Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

  Brown’s book does show some original features. Most of his definitions and rules are freshly worded. His description of nouns—the name of any person, place, or thing that can be known or mentioned—is an early version of what would later become the standard formula. His definition of verbs also sounds more modern than earlier ones—a word that signifies to be, to act, or to be acted upon.

  Brown takes an innovative approach with parsing exercises. He doesn’t wait until students have memorized most of the book’s material, but begins presenting exercises immediately. The first set comes right after he defines the parts of speech. More exercises appear after each new section and Brown explains each time what he wants from the students: “It is required of the pupil—to distinguish and define the different parts of speech, and the classes and modifications of the articles and nouns.”44

  His parsing exercises differ in another way, too. Most of his contemporaries’ books presented the text to be parsed, then provided the “resolution,” which demonstrated the actual parsing. Brown gives learners texts to parse on their own, without the corresponding answers. That way they have to work out the resolution themselves rather than merely memorizing it. He provides a separate answer key for the convenience of teachers and “private learners.”

  Brown’s exercises mainly consist of simple, original sentences rather than quotations (although, surprisingly, he occasionally quotes a sentence from Murray’s book). He supplements the parsing examples with basic questions about the material, such as “What are tenses in grammar?” He also makes heavy use of false syntax exercises.

  The Institutes reflects changes that have occurred in the English language and how it’s analyzed. Brown’s book is one of the first to list participles as a separate part of speech. Like most other grammar books by this time, he drops the question-and-response method of teaching in favor of straightforward presentation of the material. He avoids excess Latin-style noun cases, keeping only nominative, objective, and possessive. He also notes the fact that you is now commonly used for second-person singular as well as plural, although he still includes thou when demonstrating verb forms.

  Brown’s Institutes went through at least fifty editions, replacing English Grammar in the schools of his native New York and challenging it in other places. The differences between Brown’s approach and Murray’s, or maybe the fact that The Institutes was a newer book, clearly won over some schoolteachers. Nonetheless, Brown never succeeded in eclipsing Murray as he had hoped.

  Samuel Kirkham, whose 1825 English Grammar in Familiar Lectures was also widely popular, took the opposite approach from Brown. He made no attempt to escape from Murray. On the contrary, he admits frankly in his preface that he is aware of the public’s preference for “the doctrines contained in Mr. Murray’s grammar.” He therefore plans to “select his principles chiefly from that work.” Kirkham then devotes a paragraph to pointing out to Murray and any other competitors the well-known fact that “similar investigations and pursuits often elicit corresponding ideas in different minds.” If they notice similarities between his book and theirs, they shouldn’t be too quick to accuse him of plagiarism.45

  Like other aspiring grammar book authors, Kirkham struggled to set his book apart in a crowded field. He touches all the usual grammatical bases, but does include some distinctive features. He addresses students directly throughout the book, telling them exactly what he wants them to do. After his section on progressives, for instance, he says, “Now please to turn back, and read over this and the preceding lecture three times, and endeavour not only to understand but also to remember what you read.” When he first introduces parsing he says, “To analyze or parse a word means to enumerate and describe all its various properties … If you persevere you will … find it of great utility.”46

  A long footnote on philosophical grammar near the beginning of the book shows that Kirkham has been reading Webster, although he doesn’t mention him by name. Kirkham explains that while he thinks it’s absurd to try to teach English grammar based on a system like Horne Tooke’s, he knows that “a strong predilection for philosophical grammars exists in the minds of some teachers.” He therefore plans to intersperse “Philosophical Notes” throughout the text. These are Webster-style explorations of word origins for anyone who wants to study the language in more depth.

  Kirkham also includes a unique list of provincialisms organized by region, along with the standard alternative. For example, he lists the New England expression He lives to home and corrects it to He lives at home. He corrects the southernism Tote the wood to the river to Carry the wood to the river. He says I seen him, often heard in Pennsylvania, should be I saw him. Aside from Webster’s writings, this fascinating list is one of the few glimpses of regional variation to be found in an early nineteenth-century grammar book.

  Although Brown and Kirkham took different routes, they shared the same goal—to knock Murray from his publishing throne. Murray’s English Grammar was the acknowledged benchmark in the world of grammar books. For the next few decades, all hopeful grammar book authors would market their products by claiming to have improved somehow on Murray, whether through better teaching methods, original exercises, or a more readable format.

  The innovations and improvements they claimed were matters of style, not substance. The core of all grammar books—the rules themselves—remained the same. Bishop Lowth’s restrictions on sentence-final prepositions, double negatives, and pronoun case, first expounded in 1762, lived on in his successors’ books, their wording virtually unchanged. With millions of Murray’s books circulating in every part of the country, these rules became familiar maxims to people of every social class. They achieved the status of established truths.

