A History of American Literature/Chapter 12
XII.
THE ORATORS.
That the art of oratory reached its highest development in America during the first half of the nineteenth century was the direct result of the spirit of the age. Politics held the first place in the popular mind, but in politics everything turned on one great, burning issue,—slavery. slavery. Never was there a question that divided public opinion more sharply, never was there an issue that was fought and defended with more bitterness. The history of the legislation of the period is. but the story of this one question, and of the problems which grew from it. Congress became the scene of fierce and prolonged debates.
It was a school from which came some of the most wonderful orators of the century. The two parties were of almost equal strength. New States were admitted in pairs, so that the free and the slave territory were kept constantly equal. The first alarming crisis came in 1820, when Missouri sought admission as a slave State, but under the skilful leadership of Clay, who framed the measure known as the "Missouri Compromise," the danger was averted. The relief was only temporary, however, for soon the fight waged with still greater fierceness over the "Wilmot Proviso" and the "Kansas-Nebraska Bill." The debates centred about the dangerous doctrine of States Rights. The South maintained that the Union was not necessarily a homogeneous organism, but rather a league of friendly powers which were to act together when convenient, but which were otherwise free to follow their own counsels. South Carolina even maintained that each State was the judge of the legality and constitutionality of any act of Congress, and in 1832 actually attempted to put in practice this theory. Since both parties professed to "stand upon" the Constitution, this instrument was studied with extreme care and expounded with much learning and rhetoric. During the period, the leaders of the Northern forces were Webster and Clay while the South rallied about Calhoun and Hayne.
Daniel Webster (1782–1852).
"The orator of the Union."
"Take him for all in all, he was not only the greatest orator this country has ever known, but in the history of eloquence his name will stand with those of Demosthenes and Cicero, of Chatham and Burke."—Lodge.
Life. (The standard Life of Webster is that by George Ticknor Curtis, 1870. In 1851 Webster's works were collected in six volumes with a biographical sketch by Edward Everett. Webster's Private Correspondence, edited by his son, Fletcher Webster, appeared in 1856. Among the great mass of Websteriana may be mentioned the Life, by Charles Lanman, and that by Henry Cabot Lodge, in the American Statesmen Series. The best study of the comparative excellence of Webster's eloquence is Judge Mellen Chamberlain's speech at the Dartmouth College alumni dinner, a work now issued in pamphlet form.)
Daniel Webster was born in Salisbury (now Franklin), New Hampshire, during the last year of the Revolution. His father, a strong and daring man, had served through the French and Indian War as a member of the famous corps of frontiersmen known as "Rogers' Rangers," and during the Revolution he had left his little family on their backwoods farm, and had served with distinction to the close of the war. Daniel, the second son of this family, was weak and delicate. For him the severe round of farm life was out of the question, and in spite of the straitened resources of the hard-working parents, it was decided that he should go to college. Under the tutorship of a clergyman in a neighboring town, he was fitted, in 1797, for Dartmouth College, from which he was graduated in 1801. After teaching for a short time in Fryeburg, Maine, he commenced the study of law in his native town, continning it later in the office of Christopher Gore in Boston, and, in 1805, he was admitted to the bar. He thereupon practised his profession first in Boscawen, and afterwards in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, rising with rapid strides to legal prominence. In 1812, he was elected to Congress, and the remainder of his life was spent in public life or in the practice of his profes sion, of which he was soon the recognized leader. IIe served for three terms as senator from Massachusetts, and was Secretary of State under both Harrison and Fillmore.
Webster's first great oration was delivered in 1820 at the Second Centennial of the landing of the Pilgrims. In 1825, he was the orator at the laying of the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument, and during the following year he was chosen to deliver the eulogy on Adams and Jefferson. In 1829, he made the crowning speech of his life in the United States Senate, in reply to an attack by Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina. During the same year he delivered the famous speech at the White murder trial in Salem. He died at Marshfield, Massachusetts, Oct. 24, 1852.
