The Columbian Orator taught nineteenth-century Americans how to speak

Summary

Douglass used 50 cents he’d earned working odd jobs and bought The Columbian Orator at a local bookshop. He fell in love with the volume and was seldom without it, carrying the book with him when he eventually escaped to freedom. With the textbook as his guide, Douglass became, in the words of biographer David W. Blight, “the greatest African American leader and orator of the nineteenth century.” Though the legendary abolitionist read as much as he could from other sources, it’s likely that “nothing had a more immediate or lasting effect on the young Douglass’s intellectual and spiritual growth than his fortuitous discovery of The Columbian Orator,” Blight adds. “Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book,” Douglass recalled. The textbook also helped shape the destiny of Douglass’s contemporary Abraham Lincoln during Lincoln’s early days in New Salem, Illinois. With little formal education, the twenty-one-year-old Lincoln “studied with relish the classical and Enlightenment-era oratory in The Columbian Orator during his first winter (1831–32) in New Salem on the Illinois prairie,” Blight tells readers. In Giants, his 2008 book about striking parallels between Douglass and Lincoln, historian John Stauffer notes the big impact that The Columbian Orator had on both of their lives. Like Douglass, young Lincoln “was hungry for knowledge, and it was one of the few books he read during his formative years, along with a spelling book, the Bible, and one or two others,” Stauffer observes in recounting the role of the classic textbook in forming the future president. For strivers like Lincoln, guides to rhetoric had a special currency in the nineteenth century. “Lincoln was born into a national culture in which language was the most widely available key to individual growth and achievement. It dominated public discourse,” scholar Fred Kaplan tells readers of his book, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer. “No TVs, DVDs, computers, movie screens, radios, or electricity, a...