Chapter XIV: Part 14

=The Historical Background.=--In America, oratory has been the most fortunate of all the arts. Whether in the era prior to the Revolution, or in the formative years of the Republic before 1800, or in the first half and more of the nineteenth century--in the pulpit as well as at the bar and in the forum, American orators have drawn their inspiration directly from the political or religious life of the nation. From the nature of things, no other art, neither poetry, nor painting, nor music, could bear so intimate a relation to the course of our national existence as the utterance of the public speaker. Every crisis in our history, the Revolution itself, the War of 1812, the struggle between North and South, was hastened by the spoken word. Trained poets have been wanting among us; trained speakers, in so far as their powers could develop without a correspondingly high development of poetry and music, we have always possessed; men skilled in rousing enthusiasm and reverence throughout congregations of the pious, men alert to kindle the intelligence of a legislature or to sway the minds of judge and jury. From the first, this training was continuous and effective. In the bare colonial churches thought, word, and action of the pastor were criticised by an audience that had braved the sea and the savage for the privilege of listening. From the colonial courts of justice spread the education which warranted Burke in saying of a litigious populace: “In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful.... But all who read, and most do read, endeavour to obtain some smattering in that science.” With this knowledge of law, every other colonist was a keen debater for his private rights and, when the time came, for the rights of his community or nation. From a population thus educated sprang the forensic leaders of the Revolution; and to its sources in eighteenth-century popular education we follow back the steady stream of American eloquence which in the nineteenth century runs strong and full in the noblest efforts of American literature--say Webster’s tribute to Massachusetts in the reply to Hayne, and Lincoln’s undying speech at Gettysburg.

So close indeed is the bond between juridic and political history on the one hand, and the achievement of the great American orators on the other, that they can be sundered, as in the following pages, only for purposes of general reference. Since a political history of the United States from the year 1783 is not here expected, we must limit ourselves to brief notice of a few representative men, taken in something like chronological order, and mainly between the years 1800 and 1865. With the Civil War, or perhaps with the second inaugural address of President Lincoln, ended the golden age of national eloquence.

=Precursors of the Nineteenth Century.=--The careers of James Otis (1725-83), Samuel Adams (1722-1803), Josiah Quincy, Junior (1744-75), and Patrick Henry (1736-99), fall largely in the period covered by the pages from Tyler; and the orations and political writings of the Revolutionary Period itself do not come within the scope of the present sketch. Of course it is impossible to make a line of sharp division in the case of public men whom we instinctively couple with the earliest days of the Republic, but whose voices were heard to the verge of the next century, or even beyond. The “Farewell Address” of Washington to his countrymen in 1796, so long regarded with veneration, was, in spite of its conservative form, its Johnsonian balance, a document with matter for the coming age. However, it is clear that statesmen who were in their prime at the time of Washington’s death in 1799 more particularly require our attention.

_Fisher Ames._--Among these is Fisher Ames (1758-1808). Admitted to Harvard at the age of twelve, after graduation he first engaged in teaching, then studied law, and entering politics, became a force among the Federalists. Long the victim of ill health, he nevertheless made his superior mental endowment felt in the counsels of the nation. His “Tomahawk Speech” (1796), on Jay’s treaty with Great Britain, contained passages of splendour on the fear of Indian massacres. For the eloquence of this speech he has been compared to Wilberforce, Brougham, Burke, Pitt, and Fox. He could not have resembled them all. Ames had a fastidious taste, was cautious and dignified in his utterances, and was not desirous of a cheap popularity. “To be the favourite of an ignorant multitude,” he observed, “a man must descend to their level.” Four years before he died, his health constrained him to decline the presidency of Harvard.

=The Early Nineteenth Century.=--The activity of Rufus King (1755-1827) and others continued somewhat later. This friend of Alexander Hamilton, and collaborator with him in the political essays signed “Camillus,” was in 1796 accorded the delicate function of Minister to England. In 1813 the Legislature of New York elected him to the United States Senate; here he won laurels for his speech on the destruction of Washington by the British. He returned to the Senate in 1820, and he was Minister to England again under President Adams.

_John Marshall._--The name of John Marshall (1755-1835) we naturally associate with his momentous work of interpreting the Constitution. The dry light of his intellect and his lack of passion were more suited to purely legal exposition than to the eloquence of debate. When he went to Congress in 1798, the cogency of his argument was already known. It is sufficiently demonstrated by his speech in Robbins’ case (1800), a case that involved the international law governing murder committed upon the high seas by a citizen of one country sailing on the ship of another. Marshall’s uninspiring “Life of Washington” is valuable as a repository of plain fact.

_Morris and De Witt._--Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816) was early famous for his eloquence. His thought was orderly, his style finished. Successful in the practice of law, and distinguished for his services during the Revolution, he became a zealous Federalist, entering the United States Senate in 1800. Here his most notable effort was his “Speech on the Judiciary” (1802). Clinton De Witt (1769-1828), who was Mayor of New York City most of the time between 1803 and 1815, was also in the Senate for two years, and opposed the redoubtable Morris on the question of navigation on the Mississippi. De Witt was a man of wide interests, being something of a scientist and historian; his practical sense recognised the value of inland waterways. He merits more attention than can here be given him.

_Gore_, _Dexter_, _and Others_.--The same is true of the following: Christopher Gore (1758-1829), who in 1814 reached the Senate, to remain three years, and who spoke on “The Prohibition of Certain Imports” (1814) and on “Direct Taxation” (1815); Samuel Dexter (1761-1816), Secretary of War and Secretary of the Treasury; James A. Bayard (1767-1815), lawyer, Senator, Commissioner at Ghent in 1814; William Branch Giles (1762-1840); Edward Livingston (1764-1836), jurist, diplomat, Secretary of State; John Sergeant (1779-1852), candidate for Vice-President on the Clay ticket of 1832; John J. Crittenden (1787-1863), lawyer and statesman; James Hillhouse (1789-1846), orator as well as poet.

