Noah Webster's spelling book paid for America's most famous dictionary
Noah Webster wanted a young nation to stop borrowing its culture from Europe. His blue-backed spelling book taught generations of American children to read, and its steady sales funded two decades of work on An American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828 and ancestor of today's Merriam-Webster.
Webster was born on 16 October 1758 in what is now West Hartford, Connecticut. His father, a farmer and church deacon who never went to college, mortgaged the farm to send him to Yale; his mother drilled her children in spelling, arithmetic and music. The village schoolroom, with teachers he later dismissed as the dregs of humanity, left him determined to improve education. His Yale years overlapped the Revolutionary War, and he served in the Connecticut militia.
He studied law partly under Oliver Ellsworth, later Chief Justice, and passed the bar in 1781, but wartime left no legal work. He ran schools instead, and by 1785 had produced a speller, a grammar and a reader. He saw these books as an intellectual foundation for American nationhood, free of European luxury and superstition. In 1787, as A Citizen of America, he published an influential pamphlet backing the new Constitution, and he drew on Rousseau to argue for strong central government and broad schooling for girls.
In 1793 Alexander Hamilton lent him $1,500 to move to New York, where he founded American Minerva, the city's first daily newspaper, and wrote what is thought to be the first newspaper editorial. Defending Washington's neutrality and attacking the Reign of Terror earned him Jeffersonian insults such as incurable lunatic. His 1799 study of epidemics has led medical historians to call him America's first epidemiologist, and a modern bibliography of his writings runs to 655 pages.
He founded Connecticut's anti-slavery society in 1791, though he later criticised abolitionists, and helped establish Amherst College. After a first, smaller dictionary in 1806, he spent from 1807 to 1828 on the large one, popularising American spellings, and pushed for the Copyright Act of 1831. He died on 28 May 1843 while revising it, and George and Charles Merriam bought the rights.
Source: Noah Webster
