16
John C. Briggs
The orator must be, to a certain extent, a poet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1904, vol. VII: 89)
References to a golden age of oratory abound in studies of American history and literature, but what was it? Why should it be remembered? Can it be recovered for our study and perhaps for our emulation? Its importance for the history of the United States in its greatest crisis is undisputed. Forty years of Congressional debate (1820–1861), in both the House and the Senate, testify to its power and influence. In its great antebellum culmination, the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858, it practically defined our modern memory of what America was then, and what it might be, not only in narrowly historical terms but as a work of eloquent imagination, reaching for a more perfect version of itself. It arose from schoolhouses, tiny colleges, public lyceums, wilderness churches, the rural stump, and the town square, as well as from the heritage of the ancients and of the Revolution. It burst across the new democratic republic in the 1820s and 1830s and took a multitude of forms: sermons, speaker series, political debates, dedications, educational lectures, courtroom summations, entertainments, remembrances, and reports from emergent disciplines such as history, anthropology, and science. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s unusual career was representative of a larger trend: he would eventually earn far more from his peripatetic years on the lyceum lecture circuit than from all his books.
In 1850, Edward Everett, one of the most ubiquitous speakers of the antebellum era, observed that “our heroic age was historical; was prolonged even into the present time.” Everett’s era “consequently acquired something of the interest of the heroic past” (Katula 2010: 54). The revolutionary heroes’ deeds fostered and comprised a great tradition of oratory. John Adams, renowned for his speeches and founding deeds, bequeathed his legacy of eloquence to his observant son, John Quincy Adams, who prior to embarking upon a distinguished political career was the first holder of the Boylston chair in rhetoric at Harvard. The young Adams taught Edward Everett, and Everett, who eventually served as Senator and Governor (and became an admirer of Abraham Lincoln), taught Ralph Waldo Emerson. While Lincoln was a congressman in the late 1840s, he witnessed John Quincy Adams speaking in the House of Representatives. He heard Emerson speaking on the lyceum circuit (Emerson 1982: 169). Amid radical change, there was continuity in oratorical culture connecting the American founding to its inheritors. That connection stimulated reflection, encouraged emulation, and inspired oratorical innovation.
Guided in their apprenticeships by texts such as The Columbian Orator and by demonstration and practice, even marginally educated speakers could become acquainted with the ancient orator Demosthenes, for whom “the principal thing in oratory” is “action […] action […] action” (Bingham 1811: 7). They came to know that speaking at the highest levels, eloquently, embodied and entailed noble action. Those who remembered the Revolution and spoke on public occasions were challenged to extend that legacy by means of their own noble deeds. Speech of the noblest kinds was considered persuasion that served truth and the common good. In its highest manifestations, public speaking was therefore a test of character. The hyperbole in Daniel Webster’s famous eulogy for John Adams made the serious claim that the hero’s eloquence made and confirmed who he was: “The eloquence of Mr. Adams resembled his general character and formed, indeed, a part of it. […] this, this is ELOQUENCE; or rather it is something greater and higher than all eloquence – it is ACTION – NOBLE, SUBLIME, GODLIKE ACTION” (Shaw 1928: 134–135).
True eloquence required heroism of thought, which manifested itself in the actio or delivery of the eloquent speech and in the action it both mirrored and encouraged. In The Columbian Orator’s collection of readings that inspired both Lincoln, who is said to have read it as a child, and the young slave Frederick Douglass, the editor stressed the importance of the speaker’s performance over mere verbal mastery. Eloquent performance required eloquent gesture, even in qualities of voice. Noah Webster’s textbook reminded readers that tone and pronunciation were indices of character precisely because oratorical gestures had to be “expressed as though they were one’s own.” Eloquent oratory was thought to facilitate as well as require a nobly accomplished character. It could make “perfectly natural” what had been forged by study, imitation, and art. The readings in the textbook were to be read aloud because natural delivery required readers’ comprehension of what they performed (Webster 1794: 3–7).
False art could have a force “so great and powerful that where it is wholly counterfeit, it [could] for a time work the same effect as it were founded in truth” (Bingham 1811: 10). But true eloquence was believed capable of defeating verbal deception. When Emerson asserted in “Eloquence” that its working power was to “tak[e] sovereign possession of the audience,” he distinguished the eloquent orator from the mere practitioner (Emerson 1904, vol. VII: 65). The eloquent speaker would have – he would have to have – the wisdom and forbearance of a person of noble action.
In Emerson’s time, great speeches were called literature. Distinctions were sometimes made between the permanent and transient literary traditions, but the line of demarcation was changing. Sermons, lectures, occasional orations, courtroom summations, legislative speeches, abolitionist appeals, and more were making their way into respectable print. Public oratory was a fertile source of distraction and “the main form of American public ritual” (Towns 1998: 1). As Daniel Boorstin has observed, eloquent speakers – north, south, and west – sometimes “acquired a mythic role” (Boorstin 1965: 8).