_William Pinkney._--Among the noteworthy orators during the first twenty years of the last century was William Pinkney (1764-1822). The son of a sympathiser with England, he was himself devoted to the cause of American freedom. His prominence in the affairs of Maryland ushered him into national concerns. He took part in the War of 1812, and was wounded. He was Attorney-General under Madison, but resigned for the sake of his private practice. He was made Minister to Russia in 1816; in 1820 he entered the United States Senate. A specimen of his eloquence may be seen in his argument before the Supreme Court (1815) in the case of the prize ship _Nereide_. Pinkney was fond of classical learning, and well versed in current literature. He prided himself on his accuracy in the use of English. This made him over-conscious in his style, so that his thought seems artificial. His death is said to have been partly caused by his labours in the preparation and delivery of an argument.

_Quincy_, _Gallatin_, _and Emmet_.--Josiah Quincy (1772-1864), son of Josiah Quincy of Revolutionary fame, was president of Harvard from 1829 to 1845. Besides his “History of Harvard University,” he was the author of many pamphlets and public addresses. “His career in Congress was distinguished chiefly for his opposition to the Embargo, to the War of 1812, and to the admission of Louisiana.” Albert Gallatin (1761-1849), leaving his birthplace, at Geneva, Switzerland, came to Boston in 1781, taught French in Harvard, went to Virginia, and there became the friend of Patrick Henry. He was sent to Congress in 1795, and thereafter entrusted with special missions to Holland and England. He was also Minister to France (1816), and Minister to England (1826). Gallatin’s intuitions were as quick and sure as his character was upright and urbane. His information, as in his speech (1796) on the earlier British treaty, was ample and exact. Among his innumerable services to the country of his adoption, not the least were his efforts on behalf of internal commerce and the improvement in methods of banking. Thomas Addis Emmet (1764-1827) was also a foreigner--a native of Cork. He studied medicine in Edinburgh, but turning to law, was admitted to practice in 1791 and settled at Dublin. For his share in the Irish insurrectionary movement he was imprisoned; after his release he emigrated to New York, where he became an eminent pleader. He had a “dignified but earnest attitude, forcible and unstudied gestures,” and a “powerful and expressive voice.” “No orator knew better how to enlist his hearers on the side of his client.”

_Red Jacket and Tecumseh._--Foreign, likewise, although bred within our borders, was the eloquence of the Indians, Red Jacket and Tecumseh. Red Jacket was the nickname of Sa-go-ye-wat-ha (“He keeps them awake”), otherwise known as “the last of the Senecas.” He was a lover of peace, resisting entanglements, counselling the Indians neither to fight, nor yet to mingle, with the whites, dissuading them against the adoption of Christianity, settled in his ancestral reverence for “the Great Spirit.” His simple and direct language was full of sudden poetic energy. He died at a great age in 1830. Tecumseh (1770?-1812), in many things his opposite, was killed at the Battle of the Thames, where he fought with the English against the United States. A born leader was Tecumseh, magnificent in his proportions, noble in his bearing, fiery and magnetic. Prior to the War of 1812 he tried to enlist the Indians of the South and West in a general insurrection against the government. He went from tribe to tribe, reproaching them with their debasement through white civilisation, and abusing the Federal authority.

_William Wirt._--Of Swiss descent, one of the ablest men this country developed in his time was William Wirt (1772-1834). His arraignment of Aaron Burr at the latter’s trial in 1807 was masterly, and made Wirt’s name familiar to the public ear. From 1817 to 1828 he was Attorney-General. In private as in national life his character was without stain; his correspondence discloses an honesty and consistency of statement and purpose almost unequalled. His imaginative “Letters of the British Spy” (1803) described Virginian society and American eloquence as they might appear to an unbiassed traveller. “The Life and Character of Patrick Henry” (1817) was roundly praised by Jefferson. Of Wirt’s occasional addresses none was more admired than that delivered in 1830 before the students of Rutgers College.

_Judge Story._--The voluminous works of Joseph Story (1779-1845), including text-books on law, are in part made up of his discourses. He began life as a poet, but attained his first eminence as a lawyer. Before his appointment to the United States Supreme Court, he was heard on the floor of the House of Representatives. As professor in the Harvard Law School he proved an acceptable lecturer.

_John Quincy Adams._--The younger Adams (1767-1848), sixth President of the United States, received from his father, the second President, specific training for the career of statesman; even his boyhood was passed in the midst of political and diplomatic life. He studied at Leyden, then at Harvard, where, during an interim in his public activities, he afterward held the chair of rhetoric and belles-lettres. He saw diplomatic service in Holland, Russia, England, was in the Senate, and was in the House of Representatives. He was a foe of slavery, but not a Garrisonian Abolitionist. In 1836 he urged upon Congress its right under the Constitution, as he believed, to abolish slavery by legal enactment. His influence was strong for freedom of debate. This “old man eloquent” continued speaking when he was over eighty, and died on the floor of the House of Representatives. He was a diarist, a poet, a translator. He was a clear, fluent, not very terse speaker, having the agglomerative and developing style of the parliamentary orator. When he desired, he could be ironical.

=The High Tide of American Oratory.=--The burning questions of the rights of an individual state as against its duties to the central government, of the extension of negro slavery, or its territorial limitation, or its entire abolition, brought on the crisis of the Civil War, which is the central fact in American history. Correspondingly, during the interval between the War of 1812 and the War of the Rebellion, their eloquence fired by these and related questions, lie the careers of our greatest orators.

