PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
“[T]HE TASTE AND JUDGEMENT OF [WEBSTER] ARE NOT
1 GENERALLY ESTEEMED EQUAL TO HIS INDUSTRY AND ERUDITION.”
1. Per Joseph Emerson Worcester, competing American lexicographer. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: NOAH WEBSTER PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
1758
October 16, Monday: At the battle of Clostercamp, the French were triumphant over the combined forces of Great Britain, Prussia, Hanover, Brunswick, and Hesse-Kassel.
Noah Webster, Jr. was born in the front, upstairs bedroom (then described as “parlor”), probably in its 4-poster “guest” bed, in a square, white house on South Main Street in what is now West Hartford, Connecticut to Noah Webster, Sr. and Mercy Steele Webster.2 You can still visit the family farm where he was born, at 227 South Main Street (unless today happens to be Wednesday). It is probable that Noah initially attended South Middle School in Hartford, and Hopkins Grammar School of Hartford under Mrs. Wales. He would be one of the approximately 150 young scholars prepared for college by the Reverend Doctor Nathan Perkins, pastor of his village church, entering Yale College at the age of 14. It would be said of this lexicographer that, “if you had met him in China you would have known that he hailed from Connecticut” (also famous in West Hartford would be Dr. Joseph Emerson Worcester, Webster’s lexicographic rival, who would refuse to sacrifice the tradition and elegance of language to anything so mundane as usage).
1767
April 17, Friday: Noah Webster, Jr. jotted in his diary: “O habit! O Education! Of what importance that our first examples be good and our first impressions virtuous.”
2. On his mother’s side he was a great-great-great grandson of Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony, a Pilgrim First Comer. On his father’s side he was a great-great grandson of a Puritan, John Webster, who had emigrated from Warwickshire settling initially near Boston and then in 1638 migrating to “Newe Towne” (Hartford, Connecticut) as part of Hooker’s band. This John Webster had become Governor of Connecticut. Noah’s father had been born at Hartford on March 25, 1722 and was a farmer, soldier, Deacon, and Justice of the Peace; he would live to the age of 91. Noah’s mother had been born in October, 1727 and would die on October 5, 1794 at the age of 67. These parents produced five children: Mercy, born November 8, 1749; Abraham, born September 17, 1751; Jerusha, born January 22, 1756; Noah; and Charles, born September 2, 1762. Both elder sisters would marry early. Elder brother Abraham would become a farmer in New York State near Utica; younger brother Charles would enter business. 2 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1774
September: 14-year-old Noah Webster, Jr. rode horseback to New Haven to matriculate at Yale College.
1777
May 26: Oliver Goldsmith’s pastoral THE DESERTED VILLAGE (in memory of his deceased brother). THE DESERTED VILLAGE
While Noah Webster, Jr. was entering the Junior year of his college studies, invasion of the port city of New Haven by the British military holding the ports of Boston, Newport, and New-York came to be a real possibility. British General Burgoyne’s army was advancing down the Hudson River. For this reason, at the end of May the entire Junior class of Yale College began its studies far inland in Glastonbury, Connecticut with the depressed and depressing Reverend Joseph Buckminster, D.D. as their tutor: Sin is an abominable thing, which God’s soul hates and it is no less offensive in his children than in others. Was there no such thing as sin in the world, suffering would be a stranger.
Fall: The Reverend Ezra Stiles was elected president of Yale College.
Studying under the perpetually depressed and depressing Yale tutor, the Reverend Joseph Buckminster, D.D., in the hick town of Glastonbury, could not have been particularly intriguing. Despite the fact that as a student he was exempt from military service, Noah Webster, Jr. enlisted as a private in his father Captain Noah Webster, Sr.’s Hartford militia unit, on its way to resist the army of British General Burgoyne (the militia unit would not take part in any actual altercations).
GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE
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1778
June 14, Sunday: In President of Yale College Ezra Stiles’s diary, we find a reference to several students doing well in debating. Noah Webster, Jr. was among them.
The Reverend Gilbert White of Selborne sighed in his journal, “White butter-flies unnumerable: woe to the cabbages!”
September: Noah Webster, Jr. graduated from Yale College with the Class of 1778, which has been recognized as its most distinguished class up to the Civil War (among the classmates of Webster were Joel Barlow who would become a poet and Minister to France, Alexander Wolcott and Abraham Bishop who would become prominent in Jeffersonian politics, Zephonia Swift who would become Connecticut’s greatest jurist, Oliver Wolcott, Jr. who would succeed Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury, Uriah Tracy who would become a US Senator, and Josiah Meigs who would become President of the University of Georgia). Shortly after the graduation ceremony, however, Captain Noah Webster, Sr. had handed him a virtually worthless $8 Continental note and declared, “Take this! You must now seek your living; I can do no more for you.”
Thanks, Noah Senior! The son closed himself up in his room for a couple of days to think this problem through. During his study for the bar he would be obliged to take up teaching in Glastonbury, Hartford, and West Hartford.
1779
Spring: Noah Webster, Jr. taught in the Brick School House of West Hartford, Connecticut while residing with and reading law with Oliver Ellsworth (later Chief Justice of the United States, and, one of Ellsworth’s sons would marry one of Webster’s daughters). The schoolmaster assisted as he was able in the conduct of the law office.
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1780
Summer: Noah Webster, Jr. moved to Litchfield, Connecticut where he resumed his study of law under Topping Reeve, founder of the famous Litchfield Law School, or Jedidiah Strong, the Justice of the Quorum and Recorder of Deeds for Litchfield. Noah also assisted the latter in the maintenance of his office.
Winter: Noah Webster, Jr. returned to live in his father’s house in what is now West Hartford and for some months taught in a local school.
1781
April 3, Tuesday: Noah Webster, Jr. was admitted to the bar in Hartford after studying in Sharon, Litchfield, and Hartford and failing to be admitted in Litchfield (for some reason the entire class had failed, every one of the 19). From this point his name would include “Esquire.”
July: Noah Webster, Jr. initiated his own school at Sharon, Connecticut, probably in the home of John Cotton Smith. The better Whig families, who had fled to Sharon when the British had taken over in New-York, would send their children to this school.
September: Noah Webster, Jr. received an MA from Yale College. His dissertation topic was “On the universal diffuse of literature as introductory to the universal diffusion of Christianity.”
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October 9, Tuesday: Noah Webster, Jr. suddenly closed his school at Sharon, Connecticut (this may have been due to rejection as a suitor by local lass Rebecca Pordee).
Austria declared armed neutrality in the war between Great Britain and the United States.
American and French siege guns opened fire on the British defenders of Yorktown.
1782
In New York, a third revision was made to the 1778 Militia Act. Gaolers were once again made exempt from any military service. However, Quakers were to be required to pay £10 for exemption from military service.
At the age of 22 a Massachusetts woman, Deborah Sampson, cut her hair and enlisted in the Continental Army, calling herself Robert Shurtliff and fighting in New York. She wrote letters for illiterate soldiers and did her best to avoid rough soldiers’ games such as wrestling (the one time she did wrestle, she was flung to the ground). After the war she would marry, and in 1838 her husband would become the 1st man to receive a pension from the United States government on the basis of his wife’s military service (Sampson’s maritime equivalents of this period included Fanny Campbell and Mary Anne Talbot).
As a teacher, Noah Webster, Jr. was exempt from wartime conscription. However, it seems that when he arrived in Goshen, New York in this timeframe, he had but 75¢ in his pocket. He began to teach at the Farmer’s Hall Academy, to which several signers of the Declaration of Independence were sending their children. In this period he was struggling to compile a spelling book.
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1783
Schoolmaster Noah Webster, Jr. put out his first book, A GRAMMATICAL INSTITUTE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, or the “Blue-backed Speller” as it was mostly called. This is also sometimes titled THE AMERICAN SPELLING BOOK. Some said that in this volume the poorly done woodcut of the author was such as to frighten children — it looks as if his head was being molested by a porcupine.
During this year this schoolmaster, anticipating Waldo Emerson’s speech of August 31, 1837, bloviated to his diary “America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms.”
January: In the interest of profiting from his writings, Noah Webster, Jr. had been campaigning to induce various states to enact laws protecting copyright. At this point Connecticut led the way.
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March: Connecticut having responded to the initiative of Noah Webster, Jr. by enacting a 1st statute protecting copyright, at this point Massachusetts enacted a similar law.
Spring: Noah Webster, Jr. returned to Hartford, Connecticut, where he would practice law and write.
October: Noah Webster, Jr. published his SPELLING BOOK, which would be the 1st in a series of three volumes AGRAMMATICAL INSTITUTE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. For what this is worth, it is said that no other secular book has reached so many minds in America (never mind that one finds oneself tempted to pioneer a similar remark about a type of sandwich based upon a patty of ground beef).
1784
January 20, Tuesday: In his diary, Noah Webster, Jr. recorded having sighted a comet (this was C/1783, a nonperiodic comet which had been being watched since November 19th and would arrive at its perihelion on the 21st). SKY EVENT
March: Jonas Hartwell of Concord, who had been imprisoned by the Inquisition in Bilboa, Spain, although he had been released at the demand of the American government, died a few weeks after his release. The charge would be made, that he had been killed by some sort of slow-acting poison administered during his captivity.
Noah Webster, Jr. published GRAMMATICAL INSTITUTE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (Part II), pleading for a simplified spelling of words that would be appropriate to a republic in which all citizens must be literate in order to fulfill political duties — for instance, he proposed to substitute “labor” and “color” for “labour” and “colour,” “wagon” for “waggon” much as we do today. There are similarities, of course, between this 18th- Century project of American nationalism, and the project of the People’s Republic of China (mainland China) of the 1950s and 1960s to simplify the Chinese character set down to a 6,000-character “pinyin” set adequate to read a newspaper and thus be “informed” — but inadequate to any real and therefore dangerous thought process.
March 28, Sunday: Noah Webster, Jr. jotted in his diary: “At church-heard an excellent sermon. It is much easier to hear than to remember and practice.”
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August 12, Thursday: Noah Webster, Jr. jotted in his diary: “Read a little law and some poetry, if a man lays up a few ideas everyday and arranges them, it is enough.”
August 24, Tuesday: In England, Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s daughter Emma was born.
In Bedford, New Hampshire, Joseph Emerson Worcester was born. Neither he nor any of his 13 siblings would be permitted to leave home to begin their formal education until the date of their 21st birthdays. All but one of these 14, including Joe, would become teachers. Joseph would rise to fame as a lexicographer but, unlike his competitor Noah Webster, Jr., would be disinclined to sacrifice the tradition and elegance of language to anything so mundane as usage.
1785
Noah Webster, Jr. fulminated in defense of the western land claims of Connecticut, in a contest with Pennsylvania. The state lost this particular contest but would, eventually, win some “Western Reserve” lands. He declined an offer from George Washington that he tutor his stepchildren, explaining that writing was his “principal pleasure.” During this year and the following one he would be traveling extensively to further copyright legislation, while lecturing and selling copies of his publications to make money.
His travels would take him to New Haven, New-York, Baltimore, Virginia, and South Carolina. He would meet not only Washington but also Mrs. Aaron Burr, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin. While in New-York he perfected his scheme for a phonetic alphabet — Franklin in particular would be enthusiastic about this.
February: Noah Webster, Jr.’s A GRAMMATICAL INSTITUTE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: COMPRISING AN EASY, CONCISE, AND SYSTEMATIC METHOD OF EDUCATION, DESIGNED FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS IN AMERICA: IN THREE PARTS, PART III CONTAINING THE NECESSARY RULES OF READING AND SPEAKING, AND A VARIETY OF ESSAYS, DIALOGUES, AND DECLAMATORY PIECES, MORAL, POLITICAL AND ENTERTAINING; DIVIDED INTO LESSONS, FOR THE USE OF CHILDREN. This, along with his SPELLING BOOK and the first GRAMMAR, “completed the system of education he had proposed for the improvement of American elementary education.”
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March 9, Wednesday: Noah Webster, Jr.’s SKETCHES OF AMERICAN POLICY UNDER THE FOLLOWING HEADS: I. THEORY OF GOVERNMENT, II. GOVERNMENTS ON THE EASTERN CONTINENT, III. AMERICAN STATES, OR, THE PRINCIPLES OF THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONS CONTRASTED WITH THOSE OF EUROPEAN STATES, IV. PLAN OF POLICY FOR IMPROVING THE ADVANTAGES AND PERPETUATING THE UNION OF THE AMERICAN STATES: “It is scarcely possible to reduce an enlightened people to civil or ecclesiastical tyranny.” In this 48- page pamphlet Part IV consists of the lexicographer’s argument for a new form of federal government.
1786
November 1, Wednesday: Noah Webster, Jr. arrived back in Hartford, Connecticut, having been absent since May 1785.
December 25, Monday: Noah Webster, Jr. relocated from Hartford to Philadelphia. Not noted for his humility, it is remembered that when he arrived in Philadelphia and was greeted by Dr. Rush, the following conversational exchange took place: “‘How do you do, my dear friend. I congratulate you on your arrival in Philadelphia.’ ‘Sir, you may congratulate Philadelphia on the occasion.’” He would teach “English Language” and “Mathematics” at the Protestant Episcopal Academy. George Washington would visit his rooms to return the courtesy of his visit to Mount Vernon. In Philadelphia he would also be encountering Rufus King, Edmund Randolph, and James Madison.
Since we know that Henry Thoreau’s Aunt Jane Thoreau was born on Christmas Day, in Richmond Street in Boston between Salem and Hanover Streets, and since she was 64 as of the national census of September 1850, wouldn’t she surely have been the Christmas present of Jane “Jennie” Burns Thoreau, the 42-year-old mother of nine-year-old John Thoreau, to Jean Thoreau, of the year 1786, and before the year was out died — despite the confusing change between year ends in the old and new calendars?3
HENRY’S RELATIVES
This surmise has not been borne out by review of the Concord town records, which are now on the Internet. According to those records, a Thoreau infant was born in that year, in Concord, and was named not Jane but “Mary.” Unless Thoreau’s Aunt Maria Thoreau were born very early in the year 1786, and then the mother Jane Burns Thoreau got pregnant immediately and delivered a second baby at Christmas in Boston during the very same year, then it would seem that the likeliest hypothesis is that Thoreau’s Aunt Jane must have been born not on Christmas 1786 but on Christmas 1787: Births
Name Sex Birth Date Birth Place Father’s Name Mother’s Name
THOREAU, John 1754 Concord
THOREAU, Mary F 1786 Concord John 3. In any event, the tradition of giving gifts on Christmas had not yet begun. At the time, gifts were still being exchanged instead as of the New Year’s! 10 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: NOAH WEBSTER PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN Births
Name Sex Birth Date Birth Place Father’s Name Mother’s Name
THOREAU, Sarah 1791 Concord
THOREAU, Helen L. F 1813 Concord John Cynthia
THOREAU, John M 1815 Concord John Cynthia
THOREAU, Sophia Elizabeth F Sept. 27, 1819 Chelmsford John Cynthia
(We note that this “John Thoreau” registered as having been born in Concord in 1754, actually had been born on the Isle of Jersey, in the English Channel, with his given name being “Jean.” Also, Helen Louisa Thoreau was born not in 1813 a year after her parents got married, but in 1812 — that is, in the same year in which they got married, and very likely not quite nine months later. Also, John, Junior was born not in 1815 but in 1814. Also, Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau was born not on September 27th, 1819 in Chelmsford, but on June 24th. We note in addition that although David Henry Thoreau’s three siblings’s births are present in the town records, and although his baptism can in fact be found recorded in the parish book, his own birth in 1817 to Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau and John Thoreau is for some reason not present in this town record.)
Per Thoreau’s JOURNAL:
December 28, 1858: … Aunt Jane says that she was born on Christmas Day, and they called her a Christmas gift, and she remembers hearing that her Aunt Hannah Orrock was so disconcerted by the event that she threw all the spoons outdoors, when she had washed them, or with the dish-water.
December 28, 1858: ... Father says that he and his sisters (except Elizabeth) were born in Richmond Street, Boston, between Salem and Hanover Streets, on the spot where a bethel now stands, on the left hand going from Hanover Street. They had milk of a neighbor, who used to drive his cows to and from the Common every day.
THOREAU LIFESPANS
1787
Noah Webster, Jr.’s “Examination” attempted to counter certain Quaker scruples upon the fact that human enslavement had just been enshrined in the current draft version of the federal Constitution: But, say the enemies of slavery, negroes may be imported for twenty-one years. This exception is addressed to the quakers, and a very pitiful exception it is. The truth is, Congress cannot prohibit the importation of slaves during that period; but the laws against the importation into particular states, stand unrepealed. An immediate abolition of slavery would bring ruin
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upon the whites, and misery upon the blacks, in the southern states. The constitution has therefore wisely left each state to pursue its own measures, with respect to this article of legislation, during the period of twenty-one years. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
October 16, Tuesday: Noah Webster, Jr. confided to his diary: “My Birthday! I have been industrious and endeavored to do some good — I hope I shall be able to correct my faults and yet do more good.”
