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American Men of Letters.
EDITED BY
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
[Illustration: N. Webster]
American Men of Letters.
NOAH WEBSTER.
BY
HORACE E. SCUDDER.
[Illustration]
BOSTON:
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY.
NEW YORK: 11 EAST SEVENTEENTH STREET.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge.
1890.
Copyright, 1881,
BY HORACE E. SCUDDER.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
CONTENTS.
* * * * *
Page
CHAPTER I.
EARLY LIFE 1
CHAPTER II.
THE GRAMMATICAL INSTITUTE 33
CHAPTER III.
AUTHOR AND PUBLISHER 52
CHAPTER IV.
POLITICAL WRITINGS 111
CHAPTER V.
EXCURSIONS 150
CHAPTER VI.
PREPARATIONS FOR THE DICTIONARY 182
CHAPTER VII.
AN AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 235
CHAPTER VIII.
CONCLUSION 277
* * * * *
Acknowledgment is due to Mr. Gordon L. Ford, of Brooklyn, N. Y., for the
valuable assistance which he has rendered by permitting the author to
make use of his admirable collection of printed and manuscript material
relating to Noah Webster.
NOAH WEBSTER.
* * * * *
CHAPTER I.
EARLY LIFE.
The village of West Hartford lies about three miles from the centre of
Hartford and is mainly grouped about two cross-roads, one leading from
the city west to Farmington, the other, the village street, following
the line of the Connecticut River and rambling from Bloomfield, the next
village north, to Newington and New Britain on the south. The changes in
the place for the last hundred and fifty years have not been great; the
Farmington road, to be sure, as it leaves Hartford, keeps a city
character and shows trim villas at intervals nearly all the way to the
village, but the village has not moved to meet the city, and its houses
and one or two churches and post-office have admitted new-comers so
slowly that the general air of the place can scarcely be different from
what it was in 1758, when Noah Webster was born there, October 16. The
house in which he was born is still standing, about a mile from the
corners, on the road leading south; it is upon a broad table-land, and
the wide fields which lie below it, stretching away to Talcott Mountain,
where the western view ends, are the fields which Webster's father
planted.
The ancestral stock was substantial. Noah Webster remembered the funeral
of his grandfather Daniel, and Daniel was five years old when his
grandfather died, who was one of the first settlers in Hartford and
Governor of Connecticut. The family had lived thus in this district for
five generations, as farmers, long lived and good citizens. The place
where Webster was born was sold by his father in 1790 to the family
whose representatives now live there; it covered eighty acres then, but
has been broken in upon from time to time. The senior Webster sold it
because he was poor. He lived his life of ninety-one years in a
Connecticut village, leaving it only when he led a company for one
campaign in the Revolutionary War. His square, upright tombstone stands
in the village graveyard, and commemorates the stocky virtues of
integrity and piety. He was Deacon Webster and Squire Webster, and
reached thus the highest offices in state and church which a little New
England village could offer.
Upon the senior Webster's stone is the name of his wife Mercy, who is
comprehensively disposed of as "his consort, equally respected for her
piety and virtues." She was a descendant of William Bradford, the
Plymouth governor, and thus the two lives which met in Noah Webster were
Pilgrim and Puritan, without, it appears, any quartering from other
sources. All the Websters were a sturdy race. Noah Webster, senior, died
in his ninety-second year; Noah the son in his eighty-fifth; his two
brothers lived for eighty years or more, and his two sisters for
seventy. Out of the scanty memoranda of the family genealogy little more
is to be gleaned, but it is enough for our purpose to know that the man,
whose fortunes we are to follow, inherited the Puritan mind and the New
England constitution.
He had, what every New England family wished to give a boy who had any
quickness of intellect, the education that was at the door. He worked on
his father's farm and went to the village school where rarely a book was
used except a spelling-book, a psalter, a Testament or a Bible. When he
was fourteen years old he had shown that he was of the college kind, and
studying for two years with Dr. Perkins, the village minister, and in
the Hopkins Grammar School at Hartford, he entered Yale College in 1774.