The French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the United States in 1831, observed that high democratic oratory enlarges thought and elevates language (Tocqueville 2000: 476). The most prominent examples of antebellum oratory were characterized by (i) high‐mindedness; (ii) wide‐ranging sympathy; (iii) rivalry tempered by civility; (iv) formality; (v) expressive ease; (vi) reliance upon tradition and traditional sources of judgment; (vii) originality in approach, style, and conclusions; (viii) power to range over a broad field of topics; (ix) concentration of mind brought on by a sense of impending crisis; and (x) explicit or underlying optimism, even in the midst of doom‐saying, about the prospects of liberty, self‐government, and constitutional principles. These qualities characterize all the dominant genres of the period: sermons, occasional addresses, courtroom speeches, lectures, and political oratory. Though tested by struggle and conflict, these aspects of the antebellum oratorical tradition strongly influenced – and set the scene for – Lincoln’s eloquence. In the years leading up to the Civil War they helped prepare speakers and audiences to prepare themselves – their minds and dispositions – for a moment of decision, and for its consequences.
There were political, scientific, religious, and broadly educational performances on the lecture circuit, which was first organized in Massachusetts in the late 1820s and then proliferated in other sections, sometimes as a subscription series. Some speeches were performed hundreds of times and printed in newspapers, pamphlets, and book‐length collections. As shorthand scribes became expert, voluminous records were circulated by railroad and in later years by telegraph and newspapers, accelerating speakers’ influence and subjecting them to the scrutiny of widely varied audiences. Far more commonly than today, those printed speeches were read aloud – re‐performed – before scattered listeners. The burgeoning of newspapers, transcriptions of statehouse speeches, and the Congressional Globe (established in 1833 and later named the Congressional Record) made available for public readings and personal study a wealth of oratorical exempla, models of leadership, and initiations into political and social controversy. From the time he ran his small store in the woods of Illinois, Lincoln gathered, read, and performed the literature of oratory from a host of newspapers and other printed sources.
Much that was spoken was lost. The work of thousands of antebellum speakers either did not get printed or lived only briefly in transient publications. Some of the most notable in that number were women: abolitionists and suffragists like Frances Wright, Angelina Grimke, Abby Kelley, Lucretia Mott, Ernestine Rose, and Lucy Stone. But some speeches by prominent men fell into the shadows as well. Henry Clay, perhaps the most influential statesman of the prewar age, did not and could not ensure that his Congressional speeches were faithfully printed. Rather than speaking from finished manuscripts, he tended to rely upon others to report his speeches, and the transcripts were less than perfect. Some of his major speeches were not recorded in any form. It was said that his extemporaneous, emotionally expansive oratorical performances, heightened by his highly effective and fluid facial expressions and theatrical gestures, needed to be witnessed for their full effect. What we know of the abolitionist speeches of the unpublished women orators is not entirely different: they tended to speak with great personal intensity, with witnesses testifying to the power of their speeches’ overall effects (Brigance 1960, vol. 1: 153–192). Sometimes the lack of a record had political advantages. Lincoln’s 1856 “lost speech,” said to be an uncharacteristically impassioned expression of antislavery sentiments, was never published nor, as far as we know, preserved in manuscript. Some think it was the precursor to the pivotal House Divided Speech, delivered in 1858, which with impressive force and tact let fall (did not throw down) the gauntlet after the Dred Scott Decision had raised decisive doubts that slavery could be confined to the South.
It was the enlarging possibility of war of the worst kind – civil war – that stirred the era’s oratorical capacities most profoundly at least as early as 1820. It was a time of great hope and mounting dread. In that year there was “a fire bell in the night,” as Thomas Jefferson described it: the possibility of catastrophe awakened by the Missouri question. Should that border state be admitted to the Union as slave or free (Lincoln 1953, vol. 2: 128)? Deep questions about slavery – how to understand it and what to do about it – made their way into the center of audiences’ disquiet, whatever their sectional allegiances and preoccupations. Clay, Lincoln, and many others, including prominent sectional spokesmen such as Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, considered the stakes of the growing conflict to be of the highest order: the survival and flourishing not only of particular sections, North, South, and West, but of a constitutional, self‐governing polity that included them all – a political legacy they thought was unique in the modern world. Their oratory in response to the decades‐long crisis would create an unmatchable standard for postbellum generations.
For antebellum speakers and audiences, the constitutional concerns raised by slavery were existential: dangerous to moral and political character and to the existence of what George Washington had called the American experiment. How might Americans imagine themselves a free people, and how might they be addressed as a free people, if the sorting out of the problem of slavery threatened the possibility of constitutional self‐government? The gravity of the situation – the threat of chaos and dissolution amid hopes of saving the Union as something worthy of being saved – pressed down upon thought and yet encouraged a new kind of nobility. Antebellum oratory arose in partnership with the so‐called permanent literature to clarify, redirect, displace, and reimagine the American prospect. It sought to deepen and strengthen audiences’ moral and imaginative grasp of the situation, as well as their powers to face it.