October 24, Wednesday: Noah Webster, Jr. relocated from Philadelphia to New-York. A stickler for detail, while residing in this metropolis he would compulsively count the houses and compile the names of the streets. He would publish the American Magazine as a “new forum from which to address his fellow citizens.”
1788
October 16, Thursday: Noah Webster, Jr. determined to abandon New-York. He confided to his diary: “30 years of my life gone — a large portion of the ordinary age of man: I have read much, written much, and tried to do much good, but with little advantage to myself. I will now leave writings and do more lucrative business. My moral conduct stands fair with the world, and what is more, with my own Conscience. But I am a bachelor and want the happiness of a friend whose interests and feelings should be mine.”
December: After a short visit with his family of origin in Hartford, Connecticut, Noah Webster, Jr. relocated to Boston.
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1789
May: In Boston, Noah Webster, Jr.’s DISSERTATIONS ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE; WITH NOTES. TO WHICH IS ADDED, AN ESSAY ON A REFORMED MODE OF SPELLING, WITH DR. FRANKLIN’S ARGUMENTS ON THAT SUBJECT, dedicated of course to Benjamin Franklin.
He then returned to his family in Hartford, Connecticut, where he would practice law, write, and serve on the city council. He would author two books and place several articles in the Courant noting that epidemics of influenza (catarrh) followed shortly after volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, such as those of 1698, 1757, 1761, and 1781.
October 26, Monday: After a 2-year courtship, Noah Webster, Jr. got married with Rebecca “Becca” Greenleaf of Boston. Seven children would be born to their union, in addition to one who would not survive its infancy.
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1790
April 19, Monday: Noah Webster, Sr. sold the family home in West Hartford, Connecticut to Lemuel Hulbert of Wethersfield for 600 pounds: “One certain piece or parcel of land, situate in said Hartford, containing 81 acres with all the buildings thereon standing, said land bounded as followeth, viz: South on land belonging to George Olcott, West on land belonging to the heirs of Amaseah Stanley, deceased, North partly on Jonathan Gilbert’s Land, partly on Joseph Cotton’s Land, partly on Land belonging to James Stanley, and partly on the new highway so called and East on a highway” (in later years Noah, Jr. would revisit locales there that he remembered, for instance as “trees which he planted in his boyhood”).
June 22, Tuesday: Noah Webster, Jr.’s A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS AND FUGITIVE WRITINGS. ON MORAL, HISTORICAL, AND POLITICAL SUBJECTS.
August 4, Wednesday: The US Coast Guard was founded.
The Congressional Funding Act established public credit, authorized the US Treasury to accept war bonds as debt payment, and assumed all state debts to the Federal government.
Birth of Emily Schotten Webster, 1st child of Rebecca Greenleaf Webster with Noah Webster, Jr. (she would marry William Wolcott Ellsworth).
October 18, Monday: Noah Webster, Jr.’s THE LITTLE READER’S ASSISTANT, inculcating “wholesome lessons by means of moralizing tales.”
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1791
October: Noah Webster, Jr. helped found a Connecticut Society for the Abolition of Slavery.
It would be a mistake, however, to presume from this that the evil of human enslavement was very high on this dude’s list of Things That Needed To Get Fixed — in 1837 he would instruct a daughter, for instance, one who was being unduly influenced by abolitionists, that “slavery is a great sin and a general calamity – but it is not our sin, though it may prove to be a terrible calamity to us in the north. But we cannot legally interfere with the South on this subject. ... To come north to preach and thus disturb our peace, when we can legally do nothing to effect this object, is, in my view, highly criminal and the preachers of abolitionism deserve the penitentiary.”
Wow, we ought to lock up the Frederick Douglass who had followed the North Star merely to disturb Noah’s daughter’s slumber? –With its support coming from folks like this Noah, abolitionism certainly didn’t require any enemies!
During this month he was publishing, anonymously of course, a PROMPTER similar to Benjamin Franklin’s POOR RICHARD’S ALMANAC. Some representative examples of this publication’s Franklinesque wit and wisdom: • Page 21 — “It will do for the present.” This common saying does as much mischief in society, as rum or pestilence. • Page 34 — “Come, we’ll take the t’other sip.” Not only the grog drinker but too many others in various walks of life make the mistake of taking just the other sip. • Page 36 — “Any other time will do as well.” Yes, yes, but are you sure that any other time will arrive?
1793
February 5, Tuesday: Birth of Frances Julianna Webster, 2d child of Rebecca Greenleaf Webster with Noah Webster, Jr. (she would marry Chauncey Allen Goodrich).
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August 12, Monday: Noah Webster, Jr. moved to New-York. (There he would be founding and editing two newspapers, The Washington Minerva and The Herald, A Gazette For the Country. Later these papers were named The Commercial Advertiser and The Spectator. Noah actively directed these papers until 1798. Both papers were organs of the Federalist Party which at that time was made up of those men who supported the Federalist administrations of Washington and Adams.)
In revolutionary France, there was a move to the concept of “a nation in arms” (levée en masse) in order to respond adequately to the allied forces of Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain. The sans culottes, who would prove so useful to the personal ambition of Napoleon, rushed to enlist.
August 19, Monday: Samuel Griswold Goodrich, who would become known under the pen name “Peter Parley,” was born in the parsonage of Ridgefield, Connecticut. (His grandfather Elizur Goodrich was the man who would suggest to Noah Webster, Jr. that he write a dictionary, and his cousin Chauncey would become Webster’s son- in-law and his successor as the editor of the Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.)
Elisha Mitchell was born.
December 9: Noah Webster, Jr. established New-York’s 1st daily newspaper, The American Minerva, patroness of peace, commerce, and the liberal arts, as an organ of the Federalist Party that was in support of Presidents Washington and Adams. (Actually, while in this city, Webster would start not one but two newspapers, the other being named The Herald, A Gazette For the Country. Later these papers would take more common names, as respectively The Commercial Advertiser and The Spectator.)
1795
Alexander Garden recognized the association between a skin infection (erysipelas) and a mother’s puerperal fever after giving birth. Following this, Charles White would demonstrate that an attending physician could lower the frequency of puerperal fever significantly through strict cleanliness — and through making no examination of the vagina.
“For 2400 years patients have believed that doctors were doing them good; for 2300 years they were wrong.”
— David Wootton, BAD MEDICINE: DOCTORS DOING HARM SINCE HIPPOCRATES, Oxford, June 2006
In the mid-1790s in America, on display in a tavern window on Broadway in New-York, was Edward Bright the noted fat man: Edward was at least six feet four in height, and as his fat had puffed him out in every direction, he was almost nine feet round the waist. His fingers were like those of the Roman emperor who
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used his wife’s bracelets as rings; his arms and his thighs were tubular, and as thick as the waist of a man of ordinary stature, and he had feet like an elephant, covered with the thick fat of his legs. The weight of fat kept down his lower eyelids and made them gape; but what was hideous to behold were three round chins hanging on his breast, and more than a foot long, so that his face appeared to be the capital of a truncated column. Thus Edward passed his life, sitting at a window on the ground floor looking out on the street, drinking from time to time a glass of ale, of which a pitcher of huge capacity stood always near him. So extraordinary an appearance could scarcely fail to arrest the attention of the passers-by; but they had to take care not to stop too long, as Edward quickly put them to flight by saying to them in a sepulchral voice: “What are you staring at like wild cats? Go your way, you lazy bodies! Begone, you good-for-nothing dogs!” and other similar amenities. (MED. XXI) Here was New-York in this year: “It is a clean, healthy town,” an English traveler wrote of New York City in 1794. “The streets pitched with pebbles, and the foot-way paved and raised as in our principal towns; in some places with broad stone, in others with brick only.” But a tourist’s view was oriented toward the west side of Manhattan island from the Tontine Coffee house at the foot of Wall Street, up to Nassau Street and Federal Hall and then to Broadway, which was the civic solution to the winding narrow streets of the old Dutch city. Broadway extended from the Battery, the old fort site converted into a park, for a straight mile due northeast. Most of the principal buildings, the Governor’s House, Trinity Church, St. Paul’s Church, Columbia College, the hospital, jail and work house were either on or within a block of it. A fire during the British occupation of the city hurried the transition from the gabled wooden houses of the Dutch to English brick. But one Dutch talent had not been lost, that of extending the land into the river with wooden dikes. In the early 18th century Queen Street which paralleled the East River had, like Front Street in Philadelphia, overlooked the quays and warehouses. By 1795 one could stand on Queen Street (renamed Pearl Street after the Revolution) and look east over Water and Cherry Streets. The island had been widened some 500 feet along just over a mile of waterfront. The “new ground” eased the expansion of the city’s mercantile establishments and a proliferation of cheap houses on the “flat” also provided a haven for the laboring and transient population attendant to such commerce. The expansion preserved the stately five and six story brick houses of Queen Street as suitable residences for bankers, lawyers, doctors and newspaper editors. As was demonstrated in 1791 and 1794, people could die along New York’s Water and Cherry Streets and attract little concern from the rest of the city. The disparity economically between rich and poor was probably much greater in Philadelphia. But with so many of the poor living in the alleys behind mansions, the rich and poor in Philadelphia were in the same boat. In New York the
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poor were more out of sight. “The several classes of people mix very little,” wrote a 1787 American visitor. (In 1793 when the city was fending off refugees from Philadelphia, Mayor Richard Varick was injured while trying to defend the city’s whore houses on Chatham Row off upper-Broadway from an unruly mob of sailors, blacks and white youths. The city had whores to suit all pocket books but the vices of the poor were confined to the sink east of Queen Street, a world apart from where the gallant mayor made his stand.) Founded by the most blatantly commercial country in the western world, New York had no legacy of moral perfection through brotherly love and honesty to live up to. New York would never inflict wounds on its own commerce and real estate as Philadelphia had done in 1793. John Broome, the chairman of the city’s health committee, had been president of the chamber of commerce from 1785 to 1794. He had been appointed chairman of the health committee by Governor George Clinton and when Clinton’s rival John Jay took the reigns of power, he kept Broome on, despite Broome’s prominence at a partisan rally to oppose the treaty Jay had just negotiated with the British. Health was not a partisan issue. Health was very much a civic issue among the rival Atlantic seaports. Baltimore, Maryland had a new health committee, new quarantine laws and a hospital at Hawkins Point outside the harbor to receive sick sailors and immigrants. In New York, news that fever had appeared in the West Indies in the spring of 1795, prompted passage of a rule that made the port’s pilots responsible for reporting ships that presented a health hazard. The city also purchased a house called Bellevue about a mile up the East River to serve as a fever hospital. Philadelphia began planning a quarantine hospital south of the city. The College of Physician asked the state legislature to give physicians more control in responding to an epidemic. It predicted that whenever yellow fever broke out in the West Indies, it would get into Philadelphia no matter the precautions. Once in the city it would again be “highly contagious.” Measures could be taken to limit the contagion but a committee of doctors rather than one of laymen should be in charge. The governor soon had power to appoint four doctors to advise and assist the port physician who had increased powers to remove infected people and quarantine and purify vessels.” Rush did not offer any public opposition to those measures. Indeed, he endorsed the need for vigilance against contagion on ships in a published letter in which he lauded the virtues of Benjamin Wynkoop’s new pump for ventilating ships. That ports were readied to handle incoming yellow fever cases, did not make city officials any more ready to admit that the fever had indeed reached their port. It was as if cities took preventative measures to make their assurances of continued health more plausible. In late July New York’s port physician, Dr. Malachi Treat, got the fever immediately after inspecting the Zephyr, a ship from the West Indies that had three crew members sick with fevers. The ship’s boy died the day Treat
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boarded the vessel. The doctor looked into a sack that held the corpse and thought he died of “bilious remitting fever.” Yet his diagnosis was controverted at every turn. The captain of the Zephyr, who was anxious to land his cargo (he had unceremoniously dumped water damaged coffee into the East River to hurry along inspection of his ship,) described his own fever as dysentery, and claimed the boy died of worms. Alarmed at the putrefying corpse, Treat had himself rowed out to Nutten Island to assure its proper burial. Opponents of importation pinpointed that exertion in the hot sun by a man known to have a chronic stomach disorder as the source of his fatal fever, not his exposure to contagion on the Zephyr. The health committee’s minutes toned down Treat’s report, noting only that the boy had “suspicious symptoms.” The ship’s passengers were allowed to land. Then the ship William hauled up next to the Zephyr and several crew members soon had a bad fever. Common report described it as yellow fever. The port warden talked to the owner of the William who said there had been much sickness on board during its passage. The health committee kept the warden’s report to itself. There was no Rush along the New York waterfront, much to the relief of the health committee. Shortly before he died on July 29, a colleague visited Treat. He “knew me when I entered the room,” Dr. William Smith wrote to a doctor in Philadelphia a month later, “he looked yellow, red, and bloated - his extremities cold - his pulse irregular - he raised himself in bed, and seemed willing to make unavailing efforts to get on the floor, which I dissuaded him from - he said if he could stop his gulping he should do well - it was a mixt spasmodic affection, I could hardly tell whether most a hiccup or an effort to vomit - it produced no evacuation -I inquired of him whether he thought himself under the influence of infection -he answered, and nothing more was said on the subject - ‘Ah Dr. I don’t know’ - ‘sometimes I think - But don’t you think’ - his debilitated intellect labored under a gloomy incertitude!” He died eight hours later. In the week after he died there were eulogies in the newspapers, but no mention of nor speculation on the cause of his death. During the whole of August the health committee encouraged the quick burial of fever victims, a vigilant lookout for infected ships and urged “moderation, regularity and cleanliness” both personal and civic. Particular mention was made of cleaning the “streets, yards, cellars and markets” near the East River. Yet it insisted that these were wise precautions for any hot season. The committee denied that there was a yellow fever epidemic. On August 15 it reported that only 14 had died from fever the week before “in this large and populous city.” It didn’t report that 8 of the deaths were near the intersection of Dover and Water Streets. As evidence that the fevers were not contagious, it noted that “nurses, servants, friends and attendants very generally escape with impunity.” Unmentioned was that it had banned a supposedly cured patient at Bellevue, the fever
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hospital, from entering the “compact part of the city.” Then the doctor at Bellevue got the fever. When he returned to the city, the alarmed committee ordered him to either leave the city or return to Bellevue. Yet three days later the committee issued its usual upbeat assessment. Seven had died in the last three days. Any remaining apprehensions arose not from actual sickness and death, but from “the peculiar sensibility of the public mind, arising from the late suffering of Philadelphia, New Haven and Baltimore.” Unmentioned was that they put a coffin maker on Maiden Lane to work. Doctors cooperated with the committee. On August 15, they met, and reported to the newspapers “that no CONTAGIOUS fever, in any particular different from what this city has been accustomed to, for some years past at this season, exists at present.” Soon after the meeting a young doctor went into the infected area of the city and by applying an analysis along Rush’s principles did his might to calm apprehensions. Dr. Valentine Seaman ignored the considerable anecdotal evidence of the family and friends of victims that blamed visits to noxious ships along the wharves. For example John Camp who died on the 7th was said to have taken the fever after working on board an infected ship. Instead Seaman reported to the health committee that he had found “the cause of the present complaint,... a fruitful matrix generating the seeds” of the fever. The city corporation had built up Water Street in that area with landfill without requiring lot holders along the street to fill their yards to a level with the street. “Hence, the refuse water and offal substances from the families occupying these places are left to stagnate and putrefy.” Even a rain shower which contributed to the health of well drained areas, only made matters worse in that sunken plain where each building housed “several families.” Seaman thought if the problem was “not properly cared for,” more would die in the vicinity. Newspapers couched calls for vigilance with assurances that an epidemic was impossible in the city. It would be a “disgrace...,” one essayist exhorted, “if New York, which is certainly one of the most healthy spots on our continent, should become the seat of contagious disease merely through the negligence of its inhabitants;” indeed, there was no place on the “globe, where the inhabitants have less reason to apprehend the fatal effects of those fevers which have so long harassed other parts of the world.” Vigilance in this case meant cleaning up filth and refraining from throwing dead animals in the street. While this could be cited as a reaction based on Rush’s theory of the local origin of the disease, it only replicated the successful campaign that kept fever out of the city in 1793 when streets were carefully policed for cleanliness. After Seaman’s report members of the health committee investigated an alley off Pearl Street where water was backed up. The next day, August 19, it asked the owner of Fitch’s store to fill up the morass under the store, less out of Seaman’s concern than to “ease the minds of neighbors.” On the 22nd it ordered the cotton and coffee in Mott and Lawrence’s store,
