36. Noah Webster Sr. to Noah Webster, July 28, 1787, quoted in Ford, Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, vol. 1, 174.
37. Webster, Dissertations on the English Language, vii–viii.
38. Ibid., 231.
39. Ibid., 286–87.
40. The amount of the loss is from Monaghan, A Common Heritage, 66; Noah Webster to Timothy Pickering, December 8, 1791, quoted in Ford, Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, vol. 1, 309.
41. Nathaniel W. Appleton to Noah Webster, January 17, 1790, quoted in Ford, Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, vol. 1, 278.
2. GRAMMAR FOR DIFFERENT CLASSES OF LEARNERS
1, For some discussion of this issue, see Lyda Fens-de Zeeuw, Lindley Murray (1745–1826): Quaker and Grammarian (Utrecht: LOT, Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics, 2011), 81–83.
2. Lindley Murray, Memoirs (New York: Samuel Wood, 1827), 65. See Fens-de Zeeuw, Lindley Murray, 97, for Quakers in York.
3. Murray, Memoirs, 84; Lindley Murray to Joseph Cockfield, March 9, 1811, quoted in Fens-de Zeeuw, Lindley Murray, 68.
4. Murray, Memoirs, 86, 272.
5. Ann Tuke, Mabel Tuke, and Martha Fletcher to Lindley Murray, quoted in Allen Walker Read, “The Motivation of Lindley Murray’s Grammatical Work,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 38 (1939), 527–28.
6. Lindley Murray, English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners (York, England: Wilson, Spence & Mawman, 1795), iii.
7. Murray, English Grammar, 20, 37; Robert Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar [1775] (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1979), 14, 29.
8. Murray, English Grammar, 28.
9. Ibid., 122.
10. Murray, Memoirs, 91.
11. Murray, English Grammar, 183.
12. Ibid., 208–9.
13. Ibid., 222.
14. Murray, Memoirs, 92.
15. Letter printed in the Literary Magazine and American Register 1 (January 1804), quoted in Read, “Motivation of Lindley Murray’s Grammatical Work,” 531–32.
16. Sales figures for England and the United States are estimates, based on what’s known about numbers of editions, how large the print runs were, and how many copies sold annually. They are taken from various places, including the appendix to Charles Monaghan, The Murrays of Murray Hill (Brooklyn, NY: Urban History Press, 1998); Rollo LaVerne Lyman, English Grammar in American Schools Before 1850 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922), 80, 137; Murray, Memoirs, 262; Fens-de Zeeuw, Lindley Murray, 160.
17. Murray, Memoirs, 137.
18. Lindley Murray to John Murray, November 5, 1804, quoted in Fens-de Zeeuw, Lindley Murray, 200.
19. Lindley Murray, English Exercises, Adapted to Murray’s English Grammar [1797] (York, England: Wilson & Sons, 1833), 7.
20. Lindley Murray to Jedidiah Morse, 1806, quoted in Fens-de Zeeuw, Lindley Murray, 199.
21. Lindley Murray to Samuel Latham Mitchill, March 26, 1804, quoted in Fens-de Zeeuw, Lindley Murray, 201.
22. Murray, Memoirs, 9. Murray says here that he attended the school at the age of six or seven, but records show that he was enrolled in 1756, when he would have been eleven. See Fens-de Zeeuw, Lindley Murray, 35.
23. Murray, Memoirs, 25.
24. Ibid., 43.
25. Monaghan argues in The Murrays of Murray Hill that Lindley Murray was forced to move to England, not because of his health, but because of his loyalty to the British during the Revolution. He believes that Murray was sacrificed to protect the rest of the family from retribution after the war. However, by 1783 the Treaty of Paris had granted Loyalists amnesty and Loyalist New Yorkers did not suffer much backlash. Robert Murray, who was much more openly Tory than Lindley, lived peaceably in New York for the rest of his life. Lindley Murray’s poor health was unquestionably genuine. It seems reasonable to accept that as his reason for moving and for staying in Yorkshire. As his debility worsened over the years, returning to New York would have simply been too difficult.
