This edition of American Orators and 
 Oratory, printed by The Imperial Press, on 
 Ruisdael hand- made paper, is limited to five 
 hundred copies, of which this is number -: 
 


AMERICAN ORATORS 
 
 AND 
 
 ORATORY. 
 
 Being a report of lectures delivered by 
 THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, 
 at Western Reserve University, under the 
 auspices of the Western Reserve Chapter 
 Daughters of the American Revolution. 
 
 PKINTXD BY 
 
 C&e Jmpertal 
 
 CLKTELAND, OHIO, MARCH, 1901. 
 
COPYRIGHT, IQOI, 
 
 BY 
 
 THE WESTERN RESERVE CHAPTER, 
 DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, 
 
A Prefatory Note. 
 
 In the year 1899, the Western Reserve Chapter, 
 Daughters of the American Revolution, founded 
 a Lectureship of American History in the College 
 for Women, Western Reserve University, to be 
 filled each year by some eminent historian. 
 
 In January, 1900, the Lectureship was auspi 
 ciously opened by the late Moses Coit Tyler, of 
 Cornell University. His winning personality 
 and his profound scholarship will always remain 
 a precious memory to those who had the privilege 
 of listening at that time to this distinguished 
 historian. 
 
 For the second of this series the Chapter was so 
 fortunate as to secure Colonel Thomas Wentworth 
 Higginson. 
 
 The enthusiastic reception of these lectures 
 suggested the desirability of issuing them in 
 permanent form for the members. 
 
 The Chapter here offers a verbatim report of 
 these lectures, for which it is indebted to Mr. 
 Charles W. Chesnutt. 
 
 A special acknowledgment is made to Mr. 
 Charles Orr for his helpful suggestions in the 
 preparation of this book. 
 
 THE PUBLISHING COMMITTEE. 
 
 M760113 
 
COLONIAL ORATORY; OR THE 
 REIGN OF THE CLERGY 
 
Colonial Oratory, or the Reign of 
 the Clergy. 
 
 HE following lectures in regard to 
 American orators and oratory are 
 founded in part upon a course 
 of lectures upon that subject 
 which I gave before the Lowell 
 Institute of Boston. Why American 
 orators and American oratory are dis 
 tinguished from others, to be treated 
 separately, might perhaps be regarded as a matter 
 of quantity at least, if not of quality; for 
 no one can deny that the proportion of oratory 
 furnished from this side of the water has been 
 for at least three centuries greater than that from 
 the other. 
 
 An eminent English author who came here a 
 year or two ago, told me that he came under two 
 impressions, both of which were corrected by 
 the facts. He had learned, he said, from Dickens 
 and others, that the two things which every 
 native-born American enjoyed and demanded 
 for his happiness, were, in the first place, the 
 privilege of shaking hands, and, in the second 
 place, the privilege of making a speech. He had 
 
8 Colonial Oratory, 
 
 already attended one public dinner, given to one 
 of our most eminent citizens most eminent at 
 that time, at least and he was informed that 
 it had been specially stipulated by the subject of 
 the dinner, that he should not be asked to shake 
 hands much, and should not be asked to speak 
 at all. It need hardly be explained to those of 
 tolerably long memories that this distinguished 
 American for whom the dinner was given was 
 Admiral Dewey. 
 
 Then, beyond that, so soon as we place side by 
 side the oratory of the original English-speaking 
 man and that of his descendant, the American, 
 we find certain differences in methods which 
 although very poorly studied as yet, and very 
 imperfectly explained, still make the two in 
 some degree, distinct branches of public speaking. 
 
 I was asking an English member of Parliament 
 a few years ago about one of the few American- 
 born members of that body, and the only one, I 
 think, who has ever made a speech there, how 
 he was regarded among his fellows. 
 
 He said: ** He has some great obstacles to 
 overcome. He was educated in England; he 
 took honors at Oxford, was a fellow of Oxford 
 for some time. He might in some respects pass 
 for an Englishman. But he has one fatal defect 
 he talks too well. Our people don t like that, 
 and they dislike it particularly in Parliament. 
 They don t like to see a man get up and make 
 a speech as though it were the most natural 
 
or the Reign of the Clergy 9 
 
 thing in the world to do ; they demand a certain 
 amount of preliminary hesitancy that is good 
 form for us. 
 
 And it is, I think, absolutely true. How far it 
 comes from greater talkativeness in Americans, 
 or from a want of bashfulness ; and how far from 
 an awkward kind of bashfulness in the English 
 man himself, an undue feeling of pride, a feeling 
 that it is not quite becoming a man to put him 
 self in the way of asking the attention of others 
 to what he says which of these is the origin of 
 it, I can t say, but I think the difference is very 
 clear. 
 
 Daniel Webster, you will find somewhere in 
 his letters, when he first came back from Eng 
 land, was quite astonished, after hearing a subject 
 discussed in Parliament, at hearing it discussed 
 in Congress also, and finding that the question 
 had been settled in about as many hours in Par 
 liament as it took days to settle it in Congress. 
 
 The Englishman, as far as I have observed, as 
 a rule gets up with reluctance, and begins with 
 difficulty. Just as you are beginning to feel 
 seriously anxious for him, you gradually discover 
 that he is on the verge of saying some uncom 
 monly good thing. Before you are fully prepared 
 for it he says that good thing, and then to your 
 infinite amazement he sits down ! 
 
 The American begins with an ease which 
 relieves you of all anxiety. The anxiety begins 
 when he talks a while without making any 
 
io Colonial Oratory, 
 
 special point. He makes his point at last, as 
 good perhaps as the Englishman s, possibly bet 
 ter. But then when he has made it you find that 
 he goes feeling on for some other good point, and 
 he feels and feels so long, that perhaps he sits 
 down at last without having made it. 
 
 My ideal of a perfect speech in public would 
 be that it should be conducted by a syndicate or 
 trust, as it were, of the two nations, and that the 
 guaranty should be that an American should be 
 provided to begin every speech and an English 
 man provided to end it. 
 
 Then, when we go a little farther and consider 
 the act of speech itself, and its relation to the 
 word, we sometimes meet with a doubt that we 
 see expressed occasionally in the daily papers 
 provided for us with twenty pages per diem and 
 thirty-two on Sunday, whether we will need 
 much longer anything but what is called some 
 times by clergymen "the printed word" 
 whether the whole form of communication 
 through oral speech will not diminish or fade 
 away. 
 
 It seems to me a truly groundless fear like 
 wondering whether there will ever be a race 
 with only one arm or one leg, or a race of people 
 who live only by the eye or by the ear. The 
 difference between the written word and the 
 spoken word is the difference between solitude 
 and companionship, between meditation and 
 something so near action that it is at least half- 
 
or the Reign of the Clergy 1 1 
 
 way to action and creates action. It is perfectly 
 supposable to imagine a whole race of authors of 
 whom not one should ever exchange a word with 
 a human being while his greatest work is being 
 produced. 
 
 The greatest work of American literature, 
 artistically speaking, Hawthorne s ** Scarlet 
 Letter, was thus produced. His wife records 
 that during the year that he was writing it, he 
 shut himself up in his study every day. She 
 asked no questions ; he volunteered no informa 
 tion. She only knew that something was going 
 on by the knot in his forehead which he carried 
 all that year. At the end of the year he came 
 from his study and read over to her the whole 
 book ; a work of genius was added to the world. 
 It was the fruit of solitude. 
 
 And sometimes solitude, I regret as an author 
 to say, extends to the perusal of the book, for I 
 have known at least one volume of poems of 
 which not a copy was ever sold; and I know 
 another of which only one copy was sold through 
 my betraying the secret of the author and men 
 tioning the book to a class-mate, who bought that 
 one copy. 
 
 Therefore, in a general way, we may say that 
 literature speaks in a manner the voice of soli 
 tude. As soon as the spoken word comes in, you 
 have companionship. There can be no speech 
 without at least one person present, if it is only 
 the janitor of the church. Dean Swift in reading 
 
12 Colonial Oratory, 
 
 the Church of England service to his man-servant 
 only, adapted the service as follows: ** Dearly 
 beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth thee and 
 me in sundry places, etc. ; but in that very 
 economy of speech he realized the presence of an 
 audience. It takes a speaker and an audience 
 together to make a speech I can say to you 
 what I could not first have said to myself. ** The 
 sea of upturned faces, as Daniel Webster said, 
 borrowing the phrase however from Scott s 
 " Rob Roy " " the sea of upturned faces makes 
 half the speech. And therefore we may assume 
 that there will always be this form of communi 
 cation. It has, both for the speaker and for the 
 audience, this one vast advantage. 
 
 A brilliant woman once said to me that she 
 had often wondered which taught us the most 
 about any man or any woman to know every 
 act of their lives, to read every word they had 
 written, or the first glance at their faces. The 
 orator has the advantage of that collective glance, 
 and often the audience has the melancholy ad 
 vantage of looking at one face and very often 
 wishing that there were more to be seen in it. 
 
 Thus I have laid out in a general way the 
 ground and basis of oratory the communica 
 tion of man with men. There have been in this 
 country several successive periods of oratory, one 
 of which I am to describe as the Colonial Period 
 what I might call, in other words, "The Reign of 
 the Clergy." 
 
or the Reign of the Clergy 13 
 
 We get from the Scriptures themselves the 
 origin of the early practice among the Puritans, 
 of having what they called a pastor and a ^eacher 
 to every church. They had, you will notice, in 
 nearly all the early Puritan churches, that double 
 combination and that double ministry. They 
 were bred on the Old Testament, and easily 
 recalled that strange scene in the Book of Exodus, 
 where the Prophet Moses, endeavoring to get rid 
 of the terrible responsibility demanded of him by 
 the Deity, begs off on the ground that, 
 
 44 O my Lord, I am not eloquent; but I am 
 slow of speech, and of a slow tongue. 
 
 And we read there that the Lord was wroth 
 with Moses, and said to him : 
 
 " Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? I 
 know that he can speak well. And he shall be 
 thy spokesman unto the people." 
 
 So the forces were joined, the pastor and the 
 teacher. And we may truly say that the two 
 great Puritan migrations the Plymouth and 
 the Salem migrations both began in eloquence, 
 that they were founded upon eloquent words. 
 
 When John Robinson said to the pilgrims, at 
 their last meeting in Europe before the Plymouth 
 colony was launched, " I charge you in the sight 
 of God that ye follow me no farther than as ye 
 see that I follow Christ ; there is more light yet 
 to break out of the Word of God," he predicted 
 the whole subsequent development of New Eng 
 land theology. And when the leaders of the 
 
14 Colonial Oratory, 
 
 other great New England colony, that of Massa 
 chusetts bay, sailed from England, we are told 
 that when they were off Land s End their chosen 
 teacher, Francis Higginson, collected the emi 
 grants around him on the deck and said : 
 
 "We will not say, as the Separatists did on 
 leaving England, * Farewell, Rome ! Farewell, 
 Babylon! But we will say, * Farewell, dear 
 England! farewell, the Christian Church of 
 England and all the friends there ! We go to 
 propagate the positive part of church reformation 
 and to preach the Gospel in America ! 
 
 How could any band of religious emigrants 
 going forth to their duty on another continent 
 and across an unknown sea, fail to respond in 
 their career to such beginnings of oratory as that? 
 
 Accordingly we find that the Puritan oratory, 
 in quantity at least if not in quality, was enough 
 to overpower the most daring modern mind. 
 Holy Master Cotton, minister of Boston, came 
 out from England with two clergymen elders 
 they would have been called to accompany 
 him, and they preached a sermon apiece on every 
 one of the forty days of the voyage. After every 
 meal they had a sermon. The sermon if it had 
 been on land would have been an hour long at 
 least ; and on the ocean, where there was nothing 
 else to do, it may have stretched into a second 
 hour. 
 
 When Samuel Sewall, afterwards best known 
 as Judge Sewall we know that he was in- 
 
or the Reign of the Clergy 
 
 tended for the church, as every learned man was 
 in those days when Samuel Sewall preached 
 his first sermon to a new parish he was too shy 
 to look at the hour-glass, and preached for two 
 hours and a half before the sermon was done. It 
 is perhaps unnecessary to add that he never was 
 settled over any parish and did not remain long 
 in the ministry. 
 
 The vast extent, the vast elaboration of all 
 religious services in those days is the first thing 
 that impresses us. Let us paint for ourselves a 
 picture of a Sunday service among the Puritans. 
 
 The sun shines down brightly, we will suppose, 
 over a little forest settlement, more and more 
 cleared every year, so as to carry the wolves and 
 bears and Indians into the yet remoter distance, 
 yet not so far off but that two stout gates at either 
 end of the village serve as protection, and no one 
 is allowed to live more than half a mile from 
 the meeting-house. 
 