There were about a hundred and fifty students in New Haven at that time,
with a faculty consisting of a Professor of Divinity, who performed the
duties of President, a Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy,
and three tutors. Joel Barlow was a classmate, and so were Oliver
Wolcott, Zephaniah Smith, Ashur Miller, and others who occupied high
judicial positions afterward in the young republic. In Dr. Stiles's
Diary there is an entry June 14, 1778, Webster's senior year. "The
students disputed forensically this day a twofold question; whether the
destruction of the Alexandrian Library and the ignorance of the Middle
Ages, caused by the inundation of the Goths and Vandals, were events
unfortunate to literature. They disputed inimitably well, particularly
Barlow, Swift, and Webster."
There is something peculiarly felicitous in this grave record. It was a
rotund kind of learning which was cherished by Dr. Stiles and similar
guardians of the old traditions of scholarship, and in the absence of
much commerce with their intellectual peers beyond the limits of the
colonies, each college made believe very hard that its students were
scholars, and its scholastic life the counterpart of historic
universities. But it is easy to believe that the fate of the Alexandrian
Library and the performances of the notorious Goths and Vandals, those
favorite and dimly understood barbarians, had no such power in
determining the education of the young Yale student as had the events of
the war then going on. Webster had entered college in the fall of 1774;
in the spring of 1775, while he was still a Freshman, he had his little
initiation into Revolutionary society. General Washington was on his way
to Cambridge, to take command of the American army, and with him was
General Charles Lee. They passed through New Haven, and Webster has left
a little sketch of the scene.
"These gentlemen lodged in New Haven, at the house of the late Isaac
Beers, and in the morning they were invited to see a military company of
students of Yale College perform their manual exercises. They expressed
their surprise and gratification at the precision with which the
students performed the customary exercises then in use. This company
then escorted the generals as far as Neck Bridge, and this was the first
instance of that honor conferred on General Washington in New England.
It fell to my humble lot to lead this company with music."
The last sentence is a faint hint at an amusing and pardonable little
vanity of Webster's, who, as the reader will discover later, liked to
think that he had a hand in pretty much every important measure in the
political and literary history of the country in those early days, and
remembered that when the great Washington appeared, Webster was ready
with the prelusive fife. The three years which followed were years of
excitement and distraction. In the summer of 1777 the college life at
New Haven was broken up, and the classes were disposed in various towns,
the Junior class, in which Webster belonged, being stationed at
Glastonbury and placed under the charge of Tutor Buckminster. This was
the time when all New England, especially the southern part, was thrown
into a ferment by Burgoyne's movements, and men were hurried into the
field to meet this army coming down from the north. Webster's father was
captain in the alarm list, and Webster shouldered his musket as a
private in his father's company. The episode was probably in the summer
vacation, and put a stop to his work on the farm rather than to his
studies in college. Burgoyne's defeat released the young volunteer, but
an education which was divided between the camp and the cloister was
pretty sure to be fruitful in something beside scholastic learning. A
college, scattered as if by the enemy's bombs into country villages, was
likely to think with all the eagerness of youth upon questions of
political ethics, and of the broad grounds of human freedom. There are
two words often used in the ephemeral literature of that day,--_slave_,
_free_,--words used somewhat recklessly at times, but marking the
general current of men's thoughts.
Webster, in one of his reminiscences, recalls the wretched condition of
affairs when he was in college: "So impoverished was the country at one
time," he writes, "that the steward of the college could not supply the
necessary provisions of the table, and the students were compelled to
return to spend several months at home. At one time goods were so scarce
that the farmers cut corn-stalks and crushed them in cider-mills, and
then boiled the juice down to a syrup as a substitute for sugar." The
years which followed his graduation were, if anything, still more
discouraging. When he went home, after Commencement, his father gave him
an eight-dollar bill of the Continental currency, worth then about fifty
cents on the dollar, and left him to his own resources. His plan was to
study law, but his first business was to maintain himself, and he took
up school-teaching, spending the winter of 1778 in Glastonbury, where
he had gone with his class the year before. In the summer of 1779 he
returned to Hartford and taught there, living in the family of Mr.,
afterward Chief Justice, Oliver Ellsworth, and picking up a little law.
In the hard winter of 1780 he taught in his native village, and in the
next summer he lived with and assisted Jedediah Strong, register of
deeds in Litchfield, where he read law, and then was admitted to the bar
in Hartford.
