there was no turning back.
    But Webster had no idea how he could earn a living. Barlow found himself in a similar predicament, writing Webster from New Haven shortly after their graduation, “We are now citizens of the world . . . no longer in circumstances of warming the soul and refining the sensibility by those nameless incidents that attend college connection . . . . I am yet at a loss for an employment for life and unhappy in this state of suspense.” While Barlow and Webster both held fast to their literary ambitions, they felt hopeless about ever achieving them. As the two Yale men well knew, war-ravaged America did not yet harbor any professional writers.
    Webster had hoped that his father might provide some wise counsel, but that’s not what he got. One day that fall, while he was pacing up and down the pine-planked floor of the family parlor, Noah Sr. pulled out one of those hardly inflation-proof eighty-dollar Connecticut bills and told him, “Take this; you must now seek your living; I can do no more for you.”
    The twenty-year-old was stunned. He felt, as he later wrote, “cast upon the world.” Webster promptly raced up the stairs to the second floor and threw himself headfirst onto the straw mattress in his boyhood bedroom. For the next three days, he hardly came out—even for meals. He did little but read The Rambler, the collection of moral essays penned a generation earlier by his idol, Samuel Johnson (then still living in London off the special pension granted by King George III). “This