The lyceum and public culture in the nineteenth-century United States 9780870137440, 9780870137457

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Illustrations (page viii)
Acknowledgments (page ix)
Introduction (page 1)
Chapter
1. From Mutual Education to Celebrity Entertainment (page 13)
2. Modeling an Ideal in Josiah Holbrook's Family Lyceum, 1832-1833 (page 49)
3. Judging Popular Lectures in Milwaukee, 1854-1857 (page 77)
4. Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s-1870s (page 113)
5. Anna Dickinson's "Whited Sepulchres," 1869-1870 (page 143)
6. "A Living Shuttle" (page 173)
Appendix
1. Lyceum Timeline (page 191)
2. Josiah Holbrook's Plan for Mutual-Education Societies, 1826 (page 193)
3. The New York Tribune's List of Lyceum Lecturers, 1859-1860 (page 197)
4. Lectures Sponsored by the Young Men's Association of the City of Milwaukee, December 1854-March 1857 (page 203)
5. "The Races," by Frederick Douglass (page 207)
6. "Whited Sepulchres," by Anna Dickinson (page 221)
7. "Mormonism," by Anna Dickinson (page 239)
8. Selections from Anna Dickinson's Letters Home, Summer 1869 (page 251)
Notes (page 257)
Bibliography (page 327)
Index (page 351)

Citation preview

The Lyceum

and Pyptic Culture in the

Nineteenth-Century United States

Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series Eisenhower's War of Words: Rhetoric and Leadership

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Robert E. Terrill Metaphorical World Politics

Francis A. Beer and Christ’l De Landtsheer, Editors

The Lyceum

ond Puc Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States Angela G. Ray

Copyright © 2005 by Angela G. Ray

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). Michigan State University Press East Lansing, Michigan 48823-5245

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

11 10 09 08 07 06 05 12345678910 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Ray, Angela G.

The lyceum and public culture in the nineteenth-century United States / Angela G. Ray. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87013-744-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-87013-745-X (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Lyceums—United States—History—19th century. 2. Popular culture— United States—History—19th century. 3. Lectures and lecturing—United States— History—19th century. I. Title. LC6551.R39 2005 374’ .22’097309034—dc22

2004025630 Martin J. Medhurst, Series Editor, Baylor University

Editorial Board Denise M. Bostdortf, College of Wooster J. Michael Hogan, Penn State University

G. Thomas Goodnight, University of Robert L. Ivie, Indiana University

Southern California Jay Mechling, University of California, Davis

Robert Hariman, Northwestern University John M. Murphy, University of Georgia Marout Aziz Hasian Jr., University of Utah David Zarefsky, Northwestern University David Henry, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Barbie Zelizer, University of Pennsylvania

press 8 press Michigan State University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative and is committed to developing and encouraging ecologically responsible publishing practices. For more information about the Green Press Initiative and the use of recycled paper in book publishing, please visit www.greenpressinitiative.org. Cover and book design by Sans Serif, Inc. Cover art is a reproduction of a lithograph of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1853) by D. W. Moody after George J. Robertson, Henry Moeller Collection, neg. no. WHi(X3) 17087. Reproduced by permission of the Wisconsin Historical Society,

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Visit Michigan State University Press on the World Wide Web at: www.msupress.msu.edu

In memoriam Martha Uene Baggett Ray 1936-1990

BLANK PAGE

Contents

List of Illustrations Viil Acknowledgments ix

Introduction ]

Chapter 1. From Mutual Education to Celebrity Entertainment 13

1832-1833 49

2. Modeling an Ideal in Josiah Holbrook’s Family Lyceum,

3. Judging Popular Lectures in Milwaukee, 1854-1857 77 4. Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 113

5. Anna Dickinson’s “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 143

6. “A Living Shuttle” 173 Appendix

1. Lyceum Timeline 19]

Societies, 1826 193

2. Josiah Holbrook’s Plan for Mutual-Education

1859-1860 197

3. The New York Tribune’s List of Lyceum Lecturers,

4, Lectures Sponsored by the Young Men’s Association

of the City of Milwaukee, December 1854—March 1857 203

5. “The Races,” by Frederick Douglass 207 6. “Whited Sepulchres,” by Anna Dickinson 221 7. “Mormonism,” by Anna Dickinson 239

Notes 257 ~Index Bibliography 327 351 Summer 1869 251

8. Selections from Anna Dickinson’s Letters Home,

Illustrations

Josiah Holbrook 16 Plan for a lyceum building 23

Arithmometer , 5] Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1853 81

Jerome Ripley Brigham 85 Frederick Douglass 117

Anna Dickinson 145

Vill

Acknowledgments This book was written and revised in several stages, in multiple locations. It began as a dissertation project at the University of Minnesota, and I completed much of the original writing while living in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I

revised the manuscript when I was an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis, Tennessee, and I saw the project through to publication as an assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In Minnesota and Wisconsin, in Tennessee and Illinois, as well as in Kentucky and Louisiana, Virginia and Iowa, Oregon and Pennsylvania, Nevada and Texas,

Taiwan and Japan, there are those to whom I owe gratitude for making this book possible.

I am grateful to funding agencies that provided the money and time for me to complete this project. The research and writing of the initial version

were supported by the University of Minnesota, in the form of a onesemester dissertation grant from the Department of Speech-Communication (now Communication Studies) in the spring of 2000 and a year-long Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Graduate School in 2000-2001. A Faculty Research Grant from the University of Memphis in 2002 as well as a one-course release during the spring of 2003 assisted me in completing the revisions. An abbreviated version of chapter 4 appeared in the winter 2003 issue of the journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs, and that material is reprinted here by courtesy of the journals program at Michigan State University Press.

Faculty at the University of Minnesota unfailingly supported me and this project. I first learned about the lyceum in a course on the rhetoric of U.S. women’s rights taught by my advisor, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. Dr. Campbell lent me materials from her voluminous files, discussed the organization and emphases of the dissertation with me at every stage, and promptly provided discerning commentary on each chapter as I wrote it. Dr. Robert L. Scott also contributed to this project from its inception. He gave me his own copy of Carl Bode’s American Lyceum, and he talked with

me on many occasions about the implications for rhetoric that are suggested by the discourse that I uncovered. He read the chapters as I produced them and gave me much helpful advice. The continuing enthusiasm

of Drs. Campbell and Scott has profoundly encouraged me, and I thank 1X

X Acknowledgments them, with much affection. Further, Kirt H. Wilson, always an inspiring teacher and a model scholar, responded thoughtfully and in great detail to several of my early efforts to articulate a history of the lyceum; Robert L. Brown Jr. helped me see links between my project and other studies of U.S. cultural practices; Edward Schiappa directed me to useful sources on the history of debating; Mary Vavrus responded to my early formulations of ritual and spectacle in the study of communication; and Mary Lay was a thoughtful reader of the complete dissertation. I am grateful for the skilled and generous assistance of the Minnesota faculty. Any scholar doing archival research owes a debt to librarians, curators, and archivists. I acknowledge the aid of the staff of the Library of Congress, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Chicago Historical Society, the Minnesota Historical Society, the Rhode Island Historical Society, the New York Public Library, and the Louisiana State University Libraries. The staff of the Polk Library at the University of Wisconsin—Oshkosh was of great help, especially archivist Joshua Ranger, Erin Czech of Interlibrary Loan, and library services assistant Bill Knudson.

Individuals affiliated with the Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series at Michigan State University Press immeasurably assisted this project’s transformation from a dissertation to a book. I am particularly grateful to series

editor Martin J. Medhurst for his support and his careful shepherding of my manuscript through the acquisitions process. Frederick Antczak, David Henry, and David Zarefsky provided detailed, perceptive commentary on the manuscript that was both encouraging and incisive. Many friends also contributed to the development of this book. Joshua Gunn read and responded in detail to whole chapters and parts of chapters and talked with me at length about the points of intersection between my work and his own. Others have discussed with me their own work and

mine, helped me manage my time, cheered me on, lent me computer equipment, or talked me through difficulties. These individuals include Loren P. Q. Baybrook, Kristin Brown, Karyl Daughters, Susan Harris, Ghazala Hashmi, Jane Henrici, Lin-Lee Lee, Hiroko Okuda, Michael William Pfau, Mike Randolph, Georgiana Strickland, Jennifer StromerGalley, and Kazimierz Zaniewski. My students at Memphis and at Northwestern have energized me with their questions and observations, and I am grateful to them for regularly showing me the importance of what I study through their innovative adaptations of classroom material.

I also acknowledge the influence and help of my parents, Kenneth Wayne Ray and Martha Ilene Baggett Ray. Both teachers in the public

Acknowledgments Xl] schools of Kentucky, they taught me a love of learning and an interest in the past, and much of who I am I owe to them. My father is a constant source of support, and although my mother’s death occurred a decade before I began writing this book, those who knew her will have no difficulty in seeing her influence here.

Finally, I owe special thanks to my spouse, Harold E. Gulley, who chaired the Geography Department at the University of Wisconsin-— Oshkosh when I was writing the first version of the manuscript that became this book. For his willingness to begin an adventure in 1996 that re-

quired separate households and regular 550-mile round-trips between Oshkosh and Minneapolis while I completed my Ph.D. course work, I am grateful. For imagining my project as a geographic study of cultural diffusion in ways that gave me new insights, I am grateful. For helping me to obtain research materials, I am grateful. I am grateful for his companion-

ship and for his interpretation of “love, honor, and cherish” to include making long drives, meeting financial challenges, hauling furniture, cooking dinners, seeking new jobs in new cities, and welcoming the presences of nineteenth-century figures into our everyday lives. I acknowledge him.

BLANK PAGE

Introduction leeting glimpses of leisure activity from the nineteenth-century United

Fen imply a developing culture attracted to spectacle and technological innovation, quizzical about the potential of government, eager to regulate boundaries for public speech, intrigued with celebrity, and conscious of

the performances of socioeconomic class. For example, magic-lantern slides of apes, monkeys, and baboons were a great hit during the 1829-30 lecture season in Concord, Massachusetts. A decade later, in January 1840, a debating club in Euclid, Ohio, considered the question “Does the present form of United States government possess the elements of perpetual duration?” After the debate, 90 percent of the members voted in the negative. In Cincinnati in 1852, the Young Men’s Mercantile Library Association sponsored a lecture by Orestes Brownson, who denounced the popular Hungarian exile Louis Kossuth and was subsequently censured by the association for “travelling outside the proprieties of the lecture hall.” On 14

March 1855, Charlotte Forten heard Ralph Waldo Emerson lecture in Salem, Massachusetts. In her diary, she pronounced Emerson “a fine lecturer, and a very peculiar-looking man.” A year and a day later, in New Or- . leans, William Makepeace Thackeray lectured on the English king George IV. During the Civil War, lecture-goers of Providence, Rhode Island, heard Wendell Phillips’s “The War; or, The Times,” Henry Ward Beecher’s “The Beautiful,” and George Vandenhoff’s readings from Don Quixote. In the early 1870s, the celebrity lecturer Anna Dickinson wrote to her mother irom Kansas City, Missouri, of the “ostentation” of the West, of the “wonderfully fine clothes” of lecture-goers and the “ivory rings” on the harnesses of their horses.! These incidents demonstrate a high degree of variability, yet owing to nineteenth-century rhetorical practice, they can be discussed as linked, if not continuous. Parts of a singular phenomenon, these and thousands of other ordinary moments were called by a single name: lyceum. The connections between these variable events, then, are both rhetorical and cul-

tural. They are rhetorical first because they were associated through a public symbol, the word lyceum. This naming, as well as the regular enactment of ordinary activities under the rubric of the name, was symbolic action that constituted a self-representational public practice. The incidents

performed as lyceum practice not only defined the parameters of what ]

2 Introduction lyceum activity could be but also gave participants a means of creating and maintaining a sense of themselves as individuals who were parts of groups, both local and national. Lyceum activity was thus a means of simultaneously making and expressing culture, understood as distinctive patterns in

the behavior of human groups. It is in the broad, neutral sense of sym-_ bolic action as culture-making practice that the word rhetoric is used in this

book: here it is construed not as “art of the public speaker” or “empty words” but rather as “that art by which culture and community and char-

acter are constituted and transformed.” The legal scholar James Boyd White’s functional definition resonates with Kenneth Burke’s claims that it is through the use of symbols that human beings represent themselves as selves, band together in groups, and create and destroy boundaries among those groups.‘ It is by rhetorical action that cultures are made. This book

operates from the premise that the lyceum in the nineteenth-century United States was a discontinuous, culture-making rhetorical practice. In

the particularity of ordinary moments, nineteenth-century Americans made sense of themselves and their world, and it is that process of “making sense”—shaping what would be validated as common beliefs and values— that this book attempts to explicate.? The history of the changing lyceum in the nineteenth century illustrates a process of expansion, diffusion, and eventual commercialization. In the

United States in the late 1820s, a politically and economically dominant culture—the white Protestant northeastern middle class—institutionalized the practice of public debating and public lecturing for education and moral uplift. The lyceum in the 1820s and 1830s was characterized by organized groups in cities and towns, particularly in the Northeast and the Old Northwest, or what is now called the Midwest.® These groups were es-

tablished to promote debate, to create a setting for individual and group study, and to provide a forum for members to lecture to one another about their own areas of expertise. The groups also supported public schools and the founding of libraries, and they offered leisure activity for young people,

especially young men, that contemporaries identified as morally sound. Some lyceum organizations continued debating and other participatory activities into the late nineteenth century. In the 1840s and 1850s, however, the most visible activity of many lyceums was the sponsorship of public lectures, which were presented for institutional profit as well as public instruction and entertainment. By the late 1860s, arranging lyceum lectures had become a lucrative commercial enterprise, and the most highly sought

Introduction 3 platform celebrities during the Reconstruction era earned large incomes trom lecturing. Lyceum activity thus began as part of a movement for public education and self-improvement and gradually metamorphosed into commercial en-

tertainment. Yet the function of entertainment (as acceptable use of leisure) was present in the discourse of early lyceum promoters, and an emphasis on learning remained salient in the lyceum’s commercial phase. An oscillation between the functions of education and entertainment typifies nineteenth-century discussions of the lyceum. Indeed, the shifts in meaning of the term lyceum itself provide a lens through which to view this interplay.

The Word Lyceum During the nineteenth century, the denotative and connotative meanings of the term /yceum changed as a result of common usage and public behavior. The term in the 1820s illustrated the classical interests of early promoters. Through use, it became a word to denote a widespread social practice, a specific local association, a building constructed for the use of such an association, and the programs and performances sponsored by such a group.

As the explicitly educational emphases waned in the 1840s and 1850s, lyceum was paired, attributively, with terms like amusement or entertainment. Despite the changes, /yceum, as historian Carl Bode observed, “continued to stand, grandly if a little vaguely, for learning.”’

To advocates of mutual-education societies in the 1820s and 1830s, the correlation between lyceum and learning was anything but vague. Early promotional materials present the lyceum as a return to the much-admired

splendors of ancient Greece and also a herald of a new, broad-based democracy in the nineteenth-century United States. Athens was to be re-

created in the New World, only better. In 1832 Josiah Holbrook, the lyceum’s major promoter, explicitly identified the U.S. lyceum with the Lyceum in Athens, the garden with covered walkways adjacent to the temple of Apollo Lyceus where Aristotle taught his pupils in the fourth century B.C.E.8 The choice of lyceum, a Latin word derived from a Greek epithet for the god of the sun, emphasizes the classical training of the U.S. lyceum’s

college-educated advocates. Holbrook, for example, was a graduate of Yale.? In addition, the term lyceum was associated with organizations that promoted the natural sciences, such as the eighteenth-century Lycée (later the Athénée) in Paris and the early nineteenth-century Lyceum of Natural

4 Introduction History in New York.!° Holbrook’s own commitments to science—fostered

through his affiliation with Benjamin Silliman, Yale’s first professor of chemistry and natural history—meant that if the lyceum he envisioned borrowed its name from an ancient Greek school, its main subject matter was to be modern nineteenth-century science. The word lyceum carried both inflections for Holbrook and other antebellum elites. Early advocates defended the choice of lyceum by identifying it as a “neutral,” “universal” term referring to no particular “class.” In 1828 and 1829 the American Journal of Education stated that the term was chosen because it was perceived to be “classless.”!! Here class betokens meanings in

addition to socioeconomic status; it suggests any kind of demographic grouping, by age, sex, or occupation. According to lyceum promoters, the term /yceum connoted inclusiveness. Whereas organizational names like Mechanics’ Institute, Mercantile Library Association, or Young Men’s Asso-

ciation imply that the societies target mechanics, mercantilists, or young men, a name like Davenport Lyceum or Euclid Lyceum implies a restriction on participation based only on geographic area. Despite the rhetoric of inclusion, resistance to the term /yceum suggests conflicts over the assumptions about what could count as “classless.” The connotations of the word lyceum could be quickly understood primarily by those few who had received a university education. Evidence indicates that some people complained that the term was too “learned,” that it sounded too pretentious for a “popular institution” meant to have wide appeal, and, parochially, that an “English word” would be preferable to a Latin one. De-

spite such concerns, the promoters’ favored Latin term was broadly adopted as itself an English word, and the “awkward plural,” lyceums, was accepted as a minor evil.!2 Some institutions that were organized and operated as lyceums, however, chose association names with “class”-specific elements, like Young Men’s Association or Mechanics’ Lyceum. Still, the widespread acceptance of the term lyceum (for names of associations and, more important, as a generic term for a set of activities) highlights the influence of the college-educated promoters of the movement and also the salience of classical references for this group. The rhetoric of “mutual instruction,” of farmers and mechanics teaching each other, was coeval with a hierarchical model of instruction by the classically learned, who defined

what knowledge counted as “useful” and the appropriate ends to which such useful knowledge should be put.!4

Holbrook did not use the word lyceum in a letter that he published anonymously in the October 1826 issue of the American Journal of

Introduction 5 Education, the epistle credited with precipitating the founding of many mu-

tual-education societies throughout the United States.!4 The term, how-

ever, was in use the following month when Branch Number 1 of the American Lyceum was founded in Millbury, Massachusetts. As such societies proliferated, the term /yceum quickly acquired new meanings referring to the activities and structure of these groups. In the 1840s mutual instruction gave way to a circuit of traveling lecturers, and scientific and literary topics shared billing with subjects of inspiration, moral uplift, and social reform. The term /yceum in phrases like lyceum lecture, lyceum circuit, and lyceum lecture system then connoted not science or neoclassicism but an organizational structure that supported popular lecturing for public amusement and institutional profit.

The term lyceum continued to be used throughout the century, but it waned alter midcentury in published commentary. Popular lecture system frequently denoted the lecture circuits. In 1868 Thomas Wentworth Higginson observed the decline of the term /yceum. For him, the word meant instruction: “With the name ‘Lyceum’ is also passing away the ‘Lyceum lecture.’ The scholar recedes from sight, and the impassioned orator takes his place. There is no time for Longfellow to analyze ‘Dante,’ nor for Lowell to

explain Hamlet, while Sumner thunders the terrors of the Lord against a delinquent President, or Anna Dickinson pleads for the enfranchisement of one half the human race.”!> Higginson articulated the shift as a change in performative style and in subject content. Although he was hyperbolic in his claims about the altered subject matter—literary lectures persisted as long as the lecture circuits did—Higginson provided a plausible explanation for the decline in the use of the term /yceum. In the 1850s and 1860s, as the lyceum system came to be conceived less as a means for diffusing practical

knowledge than as a forum for the expression of controversy, the term lyceum in its earlier sense of an institution for public instruction also waned. Yet the term did remain in use. In the 1870s and 1880s, when the platform was seen less as a forum for controversy than as a stage for comics, humorists, singers, and impersonators, commercial management agencies like the Redpath Lyceum Bureau retained the nominal reference even as their “talent” changed.!® In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the term lyceum described the kinds of commercial entertainments promoted by the agencies called lyceum bureaus.

Despite the changes in social practice that altered the denotational meanings of the term, /yceum retained a connotational affiliation with learning, as Higginson demonstrated and Bode observed. The sense of the

6 Introduction lyceum as an institution with an educational purpose, articulated by early promoters, persisted into the commercial era. The oscillation in emphasis

between education and entertainment coincided with a sense of the lyceum as serious or frivolous, of lyceum-goers as participants or spectators, of lyceum performers as teachers or talent. Although the general trajectory of lyceum activity can be described as moving from education to entertainment, both functional impulses existed together, often in tension, from the 1820s forward.!’ The word lyceum embodied the paradoxes of playful learning and serious fun.!8

The Lyceum as Culture-Making Rhetorical Practice What does it mean, practically, to understand lyceum activity as a culture-

making rhetorical practice that mixed the functions of public education and public entertainment? Such a presumption has implications for the conception of lyceum activity as well as for the analytical approach and scholarly attitude demonstrated in this study. It presumes the significance of symbolic action in creating public selves and public cultures, and it sug-

gests an approach informed by both rhetorical criticism and cultural analysis.

Shaping Public Selves and Public Cultures Understanding the lyceum as a culture-making practice attends to the ways that lyceum participants established ideals of group membership through a complex self-representation—demonstrating by expressed word

and enacted practice what being “American,” for example, could and did mean.

In the Jacksonian period, laws governing the franchise had been recently altered to give voting rights to non-property-owning white men (with the simultaneous disenfranchisement of some white women and some free black men).!? These policy changes precipitated much elite concern with improving public education, or, from another perspective, with ensuring the consonance of elite and nonelite norms and attitudes. At midcentury, the extension of canals and railroads had made travel and commerce easier Over great distances and the development of the penny press had made reading material available to a large segment of the U.S. population. Various forces were then at work to weave an “American” nation that

could encompass disparate people in varying places and conditions.

Introduction 7 Historian David Waldstreicher asserts that patriotic celebratory rituals in the streets of the young republic, along with descriptions in print media that enabled the rituals to be duplicated elsewhere, contributed to the cre-

ation of U.S. nationalism.29 Similarly, the phenomenon of the public lyceum lecture provided a mechanism for the production of a mass culture. Donald M. Scott argues that the lecture system “not only expressed a national culture; it was one of the central institutions within and by which the public had its existence.”2! In the mid-nineteenth century, many people, from Maine to Michigan and Minnesota to Maryland, would have seen the same lecturer give roughly the same speech, and the speeches and activities of prominent lecturers were reported in newspapers—in news re-

ports as well as in advertising columns. Thus oral and print media combined to suggest not only what topics were salient to the lecture-going public but also which performers had risen to the ranks of the prominent. Participating in a culture requires shared knowledge (endoxa), and both the mutual-education societies and the sponsored public lectures of the nine-

teenth century educated the population about who they were and what was important to them. These institutions and events created a body of Shared ideas and shared experiences, shaping a sense of nationhood through communal participation. The lyceum can thus be seen as a site where public selves and public cultures were constituted. The lyceum is a place of constitutive rhetoric not in the strict sense of being a location in which people explicitly called selfhood or nationhood into being (as constitutions do, in phrases like “We the people”). Rather, it was a site where group identifications could become meaningful through the repetition of behavioral patterns, through recurring rhetorical acts.22 Without saying so explicitly, a lyceum-goer could

enact a symbolic assertion: I go to the lyceum; I am an American; the lyceum is an American institution; what we do is what being American is. Ordinary, repeated behaviors in this quasi-civic arena were normalized and routinized, made available for subsequent labeling as “typical.” Even without overt labeling, however, the regularly enacted behaviors demonstrated “normality” and “typicality.” The lyceum not only had a civic role in creating a sense of “Americanness” among disparate people spread over a large territory, but lyceum activity also provided a mechanism to affirm a specific New England culture

as the national norm. The beliefs and values promoted in most lyceum venues had deep roots in the particularities of British American Protestantism, and participants came to understand these beliefs as “American.”

8 Introduction Indeed, as Andrew Rieser notes, “the rise of nativism after the lyceum vogue is not entirely coincidental.”2* The lyceum as a public practice, however, also contained the potential for the subversion of some of the norms and ideals that Protestant New England upheld. The enacted self-representation included the validation of opposing views: I go to the lyceum; I am an American; we believe in debate, in allowing opponents to be heard; we

believe in our fair-mindedness. As a location for the creation of a public culture, the lyceum, particularly as it developed in the middle of the nineteenth century, encompassed voices of reform. These reformist voices adapted familiar lyceum themes, presenting alternative models and suggesting modifications to accepted beliefs and values. The entertainment function of the lyceum both assisted reformers in gaining access to public platforms (sometimes as curiosities) and also constrained the potential reception of their ideas (since audience members could be comfortably distanced spectators).24 This study thus has a dual focus, examining dominant and reformist discourse. It explicates the ways that the lyceum contributed

to the creation of the idea of a U.S. public—at a time of rapid change in land area, immigration, transportation and communication technology, and social roles—and the ways that lyceum activities promoted and also restricted the reception of voices raised in calls for social change.

Studying the Lyceum as a Rhetorical and Cultural Practice Understanding the lyceum as a culture-making rhetorical practice requires an analytical approach that blends rhetorical criticism and cultural analysis. This study seeks to explain, broadly, how a nineteenth-century public practice contributed to cultural formation and change. Questions concerning the relationships between knowledge formation and public representations owe much to the work of rhetorical theorist Robert Scott and media theorist Stuart Hall, for example.2° Further, observations about the dynamics of economic and political power, as well as the dispersion of such power, are informed by the work of Michel Foucault and myriad ideological and cultural critics.

Scholars of rhetoric—an art of the particular—however, are guarded about generalization. If criticism is most salient when its analytical approach emerges from “the nature of the acts that it studies,” as Karlyn Kohrs Campbell recommended in 1979, then much depends on how the critical object is understood.2® “Lyceum practice” is ambiguous and ephemeral, encompassing disparate events spread broadly over space and

Introduction 9 time. This study demonstrates the view that “lyceum practice” was simultaneously a broad cultural formation of collective self-representation and also a series of discrete, unique events or moments. Each of these moments is past and hence is not susceptible to direct critical apprehension. Yet the written evidence that remains—in reminiscences, private correspondence, editorial commentary, speech texts—offers the potential for the creative representation of the past event, the past “text” that is “read” not directly but via surrogates. The surrogates—the editorials, diary entries, newspaper reports, personal letters—are read closely, following the lead of rhetorical critics like Michael Leff.2” Critical insights gleaned through multiple instances of such re-creative and creative “reading” of individual moments in lyceum practice then serve as elements of another “object” of study, a more

general sense of the lyceum as a cultural artifact, an object made from combining readings of the traces of specific past events. This second object is a thing made by the critic and rendered plausible (or not) by readers. It is a sense of what the lyceum may have been, a site of nineteenth-century culture-making. The process of paying close attention to specific moments, leading to-

ward broader statements about cultural formation, does not itself require the scholar to exhibit a particular attitude. One can imagine such a study motivated by fury, for example. It is fair to readers at this point, however, for me to describe the attitudes that are likely to be found manifested in these pages. My training and my self-definition as a scholar encourage me to provide an account of events that is as complete and accurate as possible, while recognizing the limitations of extant sources and personal acu-

men. My attitude toward the people and events that I study, though, manifests not so much scholarly training as personal inclination. I think of these long-dead individuals as genuine, complex persons, with needs, values, and beliefs that seemed to them to be coherent and worthwhile. I owe them care and, to the extent that I can manage it, accuracy in representing their lives. I assume that my interpretations of their actions would not be commensurate with their own, and I value those disparities as representations of varying concerns of our differing eras. Although I believe that I have a responsibility to evaluate the ethical consequences of their symbolic action, both for good and for ill, I begin from a position of empathy—not sympathy, for the differences between us are too vast for such affinity, but empathy, in the sense of an imaginative projection of understanding based on a recognition of shared humanity. A great-uncle of mine used to enjoy talking about U.S. history, especially about the ways that events had had

10 Introduction an impact on our family. Not infrequently, he would shake his head and say, “They were living in their times.”2° This attitude is not far distant from my own assumptions as a scholar. Understanding people in the past as “living in their times” does not excuse their errors or protect them even from

our condemnation. It does, however, encourage us to make vigorous efforts to comprehend them prior to rendering judgment. This position is compatible with scholarship in rhetorical criticism that emphasizes the importance of situating texts carefully within their cultural contexts.+? This study, therefore, focuses on specific moments and at the same time attempts to re-create a sense of the broader context in which such moments occurred.?9 Indeed, it strives to present the “context” that such moments helped create as itself a rhetorical text. The parameters of this study are both spatial and temporal. Although the lyceum extended throughout the United States, North and South, East and West, this study is primarily restricted geographically to the hearth areas of lyceum practice, first New England and then the Old Northwest. The study is bounded temporally

from the mid-1820s, when the lyceum was established as a coherent movement for mutual education, until about 1880, an arbitrary date following the panic of 1873, the 1874 founding of the Chautauqua Institution, and the decline in public interest in lyceum activity during the 1870s. Chapter 1 provides a narrative account of nineteenth-century lyceum history, in order to establish an informational basis for understanding the typicality and the uniqueness of the case studies. The four cases form the core of the study. The first two cases consider lyceum practice primarily in its dominant mode, as the opinions and attitudes expressed and enacted by typical lyceum leaders, white Protestant men of the professional elite. Chapter 2 examines the Family Lyceum, a magazine published in Boston in

1832 and 1833 by lyceum founder and promoter Josiah Holbrook. The magazine can be read as a model suggesting the ways that the lyceum was

envisioned by its major advocate. Chapter 3 investigates the judgments made by individuals in Milwaukee in the mid-1850s about the popular lectures sponsored by the local lyceum, the Young Men’s Association of the City of Milwaukee. Milwaukee was a major site on the developing lecture circuit in the Northwest in the 1850s, and the Young Men’s Association was that city’s primary sponsor of public lectures. The relevant texts used in this analysis include the minutes of the association’s board of directors, the private correspondence of the association’s president, and the advertisements and editorial commentary concerning the lectures from newspapers published in Milwaukee at the time. The analysis explicates the ways

Introduction 1] that judgments were made of what could count as a good popular lecture in Milwaukee only a few years after Wisconsin statehood. Such decisions contributed to the maintenance of the young city’s cultural environment. The third and fourth cases turn away from dominant discourse to examine the potentials and constraints of the lyceum on the utterances of social

reformers. The two reformers studied—Frederick Douglass and Anna Dickinson—were major national figures who were celebrated as lyceum lecturers. Chapter 4 takes as its text the extant lyceum lectures of Frederick Douglass, particularly from the late 1850s through the mid-1870s. A group

of speeches—”The Races,” “Self-Made Men,” and “Our Composite Nationality”—illustrates Douglass’s adaptations of familiar lyceum themes in order to convey the centrality of African American experience in Amer-

ican life. Chapter 5 studies invention and reception in “Whited Sepulchres,” a lyceum lecture given in 1869 and 1870 by the celebrity lecturer _ Anna Dickinson. Incorporating personal letters that Dickinson wrote to her | family, a partial preparation text in Dickinson’s own hand, and a complete stenographic account of one performance of the lecture, this reading of “Whited Sepulchres” suggests that it can be understood as a popular modification of the Protestant sermonic form. In its language and its performance, Dickinson’s lecture illustrates the ways that the lyceum provided a mechanism for introducing feminist critique to a mass audience but also constrained the form and reception of that critique. The appendixes include texts of Douglass’s and Dickinson’s that are published here for the first time.

Chapter 1 establishes the framework within which lyceum participants enacted a self-representational practice. Chapters 2—5 investigate discrete instances of lyceum activity, moving chronologically from 1832-33 to the mid-1850s, then bridging the Civil War and ending in 1869-70.3! The loca-

tions for these instances shift first from Boston, at the center of the lyceum’s New England hearth, to Milwaukee, in the Old Northwest, the

lyceum’s most prominent area in the 1850s. In Douglass’s own selfpresentation and in his verbal emphasis on slavery and its aftermath, the third case embodies both the links and the discontinuities between North and South. Dickinson’s speech in the fourth case was based on an 1869 trip through the West to Utah and California, thus illustrating the expansion of

an American empire from ocean to ocean. Chapter 6 links the themes of the case studies to examine the varying forms of rhetorical action in the nineteenth-century lyceum.

12 Introduction This book thus proposes an understanding of the lyceum as a cultural

practice of self-representation, investigating the ways that rhetorical processes created, maintained, and challenged a particular set of New England ideals as an “American” norm. It explores the interaction of the func-

tions of education and entertainment, and it explicates the types of knowledge proposed and demonstrated as “useful” for a democratic republic. The study also represents an area of inquiry little examined by scholars. Prior book-length studies of the lyceum date from the 1950s: David Mead’s Yankee Eloquence in the Middle West (1951) and Carl Bode’s American Lyceum

(1956).24 This book, informed by rhetorical and cultural history and criticism, tells a story of a public practice, of an intellectual history, of enter-

tainment and education, of wisdom and foolishness, of compassion and avarice. Its stories are multiple, both mundane and extraordinary. Through the lens of the lyceum, we see images of the complex and contradictory world of the nineteenth century, a time of tragedy and hope that continues

to influence our lives.#?

I

From Mutual Education to Celebrity Entertainment Be BYE Bye BNE

ublic education in useful, “practical science” was the expressed goal of Pin. lyceum movement of the 1820s. Typically, well-to-do British American Protestant men banded together in villages and towns to read original compositions, to debate questions of policy and value, to present and hear lectures, and to enjoy the companionable presence of their peers. Within two or three decades, many local lyceums had become institutions for the sponsorship of lectures presented to the fee-paying public. The development of circuits for traveling lecturers fostered the creation of “public lec-

, 13

turer” as an occupational category. By the late 1860s commercial

management agencies enjoyed considerable success in arranging appearances not only for lecturers but also for musicians, comics, and impersonators. (For a timeline of the nineteenth-century lyceum, see appendix 1.) The lyceum as a cultural practice is best understood functionally. It legitimated the cultural and intellectual leadership of the economically and

14 Chapter One socially powerful, engineering public consent to dominant New England values. Yet paradoxically, a major democratic-republican value was the validation of a culture of critique, and thus the lyceum provided a mechanism for the public expression of controversy, albeit within contained forms. !

This chapter traces the history of the nineteenth-century U.S. lyceum, focusing primarily on its dominant British American mode. The lyceum was widespread and diverse, and no generalization presented here lacks its exceptions. This chapter highlights the characteristics of the lyceum in the locations in which it was ubiquitous: in the Northeast from the 1820s and in the Old Northwest from the 1840s. Tracing the shifts in emphasis on education and entertainment and on the role of controversy in lyceum prac-

tice, the chapter charts the transformation of the lyceum from mutual-education society to a forum for celebrity entertainment. The section on the early lyceum emphasizes both the rhetoric of early promoters and the ways in which cultural practice adapted the promotional vision. The section on the popular lyceum lecture system highlights commercialization, emphasizing the development of lecture circuits, conceptions of mass audiences, and the emerging culture of celebrity.

The Early Lyceum “Useful knowledge” and “republican virtue” were mantras of the early nineteenth century. With the new country frequently identified as an “experiment” in democracy, the success of the endeavor depended on tapping the skills and potentials of the citizenry—and controlling the potential of mob rule. Although only a tiny fraction of the white male population had access to colleges and universities, primary education for white boys and girls was widespread in New England and on the increase elsewhere. Edu-

cational reformers of the early nineteenth century, many but not all of whom were New Englanders, encouraged public support of schools and the improvement of teacher training. In addition, reformers stressed the necessity of adult education. This emphasis fostered the development and diffusion of two New England institutions: the agricultural fair and the lyceum. Both were social structures designed to promote utilitarian knowledge among working people.? The U.S. agricultural fair traces its history to a “cattle show” in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1810, and the lyceum, to the founding of Millbury Branch Number | of the American Lyceum in Millbury, Massachusetts, in 1826.

From Mutual Education to Celebrity Entertainment 15 Just as the Pittsfield cattle show had its precursors, so educational institutions like the one established at Millbury had existed previously. At Mill-

bury, however, writes historian Carl Bode, the lyceum “as a social institution,” as a movement, gained substance.* This new movement had a leader, a constituency, promotional activities, an organizational structure, and explicit goals. The form and expressed purposes of the lyceum owed much to the vision promoted energetically by the educational reformers who were the lyceum’s most ardent champions.

The Promoters’ Vision In October 1826, a month before the founding of the Millbury Lyceum, editor William Russell published an unsigned letter in the Boston-based periodical the American Journal of Education under the title “Associations of

Adults for Mutual Education” (transcribed herein as appendix 2).4 This twelve-hundred-word epistle was written by Josiah Holbrook, a Yaleeducated farmer, teacher, and scientific lecturer (figure 1). It described Holbrook’s conception of a nationwide network of associations that would fos-

ter learning among youth and adults. The purposes for mutual-education societies described in this letter can be refined to two foci: an inward focus on improving the individual, situated within a communal structure, and an outward focus on improving the products of economic and social activity. That is, mutual-education societies could raise “moral and intellectual taste”’—here Holbrook echoes the Scottish rhetorician Hugh Blair—and could also improve economic production.> Such purposes emphasized the value of “useful knowledge” in creating a social realm consonant with elite ideals. Holbrook’s letter displays the powerful earnestness of an Enlighten-

ment faith in human progress and perfectibility and in the possibility for creating social cohesion through collective enterprise. Holbrook theorized progress fueled by collective learning. In his vision for lyceums, groups of individuals would meet regularly in towns and villages throughout the country, teaching each other from their own areas of

expertise (e.g., engineering, farming, bookkeeping, the law) or studying important and useful subjects in company (e.g., chemistry, mineralogy, botany, history). Each group might, when it seemed desirable, obtain in-

structional lecturers from outside the society. In addition, the society would form a nucleus for intellectual activity in a community.® Holbrook’s plan showed the influence of British mechanics’ institutes, established in

the early nineteenth century to provide instruction to workers, especially in fields directly related to their occupations.’ The implicit and sometimes

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Women’s lively participation as contributors to the journal overshadows negative assessments in the entries for housewifery, marriage, and wedded bliss in the “Modern Dictionary,” in which the humor turns on a recognition of women’s having abandoned their appropriate social role or on an interpretation of marriage as a disappointment for men. The desirability for the education of women tends to be assumed rather than discussed. When articles address the topic directly, rationales are drawn from the tradition of republican motherhood: women need to be educated so they can provide appropriate instruction to the next generation of (male) patriots.34 The female contributors, however, do not argue for this rationale or, indeed, for

any gender-specific rationale. The young Georgia woman who demonstrated a model of a forcing pump for her classmates did not justify her suitability for learning the mechanism of a fire engine, and the Boston lyceum member argued only that “it is unquestionably a christian [sic] duty to cultivate the mind,” a duty falling equally on both sexes.?> The Family Lyceum thus represents women as thinking beings, actively participating in their own and others’ education. Contradictory images occasionally arise,

set uneasily against the quantity of material contributed by women readers, enacting their own capacities. The Family Lyceum emphasizes “universal education,” available to chil-

dren and the elderly, to men and women, to individuals who are farmers and mechanics and those who are philosophers.*© The journal itself was designed to shatter barriers of distance: it could reach families who lived too far from others to participate regularly in established lyceums. Although universal accessibility was an espoused goal, the journal requires

literacy and also demonstrates a hierarchical approach to educational

Modeling an Ideal in Josiah Holbrook’s Family Lyceum 63 content.?” The sciences and mechanical arts of western Europeans and the © British Americans of New England, along with their Christian religion and ethical codes, were meant to civilize and Christianize—and colonize—the peoples of the world. Little instruction was anticipated in reverse. People distinct from the white Protestant New England culture are increasingly

lauded in the pages of the journal the more they mimic that white New England culture, the closer they approach the specific ideal promoted as “universal.” The invoked audience of the Family Lyceum is broad within constraints, and the communicative exchanges within the journal and between the journal and its readership are similarly complex.

The Communicative Exchange “The School Globe” provides an analogy for the various communicative exchanges enacted by the Family Lyceum. The intergenerational encounter of Harriet and her uncle consists of a demonstration followed by a conver-

sation, which is participatory but maintains the uncle’s authority. The uncle’s demonstration of the properties of the earth, using an apple, illustrates the pedagogical rule propounded by the Family Lyceum, that instructors should use “apparatus,” or physical objects, to show abstract principles. Learning thus proceeds by visual observation of phenomena rather than by written precept or the oral transmission of abstractions. This is lecturedemonstration in which one who is more knowledgeable transmits wisdom to the less enlightened.*® In the terms of the Family Lyceum, this demonstration qualifies as an “experiment.” This is not an experiment in the sense of the testing of hypotheses to contribute toward the discovery of previously unknown principles. Rather it is an experiment in the sense of a specimen or example, a practical proof, an experience. Both meanings were current in the early nineteenth century.*? The “experiments” in the Family Lyceum involve the exemplification of facts that already constitute part of the store of human knowledge (e.g., the earth rotates on an axis; metal expands when heated). The journal’s readers, as “experimenters,” are also invited to see their routine experiences as experiential science: “Putting the finger into a candle,” the first issue noted, “is a chemical experiment we have probably all tried, and learned from it an important lesson.”49 Experiments thus constitute material experience, adding facts to the individual’s private store.*! The clergyman’s choice of the apple as the “experimental apparatus” is both quotidian and richly suggestive. Apples were readily available in early

64 Chapter Two nineteenth-century New England, and the apple highlights the ordinariness of the domestic scene. In selecting an object so common to illustrate astronomical principles, the clergyman shows his ability to perceive an example of the workings of the universe in the most common site. Christian symbolism, however, transforms the ordinary apple into an ambivalent sign: of temptation, of evil, and also of spiritual knowledge. Long associated with the “fruit” of the Genesis story of the Fall, the apple in Christian iconography has represented evil and, when shown with Christ or the Virgin Mary, has also represented salvation.42 The fact that Harriet’s uncle is a clergyman militates against understanding the story as an allegory of the Fall, since conflating the clergyman with the serpent is problematic given Holbrook’s religious commitments.*? Still, the association of the apple with wisdom and with earthly knowledge, gleaned from the temptation story in Genesis, provides a hint of

ambivalence in “The School Globe.” Later, the clergyman replaces the apple—organic, and thus susceptible to decay—with the manufactured globe, a clearer representation of the terrestrial world, a product of the industrial, capitalist economy, and also a less ambiguous cultural signifier. The Christian symbolism invoked by the choice of the apple as the clergyman’s “visible object” highlights the nonsectarian religious tone of much

of Holbrook’s journal. In its thematic universe, the goal of learning about the physical world is the better understanding of the mind of God, revealed through the “book of nature” as through Christian scripture, or the “book of revelation.”44 A subsidiary effect of comprehending divine wisdom is be-

havior leading to self-improvement and social betterment (such as study and philanthropy) rather than behavior fostering dissoluteness (such as spending time in taverns). The apple that is shown to Harriet, then, is perhaps seductive, but it represents desire as it is funneled into appropriate channels, desire that yearns toward knowledge of God’s wisdom as manifested in nature. This apple represents the earth as it illustrates divine creation. It will not be fermented into cider.

The uncle’s authority—as he points Harriet toward appropriate knowledge—remains intact throughout the dialogue. The clergyman’s lecture-demonstration—the details of which are omitted—proceeds with Harriet in the role of the thoughtful spectator. Visualization results in speech: “She looked” and then “said.” Both Harriet and her uncle exhibit surprise: “Why uncle,” she says; “Why Harriet,” he answers. Harriet’s surprise stems from her recognition of a startling astronomical fact; the uncle’s, from a recognition of Harriet’s ignorance. Harriet’s question asks simply for a clarification of the salient fact—“the earth really turns round”—rather than,

Modeling an Ideal in Josiah Holbrook’s Family Lyceum 65 say, for an explanation that might challenge her uncle past the limits of his knowledge: How do you know, Uncle, that the earth turns ‘round? What causes it to turn? How fast does it go? The uncle’s power in the situation becomes even more pronounced in his response to her question. Instead of answering the question she asks—with Yes, I do mean that the earth turns ‘round—he responds with his own question, a shaming retort highlighting Harriet’s ignorance and perhaps her idleness: “Why Harriet, did you not learn that several years ago?” Lacking the power, in her subordinate role, to deflect his question, she responds directly: “Yes, sir, I learned it, but I

, never knew it before.” Harriet’s response makes a distinction between learning as hearing of something, or becoming conversant with a precept, and knowing, as becoming familiar with information through one’s own experience (like the French connaitre or the German kennen and like the English expression “to get to know someone”). The conversation between Harriet and her uncle, then, challenges Harriet’s store of basic facts but not

her uncle’s. Harriet’s final response shows that she has progressed in knowledge and has understood that knowledge gained experientially (“experimentally”) has greater potency than abstract ideas gleaned by precept. Harriet is thus the perfect reader of the Family Lyceum. Dialogues in the Family Lyceum follow the pattern of the knowledgeable lecture delivered to the less knowledgeable. Just as the clergyman presents received astronomical knowledge to Harriet, so Mother presents received anatomical knowledge to Robert, Uncle Philip presents received entomological knowledge to his nephews, and an English father named Mr. Oakley presents a consensus on the hierarchical ordering of human societies

(from the “savage” to the “polished European”) to his five children. Uncle Philip, by referring to specific books from which he obtained his information—footnoting, in effect—illustrates the method by which learning from books is translated into teaching the less knowledgeable. Thus, by modeling, he makes this method an implicit part of the lesson, so the boys in their turn can also read and instruct.* These dialogues model the types of family events that the Family Lyceum itself might inspire: individual family members read the articles on biography, geology, or botany and then convey their propositional content to the others, preferably by using physical objects for demonstrations. Since the journal was meant to be accessible to all, any family member who could read could become an “expert.” Such a process mirrors the ideal, cooperative lyceum practice that Holbrook envisioned: each member could teach the others some body of knowledge that that person possessed. Although

66 Chapter Two the Family Lyceum emphasizes the importance of discussion—“the magic wand of conversation”—both in creating pleasure and in fixing information into the memories of the conversants, the models and ideals presented

in the journal instantiate an interaction that is less mutual than the term conversation implies. Individuals might speak in succession, but they deliver

univocal lectures to each other rather than involving themselves in an interchange of information or ideas that might alter their beliefs. Colleges at this time relied heavily on recitation, or rote repetition of memorized texts.

Holbrook’s emphasis on the lecture-demonstration—pioneered by his teacher, Benjamin Silliman—thus represents an innovative shift in educational practice, but strong traces of the recitation method remain.*® The authorial personae of the instructional articles in the Family Lyceum are commanding, suggesting that the information supplied is unquestionably accurate (Uncle Philip warns his nephews that some books are more reliable than others, but the Family Lyceum, in its overall tone and in the identification of its sources as sound, rhetorically establishes itself as trustworthy).4’ Academic and investigative controversies are elided: the exten-

sive material on the relatively new science of geology, for example, contains no reference to the intense Werner-Hutton rock dispute of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Neptunists, followers of German mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner, posited a prehistoric worldwide ocean, in which rocks were formed by the precipitation of chemicals in the water. The Plutonists, followers of Scottish physician and farmer James Hutton, asserted that volcanic activity continually extruded magma that solidified into rock.4® The Family Lyceum includes a number of articles on volcanoes, and the series “Geology” makes assertions both about

a worldwide ocean and about the continuing volcanic creation of rock, all without reference to the rock dispute. Such suppression of controversy in discussing science implies that scientific fact is preexistent and discoverable. The “experimenter” observes and notes what exists in the world. The forging of accepted scientific fact within a community of acting scientists, in the heat of controversy and scientific interchange—conversation—is not part of the Family Lyceum’s process of knowledge creation. In this journal, knowledge for the public consists of facts. These facts are multitudinous but susceptible to observation, comprehension, and arrangement. The learning process as an assimilation of facts is richly illustrated by the Family Lyceum’s weekly quiz on the contents of the previous week’s issue. The thirty-sixth issue, for example, includes the following questions in its thirty-two-item quiz:

Modeling an Ideal in Josiah Holbrook’s Family Lyceum 67 From what place is Europe chiefly supplied with pumice stones? In what has America the advantage over England, as illustrated in the paper and flour mills in Dover? What is the mean temperature of Albany? What circumstances stimulated Galvani to investigate the principles of electricity in relation to its action on the muscles? What anecdote is related of Franklin, illustrative of true independence? What is the number of Societies of the nature of Lyceums in Boston, and what is their condition?*?

The quizzes implicitly recommend study and memorization as the procedure for learning. Most quiz questions require recall of details about the previous paper’s content, and others demand a recitation of evaluative judgments made the previous week. The quiz does not ask the pupil to apply the information to new contexts, to inquire into the processes by which the information was produced or presented, or to question the judgments rendered. The extent of the quiz and the fact-based nature of most items imply that an ability to answer the quiz fully and correctly represents mastery of the knowledge presented in the previous issue. The acquisition of knowledge, according to this plan, is incremental and regularly measured, and the “facts” are not challenged. Thus the readers of the journal are invited to see themselves as pupils at the school of the Family Lyceum, reading and assimilating the materials presented and undergoing regular examinations. In a dramatic departure from this norm, however, the journal in one case did invite readers’ participation in building new knowledge. A gap existed in scientific knowledge: “Science

has not yet advanced so far as hardly to enable the greatest philosopher to conjecture the cause of the most singular contrast between the weather this season and last.” To remedy this gap, Holbrook proposed the widespread collection of meteorological data and then publication in the journal. If data were available for comparison, then “materials would be furnished for much speculation, and possibly for some sound theory on the subject of the - weather.”°° This is a model of Baconian scientific induction: observation of natural phenomena and then generalization from those particulars. The journal invited readers to participate in a grassroots effort toward the creation of scientific theory by collecting basic information. Not coincidentally,

knowledge of weather processes and patterns would be of great practical benefit to farmers and seafarers, to travelers and gardeners. Responses came from varied sources: an academy for young women in Savannah, Georgia, was the most regular and consistent participant, and

68 Chapter Two occasional weather data also came from other schools, like the Scottsboro Institute in Georgia, the Columbus High School for Young Ladies in Ohio, and the New Hope Academy in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Weather information was gleaned from published or individual sources in Concord, New Hampshire; Boston and Waltham, Massachusetts; Charleston, South Carolina; and Montreal. Average daily temperatures, wind direction, and general weather conditions (e.g., “cloudy,” “fair,” “rain”) were normally reported in tabular form from one location at a time, although on a few occasions the journal printed tables from multiple locations side by side, so comparisons could be made.°?! The phase of “speculation” and theorybuilding was not reached in the 1832-33 span of the Family Lyceum, but participant-readers gathered considerable data. The students at the Scottsboro Institute, moreover, shared other compositions in the journal’s pages: instructional lecture-essays, a descriptive article on the cotton plant, and a speech given by a young woman at a benevolent society meeting. Pupils at

the Savannah academy also began a private correspondence with their counterparts in Boston.?2 The participatory aspects of the Family Lyceum encouraged “mutual instruction” and invited readers to understand themselves as active contributors in scientific discovery and education. The “conversations” within the Family Lyceum and between the journal and its readership focused on noncontroversial, experiential, “experimental” lecture-demonstrations when the topic was received wisdom. When lacunae were perceived in scientific understanding, notably in meteorology, the Family Lyceum provided a site for readers to present data gathered in their local communities, with a view toward an eventually comprehensive perspective on weather patterns. Reader participation, again, did not consist of discussions so much as univocal lecture-presentations. Nonetheless, the presentations of readers increased the variety of voices in the jour-

nal’s pages. ,

These voices did not speak of just anything, however. Only certain sub-

jects were suitable for inclusion as “general knowledge.” The types of knowledge that the Family Lyceum invoked, through the voices of its editor,

its extracts, and its reader-contributors, offer a picture of what counted as essential knowledge for the model citizen.

General Knowledge The types of knowledge gained in “The School Globe” emphasize the goals of Holbrook’s journal. Within the story, the characters obtain knowledge

Modeling an Ideal in Josiah Holbrook’s Family Lyceum 69 that is factual, personal, and social. The knowledge that the earth “really turns round” is factual and “scientific.” It is the result of observation and inquiry, but the controversies of the investigative process are elided in the demonstration, by analogy, of received wisdom. Harriet accepts the fact of the earth’s rotation by an experience of watching her uncle with an apple: when she “looked with great earnestness,” she looked at her uncle, not at the apple. It is through faith in her uncle’s superior knowledge, preparation, and goodwill that the apple-earth analogy works for Harriet. Simi-

larly, the authorial personae of texts in the Family Lyceum deliver information in unqualified statements of fact, encouraging readers to accept them as reliable reporters. In addition to this transmission of factual knowledge, the anecdote describes growth in self-knowledge both by Harriet and her uncle. Harriet realizes her capacity for transformation from ignorance to enlightenment through experiential learning. Her uncle learns of the efficacy of philanthropy, of spending his money to assist in the reform of the common schools. Further, by conversing with his niece, the clergyman obtains social knowledge, realizing the status of the schools of the town, and he applies his own wisdom to this problem, transforming

the social realm in which he and Harriet learn and live. All this knowledge—factual, personal, and social—is gained by experience, by communicative interaction within the family. The Family Lyceum purveys factual information in the form of scientific knowledge about such subjects as chemistry, geology, anatomy, botany, and mathematics; in the form of historical knowledge about individuals of the past presented as models of industriousness and scientific learning; and in the form of current events involving schools and lyceums. As the previous section demonstrates, controversy that was involved in the acceptance of this factual knowledge as fact is stripped away. The body of factual knowledge that the journal emphasizes, then, is overtly nonpolitical, both in the sense that political factors in the gathering and analysis of data are suppressed and also in the sense that contemporary politics are not discussed. During the publication of the journal, Democratic president Andrew Jackson won reelection in November 1832 by defeating National Republican Henry Clay. The chief issue of the election concerned Jackson’s veto of the rechartering legislation for the Bank of the United States. Furthermore, the

controversy between Jackson and John C. Calhoun over whether states could nullify federal law reached a crucial juncture in December, when Calhoun resigned the vice presidency. These issues were beyond the purview of the Family Lyceum, except for brief references such as the observation that

70 Chapter Two young women in Georgia and Massachusetts were able to share educational materials without either threatening to become nullifiers. In fact, in late No-

vember the journal recommended that editors and publishers across the country turn their attention away from the recent political contest and toward the construction of lyceum buildings. Although the journal argued for | the value of lyceums on the grounds that these associations could, “more than any other institution,” convey to “republicans a knowledge of their political rights—of the nature and genius of their government,” such discussions were left to face-to-face lyceum meetings. They were not an emphasis of the journal.>* The Family Lyceum was more likely to convey information about hickory trees and clayey soil than about Old Hickory and Henry Clay. Is this to say that the “model citizen” of the Family Lyceum lacks commitment to the republican political process? Not quite. Holbrook’s journal ad-

vocates political involvement, but only by those who have been appropriately schooled in the “book of nature.” The journal reported in May 1833 that political actors who study only indoors, using only books, “are visionary and utopian, and yet ambitious, and overbearing, and of course dangerous.” The succeeding issue called attention to this passage in

the list of questions: “Who make the best statesmen, those educated by schools and books merely, or those who have a knowledge of practical pursuits?” An extract from Sir Humphrey Davy, published in February, made a

distinction between temporary political action and the lasting effects of harnessing magnetic fields to aid navigation: “Monarchs change their plans, governments their objects, a fleet or an army effects its purposes, and then passes away; but a piece of steel touched by a magnet, preserves its character forever, and secures to man the dominion of the trackless ocean.”>* The exercise of power, therefore, is equated with domination and

control of nature, gained only through an experiential understanding olf natural phenomena. The emphasis on knowledge applied for industrial and economic ends is ubiquitous in the Family Lyceum. Although “The School Globe” does not explain the utility of knowledge about the shape and motions of the earth, the

society in which Harriet and her uncle lived found this information to be crucially useful. Early nineteenth-century New Englanders relied on the oceans for a significant part of their economic livelihood. During the colonial

era, New England carpenters had built British merchant ships, and in the 1780s U.S. interests had established regular trade with China. In the nineteenth century, whalers sailed from such ports as Nantucket and New Bedford, Massachusetts, and New England fishing vessels prowled the North

Modeling an Ideal in Josiah Holbrook’s Family Lyceum 71 Atlantic. New Englanders also contributed goods to the trilateral cotton trade between New York, southern cotton ports like New Orleans and Charleston, and European cities like Le Havre and Liverpool.°? A society with such an economic investment in global trade had need of information useful to ship-

building and navigation. Knowledge of global patterns induced practical benefits for the safety of seafarers and the increase of wealth. The Family Lyceum repeatedly stresses the utility of knowledge in improving occupational activity.°° The wasp provides lessons in architecture to the mason, geological knowledge undergirds the mining industry, and a knowledge of chemistry assists farmers and housekeepers, as well as “the

tanner, the brewer, the tallow-chandler, the dyer, the painter” and “all who live by eating.”?’ Comprehension of the scientific principles underlying, say, planting corn and baking bread, so the argument runs, will have practical effects in improving agricultural and domestic products. The Family Lyceum does not solely focus on economic and industrial utility, however. Gaining knowledge is most useful, it argues, for increasing human comprehension of the mind of God. Thus the study of rock formations, seasonal patterns, or insect behavior creates a synecdochic under-

standing of the patterns of the Creator.°® Shifting from its customary middle style into an English high style, in language reminiscent of the King James Version of the Bible, the Family Lyceum preaches: “To him whom the science of nature delighteth, every object bringeth a proof of his God; and

every thing that proveth this, giveth cause of adoration.” Delight and pleasure are thus commingled with a search for the divine. “I do not know anything more pleasant to notice,” says Uncle Philip, “than the works of God.”*? The focus on divinity also creates the foundation for the ordering of creation.©? Humanity is at the center of this order, the one given “dominion” over the lesser creation, the one granted custody and control, the one for whom the Creator formed the earth and heavens.®! The journal characterizes natural phenomena as especially designed for human beings: “What a merciful provision, therefore, has Providence made, for the safety of the American in the tail of the Rattle-Snake.”©2 Learning about human beings also becomes a means by which one can seek God, and in this study are all others subsumed: “The science of man is the science of all sciences. It embraces every thing within us, and every thing without us.”©? Knowledge of humanity is thus the supreme synecdoche for God, and the human being is the measure of all things, the ultimate model. Notwithstanding abstract paeans to divinity, the lessons in this ultimate science that the journal offers are more prosaic: biographical sketches, a

72. Chapter Two twelve-part dialogue stratifying human societies by degree of “civilization,”

and articles on basic human anatomy. Individual self-knowledge begins with fact-based knowledge of physio-mechanical structure: “What individual is fully acquainted with himself? Not one. ... Is there one person in ten, even in New England, who knows the number of bones he has in his hand?”’°* Again, it is scientific practice—in this case, dissection—that provides significant and useful information. It is New Englanders, presented as

the superior inheritors of the tradition of the city on a hill and the divine errand into the wilderness, who must be rightly educated in order for their mission to be fulfilled. The essential technique for self-knowledge and ultimately for knowledge of God is an exegetical practice, reading the “book of

nature.” “What is the study of words compared with this? Wherein is knowledge but in the study of Nature?”©? The choice of subject matter in the Family Lyceum, as well as the hierar-

chies and goals of knowledges articulated in its pages, suggests that the most important knowledge is gleaned by reading the “book of nature” for utilitarian ends. Such useful knowledge leads to a greater understanding of the Creator’s purposes (moral utility) and the fulfillment of one’s own role within those purposes (intellectual, moral, physical, occupational utility). The purposive action resulting from the acquisition of knowledge thus has material consequences.

Consequences of the Acquisition of Knowledge The private encounter between Harriet and her uncle has public consequences. Harriet learns a basic astronomical fact that makes it possible for her to participate more actively in the life of her society, to comprehend principles that affect seafaring, seasonal changes, and the regular transfor-

mation from day into night. As this kind of information is shared more widely, it becomes accessible for use in making improvements in such areas as navigation and agriculture, improving the economic and productive capacities of U.S. workers. The clergyman’s acquisition of knowledge also has widespread effects. His private conversation with his niece induces him to act personally in the

public realm. Benevolence to the community emerges from experience within the family unit. Social improvement—in this case, the purchase of educational materials for the common schools—is the responsibility of in-

dividuals acting personally. Governments are not invoked. This stance characterizes the Family Lyceum. Although governments are occasionally

Modeling an Ideal in Josiah Holbrook’s Family Lyceum 73 praised for their efforts on behalf of education—the federal government for

setting aside the sixteenth section of every surveyed township to benefit education in the Northwest Territory, the Massachusetts legislature for providing copies of a state geological survey to all Massachusetts schools, and the New York legislature for purchasing an instructional text for teachers for each New York school district—it is at the individual level that the journal recommends efforts for educational and civic improvement.®® Invoking the apostle Paul’s quotation of Jesus, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” the Family Lyceum urges readers to make gifts to others. It appeals to children to collect rocks and minerals from their local area and

share them with other students of geology at a distance. It recommends that schools share the products of their learning: examples of composition, handwriting, and needlework. It urges readers to submit contributions to the journal as gifts to other readers: “Experiments or incidents, occurring in the physical, intellectual or moral world, calculated to illustrate the principles of matter, mind or heart, will be particularly valued.”°’ Letters and contributions from readers, as well as reports from lyceums, indicate that gift exchanges did occur. For example, a teachers’ seminary in Andover,

Massachusetts, sent specimens of rocks to each school in the county. Lyceums in New York and Boston exchanged rocks and minerals. A school lyceum in Boston presented three hundred sets of geological specimens to the schools of Massachusetts. Seamen donated items from their voyages to lyceums. In addition, one reader in Connecticut volunteered to receive geological specimens from Boston schoolchildren for his own study and for the benefit of his local schools, offering to “the little fellows in Boston” the blessings of giving. Another, in Arkansas, offered himself as a gift: he pro-

posed to marry any New England woman whom Holbrook chose— between the ages of twenty and thirty-five—who would move to Arkansas and teach school in his locale.68 The journal proffered the general model of the gift exchange, to encourage mutual instruction and to forge social ties. Reader-participants responded to this call in their own ways. The benevolent efforts described in the Family Lyceum most often take

the form of market purchases, translating philanthropy into capitalist terms. The journal enjoins schoolchildren to contribute money toward the purchase of a copy of Samuel Read Hall’s Lectures on School-Keeping for their

teacher. It urges civic-minded adults to buy shares in lyceum buildings. It recommends to teachers, pupils, parents, and other interested parties the purchase of Holbrook’s apparatus, to illustrate scientific and mathematical principles.©? An important consequence of the interaction between Harriet

74 Chapter Two and her uncle is a market exchange of the uncle’s money for Bostonproduced globes, supporting the capitalist economy. Holbrook’s apparatus, which included globes for schools, was available to families, schools, and lyceums, and many of the articles in the Family Lyceum promote the purchase of specific books as well as the apparatus.’° The journal thus became a promotional outlet for products of the knowledge industry—magazines, books, and illustrative equipment. In this commercial impulse, the goals of industrial capital and the goals of early lyceum promoters merge. Not only does the clergyman’s benevo-

lence take the form of an economic exchange, but he also assesses the value of the globes in economic terms: “He remarked, that they had paid for themselves many hundred times.” In what currencies did this payment occur? The journal suggests that the results of expenditures on such items as lyceum buildings, libraries, and apparatus can be measured in economic terms as well as in educational and moral terms. Establishing a lyceum costs less money to a town than building a tavern (the savings? precisely $2,849.40!). Towns that support schools and churches are economically prosperous towns. Poverty decreases, the journal states, when communities make a commitment to Christian education, since with knowledge, the needs of the population can be supplied.’! In addition to the ultimate benefits described in the previous section—an individual’s closer approximation to divinity—benefits were to be derived in cash. The Family Lyceum began publication in the same year that Horatio Alger was born in Revere, Massachusetts. Alger’s rags-to-riches novels, in which virtue, pluck, and effort reap financial rewards, emerged from some of the same motivating forces that gave birth to Holbrook’s journal’s faith in the economic prosperity accruing to those who work hard (and, conversely, in individual responsibility for poverty). The Family Lyceum does not overtly blame the

poor for their poverty. Instead, it urges the nonpoor to make the same kinds of civilizing and Christianizing efforts with the poor within their so-

ciety as with the “savage” in the wilderness. Just as a Liberian outpost would, it was argued, civilize and Christianize “benighted” Africa, so the “civilized” poor person would return home to civilize others.’4 In both cases, the values of the white Protestant New England middle class are represented as the means for universal uplift. The consequences of the acquisition of knowledge for people like Har-

riet and her uncle, then, involve individual action in the public realm. The model response to learning articulated in the Family Lyceum is a sharing

of the products of personal industry (e.g., conversations, essays, rock

Modeling an Ideal in Josiah Holbrook’s Family Lyceum 75 collections) and a sharing of the products of financial prosperity (e.g., books, equipment, buildings). Both are community-building activities. Shared products of personal industry should foster mutual mental and moral improvement and also shared norms and goals. Financial expenditures help establish the edifices of the society, instantiating its values in bricks and mortar and creating further models for others to emulate, all around the round earth, in all its turnings.”