There was, however, no business. People were too poor to go to law, and
the whole country was depressed by its condition. The struggle for
independence had not been a short, sharp one, marked by an intense flame
of enthusiasm; the end was reached less by heroic endeavor than by
heroic patience and the wisdom of a few. The depths of ignominy into
which Continental currency had sunk measured the hopelessness with which
those who lived by wits rather than by manual labor surveyed the field.
So, relinquishing the law, Webster resumed teaching, this time in
Sharon. An advertisement gives notice of what he expected to do in his
school:--
"On the first of May will be opened, at Sharon in Connecticut, a school,
in which children may be instructed, not only in the common arts of
reading, writing, and arithmetic, but in any branch of academical
literature. The little regard that is paid to the literary improvement
of females, even among people of rank and fortune, and the general
inattention to the grammatical purity and elegance of our native
language, are faults in the education of youth that more gentlemen have
taken pains to censure than correct. Any young gentlemen and ladies, who
wish to acquaint themselves with the English language, geography, vocal
music, &c., may be waited on at particular hours for that purpose. The
price of board and tuition will be from six to nine shillings lawful
money per week, according to the age and studies of the scholar; no
pains will be spared to render the school useful. NOAH WEBSTER.
"SHARON, _April 16, 1782_.
"N. B. The subscriber has a large convenient store in Sharon fit for
storing articles of any kind, where they may be secured at a moderate
expense."
One would like to know if R---- P---- was one of the young ladies upon
whom he waited at some particular hour, for tradition tells of the young
teacher, with a commanding figure and erect carriage, very careful in
dress and precise in speech, sparing no pains not only to render the
school useful but himself agreeable to this young lady, who found,
however, a stronger attraction in a soldier lover, soldiers having then,
as later, a singular advantage in such rivalries. This precise-speaking
young school-master was ready enough for a frolic, as may be guessed
from two consecutive entries in his brief diary, a little later:--
"_Feb. 18, 1784._ At evening rode to Wethersfield [from Hartford, where
he was then living] with the ladies, who reminded us of the mile-stones
and bridges." [Does any one now need to be told why?]
"_Feb. 19_, P. M. Rode to East Windsor; had a clergyman with us, who
sang an excellent song. Mile-stones and bridges almost totally
neglected."
The demure mouth with which this last sentence is spoken must have had a
curl at the corner occasionally. While living at Sharon he took the
opportunity to study French with a M. Tetard, a French Protestant
minister living in New Rochelle.
* * * * *
From the scanty records which remain I have traced thus far Webster's
early life and education, but it is fair to find in his subsequent
career traces of the influence which New England surroundings cast about
every New England boy. The simplicity of life which characterized a
province so uniform in its character was especially evident in the
Connecticut Valley. Here, longer than in the cities and on the
sea-board, native English and Puritan stock retained the form and power
which an unbroken succession in blood and a freedom from external
pressure had made possible. The families known by Webster in his
boyhood, among whom he lived, and whose lives passed into his character,
were a part of the great migration which founded a new England between
1630 and 1640, and from a basis of English law and custom, modified by
theocratic doctrines, and partially shaped by a struggle with the
wilderness, built a state which was to be one of the great forces in
American history. The agricultural life, which was more productive in
the valley of the Connecticut than elsewhere, determined largely the
social life of the colony, made Connecticut the most serenely democratic
of the New England States, emphasized the individual worth, and allowed
free play in self-government. The church held its own for a longer
period than in Massachusetts; the inevitable surrender of the
ecclesiastical power of the Congregationalists was deferred until a much
later date; and to-day it is in Hartford that one will find most
distinctly the lines of colonial Congregationalism.