We can understand a good deal about Lincoln’s oratory, as it was imaginatively drawn from and developed beyond that of his predecessors, if we recognize that he thought of the Union as an almost human embodiment – a constitutional republic animated by Jefferson’s proposition that all men are created equal. It was mutable and mortal, necessarily dependent upon the decisions of its people and hence their capacity to govern themselves. But it was also perpetual in the sense that it was a constitutional union animated by the Declaration and Jefferson’s “self‐evident” truths. He assumed and argued that it was brought forth and matured by the Founders and those who could perpetuate the Founders’ most important ideas. In his conception, secession presumed to sunder what could not be divided. By necessity, the sections could not go out of the presence of one another; their long borders and profound disagreements would prevent a peaceful separation. Neither section, once separated, could settle the slavery question without a mutual ordeal and internecine war.
Lincoln wasn’t the only one to go back to revolutionary sources for his oratorical focus. Speakers repeatedly invoked, applied, interpreted, and revised or resisted that legacy. They sought to preserve, purify, limit, and sometimes separate themselves from it. What did the phrase “all men are created equal” in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence mean? Was it relevant to the Constitution? Was the Constitution a charter of association or a document animated by the Declaration? What were the Founders’ understandings of those questions? Could their ideas be known? Did the Constitution speak beyond or apart from the purposes of the Founders? What were the claims that the Constitution made on later generations? Were there limits to those claims? These questions were connected, directly or indirectly, to ideas of oratory and oratorical practice. Was public address on such important and complex questions essentially lawyers’ work, or was it eminently a matter for extensive public debate? Was the slavery question an isolated problem, or did it reside in the constitutional being of the republic, calling upon the people to apprehend and grapple with it? Could the people’s responsibility be discharged merely by voting, or by a renewed understanding of the constitutional republic’s responsibility to sustain the ideas of its founding? In 1858, Lincoln engaged Stephen Douglas on these very questions in their famous debates, and the oratorical strategies of each man reflected his approach to these subjects and his conception of this audience’s function in the American republic. Thanks to the transcribers and their newspapers, and Lincoln’s shrewd and swift publication of an edition of both men’s speeches after that election, their debates came to be known far beyond Illinois.
The audiences of the time aspired to know higher principles, but their accompanying habit of skepticism toward old truths – if we are to believe the astute Transcendentalist and reforming Unitarian minister Theodore Parker – had corroded their grasp of the enduring ideas they were admirably aspiring to discover. In 1848, Parker gave a speech in which he characterized even highly educated New England audiences as philosophically curious yet adrift. Yearning for “ultimate facts,” they flocked to long courses of lectures on scientific minutiae given by the great scientists and philosophers of the age, but found meager fare to engage the issues of their time. Even though their New England world was filled with moral controversy over slavery, his audiences remained, in Parker’s view, almost indifferent to the moral principles that underlay the debate:
there is a philosophical tendency, distinctly visible; a groping after ultimate facts, first principles, and universal ideas. […] What audiences attend the Lowell lectures in Boston – two or three thousand men, listening to twelve lectures on the philosophy of fish! It would not bring a dollar or a vote, only thought to their minds! […] The circumstance, that philosophical lectures get delivered by men like [James] Walker, [Louis] Agassiz, Emerson, and their coadjutors, men who do not spare abstruseness, get listened to, and even understood, in town and village, by large crowds of men, of only the most common culture; this indicates a philosophical tendency, unknown in any other land or age. […] Young maidens complain of the minister, that he has no [natural or moral] philosophy in his sermons, nothing but precepts, which they could read in the Bible as well as he; perhaps in heathen Seneca. He does not feed their souls.
Parker observed a soul hunger that was depriving itself of sustenance: “we have rejected the authority of tradition, but not yet accepted the authority of truth and justice. […] Accordingly, nothing seems fixed. There is a perpetual see‐sawing of opposite principle. […] The great men of the land have as many turns in their course as the Euripus or the Missouri” (Widmer 2006: 364–365, 367).
Orators’ audiences were often full of conviction yet elusive and complex. If they reached unsuccessfully toward higher principles, they had strong if sometimes inconsistent political opinions. Northern, southern, border‐state, and western audiences divided into slavery and antislavery Whigs, unionist Jacksonian Democrats, Democrats willing to support nullification and perhaps secession, and various other groups. Radical abolitionism as advocated by William Lloyd Garrison had a following but aroused anger and violence even in Boston, where he was mobbed in 1835. Unionists were plentiful in the South; supporters of the slavery status quo were numerous in New York. In the West there were quickly filling states and territories populated with settlers, many with strong union sentiments and a desire not to have anything to do with slavery, even if that meant allowing it in the new territory next door. Westerners were potential allies with other sections, but as an astute observer of the oratory of the period noted, “[t]he North appeared to have no unity, no common cause to which an oratory could appeal. The public mind was divided, atomized, unsynthesized. A foundation had still to be set on which a structure of opinions could be built” (Brigance 1960, vol. I: 99). That was the task that the great political oratory arose to perform.
Henry Clay
In all sections, therefore, much depended upon leaders and opinion makers whose speeches showed that they grasped something deeper in the meaning of relevant principles and events, and that they could present a credible response to an impending crisis that seemed to many unsolvable, or resolvable only in denial or through violence. How then could the greatest speakers of the age navigate such waters? Lincoln provides us with a reference point in his eulogy for Clay, whom he called his “beau ideal of a statesman” (Lincoln 1953, vol. 3: 29).
