The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster Read Online Free Page B

hallmark features of his adult personality are already in evidence—the arrogance, the obsequiousness and the hypersensitivity to perceived slights. Addressed to “Mr. Printer,” the letter starts off like a legal brief: “After I have stated my case to you truly, I may then hope thro’ your means for a redress of my grievance; the which if I obtain, will oblige several of your young friends as well as myself.” Throughout his sixty-year literary career, Webster would look to his reader as a vital ally, who could both provide the empathy that he had never received at home and help him right what was wrong with the world. To convince the printer of his worthiness as an object of concern, Noah spends the first third of the letter boasting of his accomplishments. The boy touts his “natural good genius” and his “considerable degree of knowledge in the art of music.” He then goes on to list the “advantages . . . flowing from this pleasant art,” which include a “dutiful obedience to our parents” and “good manners.” Finally, in his coda, he highlights the various injustices that have been heaped upon him and his fellow musicians. “But alas! There are but few comparatively,” he concludes, “that openly encourage us. Some only deride us, and others are so silent or passive, as that we are greatly at a loss whether we please or displease the greater part, since the opposition we meet with from the envious and ill-natured cannot have passed unobserved, and yet no means have been used to prevent the growing mischief.” Webster’s complaint of both cold indifference and malevolence in his fellow churchgoers seems a bit far-fetched. Apparently, the boy was avidly seeking praise for his musical efforts and was crestfallen when it was nowhere to be found. Throughout his life, Webster’s mercurial temperament would frequently leave him feeling like an aggrieved outsider. This persistent sense of outrage, which often had its roots merely in the battle going on inside his own head, would spark an equally persistent desire to be heard.
     
     
    A LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR LATER, on Wednesday, October 14, 1772, Noah, then just two days shy of fourteen, headed down Main Street with his family to attend a special service at the Fourth Church of Christ. It was a day of fasting and humiliation, then a common occurrence in Puritan New England, particularly on momentous occasions when God’s aid was sought. The twenty-four-year-old Nathan Perkins was to be ordained as the new pastor, just the third in the church’s sixty-year history. The West Division had gone without a full-time minister since the untimely death of the much beloved Nathaniel Hooker, Jr., two and a half years earlier. (The great-great-grandson of Connecticut’s founder and the man who had baptized Noah, Hooker was just thirty-two when he died.) After auditioning sixteen local candidates and engaging in a fierce debate that caused deep divisions among the typically united townsfolk, the Ecclesiastical Society had finally issued an invitation to Perkins, an outsider, who had recently graduated from the College of New Jersey (today Princeton University). While the First Church of Hartford had offered nearly twice as much as the seventy pounds in base pay, Perkins, who came from a family of wealthy landowners, was convinced that the “good farms of West Hartford would be a better security . . . than the trade of Hartford town.”
    The short and stocky Perkins had already made a highly favorable impression with his thoughtful sermons, delivered entirely from memory, which he had been preaching as pastor-elect since the first Sabbath of the year. Perkins’ theological views were strongly influenced by Jonathan Edwards, the Connecticut cleric who had ushered in the Great Awakening, a period of religious revival that lasted from 1730 to 1760. Edwards had combined a harsh Calvinism, which emphasized the depravity of human beings, with a belief in the need