 There has been no stroke of work done 
 in the village since three o clock 
 yesterday afternoon. Last night 
 a preparatory lecture was held, 
 and now comes the consumma 
 tion of all in the solemn weekly 
 service. We will not decide 
 where this little settlement was. xm 
 If it was Cambridge village, a- v $ 
 drum has been beating for the ^ 
 last half hour to call the people 
 
i6 
 
 Colonial Oratory, 
 
 together ; and if Salem village, a bell has been 
 ringing and a red flag hung out from the church 
 like an auction flag goods without money and 
 without price within. Or, if it is old Haverhill 
 village, Abraham Hay ward has been blowing his 
 horn for half an hour ( a service for which Abra 
 ham receives half a pound of pork annually 
 from each family in town). 
 
 Let us draw nearer. Here are the outposts of 
 the church, as it were the stocks, the whipping 
 post, a wooden cage where offenders may be 
 confined. And there, beyond it, stands the 
 church itself, a humble building as yet, possibly 
 of brick, more likely of wood, with a heavy stack 
 of chimneys and a bell-rope hanging down in the 
 center of the church like that you still see in 
 the old church at Hingham to be sounded from 
 within. You see six or eight windows with small 
 panes of glass or oiled paper, and between the 
 windows are nailed the heads of all the wolves 
 that have been killed in the town that year ; but 
 the Quakers think that some of the wolves have 
 | cheated them and got inside in sheep s clothing. 
 At the entrance to the enclosure surrounding 
 the church, stands a sentinel in armor painted 
 black, carrying a match -lock 
 musket in his hand. He is girded 
 with his bandoleer, supporting 
 his sword and a dozen tin cart 
 ridge boxes. The governor has 
 just passed by, with his four 
 
or the Reign of the Clergy 
 
 attendants carrying halberds before him a com 
 bination of lance and axe which you may still 
 see carried before dignitaries in Scotland. 
 
 Then comes the clergyman led by the sexton, 
 who doffs his broad-brimmed hat for the purpose. 
 The minister wears a black skull-cap, a black 
 Geneva cloak, and his black gloves open at the 
 finger and thumb to handle his manuscript the 
 better a practice which still lingered in my 
 childhood and perhaps does now. He ascends 
 the pulpit, the boys on the stairs being moved 
 aside to make way for him. He faces his con 
 gregation, a few hundred people, * seated, as 
 it is called by the authorities, once a year. They 
 take their places in the order of their social posi 
 tion the magistrates and their wives, the other 
 elders and their wives, and so on down to the 
 humblest position in the town ; and in the corner 
 of each pew there is a large wooden cage to hold 
 the smallest child in the family. 
 
 These people are dressed now for Sunday, 
 sometimes in garments thought so showy that 
 the clergymen preach against them. 
 
 The young men have great 
 ruffs, they have gold and silver 
 buttons, they have curious knots 
 at the knees, and great pictur 
 esque boots outside. The young 
 girls who sit beside them wear 
 silk or tiffany hoods. They wear 
 embroidered caps, immoderate 
 
1 8 Colonial Oratory, 
 
 great ruffs around their necks, mysterious things 
 called slashed apparel and cut-work, which are 
 often preached against. " Such pride," one 
 clergyman says, * as it might bring down the 
 wrath of the Lord on every church in the coun 
 try." And all the boys in town are carefully 
 collected on the pulpit stairs and the gallery 
 stairs, with a sufficient number of tithing men 
 detailed to take charge of them. 
 
 Then comes the period of service. Four psalms 
 are to be sung during the morning service, ten 
 tunes being the whole range known in the colony. 
 There is prayer, and then in due time comes the 
 sermon. It may be an especial sermon. It may 
 be provided for some particular case ; for some 
 funeral, for instance, because they have no pray 
 ers at funerals; or for some wedding, since 
 weddings are private. 
 
 Benjamin Calf of Newbury writes, in one of 
 his quaint poems, of a certain clergyman : 
 
 " On Sabbath day 
 He went his way, 
 
 As he was used to do, 
 God s house unto 
 That he may know 
 
 What he had for to show. 
 
 " God s holy will 
 He must fulfill, 
 
 For it was his desire 
 There to declare 
 A sermon rare 
 
 Concerning Madam Fryer." 
 
or the Reign of the Clergy 19 
 
 So Madam Fryer had her funeral sermon. 
 
 Or, if we are fortunate, the sermon may be one 
 of those which emerge like flowers in the midst 
 of those dry old volumes of Puritan sermons, vol 
 umes now hardly readable by mortal men, yet 
 sometimes having titles that will touch your 
 heart. It may be that we are to hear Increase 
 Mather s sermon on " The Morning Star," or on 
 " The Voice of God in Stormy Winds," or his 
 more formidable sermon called " Burnings 
 Bewailed, in which he gives his theory of the 
 great fire that took place in Boston the other day. 
 He attributes that circumstance, not to any trivial 
 accident of the elements, but it is clear to his 
 mind what one cause is responsible for it. He 
 attributes it partly to Sabbath-breaking, and 
 partly to monstrous periwigs. 
 
 * Monstrous periwigs, he says, * such as are 
 worn by some church-members, which resemble 
 the locusts that came out of the bottomless pit. 
 Rev. 9:2, 3." 
 
 These same periwigs are called by an eminent 
 divine, " Horrid bushes of vanity, which can find 
 no countenance either in the light of nature or in 
 express Scripture. I. Cor. 14:8." 
 
 That was the way in which, in those formidable 
 sermons, they clinched and hammered down each 
 doctrine by a bit of actual Scripture text driven 
 through it to hold it there forever. And I do not 
 doubt that, as one may still see in Scotland, the 
 hearers all had their Bibles with them, and when- 
 
2O Colonial Oratory, 
 
 ever a text was announced, turned over the pages 
 rapidly to identify it and make sure that the 
 clergyman had not cheated them with the wrong 
 verse. 
 
 Or, it may be that the sermon we are to hear 
 is that yet more formidable discourse by Cotton 
 Mather, the son, called " Brontologia Sacra," a 
 sermon on thunderstorms, written during a period 
 of such occurrences, and delivered, as it happened, 
 directly in the midst of one. It is divided into 
 seven separate chapters, or bolts, with plenty of 
 sharp lightning mingled in from the Bible and 
 from the Hebrew Fathers. 
 
 Just as Mather says, ** In thunder there is the 
 voice of Almighty God," a messenger comes 
 rushing into the church, like the man in the book 
 of Job, to tell him that his own house has just 
 been struck, and that, though no one i skilled the 
 house has been filled with the lightning and the 
 furniture damaged; which Mather takes as com 
 posedly as any scientific lecturer in his laboratory 
 would take an unexpected explosion of gas it 
 vindicates the power of the article. And so Mather 
 takes it and says, with a bit of superb and 
 evidently spontaneous eloquence, that he wishes 
 his hearers might be like that magnet which 
 once in his house, during a thunderstorm, was 
 turned instantaneously from north to south, and 
 he wishes that the next bolt may turn their stub 
 born souls from Satan to God. But afterwards 
 he has to admit that Satan is allowed to have a 
 
or the Reign of the Clergy 21 
 
 hand in thunderstorms also, and points out the 
 fact which is often referred to in Se wall s diary, 
 for instance, and a popular impression in those 
 days that for some reason or other churches 
 and ministers houses were peculiarly vulnerable 
 to the electric fluid. 
 
 Suppose the sermon, be it an hour or two hours 
 long, to be finished. It has been the pomp and 
 circumstance of glorious preaching. The con 
 gregation probably stirs with that slight expres 
 sion of ultimate relief which the most eloquent 
 sermons, perhaps even ordinary lectures produce 
 when they are at last ended. If there have been 
 any slumbering eyes under the silk or tiffany 
 hoods, they are delicately touched by the wand 
 of the tithing man, with the soft end of the wand, 
 which is the tail of a rabbit ; while if little boys 
 have been similarly weak, the other end, which 
 has the rabbit s hoof upon it, taps the boy s fore 
 head less gently. 
 
 They have not reached that fine point of dis 
 crimination which Henry Ward Beecher an 
 nounced for the benefit of clergymen when he 
 was at a country convocation of ministers. It 
 was in the height of summer, and they all com 
 pared notes on the terrible problem of keeping 
 the farmers in their congregations awake during 
 the afternoon service. Finally they appealed 
 to Mr. Beecher of all men, one would suppose, 
 the least subject to that experience. He said 
 they were not perhaps very much troubled 
 
22 
 
 Colonial Oratory, 
 
 with it in Plymouth Church, but they had one 
 unfailing method to remove the evil. 
 
 * The sexton, he said, * is placed at a certain 
 point on the gallery stairway from which he can 
 command every face in the church. He keeps 
 watch during the sermon, and his instructions 
 are if he sees a single person going to sleep, he is 
 to go directly up into the pulpit and wake up the 
 minister. Thus another age often brings into 
 operation, by higher instrumentalities, what the 
 most skilful mechanism of other days could not. 
 In Puritan days they hadn t got beyond the tith 
 ing rod with a rabbit s hoof at one end and his 
 tail at the other. 
 
 Now comes the expected moment the 
 varying lottery of divine service. The 
 thing you cannot foresee, the Sun 
 day Herald, as it were, of the 
 Puritan world is to be unfolded. 
 First, perhaps, some new law 
 made by the legislature is to be 
 read and listened to reverently. 
 Then perhaps some elder exer 
 cises on a text of Scripture 
 pretty severe exercise it some 
 times proves for a day of rest ; and 
 then perhaps some offending man, 
 possibly a magistrate or an elder, 
 comes before the audience and 
 with a foul linen cap drawn down 
 over his eyes makes acknowledg- 
 
or the Reign of the Clergy 23 
 
 ment to the congregation for some sin of which 
 he has been convicted. 
 
 Then there is more singing, more praying, and 
 the occasion is not omitted to say, ** Brethren, 
 now there is time for contribution ; therefore he 
 who has, let him freely give. And the people, 
 instead of sitting idly in their pews and looking 
 surprised that they have left their purses at home 
 when the contribution box is handed around, the 
 people themselves have to come up and put in 
 their contributions before the elders and in the 
 sight of the world. Then the service is dismissed, 
 the people scatter. The women who have ridden 
 in from outside and dismounted on the big horse 
 block, remount their horses and ride away ; only 
 that a few, who have come from still greater 
 distances, remain and take their dinner of cold 
 pork and beans in the meeting-house. 
 
 There is the Sunday service, there is the day, 
 there is the life of those stern, simple, self -de voted 
 people. They may sometimes criticise the ser 
 mon ; let them beware how they do it ! I read 
 with pain that an ancestor of mine in the old 
 Salem church called forth from an irreverent 
 parishioner the remark that he preached lies, and 
 that his doctrine was the doctrine of devils; 
 and the fact that his name was Thomas Maule, 
 and that he was mauled to the extent of ten 
 stripes for saying so, is no satisfaction to that 
 clergyman s posterity. 
 
 Yet we know that behind all this power, all 
 
24 Colonial Oratory, 
 
 this enormous deference, there still remains a 
 curious kind of democratic relation. Clergymen 
 were not called clergymen, they were called 
 elders. They were not appointed by any bishop ; 
 they were chosen by the congregation, and the 
 congregation could, if they fell from grace, dis 
 place them and did so. And yet, on the other 
 hand, society was so organized that the power 
 of these same clergymen was almost terrific. 
 
 The franchise, for instance, was at first given 
 to church-members only. But it was the clergy 
 man who decided who should be church- mem 
 bers, so that the clergy virtually cast every 
 ballot that was cast at the elections. Cotton 
 Mather said : 
 
 New England being a settlement bound up in 
 religious considerations, the clergy ought to 
 interest themselves in politics. " It is curious in 
 how many denominations the tendency now is 
 toward the other view of the subject. And 
 when, in the election of 1673 or thereabouts the 
 pious John Wilson, wishing to promote the elec 
 tion of his favorite candidate for governor, 
 ascended a tree on Cambridge common and 
 preached from the branches, he reached a point 
 which even the most skilful manager of city 
 politics has hardly proposed to imitate in that 
 city. 
 
 Those men had a power which we shrink from, 
 and yet which they carried out with an almost 
 touching simplicity and self-confidence. They 
 
or the Reign of the Clergy 25 
 
 were more than themselves, they were the repre 
 sentatives of God. They spoke for the eternal 
 needs of the people, for the principles of the New 
 England government ; and we cannot deny that 
 oratory existed in them when we think that it 
 was by their words alone, although thus lavishly 
 displayed, that they ruled those young settle 
 ments and brought them forward to the day when 
 the rule could pass into other hands. We know 
 that in the worst things done in those days the 
 treatment of the Quakers, of the Indians, of the 
 witches we know that good as well as evil came 
 from the rule of the Puritan clergy. When the 
 brave Miantonomoh, for suspected treason, was 
 tried before the legal authorities and they could 
 find no charge against him they turned him over 
 to the elders. The elders decided that he must 
 be put to death, and the chief, Uncas, was dele 
 gated to slay him in cold blood, and did so. 
 
