A NATION OF SPEECHIFIERS

Making an American Public after the RevolutionBy CAROLYN EASTMAN

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2009 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-18019-9

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................................................................................................ixIntroduction: Messy Beginnings.....................................................................................1PART I * Making an American Public: Overviews......................................................................151 Demosthenes in America FROM SENSIBILITY TO NATIONALISM IN ELOCUTIONARY EDUCATION................................172 Vindicating Female Eloquence GIRLS' ORATORY AND THE RISE AND FALL OF A FEMALE COUNTERPUBLIC.....................533 Mourning for Logan "INDIAN ELOQUENCE" AND THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN PUBLIC......................................83PART II * Contesting Public Participation: Debating "the Public"...................................................1134 "A Club Is a Nation in Miniature" YOUNG MEN ON THE MAKE AND THEIR DEBATING SOCIETIES............................1155 Saint Franklin JOURNEYMEN PRINTERS AND THE MEDIUM OF DEMOCRATIC VIRTUE..........................................1456 "Who's Afraid" of Frances Wright? MEDIA DEBATES ABOUT THE PUBLIC AND ITS SPOKESMEN..............................179Conclusion: The Ongoing Process of Making an American Public.......................................................211ABBREVIATIONS......................................................................................................219NOTES..............................................................................................................221INDEX..............................................................................................................283

Chapter One

Demosthenes in America

FROM SENSIBILITY TO NATIONALISM IN ELOCUTIONARY EDUCATION

American schoolbooks routinely presented the Greek orator Demosthenes as a model for children to admire and emulate. In their stories, Demosthenes appears as a youth eager to display his civic virtue by speaking before the assembly but stymied by crippling speech impediments. As one early nineteenth-century schoolbook told the tale, he was "hissed by the whole audience" in his earliest attempts at public speaking, yet he triumphed over his humiliation through sheer will. He "went to the sea shore; and whilst the waves were in the most violent agitation, he pronounced harangues, to accustom himself by the confused noise of the waters, to the roar of the people, and the tumultuous cries of public assemblies." He placed pebbles in his mouth to overcome his "thick mumbling way of speaking," and to correct his chronic shortness of breath, he declaimed while marching uphill.1 These legends of his perseverance raised him to the status of an elocutionary saint in early national schoolbooks. By learning to invest his speech with power and eloquence, Demosthenes went on to champion some of his country's most important causes, earning fame for both Greece and the art of oratory.

Demosthenes was the perfect model for American schoolchildren—and not just because his life epitomized the benefits of hard work and self-improvement. He symbolized the ideal civic orator, the "good man" whose selfless passion for virtue infused his speech with conviction and moved others to public action. The new United States decidedly lacked such a leader. American schoolbooks were replete with eloquent speeches on liberty and truth, but most had been delivered by contemporary British leaders such as William Pitt and Edmund Burke. The Revolution had produced a few memorable speakers—most notably Patrick Henry, whose "give me liberty or give me death" speech remained legendary (and apocryphal)—but none had assumed prominent positions in the postwar federal government; some of them, including Henry, had even become vocal Anti-Federalists. In fact, the most prominent American political figures of the late eighteenth century were notoriously weak speakers. When George Washington read a prepared speech for his inauguration in 1789 from handwritten notes, many in attendance cringed at his clumsy attempts to gesture while shifting the pages from hand to hand. Schoolbook editors did not hesitate to address this gap in oratorical leadership. Trying to put the best face on the problem, Increase Cooke's American Orator (1811) explained that "the public speakers of this country have been celebrated as excellent reasoners; while their orators have been few." Cooke attributed these leaders' oratorical failings to "indolence with regard to the requisite labour, and inattention to the high value of eloquence." Acknowledgments like this, alongside the story of Demosthenes, allowed schoolbooks to up the ante when they asked children to improve their speech. The future of the republic depended on it—or so they implied.

Apparently the republic depended more on children's good speech habits than on what came to be called "civics," since information about the nation's history, its founding texts, or the people's shared characteristics was almost entirely absent from American schoolbooks and children's reports of school curricula before the 1810s. Instead, teachers and schoolbooks alike concentrated on refining children's characters, deportment, and speech as important elements of preparing them to participate in society. Learning "genteel address" via the methods circulated by the transatlantic elocution movement was crucial to all walks of life, educators insisted. "Knowledge adorned by manners, and polished by refinement, will infallibly procure" a good reputation and success in business, the Universal Asylum told its readers in 1791. As much as this philosophy differed from later notions of civics instruction, however, contemporaries would have argued that it did teach children that they had important roles as members of the public. As they improved themselves, they improved the nation as a whole. Educational practices forwarded an understanding of belonging to the public that prompted highly engaged participation by nonelite men and women.

This chapter establishes a conceptual foundation for the book as a whole by showing that elocutionary education taught lay Americans to share views of public engagement long before such participation was defined solely in patriotic terms. My close examination of the ideals and practices of this ubiquitous form of learning demonstrates that its early emphasis on cultivating sensibility transmitted a powerful sense of children's responsibilities as members of the public. Nor were those prescriptive messages limited to printed schoolbooks; they were evident at the "exhibition days" when schoolchildren displayed their knowledge by declaiming short speeches and scenes before large audiences of parents and community members, performances that gave enormous numbers of boys and girls throughout the Northeast similar experiences in public speaking. Not until the 1810s did schoolbooks begin to engage their readers explicitly as national subjects and to cultivate patriotism—and even then they emphasized the central significance of oratory. As schoolbooks heralded new congressional orators such as Daniel Webster, John Randolph, and Henry Clay as exemplifying political virtue, they claimed that the United States had now realized its potential to create civic leaders who might fulfill the role of Demosthenes in America. In sum, the focus on oratory in...