26. Lindley Murray to Noah Webster, 1803, quoted in Emily Ellsworth Fowler Ford, comp. Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, vol. 1 (New York, 1912), 533.
27. Noah Webster to Joel Barlow, October 19, 1807, quoted in Ford, Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, vol. 2, 30.
28. Noah Webster, A Philosophical and Practical Grammar of the English Language (New Haven: Oliver Steele & Co., 1807), 3.
29. Ibid., 5.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 13.
32. Ibid., 51, 168.
33. Ibid., 25–26, 33–34.
34. Ibid., 92.
35. Unsigned review of A Philosophical and Practical Grammar of the English Language, Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, May 1, 1808, 267.
36. Ibid., 275, 277.
37. Noah Webster, A Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 1 [1828] (London: Black, Young, and Young, 1832), xlviii–l. When Webster published the American Dictionary of the English Language in England, he deleted the word American to make the volume more palatable to English buyers. The text is unchanged.
38. Lyman, English Grammar in American Schools, 80–81.
39. Goold Brown, The Institutes of English Grammar [1823] (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1982), x.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., iv.
42. Ibid., vi–vii.
43. Ibid., viii, x–xi.
44. Ibid., 38.
45. Samuel Kirkham, English Grammar in Familiar Lectures [1825] (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1989), 10.
46. Ibid., 49–50.
47. Octavo books were produced by printing sixteen pages of text on one sheet of paper and folding it three times to make an eight-page section. The format sometimes implied cheapness. Elizabeth Frank, Murray’s friend and secretary, states in her continuation of his memoirs that all his books were printed on good paper and with clear type (Murray, Memoirs, 233).
48. Murray, Memoirs, 101.
49. Ibid., 102.
50. Benjamin Silliman, “Travels in England, Holland, and Scotland,” quoted in Murray, Memoirs, 146–47.
51. Andrew Reed, Martha: A Memorial of an Only and Beloved Sister (London: Francis Westley, 1823), 174; Daniel Alexander Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years [1888] (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 21.
52. C. P. Bronson, Elocution, or Mental and Vocal Philosophy (Louisville: Morton & Griswold, 1845), 367.
3. THE VALUE OF GRAMMAR
1. The description of Jackson’s inauguration day comes from James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, vol. 3 (New York: Mason Brothers, 1888), 168–73.
2. National Journal, February 21, 1828, quoted in Allen Walker Read, “Could Andrew Jackson Spell?” American Speech 38 (October 1963), 188. Andrew Jackson’s reputation as a bad speller was reinforced years later when a former supporter spread the false rumor that Jackson used the abbreviation O.K. to stand for “oll korrect.” In fact, O.K. originated in the 1840s as a joke among several newspaper editors. For the full story see Allan Metcalf, OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
3. Newspaper quotations are from Read, “Could Andrew Jackson Spell?,” 191. Adams’s opinion is quoted in Cyrus Townsend Brady, The True Andrew Jackson (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1906), 272.
4. Brady, True Andrew Jackson, 190, 191.
5. Ibid., 273.
6. Ibid., 252–53.
7. Read, “Could Andrew Jackson Spell?,” 192.
8. Quoted in Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, vol. 3, 170.
9. David Crockett, The Autobiography of David Crockett [1834] (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 17–18.
10. James Kirke Paulding, The Lion of the West [1830] (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1954), 21, 27.
11. Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett of West Tennessee (New York: Harper and Bros., 1837), 164.
12. Crockett, Autobiography, 36.
13. Ibid., 92.
14. Ibid., 17.
15. Unsigned review of Practical Observations upon the Education of the People, North American Review, July 1826, 53.
16. Samuel Kirkham, English Grammar in Familiar Lectures [1825] (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1989), 13–14.
17. Goold Brown, The Institutes of English Grammar [1823] (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1982), vi.
18. David Crockett to G. W. McLean, January 17, 1834, quoted in James Atkins Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, edited by John B. Shackford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 265. For a detailed discussion of Crockett’s genuine grammar and spelling, and the part Chilton played in correcting it, see Appendix 2 of Shackford.