“_Old Bullion._”--Thomas Hart Benton (1782-1858) cannot be reckoned one of these. Indifferent to the spread of slavery, he was in favour of developing the great Western territories at any cost. He urged a reduction of the prices charged by the government in the sale of public lands, and promoted the interests of a railroad to the Pacific. As an advocate of specie currency he acquired the sobriquet of “Old Bullion.” Retiring from the Senate after extended usefulness there, he published his “Thirty Years’ View,” a history of the workings of the American Government from 1820 to 1850, highly commended by Bryant for its taste and simplicity of style.

_Henry Clay._--Slightly the senior of Benton, Henry Clay (1777-1852) was in public life for an even longer time. By birth he was a Virginian. In the face of early hardship he rose to be Senator from Kentucky (1806-1807); from 1811 until 1852, for forty-one years, he was almost steadily in the eye of the nation. A leader of the Whig party, he sided with his great opponent, Calhoun, against the more timid Madison, in precipitating the second war with England; and he was prominent in the negotiations for peace that followed. Clay was four times Speaker of the House of Representatives, and four times unsuccessful candidate for President of the United States. The influence which he had shown over juries in Kentucky he likewise exercised in the national legislature. In the management of conflicting interests, and in furthering the measures of his party, he had a genius for detecting what was possible or expedient. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Tariff Compromise of 1833, and the Slavery Compromise of 1850 were largely owing to him. He was a master in effecting legislation. According to Blaine, “Mr. Webster argued the principle, Mr. Clay embodied it in a statute.” Among his celebrated speeches were those on the New Army Bill (1813), on the Seminole War (1819), and on the Tariff (1824). At his death, a colleague, Joseph R. Underwood, said in the Senate:

The character of Henry Clay was formed and developed by the
influence of our free institutions. His physical and mental
organisation eminently qualified him to become a great and
impressive orator. His person was tall, slender, and commanding;
his temperament ardent, fearless, and full of hope; his countenance
clear, expressive, and variable--indicating the emotion which
predominated at the moment with exact similitude; his voice
cultivated and modulated in harmony with the sentiment he desired
to express ...; his eye beaming with intelligence, and flashing
with coruscations of genius; his gestures and attitudes graceful
and natural. These personal advantages won the prepossessions of
an audience, even before his intellectual powers began to move his
hearers; and when his strong common sense, his profound reasoning,
his clear conceptions of his subject in all its bearings, and his
striking and beautiful illustrations, united with such personal
qualities, were brought to the discussion of any question, his
audience was enraptured, convinced, and led by the orator as if
enchanted by the lyre of Orpheus.

_John Caldwell Calhoun._--The character and intellect of John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850) were admired even by those who least cared for his opinions. A South Carolinian of Scotch-Irish extraction, he graduated from Yale, in 1804, with the highest honours. He towered in political life from 1808 until he died: as leader of the war party under Madison; in upholding the doctrine of nullification--that is, the right of each state to resist a Congressional enactment which the state might deem injurious; in the annexation of Texas; and in the defence of slavery. Calhoun was fearless and precise in the discharge of his duties as Secretary of War under Monroe, reducing expenses, and rendering petty defalcation impossible. He was Vice-President in 1825. His ruling ideas are contained in his “Disquisition on Government” and “Discourse on the Government of the United States” (in the first volume of his works), and in speeches before the Senate--for example, on Nullification and the Force Bill (1833) and on the Slavery Question (1850). He was thus characterised by Webster:

The eloquence of Mr. Calhoun ... was plain, strong, terse,
condensed, concise; sometimes impassioned--still always severe.
Rejecting ornament, not seeking far for illustration, his power
consisted in the plainness of his propositions, in the clearness
of his logic, and in the earnestness and energy of his manner....
His demeanour as a Senator is known to us all--is appreciated,
venerated by us all.

_Hayne and Randolph._--When Calhoun was Vice-President, his spokesman in the Senate was a fellow Carolinian, Robert Young Hayne (1791-1840), who was a soldier in the War of 1812, but who, in his vindication of state rights, refused the Attorney-Generalship of the country to be Attorney-General of South Carolina. He also retired from the Senate to be Governor of his State. In his unlucky debate with Webster in 1830 he carried sectional jealousy--of the South against New England--into the question concerning the sale of public lands in the West. Graceful in person, of a fine countenance, industrious, commonly amiable, Hayne “had a copious and ready elocution, flowing at will in a strong and steady current, and rich in the material that constitutes argument.” His prejudices, however, could distract him from the subject in hand. The bellicose Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke (1773-1833), was in Congress at the age of twenty-six. His bitterness toward England seems excessive. Eccentric, singular also in appearance, biting and unexpected in retort, he was a figure of interest when he came to the Senate in 1825. His duel with Henry Clay is a matter of unpleasant history. Enthusiastic contemporary estimates of him by Paulding and others have not worn well.

