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The art of public speaking has deep roots, theoretical and practical, in human history, but it is no exaggeration to claim that antebellum America marks a particularly fruitful period in the history of oratory. Already in the late eighteenth century, the tumultuous events of British America leading to the Revolutionary War led likewise to what Jay Fliegelman calls an "elocutionary revolution." The new eloquence of the new American nation was grounded in the persuasive performances of public speakers, and the performances became so persuasive that the period between 1820 and 1870 constituted a "golden age of American oratory," as the writer Edward G. Parker described it in his 1857 study by that name. Given the political, social, and cultural stakes of the expanding nation, it is not surprising that eloquence engaged some of the most talented men and women of the period. In state and national legislatures, at political rallies and Fourth of July celebrations, in the pulpits and camp meetings from Boston to the Mississippi, at antislavery meetings and women's rights conventions, and in the lecture halls and lyceums of cities and towns across the country, speakers rose, each of them trying to make the occasion of his or her own performance a memorable act of moral persuasion.

Many eminent orators learned their trade in the colleges of their youth. From the middle of the eighteenth century, American colleges like Yale, Harvard, and William and Mary encouraged students to give public declamations every week, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century they were offering courses in rhetoric and elocution. Textbooks such as Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), Caleb Bingham's The Columbian Orator (1797), and John Quincy Adams's Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (1810) combined theory and practice for the generation that came to maturity between 1820 and 1850. In addition, undergraduates often were members of literary and debating societies, which sponsored a wide range of weekly debates on cultural and political topics. Indeed, by 1800 the literary societies were so important at Yale College that entering students were automatically assigned to either the Linonia or the Brothers in Unity.

The education system of eighteenth-century British America emphasized classical languages and rhetoric, and it had as a primary goal the preparation of young men for the ministry. By the early nineteenth century, however, the college-bred man could expect to find more opportunities for public address than the pulpit would provide. Forensic, celebratory, and political speaking created a host of arenas in which the public address flourished. In all of these forums, the goal of oratory was more than simple instruction or entertainment, though it certainly kept those classical goals in mind. In addition, the American orator of the nineteenth century had to meet and persuade his or her audience of their common good, and in order to do so he or she could not stand above his listeners nor apart from them. Thus speakers in the period began to adopt a less-formal style, eschewing the grandiloquence of an Edward Everett and embracing the simple, direct eloquence of orators like John Adams, from the generation of the Founding Fathers, and Abraham Lincoln, from the generation of the Civil War. The effect of this stylistic shift was to emphasize the democratic influence of oratory in nineteenth-century American culture, which Jay Fliegelman describes as already vital to the late-eighteenth-century Republic: "True oratory represented and reiterated shared beliefs in an effort to maintain a shared cultural world, one that provided a circumscribed scene for human action and created consensus by calling forth the universal nature of man, whose moral dictates would then ensure that sociability would rule individual behavior" (p. 45).

Perhaps the most important literary innovation of the oratorical culture, the popular lecture, also came closest to this ideal version of "true oratory." The popular lecture developed out of the lyceum movement, which was begun in 1826 by Josiah Holbrook (1788–1854). The lyceum was a remarkable institution for popular education in communities of all kinds, and it spread throughout New England and into the upper Atlantic states, the Midwest, and the South. In the first decade, lyceums featured local lecturers, especially the clergy and self-proclaimed experts in applied sciences. By the mid-1840s, according to the historian Donald M. Scott, there were nearly four thousand communities with a lyceum or similar institution for sponsoring public lectures, especially in the winter months. Celebrities like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Frederick Douglass, Bayard Taylor, Sylvester Graham, and Wendell Phillips could be seen regularly in New England and as far west as St. Louis, Missouri, or Davenport, Iowa. The topics were encyclopedic, ranging broadly over health, contemporary social life, social reform, travel, history, literature, aesthetics, natural history, and philosophy. Like "true oratory," the public lecture was supposed "to incorporate the public, to embrace all members of the community, whatever their occupation, social standing, or political and religious affiliation. Useful to all and offensive to none, the lecture was an oratorical form deliberately and carefully separated from all partisan and sectarian discourse" (Scott, p. 793). Moreover, the lyceum circuit gave many intellectuals and writers a career and a decent living. By the 1850s the lecture system, run by a host of booking agents and bureaus, had created at least the myth of a "shared cultural world" in which successful lecturers like Emerson and Taylor kept divisive issues at bay and formed a common, public discourse in the neutral space of the lecture hall.