  * * *

  Murray still dominated the grammar book market when he decided to give up writing. Toward the end of his memoirs, completed in 1809, he announces that he will no longer write grammar books. A year earlier he produced a two-volume “octavo” version of his English Grammar, much revised and enlarged.47 The first edition sold out within months. “I had the satisfaction to perceive,” he says, “that all my literary productions were approved … But I was fully persuaded that an author ought to terminate his labours before the tide of favour begins to turn; and before he incurs the charge of being so infected with the morbid humour for writing, as not to have the discretion to know when to stop.”48

  Part of Murray’s reason for retiring from grammar book writing was his worsening health. By the end of 1809 he was so weak he could no longer go out for his daily carriage rides or even sit in the garden. Often his vocal muscles were so weak he couldn’t speak above a whisper. He spent the next seventeen years, until the end of his life, confined to his house. Besides his chronic muscle weakness, he faced recurring bouts of severe illness, probably brought on by his lack of movement. Only by keeping to his strict schedule and careful diet was he able to continue some semblance of normal life.

  In his memoirs, Murray expresses the hope that there will “still remain for me other sources of employment and some degree of usefulness, better adapted to … my growing infirmities of body.”49 From the confines of his sitting room, Murray remained engaged with the larger world. He was a member of the Anti-Slavery Society and supported William Wilberforce, Yorkshire’s member of Parliament, who led the fight to abolish England’s slave trade. He involved himself in local charitable causes, ranging from a school for poor children to the animal welfare league. He also wrote two brief essays on religious subjects. Like all his writing, these were well received.

  Whenever he felt well enough, he continued to tinker with his books. Whether or not Murray fully absorbed the ferocious comments of Webster, Brown, and other critics is unclear. He certainly took seriously any errors or gaps that came to his attention. He diligently reworded and polished until problems were corrected to his satisfaction, bestowing what a friend termed “parental care” on all his publications.

  Murray’s grammar books had ma
de him a celebrity. He was awarded honorary memberships in New York’s Historical Society and Literary and Philosophical Society. Scholarly and literary people asked to meet him and afterward wrote about their visits. One such person was a Yale professor of chemistry named Benjamin Silliman. He arrived on a November day in 1805 when Murray was fortunately able to talk. Professor Silliman reports, “Our conversation related principally to literature, morals, and religion, and the state of these important subjects in the United States and England.” After his visit, he rode back to York “with impressions of the most agreeable kind.”50

  By the time of Murray’s death in 1826, just short of his eighty-first birthday, his name had become one to conjure with. Reviewers who wanted to suggest that a book’s style could use some improvement would say that the author seemed unfamiliar with Murray. In contrast, those who wrote well were said to have obviously studied their Murray. “Murray” was shorthand for good grammar.

  Murray’s grammar was used to fill out descriptions of fictional characters. Dickens includes the book in a miscellany of items strewn around schoolmaster Wackford Squeers’s study in Nicholas Nickleby. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe describes Haley the slave trader by saying, “His conversation was in free and easy defiance of Murray’s grammar.”

  Memoirs and biographies also frequently mention the grammar. Yorkshire clergyman Andrew Reed, recalling his sister from around 1812, says, “She then went through Murray’s Grammar,… not merely committing its rules to memory, but understanding and applying them.” African Methodist-Episcopal bishop Daniel Payne, recalling his efforts at self-education during the same period in South Carolina, tells his readers, “I began with ‘Murray’s Primary Grammar,’ and committed the entire book to memory.” Then, feeling that he didn’t really understand the book, he went through it a second time.51

  Murray’s grammar was enough of an institution to figure in comic sketches. In an 1845 book of elocution exercises, a character named Mrs. Grumpy tells a schoolmaster whose school she’s thinking of patronizing, “I’ve heerd a great deal about your school, and I’ve determined to send you one of my gals, if you can only satisfy me on one pint. They tell me you have some newfangled notions on the subject of grammar; and I never will have nothing to do with no one that does not know Murray’s Grammar.”52 The schoolmaster assures her that all his pupils receive a thorough grounding in Murray.

  Gradually, newer books would replace Murray’s. New teaching methods evolved and updated texts gained favor. Until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, however, people concerned with improving their minds and their circumstances would define being educated as having a good understanding of Murray’s English Grammar.

  3.

  The Value of Grammar

  Three years after Lindley Murray’s death, when his books were still enjoying peak sales, America entered a new cultural and political age—the age of Andrew Jackson. Jackson was the first “people’s president.” The six presidents before him had all come from families that were as close to being aristocrats as was possible in the United States. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were wealthy plantation owners; the Adamses were patrician New Englanders. Jackson’s election broke with this tradition. The son of working-class Irish immigrants, he had grown up in the rugged Carolina backcountry and begun his adult career in the wilds of frontier Tennessee.