 King Philip a patriot according to his own 
 light, at least in a time when it was not consi 
 dered a want of patriotism for a man to fight for 
 the freedom of his own country against a stronger 
 one King Philip was pursued through settle 
 ment after settlement, and when he was at last 
 entrapped and killed, the four quarters of his body 
 were cut apart and sent to be exhibited in differ 
 ent towns of New England; his head was set 
 up and remained for years in the peaceful town 
 of Plymouth, and the clergy boasted that they 
 had prayed the bullet into Philip s heart. 
 
26 Colonial Oratory, 
 
 That side of it looks rather dark. But on the 
 other hand we remember that at a later time, 
 when the different colonies had become more or 
 less united and the council of the united colonies 
 had voted to prosecute an Indian war, the Massa 
 chusetts clergy, satisfying themselves that the 
 war was unjust, caused the Massachusetts con 
 tingent to be recalled after it was already on its 
 way to the field ; and they came back and took 
 no part in the contest. There again the clergy 
 reached what is very nearly the highest point of 
 unselfish patriotism to stand with a minority 
 against what they think an unjust war. The 
 clergy, whom we think of as fierce and formidable 
 among the Puritans, were, in reality, even in 
 those days, fathers of their people. They were 
 kindly, they were sympathetic, when you once 
 got behind this veil of austerity. 
 
 Nothing ever made the position of the Puritan 
 clergy quite human or quite intelligible to me, 
 until I read that story of holy Master Wilson, the 
 man who stood by Mary Dyer s scaffold, not to 
 protect her, but to make a pious ballad on her 
 execution after it was over. Master Wilson, a 
 terror to evil-doers, was once at some great public 
 gathering, and somebody said to him, 
 
 " Sir, I will tell you a good thing. Here is a 
 mighty assemblage of people, and there is not 
 one of them all but loves Mr. Wilson. 
 
 " I will tell you a better thing," replied the old 
 man. " Here is a mighty body of people, and 
 
or the Reign of the Clergy 27 
 
 there is not one of them all but Mr. Wilson loves 
 him." 
 
 You cannot make that combine with your 
 merely theocratic, conventional view of the Puri 
 tan clergy. 
 
 I remember also what content it gave me as a 
 boy when I first read the story of holy Master 
 Cotton, another Boston clergyman, one of the 
 best of them the one who was called the 
 universal scholar, the walking library, who loved 
 to sweeten his mouth with a piece of John Calvin 
 before he went to sleep, he said. One day as the 
 old man, grown rather feeble and rather deaf, 
 was walking the streets of Boston some street 
 boys saw him. It was a new idea to me that 
 there could be any street boys in the Puritan 
 time ; I supposed they were street little old men. 
 I knew there were boys but I did not know 
 exactly where they were kept, but it never 
 occurred to me that they could be allowed to be 
 in the streets at all. Some street boys came 
 along, and one of them said: ** Let s put a trick 
 upon old Cotton. And you can fancy the old 
 man walking along in his Geneva cloak and his 
 cocked hat, and his cane patting the ground as he 
 went meditating on the nineteenthly or the twen- 
 tiethly of his next Sunday s sermon; and you can 
 imagine those boys combining to see what trick 
 they would dare to put upon him ; and you can 
 imagine them consulting together and pushing 
 one another up to it: " You do it! " " No, no! 
 
28 Colonial Oratory, 
 
 you do it." "No, you do it!" And finally 
 perhaps the one who proposed it slinking off into 
 the background, as is usually the case, and some 
 little fellow who has been put up to it by the 
 others runs up behind him and twitches his cloak 
 and says, * Cotton, thou art an old fool ! Now, 
 what does the Reverend Mr. Cotton do? Does 
 he call for the tithing man and have those boys 
 sent to jail or to the whipping-post? Not a bit 
 of it ! There is human nature in the old man ; 
 and so, as he trudges along, he suddenly turns 
 round upon them just in time to see their heels 
 disappearing round the next corner, probably. 
 * I know it, says the old man, * I know it. 
 The Lord make both me and thee wiser ! And 
 then he goes on around the corner, chuckling 
 over the thought of how he has outwitted those 
 boys. 
 
 We are to look at the eloquence of the Puritan 
 clergy as that of men filled with what they 
 deemed a divine mission, filled with a mixture 
 of theology now outworn and not now preached 
 in any pulpit in its fullness as they preached it. 
 We can fancy them with their limitations and 
 their purposes, their doubts perhaps, for they 
 expressed freely their desires, their sorrows, 
 and yet having, in their simple lives, such a 
 career as we know. There was no luxury for 
 them. They were not very amply paid. That 
 ancestor of mine of whom it is said that he 
 preached lies and his doctrine was the doctrine 
 
or the Reign of the Clergy 
 
 of devils, had about the highest salary I have 
 found recorded in the colonies. He had one 
 hundred and sixty pounds a year in " country 
 produce," with a discount of twenty pounds if 
 paid in solid cash, * * solid cash meaning black 
 and white wampum beads and bullets, value one 
 farthing. But when we see what they did, I 
 think we shall see that they earned their salaries. 
 That very ancestor of mine, in an election ser 
 mon, said once: 
 
 * You are to remember, my friends and 
 brethren, that our New England was not 
 originally a plantation of trade, but of 
 religion. Let merchants and such as are 
 making their cent per cent, remember 
 this. Let all others that have come 
 among us since at sundry times bear 
 this in mind, that worldly end was not 
 the aim of the planting of New Eng 
 land, but religion. And if there be a 
 man among you who counts his re 
 ligion but as twelve, and 
 the whole world as thir 
 teen, let such a one re 
 member that he has neither 
 the spirit of a true New ^ 
 England man, nor yet of 
 a sincere Christian. 
 
 -* N 
 
REVOLUTIONARY ORATORY, OR 
 THE RISE OF THE LAWYERS 
 
Revolutionary Oratory, or 
 the Rise of the Lawyers. 
 
 T the end of my last lecture I left 
 New England wholesomely but 
 uncomfortably under the absolute 
 control of the Puritan clergy; and 
 the part of the subject I have to 
 present now is to me peculiarly interesting, be 
 cause it has never been, so far as I know, fairly 
 or fully discussed the extraordinary effect pro 
 duced by the events of the next hundred years 
 in transferring that control from the clergy to 
 another class, the lawyers, who were for many 
 years to exercise it in their turn. 
 
 It is very interesting to see how, out of the 
 early system of our colleges, the older colleges 
 in the eastern colonies, colleges which existed 
 practically for the education of the clergy, there 
 came in time the training in other directions 
 which was to enlarge and simplify the position 
 of affairs in the community as a whole. 
 
 If you look at the old catalogues the triennial 
 and quinquennial catalogues of Harvard and Yale, 
 where all the clergy have their names placed in 
 italics, you will see -that for a hundred years those 
 colleges existed essentially to train clergymen 
 
34 Revolutionary Oratory, 
 
 and that everything else was secondary. Those 
 who organized them did not foresee that out of 
 that training of the clergy was to come the 
 gradual development of other studies not specially 
 belonging to the clergy, from our point of view, 
 but studies which were urged on them from 
 necessity as a part of their duty, and which ulti 
 mately resulted in detaching themselves and 
 producing special classes in other directions. 
 
 Professor Goodale of Harvard University has 
 shown very clearly, for instance, how the whole 
 department of medicine came up at first as a col 
 lateral affair in those colleges, produced from 
 necessity in the training of the clergy. Why? 
 Because the clergy were the physicians of their 
 parishes. Thence the whole materia medica 
 gradually established itself in successive depart 
 ments of study, in order that the clergy might 
 learn how to be good doctors. And in just the 
 same way, out of the extraordinary fact that the 
 clergy were practically the lawyers of the people, 
 there came ultimately a separate race of lawyers. 
 
 In the diaries of that strange old man, a most 
 picturesque and interesting character of the 
 Puritan period, of whom I have spoken, Chief 
 Justice Sewall, you find the most singular exhibi 
 tion of the life of a man who might either be 
 regarded as something of a clergyman veneered 
 over with a little law, or something of a lawyer 
 veneered over with a good deal of clergy. 
 
 He was Chief Justice of Massachusetts. He 
 
or the Rise of the Lawyers 35 
 
 was the man of whom I told you that at his first 
 sermon he forgot his hour-glass and preached 
 two hours and a half, and was not much encour 
 aged to preach any more. But there was nothing 
 in that, to prevent him from being a good lawyer, 
 it seems, and he was placed at the head of the 
 law department in the Massachusetts colony. 
 
 And how did he occupy himself while listening 
 to long debates, or apparently discussing with 
 his companions great legal problems? Why, he 
 busied himself in writing out little Scripture 
 texts and handing them round for the nurture and 
 admonition of the other judges, who were also 
 clergymen veneered with a little law. Or he 
 wrote little poems of a pious description sug 
 gested by the lawsuit that was going on, or 
 perhaps suggested by something that had recently 
 happened, having just attended a funeral, for 
 instance, and recalling a certain similarity in the 
 names of the bearers, he wrote them out in this 
 couplet : 
 
 " Two Sams, two Johns and one good Tom 
 Bore prudent Mary to the tomb." 
 
 And thus the widow Coney was dismissed. 
 
 And all through Judge Se wall s life that 
 same combination existed. In command of a 
 military company occasionally, when the captain 
 was out of the way he offered the prayers when 
 the military training began. He in all ways, 
 even to the process of making love to three 
 successive widows, brought to bear the same 
 
3 6 Revolutionary Oratory, 
 
 theological interest and was ready with his Scrip 
 ture texts or his little poems ; only for the advan 
 tage of the widows, each was commonly employed 
 to wrap up a little piece of sugar candy, which 
 was a new-found delicacy in those days, and 
 answered in the process of love-making to widows 
 the purpose of ice-cream soda to the women of 
 the present day. 
 
 This was the chief justice of the colony. And 
 when you ask who the lawyers were, the answer 
 is that there were no established lawyers, no 
 established and recognized attorneys until the 
 year 1701, and that there was no examination or 
 preparation required among those for many years 
 after. 
 
 An English lawyer of some learning, a Lin 
 coln s Inn man, came out to establish himself in 
 Boston. He argued one case, and argued it in 
 such a thoroughly unecclesiastical manner that 
 he was never allowed to argue another, but 
 retired to a small market garden in Brookline 
 where he complained that he had neither a house 
 to live in nor a garden to cultivate. 
 
 Of the recognized attorneys one quite distin 
 guished was a tailor, another was an apothecary 
 and so on, there is that absence of all rigor in the 
 administration of justice. After the examinations 
 began in Massachusetts the first eminent lawyer 
 was Benjamin Gridley, in 1730, often called the 
 father of the Boston bar. The clergy, not content 
 with acting as judges, or arguing cases if neces- 
 
or the Rise of the Lawyers 37 
 
 sary for they were always welcome as attorneys 
 would boldly go into lawsuits in progress, 
 observe what was going on, and if they were not 
 pleased with the judge s decision would overrule 
 it. If they did not like the examination of the 
 witnesses they would examine them themselves; 
 if they did not like the action of the jury they 
 would overrule it and pronounce the verdict 
 themselves. 
 
 It was all a curious travesty of legal technical 
 ities, and one can hardly be surprised that upon 
 one occasion one of these attorneys when a 
 witness having arrived late an old woman 
 and the court-house was crowded, pointed out 
 to her the seats where the judges sat and the 
 stairway that led up to them and told her to go 
 up there and seat herself among the judges. And 
 when called to account he said that he had always 
 been told that that was the place where the old 
 women sat. 
 
 Now, what made the possibility of any change 
 in all this condition of affairs? The change came 
 from two or three things. In a general way it 
 came from the expansion of thought, and from 
 the expansion of settlements also. It was not 
 possible, in the nature of things, that the rigor 
 of the Puritan theology should last forever ; and 
 it did not. A greater variety of people came as 
 settlers, with different opinions, a greater 
 variety of saints, and a tolerable variety of sin 
 ners. 
 
38 Revolutionary Oratory, 
 
 There were clergymen who, though firm in 
 their own convictions, had no absolute faith 
 in the Westminster catechism; and outside of 
 that there were many persons in whom, as time 
 went on, a sense of humor began to develop, and 
 who were unable to see this strange Puritan life 
 as seriously as at first. There were the Epis 
 copal clergy, for instance, to deal with, who were 
 very apt to be loyalists, very apt to be educated 
 men, and sometimes men who would have their 
 jokes at the Puritan proprieties. The Reverend 
 Matthew Byles, a loyalist clergyman at Boston, 
 at the end of the first hour on his sermon would 
 pay deference to the habits of the community by 
 having his hour-glass at his side and turning 
 it over; but, he would remark incidentally , * Now, 
 my hearers, let us take another glass. It was 
 an innocent bon mot in its place but perhaps 
 somewhat secular. 
 
