Abstract: This chapter will explore the oratorical culture of the 19th-century Senate, with emphasis on concepts used by its practitioners, divergent strains, and change over time. It will focus on Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and Douglas in their roles as exemplars; Roscoe Conkling and Judah Benjamin as neglected practitioners; and uses made in the Senate of Cicero and manuals such as those of Richard Whately, Alexander Bain, and Adams Sherman Hill.

Summary of chapter:

For the rhetorical purposes of the present generation, the Senate of the 19th century most frequently appears as a golden oratorical age with reference to which contemporary political rhetoric may be deprecated. At mid-century, it rather represented a pantheon of civic great men, whose perorations would be memorised, but whom reverence ran together with a declining scholarly interest in rhetoric to shield from close analysis. This chapter will further research the oratorical culture of the 19th century Senate, with an eye toward the concepts used by the practitioners, divergent strains within the performative culture, and change which it underwent over the course of the century.

A speech in the nineteenth-century Senate served two audiences, one in the chamber and a second via pamphlet, and the two resulting speeches often bore little relation to one another. This contribution will compare transcribed notes with pamphlet forms of Webster's speeches as preserved in the Boston Public Library's archives, as a window into exploring the difference between nineteenth-century oratory as persuasive speech and rhetoric as persuasive text.

Additional insight into the oratorical culture of the Senate in the nineteenth century comes through research into the socialisation process of senator-orators: in particular, uses which they made of Cicero, and the role of manuals such as those of Richard Whateley, Alexander Bain, and Adams Sherman Hill. The role of Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (1783), adopted at Yale College as a standard text in 1785 and at Harvard in 1788, bears research; and the oratorical doctrines imparted in that century through legal training, the first profession of much of the Senate, are also worth investigation. Substantial attention will be given to Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and Douglas in their role as exemplars of the nineteenth-century oratorical tradition in the Senate, as well as to New York Radical Republican Roscoe Conkling and Jewish Southerner Judah Benjamin as neglected instances. Their writings and correspondence, particularly during the time of their socialisation into the oratorical norms of the Senate, are worth researching for their own concepts about the act of oratorical performance.

The relationship between the Senate, as the principal national venue of performance for oratory, and the ongoing decline at the time of classical oratory as the elocutionary movement and belles lettres gained prominence, has not been investigated. From its prominent endowment in 1806, the Boylston Professorship at Harvard was in the course of the century converted to a chair of belles lettres and ultimately into a professorship of poetry. Whatley's orator approaches the process of rhetorical invention not as an investigator but as a communicator who is 'already armed with a general proposition he will advance and with a knowledge of the substantive resources, factual and inferred, by which that proposition may be established.' He thus completes, together with Blair and Campbell, the separation between rhetoric and philosophy begun with Bacon. Thereby severed from the mainstream of Enlightenment intellection, the rhetoric-manualists attempted to ground their field's principles in unchanging mental processes, an effort which in the absence of a suitable psychology of aesthetic was condemned to flounder.

While the oratorical tradition of the nineteenth century Senate has been the subject of great praise, it has not been the subject of equally great research. By investigating its principal practitioners, the processes by which they became socialised within their tradition, and the strains and trajectories within that tradition itself, this chapter endeavours to make a first effort toward remedying this gap in our intellectual relationship with our national political tradition.