The Family Lyceum as Model The Family Lyceum models an ideal early lyceum practice in its emphasis on

mutual instruction, noncontroversial scientific subjects, and “experimental” lecture-demonstration. The figure of the ideal lyceum participant, who is also an ideal member of the republican polity, emerges implicitly within the pages of the journal. What sort of figure is this? The model reader is a white middle-class Protestant of English descent, who might be male or female. He or she learns to observe natural phenomena, the “book of na-

ture,” and from these observations learns to draw analogies to human behavior and to make inferences about the mind of God. Important general knowledge encompasses science and morals, with a central focus on “self-knowledge.” Knowledge is manifold but highly ordered, and the emphasis on strict organization of information about natural phenomena carries over into the organization of information about human cultures and societies. Knowledge on subjects ranging from geology to human behavior is arranged in elaborate hierarchies. Mastery of knowledge is equated with memorization and recall of the structures of these hierarchies. This learning is pleasurable, not a chore. The ultimate goal of all learning is a better comprehension of the mind of God. The consequences of learning involve using knowledge to improve oneself, not only morally and intellectually but also economically. Improving oneself economically demonstrates a mastery over the lesser creation, divinely ordained for human use. The possessor of knowledge also has a responsibility to act in ways that make such knowledge universally accessible. Knowledge is not its own end. The end of learning is action. In action, the values and beliefs of Protestant New England are refigured as universal norms. Holbrook’s Family Lyceum rhetorically represents a teaching and learning

practice that invests participants with the ideals of hard work, controlled leisure, self-improvement, utilitarianism, virtue, republicanism, religious faith, and pleasure in each of these. It therefore provides a site for the

76 Chapter Two inculcation of specific ideals and values that are naturalized and normalized until they seem to be universals. These norms range from a beneficent valuation of individual freedom and self-worth to a virulent cultural egoism de-

signed to recast the world in its own image, from ideals of equality to manifest destiny. The religious, social, political, and economic interests of Protestant New England, normalized as the U.S. ideal, merge into a tidy array, providing clear models for individual belief and behavior. Claiming a relationship of near identity between education and entertainment, instruction and amusement, the journal asserts that acquiring this general and cul-

tural knowledge is recreation as well as re-creation: the serious play of making oneself over in a new guise, according to new models, for a new world.

The records of many antebellum lyceums suggest a rhetorical commit-

ment to these same New England norms and values, although formal lyceum organizations tended to target a narrower segment of the population than early promoters like Holbrook envisioned. Young elite white men were the officials and participants in most lyceums, and most local lyceums thus provided a mechanism for these young men to exert cultural and intellectual leadership in their communities. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the 1850s, for example, local elite men—many of whom were native New Englanders—operated a lecture-sponsoring library company, the Young Men’s Association of the City of Milwaukee. These young men propagated familiar eastern cultural models for a growing western community.

3

Judging Popular Lectures in Milwaukee, 1854-1857 Ie Bye Be BNE

B’ the mid-1850s the original New England lyceum ideal had metamorphosed through thirty years of lyceum practice. Whereas the “audience” in societies for mutual education were participant-learners, the audience by the 1850s had become spectator-judges, watching lectureperformances at sponsored public gatherings. The hearth of lyceum activity

had moved westward, to areas of newer European American settlement, like Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Protestant Yankee immigrants

brought to the Old Northwest their cultural institutions, including churches, schools, and lyceums. As developing transportation networks linked East and West by water and rail, many lyceums of the growing West could sponsor courses of lectures by notable easterners. These lectures be-

came sites for mutual scrutiny: the lecturers could see and evaluate the “great West,” and the residents of the West could likewise observe and assess the performances of the lecturers.! Simultaneously, members of the 77

78 Chapter Three audiences could watch and appraise each other, testing the “intellectual taste” of the local citizenry. Through these multiple experiences of observation and critique, a nebulous set of criteria for judgment emerged. Not ex-

plicitly defined, these criteria helped classify both the lecturers’ performances and the discernment of the audience. What counted as a “good” popular lecture? Who was an appropriate lecturer? What kind of experience should a lecture-goer expect? Whose judgment mattered? What did the experience of the lecture and the judgment of it say about the social situation in which the experience and judgment occurred? The task of this chapter is to make explicit the criteria used to judge lyceum lecturers and audiences in the mid-1850s and to examine the ways that these criteria were negotiated and expressed. The mid-1850s was a period of ad hoc cooperation among western lyceums, well before commercial bureaus sold packaged lecture seasons. At this point, when lecture circuits were developing but were not yet rigid, local lyceum leaders and local audiences could render meaningful practical judgments about the quality and value of particular lectures and lecturers. The days of centralized control of content through the commercial lecture bureaus were yet to come. This historical moment, then, offers a unique opportunity to evaluate the ways that western lyceums contributed to the creation of an intel-

lectual culture near the frontier of European settlement, dramatically disclosing the development of cultural norms. Various locations in the Old

Northwest could provide a window on the world of lyceum decisionmaking in this period, but I have chosen Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as both a representative instance and a unique example. Milwaukee was representa-

tive in that it was one of the significant nodes in the new lecturing network of the Old Northwest, along with cities like Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. Like these other cities, it was also distinctive, with a particular geography, economy, and heritage of immigration and settlement. An unusually rich collection of surviving source material pertaining to

three lecture seasons in Milwaukee in 1854—55, 1855-56, and 1856-57 makes possible a detailed investigation of this site at this time. In these three seasons, a lyceum organization, the Young Men’s Association (YMA) of the City of Milwaukee, sponsored thirty-six public lectures (for a com-

prehensive list, see appendix 4). Available in Wisconsin archives are the

minutes of the YMA’s board of directors, copies of the five Englishlanguage daily newspapers published in Milwaukee at the time, and the preserved correspondence of the YMA president in the mid-1850s, attorney Jerome Ripley Brigham. Brigham arranged the YMA’s schedule of

Judging Popular Lectures in Milwaukee, 1854-1857 79 lectures during these three seasons. His private papers include letters received from lecturers and from other lecture organizers, notably Samuel D. Ward, a Chicago commission merchant and an officer of the YMA of that city. These sources offer a wealth of information about local lyceum activity that is unavailable for other seasons. The chapter begins with a narrative describing Milwaukee and the YMA in the 1850s, establishing the setting within which the YMA lectures were delivered and discussed. It continues with three sections, each focusing on a different stage of judgment: before, during, and after the lecturing event. In rendering judgments, Milwaukee’s economic and cultural leaders created representations of themselves and the intellectual milieu they wished to animate in their young city.

Young Milwaukee Milwaukee was incorporated by the territorial legislature in 1846, two years before Wisconsin achieved statehood. On the western shore of Lake

Michigan, the city was notable for its buildings of cream-colored brick made from local clay. Milwaukee grew from a population of 20,061 in 1850 to 45,246 in 1860, at the same time that its lakeshore rival, Chicago, increased from 29,963 to 109,260. At the time of the 1850 federal census, more than 60 percent of Milwaukee’s enumerated residents reported having been born in Europe, and about two-thirds of these were German. The city’s workers, both native- and foreign-born, contributed to Milwaukee’s nascent industrial economy. Flour mills, meat packing and curing houses, tanneries, iron foundries, and breweries thrived in the city. By 1860 wealth

in the state’s largest city was highly concentrated. Skilled carpenters in Wisconsin made about $1.73 per day, male day laborers received $1.05 per day, and female domestics earned their board plus $1.30 per week. At the

other end of the spectrum, 10 percent of the men in Milwaukee County held 83 percent of the total wealth, and forty-six men each held real and personal property valued at $100,000 or more. Most of the wealthiest men,

primarily real-estate speculators, lawyers, bankers, and merchants, had been born in the United States. Half of the forty-six were natives of New York State, and another quarter hailed from New England. Although German immigrants had begun to transform the culture of Milwaukee established by its earlier Yankee immigrants, most of the economic power in 1860 remained in the hands of native-born northeasterners.?

80 Chapter Three Although the Great Lakes always linked Wisconsin with the eastern seaboard, commercial and personal interaction became easier when telegraph lines reached the state in 1849. The state’s first railroad line opened with great fanfare in 1851, covering the twenty miles between Milwaukee and the town of Waukesha. Promoters projected that this line would soon link Milwaukee with the Mississippi River, completing a water-and-rail

route from the East that would make Milwaukee a major transshipping center. A rail line connecting Milwaukee and Chicago opened in 1855. During the 1850s, railroad companies and lake shipping interests competed

for goods and passengers. By the water route, Milwaukee was closer to eastern markets than Chicago; by rail, Chicago was closer. At midcentury, then, Milwaukeeans understood their young city to be a legitimate rival to Chicago (see figure 4). Milwaukee’s elites had economic and psychological motives for maintaining social and cultural amenities that would propel the Wisconsin city to a status as the true Queen of the Lake.*

Well before the 1850s, however, the educated elite of the young community—most of whom had emigrated from New England and New York—established organizations like those they had known in the East to encourage intellectual self-improvement and to provide opportunities for social interaction. The Milwaukee Lyceum was formed in January 1839. Its first officers included Lucius Barber, a physician and politician from Con-

necticut; Hans Crocker, a lawyer and businessman born in Dublin; and New York—born Increase Lapham, a pioneer naturalist, geologist, and au-

thor who would later write the first book published in Wisconsin, Geographical and Topographical Description of Wisconsin (1844). These men and

their associates organized the lyceum along the lines of many of the early lyceum organizations in the East. Members held weekly meetings to discuss and debate political and social issues, including the establishment of the Wisconsin-Illinois boundary and the right of any state to withdraw from the Union. In 1842 the group began a collection of rocks and minerals, shells, and other artifacts to illustrate the natural history of the Mil-

waukee area. Like many organizations of its type and its era, the Milwaukee Lyceum experienced waxing and waning interest in its activities, and it was effectively defunct by the mid-1840s.° The successor to the Milwaukee Lyceum was an association of the type that Josiah Holbrook called a “class”-based lyceum. The “class” was young

men. The YMA emerged from a meeting of interested persons at the United States Hotel in Milwaukee on 8 December 1847. From this meeting grew an organization that sometimes held debates and sponsored lectures,

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82 Chapter Three but its primary reason for being was establishing and expanding a collection of books, periodicals, and newspapers. In 1849 its board of directors discussed the possibility of incorporating under state statutes “relating to libraries & Lyceums.”® In this instance, and in the usage of Brigham’s corre-

spondents in the mid-1850s, the term lyceum was a generic category, encompassing organized societies that engaged in practices like speaking, debating, and fostering the “improvement” of individuals, intellectually and morally.’ The YMA incorporated on 8 March 1852, with the avowed purpose of “establishing and maintaining a Library and Reading Room, in-

stituting literary and scientific lectures, and providing other means of moral and intellectual improvement.”®

The arrangement of these goals implies the primacy of the library and reading room. Indeed, although the association gained attention in the 1850s and 1860s as the sponsor of an annual course of public lectures, a chief motivation for offering lectures to the fee-paying public was to obtain funding to purchase additions to the library’s collection. Mostly local men

delivered lectures before the association in the early 1850s, but by 1853-54—before the railroad connected Milwaukee and Chicago—such “home lectures” had given way to a season’s series of public lectures from “abroad.” Lecturers that season included George William Curtis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and Horace Mann.’ Thereafter, annual sponsorship of lectures established the YMA as the primary purveyor of regular events for the city’s lecture-going public and as a significant participant on the lyceum circuits of the West.!° In the mid-1850s Brigham in Milwaukee, Samuel Ward in Chicago, and their counterparts in cities like Detroit and Cleveland, as well as in smaller towns like Madison, Janesville, Waukesha, and Racine, Wisconsin, cooperated in luring eastern lecturers to the West by arranging multiple lecturing

opportunities for them. In 1864 the Milwaukee YMA was a founding member of the Associated Western Literary Societies (AWLS).!! Despite the

advantages of coordinating activities with other western societies, the YMA, always on a shaky financial footing, by the 1870s had incurred significant debt. On 8 March 1878, exactly twenty-six years after it incorpo-

rated, the association formally disbanded, transferring all of its property—including almost ten thousand books—to the city of Milwaukee for the establishment of a free municipal library. The Milwaukee Public Library thus came into being, and the public gained free access to the collection that it had financed by patronizing the YMA lectures. !2

Judging Popular Lectures in Milwaukee, 1854-1857 83 Comprehensive information about YMA members remains elusive. Doc-

umentary evidence suggests that membership—which reached about 300-350 persons in the mid-1850s and about 2,000 in the late 1860s and early 1870s—did not represent a broad cross section of the city’s residents.!3 As the name suggests, young adult men were the target audience. In 1850 adult males between the ages of twenty and thirty constituted the largest demographic group in Milwaukee County, according to the classification framework used by the U.S. Census Office. Women of the same age range were the second largest group. Although the YMA’s 1852 charter did not specifically prohibit women from membership, contemporary source material suggests their informal exclusion. Historian Frank Flower, how-

ever, indicates that a few women belonged to the YMA in the late 1850s and early 1860s. !4

In the mid-1850s the association charged a $1.00 initiation fee, plus dues of $0.50 each quarter. These fees gave members access to the library and reading room. In addition, a season ticket for one person to attend the YMA lecture course in 1854-55 cost $2.00; for three persons (such as a family group), $3.00. Alternatively, an individual could pay $0.25 admission for each lecture.}> Such prices might have seemed prohibitive for most of the city’s laborers. When the YMA organized in 1847, however, the city press articulated a vision of inclusion of all economic classes of local men. An editorial writer styled “Progress,” who had attended the organizational meeting, expressed regret that so few mechanics and laborers were there: I was glad to hear it so freely expressed that it [the YMA] should be restricted to no sect, class, or condition, and that all classes were represented in the meeting. But I concluded, on looking around the room, that there were few mechanics and less laborers there, and it is these classes that will _ reap the greatest benefit from such an association. . . . ... Why may not the Drayman cart away the Merchant’s argument in debate, as well as his goods from his warehouse: and the Barrow-driver move the learned Lawyer—by employing his leisure hours in mental cultivation, from a sophistical position, as well as move his Barrow of dirt, or the Hod-carrier, climb the pleasant steps of science, as well as the rounds of the Mason’s ladder? !©

Progress’s utopian vision of laborers transforming the activities that they did well at work into analogous intellectual power through study represents the kind of republican ideal of individual self-improvement advanced by early lyceum promoters. This ideal, however, fails to consider the collective experiences of Milwaukee’s laborers—working hours, wages, living conditions,

84 Chapter Three or the locations of their residences and workplaces in relation to the sites of YMA activity. The ideal assumes leisure time, discretionary income, and easy mutual interaction among the different socioeconomic classes of the city. Such an ideal appears to have been distant from experienced reality. The leadership of the YMA—its elected officers, board of directors, and

committee members—came primarily from the white Protestant professional male elite. Many of these men had been born in the Northeast, and they were lawyers, physicians, bankers, merchants, journalists, and politicians.!’ During the three-year period 1854-57, for example, the YMA’s Lecture Committee comprised lawyer Edwin L. Buttrick, physician John K. Bartlett, banker Charles F Isley, and hardware merchant George Lefevre. Yale-educated Bartlett was a native of Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Usley was born in Eastport, Maine.!® The YMA president and lecture organizer during this period was Jerome Ripley Brigham (see figure 5). Brigham’s biography illustrates the strong connections between the YMA leadership and the culture of the Northeast.

Born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in July 1825, Brigham came with his natal family to the Wisconsin Territory in 1839. He returned east to attend Amherst College, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1845. Then, back in Madison, he studied law and briefly taught school. In 1848 Brigham became the first clerk of the supreme court of the new state of Wisconsin. Admitted to the bar in 1851, he moved to Milwaukee, where he began practicing law with Charles Wells in 1852. The offices of Wells and Brigham were in the Phoenix Buildings, which in 1854 boasted two telegraph offices. Undoubtedly this proximity was helpful when Brigham was busy arranging YMA-sponsored lectures. Before his marriage in 1857 to Maine-born Mary Ilsley, Brigham lived in lodgings and participated actively in the YMA. He joined the YMA’s board of directors in 1852 and was

elected association president in 1854, shortly before his twenty-ninth birthday.!? When Brigham died in 1897, the Milwaukee Bar Association

lauded his commitment to “the duties of citizenship,” his interest in promoting “general intelligence,” and his “serious religious nature,” exemplified by his loyalty to Plymouth Congregational Church. His denominational affiliation emphasized his New England heritage; Congregationalism

traces its roots through the Massachusetts Pilgrims to English nonconformists. The bar association resolved that Brigham had embodied the best of East and West: “Born in western Massachusetts, of sound New England stock, and transplanted to Wisconsin in his youth, he possessed much of the freedom of western training, combined with the culture of the East.”2°

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noncontroversial. There was no antilyceum. Rather than presenting the lecture platform as a site roiling with debate and political ferment, the press often spoke of the lecturing events as “feasts” and “banquets.” Whereas T. Starr King’s “Sight and Insight” was “a delicate literary repast,” Gough on temperance was “a glorious feast.”8© The Free Democrat urged readers to attend the “intellectual banquet” of Pierpont’s “Golden Calf” as a respite, as a means “to forget the turmoil and anxiety of an election.” The YMA lecture thus rhetorically becomes an extension of the family home, a

social outing: “Husbands, brothers and lovers will do well to remember that they can finish their voting and get home to tea, in season to accompany their wives, sisters and sweethearts to the lecture.”®’ As an event, like a church service, where “respectable” and “fashionable” women could appear in public without censure, the YMA lecture is represented as a feminized space, more like home than like the polls. Yet it was still a space in which broad civic questions were addressed. Rarely, however, did lecturers resolve these broad issues into specifics. Even Phillips’s antislavery message—delivered as part of a second lecture to

the YMA, after the noncontroversial “Lost Arts’—was muffled within a

larger discourse concerning general “duties” of “thoughtful men in a

Judging Popular Lectures in Milwaukee, 1854-1857 107 republic.” The Sentinel found the lecture to be “free from anything .. . that could offend.”88 The radical Phillips did not challenge Wisconsinites to re-

visit their statutes on voting, for example, although the state denied the franchise to the small number of free African American men who lived there.8? Although the antagonism over the issue of U.S. slavery in the mid1850s was reaching a crescendo, few of the YMA lecturers seem to have

mentioned it. Explicit antislavery lectures were delivered in Milwaukee, but not under the auspices of the YMA.” Discussions of the status of Native Americans, which might have hit close to the bone so near the frontier of European settlement, seem to have been absent from YMA platforms in the mid-1850s. To the extent that controversy was perceived as an attribute of the rough-and-tumble world of politics (coded masculine), then so-

cial norms suggested that controversial issues should be tempered in “popular” public lectures to mixed, or “promiscuous,” audiences. The YMA leaders’ understanding of the association’s role in the community—to provide “literary and scientific” lectures—also muted the appearance of controversial material on the YMA platform. The management of what would count as controversy was exhibited in

press discussions of John Gough, powerful advocate of total abstinence. Conceivably, Gough could have been perceived as a controversial figure in a city with a large German population that boasted a nascent brewing industry. Yet the English-language press offered no hint that Gough’s pres-

ence might be divisive, suggesting once again the limited demographic focus for YMA lectures, among the Yankee-Yorkers. The muting of political controversy in popular lectures is illuminated by

the fact that the English-language papers in Milwaukee expressed general agreement about the quality and substance of the lectures, although the partisan papers varied widely in their political commitments, from the emphatically Republican Free Democrat to the American, which supported a Know-Nothing agenda.?! Rarely did the press critique the lecturers’ arguments, even in passing. In one noteworthy departure from this practice, the Free Democrat in March 1855 debated the substance of Horace Mann’s lecture “Woman.” Over two days, the paper printed an extended report of Mann’s lecture, which argued that women should be educated for those occupations for which they were “naturally” well suited, like teaching and “the healing art,” but that their presence in political decision-making might lead to the dissolution of the family: “What might result if the husband was a dem. the wife a whig and the daughter a third party man!” Following the lengthy report, the Free Democrat appended its “remarks,” which argued for

108 Chapter Three woman suffrage on the grounds that women’s presence would purify politics. Both positions relied on an unexamined assumption of the innate pu-

rity of women, but Mann and the Free Democrat reached opposite conclusions about women’s entry into political life. It is the simulation of a

debate in the newspaper, however, that demonstrated for the readership how the content of YMA lectures could spark discussion of contemporary social issues. This instance was unique in the 1854—57 period. Press reports of YMA lectures represented the “good” popular lecture as

one delivered by a person with expertise (preferably direct personal experience) who had the power to engage large audiences through skills in performance. Some newspaper writers preferred an older lecturer—presumed to have had more useful experience—with a powerful physical presence. A “musical” or melodious voice that could fill a hall was an asset, much to be _preferred over “dreamlike” or monotonous voices, which were like an “opiate.”?2 In the Sentinel’s assessment of T. Starr King’s “Substance and Show,” delivered in January 1856, the writer adapted the theme of the lecture (reality and illusion) to compliment King’s ability to draw the audience in with his eloquence: In person, he is slight and young-looking and creates a feeling of disappointment in those of his audience who have not yet learned to discriminate between ‘substance and show,’ which disappointment is at once relieved by the flash of his eye and the determination of his mouth, and gives place as he proceeds, with his lecture, in a voice strong and melodious and with the manner of an orator, to a feeling of complete and unbounded satisfac-

lecture.?? :

tion which fastens his audience in perfect attention until the end of his

In this temporal progression from initial disappointment to eventual captivation, the Sentinel represents the process of “drawing in.” The substance of the lecture matters to the assessment—in December the press compared King’s “Sight and Insight” unfavorably with his January effort—but the manner in which the lecturer manifests the quality or power of an oratorical capacity, through voice and gesture and physical vitality, was deemed the method by which the lecturer created the force to engage the attending audience.?4

A good popular lecture, according to the American, consisted of “something worth saying, well said.”?> According to the English-language newspapers of Milwaukee in the mid-1850s, something worth saying could be stated cogently, in a single thematic statement that would unity the strands of narrative and evidence. Something worth saying might examine broad

Judging Popular Lectures in Milwaukee, 1854-1857 109 social phenomena, like business or intellectual pursuits, and might direct auditors toward a commitment to social, moral, or intellectual improve-

ment. Much of this discourse focused on improving individuals and, through them, the collective, not reshaping society through institutional or

governmental action. The lectures—the something worth saying— promoted the values of their sponsors, with just enough sting to encourage the virtues of continued vigilance and humility. Saying well this something worth saying required personal strength, power, and force from the lecturer, who was considered to be most himself when he was meeting the

expectations of the audience in subject and manner. Saying something worth saying well, the lecturer could not only provide an exemplar of the culture of the Northeast or the values of the Yankee-Yorker sponsors but could also represent a model of the thoughtful citizen for the West.

Milwaukee’s Assessment of the Good Popular Lecture Samuel Ward told Jerome Ripley Brigham in the autumn of 1855 that he thought that the chaplain of Congress, William H. Milburn, was not “much of a ‘preach,’” but, Ward added, “he is a good speaker and might give a good popular lecture.” E. H. Chapin, who delivered “Modern Chivalry” as a YMA-sponsored lecture on a Saturday evening and then two sermons on Sunday, was pronounced by the Free Democrat to be “more at home in the pulpit, than on the rostrum.” The lecture of Harvard professor C. C. Felton, according to the American, “was delivered in a style best adapted to college halls.” The Wisconsin deemed T. Starr King’s “Sight and Insight” an essay rather than a lecture: “The essay instructs; the lecture is to please.” Further, the Sentinel expressed disappointment that Wendell Phillips did not orate on an antislavery theme but recognized that he had “kept in view the distinction between a lecture and a speech, and gave us a beautiful lecture.”?°¢ The commentators on western lecturing practice in the mid-1850s certainly had generic constraints in mind when they referred to the “popular lecture.”

What was a popular lecture to these people at this time? Opinions varied from writer to writer, and a single writer expressed different views at different moments. None of them proposed a codification of characteristics. In extant texts, the popular lecture is defined negatively. It was not a sermon, a pedagogical address, or a stump speech. It was not a sermon, although members of the clergy might deliver it and it might borrow features

110 Chapter Three of the Protestant sermonic form, exposing errors and calling for repentance and renewal. It was not a pedagogical address, although educators might deliver it and it might provide instruction on subjects like the history of revolutions in France, the customs of Hindus in India, or old English ballads. It was not a stump speech to rally support for a cause, although a re-

former might deliver it and it might contain explicit criticisms of contemporary life. The popular lecture was something else. Rather than concentrating on its putative ontological essence, we might

do better to focus on the needs that the popular lecture met within the community that considered it important. In Milwaukee of the mid-1850s,

the YMA leaders organized and sponsored public lectures to meet the needs of their treasury, so they could add to their growing collection of books and periodicals. They also sponsored lectures to fulfill a role within the community as purveyors of “culture” and intellectual stimulation and improvement. Members of the paying audiences may have accepted the cultural authority of the YMA and may have found in the experience of attending lectures a means of concentrating their mental energies on ideas

different from those they met in their everyday lives. Others may have seen attendance as a means of extending their reading practice, of continuing the interaction with ideas first met in print. Further, for a segment of the Milwaukee population, YMA lectures provided opportunities for respectable socializing, relief from monotony, and a basis for participating in informed postlecture conversations with friends and neighbors. The chance to experience the presence of the notable person, to put a face and voice and body with the celebrity name, allowed audience members both to participate in the elevation of the celebrity to star status and also to recognize the celebrity as someone just like them. Writers for the press, part of the empirical audience who in the pages of the newspapers explained themselves as different from the popular audience, could use the YMA lectures as a vehicle for establishing their own authority as arbiters of public taste and public value. In the economic cycle of production—production of the idea of the celebrity, the event of the lecture, the proceeds, and the reputations of lecturer, audience, and YMA—experiential and commercial value was added at every stage. The economic process emerged from and also contributed to the creation of the cultural milieu in which it occurred.

What made popular lectures different from the sermon, the instructional address, and the stump speech was not only their explicitly commercial function, although this was significant. It was also the ways in which

participants used these events to explain themselves to themselves, to

Judging Popular Lectures in Milwaukee, 1854-1857 11] represent who they were by the kinds of lecturers they endorsed, the kinds of experiences they expected in the lecture hall, and the kinds of subjects they deemed important or “useful.” The ideal popular lecture was delivered by a gifted celebrity who had a striking physical presence and a captivating platform manner, capable of sparking thought and igniting emotion.

The lecture exhibited a singleness of purpose, was based on evidence gleaned from personal experience, and demonstrated the lecturer’s ability to classify and organize knowledge, to make it manageable. The good lecture repressed controversy, reassuring audiences that the world was orderly and susceptible to control. It gave the audience something to think and talk about afterward. It brought before their eyes a picture of who they were and an image of what they could become. It was a social event, simultaneously ordinary and remarkable. A banquet to be remembered, the ideal popular lecture made the audience hungry for more. In March 1866, a decade after the period examined in this chapter, on the other side of civil war, the YMA sponsored lectures by Frederick Douglass and Anna Dickinson. Douglass presented “The Assassination and Its Lessons,” and Dickinson, “Home Thrusts” and “Flood Tide.”?’ The conventions for public speakers and for appropriate lyceum topics had changed since the mid-1850s, and an African American man and a young white woman could now espouse partisan politics and social reform from the YMA platform. Yet the lyceum customs common in the 1850s affected the later performances of Douglass, Dickinson, and other reformers. The expectations for lyceum performances established by promoters like Holbrook in the 1830s and by lyceum practice in myriad places—including Milwaukee—through the 1850s remained part of what could be popularly imagined as appropriate lyceum practice, even after the social, cultural, and economic transformations wrought by four years of war. With the promotional ideals of Holbrook’s Family Lyceum and the practical judgments of

Milwaukee’s elites representing the lyceum stage as set by dominant discourse, the following two chapters examine the potentials and limitations of the lyceum for reformist lecturers, those who responded well to the performative expectations of the lyceum and at the same time contravened many of the values and beliefs previously normalized in lyceum practice.

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4

Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s-1870s We aye Be BYE

n lyceums organized and operated by European Americans, usually | ae Americans, the voices of African Americans were rarely heard. The situation of enslaved African Americans was debated, abstractly, in white members’ meetings; individual African Americans like Charlotte Forten sometimes attended sponsored public lectures; and other individu-

als were sometimes denied membership or equal privileges in these lyceums.! In the period leading up to the Civil War, however, a few African

American lecturers, such as James Sweat Rock, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Frederick Douglass, began speaking on white lyceum platforms. During the postwar period, Douglass became a much-sought platform celebrity, adding remunerative lyceum appearances to his many speaking engagements. Speaking to racially homogeneous and also mixedrace audiences, Douglass employed the conventions of popular lecturing

and popular entertainment and yet challenged the white supremacist 113

114 Chapter Four society in which he and his audiences lived. Before, during, and after the Civil War, he translated the recurring themes of education, moral uplilt, self-improvement, and the qualities and direction of U.S. public life into a form carefully designed for a mass audience. These themes were suited for

the lyceum, but Douglass used them to promote the advancement of African Americans and to provide incisive criticism of U.S. society. In the process, he articulated an ideal of Americanness and called for adherence to this ideal by individuals of all racial groups. This assimilationist-integra-

tionist vision contained the revolutionary potential of what philosopher John P. Pittman has called social assimilation, a form of assimilation that involves not the passive acceptance of the cultural domination of a powerful group but rather social transformation, changing the attributes of society generally by shedding “an identity that is predominantly the effect of a system of oppression.” This chapter investigates the ways that Douglass’s lyceum speaking enacted and espoused freedom of the mind and body and also promoted cul-

tural transformation through a moral vision. First, a section describing Douglass’s own education and his participation in lyceum activity demonstrates how his lyceum speaking fit within his commitments to learning as a means of freedom and to agitation on behalf of African American humanity. The remainder of the chapter responds to three questions: How did Douglass render his arguments “popular” for the lyceum venues? How did Douglass enact his pedagogical philosophy? How did Douglass articulate a vision of the results of learning for U.S. society? Three sections, corresponding to these questions, examine, first, Douglass’s translation of his political

positions into the form of the popular public lecture; second, his use of models that could inspire emulation; and third, his depictions of a moral vision for the future of the United States. Evidence is gleaned from various lyceum speeches of Douglass’s, but each of the three sections takes one lec-

ture as its central point of reference: for the first, “The Races,” second, “Self-Made Men,” and third, “Our Composite Nationality.”

Degrees of Freedom Douglass’s conception of the value of learning coincided with views of ed-

ucation common in the nineteenth-century United States: depending on one’s perspective, education was a positive or a negative force, but its em-

powering potential was widely assumed. Douglass’s understanding of learning in its functional and moral dimensions was strikingly similar to

Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 115 that espoused by advocates of public education and also by New England lyceum promoters.* The power of literacy was also acknowledged, backhandedly, in the ubiquitous laws in slave states prohibiting anyone from teaching slaves to read: many whites feared literacy for its potential to foster discontent, to increase cooperation among slaves, and to promote insurrection and the eventual dissolution of the slave labor system. Slaves themselves sought the empowering possibilities of learning, sharing coded stories and songs, interpreting Christian scripture for its empowering potential, and sometimes, secretly, learning to spell, read, and write. For example, a former Alabama slave named Jenny Proctor recalled for a Federal Writers’ Project interviewer in the 1930s that she and her friends had studied a Webster’s Spelling-Book in the middle of the night by the light

of a pine torch. Frederick Douglass (in slavery named Frederick Bailey) had had the unusual experience of being taught to read as a child by his white mistress in Baltimore, until her husband learned of the activity and forbade it. Douglass then pursued self-education in a clandestine fashion, learning from the Bible, from newspapers, from Webster’s Spelling-Book, and from a copy of Caleb Bingham’s elocutionary manual, The Columbian Orator,

the first book he ever purchased. He later set out to share this knowledge with other slaves on an Eastern Shore plantation, in a Sunday school run by him and a white man named Wilson. In the school’s second meeting, a group of Methodist slaveholders, which included Douglass’s owner, attacked the assembled students and closed the school. A few years later, hired out to work on William Freeland’s farm, Douglass alone conducted a secret Sunday and weekday-evening school for between twenty and more than forty pupils. During this time, he also engaged in informal debates about liberty with other slaves, and he delivered abolitionist lectures to them.? Such secret meetings ignited the revolutionary potential of the mutual-education society: Douglass would later recall having met, in freedom, “several slaves from Maryland, who were once my scholars; and who obtained their freedom, I doubt not, partly in consequence of the ideas imparted to them in that school.” In 1838, shortly before Douglass’s own escape from slavery, a group of free African American caulkers who worked alongside him in the Baltimore shipyards ran a risk of punishment for fraternizing with a slave. They invited Douglass to join them in an association that they organized, the

East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society. They shared their own knowledge of reading, writing, and mathematics with Douglass, and he, “several times,” took “a prominent part” in their debates. He later recalled

116 Chapter Four with fondness, “I owe much to the society of these young men.”’” Douglass

had learned experientially to equate learning with freedom, to interpret a personal commitment to intellectual development as an attack on slavery, as a means of active resistance to systemic oppression.

Participating in an organized lyceum while yet a slave is an extraordinary circumstance, one that owed much to Douglass’s urban residency and his unusual intellect, tenacity, and quest for knowledge. In freedom, however, Douglass would work alongside black abolitionists who had participated in lyceums and literary societies organized and run by free African Americans in the 1830s and 1840s. Owing to his prior training, both in slavery and in freedom, Douglass shared their goals of empowerment through self-education. His early, clandestine study while still a slave in Maryland, as well as his active participation in the religious and political life of the black community in New Bedford, Massachusetts—where he and his wife, Anna Murray Douglass, settled shortly after his escape— prepared him well for the occupation he undertook in 1841.8 He became an abolitionist lecturer and antislavery agent. In August 1841 he first spoke to a racially mixed audience, at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket. In his Narrative, he recalled the trepidation of that moment, which brought him to the attention of white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison: “I felt myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down. I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I desired with considerable ease.”? As rhetorical scholar Gregory Lampe has observed, in this passage Douglass asserts that his “powers of speech both freed him from slavery and from being defined by another’s whiteness.” 19 In the Narrative, Douglass rhetorically creates a moment of self-transformation, as he breaks his silence and gives voice to his own ideas and experiences. Although the Narrative does not mention it, Douglass’s first speech to the Nantucket abolitionists was in support of a resolution condemning white northern prejudice as “the body-guard of slavery.”!! His first public

address to white people challenged them, defining their morality via the touchstone of the experience of black Americans. Douglass, who was legally a fugitive slave until December 1846, when he permitted English friends to purchase his freedom, achieved renown as an abolitionist lecturer, newspaper editor, and autobiographer (see figure 6). He traveled through the northern United States, as well as Canada, Britain, and Ireland, delivering impassioned antislavery speeches that drew on his personal experience and expounded his philosophical positions. In Rochester, New York, in 1847 he began publishing a newspaper, the North

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118 Chapter Four Star. Douglass’s editorial ventures were multiple: the North Star (1847-51), Frederick Douglass’ Paper (1851-60), Douglass’ Monthly (1858-63), and the New National Era (1870-74). He published several versions of his autobiog-

raphy, the first of which was intended to demonstrate that he had been a slave, a fact questioned by white northerners who found him too articulate and thoughtful. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass appeared in 1845, My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855, and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

in 1881 and, in a revised edition, in 1892. In writing and speaking, Douglass vigorously promoted the causes of abolition, the elevation of African American people, and woman’s rights. He spoke frequently at conventions and meetings, on scheduled lecture tours and anniversary occasions, and in churches and public halls. With so much material to study, scholars of Douglass have not systemat-

ically examined his lyceum speaking.!4 John Blassingame writes that Douglass first spoke to a lyceum in 1854, in Manchester, New Hampshire. In Life and Times, Douglass dated his significant lyceum participation to the postwar period, when he began receiving copious invitations from “colleges, lyceums, and literary societies.” Postwar lyceum speaking, Douglass wrote, provided him with a reliable and much-needed source of income, between “fifty to a hundred dollars a night.” Life and Times, however, contrasted Douglass’s “new vocation,” which was “full of advantages mentally and pecuniarily,” with his other activities for the enfranchisement and uplift of postwar African Americans. Scholars have accepted this contrast, with Waldo E. Martin Jr., for example, writing that Douglass’s lyceum lecturing “was secondary to his efforts to promote the elevation of his people.”!+ Extant texts of Douglass’s lyceum lectures suggest that his lyceum speaking was, instead, integral to these efforts, providing a forum for the diffusion of his reformist ideas. As a prewar abolitionist orator and postwar Republican stump speaker, Douglass spoke to black audiences, white audiences, and integrated audi-

ences. Since he was connected with prominent individuals within the black abolitionist community such as editor and physician Martin R. Delany, antislavery lecturer Charles Lenox Remond, and physician and jour-

nalist James McCune Smith, it is possible that he may have spoken at northern African American lyceums in the antebellum era. The state of scholarship on these organizations, and on Douglass’s precise itineraries and sponsors, however, makes such a supposition speculative. In the post-

war period, he certainly spoke at venues like the Douglass Institute, an African American association named for Douglass himself and founded in

Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 119 Baltimore in 1865 to promote intellectual and moral activity among young people. !4

Currently accessible evidence of Douglass’s lyceum speaking usually concerns his presentations sponsored by associations run by whites. Audiences at these lectures were at least sometimes racially mixed. In Cincinnati in January 1867, for example, controversy erupted over the attempted restriction of African American spectators to the gallery level for one of Douglass’s speeches. A correspondent for the Cincinnati Commercial thought it “a short-sighted policy to draw such lines when the center of attraction is himself of the tabooed.”!> In Life and Times, Douglass wrote that he never rose “to speak before an American audience without something of the feel-

ing that my failure or success will bring blame or benefit to my whole race.”!6 Not only his “failure or success” as a speaker but also his bodily

presence could call attention to racist practices and enact an argument against them. Although many African American public speakers were active during the midcentury period—including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles

Lenox Remond, Sarah P. Remond, James Sweat Rock, James McCune Smith, and Sojourner Truth—Frederick Douglass was the only African American to lecture regularly under the auspices of lecture-sponsoring associations run by whites, the only African American to become a national lyceum celebrity.!’7 In 1858 and 1859 Douglass’s name appeared on the New York Tribune’s list of available lyceum lecturers. In the 1860s he spoke before the Salem, Massachusetts, Lyceum for six consecutive seasons, delivering “Equal Rights for the Freedmen” (1864-65), “The Assassination

and Its Lessons” (1865-66), “On Some Dangers to the Republic” (1866-67), “Self-Made Men” (1867-68), “William the Silent” (1868-69), and “Our Composite Nationality” (1869-70). In the 1866-67 season, Douglass’s popularity as a lyceum lecturer in Iowa was surpassed only by that of temperance advocate John B. Gough. That same season his lecture tour of the West included an appearance before the Young Men’s Association of the City of Milwaukee, which made a $130 profit from the evening.!® Douglass’s vigorous lecturing schedule in 1866-67 coincided with signilicant activity by the Associated Western Literary Societies. Indeed, he maintained an affiliation with this cooperative association in arranging his lecturing schedules in the mid to late 1860s.!? His association with James Redpath’s Boston-based management bureau, however, is better documented. When Redpath, who had been active in the radical wing of the abolitionist movement, established the Boston Lyceum Bureau in 1868,

120 Chapter Four Douglass was among the first lecturers to acquire Redpath as a manager. Douglass appeared on Redpath’s annual published list of lecturers from 1869 through 1876.29 Douglass’s papers that are now preserved at the Library of Congress include a few handwritten schedules of lecturing engagements made for Douglass by the Redpath Bureau in 1872, 1873, 1875, and 1877. The most comprehensive lists include the date, place, sponsoring society, contact person, lecture title, and fee for each appearance. During this period, Douglass customarily earned between $50 and $125 per lecture, with $100 being his most common fee. He kept several lectures in his

repertoire at once: for example, he was scheduled to deliver “Santo Domingo,” “Self-Made Men,” “Recollections of the Anti-Slavery Conflict,” and “Our Composite Nationality” within a week in Minnesota during January 1873, and January and February 1877 found him giving “Self-Made Men,” “William the Silent,” “Recollections of the Anti-Slavery Conflict,” “Our National Capital,” and “John Brown” in Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Ohio.2! Douglass’s chief source of income during the late 1860s

and early 1870s was his lyceum lecturing, and his oratorical talents and widespread appeal meant that the Douglass-Redpath affiliation also proved lucrative for the Redpath Bureau, which received a 10 percent commission on Douglass’s lecturing fees.?2

Scholars have well documented Douglass’s powerful oratorical style, which, as Lampe observes, demonstrated the influences both of African American preaching and storytelling and of the elocutionary prescriptions, derived from Cicero and Quintilian, contained in Bingham’s Columbian Orator. Thus, Lampe writes, Douglass combined “the oral tradition of the slave culture with the classical rhetorical tradition.”2* The language that Douglass’s contemporaries used to describe his oratorical power is similar to that which Milwaukee commentators in the 1850s used to express the popular

eloquence of celebrated lyceum lecturers like Gough and Beecher. One contemporary said that Douglass’s platform performances exhibited “fire, not the quick and flashy kind, but the steady and intense kind.” He was “brim full of humor at times, of the dryest kind. You can see it coming a long way off in a peculiar twitch of his mouth; it increases and broadens gradually until it becomes irresistible and all-pervading with his audience.” Douglass, another contemporary wrote, spoke with “ease and naturalness”

while he “swayed the feelings of that surging multitude,” suggesting an “immense reserve force which on momentous occasions might be used with startling effect.” Garrison in 1845 had written that Douglass “excels in

pathos, wit, comparison, imitation, strength of reasoning, and fluency of

Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 12] language.”24 Douglass’s conversational style and carefully reasoned argument, his use of poetic imagery and striking cadences, and his attention to dramatic presentation and declamatory technique all attracted lyceum audiences just as they did groups at antislavery meetings. Whereas Douglass seems to have delivered his orations to antislavery meetings mostly without notes and sometimes impromptu, evidence about his lyceum lectures indicates that his most common approach was carefully to prepare a manuscript beforehand and then either deliver the text from memory or read it from a copy carried to the platform.?> In Life and Times, Douglass dated his experience of preparing closely argued, written texts to

1854, when he was invited to deliver a commencement address to the Philozetian and Phi Delta literary societies at Western Reserve College, then located in Hudson, Ohio. He gave a speech refuting scientific racism,

which he later adapted for popular audiences as “The Races of Men.” Douglass identified the “reading and labor expended” to produce the 1854 speech for a college audience as “needed steps” that prepared him for his career as a popular lecturer.2© In the 1890s he recommended the careful preparation of speeches as “solid and lasting,” in comparison to the “fitful outcroppings of genius” in spontaneous speaking.2”? The rhetorical conjunction between lyceum speaking and scholarly preparation in Douglass’s writing recalls the traditional emphasis of mass public education as a primary goal of lyceum activity. The educator speaking to pupils enacts the role of the careful scholar. Douglass’s development of standard speeches for lyceum performance,

by contrast, emphasized the entertainment function of lyceums. As a lyceum celebrity, Douglass prepared his own star turns. He composed a repertoire of speeches, often delivering a single lecture many times over a period of years. His papers in the Library of Congress attest to the fact that he rewrote and modified his texts over time, making changes in phrases and single words or updating temporal references.28 Like Wendell Phillips’s “Lost Arts” or T. Starr King’s “Substance and Show,” Douglass’s “Self-Made Men” became a lyceum staple. Writing of his development of this lecturing

standard in Life and Times, Douglass recalled an Irish statesman: “When Daniel O’Connell was asked why he did not make a new speech he play-

fully replied that ‘it would take Ireland twenty years to learn his old ones.’”*? Douglass also joked from the lyceum platform about “what a large and flourishing business can be done on a small capital” in public lecturing. “A new title and the same old lecture may be delivered once a year

in the same place, with about the same popular impression in its favour;

122 Chapter Four for scarcely one in a hundred, will catch and retain the exact forms of speech which constituted the essential excellence of the discourse. But here again I am reminded of the old saw about glass houses.”29 Joking, with disarming self-deprecation, about lecturers as charlatans repackaging

the same old content and about popular audiences as dupes, Douglass could establish rapport with his own audience, recognizing the spectacular function of popular lecturing and sharing the Barnum-like sense that the

public takes pleasure in knowing its own complicity in the trickery of entertainers. On public platforms, Douglass as orator and performer could be interpreted as both a curiosity and an inspiration. In an era in which the antics of the blackface minstrel show defined African Americans for many northern whites, Douglass’s scheduled appearance—as a serious orator who was also a black man—could draw crowds of white people curious to see an exhibition of what was to them an oxymoron.?! In Cincinnati in 1868, Doug-

lass began his lecture “Self-Made Men” to a mixed-race audience by referring to this very aspect of his popular perception. Paraphrasing Samuel Johnson on women preachers, he said, “Men come to hear Fred. Douglass

speak ... as the boy is amused with his dog when he stands on his hind legs—not because he stands well, but because he stands at all.”32 Using humor, Douglass exposed the status of curiosity to which many of his auditors restricted him. Also, by creating laughter through the quotidian image of the boy and his performing dog, he made the position of the curlosity-seeking audience less easy to inhabit, by demonstrating that the analogy did not work: just as the man speaking to them was so obviously different from a dog doing tricks, so those who joined in laughter at the image could not as comfortably maintain the role of the boy pleased by a dog’s performing beyond his expectations. It is a gentle attack on white supremacy but a savvy one, exposing the absurdity of a stereotype by trying it on for size and finding it so utterly inapt.?3 For many African Americans, however, Douglass could be understood as a model, an inspiration, a “representative man.” In 1841 he had heard the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet of Troy, New York, speak to a group of African Americans in New Bedford. Fifty years later Douglass recalled the transformative power of Garnet’s oratory: “Before hearing him I thought I

was a man, but after hearing him I knew I was a man and a man among men.”?4 This ability to inspire auditors with a sense not only of their humanity but also of their capacity for excellence was one that other African Americans attributed to Douglass. The clergyman William Henry Crogman

Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 123

remembered that, as a young man, he had heard Douglass speak in Boston’s Fanueil Hall: “There stood the orator and the man, and never since have I seen the two in such exquisite combination.” In the early twentieth century Francis J. Grimké wrote that “Mr. Douglass pointed the way—the way of persistent efforts to improve ourselves, and of manly resistance to all efforts to curtail our opportunities.”2> As an advocate, then, Douglass “personified his people’s cause,” as Martin observes, blending in his oratorical presence an individual experience of African American life and an exemplar of an ambitious and struggling people.*° Douglass enacted a sense of popular lecturing as both education and entertainment and created a platform persona of an engaging advocate and an incisive social critic. As “a man and a man among men,” Douglass argued for and exemplified the fundamental humanity of African Americans as well as the potential for social growth through personal advancement. In his lyceum speeches, Douglass as educator and Douglass as entertainer

emphasized the individual potential of ordinary people. Education, he prophesied, could transform ordinary people to result in extraordinary social consequences. In his lyceum speech “The Races” (also known as “The Races of Men” and “The Brotherhood of Man”), Douglass modified his 1854 commencement address for a popular audience, appealing to the common commitment to the people’s “common sense.”

Common Sense In “The Races of Men,” as in its predecessor, “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered” (Douglass’s 1854 address at Western Reserve College), Douglass argued that human beings derived from a single origin, not

multiple creations. Foregrounding the humanity of individuals of African

descent, he maintained that the dispute over single or multiple origins (monogenism versus polygenism, a major pre-Darwinian debate) masked

the more fundamental political, social, and moral question of whether African Americans were fully human and thus whether they could be appropriately enslaved.*’ Whereas the basic arguments in “Claims” and in “Races” are the same, the differences in the two texts illustrate Douglass’s understanding of the variation in arguments and appeals appropriate for a college audience and for a popular one. In “Claims,” Douglass appealed to a series of published authorities in support of his monogenist views and invited his audience of scholars to understand themselves as responsible for shaping public opinion. In “Races,” by contrast, he constructed a basis of

124 Chapter Four appeal in the “common sense” of the people. (An annotated transcription of “Races” appears as appendix 5.) On several occasions Douglass described his understanding of what a popular lecture should be in order to be successful. It should address a theme of widespread public interest, articulate ordinary ideas in unusual ways, and provide a measure of amusement. In one iteration of his lecture “Our National Capital” in 1877, for example, he observed: “Popular lectures, or lectures to be made popular, must be upon popular subjects, those in which the public have a warm and vital interest.” On many occasions he asserted the constant public interest in the theme of humanity. In one version of “Pictures and Progress,” he noted that “it matters very little what may be the text in these days. Man is sure to be the sermon... . He is before all books a study.” Originality of subject or expression was less important to a popular lecture than felicity, owing partly to

the capacities of lyceum lecturers, who, he joked, “of all men in the world ... have most reason to complain that the ancients have stolen their best thoughts.” Further, in an 1871 letter to James Redpath, Douglass identified entertainment as a central purpose of public attendance at

lyceum lectures, writing that “people do not attend lectures to hear statesmanlike addresses, which are usually rather heavy for the stomachs

of young and old who listen. People want to be amused as well as instructed.” 38

In keeping with an emphasis on popular subjects for popular lectures, Douglass began “Races” by rhetorically inviting his audience to understand his subject as vital: “The relation existing between the white and colored people of the United States, is the great and all commanding question for this age and nation to solve. The consideration of it in one or another of its manifold forms, is most in order on all occasions.” These simple declarative

sentences invite auditors to accept the subject with weighty seriousness, preparing them for the “silence and attention” that Bingham’s Columbian Orator deemed most appropriate for an audience for a speech. If the subject is “most in order on all occasions,” then the possibility of arguing that the subject is inappropriate for any specific occasion (including the particular speaking moment) is limited.?? In his introductory remarks, Douglass further created a role for the audience to inhabit. He observed that anyone “who can throw any light upon

[the subject] or upon any of its relations and bearings—no matter how humble his origin or how limited his attainments in other respects—may hope for a calm and candid hearing from every intelligent lover of his

Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 125

country.”49 The use of the third person for both speaker and audience member provides a means of abstracting the specific circumstances and , perceiving the speaker-audience interaction as paired roles. Anyone who wishes to identify with the role of an intelligent patriot must be prepared to give “a calm and candid hearing” to the speaker of the hour. Douglass’s

description of the speaker, one who may be of humble antecedents and limited achievement, can be read in multiple ways. It can be understood as simple deference; it can be understood as self-defensive masking behav-

ior.4! It can also be understood as a means of establishing credibility through a thinly disguised third-person reference to Douglass’s own personal experience in slavery. (By the time this version of “Races” was delivered in the late 1850s, Douglass had published two autobiographies, and his lite story was well known.) For who would be more able to “throw any light” on U.S. race relations than Douglass, one of “humble” origin and considerable “attainments”? Lyceum audiences favored argument from personal experience, and Douglass’s indirect allusion to his own life may well have reminded his auditors of his authority on his chosen subject. The indirection allowed his audience the pleasure of reaching that conclusion for themselves. Douglass’s other, more specific allusion to his own life in “Races” emphasized the notion of common sense, a construct within the speech to which Douglass frequently appealed. “I am as you know,” he said, “from the slave plantation—a bad School. I bring no pleasing arts to grace my

speech and win applause. I come only to speak for the simple truth.”4 Whereas the speech is far from simple, and Douglass was well prepared to please through artistry, the claim of speaking “simple truth” is a powerful appeal. It assumes that truth is accessible and easily comprehensible and that no artifice will shield it (because the speaker is unschooled in artistry). It suggests that the complexities even of the ethnological literature, ema-

nating from “the reputed learned and wise,” can be confounded by straightforward truth-telling. It resonates with biblical undertones and suggests a prophetic role for the speaker of “simple truth”: “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise,” says the apostle Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians, “and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” (The whiff of a mistrust of intellectualism that the “simple truth” passage contains are a decided shift from the more scholarly “Claims.”) Calling on the audience to judge the unity or diversity of human origins by “reason, and our ideas

and apprehensions of the wisdom[,] power and Goodness of God,”

126 Chapter Four Douglass created a context in which not only the ethnological arguments but also the role of “simple truth” could be correlated with divine inspiration as understood within a Protestant Christianity that assumed the priesthood of the individual believer.** “Claims of the Negro” consists of a scholarly review of recent ethnological literature, both polygenist and monogenist, with direct quotations and direct engagement with the arguments of polygenist works like Samuel G. Morton’s Crania americana and Charles Hamilton Smith’s Natural History of the Human Species. “Races,” by contrast, rarely appeals to published authorities, and its quotations come from the Bible and from a poem by William Cowper. Its fundamental appeal is to “common sense.” This appeal recurs throughout “Races” in homely images likely to amuse a popular audience,

especially one familiar with nonhuman animals. Arguing that African Americans are fully human, for example, Douglass asserted his inability to persuade the “scientific men” who were unable to discern “the exact position where to stop the negro in the Scale of Creation.” Instead, he said, “I speak to common men, men of common sense and common discrimination, men who never hesitate as between a man and a horse, as to which

is the horse and which the man.” Such a joke appeals to “simple truth” and to the ability of “common men” easily to discern truths seemingly occulted from those reputed to be wise. Describing the self-evident human capability of African Americans to learn and pass on knowledge to their descendants, Douglass observed that such an ability was not like that of

“the bear, who is no wiser to day than bears generally were a thousand years ago.” Again, the easily observed differences between humans and animals propound the simple truth of African American humanity. Asserting his own willingness to accept even polygenism if it can be proven true,

Douglass said, “Give me to know the simple truth and I will accept it, though it should make me first cousin to the lowing ox or the neighing horse.” The terms of the speech—as well as the laughter engendered by absurdity—make such a possibility preposterous and align the simple truth with common sense, or “horse sense.” In fact, even the sense of nonhuman animals testifies to “the complete manhood of the negro. The birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and the cattle upon a thousand hills, admit his mastery and own his dominion. The dog follows his black master as readily as his white master.”44 Animal images thus support commonsensical definitions of humanity, appealing to popular sensibility in ways that boost confidence in knowledge derived from experiential observation and received wisdom.

Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 127 Received wisdom about “races”—understood in “Races” sometimes as categories describing physical features like skin color and hair texture and sometimes as groups of people from a common country—unfortunately led Douglass into several stereotypes and into hierarchical rankings of cultures that undercut his emphasis on human unity. He described the Chinese as “secretive,” Native Americans as “taciturn” and “unapproachable.” Although compared to “ancient Bretons,” the peoples of West Africa were portrayed as living in a “barbarous and unenlightened” region. An acceptance of a “scale of Civilization,” on which the “Saxon is high in the ascendent,” opened up the possibility of an unquestioning acceptance of racial and ethnic stereotypes that the major portion of the speech actively resists, as well as the possibility of understanding assimilation-integration as a straightforward promotion of white European culture.4? Yet Douglass strove to resolve this tension through recourse to the major dichotomy of the speech, freedom versus slavery. Slavery is the cause of any lack of “cultivation” among African Americans, he stated, the cause of “our” ab-

sence from national political and social life. Both the articulation of stereotypes and also the ambiguous struggle to sustain a causal link between a perceived (and, within the terms of the speech, accepted) cultural “inferiority” of African Americans and the legacy of their history illustrate the challenges of the assimilationist-integrationist position and popular adaptation. The speech as a whole, however, encourages an understanding of “common sense” that supports a simple choice between freedom and slavery. “Races” develops an extended dichotomy, placing “on trial” the theories of

a single origin and multiple origins of humanity. The unity theory is opposed to the diversity theory, as “friends of freedom” are opposed to “enemies of freedom” and African Americans are understood as “men” or “merchandise.” Douglass develops the speech like an advocate at a trial, dramatically suggesting a courtroom case, with the popular audience as jury. Issues arise in a developmental sequence: Is the African American “a man or is he an animal?” If a man, then “are we veritable men?” Finally, if true men, do African Americans descend from the same family as other human beings? Addressing each of these questions in turn, Douglass then presents the dichotomy, as a simple truth, in a chiasmus that embodies a call to action: “The negro manhood must be acknowledged and slavery abandoned, or slavery must be sustained, and the negro’s manhood denied.”4° The chiastic structure, in which “negro manhood” envelops “slav-

ery,” suggests that the question of African American humanity is the

128 Chapter Four broader question of the age, encompassing the debate about slavery. Slavery thus becomes, rhetorically, not simply an economic or political system.

It is a manifestation of the deeper moral problem of denying the selfevident humanity of individuals of African descent. This attitude pervaded Douglass’s writing and speaking, which carried through the Civil War and black emancipation and on into the continuing

battles against white supremacy in the postwar period. During the war, Douglass articulated this idea as “abolition war” and “abolition peace” in speeches like “The Mission of the War,” in which he called for “no war but an Abolition war; no peace but an Abolition peace; liberty for all, chains for

none; the black man a soldier in war, a laborer in peace; a voter at the South as well as at the North; America his permanent home, and all Americans his fellow-countrymen.”47 In “Races,” delivered in the late 1850s and early 1860s, Douglass translated “Claims of the Negro” for a popular audience, retaining the clarity of the fundamental dichotomy between monogenism and polygenism, unity and diversity of origins, and subsuming such scholarly debates under the broader rubric of the recognition or denial of African American humanity. In “Races,” however, Douglass appealed not to scholarly authority but to a basis of knowledge called “common sense,” available to ordinary people through experiential observation and through faith in sacred texts. The appeal to “common sense” was strengthened through laughter—the laughter of recognition, of shared experience, of absurdity. Some “commonsensical” acceptance of ethnic and racial stereotypes and cultural hierarchies prevented an incipient critique of the “scale of Civilization,” although efforts to explain these hierarchies in relation to the moral crisis of slavery implied that placement on the “scale” was impermanent—social and cultural, not “natural.” For U.S. lyceum audiences engrained with the concepts of cultural hierarchy but also with the sense of the unquestionable good of “freedom,” “liberty,” and “civilization,” Douglass’s speech proposed a disruption of the permanence of racial hierarchies and an expansion of the ideal of freedom. Freedom thus shifted its meaning beyond a historical release from the tyranny of a British monarch to encompass the contemporary material conditions of African Americans. “Races,” in addressing the moral ideal of human freedom, constructed

knowledge as collective common sense, as received wisdom, as simple recognition of truths already known. In Douglass’s most popular lyceum address, “Self-Made Men,” he explored means of attaining new knowledge, of creating the honorable manhood of individuals.

Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 129

Common Man In various lyceum lectures, Douglass displayed the familiar pedagogical technique of teaching via models, portraying the lives of distinguished men as lessons to be learned and, to some degree, emulated. (Although Douglass was an active supporter of woman ’s rights and, for example, spoke at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention on behalf of the highly controversial res-

olution of Elizabeth Cady Stanton promoting woman suffrage, in his lyceum addresses he referred to African American manhood as “the very first proposition of the abolition creed.” The exemplary individuals that he cited were almost all men.)4® The lives of persons like U.S. president Abra-

ham Lincoln, the sixteenth-century Dutch revolutionary leader William the Silent, and the U.S. abolitionist and insurrectionist John Brown became models of moral courage in lyceum speeches such as “The Assassination and Its Lessons,” “William the Silent,” and “John Brown.”4? It was in “Self-Made Men,” however, that Douglass’s interest in teaching and learning via the lives of unusual individuals was most directly manifested.

In his popular lectures, Douglass described means of attaining knowledge: one could learn by observing the lives of distinguished others or by personal experience of significant events. In “The Assassination and Its Lessons,” for example, he said that human progress could be traced to “two kinds of teachers—great men and great events.” In keeping with an understanding of education as experiential learning, he observed that “most men

were taught by events,” such as the downfall of the Confederacy and the assassination of President Lincoln. Earlier, in “The Mission of the War,” he

referred to the South’s rebellion as “a rapid educator,” and later, in “William the Silent,” he spoke of war more generally as “a school” that “develops great characters, great deeds, great qualities.” In an 1860 version of “Self-Made Men,” he responded to Shakespeare’s metaphor of the world

as a stage with what he proposed as a more universal metaphor: “To all mankind, the world is a vast school.”>° Fully comprehending the lessons of experience and observation for noble, moral goals, however, required effort. “Self-Made Men” promoted that effort for individuals, both black and

white, partly through direct appeals to an ideology of uplift and partly through description of model individuals.

As Martin has observed, Douglass “espoused a_ representative Afro-American version of the dominant middle-class uplift ideology,” pro-

moting hard work, thrift, and self-improvement for moral ends, yet at times neglecting the conflict between moral and economic success.?! In an

130 Chapter Four industrializing society that promoted individualism and entrepreneurship, such a subject would have considerable appeal for many people who attended lyceum lectures and certainly for those who organized them. In Life and Times, Douglass noted that although “The Races of Men” was “seldom called for,” his lecture “Self-Made Men” was “in great demand, especially in the West.”>4 Douglass gave versions of “Self-Made Men” over the course of about thirty-five years, beginning during a lecture tour in Michigan, IIli-

nois, and Wisconsin in 1859. He gave the speech before lyceums and also before audiences at African American educational and religious institutions.°3 For African American auditors, the speech promoted an ethic of self-help and encouragement through inspiration; for white auditors, it supported the dominant self-improvement ethos while challenging it to encompass models of personal excellence derived from black American life. In “Self-Made Men,” an ethic of self-help and self-improvement is primarily one of individual responsibility, with the caveat that the legacy of racism and slavery called for a collective response in order for the individual African American to have the “fair play” needed for advancement. As Martin notes, during Reconstruction Douglass promoted individual selfreliance as well as federal aid to the freed people, reconciling these efforts as “mutually consistent” owing to the history of enslavement.*4 In his lecture Douglass defined self-made men as those who have risen “to the ranks of the admitted good and great men of their day and generation” without “the ordinary helps of favoring circumstances,” like wealth and formal education. Dismissing a simple explanation of individual uniqueness, Douglass suggested the availability of mental, moral, and social advancement to everyone when he identified the cause of these men’s success as “industry and application.”>> It was through one’s own effort and labor that success could be achieved, success defined ambiguously and hence in multiple ways: as moral courage, renown, learning, political leadership, or economic production. Such an emphasis on individual effort, and hence indi-

vidual responsibility for one’s own condition, resonated with lyceum audiences familiar with this laissez-faire, self-help philosophy. The limits of individual responsibility for one’s own condition, especially

in the face of human bondage, introduced the dilemma of personal selfreliance and the necessity of collective action to ensure individual opportunity. In an 1850s version of “Self-Made Men,” Douglass described what he asserted was observable fact: “The men who can get up will be helped up. The men who cannot get up will be kicked down.” By 1893 this phrase had

become “the man who will get up will be helped up, and... the man who

Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 13] will not get up will be allowed to stay down.”°© The earlier phrasing suggests that some are capable of advancement while others are not; the latter phrasing replaces the implication of variation in capacity with a variation in willingness to expend necessary effort. The earlier phrasing also suggests that the incapable will be attacked by those who are capable and already advanced; the latter, composed after bitter experience of continuing oppression of African Americans after emancipation, perhaps wishfully as-

signs a more passive posture to those who enjoy advancement, that of “allowing” the unwilling (who may yet be capable of rising) to remain inert. This amelioration, however slight, hints both at universal, though perhaps latent, capacity in individuals and also at the significance of action by the already “advanced” that does not punish but only assists.