19. Books that discuss female language education include Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983); Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
20. Aaron Burr to Theodosia Burr, January 8, 1794, quoted in Correspondence of Aaron Burr and His Daughter Theodosia, edited with a preface by Mark Van Doren (New York: S. A. Jacobs, 1929), 14.
21. Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 67.
22. Emily Ellsworth Fowler Ford, comp., Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, vol. 1. (New York, 1912), 42.
23. Caleb Bingham, The Young Lady’s Accidence [1784] (Boston: S. Lincoln, 1804), title page.
24. Benjamin Rush, “Thoughts upon Female Education” [1787], in Essays, Literary, Moral, and Philosophical (Philadelphia: Thomas and William Bradford, 1806), 75–77.
25. Ibid., 77.
26. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 38; editor’s notes to David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World [1829], edited by Peter P. Hinks (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 119.
27. Walker’s Appeal, 32.
28. Ibid., 32–33.
29. Ibid., 36.
30. As a result of the American Colonization Society’s efforts, several thousand free black Americans emigrated to Liberia when it was founded in 1820.
31. Freedom’s Journal, March 16, 1827.
32. Freedom’s Journal, November 16, 1827.
33. Boston Evening Transcript, September 28, 1830, quoted in Walker’s Appeal, 109.
34. M. L. Houser, Abraham Lincoln, Student. His Books (Peoria, IL: Edward J. Jacob, 1932), 9.
35. Quoted in John Locke Scripps, Life of Abraham Lincoln [1860] (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 28, fn. 7.
36. Quoted in David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 29.
37. Quoted in Houser, Abraham Lincoln, Student, 10. Houser is one of several sources for Lincoln’s reading habits. Others are Scripps, Life of Abraham Lincoln and Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, vol. 1 (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928).
38. Scripps, Life of Abraham Lincoln, 65, fn. 9. Further details of Lincoln’s grammar studies come from Donald, Lincoln and Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln.
39. New York Herald, May 19, 1860, quoted in Coming Age, January 1899, 551.
40. Atlas and Argus, May 21, 1860; Philadelphia Evening Journal, May 24, 1860. Both are quoted in North American Review, January 1912, 738.
41. Many people have analyzed and written about Lincoln’s speeches. Resources that I found useful include Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence; John Channing Briggs, Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2005); Paul F. Boller, Presidential Anecdotes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Jacques Barzun, “Lincoln the Literary Genius,” Saturday Evening Post, February 14, 1959.
4. RATIONAL GRAMMAR
1. William Bentley Fowle, The True English Grammar, vol. 2 (Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1829), 23–24, 27.
2. William Bentley Fowle, The Teacher’s Institute, or Familiar Hints to Young Teachers [1847] (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1866), 119.
3. Ibid., 140.
4. Ibid., 141.
5. Ibid.
6. Fowle, True English Grammar, vol. 2, 9.
7. The sum involved is found in “William Bentley Fowle,” New-England Historical and Genealogical Register and Antiquarian Journal, April 1869, 112. Relative dollar amount comes from Samuel H. Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to Present.” MeasuringWorth. http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/ (accessed August 9, 2013).
8. Fowle, Teacher’s Institute, 142–43.
9. Fowle’s reforms are detailed in “William Bentley Fowle,” American Journal of Education 10 (June 1861), 599–601.
10. Fowle, True English Grammar, vol. 2, 17.
11. A list appears in “William Bentley Fowle,” New-England Historical and Genealogical Register, 116.
12. John Horne Tooke, Epea Pteroenta [Winged Words], or, the Diversions of Purley, Part I [1786] (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 341–43.
13. Ibid., 344–45.
14. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, April 1840, 484.
15. William Bentley Fowle, The True English Grammar, vol. 1 (Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1827), 156.
16. Ibid., 179.
17. William S. Cardell to Thomas Jefferson, February 1820, quoted in Allen Walker Read, “American Projects for an Academy to Regulate Speech,” PMLA 51 (December 1936), 1152.
18. William S. Cardell, Elements of English Grammar, Deduced from Science and Practice, Adapted to the Capacity of Learners (New York: Bliss & White, 1826), x.
19. Ibid., 52.
20. Ibid., 20. Thing comes from an Old English word that can refer to a meeting or a business matter, as well as an inanimate object.
