Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

He gesticulated with his whole body. Wendell Phillips most irreverently as well as most unjustly compared him to a monkey in convulsions. His bowings down and straightening himself again were spoken of by another critic, not unfriendly, as opening and shutting like a jack-knife. His curly black hairs seemed each to have a separate life of its own. His eyes shone like coals of fire. There is a passage of Everett's which well describes Choate, and is also one of the very best examples of Everett, who, with all his fertility of original genius, borrowed so much, and so enriched and improved everything that he borrowed. Cicero said of Antonius:

"Omnia veniebant Antonio in mentem; eaque suo quaeque loco, ubi pluimum proficere et valere possent, ut ab imperatore equites pedites levis armatura, sic ab illo in maxume opportunis orationis partibus conlocabantur."

Now see what Everett does with this thought in his eulogy, spoken in Faneuil Hall, the week after Choate's death:

"He is sometimes satisfied, in concise epigrammatic clauses, to skirmish with his light troops, and drive in the enemy's outposts. It is only on fitting occasions, when great principles are to be vindicated, and solemn truths told, when some moral or political Waterloo or Solferino is to be fought, that he puts on the entire panoply of his gorgeous rhetoric. It is then that his majestic sentences swell to the dimensions of his majestic thought; then it is that we hear afar off the awful roar of his rifled ordnance; and when he has stormed the heights, and broken the centre, and trampled the squares, and turned the staggering wings of the adversary, that he sounds his imperial clarion along the whole line of battle, and moves forward with all his hosts, in one overwhelming charge."

One of the most remarkable advocates of my day was Sidney Bartlett. He seldom addressed juries, and almost never public assemblies. He was a partner of Chief Justice Shaw before 1830. He argued cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts after he was ninety. He cared for no other audience. He had a marvellous compactness of speech, and a marvellous sagacity in seeing the turning-point of a great question. He found the place where the roads diverged, got the Court's face set in the right direction, and then stopped. He would argue in ten or fifteen minutes a point where some powerful antagonist like Curtis or Choate would take hours to reply. I once told him that his method of argument was to that of ordinary lawyers like logarithms to ordinary mathematics. He seemed pleased with the compliment, and said, "Yes, I know I argue over their heads. The Chief Justice told me he wished I would talk a little longer." I do not know that Bartlett ought to be reckoned among orators. But he had a great power of convincing, and giving his intellectual delight to minds capable of appreciating his profound and inexorable logic.

Edward Everett seems to me, on the whole, our best example of the orator, pure and simple. Webster was a great statesman, a great lawyer, a great advocate, a great public teacher. To all these his matchless oratory was but an instrument and incident.

Choate was a great winner of cases, and as relaxation he gave, in the brief vacations of an overworked professional life (he once defined a lawyer's vacation as the time after he has put a question to a witness while he is waiting for an answer), a few wonderful literary and historical addresses. He gave a brief period of brilliant but most unwilling service in each House of Congress. He made some powerful political speeches to popular audiences. But his heart was always in the court-house. No gambler ever hankered for the feverish delight of the gaming table as Choate did for that absorbing game, half chance, half skill, where twelve human dice must all turn up together one way, or there be no victory.

But Everett is always the orator. He was a clergyman a little while. He was a Greek professor a little while. He was a College President a little while. He was a Minister to England a little while. He was Representative in Congress and Senator. He was Governor of the Commonwealth. In these places he did good service enough to make a high reputation for any other man. Little of these things is remembered now. He was above all things—I am tempted to say, above all men—the foremost American orator in one class.

There is one function of the orator peculiar to our country, and almost unknown elsewhere. That is the giving utterance to the emotion of the people, whether of joy or sorrow, on the occasions when its soul is deeply stirred—when some great man dies, or there is a great victory or defeat, or some notable anniversary is celebrated. This office was filled by other men, on some few occasions by Daniel Webster himself, but by no man better than by Everett. A Town, or City, or State is very human. In sorrow it must utter its cry of pain; in victory, its note of triumph. As events pass, it must pronounce its judgement. Its constant purpose must be fixed and made more steadfast by expression. It must give voice to its love and its approbation and its condemnation. It must register the high and low water mark of its tide, its rising and its sinking in heat and cold. This office Edward Everett, for nearly fifty years, performed for Massachusetts and for the whole country. In his orations is preserved and recorded everything of the emotion of the great hours of our people's history. The camera of his delicate photography has preserved for future generations what passed in the soul of his own in the times that tried the souls of men.

I do not know where he got his exquisite elocution. He went abroad in his youth, and there were good trainers abroad, then. He must have studied thoroughly the speeches of Cicero and the Greek orators. Many casual phrases in his works, besides many quotations, show his familiarity with Cicero's writing on oratory.