Abstract
Dedicated to the “young men of the United States … that they may be encouraged to adhere to the simplicity of truth … and emulate the noblest deeds,” Weekly Register editor Hezekiah Niles attempted to collect stirring speeches of the revolutionary period 46 years after the Declaration of Independence.2 Although he managed to fill 500 pages, Niles still lamented the impossibility of chronicling the words of men who, of necessity, privileged action over oratory. On the centennial of independence, Ralph Waldo Emerson praised this same quality, suggesting that speech “is not to be distinguished from action. It is the electricity of action. It is action, as the general’s word of command or chart of battle is action.” Emerson pared down the ultimate power of eloquence to its essence: “If I should make the shortest list of the qualifications of the orator, I should begin with manliness; and perhaps it means here presence of mind. Men differ so much in control of their faculties!”3 I would argue that the delicate marriage, or the deliberate divorce, of passionate action and manly self-control provides the key to understanding masculine leadership and identity in the nation’s first 100 years.
The patriots of the revolution did not make speeches to be unattended by their brethren in Congress and fill up the columns of newspapers. They only spoke when they had something to say, and preferred acting to talking.1
Hezekiah Niles, 1822
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Notes
Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 2, 89, 94.
Thomas Paine, “Common Sense,” in The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 1, ed. Moncure Daniel Conway (New York: Putnam’s, 1894), 71.
Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 14.
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, ed. Albert Stone (New York: Penguin, 1981), 69.
Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence, 15. For further discussion on the impact of elevated oratory, see Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990), 46. Paul C. Nagel explores Adams’s personal side and the ways it influenced his political actions in John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life (New York: Knopf, 1997).
John Quincy Adams, quoted in Great Debates in American History, vol. 4, ed. Marion M. Miller (New York: Current Literature, 1913), 123.
Thurlow Weed, The Life of Thurlow Weed, vol. 1, ed. H. A. Weed (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), 178. Joseph Wheelan examines Adams’s political life after presidency in Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress (New York: Public Affairs, 2008).
Willis Hall, An Address Delivered August 14, 1844, Before the Society of Phi Beta Kappa in Yale College (New Haven, CT: Hamlen, 1844), 30.
Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 162. Hofstadter convincingly demonstrates a mistrust of abstract, theoretical intellectualism, seen as an unfair advantage of power and privilege, in preference of common sense, functional thought, and pragmatic action through the country’s history.
Nowhere did Jackson more obviously fashion himself as the nation’s patriarch than in his dealings with the American Indians, claiming their actions, “compelled your Father the President to send his white children to chastise and subdue you, and thereby give peace to his children both red and white” (Andrew Jackson, quoted in Paul Michael Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian [New York: Knopf, 1975], 199). In his troubling relationship with Native Americans, Jackson limits the father role to harsh punishment (Indian removal, ethnic cleansing, and enforced treaties) in preference of his favored children, the whites.
Andrew Jackson, quoted in Amos Kendall, Autobiography, ed. William Stickney (Boston, MA: Lee and Shepard, 1872), 631.
Andrew Jackson, quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 57.
For a comparative examination of these three figures, see Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay and Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Calhoun was the second man to serve as vice president under two presidents. George Clinton served under both Jefferson and Madison. Calhoun was the first vice president to resign (1832), leaving office toward the end of Jackson’s first term to return to the Senate.
John C. Calhoun, quoted in John S. Jenkins, The Life of John Caldwell Calhoun (Auburn, AL: James Alden, 1858), 277.
John C. Calhoun, quoted in Arthur Styron, The Cast Iron Man: John C. Calhoun and American Democracy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1935), 199–200. James H. Read examines the complexity of Calhoun’s political contributions in Majority Rule Versus Consensus: The Political Thought of John C. Calhoun (University Press of Kansas, 2009).
For exploration of Calhoun as man and politician, see Irving H. Bartlett, John C. Calhoun: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994);
John Niven, John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993).
Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun (1830), quoted in Warren Choate Shaw, History of American Oratory (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1979), 179.
John Wentworth, Congressional Reminiscences: Adams, Benton, Calhoun, Clay, and Webster (Chicago, IL: Fergus Printing, 1882), 35.