 Then there was the class of professional scoun 
 drels who developed themselves the picturesque 
 villains of that early period. There was Stephen 
 Burroughs, whose life has gone through perhaps 
 twenty editions after long intervals of time, and 
 who will perhaps live forever as a curious exhibi 
 tion of the rogue side of life in the Puritan 
 period. Stephen Burroughs went through the 
 country defrauding people and very commonly 
 wearing the garments of a clergyman, always 
 ready to preach or pray in either sense of the 
 word. On one occasion, when pursued for a 
 
t 
 
 or the Rise of the Lawyers 39 
 
 theft, he took refuge in a haymow. They caught 
 him at last, and when he pleaded his clerical 
 character as an excuse they said that if he was a 
 clergyman he must preach a sermon from the 
 haymow and let them select the text. He 
 assented, and they selected as the text: "Old 
 shoes and clouted on their feet " He preached 
 a sermon from that text and they let him off. 
 
 Those things began to give a little background 
 of something else to this habitual Puritan consci 
 ousness. And then there gradually came up, 
 even in families, and even in exceptional house 
 holds, a little levity of spirit, a little habit of 
 taking things somewhat differently from the old 
 way in which they were taken. 
 
 Among the Puritan clergy, who generally 
 unlike many of their successors had large 
 families of daughters, and whose daughters 
 unlike many of those of their successors were 
 generally all married, sometimes several times 
 over, there was often a great deal of marrying 
 to be done in their own households. And it was 
 etiquette to let the bride select the text for her 
 own wedding sermon. 
 
 So when Parson Cranch, of Milton, was to offici 
 ate in that way for his eldest daughter, Mary, she 
 cast down her eyes and blushed, we may suppose, 
 when called upon to make the selection, and 
 chose for her text: " Mary hath chosen the better 
 part, which shall not be taken away from her. 
 And it was not taken away. 
 
40 Revolutionary Oratory, 
 
 But when her younger sister, named Abby, 
 wished to marry young Squire Adams, christened 
 John, and he being in various questionable prac 
 tices among others, beginning to be an attor 
 ney when he was objected to by the father, was 
 not well received by the family, was never even 
 invited to stay to dinner, she selected for her 
 text: "John came neither eating bread nor 
 drinking wine, and ye say he hath a devil." 
 And yet Abby lived to be wife of the first Presi 
 dent Adams, and the ancestress of indefinite 
 generations of Adamses. You will find her 
 letters also among the spiciest products of the 
 later Puritan period. 
 
 Now all these things tended to relax and 
 modify that severe and strict rule of life with 
 which the Puritan colonies began. And then 
 again, from another source there came up a series 
 of differences. The colonies increased, and so the 
 business of the colonies increased. Men went 
 from one colony to another to conduct lawsuits. 
 There was no general system of laws. Before a 
 general system of laws had been formed there 
 was great trouble. Even in New England there 
 was, after a while, a fringe of outlying colonies 
 where the ancient reverence did not exist. There 
 was sent, on one occasion, down to the settle 
 ments on the coast of New Hampshire and 
 Maine fishing colonies, fishing settlements be 
 ing there a young clergyman of the straitest 
 description ; and he was preaching at one of these 
 
or the Rise of the Lawyers 
 
 fishing settlements, and he said to them that they 
 must approve themselves religious, because, he 
 said, " That is the end and aim of your coming 
 hither." 
 
 Whereupon one young fisherman raised his 
 head from the bench where he was lying 
 because in those days, as at the Isle of Shoals 
 within my memory, the fishermen whenever they 
 went to church, all insisted in lying full-length 
 on the pews, as though they were on the thwarts 
 of a vessel, or lying on the rocks; your fisherman 
 anywhere likes to take his Gospel in a horizontal 
 position. When the young clergyman had made 
 this statement, as I have said, one young fellow 
 raised himself up and said : 
 
 * The elder is mistaken. He thinks he is speak 
 ing to the people of the Bay. Our chief aim 
 here is to catch fish, and we do it." 
 
 Now that formation of a more varied circle of 
 elements created great additional difficulty and 
 made a demand for some more positive law. I 
 have here a remarkable passage written by a 
 young Virginian, describing this great complica 
 tion that came up in 1701 he wrote. He 
 describes the ex 
 traordinary state 
 of chaos in which 
 the colonies were 
 as regards their 
 relations, not 
 merely with the 
 
 VVXVv ScO--> 
 
 N \?\ ^ "V v% - 
 
 N . * _ v * * V- 
 
 N 
 
42 Revolutionary Oratory, 
 
 rest of the world but with one another. He says: 
 "It is a great tmhappiness that no one can 
 tell what is law and what is not in the planta 
 tions. Some hold that the law of England is 
 chiefly to be respected, and where that is deficient 
 the laws of the several colonies are to take place. 
 Others are of opinion that the laws of the colonies 
 are to take the first place, and that the law of 
 England is of force only where they are silent. 
 Others there are who contend for the laws of 
 the colonies in conjunction with those that were 
 in force in England at the first settlement of the 
 colony, and lay down that, as the measure of our 
 obedience, alleging that we are not bound to ob 
 serve any late acts of parliament in England ex 
 cept such only where the reason of the law is the 
 same here that it is in England." 
 
 You see how complicated he makes it. It is 
 as bad as questions of imperialism, as bad as 
 knowing what is law in the Philippines. And 
 he goes on: 
 
 " But this leaving too great a latitude to the 
 judge, some others hold, that no late acts of 
 parliament of England do bind the plantations 
 but those only wherein the plantations are 
 particularly named. Thus are we left in the 
 dark in one of the most considerable points of 
 our rights; and the case being so doubtful, we 
 are too often obliged to depend upon the crooked 
 cord of a judge s discretion in matters of the 
 greatest moment and value." 
 
or the Rise of the Lawyers 43 
 
 This passage may be found in Frothingham s 
 * Rise of the Republic," page 109. It is the 
 best statement that I know, of the state of chaos 
 into which they were thrown. As a result there 
 came to be needed a new race of men specially 
 trained, men who for that purpose should come 
 to the front and meet some of these perplexities 
 which the clergy could not. Then all the dawn 
 ing anxieties of the revolution came, all the pre 
 liminary stages dating back long before the 
 actual declaration ; and it needed men who were 
 trained to deal with these, men who had some 
 other training than the ecclesiastical training of 
 Samuel Sewall and his kindred, or the training 
 of the tailors and the apothecaries who were 
 accustomed to argue cases in the city courts. 
 
 On the other hand, in training this body of 
 men they had to deal with a great prejudice. 
 The law was not considered, as I told you, a 
 reputable profession, at least not as compared 
 with the clerical profession. It is a singular fact 
 that the three leaders of the revolution, in the 
 Massachusetts colony, John Adams, Sam Adams, 
 and Oxenbridge Thatcher, were all trained 
 originally to be clergymen, and all afterwards 
 determined to be lawyers, and get their legal 
 training in addition. John Adams did it ; Oxen- 
 bridge Thatcher did it. Sam Adams s parents 
 held so hard to the doctrine that the law was a 
 disreputable profession that they never allowed 
 him to enter it. He went into business, but 
 
44 Revolutionary Oratory, 
 
 before he got through, mixed himself up with 
 legal questions more than the two others put 
 together. And what is more, and what has only 
 lately been brought out distinctly, partly by the 
 researches of my relative, Professor Channing 
 of Harvard, there existed in the southern col 
 onies represented by Virginia very much the 
 same feeling, only coming from a different 
 source. 
 
 It was not a question of church membership 
 or of ecclesiastical training the southern colo 
 nies never troubled themselves very much 
 about those things but turned upon a wholly 
 different thing. The southern colonies were 
 based on land ownership ; the aim was to build 
 up a type of society like the English type, an 
 aristocratic system of land-owners as in Eng 
 land. And these miscellaneous men who, with 
 out owning large estates or large numbers of 
 slaves, came forward to try cases in court, 
 were regarded with the same sort of suspicion 
 which the same class had to meet in Massachu 
 setts. 
 
 Patrick Henry, the greatest of Virginians for 
 the purpose for which Providence had marked 
 him out, was always regarded by Jefferson in 
 very much the same light in which Sam Adams 
 was by his uncles, who were afraid he wanted to 
 be a lawyer. Henry was regarded as a man 
 from the people, an irregularly trained man. 
 Jefferson, you will find, criticises his pronuncia- 
 
or the Rise of the Lawyers 45 
 
 tion severely. He talked about yearth instead 
 of "earth." He said that a man s " nateral " 
 parts needed to be improved by * * eddication. 
 Jefferson had traveled in Europe and talked with 
 cultivated men in other countries. He did not 
 do that sort of thing, and he, not being a man of 
 the most generous or candid nature, always tries 
 to make us think that Patrick Henry was a 
 nobody who had very little practice. And it was 
 not until the admirable life of him written for 
 the " American Statesmen " series by my prede 
 cessor in this lectureship, Moses Coit Tyler, 
 whose loss we so greatly mourn, that it was 
 clearly made out that, on the contrary, he had an 
 immense legal practice and was wonderfully suc 
 cessful in a great variety of cases. 
 
 So, both North and South, there was this anta 
 gonism to this new class coming forward; and 
 yet that new class stepped forward and took the 
 leadership of the American Revolution. Not 
 that the clergy were false to their duty. They 
 did their duty well. There is a volume I know 
 what good libraries you have in Cleveland, to 
 say nothing of the University, and therefore I 
 mention special books more freely there is a 
 book by J. Wingate Thornton called " The Clergy 
 of the American Revolution," which contains an 
 admirable and powerful series of sermons by 
 those very clergymen whom I have criticized for 
 their limitations. They did their part admir 
 ably, and yet one sees as time goes on that the 
 
46 Revolutionary Oratory, 
 
 lawyers are taking matters into their own hands. 
 But the change was not always a benefit to the 
 style of oratory. It was a period of somewhat 
 formal style; it was not a period when the 
 English language was reaching to its highest 
 sources. You will be surprised to find, for 
 instance, in the books and addresses of that 
 period how little Shakspeare is quoted, how much 
 oftener much inferior poets. In Edmund Burke s 
 orations he quotes Shakspeare very little; and 
 Edmund Burke s orations are interesting espe 
 cially for this, that they are not probably the 
 original addresses which he gave, are literature 
 rather than oratory, and are now generally sup 
 posed to have been written out afterwards. What 
 we know is that they did not hold their audiences. 
 Edmund Burke was known in parliament as the 
 "dinner-bell," because as soon as he got up to 
 speak the hungry Englishmen got up and went 
 out to take their dinners. Goldsmith said of 
 him: 
 
 " Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such, 
 That you scarcely can praise it or blame it too much ; 
 Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining, 
 And thought of convincing while they thought of 
 dining. 
 
 You know Englishmen take their dinner in the 
 midst of the parliamentary sittings, and often 
 parliament does not adjourn at all so long as 
 there is a member left who is not hungry. 
 
 Like Burke most of the orators of that 
 
or the Rise of the Lawyers 47 
 
 period have a certain formal style. When all is 
 said and done, the clergy got a certain pithiness 
 from that terrific habit they had of going back 
 every little while and pinning down their thought 
 with a text. One English clergyman of the 
 period compared his text to a horse-block on 
 which he ascended when he wished to mount his 
 horse, and then he rode his horse as long as he 
 wished and might or might not come back to 
 that horse-block again. Therefore we see in the 
 oratory of that time a certain formality. 
 
 Moreover, in the absence of the modern reporter, 
 we really do not know exactly what was said in the 
 greatest speeches of that day. The modern 
 reporter, whose aim is to report everything that 
 is said, and who generally succeeds (I hope it will 
 not be so in this particular case) in putting in a 
 great many fine things which haven t occurred 
 to the orators the modern reporter was not 
 known, and we have but very few descriptions 
 even of the great orations. One of these, fortu 
 nately, we have from a very able source John 
 Adams. He describes to us the address of James 
 Otis on what was called " writs of assistance," 
 which was merely an old-fashioned form of search 
 warrant. It was seventeen years before the revo 
 lution broke out ; and in his old age he gave a 
 description of it, done in a spirit of generosity 
 and freedom which does not belong always to his 
 earlier days. He says, writing in the year 1817, 
 and looking back more than half a century : 
 
48 Revolutionary Oratory, 
 
 " Whenever you shall find a painter, male 
 or female, I pray yon to suggest a scene and 
 subject." That is not, by the way, putting 
 it very near, because you may remember perhaps 
 that John Adams said once that there were no 
 painters or sculptors in America and he hoped 
 there never would be ; but he has got so far in 
 his old age as to imagine what a painter might 
 do, and he says: 
 
 ** The scene is in the council chamber of 
 the old town house in Boston. The date is 
 the month of February, 1761. That council 
 chamber was as remarkable an apartment and 
 more so, than the house of lords or house 
 of parliament in Great Britain, or that in Phila 
 delphia in which the Declaration of Independence 
 was signed in 1776. In this chamber, near the 
 fire, were seated five judges with Lieutenant- 
 Governor Hutchinson at their head as chief 
 justice, all in their new fresh robes of scarlet 
 English cloth, in their broad bands and immense 
 judicial wigs. In this chamber were seated, at a 
 long table, all the barristers of Boston and its 
 neighboring county of Middlesex, in their gowns, 
 bands and tie-wigs. They were not seated on 
 ivory chairs, but their dress was more solemn 
 and more pompous than that of the Roman senate 
 when the Gauls broke in upon them. In a corner 
 of the room must be placed " I ask your special 
 attention to this sentence "In a corner of the 
 room must be placed wit, sense, imagination, 
 
or the Rise of the Lawyers 49 
 
 genius, pathos, reason, prudence, eloquence, 
 learning, science, and immense reading, hung by 
 the shoulders on two crutches, covered with a 
 cloth greatcoat, in the person of Mr. Pratt," 
 Mr. Pratt was the great lawyer of Boston in that 
 day " who had been solicited on both sides but 
 would engage on neither, being about to leave 
 Boston forever as Chief Justice of New York. 
 Two portraits, at more than full-length, of King 
 Charles II. and King James II. were hung on the 
 most conspicuous side of the apartment. If my 
 young eyes or old memory hath not deceived me, 
 these were the finest pictures I have seen. The 
 colors of their long flowing robes and their royal 
 ermine were almost glowing, the figures the most 
 noble and graceful, the features most distinct 
 and characteristic; far superior to those of the 
 king and queen of France in the senate chamber 
 of congress. I believe they were Van Dyck s. " 
 Those pictures have long since disappeared; no 
 one knows exactly what became of them. They 
 were probably sent back to England at the time 
 of the revolution. 
 