PULPIT ELOQUENCE

If the public lecture was to become the most innovative new literary form of oratory in antebellum America, it had its roots in the preaching of American ministers. As Lawrence Buell has argued, the change from strict Congregationalism to the more liberal doctrines of Unitarianism was accompanied by a liberalizing of religious writing: "During the nineteenth century the idea of the sermon as a means of expounding and enforcing doctrine tended to give way to the idea of the sermon as an inspirational oration. Much more was made of imagination and creativity in preaching than had been the case before" (Literary Transcendentalism, p. 105). The earliest proponent of this shift, both in doctrine and in sermon style, was William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), who preached at the Federal Street Church in Boston from 1803 to 1842. Channing's sermon "On Unitarian Christianity" (delivered in Baltimore on 5 May 1819) articulated the central beliefs of Unitarians before a large audience of ministers and established Channing's reputation as the premier Unitarian in the country. In addition, Channing's liberal theology inspired the younger New England intellectuals and artists who would found the transcendentalist movement in the 1830s and 1840s. In sermons and speeches, his style was plain and direct, but he refused to pander to audiences.

Theodore Parker (1810–1860) was the heir apparent to Channing's Unitarianism, carrying the liberalization yet further. Inspired both by Channing and by Ralph Waldo Emerson's (1803–1882) 15 July 1838 address to the graduating seniors at Harvard Divinity School, Parker dedicated himself to writing sermons that would tell the truth as directly as Emerson and Channing had done. That truth led Parker to deliver the sermon "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity" on 19 May 1841, in which he argued that "oneness with God" was more important than any system of doctrines and rituals. From 1841 to his death, Parker was one of the most controversial and liberal preachers in New England. His theology and preaching style broke radically with the conventions of nineteenth-century American Protestantism, and his sermons often became indistinguishable from lectures. He was polemical and ratio-nalistic, but he could also give way to flights of poetic sensibility and figurative excess.

A third great pulpit orator of the period was Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887), who further liberalized Christian doctrine and blurred the boundary between sacred and secular speech. Beecher spoke most prominently from the pulpit of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, attracting huge crowds because of his dynamic style. His sermons joined liberal religion and such social reform issues as antislavery, women's rights, and temperance. He lectured widely on women's rights throughout his career, and he was a celebrity speaker, invited by President Lincoln to deliver the celebratory oration "Raising the Flag over Fort Sumter" on 14 April 1865. In a deep historical irony, Beecher delivered the oration on the day President Lincoln was assassinated. Rather than bespeaking reconciliation, Beecher's rhetoric was as divisive as the shot from John Wilkes Booth's pistol.

"A FRUITFUL NURSERY OF ORATORS"

The ideal of the sermon, lecture, or speech as a way of embodying a shared cultural world, uniting speaker and audience, is immediately challenged by the historical context of the golden age of oratory. The antebellum period was, according to the poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) in his Specimen Days, characterized by "convulsiveness," not by the high-minded abstraction of the Fourth of July speech or the commencement address. In his 1846 lecture "Eloquence," Emerson asserted that "the resistance to slavery in this country has been a fruitful nursery of orators. The natural connection by which it drew to itself a train of moral reforms, and the slight yet sufficient party organization it offered, reinforced the city with new blood from the woods and mountains" (Collected Works 7:95). Both Whitman and Emerson point to the true occasions of true oratory in division, conflict, and passionate disagreement. Although Emerson tells only half the story, he accurately points to African American slavery as the nursery of great orators, for great orators appeared on both sides of the slavery debate.

The most fruitful of nurseries, at least in numbers, was the political. The three most famous political orators of the century were U.S. senators during the period from 1830 to 1850: John Calhoun of South Carolina, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Calhoun (1782–1850) is best known as the orator of nullification, state's rights, and proslavery, and his speeches were marked by their close reasoning and deliberative style. Clay (1777–1852), the least educated of the great triumvirate, became celebrated as a forensic speaker, was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1810, and became a figure of moderation, the "Great Pacificator," in the slavery debates of the Senate, especially in the bills that are known as the Compromise of 1850. His style was direct, emotional, and spontaneous, but he prepared thoroughly for his speeches. From all accounts his voice was impressively varied in tone, register, and rhythm. Without doubt the most prolific and celebrated of the three great political orators, Daniel Webster (1782–1852) excelled in forensic speaking, winning fame for arguing such important cases as McCulloch v. Maryland before the Supreme Court in 1819, which furthered the scope of federal power in relation to the states. Webster was equally famous for his ceremonial addresses, such as the Plymouth oration of 22 December 1820, the Bunker Hill Monument address delivered on 17 June 1825, and his "Eulogy on Adams and Jefferson" delivered on 2 August 1826. In the last of these three speeches, Webster famously re-created a speech by Adams concerning the Declaration of Independence, adopting the elder statesman's direct and forthright style: "Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote. . . . Why put off longer the Declaration of Independence? That measure will strengthen us. It will give us character abroad. . . . But while I do live, let me have country, or at least the hope of a country, and that a free country. . . . Independence now, and Independence for Ever!" (quoted in Duffy and Ryan, pp. 420–421).