The life of the household in a Connecticut village in the middle of the
eighteenth century was very self-centred. Remote from towns,--for
Hartford was only a village then,--the demands of farming life
determined the round of days. Every one from childhood fell of necessity
into his or her place as one of the workers, out doors and in, and the
simplicity of the social organization made the farmer a mechanic as
well. There was the blacksmith's shop, where a rudely trained skill
supplied the more special needs; but the farmer himself not only used
his tools, but mended and to some extent made them; he was carpenter
also, and shoemaker, and, in general, necessity had taught his hands to
shape and his fingers to be dexterous. The boy made his own traps and
small tools and carts, and early learned that handiness and adaptability
without which he would be likely to go through life in a destitute
condition. There is to be found still, especially in the back country, a
curious survival of this old economy in the hired man, who shines in
literature in the person of Mr. Jacob Abbott's Jonas, the embodiment of
practical wisdom, learned not so much from books as from the daily
school of farm and shop life. The hired man of that time was the
occasional unattached member of society, or one who was forced out of
the family hive by the excess of hands and the deficiency of land.
Commonly the family itself supplied the necessary laborers, and these
all in their youth, no matter what intellectual promise they might give,
were, as a matter of course, parts of the regular farm company.
The jack-of-all-trades character of the farmer and the absence of a
force of artisans and special craftsmen easily compelled a state of
mutual dependence. If a house or a barn were to be built, the
neighborhood was called in at the critical moment to raise the frame;
and the farmer who asked the help made his acknowledgment not only by
serving when his neighbor needed him, but by acting as host to the
company, and making the raising a time of good cheer and hilarity.
Harvest also gave opportunity for mutual help and neighborly charity, so
that much of the social life of the day grew naturally out of the common
work and occupation of the community. In-doors it was the same, and
quilting bees and huskings and spinning bees made work and play shade
into each other. A community where every one worked and each might be
needed by his neighbor would scarcely suffer very marked distinctions of
rank; and in the lighter social life, which made no pretense of work,
the sleighing parties and athletic sports, the suppers and dances which
followed the bees, an equality of condition was assumed, very favorable
to self-respect and independence of judgment. It is to be noticed that
the substitution of alphabetical order in college classes for a rank
based upon social distinction occurred earlier at Yale than at Harvard,
and it is not unlikely that the more democratic life of Connecticut had
something to do with it.
Distinctions, however, there were, but they were laid chiefly in reasons
which all were willing to accept. The magistrate and the clergyman,
though familiar associates of the plainer people, were conceded a
deference which superior education, and not superior birth, compelled,
and without question the road to eminence was held to lie through
education. No one dreamed of securing the special honor of the community
except by this means, and in every family a boy who showed intellectual
promise was encouraged to hope for a college education. His college
education was in most cases expected to result in an entrance to the
clerical profession, but the law had by this time begun to have a more
distinct claim upon attention, and the medical profession had always
demanded those who could show a positive predilection for it.[1] The
doctor, however, did not learn his science under any organized
educational system, but by personal association and study with an older
practitioner, a system which naturally lessened the likelihood of
persons drifting into the profession upon slight grounds of preference.
The self-contained life of the community, indeed, made people somewhat
indifferent to a highly educated medical profession, and increased also
the confidence with which any one might assume to observe and discuss
facts connected with the art and science of healing. In every household
there was traditional learning which served for ordinary purposes, and
the housewife knew and used herbs with something of the practical wisdom
which she applied to her cooking. In every community there was likely to
be one woman or more to whom the rest turned in emergencies, and a rude
practice was kept up which cannot be called quackery, for it was
entirely unpretentious. Something also was due to the knowledge derived
from the Indians, whose closeness to nature was supposed to give them
excellent opportunities for wresting secrets from simples. This respect
for the Indian school survives still, and affords a support to the queer
practitioners who call themselves Indian Doctors. It was never strange,
therefore, when a man who had received a liberal education turned his
attention to questions which nowadays a layman would scarcely venture to
discuss. He was not regarded as an amateur, but as occupying himself
with a legitimate part of his business.
