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Rapid Review

THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 171-173
© 2001 National Communication Association

A Theory of Eloquence

Thomas R. Burkholder

James Perrin Warren. Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999. x + 202 pages. Index. $40.00.

James Perrin Warren’s Culture of Eloquence begins, promisingly enough, with Wendell Phillips’s address, “The Scholar in a Republic,” delivered to the centennial anniversary gathering of Harvard University’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter on June 30, 1881.  “The innocuous title of his address,” Warren asserts, “. . . conceals Phillips’s wide-ranging call for social change, a call that in effect summarizes important theses from his fifty-year career as a public speaker and reformer” (1).  Close analysis of the text illuminates the power of Phillips’s appeal.  Warren writes, “By figuring history as a opportunity for moral struggle, and by figuring that struggle as a battle of words, [Phillips] . . . calls for his audience to join in preaching the sermons of agitation.  The moral force of the address resides in the jeremiad rhetoric of bravery and cowardice, a rhetoric that seems to offer a stark choice but in effect affords the audience none” (7).  However, Warren’s insightful textual analysis ends abruptly after six and one-half pages when he shifts to an examination of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s commentary on Phillips and on Phillips’s appearances before the Concord Lyceum, and a discussion of the Lyceum movement generally.

Equally promising is the list of eloquent reformers who are the subjects of succeeding chapters—Emerson; Henry David Thoreau; Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller; Frederick Douglass; Walt Whitman; and William Gilmore Simms, writer, historian, orator, and antebellum spokesperson for his native South Carolina and the South generally.  Anticipating an extended treatment of the role of oratory in the nineteenth-century pursuit of reform—the abolition movement and the prelude to war, woman suffrage and women’s rights, and the like—readers might expect Warren to turn his obvious analytical talents on the public rhetoric of those towering historical figures.  That, indeed, was my expectation.  Unfortunately, that promise is also largely unfulfilled.  In short, at least for students of rhetoric and public address, the subtitle of this book is disappointing because there is precious little of either “oratory” or “reform” to be found in Culture of Eloquence.

That is not to say this book is without merit.  In fact, the contrary is true.  Warren’s research is meticulous.  He draws on a stunning array of primary sources—journals, notebooks, published and unpublished essays, lectures, letters—to sketch a “theory of eloquence” for antebellum America.  For linguists and language theorists, Culture of Eloquence offers a detailed account of what some of the leading literary minds of the nineteenth century thought of the power and functions of language.  For scholars in English, especially, this historical account of what the leading thinkers and writers of the time thought and wrote about language should be of immense value.

Yet for scholars in rhetoric and public address, Culture of Eloquence will probably be unsatisfying.  Warren explains carefully what nineteenth-century literary figures thought about the language of oratory and reform.  But that account remains largely on the theoretical level.  In other words, there is far more effort to explicate those theories than to test or even illustrate them in oratorical practice.

One refreshing departure from that pattern is Warren’s discussion of Frederick Douglass (chapter 5).  The difference, perhaps, is that unlike primarily literary figures such as Emerson and Thoreau, Douglass was first and foremost an orator.  Indeed, Douglass was “without doubt the most eloquent and effective black orator of the nineteenth century,” according to Warren (122).  Thus, while others explain eloquence, Douglass enacts it.  Here, Warren’s considerable talent for close textual analysis reveals the power of Douglass’s language in one of his most famous orations, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered.”  The analysis illustrates clearly the theory of eloquence Warren constructed so carefully in earlier chapters.

Likewise, the treatment of William Gilmore Simms (chapter 6), perhaps the least well known of the individuals discussed in Culture of Eloquence, also departs from the theorizing mode.  Warren’s account of Simms’s failed lecture tour of the North in 1854 should be of interest to rhetorical historians.  And his analysis of Simms’s speeches excoriating Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner following Sumner’s famous speech, “The Crime Against Kansas,” demonstrates clearly that eloquence served not only the cause of reform in antebellum America, but the cause of reaction as well.

At first glance, the subtitle of Culture of Eloquence seems to promise a rhetorical history of one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history, a period that produced many of the most eloquent reformers we have known.  In one sense it does that by providing a history of the theory of eloquence for that time.  But that theory comes alive only when Warren departs the dusty pages of the journals and notebooks of Emerson and Thoreau and turns instead to the fiery orations of Douglass and Simms.