Founding Grammars (13 page)

Crockett began his political career in 1821 with a run for the state legislature. In his autobiography, he explains his inexperience with electioneering by saying, “I knowed no more about [it] than I did about Latin, and law, and such things as that.… I had never read even a newspaper in my life, or anything else, on the subject [of politics].”
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He realized early in the campaign that formal speeches were not his strength. Instead he charmed the voters at campaign rallies by telling humorous anecdotes. In contrast to the other candidates, who bored the crowd with lengthy speeches, he shared amusing stories and occasionally shared a “horn” of liquor with them.

Crockett served two terms in the state legislature. Then in 1827 he won election to the House of Representatives. He describes his method of canvassing, wearing a buckskin hunting shirt with two large pockets. In one pocket he carried a good twist of tobacco, in the other a bottle of whiskey. As he chatted with voters, he would offer them a slug from the bottle. They had to remove their “chaw” of tobacco to take it, so he would offer them a fresh one off his twist. This down-home approach, along with his tales from the canebrake, won him the majority of the votes, with no necessity for polished oratory or elegant grammar.

Near the end of his time in Congress, Crockett decided to counteract the outlandish tales circulating about him—as well as further his political career and explain his break with Jackson—by writing the true story of his life. His book appeared in 1834 with the title
A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee.
The first few printings quickly sold out. The
Narrative
is written in the folk vernacular of rural Tennessee and includes plenty of country words and phrases—
varmint, frolic, I reckon, a mighty ticklish business, root hog or die.
Nonstandard grammar also turns up from time to time—
I know'd what I come for
—and occasional misspellings—
Christmass.
For the most part, the spelling and grammar is conventional.

Crockett addresses this issue in his preface with seeming frankness. “I would not be such a fool,” he tells readers, “or knave either, as to deny that I have had it hastily run over by a friend or so, and that some little alterations have been made in the spelling and grammar.” Nonetheless, he insists, every “sentence and sentiment” is his own. Furthermore, he tells readers, he has instructed his editors to leave many of the original spellings and grammatical structures in place because they sound better to him than artificial correctness. He sums up his views by saying, “I despise this way of spelling contrary to nature. And as for grammar, it's pretty much a thing of nothing at last, after all the fuss that's made about it.”
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*   *   *

This casual dismissal of grammar by an admired national figure might suggest that the importance of grammar was on the wane in the 1820s. American voters—a larger number of people than ever before—had elected Andrew Jackson to the White House, in spite of his admittedly wobbly command of grammar and spelling. They had made a folk hero out of David Crockett, a man with even less schooling and an apparent contempt for the language arts. Americans seemed to have arrived at a moment when they could appreciate more natural American speech.

The Jacksonian era was potentially ripe for an embrace of common usages like Noah Webster's
you was
and
It's me.
Americans might even have been inspired to adopt his simplified spellings or to abandon spelling standards entirely. Their enjoyment of Crockett's evocative regionalisms and respect for Andrew Jackson's plain talk might easily have led them to a new acceptance of everyday American speech patterns. These men's success seemed to argue that language training was an unnecessary frill. Qualities such as common sense and an independent spirit were more crucial.

Yet the rejection of standardized grammar rules never happened. Instead the art of speaking and writing with propriety—the textbook definition of grammar—remained a powerful ideal goal. As a
North American Review
writer put it in an 1826 essay on the state of education, “Popular custom requires this study to be pursued.… There is a mystery hanging about it, to the eyes of most parents … but there is a vague and indefinable impression on their minds that grammar is something very important, and indeed, essential.”
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Grammar books had been selling extremely well since the first years of the nineteenth century. Half a dozen or more new textbooks were released in a typical year. After 1800, increasing numbers of public schools included the study of English grammar in their curriculum. From being an advanced subject before the Revolution—off limits to all but boys being privately educated—grammar took its place among the educational basics. In 1819 Princeton became the first college to demand a knowledge of grammar as an entrance requirement. Other colleges followed suit.

Part of the reason for grammar's increasing popularity is that Americans saw it as more practical than the study of Latin and Greek grammar, yet it carried some of the same mystique. While the classics were essential only to those training for top-flight careers, learning how to express yourself eloquently in your own native tongue was valuable to almost everyone. As with Latin and Greek, the study of English grammar was seen as excellent mental training. Besides giving students a fundamental grounding in elegant speech habits, it was meant to discipline their minds and prepare them for more advanced subjects like rhetoric and philosophy.

This reverent attitude was reflected in the way grammar books presented their topic. Authors often described the purpose of grammar studies in moral, aesthetic, or even spiritual terms. The most popular grammar books of the day adopted this tone. In the address to young learners that introduces Samuel Kirkham's 1825
English Grammar in Familiar Lectures,
Kirkham tells his pupils, “This is not only a pleasing study, but one of real and substantial utility; a study that directly tends to adorn and dignify human nature.” Kirkham sees grammar as the foundation for all further study. It “opens the door to every department of learning,” and at the same time, “cannot fail of being serviceable” even to those “destined to pass through the humblest walks of life.” It is valuable in “every situation, under all circumstances, on all occasions.”
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Goold Brown, in his 1823
Institutes of English Grammar,
places the virtues of grammar even higher. He tells readers, “The grammatical use of language is in sweet alliance with the moral.” It “forms the mind to habits of correct thinking.” He considers parsing the most important of all the school exercises because it trains students to unite grammatical correctness with fluency, a skill they can carry with them into ordinary life.
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Americans had a patriotic rationale for acquiring a good education. People at every social level were aware of themselves as embarking on a novel and potentially dangerous political experiment. A government that represented all the people, one that allowed men from lowly backgrounds to rise as far as the presidency, wouldn't work unless citizens were prepared to make informed and rational choices. For that, they needed to be educated. Female education also started to matter more. Women couldn't vote or run for office, but they were responsible for raising sons who could. As the century progressed, a complete education increasingly encompassed grammar, composition, and rhetoric in addition to reading and penmanship.

