1. The Dictionary in the Schoolroom (Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1855), irregular pagination. Copies of this title may vary according to how pamphlets were gathered. The copy cited here is held by the Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, shelf no. Ia137W381. In this copy, sections are paginated as follows: pp. 27-35 (state seals and superintendent recommendations), pp. 17-20 (sales numbers), pp. 39-50 (testimonials) and 50-56 (newspaper reviews), including engraved signatures on pp. 42-46. The Eaton quotation appears at the start of the subpamphlet “A National Standard.” Ibid., 21.
2. The first reference to the dictionary war I have found is "Executive Misuse of Language," Boston Daily Atlas, 28 January 1856. Relatively recent accounts include Sidney Landau, "Webster and Worcester: The War of the Dictionaries," Wilson Library Bulletin 58, no. 8 (April 1984): 545-49
3. Janice A. Kraus, "Caveat Auctor: The War of the Dictionaries," Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries 48, no. 2 (December 1986): 75-90
4. and Jonathon Green, Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), 251-76. These accounts generally take the grammatical nature of the conflict for granted, considering the Merriams to be only peripheral figures. For other accounts providing greater cultural context for the mid-nineteenth-century debates about language, orthography, grammar, and eloquence, see Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Knopf, 2002), esp. chap. 1
5. Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight for Popular Speech in Nineteenth Century America (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 82-90