_Daniel Webster._--The prince of American orators, and one of the great orators of modern times, was born in Salisbury, New Hampshire, on January 18, 1782. His ancestry was Scotch. He had the stinted education of a village school whose doors were open for a short term in winter. Yet he could never recollect the time when he could not read the Bible; and this and the few other books that he could obtain he perused so often that he virtually had them by heart. He was fond of committing passages to memory. But at Exeter, where he prepared for college, there was one thing which he could not do: “I could not speak before the school.” The efforts of his father made it possible for him to attend Dartmouth College. He read by himself with the avidity of a Lowell--but he also pursued with good intent the regular course of studies. Finishing this course in 1801, he studied law, earned a little money by teaching in Maine, and at length entered the office of Christopher Gore in Boston--“a tall, gaunt young man, with rather a thin face, but all the peculiarities of feature and complexion by which he was distinguished in later life.” There followed some years of practice with meagre remuneration, but of unceasing study. In 1813 he was sent to Congress from New Hampshire. His speech in that year on the repeal of the Berlin and Milan Decrees elicited praise from Chief Justice Marshall, and throughout the country. Webster immediately advanced to the front rank of debaters. It is baffling even to suggest the range and importance of his subsequent labours. When the famous Dartmouth College case, apparently a forlorn hope, was carried before the United States Supreme Court in 1818, Webster’s opening argument as junior counsel brought an unlooked for settlement in favour of the College; since then the case has furnished a ruling precedent in interpreting the Constitutional clause which prohibits state interference with the terms of a past contract. In 1820 he was engaged on the revision of the Massachusetts State Constitution. From 1823 to 1827 he was in the House of Representatives; from 1827 to 1841, and again from 1845 to 1850, in the Senate. He was Secretary of State under Harrison and Tyler, and under Fillmore. Through supposed concessions to slavery in his speech of March 7, 1850, on the Constitution and the Union, he estranged his best friends in the North, and had to endure the taunt of faithlessness in Whittier’s “Ichabod.” Historians, however, have justified the loftiness of his statesmanship even here. He died as Secretary of State under Fillmore, October 24, 1852.

During his reply to Hayne in 1830, when Webster uttered his encomium on the State of Massachusetts, strong men were moved to tears. One cannot read it at this distance without strange emotion. Passages in the second address at Bunker Hill, or the argument in Knapp’s trial--the passage on the conscience of the murderer, or more especially that at the end on the universal sense of duty--rise to the point where the ethical and æsthetic values of eloquence are one and eternal. One might go on to mention his eulogy on “Adams and Jefferson,” his “First Settlement of New England”--but we should hardly finish a mere enumeration of the speeches he delivered during his forty years of public life.

Consider [said Choate] the work he did in that life of forty
years--the range of subjects investigated and discussed; composing
the whole theory and practice of our organic and administrative
politics, foreign and domestic; the vast body of instructive
thought he produced and put in possession of the country; how much
he achieved in Congress as well as at the bar; to fix the true
interpretation, as well as to impress the transcendent value of the
Constitution itself ...; how much to establish in the general mind
the great doctrine that the government of the United States is a
government proper, established by the people of the States, not a
compact between sovereign communities ...; to place the executive
department of the government on its true basis ...; to secure to
that department its just powers on the one hand, and on the other
hand to vindicate to the legislative department, and especially
to the Senate, all that belonged to them ...; to develop the vast
material resources of the country, and push forward the planting
of the West ...; to protect the vast mechanical and manufacturing
interests ...; how much for the right performance of the most
delicate and difficult of all tasks, the ordering of the foreign
affairs of a nation, free, sensitive, self-conscious ...; how much
to compose with honour a concurrence of difficulties with the first
power of the world.

His style is simple, clear, free from tricks, unstudied in its details, the easy outflow of a mind nourished on choice and repeated reading, with the English Bible as its main source; not avoiding allusion to himself, but quickly mounting with the subject to universal application; not deficient in grace, yet on the whole massive, orderly, and neglectful of lighter emotions. In private life Webster was genial. He was fond of the open country, delighting in the rod and gun. “Black Dan” he was familiarly called, on account of his deep-set, lustrous eyes, over-shadowing brows, and commanding, swarthy countenance. The proportions and majesty of his head were in keeping with the dignity of his figure.

_William Lloyd Garrison._--With the main agitator of the Abolitionist movement there was no thought of compromise. Orator as well as writer, William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), though the herald of self-restraint, and preaching the doctrine of non-resistance, carried his principles to their extreme length. He condemned the churches for their tolerance of slavery, and disliked the Constitution for permitting it. He favoured ending the Union, if the national disease could be removed by amputation. He could not tolerate gradual treatment or the doubtful promise of an incomplete cure.

_Charles Sumner._--Garrison’s brave, handsome, and gifted friend, and the friend of Longfellow, Charles Sumner (1811-1878), was trained in the law under Judge Story. It was partly through Whittier’s influence that he entered politics, but when he succeeded Webster in the Senate his place as a leader was assured. The infamous assault upon him by Brooks in 1856, during the debate over the affairs of Kansas, left Sumner incapacitated until 1859. When “the eloquent vacant chair” was filled again, crowds gathered whenever announcement was made that Sumner would speak. His intellect was not equal to that of his illustrious predecessor; yet his sound judgment and winning personality, aided by a captivating delivery, put him, in the Senate, at the head of the new Republican party. His “Orations” have been published in eight volumes.

_Thaddeus Stevens._--While Sumner was in the Senate, Thaddeus Stevens (1792-1868), a less admirable character, led the Republicans in the House. He also was a bitter foe of slavery, and was urgent with Lincoln to emancipate the negroes. “A clear, logical, and powerful debater,” he was feared for his mordant invective. Influential with the rank and file of politicians, he rejoiced in the borrowed title of the “Great Commoner.”

_Wendell Phillips._--Of course the trumpet of the Abolitionists was the impassioned Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), ever supporting the hands of Garrison, and similarly uncompromising. On graduating from Harvard in 1831, he studied law; but he refused to engage in its practice, since this would entail his swearing to uphold a national Constitution which tolerated slavery. He was a master of sarcasm, irony, and epigram, of choice and varied wit; serene in the presence of his enemies, capturing and holding their attention. When the Civil War was over, and the cause of Abolition won, he turned to the remedy of other evils, speaking in favour of woman’s rights, and championing labour reform. In the guise of a general redresser of wrongs he lost prestige as well as something of his own sense of dignity.

