William Wirt.—Of Swiss descent, one of the ablest men this country developed in his time was William Wirt (1772–1834). His arraignment of Aaron Burr at the latter’s trial in 1807 was masterly, and made Wirt’s name familiar to the public ear. From 1817 to 1828 he was Attorney-General. In private as in national life his character was without stain; his correspondence discloses an honesty and consistency of statement and purpose almost unequalled. His imaginative “Letters of the British Spy” (1803) described Virginian society and American eloquence as they might appear to an unbiassed traveller. “The Life and Character of Patrick Henry” (1817) was roundly praised by Jefferson. Of Wirt’s occasional addresses none was more admired than that delivered in 1830 before the students of Rutgers College.
Judge Story.—The voluminous works of Joseph Story (1779–1845), including text-books on law, are in part made up of his discourses. He began life as a poet, but attained his first eminence as a lawyer. Before his appointment to the United States Supreme Court, he was heard on the floor of the House of Representatives. As professor in the Harvard Law School he proved an acceptable lecturer.
John Quincy Adams.—The younger Adams (1767–1848), sixth President of the United States, received from his father, the second President, specific training for the career of statesman; even his boyhood was passed in the midst of political and diplomatic life. He studied at Leyden, then at Harvard, where, during an interim in his public activities, he afterward held the chair of rhetoric and belles-lettres. He saw diplomatic service in Holland, Russia, England, was in the Senate, and was in the House of Representatives. He was a foe of slavery, but not a Garrisonian Abolitionist. In 1836 he urged upon Congress its right under the Constitution, as he believed, to abolish slavery by legal enactment. His influence was strong for freedom of debate. This “old man eloquent” continued speaking when he was over eighty, and died on the floor of the House of Representatives. He was a diarist, a poet, a translator. He was a clear, fluent, not very terse speaker, having the agglomerative and developing style of the parliamentary orator. When he desired, he could be ironical.
The High Tide of American Oratory.—The burning questions of the rights of an individual state as against its duties to the central government, of the extension of negro slavery, or its territorial limitation, or its entire abolition, brought on the crisis of the Civil War, which is the central fact in American history. Correspondingly, during the interval between the War of 1812 and the War of the Rebellion, their eloquence fired by these and related questions, lie the careers of our greatest orators.
“Old Bullion.”—Thomas Hart Benton (1782–1858) cannot be reckoned one of these. Indifferent to the spread of slavery, he was in favour of developing the great Western territories at any cost. He urged a reduction of the prices charged by the government in the sale of public lands, and promoted the interests of a railroad to the Pacific. As an advocate of specie currency he acquired the sobriquet of “Old Bullion.” Retiring from the Senate after extended usefulness there, he published his “Thirty Years’ View,” a history of the workings of the American Government from 1820 to 1850, highly commended by Bryant for its taste and simplicity of style.
Henry Clay.—Slightly the senior of Benton, Henry Clay (1777–1852) was in public life for an even longer time. By birth he was a Virginian. In the face of early hardship he rose to be Senator from Kentucky (1806–1807); from 1811 until 1852, for forty-one years, he was almost steadily in the eye of the nation. A leader of the Whig party, he sided with his great opponent, Calhoun, against the more timid Madison, in precipitating the second war with England; and he was prominent in the negotiations for peace that followed. Clay was four times Speaker of the House of Representatives, and four times unsuccessful candidate for President of the United States. The influence which he had shown over juries in Kentucky he likewise exercised in the national legislature. In the management of conflicting interests, and in furthering the measures of his party, he had a genius for detecting what was possible or expedient. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Tariff Compromise of 1833, and the Slavery Compromise of 1850 were largely owing to him. He was a master in effecting legislation. According to Blaine, “Mr. Webster argued the principle, Mr. Clay embodied it in a statute.” Among his celebrated speeches were those on the New Army Bill (1813), on the Seminole War (1819), and on the Tariff (1824). At his death, a colleague, Joseph R. Underwood, said in the Senate:
The character of Henry Clay was formed and developed by the influence of our free institutions. His physical and mental organisation eminently qualified him to become a great and impressive orator. His person was tall, slender, and commanding; his temperament ardent, fearless, and full of hope; his countenance clear, expressive, and variable—indicating the emotion which predominated at the moment with exact similitude; his voice cultivated and modulated in harmony with the sentiment he desired to express ...; his eye beaming with intelligence, and flashing with coruscations of genius; his gestures and attitudes graceful and natural. These personal advantages won the prepossessions of an audience, even before his intellectual powers began to move his hearers; and when his strong common sense, his profound reasoning, his clear conceptions of his subject in all its bearings, and his striking and beautiful illustrations, united with such personal qualities, were brought to the discussion of any question, his audience was enraptured, convinced, and led by the orator as if enchanted by the lyre of Orpheus.
John Caldwell Calhoun.—The character and intellect of John Caldwell Calhoun (1782–1850) were admired even by those who least cared for his opinions. A South Carolinian of Scotch-Irish extraction, he graduated from Yale, in 1804, with the highest honours. He towered in political life from 1808 until he died: as leader of the war party under Madison; in upholding the doctrine of nullification—that is, the right of each state to resist a Congressional enactment which the state might deem injurious; in the annexation of Texas; and in the defence of slavery. Calhoun was fearless and precise in the discharge of his duties as Secretary of War under Monroe, reducing expenses, and rendering petty defalcation impossible. He was Vice-President in 1825. His ruling ideas are contained in his “Disquisition on Government” and “Discourse on the Government of the United States” (in the first volume of his works), and in speeches before the Senate—for example, on Nullification and the Force Bill (1833) and on the Slavery Question (1850). He was thus characterised by Webster:
The eloquence of Mr. Calhoun ... was plain, strong, terse, condensed, concise; sometimes impassioned—still always severe. Rejecting ornament, not seeking far for illustration, his power consisted in the plainness of his propositions, in the clearness of his logic, and in the earnestness and energy of his manner.... His demeanour as a Senator is known to us all—is appreciated, venerated by us all.
Hayne and Randolph.—When Calhoun was Vice-President, his spokesman in the Senate was a fellow Carolinian, Robert Young Hayne (1791–1840), who was a soldier in the War of 1812, but who, in his vindication of state rights, refused the Attorney-Generalship of the country to be Attorney-General of South Carolina. He also retired from the Senate to be Governor of his State. In his unlucky debate with Webster in 1830 he carried sectional jealousy—of the South against New England—into the question concerning the sale of public lands in the West. Graceful in person, of a fine countenance, industrious, commonly amiable, Hayne “had a copious and ready elocution, flowing at will in a strong and steady current, and rich in the material that constitutes argument.” His prejudices, however, could distract him from the subject in hand. The bellicose Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke (1773–1833), was in Congress at the age of twenty-six. His bitterness toward England seems excessive. Eccentric, singular also in appearance, biting and unexpected in retort, he was a figure of interest when he came to the Senate in 1825. His duel with Henry Clay is a matter of unpleasant history. Enthusiastic contemporary estimates of him by Paulding and others have not worn well.