Noah Webster / American Men of Letters

by Horace Elisha Scudder

CHAPTER IV.

POLITICAL WRITINGS.

We have seen that a man who made a spelling-book could be a patriot in making it; it is easy to believe that a patriot in Webster's day could be a very active participant in public affairs. There was as yet no marked political class; every man of education was expected to write, talk, and act in politics, and Webster's temperament and education were certain to make him interested and active. He began very early to have a hand in those letters to newspapers which preceded the editorial article of the modern newspaper. The printer of a newspaper was substantially its editor, and was likely to be a man engaged in public affairs, but his paper was less the medium for his own views than a convenient vehicle for carrying the opinions and arguments of lawyers, ministers, and others.

Webster began contributing to the "Connecticut Courant," published in Hartford, as early as 1780, his first contribution being some remarks on Benedict Arnold's letter of October 7th to the inhabitants of America. He wrote again the next week on Arnold's treason, and for the next four or five years was an occasional contributor upon subjects of finance, banking, the pay of soldiers, congressional action, events of the war, and copyright. "In 1783," he writes of himself, "the discontents in Connecticut, excited by an opposition to the grant of five years' extra pay to the officers of the army, became alarming, and two thirds of the towns sent delegates to a convention in Middletown to devise measures to prevent the resolve of Congress from being carried into execution. I then commenced my career as a political writer, devoting weeks and months to support the resolves of Congress.... Of the discontents in Connecticut in 1783, which threatened a commotion, there is no account in any of the histories of the United States,—not even in Marshall's,—except a brief account in my history; the present generation being entirely ignorant of the events. The history of this whole period, from the peace of 1783 to the adoption of the Constitution, is, in all the histories for schools, except mine, a barren, imperfect account; although it was a period of great anxiety, when it was doubtful whether anarchy or civil war was to be our fate."[10]

This was written in 1838, when Webster was eighty years old. The character of that interregnum of 1783-1789 is more generally recognized now; and it is interesting to see how an old man, recalling his earliest entrance into public life, emphasizes the service which he rendered upon the side of good government. By early associations, and by the predilections of a mind which inherited a large share of Anglo-Saxon political sense, Webster was from the first a Federalist in politics. In 1785 he published a pamphlet entitled "Sketches of American Policy," which he always claimed was the first public plea for a government to take the place of the Confederation, under which the war had been carried on. He held a correspondence with Mr. Madison, in 1805, for the purpose of substantiating this claim, since it had recently been asserted that the federal government sprang from Hamilton's thought. Mr. Madison very temperately and sensibly wrote to Webster:—

"The change in our government, like most other important improvements, ought to be ascribed rather to a series of causes than to any particular and sudden one, and to the participation of many rather than to the efforts of a single agent. It is certain that the general idea of revising and enlarging the scope of the federal authority, so as to answer the necessary purposes of the Union, grew up in many minds, and by natural degrees, during the experienced inefficacy of the old Confederation. The discernment of General Hamilton must have rendered him an early patron of the idea. That the public attention was called to it by yourself at an early period is well known."

We are not especially concerned with Webster's claim except as it illustrates his character and activity. He was a busy-body, if I may recover to better uses a somewhat ignoble word. We have seen him traveling back and forth, visiting the state capitals and public men in behalf of his "Grammatical Institute," lecturing and writing, projecting magazines, and putting himself into the midst of whatever was going on. The air was full of political talk, and Webster was the conductor that drew off some of it. He rushed eagerly into pamphlet-writing, both because he had something to say, and because he never stepped back to see if any one else was about to say it. He had no public character to preserve, and he issued his pamphlet as he delivered his sentiments upon many subjects,—to whomever he might catch. He carried it to Mount Vernon and put it into the hands of General Washington, and Madison saw it there. The nickname of the Monarch, which Belknap and Hazard gave him, fitted a young man of aggressive self-confidence, who saw no reason why he should not have his say upon the subject which was upper-most in men's minds, and used the means most natural to him and most convenient.

Alexander Hamilton was but a year older than Noah Webster, and was indeed a much younger man when he first took part in the discussion of public affairs. Hamilton was a man with a genius for statesmanship; in Webster we see very significantly marks of political common sense, the presence of which in the American mind at that day made Hamilton's leadership possible. It would be hard to find a better illustration of the average political education of Americans of the time than is shown by Webster in this pamphlet and in other of his writings. We are accustomed sometimes to speak of the Constitution as a half-miraculous gift to the American people, and to look with exceptional reverence upon the framers of that instrument. Well, that mind is on the whole quite as sound as the contemptuous tone taken by Von Holst when he affirms that "the Constitution had been extorted from the grinding necessity of a reluctant people."[11] In these words, however, Von Holst himself scarcely does justice to his own convictions, and they are rather an extreme form of protest against an extravagant adulation of the Constitution. Better instruments on paper have been drawn and applied to conditions of society which were fatal to their efficacy; but the calling of the convention, the framing of the Constitution, and the final adoption were possible because in the community at large the ideas of freedom and of self-government had already been formulated in local institutions for generations, and for generations had been moulding the character of the popular thought. The towns, the parishes, the boroughs, of the early colonies were the inheritors of communal ideas which had filtered from Germanic free communities through English parishes; under the favoring conditions of a new world and its unchecked enterprise they had become political units of great integrity. The colonies, with their local government, modified rather than controlled by royal or proprietary influence, had already learned many lessons of autonomy: the period of the war had confirmed these several powers, and the conclusion of the war found them still in possession of their interior organic life, and lacking only that sovereignty which they had resisted and overthrown. But the state life was incomplete: there was an absence of a solid sovereignty in which the States could rest, and the political thought of the independent colonies required for its final fulfillment the depositary of national consciousness which the King and Parliament had been, but could no longer be. It was the working out of this practical political thought which issued in the Constitution and central government, and it was possible to be worked out only because there had been generations of Americans trained in political life.

Webster was one of these men. He was the product of the forces which had been at work in the country from the earliest days. English freedom, which had forced its ways to these shores, had grown and increased under the fostering care of self-government and native industry. He had been born and brought up in a New England country village, the type of the freest and most determinate local government; he had been educated at a democratic college; he had shouldered his musket in a war for the defense not of his State alone, but of his country, vague and ill defined though its organic form might be. When, therefore, the war was over, and the country was free and compelled to manage its own affairs, he was qualified to take part in that management, and his temper led him to look for fundamental grounds of conduct.