_Rufus Choate._--The most famous of a famous family, Rufus Choate (1799-1859) was distinguished for his pleading at the bar, his literary attainments, and, during the time that he was there (1841-1845), the exercise of his talents in the Senate. A pupil of no less a lawyer than William Wirt, Choate, in his unrivalled success with juries, and his stirring if florid occasional addresses, was indebted not alone to his natural ardour and personal magnetism, but also to thorough analysis and unremitting preparation. His eulogy on Webster at Dartmouth College, July 27, 1853, was the tribute of an eminent graduate of that institution to the noblest.

_Stephen A. Douglas._--Stephen Arnold Douglas (1813-1861) was born in Brandon, Vermont, studied law in Canandaigua, New York, continued this study in Ohio, and proceeded thence to Illinois to teach, and to practise his calling of lawyer. He was in the United States Senate from 1847 to 1861, doing his best to avert the Civil War. In 1858 and 1860 the “Little Giant” boldly appeared before audiences in the South and denied the right of any state to secede from the Union. His speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (1854) shows his attitude of _laissez-faire_ in the matter of slavery. When he matched his wits with Lincoln in their joint debate, he unintentionally hastened his antagonist’s advance toward the Presidency.

_William H. Seward._--Cautious, clear, incisive, firm in his grasp of the laws of political history, William Henry Seward (1811-1872) foresaw what Douglas could not, that the struggle with slavery was an irrepressible conflict. In New York State, of which he became Governor, he was the untiring enemy of political opportunism in every shape. An unsuccessful aspirant in 1860 for the Presidency, he eventually overcame his lack of confidence in Lincoln, and as Lincoln’s Secretary of State was of inestimable service in maintaining our relations with England during the course of the Rebellion. His “Diplomatic History of the Civil War in America” was published posthumously.

_Salmon P. Chase._--Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Portland Chase (1808-1873), was not a facile speaker, but, tall and commanding, one of the handsomest men in the Senate, he was both dignified and impressive. Like Choate, he graduated from Dartmouth and studied with William Wirt. As a practising lawyer he engaged (1837) in the defence of persons on trial for alleged violation of the Fugitive Slave Act; in the debate upon the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (1854) he advocated “free soil,” and insisted upon “the absolute divorce of the General Government” from all connection with slavery. He was a Senator both before and after holding the governorship of Ohio, and again just before Lincoln summoned him into the Cabinet. In 1864 he was made Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a position which he honoured till his death.

_Edward Everett._--In the delivery of Edward Everett (1794-1865) “there was nothing in manner, person, dress, gesture, tone, accent, or emphasis too minute for his attention.” From boyhood he had the gift of eloquence, which he developed by assiduous practice. Taking high honours at Harvard when but seventeen, he went into the Unitarian ministry, and began preaching at the Brattle Street Church in Boston, with immediate success. Invited to assume a chair at Harvard, he studied abroad in preparation, and then from 1819 to 1825 taught Greek. He left his professorship to become a member of the House of Representatives. Ten years later he was elected Governor of Massachusetts. In 1841 General Harrison appointed him Minister to England; on his return he accepted the presidency of Harvard. He succeeded Webster as Secretary of State under Fillmore; and in the national election of 1860, representing the forces that desired a compromise between North and South, he was candidate for Vice-President of the United States. During his stay in the Senate Everett also was heard on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. His orations were published in four volumes. His “Lecture on the Character of Washington” (1856), frequently repeated, and his “Eulogy on Webster” (1859) were among his most splendid efforts. He made a remarkable address at Gettysburg, though it now seems academic beside that of Lincoln on the same occasion.

_Abraham Lincoln._--For a manual of literature the essential thing in the life of President Lincoln (1809-1865) is the ennoblement that went on in his eloquence, as his character developed under the increasing gravity and tension of his public career, and as his individual spirit became more and more identified with the agonising soul of a nation. The simplicity and directness of his mental operations are apparent in any of his earlier letters and speeches; they were sufficiently evident to those who heard his debate with Douglas. But his utterance gained in dignity and closeness of texture when his native impulses for good became free from idiosyncrasy, and when his innate moral rightness grew into a deep and conscious religion. In all literature there are few things more significant than the chastening of style that accompanied the chastening of Lincoln’s personality. There is a noticeable difference even between the manner of his first and that of his second inaugural address. In the meantime he had pronounced his speech at the dedication of the National Cemetery on the battlefield of Gettysburg, November 19, 1863. There, devoid of all pretence to rhetorical artifice, yet in the perfection of English style, Lincoln gave to the world a masterpiece of literature, issuing as it were from the life-blood of the people; a masterpiece in which art and life are married, and imaginative and literal truth are become one flesh. Says Mr. Bryce:

That famous Gettysburg speech is the best example one could desire
of the characteristic quality of Lincoln’s eloquence. It is a
short speech. It is wonderfully terse in expression. It is quiet,
so quiet that at the moment it did not make upon the audience, an
audience wrought up by a long and highly-decorated harangue from
one of the prominent orators of the day, an impression at all
commensurate to that which it began to make as soon as it was read
over America and Europe. There is in it not a touch of what we
call rhetoric, or of any striving after effect. Alike in thought
and in language it is simple, plain, direct. But it states certain
truths and principles in phrases so aptly chosen and so forcible,
that one feels as if those truths could have been conveyed in no
other words, and as if this deliverance of them were made for all
time. Words so simple and so strong could have come only from one
who had meditated so long on the primal facts of American history
and popular government that the truths those facts taught him had
become like the truths of mathematics in their clearness, their
breadth, and their precision.

