RHETORIC

Rhetoric is the art and theory of persuasive speech and argument. A branch of scholarship that dates back to the Greek democracy, rhetoric has long been associated with service to public life and civic engagement. It is best symbolized by the idealized figure of the orator, who represented the finest characteristics of a culture and who, through eloquent speech, articulated the culture's public affairs in a manner that reflected its values. Classical rhetoricians believed that public language must be educated and refined but also approachable, free of jargon, and designed for the nonspecialist, a belief that was continued into the early national period in the United States.

During the early American Republic, rhetoric became an essential aspect of higher education for lawyers, politicians, and ministers, who formally addressed the public. In addition, male and female students at all educational levels studied rhetoric because, educators believed, it enhanced the civic engagement of the young. Whereas later in the nineteenth century rhetoric would come to have negative connotations, Americans during the early Republic felt that rhetoric taught youth to be proper members of a democratic public. The pedagogical emphasis on instruction in rhetoric reveals the extent to which the United States at that time remained a culture powerfully reliant on oratory and orality.

The Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece are credited with having caused rhetoric to be considered a significant branch of philosophy. They thought that knowledge from philosophy and other disciplines was, by itself, inert and therefore in need of rhetorical persuasion to propel it into effective use in the arena of human affairs. Early American public-speaking manuals particularly celebrated the Roman orator Cicero (106–43 b.c.) as a model of eloquence and incorruptible morality and suggested that his oratory had helped to protect the Roman republic from tyranny. Americans also idealized Quintilian (35?–? a.d.), a Roman teacher posthumously famous for his writings on rhetoric in Institutio Oratoria (The Orator's Education), for his advancement of polished speech and personal integrity.

Although most refer to it as an "art," rhetoric was generally understood as a body of rules to be learned by students. According to classical practice, rhetoric was divided into five parts, each of equal importance: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. This formula meant that the orator treated the logic of an argument or the development of an idea as standing on equal ground with matters of style, such as the verbal flourishes and metaphors or the orator's vocal inflections and gesture. The orator must master all of these "parts," so the reasoning went, in order to fully engage and persuade an audience. By the mid-eighteenth century, educational institutions came to rely on classically inspired works like A System of Oratory (1759) by the British rhetorician John Ward, which relied heavily on the ideas of Cicero and Quintilian. Ward's System became the most popular text on rhetoric in American colleges until the end of the century.

Americans' eighteenth-century embrace of the classical model of rhetoric represented a sharp break with seventeenth-century American practice, which idealized a far less elaborate, plain style of delivery and made a firm distinction between "style" and "substance." This earlier view was best expressed in the rhetorical theory of Petrus Ramus (1515–1572) of the University of Paris, whose writings were imported by instructors at Harvard and other American colleges during the seventeenth century. Ramus considered logic to be the central characteristic of a good sermon, and rhetoric to be only so much verbal display. As Americans moved away from Ramistic rhetoric and toward classical rhetorics, they came into line with current European and especially British public speaking and scholarship.

This shift also reflected much broader cultural changes toward an emphasis on public opinion and the engagement and persuasion of audiences. With an upsurge in the popularity of evangelical religion and participatory politics, Ramistic rhetoric—which paid little attention to adapting a speech to specific audiences or situations—now appeared out of step with a dynamic and complex society. In keeping with these developments, American colleges began to shift in focus from primarily training ministers to providing a liberal education for men with other professional intentions, such as the law or commerce. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, colleges placed rhetoric at the center of instruction and emphasized its public and civic characteristics. Students took rhetoric in all four years, participated in daily oral disputations and oral examinations, and usually culminated their degrees with a public oration before an audience of local dignitaries. Students also formed extracurricular debating societies to further develop these skills. Such a focus within higher education reflected not only the growing sense that all welleducated men must be adept at oratory but also that they must learn to persuade diverse audiences. Neither was this a movement limited to the privileged or highly educated; in most American cities and towns after the Revolution, groups of noncollegiate young men formed debating societies to practice skills in argument and delivery.

The new emphasis on gauging one's audience and respecting public opinion did not fundamentally change the long-standing hierarchical relationship between an orator and his audience, but it did provide new political possibilities in the American colonies. Public speaking became a key art form for Americans before the Revolution, when oratory helped to galvanize the American public and to establish an argument for independence. Annual speeches commemorating the Boston Massacre of 1770 and the fiery oratory of Patrick Henry helped to create a convincing narrative of intolerable British tyranny. Americans came to see oratory as so important that, after the Revolution, when constructing buildings for Congress and for state governments, architects added galleries from which visitors might enjoy legislative address and debate. In turn, Americans learned to associate their leaders with fine oratory and to criticize them when they failed to live up to the public's standards.