 44 Now for the actors and performers. Otis 
 was a flame of fire ; with a promptitude of clas 
 sical allusion, a depth of research, a rapid sum 
 mary of historical events and dates, a profusion 
 of legal authorities, a prophetic glare of his eyes 
 into futurity, and a rapid torrent of impetuous 
 eloquence, he hurried away all before him. 
 
 "American independence was then and there 
 
50 Revolutionary Oratory, 
 
 born. The seeds of patriots and heroes to de 
 fend the vigorous youth were then and there sown. 
 Every man of that immense crowded audience 
 appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to 
 take arms against writs of assistance. Then and 
 there was the first scene of the first act of opposi 
 tion to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. 
 Then and there the child Independence was born. 
 In fifteen years that is, in 1776 he grew up 
 to manhood and declared himself free." 
 
 That you will find in Thornton s " Pulpit of the 
 American Revolution," at page 114; and also 
 in the tenth volume of John Adams s works. I 
 think you will agree that James Otis must have 
 been eloquent indeed to inspire an impression so 
 permanent in the mind of the aged John Adams, 
 who in his earlier years had been ordinarily most 
 bitter in his criticism against any one who was 
 or sought to be a rival. 
 
 That was one of the great speeches, perhaps 
 one of the two great speeches of the Revolution. 
 The other was that speech of Patrick Henry, 
 which probably has been committed to memory 
 and recited by more schoolboys than any other 
 speech ever delivered in America, and which 
 brought together New England and Virginia in 
 one common admiration for its source. You will 
 remember some of the phases of it : 
 
 " It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. 
 Gentlemen may cry * Peace, peace, but there is 
 no peace ; the war has actually begun. The next 
 
or the Rise of the Lawyers 5 1 
 
 gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our 
 ears the crash of resounding arms. Our brethren 
 are already in the field why stand we here idle? 
 Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be pur 
 chased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid 
 it, Almighty God! I know not what course 
 others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, 
 or give me death ! 
 
 One of the men, John Roane, who heard that 
 speech, has recorded it in all its points of elo 
 quence. He has so described it, perhaps with 
 some aid from the imagination, that we almost 
 see as well as hear it in passing. 
 
 * When he said," writes Roane, "when he 
 said, Is life so dear or peace so sweet he stood 
 in the attitude of a condemned galley-slave, 
 loaded with fetters, awaiting his doom. His 
 form was bowed, his wrists were crossed, his 
 manacles were almost visible as he stood like an 
 embodiment of helplessness and agony. After a 
 solemn pause he raised his eyes and chained 
 hands toward heaven and prayed in words and 
 tones that thrilled every heart, * Forbid it, 
 Almighty God ! He then turned toward the 
 timid loyalists of the house, who were quaking 
 with terror at the idea of the consequence of 
 participating in proceedings which would be 
 visited with the penalties of treason by the British 
 crown; and he slowly bent his form yet nearer 
 to the earth and said : * I know not what course 
 others may take, and he accompanied the words 
 
52 Revolutionary Oratory, 
 
 with his hands crossed, while he seemed to be 
 weighed down with additional chains. The man 
 appeared to be transformed into an oppressed, 
 heart-broken and helpless felon. After remain 
 ing in this posture of humiliation long enough 
 to impress the imagination he arose proudly and 
 exclaimed, But as for me, and the words hissed 
 through his clenched teeth, while his body was 
 thrown back, and every muscle and tendon was 
 strained against the fetters which bound him, 
 and with his countenance strained with agony 
 and rage he looked for a moment like Laocoon in 
 a death struggle with coiling serpents ; then with 
 loud clear tones he cried, 4 Give me liberty, or 
 give me death! and electrified the assembly. 
 It was not a prayer, but a stern demand which 
 would submit to no refusal or delay. The sound 
 of his voice, as he spoke these memorable words, 
 was like that of a Spartan paean on the field of 
 Platsea." 
 
 It cannot be said that we do not know some 
 thing of what the oratory of the Revolution was, 
 after these descriptions. In modern times we 
 should have the address reported ; in the hands 
 of a very good reporter we should have inter 
 polated any questions that followed or that inter 
 rupted, any applause, any expressions of dissent. 
 But here, not having that, we have a description 
 by a person who saw it and heard it all. 
 
 In seeing this transition thus completed from 
 the domain of the clergy to the power of the 
 
or the^Rise of the Lawyers 53 
 
 lawyers, which certainly if it does not still 
 last, lasted up to the time of the anti-slavery 
 movement and the great reforms of the last gen 
 eration, we are led to ask, was it on the whole a 
 loss or a gain? I do not see how we can doubt 
 it was a gain ; at least that it came nearer to a 
 perfectly truthful and solid basis. 
 
 This was never perhaps stated so well as when, 
 in answer to a certain point raised by Mr. Master 
 Jewett of Baliol College addressed officially 
 as ** Mr. Master," as we say ** Mr. President" 
 he was discussing with another clergyman the 
 comparative power of the judge and the bishop. 
 The other clergyman said : 
 
 " Of course the bishop s power is greater. 
 The power of the judge does not go beyond 
 this that he can say to a sinner, You 
 shall be hanged ; but the bishop can go a 
 step further and say to him, You shall be 
 damned. 
 
 "Yes," said Mr. Master Jewett, "but we 
 must remember, after all, that when the judge 
 says to the man, You shall be hanged, the 
 man is hanged ! 
 
 In talking of the lawyers I must not now pass 
 down to the present time, further than this, to 
 speak of two modern lawyers who so greatly 
 commanded the profession by the power of 
 genius, and often, not always, by the power of 
 personal courage and self-devotion, that they 
 may be regarded as the outcome or remote devel- 
 
54 Revolutionary Oratory, 
 
 opment of that second stage of American history 
 which I have tried to portray. 
 
 It happened to me, when I was in college, to 
 be once on some business at an office on State 
 street in Boston, then as now the central busi 
 ness street of the place, in a second-story office 
 where there were a number of young men 
 writing busily at their desks. Presently one of 
 the youths, passing by accident across the room, 
 stopped suddenly and said: 
 
 " There is Daniel Webster! " 
 
 In an instant every desk in that room was 
 vacated, every pane in every window was filled 
 with a face looking out, and I, hastening up 
 behind them, found it difficult to get a view of 
 the street so densely had they crowded round it. 
 And once looking out I saw all up and down the 
 street, in every window I could see, just the 
 same mass of eager faces behind the windows. 
 Those faces were all concentrated on a certain 
 figure, a farmer-like, sunburned man who stood, 
 roughly clothed, with his hands behind him, 
 speaking to no one, looking nowhere in particu 
 lar; waiting, so far as I could see, for nothing, 
 with broad shoulders and heavy muscles, and the 
 head of a hero above. Such a brow, such 
 massive formation, such magnificent black eyes, 
 such straight black eyebrows I had never seen 
 before. 
 
 That man, it appeared, was Daniel Webster ! I 
 saw people go along the street sidling along 
 
or the Rise of the Lawyers 55 
 
 past him, looking up at him as if he were the 
 Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World in 
 New York harbor. Nobody knew what he 
 wanted, it never was explained; he may have 
 been merely waiting for some companion to go 
 fishing. But there he was, there he stands in 
 my memory. I don t know what happened after 
 wards, or how those young men ever got back to 
 their desks if they ever did. 
 
 For me, however, that figure was revealed by 
 one brief duplicate impression, which came in a 
 few months afterwards when I happened to be 
 out in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, where 
 people used to drive then, as they drive now, on 
 summer afternoons for afternoon tea only, after 
 noon tea not having been invented, they drove 
 out to their neighbors houses for fruit or a cup 
 of chocolate. 
 
 You have heard Boston perhaps called the 
 "Hub of the universe." A lady, not a Bos- 
 tonian, once said that if Boston were the hub 
 of the universe, Brookline ought to be called 
 the "Sub-hub." In the "sub-hub" I was sit 
 ting in the house of a kinsman who had a beau 
 tiful garden; who was the discoverer, in fact, 
 of the Boston nectarine which all the world came 
 to his house to taste. I heard voices in the draw 
 ing-room and went in there. And there I saw 
 again before me the figure of that day on State 
 street, but it was the figure of a man with a 
 beamingly good-natured face, seated in a solid 
 
56 Revolutionary Oratory, 
 
 chair brought purposely to accommodate his 
 weight, sitting there with the simple culinary 
 provision of a cup of chocolate in his hand. 
 
 It so happened that the great man, the god 
 like Daniel, as the people used to call him, had 
 expressed the very mortal wish for a little more 
 sugar in his chocolate; and I, if you please, 
 was the fortunate youth who, passing near him, 
 was selected as the Ganymede to bring to him 
 the refreshment desired. I have felt ever since 
 that I, at least, was privileged to put one drop of 
 sweetness into the life of that great man, a life 
 very varied and sometimes needing refreshment. 
 And I have since been given by my classmates 
 to understand I find they recall it to this day 
 that upon walking through the college yard for 
 a week or two after that opportunity, I carried 
 my head so much higher than usual as to awaken 
 an amount of derision which undoubtedly, if it 
 had been at West Point, would have led to a 
 boxing match. 
 
 That was Daniel Webster, one of the two great 
 lawyers of Boston I might almost say I might 
 quite say of the American bar at that time. If 
 I have spoken too largely in proportion of those 
 from my own part of the country, you must 
 remember that I am speaking now of the earlier 
 days; and when I come, in my next address, to 
 speak of the reformers, I shall necessarily cover 
 a wider field. But I must mention one other 
 who for his effect, at least, and for something in 
 
or the Rise of the Lawyers 57 
 
 his genius may be classed with Webster. With 
 less solidity of power he had, on the other hand, 
 a more consistent brilliancy. 
 
 We have at the Court of St. James a gentle 
 man known to you all, under the name of Choate, 
 whom you might recognize less easily if you 
 heard him mentioned, as he often is, by ad 
 miring Englishmen, as " Mr. Cho-a-te*. " " Mr. 
 Cho-a-te* is the nephew of the great barrister 
 of his age, Rufus Choate. And it is a singular 
 fact that the whole physique, the whole aspect of 
 that great lawyer was so un- Saxon, so distinctly 
 suggestive of southern Europe that the Italian 
 ized pronunciation of his name hardly seems in 
 appropriate. 
 
 He and Lord Tennyson are the only two men 
 I have seen, of English blood who were abso 
 lutely un-English in looks. Any one who has 
 seen Lord Tennyson knows that in him you 
 beheld something remote from the neat, well- 
 tailored, well-trimmed, well-valeted bearing of 
 the average educated Englishman. You saw a 
 tall lank figure with very dark complexion, long 
 features, tangled black hair, tangled mustache 
 and beard; in all respects suggesting rather 
 some imperfectly tamed Sicilian bandit or some 
 partially converted Carthusian monk, than a sub 
 stantial Englishman and a man of property. 
 Somewhat the same it was with Rufus Choate. 
 
 He had the darkness, the tangled hair, eyes 
 of unfathomable depth and sadness, and instead 
 
58 Revolutionary Oratory, 
 
 of the tangled beard and mustache he had a 
 long, anxious face, as if the woes of a hundred 
 clients were represented there. And the curious 
 thing about it, in addition, is that here was a man 
 born of the unmixed blood of Massachusetts 
 peasants, so far as they were peasants nay 
 rather, common people, common farmers in Essex 
 County where his kindred still remain, a race of 
 simple ways. And yet from among them there 
 had come this beautiful, picturesque youth and 
 this impressive, fascinating personality. And 
 another strange thing which went with that 
 was, that with all this romantic and ideal side to 
 him, he could yet wind the juries of Essex County 
 round his fingers while he was lavishing all his 
 wealth of phraseology upon their heads. 
 
