In November 1785, for example, Webster set out from Baltimore toward northern Virginia to visit the great George Washington.34 Though Washington probably wasn’t expecting him, that was of no real concern; in the immediate post-Revolutionary period, Mount Vernon had become less a country estate than a tourist hostel, besieged by presumptuous young men seeking close-up glimpses of greatness. No longer a military commander, but not yet president, Washington had ample time to greet the gawkers and indulge the conceit that, in America, any freeborn nobody could ride right up to the home of the country’s most prominent citizen, exchange greetings, and come away convinced that even the most eminent man is still just a man.
Mount Vernon was a way station on Webster’s trip to Richmond, Virginia, where he hoped to lobby the state’s leaders on behalf of copyright protections. Webster hoped Washington would write him some letters of introduction, preferably ones that did not stint on praise for Webster and his work. Although Washington had previously declined an opportunity to endorse the Institute, a letter of introduction from George Washington was a valuable commodity, and Webster must have felt there was no harm in trying again.
But, true to form, Webster soon got in his own way upon arrival. Over dinner, Washington mentioned that he had need of a personal secretary and tutor for his wife’s grandchildren and was hoping to hire a gentleman from Scotland.35 Webster was appalled by this news. A Scotsman at Mount Vernon? A subject of the Crown molding the Custis children’s minds? In his autobiography, Webster recalled the moment when he asked Washington to consider “what European nations would think of this country if, after the exhibition of great talents and achievements in the war for independence, having obtained our object, we should send to Europe for secretaries, and men to teach the first rudiments of learning”:
The question was well received; and the General instantly replied, “What shall I do? There is no person here to be obtained for my purposes.” N.W. replied he believed any northern college could furnish a person who would answer his wishes. Here the conversation at table ceased.36
More than two hundred and thirty years later, the awkward silence still rings. In Webster’s telling, the general was suitably chastised and quickly saw the merit in the grammarian’s argument. But Washington’s true feelings can perhaps be divined from the tepid recommendation he handed Webster upon the young man’s departure. Washington wrote that “there are very honorable testimonials” to the Grammatical Institute’s “excellence & usefulness,” but declined to offer any testimonials of his own. “The work,” he wrote, “must speak for itself,” or at least Webster would have to speak for it, which he was always happy to do.
So, one after another—though not solely due to Webster’s exertions—the various states passed their own copyright laws. By the time Webster concluded his lecture tour and returned to Connecticut in May 1786, every state but Delaware had a copyright statute on its books. Then, in 1790, with the Articles of Confederation a receding memory and a new federal government organized under the principles of the Constitution and the leadership of President George Washington, the first Congress passed a federal copyright law that superseded the various state statutes. (“And Congress too, with powers extending / Farther than patching work and mending; / Have now begun, in freedom’s cause, / A code of energetic laws,” wrote Webster, who was moved to verse on the occasion of Congress’s convention.)37
The Copyright Act of 1790, which was based on the Statute of Anne, provided for an initial term of fourteen years, renewable once. “Based on the Statute of Anne” is an understatement; as the legal historian Oren Bracha recently noted, “The similarity is felt on every level, including structure, legal technicalities, and specific text.”38 Like the Statute of Anne, the American bill was framed as “an Act for the encouragement of learning,” a matter of public policy instead of as a natural right. Maps, charts, and books were protected under the act, with the term books liberally interpreted to encompass printed works ranging from from catalogs to calendars.39 Authors had to register their works formally with their local district court before copyright was conferred. Many authors did not bother to do so.
By today’s standards, the Copyright Act of 1790 was a paltry grant. Even by the standards of its own time, wrote William Patry, the act was flawed. The registration requirements were onerous, and “practical or commercially useful books, such as works of instruction, textbooks, manuals, geographical atlases, and commercial directories, comprised the bulk of the registrations.”40 Still, the law allowed Webster and his peers to assert their rights to profit from and control their works, and it was the first federal step toward normalizing the concept of intellectual property in America.
What the Copyright Act did not do was launch a new literary culture in the United States. According to the copyright historian Meredith L. McGill, “The growth of American print culture did not depend on copyright. In the early republic, a national print culture was established less through the sale of books than through the distribution of uncopyrighted newspapers, magazines, tracts, and pamphlets through the United States mail.”41 Much more meaningful for American cultural flowering was the Post Office Act of 1792, which set favorable postage rates for newspapers and magazines, thus easing the dissemination of news. (The historian Richard R. John observed that the Post Office Act also helped build America’s stagecoach infrastructure, since stage operators received lucrative government contracts to carry the mail.)42
The newspaper remained the nation’s primary vessel for cultural discussion. Most American citizens had “a strong inclination to acquire . . . the means of knowledge,” Webster wrote in 1793. “Of all these means of knowledge, Newspapers are the most eagerly sought after and the most generally diffused.”43 In 1790, America had only ninety-two newspapers. By 1800, there were 235.44 In 1793, Webster became founding editor of The American Minerva, the first daily newspaper in New York City, and issued a four-page edition six days per week.45 (The Minerva was eventually rechristened the Commercial Advertiser.) Many of the era’s newspapers were vituperative and partisan, and the Minerva was no exception. Though he claimed to reject factionalism, Webster the editor “was soon unable to see morality in any political position but his own,” remarked the historian Gary R. Coll.46 Webster’s editorial tenure was tumultuous, and the newspaper business was not lucrative. He resigned in 1798, worn-out by his labors and discouraged by the antagonistic turn the national discourse had taken. Five years later, in a letter to Oliver Wolcott Jr., he acknowledged, “I regret now that I have devoted my time & the vigor of life to a business so precarious, but regret is useless.”47
In the early years of the nineteenth century, Webster was filled with regrets, mostly pertaining to his own credulous youthful populism. During the Revolution and immediately thereafter, Webster imagined that the former colonists were creating a level society, free from artificial hierarchies and class divisions. His grammatical reforms had been offered in service of that great cause. But as Webster aged, he began to realize that, while information might be fatal to despotism, an informed, egalitarian society is not necessarily an enlightened one.
