Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

  On the other hand, Jackson made no pretense of being scholarly. He didn’t read for pleasure and was apparently unfamiliar with the classics in spite of having studied Latin. As president, he admitted to one of his aides that anyone going through his private papers would find examples of “false grammar and bad spelling.”5 Although he could be a powerful and eloquent speaker, his style tended toward the folksy rather than the elevated.

  Washington Globe editor Francis P. Blair, a member of Jackson’s informal “Kitchen Cabinet,” remarked, “He was not … what is commonly termed an orator. But he was a fluent, forceful, and convincing speaker.… When perfectly calm or not roused by anything that appealed to his feelings … he spoke slowly, carefully, and in well-selected phrase. But when excited or angry, he would pour forth a torrent of rugged sentences more remarkable for their intent to beat down opposition than for their strict attention to the rules of rhetoric—or even syntax.”6

  Jackson’s grammatical and compositional skills, or lack of them, were beside the point. His ability to sway his audience and “beat down opposition” was what counted. The adoring crowds that had clamored to touch the new president weren’t interested in Jackson’s spelling capabilities or grammar. They had voted for him because he was a man of action from an ordinary background like themselves. They preferred him over an elitist rhetoric professor. As Duff Green, editor of the United States Telegraph, put it: “To argue against the presumption of General Jackson’s fitness for the Presidency because he cannot spell is absurd. We care not if he spell Congress with a K. He may … understand the rights and duties of that body, or of the people, or himself, as well as if he spelled it correctly.”7

  After the inauguration, Jackson’s supporters followed him as he rode on horseback to the White House to host a reception. Here the crowd turned into a mob. They swarmed into the building in a suffocating mass, shoving to get at the tubs of orange punch and other lavish refreshments. Eager to get a glimpse of Jackson, they climbed onto delicate damask-covered chairs in their muddy boots. A horrified Justice Story later described the event in a letter to his wife: “The president was visited by immense crowds of all sorts of people, from the highest and most polished, down to the most vulgar and gross in the nation. I never saw such a mixture. The reign of King Mob seemed triumphant. I was glad to escape from the scene as soon as possible.”8

  President Jackson also escaped eventually by climbing out a side window. He spent the remainder of the evening at a nearby hotel while the partiers continued their celebration. The public rooms of the White House were soon a welter of broken glass, stained carpets, and smashed furniture. Only when waiters carried the tubs of punch out onto the White House lawn did the crowd begin to disperse.

  * * *

  Although Justice Story and other traditionalists were horrified that a man like Andrew Jackson could be elected, many Americans admired the rough pioneer virtues that he embodied. They respected his war record and saw him as a champion of average Americans, especially fellow frontier residents. That these virtues came along with a lack of sophistication and verbal polish didn’t worry them.

  This attitude was the countervailing force against the widespread notion that the first step on the road to success was a good education. Jackson’s fellow Tennesseean David Crockett expressed the feelings of many Jacksonians in the preface to his autobiography. Addressing potential critics of his book’s homespun writing style, he tells them, “I can only say … that while critics were learning grammar, and learning to spell, I and ‘Doctor Jackson, L.L.D.’ were fighting in the wars.… Big men have more important matters to attend to than crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s.”9

  David Crockett himself is the archetypal simple backwoodsman who rose to prominence without the aid of formal schooling. Although poor and barely educated, he was elected to Congress three times. Once there his forthright personality and colorful brand of western “tall talk” captured the imagination of the American public, especially easterners who viewed the Tennessee frontier as exotic territory. He was known as “the gentleman from the cane,” a reference to the stands of canebrake that still covered some western wilderness areas.

  Crockett lore proliferated. Popular writers dubbed him “Davy Crockett” and spun his persona into an outsize American character. His motto—“Be always sure you’re right, then go ahead”—became famous. By the time the real Crockett died gloriously at the Alamo at the age of forty-nine, he was a national icon.

