War & Peace Quote by Noah Webster

Webster isn’t gently recommending scripture as personal comfort; he’s drafting a social operating system. The line reads like a moral diagnostic tool: if society is sick with “vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war,” the cause isn’t economics, institutions, or human complexity. It’s disobedience. That totalizing move is the point. By bundling private sins (“vice”) with state violence (“war”) and structural brutality (“slavery”), Webster collapses the distance between individual character and national fate, making the Bible not just a book of faith but a civic technology.

The subtext is political. Webster, the nation-building lexicographer, is also selling a theory of the republic: order depends on internal restraint, and internal restraint depends on Protestant biblical norms. His list functions like a catechism of fears for an early United States anxious about faction, revolution, and the fragility of self-government. “Despising or neglecting” is doing a lot of work, too; it frames disagreement as moral failure, not intellectual dispute, and it preemptively delegitimizes alternative ethical systems. The Bible becomes the default constitution beneath the Constitution.

Context sharpens the edges. In the early republic, leaders regularly argued that democracy required virtuous citizens. Webster’s version is more muscular: ethics aren’t merely compatible with Christianity; they “proceed” from it. The claim offers comfort (a single cure for chaos) and leverage (a mandate for cultural authority). It also reveals a tension he can’t quite resolve: invoking “slavery” as a product of biblical neglect while American Christians used the Bible to defend slavery exposes how contested “precepts” were, even then.