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which was giving off a stench, removed from the “compact part of the city.” Urging that action was Dr. Samuel Mitchill, a 31 year old chemistry professor at Columbia College who received his degree from Edinburgh after the advances in chemistry made by Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley. Mitchell was putting the finishing touches on an essay arguing that since nitrous gas, which Lavoisier had shown could kill a bird, was produced by putrefaction in cities and in stomachs, it was the likely cause of contagion. How much oxygen and azote (or nitrogen, which to sow even more confusion Mitchill wanted to call septon) made up mephitic gas could be known, therefore it should be easy to identify and control. “Since we are become acquainted with its production and composition, it is very much in the power of individuals to guard themselves against it, and for magistrates to protect cities from its ravages.” Dr. William Smith, who replaced Treat as the new port physician, was persuaded by Mitchill’s ideas, and thought rotting cotton the principal culprit in making the deadly gases. He was perhaps responding to a report “that a man had thrust his arm into a bag of damaged cotton, and that, when he withdrew it, the arm, from the virulence of the contagion, was of a livid color.” At the moment Mitchill had no instrument to measure contagion; only the very subjective nose evaluated the danger. The store owners protested that there was nothing rotten. When the committee learned that 11 people had died of the fever on the 25th, it stopped bickering with store owners, and ordered the cotton removed and the store cleaned because the public was “too alarmed.” It also ordered Fitch’s and another store cleaned and sent a subcommittee to investigate Dover Street. In its report on August 28, the committee noted those clean-ups and re- iterated that “the disorder which exists principally, if not altogether, along a part of the Eastern shore of this city, is a local malady.” Twenty had died in the past week, but only 2 in the last 24 hours. The committee sensed that once again it had defeated an epidemic. It noted in its minutes on August 30, that the fever had abated. On the 26th Pennsylvania’s governor asked his health committee if New York should be quarantined. On the 28th the lead article in the Philadelphia Gazette recalled how slowly the 1793 epidemic began and warned: “it is too well known how the malady spreads. Let not the good people of New York... be too sanguine.” On the 29th the Philadelphia health committee recommended a quarantine since “the prevalence of a contagious fever in New York is sufficiently substantiated by a number of letters from several merchants in that city.” On the 31st Governor Mifflin ordered a quarantine for ships from New York and Norfolk, where yellow fever was also reported. His action was applauded in Philadelphia. A correspondent in the Gazette chided the New York health committee for wasting so much energy calming people’s fears, when it should be getting people to “fly the contagion.” New Yorkers were dumfounded. One writer blamed Philadelphians for habitually fabricating “falsehoods about ghosts,
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pestilence, death! Ever since that awful calamity overshadowed [their] city, fear has been your pole star!” A man wrote from Peck Slip objecting to suggestions that his neighborhood was sickly. “There has not an individual, except two, in the whole slip, been ailing, and they had but trifling colds, and are now perfectly well. Indeed there has not been for years a more healthy season in this place.” A merchant with a store in the infected area reported that “business continues there as lively as ever: men, women, and children continually walking the streets, under no apprehension of danger. For heaven’s sake what has created such alarm?” One newspaper wit wrote to “A Friend in Philadelphia” that “We are all popping off here like rotten sheep. Two hundred carcasses have been burned at the Battery - 500 hanged for fear of catching yellow fever, and about 35 or 40 guillotined - all the windows in town are broken by the firing of cannon.... Pray send us about 100,000 dollars to stop the contagion, and it may compensate us in some measure for an attempt to make our vessels ride 40 days quarantine in European ports.” Governor Jay orchestrated the official reaction, collecting letters form the health committee, medical society and common council. The latter proclaimed that the city had never been healthier at that time of year. The medical society assured that the fever had never been contagious, and with cloudy, cooler weather, was fast disappearing. The health committee went beyond generalities and described Treat’s case, the cases on the Zephyr and William, and the cases in the neighborhood where those ships were anchored. Forty-four persons had been sent to Bellevue, 20 died, 16 were discharged and the 10 remaining patients were all convalescent. It suggested that Gov. Jay ask Gov. Mifflin to send a “confidential person” to the city to see how healthy it was. In its weekly report of September 6, the committee noted that no one had died of the fever the previous day. No one at the time nor in the immediate aftermath of the epidemic double checked to see if the committee’s statement on September 6 that the 10 patients then at Bellevue were convalescent was accurate. A somewhat dreamy 20 year old doctor then in charge of patients at Bellevue was not the kind to call attention to misstatements of his superiors even if he recognized them as such. But he did leave a diary. Alexander Anderson was the son of a Scot auctioneer. His passions were wood engraving, poetry and playing the violin. His father decided Alexander would become a doctor and apprenticed him to Dr. Joseph Young when he was 14 years old. In his diary Anderson wrote more about art, poetry, religion and nature, than medicine. Yet it is in his diary that one can see how Rush’s new remedies changed the practices of typical doctors. Anderson began work at Bellevue on August 24 and found six patients and a staff of six: a steward and his wife, an old black gardener, a black nurse and two white nurses. Over the next two weeks, the situation there did not mirror the reports of the health committee. Anderson described a steadily worsening situation. On the 27th, he met the full force of yellow fever.
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A patient came who was “in a shocking condition - 10th day of the disease - vomiting blood by the mouthfuls.” He died in two hours. A young girl who had nursed someone with the disease in town was brought out only to die despite Anderson’s using Rush’s remedies. On the last day of August one of the hospital nurses became sick. Suspecting fever, Anderson bled her, but the committee evidently decided her drinking problem, not the fever, was to blame. Then another nurse quit after a fight with the steward’s wife. Patients had to take care of each other. Anderson thought seriously about quitting the hospital. He regained his equilibrium by taking a day off to sail down and visit his father one day, and take tea with his mother on another. On September 4 he counted 16 patients, then “5 or 6” more were admitted. One patient died the evening of the 6th, two died on the 7th. Then in the evening a patient came from his old master Dr. Young, as well as news that the doctor’s Indian servant George had died and the doctor’s brother was dangerously ill. The health committee needed only consult with its own doctor at Bellevue to learn that the epidemic was not over. Elihu Smith
Anderson prescribed Rush’s remedies by rote. He would never challenge the health committee’s interpretation of events. Two doctors who had more experience than he were on the committee. Another young New York doctor, 24 year old Elihu Smith, also kept a journal. His experiences during the epidemic showed how Rush’s new theories inspired those in the next generation who were ambitious to become leaders of the medical profession. Or rather, inspired such an ambition in Smith, because it was the beauty of Rush’s theories, the simplicity of his therapies, and the moral force of his example that drew Smith to the war against yellow fever. It was a fight from which the young man could easily have walked away. He was having serious doubts about his career as a doctor. Since coming to New York in 1793, he had been taken aback by the difficulty of starting up a medical practice. At that moment he had one patient, a venereal complaint. He had not completely given up the idea of making a history of medicine his crowning achievement, but a book store, literary magazine or working in his father’s apothecary shop in Litchfield, Connecticut, were more likely projects. And it was thoughts about those projects rather than Treat’s death and the alarms along the wharves that filled the monologues in his journal, despite his treating one of the first yellow fever patients. His cousin’s ship had been near the William at Fitch’s wharf, and, along with four sailors, he had gotten a bad fever. Thanks, Smith thought, to his ministrations of purges then bark, the cousin survived. The four sailors, heavy tipplers, died. But Smith thought little about all that until he re-read Rush weeks later. Even after Dr. Amasa Dingley, Harvard ’85, described by Smith as having “enterprise, intrigue,” and a “good medical mind...,” told him on September 7 that “the prevailing fever” was the same that “desolated Philadelphia,” Smith, Yale ’86, was still bored by the threat.
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He included Dingley’s visit as an after thought in his journal devoted mainly to the tea-sodden perambulations of a literary chap busy writing the libretto for an opera and smitten with the idea of the perfectibility of man, or at least of his sisters back in Connecticut. After writing in his journal about Dingley’s visit, Smith couldn’t get to sleep in his rented room on Pearl Street, due to “restlessness, heightened by the buzzings and bitings of musquitoes.” On the 8th Smith spent the day walking along the Battery with a friend, reading Condorcet, and discussing “the propriety of ... showing civilities to people for the sake of inducing them to purchase commodities of us, or otherwise advance our pecuniary interest.” Smith argued that such behavior was “wrong.” At Bellevue four patients were admitted that day, including William Dewitt, a baker on Whitehall Street across from the Battery away from the supposed limits of the contagion. He was delirious and nothing Anderson did could stop it. Early the next morning Anderson found Dewitt had escaped and lay naked inside a nearby summer house. He was dying yet that afternoon had the strength to chase other patients with a club. It took three men to subdue him and push him into a little room where he died two hours later. For the next two days, judging by his journal, Elihu Smith kept busy with philosophy and hiding under the bed clothes at night to escape mosquitoes. Finally on the 11th he wrote that the heat was “very oppressive,” which made “exertion disagreeable and unproductive.” He worried that the city’s health was “sensibly and dangerously affected.” Still he seemed more interested in the rumors swirling around Secretary of State Randolph’s resignation for allegedly taking bribes from the French government. Then that night, Smith bumped into his brother-in- law Thomas Mumford who confessed to being unwell the past two days with a headache and pain in the bowels. Mumford’s wife was in Connecticut, so Smith spent a night with him and was pleased to find the purge he gave “operated kindly.” Mumford seemed better, but didn’t get well. To and from the literary salon of a Mrs. Lovegroves, Smith dropped in on his patient. He tried to induce a sweat only to come back and find Mumford had puked instead. Smith got him to sleep, and in the morning Mumford imprudently tried to walk about. He suffered a serious relapse and on the 16th Smith’s “whole day” was “spent with Mumford, or in running backward and forward for him.” Smith didn’t smell the burning tar barrels that a band of youths had set afire in the streets around Peck Slip, but finally the young aesthete condescended to describe the terror: “This whole city is in a violent state of alarm on account of the fever. It is the subject of every conversation, at every hour, and in every company; and each circumstance of terror acquires redoubled horror, from every new relation. In reality there is reason to be alarmed. I am told that 24 persons died, yesterday.... It is true, however, that of the number who are sick, and who die, there are few of the natives and long
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residents of this place. Far the greater part are emigrants, poor Irishmen; who, coming from a cooler country, in crowded vessels; changing a vegetable, for an animal diet, and in the worst season of the year; living in narrow and nasty streets, on the border of our worst slips and docks; in cellars; or half- underground rooms; nasty, ill-provided with food, and the little they have bad, and badly cooked; hard laborers and hard drinkers, fall the first and most numerous victims to disease. It is very evident, that these circumstances of themselves are enow to convert what would otherwise be only a simple remittent, to what is now denominated a malignant fever.” Not that Smith had occasion to see the poor in their hovels the way, say, a Catholic priest did. Father O’Brien actually saw the “subterraneous apartments, which admitted no light, but from their hatch-doors; so that when shut down at night, it might literally be said of them that they were buried alive.” Smith probably learned about the plight of the emigrants from talking with some one on the health committee, for they too blamed emigrants. On the 9th, in response to seven dying the day before, it ordered the inspection of all vessels with passengers from Europe, and two were approaching the port. The committee began publishing a daily toll of the dead, 11 on the 17th, 14 on the 18th, but added this explanation to alleviate apprehensions: “a large proportion of the deaths hitherto reported have fallen among emigrants lately from Europe, strangers, and other transient persons.” The committee tried to hide evidence that the epidemic had revived. It chastised gravediggers for opening more graves than the committee ordered. It tried to keep down the numbers sent to Bellevue by sending the sick to city physicians. It admonished the boatmen who took patients to Bellevue to stop acting so hastily, charging them with removing patients without warning. It sent a committee out to investigate Anderson’s methods at Bellevue, suspecting he might be causing the increase in the number of deaths. New York newspapers didn’t report on the panic in the city. Letters to Philadelphia papers chronicled that. “My God! what a change.... The fever is spreading fast,” exclaimed a letter dated the 17th. “Forty three persons have died with it in 3 days; agreeably to the report of the committee, and how many more God only knows. My family are gone to Long Island. I shall remain till a stop is put to business.” A letter written the 21st recounted a week of terror. Until the 15th those who died were of that class of people not generally known. “On that day names began to be mentioned, and those names were in different parts of the city; ...People were panic struck - they quitted town in all directions, and it is said three hundred families crossed Long Island ferry in one day.” Smith thought the number of people who had fled the city “cannot be less than 12 or 15,000.” He had planned to go home to Litchfield that week, but decided he had to stay. His friends might get sick and his leaving might be cited as desertion of the city by its physicians. He had been in the lecture hall in
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1791 when Rush urged his students never to disgrace the profession by fleeing from the plague. That day Smith saw a crowd gawking at a load of coffins in Maiden Lane. “In one shape or other the fever is constantly brought into view; and the soul sickens with the ghastly and abhorred repetition.” That night Smith re-read Rush’s account of ’93. The epidemic stopped being a social embarrassment and became an intellectual challenge. He joined Dingley on his rounds, and saw the cracks in the establishment slant on what was happening in the city. “According to him,” Smith wrote of Dingley on the 20th, “the health committee are but partially informed, and the disease is spreading rapidly. For five days past, he thinks not less than 40 a day have died.” As they walked Dingley asked a black woman in the streets about a baby saved after his father, mother and grandmother had died, and learned, to his shock, that the baby was dead. Smith had just received a letter from his friend Charles Brockden Brown who was inspired by the return of yellow fever to write a tale (that was never published) about the suffering it had visited on Philadelphia. As they finished their rounds, Smith told Dingley about Brown’s story and was “surprised to see the tears trickle down Dingley’s cheeks; and to find him, for several minutes, unable to make a reply.” Part of the emotion must have arisen from Dingley’s relief that an artist would write about the suffering that committees and editors seemed so bent on denying or explaining away as part of the bad odor of being Irish. New York editors did their best to remain upbeat. Rain, winds and cooler temperature on the 21st prompted the hope that “the city will be clear of sickness in a few days.... Broad street, Broad way, all the north of the city, and many other parts, are as healthy as usual.” In July and August to allay fears that fevers on the waterfront would spread, they insisted the fever was not contagious. Now that it was spreading they still insisted it was not contagious. One letter to Philadelphia described physicians, “called emphatically the contagious doctors,” as “terrorists” who “contributed not a little to the excessive alarm that has gone forth. Unfortunate indeed is the transient lodger, or the poor man, that is taken with it; the one is instantly obliged to quit his lodging - the other is immediately carried to Bellevue. In short, the dread and alarm people are under is inconceivable, and many I believe actually die of fright.” The committee enlarged the facilities at Bellevue and sent out a 24 year old doctor, William Johnson, to help Anderson. Still it tried to make clear that sending patients to Bellevue was not from fear of direct contagion. Fresh air would help recovery and removing the patient removed another source of mephitic air from the city. Then the new doctor got the fever. Against the express orders of the committee, Dingley brought him to town the next day, where he recovered slowly. Dingley and Elihu Smith were disgusted at the committee proclaiming that the fever was not contagious while secretly acting as if it was. Smith knew it wasn’t contagious. “Where the rooms are properly ventilated, and