 Here was a man who, on one occasion while 
 defending a sea captain on the charge of starv 
 ing his crew, would bring in the books kept by 
 the man and read aloud in his deep, solemn 
 tones the number of barrels of beans, the number 
 of pounds of pork or of herrings, and coming to 
 the climax at last pin his dark eyes upon the 
 jury and say, 
 
 " And, gentlemen of the jury, he fed that 
 ungrateful crew upon that luxurious esculent 
 of the tropics squash ! And not a man 
 would smile, and every man would look at his 
 fellow-jurymen as if now they had got to the 
 depth of a murder trial. 
 
 In those days they used to publish in the 
 
or the Rise of the Lawyers 59 
 
 Boston Post, which was the funny paper of Boston 
 then they had a funny paper then and it used 
 to put in two columns, " Poetry by Mr. Choate," 
 " Prose by the Witness." For instance the 
 famous Tirrell murder trial. There would be 
 first this passage : 
 
 "Poetry, by Mr. Choate: Down to that 
 fatal Monday evening, gentlemen of the jury, 
 when the client s last lingering hope flick 
 ered like a candle and went out. 
 
 And then you would look in the next column 
 and you would see the prose by the witness: 
 " Wai, all I know is that I come into the room, 
 and there the first thing I sot eyes on was Al. 
 Tirrell a-sitting in his chair, and he was cocked 
 up ag in the corner and he was crying. And 
 says I, What s the matter, Al. ? And says he, 
 * I m afraid I ve run ag in a snag. " That was 
 the " Prose by the Witness." And Mr. Choate 
 generally carried the day, whether by the sorrow 
 and tears of Tirrell in the one case, or by the 
 provision of the luxuriant esculent of the tropics 
 in the other. (Applause.) 
 
ANTI-SLAVERY AND 
 LYCEUM ORATORY. 
 
An ti- Slavery and Lyceum 
 Oratory. 
 
 HAVE spoken, in the two previous 
 lectures, of two very marked periods 
 in the development of American 
 oratory, and have tried to make 
 it clear from what sources the 
 modification came. The first of my lec 
 tures, you will remember, bore reference 
 to the Colonial period, or what I called 
 "The Reign of the Clergy," when all 
 public speaking, like all else, was under the 
 controlling influence of a strange ecclesiastical 
 tradition. I then explained to you how, with 
 the approach of the American Revolution, 
 there came from various sources a transfer of 
 this leadership, which took the form of what 
 I ventured to call "The Rise of the Law 
 yers. 
 
 And I pointed out to you toward the close of the 
 last lecture that, while great gain ensued in some 
 respects from this transformation, it was not 
 exclusively an advantage; that the habits of 
 speech at that period were florid, overloaded with 
 words, not simple and direct, were strongly, for 
 instance, under the control of writers like Dr. 
 
64 Anti-Slavery 
 
 Johnson in literature, and under a similar con 
 trol in what related to oratory. So that, after 
 all, there was substituted a somewhat artificial 
 style. And when, coming down later than the 
 period I actually designated, I portrayed one or 
 two ripened specimens of that tendency toward 
 the reign of the lawyers and described two of the 
 greatest among them at that period Webster 
 and Choate I recognized in both of those, that 
 there was to some extent an overladen style in 
 the one and in the other a style often heavy, 
 though rising at its highest points to extraordi 
 nary power. 
 
 We are now to contemplate a period when, 
 from obvious influences, there came a modifica 
 tion of this more ornate style; a more direct, 
 more simple and consequently more powerful 
 form of oratory. This was the result of the 
 necessity of dealing with great public questions 
 and with great moral reforms. The floridity of 
 style at that period is described in a phrase from 
 a book celebrated in its day, published in the 
 year 1828, and described by the first of English 
 essayists at that period, Hazlitt, as being the 
 most important book yet produced in America ; 
 a book containing the travels and observations 
 of President D wight of Yale College going through 
 the New England states and, to some extent, the 
 beginnings of the Western States, and stating 
 what he found there, frankly and freely with 
 that frankness and freedom which college presi- 
 
and Lyceum Oratory 6j 
 
 dents commonly showed, in those days at least, 
 in dealing with other people. 
 
 He speaks of hearing one or two addresses in 
 Boston, and speaks of them as being given in what 
 is called " the Boston style a florid style," thus 
 putting it on record, and I think with entire 
 truth, that that style prevailed at that period. If, 
 for instance, you should read if anybody could 
 do it in full the lectures upon " Rhetoric and 
 Oratory " given by John Quincy Adams at Har 
 vard University at that time, you would be 
 astonished at the immense length of those 
 lectures two stout volumes, a record of repeti 
 tion, of verbiage, surprising you by the number 
 of words that it takes him to say a simple thing. 
 
 Now the great step, after all, toward making 
 oratory human is tested, in a degree, by the 
 shortness of the words. As long as words are 
 polysyllabic and multitudinous you may reach a 
 special class, but you don t reach the human heart. 
 
 I remember, myself, one commencement day, 
 after the Civil War, when a once eminent liter 
 ary man in Boston, George S. Hilliard, one of 
 the most brilliant of the elder type of men, 
 who had been rather out of sympathy with the 
 college during the war-time, came back at last 
 and made an address at the commencement din 
 ner. Dr. Edward Hammond Clarke, of Boston, 
 a classmate of mine, sat beside me as he heard 
 this address, and he turned to me at the end and 
 said: 
 
66 Anti-Slavery 
 
 " It is a very strange thing. I can remem 
 ber the time when that address would have 
 seemed to me the height of eloquence, and yet 
 now it makes no impression upon me at all." I 
 said to him, 
 
 " That is just the feeling that has been in my 
 mind." 
 
 When afterwards Dr. Clarke himself was called 
 upon, a man not then habitually a public speaker, 
 he simply began and went through a per 
 fectly straightforward, up-and-down description 
 of the present condition and prospects of the 
 medical school of the university, and swept all 
 hearers with sympathy. Everybody listened to 
 him, everybody delighted in the statement he 
 made. 
 
 The period of the shortening of words and the 
 directness of address had come. It had always 
 come when the learned man of that day was face 
 to face with the plain man, who spoke simply the 
 words that he meant and said the thing in the 
 shortest way. 
 
 There used to be a story in my college, in my 
 childhood, of the first mayor of Cambridge. I 
 notice that cities are very apt to take for their 
 first mayor a learned man, a college-bred man at 
 any rate. Sometimes experience brings them 
 nearer to a man of the people, at the end, than 
 the old-fashioned college man was. 
 
 Our first mayor was a college man. He did his 
 duties faithfully and was a man of great dignity. 
 
and Lyceum Oratory 
 
 There came one night an alarm of fire just as 
 he was going to bed. The old gentleman felt 
 that his duty was there. He got up, put on his 
 fur coat and his fur cap, took his gold-headed 
 cane in his hand and walked manfully in the 
 direction of the fire. As he came near he found 
 a great tumult going on, people running about 
 the street, and at last a man came running past 
 him with a pair of old-fashioned fire-buckets in 
 his hands. Mayor Green stopped and planted 
 his gold-headed cane in the street and said : 
 
 " Can you tell me, my friend, the probable 
 origin of this alarming conflagration? " 
 
 * * Sot, I guess ! said the man, and ran on with 
 his fire-buckets. 
 
 There you have the condensation, and there 
 you have the extreme. And when you got some 
 of that monosyllabic quality into public speak 
 ing, you came in contact with real things, and 
 handled them in a real manner. The 
 monosyllabic period did not come from 
 any book, into New England, into the 
 United States. It did not come from 
 any preconceived theory of method. 
 It came, one may say, when a hitherto 
 unknown young man took his old- 
 fashioned printing-press and moved it 
 up from Newburyport to Boston, started 
 the anti-slavery movement, and began 
 a newspaper called The Boston Libera 
 tor. It was done so obscurely that when 
 
 o 
 
68 Anti-Slavery 
 
 he got into trouble with the genteel part of the 
 population, and the mayor went to hunt up the 
 printing-office he found it difficult to discover it. 
 It was in an obscure part of the city. The young 
 man was still obscurer, but he was definitely a 
 man with a purpose. He brought that purpose 
 with him; he brought his cause with him. 
 People gathered around him instinctively. He 
 was trained on the Bible; he was full of Bible 
 texts to the end of his life. He became very 
 heretical in his views of the Bible, but the more 
 heretical he was, the more he quoted it. And 
 always, from beginning to end, he said what he 
 wanted to say very plainly. 
 
 I spoke of Dr. Johnson just now. There is a 
 fact which illustrates very well that when the 
 great Dr. Johnson got to his highest point and 
 did his best work he adopted quite a different 
 style. Some of you have encountered his high- 
 water mark in the books of extracts, the time 
 when he, having been finally flattered and 
 approached by the Earl of Chesterfield who had 
 snubbed and repelled him when he was an un 
 known youth, when he wrote his answer to this 
 gentleman s offer of assistance and he says to 
 him, in the latter part of his brief letter: 
 
 ** The notice that you have been pleased to take 
 of my humble labors, had it been early, would have 
 been kind. As it is, it has been delayed until I am 
 old and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot 
 impart it, till I am known and do not want it." 
 
and Lyceum Oratory 69 
 
 That letter has always been celebrated for the 
 concentration, in a series of vigorous words, of 
 the life and emotion of a strong man, who in the 
 less serious affairs of life had dealt in poly 
 syllables. 
 
 And it is a curious fact that when you read about 
 Garrison s early history he had never perhaps 
 erred in the other direction we find him always 
 setting forth on that plane of perfectly direct 
 statement which he always followed. When he 
 went, at the beginning of his movement, to con 
 sult with old Dr. Beecher, and Dr. Beecher 
 declined to take up the anti-slavery enterprise, 
 because, he said, he had already too many irons 
 in the fire, " Then, Dr. Beecher," said Garrison, 
 " the best advice I can give you is to take all the 
 others out and put this one in. 
 
 There you have the monosyllables again. In 
 the same way, when he was called to account by 
 the mayor, mobbed in the streets, he still held to 
 the same simple forms of statement, still declined 
 to make the slightest compromise, still said his 
 words in the plainest way. Following him, 
 the men who came forward and women on 
 the platform, all from the very first struck a point 
 of contact with the plain people that very 
 phrase came from Charles Sumner himself, per 
 haps the most learned among them all " the 
 plain people and hence the plain people fol 
 lowed them. Garrison had said : 
 
 " I am in earnest; I will not equivocate; I will 
 
jo Anti-Slavery 
 
 not retract a single inch; I will be heard." 
 And he was heard. 
 
 It happened very frequently, by one of those 
 things which we call fortunate, or providential, 
 according to our habits, that he reached and 
 called to him the man who, of all the young men 
 of Boston, was the most favored, the most intel 
 lectually gifted, the most assisted by circum 
 stances in obtaining prestige. 
 
 When some celebrated Englishman was in Bos 
 ton, and was at the office of Mr. Ticknor the 
 study of Mr. Ticknor, which looked on Park street 
 in Boston, looked across on the Common he was 
 complaining, with the frankness of Englishmen, 
 of the absence of a controlling look of gentleman- 
 liness about Americans. He said he had scarcely 
 seen a man in America who looked to him like a 
 gentleman. And it was perfectly true at that 
 time, and is to-day, that the average American is 
 not groomed quite so well, he is not so suggestive 
 of the valet in the brushing of his coat and 
 the set of his hat as the average Englishman. 
 At any rate, this man thought so, and he said, 
 as he walked up and down the room talking 
 about it: 
 
 Stop ! Who are those walking up and down 
 the street on the other side? They are the only 
 two men I have seen in your country who had 
 the look of gentlemen ! Mr. Ticknor went to 
 the window and smiled and said, 
 
 " You will hardly believe it, but those two 
 
and Lyceum Oratory 71 
 
 men are two of our most extreme radicals they 
 are Wendell Phillips and Edmund Quincy." 
 
 4 What do I care," said the Englishman, 
 " whether they are radicals or not? I don t know 
 what you call radicalism here. What I said was 
 that they were the only two that looked like 
 gentlemen." And both those typical gentlemen 
 were the first who rallied around the plain, 
 strong printer s boy from Newburyport, who 
 did not know or care whether he looked like a 
 gentleman or not. He looked like a man that 
 was enough. 
 
 My elder brother, who was in college with 
 Wendell Phillips, used to say that of all the Har 
 vard students of his time there was but one for 
 whom the family carriage was sent out from Bos 
 ton every Saturday to take him home to stay 
 over Sunday. That one was Wendell Phillips, 
 and he therefore brought this tradition of cul 
 ture what was called culture then, this tradition 
 of social polish, to strengthen the tradition and 
 the habit of Garrison s monosyllables on the 
 other side. And from the time he first found 
 himself at Faneuil Hall and made, in answer to 
 the district attorney s pro-slavery defense of the 
 Alton mob, his appeal to the pictured ancestors 
 on the walls, he stood, as he stands to this day, 
 the recognized superior I will not say of all 
 American orators, though perhaps I might say 
 it, but certainly of all New England orators. 
 