Webster was a John Adams Federalist, a proponent of a strong national government, preferably governed by citizens just like himself: sensible, rational men who settled their disagreements via polemics and correspondence. He watched in horror as Americans took to political parties and began to elevate factional concerns over the public welfare. He worried that this discord was the result of a French plot to divide the nation, and his letters from this time are rich with suspicions of conspiracy. “The people of America, Sir, will not be tricked out of their independence in the mean, dastardly manner by which the French extend their conquests,” Webster wrote to Joel Barlow in 1798, in response to a letter in which Barlow had the temerity to suggest that perhaps the French weren’t actively plotting America’s demise.48
The election of Thomas Jefferson—former minister to France—to the presidency in 1800 just fed Webster�
�s fears. To Webster and other Federalists, Jefferson was a fool and a villain—and, worse, a populist. In a letter to the physician Benjamin Rush, Webster gloomily noted, “We have, by our constitutions of government and the preposterous use made of the doctrines of equality, stripped old men of their dignity and wise men of their influence, and long, long are we to feel the mischievous effects of our modern policy.”49
Webster’s ideal America had not come to pass. “All [Webster’s] measures are exploded, his predictions have proved false, not a single sentiment of his has become fashionable,” jeered the journalist William Cobbett.50 Not only was Webster unfashionable, he was poor. Despite the continued popularity of his speller—by 1804, the book was selling at a rate of two hundred thousand copies per year—Webster lived perennially on the brink of insolvency, usually thanks to his own financial incompetence. “My income barely supports my family, and I want five hundred dollars’ worth of books from England which I cannot obtain here, and which I cannot afford to purchase,” he wrote to Barlow in 1807.51 Webster eventually condemned the primacy of partisan political chatter in the nation’s cultural conversation. Little room was left for more scholarly debates, he complained to Oliver Wolcott Jr.: “vast sums of money [are] expended in donations to support a party or a newspaper—when not a cent can be obtained for very valuable purposes.”52 The Copyright Act of 1790 had portended the arrival of a republic of letters. But its citizens seemed primarily interested in the poison pen.
Under these circumstances, Noah Webster began the project that would be his legacy: the American Dictionary of the English Language. His plan was madly presumptuous. Webster proposed to improve upon the work of Samuel Johnson, the celebrated British lexicographer and coffee wit whose own Dictionary of the English Language had been well beloved since its first publication in 1755. Just as he had publicly criticized Dilworth when he was assembling the blue-backed speller, Webster justified his project by repeatedly asserting that Johnson’s Dictionary was fatally flawed. In October 1807, he assured the historian David Ramsay that “not a single page of Johnson’s Dictionary is correct: every page required amendment or admits of material improvement.”53 (What’s more, Johnson’s lexicon contained a shocking amount of “vulgar words and offensive ribalry.”)54 Webster’s work would be a work of scholarship and reference; a learned bulwark against ignoble populism.
He spent two decades preparing the work, much longer than he originally anticipated. (“His original research plans had to be extended because of his lack of knowledge of the origin of words,” historian K. Alan Snyder drolly observed.)55 Webster labored from inside a doughnut-shaped table on which rested “dictionaries and grammars of all attainable languages.”56 During the years he spent sequestered in etymological toil, America began to emerge.
The American postal system continued to expand, swelling from 903 post offices in 1800 to 2,300 in 1810.57 As went the mail, so went the media; the number of American newspapers grew with the postal system, and early-nineteenth-century newspaper readers “treasured each issue as a key to a wider world and a solvent of their isolation,” in the words of historian Andie Tucher.58 (“I am often asked, what progress I have made in the compilation of my proposed Dictionary; and when in all probability it will be completed. To these questions I am not able to give precise answers,” Webster wrote to Thomas Dawes on July 25, 1809.)59 The United States declared war on Great Britain in 1812 and called it off in 1815. (“I have examined and collated the radical words in 20 languages, including the seven Asiatic languages or dialects of the Assyrian stocks,” Webster wrote to John Jay in June of 1813.)60
The North American Review, America’s first literary magazine, was founded in 1815. (“Wherever the use of comptroller exists, it is a reproach to literature,” Webster insisted in a December 1816 letter to John Pickering.)61 James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving became America’s first significant homegrown novelists, with Irving’s Sketch Book selling five thousand copies upon its release in 1819. (“I have advanced to the letter H,” Webster informed Stephen van Rensselaer on November 5, 1821.)62
The xenophobia that had animated the national polity at the turn of the century began to subside and transmute into domestic resentments; the cultural and political divide between North and South quickly became a chasm. (“In order to give my work all the completeness to which it is susceptible, I purpose to go to England next summer, if life and health permit, and there finish and publish it,” he wrote to Samuel Latham Mitchill in December of 1823.)63 American culture had evolved on its own without all that much input from Noah Webster.