Webster's fame as a U.S. senator stems from slavery and states' rights debates on the Senate floor. Perhaps the most famous is the Webster-Hayne debate of 1830. Senator Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina defended his state's right to ignore the federal tariff and, in response to Webster's answer, attacked the Massachusetts senator for inconsistency. Webster's reply stretched over two days and thirty thousand words, and it was circulated as a pamphlet after Webster revised it. The most famous line comes from the peroration: "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" Three years later Webster debated Calhoun concerning President Andrew Jackson's force bill, which threatened South Carolina with invasion by armed federal troops. Webster carried the day and the vote, extending the power of the federal government. Finally, in the debates over the Compromise of 1850, Webster delivered a series of speeches supporting Clay's moderate view and combating Calhoun's states' rights position. The speech of 7 March 1850 became infamous for its careful legalisms and parsing of history. Though Webster's rhetorical and legislative compromises, including his support of the Fugitive Slave Law, led to his vilification by such liberal admirers as Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, he remained a political force in Massachusetts and the country until his death in 1852.

The debate over African American slavery and the future of the Union became the most important social issue of the day and provided a host of orators, not confined to the political arena, with a subject for speech. Three of the most famous orators of the period are associated with the antislavery movement: William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass.

Garrison (1805–1879) was the very embodiment of the antebellum abolitionist. He edited and published the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator from 1831 until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865. While writing and publishing the inflammatory prose of abolitionism, however, Garrison also took to the lecture platform in Great Britain and in the United States. Moreover, he refused to ally himself and the movement with any political party, even refusing to vote. His rallying cry was "No Union with slaveholders," and he welcomed the secession of the Southern states in 1861. For Garrison, the page and the platform were interchangeable: he routinely printed his own and others' speeches in The Liberator, and the newspaper records nearly a thousand of his own speeches during the convulsive years leading up to the Civil War. Consistently combative and pious, Garrison proclaimed from the outset that he would be "harsh as truth, and uncompromising as justice," for he did not wish "to think, or speak, or write with moderation." In his antislavery lectures, Garrison would often introduce himself as "the peace-disturber Garrison—the fanatic Garrison—the madman Garrison," prompting delightful laughter in his audience at the sight of the innocuous, balding young man before them. In the autumn of 1865 Garrison conducted his own five-week lecture tour of the North and Midwest, traveling as far as Chicago and delivering "The Past, Present, and Future of Our Country" to receptive audiences. But the tour convinced him that he was no lecturer, and so his career as a public speaker ended with The Liberator.

Wendell Phillips (1811–1884), born to a storied Boston family, distinguished himself as a public speaker at Harvard College and Harvard Law School and became the most famous extemporaneous abolitionist speaker of the antebellum period. By 1838 he was no longer a practicing attorney, devoting himself to the antislavery movement and making a living on the lyceum circuit. At the height of his fame he earned as much as $250 for delivering the popular lecture "The Lost Arts," which he could vary at will and which he delivered over a thousand times in his career. Consulting his own commonplace book (a personal journal containing newspaper clippings, quotation, and scraps) before the performance, Phillips would speak for over an hour without notes, and the audience would be certain to hear an impassioned, eloquent voice. Like Garrison, Phillips was most renowned and effective as an agitator. His most famous antislavery speech, "The Murder of Lovejoy," narrated the career and death of the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy, killed by a mob in Alton, Illinois. Phillips first delivered the Lovejoy speech at Faneuil Hall in Boston on 8 December 1837 to a crowd of five thousand listeners. The power of his eloquence galvanized the antislavery movement in Boston and established him as the voice of the movement. Until the disbanding of the American AntiSlavery Society in 1870, when the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted, Phillips continued to speak on behalf of free speech, freedom of the press, and universal male suffrage. During the Civil War he agitated for female suffrage as well, but after 1866 he moderated his public statements in hopes of achieving suffrage for blacks.

