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accumulated a large amount of interesting and valuable material, especially in the field of pronunciation. Much of it he utilized in his “Dissertations on the English Language,” published at Boston in 1789.
    In the opening essay of this work he put himself squarely behind Adams. He foresaw that the new Republic would quickly outstrip England in population, and that virtually all its people would speak English. He proposed therefore that an American standard be set up, independent of the English standard, and that it be inculcated in the schools throughout the country. He argued that it should be determined, not by “the practise of any particular class of people,” but by “the general practise of the nation,” with due regard, in cases where there was no general practise, to “the principle of analogy.” He went on:
    As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be
our
standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, 14 and her language on the decline. But if it were not so, she is at too great a distance to be our model, and to instruct us in the principles of our own tongue.… Several circumstances render a future separation of the American tongue from the English necessary and unavoidable.… Numerous local causes, such as a new country, new associations of people, new combinations of ideas in arts and sciences, and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe, will introduce new words into the American tongue. These causes will produce, in a course of time, a language in North America as different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one another: like remote branches of a tree springing from the same stock, or rays of light shot from the same center, and diverging from each other in proportion to their distance from the point of separation.… We have therefore the fairest opportunity of establishing a national language and of giving it uniformity and perspicuity, in North America, that ever presented itself to mankind. Now is the time to begin the plan. 15
    What Witherspoon thought of all this is not recorded. Maybe he never saw Webster’s book, for he was going blind in 1789, and lived only five years longer. Webster seems to have got little support for what he called his Federal English from the recognized illuminati of the time; 16 indeed, his proposals for a reform of American spelling,set forth in an appendix to his “Dissertations,” were denounced roundly by some of them, and the rest were only lukewarm. He dedicated the “Dissertations” to Franklin, but Franklin delayed acknowledging the dedication until the last days of 1789, and then ventured upon no approbation of Webster’s linguistic Declaration of Independence. On the contrary, he urged him to make war upon various Americanisms of recent growth, and perhaps with deliberate irony applauded his “zeal for preserving the purity of our language.” A year before the “Dissertations” appeared, Dr. Benjamin Rush anticipated at least some of Webster’s ideas in “A Plan of a Federal University,” 17 and they seem to have made some impression on Thomas Jefferson, who was to ratify them formally in 1813; 18 but the rest of the contemporaneous sages held aloof, and in July, 1800, the
Monthly Magazine and American Review
of New York printed an anonymous denunciation, headed “On the Scheme of an American Language,” of the notion that “grammars and dictionaries should be compiled by natives of the country, not of the British or English, but of the
American
tongue.” The author of this tirade, who signed himself C, displayed a violent Anglomania. “The most suitable name for our country,” he said, “would be that which is now appropriated only to a part of it: I mean New England.” While admitting