“One of the few memorable Federalist documents, to be put alongside the government reports of Hamilton, is Noah Webster’s dictionary of the American language, which he compiled during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Webster’s work seems to represent a fallback position for moderate Federalists: If you cannot control the people, perhaps you can control their language, and thus how they think and speak. As one scholar states, “Webster’s main motivation for writing and publishing it was not to celebrate American life or to expand independence. Instead, he sought to counteract social disruption and reestablish the deferential world order that he believed was disintegrating.”106 Not only was””
First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country