Lincoln’s view of Clay and Clay’s oratory was unique and distinctively perceptive. He saw that Clay had combined antislavery principle and political practicality, and that he had succeeded in ways his most hyperbolic eulogists had not noticed. They had hardly considered Clay’s antislavery views. Despite his sometimes partisan history, he was for them the great non‐partisan, the non‐political compromiser who resolved rather than forced the issue. As one eulogy put it, during the debate in the Senate over the Compromise of 1850 Clay had “exorcised the demon which possessed the body politic,” as though the entire question of slavery had been resolved by the horse‐trading of the Great Compromise (Lincoln 1953, vol. 2: 123). When we read Lincoln’s praise of his beau ideal as an antislavery man, we are struck by its originality. Clay disliked, Lincoln noted, making occasional addresses, for the nature of those occasions tempted the speaker to indulge in exaggerations of praise and blame (Brigance 1960, vol. II: 631). For all its showmanship, Clay’s style, Lincoln contended, was essentially plain and discursive. The performances were appeals to currents of shared sentiment. Yet his antislavery convictions had a way of animating the form and substance of his rhetoric of compromise so that the agreements he fostered were not all pro forma. Clay’s compromises were not merely formalistic.
Many observers marveled over the ways Clay expressed himself in theatrical gestures and emotional appeals. His mixture of plainness and showmanship, so pleasing to audiences in his home ground of Kentucky and in Illinois and the burgeoning territories, found audiences in all sections. They caught his “contagious enthusiasm, which leaves no time for hesitation or doubt” (Brigance 1960, vol. II: 635). There were reservations: Clay’s New England friend Daniel Webster admired his effectiveness but regretted the “earnestness & ardor” that exposed him “to the danger of too much apparent vehemence.” But Clay had, for Webster, “a degree of warmth, which in our colder latitudes, is excited […] only by uncommon occasions” (Brigance 1960, vol. II: 634). Clay’s excesses were essential to his power of principled engagement in troubled times. He engaged the moral sentiments in a way that could make compromise real. If his speeches sometimes lacked life in the recorders’ notes and on the printed page – as another great speaker of the age, Edward Everett, lamented (Everett 1827: 443–444) – his words as he delivered them were unmatched in their practical effects. His oratorical performances somehow became him. Within the digressions and apostrophes, he somehow spoke for the Union, not as a confederation but as a lasting pledge of sacred honor to the Constitution and the principle of self‐government for all.
Clay had said that he relied upon a spirit of “adjustment” or “arrangement” that enabled his fractious colleagues to agree without sacrificing their principles. Toward that end he knew how to elicit their sacrifice “of feeling, of opinion.” No “great principle” would be lost, he said, if lesser opinions could be dropped or suspended for the sake of true amity. Yet he sought “ample” concessions leading to a “forbearance” that transcended mere toleration. He sought and sometimes activated a spirit of political generosity from both sides that worked to enlarge the idea of the Union. To reach that goal, Clay was willing to acquiesce in certain kinds of legislation “contrary to my own judgment and to my own conscience,” though not without reminding his hearers that there were limits – that certain principles were beyond compromise (Widmer 2006: 391).
It was those limits, and Clay’s use of rare but forceful displays of how important they were to him and to the soul of the Union, that defined Clay’s oratorical power for Lincoln, and helped model Lincoln’s own approach to political argument and persuasion. Lincoln spoke of Clay as though he could project his antislavery ideas in ways that animated – gave systemic life to – his compromising rhetoric. In the crucial 1858 debates with Douglas, Lincoln quoted from Clay’s 1827 speech to his Colonization Society seven times to draw attention to his subtly insistent antislavery conviction, and to link it to sentiments of the American Founders, who he said stood in opposition to Stephen Douglas’s careless toleration of slavery wherever local voters approved of its existence:
If [the advocates of permanent American slavery] would repress all tendencies towards liberty, and ultimate emancipation, they must […] blow out the moral lights around us, and extinguish that greatest torch of all which America presents to a benighted world – pointing the way to their rights, their liberties, and their happiness. […] They must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate the light of reason, and the love of liberty. Then, and not till then, when universal darkness and despair prevail, can you perpetuate slavery, and repress all sympathy, and all humane, and benevolent efforts among free men, in behalf of the unhappy portion of our race doomed to bondage.
(Lincoln 1953, vol. 2: 131)
The effect of such passages in Clay’s sometimes day‐long speeches indicated something else: that he assumed there was a self‐governing, constitutional, vulnerable republic at stake, one whose moral being would dissolve if its founding promises were ignored or abandoned. When Lincoln claimed that Clay directed “all his efforts” for “practical effect” and “never spoke merely to be heard,” he had in mind – and his speech‐making was predicated upon – that vision.