The 1893 version issued a call: “Give the negro fair play and let him alone.” Fair play, however, required attention to the history of “barbarism” in Africa (another unfortunate stereotype, one that also underlines Douglass’s persistent assertion of the black American’s primary and fundamental] identity as an American) and of two hundred years of enslavement in the United States. “Throw open to him the doors of the schools, the factories, the workshops, and of all mechanical industries,” said Douglass. “If he fails

then, let him fail! I can, however, assure you that he will not fail....Ina thousand instances has he verified my theory of self-made men.”°” That is, black men have already demonstrated industry and application in the face of seemingly insuperable obstacles; with those obstacles removed, progress and success are inevitable. Further, the passage suggests that although individuals demonstrably can “make themselves” without the aid of schools, access to educational opportunities is a far better means to promote collective progress. Aligning African American experience with the dominant self-improvement ideology, which unquestioningly assumed access to the means of self-improvement, thus resulted in a certain amount of labored effort in “Self-Made Men.” Although Douglass stopped short of an explicit critique of the ideology itself, the paradoxes introduced in his speech illustrate some of the lacunae within the self-improvement ethic.® In addition to abstract discussions of the definition of self-made men and the causes of such men’s success, “Self-Made Men” included extended individual examples as well as brief references to others. The significance of having models to follow was explained in an early version of the speech, when Douglass described groups of boys chasing after Daniel O’Connell, “shouting his praises with ecstatic joy.” He explained their behavior: “They felt the better and nobler for doing it. They saw in the giant agitator, the

132 Chapter Four manhood of their dreams. He was the highest approximation to their ideal of human greatness, and [they] felt, that he belonged to them by right of discovery and the higher claims of a common blood.”?? O’Connell is exceedingly great but also one of their own. Both larger than life and a per-

son just like any other, the renowned liberator of the Irish Catholics embodies an imagined, “dream”-world manhood for his young followers, who link themselves to him, his cause to theirs, and his greatness to their potential. Rhetorically, the figure of O’Connell in “Self-Made Men” provides not only evidence of the importance of close communion with in-

spiring others but also the significance of maintaining the memory of models of greatness that can continue to inspire effort and moral courage. In keeping with Douglass’s integrationist impulses, the model men that he discussed in extended examples and mentioned briefly were both white and black. Here, then, he proffered an expansion of the canon of the great

and the good, demonstrating both the capacity and the willingness of African Americans to work hard and to achieve in the face of powerful obstacles. Black auditors could hear excerpts of a history of black achieve-

ment and locate models of greatness in people like themselves; white auditors could hear an expanded history with new names and be challenged to seek models of greatness beyond the limitations of their own racial boundaries. In “Self-Made Men,” Scottish stonemason, geologist, and writer Hugh Miller; American blacksmith and scholar of languages Elihu Burritt; and Hungarian exile Louis Kossuth, who had educated himself in an Austrian prison, took their places beside Benjamin Banneker, an eighteenth-century free man in Maryland who produced almanacs and worked as a surveyor of the District of Columbia; William Dietz, a servant in Al-

bany, New York, who became an estate manager, a draftsman, and a designer of bridges and railways; and Toussaint l’Ouverture, a slave in Saint Domingue who led a successful revolt that abolished slavery in the French colony and who later directed a rebellion that eventually established an independent Haiti. (In postwar versions of “Self-Made Men,” Douglass in-

cluded Abraham Lincoln on this list.) In this group, laborers apply themselves to study and become creators of knowledge and shapers of human space and human destiny. Banneker, Dietz, and Toussaint provide special models, which also refute ethnological claims of African American inferiority. Douglass repeatedly called attention to the color of these men. “With honest pride,” he said in

1860, “I turn to this black sage [Banneker] as in part blotting out the charge of natural inferiority so often brought against the negro race. ... He

Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 133 was black.” Dietz was also an exemplar: “His achievement if known, would

do more to elevate the popular estimate of the coloured race than any number of learned desertations [sic] on the natural equality of races.”°! Toussaint was a “slave” who “in an age of great men... towered among the tallest of his times.” Here slavery is metonymic for color, and the color term black, conversely, recalls the obstacles promulgated by the denial of

, African American humanity and thus the special strength of these exemplars.©°? By 1893 the degree of blackness of these individuals had become significant in relation to their rhetorical power as evidence to refute ethnological precepts. “I am sorry that Bannecker [sic] was not entirely black,”

Douglass, who was also of mixed racial ancestry, said, “because in the United States, the slightest infusion of Teutonic blood is thought to be sufficient to account for any considerable degree of intelligence found under any possible color of the skin.” Dietz, on the other hand, “was positively and perfectly black; not partially, but WHOLLY black,” and Toussaint “was

black and showed no trace of Caucasian admixture.”®* Racial purity seemed necessary for an effective refutation of pervasive racist assumptions derived from ethnology. Thus the color imagery in “Self-Made Men” repeatedly reinforced blackness, a blackness associated not only negatively

with social condition but also positively with personal education, invention, and bravery. In Douglass’s descriptions of Banneker, Dietz, and Toussaint, he rhetorically conjured authorities respected among European Americans to vouch for the authenticity of these individuals as models of greatness, in much the same way that Garrison’s preface and Phillips’s prefatory letter appended to the 1845 Narrative supplied a seal of authenticity for Douglass’s work. The appearance of such rhetorical validation constituted both a response to the exigencies of white supremacy and a reinstantiation of it. The judgmental figures presented in “Self-Made Men” hailed from politics, science, and literature. In many versions of “Self-Made Men,” Douglass quoted a 1791 let-

ter from Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Banneker.®* Jefferson was presented positively, as “the father of American Democracy” and as a person who “was not ashamed to call the black man his brother and to address him as a gentleman.”©> Douglass further noted publication of Dietz’s design for a New York City railway in an 1853 issue of Scientific American. Poets and ora-

tors, he observed, had vied with one another to declare the fame of Toussaint l’Ouverture. In various versions of “Self-Made Men,” Douglass cited

Phillips’s popular lyceum lecture, “Toussaint l’Ouverture,” as well as

134 Chapter Four similarly eponymous poems by William Wordsworth and John Greenleaf

Whittier. Scholars have noted that Douglass was mistaken in his assertions about the egalitarian principles of the slaveholding Jefferson.©’ This is true, and the tone of Jefferson’s ambiguous response to Banneker is open to debate. In “Self-Made Men,” however, the figures of Jefferson, the Scientific American, Phillips, Wordsworth, and Whittier function rhetorically as “expert” testimony adapted for specific audiences.°8 They are called on to accede to the significance of the work and lives of Banneker, Dietz, and Toussaint for audiences that could be expected to place value on them as credible witnesses. African American audience members were invited to realize that

the work of these men had received unusual recognition from powerful white elites; white audience members were invited to notice that other white persons had valued these men’s contributions and to do the same in turn, understanding Douglass’s representations of notable elites as models

for their own attitudes. Douglass’s attention focused on the models of noble black manhood. The reification of white authorities as unquestioned judges of worth is an unfortunate concomitant of his well-honed sense of

popular “common sense” and the informal rules of evidence for public persuasion.

The ideal of the “self-made man” was part of that general “common sense.” The theme was ubiquitous in the nineteenth-century United States. As noted in chapter 2, “Self-Made Men” was the title of a series of biographical articles in Holbrook’s Family Lyceum. Various lyceum lecturers, including New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, presented speeches with the same title.©? Harriet Beecher Stowe published The Lives and Deeds of Our Self-Made Men, in which she included “as a specimen of the graduates from

the American school of Christian Democracy” individuals like Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, Horace Greeley, John Brown, William T. Sherman, Henry Ward Beecher (her brother), and Frederick Douglass.’ Douglass’s own version of “Self-Made Men” comported with the ideol-

ogy of self-help and self-improvement familiar to nineteenth-century lyceum audiences. In Douglass’s treatment, this ideology was altered—and sometimes stretched almost to the breaking point—to adapt to the lived circumstances of African Americans. Instructing through the use of models

designed to inspire, promote pride, and encourage emulation, Douglass supplied a new canon of greatness that included both white and black men. He stated, “Race is narrow[,] manhood is broad. The one is special, the other is universal.””! He enacted rhetorical integration in various ways,

Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 135

notably by combining men of different racial backgrounds on his list of canonical models. In later iterations of the speech, he quoted the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar beside that of William Shakespeare.’2 This rhetorical equality was undercut, however, by the reliance on white witnesses to testify to the merit of many of the black men included as models of

greatness. |

Further, although within the speech Douglass identified industrious seltf-

made men with the third-person pronoun they—“they,” he said, “have worked harder, longer, better, and more wisely than we”—his self-presentation made his own oratorical performance an enactment of the concept of the “self-made man.”’* Even his critics did not fail to note the resemblance, and Douglass could respond: “I plead guilty at once to the implied charge that Iam a self made man, and what is more, I am not ashamed of that charge.”’4 The pride in having exercised “manly energy,” of having propelled oneself into honorable manhood, Douglass said, was both a potential pitfall for the self-made man and a motivational force for continued action in the face of obstacles.’> Douglass’s own experiences, well known through his autobiographies and his years in public life, had become part of

nineteenth-century common knowledge. Thus he embodied as well as articulated a model of African American manhood. Despite the great blight of racism and its manifestation in slavery, the

United States, Douglass asserted, was uniquely well suited for the selfmade man. It was the United States, as a home and as a democraticrepublican project, that deserved the application of individual energies. In “Our Composite Nationality” and other lyceum speeches, Douglass promoted a concept of the United States as a unique nation in which a great variety of individuals could flourish. Again, Douglass’s articulation of a national destiny both resonated with dominant assumptions about American exceptionalism, common in lyceum discourse, and also challenged those assumptions.

Uncommon Nation Douglass ended “Self-Made Men” in an appeal for the value of education — that reached beyond individual self-improvement into the social realm. In one version, for instance, he said: “After all, let us remember that neither self education nor education as generally received, will amount to much unless joined to some noble purpose.” Such a purpose, of which “in our

country there is no dearth,” involved waging “war upon every form ol

136 Chapter Four wrong no matter where, or in what company we find it.” Since, he noted, “on the side of the oppressors there is power,” such a moral crusade required the constant and best energies of a multitude of individuals.’ It was in correcting the errors and capturing the potential of life in the United

States, in translating the rhetorical promise of the Declaration of Independence—and expanding access to the ideal of equality—that Doug-

lass located a fundamentally moral call to action for those who had acquired the benefits of knowledge. In his lyceum speeches, the challenge of this call to action manifested itself in terms familiar to Christian theists: conviction of sin, repentance, and redemption. In applying these familiar steps to the secular religion of U.S. democratic-republicanism, Douglass maintained a theory of American exceptionalism and also challenged that theory. He reinterpreted history and adapted images of the present and future to invoke an imaginative model, a dream of national greatness, that encompassed a diversity of individuals and opinions. The paradox of concord achieved through a concerted avoidance of “the arrogance and intolerance” resulting from “general conform-

ity” rhetorically created an imagined future of national unity that

embraced individual variation.’ |

The identity and quality of the United States as a government and as a people were topics that Douglass frequently addressed directly in his popular lectures. During the Civil War, speeches like “Pictures and Progress” and

“Fighting the Rebels with One Hand” explored the odium of U.S. slavery , and called for the induction of black troops into the Union forces and for conversion of Northern war aims to an all-out fight against the injustice of slavery. In 1864 “The Mission of the War” urged continued patience among the Northern people for the prosecution of the war, bemoaned the persistence of Northern failure to comprehend that the “true mission” of the war was the moral cause of emancipation, and reinterpreted “manifest destiny” as the “sacred” opportunity of the war “to unify and reorganize the institutions of this country.” This “manifest destiny” is not a sense of righteousness in spreading U.S. institutions to other parts of the world but rather a salvation through bloodshed of the potentials latent in the error-filled U.S. institutions themselves.’? (In the 1870s Douglass would use manifest destiny

in its more conventional sense, arguing in favor of the U.S. annexation of Santo Domingo.)’? In the Reconstruction period, Douglass’s lyceum speech “The Assassination and Its Lessons” included criticism of Andrew Johnson’s

Reconstruction policies and warned against failing to sustain a moral war against race prejudice in peacetime. “Sources of Danger to the Republic”

Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 137

expanded these themes, calling for restraints on presidential power and urging a continued war against U.S. “reverence for slavery.” “We may do now from choice and from sacred choice,” he said, “what we did by military necessity.”8° Responding by moral choice would be far more noble and honorable than responding halfheartedly to the exigencies of wartime, as, he noted, the U.S. government did in the tardy and reluctant issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Douglass’s lyceum speeches during the war and its immediate aftermath were unabashedly political and partisan, as were many lyceum lectures of this period, which frequently bore titles like “The Present War,” “The State of the Country,” or “The Way to Peace.”8! Douglass’s lectures were designed to influence public opinion in support of, first, the prosecution of the war as an abolition war and, later, the prosecution of the peace as an abolition peace. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Douglass made consistent rhetorical efforts to shape the interpretation of current political and military events in light of the sacred, moral cause of the destruction of slavery and its roots in the denial of African American humanity. He would later work to shape the memory of the Civil War in similar terms.82 The cause of national progress through abolition war and abolition peace constituted the greatest “noble purpose” to which individuals could commit themselves. The relationship of individuals to national life was most clearly rendered in “Our Composite Nationality,” one of Douglass’s lyceum speeches of the late 1860s and 1870s.®? He identified as the specific task of the lecture the

exposition of the question “whether we are the better or the worse for being composed of different races of men.” The implicit answer was “the better.” The theme had been part of Douglass’s repertoire for many years. In “Claims of the Negro” in 1854, for instance, he approvingly cited James McCune Smith for observing that “our own great nation, so distinguished for industry and enterprise, is largely indebted to its composite character.”84 “Our Composite Nationality,” however, engaged the theme in relation to postwar politics and economics, discussing particularly the civil condition and treatment of Chinese immigrants. The “only wise policy” that the United States could adopt, in order to fulfill its destiny as “the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family,” Douglass argued, was to extend “a liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United States.” Incorporating immigrants from among “all nations, kindreds, tongues and peoples”—as soon as “they learn our language and comprehend the duties of citizenship”—was the

138 Chapter Four best way to create and sustain liberty, he said.®> In the vision of an inclusive and expansive future for the United States, Douglass rhetorically created an ideal that paradoxically meshed difference and unity.

In “Races,” Douglass had represented the value of human variation. “Without it the world would be a monotonous desert,” he said. “Difference is [as] essential as likeness. .. . Eternal wisdom alone was sufficient to pro-

duce likeness, without destroying Individuality, and difference without producing confusion.”8° The grouping of myriad individuals, valuable in themselves, into collectives, however, required a complicated mix of suppression of parts of immigrants’ previous identities and also of acceptance

of difference by earlier immigrants and the native-born. The rhetorical challenge of describing a form of assimilation that also required changes in

the cultural mores of the host country resulted in ambivalence in “Our Composite Nationality.”

Chinese immigrants, for example, were described as demonstrating a “capacity for improvement” in the desire to come to the United States. “The Chinaman may be a bigot” in a continuing and “superstitious attachment” to China, said Douglass, “but it does not follow that he will continue

to be one tomorrow.” Such remarks suggest an operative theory of U.S.

cultural superiority and a position of the United States as the world’s teacher. On the other hand, Douglass also implied that that very U.S. culture owed its strength to the contributions of varied individuals and that the United States would also benefit from the contributions of Chinese immigrants. He cited benefits in economic development, manufacturing skill, and agricultural improvement, and he reinterpreted religious difference as an aid to religious freedom: “I think a few honest believers in the teachings of Confucius would be well employed in expounding his doctrines among us... . Religious liberty always flourishes best amid the clash and competition of rival religious creeds.”8’ Freedom requires controversy—difference, not conformity. Thus “Our Composite Nationality” implies a bipartite structure in the assimilation of immigrants. Immigrants are to be “improved”

via the law, language, and national ideals of the United States, but the characteristics of that national culture are not fixed. They are also to be enhanced by engaging the ideas of immigrants. Douglass identified hostility to Chinese immigration as a manifestation of race prejudice, comparing native attitudes toward the Chinese in California with the hostility toward African Americans over the previous two centuries. Only proximity, contact, and listening could remove the “mountains of prejudice” that existed. The ideal of American unity, then, becomes

Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 139 in “Our Composite Nationality” inextricably bound up with the recognition of “human rights,” identified as “eternal, universal and indestructible.” The “sreatness and grandeur” of the United States, Douglass argued, “will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds.” Although “the policy of our government has been governed by race pride, rather than by wisdom,” the ex-

ercise of wisdom—of the experiential learning gleaned in “the school of affliction,” derived from long conflict between European Americans and Native Americans, between European Americans and African Americans— can constitute a noble purpose, a sacred choice.?? Douglass called on the

American public to throw off the trammels of its heritage of slavery and aristocracy and to realize the expansive and progressive potential of its foundational creed of liberty and equality. In lyceum lectures like “Our Composite Nationality,” then, Douglass propounded an ideal of Americanness that both accepted and challenged a dominant sense of national exceptionalism. Never one to suppress material evidence of Americans’ failure to live up to the rhetoric of freedom and equality, Douglass did not deny the vast disparity between national ideals and individual experience. He thus cautioned against a too-ready assumption of preexistent national virtue and reinvented a U.S. providential mission, defining it in moral terms as self-improvement on a na-

tional scale. At the heart of this mission was an active recognition of universal humanity. Imagining the potential for the United States to become the most “perfect illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen,” Douglass struggled with the paradox of unity and pluralism.®? Often envisioning an ideal civil society in which racial or ethnic identities were far less significant than “Americanness,” Douglass also imagined a national identity transformed through incorporation of difference.

Assimilating Difference Douglass’s lyceum lectures taught and enacted assimilation and integration for popular audiences. He rhetorically accepted premises long familiar to lyceum participants—like the value of ordinary experiential observation, the importance of learning via models, and the unique role of the United

States in world progress—and then adapted them to correspond to the lived experience of black Americans, changing the foundation of these premises in the process.

140 Chapter Four Through familiar metaphors, homely images, and accessible humor, Douglass appealed to a rhetorical construct called “common sense,” inviting auditors to translate their own experiential observations (Can I tell the difference between a man and a horse?) into a form of knowledge that recognized the universality and unity of humankind. This form of knowledge required only basic perception and rudimentary interpretation. That was, indeed, the point: even birds, fish, cattle, and dogs knew that an African American man was a man. The realization of the humanity of African American people was a foundational principle, but a first principle. Education for freedom and education as freedom, for Douglass, required further, indeed lifelong, learning, honing one’s ability to make moral judgments through industrious effort. The valuation of learning through experiential observation encouraged individuals to trust their senses, including their “moral sense.” This moral sense, however, required development, since, as Douglass noted in “Santo Domingo,” conscience “usually says what it is educated to say.”?9 Moving beyond basic perception, individuals could seek the intellectual and moral development necessary for personal or collective progress. Again, people were likely to learn through experience—personal experience of events or experiential observation of the lives of others. In lectures like “Self-Made Men,” Douglass proposed a canon of great men worthy of emulation. In keeping with his assimilationist-integrationist positions, these canonical figures were both white and black, providing an integrated history and an integrated set of models. An emancipatory education demanded not only contemplation but also action. In speeches about U.S. public life and future goals, Douglass articulated a series of noble purposes to which individuals could apply their ef-

forts. Foremost among these noble purposes was the application of individual energies toward the creation and maintenance of a national culture that could incorporate people and ideas from around the world. The strength and potential of the United States, in Douglass’s view, varied according to the mental progress of U.S. citizens toward an ideal in which racial or ethnic or religious differences ceased to be used as bases for social stratification. Nonetheless, individual, material circumstances in a country far short of this ideal demanded that action resulting from emancipatory

education include collective promotion of access to opportunities for everyone. Douglass’s lyceum lectures were among his most assimilationist productions. Delivered before varied audiences, sometimes racially homogeneous

Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 141 and sometimes integrated, they tended to uphold cultural ideals common to the white Protestant northern elite. They validated the promise of popular “common sense,” the ethic of self-improvement, and American exceptionalism. Yet Douglass also adapted and transformed these models by insisting on the centrality of African American experience in American life. If “common sense” might be considered to include an acceptance of race prejudice as “normal” and “natural,” then Douglass’s “common sense,” conversely, demanded an antiprejudiced recognition of the fundamental humanity of African Americans. If self-improvement ideology assumed access to the means of self-instruction and implied individual responsibility for one’s own economic condition, then Douglass’s self-help philosophy focused on moral courage and recognized that human progress was more likely if oppressed persons had open access to the ordinary “favoring circumstances” of schools and workplaces. If the ideology of American excep-

tionalism promoted a belief in preexistent virtue and a foundation of freedom, then Douglass pointed to a history of enslavement and aristocracy and challenged Americans to align themselves with a mission not to restore previous conditions but to envision the progressive potential of an expanded conception of freedom. The rhetorical distinctions among the dominant positions and the positions Douglass proposed were not characterized by unwavering consis-

tency. In defining Americans of African descent as fundamentally American, Douglass perpetuated degrading stereotypes of Africa. In reinventing self-help ideology to apply to the realities of nineteenth-century African American life, Douglass struggled with the conflation of economic and moral success and with the question of the degree of individual responsibility for one’s own situation. In envisioning an ideal U.S. culture to which immigrants would contribute freely, he grappled with the contradictory claims of unity and pluralism. The evidence of such struggles highlights the challenges of creating a popular and consistent assimilationist position, in which assimilation amounts to something other than an acceptance of dominant values and a suppression of variant ideals. Douglass’s exertions in redefining hegemonic concepts, however, disturbed the idea of these concepts as immutable. Douglass’s personal history and public self-representations meant that his own presence also issued a rhetorical challenge to dominant ideas. He

could use his own experiences to determine the level of his country’s progress toward an emancipation of the public mind. After his western lecture tour in early 1859, for example, Douglass wrote in Douglass’ Monthly:

142 Chapter Four “We think a negro lecturer an excellent thermometer of the state of public opinion on the subject of slavery. .. . The negro is the test of American civilization, American statesmanship, American refinement, and American Christianity. Put him in a rail car, in a hotel, in a church, and you can easily tell how far those around him have got from barbarism towards a true Christian civilization.”?! In this passage, Douglass placed himself, as individual “negro lecturer,” in the same position in relation to the state of U.S. moral development that he assigned in his lectures to African Americans generally. At the center of American moral life, African Americans became the means by which the progress of civilization could be measured. Douglass himself was publicly understood as an exemplary model of an African American “self-made man.” Indeed, in 1871 he said, resignedly, to

James Redpath that, with the public, he would “never get beyond Fred Douglass the self educated fugitive slave.” For him, however, the “mental advantages” of the lyceum platform included the opportunity to develop

and deliver speeches on a variety of topics, such as sixteenth-century Dutch history. Nonetheless, all his speeches, even “William the Silent,” orbited around the central theme of African American emancipation and uplift. As he put it in “Pictures and Progress,” “The speech I was sent into the

world to make was an abolition speech.”?2 In his lyceum speaking, he translated the themes of abolition war and abolition peace into popular terms. Lyceum performances also provided him with a forum to correlate these themes to a variety of subjects and means of expression, again enacting the potential of assimilation-integration through continuing emancipa-

tory self-education. Douglass seized his right to speak on many subjects—history and biography, political policy and personal growth. In relating these subjects to the central tenet of African American humanity and full participation in civil and political life, Douglass used the lyceum forum as a venue for public instruction and public exhibition of his arguments, both explaining and displaying the meaning of freedom. Just as the lyceum, especially during Reconstruction, provided a forum for the expression of African American reform discourse before a popular audience, so it offered an arena for the discourse of woman’s rights. The lyceum celebrity Anna Dickinson adapted gendered norms for public performance to challenge the conventions themselves. Like Douglass, Dickin-

son proffered an assimilationist vision that yet embodied a radical challenge.

S

Anna Dickinson’s “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 Ne ae ae ae

y 1869-70 Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was a celebrated lyceum lec-

Bi a well-known and successful social commentator and entertainer. Her major speech for that season, “Whited Sepulchres,” drew upon her experiences during an 1869 trip on the newly completed transconti-

nental railroad.! Adapting the then-standard lyceum forms of the travel narrative and the speech of social critique, as well as the image of the manifestly destined western pioneer-explorer, Dickinson shaped a figure of a

new representative woman and a public attack on the conventions of patriarchy. Such bold assertions were unusual on lyceum platforms, as was Dickin-

son’s platform presence. The proportion of public lyceum lecturers who were women was small throughout the nineteenth century, in keeping with contemporary norms that defined the public speaker as male and encouraged women to avoid asserting their own ideas in public forums. 143

144 Chapter Five Only a few women spoke on the platforms of town lyceums in the antebellum period, and several of these were actors or readers, often of the

works of others.* The Civil War brought enlarged opportunities for women’s action, and women delivering public lyceum lectures in their own words became somewhat more common, particularly in the immediate postwar period. For example, the Salem, Massachusetts, Lyceum, which sponsored only two women between 1830 and the Civil War, heard Clara Barton and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper during the 1866-67 season and Mary Livermore in 1869-70 and 1870—71.4 Yet even after the war,

most women who appeared before lyceums were readers, musicians, or dramatic interpreters, usually performing work authored by others. The Franklin Lyceum in Providence, Rhode Island, for instance, sponsored

women readers, impersonators, and musicians in the late 1860s and throughout the 1870s. That lyceum, however, also presented an anomaly: Anna Dickinson, a woman orator who appeared year after year and addressed, in her own words, issues such as labor, poverty, and the civil and

political rights of women.? In 1868 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, herself a lyceum lecturer, wrote of Dickinson that “we boast to-day that the most popular American orator is a woman.”® Dickinson’s fame and commercial

success rivaled that of lecturing stars like John B. Gough and Wendell Phillips (see figure 7). A spectacular star, Dickinson was gifted in dramatic presentation, and her lyceum performances both followed convention and also translated reformist ideas for a mass audience. Dickinson’s 1869-70 speech in Providence was “Whited Sepulchres.” In Providence, as in Worcester, Quincy, and Boston, Massachusetts; Albany, Buffalo, Elmira, and New York, New York; Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, and Portsmouth, Ohio; Flint, Michigan; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; St. Louis, Missouri; and Omaha, Nebraska, audiences heard Dickinson dramatically re-create her own experiences in the West that had occurred the previous summer. Anna Dickinson, accompanied by her brother John, a Methodist minister, had traveled the new rail lines all the way to California. They made extended stopovers for sightseeing and trekking, including

a four-day visit to Salt Lake City. From this experience she developed “Whited Sepulchres,” a critique of “the underlying theory in regard to the proper place and subordination of women” that she saw as universal, pervasive, and pernicious, a theory that reached its “logical conclusion,” according to Dickinson, among the polygamists of Utah.’ (A transcription of “Whited Sepulchres” as performed in Quincy, Massachusetts, in January

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146 Chapter Five 1870 appears as appendix 6; a transcription of an earlier, partial preparation text appears as appendix 7.) Dickinson’s lecture did more than present an imaginative re-creation of a past location and moment within a present, different location and moment shared with her audience, a representation of a city within the Utah desert in mid-June reproduced in a public lecture hall in a Massachusetts town in January. In sermonic language, she also rhetorically constituted space and time within the text of the speech, borrowing from the imperialist ethos of a society heady from the symbolic conquering of a continent through the completion of the rail network. At the same time, the lecture challenged the assumptions of this society. Dickinson presented a revisionist view of the links between East and West and explored the terrain of an imagined social landscape, representing the edifices of human institutions as resting on a vast, global substratum of patriarchal theory.® Seeking a place in the world for women to realize their own complex destinies, she also presented a vision of an alternative spatial organization—imagined as divinely sanctioned—in which doors to educational institutions would open to women and women could control their own homes and lives. This revised social structure was predicated on a preexisting natural law, which

she represented as the timeless and divine essence of an individual woman’s immortal soul. Social institutions were time-bound, and even rocks and trees were bound in geologic time, but a woman’s soul was made for the “sublimer regions” of eternity.? Dickinson thus presented in “Whited Sepulchres” a reformer’s vision of

the newly linked continent and its social mores. She used conventional lyceum forms—the travel narrative, the eyewitness account, even the antiMormon diatribe—as means of critiquing the social and cultural environment that she and her audiences inhabited. This chapter demonstrates the ways in which Dickinson used the conventions of postwar lyceum practice in “Whited Sepulchres” in order to envision the possibility of social change, of the progressive potential of new spaces where women could live. It was through a multilayered re-creation of space and time, constituted rhetori-

cally within the lecturing event, that Dickinson invested conventional forms with new potentials. Conventional forms and ideas, however, also resulted in unresolved conflicts within “Whited Sepulchres,” involving woman ’s status as individual soul and woman’s status as mother, responsi-

ble for other souls. A close examination of this lyceum lecture, supplemented with commentary from contemporary newspapers and Dickinson’s

personal letters, offers the potential for understanding Dickinson’s

Anna Dickinson's “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 147 inventional processes in reshaping lyceum conventions for reformist purposes. Such a reading suggests the limits of what was possible for reformers in the lyceum, who promoted social critique while also responding to the exigencies of the marketplace. To this end, the chapter begins with a section that examines Dickinson’s rise to the status of celebrity and also describes the 1869 excursion that led to the development of “Whited Sepulchres.” The remainder of the chapter is a reading of that speech, examining it as a popular form of the Protestant sermon, exploring the attributes of the speaking persona, and investigating the rhetorical representations of space and time within the text. Performing within the conventions of the popular lecture, Dickinson found space for harsh criticism of contemporary social practice.

Dickinson’s Heritage Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was born on 28 October 1842, the youngest of five children of John and Mary Edmondson Dickinson, abolitionist Quakers of Philadelphia.!9 Both of John Dickinson’s grandmothers had been Quaker preachers. A dry goods merchant and also a committed antislavery speaker, Anna’s father died when she was very young. Mary Dickinson taught her children from the Bible and from literary classics, including Shakespeare, and Anna secretly devoured the verse of Lord Byron and avidly perused the daily newspapers. Quaker schools provided her with what formal education she received, and she began paid employment at fifteen, working as a copyist, schoolteacher, and then, briefly, as an adjuster for the U.S. Mint. When she lost her position at the Mint in early

1862, after publicly denouncing the actions of Union general George McClellan, earning a living by some other means became a pressing concern. Her career as a public figure had begun several years previously. In 1856 she published an article in Garrison’s Liberator concerning a vicious attack on a Kentucky abolitionist. She first spoke publicly during an open debate at a Friends of Progress meeting in Philadelphia in 1860. The subject under discussion was “The Rights and Wrongs of Women.” Gifted with a capacity

for impassioned invective and dramatic narration, she accepted wartime invitations to lecture in New England on emancipation and on the cause and course of the Civil War. She first spoke on a lyceum platform in November 1862 in Boston, where she delivered “Hospital Life,” based on her experiences among wounded soldiers in Philadelphia. She earned $100 for

148 Chapter Five this appearance. It was the 1863 congressional elections, however, that catapulted her to prominence throughout the Union. She stumped for Republican candidates in New Hampshire and Connecticut, and many political leaders attributed the Republican victories in those states to her speeches. Speaking on behalf of the reelection campaign of Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin, she went into the Pennsylvania mining region, reportedly

gaining the respect of one group of miners when she remained intent on speaking even after a bullet clipped a curl of hair from her head.!! To her supporters, Dickinson, who turned twenty-one in 1863, had become the Joan of Arc of the Union cause. To her many critics, she represented a monstrous attack on accepted gender norms. By January 1864, however, she had become both celebrated and notorious, a public woman known for her considerable oratorical skill. On the sixteenth of that month she delivered an invited speech, “Words for the Hour,” in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives before congressmen, senators, and Abra-

ham and Mary Todd Lincoln. She designated the proceeds—more than $1,000—to the Freedmen’s Bureau (even members of Congress paid admission). Newspapers throughout the country proclaimed the unparalleled

event: a woman had spoken about contemporary politics in the House chamber to an assembly of the most powerful Union political leaders. Her name was made. Unable to pursue a political career because of her sex, she invested her energies after the war in vigorous lyceum activity. Dickinson took to heart a sense of the lyceum as a moral force. Having come to public speaking

through a commitment to the abolition of slavery, she continued to espouse social reform in her postwar career. Reminiscing about the midcentury lyceum in a letter to the New York Herald in 1892, she wrote that “the lyceum platform was a lay pulpit” from which was preached a gospel of “the rights of a human being as a human being, regardless of sex, color, race or condition.”!4 Normally presenting one major lecture each season, interspersed with either lectures from previous years or new lectures being

assayed, Dickinson spoke on such hot-button issues as prostitution, polygamy, the social and legal rights of women, immigration, trade unionism, and monopoly capitalism. On the postwar platform, controversy had itself become a form of public entertainment, and Dickinson delivered controversy in spades. Her most successful lecture, however, was a dramatic narrative describing and interpreting the life of Joan of Arc.!3 Dickinson’s plattiorm manner ensured her popularity. Helen Potter, who

attended lectures and observed lecturers intently enough that she could

Anna Dickinson's “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 149 later impersonate them, described Dickinson’s appearance and performa-

tive lecturing style: |

This extraordinary gifted lady, as a platform celebrity, was a slender girl of medium size, eloquent, magnetic, and unsurpassed in extemporaneous oratory. Her lithe figure, long arms, and luxuriant dark brown hair, slightly

turned at the ends, gave her a dramatic appearance to begin with. Her speech was marked by rising inflections at the end of sentences, the remainder being given in a monotonous tone of voice, with almost rhythmic pro-

longing of accented syllables. . . . Her action was pronounced and also rhythmic or accented. Journeying from right to left of the platform, with a halt or swing on each measured step; pushing back, now and then, her heavy locks; her eyes flashing as she coursed from side to side with defiant, accented stride, her hands clasped behind her; or, standing still and resolute as a Napoleon, and pointing at a wrong, personified and cowering before her—she was the very acme of fiery eloquence.!4

Newspaper writers often called her “magnetic” or “eloquent,” but Potter’s vivid description gives a clearer picture of what audiences would have ex-

. perienced at a Dickinson lecture that led to the label “magnetic.” Her speech texts, including “Whited Sepulchres,” contain simulated dialogue and personifications of abstractions, and Potter’s report suggests that Dickinson not only uttered but also performed these dialogues. On the stump and on lyceum platforms, Dickinson developed a distinc-

tive and dramatic lecturing personality. In 1892 she wrote about the ephemeral quality of a speaker’s personal dynamism, the ineffable something that induces audiences to participate imaginatively in the world the speaker makes. She wrote in abstract terms, but she could have been describing qualities of the lecturing persona that she developed: “Present, visible personality, the nameless something we call magnetism with a soul and a brain behind it, is if not lasting, certainly the most absorbing and powerful influence to which masses of men and women have ever succumbed or ever will yield.”!> Eloquence for Dickinson was thus an aspect of performance that encompassed passion and intellect, moral force and captivating speech. This persuasive power was also a capacity specific to an individual, experienced by others in the ephemeral interaction of the lecturing event. The celebrated persona called Anna Dickinson, popularly imagined as a young American Joan of Arc on political campaigns in the midst of a national crisis and later as the magnetic Queen of the Lyceum, ensured pay-

ing houses throughout the country. Dickinson’s lyceum career was

150 Chapter Five economically successful, at least in the 1860s and early 1870s. (Her unpopular support of Horace Greeley in the presidential campaign of 1872, com-

bined with the decline of the lyceum in the wake of the panic of 1873, precipitated her pursuit of a new, less successful career in the theater.) During the height of her lyceum travels, she regularly lectured throughout the Northeast and into the Plains; in 1869 she spoke as far west as San Francisco; and in 1870-71, when “Jeanne d’Arc” was her major speech, she extended her regular routes with a tour of the South.!© By 1872 she was earning $150 for an evening’s lecture in towns like Bloomfield, Connecticut; Cuba, New York; and Xenia, Ohio, whereas she could command $400 in Philadelphia and $300 in Chicago.!’” During this period, Dickinson was one of the best-paid lecturers on the lyceum circuit. Her earnings supported her and her natal family. The excursion to the West, from June through September 1869, was depicted in a letter that Dickinson wrote home as recreation, as “wanderings for pleasure, & sight seeing.”!® In several locations, Dickinson did “hoot,”

as she called lecturing in her private correspondence. For example, in a speech in Virginia City, Nevada, she criticized local residents for the drinking and gambling that she found to be ubiquitous there. In San Francisco,

she delivered a “vigorous” denunciation of the vicious treatment of Chinese immigrants at the hands of “American freemen” in that city. She was subsequently feted by local Chinese leaders.!? Dickinson also spoke in favor of woman suffrage in San Francisco, and the members of the Woman

Suffrage Association of that city gave a public breakfast to demonstrate their admiration for her.29 Although the California speaking engagements helped to fund the trip, Dickinson did not speak on a regular basis during the summer.2! Instead, she and her brother explored lakeshores, trekked in the mountains, and toured mines, schools, missions, and other notable sites of the West.

An observant traveler, Anna Dickinson described in lush detail the scenery and people of the West in long letters to her mother, Mary Edmondson Dickinson, and her sister, Susan Dickinson, who were back home in Philadelphia.22 (Excerpts from these letters appear as appendix 8.) Writing of the stopover in Salt Lake City, however, Dickinson simply promised her mother descriptions of the city and its inhabitants at a later time: “I will not dilate upon that now as J have so much to say about it.—Must wait for longer space & time, as I cannot end I will not begin.”2* She would find

space and time to articulate her observations and opinions publicly in “Whited Sepulchres.”

Anna Dickinson's “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 151 As Anna and John Dickinson were traveling westward toward California, they encountered the members of the Committee on Ways and Means of the U.S. House of Representatives, and they joined the committee on a special train through Utah’s Weber Canyon. Later they shared the stagecoach journey from the rail line to Salt Lake City with the congressional

leaders, arriving on Saturday, 19 June. The entire party stayed at the Townsend House, where a serenade by Captain Croxall’s Brass Band attracted a curious crowd late on Saturday night. The congressmen continued on to California on Sunday, although Iowa Republican William Boyd Allison, lovesick over Anna Dickinson, was loathe to depart. Anna and John stayed on in the Mormon city until Wednesday, 23 June, since in one day, as Anna wrote, they “had not seen the half we wished to see.”24 Dickinson delivered a version of “Whited Sepulchres” first in California and then later from the Plains to the Northeast.2? During the 1869-70 lecture season, she sometimes delivered her suffrage lecture “To the Rescue,” which also drew on her western experiences, but “Whited Sepulchres” was the year’s major offering. The speech was topical, or as the Boston Advertiser put it, “Whited Sepul-

chres” “hit upon a real issue” and “a living subject.” Not only did eastern audiences have a renewed interest in the Mormons’ western enclave now that the railroad made it so much more accessible, but during 1869-70 the residents of Utah Territory petitioned Congress for admission to statehood, a status that would come only in 1896. Further, Congress was debating the Cullom Bil, which placed restrictions on polygamists; it passed the House in March 1870 but did not reach the Senate floor.26 Audiences for “Whited

Sepulchres,” whose newspapers frequently discussed Mormon Utah, would perceive the political implications of the speech. A comparison of an

early preparation text in Dickinson’s own hand with newspaper reports throughout the season and with a stenographic report of her lecture as presented in Quincy, Massachusetts, on 6 January 1870 evinces Dickinson’s efforts to keep her lecture current through the season.’ In Quincy, she referred to events occurring since her summer trip, including Vice President Schuyler Colfax’s October visit to Salt Lake City, as well as a sensational, ongoing trial in New York, in which Daniel McFarland was being tried for the November murder of Tribune journalist Albert Richardson.

In keeping with expectations for the lyceum, Dickinson’s “Whited Sepulchres” exhibited both educational and entertaining aspects. It provided detailed descriptions of western places and people to audience mem-

bers who might never visit the sites or meet the people, and it did so in

152 Chapter Five dramatic, and sometimes melodramatic, fashion, as Dickinson told captivating stories filled with dialogue and engaged in simulated dialogue with imagined interlocutors. “Whited Sepulchres” amply fulfilled the requirements of the popular lecture: it contained instruction and entertainment, it exhibited singleness of purpose, and it provided evidence from personal experience. It was engaging, capable of sparking thought and promoting reform-minded responses. Dickinson, however, skillfully employed these forms to new purposes, establishing a revisionist view of contemporary U.S. society and creating her own interpretation of social institutions. Dickinson, a young, popular, and experienced lyceum celebrity, thus personified the role of cultural commentator, ferreting out and exposing social ills. Reflecting on her career in 1892, she recalled her first speech at the Friends of Progress meeting in 1860, crediting her family origins with her enthusiasm for denouncing evil. “Fighting and preaching wedded,” she wrote, “ought to have a child of action, and that is the stock from which I erow.”28 Sprung from Quaker preachers and passionate abolitionists, she performed a sense of duty and heroic mission to illuminate wrong and illustrate remedies. Denunciations of wrongdoing and calls to redemptive action were familiar to her audiences, of course, since many, perhaps most, of them had regular exposure to such utterances in the form of the Protestant sermon.

The Lecture as Protestant Sermon Dickinson’s “Whited Sepulchres” not only adapts lyceum conventions of

the travel narrative and eyewitness experience, but it also represents a popular, nonsectarian version of a Protestant sermon. Dickinson herself understood lyceum lecturing as sermonic, and several contemporary newspaper writers labeled “Whited Sepulchres” a kind of popular sermon. The Zion’s Herald of Boston praised her exhibition of “the best style of pulpit eloquence,” and the New York—based woman suffrage newspaper the Revolution said that Dickinson had “stood like Dante on the shores of Inferno” and had “come back to tell her blinded, sinning and guilty nation the horrible story of woman thus wronged, thus outraged, by the religion and republicanism of America.” The Revolution might be expected to endorse Dickinson as a prophet and to interpret the object of her scorn as U.S. institutions, but even a writer in the Boston News, who imagined the lecture as a straightforward anti-Mormon discourse, could encourage readers to attend it on a Sunday, on the grounds of its sermonic character: “We do

Anna Dickinson’s “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 153 not approve of Sunday entertainment of whatever kind; but this lecture, we hear, is in fact a sermon, quivering with Christian compassion for the outraged women of Utah.”2?

Dickinson’s lecture abounds with references to Judeo-Christian scripture, both in direct quotation and in allusions. These would have resonated distinctly with typical lyceum audiences. “Whited Sepulchres” takes its title

from the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.”39 The theme of external beauty versus internal decay—of death encased within apparent vitality—recurs throughout the speech, and the condemnation implicit in crying “woe” describes the lecture’s vituperative attacks on U.S. religious and political leaders who

upheld “theories” that dealt death to women. In the lecture, Dickinson refers to parts of the Sermon on the Mount, and in the final three sentences she alludes to seven different scriptural texts, from the older cre-

ation story in the first chapter of Genesis (which propounds the simultaneous creation of male and female) to an invocation of the dignity

and sanctity of the individual human soul as a God-created and Godinspired being, and on to fiery apocalyptic visions of Isaiah, 2 Peter, and Revelation. As a popular sermon, “Whited Sepulchres” provides description, condemnation, and hope for redemption. Judeo-Christian scripture is the foundation upon which the sermonic edifice rests. A traditional Protestant sermon of the period would begin with the quotation of a biblical text, explicate that text, and then apply the moral principles gleaned from the text to contemporary life. The conventions of the supposedly nonsectarian lyceum, however, frowned on following this cultural form too closely, and Dickinson’s sex made problematic her adoption of an explicitly ministerial persona.?! Her “text,” then, in “Whited Sepulchres” was the example, the case study, of social and moral life in Brigham Young’s polygamous Utah. An Albany, New York, newspaper even identi-

fied Salt Lake City as “the text to the real burden of her plaint.”>4 Polygamy in Mormon Utah is cast in the lecture as the ultimate negative consequence of an acceptance of the idea of woman’s “natural” subordination to man. Morally, it represents the depths of hell, presided over by a demonic figure named Brigham Young.?* “Whited Sepulchres” melodramatically portrays Mormonism as an irredeemably evil villain, an interpretation consistent with other anti-Mormon lectures and published writings of the period. Nonetheless, the villain in “Whited Sepulchres” has powerful

154 Chapter Five associates throughout the world, and this is a distinct departure from the | typical view. Polygamy in this text is constituted not so much as the peculiar practice of an alien tribe but as the logical outcome of universal patriarchal principles. The application of the lesson calls for an alternative view of gendered humanity, one based on a recognition of “God’s life” incarnated within every human soul. “Whited Sepulchres” relies on scriptural authority as a basis for its moral and ethical positions. Yet the speaker secures to herself the latitude of arranging and interpreting scriptural references according to the dictates of her own conscience. The speaker as represented within the text gains authority through expectations of female piety, responding to the outraged purity of the women of polygamy. This source of authority became a site of controversy, illuminating the limitations and contradictions in cultural expectations of “womanly” piety and purity, especially as such expectations meshed with norms of the public platform.

Woman as Speaking Persona Although fewer restrictions on women’s speaking in public existed after the Civil War than before it, Dickinson was still a special case.*4 With her “name and fame as a lecturer in behalf of humanity, and especially her own sex, .. . known from ocean to ocean,” as a newspaper in Dayton, Ohio, put it, and with her history of speaking on topics as controversial as slavery and prostitution, she had a greater capacity for introducing alarming subjects to popular audiences than did most of her contemporaries. One newspaper commentator, writing about “Whited Sepulchres,” called Dickinson unique: “We doubt if there is any one else who could have stood

in Institute Hall last night and said what she did and escaped being hissed or silenced; and she did it and actually pleased her audience in doing it.”*>

Not all commentators thought audiences were “pleased,” however. The question of whether the subject of “Whited Sepulchres” was “indelicate” or “unwomanly,” in fact, elicited considerable discussion in the newspapers during 1869-70. The Milwaukee Sentinel reported regret “that Miss Dickinson has chosen so foul a vehicle in which to move her sex toward a higher life.” Another journalist turned Dickinson’s own theme of appearance versus reality against her: “She rolls up abominable, unwomanly doctrine in the garb of beautiful language.” A Cleveland paper insinuated that the unmarried lecturer might be guilty of sexual impropriety: “Anna discourses of

Anna Dickinson's “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 155 wifehood, motherhood, and connubial matters generally with a fluency that could scarcely have been expected in one of such limited experience in these things.” But Dickinson had her defenders. The Boston News reported that “the friends of the lady indignantly deny the charge . . . that

the speech has any thing indelicate or unmaidenly in it,” and in > Charlestown, Massachusetts, a Chronicle reporter cited “pure-hearted women” who had called Dickinson’s lecture “beyond reproach” and “exquisitely refined and womanly.”*’ Such variations in editorial opinion illustrated a public negotiation of the norms for public speaking by women, which pointed up the tension between expectations of purity and piety: Should woman’s presumed purity dictate ignorance and therefore silence on human sexuality, or should her presumed piety dictate active, public engagement in moral issues involving the oppression or victimization of women individually and collectively? None of the reporters went so far as to question the identification of purity and piety as naturally “feminine” qualities. %®

Dickinson’s advocates and critics issued competing statements about her “womanliness,” rhetorically wrangling not only over the norms of public speech but also over the social definition of womanhood. The speaking “I” of “Whited Sepulchres,” however, unapologetically assumes authority as

both speaker and moral force. The speaking persona emerges as a representative woman, a term by which Dickinson herself was sometimes identified. The journalist Nellie Hutchinson, for example, once wrote about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Anna Dickinson as “repre-

sentative women”: the “mother of men,” the “executive power,” and the “glorious girl.” During Dickinson’s 1869 journey, a newspaper in Stockton, California, called her “the most creditable living specimen of representative American womanhood.”?? This use of representative does not denote a typical example of the type. Rather, it suggests an exemplar, an individual ca-

pable of standing in for others or giving voice to the unexpressed needs and desires of others. It is this kind of representative woman who speaks “Whited Sepulchres,” seizing the authority to explicate and interpret even the ineffable soul-stirrings of other women: “I speak for the hearts of tenderer and sweeter women, when I speak these words and I tell you what is in their souls.”49 The representative woman as speaking persona shifts among various attitudes. She is successively the specific “I” who witnesses western scenes,

the instructor who provides information gleaned through study about the social and political hierarchies in Utah, the moral “I” who receives a special

156 Chapter Five call to vigorous action on behalf of oppressed women and then interprets her own experiences in light of that call, the social critic who expounds the theory that social institutions are fundamentally patriarchal, the debater who introduces counterarguments in order to rebut them, the advocate for women’s access to education and the franchise, and, finally, the soul who transcends time and space, offering a postapocalyptic vision that serves as a promise and a call to action in the preapocalyptic present. Adopting a series of roles in a succession of scenes, the speaking voice of “Whited Sepulchres” ranges from the specific space of Salt Lake City to a transcendent space, where she goes “on from height to height of sublimer regions.” She ranges in time as well as space, journeying from sunset after “a lovely day in June” to the “rising glory of the morn”—having thus passed through the night—and on beyond the sunrise to the postapocalyptic timelessness of eternity.*!

Via the progressions in space and time, “Whited Sepulchres” articulates a fundamental dichotomy between death and life, between death within seeming life and a potential life available to those who can envision and adopt “God’s life.” The metaphor of the whited sepulchre establishes the theme of decay within what is outwardly beautiful. In a moral sense, the text argues, those seemingly live individuals who propound and accept the

death-dealing theories of women’s “natural” subordination are already dead. Life, in this view, is found in “God’s life,” which is truly natural. Women can manifest this spiritual life in the present order either by resisting their own subordination (exhibiting the “fires of life”) or by acting on behalf of others who are oppressed (the speaker is called to “live to work,” and she proposes that admonition as an important part of a “new proverb” for everyone) .42

The remainder of this chapter illustrates the dramatic transformation of lyceum conventions into reformist social commentary. It explicates the sermonic discourse of the representative woman as she conjures three differ-

ent spaces, or “scenes”: the natural scene, the human scene, and the transcendent scene. As Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount comments on what is both human and divine from a position outside Decapolis and Jerusalem, so the representative woman comments on the society inhabited by herself and her audiences by rhetorically ranging in space. Going out of the urban East, into the western landscape, into the natural, divine creation, provides a basis for comprehending and critiquing human social organizations throughout the world.

Anna Dickinson's “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 157

The Natural Scene “Whited Sepulchres” begins and ends with vivid descriptions of western scenery. Two sketches—the first of the Great Salt Lake Valley and the second of Yosemite Valley—partake of the form of the travel narrative, and

they also provide a broad frame for the speech in an idealized, imagined West. The setting of Salt Lake City begins the speech: A great stretch of level plain; beyond it, an inland sea of sapphire reflecting a sapphire sky; all about it, range after range of stately mountains, glowing through the marvellously clear air, masses of amber and purple and gold, whilst over all ranged, diamond bright, the eternal walls of snow.*?

A descent in the Yosemite provides the conclusion: O, what a descent! a vast wall of rock on the one hand, a weird gleaming fall of four hundred feet on the other; an abyss beneath; a thunderous roar filling the air; the spray and mist flying wild and white through the night; below me Egyptian darkness; all about me sombre mountains, inaccessible steeps, their tops three, four, five thousand feet away, peaks and points and towers and pinnacles and domes; shapes of beauty and shapes of grace, and shapes of majesty and power; these carved in the whitest of granite and these alone, above this sea of darkness, tipped by the rising glory of the morn and fairly glittering in its light.44

A comparison of these passages with the letters that Dickinson sent home in 1869 reveals her inventional practices and also the rhetorical transformation of scenic description into the realm of morality. In the letters, descriptions of nature simply purport to allow Dickinson to share her experiences with her family at home. In the speech, the Valley of the Great Salt Lake is offered as a beautiful natural contrast to the man-made horrors of the sepulchral city, whereas the Yosemite Valley creates a context for a vision of a coming apocalypse and the resilience of woman’s immortal soul. The exercise of writing descriptive letters home, however, meant that Dickinson had practiced phrasing and vivid language directed to a specific, inti-

mate audience that she could draw on when composing a speech to be heard in public.

She described the setting of Salt Lake City in a 26 June letter to her mother, and the rich picture provided in the speech also resonates with other epistolary passages portraying western settings. Thus the opening scene of “Whited Sepulchres” offers an image of a generalized West. Dickinson wrote her mother about the stagecoach trip from the rail line to Salt

158 Chapter Five Lake City: “Mountains to right of us,—mountains to left of us,—presently

in the midst off to the right, a gleaming, splendid sheet of water.—Salt Lake.—Mountains in its midst. Islands of mountains,—& soon then—alter

the Wasatch Range with their White Heads.—lIt is difficult to tell how greatly snow adds to the sublime effect of a scene,—lifting one’s eyes to it,

from hot, dry, sun-baked land.” In the same letter, she told of her first glimpse of the Rockies, a few days earlier: “Away off at the South, through gaps & rents in the nearer & lower range the Rocky Mountains lifted themselves, shapely & grand, & crowned with eternal snows,—the sun blazing across them,—S& the evening shadows, blue & purple softening them to our gaze.” A few days later she wrote to her sister about Lake Tahoe: “It is surrounded on all sides by snow capped mountains, 20 miles long, 14 wide, the water cold as ice, clear as crystal, blue as sapphires.”4> As an amalgamation of western scenery, with its ranges of mountains topped by “eternal snows” seen in dramatic light, as well as its arid plains and sapphire lakes, the opening scene of “Whited Sepulchres” portrays the natural landscape of the West as a space of wonder. The sublime scene can become dangerous when seen up close, however, and the ending sketch of “Whited Sepulchres” borrows from a description

of a precarious descent by the Vernal Falls in Yosemite, in a letter that Dickinson wrote to her mother in August: “Here was the dark canon through which we were passing,” she said, “a wall of rock on one side,— the white, gleaming fall on the other, an abyss beneath us,—the spray fly-

ing wild & white—all around us sombre mountains, their tops above, touched by the rising morn, & these fairly glittering in its light.”4© The passage in “Whited Sepulchres” expands on this description through accumula-

tio, adding specificity, additional adjectives, and synonymous nouns: “sombre mountains” of the letter becomes “sombre mountains, inaccessible steeps,” providing a sharper sense of verticality and also situating the audi-

tor with the narrator at the point of visualization, a point constrained by their shared humanity. Likewise, “their tops above, touched by the rising morn,” expands dramatically to “their tops three, four, five thousand feet away, peaks and points and towers and pinnacles and domes; shapes of beauty and shapes of grace, and shapes of majesty and power; these carved in the whitest of granite and these alone, above this sea of darkness, tipped by the rising glory of the morn.” The multiplication of descriptive phrases creates a sense of numberless formations, at varying distances, as well as a poetic verbal rhythm. Although the description in the speech is much more

dramatic and detailed than that in the August letter, the order of the

Anna Dickinson's “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 159 elements is the same, and many of the nouns and adjectives are identical, demonstrating both Dickinson’s adaptation of her personal correspondence for public presentation and her method of careful preparation, memorization, and practice for performance. The illusion of direct, extemporaneous oratory was carefully crafted through extensive preparation and then per-

formance without manuscript or notes. ,

The imagery of the natural scenes is controlled and restricted. The scenic descriptions in the speech, as in the letters, are primarily visual. References in the Salt Lake section are exclusively visual, from the “inland sea of sap-

phire” to the “eternal walls of snow.” The imagery of the Yosemite section—with its “vast wall of rock” and “shapes of beauty”—is mostly visual, although the falls offer the auditory image of the “thunderous roar,” and the “spray and mist” suggest tactile as well as visual perception. These scenes are primarily sites of imaginative visualization, to be experienced by auditors as conjured paintings or scenic backdrops. Further, both scenes in the speech are unpopulated, and nothing within them seems susceptible to

death: there are no plants and no animals. These scenes, then, appear timeless from a human perspective, although the end of the speech undercuts this assumption when the immortal soul transcends even geologic time, as the earth melts in a fiery blaze. The apparent lifelessness is both a cause for awe and a suggestion that these scenes are not places for human dwelling. They are places for travel, for passing through, for momentary engagement. The traveling “I” of the speech is solitary, powerful, dauntless. She is an explorer and pathfinder, seizing the potential of wide western spaces and the exigencies of travel to defy the custom of gender norms—traveling alone, relying on her own sense and resources, and testing herself between the inaccessible steeps and the gaping abyss. This figure borrows from the myth of the heroic (male) conqueror who wins the West alone and unaided. Although auditors learn within the speech that the “I” traveled to Salt Lake City in the company of national political leaders, these companions do not appear in the opening scene. Similarly, as Dickinson transformed the letter about Yosemite to the speech, the “we” and “us,” the “John and I,” of the historical moment became the “me” of the symbolic event. In the universe of “Whited Sepulchres,” the traveling “I,” the representative woman, faces the natural scene alone, but she is strong and unafraid, adapting characteristics coded masculine to meet the specifics of her situation and thus creating a new model for womankind.*/

160 Chapter Five The extant preparation text emphasizes the foolishness of conventions for gendered behavior in the opening West. It includes a short segment about horseback riding in which custom grants men a decided advantage over women because men ride astride instead of sidesaddle. In presentations of the speech during the fall of 1869, Dickinson evidently revealed that she had ridden astride in Yosemite Valley. The Boston Journal reported without comment that “Miss Dickinson had tried [riding] both ways,” and . the Salt Lake Telegraph, condemning Dickinson for “sailing around the country” propounding “shameless untruths” about Mormonism, used the fact that she had “mount[ed] a mustang male fashion” as evidence of her eross usurpation of a male role.*® Bestriding a horse became a figure for sexual aggression, a shocking sexual inversion: Women ride sidesaddle, and men ride astride. That woman rode astride. Is that woman a man? The

horseback-riding segment of the speech, which did not appear in the Quincy performance in January, symbolically defied custom and openly challenged accepted conventions about male and female behavior—and attire, since riding astride required the split skirt of the bloomer costume. What was “proper” could change with the setting, the speech implies, and the solitary traveler amid western scenery adapts herself to the situation, in the process challenging the “unnatural,” gendered definitions of propriety. From the perspective of the traveling “I,” the experience of both natural scenes occurs in a past time, the first at sunset on a June day, the second near dawn on a day during the same summer. These temporal references bracket the speech itself in a long night. The vignette of the Great Salt Lake

Valley is contextualized in a remembered past: “It was,” “I... saw.” The scenic description, however, is a series of phrases, not complete sentences, and it contains only one verbal form that is actually used as a verb, the past-tense “ranged.” “Reflecting” and “glowing” are present participles. Similarly, the Yosemite scene is set in a specific past moment: “One day ... 1] reached the descent.” The description itself contains no verbs, only the present participles “filling,” “flying,” “carved,” and “tipped.” With so few verbs, the temporal marker that tense provides is muted. The reliance on nouns and adjectives and the restricted use of verbal forms thus reinforce the apparent timelessness of the scenes. Auditors are encouraged to experience the description of the past time as an ongoing moment, as if they are all imaginatively present with the traveler within it. The experienced scene of the past is brought into the present and, implicitly, extended into the future, along with the “eternal” snows.

Anna Dickinson’s “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 161 In contemporary commentary, the scenic descriptions were the most frequently praised sections of the speech. A Dayton, Ohio, paper, for example, quoted only the final section of the speech, which it called a “description of the famous Yosemite Valley,” not, say, a peroration on woman’s

immortal soul. A journalist who recoiled from Dickinson’s “abominable” ideas still liked her word pictures: “Who could listen to her descriptions, for instance, of the Valley of Yo Semite, and not see the picture as her words painted it?” An explanation for the suitability of scenic description from a woman lecturer appeared in the New York Tribune, which identified a “picturesque and dramatic instinct” as characteristic of the “feminine tempera-

ment.”*? Dickinson’s portrayal of natural scenes, then, fulfilled expectations for imaginative, engaging entertainment in a lyceum travel narrative and also expectations for women’s speaking, emphasizing the “picturesque and dramatic” rather than the overtly argumentative. Most commentators chose to ignore Dickinson’s use of these natural scenes as contrasted against human, moral scenes and as symbolic figurations of the resilience of the female soul.

The natural scene, then, is of an idealized West, visualized through vivid, descriptive language as a place for perception by an explorer or trav-

eler, not a potential dweller. It is a scene to inspire awe, one that seems timeless from a human perspective, and it is a scene that creates conditions for a representative woman to wonder at the magnificence of her own immortal soul. She is a traveler and conqueror, the only life form that moves in the natural scene. She is solitary, and the scene itself forces a reconsideration of the norms that govern her behavior within human society, norms

that in that context have come to seem natural but in fact are not, since they are so obviously ill suited for a truly natural environment. The traveler by definition dwells someplace else, however, and the natural scenes of the idealized West cause the speaking “J” to turn her attention to the contrasting scenes, the social realms and physical spaces in which she and other humans dwell.

The Human Scene “Whited Sepulchres” calls the Valley of the Great Salt Lake “the fair things

and wondertul things of God’s handiwork.” Dickinson’s compositional practices—as suggested by the terms struck through in her preparation text—illustrate a conscious effort not to repeat the same word in close succession. Thus repetition that does occur deserves attention. From the “fair

162 Chapter Five things .. . of God’s handiwork,” the text turns immediately to the city, the whited sepulchre, “fair indeed to the eye.” Fair to outward seeming, fair to the eye of ignorance, as fair, apparently, as the majestic mountains and the sapphire sea, the human scene is shown to be the antithesis of the natural scene. It is “the depths of Hell.” This place of ultimate evil is symbolically linked, however, to other places. Salt Lake City is bound tightly to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities through its inhabitants’ shared “theories” about women’s subordination. This moral linkage seems far tighter and more far-reaching than the physical bonds of the Pacific Railroad. Indeed, “Whited Sepulchres” dissolves the apparent distance between the moral spaces of East and West, arguing that patriarchal theory is the

substratum upon which human social institutions are established and maintained. The human scene is thus a time-bound moral space.°® The rhetorically constituted vision of Salt Lake City and Mormon Utah generally is that of a

hierarchical structure consisting of multiple “districts,” each under the power of a leader ultimately controlled by the Great Satan of the narrative, Brigham Young. Apparent cleanliness and order mask a vast undercurrent of oppression, threats, and coercion. Dickinson’s information about general Mormon social organization—as opposed to information about the attitudes and beliefs of individual Mormon women—did not come from eyewitness experience. She did not witness an election, for example, although she describes one in the lecture. The speaking “I” in these passages is that of an instructor, reporting and interpreting information gleaned from sec-

ondary sources. Errors of fact represent the limitations of Dickinson’s knowledge and the limitations of using secondary materials to support invective. That is, “Whited Sepulchres” is not a source for accurate Mormon history. For example, the recently deceased Heber Kimball had forty-three wives, not two hundred wives, as Dickinson claimed. Dickinson had visited the tabernacle in Salt Lake City, not the temple, as the speech indicates, and the speech demonstrates no comprehension of the varieties of nineteenth-century Mormon marriage, connubial and nonconnubial, for the lifetime of the parties and for all eternity.?! Some northeasterners believed that now that the South had been vanquished, the United States should send its armies against the Mormons: “It is as much our duty to destroy Mormonism as it was our duty to annihilate slavery,” wrote a commentator in the Boston Sunday Times.°* Many people in the East who did not care whether the Mormons were polygamists still perceived a threat to U.S. republican ideals from a Mormon theocracy that

Anna Dickinson's “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 163 did not acknowledge a separation of church and state. “Whited Sepulchres” does not call for military intervention in Utah, but its general descriptions of Mormon social practice fit well within the conventions of anti-Mormon activism of the day. Within the lecture text, Salt Lake City is a symbolic space, a rigidly organized city in which purposive action is possible only for the representation of evil, called Brigham Young. It is clean and orderly and quiet, but the quietness is the silence of a tomb. The action of Young’s minions is reduced to motion, as is the action of the women of polygamous marriages.>4 The appearance of houses mirrors the number of wives—“I passed along low huts and counted from the number of doors without the number of wives within”—and thus the presence of women affects the organization of domestic spaces. Yet women lack control over these spaces, moving within

them only at the pleasure of the “master.” The human scene within the symbolic city, the city of death, is thus a moral scene: “I saw on all sides of me coarseness, vulgarity, indecency, and obscenity, dressed in the garb of piety and covered by the cloak of religion.”°> Within this human space, abstract concepts of immorality are personified and ubiquitous.