Even more surely was the educated man a lawyer. There was always a good
deal of litigation going on in Connecticut, but the legal profession
scarcely existed as a distinct body until Webster himself came upon the
stage. Plaintiff and defendant addressed the court if they desired, and
in the loose practice of the day there were no intricate and technical
processes which debarred any intelligent man from taking part in a
cause. Substantial justice was done, and every citizen took part in
legal affairs with confidence that he only needed perseverance and a
fair cause to achieve success. Above all, the constant and familiar
participation in public concerns was a school for the citizen, in which
he learned thoroughly the art of legislation, and acquired a readiness
in government which stood him in good stead when the scope of
governmental power was enlarged. The New England town was always the
centre of political life, and each member of the town learned early his
inalienable right to a participation in all the benefits which the
community could confer. In town-meeting he learned to vote and to be
voted for; a gradation of offices from fence-viewer or hog-reeve to
selectman gave training in administration to all who had any capacity
for organization or leadership; the discussion of town affairs sharpened
the wits, and, better still, educated the towns-man in a distinct
recognition of his political relations; he learned to think politically,
and as the Revolution drew near, the petty interests of the local
community widened into larger questions of state when the towns
themselves found that they were parts of a larger body corporate. Then
the principle of representation was constantly delocalizing the town,
and bringing into the arena subjects which reminded men of their
relationship to the state and the crown. Men who had grown up under the
discussion of questions which involved great historic processes were not
likely, when the occasion came, to hold back from writing or speaking on
great national themes, merely because they were not publicists by
profession.
The military system, which formed so important a part of the New
Englander's education, added to the picturesqueness of his life and to
the notion of solidarity. The experience with Indian and Frenchman, as
has often been shown, had made the unostentatious farmer-soldiers of New
England a formidable and resolute body when the day of the Revolution
came. Before that day the train-bands of the towns were the color and
music of the otherwise monotonous life. Four times a year came muster
with its drill, its competitive shooting, its feasting, its sports, and
its exercise of self-government in the election of officers. This
visible expression of the power of the community generated a
self-confidence and a spirit of generous comradery in the mind of the
young soldier; the courage which it gave, the habit of standing upright
in any presence, the belief that back of the voice lay the strong arm,
were parts of the education of such men as Webster.
Of the more specific literary education I have already spoken. Webster's
training as a scholar was that of other Americans of his day, neither
better nor worse; and indeed there was not much to choose between the
chances of town and country. So late as 1813 Mr. George Ticknor, in his
reminiscences, relates his difficulties in undertaking the study of
German in Boston: "At Jamaica Plains there was a Dr. Brosius, a native
of Strasburg, who gave instruction in mathematics. He was willing to do
what he could for me in German, but he warned me that his pronunciation
was very bad, as was that of all Alsace, which had become a part of
France. Nor was it possible to get books. I borrowed a Meidinger's
grammar, French and German, from my friend Mr. Everett, and sent to New
Hampshire, where I knew there was a German dictionary, and procured it.
I also obtained a copy of Goethe's 'Werther' in German (through Mr.
William S. Shaw's connivance) from amongst Mr. J. Q. Adams's books,
deposited by him, on going to Europe, in the Athenæum, under Mr. Shaw's
care, but without giving him permission to lend them."[2] Mr. Hillard,
in commenting on this, says well that "there are now, doubtless, more
facilities in New England for the study of Arabic or Persian than there
were then for the study of German." But it was not yet even 1813 in
Hartford and its neighborhood, and in the middle of the eighteenth
century the literary resources were meagre in the extreme. Learning was
not concentrated in the towns, but the access to books there was easier.