Even in his final public address, "The Scholar in the Republic," Phillips maintained the independent, radical stance of the social reformer. Speaking at the centennial gathering of Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard University on 30 June 1881, Phillips urged the scholars to become agitators, for "the agitator must stand outside of organizations, with no bread to earn, no candidate to elect, no party to save, no object but truth,—to tear a question open and riddle it with light" (Warren, p. 2). In Phillips's narrative of American history, the abolitionists' "crusade against slavery" became an overarching reform movement, gathering the issues of free speech, universal suffrage, labor reform, women's rights, and states' rights into a single moral struggle. And Phillips sarcastically contrasted the courage of the moral reformer to the moral cowardice and silence of such speakers as Edward Everett, former president of Harvard University, who delivered his popular lecture "The Character of Washington" throughout the years of greatest agitation: "Everett carried Washington through thirty States, remembering to forget the brave words the wise Virginian had left on record warning his countrymen of this evil" (Warren, p. 6).

The abolitionist movement provided a further opportunity for new oratory by bringing black abolitionist speakers before white audiences. Charles Lenox Remond, William Wells Brown, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Frederick Douglass are only the most famous of the host of black orators in the antebellum period. Without doubt the most eloquent of them all was Frederick Douglass (1818–1895). Born a slave on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Douglass escaped in 1838 and became a Garrisonian abolitionist in 1841. From 1841 to 1845 he was a paid lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and after his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself was published in 1845, he conducted a successful two-year lecture tour of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1847 his British friends purchased his freedom for 150 pounds, and Douglass returned to the United States. By 1849 Douglass's sense of independence brought him to break with Garrisonian abolitionists and begin a long and successful career as a newspaper editor and journalist. At the same time, he became more and more famous and skillful as a social reformer and orator. Like Phillips, he spoke for women's rights, freedom of speech, civil rights for blacks, and universal suffrage as well as such issues as temperance, peace, and abolition of capital punishment. His most famous speeches include "What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?" (delivered at the Independence Day celebrations in Rochester, New York, in 1852), "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered" (delivered at Western Reserve College in 1854), and "The Dred Scott Decision" (1857).

MOTHER TONGUES

Early in the period, women were largely excluded from public platforms, just as they were largely excluded from the possibilities of a college education or a public career. The Scottish-born reformer Frances Wright (1795–1852) is generally considered the first woman to deliver a public address in the United States, speaking on women's rights in New Harmony, Indiana, in 1828. Other early speakers were Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) and Angelina Grimké (1805–1879), who wrote and spoke for the American Anti-Slavery Society and on behalf of women's rights. Two other intellectual women associated with public speech and the transcendentalist movement were Elizabeth Peabody (1804–1894) and Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), who held "conversation" classes in Boston from 1839 to 1844, providing women with a forum for speaking and listening to one another in order to cultivate self-culture among the thinking women of metropolitan New England. The effects of Fuller's conversational style can be seen in both the style and the content of her important feminist work Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845).

By mid-century the restrictions on women's speech were loosening, especially within the reform movements themselves. Three of the most important women orators in the period began within the abolitionist movement and moved toward issues of women's rights, especially female suffrage. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), Lucy Stone (1818–1893), and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) devoted their lives to lecturing, writing, and lobbying for women's right to vote. Anthony in particular was acquainted with the premier abolitionists of the day, and she was closely associated with Stanton for much of her life. Both women worked for antislavery organizations, and in their collaboration both were effective public speakers on behalf of women. The same connection between women's rights and antislavery runs through Stone's career. After becoming the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a bachelors degree (Oberlin College, 1847), Stone worked as a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1869 Stone and Henry Ward Beecher split from Stanton and Anthony, with the result being two different national suffrage associations. The three women differed in their politics and strategies, but they appeared together as witnesses before the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage on 20 February 1892, speaking eloquently to the law-makers on behalf of truly universal suffrage.