Using this symbolic city of evil as an extended illustration of a larger problem, Dickinson links Salt Lake City directly with other locations in a present time: Salt Lake City is very like every other great city under the sun; because things here are sanctioned that are elsewhere simply tolerated; because in Salt Lake City a man claims half a dozen wives, goes through some marriage

service with them, lives with them as such thereafter, and in New York, Boston or Philadelphia, a man does precisely the same thing without any such preliminary service. In Salt Lake City, they call it religion; in New York, Boston or Philadelphia, they call it “a young man sowing his wild oats,” be-

cause things here go uncovered and brazen-faced, that elsewhere move masked and vailed [sic]; because the underlying theory,—See you I do not say polygamy; I do not say illegal abominations,—but the underlying theory in regard to the proper place and subordination of women, whereon this whole system of polygamy is reared, is precisely the same in Salt Lake that it is in London, Paris, New York, Boston or Philadelphia.°®

This linkage is a moral one, articulating Salt Lake City with European capitals and East Coast cities via the common bond of a common theory, the “underlying” foundation of human social institutions. This theory explains

polygamy, it explains prostitution, it explains restrictions on women

164 Chapter Five everywhere. The cities of the world, the argument goes, are built on the exploitation and subordination of women. Typical lyceum audiences would have expected a denunciation of Mormon polygamy. The connection of this “alien” people with their own society and their own practices, however, was less anticipated. In performance, Dickinson often went out of her way to make clear the link to the specific place where she was speaking. The Spy of Worcester, Massachusetts, reported that she had said: “That theory is as rife in the cities of Worcester or

Philadelphia as it was among the God-forsaken heathen in the desert plains of Salt Lake.” The Milwaukee Sentinel angrily reported that the lecturer pronounced that Mormon polygamy “is nothing more than what exists in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, to say nothing of Milwaukee.”>’

Audience members were ready to hear titillating descriptions of plural marriage as well as denunciations of a peculiar people in a distant land, but the moral correlation with themselves hit too close to home. Dickinson’s main target of condemnation, in fact, is outside the Mormon enclave. In one section of the lecture, the speaking persona offers four successive reasons why work on behalf of oppressed humanity is so important. All four criticisms are leveled at non-Mormon leaders, and all four actions that Dickinson attacks are speech acts: “Washington . . . declares,”

“the law makers ... discoursing of the subject by the way,” “at the Townsend House... came forward the orator of the party,” and “the Rev. John Todd... preach[ed] .. . a sermon.” The four observations are also identified with particular places, moving from Washington into the heart of the Mormon theocracy. The U.S. government in Washington is inconsis-

tent in its condemnation and support of Mormon polygamy. Washington goes to Salt Lake as a stagecoach full of congressmen, and the legislators joke about polygamous marriages in ways that would be unacceptable for their own wives, demonstrating their acceptance of the “underlying theory” of women’s subordination, which includes a differential moral stan-

dard. At the Townsend House in Salt Lake City, some of these same congressmen heartily promise cooperation with the leaders of the Utah Territory. Finally, within the tabernacle itself, a leading Congregational minister from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, aligns himself spiritually with the Mormons, failing to criticize any aspect of their social practice. John Todd, like his fellow Congregational minister Horace Bushnell, mentioned later

in the lecture, had exhibited a commitment to the “underlying theory” of women’s subordination in published work: Todd in Woman’s Rights (1867) and Bushnell in Women’s Suffrage: The Reform against Nature (1869). Todd

Anna Dickinson's “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 165 had argued that education would kill women, since they were not physio— logically constituted for intellectual stimulation, and Bushnell, that enfranchising women would destroy the grand American experiment. “Whited Sepulchres” links the voices of Mormon polygamists, understood as aberrant by lyceum audiences, with the voices of these respected New England clergymen, explaining them as part and parcel of the same moral impulses. Similarly, national political leaders come in for their share of criticism, as they “strike hands” with the Mormon leaders in a gesture of commonality. By such “fruits,” by such actions, they are known for what they are: they are rhetorically constituted as associates of the devil, despite their social or political status or their outward professions of morality. These eastern male leaders are at home in the moral scene identified as Salt Lake City, as the women who dwell there can never be. It is as a woman that the voice of “Whited Sepulchres” speaks of the human scene. She is an observer of the intimate household spaces of the city of the seeming saints, gaining admission to private rooms and hearing women speak there about their feelings of discontent with their marriages and their lives. Premises about a universal sisterhood of women, as well as about conventions of paying calls, imply that a woman is uniquely able to elicit these confidences. (In introducing Dickinson’s lecture in New York, Horace Greeley said that the chances for such observation “do not come to

a man under any circumstances as they do to a woman.”)?® It is “as a woman” that the speaking “I” melodramatically longs for death. Her misery is fleeting, however, and she transforms despair into a call to heroic action, realizing that her mission is to “live to work.” This work is to “talk,” a response in kind to the speech acts of the men who wield religious and political power. “‘Being a woman,’” Dickinson said, “‘I will [talk] ... and I give you fair warning, it shall be done here and elsewhere,’—and you see I am keeping my promise.”°? Identifying with her own sex, she engages in simulated dialogue with the male political elite, claiming her right to speak for a gender-neutral moral standard on the stagecoach in Utah and indeed throughout the country. Then she addresses the lyceum audience directly, demonstrating that the present location is the “elsewhere,” where the sermon against woman’s oppression also needs to be preached. “AS a woman,” the speaking “I” ranges from the specificity of a conversation with particular Mormon women within the confines of their own dwelling places to a generalized, omniscient view of women’s oppression throughout the world. She assumes the role of guide, untrammeled by geographic boundaries and obstacles, who “can take you out of this place” to

166 Chapter Five Persia and India and Turkey and China, to California and Mexico and Germany, and finally to the city beyond the Rockies, a city “deserted of de-

cency.” Are the women of the world “contented”? The word itself, in frequent repetition, mimics the voices of the “underlying theory,” who overexert themselves to insist that women are satisfied. In the excessive repetition within the speech, the word contented acquires an ironic cast, and its referential meaning starts to slip. In rebutting the assertion of contentment, the speaking “I” has two responses: So what if they are “content”? “Degradation that hug[s] the chain” is the most “hideous feature” of slavery.°° And further, they aren’t really content, as their own voices testify. The omniscient narrator then introduces “discontent” as a more solid term and a more appropriate response to the human scene. She investigates the discontent of women within polygamy by going into houses and convers-

ing, and then she moves from the private dwelling spaces of individual women to a universal discontent of women, women who all dwell in places founded upon the underlying substratum of patriarchy. Discontent—identified as slavery’s “noblest attribute”—has, according to the argument of the speech, its own substratum, its own foundation. There is something “at the bottom.” This something may initially seem less substantial than the powerful patriarchal theory upon which a universal op-

pression based on sex has been erected. In the context of the Protestant sermonic form, however, what appears to be insubstantial from a human, time-bound perspective may be eternal. What lies at the bottom of the discontent is the “spirit of to day,” a spirit of the present moment that refuses to be restrained by the past and looks upward toward “God’s life.”©! In exploring the contours of this spiritual foundation, “Whited Sepulchres” envisions a new scene, one that transcends the present human scene but has the capacity to outlast the natural scene as well.

The Transcendent Scene The moment of transcendence occurs in “Whited Sepulchres” in the final section, which is also a call to women to manifest the capabilities of their immortal souls in the present moment, beyond the lyceum experience and

outside the confines of the lecture hall. The soul of the representative woman, speaking in language that is an amalgam of scriptural references, responds to the grandeur and danger of the mountains of Yosemite with a vision of existence beyond the apocalypse: “I am greater than these; before

them, my essence was; above them and beyond them can I now soar.

Anna Dickinson's “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 167 When these shall pass away, when the heavens above them shall roll together as a scroll and the earth beneath them melt with a fervid heat, and these vanish into nothingness, I shall live and grow and reign and go on from height to height of sublimer regions, conquering and to conquer; for the spirit of God hath created me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life.”©2 The soul’s vision collapses time past, present, and future, recognizing a value and an existence prior to and beyond even the apparently timeless natural scene of Yosemite. It imagines triumphantly explor-

ing spaces even more awesome and sublime than the mountains and abysses of the West. It is not a coincidence that this vision only occurs in the natural scene, not the human scene. After all, the natural scene is the nearest to sublimity and timelessness—and the farthest away from the

cities, with their underlying theories and seemingly omnipotent social institutions—that human perception can experience. Within the universe of “Whited Sepulchres,” the limits of human perception dictate that the contours of the “sublimer regions” remain a mys-

tery. The imagination of the audience must also fail at the point of envisioning a disembodied spirit, especially since the speaking persona is gendered, and the historical person delivering the lyceum lecture exhibited the voice and body and long skirts of a wealthy twenty-seven-year-old white woman from Philadelphia. Solving the problems of embodiment and the immortal soul, however, is not the project of the lecture. In “Whited Sepulchres,” the realization of spaces and times outside observable space and time, as well as of the transcendent qualities of the immortal soul, provides a rationale for the embodied soul to work tirelessly in the immediate place and the present moment.®? God’s life, God’s law, natural law—this is the fundamental inspiration for the “spirit of to day.” This spirit, manifested in expressions of discontent among women, is figured as “the life of God that is in every human soul demanding the utmost possibilities and free-

dom for growth. It is this idea that in some shape is working its way through the brains and consciences and hearts of the women of to day.”®4

The inspirational force, then, emanates from a divine source. Women’s souls respond, and their bodies are called to active work within the human scene, on behalf of both body and soul. The visionary persona who sees and interprets the transcendent scene is,

as noted previously, a representative woman. The leader or exemplar shows by dramatic example the possibility of a postapocalyptic vision and the potential of allowing such a vision to inspire action in the present moment. The representative woman is already active, has already heard a call

168 Chapter Five to heroic action on behalf of oppressed humanity. She is herself “an uneasy spirit” who “wander[s] to and fro in the world” registering protests.©? Her substance at her most significant moment—the moment of doing the work for which she lives—is a spirit. This spirit, the immortal soul or its manifestation, partakes of the “spirit of to day.” The last vision of the lecture, then,

provides a larger frame for the visions of potential progress within the human scene. Progress coincident with the special valuation of a woman’s immortal soul is possible, according to “Whited Sepulchres,” “now.” The present moment is a special moment, a postemancipation moment, a time of reconstruction and renewal after a bloody war, a time when men are seeking to expand their own civil and political rights. Women want to be part of that expansion, making it a mutual effort of men and women. The speaking voice of “Whited Sepulchres” notes this impulse for the men in the audience: “The woman of to day... is trying to go with you hand in hand, side by side, step for step, brain for brain and life for life up the rights you are clambering, desiring not to be abandoned in the valleys you have deserted and are leaving behind.”®® The representative woman goes to the peaks and has a vision; it is no longer possible to be contented in the valleys, especially when the valleys of the world are exemplified in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. The organizational theory operative in the valley makes the valley a valley of shadows and a valley of death, a valley of custom and habit. Life is found amid the peaks, but the peaks must be scaled, even by individuals who embody the modern progressive spirit. The vision of changes in the human scene involves an opening of educational opportunities to women and a valuation of women’s work, partic-

ularly women’s work in rearing children. According to the argument, mothers’ work—the shaping of immortal souls—is work for eternity, in contrast to men’s time-bound work of all kinds. “Whited Sepulchres” explicitly calls for the enfranchisement of mothers, for valuing mothers’ work equally with statecraft, and for educating women so that they will be capa-

ble of performing their immortal work. The argument of this section, which calls for enfranchising only a subset of womankind and promotes a rationale for women’s education based on their roles as mothers to a rising

generation, exists in tension with representations of womanhood elsewhere in the speech. Although the passage about motherhood concludes with the observation that women must first develop their own souls before they can de-

velop the souls of others, the overall argument of the section relies on

Anna Dickinson's “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 169 contemporary assumptions about woman’s highest duty being motherhood, about woman’s nature inclining her to this great work, and about woman’s innate piety and moral superiority to man, who evidently lacks responsibility for the upbringing of his children. Nineteenth-century lyceum audiences were familiar and comfortable with this line of thought, and Dickinson was praised for her paeans to the “Divinity of Maternity,”

although some commentators, applying a standard that did not hold for male lecturers and writers, said that she ought to become a mother herself before she tried to speak publicly about it.°”

The argument, however, contradicts the framework established elsewhere in “Whited Sepulchres,” where part of the “underlying theory” oppressing women is the idea that they were sent into the world solely to be wives and mothers. Further, although the women of polygamy are represented as suffering from the untimely deaths of their children, the specific discontentments registered in the longest, most dramatic sections of the private conversations concern the pain of sharing a spouse. The speaking persona of the representative woman, also, is notable for her solitariness—

traveling, exploring, observing, instructing, reporting, exhorting, all by herself. She appears to be unattached, and if she is wife or mother, that is not apparent.©® In the preparation text, this figure appears as one who combines characteristics traditionally labeled feminine and masculine: “If men are bold, aggressive, domineering, & women are the reverse, the two are to be brought twain together, not by aggravating & intensifying the peculiarities of either, but by imparting somewhat of the nature of one to that of the other.”©? The preparation text, in describing the roles of modern women, both actual and imagined, is less streamlined than the Quincy version, but it offers a greater range of options for women, based upon a radi-

cal sense of the power of individual potential: “We are all born for one another to help one another, to sacrifice for one another, but first of all we are born for ourselves.” This is a secular vision: Dickinson crossed out “& for God” after “born for one another,” transmuting divine responsibility into a similarly eternal responsibility for personal, individual growth.’9 The

call for enfranchising only mothers appears in this version also, but it comes after a substantial section delineating the problem of men’s “property rights” in women and before a call to realize the dignity of mothers, inextricably related to the dignity of all women. In wrestling with the ideas of woman as an individual and woman as she exists in her relations with others, in grappling with arguments based in natural law and arguments based on expediency, and in addressing the

170 Chapter Five characteristics of woman’s “nature,” the versions of “Whited Sepulchres” exhibit the conflicts of feminist activism during the nineteenth century and subsequently. How does one promote the value of work that many women

do without arguing that that work is somehow naturally suited to all women? What happens when arguments for equality acquire the alienating characteristics of arguments for a natural superiority? Can the androgyne and the radically gendered ideals coexist? In supporting the social and political rights of a large group of people who share sex and gender, how does one take into account the tremendous variation among this group, along axes other than sex and gender? Can an individualistic ethos promote communal, social action? What is the value of and the alternative to the representative figure, the one who commands authority to speak to and for others? In articulating a vision of social transformation for lyceum audiences, Dickinson manifested the power and the paradoxes of popular advocacy.

Within the text is a call for purposive action. The transcendent time and space of “Whited Sepulchres” are not envisioned as peace and rest. Rather,

the immortal, postapocalyptic soul continues to live and grow and conquer, continues to travel from height to height. “Live to work” thus is a new proverb not only for the present moment but also for the ultimate future, eternal timelessness. Applying the vision of the transcendent scene to the quotidian, human scene, however, results in all the inconsistencies and ruptures in goals and desires that occur at the point where radical politics are made popular and material and where conventions and definitions are undergoing transformation, disjointed and partial.

The Lyceum Sermon of the Representative Woman On 10 May 1869 the Reverend John Todd delivered the invocation at the ceremony in Promontory, Utah, when the final railroad spike physically joined the tracks laid from Omaha and those from Sacramento, symbolically linking East and West. A month later Todd spoke in the tabernacle in Salt Lake City before a crowd that included Anna Dickinson. As Dickinson sat seething, she was the same age that Todd had been when those farmers and skilled workers of Millbury, Massachusetts, founded Branch Number 1 of the American Lyceum. Indeed, Todd was an old friend of Josiah Holbrook’s. Todd, a Yale graduate and a longtime Congregational minister,

Anna Dickinson's “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 17] typified the lyceum lecturer of the 1850s, a decade during which he consistently appeared on the New York Tribune’s list of available lecturers.7!

The lyceum circuits displayed the contradictions of nineteenth-century life, and Todd and Dickinson dramatically illustrate deep ideological divi-

sions. His was the voice of orthodoxy; hers, the voice of reform. He preached the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards; she was a sometime Methodist with a Quaker heritage. He authored a conservative text, Woman’s Rights (1867), decrying the rising women’s movement; she published a novel, What Answer? (1869), defending interracial marriage. They

agreed that their shared present represented a time of sweeping social changes; they did not agree about the value of those changes. They disagreed, fundamentally, about the innate abilities and potentials of women. Within the text of “Whited Sepulchres,” the figure of Todd became a powertul proponent of patriarchal principle. Like Mormonism itself, the historical Todd emerged from the religious and sociocultural milieu of the

Northeast. Like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and Heber Kimball, John Todd was a native of Vermont. In the world of “Whited Sepulchres,” the figure of Todd, like the representation of Mormonism, was both alien and familiar, one of us and yet not one of us. His was a power to be reck-

oned with, an enemy worthy of the best efforts of the representative woman, an opponent against whom she could match brain and heart and soul.

The representative woman met the preacher with a sermon. The sermon ranged over time and space, exposing the darkness of the valleys and envisioning a new world from the mountaintops. It dramatically conjured its demons as well as its divinities. From a religious perspective, it aligned itself firmly with Protestant teaching, demonstrating a familiarity with scrip-

ture to challenge the preacher on his own ground. From a secular perspective, it contributed to long-standing lyceum concerns about U.S. citizenship, exploring questions about who could be included in the U.S. polity, questions that social change and geographic expansion made ever more complex. The sermon proposed an alternative geography, however,

one not organized by physical distance, natural barriers, or imposed boundaries. Human institutions, it argued, are organized in a moral space, on a bedrock of gender-bound conventions. This is the bedrock that props up the national government and John Todd’s Pittsfield church. A vision of immortality, however, intimates that this bedrock is ephemeral and that what lasts is spirit. The spirit of the individual, the spirit of progress, the spirit of today all partake of the divine.

172 Chapter Five Dickinson’s “Whited Sepulchres” in some ways is a representative lyceum lecture, both in the sense that it typifies the form and in the sense that it is an exemplary model. It is engaging and dramatic, and Dickinson’s performances evidently pleased many audience members, some of whom could describe the lecture as “enjoyable” even though they “heartily dissent[ed]” from its arguments.’/2 Those arguments represented a populariza-

tion of eccentric notions for the day, an articulation of ideas otherwise confined to the meetings of woman’s rights conventions or the pages of radical journals. The points at which the speech relies on conventional ideas of woman’s roles and identities—as well as the focus in many newspaper reports on the picturesque descriptions and the paeans to motherhood—illustrate the limits of making radical views palatable to a paying, popular audience. The lyceum in the postwar period provided a space for such utterances, but the lyceum, too, was built on the “underlying theory,” and this foundation influenced even those lecturers who came to the hall ready to undermine it.

6

“A Living Shuttle”

| Iie we Bye Be

n 1868 lyceum lecturer Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote an article | ae “The American Lecture-System,” which was published in both U.S. and British periodicals. He articulated a view of the lyceum lecture as one of the means by which “the measured footstep of advancing civilization”

was treading across the North American continent. Accompanying the march of the iron rails from east to west, in Higginson’s narrative, were “all the signs and appliances of American social order: the farm, the workshop, the village, the church, the schoolhouse, the New York Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, and—the popular Lecture-system.” Higginson envisioned an advancing New England: “Gradually the New England element, which is apt

to be the organizing and shaping force in a north-western town, calls loudly for some direct intellectual stimulus. ... Let us have the orator, the philosopher, the poet; but as we cannot go to him, he must come to us.” The “signs and appliances of American social order,” for Higginson, were weaving a new fabric, the fabric of a uniquely “American” nation. The 173

174 Chapter Six lecturer’s role was not that of the weaver but rather the weaver’s chief instrument, the shuttle: “It is an exciting life, thus to find one’s self moving to and fro, a living shuttle, to weave together this new web of national civilization.”! It is a spatial metaphor, of rapid, regular movement across distances, carrying a single thread on its journey to create a cohesive pattern. Higginson’s great national fabric, woven in a pattern developed in New England, suggests similar metaphors to describe the ritualistic practices of the lyceum itself. They are “ritualistic” in their regularity, in the intellectual investments that participants made in them, and in their efficacy for producing self-representations. The ritual patter might go something like this:

We have a lyceum in our town. Its presence and our participation in it demonstrate how well we fit into the greater “national civilization.” The lyceum civilizes us; we show that we are civil by our participation in it. The warp and woof of the lyceum, the perpendicular connections that occur repeatedly and help to form the pattern, are the dual but disparate functions of education and entertainment. We demonstrate civilization by an appro-

priate use of our leisure time; we develop ourselves and demonstrate our resourcefulness by combining our education and entertainment into one. The resulting patterned fabric becomes a cultural event-object that is simultaneously utilitarian and artistic, to keep us snug and to be displayed as an objet d’art. It is at once a naturalized part of our everyday environment and evidence of our civilization. The fabric produced from nineteenth-century lyceum practice, however, is far from regular. Sometimes the weave favors the warp, sometimes the

woof. Although the relative value of the education and entertainment functions changed through time, both strands were ever present. Debates provided both serious training in argumentation and recreation for leisure hours in a clublike setting. The early lectures demonstrated an earnestness of purpose in their scientific and literary themes, but lecture-goers even in early years showed a penchant for such delights as Nehemiah Ball’s “Phantasmagoria Lantern” slides, demonstrating gee-whiz technological wizardry for “instructional” purposes.2 Similarly, Edward Hitchcock used visual aids—what Josiah Holbrook had called “visible objects’—in the form of large illustrative drawings to accompany his geological lectures in Milwaukee in 1856.?

As entertainment functions gained in prominence, especially in the post—Civil War period, the lyceum with its developing commercialization yet retained an educational component, illustrated in the retention of old-

style instructional topics and especially in the published commentary

“A Living Shuttle” 175 bemoaning the passing of the “real” lyceum, represented as having been fundamentally scholarly. Even some of its celebrated “entertainers” selected topics that adapted the forms of the instructional lecture. Mark Twain’s “Sandwich Islands” lecture, a parodic travel narrative, exemplifies this approach.* Further, platform personalities whose very presence constituted a spectacle also fulfilled an instructional function. “Instruction” oc-

curred even in the public self-presentation of lecturers like Frederick Douglass and Anna Dickinson. Their self-representations threatened the oxymoron through bodily enactment, providing an experience (an “experiment”) for the audience and proving through demonstration that the category of public lecturer was more fluid than previously thought. At the same time, the easy slippage between (serious) instructor and (frivolous) entertainer both supported and undercut these enacted arguments. If education and entertainment were the warp and woot that made the pattern of lyceum fabric, then the commercial function was also ever present. The thread came at a price, and the fabric of the lyceum itself was intimately bound up with the nascent U.S. capitalist economy. Even in the earliest years of the lyceum as mutual-education society, economic components were present in membership fees. Josiah Holbrook’s educational ap-

paratus, as well as the periodical and book texts that he produced and recommended, were sold as commodities, products of a knowledge industry. The public lectures sponsored by lyceums in the middle and later nineteenth century were usually designed to raise funds for the societies, as the lectures in Milwaukee supported the acquisition of books for the library of the Young Men’s Association (YMA). With the rise of commercial management bureaus in the late 1860s, of course, the arrangement of courses of lectures and traveling lecturers unabashedly became a business enterprise. The commodity exchanged in the marketplace of the lyceum had transformed from illustrative apparatus—globes, arithmometers, pulleys and levers, charts—to the lecture event itself: the price of a ticket bought a pa-

tron a certain kind of experience, tightly bound up with the celebritypersonality who strode the stage. These experiences were part exhibition and display; part readings of the texts that constituted the celebrity per-

formers; part participation in a familiar public ritual, the meanings of Which were articulated both orally and in print; and part engagement with the ideas sanctioned as worthy of hearing by lyceum leaders and organizers.

The four cases in this study demonstrate changes in the rhetoric of the

lyceum over time. The roles of the audience, the types of knowledge

176 Chapter Six valued and espoused, and the promoted and enacted functions of lyceum practice suggest variant expectations of what symbols do.

Audiences The cases examined herein demonstrate multiple roles for the audience. In the promotional propaganda of Josiah Holbrook’s Family Lyceum, for instance, “audiences” are envisioned as participant-learners. Even the word audience seems inappropriate to the rhetoric of Holbrook’s journal. The

imagined participants in mutual-education societies are better cast as members than as spectators. That is, individuals take turns being pupils and

teachers, audiences and lecturers. These imagined people exhibit all the characteristics that were publicly promoted in British American New England: they are honorable, virtuous, and, above all, moral. The written constitutions of many early lyceums espoused these precepts: in Euclid, Ohio, in 1841, for example, article 7 of the constitution of the Euclid Lyceum provided that “any person of good moral Character may become a member by subscribing to the Constitution and By-Laws.”> The ideal of the “good man speaking well,” derived from Cicero and Quintilian, survived in the nineteenth-century lyceum as a neoclassical model and as an enactment devoutly wished. The pages of Holbrook’s journal imagined an “audience” of participantlearners that was broadly inclusive and yet bounded, encouraging the participation of men and women, young and old, the lawyer and the laborer, but delimited by the norms of British American New England culture. Holbrook recommended “mothers’ lyceums” and “mechanics’ lyceums,” for instance, grouping individuals by “class.” The Family Lyceum cast Native

Americans as subjects of study and colonization, but African Americans were in an ambivalent position as simultaneously insiders and outsiders. In practice, individual lyceums of the 1830s and 1840s were demographically segregated, yet not nearly as sharply, say, as Americans were segregated by the laws governing the franchise. Most lyceums were operated by and for the white male elite of local communities, although evidence suggests that

women attended and participated in these meetings in some locations. Children also came to some of these lyceum meetings, and wealthy members sometimes brought their servants or professionals brought their clerks

Or apprentices. Further, lyceums founded and run by and for African Americans—usually but not always segregated by sex—provided a means of self-education, practice in writing and speaking, and community

“A Living Shuttle” 177 development for free black Americans living within a white supremacist society. The early lyceum ideal of broad inclusion—not pure even in its earliest articulations—never came to fruition, but the lyceum forms and structures made adaptations possible that created opportunities for some individuals who were excluded from the conventional “favoring circumstances” of schools and colleges.

Although some mutual-education functions remained in lyceum practice until the late nineteenth century, the broad-scale transformation from mutual education to a system of popular lecturing was accompanied by a corresponding change in the nature of the audience. From participants and learners, the audience became spectators and judges of performance. The case of the judgments made of lectures in 1850s Milwaukee illustrates the cultural leadership of native New Englanders, who attempted to create an extension of the Northeast on Lake Michigan. Professional elites from New

England were invited to lecture, and their performances were judged according to formal structures derived from the classical education provided in U.S. colleges and also according to the local elites’ sense of topics and performative styles most likely to draw a paying popular audience. The lecturing events became social functions, suitable for men and women alike,

yet always existing under a rhetorical rubric of public improvement and education. Further, the Milwaukee case dramatically illustrates the complex interactions among oral and print media in promoting and sustaining the lyceum and making meanings of its practices. The newspapers made the lyceum, in a material sense: promoting its events, reporting the lectures as news items, and making meanings of lectures, lecturers, and the Milwaukee citizenry. The “audience” had metamorphosed from a group of public-minded individuals learning from each other into a “great compound vertebrate,” in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a body imagined as coherent that was simultaneously patron and patronized. The audience in the case studies of the lyceum lectures of Douglass and Dickinson shifts from the compound vertebrate as coherent and material to an audience as invoked in the discourse of social reformers. Whereas Douglass and Dickinson often addressed the same type of empirical audience that James Russell Lowell and Henry Ward Beecher found in Milwau-

kee in the 1850s, they invited this audience to imagine themselves as agents of social change, as a collection of individuals, potentially of goodwill, who could and would act to bring American ideals and American reality more closely into alignment. The lectures of Douglass and Dickinson

also implied the participation of people often excluded from public

178 Chapter Six discourse, audiences who would comprehend attacks on the conventions of racism and sexism as inspiration and empowerment. So Douglass spoke both about and to other African Americans; Dickinson, about and to other women. The speeches of both were assimilationist, to a degree, in that they validated aspects of dominant cultural mores. Douglass promoted a self-improvement ethos, for example, and Dickinson upheld conventional notions

of motherhood. Yet the audiences invoked by their speeches were also challenged to move beyond accepted conventions: to work for the access of African Americans to the means of self-improvement and to work for the enfranchisement of mothers. The lyceum audiences in Holbrook’s promotional magazine, in newspapers and correspondence in Milwaukee, and in the speeches of reformers like Douglass and Dickinson are constituted, first, as alternately active and

passive teachers and pupils, then as even more passive but still powerful fee-paying spectators, and finally as potential agents of change who needed to be goaded out of passivity into action on behalf of reform. These variants represent in microcosm various ideas of the U.S. “public,” as fundamentally intelligent and hardworking and as dupes easily deceived and requiring elite leadership, as capable of making discriminations among varying qualities of performance but needing guidance in understanding the categories, and as potentially persuadable and potentially effective actors in reformist projects. The lyceum audience—invoked and empirical, imagined and material— was also defined through the ways that knowledge was articulated and un-

derstood. What could count as knowledge and how learning could occur were of fundamental significance for the creation of an imagined public.

Knowledges In broad outline the audience varied from participant-learner to spectatorjudge, from engaged actor to bestial “vertebrate.” So the understanding of what counted as appropriate public knowledge ranged from an orderly storehouse to an articulation of variant knowledges gleaned in multiple ways.

In Holbrook’s Family Lyceum, knowledge is compartmentalized in a Baconian framework, but the framework is not fully worked out: categories

are imposed on “the store-house of nature,” but, for example, heat, salts, metals, and “mind” are grouped together as “common things.” The world is assumed to be susceptible to description in a tidy, orderly array, mimicking

“A Living Shuttle” 179 a conception of the human mind as a repository of discrete pieces of information. Transferring this notion to the anthropomorphism of machinery, people of a later era would adopt the term memory to describe the electronic storage capacity of computers. The knowledge held in the vast storehouse of nature, expressed as the subject of study in Holbrook’s journal, is transmitted in packets of “facts” from the expert to the nonexpert. Yet the status of expert, so the journal suggests, is attainable by everyone. Even Harriet, once she has assimilated the knowledge that the earth rotates, can convey this information to oth-

ers. Even Uncle Philip’s nephews can transfer their knowledge of the working behavior of insects. Thus expert status is directly related to the factual knowledge that one possesses, and one’s own experiences (“experiments”) are a primary source for such knowledge. In the ideal mutual-education society, members would first teach others from their own areas of occupational expertise and then would become experts on other areas through reading and study. Through “industry and application”—the very methods that Douglass recommended—individuals could attain a level of knowledge that would enable them to function competently in a democratic-republican society. One optimistic correspondent to the Milwaukee Sentinel and Gazette wrote in 1847, for example, “Why may

not the Drayman cart away the Merchant’s argument in debate, as well as

his goods from his warehouse?” Economic disparities were not to be erased but rather rendered insignificant in the context of the lyceum. The implication that such competencies could also carry over into, say, public political forums was rarely expressed directly. The practices of many lyceum organizations revised the earlier senses of useful knowledge and the roles of teachers and pupils. In the era of the nascent lecture circuits, exemplified by the Milwaukee case, lyceums presented “courses” of lectures for fee-paying public audiences. These courses were rarely thematically coherent. Indeed, subjects ranged widely, from tales of exotic travel to discussions of moral and ethical questions, from historical and literary description to meditations on human nature. Within a three-month period in Milwaukee in 1857, the YMA sponsored Horace

Greeley’s “Europe,” three lectures on temperance by John B. Gough, Henry Bellows’s “Freeman’s Fallacies: The Foes of Liberty,” and John G. Saxe’s extended poem “Yankee-Land.” The multipart scientific series, such as Edward Hitchcock’s 1856 lectures on geology, was the exception to the rule in the YMA and, indeed, in most lyceum organizations of the period.

— 180 Chapter Six Although the lecture offerings were often random—a series of electives rather than a core curriculum—each lecture was presumed to be presented by an expert. The significance of the credentialing processes of schools and

colleges was amply demonstrated by the Milwaukee case. Instead of lyceum members reading up on astronomy or public policy and then teaching each other, the lyceum now joined with the new railroads and the possibilities for quick communication through telegraphy and the print media to produce the popularization of the professional expert. The

Amherst professor, the Connecticut clergyman, the Massachusetts

Status. ,

legislator—these individuals could be brought bodily to the local lyceum to educate the public audience. At the same time, this practice shored up the popular credibility of these people as individuals who had attained “expert”

The emphasis in lyceum commentary on personal experience, one of the most important markers of a lecturer’s expertise in the Milwaukee newspapers, meant that the lyceum yet retained space for graduates of “the school of life,” such as temperance advocate Gough or, later, individuals like Douglass and Dickinson. Such lecturers could be praised just to the extent that they confined their remarks to the subjects for which their own experience was deemed to suit them best. Yet the same was true of the formally educated Boston aristocrat-abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who in Milwaukee was thought to be “not himself” when not speaking about slavery. This suggests, then, that the celebrity culture of the lyceum fixed each cre-

ated personality at a point where personal experience—expertise—and subject matter met. A lecturer strayed outside these narrow bounds at some peril to his or her public appeal. The forms of knowledge articulated in the public lectures of Douglass and Dickinson thus are represented as deriving chiefly from personal experience. Douglass had been a slave, a fugitive slave, and a free man. He was largely self-taught. Dickinson was a woman who had traveled to Salt Lake City and on to California. She had visited the homes of women in the West (albeit briefly), and she seized the opportunity to draw comparisons among women’s experiences throughout the world. Her lecturing persona spoke as a white woman, just as Douglass’s lecturing persona spoke as a black man. Knowledges gleaned from living as a white woman or a black man could be understood as either exotic or familiar, the lecture as an exhibition or a means of empowerment. Reception can never be fully controlled. Yet public lectures by individuals like Douglass and Dickinson embodied

experiences and knowledges that challenged the rampant negative

“A Living Shuttle” 181 representations of both black men and white women and recommended a reevaluation of the significance of their ways of learning and living. The activities of both the mutual-education society and the lyceum as lecture sponsor, then, suggest that the democratic-republican public should be generalists, not specialists. Small packets of knowledge—delivered in short articles, in mutual lecturing sessions, or in a public lecture of one or two hours—conveyed “essential” information, about geology or theology, travels to India or English ballads. The four cases presented herein also suggest that the nineteenth-century U.S. lyceum, from the beginning, prized knowledge derived from personal experience. Early lyceum members were encouraged to conceive of their own lives as an endless series of “experiments,” and later public lecturers were especially valued if their topics closely matched their areas of expertise, achieved through professional credentialing, occupational experience, or individual circumstances of life. If life experiences could prove useful in one’s lyceum participation, then the functions of lyceum practice—why people undertook to do this—also implied that the lyceum was thought to be fundamentally “useful.” The ways that usefulness was described and enacted, however, echoed the va-

riety of ways in which education and entertainment intersected or coalesced.

Functions The discourse of the nineteenth-century lyceum promoted its practice as simultaneously utilitarian and recreational. In the Family Lyceum, for instance, lyceum activity was construed as “mental exercise,” a kind of mus-

cular education to sharpen the intellect and hone argumentative and instructional skills. Such exercise constitutes self-improvement from the inside out. It was an appropriate way to use one’s leisure time, to expend energies in acceptable pursuits. The converse was also true: if leisure time was used in study and the companionable pleasure of an educational enterprise, then it would not be used for less savory activities like hanging out in taverns or, in Holbrook’s view, attending frivolous balls or profitless military drills. The notion of mental exercise, of a public gymnasium for the intellect, persisted in the activities and plans of actual lyceum organizations. Debates and the reading of original compositions at lyceum meetings provided not only opportunities for intellectual growth but also the pleas-

ures of spending time with others similar to oneself in a clublike atmosphere. Individuals who had attended colleges might find in lyceum activity

182 Chapter Six an extension of the student literary society, one of the few aspects of college life that was controlled by students themselves without strict institutional oversight.’ For people who had not attended college, the lyceum offered the same kinds of pleasures: socially sanctioned, “moral” recreation, with the added benefit of experiencing part of the life available to elite men in U.S. colleges. This healthy use of leisure, according to the rhetoric of the early promoters, was to furnish participants with information of use in their occu-

pational pursuits. Learning was to be of “use” to everyone, and “usefulness” was construed in economic, moral, ethical, and religious terms. The knowledge gleaned at a lyceum meeting was supposed to equip members with skills that would improve their artisanal abilities, or their

agricultural endeavors, or their homemaking, or their argumentative prowess. It was also a means of improving oneself, making oneself ever closer to the ideal mind, that is, the mind of the Creator. Whereas a cynic might observe that lyceum participants worked hard to rationalize their expenditure of time on a pleasurable social gathering, it is also true that the ethic of the New England Protestants who were the lyceum’s main promoters and practitioners required that every individual be called to account for the way that each moment was spent. Rhetorically meshing pleasure with profit made the lyceum cohere with social norms and ethical codes.® The intellectual function remained a significant part of the discourse of lyceum practice into the era of the popular lecture system. The significance of public performance, however, meant that descriptions focusing on the

eloquent lecturer as consummate entertainer grew in importance over time. The Milwaukee case illustrates the importance of the norms of performance in judging a popular public lecture as “good” or the reverse. The “name,” the celebrated personality, possessed a power. When unleashed in performance, that power was supposed to “draw in” audience members, to create the unique experience of losing themselves in the voice and thought and world created by another. In an oratorical culture, the public lecture hall provided a place for the public, communal expression of the desire to leave one’s quotidian existence for a period of time, to be borne along into an unfamiliar setting by a gifted other, a trusted traveling companion who possessed a special power.?

Individuals on the lyceum circuit who espoused social change also had

to meet the expectations for eloquence and dramatic engagement. Especially for social reformers like Douglass and Dickinson, who contradicted performative norms simply by appearing as public lecturers, the

“A Living Shuttle” 183 requirements of eloquence, of engaging one’s public, were particularly salient. Douglass’s use of humor and homely images, Dickinson’s vivid scenic descriptions and dramatic interpretations—such strategies can be un-

derstood not only as reassurances to an audience expecting a good show but also as a concrete embodiment of the implicit, abstract argument that these individuals understood the conventions and could play the game as well as anyone. The rights discourse that these lecturers espoused thus was buttressed by their success at enacting the role of lecturer so competently. Yet their unique competence may also have deflected attention from the abstract, global ideals they were espousing. On the lyceum circuits, as in public practices generally, nineteenth-century individuals whose bodily presence violated existing social norms for public display always confronted the double-edged sword of convention: performing well according to cultural expectations demonstrated that the potential for excellent performance was not restricted to the group that most benefited from conventions, but it simultaneously reinstantiated those forms as powerful and worthy of emulation. The cases of Douglass and Dickinson imply not only that entertainment was a primary function of lyceum practice but also that controversial positions were themselves educative. Social reformers who told people news that they had not heard before, who spoke from a subject position different from the “ordinary,” were enacting an educational function that was fundamentally expansive. They represented new ways of viewing the world, new possibilities of human experience, new personal stories that paralleled, or contradicted, or tangentially intersected the more familiar experi-

ences and stories told in conventional lectures. Both Douglass and Dickinson relied on rhetorical forms familiar to lyceum audiences: Douglass, on the self-improvement lecture or the paean to American exception-

alism, for example, and Dickinson, on the travel narrative and the Protestant sermon. In both cases, these forms created a zone of comfort and familiarity, but the possibility of change in society more broadly was signaled in the alterations of the formal conventions of these standard lyceum types. The texts of the lyceum—the promotional materials of early advocates, the judgmental commentary of organizers and participants, the lectures of celebrities—imply not only variety in the roles for audience members, the

types of knowledge produced and transmitted, and the functional rationales for lyceum practice. They also exemplify variety in the ideas of what words and images and public performances are and can be.

184 Chapter Six Rhetorics of the Lyceum The four cases examined herein suggest three different concepts of rhetoric in the process of making meaning: rhetoric as a transmitter of facts, rhetoric as an art of performance, and rhetoric as a constitutive, creative public practice. The case of Holbrook’s Family Lyceum implies that the central function of

words and images and practices is to transmit preexisting knowledge. In this formulation, symbols are not themselves creative but instead are instruments, tools to be used in the direct, relatively transparent communication of information between people. (The popular metaphor of the new railroad lines as means for “communication” across distance is appropriate here.) Thus symbols made by human beings are by definition faulty and not truly creative. Only the “book of nature,” the work of the Creator, is evidence of a uniquely creative spirit. This construction of the roles of truth and rhetoric reveals the Platonic inheritance, transmuted in the discourse of modernism that brought truth from heaven to earth. Yet the method of communication promoted by the Family Lyceum is hardly Platonic; there are no Socratic questions and answers here. Rather, the method is “scientific,” the lecture-demonstration ideal pioneered at Yale by Benjamin Silliman. The emphasis is firmly on preexisting scientific knowledge that is presented

for mass consumption, not (usually) on experimental testing of hypotheses. Instead, “experience” itself, that is, observation, constitutes the “experiment.” Sensitive observers notice and transmit truths. They do not make them. The Family Lyceum, however, also exhibits a sense of the importance of imaginative engagement in instructional, rhetorical practice. The focus on

the importance of engaging pupils through such means as the anthropomorphism of geometric shapes or the use of an apple to teach astronomical principles highlights the imaginative function of rhetoric, now rhetoric understood in a Baconian framework: in working among the faculties of the mind, rhetoric has a small but crucial role to play, to engage the imagination in support of the reason for the better moving of the will.!° Words and visual images—the clergyman’s authoritative voice and the apple, for example—work through multiple channels to engage the imagination and promote the dawning of the rational faculties, in Harriet’s case the realization of the preexistent truth of the earth’s rotation. In Holbrook’s Family Lyceum, then, rhetoric is simultaneously construed as a (mere) transmitter of preexistent truths and, through demonstration, exhibited as a crucial

“A Living Shuttle” 185 aspect of teaching practice: the pupil can hear a truth expressed, but the inculcation of that truth occurs best when the pupil can hear and see and experience (“experiment”) personally.!! In the Milwaukee case, the rhetoric of facts (still present in much of the

lecture content) gives way to rhetoric as an art of performance. In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, lectures for popular audiences— including lyceum lectures—constituted a special kind of epideictic, the cat-

egory of ceremonial or display oratory that Aristotle formulated in the fourth century B.c.E. Edward Schiappa and David Timmerman observe that Aristotle’s creation of this category collapsed the Greek rhetorical practices of the speech of praise, the oration given at a festival, and the funeral oration. In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the catchall category of epideictic speeches—

contrasted with deliberative and judicial forms—describes a means of praising or condemning some person or action, and its temporal orientation is in the present moment. Although a speaker might allude to the past or the future—as one would, say, in a eulogy—the focus of the speech is centered in the present, in sustaining the community. Audience members fulfill the role of judges of performance, making an aesthetic rather than a political judgment.! The “good speech” is one that is well made and well performed. A translation rather than a direct application of ancient epideictic helps make sense of nineteenth-century practices. To say that the lyceum lecture constituted a special type of epideictic means partly that the lyceum lecture was a community-building and community-sustaining rhetorical event. It

praised Athenians to Athenians, or, rather, Milwaukeeans to Milwaukeeans and Americans to Americans. Not only by hearing the many lectures that focused attention on what was good and bad in U.S. society but also by participating in lyceum practice generally—attending events that were widely described as “improving”—individuals could exhibit a commitment to the social norms and values of Protestant New England that were coming to be seen as “American.” These events drew boundaries between participants and nonparticipants, and speeches often continued that boundary drawing, identifying persons and groups in the world that were

to be understood as the exotic other. The lyceum in young Milwaukee helped codify the hierarchies of the local community in the intellectual realm, which mirrored the economic realm, and helped identify cultural leaders and engineer public consent to their values. The lyceum thus functioned as a consensus builder, and the expression of divergent views on its

platform simultaneously placed aberrant ideas in a formal context of

186 Chapter Six containment, created a safety valve for the controlled release of disparities from norms, and enacted the consensual view of “Americanness” as encompassing a diversity of persons and opinions. In 1850s Milwaukee, local

opinion leaders reminded the public which speakers diverged from the norm, rhetorically shoring up intellectual boundaries and attempting to control the uncontrollable power of representations, always open to varying interpretations. }3

The lyceum lectures in 1850s Milwaukee did not focus solely on praise and blame, although the capacity of a lecturer to organize and codify information and to articulate clear claims of value was highly prized. The more salient site for praise and blame in lyceum epideictic was the judgments of the spectators, called upon to render opinions about the lecturing performance. Again, the significance of a lecturer’s capacity to “draw in” audience members, to involve them in a spellbinding, ephemeral experience, illustrates the importance of the rhetorical performance. The lecturer’s “name” had a certain kind of power; expectations for performance were derived from the characteristics and qualities of that presumed power. Since midcentury lyceum lecturing was commercial as well as intellectual, the creation of a celebrity name meant that the experience of attending a lecture also had a commodity value in the marketplace. The public paid for the sustenance of communal norms, and lecturers who could inspire accolades for their performance were rewarded in the symbolic currency of the capitalist system: that is, in cash.

This nineteenth-century form of epideictic, then, is bound up with ethos, both the creation of an ideal of individual character and the creation of an ethic of group identity. The ethos, or represented persona, of the lecturer-performer had special significance, as “names” were made and un-

made and as the names of lecturers made or unmade the names of the lyceums that sponsored them. Further, in the communal experience of coming together—making a coherent group, a subset of the “public,” even for an hour or two—individuals could understand themselves as part of a whole. The character, sentiments, and guiding beliefs of that whole—call it “Concord,” call it “Milwaukee,” call it “America”—were expressed and created there in the experiential moment. Whereas the lyceum can be understood as a quasi-civic arena for building consensus and controlling divergent views, the representations created by individuals who espoused those divergent views were not easy to control. Meaning-making is notoriously slippery, and ambiguities present in all symbolic systems suggest the difficulty of fixing stable meanings. This very

“A Living Shuttle” 187 lack of stability both assisted and constrained the potential public reception of voices raised in calls for social change, like those of Douglass and Dick-

inson. These two cases illustrate yet another conception of rhetoric: whereas lyceum practice for Douglass and Dickinson was certainly an art of

performance and in many of their assertions they espoused a rhetoric of facts, the theory of rhetoric that emerges most notably from their lyceum speeches is rhetoric as a constitutive, creative art. Later twentieth-century rhetorical theories can help make sense of Douglass’s and Dickinson’s rhetorical practice: rhetoric is a means of making knowledge, a way of con-

structing what will count as meaningful, an art by which representations are created and challenged.!4 This book argues that all lyceum practice was

constitutive of culture, but in the discourse of those espousing social change, that function is especially evident. Both Douglass and Dickinson adapted familiar lyceum forms. Their performances and their utterances relied on mainstream nineteenth-century endoxa, or common beliefs and common knowledge. They did not act in incomprehensible ways, and they did not speak gibberish. Instead, they employed homely metaphors and vivid imagery and dramatic performance styles that “common sense” could easily categorize and interpret. In departing from those familiar forms—the form of the self-improvement lecture, the form of the lay sermon—Douglass and Dickinson reformulated and reshaped old models. The new wine poured into the old bottles did not break the old bottles straightaway, but it threatened to remold and reshape the old bottles into new and different forms, forms more suitable for the contents. The strength of the attack on the old forms varied in Douglass’s and Dickinson’s lectures from speech to speech and even from moment to moment. Lyceum practice thus exhibited shifts and changes in understandings of what rhetoric could and can be. The lyceum manifested the transmission model of the rhetoric of facts, rhetoric as an art of performance, and a constitutive rhetoric of representation. Oscillations among these conceptions of rhetoric illustrate the ways in which the lyceum itself, as public self-

representation, can be understood as a site for negotiating the fears and hopes for what symbolic systems can do.

Warp, Woof, and Patterns of Meaning This study examines the discourse of the nineteenth-century U.S. lyceum in two modes: in the processes of engineering consent to the norms and

188 Chapter Six values of the professional class of white Protestant New England and in the

processes of creating resistances to those norms and values from within them. Lyceum practice itself can be understood to have worked through

ritualistic appeals to conventions that were presumed to have been “universals”—the value of learning, the appropriate use of leisure time, the importance of utilitarianism. The discourse of promoters and organizers emphasized individual and collective “improvement” through a conserva-

tive activity in which codified “knowledge” was presented in palatable forms of fact for a mass public. Nonetheless, the structure of the lyceum and the mores that it upheld created space for alternative views and for lecturers who diverged from presumptive ideals. Education and entertainment, the two functions simultaneously present in lyceum discourse and lyceum practice, met at points of controversy, in the discourse of social reform. In rhetorically envisioning better ways to

live—with the promises of the “American experiment” made real for African American men and women, for Chinese immigrants, for white women, for laborers—reformers represented a new world in performance.

The stuff of this act of creation was the forms and models of familiar speech, the dramatic performances expected of the “good” lecturer, but the product was a new thing. Of course, the positive representations that reformers exhibited were just as susceptible to multiple interpretations as the negative representations they so vigorously combated. Yet if stabilizing meaning is impossible, as media theorist Stuart Hall

reminds us, this is not a motive for despair. The instability of meaning, the experience of constantly creating and reforming and reshaping com-

munities, cultures, and characters—the rhetorical nature of human experience—is also a promise of hope. In Hall’s terms, it suggests a “politics

without guarantees,” a determined engagement with social practices that realizes the ever-shifting instability of representations.!> If the celebrity persona of Frederick Douglass was a positive representation of African American manhood set against, for example, the tradition of blackface minstrelsy, and if the persona of Anna Dickinson contradicted the representations of white women propounded by people like John Todd and Horace Bushnell, then the failure of the former to obliterate the latter is not a condemnation of the positive representations as insufficient. Instead, the presence of alternative representations implies that the rhetorical processes of representing are themselves ever open and ever unstable. This interpretation, however, comes from a twenty-first-century perspective reading back into nineteenth-century practices. This study does

“A Living Shuttle” 189 not imply that lyceum participants necessarily interpreted their own activities in this way. Rather, it suggests that the theories of rhetoric implicit in

their actions and utterances can be extended logically into a framework consonant with the notions of rhetoric as a constitutive art, and of symbolic systems as ever open to shifts and changes and new conceptions. Far from implying that symbols have no “real meaning” and thus that every

symbol can mean anything, this framework suggests the crucial importance of human action and utterance in making meanings in each moment, of the significance of a rhetorical consciousness.

The constitutive role of rhetorical processes as exemplified in the discourse of the nineteenth-century lyceum recalls Higginson’s metaphor of weaving. The warp and woof, the speedy shuttle traveling to and fro, the predetermined pattern based on New England models—these were set to produce a regular national fabric of brilliant color and coherent design. The variety of representations that emerged in lyceum practice, however, created something else—something less regular, less predetermined, and far less symmetrical. As people gathered in groups to learn or to enjoy an out-

ing, to see a famous celebrity or to watch their neighbors’ reactions, to practice skills in speaking and reading and argument, to display their own oratorical abilities or to render judgments of the abilities of others, to examine the new public hall or to take a stenographic report of a lecture for tomorrow’s newspaper, their words and their actions, their responses both expressed and suppressed, made multiple meanings of themselves as indi-

viduals and as constituent members of collectives. The resultant design bore evidence of the preset New England pattern, but the gaps and tears, the adaptations, the dropped threads and new fibers, created a far more complex fabric, a fabric made of words and images and public practices, a fabric yet unfinished.

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| Appendix 1 Lyceum Timeline 1806-10 Josiah Holbrook studies at Yale College 1824-25 Holbrook founds and operates Agricultural Seminary, Derby, Conn.

1825 Erie Canal completed 1826 Publication of Holbrook’s “Associations of Adults for Mutual Education,” American Journal of Education; founding of Millbury, Mass., Lyceum

1828 Andrew Jackson elected U.S. president 1831 The national American Lyceum founded 1837 Lyceum Village, Berea, Ohio, founded; panic of 1837 1839 American Lyceum holds final meeting 1844 Lyceum Village closed; interurban telegraph network begun 1846-48 Mexican War 1852 Railroad reaches Chicago from the East 1854 Death of Josiah Holbrook 1861-65 U.S. Civil War 1864 Associated Western Literary Societies (AWLS) organized

1866 American Literary Bureau, New York, founded 1868 James Redpath’s Boston Lyceum Bureau founded 1869 Transcontinental railroad completed 1870 Ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment; AWLS merges with American Literary Bureau

1873 Panic of 1873

1874 Chautauqua Institution founded, Chautauqua, New York 1875 Redpath sells Lyceum Bureau; Redpath name retained

19]

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°/

Appendix 2

Josiah Holbrook’s Plan for Mutual-Education Societies, 1826 Associations of Adults for Mutual Education. * [The following article is from an individual whose attention has been long

and peculiarly directed to the subject on which he writes; and who has contributed extensive and efficient service to associations modelled on a plan similar to that which is now presented to our readers. The subject here introduced to public attention, is one of uncommon interest, when regarded in connection with the progress of general improvement by means of education; it is equally important in a political point of view, as intimately connected with the diffusion of intelligence, and with the elevation of character among the agricultural and mechanic classes; and to the friend of moral improvement it offers a source of peculiar gratification, as a sure preventive of those insidious inroads of vice, which are ever ready to be made on hours of leisure and relaxation. ] To the Editor,

Sir, I take the liberty to submit for your consideration, a few articles as regulations for associations for mutual instruction in the sciences, and in useful knowledge generally. You will see they are upon a broad basis; and the reason is that men of views enlightened enough upon education to see its defects and its wants, and spirit enough to act, are scattered more or less through the country; and all that is necessary for action, is some definite plan of operation by which their efforts can be united and brought to bear

“[Josiah Holbrook], “Associations of Adults for Mutual Education,” American Journal of Education 1, no. 10 (October 1826): 594-97. Editor William Russell is responsible for the headnote. 193

194 Appendix 2 upon one point. It seems to me that if associations for mutual instruction in the sciences and other branches of useful knowledge, could once be started in our villages, and upon a general plan, they would increase with great rapidity, and do more for the general diffusion of knowledge, and for raising the moral and intellectual taste of our countrymen, than any other expedient which can possibly be de-[p. 595:]vised. And it may be questioned if there is any other way, to check the progress of that monster, intemperance, which is making such havoc with talents, morals, and every thing that raises man above the brute, but by presenting some object of sufficient interest to divert the attention of the young from places and practices which lead to dissipation and to ruin. I do not doubt but alterations in the title and articles will be advisable; but I believe most confidently, that something of the general plan may be carried into effect.

Society for Mutual Education. The first object of this society is to procure for youths an economical and practical education, and to diffuse rational and useful information through the community generally. The second object is to apply the sciences and the various branches of education to the domestic and useful arts, and to all the common purposes of life.

Branches of this society may be formed in any place where a number are disposed to associate for the same object, and to adopt the following or similar articles as their constitution:

The society will hold meetings, as often as they think it expedient, for the purpose of mutual instruction in the sciences, by investigating and dis-

cussing them or any other branch of useful knowledge. The several branches of Natural Philosophy, viz: Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Pneumatics, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Botany, any branch of the Mathematics, History, Political Economy, or any political[,] intellectual, or moral subject, may be examined and discussed by the society. Any branch of the society may, as often as they think it expedient, procure regular courses of instruction by lectures or otherwise, in any subject of useful knowledge.

The society, as they find it convenient, shall procure books, apparatus for illustrating the sciences, a cabinet of minerals, and other articles of natural or artificial production. The society may aid in establishing and patronising an institution or institutions, for giving to youths a thorough education, intellectual, moral

Josiah Holbrook’s Plan for Mutual-Education Socteties, 1826 195

and physical, and in the application of the sciences to agriculture and the other useful arts, and for qualifying teachers. The aid to be given by furnishing means for the pupils by agricultural or mechanical operations, to defray or lessen the expenses of their education. Any person may be a member of the society, by paying to the Treasurer, annually, one dollar. And ten dollars paid at any one time, will constitute a person a member for life. The money paid to the society for membership or otherwise, shall be appropriated to the purchase of books, apparatus, a cab-[p. 596:Jinet, aiding an institution for practical education or for some other object for the benefit of the society. The officers of each branch of the society shall be a President, Vice President, Treasurer, Recording and Corresponding Secretaries; five Curators, and three Delegates to meet delegates from other branches of the society in the same county. The President, Vice President, Treasurer, and Recording Secretary, shall perform the duties usually implied in those offices. The corresponding secretaries shall make communications to each other for the benefit of the society, as discoveries, improvements, or other circumstances shall require. The curators shall have charge of the library, apparatus, cabinet, and all other property of the society, not appertaining to the treasury.

The delegates of the several branches of the society in any one county, shall meet semi-annually, at such place as they shall choose, for the purpose of consulting upon measures for promoting the designs of the society, particularly for encouraging an institution for giving an economical and practical education, and for qualifying teachers. The delegates from the several branches of the society in any county, shall be called the board of delegates from the society for Mutual Education in that county. The board of delegates in each county shall appoint such officers as shall be necessary for their organisation or for doing any business coming within their province. Each board of delegates shall appoint a representative, to meet representatives from other boards who shall be styled the Board of Mutual Education for a given State; and it might be advantageous to have also a General Board embracing the United States. It shall be the duty of the General or State Boards to meet annually to appoint a president and other officers, to devise and recommend such a system of Education as they shall think most eligible, also to recommend

196 Appendix 2 such books as they shall think best fitted to answer the purposes for which they are designed, and to adopt and recommend such measures, generally, as are most likely to secure to the rising generation the best intellectual, moral, and physical, education, and to diffuse the greatest quantity of useful information among the various classes of the community. Any branch of the society will have power to adopt such by-laws and regulations, as will be necessary for the management and use of the library, apparatus, cabinet, &c. and for carrying into effect any designs not inconsistent with the general object of the society. Several institutions essentially the same as here proposed, have already been formed in our country, and some of them are highly useful and respectable: that others may and will be formed, there is [p. 597:] no doubt. The object of the above articles is to forward the formation of them upon a general plan, and to form a connecting link between them which will en-

able them to unite their efforts, and may possibly lead them to vie with each other in prosecuting their general object, which is certainly second to

no one that ever enlisted the talents of the Philosopher or of the Statesman, or the feelings of the Philanthropist.

Appendix 3

°,

The New York Tribune’s List of Lyceum Lecturers, 1859-1860 Lyceum Lecturers. * The following list includes, we presume, the names of all those persons who are ready for engagements as public lecturers the present season:

Alcott, A. Bronson Concord, Mass. Alger, the Rev. Wm. R. Boston, Mass.

Anderson, T. D. Roxbury, Mass.

Anthony, Susan B. Rochester, N.Y. Bacon, George B. New-Haven, Conn.

Arpin, P. New-York

Balch, the Rev. William S. Ludlow, Vt. Beecher, the Rev. Charles Galesburg, IIl.

Beecher, the Rev. Henry Ward Brooklyn, N.Y. Beecher, the Rev. Thomas K. Elmira, N.Y. Bellows, the Rev. Henry W., D.D. New- York

Benjamin, Park New-York Bentley, Henry New- York Birnan, L. B. Newark, N.J.

Birney, William Cincinnati, Ohio Blackwell, the Rev. Antoinette L. Brown New- York

*“Tyceum Lecturers,” New York Tribune, 9 September 1859. Abbreviations of states have been made consistent throughout, and the alphabetization of the Tribune list has been corrected. Compare “The Lecture Season,” New York Tribune, 27 September 1853; “The Lecture Season,” New York Tribune, 20 September 1854; “The Lecture Season,” New York Tribune, 19 October 1855; and “The Lecture Season,” New York Tribune, 12 October 1858. 197

198 Appendix 3 Blodget, Lorin Philadelphia, Pa. Booth, Henry Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Boutwell, the Hon. George S. Groton, Mass.

Boyd, Geo. William New-York Brown, Brownlee Newburgh, N.Y.

Brown, Ira D. Utica, N.Y.

Brown, J. B. New-York

Brown, Prof. Wm. Symington Boston, Mass.

Brown, Wm. W. Boston, Mass.

Buchanan, Dr. J. R. Cincinnati, Ohio Bungay, George W. Utica, N.Y.

Burchard, the Rev. J. Adams, Jefferson Co., N.Y.

Burleigh, C. C. Plainfield, Conn.

Burleigh, William H. New-York

Burlingham, the Rev. A. H. Hamilton, Madison Co., N.Y.

Chapin, the Rev. E. H. New-York

Cheever, the Rev. Henry T. Jewett City, Conn.

Chester, Apson G. Syracuse, N.Y.

Clapp, Henry W. New-York

Clapp, William W. N. Boston, Mass.

Clark, Benjamin C. Boston, Mass.

Clark, the Rev. Rufus W. Brooklyn, N.Y. Clark, the Rev. Thomas M. Providence, R.I.

Coggeshall, W. T. Cincinnati, Ohio Conant, C. B. New-York Congdon, Charles T. Lynn, Mass.

Cook, Clarence Newburgh, N.Y. Cox, the Rev. S. Hanson, D.D. Attica, Wyoming Co., N.Y. Crosby, Frank Philadelphia, Pa. Crozier, the Rev. H. P. Huntington, Long Island, N.Y.

Curtis, George William New-York Cushing, the Hon. Caleb Newburyport, Mass. Cutting, the Rev. S. C. Rochester, N.Y. Cuyler, the Rev. Theodore L. New-York

Dall, Mrs. C. H. Boston, Mass. De Cordova, R. J. New-York

Deming, Henry C. Hartford, Conn.

The New York Tribune’s List of Lyceum Lecturers, 1859-1860 199

Denison, the Rev. C. W. Bultalo, N.Y. Dewey, the Rev. Orville Boston, Mass. Dexter, the Rev. Henry M. Boston, Mass.

Dix, William G. Boston, Mass.

Doane, the Rev. Hiram Norwich, N.Y.

Douglass, Frederick Rochester, N.Y. Dresser, Miss Helen M. Boston, Mass.

Dunn, Nathaniel Yorkville, N.Y.

Ehle, George L. New-York

Elder, Dr. William Philadelphia, Pa.

Elliott, C. W. New- York

Emerson, Ralph Waldo Concord, Mass. English, Thomas Dunn New-York

Ewing, W. Pinkney El[k]ton, Md.

Fernald, Woodbury M. Boston, Mass. Fletcher, the Rev. J. C. Newburyport, Mass.

Fontana, Sig. G. B. Boston, Mass.

Forbes, Col. Hugh New-York

Fowler, Prof. Henry Rochester, N.Y. Fowles, Prof. John W. Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Fox, Henry J. Ashland, Green[e] Co., N.Y. Frothingham, the Rev. O. B. New-York

Fry, William Henry New-York

Gage, Mrs. E. G. Fayetteville, Onondaga Co., N.Y.

Gage, Mrs. Frances D. St. Louis, Mo.

Gannett, the Rev. Ezra S., D.D. Boston, Mass.

Garrison, Wm. Lloyd Boston, Mass.

Gay, S. H. New-York Giddings, the Hon. Joshua R. Jefferson, Ohio

Giles, the Rev. Henry Bucksport, Me.

Gilman, Arthur Boston, Mass.

Goddard, William Cincinnati, Ohio Godwin, Parke New- York Haskell, Daniel N. Boston, Mass. Hatch, the Rev. J. S.[?] Brooklyn, N.Y.

Hedge, the Rev. F. H., D.D. Brookline, Mass. Henry, the Rev. C. S., D.D. Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Henshaw, J. Sydney Utica, N.Y.

200 Appendix 3 Heywood, E. H. Worcester, Mass. Higginson, the Rev. Thomas W. Worcester, Mass.

Hitchcock, Prof. Edward Amherst, Mass.

Holland, the Rev. E. G. New-York

Holland, the Rev. FE. W. East Cambridge, Mass.

Holland, Dr. J. G. Springfield, Mass.

Holmes, Dr. Oliver Wendell Boston, Mass.

Hopkins, the Rt. Rev. Bishop John H. Burlington, Vt.

Hopkins, the Rev. Prest. Mark Williamstown, Mass.

Hosmer, Wm. H. C. Caledonia, Livingston Co., N.Y.

Howe, Wm. W. New-York

Hunt, the Hon. Washington Lockport, N.Y.

Hyatt, James Stanfordville, Dutchess Co., N.Y. Jones, Philip Boileau New- York Kelly, E. G. New-York Kimberly, Miss Mt. Carmel, Conn. King, the Rev. T. Starr Boston, Mass.

Kneeland, Dr. Samuel, Jr. Boston, Mass. Langey, the Rev. S. Herbert New- York

Lee, the Rev. David K. Auburn, N.Y.

Livermore, the Rev. A. A. Yonkers, N.Y.

Lord, the Rev. John Stamford, Conn.

Loring, James S. Boston, Mass. Lowell, Prof. James Russell Cambridge, Mass. Ludlow, Fitzhugh New-York Lyon, the Hon. Caleb Lyonsdale, N.Y. MacFarland, C. Philadelphia, Pa.

MacKenzie, Dr. Shelton Philadelphia, Pa. Mandell, the Rev. Albert Skaneateles, N.Y.

Marble, M. M. Boston, Mass.

May, the Rev. Samuel J. Syracuse, N.Y.

Mayo, the Rev. A. D. Albany, N.Y. Melville, Herman Pittsfield, Mass. Miner, the Rev. A. M. Boston, Mass. Mitchell, Donald G. New-Haven, Conn.

Monti, Prof. Luigi Boston, Mass.

Murdock, the Rev. David, Jr. New-Milford, Conn.

The New York Tribune’s List of Lyceum Lecturers, 1859-1560 201

Neal, John Portland, Me.

Neal, the Rev. Rollin H., D.D. Boston, Mass.

North, Prof. Edward Clinton, N.Y.

Noyes, Dr. John O. New-York

Olcott, Henry S. New-York

Oscanyan, C. New-York

Osgood, the Rev. Samuel S. New-York

Palmer, Dr. J. W. New-York Paret, Thomas D. New-York

Parker, Col. Edward G., Jr. Boston, Mass.

Parmenter, Frederick A. Owego, N.Y.

Peabody, the Rev. A. P., D.D. Portsmouth, N.H.

Phillips, Geo. S. Boston, Mass. Phillips, Wendell Boston, Mass. Pierpont, the Rev. John Medford, Mass. Pillsbury, Parker Concord, N.H.

Powell, A. M. Ghent, Columbia Co., N.Y. Prince, the Rev. N. A. Bethel, Conn. Quincy, Josiah, Jr. Boston, Mass. Ray, William Porter New-York Reuben, Levi, M.D. New-York Reynolds, the Rev. E. W. Newburgh, N.Y.

Rock, Dr. J. S. Boston, Mass. Rose, Mrs. Ernestine L. New-York

Sanford, the Hon. Mitchell New-York

Saxe, John G. Burlington, Vt. Scherb, Emanuel V. , Boston, Mass. Sedgwick, Stephen J. New- York

Seelye, J. H. Schenectady, N.Y. Shackford, the Rev. Chas. C. Lynn, Mass.

Shillaber, B. P. (Mrs. Partington) Boston, Mass. Smith, the Rev. C. Billings, D.D. Iowa City, Iowa

Smith, Elizabeth Oakes New-York

Smith, Dr. J. V. C. Boston, Mass.

Solger, Dr. R. Boston, Mass. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Seneca Falls, N.Y. Stark, Wm. Manchester, N.H. Stone, the Rev. A. L. Boston, Mass. Stone, the Rev. Thos. T. Bolton, Mass.

202 Appendix 3 Stuart, William New-York Sumner, Geo. Boston, Mass.

- Sweet, Samuel N. Florence, Oneida Co., N.Y.

Sweet, Stephen R. Utica, N.Y.

Taverner, Prof. J. W. New- York

Taylor, Bayard New-York

Thompson, the Rev. James W., D.D. Salem, Mass.

Thompson, the Hon. John Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Thompson, John R. Richmond, Va. Thompson, the Rev. Joseph P., D.D. New- York

Thomson, Mortimer (Doesticks) New-York

Thoreau, Henry D. Concord, Mass. Tiffany, the Rev. Charles C. Derby, Conn. Tiffany, Osmond Springfield, Mass.

Tilton, Theodore New-York Tilton, Warren Boston, Mass.

Todd, the Rev. John, D.D. Pittsfield, Mass.

Underwood, F. U. Cambridge, Mass.

Vail, Henry C. Sing Sing, N.Y. Van Benthuysen, H. B. Oramel, N.Y.

Van Santvo[o]rd, C., D.D. Greenwich, N.Y.

Van Schaack, Mrs. Eliza T. Coxsackie, Greene Co., N.Y.

Vinton, the Rev. Dr. Francis New-York

Wadleigh, Dr. N. B. Glen Haven, Cortland Co., N.Y.