 Wendell Phillips s manner brought with it 
 
72 Anti-Slavery 
 
 that air of comparative repose which character 
 izes the speaking of today the directness and 
 simplicity. Indeed it was almost an extreme. 
 He began his addresses so quietly that it always 
 bewildered the Southern visitors, who frequently 
 came into the anti-slavery meetings and some 
 times spoke there, in a very manly and direct 
 way. 
 
 They would say, * This quiet person, is he the 
 famous agitator? " And we on the platform 
 sometimes found his beginnings a little too 
 quiet. The remedy was to send two or three 
 young fellows up into the gallery to hiss a little 
 and then the tide came in. He rose invariably 
 with the occasion. He could not be said to love 
 public speaking ; he always said that he did not 
 desire it at all, that he would rather never make 
 another speech. 
 
 I think he had enough in him of the old tradi 
 tion that he would have liked better the recog 
 nized ways. He always said he should like to be 
 in the United States Senate. In theory he 
 didn t enjoy mob oratory it was when the fight 
 came on that he enjoyed it. More than once I 
 have gone to meetings with him, and he has said, 
 * Why do these people all come out to the meet 
 ings? There, for instance, is a man and wife; 
 two comfortable, respectable looking people. 
 They have a pleasant home, a pleasant family 
 fire, occupations of their own. Why do they 
 leave it to come out to hear anybody lecture? " 
 
and Lyceum Oratory 73 
 
 He always appreciated the position of those 
 who didn t go to his lectures, and was rather 
 sorry for those who did. And yet public 
 speaking became to him more than to anybody 
 else, perhaps, the absorbing pursuit of life. He 
 himself had, in the ordinary sense of the word, 
 no comfortable home. His wife was a con 
 firmed invalid, always giving fire to his thought 
 and energy, but always an invalid. There was no 
 home room. The parlor was forlorn, the 
 dining-room was forlorn ; it was a sea of news 
 papers. It was in his wife s sick-room, where 
 strangers were rarely admitted, that you saw 
 Wendell Phillips at home. And it was the con 
 centration of a life. 
 
 Nothing can be more unreasonable than my 
 friend Professor Wendell s statement in his recent 
 very valuable book upon the " History of Ameri 
 can Literature that Garrison, for instance, and 
 Parker were coarse and vehement of speech be 
 cause they were born plebeians, they were men 
 of the people. Their worst efforts in the form 
 of vehemence of speech could not be compared 
 to what the scions of the first families of Boston 
 were ready at any time to say and do to them. 
 
 Phillips himself was capable of extreme plain 
 ness and even injustice of speech. The anti- 
 slavery movement could not, in its nature, be a 
 school for carefully weighing words ; but it could 
 be a school for the superb use of them. The 
 power of directness never was more highly culti- 
 
74 Anti-Slavery 
 
 vated. There never in this world was a more 
 absolutely unselfish gathering of men and women 
 than there was there. Even the other reforms 
 came nearer to the basis of selfishness, because 
 they came nearer to the homes of the people who 
 promoted them ; but this movement was to save 
 the homes and lives of people at a distance, of a 
 different color, of a different race. It was the 
 most unselfish movement in the history of the 
 country, at least the most unselfish I ever knew 
 of or had to do with. 
 
 One incidental advantage of this was that it 
 always had surroundings even on the platform, 
 that went far beyond those of any other move 
 ment ; it was always the most picturesque of plat 
 forms. 
 
 It had not only these persons of strong nat 
 ural command in their aspect, like Garrison, 
 or of traditional refinement like Phillips and 
 Quincy; but it had, of course, also its fringe of 
 picturesque and generally amiable fanatics; 
 those "men with beards," whom Emerson 
 describes as characteristic of the early reform 
 meetings in Boston, at a time when merely to 
 have a beard was to step outside of the proprie 
 ties of life and make one marked. 
 
 The chief type of these was Charles Burleigh, 
 whom some of you remember, who for the simple 
 offense of letting his beard and hair grow as 
 nature made them, was often charged in the 
 newspapers with the blasphemous effort to resem- 
 
and Lyceum Oratory 75 
 
 ble the pictures of Jesus Christ, which he un 
 doubtedly did. 
 
 And when James Russell Lowell in his earlier 
 enthusiasm took up the anti-slavery reform and 
 used to go about with Burleigh, he too let his 
 beard grow, then a very rare phenomenon, and 
 it used to amuse him very much at the way 
 people would look at Burleigh and point out 
 Lowell, the young neophyte, trying to look as 
 blasphemous as Burleigh did by letting his beard 
 grow! 
 
 Then there was old Father Lamson, always 
 dressed in white and always ready to protest 
 against the sins of the world. Then Abby 
 Folsom, whose shrill voice mounted high at any 
 suggestion of hissing or dissent, " It is the capi 
 talists! " long before real capitalists on the 
 modern scale had begun to exist in America. 
 
 Then there were old Quakers, venerable men 
 who simply gave their looks and their silence to 
 the meetings. And then, most perceptible of 
 all, was the perpetual circle of newly arrived 
 fugitive slaves who had just been landed on the 
 wharves of Boston and unpacked from boxes or 
 barrels where they had been stood on their heads 
 perhaps for hours on the way; or women like 
 Harriet Tubman who, after making her own 
 escape had gone back seven times into slavery 
 to bring out parties of fugitives with her; or 
 women like Elizabeth Blakely, who had crowded 
 herself up into a narrow passage between the 
 
76 Anti-Slavery 
 
 wall of the ladies cabin and the side of the ship, 
 a passage so narrow that she was hidden and they 
 could not find her, though they knew she was on 
 board and they had fumigated the whole ship 
 twice with sulphur to drive her out ; but she still 
 stayed on and came out alive in Boston. It was 
 all picturesque life, novel life, real life, new 
 incidents. 
 
 And then there would perhaps come some man 
 stumbling in his heavy slavery gait upon the 
 platform, walking as if a hundred pounds of 
 Virginia mud or South Carolina chains were 
 appended to each heel; and that man would 
 afterwards, under the influence of freedom, 
 develop into the superb stature and the distin 
 guished bearing of Frederick Douglass. 
 
 Those were the incidents of the platform. A 
 deaf man might have gone into an anti-slavery 
 meeting and been thrilled from beginning to end, 
 without hearing a word that was said. 
 
 And in the midst of this, Wendell Phillips with 
 his natural gifts, took the leadership. There 
 were, of course, times when it was comparatively 
 easy sailing, when he had his statement to make 
 and no immediate contest ; and then there would 
 be other times when there would be a direct 
 almost hand-to-hand, at least voice-to-voice con 
 test with some mob of assailants. 
 
 I remember one of these, for instance, in 
 Faneuil Hall when the Abolitionists had been 
 shut out there for a long time. 
 
and Lyceum Oratory 77 
 
 It was after Webster s seventh of March speech 
 and Webster also, by creating antagonism, had 
 been shut out for a time. The Abolitionists got 
 in first and then the young enthusiasts for 
 Webster, mostly young lawyers and business 
 men, came by hundreds and made a mob, a solid 
 body in the middle of Faneuil Hall determined 
 absolutely to silence Wendell Phillips. 
 
 Practically they did silence him for a time, 
 because the moment he began to speak the shout 
 would be given, " Three cheers for Daniel Web 
 ster ! and the cheers would ring and ring. 
 Finally they would die away, and then Phillips 
 would hasten to begin again, and the cheers 
 would begin again. This happened again and 
 again some three or four times, absolutely silenc 
 ing Phillips. Phillips then chose his method of 
 defense. He foresaw that in a little while even 
 the luxury of cheering would become monot 
 onous, the cheerers would get a little out of 
 breath. So when the intervals began to become 
 a little longer after the cheering Phillips, sud 
 denly struck in with a wholly unexpected appeal, 
 and himself called for cheers for Daniel Webster. 
 
 " Yes, " he said, " three cheers for Daniel Web 
 ster, for the man who said so-and-so, and then 
 went and did so-and-so ! 
 
 And he had got in four or five good points 
 of his argument before they knew where they 
 were and began to cheer again. Then would 
 come another lull, with some curiosity to know 
 
7 8 Anti-Slavery 
 
 what he would say next. He was waiting pa 
 tiently. 
 
 " Yes, " he would cry, " three cheers for Daniel 
 Webster, who on such and such a day committed 
 himself to so-and-so, and then afterwards said so- 
 and-so! " 
 
 He would be interrupted, but each time his 
 chance would become greater, and he would say : 
 * Oh, I love to repeat the Book of Daniel! 
 Three cheers for the man who did this or that! " 
 
 And by degrees he had so tired out that mob of 
 howling but inexperienced youth that their 
 cheers gradually died down, and Phillips had 
 begun to call for three cheers for Charles Sum- 
 ner and half the audience were joining in those 
 cheers. Never did I see such a personal triumph 
 of one man over many. And the whole concep 
 tion of it, the strategy of it, the individuality of 
 it belonged to Wendell Phillips alone. 
 
 Then while combining this power of con 
 test he also had a power of what would more 
 commonly be recognized as oratory. If you read 
 his two volumes of orations you will find in 
 them here and there passages of the superbest 
 continuity, of an ocean-like grace and dignity. 
 
 There is one passage there which I once could 
 repeat verbatim, but cannot now one passage 
 there comparing slavery and war and showing 
 slavery to be the worst evil, the more crushing 
 peril of the two. It swells like ocean s surges, 
 and finally, enumerating point by point he comes 
 
and Lyceum Oratory 79 
 
 to the conclusion, taking into consideration very 
 fully the evils on both sides, he comes to this 
 superb climax: 
 
 * Where is the battle-field that is not white 
 white as an angel s wing compared with the 
 blackness of that darkness that has brooded over 
 the Carolinas for centuries?" 
 
 I have good reason to remember that passage. 
 I used to say it in anti-slavery speeches in small 
 country towns, and I remember on one occasion 
 where I was thrilling my audience, or at least 
 myself, and I rose to that point in the conclusion 
 that I said: 
 
 " Where is the battle-field that is not white, 
 white as the raven s wing? " 
 
 And I have no memory of an audience more 
 curious than the bewildered way in which, in that 
 small country church somewhere in central New 
 York, I could watch the different faces as I made 
 some feeble apology that it was inevitable that 
 slavery should mix black and white, or something 
 like that ; I could watch the difference between the 
 young and ardent who grasped at the blunder in 
 a minute and enjoyed it thoroughly, and their 
 more meditative parents, who after tackling with 
 it a while understood it by degrees; and the 
 respectable citizens in the side aisles who didn t 
 fairly comprehend that anything was gone wrong 
 and probably never have fathomed it. 
 
 And, you are to remember that on this anti- 
 slavery platform there was a race of men and 
 
8o Anti-Slavery 
 
 women who had been trained by the move 
 ment itself, who had brought their various gifts 
 to it and who, while retaining the greatest indi 
 viduality and speaking for themselves, still had 
 different points of view to contribute. 
 
 Phillips sometimes though rarely, tried to 
 modify a little the statements of the more ex 
 travagant as where, for instance, Charles Lenox 
 Remond of Salem, a colored man of great ability, 
 and who it seemed to me as a free colored 
 man was bitterer about slavery than the men 
 who had achieved their own freedom. When 
 Charles Remond used the expression often quoted 
 that * * George Washington was a villain, 
 
 " Charles," said Wendell Phillips, " the epithet 
 is not felicitous which I always thought one 
 of the most delicate repressions ever applied to 
 an over-zealous apostle. 
 
 Then there would be that fine type of the 
 yeoman reformer, Stephen Foster of Worcester, 
 a man who had the arms, the big hands, and the 
 sunburned face of the thorough farmer that he 
 was; who had taken the stoniest farm in the 
 neighborhood of Worcester, Massachusetts, and 
 made it into the best by the labor of those same 
 hands and arms; and who, when I once said to 
 him, " I should think you would like better to 
 farm it at the west, where you would have a 
 better soil to deal with," replied, " I should hate 
 to farm it at the west. I don t wish to put my 
 spade into the ground where it doesn t strike a 
 
and Lyceum Oratory 81 
 
 rock." There was the abolitionist turned 
 farmer, or the farmer turned abolitionist. 
 
 I remember the time when one of those southern 
 speakers who, as I have said, came into the meet 
 ings in a manly way and spoke their minds 
 sometimes I remember when Foster had been 
 rather too hard upon this man, as I thought 
 pressed him rather too closely. The young fellow 
 turned to him with his southern feeling and said : 
 
 44 Do you mean to say that I lie? " 
 
 44 Don t know anything about that," said 
 Stephen Foster, going steadily on with his plow 
 share no matter whom he hit 44 1 don t know 
 anything about whether you d lie or not. / know 
 you steal" assuming as the foundation for his 
 statement the principle that no man could ever 
 have ownership in men. 
 