21. John Lewis, Analytical Outlines of the English Language (Richmond, VA: Shepherd & Pollard, 1825), 1.
22. Ibid., 17.
23. Ibid., 141, 155.
24. Unsigned review of Analytical Outlines, North American Review, July 1826, 109, 114; unsigned review of Elements of English Grammar, New York Literary Gazette and American Athenaeum, March 25, 1826, 32.
25. Unsigned review of The True English Grammar, United States Review and Literary Gazette, June 1827, 201; unsigned review of Elements of English Grammar, Friend, November 29, 1828, 49.
26. Unsigned review of Analytical Outlines, North American Review, July 1826, 110.
27. United States Review and Literary Gazette, June 1827, 202, 204–5.
28. Unsigned review of The True English Grammar, North American Review, October 1827, 451–52, 457.
29. Fowle, True English Grammar, vol. 2, 8.
30. Ibid., 25.
31. Ibid., 15–16, 33.
32. Ibid., 30.
33. Oliver Wolcott to Noah Webster, 19 Sep. 1807, quoted in Emily Ellsworth Fowler Ford, comp., Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, vol. 2 (New York, 1912), 27.
34. Noah Webster to Joel Barlow, October 19, 1807, quoted in Ford, Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, vol. 2, 30.
35. Noah Webster, A Dictionary of the English Language [1828], vol. 1 (London: Black, Young, and Young, 1832), vi.
36. Quoted in Ford, Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, vol. 2, 293.
37. Noah Webster to Thomas Dawes, July 25, 1809, quoted in Ford, Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, vol. 2, 70.
38. Webster, Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 1, vii.
39. Noah Webster to Thomas Dawes, July 25, 1809, quoted in Ford, Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, vol. 2, 71.
40. The numbers of new words and definitions come from Ford, Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, vol. 2, 309.
41. Western Recorder, January 20, 1829, 12; “Webster’s Dictionary and Spelling Book,” Religious Intelligencer, January 16, 1830, 544; Professor Jameson, review of An American Dictionary of the English Language, Museum of Foreign Literature, Science and Art, July–Decembe
r 1830, 71.
42. Unsigned review of An American Dictionary of the English Language, North American Review, April 1829, 464, 474.
43. Noah Webster to William Chauncey Fowler, quoted in Joshua Kendall, The Forgotten Founding Father (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010), 303.
44. Lyman Cobb, A Critical Review of the Orthography of Dr. Webster’s Series of Books for Systematick Instruction in the English Language (New York: Collins & Hannay, 1831), iv.
45. Preface to Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (New York: N. and J. White, 1834), iii.
46. Ford, Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, vol. 2, 358, fn. 1.
47. William Bentley Fowle, Common School Grammar, Part First (Boston: William B. Fowle & Nahum Capen, 1842), iii.
48. Peter Bullions, The Principles of English Grammar [1846] (New York: Pratt, Woodford, Farmer & Brace, 1854), iii, iv.
49. Ibid., 72, 119, 187.
5. GRAMMAR AND GENTILITY
1. Richard Grant White, Words and Their Uses, Past and Present [1870] (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1881), 274–75.
2. Ibid., 276.
3. Ibid., 323; Richard Grant White, Every-Day English (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1880), 277–78.
4. Ibid., 295.
5. White, Words and Their Uses, 7.
6. Ibid., vi.
7. Ibid., 80, 82.
8. Ibid., 18–19, 26.
9. Ibid., 24.
10. Ibid., 211.
11. Ibid., 108, 142.
12. Ibid., 265.
13. Ibid., 240.
14. Ibid., 62; William Mathews, Words: Their Use and Abuse [1876] (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1898), 62. The number of books sold is from The Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 12 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928–58), 406.
15. White, Every-Day English, 363; Mathews, Words, 97.
16. Edward S. Gould, Good English, or Popular Errors in Language [1867] (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1870), 31; Alfred Ayres, The Verbalist [1881] (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1889), 110.
17. White, Every-Day English, 364.
18. White, Words and Their Uses, 265.
19. Ibid., 86.
20. Ibid., 90, 138.
21. Gould, Good English, 2–3.
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