Wainwright, J. Howard New- York Walker, the Rev. Jason F. Glenn’s Falls, N-Y. Wardner, the Rev. N. Plainfield, N.J.

Warren, Ira D. New- York

Whipple, Edwin P. Boston, Mass. Wilder, George D. Brookline, Mass. Willard, the Rev. John B. Still River, Mass. Wilson, James Grant Chicago, Il. Winter, William Cambridgeport, Mass. Youmans, Edward L. New-York Youmans, Eliza Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Appendix 4 Lectures Sponsored by the Young Men’s Association of the City of Milwaukee, December 1854—March 1857* Date Lecturer, Occupation, Residence Lecture 1854-55

Dec. 9 Josiah Quincy “The Mormons and Their politician, educator, and writer, Prophet” Boston

Dec. 26 Parke Godwin “The Future Republic” editor and author, New York

Jan. 15 Abram Newkirk Littlejohn “Our Characteristic Wants” clergyman, New Haven, Conn.

Jan. 19 Thomas Starr King “Substance and Show” clergyman, Boston

Feb. 27 Bayard Taylor “India” traveler and author, New York

Mar. 1 Bayard Taylor “The Philosophy of Travel” Mar. 6 John Pierpont “The Golden Calf” (a poem) clergyman and poet, Medford, Mass. “For the schedule of lectures, Milwaukee Sentinel, Milwaukee Free Democrat, Milwaukee Wisconsin, Milwaukee News, Milwaukee American, and Young Men’s Association of the

City of Milwaukee, Minutes of Meetings of the Board of Directors, 1848-68, Milwaukee Area Research Center, Golda Meir Library, University of Wisconsin— Milwaukee. For occupations and residences of the lecturers, esp. the Milwaukee newspapers; the Dictionary of American Biography; “The Lecture Season,” New York Tribune, 20 September 1854; and “The Lecture Season,” New York Tribune, 19 October 1855.

203

204 Appendix 4 Mar. 23 Horace Mann “Great Britain” educator, Yellow Springs, Ohio

Mar. 24 Horace Mann “Woman” Apr. 10 James Russell Lowell “The Ballads” professor and poet, Cambridge, Mass. 1855-56

Oct. 13 Henry Ward Beecher “Patriotism” ** clergyman, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Nov. 10 Wendell Phillips “Lost Arts”** abolitionist and orator, Boston

Nov. 23 Wendell Phillips “Duty of Thoughtful Men in a Republic”

Dec. 7 David Paul Brown “The Passions” lawyer, Philadelphia

Dec. 13 John Bartholomew Gough “Temperance”** temperance advocate, Worcester, Mass.

Dec. 14 Thomas Starr King “Sight and Insight” clergyman, Boston

Dec. 22 Theodore William Dwight “The Man of the World and professor, Clinton, N.Y. the Man of Books”

Dec. 28 James T. Robinson “Opinion” politician, Adams, Mass.

Jan. 4 Edward Hitchcock “Inorganic Geology” professor, Amherst, Mass.

Jan. 7 Edward Hitchcock “Organic Geology” Jan. 11 Edward Hitchcock “Fossil Footmarks” Jan. 14 Edward Hitchcock “Glimpses of the Geology

| Worlds”

and Habitability of Other

Feb. 4 Cornelius Conway Felton “Paul, Demosthenes and professor, Cambridge, Mass. Socrates”

“In 1855-56, these five lectures were “extra,” not included in the price of a season ticket or considered part of the “regular course.” All ten lectures in 1854—55 were accessible to season-ticket holders. The Young Men’s Association did not sell season tickets in 1856-57.

Lectures Sponsored by the Young Men’s Association of Milwaukee 205

Feb. 11 George Sumner “Old Europe and Young traveler and author, Boston America”

Feb. 15 George H. Gould “Transcendental Property” clergyman

Feb. 22 Thomas March Clark “Form and Force” clergyman, Providence, R.I.

Mar. 1 George Sumner “France and Louis Napoleon”**

Mar. 8 Edwin Hubbell Chapin “Modern Chivalry”*** clergyman, New York

1856-57

Dec. 27 E. H. Goddard “Art” Cincinnati

Dec. 31 E. H. Goddard “Milton’s Satan”

Jan. 26 Horace Greeley “Europe” editor, New York

Feb. 18 John Bartholomew Gough “Temperance” temperance advocate, New York

Feb. 19 John Bartholomew Gough “Temperance” Feb. 20 John Bartholomew Gough “Temperance” Mar. 14 Henry Whitney Bellows “Freeman’s Fallacies: The

clergyman, New York Foes of Liberty”

Mar. 31 John Godfrey Saxe “Yankee-Land” (a poem) , editor and wit, Burlington, Vt.

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Appendix 5 “The Races,” by Frederick Douglass* The relation existing between the white and colored people of the United States, is the great and all commanding question for this age and nation to solve. The consideration of it in one or another of its manifold forms, is most in order on all occasions, and he who can throw any light upon it or upon any of its relations and bearings—no matter how humble his origin or how limited his attainments in other respects—may hope for a calm and candid hearing from every intelligent lover of his country. I am here to throw out a few thoughts upon that branch of this great controversy which respects the unity of the races of men. This subject has hitherto got but very little attention from the friends of freedom, but very much from the enemies of freedom. Those enemies have had in this respect every thing their own way. They have chosen the ground and compelled us to meet, if we meet them at all, upon their own conditions. Not content with their victories in other fields, not content with ruling this nation as with a sceptre of Iron, not content with gagging the pulpit, fettering the press, and suppressing free speech, not with controlling and directing public opinion, and corrupting the fountains of justice & liberty at their source, not content with trampling upon the declaration of Independence, violating the Constitution, and perverting the holy teachings of the Bible, the advocates of human bondage have sought the aid of science, and hope by means of it to read the negro out of the human family. This foul attempt to arrest the progress of Civilization and to stab the cause of GHizatien Liberty I am here to expose and repel with whatever of fact and of argument I can command. *”The Races,” in con. 21, reel 14, frs. 194-205, Frederick Douglass Papers, MS 16,377, Library of Congress. This speech text is a holographic manuscript; terms struck through in the manuscript are included here, also struck through. 207

208 Appendix 5 And here Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to say, that I hope you are not expecting any thing like a rhetorical display on this occasion. Neither the nature of the Subject—nor my aptitude as a speaker will permit me to gratify any such expectations—if indeed, any such have been formed. Facts and arguments and not fine flights of oratory are all that I can promise you

in this discussion. I am as you know, from the slave plantation—a bad School. I bring no pleasing arts to grace my speech and win applause. I come only to speak for the simple truth. First of all let me call your attention to the race which it seems desirable by some means—or other—to shut out of the pale of humanity. No people are more talked about and no people seem more imperfectly understood. Those who see us every day seem not to know us. We are regarded as the English are sometimes said to regard the Irish—as a moral and social enigma which any body may be excused for inability to solve. [p. 2:] The cause of this estimate of us, is not to be found in any supposed or transparent characteristics of the negro race. We are certainly not a secretive people like the Chinese, nor a taciturn people like the Indian, nor are we as unapproachable. We do not vanish before the advancing tread of the white man, nor seek to avoid him, but we follow him rejoicing in every step he makes in the pathway of Liberty and Civilization. The explanation of the ignorance of which I complain, is to be found in the peculiar stand point from which we have been viewed by those who have sought to investigate our true character, and to ascertain our true position in the Scale of Creation. Accustomed to view and weigh the negro as an article of property admirably adapted to put money in the white man|[’]s purse, it has been easy to lose sight of his human character, and hard to recognize him as an equal member of the human family. The first question the black man has to meet in all his upward tenden-

cies touches his very manhood. All argument for his enslavement and degradation involves a doubt either expressed or implied, that the negro is deferent as a man. We are coolly put upon trial for our very manhood. Is he a man or is he an animal? That is our first question, and I like to dispose of rudimental questions, in their order, and as this is first I will dispose of it now.

I do not say that the negro is not an animal. Viewed physically all men are animals, and some of them, not the most exalted animals either. It is not however in this general respect that the question is raised.

“The Races,” by Frederick Douglass 209 We are upon trial, upon the naked question of our manhood. Are we veritable men? My answer to this fundamental question is that by every fact, by every argument, by every principle, by every consideration, whether, of a mental, moral, or spiritual nature—by every thing in heaven and on the Earth which vindicates the humanity of any, the negroes [sic] humanity can be equally vindicated. The lines which separate him from the brute creation

are as broad, distinct and palpable, as those which prove and define the manhood of any of the most highly favored races of men.

The negro, in common with every other variety of the human family stands erect, the admitted monarch of aH the whole animal kingdom, a man, a whole man. Nothing more, nothing less. [p. 3:] In his virtues, he is a man. In his vices, he is equally a man. He shares alike all the moral beauties and deformities of the common family of man. Science has been at the pains of pointing out certain marks which dis-

tinguish man from all other forms of animal life. The negro responds to them all. He lacks nothing, but Cultivation. He has two hands; he talks[,] he laughs, he weeps. Man is the only laughing, talking, and weeping animal in the world, and the negro cannot be denied either of these distinguishing powers.

But he is not destitute of other and more advanced evidences. He weaves his garments, cooks his food, cultivates the soil, works with tools, and resists his circumstances, and thus answers Scientifically the questions raised by Science, concerning the definition of Man. But we go still higher into the attributes of manhood. The negro thinks, reasons, and remembers. He acquires and transmits his mental acquisitions to alter-coming generations, and is not like the bear, who is no wiser to day

than bears generally were a thousand years ago. He has a moral nature making him the subject of Law and government human and divine. And he is not destitute of that divine faculty, that enables him to comprehend

of justice and mercy. ,

the idea of immortality and to grasp the sublime and glorious idea of a God

Then too we have the testimony of all other animals to the complete

manhood of the negro. The birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and the cattle upon a thousand hills, admit his mastery and own his dominion.! The dog follows his black master as readily as his white master. Against the united testimony of the whole animal kingdom in favor of the complete human Character of the negro, there comes but one denial, and that comes from man himself. It comes not from common men, not

210 Appendix 5 from the illiterate and unthinking, but from the reputed learned and wise.

Your scientific men, men who have stood and measured the Earth, sounded the depths of oceans, and weighed the heavenly bodies, who profess the most positive knowledge respecting the whole universe, are the only men who profess to have difficulty in determining the exact position where to stop the negro in the Scale of Creation. I profess no ability to enlighten and convince such men as these. I speak to common men, men of common sense and common discrimination, men who never hesitate as between a man and a horse, as to which is the horse

and which the man. [p. 4:] But granting that the negro is a man, I am called upon to admit that he is an inferior type of manhood. This I am told I must admit, as the facts are all against me. My answer is that I can admit no such thing. | see no difference between the white savage and the black savage—they are both on a level in crimes and barbarities, delighting in cruelties and superstitions of the darkest and most revolting descriptions. There is much in the customs and habits of the ancient Bretons to remind [us] of just what is passing now in some of the most barbarous and unenlightened parts of the western Coast of Africa. But I shall have more to say about this at another time. Who shall point us out the exact standard of mentality, which shall determine the equality of races? Where shall we find it. I do not, and I hope you do not deem it necessary in order to prove the manhood of any making the claim, to show that such an one is a very Clay

in eloquence, or a Webster or Calhoun, in logical precision and mental power.2 For tried by such standards, I apprehend that very few, even of the most highly gifted of the white race, would be able to maintain their equality in the ranks of mankind. Yet something like this folly has been insisted

upon, in respect to the negro. His faculties and powers, uneducated and unimproved, have been held up in striking and glorious contrast with those of men, of the highest culture and the fullest opportunities for expansion and developement [sic], and the world has then been called upon,

to mark the difference between the white man and the black man, the man admitted and the man disputed. Thus you will observe that the argument for inferiority proves too much, and therefore, proves nothing to the purpose. It would whirl you and the great mass of mankind into the degradation of Ethnological inferiority.

I come now to the second question: a question which was formerly thought, in the days of human simplicity to be entirely involved, in the first question discussed. The admission that a person possessed all the

“The Races,” by Frederick Douglass 211 attributes common to humanity, was supposed to carry with the further admission, that such an one must have descended from Adam and Eve, like the rest of us. But this is so no longer. Every inch of the ground for the negro is sternly disputed. He must not only prove that he is a man, he must prove that he is equal to other men, and when he has proved that, he must

prove that he is the descendent of the same family. [p. 5:] Looking out upon the broad surface of the Earth, studying its climates, soils and geologic history, observing the effects of rivers[,] lakes and oceans, traversing its Islands, capes and continents, and beholding its mountains, vallies and

plains, and remarking the striking differences every where observable among its multitudinous Inhabitants, in colour[,] form and features, our learned men have raised the question Can all these various tribes, kindreds and tongues and peoples, so widely separated and so strangely dissimilar, have had a common and an united origin.

Such is the question, the great question, fairly stated. I have not the slightest disposition to dodge it or mistate [sic] state it. Give me to know the simple truth and I will accept it, though it should make me first cousin to the lowing ox or the neighing horse.

I will say farther that this is not by any means a one sided question. Much very much, from the nature of the case, can be said in support of the diversity theory of human origin.* There is learning, research, and whole columns of facts to be met and repelled.

I make still another admission, that viewed apart from the Bible it is clearly impossible to demonstrate that mankind are Brothers in the sense that they have all descended from the same original parents. But while I make this admission and make it freely, I equally deny, that that they whel who hold, the diversity theory, can either +4++h-eF with or without the Bible demonstrate their position. In this respect we hold a decided advantage. For laying aside the sacred character of the Bible, for the sake of the argument, it is still a great advantage to have with us the most ancient and the most authentic record of the history and experience of mankind. The misfortune of those who advocate the Diversity theory is, that they find it utterly impossible to trace the entangled threads of human history, sufficiently near their starting point in any quarter of the globe to demon-

strate any thing whatever, concerning the origin of any one type of the human family. Nor is this the only disability under which they labor. They cannot themselves agree respecting the most important starting points of their theory. In the first place they cannot tell the number of the original

212 Appendix 5 races, nor can they in the second place tell us, which are the original races. On neither point can our American Ethnological writers give us clear and definite conclusions. They begin [in] conjecture and end in confusion. [p.

6:] Differing however at other points all substantially agree that their [there were] various creations. They deny the Bible account of creation but can give us themselves no more reasonable account. They tell us that there

are original races, but cannot tell where or who they are. Their position may be stated thus: Mankind have come into existence like plants, with constitutions and habits, adapted from the beginning, to the climates, soils, and other natural conditions, peculiar to each separate locality, that the differences seen among men, in colours, forms, and features, in character and

habits are, original and inherent, and are altogether too great to be accounted for, on any other supposition than that of a separate and distinct creation.

Against this theory I am to maintain, that mankind are a unit, that they did not spring up in different parts of the globe, but in one quarter, that

they descended from one pair, and by migrations and the mutations of time, and other physical agents, they have acquired the various differences, which they are now seen to possess.* Here then, are the two views of human origin, which form the ground work of my lecture. But it will be asked at the outset, if demonstration is impossible, without the Bible, and the Bible is for the sake of the argument to be set aside, of what use is the discussion, and how shall we arrive at the truth in respect to the subject. This is my answer, We can consider the Evidence on both sides and determine for ourselves, which theory of human origin is most in accordance with reason, and our ideas and apprehensions of the wisdom|[,] power and Goodness of God.

The range of discussion would be come very narrow indeed, if only those propositions, should be discussed, which can be demonstrated. But it is not for the colored man to apologize for this discussion. It is forced upon him by the circumstances of his condition, and the views and feelings with which he is contemplated. This country is peopled, by what may be described as the most dissimilar specimens known to Ethnological Science. The negro and the Anglo Saxon, are singularly opposite, in physical characteristics. But not more op-

posite in these than in social condition. We are here on the same continent, in the same country, under the same government, braving the same

“The Races,” by Frederick Douglass 213 climates, the same lattitudes [sic], longitudes, and attitudes. [p. 7:] These two peoples, FRe¥ constitute, and in all the likelihoods of the case, will continue to constitute in some relation or other the principal inhabitants of this country. For unless, the wheels of civilization shall be reversed and shall roll backward, unless the dovelike spirit of Christianity shall in utter despair, take to itself wings and fly away from us, as from a doomed city, leaving us to the fiery wrath of God’s indignation, there can never come a

time when the American people can be wrought up to the stupendous wickedness of driving us out or exterminating us as a people. At at present the negro and the Saxon bear no comparison. The Saxon is high in the ascendent in every respect. As a people we move about among you like dwarfs among giants. In our Own proper persons we are seldom seen in your national activities. We are morally, socially and politically dead. Slavery has murdered us in all these relations. Nevertheless, we are here and our destiny is, measurably bound up with yours. At any rate, It is easy to see that in proportion as the doctrine of human Brotherhood is recognized or rejected, we shall rise, or fall, become men or continue merchandize in this Republic.° There is therefore a necessity laid upon us to discuss this question of the races. Let me answer another objection which may be started just here. It may be said: That arguments favoring the unity of the races coming from one of

lowly origin are open to the suspicion that the wish is father to the thought.© That I argue so, because I wish it so. This may be true, and my opponents may have the advantage of the admission. But this is after all, very evidently a two edged weapon. It cuts both ways, and may wound those who bring it quite as severely, as those against whom it is brought. The desire to rise, though strong, is not stronger than the desire to keep down the negro, and if a desire to rise be a disqualification for uttering sound views on the one hand, equally is the desire to oppress and keep down the negro a disqualification on the other. But the case can be made much stronger. On the one hand there is the inborn natural desire to advance in the scale of Civilization. On the other, there is the tremendous overwhelming consideration of #veat¢ two thousand millions of dollars, a mountain of gold, a perpetual bribe to learning, eloquence, research axéd invested in human flesh. This immense capital invested in the souls and sinews of earpeepte the negro is able to command science, art, and philosophy, to crush the negro, when he assumes personalty, instead of remaining quietly as property. Fhis-vest+-preperhy--hise ~ [p. 8:] Whenever and wherever men have been oppressed and enslaved,

214 Appendix 5 their enslavers and oppressors, have in every such instance found a warrant for such enslavement and oppression in the character of their victims. The vices and crimes which grow out of slavery are generally charged as the inherent and peculiar characteristics of the race who are the victims of slavery. When the United States coveted a part, as she now does the whole of Mexico, and sought to wrest from that sister Republic her coveted domain, you all remember well, the notions respecting the character of that nation which were spread over the country by our fillibustering [sic] journals.’ Such supremely pious journals as the New York Herald and the New York Observer, promptly recognized the Mexicans as an inferior race. The old Castilian blood had according to these authorities become almost too weak to run down hill. The Mexicans were a worthless and turbulent set, and stood much in need of having the beneficent arm of Anglo Saxson [sic]

rule extended over them, and that this was plainly indicated by manifest destiny and Divine Providence! As in our own case towards Mexico, so with Russia, in regard to the Ottoman Empire. Nicholas having gradually prepared himself to compass the destruction of Turkey, excused himself and his meditated crime by assuming that Turkey was already on the verge of dissolution. She was already sick unto death, and he was only going to help her to die decently.2 So too when England wishes to impose some new burden upon Ireland, when she is about to set her heel down more firmly upon the heart of the Emerald Isle, the London Times leads the way, and the provincial journals follows [sic] in all sorts of disparagements of the

Irish people. The old complaints, the plea of tyrants, inferior race, incapable of Self Government and a thousand other sins are laid at the door of the poor Celts. Well and fully is this subterfuge seen and understood in the United States, when it is resorted to by other nations. It then deceives nobody. But the case is different when the black race is concerned. [p. 9:] At present, we are more completely the victims of this dodge than any other people in the world. I have already briefly explained why this is so. It is be-

cause no respectable and plausable [sic] defence can be made of slavery short of branding the negro as an inferior man, or denying his manhood altogether. To this length the Richmond examiner [sic], one of the ablest papers in Virginia (and that is not perhaps, saying much for its ability) has already gone. The Supreme Court has followed, and Stephen A. Douglas is on his way to the same conclusion.” There is no stopping place. The negro manhood must be acknowledged and slavery abandoned, or slavery must be sustained, and the negro’s manhood denied.

“The Races,” by Frederick Douglass 215 Admit that the negro is a man and you admit that the principle of freedom contained in the declaration of American Independence apply [sic] to him. Hence it is that leading politicians in the South, and in the North have scouted the doctrine of human equality, and branded the declaration as afifirming a falsehood. This struggle is now upon the country. The vital question at bottom of this contest is not as some think, whether slavery shall be extended, or limited, whether the South shall bear rule or not, but the real question is whether, the four millions now held in bondage are men, and entitled to the rights and Liberties of men, or are mere brute beasts falling naturally into the class of things of which we may rightfully make property. The fact that slavery can only be defended upon the denial of the manhood of the negro, and the whole doctrine of human Brotherhood, reveals the motive and explains why the South, the generally indolent and unscientific South, takes so lively an interest in the subject of Ethnology, as expounded by Doctors Nott, and Morton, and by Glidden [sic], and Hamilton Smith. !°

The South is not remarkable for its proficiency in scientific pursuits. It has done £6 very little for Chemistry, Botany, Geology or Astronomy. It has done nothing for Metaphysics, Ethics or Theology, but it has shown great zeal in this modern science. The mental power of the Sunny South expends itself on the subject of negroes. Negro physiognomy, negro phrenology, negro craniology, and negro Ethnology, are the Chosen Studies of the scientific mind of the South. One doctor, I forget his name, writes to a northern paper—Send me a single hair, of any one, and I can tell if their [sic] is the remotest relationship be [sic] between its owner and the negro. [p. 10:] The latest and most #eberate elaborate effort against the unity of the races, is a work by Nott and Glidden called the Types of Mankind.!! To the dealers in slaves and in the souls of men, the facts and reasoning of this

Book are as clear and conclusive, as the book of Mormon is, to the polegamists [sic] of Utah. Such are some of the relations and bearings of this question, as they af-

fect the people of this country. One solution of it favors, Universal Man, and another favors the interests of a class of men who gain their fortunes by the blood of souls. I come now to the direct argument in favor of the Unity of the races. My first argument is deduced from moral considerations. When any theory can be shown to be in harmony with the welfare, happiness and perfection of the race, when it can be said to directly te promote #Hese these conditions,

216 Appendix 5 mankind have been willing to admit the# its reasonableness and truth. If men were no where commanded to abstain from lying & stealing, and to live honestly, the misery and ruin which these ev# habits would bring on the one hand, and the peace and happiness, which would flow trom honest and upright conduct on the other, would be enable us to know the true path. In the light of this principle, the Unity of the races has nothing to fear. It will bear the most searching tests, while its rival—the doctrine of the diversity and inferiority of races—is shown to be entirely unsound. By there [sic] fruits ye shall know them will apply here as well as else where. !2 What then are the fruits of the Unity theory, or of human Brotherhood,

as taught by the Bible, and as a affirmed ef on this occasion? These they are: It naturally leads to the exercise of benevolence. It tends to order. It prompts to all manner of good offices, it represses violence, and defends the weak, the poor and the needy. Upon its front it carries with it the implication of equal rights, mutual protection, reciprocal benefits, general welfare, common wants, common destiny. It makes the rights and interests of any the rights and interests of all, and every where teaches the lesson Hym|[n]ed by the Angels on the plains of Bethlehem, peace on Earth and good will toward men.!? These are the natural fruits of the doctrine of human Brotherhood. The Civilization and Christianization [p. 11:] of the world, spring up and flourish where this doctrine is received, and they draw their life and power from it. Now while all this and more can be said of the precious fruits of this doctrine, and not a single moral consideration can be adduced against it, let us inquire, or rather state briefly, some of the natural results of the opposite doctrine. Grant that instead of one human family, we have many, that men are of various origin, that they are essentially different, in original endowments, that some are superior and others are inferior, grant this I say, and it is all

claimed, and this doctrine of diversity, becomes the apology for every species of clan[n]Jishness, and of all manner of inequality and injustice. Where the white man is in the ascendent, it would favor the infernal sentiment proclaimed by the Chief Justice of the United States, that bleekmen

Reve persons of African descent have no rights which white men are bound to respect.!4¢ And where black men are in the ascendent, it favors

the idea that white men have no rights which black men are bound to respect.

“The Races,” by Frederick Douglass 217 To my mind it completely unchains the Devil of human pride and selfishness, and sends him abroad to afflict and devour every precious thing in the sight of God and man. Grant this diversity theory, and there is no longer any common law of right equally applicable, and therefore equally binding upon all. Grant this Theory and you sweep away at a wave, the very foundations of morality and order. You leave mankind on a turbulent sea afloat, without rudder, chart, or compass. We should stand in relation to each other, as one set of wild beasts, stand to another, the larger and stronger, preying on

the smaller and the weaker. For it would be naturally inferred that the laws and principles which properly apply to superior races, cannot apply to inferior races. The superior race must have superior law, superior Liberty, & superior privileges. And the inferior the opposite sorts of law, Liberty and privileges. This is no picture of the fancy, but the clear and rational deductions-ef from the diversity theory, as now held and practiced in the United States. When men say this is the “white man’s country,” “white man’s government,[“] [p. 12:] and that the rights and Liberties declared and secured in the organic laws of the Land, are the rights and Liberties of white men, they but carry out the legitimate results of the diversity theory. They revolt at the idea of enslaving a man of one race and rejoice at the enslavement of another. Again: What becomes of the golden Rule under this modern theory of human origin? The very pillar in the Temple of the Gospel of the Son of God, is this. All things whatsoever, ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.!° The principle laid down in this comprehensive precept, is founded in the idea of the most perfect Brotherhood of man. It assumes that every man should see in every other man, an equal Brother, a second self. Nothing

more, nothing less. Remove this idea, and the whole superstructure of Christianity comes down with a crash. Mankind, are again driven forth into the wilderness of sin and death, and the world is without a savior. Thus it will be seen, that in order, to enslave and plunder the colored race, the Christian religion must be undermined, and its grand central idea scouted as false and worthless. The golden rule becomes one thing for the Celt, another for the Saxon, and another for the Indian, and still another for the Negro. We should have a new rendering of the Golden rule[:] All things whatsoever what white men would have done unto themselves, they should do the same to white men!

218 Appendix 5 The world is all at variance under this theory, the great Laws of justice, 4 Liberty, and benevolence, are of local, not of universal application, the

golden links of human brotherhood are broken, and Christianity is abolished!

Lands intersected by a narrow frith abhor each other. And mountains interposed make enemies of nations Who else like kindred drops had been mingled into one.!© But it may be said, and it has been said by some of the less reckless of the advocates of human diversity, that although mankind are not brothers

in the sense that they have descended from the same parents, they are nevertheless essentially the same, in point of human # nature. [p. 13:] Let

us look at this admission: It is logically fatal to the diversity theory of human origin. If mankind are essentially the same, as we who hold the unity theory, contend that they are, and the less reckless of our opponents

admit, it irresistibly follows, that the differences between them are @ nonessential, and properly referrable to external causes, rather than to any separate creation. But our opponents shall not argue on both sides. They must either stand wholly on their own ground, or they shall stand wholly on ours. The feat of riding two horses is hard under favorable circumstances when both are

going in the same direction, but the attempt has never been successful when the horses were going in opposite directions. If it be said that mankind are in essense [sic] every where the same; you come to us. If the opposite ground be taken, you encounter the moral ar-

gument already submitted, and with it another class of facts, which are overwhelmingly in favor of the unity theory of Hess mankind. These facts come under the Laws that govern species, a#¢ that seperates [sic] various animals, into their several kinds, and prevent##¢ any perma-

nent deviation from them. The horse must always be a horse, and man must always be man. Order reigns every where, and the Laws that protect this order of nature, are self adjusting and self executing. All attempts to blot out the distinctions between animals must fail.

But to return to the admission that all men are essentially the same. What becomes of the physical necessities for a diversity of creations, if all men are in essense [sic] alike? The logic of our opponents, may be stated thus: The earth is so diversified in all its physical appointments, and conditions that races adapted to its several belts may be reasonably inferred from that fact. But, after all there is [sic] no essential differences between the

people who inhabit one part, and those who inhabit another! Here is an

“The Races,” by Frederick Douglass 219 house divided against its self. Let it fall, as all such houses must.!7 It assigns

a grand cause for all insignificant result, and supposes the Almighty to have exerted his creative power repeatedly in producing essentially the same thing. All nature as well as revelation unites in the affirmation, he spake and it was done.!® He commanded and it stood fast. It is ¥as a vastly more sublime exhibition of power, t6 which is involved in the supposition, that from the beginning, our first parents were endowed with all the germs of adaptability, to all climates, than to suppose that their [sic] were separate

creations. [p. 14:] Thus viewed, man appears wonderfully and fearfully made, capable of living under all skies, braving all climates, walking alike amid the Eternal snows of Greenland, and the burning sands of Africa, and every where able to make himself at home.!? It is strange, passing strange, that mankind should have ever made aa [sic] difference in Color, or in any other mark of variety, an apology for oppression. The God and father of us all has no where displayed his wonderous [sic] power and goodness, than in the marked differences in the colour, forms and features of men. The necessity for diversity among beings of the same species needs no argument. Without it the world #e4 would be a monotonous desert. Difference is [as] essential as likeness, and we have both. Eternal wisdom alone was sufficient to produce likeness, without destroying Individuality, and difference without producing confusion. Who has not been struck by the wonderful fact, that no two persons, are to be found precisely alike, even in the same family? Equally plain too is the fact that no two out of all the millions of Earth[‘]s inhabitants are so

unlike that one finds any real difficulty in dems assuming the human character of either. O! that men would call away the narrow suggestions of pride and prejudice, and learn from the hallowed Bible the glorious he truth—that of one blood God has made all nations of men for to dwell upon all the face of the Earth, and that He is no respector [sic] of persons, that we are all alike sub-

ject to the same wants, the same hopes and fears, and bound to the same silent continents of death and Eternity.29

From this humble stand point we should easily see the simple truth, shining steadily in the star lit dome of heaven, and hear, in the deep stillness of our own souls, the song of the angels, Glory to God in the highest peace on Earth and goodwill toward man [sic].?! So much I have deemed proper to say upon the general question of the unity of the races, and upon the bearings of the question.

220 Appendix 5 [p. 15:] On Thursday Dec. 16'® lectured in Walden Orange Co. New York—Subject Self Made Men—Stopt with Mr. Gowley. Was kindly received and cordially entertained. Jan. 18. 1859. Lectured Troy, Bradford Co. on Self-Made Men, and race. Took tea with Rev. Jordon Carnachan, a scotch Presbyterian.

Delivered this lecture in North Brookfield Beeember 2. Jan. 1861.

In Gloversville Glovers 5. Jan. 1861.

In Johnstown 6. Jan. 1861.

Appendix 6 “Whited Sepulchres,” by Anna Dickinson* “See Naples, and die.” So ran the old proverb. “See Salt Lake City, and live; live to work!”—should the new one be. It was at the close of a lovely day in June that I first saw this “City of the Saints.”! A great stretch of level plain; beyond it, an inland sea of sapphire

reflecting a sapphire sky; all about it, range after range of stately mountains, glowing through the marvellously clear air, masses of amber and purple and gold, whilst over all ranged, diamond bright, the eternal walls of snow. In the midst of such surroundings,—the fair things and wondertul things of God’s handiwork,—lies this “Whited Sepulchre”; fair indeed to the eye, pleasant to the traveller who knoweth not that the dead are there, and that her inhabitants are in the depths of Hell.? [p. 2:] Wide, clean, cool streets; a dashing mountain stream flowing through the principal avenue with rivulets cutting away from it through the streets and avenues, crossing and intersecting them; this for the irrigation of the fertile soil which needs only an abundance of water to produce the richest crops in the world. The houses,—poor Adobe huts, the most of them,—half

hidden in the wilderness of greenery that surrounds them, bushes and trees laden with flowers and heavy with fruit. Cleanliness; order; quiet. Drinking, no doubt, yet no drunkenness visible; and, as far as I could learn, no licensed drinking saloons, no licensed gambling saloons. An outward decency preserved, as safe for a woman to walk unattended through the streets at noon of night as at noon of day; which is more than can be said of some more reputable cities nearer home. Cleanliness; order; quiet. Too quiet, in fact, since the stagnant pool is stiller *““Whited Sepulchres,’ as delivered by Anna E. Dickinson, at Quincy [Mass.], Thursday, Jan’y 6, 1870, James A. Slade, Stenographer,” in con. 15, reel 17, Irs. 570-96, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, MS 17,984, Library of Congress. 221

222 Appendix 6 than [p. 3:] the running brook, but can be scarcely considered more wholesome. “I love the noise of a free nation,” said De Gasparin.*? He would be pleased by no such sounds here. Utah is the most absolute tyranny, the most unmitigated despotism, upon which the sun shines to day. Utah, Mormonism, is Brigham Young.* No intelligent person can go into this territory with eyes to see and ears to hear and comprehension to understand without realizing that the magnet that holds these people to its centre and the chain that binds them fast and strong is this one man, who possesses that rarest of commodities, brains, and that infinitely rarer faculty, the knowledge of how to use them. The head of the church and the head of the state; absolute in power in consequence. Does Brigham Young

the president, the civil magistrate, issue some command, or pronounce some order, against which his faithful followers complain, or are inclined to rebel, [p. 4:] Brigham Young the seer, the prophet, the inspired head of the church has a revelation direct from heaven which he announces on the next Sabbath afternoon from his high place in the temple, and his people not only bow to it with submission, but accept it with delight. The territory is districted and the city is districted; at the head of each one of these districts is one of this man’s intelligent tools, who is, at the same time, a bishop in the church, a civil magistrate, a judge of elections, and a military officer: a bishop in the church, as keen, as absolute in spiritual authority, as thoroughly well informed as any Catholic priest could be through the confessional; a civil magistrate and judge of elections. Under the eye of this man lies what is known as the book of the district, in which is entered the name of each man, woman and child who lives in the district which he controls; and opposite the name a number at-[p. 5:]tached. It is for reference, I suppose, in scores of ways, but chiefly for use at election time. In Utah everybody votes; that is, of course, everybody who is anybody, for women there as elsewhere are accounted as nobodies.? I mean every man in the territory votes; it is utterly immaterial that this man is an unnaturalized foreigner, as indeed they almost all are, or is a youth under age. What of that. It is no part and parcel of the republic; it is no portion of the United States; it is Brigham Young’s little personal property and possession, wherewith he will do what he sees fit. The men vote with the ballot,

but with the worst effects of an open vote. But one candidate, that of Brigham Young, is presented for their choice;—you see they simplify on Tammany tactics.© The ballot is stamped with the one word “For,” or “Against,” with the number of the man who casts it; they are taken from

the box; the judge reads the number, finds the [p. 6:] corresponding

“Whited Sepulchres,” by Anna Dickinson 223 number in the book, reads the name written over against it and knows on the instant who has cast it; he opens it, finds whether the word “For” or “Against” be stamped upon it, and knows again whether the man is a faithful brother in the church, to be trusted accordingly, or whether he is a malcontent to be pursued with dislike, with suspicion; if discontent grow into

open rebellion, to be pursued to the death; for Brigham Young and Brigham Young’s Danites have a speedy and effectual method of settling discontent in the midst of his domains. These Danites are an organization thoroughly informed and officered, with rules and orders and oaths, that brook no interference, orders that are carried out implicitly, oaths that are fearfully kept—a band sworn to the destruction of whatsoever may menace the destruction of the faith they believe.’

Man after man has died in the length and breadth of this territory of Utah, in no sense by the visitation of God. [p. 7:] Men have died, to use a

perfectly well known case, as Dr. Robinson died.2 A man whose only crimes were that he dared to protest against enormities where they were committed; that he ventured to take possession of United States land in the midst of an United States territory; (for the Mormons claim every inch of this territory of Utah as their own. It is next to impossible for a Gentile to obtain foothold there; they have preempted every square inch of ground in the territory; it is next to impossible for one who is hostile to their faith to find a spot for a home in the length and breadth of the territory, and particularly in the midst of the city.) that he had farther dared to carry from a Mormon home to a wedding altar a young girl, and then and there make her his honorable wife. For all this, this man was assailed, was threatened,

was outlawed, was finally brutally murdered on the streets. The United States authorities took no note; the Mormon authorities took no [p. 8:] note; his own comrades and friends, for he was the surgeon of the camp, investigating the case afterwards, proved beyond doubt this thing to have been, as others like unto it had been, not the work of a half a dozen angry Mormons, but one of their governmental assassinations. Every police officer had been withdrawn from his beat in that district for the night; orders had manifestly been given by those who had the right and power to give them, that no one in the neighborhood should give any heed to any shout or sound or cry that might be heard; for not a door was opened, not a win-

dow was raised, not a hand of help was extended, when this deed was done. His dead body was found lying where it fell; it was carried out to the camp on the hill and buried, and his friends wrote over it, “Assassinated by the Mormons. ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.’”? And the

224 Appendix 6 United States authorities are quite satisfied that the Judge of all the earth will certainly do right; that [p. 9:] the life and death of such a man as this will be vindicated in his own good time; but for itself, Washington is altogether too busy, about other and more important matters, to interfere in behalf of anything so insignificant as the protection of the lives and liberties of its faithful citizens. A military organization; each man trained to arms; as ready in their use

and twice as ready to use them as any soldier in the field. Hatred of the government preached; a sermon delivered on the average at least once a month by their historian, George Smith, wherein is recounted a long list of the ills and grievances wherewithal they charge the United States government; this, seemingly, that the gospel of hatred may be as thoroughly comprehended by the latest comer as by the oldest inhabitant.!9 Utter, abject, unquestioned obedience taught them to the only authority they recognize: that of Brigham Young. This man stands in power, simply absolute; there is no crowned head in Europe to day who possesses [p. 10:] such power over the lives and consciences of his people as does this man in the midst of the

territory of the United States; there is no potentate of the old world that has such a grasp and hold upon the destinies of his people as does this man

in the midst of our republic. The chief idea that would strike any one in coming into the midst of this territory and watching the working of the government there set up with unprejudiced eyes, would be, that it is an excessively keen and exceedingly nasty trick for making money and gaining power. Brigham Young went to Utah a poor man; he is to day the third heaviest depositor in the Bank of England. He has about him two or three hundred men, who are his intelligent tools; men who have brains to com-

prehend his plans, supple hands and dead consciences to execute them. These men with but a few paltry exceptions,—such numbers as you could count on your fingers and thumbs,—are Americans, but for [p. 11:] the great rank and file of the people there gathered, the one hundred and twenty odd thousand, thirty thousand of whom live in Salt Lake, they are in no sense Americans. They are Swedes, Finns, Danes, Germans, French, the great majority of them English and Welsh, the most vicious and degraded of the peasant class of Europe. They know nothing of us at home;

they came here knowing nothing about us; they are hurried across the country, learning nothing of us, and, reaching their destination, are taught nothing of us except to hate us. These are sheep to be shorn, fields to be reaped, the shearers and reapers being Americans with American brains.

“Whited Sepulchres,” by Anna Dickinson 225 These few monopolize horses, lands, profits, honors, dignities, emoluments, wives.

It is a universal belief, and a natural one, that the women of the territory far outnumber the men, yet, it is a mistake, I believe, nevertheless. The testimony of the people outside [p. 12:] of the city, the testimony even of the inhabitants of the city, and the testimony of those who have visited this place, all goes to prove, that the balance hangs about even; if to either side, it swings to the side of the men. The theory of Polygamy is universally accepted, believed in, sworn by, is, as every one knows, the corner stone of their edifice; but the practice of polygamy, for reasons manilest, is impossi-

ble. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” says the good Book of old.!! What are they? Cleanliness; order; quiet; an outward decency; a wonderful patience and marvelous industry in overcoming natural obstacles; an unquestioned obedience to the law and authority they recognize. That on the one hand; on the other, no free schools, no common schools, no general

school system; no libraries, no reading rooms, no mental life; none of strength’s rich superfluity,—humor. It is the universal testimony that every one bears who has gone among their people, that in their theatre, on the

streets, wherever they go, they carry sombre and stolid [p. 13:] countenances, sad but not stupid; a laugh without mirth, and a gayety affected and mechanical. No homes, however. How indeed can there be any home,

or any home spirit, in any right sense of the term, where many a child scarcely knows the face of his father, where a man spends his time in half a dozen or a dozen houses, among half a dozen or a dozen women, who

hate one another, who strive, each in her poor fashion, to supplant the others, the means adopted being simply the utter and abject degradation of body and soul together. No homes, however. How indeed can there be any

home, or any home spirit, in a place where, when you suggest that love and tenderness and respect are the only things that should draw and hold a man and a woman together for a lifetime, they laugh at you as a fool and

a sentimentalist, where men and women are drawn together and herded together as the beasts that perish. Into this city I came, through its streets I rode, and had pointed out [p. 14:] to me, here, there, yonder, houses wherein lived the so-called wives of

one man. I passed along low huts and counted from the number of doors without the number of wives within. One Adobe hut, one room, one wite and children gathered there; another wife taken, another room added, another door facing the street, another wife and children gathered there, and so on to the end of the pitiable and loathsome chapter. I went into these

226 Appendix 6 houses and was met by the master of the establishment (for a man in Utah is indeed lord of his home), and there would come in one and another and another woman who would be presented as “my wife,” but these women entered, not as you, madam, might go into your parlor, as one who had a right there to receive a guest, these women came into the room, and sat down in the room, as a tolerated slave or a dog might come into the presence of a master; and one of these women there sitting would say to me, “I have had a dozen children and buried [p. 15:] six”; another would say to me, “I have had ten children and buried eight”; for the record of mortality among these little ones, as indeed is the case wherever this institution prevails, is frightful; and as I looked at those who remained, little, pale, puny, stunted creatures, and remembered the fate before them, I said, “Would that they too were in their graves.” I saw them running wild, little animals on the streets; I saw hundreds of young girls, growing to womanhood, and so growing, approaching a life of sorrow, degradation and shame; I saw on all sides of me coarseness, vulgarity, indecency, and obscenity, dressed in

the garb of piety and covered by the cloak of religion, and seeing, and hearing, and comprehending all this, such an awful sense of degradation and despair took possession of me as a woman, that I covered up my face and cried, “my God let me die”; and then I bethought me, No! that would be a coward’s part; let me live to work; there is need of me. [p. 16:] Need indeed! The United States government has a law whereby it virtually declares polygamy to be illegal; whereby it asserts that one woman can legally claim one man for her husband and the reverse. The other day in this territory died a man, Heber Kimball by name, leaving what is there counted two hundred widows.!4 The United States Assessor justly said, “The government of the United States recognizes no such institution as this; the woman this man carried first to the altar is his wife, his widow; of these one hundred and ninety-nine others, I know nothing.” The case was carried to Washington, and Washington, which through one branch asserts that polygamy is illegal, through another branch declares that the rights of

each one of these two hundred women shall be recognized; in other words, the government of the United States outrages decency, law, civiliza-

tion, and christianity alike, by indirectly tolerating and supporting this abomination. Need indeed! for as I went towards [p. 17:] this city of iniquity the men

with whom I travelled, not roughs, not rowdies, not “lewd fellows of the baser sort” from the street corners, but gentlemen, educated, polished, elevated by the ballots of their confederates into office and trust in the land.!?

“Whited Sepulchres,” by Anna Dickinson 227 These men, having faithfully abstained from touching this matter as law makers, as men, discoursing of the subject by the way, found the whole affair marvellously funny, a capital joke. “It wasn’t such a bad place,” said Number One; “Very sensible institution,” said Number Two; “Capital arrangement,” said Number Three, “a man can get a divorce from a disagreeable wife for five dollars”; “And no questions asked,” said Number Four; “What a nice thing it was,” said Number Five, “if a man made a mistake, to try it over two, ten, or twenty times”; “Yes,” added Number Six, “and lose no caste in church or state thereby”; “A precious shrewd set of fellows,” said Number Seven, and so on. Say they did not mean a word of it; say they were joking; what would have been thought of the wives of those [p. 18:] men, the middle aged matrons who bear their names and are mothers of their grown up daughters, what would have been thought of even the decency of those women, if they on a summer’s pleasure holiday had seen fit to discuss the relations between man and woman, and marriage in that wise. So said I to one of these honorable gentlemen, who straight way responded, “I wish you would not drag your hateful theories into everything; you must not judge a woman as you do a man; you can’t

talk after that fashion.” “Can’t I? Mustn’t I? Being a woman, I will, notwithstanding, and I give you fair warning, it shall be done here and elsewhere,”—and you see I am keeping my promise. Need, indeed! for having heard such talk as this by the way, I sat upon a Saturday evening at the Townsend House, listening to a serenade, which, you may be sure, was not intended for me, and the Chairman of the party, who represents in one district your own dear state [p. 19:] of Massachusetts, behaving honorably, as a gentleman of Massachusetts should, said a

few brief words of thanks and retired.!4 Mr. Hooper has no need to be ashamed of his record; but he having gone, came forward the orator of the party, whom my own city of Philadelphia delights to honor.!> He was full of interest in what he had seen, as indeed they all were; he desired to express his admiration for what he had seen, as indeed they all were ready to express it. Such wonders of patience! such marvels of industry! such obstacles overcome, could have sprung from nothing save a profound religious faith and a great religious enthusiasm. Again he desired to express his admiration, and ere leaving there, he wished to pledge, in behalf of himself and his companions,—See you, my friends, who they were: the leading

committee of Ways and Means of the House of Representatives in the midst of a rebellious community,—he desired to pledge, in behalf of himself [p. 20:] and his companions, every assistance the United States

228 Appendix 6 government could give these people in the spread and growth of their ma-

terial prosperity, and in whatsoever would redound to the glory of our common country.!¢ And yet, he and every man beside him, knew perfectly well that no assistance whatever could be given these people in the spread

and growth of their material prosperity that would not also add to and strengthen the doctrine of devils that is their religion. Need indeed! for having heard such speech making as this on a week day, I went one Sabbath afternoon into their temple [sic] and saw sitting in a high place among elders, bishops, dignitaries, and apostles, well meant,

kindly disposed, kindly received, at home there, the Rev. John Todd;!7 heard him preach them a sermon, wherein he utterly ignored anything so insignificant as the few thousands of women there gathered but addressed the men, again and again, [p. 21:] in terms of tenderness and brotherhood and good fellowship; heard him hope that all mere, minor differences being swept away they might at last make securely the port toward which he doubted not they were all tending; heard him tell them the story of how there came to the gates of Paradise a disembodied soul demanding entrance, and the angel there on guard challenged the soul, and said, “What are you?” “A Baptist.” “Ah!” said the angel, “a Baptist; your place is there”; and then came a Methodist, a Presbyterian, a Congregationalist, an Episco-

palian, and so on to the end of the list, and as one and another and another gave his denomination his place was assigned without. By and by, as they sat gathered there, came sounding up over the pearly gates and the

everlasting walls the new song of the Lamb, and as one after another caught the familiar strain, one voice after another joined in the familiar chorus, and the angel said, “What! I thought [p. 22:] you were a Baptist, Methodist, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, but if you sing that song your place is not without but within. Enter.” Dr. Todd did not say “Mormon” by word, but if he did not say it by implication, what sense could the story have, told to such an audience? The application was made as he meant it to be, and the papers the next day commended him accordingly. He told these people again and again that the only thing they needed for present safety and eternal prosperity was faith in Christ and an acceptance of the doctrine of atonement. These people believe in it, swear by it, are as orthodox as Dr. Todd himself, are as orthodox as the faith wherein I was born and bred; so far as this man saw fit to enunciate his belief, every soul there said amen to it;—and yet, who were these men with whom this minister of the Gospel of God claimed kinship and brotherhood? Passing by the thousands [p. 23:] of minor offenders there gathered, there were such

“Whited Sepulchres,” by Anna Dickinson 229 men as Bishop Johnson, who has four sisters, his own nieces, for his wives; there was George D. Watt,!® church reporter and correspondent of the Alta California, respected and respectable, not ostracised but conspicuous in entertaining members of congress and others of note, who doubtless shiver at the Byron Scandal, yet married to his own half sister; and there was Curtis Bolton, who has a mother and a daughter for his wives. In the face of such

enormities as these, this man who professes to be both christian and a leader of souls, stood among these people and struck hands with these people as one of them. And yet, why indeed not? for barring incest and the loathsome features of the case, Dr. Todd’s theories in regard to the proper subordination and subjugation of woman in the world are so admirably exemplified in Salt Lake that he may well feel at home there. Looking at all this and [p. 24:] listening to all this, I said, “Why? Why such speech and such action here, why such speech and such action elsewhere?” Scarcely a public man has gone to Salt Lake City this last summer (and you know how many have been there), scarcely one has gone, with the prominent and honorable exception of our gallant Vice-President, but has gone down into the mud and

filth of this place and struck hands with its leaders.!? There is Brigham Young, we will say; the head and front of this whole offending; a man without whom it would drop asunder in a twelve month; a man upon whose soul is written the record of crimes, directly performed or directly instigated, out of all count and past all number; a man who has entered against his name a list of forty three women whom he claims as his wives and lives with as such; a man who elsewhere would be considered a disgrace to a first class penitentiary; from whom a respectable convict would shrink. This man goes to the Capitol [p. 25:] of such a nation as ours, and

senators and representatives and cabinet officers call upon him and pay their respects to him, and women, the mothers of young girls, invite him to their houses and give him a seat at their tables beside their daughters. Reverse the case; say it were a Woman; nay, say it were even one of those forty three wretches he has gathered in his home, and you answer, “That is

quite another affair, a very different thing.” No, it is not! The laws of morality and the laws of God recognize no sex, whatever paltry and infamous distinctions you and I may see fit to draw. Look at all this, I said, “Why meet it with such silence?” The papers have lately been filled with discussions of a deed, done yonder in the city of New York: ministers have preached their sermons of denunciation; editors have written their articles of denunciation; society has spoken its speech of denunciation upon this

230 Appendix 6 matter.29 Good men and bad men, good women and bad women [p. 26:] have combined in the cry that has been raised against this one deed; virtuous souls have been horrified; evil-minded men wallowing in the filth of a lifetime have gathered up the dirt about them to throw at a stainless and spotless reputation; the country has run from the nodes to the pole, from the Atlantic to the Pacific about this deed. A virtuous country, truly! A civ-

ilized and christian society, certainly! yet, pulpit and press, man and woman, society at large, all these have stood day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, whilst deeds were done that outraged the earth and defied and insulted heaven, and not a voice has been raised, nor a finger lifted in condemnation. Looking at all this I said, “Why meet it with such silence?—the silence of the press, of the pulpit, of society, of government, and above all the silence of women elsewhere?” and with the question came the answer: because, after all, Salt Lake City is [p. 27:] very like every other great city under the sun; because things here are sanctioned that are elsewhere simply tolerated; because in Salt Lake City a man claims half a dozen wives, goes through some marriage service with them, lives with them as such thereafter, and in New York, Boston or Philadelphia, a man does precisely the same thing without any such preliminary service. In Salt Lake City, they call it religion; in New York, Boston or Philadelphia, they call it “a young man sowing his wild oats,” because things here go uncovered and brazen-faced, that elsewhere move masked and vailed [sic]; because the underlying theory,—See you I do not say polygamy; I do not say illegal

abominations,—but the underlying theory in regard to the proper place and subordination of women, whereon this whole system of polygamy is reared, is precisely the same in Salt Lake that it is in London, Paris, New York, Boston or Philadelphia, that this [p. 28:] woman was sent into the world, not for herself, but for another, and that other, of necessity, a man; that she was put here, not as an individual, not as an entity, not as an entire human being; but as a finishing out and a supplementing and adorning, an after thought, of some other human being, and that other human being, of necessity, a man; that the proper relation between these two is that he should govern and she serve, he rule she submit, according to that eloquent scholar and divine, Dr. Horace Bushnell, till Heaven shall release her;2! that she is not to live out her full measure of existence and duty and care and responsibility, whether she is to be a wife and a mother or no, just as a man lives out the full measure of his existence and duties and cares and responsibilities and lives a noble and admirable life whether he be a

“Whited Sepulchres,” by Anna Dickinson 231 husband and father or no. Dr. Todd and others like unto him say the sole and only purpose for which woman was [p. 29:] created and sent into the world was that she should be some man’s wife and a mother of his children. “Admirable,” cries Mormonism; “since that is for what woman is cre-

ated every woman shall be a mother and until she does that the gates of Heaven shall be closed against her; if she will not be what God and nature

intended her to be, she shall have an exceedingly bad time in the life to come.” She was sent to finish a man, to supplement a man, to adorn a man, to rub off the sharp edges and rough angles of a man, to be a covered light whereby some man is to shine and spread and magnify and glorify himself in the world; in brief, as Dr. Bushnell eloquently sums it up for us, woman was sent into the world for the purpose of putting goodness into a man. “Excellent admirable!” cries Mormonism; “in that case the more the better; if one woman will put a moderate amount of goodness into a man, twenty will certainly constitute him a saint. The patriarchial [sic] [p. 30:]

institution shall be re-established on earth and shall be continued in Heaven.” Stripped of all sentimentality and all glamour; of delicate words and airy

sentences, full of idle compliments that signify nothing, the actual theory of these men finds its legitimate consequence in Utah. They may deny it; they may shrink from it; they may cover their eyes and stop their ears and

turn away their faces in horror from it; their own theory pursued to its ending finds its logical conclusion there. There, as elsewhere, the same arguments are advanced in regard to the condition of woman; there is not an intelligent Mormon in the length and breadth of Utah, but uses the same arguments in defence of the system which he believes and upholds. There as elsewhere people can say to me “Nobody thanks you. Why should you, an uneasy spirit, go wandering to and fro in the world protesting against this system. These women are satisfied, they are [p. 31:] contented; they not only desire no change but they laugh at and ridicule and sneer at their so-called emancipators.” That is what can be said to me in Salt Lake City,

that is what can be said to me here, and being said to me, I answer, “Granted; it is true; but what is proven thereby? That there are human beings too ignorant to know they are wronged, too debased to feel, too careless to inquire, too happy in servitude to know that freedom holds aright better for them,—all this I grant you, but not that wrong is right.” The very

argument urged for is the strongest against, since there was no more hideous feature of slavery than the degradation that hugged the chain; discontent was its noblest attribute. For any human being, I care not who it

232 Appendix 6 may be, whether it be a man or whether it be a woman, for any human being to say in such a day as this, a day of change, of alteration, a day of progress and reform, [p. 32:] a day that has its face set towards tomorrow and away from yesterday, “I am content with what the past has assigned me and ask nothing of the future,” is simply to remind me of the mole exclaiming in its blindness “How they excite my pity with their prating about a sun!” Content! what is proven by that? Why, I can take you out of this place,

out of this city, out of this land, to Persia, and I can show you that the women, bought and sold in the shambles and market places, are contented; I can take you to India, or Turkey, and point out to you a long line of faces gathered behind the prison doors of harems, and I will show you that they are contented. I can take you to the plains of China, of California,

of Mexico, and show you the Indian women carrying all the burdens, doing all the work, enduring all the torture, suffering all the degradation, accomplishing all the toil, that their lords and masters may go free and untrammelled, and I can show you that these are contented. Nay, I can take you from all [p. 33:] these to Germany, and I can point out to you a peasant woman harnessed with a dog, dragging a cart, whereon is garden stuff and her husband, and I can show you that this woman, harnessed with a brute, and dragging one, is contented. I can take you from all this to the afternoon of the nineteenth century in the civilization of America, and I can lead you out to this city lying beyond the Rocky Mountains, a city deserted of decency, abandoned of goodness, forsaken of God himself, if there be such a spot under the sun, and I can show you that the beings, the most wronged and most defrauded and most degraded and most outraged by this system, the women of polygamy, are its most ardent and strenuous defenders, upholders and supporters. At least every man in the territory will tell you so; at least every woman, standing with husband or neighbor’s husband, stranger or friend near at hand, will repeat her oft told lesson and tell you so, and honestly believe she tells you [p. 34:] the truth. That was what I heard on all sides of me when I went into this city. Satisfied? more

than satisfied, contented? more than contented, happy; they would not change their condition if they could; they would that polygamy were accepted by the world and Mormonism were the religion of humanity.

That is what I heard again and again, and then thrice repeated again, ~ until I said at last, “This is simply monstrous; it is utterly unnatural; it is not the wife, it is the bigot, it is not woman, it is a foolish and maddened reli-

gious enthusiasm that speaks here.” Then going about among these

“Whited Sepulchres,” by Anna Dickinson 233 women here, there, and yonder as opportunity was offered or made, talk-

ing with them in such a voice and looking at them with such eyes that these women could comprehend, that what I had to say, came from no idle curiosity, but sprang from the depths of a heart sad and sore for them, and

their cause, one woman and another and another spoke after this wise. Said I to one of these women, “You were [p. 35:] married in England?” “No.” “Married here?” “No. I was married in St. Jo.” “You knew of polygamy when you left England?” “No.” “When you married?” “No. I knew nothing about it.” “When did you learn?” “When I came to this place,” she answered, and then she said, “My husband took me to his home where I found a woman who had a prior claim; a woman whom I had known in my babyhood and in my girlhood, who had been a second mother to me in fact.” “Who was she?” I said. “I stood face to face with my aunt.” “Doubtless she was happy.” I said, “she was quite contented? It was

what she desired, it was what her faith taught her was a good thing; she was pleased with the arrangement.” “No, she was not,” and then, suddenly, “She did not live to be discontented long; it was all soon over with her; she died.” Something in her voice struck my ear, and beyond it my heart, and I turned and looked the woman quickly in the face, and said, “Of what did she die?” And the woman answered as rapidly, “She died of a broken heart.” Contented! “Doubtless I was mistaken [p. 36:] in supposing that you are unhappy and discontented,” said I; “you are all satisfied, you

are all contented, you are all happy, you desire no change”; and she quickly answered, “There is not one woman in ten that cares anything for

her life; but what would be glad to die to morrow and be through with all this.”

Contented! I said to another of these women, “You were married before you came here?” “I was married at Independence, seventeen years ago.” “You knew of polygamy before you came to this country?” “No, the mis-

sionaries say very little about it.” “You knew of it when you were married?” “Yes. I knew of it then.” “You were not afraid?” “No. I thought my husband would not care anything about anybody else.” “And if he did?” “If he did I must submit; I can’t take part of a faith and not the rest, and this is the only faith by which I can save my soul.”—for this religion, not only compels the latest wife to submit to her degradation, but to present with her own hand, as a free will gift and offering, the next wife to the husband

at the altar. “But then,” added the woman hastily, “I would [p. 37:] not have you understand that I would change my position if I could,” and with an air of defiance, “I would rather my husband had twenty wives instead

234 Appendix 6 of two; I wish polygamy was accepted and Mormonism were the faith of the world.” I got up and walked about the room, and looked at the flowers, and talked about the pictures, and a score of matters, and by and by in my wanderings about the place, I came and sat down again by the woman. I dropped my hand on hers where it rested on the elbow of the chair, and | said, “How long have you been in this country?” “I have been here seventeen years.” “What church did you go to before you came here?” “Iwania Methodist.” “And your husband—did you know him then?” “Yes, he was my lover.” “And he?” “He was a Methodist too.” Said I, “Suppose yourself back in England, a young, happy, bright faced girl once more, and your husband,—then your lover—came to see you now and again, went with you to the little village church on Sabbath mornings and came to see you on [p. 38:] Sabbath evenings, and having laid bare his heart to you, and

told you he loved you and asked you to be his wile, he took you to the wedding altar and from there to his own home, where he was all the world to you and you were all the world to him—would not that be better than this? Would you not be a happier woman, than now?” O, the face of this happy woman, the voice of this happy woman, as she cried, “Don’t! don’t ask me such a question as that.” Contented! I went back to my hotel, after my wanderings and sat down

by the second wife of the man who kept it. I said, “You were your husband’s first wife?” “No, his second wife. His first wife was a Gentile; they had been married before they came to this place for forty years. My husband was an old man when he married me.” Said I, “Had you no feeling about coming into this home and taking this woman’s husband?” “None whatever!” “Had you never any pang of conscience or feeling of uncertainty about the matter?” “Not for a long time; not till a [p. 39:] little while

ago.” “And then?” I said. “Then,” she answered, “my husband married again.” I said, “The first wife is quite satisfied, no doubt?” The woman answered me nothing. “She was perfectly happy, no doubt?” and still she an-

swered me nothing. “Did you live together?” “No, we had separate apartments; we had different rooms, different houses, so to speak.” “Your husband married again, you say?” “Yes, he has married twice since then.” “And you?” I said. “Oh! I have fought against it, and struggled against it, and by and by, I went to his first wife. I thought on this ground we might

make common cause. And I went to her and told her what I knew and what she did not know, and I said, ‘Let you and I join together to prevent this thing; we can do it; we can keep another woman from coming into this house, if you will only help me,’ and the woman—an old woman she

“Whited Sepulchres,” by Anna Dickinson 235 was; I thought the fires of life had burned out of her—turned and looked at me with such a face and said, ‘Help you? no, you came into my home, you stole [p. 40:] away my husband, you broke my heart, and now your turn has come, and J am glad of it.’” Contented! I tell you, piercing through ignorance, and bigotry and superstition and false faith, every woman there is sad, and sore, and discontented to her heart’s core. Neither are women elsewhere, to whom fate has assigned a happier and better portion, quite contented with what has been given unto them. This discontent which is almost universal, springs out of no woman’s rights conventions, out of no strong minded appeals nor harangues, out of no discussion of legal rights or legal wrongs, legal powers or legal disabilities. What lies at the bottom of the so-called woman movement of to day is simply the spirit of to day;—a day wherein men are crying, “Precedent to the wall” when liberty crosses its track; a day wherein men are tearing down the old, to build afresh, and better the new. In a day, wherein men are tending in the community, in society, in the church [p. 41:] and in the state to a broader and more liberal and more humane democracy, women are told to be satisfied with aristocracy and the

excellent privilege of subordination on the one hand to the opening responsibility of power on the other. Custom and habit and antiquity are appealed to in opposition; theory,—those reasons for irrational things and excuses for inexcusable ones; ridicule and satire and cheap wit. They talk

about bloomers, and pantaloons, and strong minded monstrosities, and latch keys and crying babies and hen-pecked husbands,—all these are deemed argument, when they are urged in opposition to the cry that in some shape is sounding from the souls of half the community. Light realms and inexpensive! They will not stop or stay such a movement as this. I tell you, so true as you sit and I stand here to night that you cannot laugh this

thing down, nor sneer it down, nor preach, nor legislate, nor denounce it down; for on our side are nature’s laws, and [p. 42:] God’s life is in the cause that we struggle for to day; the law of nature that water will not run up hill, and, consequently, there can be no need of any barriers to prevent it, but that it should have the right to rise to the level of its source; the life of God that is in every human soul demanding the utmost possibilities and freedom for growth. It is this idea that in some shape is working its way through the brains and consciences and hearts of the women of to day. I may be an unfortunate speaker on this theme. I may be a poor advocate, but I tell you the truth when I tell you that this movement, so far from

being a reformation against nature, is one that grows out of the very

236 Appendix 6 exigencies and necessities of nature itself; so far from growing from hatred, it springs from love; so far from being an effort on the part of these women

to array themselves in hostility to men, it is an effort on the part of these women to get nearer your sides. You will grow; you will be in all that pertains to true manhood more of men to day than [p. 43:] were the men of yesterday.

All then, that this movement really signifies, is that the woman of to day is trying to keep step with the music of to day; to march with the onward march of the race; is trying to go with you hand in hand, side by side, step for step, brain for brain and life for life up the rights you are clambering,

desiring not to be abandoned in the valleys you have deserted and are leaving behind. That is all this movement really signifies; that is what the future will recognize it to have signified when stripped of a thousand extraneous follies and surroundings, it stands, as it will stand, crowned and

triumphant. , A poor advocate—a harsh voice and bitter tongued advocate, it may be, who stands before you and says these things, but I speak for the hearts of

tenderer and sweeter women, when I speak these words and I tell you what is in their souls. It is not true that the masses [p. 44:] of women desire the applause of listening senates to command nor yet to read their history in a nation’s eyes; it is not true the mass of women desire to have their name shouted by a people’s voice, that prove the echo of all human fame;

it is true that left to themselves these women would select the place of home, wifehood and motherhood for their portion. It is equally true that society acts to day as though the most unnatural desire to woman’s soul were that of home, wifehood and motherhood; else, why the constant assertion in regard to the growing infrequency of marriages in America, the petitions to young girls to go to wedding altars; why do science and religion and press and pulpit combine in entering protest, solemn and awtul, against the growing frequency of homes in America that are silent, darkened, desolate, the sunshine of the babies’ faces, the music of the babies’ voices silenced, darkened, silenced, stricken out—O! pitiful perversion of humanity by a [p. 45:] mother’s hand. Why all this? It is simply that while society constantly deifies wifehood and motherhood with its lips, it as constantly degrades and defiles it by its acts; it is because whilst it says to the young girl looking out upon life “No life is so great and noble and exalted as that of wifehood and motherhood,” it persistently and viciously elevates every species and kind of man’s work above that of woman’s. Every school, every seminary, every university, every college is opened to the boy or the

“Whited Sepulchres,” by Anna Dickinson 237 | young man; art exhausts her stores and science spends its resources upon a young man; every thing is done that can be done to fit this boy or this young man for the place of a master mechanic, machinist, physician, lawyer, minister, artist, editor, statesman—what you will. Society shuts school, seminary, college, and university against this girl; it tells art to keep her stores and science to hold her resources from the grasp of a girl. It says to this girl, “You have no need of this [p. 46:] education, of this culture, of

this training, of this aid, of this help; you are not to be anything that this man is to be, you are only to be a wife and a mother.” Society says to a young man “Spend your twenty years or twenty four years in fitting yourself for a profession”; society says to the young, untrained, untried, uncultured, unformed in body or mind child of fifteen or sixteen, “You are ready and able to assume the most solemn and awful responsibility that can fall upon a human life or a human soul”; and yet, society knows or should know that this man’s work is to this woman’s work as starlight is to sunlight. The work man accomplishes is wrought with the tools of time, is done in time, for time, and finds with time its ending; however delicate and exquisite the work he performs, moths will eat it, the rust will corrupt it, the grave cover it and oblivion sweep it away.22 There is no work that a

man does in time [p. 47:] that will not find with time its ending; but woman’s work is wrought with spiritual tools to an everlasting end, and is to stand up in blessing or in cursing against her here or hereafter. What is put into the first of life is put into the whole of life; the work this woman accomplishes moths will not eat, nor rust corrupt, nor the grave cover, nor oblivion sweep away; it is to live,—to live to suffer or enjoy whilst the ages roll their minds and eternity itself shall endure. And because this woman’s work is greater, she should have the greater opportunity. She should have

a finer training. She should have the largest liberty. She should possess every advantage of education, training, culture, power, ability that man possesses to day, not because she would be a man or do a man’s work in the world, but because she is a woman with a woman’s work to perform and because as a woman, God has given her a greater work than any man can do. [p. 48:] And, if she does not want this training, if she does not want this culture, if she does not want this power, society for its own sake and for the sake of God and his hereafter should force it upon her; because

what she does is to stand up to accuse and condemn or to bless by its record this soul which has been in this woman’s form at the last great day and through all eternity to come.