Supporters of secession often employed rigorously forensic rhetoric arguing against any constitutional arrangement that was distinct from a political contract. Like some abolitionists, some secessionists assumed that secession could take place without a mutually destructive, internecine war. Radical abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison – who at an antislavery meeting in 1854 famously burned a copy of the Constitution, declaring: “So perish all compromises with tyranny!” – were willing to direct their zealous rhetoric against the document itself as the root of the evil, as though the Union were dispensable or somehow invulnerable to such a loss. Neither extremity of the political spectrum shared Clay’s or Lincoln’s enduring belief that the republic’s moral as well as its physical life, and the life of its sections, lay in the balance. Both men said they preferred their own death to death of that republic. Even in war – especially in war – Lincoln framed his speeches, with Clay’s influence, to articulate the nature of that aspiringly eternal yet all‐too‐vulnerable Union and the consequent means by which it could be saved.
Daniel Webster
Lincoln might have modeled his oratory after Daniel Webster’s, especially Webster’s powerful and much‐published defense of the Union in the Second Reply to Hayne, a speech delivered in the Senate in 1830 (Widmer 2006: 182–254). The New Englander’s ornate, ardent, and pointed encomium to the flag at the end of that speech was arguably the most famous sentence of the antebellum era:
Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as “What is all this worth?” nor those other words of delusion and folly, “Liberty first and Union afterwards”; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart, – Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!
(Widmer 2006: 254)
Lincoln almost never made explicit reference to Webster, according to the printed record. He rarely used Websterian hyperbole. Yet as speakers the two men had much in common. Neither indulged in fireworks as much as one might expect. Both masterful trial lawyers, they relied, more than anything, upon their elevation of the common idiom, and their use of forms of logical presentation that could reach the jury of their peers and of public opinion. Before he knew of Lincoln, Emerson was using terms for Webster that would later characterize the simplicity, strategic ornateness, and convincing power of Lincoln’s western mode of speaking: “[Webster’s] rhetoric is perfect, so homely, so fit, so strong. […] What is small he shows as small, and makes the great great. In speech he sometimes roars and his words are like blows of an axe” (Emerson 1982: 169).
We learn much about Lincoln’s studious originality – his imitation and departure from Webster as well as Clay – when we notice how Webster, to serve his presidential ambitions, interlaced his calculated excess and simplicity with a shrewd evasiveness that enabled him to avoid Clay’s moral reasoning and defend the Union in a way that might gain acceptance from all the sections of the country. Clay had kept the light of liberty and emancipation alive in his vision of the Union, at least for a time, with the help of circumambulation, analogy, digression, and the logic of juxtaposition. But his oratorical accomplishments were, in the end, a holding action. As the most forceful advocate for union, Webster was more emphatic and strategically confrontational, but much less willing to evoke antislavery sentiment. While dismissing abolitionists’ strategy and taking umbrage at southern threats of secession, he sought compromise by means of a grand display of magnanimity. He defended liberty in terms favorable to sectional rather than individual freedom, while making support of the Union tantamount to a civil religion. He was in many ways fearless. In his Reply to Hayne, he accepted his fellow senator’s veiled challenge to a duel with a high‐spirited, sneering civility that reduced it to a trial of rhetoric. But during the crucial compromise debate of 1850 he spoke dismissively of abolitionism without taking any stand with regard to slavery: “I do not think them [abolition societies] useful” (Widmer 2006: 514). When he cited the Founders’ support for the principle of equality (for example, in saying the Union was “founded upon principles of equality” [Widmer 2006: 522]), he steered around the phrasing of the Declaration. He was, unapologetically, a northerner standing apart from the land of cotton, but it wasn’t at all clear – he seems to have made sure it wasn’t clear – whether he was speaking about the equality of the sections (a pillar of John C. Calhoun’s defense of southern claims) or the equality of all men. Using the incompleteness inherent in lawyerly precision (a talent Lincoln used to sustain and advance the antislavery cause), Webster’s emphatic oratorical performances carefully refrained from linking union and liberty to emancipation.
Today Webster is most widely known, partly through John Greenleaf Whittier’s outraged poem “Ichabod,” for New England abolitionists’ disgust at his canny endorsement of a strict Fugitive Slave Law in the Compromise of 1850. For the abolitionist poet and his descendants, Webster became the “fallen angel,” enchained by his own political and oratorical power because his success as a speaker came at the price of denying freedom to the enslaved. But in Lincoln’s time Webster’s political and oratorical reputation was still generally strong. He failed to win the Whig nomination for the presidency in 1852, but it is reasonable to believe that his mighty defenses of the Union added magnitude to the union cause in all sections from the time of the Nullification crisis in the 1830s until after his death. In his Second Inaugural Address in 1833, Andrew Jackson had used stark warnings to stop nullification, without giving the least hint of any antislavery sentiment (Widmer 2006: 255–258). In the turmoil over the disposition of the territories won in the Mexican War, President Zachary Taylor made threats but no substantial speeches. But Webster’s famous defense of the Union was framed in a way that helped secure the cause of the Union. His memorable articulation of unionist sentiment irrevocably linked union with liberty.
As the North and West grew and expanded, that sentiment grew, providing Lincoln with the opportunity to develop an oratory that wed high unionism with antislavery conviction. In speeches whose compelling logic, simplicity, and moral weight surpassed the work of Webster and Clay, he eventually gathered a following for union and federal control of the territories. He found a way to speak convincingly for a Constitutionalism deeply informed by the principles of the Declaration. By presenting the Union as that kind of embodied being, Lincoln’s oratory was instrumental in forming the consensus that created the new Republican Party. It was a consensus, never complete, that made it possible for a Union worth saving to endure the Civil War and prepare for emancipation.