Grammar books were the self-help manuals of their time. Ambitious adults who had missed their chance at formal lessons studied on their own, hoping to raise themselves to a higher economic and social level. Grammar books, spellers, and readers were easy places to start. They were readily available even outside the cities. Print shops and general stores sold them and traveling peddlers carried them into remote areas. The multitude of editions ensured that there were always plenty of secondhand copies around. Grammar book writers expected many of their books' users to be adults. The subtitle of Lindley Murray's grammar book is “
Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners,
” and Kirkham and Brown both mention “private learners” on their title pages. For this reason, many authors provided answer keys.

Men such as David Crockett seem to be exceptions to these trends. Crockett was not as impervious to grammar, however, as he first appears. The “friend or so” that he mentions in his introduction was Thomas Chilton, a congressional representative from Kentucky. Crockett admits that Chilton “ran over” his book looking for grammar and spelling errors. In reality, the congressman did much more. He essentially acted as a ghostwriter. Not only did he collaborate closely on Crockett's autobiography—perhaps writing it to Crockett's dictation—he routinely helped him with letters, circulars, speeches, and other official utterances.

Crockett's unedited letters are filled with misspellings and grammar mistakes. In a letter describing his intention to tell his own life story, he writes, “I am ingaged in prepareing a worke that may be of little prophit to me but I consider that justice demands of me to make a statement of facts.… no doubt but you have saw a book purporting to be the life and adventers of my self that book was written without my knowledge … and in fact the person that took the first liberty to write the book have published a second addition.”
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Crockett's natural writing style is a far cry from the carefully placed regionalisms and occasional slight misspellings of his autobiography. Crockett's audience was delighted with the book's colorful frontier idiom, but they would not have wanted to read page after page of real spelling and grammar mistakes.

Crockett was canny enough to realize this. The
Narrative
gives readers a taste of the Tennessee backwoods, but a smoother version than the raw natural product. The book's language aims for a version of Crockett's authentic speech that educated people would find acceptable. Even folk heroes had to meet certain linguistic standards—at least if they wanted to be taken seriously as writers and political figures.

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One strand of American culture celebrated uniquely American dialects, but a more dominant strand embraced grammar standards as an important part of being educated and socially mobile. Andrew Jackson and David Crockett were popular figures. Nonetheless, Jackson's linguistic weaknesses were subject to scathing criticism, and Crockett felt the need to tidy up his natural speech before publication. In spite of superficial appearances, early nineteenth-century Americans valued proper grammar.

The significance of grammar training is also obvious from the fact that not everyone had equal access to it. Until the Revolution, females were one deprived group. During most of the eighteenth century, education for girls was spotty at best. They were not always allowed to attend school. When they did, they were taught separately from boys and limited to brief classes at the beginning or end of the day. Most girls, even those from the upper classes, learned only basic reading and writing.

Outside the upper classes, a majority of women remained illiterate. Others learned to read, but not to write. Women didn't need to write as much as men did—they didn't write business letters or keep records. Reading was a more practical skill. It allowed women to read the Bible, or read aloud to their children. (Many lower-class men were also illiterate, but the numbers were not nearly as large as for women. Families of every class often included a literate husband and an illiterate, or a semi-literate, wife.)
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Grammar studies were out of reach for all except those rare privileged girls who received a masculine private education. One such was Aaron Burr's daughter, Theodosia. Burr's commitment to equal education for girls meant that his daughter learned Latin and Greek, as well as English grammar and composition, at an early age, but his idea of what constituted a suitable female education was very much in the minority. While Burr was away from home in the 1790s as a senator from New York, he wrote almost daily letters to Theodosia. He advised her on what to study next and critiqued the spelling, grammar, and style of her letters to him. His letter of January 8, 1794, instructs his eleven-year-old daughter, “Learn the difference between
then
and
than.
You will soonest perceive it by translating them into Latin.”
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By the turn of the nineteenth century, young women's prospects for learning grammar had improved. Nearly two hundred female-only institutions sprang up between 1790 and 1830.
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These new schools usually offered a greater range of subjects than they would have earlier. Traditionally, daughters of the upper classes who attended private academies had been taught literacy and simple arithmetic, but spent much of their day learning genteel accomplishments such as music, dancing, drawing, and needlework. The new schools added more serious subjects, including classical and modern languages, rhetoric, and English grammar.

The belief that girls should learn grammar was still a novelty in 1782, the year that Noah Webster started his school in Sharon, Connecticut. Webster mentioned the issue specifically in the newspaper advertisement announcing the school's opening. The ad deplores “the little regard that is paid to the literary improvement of females, even among people of rank and fortune,” and promises that Webster's school will give full attention to the education of young ladies as well as gentlemen.
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At around the same time as Webster was starting his school, Caleb Bingham, a teacher in a Boston girls' school, brought out
The Young Lady's Accidence.
(
Accidence
is a term for a beginning-level grammar book.) Bingham's book was “designed principally for the use of young learners, more especially those of the fair sex, though proper for either.”
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The author was evidently thinking of his own pupils, but he must have recognized a growing niche market as well when he specified that his grammar book was mainly for girls.