238 Appendix 6 Ministers might as well put their fingers on their lips, editors drop their pens, society keep silence forever upon this great question of sorrow and

despair and shame when American households touch this question of wifehood and motherhood. They have got to go down deeper and ascend

higher. Enfranchise motherhood; make it as honorable in fact to be a mother as to be a statesman; make a woman a free will agent in her work as man is a free will agent in his. Train her for it, fit her for it, and then hold her [p. 49:] responsible. In how few and how rare cases seemingly

does this woman comprehend the greatness and majesty of the work whereunto she is called; does she appointed of God to reign trail her scep-

tre in the dust? does she count some pleasure, some duty above that of moulding and fashioning to perfection an immortal soul, and first her own, first her own. Talking of that, of the greatness and grandeur and divinity of an immortal soul, of one’s duties to that wherever it be found, in the body of woman or of man, I bethink me of a scene witnessed last summer in the world famous Yo Semite Valley.22 One day, after a long and wearisome tramp, I reached the descent by Birney [sic] Fall, when it was in deep shad-

ows.24 O, what a descent! a vast wall of rock on the one hand, a weird gleaming fall of four hundred feet on the other; an abyss beneath; a thunderous roar filling the air; the spray and mist flying wild and white through

the night; below me Egyptian darkness; all about me [p. 50:] sombre mountains, inaccessible steeps, their tops three, four, five thousand feet away, peaks and points and towers and pinnacles and domes; shapes of beauty and shapes of grace, and shapes of majesty and power; these carved in the whitest of granite and these alone, above this sea of darkness, tipped by the rising glory of the morn and fairly glittering in its light. A marvellous scene! I stood awhile and let it penetrate me. I was not crushed by it;

something within me, not heart or brain, swelled and swelled until the walls here felt as though they would give way; something that cried “I am greater than these; before them, my essence was; above them and beyond

them can I now soar. When these shall pass away, when the heavens above them shall roll together as a scroll and the earth beneath them melt with a fervid heat, and these vanish into nothingness, I shall live and grow and reign and go on from [p. 51:] height to height of sublimer regions, conquering and to conquer; for the spirit of God hath created me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life.”2° Since these things are so, since he has made us in his own image, but a little lower than the angels, and crowned us with glory and honor, see to it, Woman, who listens, as God himself hath commanded, that no man take your crown.?°

Appendix 7 “Mormonism,” by Anna Dickinson* [The first page of the extant text is marked as page 2.] the society about them, & computed the growth & sp[tear] the evil by continuance & remembered that the days were going on & on, & the measure of each one’s condemnation being steadily & surely filled. I stood still & cried from my heart.—

“Oh God of the living whilst yet ‘mid the dead & the dying we stand here alive,” inspire each one of us to do what in us lies for the alleviation & ennobling of humanity.—A humanity that spite of age of civilization & Christianity, greansis wallows in filth & groans in chains. | It was at the close of a lovely day in June that I first saw the City of the Saints.—a great stretch of fine plain.—an inland sea of sapphire reflecting a sapphire sky.—range after range of stately mountains flowing through the marvellously clear air, masses of amber & gold, while over all “Rang’d dia-

mond bright the eternal wall of snow.” In the midst of such surroundings,—the rare things & majestic things of God’s handiwork, lies this whited sepulchre.—Fair indeed, to outward seeming,—but—wihis-—HHed with-abeminatons—o—at-treteansess pleasant to the eye of the traveller, who knoweth not that the dead are there, & that her peepte inhabitants are in the depths of hell.”

Wide, clean, cool streets.—An icy dashixe mountain stream dashing through the central ene avenue, with little brooks & rivulets flowing from it through eaeh-eftke the others—so that if you will you may drink nectar from the gutter before your door.—this, to irrigate the alkaline soil which really needs little work, & plenty of water,—the houses,—poor adobe huts,—not a dozen fine ones, charming in their verdant surroundings.— each upon a little lot, with a wilderness of greenery sare about ther it, *“Mormonism,” in con. 15, reel 17, trs. 508-24, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, MS 17,984, Library of Congress.

239

240 Appendix 7 flowers & shrubs, bushes & trees burthened with fruit.—Everything orderly, well conducted, quiet,—too quiet in fact, since a stagnant pond is stiller than a foaming brook [but] can scarcely be considered more wholesome. [p. 3:] “I love the noise of a free nation” said De Gasparin. He would be pleased

with no such sounds here. Utah is the most rigid despotism, the most absolute hierarchy upon which the sun shines to day.—Utah.—Mormonism, is Brigham Young.—When BHeham—Your¢ /ie dies, the bottom virtually drops out of that tub,—God hasten the day, tho’ a huge amount of inconceivably dirty water be spilled over the world thereby!

Brigham Young is the head of Church & State.—Religious, civil, military,—the Territory is districted & the City is districted, over each dis-

trict is one of his intelligent tools—Who is the bishop, as thoroughly

posted, as successfully prying as the Catholic Priest through the confessional.—Religious Chief, Civil Magistrate, judge of elections.—Each man’s name is recorded in a book,—with a number attached.—It is nothing

that he is under age,—or a foreigner, unnaturalized,—this is Utah,—not the U.S.—President Young’s domain, not a Ter. of the Republic.—But our candidate—the President’s is submitted to the people.-—The men vote by ballot, but with the worst effects of an open vote.—each list of paper has printed inside “for” or “against,”—outside is the voter’s number.—The judge of elections, who is also the keeper of his conscience, opens his book,

turns to the number,—knows on the instant whether the man is abjectly obedient,—a faithful brother in the church to be trusted [and] rewarded,— or whether he is one of the disaffected to be watched, & perchance destroyed in the end.—for in Utah Disaffection that grows to open revolt, has been done away with, is done away with by assassination at the hands of a band—the Danites,—solemnly sworn to such work.—[p. 4:] A regular military organization,—each man made familiar with arms,— hatred of the Govt. preached,—a sermon delivered a[t] least once a month recounting the wrongs inflicted upon them by an authority which they do not recognize, but slavish obedience inculcated to that they do.—lIs there

any doubt expressed of the wisdom or justice of a provision or decree of Brigham Young the President, Brigham Young the Sun, the prophet, the inspired spiritual head, has a revelation direct from heaven.—& they bow their heads to submit, nay embrace with rapture, tho’ it be to the taking away each year not only 1/10 as of old, but 1/5 of their entire worldly substance.

“Mormonism,” by Anna Dickinson 241 “By their fruits ye shall know them”—I have no desire to enter upon a detailed account of the illegal, treasonable, atrocious proceedings enacted in this region.—Brigham Young & his elders & dignitaries are Americans, almost without exception, the great rank & file are foreigners.—Swedes, Danes, Germans, Swiss, French,—chiefly English & Welsh,—ignorant, deeraded, brutalized, the lowest class of European peasants.—these are sheep

to be sheared, fields to be reaped,—the clippers & reapers who have brains,—in the main American brains.—Monopolize houses, lands, dignities, profits, emoluments, wives.— ‘Tis a general theory that the women here far outnumber the men,—tis not the case.—the-+majert=y Many of the men have but one wife,—& the young men, in thousands of cases have none at all. They all believe in the theory of Polygamy, but they are not all able to practice it. “By their fruits ye shall know them.”—Order, cleanliness, quiet.—that

on the one side.—on the other, no schools,—I mistake, your guide will point you out one size of district school &c.—40 or 50.—Brighams— another 100, 200.—Heber Kimball.—full.—no free schools,—no place of education, no library nor reading room. Nor mental life.—[p. 5:] No mirth nor gladness.—In the theater, ~eu-rearHtttetevehter—S—the eheerne-is-thatoefelagiers on the streets, everywhere, they wear sombre, stolid countenances,—sad when not stupid, the laughter is without happiness & the gayety affected and mechanical.

No homes.—for how can there be any sense of home, when the man spends his time in half a dozen or a dozen houses, among as many women,

who hate one another, & strive each in her poor way, to stand first in favor,—the palm generally being awarded, as with any other stock animal, to her who bears the most children.

Into their houses I went,—& one woman after another came into the room, & was presented by the lord & master as “my wife,” the sentence re-

peated indefinitely—& these women met you, not as mistresses of their homes, but slunk into their seats as tolerated servitors in the presence of their Chief.—And this woman said I have had a dozen children & buried six, & that one said I have had fifteen & buried ten,—& as I looked at the stunted, puny little animals that remained, marked with the brutality of men & the degradation of women, I whispered would God they too were in their graves.—I looked at the adobe huts half-a-dozen rooms—half-adozen wives,—et I went into the theatre & saw a man bending over a score

of women,—his,—I teeked heard people tell as a capital joke of how Brigham Young would stop before some pretty fair haired girl, with words

242 Appendix 7 of praise, & say “Where does she belong” to be answered,—”Why don’t you know your own daughter?”—” Daughter” would say the fine joker.— "And is a man to pick out one in a hundred.” Or of another piece of infantile wit—to the effect that the President’s hopeful son Joseph declined certain hospitalities tendered him by some of our offi[tear], upon a [p. 6:] night when his father was away, upon the plea that he was “going home to make love to his mothers.” added—§_ceerse-D—Hyatt

And seeing & hearing all this, such an awful sense of humiliation & despair took possession of me, as a woman that I wanted to cover up my face & die.—& then reconsidered & said no,—I will live, there is need of me. Need indeed, for as I came to this sewer,—the men with whom I was, not lewd fellows of the baser sort, but men honorable & dignified found the whole thing marvellously funny.—the jokes they made &c.—Say they didn’t mean it. Say it was fun. What would be thought of the wives of these

men, respectable, middle aged matrons, if they had so talked. Oh that’s quite another affair say you.—Is it so? I think not. I remembered persistently through this that what is saver [sic] for the goose is saver for the gander,—or ought to be. Then I stood at my window, & listened to a serenade, assuredly not given

to me,—tho’ when some enthusiastic Gentile in the crowd shouted Miss Dickinson,—there was a lively discussion as to who or what was called.—& an excited Saint, desiring to see a// the curiosities of the party & being de-

termined to be on the right side,—or at least non-committal howled, “Bring it out.”—So standing I heard a congressman in behalf of himself & his confreres pledge to that people, ## any help that could be afforded them in their material growth & prosperity.—knowing full well that they cannot grow in material power, without at the same time, spreading & strengthening the Doctrine of Devils, which is their religion. Then I sat in their Temple [sic] & saw among their Elders & dignitaries.— as one of them,—well met, at home, kindly disposed,—John Todd,—heard him [p. 7:] address them as fellow sinners, &+eHew brothers,—heard him

tell a story of Methodist &c.—Heard him inform them that all that was necessary to their Salvation was faith in Christ,—will these men believe this,—swear by it.—are as orthodox as John Todd himself.—There was not one word of condemnation, even by implication, of the rottenness before him. And what rottenness,—Who were these men with whom he claimed

kinship & brotherhood,—who believe in his creed, so far as he cared to

“Mormonism,” by Anna Dickinson 243 announce it. Beltes; -hehas—a-tetterS—tagiter-torhis ves: — Bishop Johnson, who has 4 nieces, all sisters for wives.—Geo. D. Watt,—Church Reporter, contributor to the leading paper of California,—respected & respectable & religious, conspicuous fer in entertaining members of Congress & others of note,—not ostracized as Byron, & with no naughty things written about him, yet married to his half-sister. & Bolton who has a mother & daughter for his wives. John Todd, minister & divine, did not cry Oh, God. Where are thy lightnings,—but spoke among them as one of them,—S& indeed, barring insult, & the loathsome features of the case,—John Todd’s theories of women are so admirably exemplified in Salt-Lake that he might well feel at home there.

heres Looking at all this I said, Why?—Why such carelessness, such indifference,—manifested in speech and action here, in the silence of the press,

the silence of the pulpit, the silence of society, the silence of Government,—& with the question came the sad [tear] ‘Tis because Salt-Lake City, is aft[tearJix [tear] City. ‘Tis because things [tear] because things he[tear] [p. 8:] are masked & veiled.—’Tis because the underlying theory of woman is the same among Saint & Gentile. That she belongs to a man, body & soul, heart & nature. She is his to have & to hold, he to govern— vide Bushnell.—She to serve till God releases her.

She was created for him,—not for herself or for God. She is to help him,—first, last, & always—not to perfect herself & then to assist another.—She is to preside over his home, not her own.—She is to be the mother of fis children,—not her own.—She was born to be not a human being,—not a woman, but to be a wife & mother.—And to be a wile, & pre-eminently a mother, not for her own pleasure or profit, but for his Satisfaction.

John Todd’s theory & the theory of a majority of people is that a woman was created for the sole purpose of motherhood,—not mental [and] spiritual but animal motherhood.—Excellent says Mormonism, every woman shall be a mother,—& unless she is she shall not be able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.—Her desire shall be unto her husband.—She shall be the subject nature, the-ecovered-ratire; who is to add glory to her husband by

her covered light. Says Horace Bushnell, & a multitude cry amen.—Admirable says Mormonism.—If a house is to be exalted by a woman, & a woman’s duty in life is to exalt a man, the more the better,—the Patriarchal Age shall be restored upon earth, & continue in Heaven.

244 Appendix 7 Stripped of all sentimentality, of all glamor [sic], of all sweetness, of all airy nothings, of delicate words & gracious sentences, full efteairseunds whiech+realy-stenity of emptiness, the actual theory of John Todd, & Horace Bushnell & others like unto them finds its tegtt#mate-actor logical conclusion in Utah.—Pursued to its whimatetinstt ultimate consequence, here is

its close. [p. 9:] , And here as elsewhere is to be found what is used as the strongest argument of their subjugation.—It is natural for a woman to so submit, to love to be ruled, to have the decisions of questions that are to are [sic] to be answered through time & eternity left in the hands & the mouth & the wits of another.—keseevet To attempt to alter this is to reform against nature.— Whosoever desires this is to be denounced as lunatic, radical, infidel,—& to be stoned on the strands of controversy. Page 13 {Women love their servitude,—the method in which they accept it proves that nature so ordained them to be.—It is natural for a man to be strong, reliant, bold, adventurous, governing,—it is natural for a woman to be weak, timid, appealing,—Is there any confounding here of cause &

effect—That he is so, & that she is so, is most true-—What made them so?—Nature?—As well say that nature compels a man to ride astride, & a woman to ride a side-saddle,—S& nature is accordingly demonstrated in the results of such different riding. When I was in the mountains this summer I

amused myself by watching these two methods.—The man, put foot in &c.—Woman rolled in,—Know what I say.—long side, helpless, exhausted on one side, numb on other,—unable to look but only to hold on, absorbed in herselfi—poor hands rubbed sore.—natural for her to be less interested,

to have less strength &c.—So art is to add to nature to make her still less so.

Just so these two are riding through the world. Every advantage of freedom, ease, security is given to the man.—S&c. As for woman—they are all

on one side.—Then people cry,—behold the result of art!—Oh, no, but

mark what differences nature has unalterably made between men & women.} It is natural for a woman to be subservient,—to yield,—they love it, they

thank no one who would change it. They deride & denounce their so called emancipators. [p. 10:] Well! What does that prove?—That there are human beings too ignorant to know they are wronged,—too careless to inquire too debased to feel,— all this I grant you, but not that wrong is right.—The very argument used for, is the strongest against.—As in Slavery naught as is so terrible as the

“Mormonism,” by Anna Dickinson 245 degradation that hugs a chain.—Discontent is its noblest feature.—The woman who at present is contented reminds one of a mole exclaiming “How they excite my pity with their prating about a sun.” Contented.—So are the women of Turkey.—Persia, (Shambles)—Hindoo (Suttee)—China.—No souls.—transmigrate to men.—only woman author of note, “Women were made for the same purpose that tiles are,—for men to tread upon.”—And at home in America,—in Utah, & the 19th century of Christianity, the most ardent, enthusiastic, uncompromising advocates of this system which degrades & violates them, body & soul, are the women. What is the explanation.—Is it that these feel that they can never attain

the same position as others, & so sneer at this position beyond their reach.—” Since we cannot attain grandeur” says Montaigne, “let us take our revenge by abusing it.”.—Cannot attain happiness & respectability, take their revenge by denouncing these. The testimony borne by all travellers to the truth of this.—I did not believe it—The inquiries I made.—Mrs. Richards “& something good.”—Mrs. Jennings.—These contented.—My efforts to secure a talk with her, successful at last —”Oh, my God, wouldn’t I?” Piercing through disguise of education, & bigotry, & ignorance, they are not satisfied.—Nor are these.—They are discontented,—no woman’s rights

convention, &c. is responsible for this, ‘tis but one form of its development—’Tis the spirit of the age,—a day of turning & overturning,—a day in

which the relations of man to society, to government, to one another are being so strictly scrutinized,— women alone—tho’ they form one half the race are to be crushed by custom & antiquity. [p. 11:] The sketkime steeds upon which knaves & bigots invariably mount, when they want to ride over the timid & the credulous—never do we hear so much solemn palaver about the time honored institutions, & approved wisdom of our ancestors, as when attempts are made to remove some Staring monument of their folly.— Custom is appealed to—that reason for irrational things & excuse for inexcusable ones.—Ridicule & satire, & cheap wit are deemed arguments in response to this cry which is sounding in some shape or form from the soul of the half of humanity.—Light weapons & inexpensive. ‘Tis an easy thing

to scoff at right, a little wit, guided with ill nature. Confidence & malice will do it—We are on the great stream.—We will float with the tide,—nay we will pull against it, yet floating or resisting we are borne along.—There

are some boats off at the head,—how they fly through the water,— how they wish make for the ‘apis cataract,—how they are laughed at &

246 Appendix 7 derided as they draw near the rapids.—over they go,—down they plunge,—to float in safety, to ride triumphantly,—to have the shouting multitude cheer them as they glide,—or to rush over to wreck & destruction, while the mob cries aha!—& laughs them to scorn.—Well, what of that,—the boat goes over,—S& if wrecked, it is here! but see you!—bHt The

boat that is wrecked in the midst of derision to day—wttte is worshipped by humanity as a shrine to-morrow.—That humanity which has ‘eaeked +5-erae advanced thus far, the laggers & skulkers,—the conservatives & reactionists,—the most bound of the past,—laughed at in turn, derided in turn by the present. Women have caught this onward march of the age.—they are essaying feebly to find their right place,—Where a// has been wrong, & keep step to the music of to day.—You will turn the world into a Democracy for him, not aristocracy,—prrrHteged classes legislation—an excellent privilege of subordination on our side, an ennobling responsibility of power on the other shall still continue as the proper ordering between men & women.— You cannot so keep it—Women, (as men) may consent to wear old clothes forever, & may even feel a pang at parting with them, but the first appearance of a new garment is hailed with exultation. This garment has appeared, has been worn—S& tho’ [p. 12:] it may fit awkwardly, & need trimming, curtailing, or lengthening, women have seen it, & are becoming enamored of it,—& mockery—the fume of little hearts will not dissuade them from looking & sighing for it.

You can’t laugh this thing down, nor swear it down, nor legislate it down, nor denounce, nor preach it down.—’#is-efRatreSGed for on a side are nature’s laws and God’s life is in the cause that is struggled for to day.

The law of nature, that water will not run up hill, & thus there can be no kind of enactments to prevent it, but that it should be permitted to rise to the level of its source without breaks-er barriers or hindrances.—The life

of God, which is in every human soul, demanding utmost possibilities ef treedom of culture & freedom for growth.

Bret stteh-a-Feet fe peisen-|eat ere — feb a bet pate 6+ ereeked—oerdisterted—srewth—_butthes- + +he-s tear ]-6efHte-S—peaacer heath _S—pewer This is the sentiment that often unconsciously is stirring in the minds & the hearts & the consciences of women to-day—+#his ‘tis universal.—As in

America, sO in Europe & in Asia the women are striving te-reach-seme ether alter more liberty & a larger life.—The suffrage agitation, & the legal

“Mormonism,” by Anna Dickinson 247 quibbles, & the meetings & petitions & conventions are not the cause, they are but a few out-srewtksbursts of a tAbhversat profound discontent,—let us have more of it,—more of what Mr. Emerson would call a wholesome discontent.—Since it is by force & disturbance, not stagnation, that the ocean arrives at transparency. The lesson women will have to learn & are learning is to respect their bodies & souls, & brains.—is to comprehend that seH-extineter+s-Het sell-

sacrifice is not self-extinction S+hatne-eedistobesained by themsebres nortothersthredek [p. 13:] And the lesson men will have to learn is that however unlike, a woman is as hereu complete an entity as a man,—her individuality to be as pro-

foundly reverenced, her life, however different to be as free as their own.— We are all born for one another &+er-Ged to help one another, to sacrifice for one another, but first of all we are born for ourselves,—since what shall it profit one of us if we gain the whole world & Jose our own selves.— Lose the finest or noblest part of that which is, & is to be forever.—

The teaching which has hitherto been given & received has been that a man was to increase as a woman decreased,—was to grow as she shrunk, was to be elevated by her absolute submission, & abnegation, & sacrifice, & if need be annihilation of self.—

o) be -his-wife—€ Li bie 7

decttne—anindel-dectine—sineethis-setH This doctrine is so unblushingly set forth in Dr. Bushnell’s book, that one might be tempted to think him a descendant at least of the wild Tartars, who are anxious to kill a man of extraordinary parts, thinking these will enter the brain of the murderer.—A woman is to eeveH¥ destroy ambition, independence, freedom, noble selfassertion in a woman’s soul,—nay the woman is to crucify these herself, that thereby this man by her side may be #eblet+& free, & larger,—Shes+e betess+than-aremas nobler,—more of a man. In just such measure will he be less.—If men are bold, aggressive, dom-

ineering, & women are the reverse, the two are to be brought twain together, not by aggravating & intensifying the peculiarities of either, but by imparting somewhat of the nature of one to that of the other.—The mest result of that is seen in the choice & master spirits of our age,—a manly woman,—& womanly man.—Mrs. Browning & Geo. Wm. Curtis we will say,—Where are sweeter & nobler [tear] of humanity. Phave-re-desize [tear]

248 Appendix 7 A—wer|[tear] to hold her [tear] of wom[tear] [p. 14:] nor to read their history in a nation’s life.”—It is not time that the majority of them long to hear their names shouted by a people’s voice—a people’s voice.—”the proof & echo of all human fame.”—It is time that the choice, the selection of life by these would be at home,—wife, mother.—And it is equally true that men & [sic] act, & speak, & write as tho’ they thought a home, & witehood & motherhood, the three things most unnatural to a woman’s soul. Else why is every other avenue closed, every door shut tight. Colleges &c.—double bound.—Else why do preachers w+te talk & editors write, & scientific men, put feeble pamphlets & documents, to urge young women to merry the altar, to protest against the infrequency of marriages, to decry & denounce & anathematize the awful sin of the day,—the most unnatural of crimes, the destruction by a mother of her child, ere its baby eyes see the light.

What is the reason?—The reason is that it is natural for a woman to be a wife & mother, but unnatural for her to be such a wife & mother as men & society make her in the majority of cases to day. It is that while by their

lips men deify wifehood & motherhood, by their acts they degrade & defile it.

People are constantly told that what men love best is a simple, earnest, faithful, painstaken wife.—Then they look about them, & see this woman made a slave of her self, buried herself, bad home &c.—faded, worn out— he young & fresh.—”Poor fellow—tied to that old thing.” They are told that wifehood is the most honorable & dignified position for a woman to fill.—then see that the girl by their sides has more freedom, is more honored by the law, more respected by the Government than this woman of years & experience,—Sees further that the only state in which a woman ceases to be a dependant is that of widowhood.—That was at first a puzzle to me, but at last I concluded men thought their wives had gained enough sense from contact with them to [p. 15:] eres trust [tear] of life & action thereafter.—& when this was not done twas because the man modestly doubted his own capacity as a teacher. They are sheyer told that motherhood—tor ’tis this alone that makes the broad distinction between the sexes,—is ennobling,—divine,—then they see this motherhood made the excuse for injustice & degradation & wrongs manifold.

X By it she is the property of a man, body & soul.—Ah, no,—not as soul you say.—’Tis in soul.—For purit¥ she is exempted even from a sense of personal responsibility for spiritual morality. Purity is not an attribute of

“Mormonism,” by Anna Dickinson 249 her soul,—a thing between God & herself alone,—but /1is property.—If she takes one mis-step & strives through anguish to atene expiate it,—to walk with bowed head & bleeding feet every step of the way,—still marked & tainted.—There is no future for her tho’ she has had the virtue to repent & the energy to atone—but if a man marries her, tho’ he be libertine, mistress

& married in sin, the world accepts her, & says “If he is satisfied, whose business is it?” X X His property?—Well not in body!—FRrat-she-+efises-te-tyre+-siz A

brute may secure a divorce in more than one nation of Christendom, & more than one state in America ¢het [illegible] the plea that his wile claims to own herself.—Body & soul?—fillegible]. ‘Tis to please & serve him, that is her chief end in life.—& to this human end the divinity of motherhood is to be enslaved. te-+he

How persistently ministers preach to a woman, a drunkard’s wife, to stay with him,—S& society commands her, & sings her praises,—the praise

of the devotion of woman’s love,—perchance over her untimely grave. many with drunken wife—Ghastly mockery.—God can look with nought save sorrowing condemnation upon the-destrretien the steady embrutalizing & degradation, which of necessity comes from such a life contract—the destruction of one life & almost of one soul, to try to save the an other.— "To his own [illegible].” [p. 16:] But that might pass if she were there as his comrade & friend,—she is not.—She is there, & society knows she is there, & the church commends

her for being there as his wife & the mother of his children—Loathsome fact!—She is the mother of half-a-dozen children.—4 or 5 die.—Visitation of God. Sin to fill almshouses, jails.—Scaffolds.—Eternity.—Mysterious Providence!—Horrible blasphemy.—nRetse-artittasthis_but+his—a-type

The time has gone by to tell an intelligent American woman that her chief good in life is served by serving some man, & being the mother of half-a-dozen children, stamped not with the image of God but the worst passions of men.—

Ministers &c.—stop writing, preaching, anathematizing. Go down deeper.

Enfranchise motherhood! (keep this) Meke+-ashernerableto—be-ametherastebe-—a-statesinan Make a woman a free will agent in her work, as man is a free will agent in his.

Train her for it—Then hold her responsible.

250 Appendix 7 Today the world puts every species of man’s labor above this.—The mes bey sean boy selects his work,—has free choice & action,—long apprenticeship at loom or shop.—long student life for Profession.—Rerm—Gitt+mere

iHerant—than Permit, nay compel [a] girl to enter upon these solemn & awful responsibilities more ignorant of her work, than a child of an engine. He is to be trained because he is to be a physician &c.—She not because she is to be a mother.—For this very reason she should be.—He works with coarser tools to a coarser end,—but she with the tools of the Spirit,—with

finer tools to a finer,—an eternal end.—”Character is Destiny” says Novalis—” What is put into the first of life is put into the whole of life.”—

This woman’s work being finer should be more finely trained.—Being [tear] greater, she & she alone [p. 17:] being fitted for it should decide how much of it she can perform, [tear] when she shall accomplish it.—

It is time the old atheism of a curse was destroyed.—[tear]men are to submit,—very well to the curse of God, but not to its infliction by man. Slavery. So labor was regarded as a curse.—educated, skilled, ennobled,— ‘tis a blessing to day.—So [tear] is rightly done,—a blessing. The world does

not begin to know what creatures humans may be.—\Hen-+they-aremade

Fo—day—tis—a-_etssetna other pra te the satien Few mothers to day have that crowning happiness,—as indeed few are permitted to realize the dignity—or do realize the dignity of their position.—Snubbed, governed, ruled, how is this nature to transmit nobility, or demand respect.—Girls follow in footsteps, taveht trained to nurture. Children & pre-eminently some, who Jove their mothers, have a tender regard, a pity for them.—Soci-

ety has no right to entail upon a mother, to force a mother to sepa merit the pity of her child.—She should be loved as a mother, reverenced as a su-

perior, adored as a creator—Man should help her, above all she should help herself to this exalted destiny. For she does not yet.—In rare cases does she fully comprehend what it is to respect her own individuality or to reverence her soul.—Something else,—a some one else is of more importance than the perfection of that which is to her, or should be to her, more than the universe besides. ‘Hs

When I recall at this moment a scene witnessed in the ta-tamed Yosemite.—One night,—after a long day’s tramp I reached the descent by the Vernal Falls when it was in deep shadow.—Ah what a descent!—Here was the dark canon through which I was passing [Extant text ends, at the bottom of page 17.]

Appendix 8 Selections from Anna Dickinson's Letters Home, Summer 1569 From Anna E. Dickinson, Elko, Nevada, to Mary Edmondson Dickinson, Philadelphia, 24 June 1869, in con. I, reel 1, frs. 600-602, Anna E. Dickin-

son Papers, MS 17,984, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as AED Papers). Elko.

June 24. 1869 Dear Little Mamlet, We have been bad people I know, for not writing sooner, but indeed, we have been so incessantly moving, so constantly engaged, so tired if we had a moment’s respite that we could not summon energy to find paper pens & ink, & write with them home.

Just now I am scrawling on my knee, at the place where we have stopped for breakfast.—John has gone away with some one, to look at certain wonderful hot springs that are near,—& IJ am trying, under difficulties

to say a word to you at home.—Here, & with such surroundings, & in haste, I can give but brief [fr. 601:] account of our wanderings.

We left Omaha Wednesday afternoon. The Com[mittee]. having telegraphed us to join them in the morning,—but I thought we would be more independent to travel alone,—& refused when we overtook them the next morning to go into their car—They had a special train.—But at noon, , Maynard, Kelley, & Allison so insisted that it was ungracious to refuse, & we went in, to dinner & for the afternoon but returned to our own car at night.—They purposed overtaking us, & carrying us on with them the next day, but an accident detained them four hours.—So they telegraphed us to lay off at Wahsatch,—where we slept,—& they would take us through the next day. 251]

252 Appendix 8 This we very gladly did as Weber Canon is the very finest part of the entire route, & was at that time passed through by the regular train, at night. We had a rare time going through it,—from 7 till 2.—(The regular running

time is about 2 hours)—They had a platform car attached to the train which stopped,—ran slow,—or did whatsoever was commanded.—in the afternoon,—(this was 7th day) we all went to Salt Lake City,—they made but brief stay,—till the next evening & begged us to go on with them, but we had not seen the half we wished to see & remained till yesterday,— Wednesday morning.— It’s quite useless to try to tell you now anything of what we have seen & heard. When we reach Va. City as we will to-morrow we will write or try

to write something about [fr. 602:] it—tho’ for myself I have seen so

much, & in such rapid succession that I am in a state of absolute confusion—perhaps when I eat, & sleep, & clean, & rest,—I may have my brain in decent condition, for the present suffice it to say we are well, & flourishing & happy,—& hope the like can be said of all at home, & with dear love to each & all, & Iam always Thy loving daughter, Anna From Anna E. Dickinson, Virginia City, Nevada, to Mary Edmondson Dick-

inson, Philadelphia, 26 June 1869, in AED Papers, con. 1, reel 1, frs. 604-8.

The next morning we breakfasted at North Platte,—still open rolling Prairie, —& were besought to join the Congressmen but declined,—dined at

Sidney, & went aboard the Congressmen’s car.—& that afternoon & evening were ours to be forever remembered.—The country is green & lovely, & from this beautiful base,—the Black Hills, spires of the Rocky’s shoot into the air—red sandstone & granite, big & little masses of rocks, torn by the storms & beaten by wind & rain through countless ages into every shape & form,—strange, grotesque, sublime,—while away off at the South, through gaps & rents in the nearer & lower range the Rocky Mountains lifted themselves, shapely & grand, & crowned with eternal snows,—

the sun blazing across them,—& the evening shadows, blue & purple softening them to our gaze.—

At night we went back to our own car, & in the morning opened our eyes upon the Bitter Creek Country, a region which Mother would travel

Selections from Anna Dickinson's Letters Home, Summer 1869 = 253

far to see.—’Tis my idea of Arabia Petra,—desert,—but [fr. 605:] sublime,—

a strange, grey, effect to the land,—soil & desolate sage brush,—hills of sand & of rock, the most extra-ordinary in shape that can be conceived,— towers, & walls, & mountains, & castles, & solitary sentinels standing out upon other mountains & hills,—where the stone was soit above, or in the middle or at bottom, washed & blown away, leaving the harder rock, in these forms,—over all a dull leaden sky,—there was something weird, ghostly, unearthly in it all,—something once seen never to be forgotten,— the country we passed through in the afternoon was dismal desert,—just bare & ugly with low hills, & interminable stretches of sage brush,—this brush being stunted, & dull a dreary blue green.—Towards night the first range of the Wahsatch, snow-capped & exhilarating began to appear,—& reaching Wahsatch we camped for the night.—The Congressmen had telegraphed us to wait for them,—S& in any case we purposed staying over to see the Weber Canon by daylight.—Mr. Hoxie, the assistant Supt. of the

Road had telegraphed ahead, So [fr. 606:] we had every thing in royal style, a caboose, some buffaloe skins, a stove, fire, a wash basin, water,— what not,—then we slept like a King & Queen,—& were picked up by the Congressmen in the morning. Then also we had bestowed upon us some beautiful moss agates,—the country through which we passed in the afternoon is rich in them, but steam can travel faster than human legs, so we could not go off on a hunt. The finest scenery upon the whole road is through Weber Canon, there are spots where we are literally land-locked—vast walls of rock rising be-

hind, beside, before us,—with a little tunnel burrowing its way into the barrier.

On the first the rocks are green,—poor green,—bits of shrubs & sage - brush,—on the left bare stone,—that is because of the different stratification of rock. The snows resting on the one side & blown off upon the other,—there is a Pulpit Rock not unlike the one at Nahant, & a Devil’s Slide long shapes of rock running so [drawing of two parallel lines set about 45 degrees from vertical] down the face of the mountain, ragged & torn on the edges, with space between for two men to slide down. [fr. 607:] You will get a better idea of these wonders from the pictures we will bring home, than J can give you in my halting language. Left the cars & mounted the coaches at Deseret, about 2 o’clock for Salt Lake.—Mountains to right of us,—mountains to left of us,—presently in

the midst off to the right, a gleaming, splendid sheet of water.—Salt Lake.—Mountains in its midst. Islands of mountains,—& soon then—alter

254 Appendix 8 the Wasatch Range with their White Heads.—It is difficult to tell how greatly snow adds to the sublime effect of a scene,—lifting one’s eyes to it, from hot, dry, sun-baked land.—34 miles, in less than four hours, & we are whirled round the base of a mountain, & into the famous city.—I will not

dilate upon that now as I have so much to say about it.—Must wait for longer space & time, as I cannot end I will not begin.— This was Saturday Eve.—the Congressmen—some of them, (not Allison, however—he is spooney on somebody & was dragged off protesting), impatient to push on, departed—John and I wishing to see & know stayed till

Wednesday morning,—left at 5—took the [fr. 608:] train at Deseret at 10.30—Mr. Hoxie first feeding & making much of us,—travelled that after-

noon & night, & the next day & night till 2 in the morning over country Hilly & mountainous but comparatively uninteresting—alkaline, poisonous—not a living thing in sight—sluggish little streams, white baked earth—hundreds of miles of dreary sage brush—a dismal land—the valley of the Humboldt.

From Anna E. Dickinson, Santa Cruz, Calif., to Mary Edmondson Dickinson, Philadelphia, 5 August 1869, in AED Papers, con. 1, reel 1, frs. 680, 690-91.

At 10 o’clock we reached Hardin’s Mill’s where we take horses for the Valley—26 miles away.—Some women who come here are silly enough to ride in on side-saddles, the result being a tortured horse with a great sore on his back, extreme danger & exhaustion, & often severe accident to the rider.—So I, being sensible eschewed any such method of progression.

Behold me then with a great flap hat tied down at the sides,—a blue bloomer dress consisting of a loose coat, skirt to the knee, trowsers to the garter, below this blue woolen stockings & stout leather shoes,—thus armed & equipped I bestride my beast & away we go to Yo-Semite.... [fr. 690:] ... When the intervening space had been crossed & we gained the summit of the Vernal Fall it was dark.—It seemed wild enough, coming down the ladders,—back foremost,—hands & feet both in hard service, [fr. 691:] but that was child’s play to the rest of the descent.— The fall of water is always much heavier at night,—the way was dark.— The spray & mist beat against us with a dashing wind—the path was slippery stones, & foot-deep mud.—We would thrust out our sticks & plunge

Selections from Anna Dickinson's Letters Home, Summer 1869 255 after them,—or find no resting place for them & so try another,—but if any

one would offer me $1000 for that part of our tramp & I could sell it, I would not. Here was the dark canon through which we were passing,—a wall of rock on one side,—the white, gleaming fall on the other, an abyss beneath us,—the spray flying wild & white—all around us sombre mountains, their

tops above, touched by the rising morn, & these fairly glittering in its light.—Oh, a wonderful, wonderful, ghostly, weird scene. At last we gained our horses & at half past ten reached home.—

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Notes

Introduction 1. Kenneth Walter Cameron, ed., The Massachusetts Lyceum during the American Renaissance: Materials for the Study of the Oral Tradition in American Letters: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Other New-England Lectur-

ers (Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental Books, 1969), 27, 116; George H. Chapman, Journal, 1839-42, Archives, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison; Cincinnati Gazette, 25 February 1852, quoted in David Mead, Yankee Eloquence in the Middle West: The Ohio Lyceum, 1850-1870 (East

Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951), 133; Charlotte L. Forten, The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, edited by Brenda Stevenson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 130; Mary Lucille Hamilton, “The Lyceum in New Orleans, 1840-1860” (master’s thesis, Louisiana State University, 1948), 70; Regina C. McCaugheySilvia, “Lectures and Discussion Questions of the Franklin Lyceum: A

Guide to Attitudes and Ideas in Nineteenth Century Providence” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rhode Island, 1991), 289-90; Anna E. Dickinson (AED) to Mary Edmondson Dickinson, 10 May 1871, in con. 2, reel 2, fr. 158, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, MS 17,984, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as AED Papers). 2. The term culture is meant to designate “patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embod-

iment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action”; A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, “Culture, a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions,” Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 47, no. 1 (1952): 181, quoted in Wilbur Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States, rev. ed. (En-

glewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992), 69-70. , 3. James Boyd White, Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), xi. A useful discussion of the origins of the word rhétoriké is Edward Schiappa, The 257

258 Notes Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), chap. 2. 4. See, e.g., Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945; repr., Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1969); Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); and Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). A helpful introduction to Burke’s oeuvre, especially as it relates to studies of societies, is

Kenneth Burke, On Symbols and Society, ed. Joseph R. Gusfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 5. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 6. A detailed discussion of the terms for the Middle West, as well as its boundaries and history, can be found in James R. Shortridge, The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989). 7. Carl Bode, The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind (Carbondale:

Southern Illinois University Press, 1956), x—xi, xii. 8. “The Lyceum System,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 18 (15 December 1832): 71. In 1833 Holbrook included a biography of Aristotle in his weekly journal, the Family Lyceum; see “Aristotle,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 24 (26

January 1833): 93. George A. Kennedy notes that upon founding the Lyceum in 335 B.c.E., Aristotle may have taught “rather popular subjects, including poetics, rhetoric, politics, and ethics, but later devoted his attention to metaphysics”; Kennedy, introduction to On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, by Aristotle, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 6. Holbrook’s Family Lyceum ran

from 28 July 1832 to 7 December 1833, with two interruptions; see Richard L. Weaver II, “Josiah Holbrook: Feeding the Passion for SelfHelp,” Communication Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1976): 14n.30. The microfilm version in the American Periodicals Series (APS), prepared from the Library of Congress copy, contains the full text of the numbered issues of volume | (28 July 1832 to 10 August 1833) plus two “extra” issues. The APS version is the source consulted for this book. Citations

of the extra issues will refer to the “December 1832” issue and the “anatomy extra” issue.

9. He studied there from 1806 to 1810; “Josiah Holbrook,” American Journal of Education 8 (1860): 229; Alfred Holbrook, Reminiscences of the

Happy Life of a Teacher (Cincinnati: Elm Street Printing, 1885), 17; Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale

Notes 259 College with Annals of the College History, vol. 6, September, 1805-Septem-

ber, 1815 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1912), 334-39.

10. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), s.v. “lyceum”; Bode, American Lyceum, 19.

11. “American Lyceum,” American Journal of Education 3, no. 12 (1828):

753n.; “American Lyceum; or, Society for the Improvement of Schools and the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” American Journal of Education 4, no. 1 (1829): 52n. (Unless otherwise noted, the American Journal of Education cited herein is the periodical edited by William Russell.) The Columbian Centinel of 15 November 1828 likewise em-

phasized the term’s perceived neutrality; cited in Bode, American Lyceum, Xi.

12. “American Lyceum; or, Society for the Improvement of Schools,” 52n.

In 1832 Holbrook wrote that “the name at first presented no small obstacle in the way of its general introduction,” but he claimed that “that obstacle is now entirely removed”; “Lyceum System,” 71. 13. See Joseph F. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties: From SelfImprovement to Adult Education in America, 1750-1990 (Stanford, Calit.:

Stanford University Press, 1994). The tension between democratic rhetoric and elite hierarchies is common in U.S. educational discourse

and practice. Referring to the eighteenth century, Andrew Rieser notes that “early national educators .. . struggled to reconcile a spirit of progress with their deeply rooted paternalism”; Rieser, “Lyceums, Chautauquas, and Institutes for Useful Knowledge,” in Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, vol. 3, ed. Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter W. Williams (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001), 35].

14. [Josiah Holbrook], “Associations of Adults for Mutual Education,” American Journal of Education 1, no. 10 (1826): 594-97. The letter is transcribed herein as appendix 2. 15. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “The American Lecture-System,” Macmillan’s Magazine 18 (May 1868): 53. The Macmillan’s article is a British reprint of an article previously published in the U.S. periodical

Every Saturday. Higginson refers to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Sumner. The “delinquent President” is Andrew Johnson. 16. There are many exceptions to these generalizations, of course. “Serious” subjects and controversial lecturers did not disappear from the post-Reconstruction platform. See, e.g., the lists of platform performers available from the Redpath Lyceum Bureau through 1901-2 in

260 Notes Marjorie Harrell Eubank, “The Redpath Lyceum Bureau from 1868 to 1901” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1968), 294-320.

17. Twentieth-century scholars, agreeing with the assessment of nineteenth-century elites, frequently interpreted this trajectory as a “descent” or “decline”; see, e.g., Frederick J. Antczak, Thought and Character: The Rhetoric of Democratic Education (Ames: Iowa State Uni-

versity Press, 1985), 74-76; and Peter Cherches, “Star Course: Popular Lectures and the Marketing of Celebrity in Nineteenth-Century America” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1997), chap. 6. This book

takes a more quizzical position on the “decline,” noting that the erowing entertainment function coincided with an opening of the platform to many voices formerly denied access. For social reformers,

for example, the cultural expectations of “entertainment” both pro-

vided space for new voices and new visions, and also encouraged au- : dience members to see these entertainer-reformers as novel or absurd. 18. In this study I attempt to confine the term /yceum to refer first to societies for mutual education and later to local organizations established for members’ continuing education, members’ debating, or the sponsorship of public lectures. Thus the term lyceum in this study refers to

a local, secular organization, often with an explicit educational mission, that typically sponsored public events. Slippages in meaning do occur: literary societies and library companies, for example, were often functionally equivalent to lyceums, and I do not enforce a rigid separation among the terms. Further, in writing about the commercial period, I count as “lyceum performances” all events scheduled by a bureau such as the Redpath Lyceum Bureau of Boston without attempting to ascertain the precise nature of the local sponsoring organizations. This choice is fostered by the quality of information in extant documents, like lecturers’ schedules prepared at a bureau. Such documents often list only place names, not the names of sponsoring assoclations.

19. On the fluctuations in the rights to the franchise throughout U.S. history, see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 20. David Waldstreicher, “Rites of Rebellion, Rites of Assent: Celebrations,

Print Culture, and the Origins of American Nationalism,” Journal of American History 82 (June 1995): 37-61. 21. Donald M. Scott, “The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 66, no.

Notes 261 4 (1980): 808-9. Rhetorical theorist Michael Calvin McGee asserts that notions of what counts as “the people” come into being through cultural practices; McGee, “In Search of ‘the People’: A Rhetorical Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 235-49.

22. On constitutive rhetoric, see esp. Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech

73 (1987): 133-50; and Charland, “Politics: Constitutive Rhetoric,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane (New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 2001), 616-19. 23. Rieser, “Lyceums,” 354.

24. Combining James W. Carey’s conception of ritual communication with the typology of cultural performances articulated by anthropologist John J. MacAloon suggests a hermeneutic potential in ideals of “ritual” and “spectacle” that helps explain the complex interaction of “education” and “entertainment” in lyceum practice. Such ideas inform the rhetorical analyses in this book. See James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge,

1989), 15-18; and John J. MacAloon, “Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies,” in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle:

Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John J. MacAloon (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984), esp. 243-54.

25. Rhetorical theorist Robert Scott observed in the late 1960s that knowledge does not preexist rhetorical acts. Rather, it is through rhetorical action that humans define what counts as knowledge; Scott, “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic,” Central States Speech Journal

18 (February 1967): 9-16; Scott, “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic: Ten Years Later,” Central States Speech Journal 27 (Winter 1976): 258-66. Media theorist Stuart Hall makes a similar point in different

language: it is through shared representations that cultural knowledge comes into being; Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997), esp. chap. 1; Hall, Repre-

sentation and the Media, videorecording, produced and directed by Sut Jhally (Northampton, Mass.: Media Education Foundation, 1997). 26. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Nature of Criticism in Rhetorical and

Communicative Studies,” Central States Speech Journal 30 (Spring 1979): 12.

27. See, e.g., Michael C. Leff, “Interpretation and the Art of the Rhetorical Critic,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 44 (Fall 1980): 337-49; Leff, “Textual Criticism: The Legacy of G. P. Mohrmann,”

262 Notes Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 377-89; Stephen E. Lucas, “The Renaissance of American Public Address: Text and Context in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 241-60; Michael

C. Leff and Andrew Sachs, “Words the Most Like Things: Iconicity and the Rhetorical Text,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (Summer 1990): 252-73; Leff, “‘Things Made by Words’: Reflections on Textual Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 223-31; Leff, “Lincoln at Cooper Union: Neo-Classical Criticism Revisited,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (Summer 2001): 232-48; James Jasinski, “The Status of Theory and Method in Rhetorical Criticism,”

Western Journal of Communication 65 (Summer 2001): 249-70; and Leah Ceccarelli, Shaping Science with Rhetoric: The Cases of Dobzhansky,

Schrodinger, and Wilson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 6-9.

28. The great-uncle of whom I am speaking was Earl Stanley Ray (1913-95), the husband of Dalcy Cobb Ray (1919-80) and a veteran of World War II who lived in McLean County, Kentucky, and worked as a bulldozer operator most of his working life. 29. Good examples of criticism that demonstrates the importance of context are Randall A. Lake, “Enacting Red Power: The Consummatory Function in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69 (1983): 127-42; Gerald Philipsen, “Mayor Daley’s Council Speech: A Cultural Analysis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986):

| 247-60; and Lee Lin Lee, “Zhao Ziyang’s Plea to the Students in Tiananmen Square,” in Critiques of Contemporary Rhetoric, 2nd ed., by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Thomas R. Burkholder (Belmont, Calit.: Wadsworth, 1997), 216-33. 30. Celeste Condit has identified “the most difficult problematic of rhetorical studies” as the effort “to target the situated character of discourse

while not losing sight of the details of the discourse itself”; Condit, “Rhetorical Criticism and Audiences: The Extremes of McGee and Leff,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (Summer 1990): 330.

The text-context distinction has long been a concern for rhetorical critics. See, e.g., W. Charles Redding, “Extrinsic and Intrinsic Criticism,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 21 (Spring 1957): 96-102.

31. The notion of longitudinal studies in rhetorical criticism was suggested in 1990 by John Angus Campbell; Campbell, “Between the Fragment and the Icon: Prospect for a Rhetorical House of the Middle

Notes 263 Way,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (Summer 1990): 346-76. 32. For a survey of relevant literature on the lyceum, see Angela G. Ray, “Pupils, Spectators, Citizens: Representations of U.S. Public Culture in

the Nineteenth-Century Lyceum” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2001), 21-29. 33. Walter Benjamin notes, “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably”; Benjamin, [//uminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 257.

Chapter 1. From Mutual Education to Celebrity Entertainment 1. Stephen John Hartnett makes a similar argument, writing that “democracy is nothing more than the institutionalization of a culture that cherishes public dissent”; Hartnett, Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 176. 2. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, “Education to 1877,” in The Reader’s Companion to American History, ed. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 313-17. For information on agricultural fairs, see Fred Kniffen, “The American Agricultural Fair: The Pattern,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 39 (December 1949): 264-82, esp. 266-71; Kniffen, “The American Agricultural Fair: Time and Place,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 4) (March 1951): 42-57. 3. Bode, American Lyceum, 19-20; Paul Wakelee Stoddard, “The American Lyceum” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1947), 47. Examples of pre-

cursors of the Millbury Lyceum include the Lycaeum of Delaware; Mississippi's Society for the Acquirement and Dissemination of Useful

Knowledge; the Detroit Lyceum; the lyceum of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire; the Athenaeum of Natchez, Mississippi; the lyceum of Gardiner, Maine; and the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. On the Detroit Lyceum, founded in 1818, see Richard L. Weaver II, “Forum for Ideas: The Lyceum Movement in Michigan, 1818-1860” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1969), 1-5. 4. [Holbrook], “Associations of Adults,” 594-97. 5. Ibid., 594.

264 Notes 6. In 1829 Holbrook produced a promotional leaflet claiming that towns with lyceums enjoyed many benefits: “The improvement of conversation,” “Directing amusements,” “Saving of expense,” “Calling into use neglected Libraries, and giving occasion for establishing new ones,” “Providing a Seminary for Teachers,” “Benefiting Academies,” “Increasing the advantages and raising the character of District Schools,” “Compiling of Town Histories,” “Town Maps,” “Agricultural and Geological Surveys,” and “State Collections of Minerals”; The American Lyceum; or, Society for the Improvement of Schools and Diffusion of Useful

Knowledge, Old South Leaflets, no. 139 (Boston: Directors of the Old

South Work, Old South Meeting-house, 1829), 3-7. Bode reprinted excerpts from this pamphlet in his American Lyceum, 24-26. 7. On the European precursors of the U.S. lyceum, see Bode, American Lyceum, chap. 1. 8. Asa Rand, “American Lyceum,” American Journal of Education 3, no. 12

(1828): 749. 9. On educare, see Antczak, Thought and Character, 208n.8. See Antczak’s chapter 1 for a helpful discussion of democratic education.

10. Later on, lectures proffering advice to young men became staples of the public platform. For example, clergyman Henry Ward Beecher published editions of his lectures to young men on morals and conduct from the 1840s until his death in 1887, and editions of Beecher’s Lectures to Young Men, on Various Important Subjects continued to be is-

sued well into the twentieth century. 11. William Russell, headnote to [Holbrook], “Associations of Adults,” 594.

12. Bode, American Lyceum, 27-28; A. C. Flagg, “Improvement of Common Education,” American Journal of Education 3, no. 4 (1828): 244; “American Lyceum,” American Journal of Education 3, no. 10 (1828): 630.

13. “Republicanism of Lyceums,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 22 (12 January 1833): 86.

14. Daniel Walker Howe, “Victorian Culture in America,” in Victorian America, ed. Daniel Walker Howe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 24. 15. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), pt. 3. 16. Vern Wagner, “The Lecture Lyceum and the Problem of Controversy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15, no. 1 (1954): 121.

Notes 265 17. “Brighton Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 14 (17 November 1832): 55; “Politics,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 15 (24 November 1832): 59. See also “Republicanism of Lyceums,” 86; and “To Editors,” Family Lyceum 1,

anatomy extra (1832-33): 3. 18. On the Millbury Lyceum, see, e.g., Bode, American Lyceum, 13-14; “Josiah Holbrook,” 232; Stoddard, “American Lyceum,” 48-50; and Robert Carl Martin, “The Early Lyceum, 1826-1845” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1953), 106-14. 19. See “American Lyceum,” American Annals of Education 1, pt. 2 (June 1831): 274; “Republicanism of Lyceums,” 86; [Thomas S. Grimké], “Plan of a System of Lyceums,” American Annals of Education 5 (May 1835): 198-204; “The American Lyceum,” American Journal of Education 14, n.s. 4 (1864): 535-58; Will S. Monroe, “American Lyceum Association,” in A Cyclopedia of Education, vol. 1, ed. Paul Monroe (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 111-12; Cecil B. Hayes, The American Lyceum: Its History and Contribution to Education, U.S. Office of Education, Bul-

letin no. 12 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1932), 7-21; Bode, American Lyceum, 101-9. Proceedings of the nine meetings of the American Lyceum appear in the American Annals of Education. Using these proceedings, Hayes made a list of lectures and essays presented before the American Lyceum; Hayes, American Lyceum, 66-68.

In 1837 Holbrook promoted the idea of a “universal lyceum” to facilitate the diffusion of knowledge throughout the world; “Universal Lyceum,” American Annals of Education 7 (1837): 183-84; Bode, Amertcan Lyceum, 107-8.

20. Holbrook reported a personal expenditure of more than $500 to pay for the printing and distribution of pamphlets and circulars about the lyceum; “The Lyceum System,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 18 (15 December

1832): 71. What historian Donald M. Scott observes about the midcentury lecture system is also true of the early lyceum: “This popular lecture system was in many ways a creation of the world of print of mid-nineteenth-century America—the system could no more have operated without print than the railroad could have operated without tracks”; Scott, “Print and the Public Lecture System, 1840-60,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. William L. Joyce, David D. Hall, Richard D. Brown, and John B. Hench (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), 284. 21. “Associations for Mutual Education,” American Journal of Education 2,

no. 3 (1827): 188. The town lyceum in the county seat of Worcester was not founded until November 1829; see Martin, “Early Lyceum,”

266 Notes 249-66. Historian Joseph Kett provides a cautionary note about Holbrook’s influence in creating new organizations, writing that Holbrook also “baptized existing [literary] societies as lyceums”; Kett, Pursuit of Knowledge, xvii.

22. “American Lyceum,” American Journal of Education 3, no. 10 (1828): 628, 633. 23. “Intelligence,” American Annals of Education 1, pt. 2, no. 10 (1831): 491; Bode, American Lyceum, 86; Theodore Morrison, Chautauqua: A Center for Education, Religion, and the Arts in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 175. John S. Noffsinger, in Correspondence Schools, Lyceums, Chautauquas (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 102, re-

ported that there were only about a hundred lyceums in 1834. Be-

cause there was no central clearinghouse for information about individual town lyceums, specific data about numbers and locations of organizations are difficult to obtain; even the officers of the na-

tional American Lyceum (1831-39) were unable to measure the movement’s success quantitatively. 24. Bode, American Lyceum, 16-17, 43, 45; “Lyceums of Boston,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 35 (13 April 1833): 139; Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum,

26, 5, 191. 25. Weaver, “Forum for Ideas,” 1-5; Bode, American Lyceum, 92, 82, 86, 97, 96; Mead, Yankee Eloquence, 16; “School Statistics,” American Annals of Education 1, pt. 2, no. 7 (July 1831): 329; [Frank A. Flower], History of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Chicago: Western Historical, 1881), 560; Joseph S. Schick, The Early Theater in Eastern Iowa: Cultural Beginnings and the Rise of the Theater in Davenport and Eastern Iowa, 1836-1863

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 6. For Lincoln’s lyceum speech, see Abraham Lincoln, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 108-15; see also Thomas F. Schwartz, “The Springfield Lyceums and Lincoln’s 1838 Speech,” Illinois Historical Journal 83 (Spring 1990): 45-49. 26. Julia L. Vivian, “Austin Lyceum,” The Handbook of Texas Online, http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/AA/vqal .html, handbook updated 23 June 2001, accessed 3 June 2002; Bode, American Lyceum, 168, 177-82. On two Texas lyceums, see Louise Jarrell, “The Austin Lyceum, 1839-1841” (master’s thesis, University of Texas, 1941); and Orin Walker Hatch, Lyceum to Library: A Chapter in the Cultural History of Houston (Houston: Texas Gulf Coast Historical As-

sociation, 1965).

Notes 267 27. “Village Lyceum,” Family Lyceum \1 (December 1832): 3. See also “Lyceum Buildings,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 4 (7 September 1832): 16; “Lyceums,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 9 (13 October 1832): 34; “Politics,” 59; and “Village Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 24 (26 January 1833): 95,

28. Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 5-6, 30; McCaughey-Silvia, “Franklin Lyceum,” 9; Catalogue of the Library of the Lyceum and Library Soctety, First District, City of New Orleans (New Orleans: Printed by R. C. Kerr, 1858), ili.

29. [Holbrook], “Associations of Adults,” 595; “Popular Improvement,” American Journal of Education 3, no. 6 (1828): 278.

30. Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 110, 6; Martin, “Early Lyceum,” 342-43; McCaughey-Silvia, “Franklin Lyceum,” 3. Martin’s disserta-

tion includes a transcription of the minutes of the Downingtown Lyceum from 1841 to 1845 (342-88). In Concord, all the founding members were male, and a male membership seems to have been assumed, but the constitution did not mention sex. 31. Stanley Lebergott, Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record since ISOO (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 547.

32. The assumption of 6 percent discretionary income is based on an 1874-75 survey of expenditures in 397 wage- and clerical-worker families in fifteen Massachusetts cities and towns. With the respondents divided into five income classifications, the proportion of income spent on “sundry expenses” (everything except subsistence, clothing, rent, and fuel) ranged from 3 percent to 10 percent, with a mean of 6 percent. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial ed., pt. 1 (Wash-

ington, D.C.: GPO, 1975), 322. It is worthwhile to remember, however, that the survey occurred in the aftermath of the panic of 1873. 33. “Lyceum Buildings,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 4 (7 September 1832): 16.

34. Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 111, 192; McCaughey-Silvia, “Franklin Lyceum,” 3—4; Martin, “Early Lyceum,” 344-45.

35. McCaughey-Silvia, “Franklin Lyceum,” 4; Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 192, 198. The activities of the Lincoln Lyceum on 3 February

1835 illustrate the eclecticism of lyceum activity: the members amended their constitution to allow women to join, listened to a lecture on phrenology by a Mr. Finley, and then debated the question “Would a war with France be expedient, if she neglects to fulfill her treaty of 1831?” deciding in the negative; Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 198.

268 Notes 36. Iowa Sun, quoted in Schick, Early Theater in Eastern Iowa, 9; Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 27, 146, 32; Bode, American Lyceum, 57.

37. “Remarks of Judge Cummins,” American Journal of Education 5, no. 3 (1830): 142. 38. Benita Eisler, ed., The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1840-1845) (New York: Norton, 1998), 32-33. 39. “German Lyceums,” American Annals of Education 6 (1836): 476. Ethnic Germans were “opposed to colleges and to theoretical education,” the article stated, but they supported education that had utility for the “laboring classes.” 40. “American Lyceum,” American Journal of Education 3, no. 10 (1828): 629. 41. Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 112-15. From February to June 1829

the Concord Lyceum heard the following lectures: “On Popular Superstitions,” by the Reverend Bernard Whitman of Waltham; “The Natural History of Man,” by Dr. Horatio Adams of Waltham; “On Raising an Orchard,” by the Reverend Ezra Ripley of Concord; “The Geography and History of Asia,” by Edward Bliss Emerson; “Heathen Mythology,” by William K. Hedge of Waltham; “The Reformation in the Times of Luther,” by George Washington Hosmer of Cambridge; “On Rail Roads,” by William Jackson of Newton; “On Opticks,” by Cyrus Hosmer of Concord; “Botany,” by Dr. Edward Jarvis; and “On Chemistry” and “On Natural Philosophy,” both by Dr. William Grigg of Boston. (The records of the Concord Lyceum do not identify the hometowns of Emerson or Jarvis.) The lyceum debated the following questions: “Would it be expedient so to amend the constitution of the U.S. as to provide that the president should be chosen for six years and that he should be ineligible to a reelection?”; “Would it be expedient for the State to construct a Rail Road from Boston to the Hud-

son River near Albany?”; “Would it be expedient to establish an Infant School in Concord?”; and “Are religious controversies beneficial?” All questions were decided in the affirmative. 42.In 1833, for instance, Holbrook reported on a lyceum organized by an African American woman for the benefit of African American girls; a

ten-year-old served as president of that lyceum, and activities included religious training, reading, writing, spelling, and sewing; “A Good Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 44 (15 June 1833): 174.

43. George W. Light, “Fourth Annual Report of the Boston Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 41 (25 May 1833): 161.

Notes 269 44. Josiah Holbrook, “Lyceum Villages,” reprinted as Plate VI in Stoddard, “American Lyceum,” following 233. See also Mead, Yankee Eloquence, 16-17.

45. See Edward Schiappa, “Antilogie,” in Historisches Worterbuch der Rhetorik: Herausgegeben von Gert Ueding, vol. 1, A-Bib, ed. Gregor Kalivoda and Franz-Hubert Robling (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag,

1992), 701-8; Ronald F. Reid, “Foreword: A Long and Proud Tradition,” Argumentation and Advocacy 37 (Summer 2000): 1-11; W. Martin

Bloomer, “Controversia and Suasoria,” in Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 166-69; David Zarefsky, “Debate,” in Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 191-97; and Bloomer, “Declamation,” in Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 197-99. 46. David Potter, Debating in the Colonial Chartered Colleges: An Historical Sur-

vey, 1642 to 1900 (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1944), 64—93; Potter, “The Literary Society,” in History of Speech Education in America: Background Studies, ed. Karl R. Wallace (New York: Ap-

pleton-Century-Crofts, 1954), 238-58; Potter, “The Debate Tradition,” in Argumentation and Debate: Principles and Practices, rev. ed., ed. James

H. McBath (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 14-32. In— tercollegiate debating did not begin until the 1880s; see Potter, “Literary Society,” 245. A7.In 1832, for example, the lyceum in Concord, Massachusetts, debated the question “Would it be expedient to form a county temperance so-

ciety?” The Franklin Lyceum in Providence in 1836 considered the question “Is it expedient for Rhode Island to adopt a Constitution?” In 1842 the lyceum in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, adopted the question “Is it sound Policy in the United States to encourage foreign Immigration?” for future debate. Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 126; McCaughey-Silvia, “Franklin Lyceum,” 301; Martin, “Early Lyceum,” 362.

48. In a study of more than 780 questions debated in Michigan lyceums between 1818 and 1860, Richard L. Weaver II found that 17 percent concerned the ongoing controversy over slavery and the treatment of African Americans; Weaver, “The Negro Issue: Agitation in the Michigan Lyceum,” Central States Speech Journal 22 (Fall 1971): 196-201. 49. Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 121; Martin, “Early Lyceum,” 368. 50. McCaughey-Silvia, “Franklin Lyceum,” 301; Martin, “Early Lyceum,” 352. 51. Potter, Debating in the Colonial Chartered Colleges, 83. In Roman educa-

tion, boys who had completed the progymnasmata (a program in

270 Notes composition) continued through the declamatio, which included suaso-

ride, persuasive speeches composed by students, and controversiae, , practice exercises in forensic debate; George A. Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, 300 B.c.—A.D. 300 (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-

ton University Press, 1972), 313. One of the Elder Seneca’s suasoriae,

for instance, has Spartans considering whether to flee from Thermopylae, and another involves a deliberation by Agamemnon, who attempts to decide whether to sacrifice Iphigenia; Elder Seneca, Declamations, 2 vols., trans. M. Winterbottom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 2:507-45. 52. Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 143; Schick, Early Theater in Eastern Iowa, 9.