The country minister, who was the scholar, literary man, and
school-master, fell back largely upon the Greek and Latin classics, and
upon the few books of the day which he could get in his rare journeys to
Boston. In Boston itself there were book-stores, and John Mein,
afterward a royalist refugee, kept a circulating library in 1765 at
what was known as the London bookstore. It numbered some twelve hundred
volumes, and boasted a printed catalogue. It gives some indication of
the condition of the book business in Boston that he advertised, about
ten years before the out-break of the war, a stock of above ten thousand
volumes. If Dr. Perkins, Noah Webster's school-master, went to New Haven
to draw books from the college library, he found there in 1765 "a good
library, consisting of about four thousand volumes, well furnished with
ancient authors, such as the Fathers, Historians, and Classics; many
modern valuable books of divinity, history, philosophy, and mathematics;
but not many authors who have wrote within these thirty years."[3]
We are more concerned to know the kind of reading which was at Webster's
command when a boy outside of his school hours. That the severer
literature dominated seems evident from the recourse which he has to it
in his writings when he wishes illustrations; for, like others of his
day, the classic authors, especially of Rome, were quoted with a sense
of their being final authority. The newspaper in Webster's youth had
scarcely yet asserted itself very forcibly. The few centres of
population had journals, which did not travel very far beyond the place
of publication. The Connecticut "Courant," a weekly newspaper, was
started in Hartford in 1764, and was of the better class, poorly
printed, but serving as a medium for communications from its readers;
the leading article was anticipated by the letter to the editor or
printer, and with the exception of a scanty abstract of news the
"Courant" may be said to have been edited by its subscribers,--a policy
which made such papers very good reflections of the feeling of the
community. Older and better established than the newspaper was the
almanac, which throve in New England and performed a familiar service in
every household. Mr. Ames or Mr. Lord, and their fellows, addressed
readers in the jaunty, unconventional style which was regarded as
appropriate to a class of literature which was neither fish, flesh, nor
fowl, and after their preliminary talk and their monthly calendar, with
its wonderful comments, gave the page or two that remained to anecdotes,
poetry, and miscellaneous literature. The calendar was headed by verse,
which was taken usually from English authors of the time, and sometimes
was treated serially. Thus in one almanac the poem of "Porsenna in
pursuit of the Kingdom of Felicity" trails along the head of the twelve
months, and at the end is announced to be continued next year; next year
it starts on its journey again, and overflows upon one of the extra
pages, but still is unfinished; a third year it makes a desperate effort
to come to an end, but the editor is obliged to announce, "Conclusion
omitted this year for want of room;" and only when a fourth year has
come is he able to get rid of this continued poem. Think of the
impatience of readers who had to wait from year to year for four years
before they could finish reading this work of art! As the years of the
war drew near, the contents of these little books took on a more martial
character, and the poetical _feuilleton_ gave place to a military
chronicle.
Jejune enough do these hints seem to make the life in which Webster
grew up: but if it was poverty-stricken as compared with the abundant
resources of our own day,--if the Hartford of 1765 is to be contrasted
with that of 1881, to the manifest disadvantage of the former,--one
would wish to remember that in the very sterility of that life there was
a certain iron which entered into the constitution of the people who
lived it. If there were not the leisure and culture of the present day,
neither were there the mental indolence and dissipation. Ames's Almanac
was a joyless sort of light literature, but at least it did not reduce
intellectual recreation to a mere frivolous indulgence of the mental
faculties. A fine picture could be drawn of Webster on the one side,
extracting what juice he could from the chippy leaves of the almanac and
"Courant," and of a youth of this year, entering a public library with
his card, and having the range of a hundred thousand volumes; but the
real comparison is to be made between the results in character and
production. We are painfully familiar with the lists of books which
constitute the reading of the average boy of to-day, and know perfectly
well that they are very often narcotic and stimulant. The reading which
was had with such difficulty in the middle of the eighteenth century may
sometimes have acted as a sedative, but it was by reason of quality and
scarcity more generally brave food; in the mind of the reader there was
an immense respect for literature which induced a genuine hunger for
books, and the individuality of one who had intellectual tastes was not
impaired, as so often happens now, but fortified and enriched.
The farm, the social round, the school, the college, the out-door
sports, the in-door books and papers, were all parts of the circumstance
which affected the life of the youth, but no picture of the time would
be complete which omitted the influence upon him of the church. He would
grow up with the impression that the meeting-house was the principal
building in town, the minister the principal person, and Sunday the
principal day. A curious illustration of the strong hold which the
religious observance of Sunday had upon the colonists then is in the
construction of what were known as Sabbath-Day Houses, which I think
were peculiar to Connecticut. At any rate, there is so good a
description of them by a son-in-law of Webster's that I give it here:--
"These houses were from twenty to twenty-five feet in length, and from
ten to twelve feet in breadth, and one story high, with a chimney in the
middle, dividing the whole space into two rooms, with a partition
between them, for the accommodation of two families, who united in
building the house. The furniture consisted of a few chairs, a table,
plates and dishes, some iron utensil, it may be, for warming food which
had been cooked. Besides the Bible, there was sometimes a book on
experimental religion, like Baxter's 'Saints' Rest,' or Allein's
'Alarm.' On the morning of the Sabbath the mother of the family, with
provident care, put up her store of comforts for the dinner, substantial
or slight fare as most convenient, a bottle of cider almost of course.