The Abolitionists
It is not possible to understand Lincoln’s achievements and those of his peers without taking account of the oratory of abolitionist and southern speakers, especially the ways in which their oratory helped create the context for Lincoln’s innovation. A brief account of abolitionist rhetoric must note the division between the most radical reformers, who often spoke with vehement accusations and calls for defiance of the laws, including the Constitution, and the more moderate yet still radical speakers, especially Theodore Parker and the reformer Wendell Phillips, whose long and influential careers as lecturers and political orators characterized abolition rhetoric more than anyone else’s.
It is tempting to sum up all abolitionist oratory as an expression of moral outrage rather than an act of persuasion. It was indeed overwhelmingly directed toward attracting and holding sympathetic audiences devoted to the cause of freeing the slaves. Moral/religious suasion, not deliberation or legislation, was by far the most important goal. Energetic vilification was a favorite strategy. Those who were indifferent or uncommitted could enter the tent but they would not be made comfortable in their unbelief. The point was to find and secure believers in the cause, and then to direct them toward the moral enemy. The nexus of the revival tent, the temperance campaigns, and abolition was not accidental. Political considerations, such as the difficulty of creating alliances across regional lines, or the challenge of connecting abolition to the Constitution, were far less important than justification by testimony and deeds. Garrison and his splinter group spoke about abolishing the Constitution, as though the political body of the Founders’ republic was dispensable and moral purity trumped all.
By contrast, both Parker and Phillips delivered a wide range of lectures on historical, theological, literary, and moral and political subjects. Phillips made (and donated) a fortune delivering his famous lecture on exotic (often slave‐produced) inventions of the ancient world. Parker was a polymath, a preacher and teacher with wide interests whose speech‐lectures were sometimes filled with insightfully selected statistics. Generally more lucid and effective than Emerson – and in Parker’s case, certainly, more humorous – Parker and Phillips were masters of colloquial dialogue as well as the style of plainly eloquent orations. They wielded condescension and ridicule with élan, masterfully beating down objections from the floor. They could speak, and they often did so, with an air of ecclesiastical authority. And yet they were not clergymen in the traditional sense, nor were their speeches conventional sermons. Phillips was never a clergyman. Parker, like Emerson, was not bound by denominational politics. Their oratorical power resided in their displays of intellectual liberty, cool vehemence, and moral anger, without the obligatory references to traditional doctrine and institutional authority. Unlike Emerson, whose oratory Parker criticized as disorganized and lacking in engagement, Parker and Phillips wrote and spoke with an ease of analysis that thoroughly mixed oratory with lecture. They lifted audiences seeking connection with history and ideas, and in doing so often fostered – unfortunately for their appeal in Lincoln’s part of the country – a tone of learned, sometimes preacherly condescension. Gadflies and moral prophets, they did not speak as though they were taking on the mantle of a national or even a sectional political party. Their efforts at moral suasion had powerful political implications for a moral movement of souls.
In these things Lincoln stood apart. He was a deeply political man with deeper convictions. He was master of ridicule, but in one memorable episode a failed master who had been challenged to a duel from which his friends had to extricate him. Satire and personally directed moral condemnations are extremely rare in his mature speeches. So is condescension. As a speaker, he used humor to address Americans’ imperfections – notably in his strategically humorous engagement with Stephen Douglas in their debates and his 1859 lecture on discoveries and inventions. Lincoln consistently addressed his audience as fellow citizens – as self‐possessed and vulnerable political friends, vulnerable to the winds of fear and tyranny yet capable of mastering or enduring their fate as free persons. Like Parker and Phillips, he could use parody and satire to humble his audience’s pretensions, but he always spoke with and to his audience, even to his political enemies, rather than at or over them. When he took on Wendell Phillips’s most popular lecture topic – the superiority of ancient inventions to Americans’ naive and morally misleading fascination with modern inventions and gadgets – Lincoln spoke appreciatively of individual inventors’ remarkable luck, genius, and profit from political innovations rather than trying to evoke, as Phillips did, a sense of thrilling disquiet at stories of oppression and conspiratorial ingenuity. Lincoln described inventors as helping make the American experiment with self‐government possible; Phillips framed the topic to support abolition in the face of doom (Phillips 1892: passim).
We see more deeply into Lincoln’s oratory if we realize that he was an emancipationist, not an abolitionist. He assiduously avoided identifying himself with the abolitionists, even though he pursued many of their goals. At the same time, he did not vilify abolitionists. He read them and communicated with them. During the war he depended mightily on their support. He adapted Theodore Parker’s phrasing for the close of the Gettysburg Address. But he did not endorse, he hardly recognized, the actions of John Brown in 1859, whom Theodore Parker had supported with funds, and whose speech of blunt simplicity on the scaffold (Widmer 2006: 678–679) Emerson would praise as a monument of the age. In Lincoln’s pivotal Cooper Union Address in New York in 1860, which he delivered to a formidable audience of mixed views, the rail‐splitter dismissed Brown’s actions as “peculiar,” atypical even of abolitionist ambitions. The passage is paradigmatic of Lincoln’s alertness to the possibility that he might be suspected of imitating Brown (as a firebrand defying the Constitution in order to free the slaves). It is also a paradigmatic display of his colloquial deftness in shifting the issue toward Republican principles:
Brown’s effort was peculiar. […] An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. […] And how much would it avail you, if you could, by the use of John Brown […] break up the Republican organization? Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed. There is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this nation, which cast at least a million and a half of votes. You cannot destroy that judgment and feeling – that sentiment – by breaking up the political organization which rallies around it.
