Read Online The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster by Joshua C. Kendall - Free Book Online Page B

from across the Hudson. With Burgoyne defeated, Clinton decided to sail back to New York City. To distract the enemy, he assigned Major General John Vaughan and his seventeen hundred troops the task of burning down Kingston. Calling the capital “a nursery for almost every villain in the country,” Vaughan torched nearly all three hundred of its homes on October 16. This humiliating defeat turned Kingston into an ash heap. (New York would soon have to move its capital fifty miles further north to Albany.) As the British fleet retreated, Colonel Wyllys’ regiment exchanged fire with a British sloop. The shots whisked right past the ears of Webster and his comrades, then beginning their march toward Albany.
    That next day, Friday, October 17, would mark a watershed in the brief history of the new nation. As one Saratoga-based Connecticut soldier recorded in his journal, “The hand of providence worked wonderfully in favour of America this day . . . . At three o’clock [Burgoyne and his army] marches through our army . . . with a guard for Boston.” Within a few hours, Webster received word. He later recalled, “Before the regiment reached Albany, it was met by an express upon a full gallup brandishing a drawn sword exclaiming as he passed the regiment, ‘Burgoyne is taken, Burgoyne is taken!’ ” With “the chief cut-throat” subdued, the militiamen were no longer needed, and Webster returned home. America’s first major victory would soon convince France to join the fight against the British. Keenly aware that his brief tour of duty had helped to turn the tide of the war, the adult Webster would be moved to tears whenever he reminisced about the courier’s shouts. On his list of the forty most “remarkable events” in America’s history, which he appended to the back of his speller, Webster would include both the Battle at Bemis Heights and Burgoyne’s surrender.
     
     
    AT THREE THIRTY ON THE AFTERNOON of Thursday, July 23, 1778, the College Chapel bell tolled. This was the signal that Ezra Stiles had been waiting for. Yale’s new president was now ready to convene the Presentation Day (today Class Day) exercises for the graduating seniors.
    That morning, Webster and the rest of the class of 1778 had all passed two sets of public examinations. First came a grilling in Latin and Greek; and then, after a recess of half an hour, came a barrage of questions about the sciences. Those were the final requirements for the bachelor’s degree and the honorific “Sir” that went with it. All that now stood between Webster and his Yale diploma was the cliosophic (on the arts and sciences) oration that he was slated to deliver that afternoon.
    After being closed all spring, Yale had reopened on June 23, with Stiles at the helm. Back in March, Stiles had accepted the Yale Corporation’s offer of a hundred sixty pounds—only forty of which were to be paid in cash; the rest were to come in the form of corn, pork and wheat—for his services, but the imminent threat of capture by the British had delayed his relocation to New Haven for three months. With Buckminster in Portsmouth where he had replaced Stiles as pastor, the new president personally supervised the instruction of the seniors. As with Buckminster, who considered Stiles “an honor to mankind,” Webster and his classmates took an immediate liking to the eminent biblical scholar, who impressed them with both his vitality and his command of Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic. On June 30, the seniors engaged in their first forensic disputation under Stiles, discussing the question of whether “learning increaseth happiness.” So much did they enjoy his tutelage that the next day they asked Stiles to double their dose to two disputations a day until graduation.
    Focusing his penetrating dark gray eyes on the seniors and guests gathered in the chapel auditorium, the short and compact Stiles began in his mild yet energetic voice, “ Ut nostra cura Gradibus academis