Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America (review)

Focusing on major writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Douglass, and Whitman, as well as on lesser-known figures like Elizabeth Peabody and William Gilmore Simms, James Warren's study documents the enormous faith that writers in the antebellum United States placed in oratorical eloquence as a vehicle for cultural reform. Readers attracted by the focus on oratory and reform announced in Warren's title are likely to be disappointed, however, by the limited scope of the book. The study is mainly a survey of these writers' theories of eloquence, a catalog of written statements in which they affirm the rejuvenation of language as a means of social reform or envision the orator's ability to express and shape the sentiments and energies of audiences (and society at large). For the most part, the book fails to consider how these authors applied their theories to the actual practice of oratory in the tumultuous social debates of the pre–Civil War decades. In the case of writers like Emerson and Douglass who were active orators themselves, Culture of Eloquence gives minimal attention to their experiences and practices. For example, the chapter on Emerson primarily offers a rather dry survey of the "Adamic" theory of language announced in Nature; aside from a brief discussion of the lyceum movement and of Emerson and Thoreau's defense of Wendell Phillips as a lyceum speaker, Warren does not discuss Emerson's considerable activity as a lyceum lecturer or his forays into more overtly political oratory for the abolition movement. Warren's comments on practice are often limited to observations about stylistic performance—how these writers' pronouncements on eloquence are often penned in a style that attempts to approximate or enact the eloquence they describe. Too often, as Warren's close readings proliferate, the book loses the thread of an organizing critical argument.

To suggest so much is perhaps to criticize Warren for not writing a different book. Yet Warren's narrowly theoretical focus is puzzling given the fact that some sections of his study achieve a much more dynamic consideration of theory and practice. The most notable example is the chapter on South Carolina writer William Gilmore Simms, which considers how Simms's theory of democratic eloquence was inflected by his deep sense of sectional divisiveness and then explores how Simms himself participated in the escalating divisiveness of American oratory during an abortive Northern lecture tour (in the wake of the notorious incident in which Senator Charles Sumner was publicly assaulted on the floor of the Senate for allegedly offending the honor of South Carolina).

Culture of Eloquence does bring together an interesting collection of pronouncements on eloquence by a series of prominent American writers, and thus it will be of value to scholars concerned with antebellum theories of language, rhetoric, and oratory. Readers with a more general interest in antebellum American literature, or in oratory as a cultural practice, will want to look elsewhere.