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the patient kept cool and clean, I have no apprehension that it can be infectious,” he wrote to a colleague. “I have mingled, like other practitioners, with the sick in every part of the city, at every stage of the disorder; sat by them, conversed with them, assisted, and watched with them, this without any dread, and without any bad effect perceivable, after a lapse of more than five weeks. Neither have I heard of two well- authenticated instances of the disease’s having been propagated by intercommunication.” Merchants in New York recognized that if the fever was not contagious, than no other city could fear that it could be spread to other ports by ships from New York. Philadelphia was not impressed. On September 18 a citizens’ meeting was held at the State House to organize watch committees in each ward to make sure refugees from New York did not slip into the city. The governor’s earlier proclamation had only quarantined ships. The citizens’ committee asked stage companies to make passengers from New York leave the stage five miles from the city where they could conduct business via letters sent to the city. Rush did not participate in the citizens’ meeting. During September ten members of his household were sick with a “remitting fevers.” Rush credited his use of the lancet for preventing them from developing into something serious. All told he took blood 24 times, twice from himself in one day, and even 6 week old Samuel Rush was likewise “bled twice, and thereby rescued from the grave.” He certainly felt prepared to save the city if the fever struck, but he offered no quick prescriptions on how the city should react to the New York epidemic. In practice, in his bones, he believed a healthy person should avoid people and houses infected with yellow fever. But he knew that his theory of the local origin of the disease could not survive the supposition that yellow fever was highly contagious like influenza. Even he had blamed flu epidemics on sick travelers. Finally a week after the citizen’s meeting that banned stages from New York, Rush allowed the Philadelphia Gazette to extract a page from his yet to be published memoir of the 1794 epidemic which discussed measures a city should take to limit the spread of a malignant fever. First all physicians must be compelled by law to report cases of malignant fever. A committee of doctors should investigate. If the fever seemed to have come from a ship, the offending ships must be cleaned and her cargo carried out of the city. If it seemed to be of local origin, the offending putrefying matter must be removed, covered or destroyed. Meanwhile the infected area should be chained off and all citizens removed, and then nature’s way of killing contagion should be imitated by bringing fire hoses and drenching the streets with water. The object was to enhance “the improbability of the sick creating a reflected atmosphere of contagion.” (In a portion of the book not excerpted Rush suggested that all fevers had varying degrees of contagiousness and he ranked yellow fever below small pox, measles, influenza, and plague.) A week after his letter on public health, Rush addressed the
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issue he was vitally interested in at that moment. The Philadelphia Gazette printed several passages from the work on bloodletting that he had not yet sent to the printers. He instructed physicians on how to tell if more bleeding was necessary by looking at the blood already drawn. The six indicators were blood that was “dissolved,” of a scarlet color, had “crassementum” or blood clots that were dissolved, sank, or floated, and “sizy blood, or blood covered with a buffy coat.” (One modern commentator notes that most of the variations arise from exposure to air and impurities in whatever was used to collect the blood.) He also argued that when more bleeding was indicated it must be profuse. He cited the commonly accepted estimate that the body contained between 25 and 28 pounds of blood. (It contains about 11 pounds.) He also argued that blood was quickly replenished citing a case in Germany in which a man lost “75 pounds of blood in ten days” from hemorrhoids. He hoped the extract would help doctors in New York, and that they, in turn, would boost his theories. “Do inform me immediately,” he wrote to one, “what are your remedies? If bleeding and purging, to what extent do you use them? How many patients do you lose in a given number, and what is the practice of the other physicians in New York? An answer to these questions by the post (so accurate as to bear the public eye) will much oblige me and all the other friends of reason and of the lancet in Philadelphia.” New York physicians made a conscious effort during the epidemic to prove that they were in control. They sought to prevent the spectacle of physicians accusing one another of killing patients which demoralized the nation in 1793. The physicians continued to meet, a program of dissections was pursued at Bellevue, and a consensus formed on the value of purges, although calomel was not used by all. Glauber’s salt was a more popular purge. Dr. David Hosack used snakeroot tea in lime juice. A few used calomel to induce salivation. Everyone gave Rush due credit. In a letter to Philadelphia William Smith lauded the “justly celebrated Rush” for showing the need for purging when the stomach was in a highly inflamed state. “His work on this subject,” Smith added, “will be useful when all jealousies sleep in the silent grave.” Bleeding was less popular. David Hosack found in the New York hospital that in the majority of cases when bleeding was used “the disease terminated fatally.” Yet there was no acrimony among doctors over the procedure. The venom came from laymen. A tailor named Alexander Cuthill breached the newspapers’ ban on medical controversy by buying an advertisement “challenging the physicians of New York, to give their reasons publickly for their using the Lancet, Calomel, Bark, and Cantharides, or Spanish Flies, in the present prevailing sickness.” He offered to cure “as Buchan [a British author on home remedies] recommends in a common cold” with a purge of castor oil. Cuthill threatened to indict Dingley, the principal exponent of bleeding in the city, for murder unless he defended his methods. Among Dingley’s friends Cuthill was known as the “crazy tailor,” and
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one promptly lampooned him in the press. Cuthill was persistent and, according to Smith’s diary, began “going, whenever he hears D[ingley] has a patient, & telling the sick man that he will kill him.” Seeing first hand the kind of persecution Rush went through in 1793, Elihu Smith was moved by Rush’s dispassionate observations on the blood of yellow fever victims. After reading the article, he rededicated himself to serving his city by proving the superiority of Rush’s methods. “Do I not see ignorance, pride, stupidity, carelessness, & a superstitious veneration for foreign writers, & a mean jealousy of an illustrious writer of our own country, go hand in hand, & as it were, conspire, against the lives of men?” he asked himself in his journal. “I think I do. I think I have had sufficient opportunity to determine that his principles & practice are equally & certainly sound. I think I should apply them, in nearly all their extent.” So he resolved to be useful and go forward like Rush, “animated by a sacred love of truth, & filled with an ardent humanity & tender zeal for the welfare of my fellow creatures.” Smith based his confidence on Rush’s methods on his own experience with two patients and his visits to a handful of Dingley’s patients. Smith saw Dingley draw two pounds of blood from a man in two days, “with great advantage.” Then when one of his own patients had a serious relapse with feeble pulse and severe fever, Smith brought out his lancet. “I determined to bleed him,” he wrote in his journal. “He tottered out to a chair in the yard. I took away 18 oz. He rose, & walked, with a steady step, to the end of the yard; & after a discharge, returned; went down stairs, & returned to his room.” His next case was not so happy. He joined Dingley in trying to cure the apothecary Nathan Webb with bleeding and purges. Their patient suffered one of the worst side effects of venesection. “We were near an hour employed in attempting to stop a bleeding which took place from a vein which had been opened before,” Smith wrote in his journal. “The blood was entirely destroyed in its texture; the man stupidly insane; the house deserted; a negro nurse only remaining; except a drunken relation of the landlord, who with oaths & imprecations, refused to allow our moving the sick man, from an apartment five feet wide by twelve long, into an unoccupied, airy room. We did it however - & exerted every thing in our power to restore sensibility & hope to a man, thus forlorn, & without relation or friend near him, to yield any assistance.” A week before Smith was amused to find his hairdresser suddenly shy about working on Sunday. The Society for Aiding and Assisting the Magistrates in the Suppression of Vice and Immorality on the Lord’s Day was making noise about enforcing Blue Laws. “This is a rich season for superstition,” he had fumed in his journal, “a fine opportunity for the priests to play upon the terrors of the ignorant.... At this moment, a Methodist, who dwells in the house opposite, is beseeching the Deity, with nasal twang: & praying him to remove his judgments, from New York.” Now Smith wrote in his journal: “If prayers were ever of
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any avail, it would be worth the while to clap to, in Yankee dialect, all hands, & pray for cold weather after this rain.” When they called the next morning they found Webb dead. Meanwhile the health committee continued to orchestrate, through the newspapers, a calming message flattering to the city’s reputation. Dr. William Smith gave scientific proof that the epidemic would soon end. The thermometer dropped to freezing on September 21. From the city’s experience in 1791 and 1794, he thought that would effectively kill any contagion. Judging from a letter Alexander Anderson got from his brother, who remained in the city, the freeze didn’t kill off mosquitoes. They were plentiful enough to still keep people awake at night. At the peak of the epidemic in late September, as the health committee recorded 32, 31, and 29 deaths on the 25th, 26th and 27th, several prominent men had the fever, including Rev. John Rodgers (the doctor’s father,) and Rev. John McKnight (whose brother was a doctor.) Still, officially the point was made that only those in the low lands along the East River died. When Rodgers and McKnight survived, the health committee broke down the 380 deaths it recorded in September by profession, and was careful to note that the one preacher who died did not belong to a respectable denomination. (He was a Methodist.) Of the 269 white adult males who died, 106 were “strangers and persons employ unknown,” 21 were seamen and 28 were laborers. Only 17 were merchants and merchants clerks, and of those, “only 5 or 6 [were] well known and established merchants.” Not one practicing attorney died; the only physician, a young man who worked at the dispensary for the poor. In Philadelphia the Committee’s identifying the poor as the principal victims opened the flood gates of charity. Not in New York. While the city’s system of poor relief was overburdened, the city government asked for no donations so as not to increase the panic. Of the $8,837 collected for the poor, $7,000 came from the city council of Philadelphia. The epidemic did not end as predicted, Amasa Dingley told Elihu Smith on October 10 that the epidemic was “no better, & that those who are now taken sick, are more violently seized.” The city remained “entirely deserted,” explained another report dated the 9th, “no business of any kind going on. Every day has the appearance of a Sunday.” The arrival of ships with fall goods had not brought merchants back to town. On October 23 the health committee announced the virtual end of the epidemic. On November 4 the committee published a long letter congratulating itself for “undeviating veracity” which subdued the terror despite “falsehoods [that] have been propagated from the basest, meanest, and most despicable motives.” (to see the letter and a list of the dead) The official count of fever deaths was 730, only 150 were “citizens,” and “nearly one half the city has either wholly escaped, or experienced only here and there a scattered case.” However, unlike the 1791 and 1794 epidemics in New York this one was too big to be swept under the rug. Not that many in the city didn’t try to do just that. On November 9, James Kent, a law
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professor at Columbia, wrote to his brother that the fever had been forgotten. Unlike in Philadelphia in 1793, there was no crusade to make the city remember and reform. At one of the sermons during the requisite day of thanksgiving proclaimed by the governor, Rev. William Linn subordinated the epidemic to the campaign to support the Jay Treaty and assure peace with Britain. Between war, famine and pestilence, Linn argued, the last was the least evil. He had enjoyed the evenings “on which we assembled to pour our hearts to God, that he would ‘stay the hand of the destroying angel.’" He wept for victims but “In common years there have been more... tokens of mourning seen among us.” Not an alarmist by nature, Elihu Smith wanted to agree with those conclusions, but compelled by the example of Rush’s memoir of the 1793 epidemic, he climbed Bunker’s Hill to survey the low lying areas where the fever prevailed. A week later he toured the infected streets. He was in no position, since he had so few patients, to trumpet the virtues of bleeding. But he understood that New York presented a laboratory for proving Rush’s theories on the origin of the fever. For Rush’s purposes Smith was an ideal convert. Unlike the young Baltimore, Maryland physician Drysdale, Smith had not seen that much of the fever. His handful of cases didn’t excite new observations; meticulous journalist though he was, he didn’t write one case study. Prepared by his literary pursuits to be inclined to intellectual games, he was content to tie the simple New York epidemic to the epochal battle in Philadelphia that Rush had dissected. Better still for Rush, Smith inspired his friend Noah Webster to join him. Like Smith, Webster was a Yale graduate and transplant from Connecticut. His spelling book and grammar had been published a decade before. Those works sought to stamp certain phenomena as distinctly American. In 1794 he published a New York newspaper which, though pro-Federalist, tempered its support for Britain with unabashed nationalism. In 1789, he had observed first hand the progress of the influenza epidemic that swept the nation. That gave him an abiding interest in epidemics. During the 1795 epidemic he was frequently out of the city, but Smith talked with him at length about the fever. While Smith was enticed by the scientific puzzle presented by the Philadelphia, New Haven, Baltimore, Maryland, and New York epidemics, Webster grasped, even more than his fellow nationalist Rush, that they were harbingers of a threat to the whole nation. Webster decided to use the New York fever as the centerpiece for a national debate on the nature of the threat yellow fever posed to the new nation, and on the reforms that might save America. There was no instant history of the New York epidemic from any New York journalist. Instead Webster wrote an open letter to the physicians of Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Norfolk and New Haven, asking them to send him information which would help determine if yellow fever was of domestic origin, and if it was contagious. Answering those questions was “equally interesting to every part of the United States, and one that deeply affects
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the happiness of families and the general property of the country.” He didn’t limit his inquiries to the big ports. After alluding to the bad fevers experienced that year along the Hudson, in the Genesee country, and in swampy districts in central New England like Sheffield, Massachusetts, he called for physicians anywhere with information on malignant fevers to send papers to him for eventual publication. Once the threat was identified and understood measures could be taken to stop importation or neutralize local causes for the disease. It was perilous to let the disease become rooted in America. “Our latitudes are the same as those of many countries in Asia, where the plague rages; and perhaps our climate, which formerly resisted the progress of fatal epidemics, is assimilating itself annually to that of Smyrna and Constantinople.” More discerning physicians understood that by equating the yellow fever of the Atlantic ports and the bilious remittents of places like Sheffield, Massachusetts, just as Rush had done, Webster skewed the debate in Rush’s favor. William Currie never responded to Webster. In a November 29 letter, Rush told Webster that he was glad that “philosophical gentlemen had taken up the subject of yellow fever.” He assured Webster that “the truths” he was after were “obvious” to any man of “candor.” Rush’s upcoming book would prove “in the most irrefragable manner” that yellow fever was indigenous, and that contagion was not its “essential character” but was influenced “by season, habit and some other accidental circumstances.” While Rush hinted that he already had all the answers, he appreciated having Webster as an ally. While Webster made no pretence that he understood Rush’s theories, he appreciated Rush’s efforts to theorize with modern sensibilities in mind. As a newspaper editor he was quite familiar with the hoary nostrums an epidemic elicited. For example in the midst of the New York epidemic, “Philo-Salutis” urged people to wear a piece of sulphur or brimstone next to their skin. That would neutralize the fever inducing effluvia exhaled by insects, “not only great quantities that are visible, but smaller and smaller, ad infinitum,” that infected the air in “low marshy countries, in cities, country and towns, where much filth and moisture abound.”
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1797
April 6, Thursday: John Stewart, who had robbed the home of Captain Rust on Prince Street in Boston and hidden the loot in a tomb on Copp’s Hill, was hanged on Boston Common.
The Quintet for piano, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn op.16 by Ludwig van Beethoven was performed for the initial time, in Vienna.
Birth of Harriet Webster, 3d child of Rebecca Greenleaf Webster with Noah Webster, Jr. (she would marry William Chauncey Fowler).