His Personal Appearance.—Mr. Lodge in his admirable life of Webster says, "There is no man in all history who came into the world so equipped physically for speech." His person was imposing, his head was of massive size, his eyes deep-set and piercing, his voice powerful and sonorous, giving the impression of vast powers held in reserve. Carlyle, who was not usually impressed by Americans, wrote to Emerson in 1839:
"Not many days ago I saw at breakfast the notablest of all your notabilities,—Daniel Webster. He is a magnificent specimen; you might say to all the world, 'This is your Yankee Englishman, such limbs we make in Yankeeland.' As a logic fencer, advocate, or parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world. The tanned complexion; that amorphous, crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of eyebrow, like dull anthracite furnaces, nooding only to be blown; the mastiff mouth, accurately closed. I have not traced as much of silent Berserkir-rage, that I remember of, in any other man."—The Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence.
When in action Webster swept all before him. Once seen when he was deeply stirred, he could never be forgotten.
"As his feelings warmed the fire came into his eyes; there was a glow on his swarthy cheek; his strong right arm seemed to sweep away resistlessly the whole phalanx of his opponents, and the deep and melodious cadences of his voice sounded like harmonious organ tones as they filled the chamber with their music."—Lodge.
As a Master of English Style. (See Whipple's American Literature and Essays and Reviews, Vol. I.) As the master of a pure and vigorous English prose style, Webster has had few equals. His best orations may be studied as models of correct diction and rhetorical finish. His style may be characterized as majestic. It abounds in sonorous and elaborate word pictures. He was a clear thinker, and his sentences are as clear as his thought. His combinations are accurate and logical, and his illustrations are forceful. The orations of Clay and Calhoun seem dull and spiritless as we read them now; the magnetism of the orator, the tones of his voice, the flash of his eye, and the thrill of the occasion gave the words a life and power which vanished as soon as they passed into print. But Webster's orations lose nothing with time. They are full of their original force and fire. They hold the reader as the orator held his audience, and we feel the thrill and excitement of the original occasion. It is this that brings the work of Webster into the realm of pure literature.
"In the sphere of literature Webster has a clear title to be held as one of the greatest authors and writers of our mother tongue that America has produced. I propose to the most competent critics of the nation that they can find nowhere six octavo volumes of printed literary production of an American that contain as much noble and as much beautiful imagery, as much warmth of rhetoric, and of magnetic impression upon the reader as are to be found in the collected writings and speeches of Daniel Webster."—Evarts.
Required Reading.—The Plymouth Oration, The First Bunker Hill Oration.
Rufus Choate (1799–1859).
Life (by E. G. Parker; by Joseph Neilson, 1884. See also selections from the writings of Choate in two volumes, with memoir by S. G. Brown; and Whipple's Recollections of Eminent Men, and Essays and Reviews, Vol. II.). Rufus Choate, a native of Essex, Massachusetts, and a member of the class of 1819 at Dartmouth, was in many respects the equal of Webster as an orator. He was a man of deep scholarship, of wide and varied reading, and refinement of character. As a lawyer he has had no superior in America. His mind was accurate and analytical, singularly adapted to the sifting of evidence, while his power over juries was phenomenal.
His style is peculiar. His intimate knowledge of the intricacies of the English tongue, and his deep classical education, enriched his oratory. His vocabulary was exhaustive; he used adjectives with the skill of a painter; and his sentences, with their subdivisions within subdivisions, are marvels of length and arrangement. Some of them contain from four hundred to seven hundred words. His best known oration is the eulogy delivered on the death of Webster.