ORATORY AND LITERARY CULTURE

The most important literary figure on the lyceum circuit was without doubt Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the lecture itself had a deep effect upon Emerson's literary style. Beginning as a Unitarian preacher and maintaining his position as a supply preacher throughout his life, Emerson was one of the most successful American speakers on the circuit. Beginning in the winter of 1835–1836, Emerson offered "courses" of lectures, writing a new series of six to ten addresses for each new season. He could vary the number and order of the lectures for any given lyceum, but unlike Phillips he did not employ the extemporaneous method of speaking. Perhaps as a result of speaking from a written text, the lectures became the source for Emerson's essays, though the process was by no means simple or linear. Instead the essays emerged from much revision, involving reorganization, addition of material from Emerson's voluminous journals, and rewriting of individual sentences to create the dense, surprising, and axiomatic style of Emersonian prose. Emerson's career paralleled the development of the lyceum into the popular lecture circuit of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, and the circuit benefited as much from him as he did from it. In the 1850s, in particular, Emerson used the lecture platform to make telling speeches on the antislavery movement and to combat the compromising positions of Daniel Webster, who had been a personal hero of the younger writer. Despite these political and social interventions, however, Emerson maintained a distant, independent stance, one that exemplified the role of the public intellectual in the antebellum period.

Other prominent literary figures attempted to mount the platform and speak to their fellow citizens, but none was as successful as Emerson. The poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell gave academic lectures at Harvard University, and Lowell lectured on the lyceum circuit, as did Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Greenleaf Whittier. The relationship between the platform and the page, however, was strained for all these figures. The case is different for Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), who was, like Emerson, on the board of the Concord Lyceum and delivered lectures in his hometown and surroundings. The prose of Walden (1854), dense and repeatedly revised over a seven-year period, clearly bears the marks of its origins in lectures delivered in 1848–1849. Though he grew to despise the popular lecture as a compromise, Thoreau still rose to speak when events called to him. On 4 July 1854, for instance, on the heels of the arrest of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns in Boston, he delivered "Slavery in Massachusetts," a fiery performance. Five years later he spoke in Concord and Boston in defense of John Brown, whose raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, signaled the coming convulsiveness of the Civil War. Meanwhile Thoreau continued to address audiences in lectures such as "Walking," "Wild Apples," "Cape Cod," and "The Maine Woods," and in the twentieth century these became some of his most influential writings.

The popular lecture exercised less influence on the literary culture of the South, though there were winter lecture series in the major cities of the region throughout the period. The most accomplished man of letters in the antebellum South, William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870), delivered public lectures and patriotic addresses through the 1840s and 1850s. But Simms's career as a lecturer was more telling in its failures than its successes. In the winter of 1856 Simms traveled to New York City to begin a lecture tour of the northern states, planning to speak on behalf of the much-maligned southern institutions. The lectures addressed the sectional conflict, mounting to a fever pitch after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and Preston Brooks's caning of Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Over the space of two days, Sumner had given an inflammatory speech, "The Crime against Kansas," attacking Senator Butler of South Carolina and comparing the state to an imbecilic whore. Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina and a kinsman of Senator Butler, took it upon himself to answer Sumner's words with deeds. Simms sought to inject himself into the public debate, but the northern audiences were unwilling to listen to him. After delivering his lectures in Buffalo, Rochester, and New York City (150 persons attended the last performance), he canceled the tour and returned to South Carolina. In the early months of 1857 he toured the South, delivering a series of three lectures called "Our Social Moral," in which he excoriated the abolitionists, the northern politicians like Sumner, and the servile northern press, and accurately predicting a violent end to the conflict.

After the Civil War the lyceum circuit continued to hold an important position in American culture, and there was a proliferation of speakers' bureaus and agents. The popular lecture spread across the country, and oratory continued to flow from pulpits, platforms, and legislative halls. Still, the quality of the popular lecture changed in postbellum America. In the years leading to the Civil War, the lecture had created a kind of mythic moment of neutral investigation—high-minded, somewhat abstract perhaps, but earnest and eloquent. After the war, the popular and successful lecturers were entertainers and storytellers like Bret Harte and Mark Twain. The political arena produced no speakers on the order of Calhoun, Clay, or Webster. Henry Ward Beecher was the most influential preacher of the postbellum period, but even his reputation was marred by scandal. By 1870 the "golden age of oratory" was nearing its end. By the time Phillips gave his speech at Harvard in 1881, the figure of the orator as "the Scholar in the Republic" had nearly disappeared.

See also Abolitionist Writing; "The American Scholar"; Education; Feminism; Lyceums; Proslavery Writing; Reform; Rhetoric; Suffrage; Unitarians; Walden

James Perrin Warren