1798
In New-York, 2,086 people died of the yellow fever: The first victims of yellow fever in New York, stricken at the end of July and early August, blamed the schooner Fox which arrived in late July from Jeremie.4 Doctors, however, did not take the accusation seriously. This was not a case of diagnosis being made difficult by the victims being poor and intemperate. Among the first deaths were prominent merchants. However, the area where the fever was centered, Coenties wharf, had been the site of a small epidemic in 1797. In vain, the health committee had pressed the common council to enforce a clean up there. That the fever returned to that very filthy spot seemed a proof of the local origin of the disease. Ships from the West Indies docked up and down the long waterfront. The coincidence of the fever returning to Coenties wharf also lulled the health committee into thinking that, just as in ‘97, the epidemic there would be short lived and unremarkable. Indeed, judging from his journal, Elihu Smith hardly paid any attention to it, though the first victim, 74 year old Melancton Smith was a friend. Instead Elihu Smith was busy getting out the first number of the second volume of the Medical Repository, forming a mineralogical society and enjoying the company of Charles Brockden Brown who was staying with him and his roommate, the lawyer William Johnson. Brown was busy completing Wieland. Smith read and discussed the work with his friend and helped arrange for its publication. Very likely it was Smith who suggested a footnote in the novel which referred readers to the section of Darwin’s ZOONOMIA in which mania similar to Wieland’s was discussed. Not until August 25 did Smith and Brown take any notice of the yellow fever epidemic in the city. “The sickness increases in town,” Smith noted in his journal. “Heavy rains, uncleansed sinks, and a 4. This material was written by Bob Arnebeck. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 33 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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continuance of unexampled heat,” Brown reported in a letter to his brother in Philadelphia, “have within these ten days given birth to the yellow fever among us in its epidemical form. Death and alarms have rapidly multiplied, but it is hoped that now, as formerly, its influence will be limited to one place.” Brown felt no concern for his own safety since he lived far enough from the infected wharf, “and my mode of living, from which animal food and spirituous liquors are wholly excluded, gives the utmost security.” Living as Rush prescribed, the two young men were fearless. In his treatment of yellow fever patients, Smith bled, purged with mercury and induced salivation, always with good results. Alexander Anderson, who had been staff physician at Bellevue Hospital during the 1795 epidemic, exhibited a fearlessness bordering on the blase. The summer of 1798 had not been an easy one for him. He and his wife’s first child had died three months after birth. Struck by the frequency of infant mortality in the past, some twentieth century historians argue that 18th century couples accepted and adjusted easily to the occurrence. At his son’s death Anderson was brave and “in perfect health and strength,” but a few days later he began “to droop.” He had a colleague “draw about a pound of blood.” That afforded relief and he had it done the next day too. The morning after he “woke up mauling [his] wife thinking a beast at her breast.” Within a week he began taking “a dose of nitre and calomel 5 1/2 grains,” which “contributed to paint objects in fancy colors.” Two weeks after that he began drinking wine in the morning “for medicinal purposes,” and soon added opium to the dose. His wife fared no better and, as yellow fever spread, left to stay with her mother on Long Island. Anderson had his first yellow fever patient on August 11, a man whose wife had left him then returned and sent for the doctor. She didn’t think her husband would recover but begged Anderson to save him “for the sake of her poor children.” “I must say,” Anderson wrote in his diary, “I was somewhat pleas’d to see her punished for her cowardly flight.” The man was sent to Bellevue by the health committee where he died. Dr. Rodgers called Anderson in for three consultations on other yellow fever patients. Soon Anderson found himself vomiting and feeling weak. He thought nothing of it, and took 8 grains of calomel which forced him to spend a day in bed. Then he wavered in his Rushite convictions, filling his empty stomach with a beefsteak, which “quite” cured him. On August 30 he bumped into Dr. Bayley, the city’s health officer, who asked him to suggest a staff physician for Bellevue. Anderson went to the health committee and got the job himself. He tried to get a colleague, Dr. Chickering, to take his patients, two children with yellow fever, and was appalled when the doctor timidly refused. Noah Webster returned to New York in August, and wrote editorials for the Commercial Advertiser, then managed by his nephew, which also demonstrated how in the eyes of Rush’s disciples yellow fever completely lost its terror. (A revision the master was never able to make.) An August 22 editorial
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celebrated the country’s lack of vigilance against supposed contagion. “It is a most agreeable circumstance that the citizens of the United States have become so well acquainted with the nature of the Yellow Fever, that they no longer cut off communication between the places where it prevails, and where it does not.” Instead of night watches, guards and persecution, New York welcomed refugees from Philadelphia. Indeed New York was wise not to automatically quarantine ships as Philadelphia did because keeping ships loaded in the harbor only increased the likelihood of putrefaction on the ship which would make it unhealthy and dangerous to the community. New York’s regulations were “more safe for the city, and less troublesome to the merchant; while we freely receive all fugitives from infected places, afford them all possible aid, and suffer no inconvenience from such acts of humanity.” That said Webster soon returned to Hartford. When addressing the fever, others bewailed Philadelphia’s fate and discounted the threat to New York. On August 14 a torrential rainstorm flooded many cellars in New York prompting a call for the health committee to inspect every house and see that cellars were pumped out and purified. But for the next two weeks no one blamed any sickness on those floods. Judge James Kent wrote to his brother on August 15 that he thought that “such periodical alarms and confusion” in Philadelphia “must in the end go a great way to ruin the commerce and prosperity of that city.” In an August 25 letter the Rev. John Rodgers, father of the doctor, implored God to save Philadelphia and shrugged off “some few cases of bilious fever with us.” He thought the city “in general” was “healthy as much so as I have known it for many years at this season.” William Robinson, a Quaker merchant, wrote to Philadelphia friends on August 16 that he had heard of “two or three people” dying of yellow fever, a typical occurrence for years. “On the whole,” he added, “this city is in a very clean, sweet and healthy state -- and I know of no alarm and have not heard of a single family moving out except as usual on acct of the heat.” Robinson soon revised that estimate. “Within 6 or 8 days,” he wrote on August 27, “twelve or fourteen persons have been attacked within my knowledge, five or six of whom have died.” He listed five victims by name, and added, “a number of families in our quarter are moving out of town -- but the alarm is not yet general in the city.” Robinson moved his wife and daughter from their east side home and tried the best he could to stay out too, but business usually kept him commuting in from their refuge in Greenwich, until he got the fever. The Commercial Advertiser tried to keep those deaths in perspective. On August 30 it ridiculed a letter printed in Philadelphia that claimed one hundred died in one day on New York’s Golden Hill and Cliff Street. Perhaps 10 people had died there but the western part of the city was “probably as free from sickness as it was ever known to be at this season.” On the 28th the health committee congratulated the governor on the epidemic around Coenties wharf ending, but added that
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“unhappily” there was sickness elsewhere, “principally in unventilated situations.” The committee did not think of ordering evacuations. It was content to go after merchants who did have putrefying beef in their cellars. A writer privy to the investigations of the health committee and supporting all their actions wrote a long report on the fever in early September. He cited clusters of cases and local causes for each: new made ground, crowded buildings, swampy lots and/or offensive sewers. He ridiculed claims that the fever was imported or arose from coffee thrown on a wharf. He argued that the death rate was not out of line for the season. On September 2 Elihu Smith wrote to his friend in Hartford that he thought the flight from the city was a reaction, “certainly disproportionate to the cause.” He estimated that 600 were sick and that one in ten died. Since the evacuation the number of new cases was “small.” Unlike their colleagues in Philadelphia, New York doctors exuded confidence. On September 6 Dr. Samuel Bard wrote to the newspapers heralding a remedy for the most feared symptom of yellow fever, black vomit. His partner Dr. David Hosack had shown that “lime-water mixed with an equal quantity of new milk” had cured three cases in which black vomiting had begun. Several articles appeared in New York papers attesting to the virtues of alkaline medicines and lime as a disinfectant. “LIME has subdued the poisonous vapor issuing from the sewer of Burling-slip...,” boasted a September 7 article. “LIME WATER, soda and pearl ash are capable of restraining the black vomit.” Dr. Samuel Mitchill, the chief promoter of alkaline remedies, had by September united his new understanding of the fever with Rush’s ideas. There were three states of yellow fever. In the bilious and vomiting state, alkaline remedies were called for; bleeding was proper when the patient was in a state of high excitement; when the patient was a stupor, Mitchill thought the disease should be treated like acute scurvy and an effort had to be made to get oxygen into the system and “septon” [his word for nitrogen] out. To do that he prescribed “neutral mixtures, lemonade, cider, peaches, pears and apples.” The trio of Brown, Johnson and Smith maintained their devil may care attitude about the epidemic despite Smith confining himself to bed after getting too much sun on a sail to Long Island to see a patient. They wrote a joint letter to their friend William Dunlap, the painter and theatrical producer who as always in the late summer was in Perth Amboy. Brown joked about “this plaguey fever at our doors, in our cupboards & in our beds.” Johnson marvelled at the fever’s “unaccountable origin,... amazing attributes, and... inexplicable operations,” leaving it to Smith to explain what was going on. From his bed the doctor assured Dunlap that while it was unsafe to be on certain East Side streets, the fever was not as mortal as it was in 1795. One in ten died, “& that not more than one in a hundred would perish, with early attention & faithful nursing.” On the same day Brown wrote to his worried brother in a more serious vein. Smith assured him that not one out of nine died when properly nursed. Brown thought it would be wise to leave if the fever reached
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their end of town. By becoming sick he would become a burden. However, he knew Smith would never leave. “If I run the risk of requiring to be nursed,” Brown reasoned, “I must not forget that others may require to be nursed by me, in a disease where personal attentions are all in all.” Out at Bellevue, Alexander Anderson was his old sardonic self once again, while he tried to deal with 20 patients, four of whom died on his first day there. With 14 newly admitted patients, Anderson had to fend off “an Irishman who ask’d to stay and nurse his sweetheart at night.” He returned to town to see his patients there, and was amused to find that Dr. Chickering had taken the fever. They joked that when he recovered he would “practice without fear.” Unfortunately Anderson was too busy to put much color in his diary. A patient he dismissed as cured came back sick and promptly died; a nurse got sick. Then on the afternoon of September 5, his father came to report that Dr. Chickering had died and Anderson’s brother was sick. Faced with his own brother in a dangerous condition, Anderson lost his confidence. He conferred with Dr. Bayley about a better way to treat patients, but the older doctor seemed “at a loss.” As his brother got worse, his father became ill. On the 8th after going to Bellevue thinking his brother better, he returned to find him dead. As his father got sicker, Anderson sought out Dr. Dingley for consultation. Anderson had bled him twice, and was disappointed when Dingley only prescribed “innocent things.” Anderson saw to it that his father got calomel. On the 10th his father was so ill that Anderson had to resign from Bellevue to spend all his time with him and when able “practic’d among the neighbors many of whom are taken ill.” His father died on September 12. Finding that his mother showed “heroic fortitude,” Anderson went to see his wife on Long Island. To his shock he found her looking ghastly, emaciated and spitting blood. She died the next day. Then he returned to his mother, and was surprised at both her and his own composure. His mother was even lively until the 16th when she was seized with the fever. He gave her medicine immediately and for awhile thought she would recover. A black nurse helped care for her which allowed Anderson to see other patients. His mother became difficult, complaining of being neglected and refusing to take medicine. She died on the morning of the 21st, “delirious all night and suffered much pain.” A few blocks to the west, Elihu Smith and his friends were still sanguine. Smith recovered from his indisposition ascribing “his preservation from death entirely to his vegetable diet” and to not visiting patients when he was sick. Smith sent a long report on the New York epidemic to Rush written very much in the style of the master, a potpourri of incisive generalizations. More natives were getting sick than in 1795, which led to their being fewer deaths because natives, better educated and wealthier, were quicker to get medical attention. He thought the number of sick decreasing and since “the complaint being in great measure local, and the inhabitants of the pestilential district having mostly fled, the extension of the sickness is
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not greatly to be apprehended.” There was no question of the fever being imported. Even importationists like David Hosack agreed. Few doctors thought the fever contagious and even the general populace agreed. People left “not from fear of the sick, but of the town.” There was no hesitation to nurse a sick friend, “likewise one great cause of the less mortality among us.” As for remedies, alkalies such as soda, potash and lime water invariably relieved victims of “all commotions of the alimentary canal.” Smith asked Rush about his experience with emetics and promised to publish his letter on them in the Medical Repository. Like Anderson, Smith was soon humbled by the epidemic. A young Venetian nobleman, Dr. Joseph Scandella, had come to America to broaden his education and took a particular interest in yellow fever. Smith had befriended him, as did a number of men of science including Rush. In August Scandella sailed for Europe from Philadelphia, then the leaky ship returned to New York. Early in the epidemic Scandella joined Smith on his rounds. Then in early September he returned to Philadelphia telling Smith that he went “in search of his baggage.” On September 11, Smith learned that Scandella had returned to New York and was ill with the fever. He rescued him from unfriendly inns, and he, Brown, and Johnson nursed the unlucky Italian. On the 13th Smith wrote to Rush again, reporting that the mortality had increased. He blamed that on the fact that most of those getting sick were poor people who didn’t call for doctors in time. His confidence in Rush’s depleting remedies in combination with alkalies had not diminished. He thought that the alkalies aided the cure by “partially decomposing the calomel and thus diminishing the tendency of this latter medicine to irritate the stomach.” He revealed that Scandella was his patient and closed the letter by assuring Rush that “all that the faculty of New York can do for his relief will be attempted.” Smith noted in his journal that after being very ill, Scandella seemed better. On the 14th he seemed “much better, to all appearance.” On the 15th Smith decided his friend could not recover. On the 16th Smith himself was very ill. The day after the publication of Wieland, his first novel, Charles Brockden Brown, a frail and sickly man, had to share duties with Johnson as they nursed Scandella who lay in Smith’s bed and Smith who lay in a bed in the next room. Before his attack Smith had made a sobering reassessment of the dangers of yellow fever. Distraught at the havoc the fever made in a house where he had six patients, with two so sick they had to be sent to Bellevue where one died, Smith “became sensible of the disproportionate hazard which he incurred, and ... determined, as soon as his friend Scandella had recovered or perished and his present patients had been gotten rid of, to withdraw from town.” The best Brown and Johnson could do, after Scandella died, was to remove Smith to the “spacious, healthfully situated” house of Johnson’s brother Horace. In a letter written the 17th Brown tried to describe how bad it was in New York, how much worse than Philadelphia. A greater proportion of the
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population died and “the victims to this disease have been in innumerable cases selected from the highest and most respectable class of inhabitants.” On the 18th Brown also seemed to take the fever. Dr. Miller, who along with Smith’s other co-editor, Mitchill, tried to treat Scandella and Smith, took Brown to his own house. In Smith’s case the new alkaline treatment did not work. Nothing could “compose his stomach.” Most of the time he was in a stupor, but when revived he could answer questions rationally. Smith pressed upon his colleagues the importance of inducing salivation. Like Smith, Miller was an old student of Rush’s and followed his prescriptions. Heroic measures failed Smith. Because of his vomiting, calomel would not stay in his system. Mercury rubs failed to bring the hoped for soreness and saliva. He revived enough mid-day on the 19th to see that his vomit was black, “pronounced the word ‘decomposition’ and died.” Out at his Perth Amboy retreat William Dunlap had just replied to his jolly friends, inviting Brown and Johnson to come to Perth Amboy and “to Elihu, my apprehensions for his safety & my confidence in his doing his duty.” When he heard of Smith’s imminent death, his usually flinty diary betrayed some emotion: “Notwithstanding my firmest attempts this stroke bears hard upon me.” Just after he learned of Smith’s death, Dr. Rodgers, who weakened by fatigue had left the city, called with the news that Amasa Dingley, with whom Smith had first explored the nature of yellow fever three years before, had died of the disease. Brown recovered, and before he and Johnson came to Amboy, he wrote to Dunlap, “Most ardently do I long to shut out this city from my view....” And to his brother, he wrote the day Smith died: “O the folly of prediction and the vanity of systems.” Drs. Miller and Mitchill did not make a case study of Smith’s death. Miller told Brown that “no case was more dreadful and infinitely malignant.” While lessons were often drawn from their recoveries, the deaths of doctors were seldom detailed. The hazards they faced during an epidemic explained the high mortality in their ranks. Though men like Scandella and Smith, for whose cleanliness, temperance and morality he could vouch lay on the verge of death, Mitchill blamed “the inhabitants [who] have really poisoned their city by the accumulation of excrement, putrid provisions and every unclean thing,” plus their “gross animal diet” and intemperance. “If some of our citizens breathed air as pure and balmy as the breezes of Eden,” Mitchill wrote to Noah Webster on September 17, “they would engender this sickness by their way of life. They would breed it within them. To get the better of these visitations will therefore require more than municipal regulations. An alteration, and a considerable one too, of housekeeping and modes of life will be necessary.” Rush’s reaction to Smith’s death is not known. A letter he wrote to Smith’s parents is not extant. New Yorkers did not dwell on the accumulation of sorrows. With no family to flee to and with friends calling for his services, Anderson resolved to stay until the epidemic ended. He gave up
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Rush’s mode of practice, began using laudanum and stimulating medicines, and was surprised and gratified by his success. (Once the epidemic did end, he stopped being a doctor and devoted all his energies to engraving. Dr. Young, his first teacher, was surprised at his decision. But as Anderson, who became one of the country’s most beloved engravers, wrote in his memoirs fifty years later, “the succession of calamities” he experienced in 1798 “seemed rather too severe.”) The health committee, the city’s editors, doctors and even citizens in candid private letters continued to think that the crisis was manageable. New Yorkers clung to every healthy block as evidence that it did not have as bad an epidemic as its rival port. Rev. Samuel Miller wrote that he avoided the docks and wharves; a broker wrote that as long as he confined himself between Trinity Church and the upper part of the Battery he felt safe. Throughout September the health committee dealt with local nuisances like sewers and bad smells emanating from cellars. Here indeed was a community living and dying by Rush’s principles, although certainly commercial considerations inspired the city’s leaders, more than devotion to the ideas of Rush, Webster and most of the city’s doctors. That brave front was easier to put up because of the headlines that came from Philadelphia. Many ports were stricken but none could rival the misery of Philadelphia. For the first time, banks left the city, prompted not only by sickness and death among employees but by a robbery of the Bank of Pennsylvania on September 2. Two days later the bank moved its offices and valuables to a school house in Germantown. On the 5th the Bank of North America followed. By September 6 the city’s market had moved ten block to the west at Market and Broad Streets. On September 11, James Smith’s store was robbed. A week after that, only the quick shooting of Alderman Robert Wharton, who was supervising the jail after the jailor fled from fear of the fever, prevented an escape by several convicts. The newspapers that spread the stories of the city’s crisis were decimated by the epidemic. Fifty-one men in the printing trade got the fever. The two leaders of the partisan press died; Bache of the Aurora on September 11, and John Fenno, Sr., of the Gazette of the United States on the 16th. Fenno’s wife died on the 6th. (No one made any issue of the medical treatment Bache and Fenno received. Republican though he was, Bache did not take Rush’s cure. A French doctor gave him baths and gentle medicines. That dismayed Bache’s sister who when she visited found the house virtually flooded because the tub leaked. She worried that the damp would harm Mrs. Bache who was in the last days of pregnancy with the family’s fourth child. Perhaps taking a lesson from that, when Bache’s assistant William Duane got the fever he took 212 grains of mercury and though his “gums [were] inflamed, teeth loose and [his] face swelled,” he survived to marry Bache’s widow and carry on the Republican traditions of the Aurora.) The most affecting token of Philadelphia’s despair was the death of Mayor Hillary Baker, who had stayed to relieve the distress of those who remained in the city.