(Lincoln 1953, vol. 3: 541–542)
The truly exceptional abolitionist in this era was of course Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery and eventually left Garrison’s radical, anti‐Constitutional fold. Douglass became a wide‐ranging master of oratory, and, not incidentally, Lincoln’s demanding admirer. His speeches had a broader emotional range than those of other abolitionists. His unsettling oration “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” begins with a remarkably empathic rendering of the holiday’s meaning for those who could push slavery from their minds, then describes with cold anger the disjunction between the celebrants’ condition and the sufferings of the enslaved, and closes with a passionate resolve that fuses the two emotional strains (Widmer 2006: 526–552). His critical and ultimately admiring 1876 oration dedicating the freedmen’s monument has given us one of the most astute assessments of Lincoln’s political magnanimity (Douglass 1876: 10). Douglass’s legacy, mixed with Lincoln’s, supplied the fuel for the uniquely eloquent and neglected postbellum speech, by far the best given on the occasion, by Robert Moton at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 (Moton 1922: passim).
Southern Eloquence
No survey of nineteenth‐century American oratory can omit John C. Calhoun, the leading voice of the southern resistance to northern pressures on what were considered to be southern prerogatives and negotiated guarantees regarding trade, slavery, and Constitutional precedent. If eloquence is “poetry subdued to the business of civic life” (Braden 1970: 33), Calhoun’s speeches exemplify the power of exposition shorn of rhetorical display. He subdued the volatile medium of senatorial rhetoric in a way that turned it into a drama of inner deliberation. He used pointed understatement so say the unsayable. His speeches against annexing Mexican territory after the war of 1848–1849 (and remarkably, against expansion of slavery in those lands) are models of logical analysis, the weighing of competing arguments, and the sifting of likely outcomes in the light of Constitutional principle and common sense. On the question of slavery, his logic is relentless, his hold on a long history of relevant legislation tenacious. All turns on his premise that the Constitution originated as a compact of the states, not as a birth of freedom or an emanation of the various charters of the American Revolution. For all his forensic acumen, he also relies upon the memory of a tacit understanding which, unlike those cited by Clay and Lincoln, was supposed to maintain the North and South in political equilibrium. Colleagues called Calhoun the “cast‐iron man,” renowned for his “unyielding adherence to the dictates of his metaphysics” (Braden 1970: 182). But his paradox was the immensity of his restraint. His almost impassive, even humble expositions did double duty as warnings that he did not condescend to elaborate. The spare summative sentences of his famous speech in the Senate during the debate over the Compromise of 1850 capture the method and spirit of his oratorical career:
I have exerted myself, during the whole period, to arrest it [the agitation of the slavery question], with the intention of saving the Union, if it could be done; and if it could not, to save the section where it has pleased providence to cast my lot, and which I sincerely believe has justice and the Constitution on its side. Having faithfully done my duty to the best of my ability, both to the Union and my section, throughout this agitation, I shall have the consolation, let what will come, that I am free from all responsibility.
(Widmer 2006: 482)
Calhoun’s rigorously direct, expository spirit had at one time led him to observe that southerners were generally agreed that slavery was an evil. His listeners would have known the famous 1820 speech by his colleague William Pinkney, who entered the debate over the Missouri Compromise with a stunning frankness: he aggressively identified and agreed with a host of northern criticisms of slavery before going on to defend the southern position (Pinkney 1969: 292–337). But as time went on Calhoun and others turned away from such concessions, blaming abolitionists for threatening the safety and legal standing of the South. The very act of speaking about slavery became controversial. The “gag rule,” which prevented antislavery petitions from being read or discussed, prevailed in Congress. In official addresses, Presidents Andrew Jackson and his chosen successor, Martin Van Buren, encouraged the prohibition of speech that focused upon slavery. The best political oratory had to find ways to resist being reduced to euphemism, innuendo, and legalistic maneuver.
Abraham Lincoln
Expository and almost always cool, Lincoln’s oratory, like Calhoun’s, harbored principles that set limits on his accommodations to opposing views. And like Calhoun, he remembered – made a point of remembering – an earlier period of civil agreement over the evil of slavery. Following Clay, however, he understood that that consensus was a legacy rather than a compromise. It was not, as Calhoun had repeatedly argued, a contract that could be broken when one of the parties reneged. Lincoln rationed his legal language because he took a fundamentally different view: the Founders were generally agreed not only about the nature and destiny of slavery but also the nature of the republic as an eternal union.
