Jill Lepore - A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States

Table of Contents

In memory of
my favorite character,
Jane F. Levey, 19601999

CHARACTER , n. 1. A mark made by cutting or engraving, as on stone, metal... ; hence, a mark or figure made with a pen or style, on paper....4. The peculiar qualities, impressed by nature or habit on a person, which distinguish him from others....

NOAH WEBSTER, An American Dictionary, 1828

Acclaim for Jill Lepores

A Is for American

Eloquent.... Smart and suggestive.... Readers will enjoy an intriguing journey filled with many small gems of understanding.

The New Republic

Insightful and engaging.... Lepores handling of [these mens] distinctive careers gives them the place they deserve in the national consciousness.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Lepores fresh work is suggestive of new ways of imagining what unites and divides us, what binds us to this earth.

The News & Observer

Entertaining... a charming book about the quirky origins of some influential early American inventions.

The Washington Times

Lepore has... produced a work of cultural history that is both diverting and informative.

Book

Samuel F. B. Morse, Noah Webster, 1823. (Courtesy of the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College.)

Prologue

A Likeness

COINCIDENCE, n. The falling or meeting of two or more lines, surfaces, or bodies in the same point.

NOAH WEBSTER, An American Dictionary, 1828

In 1823, Noah Webster sat for a portrait. He was sixty-five, stiff, vain, and about to leave home for a year of study in Europe. There he would pore over crumbling pages at the British Museum and the Bibliothque Nationale, trying to track down the elusive origins of words. Meanwhile, the portrait was to be kept by his wife, Rebecca, to remember him by during his long absence. And on his return it was to serve as frontispiece for his soon-to-be-published American Dictionary of the EnglishLanguage, his magnum opus, his lifes work. Ever since 1783, when a very young Webster published his first American spelling book, his passion had been to developand, literally, to spell and definewhat he called the American language. Language, as well as government should be national, Webster insisted in 1789. America should have her own distinct from all the world. 1

Samuel F. B. Morse, Self-Portrait, 181213. (Courtesy of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.)

In 1823, when Webster, now an aging man of letters, sat in his crimson-cushioned chair and stared at his portraitist with a kind of grim curiosity, his eyes fell on the familiar face of a man half his age. The artist, Samuel Finley Breese Morse, was the son of Websters longtime friend and new neighbor Jedidiah Morse. Noah and Jedidiah had just missed each other at Yale in the 1770s (Webster graduated in 1778; Morse entered in 1779), but both men had recently resettled near their alma mater, just a few doors apart on Temple Street, not far from the New Haven Green. Now, in 1823, Morses eldest son, Finley to his friends, was called upon to take Websters likeness.

And so it came to pass that the inventor of the code painted the man who wrote the dictionary.

That day, in the humble parlor of Websters New Haven home, Samuel Morse and Noah Webster stared at each other, sniffing as oil paint fumes filled the space between them. They paused, no doubt, to stretch, to take a cup of tea, to chat. What they said went unrecorded. Still, what brought Webster and Morse together bears looking into, not least because both men are central figures in the story this book has to tell, a story about how a few early Americans tried to use letters and other characters alphabets, syllabaries, signs, and codesto strengthen the new American nation, to string it together with chains of letters and cables of wire, even as other Americans strained to break those chains and labored to stretch those cables across ocean floors.

A national language is a national tie, Noah Web-ster had insisted in 1786, and what country wants it more than America? What country, indeed? Already larger and more racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse than any western European country, America in Websters lifetime tackled the problem of unifying itself as a nation by stirring nationalist sentiment. The new United States cast off all things British and instead created its own holidays (the Fourth of July, Washingtons birthday), produced its own literature (Cooper, Emerson, and more), invented its own founding moments (including the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock), and adopted new, decidedly un-English ancestors, the noble but savage American Indian. To Webster and his supporters, the passion for American distinctiveness naturally extended to language: America could never be fully independent from England, or fully united as a nation, without its own peculiar but common tongue. As one writer asked in 1815, How tame will his language sound, who would describe Niagara in language fitted for the falls at London bridge, or attempt the majesty of the Mississippi in that which was made for the Thames?2

Noah Websters American Spelling Book, 1790. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

In the 1780s and 1790s, fully convinced that the fledgling United States must break free from England in language as in politics, Webster encouraged Americans to spell differently from their English neighbors and more like one another. Americanizing spelling, he believed, would help Americanize Americans. By making American spelling different from English spelling, Webster hoped to cultivate a kind of orthographical independence; by eradicating spelling variations within the United States, he hoped to build Americans fragile sense of national belonging. He largely succeeded. While Websters more radical spelling proposalswriting dawter for daughter, for instancesubjected him to scathing attacks (one hostile critic dubbed him No-ur Webstur, and even his adoring brother-in-law once complained, I aint yet quite ripe for your Orthography), his patriotic American Spelling Book sold wildly. Between 1783 and 1801 it was reprinted fifty times, for a total of one and a half million copies. By 1829 ten million copies had been printed, and by the time Webster died in 1843, nearly every schoolchild in the now-sprawling American Republic had learned to spell using one of the millions of cheap blue-backed copies of Websters beloved speller.3

In 1800, flush with success, Webster turned to a new linguistic project: he boldly announced plans to compile a dictionary full of Americanisms, arguing that new circumstances, new modes of life, new laws, new ideas of various kinds give rise to new words. Critics were appalled at Websters audacity. An editorial in the New England