* * *
WHEN the sixty-six-year-old Webster finished his Dictionary in January 1825, he was “seized with a trembling,” prompted by the relief occasioned by the completion of the work he had feared “he might not then live to finish.”64 So much had changed since he started the project that he must have wondered whether the world even wanted his Dictionary. He need not have worried. When the work was eventually published in 1828, it was an international success, with initial editions of twenty-five hundred copies in America and three thousand copies in Great Britain.65 “I learn however by Newspapers that it meets the approbation of liturary [sic] characters,” Webster’s brother Abraham wrote in a letter from January 1830. “I fondly hope it may be of great use in the learned world & that you may have the consolation of finding that you have not laboured so long to no purpose.”66
Many of the Dictionary’s definitions betrayed Webster’s authorial biases. Consider the definition of the word press: “A free press is a great blessing to a free people; a licentious press is a curse to society.” Or take the definition of property, which Webster used, in part, as a declaration of the morality of copyright and a defense of the authorial-ownership mentality:
No right or title to a thing can be so perfect as that which is created by a man’s own labor and invention. The exclusive right of a man to his literary productions, and the use of them for his own profit, is entire and perfect, as the faculties employed and labor bestowed are entirely and perfectly his own. On what principle, then, can a legislature or a court determine that an author enjoy only a temporary property in his own productions?67
(This argument is problematic, not least because evidence suggests that Webster may have plagiarized from existing works while compiling his Dictionary.)68
For the aged Webster, property in literature was more than just an abstract concern. Though the federal copyright law had been a boon to him, its relatively brief term had proven inadequate to his financial needs, forcing Webster to issue new editions of his speller at fourteen-year intervals to maintain an income from its sales. In a letter to the famous Massachusetts politician Daniel Webster—if the two men were related, it was but distantly—Noah expressed his heartfelt wish that Congress would acknowledge that “an author has, by common law or natural justice, the sole and permanent right to make profit by his own labor, and that his heirs and assigns shall enjoy the right, unclogged with conditions.”69
Unlike in the 1780s, when Webster argued for copyright on the grounds that it would encourage the dissemination of books—namely, his own—that would benefit the nation, in later years he was primarily concerned with retaining control over those works for personal profit. Nearing the end of his life, Webster had written many books and wanted to ensure his family continued to benefit from their sale. (He was especially concerned about providing an income for his hapless son, William, whose talents lay in playing the flute and accumulating debts.) The publication of his Dictionary made a revision of the nation’s copyright laws seem more important than ever—to Webster if no one else. “Few members of Congress feel much interest in such a law, and it was necessary that something extra should occur to awaken their attention to the subject,” Webster wrote at the time. That “something extra” would be his own presence on Capitol Hill.70
So Webster, revisiting the tactics that had worked so well for him as a young striver, traveled to Washington, D
C, in 1830 to lobby for copyright in person. Congress has always been moved by the arguments of famous, well-connected people, and Noah Webster was now both. “I found the members of both houses coming to me and saying, they had learned in my books, they were glad to see me, and ready to do me any kindness in their power,” Webster wrote. “They all seemed to think, also, that my great labors deserve some uncommon reward.”71 His works had spoken for themselves—and spoken persuasively.
The bill that ultimately found passage as the Copyright Act of 1831 was an alloyed triumph. The term was still limited, meaning that Congress still declined to see copyright as an inherent, eternal right. In 1814, Great Britain had passed a new copyright law that granted authors a term of either twenty-eight years or the life of the author, whichever was longer; the United States was not ready to go quite that far.72 Even so, Congress ended up doubling the length of the existing copyright term—from fourteen years to twenty-eight—and retaining the existing fourteen-year renewal period. Moreover, if an author died before the initial term expired, his or her surviving spouse or children could now claim the renewal rights. Meredith L. McGill observed that, by so doing, Congress “redefined copyright as something approximating a personal property right, making copyrights familial and heritable, although only for a single generation.”73
Webster was content. “My great object is now accomplished,” he wrote happily to his wife, and he had good reason for glee: the new law would provide for his family long after his death.74 But to his son-in-law, William Chauncey Fowler, Webster admitted that his satisfaction was at least partially vainglorious: the reception he received in Washington “convinces me that my fellow citizens consider me as their benefactor and the benefactor of my country.”75 He was, at long last, a respectable gentleman.
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