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“Compared with this dreadful situation,” the New York Daily Advertiser pointed out after describing the devastation of Philadelphia, “the inhabitants of New York have little grounds for murmuring. Large districts and several principal streets have remained almost untouched by the fell destroyer. A great number of rich families have continued in the city, who had ample means of removal. Many gentlemen, particularly the collector and deputy collector, and those belonging to the insurance offices, and various other public departments and branches of business, have been in the constant habit of spending five hours in town every day. The banks have not thought of moving, and not more than four-sevenths of our inhabitants, if that many, have left town.” Only Philadelphia’s rival for political pre-eminence exceeded New York for tasteless commentary during the crisis. A letter from the new city of Washington, where a plunge in real estate prices had crippled development and threatened progress on the Capitol which had to be ready for Congress in 1800, extolled the site of the new capital. It was “remarkable for the salubrity of its air, the purity of its water, and the cheapness of provisions and fuel; and that whilst the yellow fever stalks with desolating strides in some of the principal towns of the Union, the Federal City, destined at some future day to rival the glory of ancient Rome, bids fair to be secure from this ravager of cities, and to enjoy from its peculiar situation and construction an envious scene of health.” Most in the nation did not indulge in making invidious distinctions as the sickly season progressed because no place seemed safe from yellow fever. In late September the fever flared up again in Boston causing a new panic. A new arrival at a suburban refuge reported on the 24th that “the number of new cases was 40, many dead and a dying, greatly beyond any preceding time and the people preparing to remove and that the doctors now call the disorder the Plague.” Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Wilmington, Delaware, began providing counts of fever cases and deaths. In the northern port only a handful were victims. Between August 7 and September 23, Wilmington counted 127 dead, all but 8 of those adults. On the 23rd alone 10 died. Chester, Pennsylvania, then a small village, also reported deaths. New London, Connecticut, was also hit by yellow fever. Congressman Joshua Coit was one of its victims. A September 9 letter from nearby Norwich reported that based on the proportion of victims to New London’s population, the epidemic was “greater... than has ever been experienced on our continent.” The city was nearly deserted and yet people still died. “The skill of our physicians though many of them are eminent in their profession, appears to be wholly baffled with this fever; and there seems no other security but flight.” In a September 20 letter to his brother, William Russell, a Boston merchant, contemplated “the dreadful calamity with which this country is now visited in each of the commercial cities to a degree beyond all former precedents. Distressing and alarming as it has been upon former occasions it is far more so upon this
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and the direful consequences have attained an excess which has spread alarm through the whole continent.” Alice Cogswell who was recovering from a cancer operation in Princeton might have been expected to ignore the epidemics in light of her own troubles. Her brother in New York had fled in time, and her brother who was a doctor was out of harm’s way in Hartford. But the epidemic served as a metaphor for her own insecurity: “What sad havoc does this pestilential fever make with the inhabitants of this world, wives torn from their husbands, husbands torn from their wives, and in some instances whole families swept to eternity without one relict left to mourn their loss. It is enough to make ones heart weep drops of blood, or rather streams, my soul turns with horror from this scene of wretchedness and misery to the world beyond the grave where there is no more sorrow or grief. It is the god of heaven that thus desolates the world and he has just reason for it....”
April 1, Sunday: Noah Webster, Jr. relocated his family from New-York to New Haven. They would settle in the Benedict Arnold House on the harbor shore (later called Water Street). In New Haven he would write, do research, serve on the city council, and serve in the state legislature.
1799
January 7, Monday: Birth of Mary Webster, 4th child of Rebecca Greenleaf Webster with Noah Webster, Jr. (she would marry Horatio Southgate).
December: Noah Webster, Jr.’s BRIEF HISTORY OF EPIDEMIC AND PESTILENTIAL DISEASES.
1800
Noah Webster, Jr. began lexicographical work.
1801
September 15, Tuesday: Birth of William Greenleaf Webster, 5th child of Rebecca Greenleaf Webster with Noah Webster, Jr. (He would get married with Rosalie Eugenia Stuart of Faulkner, Virginia and two of their sons would get killed during the Civil War, one as a Union soldier and the other as a Confederate soldier.)
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1802
Myron Holley was admitted to the New Haven County Bar.
Noah Webster, Jr. served on the New Haven Health Council.
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1803
December 21, Wednesday: Birth of Eliza Steele Greenleaf Webster, 6th child of Rebecca Greenleaf Webster with Noah Webster, Jr. (she would marry Henry Jones).
1805
The Reverend Stephen West prepared a volume, SKETCHES OF THE LIFE OF THE LATE, REV. SAMUEL HOPKINS, D.D. PASTOR OF THE FIRST CONGRESSIONAL CHURCH IN NEWPORT, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF; INTERSPERSED WITH MARGINAL NOTES EXTRACTED FROM HIS PRIVATE DIARY: TO WHICH IS ADDED; A DIALOGUE, BY THE SAME HAND, ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT OF TRUE CHRISTIAN SUBMISSION; ALSO, A SERIOUS ADDRESS TO PROFESSING CHRISTIANS: CLOSED BY DR. HART’S SERMON AT HIS FUNERAL: WITH AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WHOLE, BY THE EDITOR, and this was published in Hartford, Connecticut for the spiritual benefit of Hopkinsians everywhere.
HIS LIFE BY HIMSELF CALVINIST VS. NON-C... SERIOUS ADDRESS
Noah Webster, Jr. served on the New Haven Fire Laws Revision Committee. CONNECTICUT
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1806
Noah Webster, Jr.’s A COMPENDIOUS DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE contained not only definitions of 37,000 words but also listings that up to that time had ordinarily been typical only of almanacs, such as “Tables of Moneys,” “Tables of Weights and Measures,” “List of Post-Offices in the United States,” and “Chronological table of the Most Remarkable Events, in or Respecting America, Intended For the Outline of American History.”
November 20, Thursday: Birth of Henry Bradford Greenleaf Webster, 7th child of Rebecca Greenleaf Webster with Noah Webster, Jr.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5 day 20 of 11 M / On taking my seat in meeting I felt my mind animated by the arisings of life, & looked forward to a favor’d season which was measurably permitted by a pretty composed mind & rather easier access to the fountain than at sometimes — but could not attain to that state which I wished or at first
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expected. Susanna Barker broke silence in a few words of encoragement to those who were wrestling for life, observing to those who know an overcoming of themselves should be given a White Stone & in it a new name written. which was succeeded by Abigail Robinson in an encoraging testimony to the same effect. ———————————————————————————————————
1807
Noah Webster, Jr.’s SECOND DICTIONARY, A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE COMPLIED FOR THE USE OF COMMON SCHOOLS IN THE UNITED STATES. In its preface the lexicographer described the great strides in “education in youth during the past 30 years” especially in “common schools, in which are taught the branches of learning necessary for the yeomanry of the country.” He considered his work particularly designed to contribute to such “common” education for basic citizenship.
During this year appeared also his 3d such work product, titled COMMON SCHOOL DICTIONARY. He warned against exposing schoolchildren to definitions that would merely baffle them (upon this publication Webster began work on his magnum opus, THE AMERICAN DICTIONARY).
January 29, Thursday: The Ottoman Empire extended its declaration of war on Russia to include Great Britain.
The infant Henry Bradford Greenleaf Webster, 7th child of Rebecca Greenleaf Webster with Noah Webster, Jr., died after two months of existence.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5 day 29 of 1 M / Our Moy [Monthly] Meeting was held in town & was a pretty good time in the first H Almy appear’d much engaged in testimony for the wellfare of society expressing a desire that Zion might arise & shake herself from the dust of the earth & put on her beautiful garments. And Abigail Robinson Arose with these words “Put thy shoes from off thy feet for the ground whereon thou standeth is holy” pointing out the necessity of our having clean hearts & hands in the administration of Church discipline, for if we attempt it in our own wills the mind of the individual will not only become more darkened but will bring pain & death over the meeting. Some exercising cases were before us in the last meeting but I apprehended things terminated well in the end. It seems to be a time of labor & exercise among the homest hearted, a time that calls for dilligence & watchfulness. May every part of my conduct be so, & may my neck not be spared from the Yoak or shoulders from the burden
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———————————————————————————————————
1808
April 12, Tuesday: Birth of Louisa Greenleaf Webster, 8th child of Rebecca Greenleaf Webster with Noah Webster, Jr., in New Haven, Connecticut (a special needs child from birth).
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 12 of 4th M / This days experience as well as many others has convinced me that I have much of the old nature to subdue, & the furnice (I fear of affliction) must be deeply enterd into ere a thorough cleansing can be experienced. I in the eveng called to See my beloved & found her releaved from her cough, for which as far as I am capable of am thankful for —
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1812
The family of Noah Webster, Jr. relocated to a farm near Amherst, Massachusetts, where he would serve in the Massachusetts legislature and help found Amherst College while pursuing his AMERICAN DICTIONARY project.
In his workspace he was relying upon a circular table on which he had arranged dictionaries and grammars from perhaps 20 nations — he would methodically move around this circle, following each word under study through each of these reference tomes. AMHERST, MASS.
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1813
November 9, Tuesday: The Emperor Napoléon I reached St. Cloud from the German front.
The allied administration in Osnabrück handed over power to an administration from Hannover.
The Tennessee militia defeated Creek Indians at Talladega, Alabama. 300 people were killed.
With the death of Noah Webster, Jr.’s father Captain Noah Webster, Sr., his name would become Noah Webster, Esq.
1814
Noah Webster, Esq. became a member of the Massachusetts General Court (he would serve also in 1815 and 1817).
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1815
The Middlesex Bar commenced the formation of a law library in Concord, to be maintained by the Treasurer of Middlesex County.
Noah Webster, Esq. continued as a member of the Massachusetts General Court (he would serve also in 1817).
Tilly Merrick was Concord’s deputy and representative to the Massachusetts General Court.
In Concord, John Buttrick continued as Town Treasurer.
In Concord, Nathan Barrett was a Selectman.
In Concord, Thomas Wheeler was a Selectman.
These were the appropriations made by the town of Lincoln:5
Date. 1755. 1765. 1775. 1785. 1795. 1805. 1815. 1825.
2 2 Minister £56 £69 /3 £70 /3 £85 £105 $— $600 $460. 1 1 Schools 13 /2 20 13 /2 50 85 — 480 520. Highways 25 50 40 80 80 $450 600 400. 1 Incidental charges 24 /2 19 37 250 125 830 1450 500.
5. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston MA: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy, 1835 (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry David Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake buried in the body of the text.)
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Representatives of Carlisle to the General court of Massachusetts:
Deacon Ephraim Robbins 1807-1808
Reverend Paul Litchfield 1808-1811
Captain Timothy Heald 1812-1813
Captain Thomas Heald 1815
Jonathan Heald, Jr., Esq. 1816
John Heald, Esq. 1818, 1821, 1823
Dr. John Nelson 1824
John Heald, Esq. 1826-1827, 1830
Representatives of Lincoln6
Chambers Russell ’54-57, ’59, ’62, ’63, ’5. Joshua Brooks 1809-1811.
Samuel Farrer 1766-1768. Leonard Hoar 1812-1814.
Eleazer Brooks ’74-’78, ’80, ’5, ’7, ’90-’2. William Hayden 1815, 1816.
Chambers Russell 1788. Elijah Fiske 1820-1822.
Samuel Hoar ’94, ’95, ’97, ’98, 1801, ’3-’8. Joel Smith 1824.
Samuel Farrar, Jr. 1800. Silas P. Tarbell 1827, 1828.
Not represented 1758, ’60, ’62, ’69-’73, ’79, ’81, ’82, ’86, ’89, ’93, ’96, ’99, 1802, ’17, ’23, ’25, ’26.
Appropriations made by the town of Carlisle
1785 1790 1795 1800 1805 1810 1815 1820 1825 1830
Minister £91 90 85 $285 290 280 320 275 320 500
Schools 36 30 60 360 300 360 360 450 360 360
Roads 60 45 60 300 480 350 400 400 350 400
Town Charges 74 60 50 300 500 550 550 700 600 600 3 County Tax —— 11 /4 22 58 —— 117 72 99 56 22 State Tax 484 48 64 227 —— 210 130 180 —— 65
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Town Clerks of Carlisle
Zebulon Spaulding 1780-1784
Asa Parlin 1785-1802; 1806-1808
John Jacobs 1803, 1809-1812, 1826
Jonathan Heald 1804-1805
Jonathan Heald, Jr. 1813-1814, 1818-1820
John Heald 1815-1817, 1821-1825, 1827-1829
Cyrus Heald 1829-——
John Keyes leased a house just to the northeast of the Courthouse that Concord had erected in 1784. (Eventually the family would buy this leased structure; Keyes, working at the nearby Courthouse, would live out his life there. His son Judge John Shepard Keyes would be born in that house and would reside in it until it would burn during the 1849 Courthouse fire.)
1816
The preaching of Thomas Oxnard in Baltimore led to the organization of the Unitarian church there, at which the Reverend William Ellery Channing would deliver his famous 1819 sermon. He met every two weeks with about 20 liberal ministers in the Boston area, mostly Congregational, for discussions relating to religion, morals, and civic order. Freeman was appointed to a committee charged with considering the creation of a formal body. The work of this committee led, in 1825, to the founding the American Unitarian Association.
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Little Harriet Beecher, five years old, was fascinated with the Reverend Cotton Mather’s MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA; ORTHEECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF NEW-ENGLAND. (Well, the mentality of the reverend author of this tome was approximately the mentality of a five-year-old, so there you are.)
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Meanwhile, her daddy the Reverend Lyman Beecher, who had done so much to safeguard Boston against the spiritual errors of the Unitarians, was urging that to counter the threat of Roman Catholicism there should be created a Protestant school for each district of the community, and that there should be at least one Protestant minister available for each 1,000 residents, and that –since Roman Catholicism feared the common man with his Holy Bible and his ability to read and understand it for himself– there must be a copy of the Holy Bible in each and every home. The Reverend, it is to be mentioned, was not a member of the Know-Nothing Party: he approved of their objectives but he thought of himself nevertheless as standing aloof from the “hatreds” which that political group tended to nurture and he thought of himself as standing aloof from the “violence and secrecy” of the means they tended to employ. (I think it is important for me here to emphasize this for you, because my sense of the matter is that very few of us now think of the development of 19th-Century “bible societies” as in any sense prejudicial or partial or sectarian. This was the year in which, in New-York, the American Bible Society was being founded and of course that was righteous. Of course it was. This was the year in which Noah Webster not only was helping found and write the constitution for a “charitable society,” but also was becoming a director of the New Hampshire Bible Society, and of course that was righteous. –It is relevant for you to recognize that what you are gazing at is the kindly countenance of American anti-Catholic prejudice.)
1817
Francis Jarvis was Concord’s deputy and representative to the Massachusetts General Court.
Noah Webster, Esq. served again as a member of the Massachusetts General Court.
In Concord, John Buttrick continued as Town Treasurer.
In Concord, Nathan Barrett was a Selectman.
In Concord, Isaac Lee continued as a Selectman.
Cyrus Hubbard had a house-raising. According to Dr. Edward Jarvis’s TRADITIONS AND REMINISCENCES OF CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS 1779-1878, page 55: I have been to only one [house] raising as a worker. That was Cyrus Hubbard’s house in 1817, sixty-one years ago. I was then fourteen years old, and was busy handing the pins to the men, who drove them into their appropriate places. This cooperation justified me and some other boys in eating of the bread and
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cheese, which we did with a relish.
1821
August 9, Thursday: The first building of Amherst Academy was dedicated by an address by Noah Webster.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 9th of 8 M 1821 / Our Meeting was pretty well attended & a very comfortable season it was, for my share of which I desire to be thankful — Hannah Dennis was very lively & large in testimony - father Rodman was also engaged in a short & pretty lively testimony. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
1822
Noah Webster relocated once again to New Haven, Connecticut. There he would continue his dictionary work.
1823
Noah Webster enthusiastically endorsed the cause of Greek Independence.7
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September: Noah Webster received an LL.D. from Yale College.
