Noah Webster / American Men of Letters

by Horace Elisha Scudder

"Finding the efforts of the friends of the bill in Congress to be unavailing to obtain a hearing, I determined in the winter of 1830-1831 to visit Washington myself, and endeavor to accomplish the object. Accordingly I took lodgings at the seat of government, where I passed nine or ten weeks; and during this time read a lecture in the Hall of the Representatives, which was well attended, and, as my friends informed me, had no little effect in promoting the object of obtaining a law for securing copyrights.

"The difficulties which had prevented the bill from being brought forward now disappeared. The bill, at the second reading in the House of Representatives, met with some opposition; but it was ably supported by Mr. Ellsworth, Mr. Verplanck, and Mr. Huntington. It passed to a third reading by a large majority, and was ordered to be engrossed without opposition. When the bill came before the Senate, it was referred to the judiciary committee. Mr. Rowan, the chairman, being absent, the committee requested the Hon. Daniel Webster to take the bill, examine it, and report it if he thought proper; he did so, and under all circumstances deemed it expedient to report it without amendment. On the second reading Mr. Webster made a few explanatory remarks: no other person uttered a word on the subject; and it passed to a third reading by a unanimous vote. On the third reading, the Senate, on motion, dispensed with the reading, and it passed to be engrossed, without debate.

"In my journeys to effect this object, and in my long attendance in Washington, I expended nearly a year of time. Of my expenses in money I have no account, but it is a satisfaction to me that a liberal statute for securing to authors the fruit of their labor has been obtained."

In this summary the whole history of the copyright statutes appears, and it is interesting to note that the earliest action by the States and Congress received its impulse from Webster's spelling-book; the later and final form of the law was adopted in connection with Mr. Webster's indefatigable efforts, and the first book to take advantage of it was his "American Dictionary." His keen sense of the business relations of his literary work is seen in this early and late energy in securing satisfactory copyright laws. It is noticeable, too, that in his correspondence with Daniel Webster he took the position which has of late been held as the only solution of all copyright questions. Noah Webster may not have been a great man in his generation, but he had a singular faculty of being the first in time in many departments of literary industry, and constantly to have anticipated other people.

Wherever he went he showed the rough draft of his book; he assailed members of Congress and men of eminence generally. He had faith in it, and he lived at a time when the individual testimony of men was of greater weight than now. There were no organs of literary or educational opinion, no academies or bodies of men especially esteemed as juries in the case of any book on trial, and indorsements were looked for as essential to the success of any new venture. There was no great public to show its interest by buying, and there were no publishers of capital and organization to relieve the author of publishing labor. In the recently published correspondence of Jeremy Belknap and Ebenezer Hazard,[5] one may read the difficulties encountered by a scholarly man in getting his historical work published. The correspondence for two years between these gentlemen, with reference to the publication of Belknap's "History of New Hampshire," a volume of five hundred pages, shows that every detail of paper, print, and binding, and almost all arrangements for securing subscriptions, fell upon the author and his friend, acting for and with him. Subscribers were sought with painful endeavor, one at a time, and all the points at issue were discussed in letters which seemed sometimes to travel by chance.

Webster, without money, and almost without friends, but with the kind of faith which works miracles with other people's faith, succeeded at length in persuading Hudson & Goodwin, printers in Hartford, to issue an edition of five thousand copies of the spelling-book. John Trumbull and Joel Barlow were his chief supporters, the latter backing him with a little money. The printer was the publisher then; and an author, in making his arrangements, was accustomed to sell the right to print and publish to various printers in various parts of the country,—a custom which continued through the first quarter of the century. The isolation of the several settled communities rendered collision between the several dealers unlikely; and, in the absence of quick communication, no place had any advantage except as a dépôt for the neighboring district. Rights to print were granted for fourteen years. Such a contract was made in 1818 by Webster with Mr. Hudson, who was to pay $3,000 a year during the term. The reader will recall similar arrangements in Irving's ventures. The popularity of the speller rendered it liable to piracy, especially in the ruder parts of the country, and as late as 1835 Mr. Webster writes to his son, established as a bookseller in Louisville: "I would suggest whether it would not be advisable to publish in Kentucky, or at least in Tennessee, a short note like this: 'The Public are cautioned against buying "Webster's American Spelling-Book;" the editions now in the market are pirated, badly printed, and incorrect. The author expressly disclaims them.'"