Lincoln’s oratory was political in that comprehensive sense: it assumed that the republic had a mortal yet procreative – in some sense principled and ensouled – existence that made it worth the saving. Saving the Union was not important merely for the sake of its survival but for the more perfect and Constitutional embodiment of its original Jeffersonian aspirations. In conviction and oratorical approach, this was the basis for Lincoln’s ultimate confrontation with Stephen Douglas, who spoke legalistically and often demagogically about the authority of “popular sovereignty,” as though the country’s identity was determined by the right to vote and particular judicial decisions rather than the principles of the Declaration as they worked their way through the Articles of Confederation and Eternal Union, the Constitution, and the Founders’ Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in the old Northwest Territory, all of the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, as well as part of Minnesota.
Lincoln’s sensitivity to the embodied, animated nature of the American republic led to the House Divided Speech of 1858, in which he invoked and adapted biblical precedent to argue that there was a constitutional national house with a free and moral nature vulnerable to the contradictions of slavery. With an almost Euclidean logic, he argued that those contradictions would eventually define that house if it did not recover its Jeffersonian and Constitutional bearings. A similar understanding was also the stimulus for the Cooper Union Address two years later, in the first half of which he used his own breathtakingly empirical study of the Founders’ voting records to show that a majority supported the federal government’s power to control slavery in the territories. The idea of an embodied, ensouled Republic informs his revision of Senator William H. Seward’s suggested wording at the close of the First Inaugural, where Lincoln calls for turning to the “better angels of our nature” – a power both within and beyond – to touch the heartstrings of a fractious, aspiring people. It is at the heart of the Gettysburg Address, which portrays the Union as conceived in liberty, dedicated upon birth to the proposition that all men are created equal, and matured in its endurance of an ordeal that threatens its life. Finally, in the Second Inaugural in 1865, that idea of the embodied republic – subject to imperfection yet responsive to a higher calling – organizes that speech around a generations‐long moral and political ordeal that continues into the latest generation, where it will end, if the meaning of its arc can be understood by the people who endure it, in “charity for all,” not only for the soldiers and the widows, but for the body of the whole and its descendants.
The Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’s Cornerstone Speech in 1861 serves as an instructive, foreboding contrast to Lincoln’s approach. There, the rebelling Confederacy is a structure rather than a living being. Its cornerstone defines all. Remarkably, Stephens accepts Lincoln’s understanding that the Founders put great stock in Jefferson’s principle. But then – in an unprecedented turn of argument – he declares that principle obsolete, a violation of scientific law now monumentalized in the Confederation’s stone foundation. Jefferson’s self‐evident truths are to be replaced by a precursor of Darwinian science. The new government’s cornerstone will be a “great” and now fully developed “truth” of “science,” which will correct the “errors of the past generation” that have prevailed “as late as twenty years ago.” Newly discovered facts now prove that the white race is superior to the black, and that the issue is therefore closed, in stone, its fate settled. The new principle is unassailable in moral terms because it is scientific. Those who question it are “fanatics,” a species of the insane. They are “attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal,” as though they could refute the laws of gravity. The argument implicitly turns upside down Daniel Webster’s temporizing stance in his famous speech of 1850. If, as Webster had argued, physical principles based on facts can be irrefutable guides to settling political and moral disputes – for example, the physical unsuitability of New Mexico’s soil and climate being an empirical refutation of efforts to introduce slavery there – then, Stephens argues, a new and more comprehensive empirical principle can fittingly declare that blacks are inferior to, and hence subject to slavery by, whites (Widmer 2006: 717–731).
Lincoln’s oratory, particularly his presidential speeches, transcends Webster’s arguments and anticipates Stephens’s objections by incorporating Jefferson’s principles into his description of the living, self‐governing republic. Calhoun had defined the Union as the mere “creature” of the states, a cancelable product of a compact (Lence 1992: 310). But for Lincoln, it was almost a created being, born of liberty and dedicated to noble ends. The new Union would live and be perfected by means of that birth and by an almost marital union of the states. As he described it in the First Inaugural, it was “formed […] by the Articles of Association in 1774” and “matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776” and “further matured” by the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, which was “to form a more perfect union.” The states had “plighted and engaged” their faith “that it should be perpetual by the Articles of Confederation in 1778,” which Lincoln and his audience knew had declared themselves, in the title of that document, instruments of “perpetual union.” Perpetuity was “the vital element” in the perfective maturation of the Union (Lincoln 1953, vol. 4: 269).
Lincoln’s speeches were all framed to address the fact that that republic could perish. It could choose to live on but only meanly, contradicting its founding principles. It could die by suicide. Or it could perpetuate those principles in the fabric of its national character, making it worth the saving. No other speaker of the period puts the pieces together in Lincoln’s way. His most memorable passages live on largely because they capture, amid the country’s greatest and still most characteristic crisis, this understanding of a flawed and perishable, savable republic. To this great tradition, almost all the speeches of postbellum orators, at best, remain instructive postscripts.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 12 (THE LITERATURE OF ANTEBELLUM REFORM); CHAPTER 14 (PROSLAVERY AND ANTISLAVERY LITERATURE); CHAPTER 17 (LITERATURE AND THE CIVIL WAR).