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

of College Street—was the square that contained the Yale campus. New Haven made quite an impression upon most visitors. Passing through a month earlier en route to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, John Adams called it “very pleasant.” A lover of symmetry, Webster would go even further in his praise, later describing New Haven as “beautiful” because, along with Philadelphia, it was one of “the regularly built towns in America.” This would be the first of many trips that father and son would take between what were then Connecticut’s co-capitals. When traveling together, one would ride on the family horse, the other would walk. With the hardy Noah Webster, Sr., often feeling that he was more fit to go on foot, the incoming freshman may well have been the one who parked the horse at the Yale president’s mansion, located on the edge of campus across from the surrounding farms.
    Callow farmboy goes off to college to get educated: Noah Webster’s coming-of-age journey was then the stuff of popular literature. Like Webster, “Tom Brainless,” the adolescent protagonist of the satiric poem “The Progress of Dulness,” written in 1772 by John Trumbull (at the time a Yale tutor), also exchanges grueling farmwork for books:
    The point’s agreed; the boy well pleased,
From country care and labor eased;
No more to rise by break of day
To drive home cows or deal out hay;
To work no more in snow or hail
And blow his fingers o’er the flail
Or mid the toils of harvest sweat
Beneath the summer’s sultry heat
Serene, he bids the farm, good-bye,
And quits the farm without a sigh.
    In his spoof of Yale, Trumbull, who would also serve as Yale’s treasurer during Webster’s undergraduate career, made fun of the college’s bland curriculum, which had traditionally pivoted around biblical studies. Founded in 1701 for the “upholding and propagating of the Christian Protestant religion,” Yale—called the Collegiate School until 1718—was originally designed to train its students for positions in local Congregational churches. Partly as a result of Trumbull’s spate of satirical poems and essays in the early 1770s, the college was more lively by the beginning of Webster’s freshman year. Believing that Yale students were “condemn’d each day to study, read, recite and pray,” Trumbull had insisted on reducing the emphasis on Latin and Greek and adding English literature and composition to the mix. Trumbull’s reform efforts quickly made their mark. Of the forty students in Webster’s class of 1778, only four would go into the ministry, as law suddenly emerged as the profession of choice. When editing a literary magazine a decade later, Webster would pay homage to Trumbull by reprinting several of his poems, including this mock-epic that recounted the “rare adventures” of the Yale country bumpkin.
    Though New Haven was up and coming—in 1763, a new state house had been added to the Green, which already featured two churches—Yale was in the sorriest state of any of the nine colleges then sprinkled across the thirteen colonies. The students referred to its treeless campus as a “Brick Prison” because it featured just three run-down buildings. The Old College, constructed back in 1717 when Yale first moved to New Haven from Old Saybrook, once aspired to grandeur, but this sky-blue, three-story structure, crowned by a cupola, was teetering. (In 1782, it would be demolished; Bingham Hall now occupies this site). The main dormitory was the nearby New College—later renamed Connecticut Hall, this Yale landmark, dating back to 1750, still stands—but it offered few amenities. During the winter, Webster and his fellow Yale men would have to spend their Saturday afternoons chopping wood to keep their dorm rooms warm. Just to the south stood the small chapel—the first on an American college campus—dwarfed by its 125-foot-high steeple, an addition contributed by the citizens of New Haven. This