7. Notice the difference between Webster’s support for freedom for black American slaves (he helped found an antislavery society), and his support for freeing the white people of Greece from their Ottoman shackles. He couldn’t suggest any concrete steps to help black American slaves be free because as a Northern white man that would be wrong — it really wasn’t any of his business or his concern. Which might cause you to suppose that he likewise wouldn’t be able to suggest any concrete steps to help the white people of Greece be free of their Ottoman shackles. But no, he could, that wouldn’t be wrong, that was indeed his business and his concern. (One may wonder where in his mind the difference lay, between the case of the black slaves here and the case of the white slaves there.) 56 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1824
This was before the internet. If you had bookish research to do, such as research into many, many old dictionaries in various languages, you needed to go where copies of those books were being store. With no Google Books as yet, these books could not come to you. Therefore, to inspect the contents of the great libraries, such as the Bibliotheque on the Continent, and the libraries of Cambridge and Oxford in England, Noah Webster needed to leave his family in Connecticut and go off on a multiple-year journey. That’s just the way it was in those bad old days.
November 11, Thursday: Sam L. Hitchcock of the society wrote to inform Noah Webster that he had been elected an honorary member.
In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 12th [sic] of 11th M / Meeting small & silent till near the close, when J Dennis delivered a short testimony. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
1825
June 18, Saturday: Noah Webster, Esq. returned to his family in New Haven, Connecticut after his lengthy research trip to European and British libraries.
In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 18th of 6th M / This & yeasterday is always a lonesome Day after Yearly Meeting. — but as we have had a time of favour, let us be thankful — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
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1828
April 21, Monday: Noah Webster provided a sequel to his 22-year-old COMPENDIOUS DICTIONARY, as AN 00 AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, in two large quarto volumes for $20. , in an edition of 2,500 copies. (Other sources allege that this happened on April 14th, and during November.) Webster was 70 years old and the preparation for this had required two full decades of his life. The publication contained 70,000 words, which would be 12,000 more than JOHNSON’S DICTIONARY as presented by Todd. SEARCH FOR A WORD
This is the original “Webster’s Dictionary” ancestral to the one now published by the Merriam-Webster Company of Springfield. It was notable for sponsoring “Americanisms” such as deviations from accepted English spellings for common words (e.g. color for colour) and for the inclusion of words of local origin (e.g. applesauce, revolutionary, skunk). The new authority explained that “The dinner of fashionable people would be the supper of rustics.”
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Mr. Webster accepted the definition of “sacrament” originated by St. Augustine as it was applied in the English Episcopal BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER:
WALDEN: The customs of some savage nations might, perchance be PEOPLE OF profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of WALDEN the thing, whether they have the reality or not. Would it not be well if we were to celebrate such a “busk,” or “feast of first fruits,” as Bartram describes to have been the custom of the Mucclasse Indians? “When a town celebrates the busk,” says he, “having previously provided themselves with new clothes, new pots, pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collect all their worn out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town, of their filth, which with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they cast together into one common heap, and consume it with fire. After having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in town is extinguished. During this fast they abstain from the gratification of every appetite and passion whatever. A general amnesty is proclaimed; all malefactors may return to their town.–” “On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood together, produces new fire in the public square, from whence every habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame.” They then feast on the new corn and fruits and dance and sing for three days, “and the four following days they receive visits and rejoice with their friends from neighboring towns who have in like manner purified and prepared themselves.” The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end of every fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world to come to an end. I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the dictionary defines it, “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” than this, and I have no doubt that they were originally inspired directly from Heaven to do thus, though they have no biblical record of the revelation.
AUGUSTINE WILLIAM BARTRAM NOAH WEBSTER
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One may interrogate this dictionary at:
Noah Webster defined the term “hybrid” as “a mongrel or mule; an animal or plant, produced from the mixture of two species.” (This year marked the first use of the advice “stay on the fence” and marked the origination of the term “long drink” — however, such usages were not at that point considered to be suitable for inclusion in something so dignified and commodious as a dictionary.)
Thoreau would use the term “fictile” in WALDEN. Here is how that term was defined in this dictionary: FIC’TILE, a. [L. fictilis, from fictus, fingo, to feign.] Molded into form by art; manufactured by the potter. Fictile earth is more fragile than crude earth.
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1829
Joseph Emerson Worcester took on the job of prepping a new cheaper edition of the WEBSTER’S DICTIONARY 00 for a fee of $2,000. . It was titled THE AMERICAN SPELLING-BOOK: CONTAINING THE RUDIMENTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS IN THE UNITED STATES BY NOAH WEBSTER and was published by William H. Niles in Middletown, Connecticut. The 71-year-old Noah Webster, when he would see the result, would be radically incensed at the ruthlessness with which Worcester had disposed of so many of the personal idiosyncracies of the previous publication.
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THE MAINE WOODS: The Anglo-American can indeed cut down, and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for Buchanan on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on them. Before he has learned his a b c in the beautiful but mystic lore of the wilderness which Spenser and Dante had just begun to read, he cuts it down, coins a pine-tree shilling, (as if to signify the pine’s value to him,) puts up a deestrict school-house, and introduces Webster’s spelling-book.
NOAH WEBSTER
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1830
Noah Webster’s BIOGRAPHY FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS. He was awarded an LL.D. by Middlebury College.
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December 28, Tuesday: Noah Webster, Esq. had relocated to Washington DC to lobby on behalf of copyright protection. On this day he visited the White House and had dinner with President Andrew Jackson, and in recording this hospitality would display the churlish chauvinism for which he was notorious by remarking on the un-Americanness of his President’s many courses of foods and wines.
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1831
Noah Webster’s THE ELEMENTARY PRIMER. He became a member of a committee to raise funds for relief of sufferers from a devastating fire that had occurred on May 29th, Sunday, 1831 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, destroying its State House.
Because of this devastating fire in Fayetteville, general contractor Thomas Bragg was hired to fireproof the wooden roof of the State Capitol Building in Raleigh using sheets of zinc soldered together and held down by nails with soldered heads — and his workmen accidentally set that structure aflame. Antonio Canova’s Roman-clad George Washington of 1818, in the rotunda, was beheaded (never mind, this statue had always looked more like Lafayette than like Washington).
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January 3, Monday: The Polish Diet issued a manifesto demanding the reunion of all of ancient Poland.
Noah Webster, Esq. delivered an hour-long lecture on the English language before the House of Representatives.
The negrero Comet was, while carrying slaves from the District of Columbia to New Orleans, wrecked on the Bahama banks. The British would take its cargo of 164 slaves to the port of Nassau in New Providence, British West Indies and there set them free. Great Britain would eventually need to pay indemnity to the American slavemasters for having done such a naughty naughty deed (SENATE DOCUMENT, 24th Congress, 2d session II, No. 174; 25th Congress, 3d session, III, No. 216). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
January 4, Tuesday: Noah Webster wrote to his wife “Becca” that his lecture on the English language before the House of Representatives had been well received, and pointing out that former President John Quincy Adams had been in his audience.
February 3, Thursday: “Statutes relating the Theological Department in Harvard University” were confirmed by the Overseers of Harvard College. With their adoption the functions of the Directors ceased and the “Society for promoting Theological Education in Harvard University” became disconnected from Harvard University, under the name of the “Society for promoting Theological Education.”
The federal Congress amended the law of copyright, extending its term from 14 years to 28 years and allowing a renewal period of an additional 14 years, and permitting an author’s wife and children to file for such a renewal in the event of the demise of the author himself. Noah Webster, Esq. considered that in lobbying for this bill, he had done a service not only to his own financial interests but of course to all its future authors and hence to the Nation itself. Also, while he had been lobbying in Washington DC, 100 members of the Judiciary
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and both Houses of Congress had endorsed “the whole Websterian series of books from the great DICTIONARY to the SPELLING BOOK.”
The Belgian Congress proclaimed Louis-Charles-Philippe-Raphael d’Orleans, duc de Nemours, son of King Louis-Philippe of France, as king (the father had refused the throne in favor of his son).
Revolution broke out in Modena, Parma, and the Papal States. Revolutionaries in the Duchy of Modena proclaimed the Duke of Reichstadt, Napoléon’s legitimate son, as king of Italy (this young gentleman was, however, at the time the prisoner of Metternich in Vienna).
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 3rd of 2 M / Quarterly Meeting well attended considering the travelling — Wm Almy Thomas Anthony & M B Allen labourers.—- Our friend John Wilbour has a weighty concern to visit England & Ireland which was committeed to the consideration of a committee to report at next Quarterly Meeting. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
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1832
August: Frederick Douglass’s white owner “got religion” but, as might have been anticipated, this didn’t help even one little bit: Frederick Douglass’s NARRATIVE
[M]y master attended a Methodist camp-meeting held in the Bay-side, Talbot county, and there experienced religion. I indulged a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did not do this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane. I was disappointed in both these respects. It neither made him to be humane to his slaves, nor to emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before. Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty. He made the greatest pretensions to piety. His house was the house of prayer. He prayed morning, noon, and night. He very soon distinguished himself among his brethren, and was soon made a class- leader and exhorter. His activity in revivals was great, and he proved himself an instrument in the hands of the church in converting many souls. His house was the preachers’ home. They used to take great pleasure in coming there to put up; for while he starved us, he stuffed them. We have had three or four preachers there at a time.
NARRATIVE METHODISTS During this month and the following one, 2t Lieutenant Jefferson Davis would be serving as an escort for Black Hawk during this headman’s transfer from Wisconsin to Missouri (there’s nothing to suggest that Davis had done any actual fighting during the Black Hawk War).
Noah Webster’s HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES (he had included American History in other of his works but this was the 1st book he had published under such a title). It goes without saying that this author fulsomely traced the hand of God in the founding of this Nation — this author has the honor of being the very earliest of our commentators to declare the Puritans to have founded in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts the 1st genuine republic to exist on this planet.
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1833
Noah Webster’s THE NEW AMERICAN SPELLING BOOK FOR THE USE OF PRIMARY SCHOOLS IN THE UNITED STATES. He would have modernized health into “helth,” breath into “breth,” tongue into “tung,” month into “munth,” and improvement into “improovment,” which of course would have constituted a great improovment.
September: Noah Webster’s THE HOLY BIBLE, CONTAINING THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS, IN THE COMMON VERSION. WITH AMENDMENTS OF THE LANGUAGE (New Haven: Durrie and Peck). This would in 1987 be reprinted in Grand Rapids by Baker Book House. A conservative revision of the KJV in which obsolete words and constructions were replaced with modern equivalents.8
The BIBLE is the chief moral cause of all that is good, and the best corrector of all that is evil in human society; the best book for regulating the temporal concerns of men, and the only book that can serve as an infallible guide to future felicity. With this estimate of its value, I have attempted to render the English version more useful, by correcting a few obvious errors, and removing some obscurities, with objectionable words and phrases; and my earnest prayer is that my labors may not be
8. Webster was an American nationalist. To continue to rely upon the language of the King James version of the BIBLE, although this language was sublime and beautiful and customary, amounted to loyalty to Great Britain and betrayal of America. By substituting words used in America for words used in England we further our own nationalistic hegemony. The authorities at Yale University quite agreed with this jingoist approach and sponsored his America-first version of the BIBLE; its use quickly spread and it would become the standard text in the Congregational Church. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 71 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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wholly unsuccessful.
Rodolphus Dickinson’s A NEW AND CORRECTED VERSION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT; OR, A MINUTE REVISION, AND PROFESSED TRANSLATION OF THE ORIGINAL HISTORIES, MEMOIRS, LETTERS, PROPHECIES, AND OTHER PRODUCTIONS OF THE EVANGELISTS AND APOSTLES: TO WHICH ARE SUBJOINED A FEW, GENERALLY BRIEF, CRITICAL, EXPLANATORY AND PRACTICAL NOTES (Boston: Lilly, Wait, Colman and Holden). This translation by an Episcopal rector, based on the text of Griesbach 1805, is peculiar to say the least. For instance, the Reverend translated LUKE 1:41 as: And it happened, that when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the embryo was joyfully agitated.
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1834
November 26, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Lyceum in Concord.
Joseph Emerson Worcester was being publicly accused of having plagiarized the work of Noah Webster.
December 10, Wednesday: Joseph Emerson Worcester replied moderately and specifically and factually to the accusations that he had been plagiarizing the work of Noah Webster.
Sir Robert Peel, 2d Baronet, took over as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, who had for three weeks been acting for him (because at the time of the dismissal of Lord Melbourne in November, he had been in Italy).
William Gladstone would be appointed Junior Lord of the Treasury in Peel’s 1st ministry.
Alexander Chalmers died in London after having produced, in addition to the materials already cited, editions of the works of the Scottish poet and philosopher James Beattie, the novels of Henry Fielding, and the historical treatises of Edward Gibbon.
December 17, Wednesday: Noah Webster himself reiterated the charges against Joseph Emerson Worcester, providing a list of 121 allegedly purloined definitions. Worcester would respond in detail, showing in each case that either Webster had not defined the word, or that Webster had himself plagiarized the definition from elsewhere, or that the definition he had offered actually differed significantly from Webster’s.
Giacomo Meyerbeer was elected a Membre associe etranger of the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts de l’Institut de France.
1836
Noah Webster’s THE TEACHER; A SUPPLEMENT TO THE ELEMENTARY SPELLING BOOK. His THE LITTLE FRANKLIN: TEACHING CHILDREN TO READ WHAT THEY DAILY SPEAK, AND TO LEARN WHAT THEY OUGHT TO KNOW. (While compiling his DICTIONARY and his translation of the BIBLE, he had used a pair of lard-oil lamps in his working area — he needed ample light for such work and this lard oil, although inferior and smelly, represented a significant economy over whale oil.)
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1837
The American Anti-Slavery Society put out the 4th issue of its abolitionist “omnibus” entitled The Anti- Slavery Examiner, containing “The Bible Against Slavery. An Inquiry Into the Patriarchal and Mosaic TEXT Systems on the Subject of Human Rights.” (This would be followed by “The Bible ... Human Rights. Third INDEX Edition – Revised.” and by “The Bible ... Human Rights. Fourth Edition – Enlarged.”)
The Reverend Adin Ballou’s THE TOUCHSTONE. The Reverend came out publicly as, shudder, an abolitionist. Although this announcement produced turmoil at his Mendon church, the pastor’s supporters would there prevail. He would be less successful in introducing such a reform at this year’s meeting of the Massachusetts Association of Universal Restorationists, his proposal there only producing a rift in fellowship between a group of social reformers and the conservative divines (under the guidance of the Reverend Paul Dean).
Noah Webster, Jr. instructed a daughter who was being unduly influenced by the abolitionist cause that “slavery is a great sin and a general calamity – but it is not our sin, though it may prove to be a terrible calamity to us in the north. But we cannot legally interfere with the South on this subject. ... To come north to preach and thus disturb our peace, when we can legally do nothing to effect this object, is, in my view, highly criminal and the preachers of abolitionism deserve the penitentiary.” Wow, we ought to lock up the Frederick Douglass who followed the North Star to disturb Noah’s daughter’s peace? –With friends like this the American antislavery crusade certainly didn’t need any enemies!
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August 31, Thursday: At noon, at University Hall in Cambridge, 200 academics lined up in their pecking order and marched west, to the music of a band, into the 1st Parish Church that had been erected where Mrs. Anne Hutchinson had been examined before her exile for heresy. In this structure they intended to hear an address “Man Thinking” by the Reverend Waldo Emerson,9 an honorary member of the society who had been retained at the eleventh hour (after they had been turned down by the orator of their choice).
The records of that society assert that the Reverend Emerson’s oration, of 1¼ hour, was “in the misty, dreamy, unintelligible style of Swedenborg, Coleridge, and Carlyle.” The last paragraph of this address included a
9. Which would be retitled and printed in 1841 as “THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR”. VIEW THIS ONLINE
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quote from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, here rendered in boldface:
Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is, the new importance given to the single person. Every thing that tends to insulate the individual, — to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state; — tends to true union as well as greatness. “I learned,” said the melancholy Pestalozzi, “that no man in God’s wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man.” Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. …this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, — but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, — some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience, — patience; — with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work, the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit; — not to be reckoned one character; — not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends, — please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men. 76 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Richard Henry Dana, Jr., once Emerson’s pupil, was there, back from his two years before the mast and graduating first in his Harvard College class and preparing to take up the study of law at Harvard’s Dane Law School. James Russell Lowell was there and later stated that the day was “an event without any parallel in our
literary annals” (it is hard to imagine how what the lecturer had to offer might have been without any parallel in our literary annals, since basically he was merely channeling schoolmaster Noah Webster, Jr.’s bloviation of 1783, “America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms”). Emerson’s heresy lasted however an hour and a quarter, after which all dined in University Hall. Davidem Henricum Thoreau was not apparent either at this Cambridge bloviation, or at its festive table.
