Chapter 19 - Oratory: Persuasion in Performance

Summary

How did literature and politics blend in nineteenth-century oratory? This chapter argues that the admixture was always particular. Thus it begins by explicating three moments of ordinary oratorical practice in Philadelphia in 1855: a gubernatorial inaugural by James Pollock, an oration by the student Jacob C. White Jr. at the Institute for Colored Youth, and a speech by delegate Mary Ann Shadd at the Colored National Convention. Themes germane to nineteenth-century oratory emerge from these examples: its ubiquity and variety, the interactions of oratorical and print cultures, the critical role of audiences in producing meanings of oratorical events, and the ephemeral characteristics of embodied performance. Further, the emphasis in these examples on freedom, citizenship, learning, leadership, and democratic life highlights political debates on racial justice, slavery, colonization, and emigration, demonstrating the myriad ways in which oratory in the nineteenth-century United States can supply an avenue into culture, voice, and lived experience that helps explain trajectories to our own time.