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

book,” Webster would later note in his third-person memoir, “produced no inconsiderable effect on his mind.” In Johnson’s maxims—such as the one that would grace the title page of his dictionary a half century later, “He that wishes to be counted among the benefactors of posterity must add, by his own toil, to the acquisitions of his ancestors”—the new graduate found the fatherly advice he longed for. Johnson advocated approaching life with a scrupulous exactness, and that’s the path that Webster resolved to take.
    Graduation from Yale unmoored Webster, separating him from everything he held dear. As he later recalled, “Having neither property nor powerful friends to aid me, I knew not . . . by what way to obtain subsistence. Being set afloat in the world at the inexperienced age of 20, without a father’s aid which had before supported me, my mind was embarrassed with solicitude and gloomy apprehensions.” To avoid lapsing into abject despair, Webster would turn to his favorite companions—words.

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    Spelling the New Nation
    AUTHOR, n. 1. One who produces, creates or brings into being; as God is the author of the Universe. 2. The beginner, former, or first mover of any thing; hence the efficient cause of a thing. It is appropriately applied to one who composes or writes a book, or original work, and in a more general sense, to one whose occupation is to compose and write books; opposed to compiler or translator.
    O n Saturday, February 20, 1779, a distraught Webster placed an advertisement in New Haven’s newspaper, The Connecticut Journal : “Lost on the road between New Haven and Wallingford a neat pair of men’s shoes almost new. Whoever shall find them and give information to the printers either of New Haven or Hartford will be handsomely rewarded, and much oblige their humble servant.” That winter, Webster was working as a schoolteacher in Glastonbury and making occasional weekend visits to New Haven to visit Joel Barlow, who had stayed on at Yale to pursue graduate studies. Nothing seemed to be going right. He couldn’t even manage to keep his belongings from falling off his horse.
    Though Webster was pleased to be back in Glastonbury, where he had spent the second half of his junior year, his first job was far from satisfying. Then a lowly occupation often held by alcoholics and former convicts, teaching paid less than two pounds per month. The working conditions were also harsh, as schoolmasters typically had to stare down rambunctious students in dilapidated and overcrowded classrooms. Webster complained of his unhappiness in frequent letters to Barlow. While Webster’s half of the correspondence does not remain, Barlow’s responses provide a picture of his mounting angst. On December 31, 1778, he wrote, “It appears by your letter that you indulge yourself much in serious contemplation upon the disorderly jumble of human events and are at a loss how you shall make your course from the college to the grave.” Barlow continued to offer encouragement. “I have too much confidence in your merits,” he reassured Webster a month later, “both as to greatness of genius and goodness of heart, to suppose that your actions are not to be conspicuous.” While Webster would languish in dead-end jobs for a couple of years, Barlow’s prediction turned out to be true long before either man expected. Soon after the publication of his speller in 1783, Webster would become a household name across New England.
     
     
    EAGER TO INCREASE HIS EARNING POWER, Webster decided to leave Glastonbury at the end of the winter term and become a lawyer. During the Revolution, for a young man with a bachelor’s degree, admission to the Connecticut bar required two years of study with a practicing attorney. In the spring of 1779, Webster moved into the Hartford home of Oliver Ellsworth, then serving as both the state’s attorney from Hartford County and as a delegate to the Continental Congress. Having also