Columbian Orator, The

By: Stephen Howard Browne

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Columbian Orator, The

Nineteenth-century America may justly be called the golden age of oratory. While aspiring authors struggled to claim a distinctive literary tradition, no one doubted American achievements when it came to the spoken word. An expanding electorate, increasing rates of literacy, and rapid population growth combined with issues of great interest to create a volatile public environment. It is no surprise, then, that the ability to speak persuasively was held at a premium, for to wield language in such a world was to wield power itself. And where there was demand, there was supply: textbooks designed specifically to cultivate the arts of oratory and eloquence were numerous and popular. Among them, Caleb Bingham's Columbian Orator was the foremost book of its kind. First published in 1797, the volume was subsequently reissued in scores of editions and became the most influential guide to public speaking in the early Republic and antebellum eras.

As popular as it was, The Columbian Orator may well have remained a historical footnote if not for Frederick Douglass. One of the greatest orators of the century, Douglass recalls in each of his three autobiographies that serendipitous event when, at age twelve, he purchased a copy of The Columbian Orator for a hard-earned fifty cents. There on the streets of Baltimore, behind the sheds or under the blankets, the young Douglass first came into contact with a world heretofore unknown. It was, he writes, a pivotal experience, indeed a definitive moment in his development not only as an advocate but also as a person.

Typically, one does not think of textbooks as possessing this kind of power. What was it about Bingham's volume that so moved Douglass? Several answers can be readily found in his autobiographical accounts. The book arrived in Douglass's hands just as he was learning how to read and write beyond the basics; it was thus a primary medium of his emerging literacy. But more than an educational vehicle, the text contained material that opened up entire vistas, in which Douglass discovered that he was not alone, that others, too, had sought freedom, resisted tyranny, and imagined better worlds. The Columbian Orator was thus a means through which Douglass could join, if for the moment only through its pages, a community of people and ideas otherwise absent. Finally, here was proof positive that language mattered, that those who commanded its resources might command the weapons of change.

Running to more than three hundred pages, The Columbian Orator is a compilation of eighty-one examples of eloquence. Besides an introductory essay on the principles of effective speaking, the volume features a broad assortment of religious, occasional, legal, and political themes. The pedagogical aim of these entries is to inspire and to provide a basis for emulation, and to this end Bingham offers up a veritable feast. Hungry as he always was, Douglass read and reread orations on Independence Day, Marcus Porcius Cato before the Roman Senate, sermons on the existence of God, and Marcus Tullius Cicero declaiming against Lucuis Sergius Catilina. He was especially taken, he writes, with the performances of Richard B. Sheridan, Lord Chatham, William Pitt, and Charles J. Fox—those icons of British liberty in whose words Douglass found inspiration and models aplenty. One piece he found particularly compelling was John Aikin's “Dialogue between a Master and Slave.” There, he discovered many of the commonplaces he would later encounter in adult life: the master's profession that slavery was benign, sanctioned by scripture, and morally tenable as well as the protests of the slave, whose appeal to a kinder God, to law, and to humanity would fund so much of Douglass's public speaking in the years to come.

A boy and his book, each bringing to the other little more than a promise that here was not just a boy or just a book. The Columbian Orator gave Douglass a reason to believe that, given the powers of speech, the boy might become a force for change in a benighted world. And Douglass gave to the book a reader who, though anxious to emulate, was to give singular expression to the prospects of human freedom.

See also Douglass, Frederick; Literacy in the Colonial Period; Literature; and Oratory and the Verbal Arts.

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