 I thought then, and I think now, that the aboli 
 tionists were not always just in their impeach 
 ments. I don t think that Garrison himself was. 
 What I mean is, they stated their principles 
 broadly and truly and they applied them to 
 slaveholders as a class with a certain justice, but 
 what they did not realize was the terrific compli 
 cations which slavery had brought with it, and 
 the multitude of cases in which there were 
 slaveholders as absolutely powerless to free their 
 slaves as they would be to swim across the 
 Atlantic slaveholders impoverished by their 
 parents, not able to guide their slaves into the 
 land of freedom, and living in states where the 
 
82 Anti-Slavery 
 
 laws were so fiendishly strict that a man absolutely 
 could not free his slaves even if he took them out 
 of the state. 
 
 There were three or four of the slave states 
 where, to make emancipation personally impossi 
 ble, it was the law that any slave set free by his 
 master should be arrested by the authorities 
 and sold to the highest bidder at auction. What 
 could a slaveholder do under circumstances like 
 that? 
 
 So far as the training of oratory is concerned, 
 which is the point now at stake, I have never 
 seen a school which seemed to me equal to this 
 anti-slavery movement. And there grew out of 
 this special reform, or joined it, other reforms 
 none of them quite so radical in the antagonism 
 they produced, but of immense importance the 
 temperance movement, the woman suffrage 
 movement, and then, in general, the lyceum 
 movement, the creation of a system of lyceum 
 lectures throughout the country. 
 
 Some of you will remember that extraordinary 
 man, unique among speakers, who first created 
 the great temperance movement and then led 
 the lyceum movement, a man whose name is 
 already being forgotten like the names of all 
 orators. All orators are forgotten. As Rufus 
 Choate said, a book is the only immortality and 
 even books die young very often. I refer to John 
 B. Gough. 
 
 John B. Gough was a man born for the stage, 
 
and Lyceum Oratory 83 
 
 trained upon the stage, and carrying upon the 
 platform in his temperance lectures the united 
 ability of amusement and entertainment of any 
 half-dozen troops of comedians who throng the 
 stages of your theaters. He filled the stage him 
 self. He never was still a moment. He was 
 constantly running from one end of the stage to 
 the other, and gesticulating, from his head to his 
 feet even with his knees and his elbows he 
 might be called the Cissy Loftus of the temper 
 ance stage. 
 
 So great was his power that when he turned 
 his attention to lyceum oratory, he earned an 
 income of thirty thousand dollars a year, simply 
 by his outside lectures. 
 
 He lectured every day in the year, often two or 
 three times in the day. And all that he earned 
 he gave away in some form or other. He not 
 only thought, as some men of this generation, 
 that our rich men ought not to die rich, but he 
 thought they ought not to live rich. 
 
 Once when planning for a new regiment in the 
 Civil War, I went to him and implored him to be 
 come ordained and go down as chaplain of the 
 regiment, he told me just how he was situated 
 and he gave me a long list of young men who 
 had entered college with the understanding that 
 he was to pay their way through, and their way 
 was to be paid by his gains still to be made 
 by lecturing. He was so entangled by his own 
 good deeds that he could not do what perhaps 
 
84 Anti-Slavery 
 
 might have "been a better deed than any of them. 
 
 Besides him came into the lyceum move 
 ment the extraordinary power of Henry Ward 
 Beecher. I never was so disappointed as when I 
 heard Henry Ward Beecher for the first time, 
 when he came from Indianapolis. Three-fourths 
 of what he said was read from a manuscript ; but 
 suddenly an inspiration would come and he would 
 be before the audience, originating all sorts of 
 wild thoughts and expressing them with that 
 immense originality in which no one on the plat 
 form ever equalled him. 
 
 Then he would go on and read his notes again, 
 becoming only gradually emancipated from them. 
 Afterwards his extraordinary power was devel 
 oped, as you know, never entirely free from 
 coarseness, never quite to be trusted in the 
 things he might say or the illustrations he might 
 use, but still unique as unique as Phillips in 
 his own way. 
 
 Then there was that other high-bred and model 
 gentleman of the period, George William Curtis, 
 a man born for a poet and made by conscience a 
 reformer, a man whose very bearing carried such 
 high breeding and whose voice such exquisite 
 music that it made little difference what he 
 said. 
 
 When Curtis was sent as a member of the New 
 York constitutional convention he happened to 
 be one day in the ante-room writing a letter, 
 when two of his fellow-members came in and sat 
 
and Lyceum Oratory 85 
 
 down and began the favorite subject of gossiping 
 about one another. They went over the different 
 members and handled them as men do under the 
 same circumstances possibly even women may 
 have similar interests. Curtis watched them 
 with pleased amusement, and when at last he 
 saw that they were getting round to him there 
 was no chance of retreat; he had to hold his 
 ground. And one of them said: 
 
 " Now, there s Curtis." 
 
 "Yes," said the other, "there s Curtis," in 
 rather a disparaging way. Said the first one, 
 
 " Curtis is what you may call an intelligent 
 man. 
 
 4 * Yes, said the other, * * an intelligent man. 
 Said the first one, rather roused, 
 
 1 * Curtis is a very intelligent man. 
 
 "Well," said the other, "I don t know but 
 what you might call Curtis a very intelligent 
 man for a literary man. 
 
 Both upon the anti- slavery platform and 
 elsewhere, the quality of leadership began to be 
 shown by women. Lucretia Mott, always strong, 
 motherly, sensible I remember once when Mr. 
 Barnum, not the most refined of men, the cele 
 brated showman, a man of great ability, had been 
 making a speech and Mrs. Mott was called after 
 him. 
 
 There could hardly be a greater contrast than 
 between her Quaker garb and her motherly, 
 wise appearance and his. And she said she had 
 
86 Anti-Slavery 
 
 heard with great interest what Mr. Barnum had 
 been saying, and thought he had been uttering 
 some very excellent opinions, although, she said, 
 41 some of his anecdotes were a little too gross for 
 ears polite." I never saw a man who was 
 holding the world of money -making in his hands 
 at that moment more conclusively sat upon, as 
 the rising generation say, than Mr. P. T. Barnum 
 was at that moment. 
 
 I remember Anna Dickinson with her fire, her 
 enthusiasm, and her curious way of carrying the 
 elegancies of life upon the platform and trailing 
 silks and velvets on the often bare boards. She 
 had a tinge of the actress in her blood also, which 
 led her at last upon the stage. 
 
 And then, above all, that woman of the 
 sweetest voice and the sweetest of manners, 
 Lucy Stone. I never shall forget how, when Lucy 
 Stone had spoken once at Brattleboro, Vermont, 
 where my sisters were then living, one of my 
 sisters writing me an account of the meeting 
 she being utterly opposed to the whole movement 
 
 burst out in indignation, not that Lucy Stone 
 should be so objectionable but that being a re 
 former she should be so lovely. 
 
 She said, " What business had that sweet creat 
 ure, with her winning voice, she whose very 
 look suggests a home and a husband and a baby 
 
 what business had she amidst that crowd? " 
 And later in life I remember when once I took 
 
 one of the most gifted of American women, the 
 
and Lyceum Oratory 87 
 
 late Mrs. Helen Jackson Helen Hunt she was 
 first, the author of * Ramona when I took 
 her, by my own request, to a woman suffrage 
 meeting in New York where Lucy Stone was to 
 speak, she said to me : 
 
 " I don t think you will wish to take me when 
 I tell you I am going on purpose to make fun of 
 the whole thing in the New York Tribune. I 
 said, 
 
 * Oh, yes, that makes no difference; I will 
 take the chance of that. Come along." We 
 went together and sat together. As we came out 
 after Lucy had made one of her sweetest appeals 
 we walked out, I remember, into the dark and 
 stormy night, and Mrs. Jackson took my arm to 
 walk along under my umbrella; she was very 
 silent, she said nothing about it. And I said 
 to her: 
 
 " Well, have you your notes ready for your 
 Tribune article? " She pressed my arm and said, 
 
 * Do you suppose that I could ever write a word 
 against anything that a woman with a voice like 
 that wants to have done? " And she did not. 
 
 I spoke once before, but not so fully as I 
 wished, of the man who on the anti-slavery plat 
 form, from his combination of the two races, was 
 most interesting and most commanding for a 
 time, though not always for he differed from 
 the others in detail and was more of a voting 
 abolitionist than they were Frederick Douglass. 
 
 In later years I walked once with Frederick 
 
88 Anti-Slavery 
 
 Douglass through the streets of Worcester. It 
 was the middle of winter and he wore a leopard- 
 skin coat and cap. I well remember looking at 
 him as he towered above my head and saying to 
 myself: 
 
 " Make the most of this opportunity. You 
 never before have walked the streets with so dis 
 tinguished-looking a man, and you never will 
 again. And I never have. 
 
 This man whom I had seen rise out of this 
 clumsy lingering of the slavery manner, shot 
 up into a superb man. This man, who learned 
 originally to write from the placards in the Balti 
 more streets after he was eighten, and by paying 
 a little boy with an apple to tell him what certain 
 letters were this man gained such a command 
 of speech and language that Mr. Yerrington, then 
 the leading reporter of Boston, who always 
 reported the anti-slavery meetings, told me that 
 of all the speakers in those meetings, there were 
 but two who could be reported without verbal 
 alteration precisely as they sppke, and those two 
 were Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass 
 the representative of the patrician training on the 
 one side, and the representative of the Maryland 
 slave on the other. 
 
 The tact of the man, the address of the man, 
 and the humor of the man made him almost 
 irresistible on the platform. He always had 
 this proud bearing, and yet he was a perfect 
 mimic. He could reproduce anything; he could 
 
and Lyceum Oratory 89 
 
 meet any occasion. I remember him once at a 
 convention in New York. The meeting had been 
 overpowered by Captain Rynders, who was then 
 the head of the swell mob in New York. He had 
 taken possession of the meeting, had placed 
 himself in the chair and graciously allowed the 
 meeting to go on tinder his presidency. He had 
 tried in vain to stop Douglass and check him, and 
 had fallen back upon brutal interruptions, even 
 saying, for instance, " Oh, you want to cut all 
 our throats ! 
 
 Oh, no, said the superb Douglass, bending 
 down graciously over him and waving his 
 hand a little over Rynders s tangled and 
 soiled headdress, * Oh, no, we will not cut 
 your throats ; we will only cut your hair. And 
 the supporters of Rynders felt the situation as 
 much as anybody. I speak of Douglass the more 
 because he has as yet left no rival of his type. 
 Even Booker Washington, with all his remark 
 able qualities and undoubtedly an organizing 
 power which Douglass had not, and perhaps 
 destined in the end to be a more visibly useful 
 man, has not that supreme power over an audi 
 ence which Douglass had. 
 
 The man who, in physique, among the anti- 
 slavery speakers was most like Douglass was 
 wholly without his humor. Charles Sumner was 
 overpowering in gravity and earnestness, but he 
 could only speak right on, although that he did 
 superbly. I never shall forget the impression 
 
90 Anti-Slavery 
 
 he made when he first came forward, as a young 
 man after his return from Europe, to preach 
 reform among the Harvard graduates and to talk 
 on the true grandeur of nations. 
 
 There was Sumner, a man tall and stately like 
 Douglass but dressed, I remember, in the swell 
 costume of that period a blue dress-coat with 
 bright buttons, a white waistcoat, drab trousers. 
 And I remember that an enthusiastic admirer of 
 his in Boston, in allusion to that speech and to 
 the opposition he had first received from the col 
 lege, said: 
 
 * There was that man Sumner, speaking with 
 a soul as white as his waistcoat ; and those clergy 
 men trying to put him down, with their hearts 
 as black as their coats." Sumner kept up the 
 standard of knowledge, the standard of high 
 training beyond any of the anti-slavery speakers ; 
 but he had not their adaptation, he had not their 
 grace. 
 
 I am perhaps lingering too long, over these 
 personal reminiscences. I am sometimes pained 
 at the discovery that the standard of virtue and 
 vice varies with advancing years, and that what 
 is stigmatized as mere gossip in a young man is 
 recognized as a virtue and even invited as a 
 lecture in a man coming near to his eighties. 
 
 It is demoralizing; if we are all gossips and 
 twaddlers, it is your fault. But nevertheless 
 I know, although I say this, how much it is to 
 those who are just coming forward into a com- 
 
and Lyceum Oratory 91 
 
 mtinity so largely composed of great names and 
 memories ; it is sometimes a great deal to have, 
 through a personal link, a tie to some other men 
 and women. It is this which has tempted me so 
 far. 
 
 I have tried to portray to you the successive 
 stages of American oratory and to bring you to 
 a stage still far from the present, but which is 
 represented even to this day in the habit of direct 
 ness, of simplicity, of straightforward talk and to 
 some degree, of monosyllables. And when I 
 point you to what I think, even to this day, the 
 two great high-water marks of our public speak 
 ing* y otl will go back with the memory of this 
 progress I have traced, you will go back to Lin 
 coln s Gettysburg address and John Brown s 
 speech in the court-room, and you will find all 
 true of them which I have claimed as part of the 
 progress of American oratory. 
 
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