The Story of Noah Webster

Noah Webster stood in a schoolhouse in Goshen, New York, in 1782, listening to his students recite from Thomas Dilworth’s A New Guide to the English Tongue. The primer, which was first published in England in 1740, had become the standard schoolbook on both sides of the Atlantic. It educated generations of children to read and, in many American classrooms, guided the curriculum itself.

Noah had been observing the lessons with growing dissatisfaction. The book did have its benefits: it was inexpensive and readily available, and it imposed a kind of order on reading instruction at a time when spelling was taught more by habit and memory than by consistent rules. Children often learned lists of words to repeat and copy rather than patterns to understand. Still, that method felt deeply flawed to Noah. He later wrote that Dilworth’s book was “totally defective or erroneous,” likening it to “a scarecrow that so frightens children when they are young, that they are afraid of grammars all their lives.”

But even more troubling to Noah was that the book was thoroughly British in its language and values. This, while America was amidst a fight for independence from Britain in the Revolution.

The war effort, though, was beginning to come to a close. General Cornwallis surrendered in Yorktown the year prior, and the British public was tired of war. While the peace treaty that would officially grant the Colonies what they fought for had not yet been signed, momentum was moving in that direction. Nation-building lay ahead for the colonists. And yet, here were American children still spelling words the British way.

The reason this latter part bothered Noah so deeply was that he believed cultural independence was needed alongside the military victory. He felt that a nation required an identity, and one of its roots was in language, notably in how children learned to read, what they read, and how they understood the world through words and their spelling.

Some accused Noah of acting out of pride. Never one to resist saying exactly what was on his mind, he replied, “I have too much pride not to wish to see America assume a national character.”

He set out to write a spelling book.

---

Noah’s book was published in 1783. He called it “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, Part I.” Few would use that name. Most simply referred to it as the Blue-Backed Speller, after its distinctive cover.

Now Noah needed to sell it. He loaded copies into his saddlebags and began traveling. Town to town, school to school, making his pitch that America needed American textbooks. Some schoolmasters listened and agreed to try the new book. Others were less receptive. To many, he was a nuisance. Some even called him an “incurable lunatic.”

Noah understood why people thought this. He was not known for being likable, and had long ago made peace with that fact. “I am not formed for society,” he would admit, preferring “the reflections of my own mind.” But he was stubborn, strong-willed, and insistent, and remained determined in his belief that language was an essential part of binding a nation together — if Americans spoke and spelled the same way and learned from the same books, then perhaps they could become the set of united states they claimed to be. The young republic had largely secured its independence on the battlefield now. Noah wanted to win it in the classroom.

His persistence came to fruition. Orders for the Blue-Backed Speller began coming in en masse. He had produced something people wanted, or at least accepted as a result of his insistence. But success brought a new ordeal: Noah wasn’t making money from many of the sales.

---

As the Blue-Backed Speller became popular, other printers started reprinting it without permission and without paying Noah a cent. America had no federal copyright law. Despite a few states having passed their own copyright statutes, they were weak and rarely enforced across state lines.