Webster and Choate.—"Webster and Choate, each in a different way, were perfection. The eloquence of Webster had the affluent potentiality of the rising sun, of the lonely mountain, of the long, regular, successive surges of the resounding sea. His periods are as lucid as light; his logic was irresistible; his facts came on in a solid phalanx of overwhelming power; his tones were crystal clear; his magnificent person towered in dignity, and seemed colossal in its imperial grandeur; his voice grew in volume, as he became more and more aroused, and his language, glowing with the fire of conviction, rose in swells, and broke, like the great ninth wave that shakes the solid crag. His speech, however, was addressed always to the reason, never to the imagination. The eloquence of Rufus Choate, on the other hand, was the passionate enchantment of the actor and the poet,—an eloquence in which you felt the rush of the tempest, and heard the crash of breakers, and the howling of frantic gales, and the sobbing wail of homeless winds in bleak and haunted regions of perpetual night. He began calmly, often in a tone that was hardly more than a whisper; but as he proceeded the whole man was gradually absorbed and transfigured, as into a mountain of fire, which then poured forth, in one tumultuous and overwhelming torrent of melody, the iridescent splendors of description, and appeal, and humor, and pathos, and invective, and sarcasm, and poetry, and beauty, till the listener lost all consciousness of self, and was borne away as on a golden river to a land of dreams. The vocabulary of that orator seemed literally to have no limit. His voice sounded every note, from a low, piercing whisper to a shrill, sonorous scream. His remarkable appearance, furthermore, enhanced the magic of his speech. The tall, gaunt, vital figure, the symmetrical head, the clustered hair,—once black, now faintly touched with gray, the emaciated, haggard countenance, the pallid olive complexion, the proud Arabian features, the mournful, flaming brown eyes, the imperial demeanor and wild and lawless grace, the poetic personality, commingled with the boundless resources of his eloquence to rivet the spell of altogether exceptional character and genius."—"William Winter's eulogy on Daniel Webster."
Suggested Reading—"Eulogy on Daniel Webster"
Henry Clay (1777–1852).
"The great reconciler, the orator of sympathy."
Life (by Epes Sargent, 1844; by Calvin Colton, 1856; by Carl Schurz, 1890, in American Statesmen Series and by others. See also Parton's Famous Americans). For a generation the most prominent figure in American politics was that of the great Whig leader, Henry Clay. Though a Virginian by birth and representing the State of Kentucky in the Senate, he was opposed, though not radically, to the institution of slavery. Ile stood midway between the extremists of both parties, and by his great tact he succeeded again and again in uniting them when irreconcilable rupture seemed inevitable. The Missouri Compromise, forbidding slavery above latitude 36° 30'; the Nullification Law of 1833; and finally the Compromise of 1850, which provided, among other things, that California should enter the Union under its own constitution, and that slavery should be abolished in the District of Columbia, arc monuments to his skill as a mediator,—a skill that postponed for many years "the inevitable conflict,"
With little education and almost no literary ability, Clay was the master of a persuasive style of oratory. Tradition is unanimous in regard to his eloquence, and yet the six volumes of his printed speeches are dry and lifeless. The life-giving principle has evaporated from them. Clay's wonderful popularity and his power over audiences was due almost wholly to his magnetic personality, his enthusiasm, and his knowledge of human nature.
John Caldwell Calhoun (1782–1850).
"Calhoun, Clay, Webster! I name them in alphabetical order. What other precedence can be assigned them? Clay, the great leader; Webster, the great orator; Calhoun, the great thinker."—Edward Everett.
Life (by J. S. Jenkins, by H. Von Holst, in American Statesmen Series, and by others. See Parton's Famous Americans). The leader of the South in its debate over the doctrine of States Rights was John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who carried the doctrine to its extreme, defending vigorously the Nullification Ordinance of 1832. Maintaining that not one of the framers of the Constitution, not even Washington or Hamilton, had contemplated a form of government that would bind a State beyond its will, he contended that the Constitution was merely a compact between the States; that the States were bound only so far as they wished to be, and that any one of them might repudiate any act of Congress which it deemed illegal or unconstitutional.