Quoted in Joseph M. Rogers, The True Henry Clay (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1905), 286.
Henry Clay, The Works of Henry Clay, vol. 6, ed. Calvin Colton (New York: Putnam, 1904), 412.
Ernest J. Wrage, “Henry Clay,” in History and Criticism of American Public Address, vol. 2, ed. Marie Kathryn Hochmuth (New York: Russell and Russell, 1955), 612.
Two recent works explore Clay’s complex politics and image: David S. Heidler and Jeannie T. Heidler, Henry Clay: The Essential American (New York: Random House, 2010);
Robert V. Remini, At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise That Saved the Union (New York: Basic, 2010).
Lincoln on Clay, quoted in Shearer Davis Bowman, “Comparing Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 106 (2008): 496.
Henry Clay, quoted in Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 10. Clay defined self-made manhood primarily in terms of the right to hold property, rather than social mobility.
Henry Clay, quoted in Modern Eloquence, ed. Thomas B. Reed (Philadelphia, PA: John D. Morris, 1903), 15: vi.
Nathaniel Parker Willis, Hurry-graphs: or, Sketches of Scenery, Celebrities and Society, Taken from Life (Auburn, AL: Alden, Beardsley, 1853), 191.
Halford Ryan, ed., U.S. Presidents as Orators: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), xiv. Of the twenty-one speakers featured, only five (Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Jackson, and Lincoln) served during the nineteenth century. Space does not allow an exploration into the masculine and rhetorical impact of such potent political speakers as Thomas Hart Benton, Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Martin Delany, and Charles Sumner, among others.
Carl Schurz, Reminiscences of Carl Shurz, vol.2 (New York: McClure, 1909), 90. Schurz based his description on recollections of Lincoln during the Douglas debates in 1858.
Edward H. Rollins, quoted in Elwin L. Page, Abraham Lincoln in New Hampshire (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), 39.
Comic Monthly, reprinted in Mildred Freburg Berry “Abraham Lincoln: His Development in the Skills of the Platform,” in A History and Criticism of American Public Address, vol. 2, ed. W. Norwood Brigance (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1943), 829.
Abraham Lincoln, quoted in John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, vol. 3 (New York: Century Company, 1890), 343. These authors present an earlier draft of this conclusion that was written by William H. Seward, which illustrates Lincoln’s efforts to simplify language while retaining poetic elements (327–44).
Alexander Hamilton Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States; its Causes, Character, Conduct and Results. Presented in a Series of Colloquies at Liberty Hall, vol. 2 (Philadelphia, PA: National Publishing, 1868–70), 447.
Henry Ward Beecher, quoted in Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Power to See It Through (New York: Harper, 1935), 64.
Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 238.
Henry Ward Beecher, quoted in Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Lives and Deeds of our Self-Made Men (Hartford, CT: Worthington, Dustin, 1872), 568;
Altina L. Waller, Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton: Sex and Class in Victorian America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 148.
Henry Ward Beecher, quoted in Constance Mayfield Rourke, Trumpets of Jubilee (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1927), 177.
Henry Ward Beecher, quoted in N. A. Shenstone, Anecdotes of Henry Ward Beecher (Chicago, IL: R. R. Donnelley, 1887), 434.
Henry Fowler, The American Pulpit (New York: J. M. Fairchild, 1856), 141.
Paxton Hibben, Henry Ward Beecher: An American Portrait, with a foreword by Sinclair Lewis, vol. vii (New York: George H. Doran, 1927; reprint, New York: Readers Club, 1942), 19. Lewis was born two years before Beecher died, so his observation was not a first-hand account.
William H. Smith, The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved, in Early American Drama, ed. Jeffrey H. Richards (New York: Penguin, 1997), 295–96.
Jeffrey D. Mason, Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 73. Mason’s chapter on the temperance melodrama (60–87) provides an overview of drinking in America, the temperance movement, and the effectiveness of moral reform drama.