=Miscellaneous and Later Orators.=--It is obvious that the lives of many ante-bellum orators overlapped upon the era of Reconstruction; and the fifty years of political activity since the Civil War have brought forth an ever growing number of men concerned in affairs of state. However, there are few in this last to compare in eloquence with those of the preceding half-century. Among recognised orators a quieter tone on the whole has prevailed; not altogether that of Lincoln, nor yet that characteristic of the best speakers in the time of Madison and the younger Adams; nevertheless marking an improvement upon the flowery and pedantic effusions of an intermediate age represented by Choate, Winthrop, and, to a certain extent, Everett. The passage of laws and the expediting of other public business have come to depend more upon influence and effort exerted off the floor of the House and the Senate, and less upon forensic argument and persuasion. With the enormous growth of the population and the corresponding increase in the size of our legislative bodies, public orators have in most cases been satisfied, perforce, with a local reputation. The following are chosen miscellaneously.

John B. Gough (1817-1886) was an English editor, who fell a victim to alcoholism, and being rescued from his habit by a friend of temperance, dedicated himself to the cause of rescuing others. He lectured widely in America, enthralling large audiences by his descriptions of the ruin worked by alcoholic beverages, and by his graphic narratives of lapsing and reformed drunkards.

George William Curtis (1824-1892) was in youth (1842) attached to the community at Brook Farm. On returning from studies in Berlin and Italy, he became connected with the publishers of Putnam’s Magazine. The management of this periodical failing, Curtis assumed a financial liability for which he was not legally responsible, and spent twenty years in lecturing, to pay off the indebtedness. He was noted as editor of _Harper’s Monthly_, and as a writer for _Harper’s Weekly_ and _Harper’s Bazar_. He was a virile speaker on civil-service reform and other subjects involving the national welfare. Wherever he went he inculcated high political ideals. His “Orations and Addresses” were edited by Professor Charles Eliot Norton.

James G. Blaine (1830-1893), a Pennsylvanian, commenced life as an editor in Maine, became a member of the State Legislature there, and thence proceeded to Congress. He made a brilliant record as Speaker of the House of Representatives (1869-1875). In 1876 he was appointed United States Senator from Maine. Several times a Presidential possibility, he was the Republican nominee in 1884, when he was unexpectedly defeated by Cleveland. Blaine’s speech on the remonetisation of silver (1878) has been often cited. He was clear and forcible, save for a slight lisp, but his character was not such as to force conviction home.

It is impossible in the space allotted to proceed further with recent or contemporary orators in political or secular life. One ought not to neglect such men as Carl Schurz (1829-1906) or Bourke Cockran (born in 1854), or among the last few presidents, Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901). Mr. Harrison, an astute lawyer, could, on short notice, and seemingly without effort, deliver the choicest of addresses, well turned, fluent, and of a convenient length. An account of American political eloquence properly ends with a reference to the distinguished statesman, now President, and after Washington and Lincoln the third among our sons of light, to whom this volume is dedicated. From the most conspicuous of public orators at the present day, we return to the early divines and theologians.

=American Divines.=--In his “Annals of the American Pulpit”--“from the Early Settlement of this Country to the Close of the Year 1855”--the Reverend William B. Sprague (1795-1875) collected the biographies of thirteen hundred or more divines who had earned as he thought a lasting memorial.[22] “From the commencement of this work,” he observes, “I have been quite aware that nothing pertaining to it involves more delicacy than the selection of its subjects, and that no degree of care and impartiality can be a full security against mistakes.” Far more difficult is the matter of selection, when in a sketch of barely a dozen pages we try to include the names of those who, during the nineteenth century, have most deeply wrought upon the private life of our citizens. The separation of church and state in America renders all the wider the ordinary cleft between public and private life, and the multiplicity of religious sects still further tends to keep the eloquence and motive force of great spiritual leaders from becoming generally known. Even among those whose power and fame have overleaped the confines of their own parish or denomination, our choice is necessarily limited to a scanty few.

=Clergymen as Educators.=--The influence of notable preachers--not to speak of the clergy as a whole--in American life is incalculable. Outside of the church and the home, it has been most evident in higher education; until a short time since, educational leadership was vested, as it should be, in the ministers of religion. As significant as the important colleges more or less directly founded for the training of pastors is the long line of college presidents taken from the ranks of that profession. At Princeton, Jonathan Edwards, head of that institution (1758) during the last month of his life, was succeeded ten years later by John Witherspoon (1722-1794), a lineal descendant of John Knox, and a signer of the American Declaration of Independence. The philosopher, James McCosh (1811-1894), was eleventh president in the same illustrious succession. At Yale we have such men as the poet, Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), and his grandson of the same name (born in 1828); Jeremiah Day (1773-1867), mathematician and commentator on Edwards; Theodore Dwight Woolsey (1801-1889), classical scholar and authority on international law, under whose presidency was trained a generation of organisers to guide the affairs of newer universities; and Noah Porter (1811-1892), whose treatise on “The Human Intellect” became a general text-book. At Union College was Eliphalet Nott (1773-1866), who, during an administration of sixty-two years, manifested consummate wisdom in the management of students. On the death of Hamilton at the hands of Aaron Burr, Nott eloquently attacked the barbarous practice of duelling. In his “Lectures on Temperance” (1823), he assisted the vigorous movement of Lyman Beecher and others against “even the common use of ardent spirits.” At Harvard was the versatile Edward Everett (1794-1865), to mention none of his predecessors. At Brown was Francis Wayland (1796-1865), the metaphysician; at Williams, Mark Hopkins, in his teaching a veritable Gamaliel. Aside from presidents, the peaceful army of college instructors chosen from the ministry is beyond reckoning--men like Frederick Henry Hedge (1805-1890), a Unitarian, professor of the German language and literature at Harvard, author of “Ways of the Spirit, and Other Essays,” “Prose Writers of Germany,” “Atheism in Philosophy,” etc.; or Edwards Amasa Park (1808-1900), descended, as his first name suggests, from a celebrated stock. Park was professor of philosophy at Amherst College, and afterward professor at Andover Theological Seminary. He was a hymnologist as well as a theologian, a biographer, as in his “Life of Nathanael Emmons,” and a contributor to the _Bibliotheca Sacra_. He had an individual, curiously periphrastic, way of putting things.