53. Lyceum records from the 1830s and 1840s imply that decisions were typically made on the perceived merits of the question rather than the relative argumentative skills of the debaters, although the records are not clear on this point. Potter indicates that debates in U.S. college literary societies in the eighteenth century were customarily judged on

the merits of the question; by the 1820s and 1830s societies had begun to judge debaters on their argumentative abilities. Even in the 1860s, however, some societies had provisions for decisions based on both the merits of the question and the merits of the debate, with the president sometimes judging the question and the membership judging the debate. Potter, “Literary Society,” 247-48; see also Potter, “Debate Tradition,” 21. 54. On debate as a process of critical deliberation rather than a representation of combat, see, e.g., Douglas Ehninger, “Debate as Method: Limitations and Values,” Speech Teacher 15, no. 3 (1966): 180-85; and Douglas Ehninger and Wayne Brockriede, Decision by Debate, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), esp. 13-15. 55. During the 1839-40 season at the Euclid Lyceum in Euclid, Ohio, two

questions were repeated; Chapman, Journal, 1839-42. For more detail on lyceum debating, see Angela G. Ray, “The Permeable Public: Rituals of Citizenship in Antebellum Men’s Debating Clubs,” Argumentation and Advocacy 41 (Summer 2004): 1-16. 56. Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 15.

57. McCaughey-Silvia, “Franklin Lyceum,” 7-8, 281. 58. Compare, e.g., the “Syllabus of Lectures” for the Salem Lyceum, the minutes of the Concord Lyceum, the records of the Lincoln Lyceum, and the list of public lectures for the Franklin Lyceum. See Cameron,

Notes 271 Massachusetts Lyceum, 15-23, 109-226; and McCaughey-Silvia, “Franklin Lyceum,” 281-99. 39, Weaver, “Negro Issue,” 196. 60. Catalogue of the Library of the Lyceum and Library Society, iv.

61. McCaughey-Silvia, “Franklin Lyceum,” 8. 62. Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 156-57, 159-60. Phillips spoke twelve times at the Concord Lyceum between 1842 and 1874 (101-90).

63. George D. Prentice to the Ulyssean Club, 2 November 1859, transcribed in Leslie H. Meeks, “The Lyceum in the Early West,” Indiana Magazine of History 29 (June 1933): 92. On Prentice, see Betty Carolyn Congleton, “Prentice, George Denison,” in The Kentucky Encyclopedia, ed. John E. Kleber (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 736. 64. See Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), esp. 147-73, 204-8; Dorothy B. Porter, “The Organized Educational Activities of Negro Literary Societies, 1828-1846,” Journal of Negro Education 5, no. 4 (1936): 555-76; and Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 102-6.

_ 65. Porter, “Negro Literary Societies,” 555-76, esp. 563; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 105. On black women in the abolitionist movement, see Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860

(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).

66. Porter, “Negro Literary Societies,” 558-59, 566, 573, 563. In 1838 Ruggles assisted Frederick Douglass; William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 72-73. 67. See Shirley Wilson Logan, ed., With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women (Carbondale: Southern Illi-

nois University Press, 1995), 1-5, 11-16; and Maria W. Stewart, Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches, ed. Marilyn Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 26, 50-55. 68. Porter, “Negro Literary Societies,” 565-66; Curry, Free Black in Urban America, 205. 69. Quoted in Curry, Free Black in Urban America, 205.

70. Porter, “Negro Literary Societies,” 557-58; Curry, Free Black in Urban America, 207; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 106.

71. Porter, “Negro Literary Societies,” 570; Forten, Journals. On the exclusion of African Americans from white lyceums, see Porter, “Negro Literary Societies,” 557.

272 Notes 72. The Concord Lyceum was anomalous in this respect. Its first season included many lecturers who were not residents of the city; in its sec-

ond year, however, most lectures were given by residents. See Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 109-20, esp. 116.

73. Bode, American Lyceum, 40. The communication scholar Waldo W. Braden ends the period of the early lyceum at 1840; Braden, “The Beginnings of the Lyceum, 1826-1840,” Southern Speech Journal 20 (Win-

ter 1954): 125-35. The publications of Holbrook and other early promoters stated that participating in mutual-instruction societies was closer to “Lyceum principle” than listening to sponsored lectures. See George W. Light, “Boston Mechanics’ Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 5

(15 September 1832): 19; Light wrote: “While kept within its proper sphere, it may be of extensive benefit, but I do maintain, that popular lecturing ought not to be the regular exercise of any institution, the protessed object of which is mutual improvement.” See also “Questions on Lyceum No. 5,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 6 (22 September 1832): 24,

74. Mead, Yankee Eloquence, 179; Weaver, “Forum for Ideas,” 57, 53, 227-28; [Josiah G. Holland], “The Popular Lecture,” Atlantic Monthly 15 (March 1865): 364; Antczak, Thought and Character, 81.

75. Higginson, “American Lecture-System,” 49; Eubank, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau,” 290-91; Cherches, “Star Course,” 227; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 1848-1861 (New York: Fowler and Wells,

1881), 690; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “American Audiences,” Atlantic Monthly 95 (January 1905): 39. 76. Olive Logan, Before the Footlights and behind the Scenes: A Book about “The Show Business” in All Its Branches... . (Philadelphia: H. H. Bancroit, 1870), 477-78; Eubank, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau,” 281-93. 77. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (New York: Sully and Kleinteich, 1891), 140-41.

78. Ibid., 141. For a description of the public lecturer that attains a mythic, heroic cast, see, e.g., Higginson, “American Audiences,” 38-44. 79. Bode, American Lyceum, 60-61, 90; Mead, Yankee Eloquence, 182-84. 80. “Lyceums,” American Journal of Education 5, no. 1 (1830): 6.

81. The sponsorship of traveling agent-lecturers by New England antislavery societies also fostered the professionalization of public lecturing. See, e.g., Stephen E. Lucas and Susan Zaeske, “Orators and Oratory,” in Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century,

Notes 273 vol. 2, ed. Paul Finkelman (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001), 452. 82. Donald M. Scott, “The Profession That Vanished: Public Lecturing in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” in Professions and Professional Ide-

ologies in America, ed. Gerald L. Geison (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 15-18. 83. Giraud Chester, Embattled Maiden: The Life of Anna Dickinson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1951), 105-6. 84. Scott, “Profession That Vanished,” 21-23; Mead, Yankee Eloquence,

134-41. For additional complaints about Wells’s management of Beecher’s 1855 tour, see Samuel D. Ward to Jerome Ripley Brigham, 25 and 30 August, 14 September, 10 and 18 October 1855, Jerome Ripley Brigham Papers, Archives, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison (hereafter cited as J. R. Brigham Papers). 85. U.S. Census Office, Population of the United States in 1860: Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census, under the Direction of the Secretary

of the Interior, compiled by Joseph C. G. Kennedy (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1864), 228, 105, 131, 249; [Holland], “Popular Lecture,” 364; “Lyceum Lecturers,” New York Tribune, 9 September 1859. 86. Bode, American Lyceum, 166. The Tribune published lists of available

lecturers on 27 September 1853, 20 September 1854, 19 October 1855, 12 October 1858, and 9 September 1859. 87. Bayard Taylor to the Ulyssean Club, 23 November 1859, transcribed in Meeks, “Lyceum in the Early West,” 91; for an adulatory description from the Terre Haute Express of Taylor’s performance of “Moscow,”

see 87. See also Angela G. Ray, “Popularizing Imperialism: Bayard Taylor and the U.S. Expedition to Japan, 1853,” in Proceedings of the 2"4 Tokyo Conference on Argumentation, ed. Takeshi Suzuki, Yoshiro Yano, and Takayuki Kato (Tokyo: Japan Debate Association, 2004), 207-12. 88. Herman Melville, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 14, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,

1993), 656-57, 317-18. On 22 January 1858 Melville delivered his lecture “Statues in Rome” in Clarksville for a $75 fee. He did not lec-

ture on this trip in Louisville or Nashville, but he followed the Clarksville lecture with appearances in Chillicothe and Cincinnati, Ohio. See the facsimile of Melville’s Notebook of Lecture Engagements, in Herman Melville, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 9, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 806.

274 Notes 89. Bode, American Lyceum, 173-75; letters from Samuel D. Ward to Jerome Ripley Brigham, J. R. Brigham Papers. Brigham’s papers contain correspondence with lecturers and the officers of lecture associations from 1854 to 1857.

90. Hubert H. Hoeltje, “Notes on the History of Lecturing in Iowa, 1855-1885,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics 25 (January 1927): 120-31; Eubank, “Redpath Lecture Bureau,” 72-81; Bode, American Lyceum, 248-49; and Anna L. Curtis, “A Brief History of the Lyceum,” in Who’s Who in the Lyceum, ed. A. Augustus Wright (Philadelphia: Pearson Brothers, 1906), 28-30. Hoeltje is the most comprehensive source on the AWLS; Eubank, however, provides information about the association’s founding in Detroit that Hoeltje did not have. On the participation of one lyceum association in the AWLS, see entries for | August 1864; 2 and 9 May 1865; 1 May 1866; 7 May, 5 August, 2 and 16 September 1867; and 5 and 13 May and 17 August 1868, in Young Men’s Association of the City of Milwaukee, Minutes of Meetings of the Board of Directors, 1848-1868, Milwaukee Area Research Center, Golda Meir Library, University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee (hereafter cited as YMA Minutes). 91. Higginson, “American Lecture-System,” 49, 52; [Josiah G. Holland], “Lecture-Brokers and Lecture-Breakers,” Scribner’s Monthly 1, no. 5 (1871): 560; Redpath quoted in Eubank, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau,” 265.

92. Eubank, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau,” 104, 106, 121, 124, 266; James Burton Pond, Eccentricities of Genius: Memories of Famous Men and Women

of the Platform and Stage (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1900), 232 (on the “club-room” quality of Redpath’s Boston offices); Mark Twain, The Complete Works of Mark Twain, American Artists ed., Mark Twain’s Autobiography, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924), 151 (on days spent at the Redpath Bureau); Mary A. Livermore, The Story of My Life; or, The Sunshine and Shadow of Seventy Years (Hartford, Conn.: A. D.

Worthington, 1899), 494-95 (on Redpath’s suggestions about lecture topics). For biographical information on James Redpath, see Eubank, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau,” 91-98; Dictionary of American Biography, 15:443-44; “Redpath, James,” in Appleton ’s Cyclopaedia of American Bt-

ography, ed. James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, vol. 5, Pickering—Sumter (New York: D. Appleton, 1888), 206; and Charles Francis Horner, The Life of James Redpath and the Development of the

Modern Lyceum (New York: Barse and Hopkins, 1926). Horner, a twentieth-century director of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau in the

Notes 275 Kansas City branch, wrote the hagiographic biography, The Life of James Redpath, in an attempt to rejuvenate enthusiasm for a declining organization; M. Sandra Manderson, “The Redpath Lyceum Bureau, an American Critic: Decision-Making and Programming Methods for Circuit Chautauquas, circa 1912 to 1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1981), 226-35. The Redpath Bureau was still functioning when Marjorie Harrell Eubank completed her dissertation research in the 1960s; Eubank, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau,” iv. For promotional leaflets from the 1920s and 1930s advertising lecturers, singers, impersonators, musical ensembles, and marionette shows, see Robert Lowrie, Collected Lyceum Brochures, 1923-1932, Archives, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison.

93. Curtis, “Brief History of the Lyceum,” 28-29; Eubank, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau,” 86; Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 103-5; Hoeltje, “Lecturing in Iowa,” 115-16; Chester, Embattled Maiden, 103-4, 86; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Anna E. Dickinson,” in Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800-1925: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, ed. Karlyn

Kohrs Campbell (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), 158; Ronald F. Reid, ed., American Rhetorical Discourse, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1995), 621-23. Earlier, the profits from

Edward Everett’s eulogy of Washington, much in demand between 1856 and 1860, helped restore Washington’s Virginia home, Mount Vernon; Waldo W. Braden, “The Lecture Movement: 1840-1860,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 34, no. 2 (1948): 211.

94. Eubank, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau,” 295-320; Manderson, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau,” 176. 95. Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 30, 116, 124. E. R. Hoar remembered Ball’s series on natural history fifty years later: “I well remember a course in natural history illustrated by a magic lantern on a very large scale, and the delight with which the young people viewed the representations of every known species of ape, monkey and baboon, accompanied by a very precise and accurate statement of their length from the tip of the nose to the insertion of the tail”; Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 27.

96. McCaughey-Silvia, “Franklin Lyceum,” 290. 97. Scott, “Profession That Vanished,” 27. 98. [George William Curtis], “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s New Monthly

Magazine 24 (January 1862): 266; “Anna Dickinson on Lecturing Then and Now,” New York Herald, 19 June 1892, in AED Papers, con.

23, reel 23, fr. 455; E. P. Powell, “The Rise and Decline of the New

276 Notes England Lyceum,” New England Magazine, n.s., 11, no. 6 (February 1895): 737. 99. Mead, Yankee Eloquence, 144, 204. 100. Eubank, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau,” 299. 101. McCaughey-Silvia, “Franklin Lyceum,” 292. 102. Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 22.

103. Dickens cited in Wagner, “Lecture Lyceum,” 133. 104. See Ann Eliza Young, Wife No. 19; or, The Story of a Life in Bondage... . (Hartford, Conn.: Dustin, Gilman, 1875; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1972); Pond, Eccentricities of Genius, xx—xxil; and Cherches, “Star

Course,” 185-96. Young had been approached by P. T. Barnum, but she cast her lot with Pond and Redpath’s bureau. 105. Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 21-22. On the lyceum lecture as a means to assist people in classifying information gleaned from newspapers, see [Holland], “Popular Lecture,” 367. 106. Bode, American Lyceum, 248.

107. See, e.g., Morrison, Chautauqua; John E. Tapia, Circuit Chautauqua: From Rural Education to Popular Entertainment in Early Twentieth Century

America (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997); Irene Briggs and Raymond F. DaBoll, Recollections of the Lyceum and Chautauqua Circuits

(Freeport, Maine: Bond Wheelwright, 1969); John E. Tapia, “Lyceums,” in Finkelman, Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century, 2:238; John S. Gentile, Cast of One: One-Person Shows from the Chautauqua Platform to the Broadway Stage (Urbana: University

of Illinois Press, 1989); Manderson, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau”; and Kenneth G. Hance, Homer O. Hendrickson, and Edwin W. Schoenberger, “The Later National Period: 1860-1930,” in A History and Criticism of American Public Address, vol. 1, ed. William Norwood Brigance (New York: Russell and Russell, 1960), 120-29. 108. In 1953 a former editor of the industry magazine Lyceumite and Talent, Louis J. Alber, connected the lyceum and chautauqua movements explicitly: he wrote, “I have always called the Chautauqua ‘the Lyceum

in summer clothes.’ The University Extension is merely the Lyceum in cap and gown”; Alber to James S. Smoot, 23 January 1953, transcribed in James S. Smoot, “Platform Theater: Theatrical Elements of the Lyceum-Chautauqua” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1954), 297.

109. McCaughey-Silvia, “Franklin Lyceum,” 294, 299.

Notes 277 110. Taylor’s Falls Lyceum, Record Book, 1859-1860, 9, and Stillwater Lyceum History [Minn., 1904], 1, both at the Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul. 111. “Popular Lectures,” Galaxy 9, no. 3 (1870): 418. 112. In his autobiography, Mark Twain claimed that the agency practice of

providing “house-fillers” only if lyceums also hired so many “houseemptiers” finally “killed” the lyceums and “abolished the lecture business”; Twain, Autobiography, 1:156.

Chapter 2. Modeling an Ideal in Josiah Holbrook’s Family Lyceum, 1832-1833 1. “The School Globe,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 1 (28 July 1832): 3. 2. Title page, Family Lyceum, vol. 1 (Boston: G. W. Light, 1833).

3. In association with manufacturers like Timothy Claxton, a Boston mechanic and lyceum lecturer, Holbrook sold his “apparatus,” or objects to illustrate scientific principles. On Holbrook’s apparatus, see Weaver, “Josiah Holbrook,” 14-15. The apparatus is advertised in the

Family Lyceum; see, e.g., “Apparatus for Families, Schools and Lyceums,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 1 (28 July 1832): 4. The extra issue of the Family Lyceum published in December 1832 includes a description of the available apparatus, complete with illustrations and prices; see Family Lyceum 1 (December 1832): 1-3. For information on Timothy

Claxton, see Bode, American Lyceum, 120-22; “Josiah Holbrook,” 253-56; and Timothy Claxton, Memoir of a Mechanic: Being a Sketch of the Life of Timothy Claxton (Boston: Light, 1839). An advertisement for Claxton’s air pumps, models of steam engines, articles for demonstrat-

ing the properties of mechanics and hydraulics, and orreries appears in the first issue of the Family Lyceum.

4. Pestalozzi (1746-1827), influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, developed a variety of educational concepts that were radical for their day, including encouraging formal teacher training and accommodating differences in individual students. He promoted the education of the poor, and his pedagogical method involved moral, physical, and intellectual training, with moral training preeminent. 5. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. and intro. John B.

Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); “Josiah Holbrook,” 229. Yale adopted Blair’s Lectures in 1785, only two years after its initial publication. Harvard followed suit in 1788. See Marie Hochmuth

278 Notes and Richard Murphy, “Rhetorical and Elocutionary Training in Nineteenth-Century Colleges,” in Wallace, History of Speech Education, 158; and Nan Johnson, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America (Car-

bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 31-46, 79-87. 6. Josiah Holbrook, “Prospectus of the Family Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1,

no. 1 (28 July 1832): 1. 7. Brougham (1778-1868) had supported the education of British work-

ingmen, a source of the U.S. lyceum ideal. During the 1820s, Brougham helped to found England’s first nondenominational university, the University of London, as well as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. He was lord chancellor from 1830 to 1834.

In 1837 Josiah Holbrook declared the establishment of a Universal Lyceum, with Brougham as the president. Bode reports that this organization existed only on paper; Bode, American Lyceum, 108-9, also 5-6. 8. Family Lyceum 1, no. 26 (9 February 1833): 101-4. 9. “Family Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1 (December 1832): 1; “Wood Cuts,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 34 (6 April 1833): 135. LO. See, e.g., “Lyceum Buildings,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 4 (7 September

1832): 16; “Amusements,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 3 (1 September 1832): 12; and “Thus I Think,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 48 (13 July 1833): 192. 11. See Samuel R. Hall, Lectures on School-Keeping (Boston: Richardson, Lord, and Holbrook, 1829; reprint, Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth Press,

1929), esp. 110-19. A typical promotional announcement for Hall’s book appears in Josiah Holbrook, “To American Children,” Family Tyceum 1, no. 41 (25 May 1833): 162; the first commendation of Hall in the Family Lyceum appears in “Schools,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 1 (28 July 1832): 2. 12. “Teaching the Alphabet,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 28 (23 February 1833): 110; “Co-operation,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 33 (30 March 1833): 130.

13. “Alkalies,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 2 (25 August 1832): 5; “Parallelograms,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 5 (15 September 1832): 18; “Water,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 6 (22 September 1832): 22. 14. See “Natural History,” Family Lyceum 1 (1832-33): 152, 166, 170-71, 176, 180, 184, 188, 192. 15. “Evaporation,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 1 (28 July 1832): 1; “Nitrogen,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 1 (28 July 1832): 2; “Indian Corn,” Family Lyceum

1, no. 9 (13 October 1832): 33-34; “Modern Dictionary,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 25 (2 February 1833): 99.

Notes 279 16. Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, A Dictionary of First Names (Oxiord:

Oxford University Press, 1990), 149; George R. Stewart, American Given Names: Their Origin and History in the Context of the English Language (New York: Oxtord University Press, 1979), 135. 17. The Ladies’ Magazine recommended the Family Lyceum to women, Stat-

ing, “Though the paper is not all addressed to ladies, ‘it is fit for ladies’”; “Notices,” Family Lyceum 1 (December 1832): 1.

18. Studies on whiteness have burgeoned in recent years. See, e.g., David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American

Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Roediger, “The Pursuit of Whiteness: Property, Terror, and Expansion, 1790-1860,” Journal of

the Farly Republic 19, no. 4 (1999): 579-600; and Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin, eds., Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1999). For a skeptical view

of the new area of study, see an interview with Maulana Karenga: “Whiteness Studies: Deceptive or Welcome Discourse?” Black Issues in Higher Education, 13 May 1999, 26. 19. “To the Clergy,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 1 (28 July 1832): 4. 20. The masthead of each issue of the Family Lyceum indicates that George W. Light and Company published the journal from the Lyceum Press at No. 3 Cornhill, Boston. 21. “Terms,” Family Lyceum 1 (December 1832): 1. 22. See table A-31, “Occupational Earnings, Daily Rates, 1832,” in Lebergott, Manpower in Economic Growth, 547.

23. See Howe, “Victorian Culture,” 3-28. 24. The term nuclear family, describing a married man and woman and their children, dates from the 1940s. On the size and definition of the early nineteenth-century New England family, see Jane C. Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home, 1760-1860 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 20-53. 25. Holbrook, “Prospectus,” 1. 26. “Glass,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 6 (22 September 1832): 21; “Dancing,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 6 (22 September 1832): 23; “Evening Entertainments: Fifth Evening,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 45 (22 June 1833): 177. 27. See Family Lyceum | (1832-33): 85-86, 9. 28. “American Geology,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 1 (28 July 1832): 2; “Village Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1 (December 1832): 3.

29. “Indians,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 15 (24 November 1832): 59; “Samoset,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 2 (25 August 1832): 6; “Evening En-

tertainments: Second Evening,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 42 (1 June

280 Notes 1833): 165. For examples of “informed” authorial personae, see, €.g., “The Chaymas,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 41 (25 May 1833): 164; and

“Evening Entertainments: Second Evening,” 165. The author of “Chaymas” asserts: “The Chaymas... go to bed at seven, and rise at half after four.” On Native Americans as models of observational technique, see “Indians,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 13 (10 November 1832):

51. Appeals for agents to undertake the process of civilizing and Christianizing appear in “The Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 1 (28

July 1832): 4; “Indians,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 13 (10 November 1832): 51; and “The World,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 30 (9 March 1833):

118. On the comparison with Africans, see, e.g., “Lyceum,” 4; and “Evening Entertainments: Second Evening,” 165. 30. “Colonization,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 51 (3 August 1833): 203. The

Family Lyceum identifies with the political positions that would in 1834 cohere into the Whig Party. The journal’s support of the American Colonization Society provides evidence of this Whiggish tendency. George W. Light, publisher of the Family Lyceum, also published the Colonizationist. The Family Lyceum demonstrated tacit acknowledg-

ment of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist activity by reprinting a notice about the Family Lyceum from the Liberator; see “Notices,” 1.

31.“A Good Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 44 (15 June 1833): 174; “Boston Mutual Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 46 (29 June 1833): 183.

32. “Notices,” 1; “Lowell Cotton and Woolen Goods,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 48 (13 July 1833): 190; “To Our Readers,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 39 (11 May 1833): 155; “Natural Theology,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 34 (6 April 1833): 134-35.

33. “On the Influence of Female Society on the Urbane, Moral, and Religious Character of the Male Sex,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 42 (1 June 1833): 166-67; “Semiramis,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 17 (8 December 1832): 65; “Cleopatra,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 17 (8 December 1832): 65-66; “Elizabeth,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 32 (23 March 1833): 125; “Josephine,” Family Lyceum 1, nos. 25, 26, 27 (2, 9, and 16 February 1833): 97, 101, 105; S. J., “The Three-fold Nature of Man,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 23 (10 January 1833): 90; L. W., “Fluids,” Family Lyceum

1, no. 46 (29 June 1833): 183; S. L., “The Moon’s Attraction Producing Tides,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 50 (27 July 1833): 198; “Meteorological Diary,” Family Lyceum 1 (1832-33): 38, 47, 71, 119, 135, 143, 171, 183, 199; “Lantern-Fly,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 18 (15 December 1832):

Notes 281 70-71. Merian (1647-1717) was noted for highly detailed and accurate drawings of natural phenomena. 34. “Modern Dictionary,” 99; “Mothers’ Lyceums,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 46 (29 June 1833): 182. The term republican motherhood derives from the work of historian Linda K. Kerber; see Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: Uni-

versity of North Carolina Press, 1980), esp. 235, 265-88. For a discussion of the effect of the concept on historical writing and also suggestions for correctives, see, e.g., Margaret A. Nash, “Rethinking

Republican Motherhood: Benjamin Rush and the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia,” Journal of the Early Republic 17, no. 2 (1997): 171-91. The Family Lyceum provides evidence that men made

arguments for women’s education based on women’s current or future mothering roles but that, in practice, women’s motivations for learning were broader than this. 35. L. W., “Fluids,” 183; S. J., “Three-fold Nature of Man,” 90. 36. “Family Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1 (December 1832): 1. See also “Republicanism of Lyceums,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 22 (12 January 1833): 86. For an example of lyceum practice among practitioners of the me-

chanical arts, see George W. Light, “Boston Mechanics’ Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 5 (15 September 1832): 19. 37. See Helen Damon-Moore, “Literacy and Reading Habits,” in Finkel-

man, Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century, 2:200-—202; and Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Books,

Reading, and the World of Goods in Antebellum New England,” American Quarterly 48, no. 4 (1996): 587-622. 38. Benjamin Silliman, Yale’s first professor of chemistry and natural history from 1802 to 1853, helped initiate the use of the lecture-demon-

stration, or the “experimental lecture.” This innovative form was a dramatic shift from the recitation method, which Silliman also used. Josiah Holbrook was a student and an assistant of Silliman’s. See Bode, American Lyceum, 8; “Josiah Holbrook,” 230; Dictionary of Amertcan Biography, 17:160-63; and Holbrook, Reminiscences, 17. On Silli-

man’s pedagogical methods, see, e.g., Bruce A. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education, expanded ed. (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1995), 251. 39. See Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 252. 40. “Combustion,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 1 (28 July 1832): 1. 41. For examples, see “Experiments,” Family Lyceum 1 (1832-33): 3, 8, 10,

13-14, 27. In his educational philosophy, John Locke had identified

282 Notes experience as the source of knowledge; see Edward J. Power, A Legacy of Learning: A History of Western Education (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 250. 42. Udo Becker, The Continuum Encyclopedia of Symbols, trans. Lance W. Garmer (New York: Continuum, 1994), 21; J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 14.

43.In any case, the clergyman does not offer the apple to Harriet for her consumption but simply shows it to her. 44. See, e.g., “Chaotic Ocean,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 37 (27 April 1833): 148. The concept of gaining knowledge both from nature and from written revelation is articulated in Psalm 19. 45. Mother and Robert appear in “Natural Theology,” 134-35; Uncle Philip and the boys in “Natural History,” 152, 166, 170-71, 176, 180, 184, 188, 192; and the Oakley family in “Evening Entertainments,” Family Lyceum 1 (1832-33): 151, 165, 169, 173-74, 177-78, 181-82, 185, 189, 193, 197, 201, 205. Frequently in the conversations on natural history, Uncle Philip indicates that his source for entomological knowledge is the work of Réaumur. The Mémoires pour servir a l'histoire

des insectes (6 vols., 1734-42) established French scientist René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683-1757) as the leading entomologist of the eighteenth century. 46. On conversation, see “Our Next Volume,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 52 (10

August 1833): 207; see also, e.g., “Our Plan,” Family Lyceum 1, anatomy extra (1832-33): 3; “Social Lyceums,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 23 (10 January 1833): 90. On recitation and the experimental lecture, see Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 249-51.

47. Uncle Philip warns the boys about errors in a book they had read about the habits of the beaver and recommends a better book, John Godman’s American Natural History; see “Natural History: Conversation VI,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 47 (6 July 1833): 188. 48. Anthony Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Ox-

ford University Press, 1989), 1-29; David R. Oldroyd, Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 86-107; Mott T. Greene, Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-

versity Press, 1982), 19-68. Hallam argues that the controversy faded with the development of the new technique of classifying strata by fossil data. Alexander von Humboldt, a pupil of Werner’s, joined the Plutonists after visiting volcanic sites. Although the Family Lyceum

Notes 283 includes a biographical sketch of Humboldt, it contains no information on his participation in this or other controversies; see “Humboldt,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 39 (11 May 1833): 153. 49. “Questions on the Last Number of the Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 36 (20 April 1833): 144. 50. “The Weather,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 24 (26 January 1833): 95; “Comparative Meteorology,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 33 (30 March 1833): 130. See also “The Weather,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 2 (25 August 1832): 8;

“Meteorology,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 21 (5 January 1833): 83; and “Comparative Meteorology,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 25 (2 February 1833): 99. 51. See the meteorological reports in Family Lyceum 1 (1832-33): 47, 71,

83,91, 95, 99, 103, 119, 130, 131, 135, 138, 143, 147, 171, 183, 199, 203, 207. 52. See L. W., “Fluids,” 183: S. L., “Moon’s Attraction,” 198; M. A. B. and E. L., “Description of Southern Plants,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 50 (27

July 1833): 198; M. B., “Address to the Benevolent Society of the Scottsboro Institute, June 17, 1833,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 50 (27 July 1833): 197-98; “Report of the Mass. Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 34 (6 April 1833): 133. 53. “Report of the Mass. Lyceum,” 133; “Politics,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 15 (24 November 1832): 59; “Republicanism of Lyceums,” 86. See also “To Editors,” Family Lyceum 1, anatomy extra (1832-33): 3. The Ladies’ Magazine recommended the Family Lyceum to women because it was “free from political excitement, sectarian bitterness and romantic incident”; “Notices,” 1. 54. “Books,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 41 (25 May 1833): 163; “Questions on the Last Number of the Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 42 (1 June 1833): 168; “Practical Science,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 26 (9 February 1833): 102. 55. Peter J. Hugill, World Trade since 1431: Geography, Technology, and Capi-

talism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 120; D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of

History, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492-1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale

University Press, 1986), 364-66; Robert D. Mitchell and Paul A. Groves, North America: The Historical Geography of a Changing Continent

(Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987), 203. 56. In higher education, utilitarianism was a subject of considerable debate in the early nineteenth century. The 1828 Yale Reports expressed the conservative position, supporting the continued emphasis on the

284 Notes Greek and Roman classics. Professional institutes and scientific schools emerged, in alignment with theories of practical education. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, for example, was founded in 1824, and both Harvard and Yale established scientific schools in the 1840s. ~ See Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 150-51; Power, Legacy of Learning, 272-74. 57. “Natural History: Conversation VI,” 188; “Geology,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 6 (22 September 1832): 24; “Chemistry,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 21 (5 January 1833): 83. Benjamin Silliman served as a consultant and

field surveyor for mining companies during the 1830s and 1840s;

John F. Fulton and Elizabeth H. Thomson, Benjamin Silliman, 1779-1864: Pathfinder in American Science (New York: Henry Schuman,

1947), 196-203. 58. Silliman merged religion and science in this way: “To study science

was, to him, to learn of the wonderful manifestations of God in the natural world, which it was man’s duty to interpret reverently and by which it was his privilege to improve the conditions of his life”; Dictionary of American Biography, 17:163.

59. “Science and Learning,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 49 (20 July 1833): 195; “Natural History: Conversation V,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 46 (29 June 1833): 184. 60. The order of creation is clearly articulated in the “Book of Nature” se-

ries: “As the more we descend downwards in our researches among the animalcule creation, the more evident traces of divinity we discover, so the more we extend our discoveries upwards into the regions of the universe, the more do we observe of the glory of God”; “The Fixed Stars,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 37 (27 April 1833): 148. 61. “The Economy of Literary and Religious Institutions,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 5 (15 September 1832): 17; cf. Gen. 1:28. The King James Ver-

sion is the source of biblical citations throughout. 62. “Reptiles,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 24 (26 January 1833): 96. 63. “Human Nature,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 17 (8 December 1832): 67. 64. “Family Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1, anatomy extra (1832-33): 1. This special issue devotes two pages, with multiple woodcuts, to the bones,

ligaments, and muscles of the human arm and hand, as well as the structure of the heart and the bones of the foot. 65. “Science and Learning,” 195. The theory of rhetoric intrinsic to this passage suggests that words are not themselves creative but that their

importance lies in their capacity to be used to transmit preexisting knowledge of nature. The Family Lyceum even suggests the superiority

Notes 285 of the “book of nature,” “the older volume,” to scripture, the book of revelation; see “Chaotic Ocean,” 148. The metaphor of exegesis, of “reading” the book, persists. 66. See, e.g., “Lines” and “School Lands,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 2 (25 August 1832): 6, 7; “Schools” and “School Cabinets,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 1 (28 July 1832): 2, 3. 67. “To Our Patrons,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 1 (28 July 1832): 3. See also “School Cabinets,” 3. The biblical quotation is from Acts 20:35. 68. “School Cabinets,” 3; “School Lyceums,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 33 (30 March 1833): 130; “Co-operation,” 130; A. N., letter to editor, Family Lyceum 1, no. 44 (15 June 1833): 175.

69. See, e.g., Holbrook, “To American Children,” 162; and “Village Lyceum,” Family Lyceum 1 (December 1832): 3. Articles on the apparatus are ubiquitous; the most complete and best-illustrated information occurs in the December 1832 extra issue. 70. Articles in nearly every issue promote the purchase of the apparatus. Books are promoted less frequently. See, e.g., “Schools,” 2, advertising Samuel R. Hall’s Lectures on School-Keeping; “American Forests” and

“Books, &c.,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 1 (28 July 1832): 3, 4; “The Schoolmaster Abroad,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 48 (13 July 1833): 191; “Family Library,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 49 (20 July 1833): 195, listing

fifty-eight recommended volumes; and “List of Approved School Books,” Family Lyceum 1 (December 1832): 4, and Family Lyceum 1, - anatomy extra issue (1832-33): 4, providing an annotated list of sixty elementary books. Hall’s Lectures, a pioneering text for teacher training, includes lists of fact-based questions pertaining to each lecture, much like the quizzes later published in the Family Lyceum. A writer in the Family Magazine chastised Holbrook for his “quack-

ery,” that is, his efforts to sell his equipment and apparatus. See “American Lyceum,” Family Magazine 3 (1835-36): 34-35, 76-78. Weaver identifies this author as Thomas Allen; Weaver, “Josiah Holbrook,” 15n.39. 71. “Lyceum Buildings,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 4 (7 September 1832): 16; “The Economy of Literary and Religious Institutions,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 5 (15 September 1832): 17; “Poverty,” Family Lyceum 1, nos. 16, 17, 20 (1, 8, 29 December 1832): 63, 67, 78. 72. See, e.g., M. B., “Address to the Benevolent Society,” 197-98. 73. A lyceum building, for instance, “when accomplished, would form a

bulwark to our nation’s liberties and a monument to our nation’s glory.” “Village Lyceum,” Family Lyceum | (December 1832): 3.

286 Notes Chapter 3. Judging Popular Lectures in Milwaukee, 1854-1857 1. Temperance lecturer John B. Gough described in his autobiography his “impressions .. . of wonder, almost amounting to awe, at the vast resources and the certain future importance and power of the great West.” Gough made his first western trip in December 1855, delivering seven lectures in Chicago, six in St. Louis, and one each in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Elgin, Waukegan, Bloomington, Springfield, and Alton, Illinois. John B. Gough, Autobiography and Personal Recollections of John B. Gough, with Twenty-Six Years’ Experience as a Public Speaker (Springfield, Mass.: Bill, Nichols, 1870), 382.

2. YMA Minutes; J. R. Brigham Papers. I consulted the extant Milwaukee newspapers held by the Wisconsin Historical Society. On Ward and the Chicago YMA during this period, see Samuel Dexter Ward, “Personal Reminiscences of Half a Century Ago,” May 1904, Samuel Dexter Ward Collection, Chicago Historical Society; Hall and Co.'s Chicago City Directory, and Business Advertiser, for 1854—'55 (Chicago: R.

Fergus, 1854), 232, 294, appendix pp. 7, 8, 10; Fourteenth Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the Young Men’s Association, of Chicago,

Illinois, Presented March 24, 1855, and the Inaugural Address of the Prestdent, for the Ensuing Year (Chicago: Scott and Fulton, 1855); Fifteenth Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the Young Men’s Association of the City of Chicago, for the Year Ending March 22, 1856, and the Inaugural

Address of the President, for the Ensuing Year (Chicago: Wright, Medill, Day, 1856); and Sixteenth Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the Young Men's Association of the City of Chicago, for the Year Ending March 28,

1857 (Chicago: S. P. Rounds, 1858). Ward was president of the Chicago YMA in 1854—55 and corresponding secretary in 1855-56. 3. U.S. Census Office, Statistical View of the United States... Being a Compendium of the Seventh Census, by J. D. B. DeBow (Washington, D.C.: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1854), 369, 347; U.S. Census Office, Population of the , United States in 1860, 539, 90; Richard N. Current, The History of Wisconsin, Vol. 2, The Civil War Era, 1848—1873 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976), 5n.5, 97-107, 122; Lee Soltow, Patterns of Wealthholding in Wisconsin since 1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin

Press, 1971), 15-43. Swedish novelist and traveler Fredrika Bremer, who visited Milwaukee in 1850, wrote that the yellow brick made the

city appear “as if the sun were always shining there”; Bremer, The | Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, trans. Mary Howitt, vol.

Notes 287 1 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853; repr., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 615. 4. Current, History of Wisconsin, 2:28, 15; “Rail Road Trip to Waukesha,” Milwaukee Sentinel and Gazette, 26 February 1851; Bremer, Homes of the New World, 1:615.

5. On the Milwaukee Lyceum, see [Flower], History of Milwaukee, 560; John G. Gregory, History of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, vol. 2 (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1931), 1076; and Bayrd Still, Milwaukee: The History of a City

(Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1948), 85-86. For biographical information on members, see Dictionary of Wisconsin Biography (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1960), 25-26, 90, 221-22. In 1860 Hans Crocker, listed as a “real estate owner,” was the fifteenth wealthiest man in Milwaukee County, holding $200,000 in real and personal property; Soltow, Wealthholding in Wisconsin, 32. Although the Dictionary of Wisconsin Biography gives Crocker’s place of

birth as Dublin, the 1860 census identifies him as a native of New York State. 6. Milwaukee Sentinel and Gazette, 7 and 13 December 1847; YMA Min-

utes, 1 December 1849. For general historical information about the YMA, see [Flower], History of Milwaukee, 560-65; Gregory, History of

Milwaukee, 2:1076-78; Still, Milwaukee, 199, 214-16, 381; Current, History of Wisconsin, 2:178—-79; Lillian Krueger, “Social Life in Wisconsin: Pre-Territorial through the Mid-Sixties,” Wisconsin Magazine of His-

tory 22, no. 4 (1939): 421-25; Theresa West, “Milwaukee Public Library,” in The Columbian History of Education in Wisconsin, ed. J. W.

Stearns (Milwaukee: State Committee on Educational Exhibit for Wisconsin, 1893), 422-27; and John G. Gregory, ed., Southeastern Wisconsin: A History of Old Milwaukee County, vol. 1 (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1932), 376. The Young Men’s Association was not the same organiza-

tion as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA); scholars should be alert for errors in secondary reference materials and in library cataloging. 7. In 1856 O. Park of Waukesha wrote to Brigham, referring to “you and

other leading characters in your Lyceum”; O. Park and others to Brigham, 22 December 1856, J. R. Brigham Papers. 8. Young Men’s Association of the City of Milwaukee, Charter, Rules and Regulations of the Association, and Board of Directors, with a Catalogue of the

Library (Milwaukee: Starrs’ Book and Job Office, 1852), 3. 9. YMA Minutes, 3 April 1854. On the designation of proceeds from lectures for the support of the library, see YMA Minutes, 3 April 1854, 2

288 Notes May 1865, and | May 1866; and Young Men’s Association of the City of Milwaukee, Supplementary Catalogue of the Library of the Young Men’s Association, of the City of Milwaukee, with the Annual Report for the Year

Ending May, 1857 (Milwaukee: Daily News Book and Job Steam Printing Establishment, 1857), 6-7.

10. During the mid-1850s, other community organizations, like the Catholic Institute, sponsored periodic lectures (see Milwaukee Sentinel,

15 December 1854), the Protestant clergy sometimes delivered socalled Sabbath-Evening Lectures (Milwaukee Sentinel, 15 March 1855),

and visiting lecturers delivered addresses on issues like woman’s rights and abolition (e.g., Milwaukee Sentinel, 6 November 1855; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 15 October 1855). In early 1857 the YMCA in Milwaukee presented a course of lectures rivaling the YMA’s oiferings; see Milwaukee Sentinel, 29 December 1856, 3 January 1857; and Wells to Brigham, 30 December 1856; Colgate to Brigham, 5 January 1857; and Wells to Brigham, 9 January 1857, all in J. R. Brigham Pa-

pers. The YMA, however, was the major association in Milwaukee sponsoring annual, nonsectarian courses of lectures in the mid-1850s. 11. On the YMA participation in the AWLS, see YMA Minutes, | August 1864; 2 and 9 May 1865; 1 May 1866; 7 May, 5 August, 2 and 16 Sep-

tember 1867; and 5 and 13 May, 17 August 1868. For further information about the AWLS, see Hoeltje, “Lecturing in Iowa,” 120-31; Eubank, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau,” 72-81; Bode, American Lyceum, 248-49; and Curtis, “A Brief History of the Lyceum,” 28-30. 12. [Flower], History of Milwaukee, 564-65; West, “Milwaukee Public Library,” 424-25; Gregory, Southeastern Wisconsin, 1:376; Acts, Rules and Regulations for the Milwaukee Public Library, May, 1878 (Milwaukee: Mil-

waukee Public Library, 1878), 3. 13. Membership figures appear, for example, in Col. Van Slyck’s Milwaukee City Directory and Business Advertiser, Containing a Sketch of the Rise and

Progress of the City of Milwaukee, Ist annual ed. (Milwaukee: Starr’s Book and Job Office, 1854), 325; Milwaukee City Directory and Business Advertiser, Containing Local and General Statistics, with a New Map of the

City, 1856-57 (Milwaukee: J. M. Van Slyck, 1856), 450-51; [Flower], History of Milwaukee, 560-65; and YMA Minutes, e.g., 2 May 1865, 1 May 1866, 7 May 1867. 14. U.S. Census Office, The Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, by J. D.

B. DeBow (Washington, D.C.: Robert Armstrong, Public Printer, 1853), 914; Young Men’s Association of the City of Milwaukee, Charter, 8-9; [Flower], History of Milwaukee, 564.

Notes 289 15. Col. Van Slyck’s Milwaukee City Directory, 325; Milwaukee City Directory,

450-51; Milwaukee Sentinel, 8 December 1854. 16. Milwaukee Sentinel and Gazette, 13 December 1847. 17. Names were gleaned from YMA Minutes; several of these individuals are listed in the Dictionary of Wisconsin Biography. See, e.g., entries for

John Bartlett (29), Hans Crocker (90), Charles Usley (185), Increase

Lapham (221-22), Samuel Marshall (240-41), Arthur McArthur (243-44), Winfield Smith (334), Horace Tenney (349), and John Henry Van Dyke (358).

18. Three men served on the committee each year. Buttrick and Lefevre served all three seasons. Bartlett served with them in 1854—55, and IIsley served in 1855-56 and 1856-57; YMA Minutes, 9 October 1854,

25 May 1855, 2 June 1856. Information about their occupations comes from Col. Van Slyck’s Milwaukee City Directory, 339; and Milwau-

kee City Directory, 83, 85, 247, 297, 317. Biographical information about Bartlett and Ilsley appears in the Dictionary of Wisconsin Biography, 29, 185. 19. See “Brigham, Jerome Ripley,” in Dictionary of Wisconsin Biography, 49; “Jerome Ripley Brigham,” in The Biographical Dictionary and Portrait Gallery of Representative Men of Chicago, Wisconsin and the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago: American Biographical, 1895), 434-35; Jerome A. Watrous, Memoirs of Milwaukee County: From the Earliest Historical Times down to the Present, Including a Genealogical and Biographical Record of Representative Families in Milwaukee (Madison, Wis.: Western

Historical Association, 1909), 181-82; Milwaukee Sentinel, 22 January 1897; and Robert S. Fletcher and Malcolm O. Young, eds., Amherst College, Biographical Record of the Graduates and Non-Graduates, Centennial

Edition, 1821-1921 (Amherst, Mass.: Amherst College, 1927), class of

1845. Information about Brigham’s course of study at Amherst is available in the Amherst college catalogs for the years of his attendance: Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Amherst College, for the Aca-

demical Year 1841-42, 1842-43, 1843-44, and 1844-45 (Amherst, Mass.:

J. S. and C. Adams, [1841-44]). Scanned images of Amherst catalogs

from 1822 to 1900 are available on the World Wide Web at http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/amherst/catalogs/. Details of Brigham’s activity on the YMA board appear in YMA Minutes, 17 February 1852 and following. The locations of Brigham’s lodgings and offices, plus the location of the telegraph offices, are identified in Col. Van Slyck’s Milwaukee City Directory, 47, 56, 282, 337-38. Photographs of Jerome Ripley and Mary Usley Brigham and some of their children are in the

290 Notes. Brigham Portrait File, Visual Materials Archive, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. Jerome and Mary Brigham are buried at Milwaukee’s Forest Home Cemetery. 20. “Resolutions Relating to the Death of Jerome R. Brigham Adopted by the Milwaukee Bar Association, January 23, 1897,” MS leaflet, 1, 4, 6, 7, Charles Ilsley Brigham Papers, Archives, Wisconsin Historical So-

ciety, Madison. This folder also contains a manuscript oration, “Washington—as President,” by J. R. Brigham, Amherst College, 14 August 1845. 21. The phrase “ordeal of the gaslight” comes from Higginson, “American Lecture-System,” 53. 22. See, e.g., Bayard Taylor’s comparison of Milwaukee with Venice and Stockholm, reprinted from the New York Tribune, in the Milwaukee Sen-

tinel, 26 March 1855. The Sentinel also reprinted Henry Ward Beecher’s description of Milwaukee from the New York Independent, Milwaukee Sentinel, 10 November 1855. 23. Lyceums can be understood to have contributed to the development

of a special case of epideictic rhetoric in the nineteenth-century United States. This rhetorical form emerges from an audience’s needs to be constituted as a coherent social entity, a “public.” Epideictic, Aristotle’s category for the speech of ceremony and display, is deeply enmeshed with ethos (see book 1, chapter 9, of Aristotle’s Rhetoric).

alogue, 7. :

24. Young Men’s Association of the City of Milwaukee, Supplementary Cat-

25. Newspaper estimates of attendance during the 1854-57 period range from about 200 to about 2,000 persons. The YMA Minutes provide detailed information about receipts, usually reported as season-ticket

sales and then as single-ticket admissions for individual lectures within a course. Whereas the single-ticket admissions offer a good sense of the relative attendance at different lectures within a course, it

is impossible to use these data to ascertain attendance at a lecture, since there is no way to know how many season-ticket holders came to a specific lecture. 26. O. Park and others to Brigham, 22 December 1856, J. R Brigham Papers. Women did speak on public platforms in Milwaukee during the

mid-1850s but not under the auspices of the YMA. Lucy Stone, for example, delivered three lectures on woman’s rights in November 1855; see the ad in the Milwaukee Sentinel, 6 November 1855. The au-

thor Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott (known as Grace Greenwood) was

Notes 291 the first woman to speak on a YMA platform, during the 1859-60 season; YMA Minutes, 10 April 1860.

27.H. J. Curtice to Brigham, 16 November 1855; and R. F. Hopkins to Brigham, 26 October 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers. 28. Milwaukee Sentinel, 17 and 18 February 1857. Similarly, when New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley spoke under YMA sponsorship in

January 1857, the Sentinel’s editor joked: “We really dislike to call much attention to the fact that Mr. Greeley lectures this evening lest we be the innocent means of augmenting the jam at Young’s Hall” (26 January 1857). The “jam” was owing not only to Greeley’s fame but also to the popularity of Frances Anne Kemble, who was giving a series of Shakespearean readings at Young’s Hall for six nights in late

January; Kemble was not sponsored by the YMA. See the ad in the Milwaukee Sentinel, 26 January 1857.

29. Biographical information about the lecturers comes from the Dictionary of American Biography. On the significance of the law and lawyers in early U.S. letters, see Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

30. Ward to Brigham, 9 August 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers. For lists of lecturers invited in 1855-56, for example, see Ward to Brigham, 6 August 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers; and YMA Minutes, 14 March 1856. Many letters from lecturers in the Brigham Papers decline protfered invitations; see, e.g., Charles Sumner to Brigham, 27 October 1854, 21 August 1855; George William Curtis to Brigham, 29 October 1854, 24 July 1855; Theodore Parker to Brigham, 30 October 1854,

30 November 1855; Oliver Wendell Holmes to Brigham, 30 July 1855; and Edward Everett to Brigham, 12 September 1855, all in J. R. Brigham Papers. Refusal of invitations was common, and not only in the West. Compare, for example, the correspondence addressed to A.

P. King, a lyceum secretary in Providence, Rhode Island, 1856-59, Franklin Lyceum Records, Rhode Island Historical Society Library, Providence. 31. H. E. Seelye to Brigham, 1 November 1854, J. R. Brigham Papers. 32. On the possibility of “too many D.D.s,” see Ward to Brigham, 2d (28?) September 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers. 33. Ward to Brigham, 14 September 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers. 34. Ward to Brigham, 14 December 1854, J. R. Brigham Papers. Shortly

beforehand, Brigham had received a letter promoting John Smith, a

local lecturer in Madison, who could deliver “The Rights of the Human Race among the Rational Order of the Universe”; D. Dumey

292 Notes to Brigham, 11 December 1854, J. R. Brigham Papers. After a lecturer had achieved renown, lyceum lecture organizers would tolerate some degree of self-promotion. See, e.g., a promotional advertisement for John B. Gough from his manager, E. S. Wells: “To the Friends of Tem-

perance in the West,” dated 8 October and 8 November 1856, J. R. Brigham Papers. Even noteworthy lecturers, however, had to take

care not to appear greedy. Wells’s management of Henry Ward Beecher’s western tour in 1855 caused particular consternation on this count. See, e.g., Ward to Brigham, 25 and 30 August, 14 September, 10 and 18 October 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers; and Bode, American Lyceum, 194-200. Ci. Mead, Yankee Eloquence, 134-41. 35. YMA Minutes, 3 April 1854.

36. See George Sumner to Brigham, 17 February 1856, and Ward to Brigham, 22 February 1856, J. R. Brigham Papers. 37. H. E. Seelye to Brigham, 1 November 1854, and Ward to Brigham, 4 October 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers. For more on Parker, see Ward to Brigham, 31 July 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers. 38. O. Park and others to Brigham, 22 December 1856, J. R. Brigham Papers. Goddard delivered “Art” and “Milton’s Satan” in Milwaukee, on 27 and 31 December, respectively.

39. Ward to Brigham, 28 July and 2d (28?) September 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers.

40. Ward to Brigham, 10 November 1855, 14 January 1856, J. R. Brigham Papers. 41. See Milwaukee American, 24 December 1855. 42. Of the lecturers who spoke in Milwaukee in 1855-56, all of them also

spoke in Chicago under the auspices of the Chicago YMA except Beecher and Gough. Brigham secured those two lecturers through Chicago manager E. S. Wells, who sponsored their Chicago appearances through his Metropolitan Literary Union. See YMA Minutes, 14 March 1856; and Wells to Brigham, 17 and 21 September, 4 October, 1 and 5 December 1855, 26 January 1856, J. R. Brigham Papers. 43. YMA Minutes, 14 March 1856.

44.In September 1855 Ward ranted to Brigham about Henry Ward Beecher’s liaison with the agent E. S. Wells, writing that Beecher had “debased” himself by letting himself “be exhibited by a showman as

would a lion Bear or Monkey”; Ward to Brigham, 14 September 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers.

Notes 293 45. On Hitchcock’s illustrations, see Hitchcock to Brigham, 10 September 1855 and 9 January 1856, J. R. Brigham Papers; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 8 January 1856; and Milwaukee Wisconsin, 8 January 1856. 46. At the time he lectured in Milwaukee, Hitchcock held a professorship named for himself at Amherst: he was Hitchcock Professor of Natural Theology and of Geology; see Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Amherst College, for the Academical Year 1855-6 (Amherst, Mass.: William

Faxon, 1855), 5. While Brigham was a student at Amherst, Hitchcock had been the professor of chemistry and natural history; see the Catalogue of Amherst College for 1841-42, 7; Catalogue of Amherst College for 1842-43, 7; Catalogue of Amherst College for 1843-44, 5; and Catalogue of Amherst College for 1844-45, 5. 47. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural H1erarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

Although total single-ticket sales for Hitchcock’s second lecture of the

four-lecture series amounted only to $14.50, the smallest sum for a lecture in the season’s course, the mean single-ticket sales for the four

lectures was $21.13. This is more than was taken in at the lectures given by James Robinson, C. C. Felton, George Gould, and Thomas Clark. YMA Minutes, 14 March 1856. Although the citizens of Milwaukee exhibited far more enthusiasm for lecturers like Phillips, Gough, and King, Hitchcock was not the least popular of the course. 48. For fees paid during 1854-57, see YMA Minutes, 13 April 1855, 14

March 1856, 6 April 1857; and correspondence in box 3, J. R. Brigham Papers. Beecher’s “forty-parson power” was legendary. The term appears, for instance, in R. F Hopkins to Brigham, 10 September 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers. 49. Milwaukee Free Democrat, 5 January 1856. On nineteenth-century elite attitudes toward the “popular,” see John Stauffer, “Popular Culture,” in Finkelman, Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century,

2:526-31. 50. Milwaukee Free Democrat, 15 December 1855.

51. On the term promiscuous and its relationship to public speaking, see Susan Zaeske, “The ‘Promiscuous Audience’ Controversy and the Emergence of the Early Woman’s Rights Movement,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 191-207. 52. Ward to Brigham, 29 February 1856, J. R. Brigham Papers. 53. The term comes from Holmes, Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 140-41.

54. YMA leaders seem to have believed that the lectures would draw best if they were held regularly, on the same evening of the week. Ward

294 Notes wrote Brigham in July 1855, “You must decide on your day if you wish to be regular. Thursday has always been ours, and I see no ob-

jection to your taking Friday unless Racine interferes”; Ward to Brigham, 28 July 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers. Exigencies of transportation and lecturing schedules rarely permitted such regularity. 55. YMA Minutes, 13 April 1855. Although the YMA advertised singleticket admissions at twenty-five cents each, the sales figures reported in the YMA Minutes are usually not evenly divisible by .25.

56. The increase was from $443.62 in 1854-55 to $759.53 in 1855-56; YMA Minutes, 13 April 1855, 14 March 1856. 57. The “extra” lectures were by Beecher, Phillips, Gough, Sumner, and Chapin; YMA Minutes, 14 March 1856. See appendix 4. 58. YMA Minutes, 14 March 1856. 59. YMA Minutes, 6 April 1857. The average figure for Gough’s receipts assumes a total of $715.71. 60. YMA Minutes, 14 March 1856, 6 April 1857. The YMA reported profits from lectures for 1854-55 at $358.46, for 1855-56 at $360.00, and for 1856-57 at $359.35. 61. Milwaukee Sentinel, 12 and 27 December 1854, 17 January 1855, 5 and 25 February 1856; Milwaukee News, 9 December 1855; Milwaukee Wisconsin, 15 December 1855; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 29 December 1855, 8 January, 29 December 1856. 62. Milwaukee Wisconsin, 28 February, 15 October 1855; Milwaukee Free De-

mocrat, 14 December 1855, 8 January 1856; Milwaukee American, 24 December 1855; Milwaukee News, 28 February 1855; Milwaukee Sentinel, 12 November 1855. 63. Milwaukee Sentinel, 23 January 1855, 12 November 1855, 5 February 1856, 19 February 1857 (see the ad for the ball on 18 February 1857); Milwaukee Wisconsin, 24 December 1855.

64. The papers reported “nearly 600 persons” to hear Quincy, a “well filled” hall for Godwin and Littlejohn, the “best audience of the course” for King, “one of the largest audiences ever convened in this city” for Taylor, and the “largest audience of the season” for Pierpont.

Mann’s audiences seemed to decline, to a “comfortable crowd,” although a “crowded audience” greeted Lowell. See Milwaukee Sentinel, 12 and 27 December 1854, 17 and 23 January, 12 April 1855; Milwaukee News, 28 February 1855; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 7 March 1855; Milwaukee Wisconsin, 26 March 1855. 65. Milwaukee American, 24 December 1855; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 29 December 1855.

Notes 295 66. Milwaukee Sentinel, 17 March 1857. 67. Milwaukee Free Democrat, 24 December 1855, 3 March 1856; Milwaukee Sentinel, 1 April 1857; Milwaukee Wisconsin, 29 December 1855. 68. Milwaukee Sentinel, 10 December 1855; cf. Milwaukee Sentinel, 8 De-

cember 1855; Seelye to Brigham, 11 December 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers. The Free Democrat reported that the only redeeming feature of Brown’s lecture was the “drollity in his manner” and “an equally droll physiognomy—which creates a sort of good humor in an audience’; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 8 December 1855.

69. Ward to Brigham, 25 January 1856, J. R. Brigham Papers; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 12 November 1855; Milwaukee Sentinel, 12 November 1855.

70. The best-attended lectures of the 1854-57 period seem to have been Gough’s three temperance lectures on 18, 19, and 20 February 1857. Season tickets were not sold that season, and the 19 and 20 February lectures were held at the Albany, a more spacious venue than Young’s Hall. Newspapers reported attendance at Gough’s lectures ranging from about 1,400 to about 2,000. The YMA Minutes indicate that receipts for the three lectures totaled $715, equivalent to 2,860 twentyfive-cent tickets. Milwaukee Sentinel, 19, 20, and 21 February 1857; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 19, 20, and 21 February 1857; Milwaukee Wis-

consin, 19, 20, and 21 February 1857; YMA Minutes, 6 April 1857. 71. Examples of Gough’s lectures appear in John B. Gough, Orations on Temperance, 2 vols., new ed., 2nd ser. (London: National Temperance

Publication Depot, 1882). Information on Gough’s speaking style, prepared by an exceptionally careful observer, is found in Helen Potter, Helen Potter’s Impersonations (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1891), I-11. 72. Milwaukee Free Democrat, 14 December 1855; Milwaukee American, 14 December 1855; Milwaukee Wisconsin, 14 December 1855. The term

“heavy Thunder” comes from Ward to Brigham, 14 September 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers. For scriptural resonance of a “live coal” and its relationship to speech, see Isa. 6:1-—13. 73. Milwaukee Wisconsin, 7 March 1855; Milwaukee Sentinel, 15 October 1855; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 10 March 1856. The Free Democrat re-

ported that Chapin’s oratory “enchains the attention of the hearer, even in spite of himself.”

74. Press reports credited lecturers like Pierpont, Beecher, and Chapin with the ability to “enchain” the attention of audiences; Milwaukee News, 7 March 1855; Milwaukee Sentinel, 15 October 1855; Milwaukee

296 Notes Free Democrat, 10 March 1856. The correlation of eloquence and enchainment is traditional: Ogmios, a Celtic god of Gaul, was imagined as a god of eloquence, who drew listeners along with chains running from their ears to his tongue.

75.In 1857 the YMA subscribed to twenty-seven newspapers; Young

9-10.

Men’s Association of the City of Milwaukee, Supplementary Catalogue, 76. Milwaukee Wisconsin, 15 October 1855; Milwaukee Sentinel, 10 December 1855. 77. Milwaukee Wisconsin, 11 December 1854. See also Milwaukee Sentinel, 12 December 1854; and Milwaukee Free Democrat, 11 December 1854.

78. Milwaukee Sentinel, 1 March 1855. For reports on Taylor’s lectures “India” and “Philosophy of Travel,” see Milwaukee Sentinel, 1 and 2 March 1855; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 28 February, 2 March 1855; Milwaukee Wisconsin, 28 February, 2 March 1855; and Milwaukee News, 28 February, 2 March 1855. Taylor’s popular travel books A Journey to Central Africa; or, Life and Landscapes from Egypt to the Negro Kingdoms of the White Nile and Views A-foot; or, Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff

both ran to many editions. 79. Milwaukee American, 3 March 1856; Milwaukee Sentinel, 3 March 1856.

Sumner’s lectures, “Old Europe and Young America” and “France and Louis Napoleon,” were reported in the Milwaukee Sentinel, 12 February, 3 March 1856; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 12 February, 3 March 1856; Milwaukee Wisconsin, 12 February, 3 March 1856; and Milwaukee American, 12 February, 3 March 1856. 80. Milwaukee Free Democrat, 15 January 1856. 81. Milwaukee Free Democrat, 14 December 1855. Gough might encourage

auditors to sign the temperance pledge, but this kind of direct appeal that had material consequences was unusual. For a discussion of the effects criterion and the rhetor’s “intent” in a twentieth-century context, see, e.g., Forbes I. Hill, “Conventional Wisdom—Traditional Form: The President’s Message of November 3, 1969,” Quarterly

Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 373-86; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, ““Conventional Wisdom—tTraditional Form’: A Rejoinder,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 451-54; Hill, “Reply to Professor Campbell,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 454-60; and Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Mythical America Revisited,” in Critiques of Contempo-

rary Rhetoric, 2nd ed., by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Thomas R. Burkholder (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1997), 202-12.

Notes 297 82. Milwaukee Wisconsin, 16 January 1855. The Free Democrat reported that Goddard said, “In so far as Art is useful, it ceases to be Art”; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 29 December 1856. 83. Milwaukee Free Democrat, 27 December 1854. The following year, dur-

ing the period of widespread disappointment in the YMA lecturers, the Free Democrat accused the YMA of importing “old fogies” rather than men “who grapple with great truths, and unmask great errors”; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 29 December 1855. 84. Milwaukee News, 28 February 1855. 85. Milwaukee Free Democrat, 24 November 1855; Milwaukee Wisconsin, 24

November 1855. 86. Milwaukee Wisconsin, 15 December 1855. Josiah Holbrook had also used the metaphor of a repast: comparing a social lyceum—a group

meeting together for mutual education in a private home—with a “fashionable party,” the Family Lyceum said: “The principal difference between the two is, that one offers a feast of sweetmeats and cordials, the other a feast of minds and souls”; “Social Lyceums,” Family Lyceum 1, no. 23 (19 January 1833): 90. 87. Milwaukee Free Democrat, 6 March 1855. 88. Milwaukee Sentinel, 26 November 1855. 89. Current, History of Wisconsin, 2:146. 90. In October 1855, for example, Stephen S. Foster delivered antislavery lectures at Young’s Hall; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 15 October 1855.

91.In an unusual engagement with the substance of a lecture, the Free Democrat in 1855 took Henry Ward Beecher to task when its editors understood Beecher to be partially supporting some tenets of KnowNothingism concerning naturalization; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 15 October 1855. 92. For example, the Sentinel credited Bayard Taylor with a “musical” voice (1 March 1855), but the Free Democrat pronounced that Edward Hitchcock’s “drawling delivery acts like an opiate upon the senses” (8 January 1856). The Wisconsin did not mind Lowell’s “monotonous tone,” however, since it formed a base from which the lecturer could “lift us by the electric force of his beautiful conceptions” (11 April 1855). 93. Milwaukee Sentinel, 23 January 1855. 94. For opinions on King’s “Sight and Insight,” see Milwaukee Sentinel, 17 December 1855; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 15 December 1855; Milwaukee Wisconsin, 15 December 1855; and Milwaukee American, 15 Decem-

ber 1855.

298 Notes 95. Milwaukee American, 26 February 1856. 96. Ward to Brigham, 18 October 1855, J. R. Brigham Papers; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 10 March 1856; Milwaukee American, 6 February 1856; Milwaukee Wisconsin, 15 December 1855; Milwaukee Sentinel, 26 November 1855. 97. On Douglass, see Milwaukee Sentinel, 23 and 26 March 1866; Milwaukee Wisconsin, 23 and 26 March 1866; Milwaukee News, 23 March 1866; and YMA Minutes, 1 May 1866. On Dickinson, see Milwaukee Sentinel, 2 and 3 March 1866; Milwaukee Wisconsin, 2 and 3 March 1866; Mil-

waukee News, 2 and 3 March 1866; and YMA Minutes, 1 May 1866. Dickinson had also spoken before the YMA during the 1864-65 season; YMA Minutes, 2 May 1865.

Chapter 4. Frederick Douglass as Lyceum Lecturer, 1850s—1870s 1. Forten, Journals, esp. 109-30, 146-96; Porter, “Negro Literary Societies,” 557.

2.John P. Pittman, “Douglass’s Assimilationism and Antislavery,” in Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, ed. Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999), 76. 3. Compare, e.g., Douglass’s keynote speech delivered at the dedication of the Colored Industrial School in Manassas, Virginia, on 3 Septem-

ber 1894; John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol.

5, 1881-95 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 616-29. 4.B. A. Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, foreword by Jerrold Hirsch (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989),

91. This collection of the narratives of former slaves was first published in 1945 by the University of Chicago Press. 5. Gregory P. Lampe, Frederick Douglass: Freedom’s Voice, 1818-1845 (East

Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998), 7-22; Waldo E. Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 7-9, 11. Douglass described these events in all three of his autobiographies. 6. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 300.