Notwithstanding his radical position, the moral purity of Calhoun's life and the honesty of his convictions commanded the respect oven of his opponents. His influence was very great. The impress of his severe, logical mind is upon every great political measure of his time. He was a clear thinker and a logician of the first rank. Webster said of his oratory:
"His eloquence was part of his intellectual character. It was plain, strong, terse, condensed, concise; sometimes impassioned, still always severe. Rejecting ornament, not often seeking far for illustration, his power consisted in the plainness of his propositions, in the closeness of his logic, and in the earnestness and energy of his manner."
Edward Everett (1794–1865).
Life (address on the Life and Public Services of Edward Everett by R. H. Dana, Jr. See also Whipple's Character and Characteristic Men, and Emerson's "Life and Letters in New England"). Few Americans of any generation have made a greater impress upon their times or have filled more positions of the highest responsibility than did Edward Everett. It was not for him to wait through slow years for the opportunity for influence and power. Fame came to him with a bound. At the age of nineteen he had won a national reputation as a profound scholar and eloquent preacher; at twenty-one he was offered the chair of Greek in Harvard University, his alma mater.
Everett's scholarship was broad and exact. While studying in Europe preparatory to taking the Greek chair at Harvard, he was hailed by the savant Cousin, as "the best Grecian he had ever known." He brought back to America a new intellectual life. Says Emerson, who was then an undergraduate, "Germany had ercated criticism in vain for us until 1820, when Edward Everett returned from his five years in Europe and brought to Cambridge his rich results, which no one was so fitted by natural grace and the splendor of his rhetoric to introduce and recommend." All listened spellbound to his wisdom, as if one of the old Greeks had wandered into the present; indeed Emerson declares that "there. was an influence on the young people from the genius of Everett which was almost comparable to that of Pericles in Athens."
In 1824, Everett was elected to Congress, where he served with distinction during the stormy ton years that followed. The rest of his life was but a succession of responsible positions. As governor of Massachusetts for three terms, as Minister Plenipotentiary to Great Britain, as president of Harvard University, as Sceretary of State after the death of Webster, and as United States senator, Everett was called upon to solve some of the most perplexing problems of his day.
As a statesman, he ranks second only to Webster and Clay; as a scholar, he has had but few equals in America; as a scholarly and finished orator, he was surpassed only by Choate; and as a popular lecturer, he has never, in America at least, had an equal. With his Oration on Washington, delivered nearly one hundred and fifty times in various parts of the United States, he earned no less than ninety thousand dollars for the Mount Vernon fund, and with many of his other lectures he was no less successful.
"His orations were composed for widely differing occasions, but in each case the treatment is so masterly that one would think the subject then in hand had been the especial study of his life. But his care did not cease with the preparation; his voice, gestures, and cadences were always in harmony with his theme, so that he was absolute master of his audience."—Underwood.
"The great charm of Mr. Everett's orations consists not so much in any single and strongly developed intellectual trait as in that symmetry and finish which on every page give token of the richly endowed and thorough scholar. The natural movements of his mind are full of grace, and the most indifferent sentence which falls from his pen has that simple elegance which it is as difficult to define as it is easy to perceive. His level passages are never tame, and his fine ones are never superfine. His style with matchless flexibility rises and falls with his subject and is alternately easy, vivid, elevated, ornamented, or picturesque, adapting itself to the dominant mood of the mind, as an instrument responds to the touch of a master's hand. His knowledge is so extensive and the field of his allusions so wide that the most familiar views in passing through his hands gather such a halo of luminous illustrations that their likeness seems transformed and we entertain doubts of their identity."—G. S. Hillard.
Among Everett's orations may be mentioned his Phi Beta Kappa Oration of 1824 on American Literature, his "Early Days of Franklin," and his Gettysburg Oration. He also wrote the life of Washington in the Encyclopædia Britannica, the life of Stark in Sparks' American Biography, and several poems. His orations were collected in four volumes in 1869.