The family then set off from their home in a large two-horse sleigh, or
on saddles and pillions. They stopped at the Sabbath-day house, kindled
a blazing fire, and then went forth to shiver in the cold during the
morning services. At noon they hurried back to their warm room. After
they had taken their meal, and by turns drunk from the pewter mug,
thanks were returned. Then the sermon came under review, from the notes
taken by the father of the family, or a chapter was read from the Bible,
or a paragraph from some favorite author, the service concluding with
prayer or singing. After again visiting the sanctuary, the family would
return to the Sabbath-day house, if the cold was severe, before they
sought their home. The fire was then extinguished, the door was locked,
and the house remained undisturbed during the week. In time the custom
of repairing to these houses changed; the houses themselves became
dilapidated, or furnished a refuge for the poor. They were better suited
to those times, when so much was thought of private family religion,
than they would be to ours, when religion has become more of a public
and social concern. The last Sabbath-day house which I remember stood on
the land owned by the first minister. It was occupied by John King, a
Hessian deserter from the British army. It was owned by one of the
Nortons. The present writer can recollect as many as half a dozen of
these houses."[4]
The legislation thrown about the Sabbath was in confirmation of the
public opinion regarding its sanctity. The harsher aspects of this
observance have been sufficiently dwelt upon in our histories; the
effect upon character has been less considered, but the elevation of one
day out of the tyranny of work, the resolute facing of eternal
mysteries, and the withdrawal into a half-brooding, half-active state of
mind must have had a powerful effect upon the imagination and
conscience. The meeting-house was no holy building, but the Sabbath day
was a holy day, and was the most comprehensive symbol of the Puritan
faith. It was what the altar is in the Catholic Church, the holy of
holies, about which the whole movement of religious worship gathered.
Whatever disturbed the profound stillness of the day was seized upon by
the law as sacrilegious; and never, perhaps, has there been a religion
which succeeded so completely in investing time with the sacredness
which elsewhere had been appropriated by place. Even the approach to the
Sabbath was guarded, and the custom of the observance of Saturday
evening appears to have been derived from the backward influence of the
day, as the release upon Sunday evening appears to have been a
concession to the flesh, which would otherwise have rebelled. Dr.
Bushnell, in his "Age of Homespun," tells of his own experience in
boyhood, when he was refused a load of apples, which he had gone to buy
on Saturday afternoon, because the farmer, on consulting the sun,
decided that he could not measure out the fruit before the strict
Sabbath began.
The minister again represented to the young New Englander the highest
expression of human attainment. He was righteous and he was learned.
Learning he had in a severe and lofty form, and though there was little
in his outward dress to mark him as a priest of God, he was isolated
from the community by his authority and profession, so that he answered
rather to one's conception of a prophet. Before him were brought
offenders against Sabbath decorum, and the minister's study was to the
boy the most awful room into which he could enter. This association of
learning with piety served to heighten still further the respect with
which learning was regarded, and to separate the young student almost by
a special laying on of hands. The minister also usually had his glebe,
and held a common interest with the farmers of the neighborhood,--a
humanizing relation which had much to do in preserving the real respect
in which he was held. The positive influence of religion upon life, by
being identified with the highest intellectualism and the most eminent
persons, had thus both its strength and weakness. There was wanting the
large and comprehensive spirit of an historic church; there was the
peril of a too abstract regard for religion; but on the other hand there
was a very strong stimulus to individualism. No one with any force of
character could grow up under these influences without being vigorously
affected by them.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] An examination of the Yale catalogue shows that, with some
fluctuations, the proportion of clerical alumni to the whole number of
graduates fell off pretty surely during the middle of the century. In
the decades marked by Webster's graduation, the proportion was roughly
as follows: in 1748, nearly one half the class entered the ministry; in
1758, nearly one third; in 1768 one fourth; in 1778, one tenth.
[2] _Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor_, i. 11, 12.
[3] _President Clap's Annals_, under date of 1765.
[4] _History of Durham, Connecticut_. By William Chauncey Fowler, LL.
D., pp. 97, 98.