Alongside the growing importance of neoclassical rhetoric, two other important rhetorical movements arose and gained influence during the late eighteenth century. The first was the elocutionary movement, which taught adherents to convey ideas and emotions successfully to their auditors by focusing extensively on the delivery of public speech. Elocutionists provided methods for modulating one's voice, gesture, and facial expression in ways that were believed to capture emotions and "natural" expression. They argued that better training in graceful and persuasive delivery would correct the dry, logical argument that had limited the effectiveness of both secular and religious speech in the past. All forms of speech were seen to benefit from this instruction—from everyday conversations to formal public oratory—making this a far more inclusive movement than one directed solely at the high-born or to aspiring formal orators.

In part because of its seemingly universal applications, elocution became particularly influential at the American common-school level and in academies and was prescribed for both male and female students. Schools had long employed oral recitation as a fundamental aspect of daily lessons, but during the early Republic, recitation became strongly allied with elocutionary techniques to the extent that most schoolbooks contained instructions for vocal inflection and gesture reprinted from prominent elocutionary writings. Indeed, elocution was so ubiquitous in childhood education that schoolbook compilers defined reading as an oral exercise, and "correct" reading as "founded upon the principles of elocution," as did Montgomery Bartlett in his The Practical Reader (1822).

The second rhetorical movement to become prominent in the late eighteenth century was belletristic rhetoric, which displayed a new concern with the aesthetic experience of persuasive speech. Belletristic theorists brought together rhetoric and the belles lettres (from the French for "fine letters"), a broad category often referred to as "polite literature" or "fine learning" and that encompassed a knowledge of philosophy, literature, history, biography, and linguistics. Influential Scottish writers such as Adam Smith and Hugh Blair advocated an elegant style of address that revealed the speaker's knowledge of literature. Many of the orators who came to the cultural forefront during the early nineteenth century and saw their speeches reprinted for broad dissemination, including Daniel Webster and Edward Everett, made use of this fine and lofty style. These speakers and their political contemporaries in the years leading up to the Civil War were so famous for their carefully wrought arguments and inspiring speech that this would later be called "the golden age of American oratory."

Both elocution and the belles lettres were rhetorical movements that were shared across the Atlantic; more distinctive to the American context was the middling oratorical style, or "democratic idiom," as the historian Kenneth Cmiel has termed it. This style married elements of the grander belletristic style with less formal aspects, such as colloquial language and folksy charm more common to ordinary people. As Henry Ward Beecher, one of the most popular speakers of the antebellum era, famously put it in 1835, "he is sure of popularity who can come down among the people and address truth to them in their own homely way and with broad humor—and at the same time has an upper current of taste and chaste expression and condensed vigor." The middling style of address indicated to listeners that an orator put on few airs about an elite background or education, yet retained the ability to elevate the thoughts and feelings of the audience.

One of the sources of this "democratic idiom" was the fiery religious oratory of the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, when some of the most popular speakers were uneducated people with great skills in persuasive, direct address. Although this style would flower most fully in the 1830s, the contrast between it and the belletristic style played an important role in the 1828 presidential election. John Quincy Adams, who had previously held the position of Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, ran against the plaintalking Tennessee lawyer and military hero Andrew Jackson. The candidates' supporters played up the great differences in style between the two men. So, although neither candidate ever electioneered on his own behalf, Jackson's election helped to usher in a new era of popular politics that eschewed refinement and elitism.

These changes in American political culture would eventually contribute to a fundamental shift in the common understanding of rhetoric. Rather than referring to public-spirited speech by the honorable orator, "rhetoric" came to connote the inflated, empty, and even deceptive words of speakers who had their own interests at heart. During the early American Republic, however, rhetoric remained associated with virtuous eloquence that galvanized the public to unified action toward the common good.

See alsoEducation: Colleges and Universities; Election of 1828; Political Culture; Revivals and Revivalism .

bibliography

Cmiel, Kenneth. Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Morrow, 1990; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Fliegelman, Jay. Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993.

Gustafson, Sandra M. Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Halloran, S. Michael. "Rhetoric in the American College Curriculum: The Decline of Public Discourse." Pre/Text 3 (1982): 245–269. Reprinted in Pre/Text: The First Decade. Edited by Victor J. Vitanza. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993.

Moran, Michael G., ed. Eighteenth-Century British and American Rhetorics and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Carolyn Eastman