For the most thorough treatment of theatre and the temperance movement, see John W. Frick, Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
See also Michael R. Booth, “The Drunkard’s Progress: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Drama,” Dalhousie Review 44 (1964): 205–12;
Jill Siegel Dodd, “The Working Classes and the Temperance Movement in Ante-Bellum Boston,” Labor History 19 (1978): 510–31.
Maud Skinner and Otis Skinner, One Man in His Time: The Adventures of H. Watkins, Strolling Player, 1845–1863, from His Journal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1938), 70.
For more on John Bartholomew Gough, see John Marsh, Temperance Recollections (New York: Charles Scribner, 1866), 127–28.
For more on Barnum’s production of The Drunkard, see P. T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs: Or, Forty Years’ Recollections (Hartford, CT: J. B. Burr, 1869; reprint, New York: Arno, 1970), 264–65.
For more on the Beecher-Tilton Affair, see Altina L. Waller, Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton: Sex and Class in Victorian America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982).
Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 32.
For discussion of the evolving role of the young man in the nineteenth-century urban environment see Richard Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990);
Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
As described by the Analectic Magazine, “only when it [history] deviates into biography, in portraying the actions of some extraordinary man, does it afford those practical models of conduct, or exhibit the consequences of ill regulated ambition, the consideration of which teaches philosophy by examples, and is truly the ‘school of life’” (Analectic Magazine 1 [January 1820]: 462). According to the Connecticut Courant (1849), Kellogg Company presses “run off daily from 3000 to 4000 copies of various popular prints … More than 100,000 copies have been sold from a single design. The portrait of Washington takes the lead and next to him stands Old Rough and Ready” (Quoted in Wendy Wick Reaves, “Portraits for Every Parlor: Albert Newsam and American Portrait Lithography,” in American Portrait Prints: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual American Print Conference [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984], 85.
Arthur M. Schlesinger provides statistics on the publication of advice manuals in Learning How to Behave: A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 18. Additional studies that specifically address etiquette manuals, conduct books, and advice literature include: Sarah E. Newton, Learning to Behave: A Guide to American Conduct Books Before 1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994);
Andrew St. George, The Descent of Manners: Etiquette, Rules and The Victorians (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993).
The study of the transformations in social practices, niceties, and identities—the historical importance of which was largely unrealized until recently—have been undertaken in the following: C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990);
Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988);
Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).
Henry Lunettes [Margaret C. Conkling], The American Gentleman’s Guide to Politeness and Fashion (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1857), 330.
Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Donald Smalley (1832; New York: Knopf, 1949), 263–64.
Frances Anne Kemble, The American Journals, ed. Elizabeth Mavor (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990).
See Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987).
Anna Cora Mowatt, Fashion; or, Life in New York, in Early American Drama, ed. Jeffrey H. Richards (New York: Penguin, 1997), 366, 311. The play provides two models of ideal American manhood in the aptly named Trueman and the young Colonel Howard.
Henry Ward Beecher, Twelve Lectures to Young Men on Various Important Subjects (New York: George H. Doran, 1879), 196;
Maurice Francis Egan, A Gentleman, 2nd ed. (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1893), 15.
Rev. J. W. Kasey, The Young Man’s Guide to True Greatness (Big Springs, KY: J.W. Kasey, 1858), 224.
John Todd, The Young Man: Hints Addressed to the Young Men of the United States (Northampton, UK: J.H. Butler, 1845), 22, 33.
Robert de Valcourt, The Illustrated Manners Book and Manual of Good Behavior and Polite Accomplishments (New York: Leland, Clay, 1855), 205.
Harvey Newcomb, How to Be a Man (Boston, MA: Gould, Kendall, and Lincoln, 1847), 101.
Samuel Robert Wells, How to Behave: A Pocket Manual of Republican Etiquette (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1856), 124.
Charles William Day, Hints on Etiquette and the Usages of Society (Boston, MA: Otis Broaders, 1844), 3.
Abby Buchanan Longstreet, Social Etiquette of New York (New York: D. Appleton, 1887), 9.
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© 2012 Karl M. Kippola
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Kippola, K.M. (2012). Act Like a Man: Images and Rhetoric of Reconstructed Manhood. In: Acts of Manhood. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137068774_2
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