not a literary figure but a language reformer—and not even the most innovative one of his time. For the modal logic at which Webster arrived is the linguistic analogue of the concept of literary style. In each case, something borrowed is said to have been rearticulated as something new. Webster’s technical solution to the problem of American English—though we might do better to call it “American-style English,” by analogy with American-style democracy or Soviet-style socialism—thus put into circulation a set of critical concepts about the nature of transatlantic emulation-cum-innovation that literary producers would need to describe their own sense of the relationship between English literary culture and its American imitations.
* * *
Because Webster called so powerfully for “the Americans” to manufacture linguistic distance from “their parent country,”7 he has long been a symbol of the so-called cultural declaration of independence supposed to have begun around the end of the eighteenth century.8 One quotation from his 1783 letter to John Canfield, for example, has become ubiquitous in scholarly and popular writing about the period: “America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms.”9 As for his linguistic works of the late 1780s—most notably Dissertations on the English Language along with its oft-quoted appendix, “An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages, and Practicality of Reforming the Mode of Spelling”—they, too, are easily mined for such stirring cultural-nationalist declarations.10 Webster has thus become a poster boy for the brand of nationalism associated with what I have called the “Anglophobia thesis” in historiography, with all of its oedipal undertones. After all, was not his cry for the “separation of the American tongue from the English” just such a revolt against paternal law at the level of language itself? Did not his system of spelling add up to a declaration of “orthographic independence” (as Jill Lepore calls it)?11 David Simpson, having some fun with this same revolutionary analogy, quips that “it was to prove more difficult to declare independence from Samuel Johnson than it had been to reject George III.”12 Yet we must guard against the presumption, however playfully expressed in these cases, that linguistic “independence” was ever Webster’s goal to begin with.
To be sure, Webster’s linguistic project was entirely of its political and cultural time and place. The 1780s was the decade in which “American English” first emerged as a cultural question that demanded some accounting and theorization.13 In 1781, the Scottish American educator John Witherspoon first coined the term “Americanism”—by analogy to the existing term “Scotticism”—to refer to the linguistic departures from the British standard that were starting to proliferate in North America.14 In 1782, Robert Ross produced an American Grammar, followed in 1785 by his New American Spelling Book.15 The timing of all this is surely no coincidence. The ongoing military conflict with Britain at the turn of the decade had lent the matter of American English cultural and political charge; after the formal declaration of peace in 1783 it came to seem even more urgent; and the question was simply unavoidable after the establishment of the federal government of the United States in 1787. In 1788, Benjamin Rush laid out a “Plan for a Federal University” in which he emphasized the central importance of “philology” as a subject for the new nation: “our intercourse must soon cease with the bar, the stage, and the pulpits of Great-Britain, from whence we received our knowledge of the pronunciation of the English language. Even modern English books should cease to be the models of stile in the United States.”16 That same year, the Philological Society of New York was formed “for the purpose of ascertaining and improving the American Tongue.”17 From the federal to the local, then, this question seemed to be everywhere at the end of the 1780s. Webster’s own work was thus perfectly suited to, and clearly shaped by, this milieu. In 1787, Webster tellingly renamed part one of his earlier Grammatical Institute of the English Language from its former title, An Accurate Standard of Pronunciation (as he had called it in 1783), to the American Spelling Book, thus rebranding it along the lines of the nationalist spellers of Ross and others.18 And while (as I will emphasize in this chapter) his proposed linguistic reforms were guided by a coherent linguistic philosophy, at times his rhetoric suggested that it was merely the production of “difference”—perhaps any difference at all—that was paramount: “As a nation, we have a very great interest in opposing the introduction of any plan of uniformity with the British language, even were the plan proposed perfectly unexceptionable.”19
What else would we want to call this, then, if not a linguistic declaration of independence? It is an understandable temptation, but as I shall insist in the pages that follow, a more careful consideration of Webster’s plan, its fuller contemporary context, and its historical predecessors tells a rather different story. Certainly his writing is full of highly quotable nationalist slogans, but the arguments in which these declarations are embedded are far less Anglophobic and far more deferential to transatlantic cultural authority than is commonly acknowledged. The trick is not to mistake slogans for theses. Particularly in the 1780s, the young Webster was not at all shy about cranking up the rhetorical winch when he wanted a point to hold maximum tension. Rhetorical bravado aside, however, Webster’s project for linguistic reform was ultimately animated not by static nationalist oppositions but by a deeply dialectical understanding of transatlantic cultural relations, the balance between tradition and innovation, and the interplay of cultural adoption and adaptation. Webster’s invectives against “our rage for imitating the errors of foreigners,”20 for example, may appear to be motivated by a revolutionary animus against British models as a bar to national originality—and it may even be fair to say that Webster himself was invoking and manipulating that animus for rhetorical purposes—but as I will demonstrate, he understood transatlantic emulation as such to be a neutral and inevitable fact of American life. Anglo-Americans simply needed to ensure that they imitated the proper models, and imitated those models properly. Once we begin to take account of these complexities, Webster’s linguistic project begins to look less like post-Revolutionary cultural nationalism par excellence and more like a layering of post-Revolutionary rhetoric atop a much older problem of standardizing English spelling. By returning Webster’s argument to the context of transatlantic debates about language and grammar in the second half of the eighteenth century, and by reconnecting that modern debate to a much older British conversation about the English language stretching back to the Renaissance, this chapter views Webster’s linguistic nationalism against a richer and more multidimensional background, and by doing so recovers some of its lost nuances.
To begin with, while Webster may have been the most important of the American language reformers, he was by no means the most radical. This much-vaunted linguistic pioneer was in fact rather conservative in his approach to the question of what American language could look like. What first bears remarking upon is a fact so obvious it may almost be neglected: Webster determined that, in order to form a distinctly “American” language, he would have to begin with English in the first place. Though, to be more precise about it, Webster didn’t really make the case for American English so much as he made the case appear to make itself: English, he tells us early in Dissertations, was “the inheritance which the Americans have received from their British parents.”21 Webster thus treated it as a foregone conclusion that “English is the common root or stock from which our national language will be derived.”22 Yet by referencing, with equal matter-of-factness, the “predilection the Americans may have for their native European tongues,”23 he also acknowledged the fact that “the Americans” in 1789 were a polyglot population with multiple national origins. I will have more to say later about this cultural situation and what Webster did to address it. For the moment, my point is simply that it was not inconceivable to him that the national language might end up being built on a basis other than English; it was just highly undesirable.
This is the side of the story that Leonard Tennenhouse will not allow us to forget in his discussion of the post-Revolutionary language debates in The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850.24 Anglo-American language reformers like Webster were not attempting to