The final success of the little book has been quite beyond definite computation, but a few figures will show something of the course it has run. In 1814, 1815, the sales averaged 286,000 copies a year; in 1828 the sales were estimated to be 350,000 copies. In 1847 the statement was made that about twenty-four million copies of the book had been published up to that time, and that the sale was then averaging a million of copies a year. It was also then said, that during the twenty years in which he was employed in compiling his "American Dictionary," the entire support of his family was derived from the profits of this work, at a premium for copyright of five mills a copy. The sales for eight years following the Civil War, namely, 1866-1873, aggregated 8,196,028; and the fact that the average yearly sale was scarcely greater than in 1847 may be referred in part to the great enterprise in the publication of school-books, which has marked the last twenty years, by which his speller has been one only of a great many, in part, also, to the impoverishment of the South where Webster's book had been more generally accepted than at the North.

The great demand that there was for elementary school-books, the real advance of Webster's over any then existing, the promptness with which he met the first call, all these causes combined to give a great impetus to the little book. At first sight there seems something amusing in the importance which not only Webster but other men of the time attached to the spelling-book. Timothy Pickering, in camp at Newburgh, waiting for the final word of disbanding, sat up into the night to read it! "By the eastern post yesterday," he writes to his wife, "I was lucky enough to receive the new spelling-book [Webster's] I mentioned in my last, and instead of sleeping (for I had a waking fit which prevented me), I read it through last night, except that I only examined a part of the different tables. I am much pleased with it. The author is ingenious, and writes from his own experience as a school-master, as well as the best authorities; and the time will come when no authority, as an English grammarian, will be superior to his own. It is the very thing I have so long wished for, being much dissatisfied with any spelling-book I had seen before. I now send you the book, and request you to let John take it to his master, with the enclosed letter; for I am determined to have him instructed upon this new, ingenious, and, at the same time, easy plan. There are, you will see by the Introduction, two more parts to come to complete the plan. I am a stranger to Mr. Webster, but I intend, when I can find leisure, to write him on the subject, using the liberty (which he requests) to suggest some little matters which may be altered and improved in his next edition, for I think the work will do honor to his country, and I wish it may be perfect. Many men of literature might think it too trifling a subject; but I am of a different opinion, and am happy that a gentleman of Mr. Webster's genius and learning has taken it up. All men are pleased with an elegant pronunciation, and this new Spelling-Book shows children how to acquire it with ease and certainty."[6]

Pickering's letter helps us to get behind "Webster's Spelling-Book" in 1783, instead of looking at it from this later vantage-ground of an accumulated American literature. There runs through the correspondence of that day a tone which we easily call provincial, but is nevertheless a distinct expression of the consciousness of the young nation. The instinct of literature is toward self-centring, and the sense of national being was very strong in men who had been giving their days and nights to the birth of a new nation. To understand the state of things in 1783 we should look at the literary ventures, inclusive of educational, within the boundaries of the Southern States during the War of 1861-1865. There the interruption of commerce with the North compelled a resort to home production in school-book literature, and intensity of feeling upon sectional questions found frequent expression in spelling-books and arithmetics. "Webster's Elementary" was reprinted at Macon, without illustrations and some of the diacritical marks, mutatis mutandis. The reader finds the morals of the book and the earlier patriotism unchanged, but remembers its latitude when he reads: "The Senate of the Confederate States is sailed the Upper House of Congress: The President of the Confederate States is elective once every six years: The Confederate States have a large extent of sea-coast, and many parts of the Confederate States are noted for the fertility of the soil." But these are innocent adaptations; one must look to the arithmetics for sectional feeling.

In Webster's time, men whose lives had been spent in the struggle for independence and autonomy looked upon everything relating to their country with a concentration of interest which not only attested the sincerity of their convictions, but made them indifferent to the larger, more universal standards. They were seeing things with American, not European eyes. When Dr. Belknap and his friend Mr. Hazard were carefully arranging for the publication of the "History of New Hampshire," they made proposals to the Longmans, in London, to take an edition, without any apparent suspicion that such a book might lack readers in England. The publishers' polite reply intimates the "apprehension that the history of one particular province of New England would not be of sufficient importance to engage the attention of this country, and particularly as it is at present brought down no lower than the year 1714." Belknap's History is an admirable piece of work, the first scholarly work of its kind on this side of the water, and Dr. Belknap respected his book. To him, as to many of that generation, a book was a serious undertaking, and each new one that came was carefully weighed and its character measured; a history of New Hampshire was not a mere piece of local self-complacency, but a dignified adventure into a portion of American history hitherto unexplored. The work expended upon it was as careful and grave as if the subject had been the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, one of the substantial evidences of the historic justification of the war for independence is to be found in the alacrity with which the scholarly element in the country busied itself about themes which were close at hand and connected with the land of their life.