  Crockett’s life inspired a genre—exaggerated tales of the intrepid men who settled west of the Appalachians. Among the Crockett-inspired writings were fake biographies, a play, and several issues of Davy Crockett’s Almanack. The Almanack provided instructions on frontier skills—how to hunt wild hogs, the basics of rifle care—and sensationally titled anecdotes told in “Davy’s” voice (although not really written by Crockett). Typically they relate remarkable deeds in boisterous, backwoodsy language. One volume includes the stories “A Tongariferous Fight with an Alligator” and “A Corn Cracker’s Account of his Encounter with an Eelskin [Yankee peddler].”

  In 1830, shortly after Crockett’s first congressional term, James K. Paulding wrote a play called The Lion of the West, modeling his hero, the Kentuckian Nimrod Wildfire, on the mythical version of Davy Crockett. The Lion of the West was hugely popular. The play introduced eastern audiences—and later Londoners—to the western tall-talk tradition of extravagant boasts and fanciful word inventions. In a letter to his aunt and uncle that announces his pending visit, Nimrod writes, “And let all the fellers in New York know—I’m half horse, half alligator, a touch of the airth-quake, with a sprinkling of the steamboat!” Later he boasts to a new acquaintance, “Of all the fellers on this side the Alleghany mountains [sic], I can jump higher—squat lower—dive deeper—stay longer under and come out drier!… I’ve got the prettiest sister, fastest horse, and ugliest dog in the deestrict.”10

  A cobbled-together variant of Nimrod’s speeches appeared in a fictional biography titled Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett of West Tennessee and has sometimes been attributed to Crockett himself. According to this story, a drunken stranger staggers up to Crockett in a tavern and cries, “Hurrah for Adams.” When Crockett indicates that he’s a Jackson man, the stranger asks, “Who are you?” The great man replies, “I’m that same Davy Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon a streak of lightning, and slip without a scratch down a honey locust.”11

  Nimrod Wildfire and his like were partial to overblown words and expressions. They were responsible for such verbal concoctions as rumbunctious (hot tempered), lickspittle (a bootlicker), exflunctify (wear out), and conbobberation (commotion), and phrases like kick the bucket, see how the cat jumps, and knee high to a frog. Although it’s likely that some were created especially for a particular story, others were genuine westernisms. David Crockett helped popularize several regional expressions including bark up the wrong tree and go the whole hog.

  Lindley Murray and other grammarians would no doubt have classified these fantastic figures of speech as low expressions, but American audiences loved them. Many entered the permanent vocabulary. Grammarians would also have frowned on nonstandard forms like knowed for knew that typified “stage western” speech. To millions of readers and playgoers, these linguistic quirks were a big part of what made tall tales so entertaining.

  David Crockett’s real life was less spectacular than his legend, but still remarkable. He was born in 1786 in rural Tennessee. The family was extremely poor and David (as he always called himself) had to scramble for a living from a very early age. He remarks in his autobiography that his father had neither the means nor the opportunity to give his children any “learning.” Like other poor children of the time, they were put to work as soon as possible. He recounts how his father hired him out when he was twelve to accompany an old Dutchm
an who was driving his cattle from Tennessee to Virginia. After traveling four hundred miles with his employer, young David made his way back home on his own. Although it was winter, much of his return trip was on foot.

  Not until after this adventure was he finally sent to the local school. His school days didn’t last long. Within the first week he got into a fight with an older boy, waylaid him after classes, and beat him up. Fearful that the teacher would punish him for fighting, he then stayed away from the schoolhouse. When his father discovered his truancy and threatened to beat him if he didn’t return to school, David ran away from home.

  He spent the next two years on the road, picking up casual work wherever he could. He only returned to his family after deciding that enough time had passed to soften his father’s wrath. Crockett concludes his story, “But it will be a source of astonishment to many who reflect that I am now a member of the American Congress … that at so advanced an age, the age of fifteen, I did not know the first letter in the book.”12 He later attended school briefly to learn basic reading and arithmetic skills, but his formal education totaled less than a year.

  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].”13 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.”14

  * * *

  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.”15

  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.”16

  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.17

  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.”18