  Like the election itself, Jackson’s inauguration on March 4, 1829, was distinctly different from what had come before. Previous presidential inaugurations had been formal, indoor affairs with invited guests. Jackson’s took place under the Capitol’s East Portico, and anyone who could find a spot on the lawn was welcome to attend. In the days before the event, thousands of exultant Jacksonians streamed into Washington, D.C. One observer who was not a Jackson supporter remarked unhappily that it seemed as if half the country had rushed at once into the capital—“like the inundation of the northern barbarians into Rome.”1

  On the morning of the inauguration itself—luckily, a sunny day—the multitudes swamped the Capitol grounds. Supreme Court justice Joseph Story estimated that the number of spectators reached at least ten thousand. They thronged together so tightly that it was difficult for the president-elect, who was on foot, to push his way through to the Capitol. Someone had tried to contain the crowd by stretching a ship’s cable across the East Portico steps, but this barrier almost snapped as those in front reached out to touch their hero. When Jackson finally appeared under the portico, a cheer went up that, as one attendee described it, “seemed to shake the very ground.”

  Most of that tumultuous crowd had never heard of Lindley Murray, or else had forgotten all they once knew. The majority of Jackson supporters were laborers or small farmers who had only a few years’ basic schooling at most. Some were recent immigrants. They hailed largely from the rural areas of the South and the western frontier. A large percentage were men who, because of their low economic status, had only recently gained the right to vote.

  When the United States was first formed, only men who owned a certain minimum amount of property were allowed to vote (mainly white men, but also free black men in some states). Elections were the business of a select few. This situation changed when frontier states like Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois began joining the union. The hardy individualists who settled these areas felt that they were just as entitled to a voice in the government as wealthier citizens. They demanded and received their voting rights. Most of the original thirteen states soon loosened their voting laws as well.

  Andrew Jackson was the ideal candidate for these new voters. A self-made man, he had risen from a humble backcountry childhood to become one of the largest landowners in Tennessee. He was the famous hero of the War of 1812 who led the victory over the British during the Battle of New Orleans. He had also put down the 1814 uprising of the Creeks. His troops nicknamed him Old Hickory as a tribute to his toughness. Like his followers, he believed in individual rights and a limited federal government. He was like them in another way, too. He received most of his education from a “common school”—a public school that taught only basic levels of reading, spelling, and arithmetic.

  This fact alone distinguished Jackson sharply from earlier presidents, although he was not completely deprived of higher education. As a child, he studied for three years at a private Presbyterian academy that offered Latin and Greek, as well as English grammar and other advanced classes. Later he attended a private school briefly to brush up on his Latin before studying for the bar exam. These experiences made him better educated than many Americans. They didn’t compare, though, with his predecessors’ privileged educations, which included exclusive private schools, tutors, and in some cases colleges such as Harvard and Princeton.

  The election of 1828 was remarkable for the no-holds-barred campaigning on both sides. Andrew Jackson and his opponent, incumbent president John Quincy Adams, had already squared off during the 1824 election, when Jackson won the most votes out of four presidential candidates, but not an outright majority. The lack of a clear winner sent the decision to the House of Representatives, which voted Adams into office. Now supporters of both men were prepared for a brutal return match.

  Adams supporters seized on Jackson’s limited formal schooling and shaky spelling skills as a major campaign issue. The pro-Adams National Journal went on the attack by publishing a note that they claimed to have received in Jackson’s own handwriting. Filled with lurid vocabulary and laughably bad spelling, it seemed to prove that Jackson was as ignorant as his enemies claimed he was: “When the midnight assasins plunges his dagger to the heart & riffles your goods, the turpitude of this scene looses all its horrors when compared with the act of the secrete assasins poinard levelled against femal character by the hired minions of power.”2 (The note probably alludes to the vicious insults leveled at Jackson’s wife, Rachel, during the campaign, which newspaper readers of the time would have realized.)

  Other Adamsite paper
s followed up by claiming to have seen letters by Jackson in which “many of the plainest words of the language” were misspelled, such as solem for solemn and goverment for government, and “good English” was “shockingly violated.” These were “proof positive,” declared one editor, “that the man who aspires to the chief magistracy is incapable of writing a commonly decent letter.” To Adams supporters, this lack of literacy was evidence of Jackson’s “absolute incapacity” to hold the office of president. Adams considered Jackson “a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.” Adams, in contrast, had once been a professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard.3

  Naturally Jackson’s supporters jumped to his defense. The fervently Jacksonian United States Telegraph published a forceful editorial against the Journal’s “pitiful and contemptible slander.” The paper revealed that the supposed “note” was actually a printed pamphlet, almost certainly written by someone other than Jackson. Another pro-Jackson writer enlarged on this idea with the suggestion that the pamphlet was a hoax meant to trick the Adams people into making fools of themselves. Yet others declared that they were in possession of letters from Jackson that not only displayed “perspicuity and precision,” but were “almost fastidiously correct” in their spelling.4 They also argued that other office holders spelled just as badly. To demonstrate this point, one supporter went to the Library of Congress and unearthed facsimile letters from famous politicians such as former vice president Elbridge Gerry.

  Portrayals of Jackson as a nearly illiterate bumpkin were obviously exaggerated. His successful legal career would have required substantial reading and writing. He had risen to the rank of major general during the War of 1812, and had served as the military governor of Florida, and as both a representative and a senator from Tennessee. He could not have filled these positions successfully if he had not had able to handle the written word reasonably well.