You might select a dozen out of the ninety-nine delegates, each of whom could personate the Original Scotch Giant in a traveling exhibition. They have large, fine heads, and a profusion of straight brown hair, though here and there is a crown smooth, bald, and shining. Taken for all in all, they are fine specimens of physical development, with frank, genial, jovial faces.
Southern Orators—Anglo-African Dialect.
The speaking is generally good, and commands respectful attention. There is little badinage or satire, a good deal of directness and coming right to the point, qualified by the strong southern proclivity for adjectives. The pungent French proverb, that the adjective is the most deadly enemy of the substantive, has never journeyed south of Mason & Dixon's line.
The members, like all deliberative bodies in this latitude, are mutual admirationists. Every speaker has the most profound respect for the honest motives, the pure patriotism, the transcendent abilities of the honorable gentleman upon the other side. It excites his regret and self-distrust to differ from such an array of learning and eloquence; and nothing could impel him to but a sense of imperious duty.
He speaks fluently, and with grammatical correctness, but in the Anglo-African dialect. His violent denunciations of the Black Republicans are as nothing to the gross indignities which he offers to the letter r. His "mo's," "befo's," and "hea's" convey reminiscences of the negress who nursed him in infancy, and the little "pickaninnies" with whom he played in boyhood.
The custom of stump-speaking, universal through the South and West, is a capital factory for converting the raw material into orators. Of course there are strong exceptions. This very morning we had an address from one member—Mr. D. B. Moore, of Tuppah county—which is worthy of more particular notice. I wish I could give you a literal report. Pickwick would be solemn in comparison.
A Speech worth Preservation.
Mr. Moore conceives himself an orator, as Brutus was; but in attempting to cover the whole subject (the Montgomery Constitution), he spread himself out "very thin." I will "back" him in a given time to quote more Scripture, incorrectly, irreverently, and irrelevantly, than any other man on the North American continent.
His "like we" was peculiarly refreshing, and his history and classics had a strong flavor of originality. He quoted Patrick Henry, "Let Cæsar have his Brutus;" piled "Pelion upon Pelion!" and made Sampson kill Goliah!! He thought submitting the Secession ordinance to the people in Texas had produced an excellent effect. Previous to it, the New York Tribune said: "Secession is but a scheme of demagogues—a move on the political chess-board—the people oppose it." But afterward it began to ask: "How is this? What does it all mean? The people seem to have a hand in it, and to be in earnest, too." The tone of Mr. Seward also changed radically, he observed, after that election.
Mr. Moore spoke an hour and a half, and the other members, though listening courteously, betrayed a lurking suspicion that he was a bore. In person he resembles Henry S. Lane, the zealous United States Senator-elect from Indiana. The sergeant-at-arms, who, in a gray coat, and without a neckerchief, walks to and fro, with hands in his pockets, looks like the unlovely James H. Lane, Senator-expectant from Kansas.