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for the recognition a student obtains by being difficult. The administration summed up his attitude in this manner, carefully pointing out that it had, despite his resistance, done everything that might be expected of it:
He had … imbibed some notions concerning emulation and college rank which had a natural tendency to diminish his zeal, if not his exertions. His instructors were impressed with the conviction that he was indifferent, even to a degree that was faulty…. I appreciate very fully the goodness of his heart and the strictness of his moral principle; and have done as much for him as, under the circumstances, was possible.
But today we would say he was, for a Comp Lit undergrad student, well “trained:” by the time he left, he had read not only the Greek and Latin canon, but also widely in Italian, French, Spanish, and German literatures (Sanskrit, Chinese, and Arabic literatures were of course encountered in translation). Luckily, as he left higher 10 education, he was able to retain his access to that omphalos of the universe, the Harvard library. We can only be grateful that there was no Sierra Press in 1843, and that no publisher cut a contract with this writer fresh from college, to produce a series of glossy-illustration nature books or “miscellanies” to lay on the nation’s coffee-tables for beaucoup bucks, and that for lack of a such a contract, this young writer had to go back to his home town and rusticate and take nature hikes. Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson’s comment on this significant ceremonial day, late in his life, was:
Highly interesting it is to find that Thoreau at twenty, in his “Part” at Commencement, pleaded for the life that, later, he carried out. An observer from the stars, he imagines, “of our planet and the restless animal for whose sake it was contrived, where he found one man to admire with him his fair dwelling-place, the ninety and nine would be scraping together a little of the gilded dust upon its surface.... Let men, true to their natures, cultivate the moral affections, lead manly and independent lives; ...The sea will not stagnate, the earth will be as green as ever, and the air as pure. This curious world ... sublime revelations of Nature.”
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 31st of 8th M 1837 / Took a Carryall & rode to Portsmouth with my wife & Mary Williams to attend the Monthly Meeting — Mary Hicks & Hannah Hale preached — To me both Meetings were hard uncomfortable seasons - We dined at Shadrach Chases & it being Rainy came home early. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
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1838
10. There’s an oft-repeated story that Thoreau refused to accept his Harvard diploma, which I showed you above. This is from Lawrence and Lee’s play “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail”:
HENRY: (embracing him) John! JOHN: Welcome home. How’s your overstuffed brain? HENRY: I’ve forgotten everything already. JOHN: At least you’ve got a diploma! HENRY: No, I don’t. JOHN: Why not? HENRY: They charge you a dollar. And I wouldn’t pay it. JOHN: But think how Mama would love it — your diploma from Harvard, framed on the wall! HENRY: Let every sheep keep his own skin.
He did pay his $2.50 diploma fee, he did go to his commencement, he did receive his A.B. sheepskin. Davidem Henricum Thoreaus did say “Let every sheep keep but his own skin” ( November 14, 1847) and “Harvard College was partly built by a lottery. My father tells me he bought a ticket in it” ( January 27, 1855). When he made a speech at this commencement, as we have seen, what he told his classmates and superiors was “This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.” What happened, how this repudiation-of-diploma story got started, was that Harvard offered, for an extra $10.00 and no additional work, to magically transform A.B. degrees into A.M. degrees, that is, despite Thoreau’s academic record, to make him a Master after the fact. Six members of the class of 1837 earned an advanced degree, and an additional 21 received the advanced degree through this painless learning, but Mr. Thoreau entirely ignored Harvard’s meretricious fund-raising scheme ( Cameron). “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 79 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Noah Webster became president of the New Haven Common School Convention.
The Thoreaus were living in the “Parkman House, to fall of 1844,” on the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building in Concord (which would not be erected until 1873). It was in this home that the Thoreau brothers would hold their school.
CONCORD ZOOM MAP
1841
March 12: Henry Thoreau was still reading through the proof-sheets of Waldo Emerson’s ESSAYS: 1ST SERIES.11 ESSAYS, 1ST SERIES
Note that Emerson deployed the term “Over-soul” –the term upon which Emersonians have come to bank so totally– on precisely this one occasion in all his writing. It was a nonce term for which he provided no real definition and to which he would not again refer.
During this month a 2d edition of Noah Webster’s unabridged QUARTO DICTIONARY was appearing on bookstore shelves. Note that on the internet nowadays, Webster is being characterized as Emerson’s friend who included this term in his dictionary — I can uncover no evidence that Webster and Emerson ever met, and the initial edition of “Webster’s Dictionary” in which this term appears happens to be the revision published in 1913: O"ver*soul` (?), n. The all-containing soul. [R.] That unity, that oversoul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other. Emerson.
1843
May: COLLECTION OF PAPERS was Noah Webster’s final publication.
Pressure from the Whig party forced Daniel Webster (no relation) to resign as Secretary of State.12
11. The copy the author inscribed to Thoreau is now at the Yale Library. 12. On the internet these two are inventively being described as cousins. I have inspected an exchange of letters having to do with copyright law, and found that neither individual hinted at the existence of any familial connection. Both Webster families are well documented over many generations; neither genealogy mentions the other. 80 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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May 28, Sunday: In a ceremony in Nauvoo, Illinois, Joseph Smith, Jr. and his wife of many years Emma Hale Smith became “sealed” in marriage for eternity (and isn’t that nice).
Noah Webster died. Nationalist jingo to the end, among his final words were expressions of hope that his writings had contributed and would contribute to the strength of the Nation through the education of the Nation’s youth.
The body would be placed in the Central Cemetery of New Haven, Connecticut. The rights to his populist dictionaries would be acquired by the firm of Charles and George Merriam of Springfield, Massachusetts, who would employ the lexicographer Chauncey Goodrich to revise the unsatisfactory edition of 1841 and offer it for sale at $6.00. This edition would become the “common denominator” cheap dictionary for America and Webster’s inane attempt at a “nu speling” would eventually be expurgated, as would the more embarrassing of his etymologies (and isn’t that nice). Noah Webster ... was by all accounts a severe, correct, humorless, religious, temperate man who was not easily liked, even by other severe, religious, temperate, humorless people. A provincial schoolteacher and not-very-successful lawyer from Hartford, he was short, pale, smug, and boastful. (He held himself superior to Benjamin Franklin because he was a Yale man while Franklin was merely self-educated.) Where Samuel Johnson spent his free hours drinking and discoursing in the company of other great men, Webster was a charmless loner who criticized
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almost everyone but was himself not above stealing material from others. —Bill Bryson, THE MOTHER TONGUE
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1848
Noah Webster’s AN AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE; CONTAINING THE WHOLE VOCABULARY OF THE FIRST EDITION IN TWO VOLUMES QUARTO; THE ENTIRE CORRECTIONS AND IMPROVEMENTS OF THE SECOND EDITION IN TWO VOLUMES ROYAL OCTAVO; TO WHICH IS PREFIXED AND INTRODUCTORY DISSERTATION ON THE ORIGIN, HISTORY, AND CONNECTION OF THE LANGUAGES OF WESTERN ASIA AND EUROPE, WITH AN EXPLANATION OF THE PRINCIPLES ON WHICH LANGUAGES ARE FORMED. BY NOAH WEBSTER, LL.D. ... REVISED AND ENLARGED BY CHAUNCEY A. GOODRICH, PROFESSOR IN YALE COLLEGE. WITH PRONOUNCING VOCABULARIES OF SCRIPTURE, CLASSICAL, AND GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES was printed by George and Charles Merriam of the corner of Main and State Streets in Springfield MA.13
A copy of this posthumous edition would find its way into the personal library of Henry Thoreau. Thoreau would explicitly refer to it twice in his journal and once in his Indian Notebook #9.
13. Does the name “Merriam” ring a dictionary bell for you? “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 83 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Per the definition for the word “sacrament”:
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WALDEN: The customs of some savage nations might, perchance be PEOPLE OF profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of WALDEN the thing, whether they have the reality or not. Would it not be well if we were to celebrate such a “busk,” or “feast of first fruits,” as Bartram describes to have been the custom of the Mucclasse Indians? “When a town celebrates the busk,” says he, “having previously provided themselves with new clothes, new pots, pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collect all their worn out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town, of their filth, which with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they cast together into one common heap, and consume it with fire. After having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in town is extinguished. During this fast they abstain from the gratification of every appetite and passion whatever. A general amnesty is proclaimed; all malefactors may return to their town.–” “On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood together, produces new fire in the public square, from whence every habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame.” They then feast on the new corn and fruits and dance and sing for three days, “and the four following days they receive visits and rejoice with their friends from neighboring towns who have in like manner purified and prepared themselves.” The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end of every fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world to come to an end. I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the dictionary defines it, “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” than this, and I have no doubt that they were originally inspired directly from Heaven to do thus, though they have no biblical record of the revelation.
AUGUSTINE WILLIAM BARTRAM NOAH WEBSTER
1855
February 5, Monday: The Anti-Slavery Society of New York opened its New-York convention.
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February 5. It was quite cold last evening, and I saw the scuttle window reflecting the lamp from a myriad brilliant points when I went up to bed. It sparkled as if we lived inside of a cave, but this morning it has moderated considerably and is snowing. Already one inch of snow has fallen According to Webster, in Welsh a hare is “furze or gorse-cat.” Also, “Chuk, a word used in calling swine. It is the original name of that animal, which our ancestors brought with them from Persia, where it is still in use. Pers. chuk,” etc. “Sans. sugara. Our ancestors while in England adopted the Welsh hwc, hog; but chuck is retained in our popular name of woodchuck, that is, wood hog.” In a journal it is important in a few words to describe the weather, or character of the day, as it affects our feelings. That which was so important at the time cannot be unimportant to remember Day before yesterday the fine snow, blowing over the meadow in parallel streams between which the darker ice was seen, looked just like the steam curling along the surface of a river. In the midst of this, midleg deep at least, you surged along. It was surprising how, in the midst of all this stationary and drifting snow, the skate found a smooth and level surface over which it glided so securely, with a muffled rumble. The ice for the last week has reached quite up into the village, so that you could get on to it just in the rear of the bank and set sail on skates for any part of the Concord River valley Found Therien cutting down the two largest chestnuts in the wood-lot behind where my house was. On the butt of one about two feet in diameter I counted seventy-five rings. T. soon after broke his axe in cutting through a knot in this tree, which he was cutting up for posts. He broke out a piece half an inch deep. This he says often happens. Perhaps there is some frost in his axe. Several choppers have broken their axes to-day.
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1859
January 2, Sunday: Erastus Flavel Beadle’s 72-page THE DIME BOOK OF PRACTICAL ETIQUETTE.
At the Tabernacle of Great Salt Lake City, Utah, Elder Orson Pratt compared the evidences of the BIBLE with those of the BOOK OF MORMON.
W.H. Gurnell wrote to Charles Wesley Slack, to promise that he was going to write to Reverend James Freeman Clarke about meeting in “Theo Parker’s Place” in a few weeks.14 THEODORE PARKER
14. Stimpert, James. A GUIDE TO THE CORRESPONDENCE IN THE CHARLES WESLEY SLACK MANUSCRIPT COLLECTION: 1848-1885. Kent State University, Library, Special Collections “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 87 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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January 2: P.M.–To Cliffs and Walden. Going up the hill through Stow’s young oak woodland, I listen to the sharp, dry rustle of the withered oak leaves. This is the voice of the wood now. It would be comparatively still and more dreary here in other respects, if it were not for these leaves that hold on. It sounds like the roar of the sea, and is enlivening and inspiriting like that, suggesting how all the land is seacoast to the aerial ocean. It is the sound of the surf, the rut of an unseen ocean, billows of air breaking on the forest like water on itself or on sand and rocks. It rises and falls, wells and dies away, with agreeable alternation as the sea surf does. Perhaps the landsman can foretell a storm by it. It is remarkable how universal these grand murmurs are, these backgrounds of sound, –the surf, the wind in the forest, waterfalls, etc.,– which yet to the ear and in their origin are essentially one voice, the earth-voice, the breathing or snoring of the creature. The earth is our ship, and this is the sound of the wind in her rigging as we sail. Just as the inhabitant of Cape Cod hears the surf ever breaking on its shores, so we countrymen hear this kindred surf on the leaves of the forest. Regarded as a voice, –though it is not articulate,– as our articulate sounds are divided into vowels (but this is nearer a consonant sound), labials, dentals, palatals, sibilants, mutes, aspirate, etc., so this may be called folial or frondal, produced by air driven against the leaves, and comes nearest to our sibilants or aspirate. The color of young oaks of different species is still distinct, but more faded and blended, becoming a more uniform brown. Michaux said that white oaks would be distinguished by their retaining their leaves in the winter, but as far as my observation goes they cannot be so distinguished. All our large oaks may retain a. few leaves at the base of the lower limbs and about the trunks, though only a few, and the white oak scarcely more than the others, while the same trees when young are all alike thickly clothed in the winter, but the leaves of the white oaks are the most withered and shrivelled of them all. Why do young oaks retain their leaves while old ones shed them? Why do they die on the stem, having some life at the base in the one case, while they wither through at the base in the other case? Is it because in the former case they have more sap and vigor? There being some snow on the ground, I can easily distinguish the forest on the mountains (the Peterboro Hills, etc.) and tell which are forested, those parts and those mountains being dark like a shadow. I cannot distinguish the forest thus far in the summer. The white pines, etc., as I look down on them from this hill, are now darker, as becomes the sterner season, like a frost-bitten apple, – a sombre green. When I hear the hypercritical quarrelling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs, –Mr. Webster, perhaps, not having spoken according to Mr. Kirkham’s rule,– I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat. The grammarian is often one who can neither cry nor laugh, yet thinks that he can express human emotions. So the posture.masters tell you how you shall walk, –turning your toes out, perhaps, excessively,– but so the beautiful walkers are not made. Mediaeval, or law, Latin seems to have invented the word “forest,” not being satisfied with silva, nemus, etc. Webster makes it from the same root with “L. foris, Fr. hors, and the Saxon faran, to go, to depart.” The allied words “all express distance from cities and civilization, and are from roots expressing departure or wandering,” – as if this newer term were needed to describe those strange, wild woods furthest from the centres of civilization. The earth, where quite bare, is now, and for five or six weeks, russet without any lively red, – not golden-russet. I notice on the top of the Cliffs that the extremities of the smooth sumach are generally dead and withered, while those of the staghorn, which are so downy, are alive. Is this a prevailing difference? Which extends furthest north? The outside bark-scales of some large pitch pines in the midst of the woods having dropped off gives a peculiar flatness to the ridges, as if it had been shaved or scraped. Minott says that a fox will lead a dog on to thin ice in order that he may get in. Tells of Jake Lakin losing a hound DOG so, which went under the ice and was drowned below the Holt; was found afterward by Sted. Buttrick, his collar taken off and given to Lakin. They used to cross the river there on the ice, going to market, formerly. Looking from the southwest side of Walden toward Heywood’s Peak before sunset, the brown light on the oak leaves is almost dazzling.
88 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1860
June 15, Friday: According to urban legend, this was the day of the founding of the 1st town in the Idaho Territory, Franklin. The settlers were 13 families of Mormons who were presuming themselves to be within the territory of a Greater Utah, who named their place “Franklin” in honor of one of the current dozen leaders of their Church, Apostle Franklin D. Richards. Actually, Lemhi, Idaho, site of Fort Lemhi, had been the 1st Mormon settlement in the Idaho Territory and had been in existence since 1855, while Lewiston (named overtly in memory of early passer-by Merriwether Lewis but covertly in honor of the Maine town of Lewiston, origin of one of the settlers), was also already in existence and would become the state capital. In actuality nothing in particular of record happened in this tiny settlement during this day (Brigham Young had visited on June 10th, in between wives, to consecrate Preston Thomas as Bishop over the community, which had been arriving in wagon trains during that spring). So, why do we now have this urban legend, sponsored on the internet, that on this day the 1st town in the Idaho Territory was created, and named Franklin? –Because on March 7, 1911 the Idaho Legislature would belatedly set June 15th apart as “Pioneer Day” and said Legislature would
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 89 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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belatedly decree this to constitute its explanation. –And who are you to say nay to your elected representatives who have determined it to be in the public interest to pin this tale on this Franklin donkey, may I enquire?
Anyway, present-day Franklin, although close, is not exactly on the site of this 1860 Franklin.
Joseph Emerson Worcester having issued his A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, George P. Marsh
compared this with the latest dictionary issued by the Webster empire, for the New-York WORLD, finding Noah Webster to be by contrast “unscholarly and unsound.” Worcester eventually would come to have the support of Thomas Carlyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horace Mann, Sr., Daniel Webster, and The Atlantic Monthly.
90 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2012. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: December 8, 2012
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 91 HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: NOAH WEBSTER PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button. 92 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 93