=Divines as Special Students.=--Although the large denominations of the Methodists and Baptists have not insisted on the possession of learning by their ministers, in their own province of scholarship American clergymen, while rarely independent of foreign, especially German investigators, have undertaken many researches of much value. Edward Robinson (1794-1863), a professor at Andover and then at Union Seminary, made a harmony of the Gospels in Greek, and another in English, compiled a lexicon to the New Testament, and wrote on the topography of the Holy Land. In this he assisted the sagacious missionary, Eli Smith (1801-1857), whose long residence in the Orient gave him peculiar advantages as a Biblical geographer. Similar advantages were enjoyed by William McClune Thomson (1806-1894), and bore good fruit in “The Land and the Book” (illustrations of the Bible from customs and scenery in the East) and “The Land of Promise, or Travels in Modern Palestine.” Nor should the translation of the Scriptures into Burmese by that great apostle, Adoniram Judson (1788-1850), go unmentioned. At home, George Rapall Noyes (1798-1868), professor of Hebrew at Harvard Divinity School, translated the New Testament into English. Leonard Bacon (1802-1881), pastor of the Centre Church in New Haven, takes rank with the ecclesiastical historians for his “Genesis of the New England Churches.” Thomas Jefferson Conant (1802-1891), of the same generation, a Baptist, was a Hebrew scholar of repute, in the main devoting himself to studies on the Old Testament, and editing critical texts of the Book of Job, of Proverbs, of Genesis, and of the Psalms. Thomas F. Curtis (1815-1872), President of Lewisburg University, Pennsylvania, compiled a history of the Baptist Church, publishing it in the year, 1857, when Sprague began to issue his monumental “Annals of the American Pulpit,” already referred to. Still another Baptist, Horatio Balch Hackett (1808-1875), for thirty-one years professor at Newton Seminary, and for five at Rochester, made himself an authority on Christian antiquities. Henry Boynton Smith (1815-1877) from 1854 to 1874 taught the subject of systematic theology at Union Seminary; he is important among the church historians--not so important, of course, as the indefatigable Philip Schaff (1819-1893). Born in Switzerland, educated in Germany, and recommended by the most distinguished German theologians, Schaff in 1844 accepted a call from this country to the Seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania; here he quickly established his reputation as an encyclopedist of religious knowledge. His greatest work was an edition, thoroughly revised, of Lange’s “Commentary on the Bible.” Professor William Greenough Thayer Shedd (1820-1894), who taught English literature in the University of Vermont, from there migrated to the chair of Biblical literature in Union Seminary (1863-1890). Besides a “History of Christian Doctrine,” and other theological works, he published an edition, which has not yet been improved upon, of the works of Coleridge. William Henry Green (1825-1900), of the Theological Seminary at Princeton, an Orientalist, was a frequent writer for _The Princeton Review_. Crawford Howell Toy (born in 1836), since 1890 professor of Hebrew and related languages in the Harvard Divinity School, is the author of meritorious published researches, including a work on “The Religion of Israel” (1892) and a commentary on the Book of Proverbs. If Charles Augustus Briggs (born in 1841) had preserved all the objectivity of a scientific historian, and not turned controversialist, he probably would not have been subjected to trial by the Presbyterians on the charge of heresy. To his studies in Biblical history and the growth of dogma has often been attached the badly chosen term, “Higher Criticism,” that misnomer for the historical interpretation of the Scriptures. A severe loss to American scholarship has recently come through the death of Alexander Viets Griswold Allen (1841-1908), biographer of Jonathan Edwards and Phillips Brooks, and author of “The Continuity of Christian Thought” (1884) and “Christian Institutions” (1897). In him the scholar became the constructive artist.

_Writers of Hymns._--Between the publication of “The Bay Psalm Book” (1640) and the revision of Watts’ version of the Psalms by Joel Barlow and by the elder Dwight at the end of the eighteenth century, sacred poetry in America underwent much refinement. From Dwight and his generation down, the writers of hymns have been many and able. Henry Ustick Onderdonk (1789-1858), William Augustus Muhlenberg (1796-1877), George Washington Doane (1799-1859), Protestant Episcopal Bishop of New Jersey at the age of thirty-three, Leonard Bacon (1802-1881), George W. Bethune (1805-1862), Samuel Francis Smith (1808-1895), George Duffield (1818-1888), Samuel Longfellow (1819-1892), above all, Ray Palmer (1808-1887), are a few of the most eminent.

=Miscellaneous Preachers.=--_Samuel Hopkins._--A disciple of Jonathan Edwards, the institutor of the Hopkinsian form of divinity (1721-1803) sought, according to Hildreth, “to add to the five points of Calvinism the rather heterogeneous ingredient that holiness consists in pure, disinterested benevolence, and that all regard for self is necessarily sinful.” He inculcated the doctrine of the free agency of sinners. A forerunner of the Garrisons, Whittiers, and Sumners, he was an early and persistent foe of negro slavery.

_Nathanael Emmons._--A typical predecessor of the nineteenth century, whose great age brought him far into it, was Nathanael Emmons (1745-1840), of Connecticut, and of Wrentham, Massachusetts. He wished to be “a consistent Calvinist,” yet to harmonise a difficult creed with the truths of common experience. He was an excellent reasoner on the evidences of moral government, establishing unexpected chains of inference, and from gladly accepted premises leading his hearers to less pleasant but unavoidable conclusions. “He was skilled,” says Park, “in disentangling a theory from its adscititious matter, and scanning it alone.” “He made but few gestures; his voice was not powerful; but men listened to him with intense curiosity, and often with awe.” Emmons had his own conception of eloquence: “I read deep, well-written tragedies for the sake of real improvement in the art of preaching. They appeared to me the very best books to teach true eloquence.” Again: “Style is only the frame to hold our thoughts. It is like the sash of a window: a heavy sash will obscure the light.” And once more: “First, have something to say; second, say it.” His writings--essays, sermons at ordinations, sermons at installations, funeral sermons, thanksgiving sermons, “A Sermon on Sacred Music” (1806)--are numberless.

_Henry Ernst Muhlenberg._--Of a different but well-known type was the son (1753-1815) of the German-American Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1742-1787). Henry Ernst was sent abroad while a boy, studied at Halle, returned, became a pastor among the Germans of Pennsylvania, and finally died at Lancaster in that State. He was endowed with an exceptional physique, walking with ease from Lancaster to Philadelphia, a distance of sixty miles. Discursive in his studies--he was an Oriental scholar and a botanist--he was tolerant in his belief, clinging to the fundamental truths of Christianity. In his discourses, he took the familiar attitude of a parent addressing his children.

_Alexander Campbell._--The founder (1788-1866) of the sect known to the rest of the world as the Campbellites, a man of prodigious energy, was without question one of the remarkable spirits of his time. His writings, over fifty volumes, represent but a moiety of his labours: he built printing-presses in the interests of his movement for religious reform; he debated in public with all comers--for example, in 1829 with the infidel, Robert Owen. Self-possessed on the platform, he indulged in little action, and he spared his voice. But his distinct and beautiful enunciation expected and received attention, his audience listening, as to a master, in perfect silence.

_William Ellery Channing._--Although “he lacks critical acumen,” “lacks also the sentiment of great originality,” “lacks that which America has so far lacked--high intellectual culture, critical knowledge,” “does not know the general result of what is known to his age,” still Channing (1780-1842), in the words of Renan, “has been unquestionably the most complete representative of that exclusively American experiment--of religion without mystery, of rationalism without criticism, of intellectual culture without elevated poetry--which seems to be the ideal to which the religion of the United States aspires.” An exemplary student at school and college (Harvard), Channing went to the South as a private tutor. His path being deflected into the ministry, he returned to New England, and was installed (1803) in the Federal Street Church at Boston. In this church he was active for twenty years, and he was at least the nominal head of it for forty. His health was delicate, and his capacity for continued exertion limited. Channing’s religion might be described as a form of ethics, allied to the political doctrines of Rousseau, too simple and theoretical for common life, and in the main salutary so far as it was a generous reaction against the harsher tenets of Calvin. The severity of Calvinism, that “vulgar and frightful theology,” in his eyes inevitably led to gloomy superstition. “God is good,” he kept repeating, and human nature in its origin also good. “He ... fell in with those who consider the human race to be actually degenerated by the abuse of free will. In Jesus Christ he recognised a sublime being, who had wrought a crisis in the condition of humanity, had renewed the moral sense, and touched with saving power the fountains of good that were hidden in the depths of the human heart.” Channing wrote no books; his literary remains consist of essays, sermons, and addresses. His “Discourse on the Fall of Bonaparte” (1814), his lecture on “Self-Culture,” and his “Address on West India Emancipation” (1842) display various aspects of a beautiful and courageous personality.

_Horace Bushnell._--“I have never been a great agitator, never pulled a wire to get the will of men, never did a politic thing,” said Bushnell (1802-1876). He graduated at Yale in 1827; from 1833 until 1859, when he retired on account of ill-health, he had charge of the North Church in Hartford, Connecticut. Thereafter he devoted his time to the preparation of special sermons and addresses and to researches in American history and the history of his own State. He took a vital interest in political questions. Bushnell was a clear and independent thinker, without bias, not given to controversy, none the less eloquent and persuasive. His sermons were collected and widely circulated. The problems of religious experience, of suffering and evil, and of education he attempted to solve in “Nature and the Supernatural,” “The Vicarious Sacrifice,” and “Christian Nurture.” In the last-named work he objected to the doctrine of natural depravity, contending for a gradual development in the child of the religious sentiment and the higher imagination, as against a sudden and crucial “conversion.” Among Congregationalists the supposed latitude of his theological opinions involved him in the charge of a leaning toward Unitarianism.

_Theodore Parker._--In his day, Theodore Parker (1810-1860) was considered the most daring of rationalists, and so “advanced,” as we now call it, in his beliefs or disbeliefs as to be outside the pale of Christianity. Present-day rationalists find him a congenial spirit. He was a man of undoubted genius, caustic, flashing, vehement, incessant in labour, dying early from sheer exhaustion. His collected works in fourteen volumes (edited by Cobbe) reveal the nature of his industry. He was unweariedly accurate in detail, being determined to leave no pebble unturned in his search for truth. His sermon on “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” (1841) and “A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion” (1842) gave evidence of his departure from the accepted form of Unitarianism. In 1845 he openly broke away, regarding the Church as an unnecessary organisation. In general, his criticism was destructive, and his attention to detail not balanced by powers of synthesis. His own convictions like iron and brooking no denial, he disregarded the tenderest feelings of other men, and in a mistaken sense of duty would trample underfoot those things which his neighbour might hold most sacred. His intellect flourished at the expense of his imagination, and his want of perspective resolves itself into a defect of taste, all the more injurious through the violence of his affections. This man, most cordially hated and feared by those whom he opposed, most ardently loved by his friends, would shed tears like a child when he met with a trivial act of kindness.