Notes 299 7. Ibid., 336. See also Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Doug-

lass, in Douglass, Autobiographies, 633; Lampe, Frederick Douglass, — - 24-25; and McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 68. 8. For a thoughtful and well-documented analysis of Douglass’s prepara-

tion for his career as an orator, see Lampe, Frederick Douglass, esp. 1-96.

9. John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivigan, and Peter P. Hinks, eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series Two: Autobiographical Writings, vol.

1, Narrative (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 80. 10. Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 61.

11. Ibid., 60, quoting the Liberator. 12. A version of this chapter, however, appeared as Angela G. Ray, “Fred-

erick Douglass on the Lyceum Circuit: Social Assimilation, Social Transformation?” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5, no. 4 (2002): 625-48. 13. John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 1, 1841-46 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), lxiv-lxix; Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 3,

1855-63 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), xiii; John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, eds., The Frederick Douglass | Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 4, 1864—80 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), xvi; Douglass, Life and Times, 812, 813, 814; Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 65-66. 14. Blassingame and MckKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:86. The insti-

tute maintained a building that included a lecture hall, classrooms, a library, and facilities for musical performances. 15. Cincinnati Commercial, 14 January 1867, quoted in Mead, Yankee Eloquence, 223.

16. Douglass, Life and Times, 815. , 17. See Richard W. Leeman, ed., African-American Orators: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996). 18. “The Lecture Season,” New York Tribune, 12 October 1858; “Lyceum Lecturers,” New York Tribune, 9 September 1859; Cameron, Massachu-

, setts Lyceum, 22; Hoeltje, “Lecturing in Iowa,” 95. On Douglass’s Milwaukee appearances, see Milwaukee Sentinel, 23 and 26 March 1866; Milwaukee Wisconsin, 23 and 26 March 1866; Milwaukee News, 23 March 1866; and YMA Minutes, 1 May 1866. 19. Hoeltje, “Lecturing in Iowa,” 126-27; Eubank, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau,” 79.

300 Notes 20. Eubank, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau,” 294-320. Redpath sold his bureau, by then called the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, to James Burton Pond and George Hathaway in 1875.

21. See con. 44, reel 29, frs. 582-92, Frederick Douglass Papers, MS 16,377, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as FD Papers). See also James Redpath to Frederick Douglass (FD), 17 April 1869, and Redpath and Fall to FD, 20 December 1872, both in FD Papers, con. 4, reel 2, frs. 461, 640. 22. On Douglass’s reliance on the lecture circuit for income, see George A. Hinshaw, “A Rhetorical Analysis of the Speeches of Frederick Douglass during and after the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska, 1972), 128; and Douglass, Life and Times, 814-15. For evidence of the 10 percent commission, see FD Papers, con. 44, reel 29, fr. 582; and Eubank, “Redpath Lyceum Bureau,” 135. 23. Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 13, see also 11-13, 41. See “General Instructions for Speaking,” in Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator, Bicentennial ed., ed. David W. Blight (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 5-23.

24. George L. Ruffin and William Henry Crogman, both quoted in Hinshaw, “Speeches of Frederick Douglass,” 353, 356-57, 354; Garrison’s preface to Douglass’s Narrative, in Blassingame, McKivigan, and Hinks, Frederick Douglass Papers, 1:5. 25. Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, \:\xv—Ixvii. In 1861, delivering

“Pictures and Progress” in the Fraternity Course lectures at Tremont Temple in Boston, Douglass said, “I confess that lecture reading is not my forte” (Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, 3:453).

26. Douglass, Life and Times, 813-14. The address was published as Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered: An Ad-

dress, before the Literary Societies of Western Reserve College, at Commencement, July 12, 1854 (Rochester, N.Y.: Lee, Mann, 1854); a copy is located in FD Papers, con. 21, reel 14, frs. 107-27, and a transcription appears in John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 2, 1847-54 (New

Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 497-525. For commentary, see Roderick M. Stewart, “The Claims of Frederick Douglass Philosophically Considered,” in Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, ed.

Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999), 145-72. 27. Blassingame and MckKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 5:563. In this

version of “Self-Made Men,” Douglass recalled the late Wendell

Notes 301 Phillips: “A man who, for nearly forty years, was the foremost orator in New England, was asked by me, if his speeches were extemporaneous? They flowed so smoothly that I had my doubts about it. He an-

swered, ‘No, I carefully think out and write my speeches, before I utter them.’ When such a man rises to speak, he knows what he is going to say. When he speaks, he knows what he is saying. When he retires from the platform, he knows what he has said.” 28. A clear example of temporal modifications occurs in various versions

of “John Brown.” The FD Papers contain several manuscripts and typescripts of this speech. Phrases like “though [variable number] years have passed between us and the tragedy that closed his life” make it possible to date the extant iterations of the speech from about 1873-74 through about 1888-89. See FD Papers, con. 22, reel 14, frs. 234, 263, 292, 323. 29. Douglass, Life and Times, 814.

30. “Life Pictures,” in FD Papers, con. 22, reel 14, frs. 400-401; cf. “Lecture on Pictures,” in FD Papers, con. 22, reel 14, fr. 379. 31. On oxymoron and its relationship to challenges to social roles, see Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (1973): 74-86. 32. Cincinnati Commercial, 18 March 1868, quoted in Mead, Yankee Eloquence, 223.

33. This tactic bears a close relation to the strategies that media theorist Stuart Hall recommended in 1997 to contest stereotypes. Hall discussed the political potential of parody, arguing that parody is a more effective strategy in combating stereotypes than proffering positive representations to counteract negative ones. Douglass’s remarks exhibit the same impulse, making a formerly comfortable position (supporting assumptions about African American inferiority) less easy to inhabit by, as Hall would say, interrogating the representation by contesting it from within. See Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” in Hall, Representation, 269-76; and Hall, Representation and the Media. For a recent analysis of Douglass’s use of humor and parody, see Gary

S. Selby, “Mocking the Sacred: Frederick Douglass’s ‘Slaveholder’s

Sermon’ and the Antebellum Debate over Religion and Slavery,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 326-41. 34. Quoted in Lampe, Frederick Douglass, 47.

35. Crogman and Grimké, both quoted in Hinshaw, “Speeches of Frederick Douglass,” 353, 357. 36. Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 55.

302 Notes 37. Ibid., 226; on Douglass’s engagement with ethnological debates, see 225-50. Since scientists, as Douglass argued in “Claims,” “write to please, as well as to instruct,” and thus could, “even unconsciously,” sacrifice truth for current fashion, they could produce texts to support the system of slavery that they wished to uphold; Douglass, Claims of

the Negro, 20, in FD Papers, con. 21, reel 14, fr. 118 (also in Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, 2:510).

38. “Our National Capital,” in Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:444; “Pictures and Progress,” in FD Papers, con. 28, reel 18, tr. 144; “Lecture on Pictures,” in FD Papers, con. 22, reel 14, fr. 379; FD to James Redpath, 29 July 1871, Alfred Williams Anthony Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, New York Public Library. 39. “The Races,” MS, 1, in FD Papers, con. 21, reel 14, fr. 194 (see appendix 5); Bingham, Columbian Orator, 19. 40. “Races,” MS, 1. 41. On Douglass’s apparent modesty in “Claims,” see Stewart, “Claims of Frederick Douglass,” 150-53. 42. “Races,” MS, 1. 43. Ibid., MS, 3, 6; 1 Cor. 1:27. 44. “Races,” MS, 3, 5. Douglass alludes both to Genesis 1:28 (“Have do-

minion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air”) and to Psalm 50:10 (“For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills”). Douglass represented a “common sense” that

was precisely opposite from that represented by many white supremacists of the nineteenth century: during the civil rights debates of 1874 and 1875, for example, Democratic congressman William Robbins of North Carolina castigated Jefferson’s doctrine of equality in the Declaration of Independence and said that “calm philosophy, aye, plain common sense, smiles at its absurdity”; quoted in Kirt H. Wilson, The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and

the Rhetoric of Place, 1870-1875 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002), 81. 45. “Races,” MS, 2, 4, 7. 46. Ibid., MS, 1, 7, 2, 9. 47. Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:24.

48. The quotation comes from an 1869 version of “William the Silent”; Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:193. On Douglass’s feminism, see, e.g., Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 136-64; and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, vol. 1, A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric (New York: Praeger, 1989), 58.

Notes 303 In an 1867 version of “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” Douglass argued for a “genuine democratic republic” in which black men and all women would be enfranchised; Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:158.

49. Versions of “William the Silent” and “Assassination” appear in Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:106-18, 186-99; several versions of “John Brown” are in FD Papers, con. 22, reel 14. 50. Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:108, 23, 187; Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, 3:291. Shakespeare’s metaphor occurs in As You Like It 2.7.139-40. 51. Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, x, 256; see 253-78. 52. Douglass, Life and Times, 814.

53. Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, 3:289; Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 5:546. See Douglass’ Monthly 1, no. 10 (1859): 44, 45; and Janesville (Wis.) Morning Gazette, 11 and 12

February 1859. One text delivered in Halifax, England, in 1860 is published in Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, 3:289-300; and

one delivered in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1893 appears in Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 5:545-75. The Carlisle text was published as Frederick Douglass, Self-Made Men: Address before the Students of the Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pa.

(Carlisle, Pa., [1893]); copies appear in FD Papers, con. 29, reel 18, frs. 371-92, and con. 49, reel 33, frs. 7-27. The Halifax and Carlisle texts and a partial, unpublished manuscript version of the speech (FD Papers, con. 29, reel 18, frs. 529-39), which Blassingame dates to about 1859 (Frederick Douglass Papers, 3:616), are the three texts that form the basis of this analysis. 54. Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 67. 55. FD Papers, con. 29, reel 18, fr. 530; Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Pa-

pers, 3:293-94. 56. FD Papers, con. 29, reel 18, fr. 531; Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 5:557.

57. Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 5:557-58. On Douglass’s complex conceptions of Africa, see Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 202-13. 58. David W. Blight notes the tensions of the dominant self-improvement ideology and the experience of African American leaders: “Few black

leaders ever gave up on... self-improvement doctrine, but the lessons of the 1850s refuted the notion that virtue would ultimately be

304 Notes its own reward”; Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 11.

59. FD Papers, con. 29, reel 18, fr. 530. O’Connell’s 1795 speech in the Irish House of Commons, supporting a bill for the emancipation of Irish Roman Catholics, was included in Bingham’s Columbian Orator; see Bingham, Columbian Orator, 212-16 (Bingham inaccurately renders “O’Connell” as “O’Connor’”).

60. See FD Papers, con. 29, reel 18, frs. 534-35; Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, 3:294-97; Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 5:565-69. 61. Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, 3:295, 297.

62. Douglass erroneously referred to Banneker as a slave, although he was free throughout his life; FD Papers, con. 29, reel 18, fr. 534; Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, 3:295; Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 5:566.

63. Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 5:567, 568. In 1879 Douglass had corresponded with Anne T. Kirk, the daughter of Banneker’s biographer, Martha Tyson. Douglass told Kirk, “There has

been an attempt lately to make [Banneker] son of a white woman by black father, and thus to credit the white race with whatever ability he possessed. I confess that my interest in him would... be measurably diminished if this should turn out to be true” (quoted in Silvio A. Bedini, The Life of Benjamin Banneker [New York: Charles Scribner’s

Sons, 1972], 298). The Tyson biography was published in 1884; it noted that Banneker had had one white grandmother but denied that he had “inherited [any] trace” of her “Anglo-Saxon blood” and asserted that “her powers of mind” had been “very limited”; Martha Tyson, Banneker, the Afric-American Astronomer, from the Posthumous Papers of Martha E. Tyson, Edited by Her Daughter [Anne T. Kirk] (Philadel-

phia: Friends’ Book Association, 1884), 30-31. Contemporary newspaper commentators sometimes denied Douglass’s own African ancestry (he was the son of Harriet Bailey, a black slave woman, and an unknown white man). A writer in Cadiz, Ohio,

in 1869, for example, claimed that Douglass lacked “the features of the negro” and said that the local judge of elections would identify him as a “White Male Citizen of the United States”; Cadiz Sentinel, 10 Feb-

ruary 1869, quoted in Mead, Yankee Eloquence, 223-24. Douglass, as

Martin notes, faced charges that his own intelligence was derived from his white ancestry. He denied this charge, attributing his intelligence to his mother; Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 260.

Notes 305 64. The version in FD Papers, con. 29, reel 18, frs. 529-39, refers to Jefferson but does not quote his letter. The texts of “Self-Made Men” in Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers (3:295) and Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers (5:567), erroneously date Jeffer-

son’s letter to 1790. On the exchange of letters between Banneker and Jefferson, see Angela G. Ray, “‘In My Own Hand Writing’: Benjamin Banneker Addresses the Slaveholder of Monticello,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1998): 387-405. 65. Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 5:567.

66. Phillips’s “Toussaint” was one of his most popular speeches on the lyceum circuit. A text as delivered in December 1861 appears in Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1870), 468-94. 67. See, e.g., Leonard Harris, “Honor and Insurrection; or, A Short Story about Why John Brown (with David Walker’s Spirit) Was Right and Frederick Douglass (with Benjamin Banneker’s Spirit) Was Wrong,” in Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, ed. Bill E. Lawson and Frank M.

Kirkland (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999), 236-37. 68. For a less flattering interpretation of Jefferson’s response to Banneker, see Ray, “‘In My Own Hand Writing,’” 399-400, 404n.37. 69. Douglass joked in a letter to a critic, “Henry Clapp once said of Horace

Greeley that he was a self made man, and worshipped his maker!”; response to criticism of “Self-Made Men,” in FD Papers, con. 29, reel 18, tr. 677. 70. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Lives and Deeds of Our Self-Made Men, new

ed., rev. and ed. Charles E. Stowe (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1889), vi. The first edition was published in 1872. 71. FD Papers, con. 29, reel 18, fr. 491. 72. See, e.g., Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 5:554—-55.

73. FD Papers, con. 29, reel 18, fr. 531. 74. FD Papers, con. 29, reel 18, fr. 677. Scholars also note the correlation;

see, e.g., Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 281; and David B. Chesebrough, Frederick Douglass: Oratory from Slavery (Westport, Conn.:

Greenwood Press, 1998), 66. 75. FD Papers, con. 29, reel 18, fr. 677. On the pitfalls for self-made men, see, e.g., Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, 3:299-300. Douglass

said that the “man who is indebted to himself for himself, is apt to think no small pumpkins of himself” and is apt to begin everything by saying “‘I am a self-made man”; ibid., 3:299.

306 Notes 76. FD Papers, con. 29, reel 18, frs. 538, 539. 77. Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:258.

78. Ibid., 4:16. Versions of “Pictures and Progress,” “Fighting the Rebels

with One Hand,” and “The Mission of the War” appear in Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, 3:452-88; Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:3-24. Douglass actively supported permitting black troops to serve in the Union forces, and after this became possible, he promoted enlistments among African Ameri-

cans (his sons Charles and Lewis served). The subject of the next chapter, Anna Dickinson, was his comrade in some of these efforts. See William Darrah Kelley, Anna E. Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass, Addresses of the Hon. W. D. Kelley, Miss Anna E. Dickinson, and Mr. Frederick Douglass, at a Mass Meeting, Held at National Hall, Philadelphia, July 6, 1863, for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments [Philadelphia, 1863].

79. See Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:342-55; Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 86-90; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 276-77. 80. Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:172. An 1866 version of “Assassination” appears at 4:106—18 and an 1867 version of “Sources of Danger” at 4:149-72. 81. See Bode, American Lyceum, 247-48. Examples of wartime courses at

the lyceum in Salem, Massachusetts, appear in Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 21-22.

82. See David W. Blight, “‘“For Something beyond the Battlefield’: Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War,” Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (1989): 1156-78. 83. The text that forms the basis of this discussion is in Blassingame and

McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:240-59. For a thoughtful analysis of Douglass’s ideas about race and nationalism, see Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 197-224.

84. Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:241; Douglass, Claims of the Negro, 33, in FD Papers, con. 21, reel 14, fr. 124 (also in Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, 2:522). 85. Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:253. 86. “Races,” MS, 14. 87. Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:255, 247, 258.

88. Ibid., 4:254, 252, 253, 245. In one version of “The Mission of the War,” Douglass referred to the ongoing Civil War as “a salutary school, the school of affliction”; FD Papers, con. 22, reel 14, fr. 434.

Notes 307 89. Blassingame and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass Papers, 4:253. 90. Ibid., 4:352. 91. [Frederick Douglass], “Our Recent Western Tour,” Douglass’ Monthly 1,

no. 11 (1859): 52. This article is reprinted in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 2, Pre-Civil War Decade, 1850-1860 (New York: International, 1950), 447-51. 92. FD to James Redpath, 29 July 1871, Alfred Williams Anthony Collection, New York Public Library; FD Papers, con. 28, reel 18, fr. 145.

Chapter 5. Anna Dickinson’s “Whited Sepulchres,” 1869-1870 1. Although the east-west rail system of the United States was a disjointed conglomeration of segments operated by many private corpo-

rations, and the “transcontinental” railroad offered nothing like a continuous journey [rom east to west, the completion of the Pacific Railroad at Promontory, Utah, on 10 May 1869 had considerable rhetorical significance in the postwar republic. Invoked to illustrate U.S. ingenuity and technological prowess, the railroad became a sym-

bol for the capacity for imperialist expansion, the assertion of Washington-based political control over vast geographic areas, and the unification of the people of East and West. See “East and West: Completion of the Great Line Spanning the Continent,” New York Times, 11 May 1869; and Samuel Bowles, The Pacific Ratlroad—Open; How to Go: What to See; Guide of Travel to and through Western America (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1869). For information on the planning and completion of the articulated transcontinental rail system, see, e.g., D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 3, Transcontinental America, 1850-1915 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 3-28.

2. See Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Gender and Genre: Loci of Invention and Contradiction in the Earliest Speeches by U.S. Women,” Quarterly

Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 479-80; and Campbell, “Feminist Rhetoric,” in Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 301-8. For material on early U.S. women speakers, see, e.g., Lillian O’Connor, Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Ante-Bellum Reform Movement (New York: Colum-

bia University Press, 1954); Doris G. Yoakam, “Women’s Introduction to the American Platform,” in A History and Criticism of American Public

Address, vol. 1, ed. William Norwood Brigance (New York: Russell and Russell, 1960), 153-92; Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her 1;

308 Notes Campbell, comp., Man Cannot Speak for Her, vol. 2, Key Texts of the Early

Feminists (New York: Praeger, 1989); Campbell, ed., Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800-1925: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (West-

port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993); Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North

(1830-1880) (New York: Oxtord University Press, 1995), 56-73; Shirley Wilson Logan, “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nine-

teenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 23-43; and Logan, With Pen and Voice, 1-16. 3. A notable exception was the poet, novelist, and woman’s rights advo-

cate Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith, who lectured in lyceums in the 1850s. See Mary Alyce Wyman, Two American Pioneers: Seba Smith and

Elizabeth Oakes Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927): Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith, Selections from the Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakes [Prince] Smith, edited by Mary Alice Wyman (Lewiston, Me.:

Lewiston Journal Co., 1924; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1980); and Timothy H. Scherman, “Elizabeth Oakes Smith,” in American Women Prose Writers, 1820-1870, edited by Amy E. Hudock and Katharine Rodier (Detroit: Gale Group, 2001), 222-30.

| The Young Men’s Association in Milwaukee sponsored only two women presenters during the antebellum era: the author Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott (known as Grace Greenwood) spoke during the 1859-60 season, and Sara Stevens presented a reading of Rafael J. de Cordova’s humorous poem “The Prince’s Visit” in 1861. See YMA Minutes, 10 April 1860, 11 March 1861. On Stevens’s reading, see Milwaukee Sentinel, 25 and 26 February 1861. De Cordova’s poem pertained to the 1860 U.S. tour of Britain’s Prince of Wales. 4. Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 15-23. Before the war, the lyceum

heard the dramatic actor Frances Anne Kemble perform excerpts from A Midsummer Night’s Dream during the 1849-50 season, and ten

years later, Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott presented “The Heroic in

| Common Life.” On the impact of the Civil War on women’s public speaking, see Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Angela G. Ray, “No Longer

by Your Leave’: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments on Women’s Rhetoric,” in A Rhetorical History of the United States, vol. 4, Public Debate in the Civil War Era, ed. David Zaref-

sky and Michael C. Leff (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, forthcoming). On Harper, see Peterson, “Doers of the Word,” 119-35; Logan, “We Are Coming,” 44-69; and Logan, With Pen and

Notes 309 Voice, 30-46. On Livermore, see her autobiography, The Story of My Life.

5. McCaughey-Silvia, “Franklin Lyceum,” 281-99. Dickinson delivered “Idiots and Women” in Providence in 1867-68, “A Struggle for Life”

in 1868-69, “Whited Sepulchres” in 1869-70, “Jeanne d’Arc” in 1870-71, “Demagogues and Workingmen” in 1871-72, “What’s to

Hinder?” in 1872-73, “For Your Own Sake” in 1873-74, and “Madame Roland” in 1875-76.

6. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Anna Elizabeth Dickinson,” in Eminent Women of the Age: Being Narratives of the Lives and Deeds of the Most Promi-

nent Women of the Present Generation (Hartford, Conn.: S. M. Betts, 1868), 480. On Stanton’s lyceum participation, see Lisa S. Strange, “Dress Reform and the Feminine Ideal: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the ‘Coming Girl,”” Southern Communication Journal 68 (Fall 2002): 1-13; and Lisa S. Hogan and J. Michael Hogan, “Feminine Virtue and Practical Wisdom: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s ‘Our Boys,’” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6, no. 3 (2003): 415-36. 7.“’Whited Sepulchres,’ as delivered by Anna E. Dickinson, at Quincy [Mass.], Thursday, Jan’y 6, 1870, James A. Slade, Stenographer,” in AED Papers, con. 15, reel 17, frs. 570-96. The quotations come from MS, 27, 30. 8. Dickinson used the word “patriarchal” in “Whited Sepulchres,” referring to the social organization of the ancient Hebrews. She compared this to social structures in her own time. Twentieth-century feminism broadened the word’s denotative and connotative meanings, which are invoked by the term’s use here. 9. “Whited Sepulchres,” MS, 51. 10. The biographical summary of Dickinson’s early life and career is based on the following sources: Chester, Embattled Maiden; Campbell, “Anna E. Dickinson,” 156-67; James Harvey Young, “Dickinson, Anna Elizabeth,” in Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary,

ed. Edward T. James, vol. 1, A-~F (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1971), 475-76; “Anna Dickinson on Lecturing Then and Now,” New

York Herald, 19 June 1892, in AED Papers, con. 23, reel 23, frs. 454-55; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, 1861-1876 (Rochester, N.Y.: Susan B. Anthony, 1881), 40-50; Stanton, “Anna Elizabeth Dickinson,” 479-512; and Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in

310 Notes All Walks of Life (Buffalo, N.Y.: Charles Wells Moulton, 1893; repr., De-

troit: Gale Research, 1967), 241-42. 11. Dickinson described her response to a hissing crowd in San Francisco in 1869: “As J have endured a great deal of hissing, some stick and

stone throwing, divers odorous eggings, and finally one or two revolver bullets, through Eastern political campaigns, I am not to be scared by a trifle of goose-breath in the West”; Anna E. Dickinson, A Ragged Register (Of People, Places and Opinions) (New York: Harper and

Brothers, 1879), 46. 12. “Anna Dickinson on Lecturing Then and Now.” The suffragist Paulina Wright Davis emphasized Dickinson’s moral tone and impassioned invective when she wrote in 1870 that Dickinson had never “withheld the most scathing rebukes of sin in high places”; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 2:433.

13. “Jeanne d’Arc” is the only Dickinson speech that has previously received analytical treatment by a rhetorical critic. See Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “La Pucelle d’Orleans Becomes an American Girl: Anna Dickinson’s ‘Jeanne d’Arc,’” in Texts in Context: Critical Dialogues on Significant Episodes in American Political Rhetoric, ed. Michael C. Leff and

Fred J. Kauffeld (Davis, Calif.: Hermagoras Press, 1989), 91-111; and, in the same volume, Wil Linkugel and Robert Rowland, “Response to Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s Anna E. Dickinson’s Jeanne d’Arc: Divergent Views,” 113-20. A text of the speech, edited by Campbell, also appears: “Anna E. Dickinson’s ‘Jeanne d’Arc,’” 279-309. 14. Potter, Impersonations, 191.

15. “Anna Dickinson on Lecturing Then and Now.”

16. Route books in the AED Papers provide information about the 1870-71 and 1871-72 seasons, including sites, fees, and speech titles. The information for 1871-72 is more complete. See the 1870-71 and

1871-72 route books, AED Papers, con. 21, reel 22, frs. 558-615. Chester, Embattled Maiden, 103-4, contains the 1871-72 schedule but without an indication of the lecture titles. (Chester’s “Port Edward” should read “Fort Edward.”) In 1871-72 Dickinson’s major speech

was “Demagogues and Workingmen”; she occasionally delivered “Breakers Ahead” or “Jeanne d’Arc.” 17. Route Book, 1871-72, in AED Papers, con. 21, reel 22, frs. 592-615. 18. AED to Mary Edmondson Dickinson, 24 September 1869, in AED Papers, con. I, reel 1, fr. 770. 19. AED to Susan Dickinson, 29 June 1869 (from Virginia City), 4 July

1869 (from San Francisco), both in AED Papers, con. I, reel 1, frs.

Notes 311 615-16, 628-34. Dickinson described her experiences in San Francisco in Ragged Register, 43-56; she covered the 1869 trip on 23-77. Ragged Register is based on Dickinson’s letters to her mother and sister

in Philadelphia written during her travels; letters are in AED Papers, cons. 1-3, reels 1-4. On the 1869 trip, see also Chester, Embattled Maiden, 96-101. 20. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, 1876-1885 (Rochester, N.Y.: Susan B. Anthony, 1886), 752. 21. Chester, Embattled Maiden, 96. 22. Extant letters from the 1869 trip are in AED Papers, con. I, reel 1. 23. AED to Mary Edmondson Dickinson, 26 June 1869, in AED Papers, con. 1, reel 1, fr. 607.

24. See AED to Mary Edmondson Dickinson, 24 June 1869, 26 June 1869, both in AED Papers, con. 1, reel 1, frs. 600-614 (quotation at fr. 601); Salt Lake City Deseret News, 21 and 23 June 1869. Dickinson

wrote her mother that Allison was “spooney on somebody & was dragged off protesting”; AED Papers, con. 1, reel 1, fr. 607. Allison, a

widower, proposed marriage to Dickinson during the summer of 1869; see AED to Susan Dickinson, 29 September 1869, in AED Papers, con. I, ree! 1, fr. 778; and Chester, Embattled Maiden, 111-12. Chester is incorrect in saying that Dickinson visited Salt Lake City “on her way back East at the end of the summer” (100); she stopped only on the way west and was in the Mormon city three days after leaving Omaha, Nebraska, on 16 June. 25. The Salt Lake City Deseret News, 1 October 1869, described the speech,

recently given in Omaha, as “her California tirade against the people of this Territory.” The Boston News reported, “The clergy of San Fran-

cisco invited her to repeat it on a Sabbath evening, and crowned her with their benedictions”; Boston News, n.d., in AED Papers, con. 22, reel 23, fr. 225. 26. Boston Advertiser quoted in unidentified clipping, n.d. [Oct. 1869], in AED Papers, con. 24, reel 23, fr. 710. On Utah’s petition for statehood in 1869, see, e.g., Salt Lake City Deseret News, 7 and 12 October 1869. On the Cullom Bill, see Richard S. Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy: A History, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1989), 108-9.

On 14 February 1870, Utah Territory became the second territory (after Wyoming) to grant the right to vote to women. The new state of Utah affirmed this right in 1896, although women’s voting in Utah had been interrupted briefly by federal intervention, rescinding the

312 Notes 1870 decision. See Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, 109; and Keyssar,

Right to Vote, 186. Dickinson’s “Whited Sepulchres” as delivered in Quincy, Massachusetts, in January 1870 stated: “In Utah everybody votes; that is, of course, everybody who is anybody, tor women there as elsewhere are accounted as nobodies”; “Whited Sepulchres,” MS, >.

27. Both are in the AED Papers: the Quincy text is in con. 15, reel 17, frs.

570-96, and the preparation text, labeled “Mormonism” by library catalogers, is in con. 15, reel 17, frs. 508-24. Transcriptions appear herein as appendixes 6 and 7. 28. “Anna Dickinson on Lecturing Then and Now.” 29. Ibid.; Zion’s Herald, 18 November 1869 (con. 23, reel 23, fr. 500); Parker Pillsbury, “Anna Dickinson and the Mormons,” Revolution, 30 December 1869 (con. 27, reel 25, fr. 240); Boston News, n.d. (con. 22, reel 23, fr. 225), all in AED Papers. 30. Matt. 23:27.

31. The work and lives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. women preachers have received recent treatment by historians. See, e.g., Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700-1775 (Chapel Hill: Uni-

versity of North Carolina Press, 1999). 32. Clipping identified in handwriting as “Albany Eve. Journal,” n.d., in AED Papers, con. 24, reel 23, fr. 714. 33. In a report of Dickinson’s lecture in the Revolution, Parker Pillsbury re-

ferred to Young as “Brigham Beelzebub Young”; Pillsbury, “Anna Dickinson and the Mormons.” 34. On changes in women’s status as public speakers as a result of the Civil War, see Campbell and Ray, “‘No Longer by Your Leave.’” Camp-

bell and Ray credit Dickinson’s public speaking with “open[ing] the doors for other women speakers.” 35. “Anna Dickinson in Dayton,” unidentified clipping, n.d., and “Exalt Motherhood,” unidentified clipping, n.d., both in AED Papers, con. 24, reel 23, frs. 711, 710. 36. Milwaukee Sentinel, 13 May 1870. Unidentified clipping, n.d. (con. 23, reel 23, fr. 578); and Cleveland Herald, 19 March 1870 (con. 22, reel 23, fr. 235), both in AED Papers. Criticisms of women speakers who publicly discussed sexuality were not unusual. See Ida Husted Harper,

Notes 313 The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Hollenbeck Press, 1898), 469. 37. Boston News, n.d. (con. 22, reel 23, fr. 225); and Charlestown (Mass.) Chronicle, 30 October 1869 (con. 24, reel 23, fr. 711), both in AED Papers.

38. The terms “purity” and “piety” refer to aspects of the so-called cult of true womanhood, described in Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976). Although Welter’s terms refer to antebellum practice,

Nan Johnson argues that such expectations survived long after the Civil War; Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 6. 39. Harper, Life of Anthony, 1:303; Stockton paper quoted in Chester, Embattled Maiden, 100.

40. “Whited Sepulchres,” MS, 43. 4]. Ibid., 50-51, 1. 42. Ibid., 42, 39, 15, 1. 43. Ibid., 1. 44. Ibid., 49-50.

45. AED to Mary Edmondson Dickinson, 26 June 1869, and AED to Susan Dickinson, 29 June 1869, both in AED Papers, con. 1, reel 1, frs. 607, 604, 622. 46. AED to Mary Edmondson Dickinson, 5 August 1869, in AED Papers, con. I, reel 1, fr. 691. 47.In “La Pucelle d’Orleans Becomes an American Girl,” Campbell investi-

gates Dickinson’s use and adaptation of the heroic androgyne in “Jeanne d’Arc.” 48. “Mormonism,” MS, 9; Boston Journal, n.d. (con. 24, reel 23, fr. 713); and Salt Lake Telegraph, 28 October 1869 (con. 23, reel 23, fr. 588), all

in AED Papers. During the summer of 1869, Dickinson wrote to her mother about donning a “blue bloomer dress” and riding astride in Yosemite Valley. She was so pleased with the experiment that she proposed adopting both the costume and the manner of riding: “’Tis the only safe, graceful, comfortable & sensible way for a man or a woman to ride, & I mean to set my face as a flint against the silly & suicidal long skirts & side-saddles.” AED to Mary Edmondson Dickinson, 23 August 1869, in AED Papers, con. 1, reel 1, fr. 722; see 5 August 1869 (fr. 680). See also appendix 8. 49, “Anna Dickinson in Dayton,” unidentified clipping, n.d. (con. 24, reel 23, fr. 711); unidentified clipping, n.d. (con. 23, reel 23, fr. 578); and

314 Notes New York Tribune, dated by hand “Dec. ’69” (con. 23, reel 23, fr. 505), all in AED Papers.

50. Campbell compares Dickinson’s “vividly descriptive, emotive language” in the opening description of “Whited Sepulchres” with the similarly “emotive terms” used “to paint the moral scene”; Campbell, “Anna E. Dickinson,” 163. 51. Stanley B. Kimball, Heber C. Kimball: Mormon Patriarch and Pioneer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 307-16. On the four forms of

marriage common during Heber Kimball’s day—the standard civil marriage (for life), the marriage in the temple (for life), the spiritual marriage (for eternity), and the celestial marriage (for life and for eternity)—see 93-94, 52. Boston Sunday Times, 31 October 1869, in AED Papers, con. 22, reel 23, fr. 224.

53. One newspaper writer reported Dickinson to have said that the Mormons’ “intimate knowledge of the mountain gorges and caverns... would stand them in excellent need in case war should be made upon them by the government of the United States”; clipping identified in handwriting as “Flint [Mich.] May ’70,” in AED Papers, con. 24, reel 23, fr. 710. 54. On action and motion, see Burke, Grammar of Motives. 55. “Whited Sepulchres,” MS, 14, 15. 56. Ibid., 26-27. 57. Worcester (Mass.) Spy, 29 October 1869, in AED Papers, con. 23, reel 23, frs. 586-87 (also frs. 606-7); Milwaukee Sentinel, 13 May 1870. 58. New York Tribune, dated by hand “Dec. 69,” in AED Papers, con. 23, reel 23, fr. 505. 59. “Whited Sepulchres,” MS, 15, 18. 60. Ibid., 32-33, 31. 61. Ibid., 31, 40, 42. 62. Ibid., 50-51. Cf. Isa. 34:4, 2 Pet. 3:10, Rev. 6:2, and Job 33:4. 63. Dickinson’s auditors sometimes failed to focus on the time-bound implications of the transcendent scene. The Ravenna Democrat reported

“the remark of a young lady, who said, ‘The thought of seeing, and holding converse with a spirit like hers [Dickinson’s] in the great hereafter, renders the thought of Heaven more glorious and attractive’”; Ravenna Democrat, n.d. [March 1870?], in AED Papers, con. 23, reel 23, fr. 589. 64. “Whited Sepulchres,” MS, 42. 65. Ibid., 30.

Notes 315 66. Ibid., 43. 67. “Exalt Motherhood,” unidentified clipping, n.d., in AED Papers, con. 24, reel 23, tr. 710; Omaha Herald quoted in the Salt Lake City Deseret News, 1 October 1869. 68. Dickinson herself neither married nor had children.

69. “Mormonism,” MS, 13. This version identifies Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George William Curtis as contemporary examples of a

“manly woman” and a “womanly man.” When she presented the speech in Omaha, Dickinson proposed Wendell Phillips as an example of “feminine masculinity,” a representation that one local newspaper writer found horrific; see Omaha Republican, 28 September 1869, in AED Papers, con. 23, reel 23, fr. 586. 70. “Mormonism,” MS, 13. 71. New York Times, 11 May 1869; Salt Lake City Deseret News, 21 June 1869; Dictionary of American Biography, 18:572—73; Holbrook, Reminis-

cences, 12; “The Lecture Season,” New York Tribune, 20 September 1854; “The Lecture Season,” New York Tribune, 19 October 1855; “The Lecture Season,” New York Tribune, 12 October 1858; “Lyceum Lecturers,” New York Tribune, 9 September 1859. 72. Unidentified clipping, n.d., in AED Papers, con. 23, reel 23, fr. 578.

Chapter 6. “A Living Shuttle” 1. Higginson, “American Lecture-System,” 48, 49. 2. Cameron, Massachusetts Lyceum, 27.

3. On Hitchcock’s illustrations, see Edward Hitchcock to Jerome Ripley Brigham, 10 September 1855, 9 January 1856, J. R. Brigham Papers; Milwaukee Free Democrat, 8 January 1856; and Milwaukee Wisconsin, 8

January 1856. 4. See Fred W. Lorch, “Mark Twain’s ‘Sandwich Islands’ Lecture and the Failure at Jamestown, New York, in 1869,” American Literature 25, no. 3 (1953): 314-25. See also Mark Twain, The Complete Works of Mark Twain, American Artists ed., Mark Twain’s Autobiography, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924), 2:349-57.

5. Entry for 5 November 1841, in Chapman, Journal, 1839-42. 6. Milwaukee Sentinel and Gazette, 13 December 1847.

7. On the literary society as a relief from the regimen of college life, see Potter, Debating in the Colonial Chartered Colleges, 64-66.

8. Carl Lotus Becker’s articulation of the “essential articles of the religion

of the Enlightenment” included the assertions that “man is capable,

316 Notes guided solely by the light of reason and experience, of perfecting the good life on earth,” and that “the first and essential condition of the good life on earth is the freeing of men’s minds from the bonds of ignorance and superstition, and of their bodies from the arbitrary oppression of the constituted social authorities”; Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-

versity Press, 1932), 102-3. The representations of human potential and possibility in Holbrook’s journal owe much to the heritage of Enlightenment thought.

9.On the concept of “oratorical culture,” see Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran, eds., Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric (Carbondale: South-

ern Illinois University Press, 1993). 10.In book 2 of The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon states that “the duty and office of rhetoric is to apply reason to imagination for the better moving of the will”; Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis, ed. Arthur Johnston (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 139.

11. On a fact-based rhetoric, see, e.g., Robert L. Scott, “A Rhetoric of Facts: Arthur Larson’s Stance as a Persuader,” Speech Monographs 35 (June 1968): 109-21. See also the related article, Robert L. Scott, “A Fresh Attitude toward Rationalism,” Speech Teacher 17, no. 2 (1968): 134-39. 12. Edward Schiappa with David M. Timmerman, “Aristotle’s Disciplining of Epideictic,” in Schiappa, Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory, 185-206. See also book 1, chapter 9, of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. 13. The Wisconsin, for example, reminded readers that Wendell Phillips’s

lecture condemning U.S. institutional structures was aberrant and perhaps even dangerous: the paper reported that the audience was “respectful,” although “they dared not agree with him.” Milwaukee Wisconsin, 24 November 1855.

14. As noted in the introduction, the work of such twentieth-century scholars as Robert Scott, Michael Calvin McGee, and Stuart Hall, as well as many others in a variety of fields, supports the notion of rhetoric as constitutive. 15. In a lecture at London’s Goldsmith’s College, Hall called for a “politics

without guantees,” specifically a politics of race that moved beyond biological difference as a basis for closing off argument; Stuart Hall, Race: The Floating Signifier, videorecording, produced, directed, and ed-

ited by Sut Jhally (Northampton, Mass.: Media Education Foundation, 1996).

Notes 317 Appendix 5. “The Races,” by Frederick Douglass 1. Douglass alludes to two passages of Judeo-Christian scripture: “And

God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl] of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28; cf. v. 26); “For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills” (Ps. 50:10). 2. Henry Clay (1777-1852), lawyer, U.S. representative, and senator from Kentucky, was the major promoter of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the compromise tariff of 1833, and the Compromise of 1850. Daniel Webster (1782-1852), lawyer, U.S. representative and senator from Massachusetts, and then secretary of state, was an enthusiastic nationalist and a champion of business interests. John C. Calhoun (1782-1850), a South Carolinian, was a U.S. representative, secretary of war, vice president, senator, and secretary of state. Calhoun advocated states’ rights and slavery. All three men were noted for powerful oratory. Dictionary of American Biography, 4:173-79, 19:585-92, 3:411-19. 3. The “diversity theory of human origin” is the theory of polygenesis, propounded by ethnologists like George R. Gliddon, Samuel George Morton, Josiah Clark Nott, and Charles Hamilton Smith. These men, who established the foundations of what came to be called the American school of ethnology, promulgated the theory that different races had separate origins and were, hence, different species. See Robert Bernasconi, ed., American Theories of Polygenesis, 7 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2002), esp. 1:v—xill.

4. Major supporters of monogenesis, the theory that all human beings had a single origin, were the U.S. educator and clergyman Samuel

Stanhope Smith (1750-1819) and the British physician James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848). Smith wrote An Essay on the Causes of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1788), and Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813). In 1879 Martin R. De-

lany (1812-85), a U.S. black nationalist leader (and former lyceum librarian), would publish a monogenist volume, The Origin of Races and Color.

5. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (1777-1864), in his opinion in Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856), used the same descriptor: he

wrote that “the negro... was... treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic whenever a profit could be made by it.”

318 Notes 6. Douglass alludes to William Shakespeare: in act 4, scene 5, of Henry IV, Part II, King Henry says to the prince: “Thy wish was father, Harry, to

that thought.” 7. The Mexican War (1846-48) was precipitated by a border dispute after the U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845. Under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war, Mexico ceded large tracts of land to the United States: California, Arizona, and New

Mexico as well as parts of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. The Rio Grande was established as the boundary between Mexico and Texas, and the war reopened the question of the extension of slavery. For a map, see D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2, Continental America, 1800-1867 (New

Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 148. 8. During the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825-55), Russia sought to ap-

propriate Ottoman Turkey, both to obtain the holy Orthodox city of Constantinople and to secure a commercial and military outlet to the Aegean and Mediterranean through the Black Sea. The Crimean War (1853-56) pitted Russia against the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France, and Sardinia-Piedmont. The Treaty of Paris ended the deadly war: a defeated Russia guaranteed the territorial integrity of Ottoman Turkey and gave up southern Bessarabia. 9.In the Dred Scott decision, rendered in 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a person of African descent was not a U.S. citizen and thus could not sue in federal court, that Congress could not stop slavery in

the emerging territories, and that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. Stephen A. Douglas (1813-61), an attorney and a U.S. representative and senator from Illinois, advocated a doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” arguing that the people of a territory should vote on whether or not to allow slavery there. Douglas promoted the Compromise of

1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Douglas continued to espouse popular sovereignty even after the Dred Scott decision. Debating with Abraham Lincoln during a U.S. senatorial campaign in 1858, for example, Douglas asserted that the territories could still enact selfdetermination via legislation about police power. He also accused Lincoln of advocating racial equality. Douglas defeated Lincoln for the

Senate seat, although the debates brought national prominence to Lincoln. Dictionary of American Biography, 5:397-403. On the debates, see David Zarefsky, Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public

Debate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

Notes 319 10. Josiah Clark Nott (1804—73), a physician and racial theorist who lived

in Mobile, Alabama, was best known for Types of Mankind (1854), coauthored with George Robins Gliddon (1809-57). Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), a Philadelphia physician and craniologist, provided the foundations for the polygenist American school of ethnology in works such as Crania americana (1839) and Crania aegyptiaca (1844). The latter volume was based on a collection of Egyptian skulls amassed by Gliddon, who served as U.S. vice consul in Cairo and later

delivered sensational lectures throughout the United States. The Flemish-born Charles Hamilton Smith (1776-1859) published The Natural History of the Human Species in 1851. See William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815-59

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); and, for texts, Bernasconi, American Theories of Polygenesis.

11. Josiah Clark Nott and George Robins Gliddon, Types of Mankind; or, Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo,

1854). In this tome, which was dedicated to the memory of Samuel George Morton, Nott and Gliddon collected all the evidence they could muster in support of polygenesis. They clearly asserted the permanent inferiority of a separate “Negro species.” Types of Mankind ap-

peared in at least nine editions before 1900. It was, as William Stanton notes, “a fighting book”; Stanton, Leopard’s Spots, 163.

12. Matt. 7:15-20: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that

bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” 13. Luke 2:13-14: “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” 14. Chief Justice Taney, in his opinion in Dred Scott, asserted that at the time of the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, people of African descent “had for more than a century

before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political

320 Notes relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit” (407). Taney’s opinion sustained these beliefs.

15. Matt. 7:12: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” 16. Douglass quotes from book 2 of William Cowper's eighteenth-century

antislavery poem The Task: “Lands intersected by a narrow frith / Abhor each other. Mountains interposed / Make enemies of nations, who had else / Like kindred drops been mingled into one.” 17. Matt. 12:25: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” Douglass’s contemporary, Abraham Lincoln, paraphrased this quotation in June 1858, when he accepted the nomination of Illinois Re-

publicans for a U.S. Senate seat. The divided house, in Lincoln’s parlance, was the “government” that was “half slave and half free.” 18. Douglass alludes to the story of the Creation in Gen. 1:1-31.

19. Ps. 139:14: “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

20. Douglass alludes to two verses from Acts: “[God] hath made of one

blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (17:26); and “God is no respecter of persons” (10:34). 21. Luke 2:14.

Appendix 6. “Whited Sepulchres,” by Anna Dickinson 1. Anna Dickinson and her brother John arrived in Salt Lake City on Saturday, 19 June 1869, in the company of the Committee on Ways and Means from the U.S. House of Representatives. The congressmen

continued on to California on Sunday, 20 June, but Dickinson and her brother remained in Salt Lake City until Wednesday morning, 23 June. Salt Lake City Deseret News, 21 and 23 June 1869; AED to Mary Edmondson Dickinson, 24 and 26 June 1869, both in AED Papers, con. 1, reel 1, frs. 600-614. 2. The title of Dickinson’s speech is an allusion to the words of Jesus in Matthew 23:27: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for

ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful

Notes 321 outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.”

3. Comte Agénor Etienne de Gasparin (1810-71) wrote, “I love the noise of free nations; I find in the very violence of their debates a proof of the earnestness of convictions”; Gasparin, The Uprising of a Great People: The United States in 1861, to Which Is Added a Word of Peace

on the Difference between England and the United States, trans. Mary L. ~ Booth (New York: Charles Scribner, 1862), 48.

4. Brigham Young (1801-77), a native of Vermont, converted to Mormonism in 1831 and was appointed to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1835. After the death of Joseph Smith in Illinois in 1844, Young organized and led the Mormon exodus to the West, arriving in the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847. He served as leader of church and state in the Mormon territory until his death. See, e.g., Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).

5. On 14 February 1870, Utah Territory would become the second U.S. territory—after Wyoming—to enfranchise women. 6. Tammany Hall was the headquarters of New York City’s Tammany So-

ciety, a benevolence and political organization that both aided the poor and immigrant population of the city and gained local political control through corruption. The group’s leaders usually coincided with the leadership of the local Democratic Party.

7. Sampson Avard purportedly established this secret organization in Missouri in 1838 to remove dissenters from the Mormon community; Edwin Brown Firmage and Richard Collin Mangrum, Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,

1830-1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 38-39. Official

church history denies the existence of the group; B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Cen-

tury I, 6 vols. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1965), 1:500-508. 8. A non-Mormon physician, J. King Robinson, was murdered in Salt Lake City on 22 October 1866, after being called out for what was purported to be a late-night medical emergency. A surgeon at nearby Fort Douglas, Robinson was married to a daughter of Mormon John M. Kay. Robinson was associated with anti-Mormon activists in the community and presided over the so-called Gentile Sunday school. He had been accused of claim-jumping. Roberts, Comprehensive History, 5: 194-206.

322 Notes 9. Rom. 12:19. 10. George Albert Smith (1817-75), a first cousin of Joseph Smith, served

as the church historian and recorder from 1854 until his death; Roberts, Comprehensive History, 3:482n.21. Smith delivered a “Historical Discourse” in the Salt Lake City tabernacle on the afternoon of 20 June 1869; Salt Lake City Deseret News, 21 June 1869. The text appears in the Salt Lake City Deseret News, 25 June 1869; an unidentified clipping of this text is among Anna Dickinson’s papers (AED Papers, con. 23, reel 23, frs. 440-41). 11. Matt. 7:20.

12. Heber C. Kimball (1801-68), a potter from Vermont, converted to Mormonism in 1832 and was appointed to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1835. In 1837-38 he led the first Mormon mission to Great Britain. He struggled in accepting Joseph Smith’s teachings on polygamy in the 1840s. His biographer numbers his connubial and | nonconnubial wives at forty-three. Seventeen of these women had children with Kimball; his offspring numbered twenty daughters and forty-five sons. Kimball, Heber C. kimball.

13. Dickinson and her brother traveled through Weber Canyon on the congressmen’s special train, and at Deseret they continued their journey with the congressmen by stagecoach. In letters to her mother in Philadelphia, Dickinson mentioned Horace Maynard (Rep., Tenn.), William D. Kelley (Rep., Penn.), and William Boyd Allison (Rep., Iowa). Allison, who, Dickinson said, was “spooney on somebody,”

proposed marriage to her during the summer of 1869. See AED to Mary Edmondson Dickinson, 24 and 26 June 1869, and AED to Susan Dickinson, 29 September 1869, all in AED Papers, con. 1, reel 1, frs. 600-614, 777-78; Chester, Embattled Maiden, 111-12. The Deseret News (21 June 1869) provided a list of the members of the party, the Committee on Ways and Means and their companions. 14. Around 11:00 P.M. on 19 June 1869, Captain Croxall’s Brass Band began serenading the members of the House Committee on Ways and Means, who were staying at the Townsend House; Salt Lake City Deseret News, 21 June 1869. Samuel Hooper (1808-75) was a Massachu-

setts Republican who had served in the U.S. House since 1861; Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to Congress, 4th ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1991), 77-B; Dictionary of American Biography, 9:203-4. 15. William Darrah Kelley (1814-90), a Philadelphia judge, was a Repub-

lican representative from 1861 until his death and was thought to be

Notes 323 the best orator among the Republican congressmen; Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to Congress, 86-B; Dictionary of American Biography,

10:299-300. Dickinson had campaigned for the Republicans in New England with Kelley in 1862. Kelley presided over a meeting of the Philadelphia Union League at which Dickinson spoke in mid-1862, and in July 1863 Kelley, Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass successfully appealed to African American men in Pennsylvania to take up arms for the Union, despite discriminatory enlistment policies. Kelley also signed the December 1863 letter that invited Dickinson to speak before Congress in January 1864. Chester, Embattled Maiden, 56-57, 68, 74-76; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 2:46-47; Kelley, Dickinson, and Douglass, Addresses. 16. The Deseret News (21 June 1869) quoted Kelley as saying: “Citizens,—

Being on our way to the Pacific coast, on business connected with the

government, which in this country means the people, and being so near to your city we felt that we would come and see a place of which we had heard so much. It is indeed a beautiful city, alike remarkable for location and scenery. After wagoning your way across the dreary

plains over twenty years ago, and alighting on this spot, I cannot wonder that it has become almost a holy land to you. The night being

too far advanced to make a speech, I will say, in the name of the Committee, that in all things tending to your future prosperity and to the glory of our common country you will find in me and the gentlemen traveling with me hearty co-operators.” 17. John Todd (1800-1873) spoke twice in the Salt Lake City tabernacle (not the temple) on Sunday, 20 June 1869. He delivered a sermon beginning at 10:00 A.M., taking as his text Ezra 3:10—13. In the afternoon Todd concluded another tabernacle service, during which Elder Jacob Gates had spoken briefly and then George A. Smith had delivered his “Historical Discourse.” The Deseret News (21 June 1869) reported that Todd said in his afternoon remarks that “he sympathized with the people in their past sufferings and present prosperity.” He also “earnestly exhorted all to look to Christ for redemption and salvation.” For scheduled times for Sunday services in the tabernacle, see Salt Lake City Deseret News, 19 June 1869.

Todd was pastor of the First Congregational Church in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; Dictionary of American Biography 18:572-73. He had de-

livered the invocation at the ceremony celebrating the laying of the last rails of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory, Utah, on 10 May 1869; New York Times, 11 May 1869. Todd had gained notoriety

324 Notes among woman’s rights advocates when he published Woman’s Rights

(Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1867), in which he argued, among other things, that woman’s sphere was the home and that women were physically incapable of intellectual training. Mary Abigail Dodge, under the pseudonym Gail Hamilton, published a response: Woman’s Wrongs: A Counter-Irritant (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868).

18. George D. Watt was the first man baptized as a result of the Mormon mission to Great Britain; Roberts, Comprehensive History, 6:103.

19. Schuyler Colfax (1823-85) served as vice president under Ulysses S. Grant. Colfax, a Republican congressman from Indiana from 1855 to

1869, was Speaker of the House from 1863 to 1869; Dictionary of American Biography, 4:297-98. Colfax visited Salt Lake City in October 1869. In a speech from the portico of the Townsend House on 5 October, he took the Mormons to task for their practice of polygamy. Mor-

mon elder John Taylor, who would become president of the church upon the death of Brigham Young, responded to Colfax in the pages of the New York Tribune; Colfax’s rejoinder was published in the New York Independent. These three texts, with an additional response by Taylor, were published as a pamphlet: The Mormon Question (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret News Office, 1870). 20. Dickinson here refers to the sensational Richardson-McFarland case. On 25 November 1869, New York Tribune journalist Albert Richardson was fatally shot by Daniel McFarland, the estranged husband of Abby

Sage McFarland, a woman whom Richardson planned to marry. Abused by her drunken husband, Abby had moved to Indiana in order to meet the one-year residency requirement to secure a divorce in that state. She returned to New York in November 1869, believing herself to be divorced from Daniel McFarland. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher married Richardson and Abby McFarland on Richardson’s deathbed, and Beecher was roundly censured for performing the ceremony, especially since New York did not recognize the divorce obtained in Indiana. In 1870 an all-male New York jury found Daniel McFarland not guilty of Richardson’s murder owing to insanity. At a protest of the McFarland verdict organized by the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that the chief problem in marriage was “the husband’s right of property in his wile.” See, e.g., Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1998), 203-8, 216. Varying views on the RichardsonMcFarland case further demarcated the split between Stanton and

Notes 325 Anthony’s NWSA in New York and the Boston-based American Woman Suffrage Association of Lucy Stone, which had parted company earlier in 1869. Dickinson in this passage rhetorically casts her lot with the NWSA. 21. Horace Bushnell (1802-76) was a native of Connecticut and a Congregational minister; Dictionary of American Biography, 3:350-54. He had recently published Women’s Suffrage: The Reform against Nature (New York: Charles Scribner, 1869), in which he argued that granting

the franchise to women would “make a final wreck of our public virtue” and would bring about the demise of U.S. civilization (31). He

also stated that “all women alike are made to be married, whether they are or not” (71). 22. Dickinson alludes to the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matt. 6:19-21). 23. On 5 August 1869 Dickinson wrote to her mother from Santa Cruz, California, describing her adventures in the Yosemite Valley. See AED to Mary Edmondson Dickinson, 5 August 1869, in AED Papers, con. I, reel 1, irs. 690-91]. A transcription of excerpts appears in appendix 8.

24. Dickinson’s preparation text for this speech, as well as the 5 August letter to her mother, give the name of the falls as Vernal. See “Mormonism,” in AED Papers, con. 15, reel 17, fr. 524; and AED to Mary Edmondson Dickinson, 5 August 1869, in AED Papers, con. 1, reel 1, fr. 690. Stenographer James Slade probably misheard “Vernal” as “Birney.”

25. This interior monologue contains multiple allusions to scripture, e.g.: “And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig tree” (Isa. 34:4). “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the

which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up” (2 Pet. 3:10). “And I saw, and be-

hold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer”

326 Notes (Rev. 6:2). “The spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life” (Job 33.4). 26. Again, Dickinson combines several scriptural allusions: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Gen. 1.27). “For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour” (Ps. 8.5); “Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hands” (Heb. 2:7). “Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown” (Rev. 3:11).

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BLANK PAGE

Index abolition, 29; and Dickinson, 147, 148; American Literary Bureau, 39, 40, 191

and Douglass, 115, 116, 118, American Lyceum, 5; Branch Number

126-28, 129, 142; and literary 1,5, 14, 20, 170, 191; history of, 20,

societies, 31, 32. See also antislavery; 191, 265n.19, 266n.23. See also

Garrison; Phillips; Weld Millbury Lyceum accumulatio, 158 American Lyceum (Bode), 12, 15, 33

Adams, Horatio, 268n.41 American social order, 173-74

Adelphic Union for the Promotion of American Victorians, 58 Literature and Science, 30, 32 American Woman Suffrage Association,

Afric-American Female Intelligence 325n.20

Society, 31 Amherst, Massachusetts, 289n.19

African American(s), 61; audiences, 34; Amherst College, 289n.19, 293n.46;

lecturers, 113, 119; literary societies, alumni, 84, 90 30-31, 32; lyceums, 26, 30-32, 34, analogy, 69 60, 118, 176-77, 268n.42. See also androgyne, 170, 313n.47 specific individuals by name; race; Anthony, Susan B., 34, 37, 42, 155

slavery anthropomorphism, 56, 184

Agassiz, Louis, 36 anti-Mormon discourse, 146, 152-54,

agricultural fair, 14-15 160, 162-65

Albany, New York, 153 antislavery, 272n.81, 297n.90, Alber, Louis J., 276n.108 320nn.16,18. See also abolition; Alcott, Amos Bronson, 21 Douglass, Frederick; slavery

Alfred (king), 59 Apollo Lyceus, 3, 22

Alger, Horatio, 74 apparatus (Holbrook): arithmometer,

allegory, 64 51, 175; defined, 277n.3; sales of,

Allen, Thomas, 285n.70 175, 277n.3, 285n.70. See also Family Allison, William Boyd, 151, 251, Lyceum

311n.24, 322n.13 Aristotle, 185, 258n.8, 290n.23

allusion, 185, 302n.44; Dickinson’s, arithmometer, 51, 175. See also

153, 320n.2, 325-—26nn.22,25-26; apparatus — Douglass’s, 125, 302n.44, 317n.1, “Assassination and Its Lessons”

318n.6, 320nn.18,20 (Douglass), 111, 119, 129, 136

Alta California (newspaper), 229 assimilation, 66-67, 86, 114, 178

Alton, Illinois, 286n.1 Associated Western Literary Societies

“American” (and “Americanness”): (AWLS), 39, 82, 119, 191, 274n.90 culture, 46, 173, 186; Douglass on, “Associations of Adults for Mutual

114, 136, 139, 140-42; identity, 6, Education” (Holbrook), 15, 17, 191,

7-8, 12, 59-60, 139; and lyceum, 193-96

186; model, 57; New England as, Athenaeum of Natchez, Mississippi,

185; and YMA, 86 263n.3

American Annals of Education, 21, 26,33 Athens, Greece, 3, 185, 258n.8 American Colonization Society, 60, Atlantic Monthly (magazine), 173

280n.30 audience(s): African American, 34;

American Journal of Education, 4, 5, 15, behaviors, 100; for celebrity, 95, 99,

18, 20-21, 25, 36 110, 175, 186; composition, 34—38;

“American Lecture System, The” described by Dickinson, 1; Family

(Higginson), 173-74 Lyceum, 57-63, 65; hissing by,

35]

352 Index 310n.11; judged lectures, 86-87, Bloomington, Illinois, 286n.1 90-102, 186; lyceum, 25-26, 34-38, — Bode, Carl, 3, 5, 44, 264n.6, 278n.7;

176-78; and mutual education, 77, American Lyceum, 12, 15, 33

177, 260n.18; “popular,” 96; Bolton, Curtis, 229, 243 promiscuous, 293n.51; YMA Bonneau Library Society, 30

Milwaukee, 83, 86-87, 89, 95-102. “Book of Nature” series, 55, 72, 75,

See also Dickinson, Anna E.; 284n.60, 285n.65

Douglass, Frederick; judgment Boston, Massachusetts: lyceum

Austin, Texas, 21 bureaus, 39-40, 119-20, 191,

Avard, Sampson, 321n.7 260n.18; lyceums, 11, 21, 26, 30, AWLS. See Associated Western Literary 31, 33, 60; as model, 58;

Societies newspapers, 151, 152, 155, 160,

, 162, 311n.25; publishers, 10, 33;

316n.10 Lyceum

Bacon, Francis, 55, 67, 178-79, 184, suffrage in, 325n.20. See also Family

Bacon, Roger, 59 Boston Advertiser (newspaper), 151

Bailey, Frederick. See Douglass, Boston Journal (newspaper), 160

Frederick Boston Lyceum Bureau, 39-40,

Ball, Nehemiah, 41, 174, 275n.95 119-20,191

Baltimore, Maryland, 30-31, 115, Boston Mutual Lyceum, 60

lyceums 311n.25

118-19. See also Douglass, Frederick; Boston News (newspaper), 152, 155,

Banneker, Benjamin, 132-33, 134, Boston Sunday Times (newspaper), 162

304nn.62-63 Boston Zion's Herald (newspaper), 152 Barnum, P. T., 39 Braden, Waldo W., 272n.73

Barber, Lucius, 80 Bourdieu, Pierre, 52

84 170, 191

Bartlett, John K., 289nn.17-18; at Yale, | Branch Number | (Millbury), 5, 14, 20,

Barton, Clara, 39, 43, 144 Bremer, Fredrika, 286n.3

Becker, Carl Lotus, 315n.8 Brigham, Jerome Ripley, 38, 287n.7; at

Beecher, Henry Ward: audience of, 99, Amherst, 289n.19; death of, 84,

177; boycotted, 37; censured, 290n.19; early years of, 84; fees of, 324n.20; criticized, 99, 103, 39; and letters from Ward about

297n.91; described, 134, 295n.74: lecturers, 91-93, 95, 101, 109,

“forty-parson power” of, 95, 294n.54; marriage to Mary Ilsley,

293n.48; lectures by, 1, 41, 97, 99, 84; photographs of, 85, 289n.19;

102, 103, 204; on Milwaukee, religion of, 84; scheduled lectures,

290n.22; morality publications of, 82, 292n.34; as YMA president, 264n.10; on naturalization, 297n.91; 78-79, 84 religion of, 90; reputation of, 99; Brigham, Mary Ilsley, 84, 289n.19 tour manager of, 37, 273n.84, Brighton, Massachusetts, 19

292nn.34,42,44 “Brotherhood of Man, The” (Douglass),

Beecher Stowe, Harriet, 134, 305n.70 123. See also “Races” Bellows, Henry W., 90, 100, 179, 205 Brougham, Henry, 278n.7

Benjamin, Walter, 263n.33 Brown, David Paul, 204; audiences of,

Berea, Ohio, 27, 19] 98; criticized, 100-101, 104,

304n.59 97

Bingham, Caleb, 115, 120, 124, 295n.68; lawyer, 90, 104; topics of, Blackwell, Antoinette Brown, 37 Brown, John, 129, 134

Blair, Hugh, 15, 52, 277n.5 Brown Blackwell, Antoinette, 37

Blassingame, John, 118 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 247,

Blight, David W., 303n.58 315n.69

Index 353 Brownlow, William, 42 Cincinnati, Ohio, 1, 21, 42, 93, 119,

Brownson, Orestes, | 122, 144, 273n.88

Brownsville, Texas, 21 Cincinnati Commercial (newspaper), 119 Brown University, 90 Civil War, 191; affected lyceums, 42,

Buffalo, New York, 31 43: African Americans in, 323n.15; Burdette, Robert J., 34 Dickinson on, 36, 147; Douglass on, bureau(s), 39-40, 78. See also American 306n.88; and women’s rhetoric, 36, Literary Bureau; Associated Western 308n.4 Literary Societies; Redpath Lyceum “Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically

Bureau; Wells, E. S. Considered” (Douglass), 123, 126,

Burke, Kenneth, 2 128, 137, 302n.37

Burritt, Elihu, 132 Clark, Thomas M., 90, 97, 98, 205, Bushnell, Horace, 164, 325n.21; 293n.47

Dickinson on, 230, 231, 243, 244, class, 2, 4, 5, 59, 80, 176

247 Claxton, Timothy, 277n.3

Butler, Benjamin, 39 Clay, Henry, 69-70, 317n.2

Buttrick, Edwin L., 84, 289n.18 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne. See Twain Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 147 Cleopatra, 54, 61 Cleveland, Ohio, 21, 35, 78, 82, 154

Cadiz Sentinel (newspaper), 304n.63 Coffin, Charles C., 44 Cady Stanton, Elizabeth, 37, 129, 144, Colfax, Schuyler, 42, 151, 229, 324n.19

155, 324-25n.20 Collyer, Robert, 42

Calhoun, John C., 69, 317n.2 Colonizationist, 280n.30 California, 21; Dickinson in, 11, Columbian Orator, The (Bingham), 115,

150-51, 158, 254-55, 311n.25, 120, 124, 304n.59

313n.48. See also “Mormonism”; Columbus, Christopher, 41, 54

“Whited Sepulchres” Columbus, Ohio, 35, 68, 93, 144

Campbell, John Angus, 262n.31 comedy. See humor

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, 8 “common sense,” 125-28, 134, 140-41,

Carey, James W., 261n.24 187

Catholic Institute, 288n.10 communication: ritual, 261n.24; celebrity: audiences for, 95, 99, 110, transmission model of, 184, 187. See 175, 186; culture of, 14, 40, 95, 103, also lecture; lyceum; print media;

180; Dickinson as, 1, 11, 142, rhetoric; telegraph

147-52; Douglass as, 113, 119, 121, Concord, Massachusetts, 1, 21, 22 188; incomes, 2~3, 40, 46; lyceum as Concord Lyceum: audiences, 25; fees,

forum for, 26, 46, 94, 102; 22, 40; founding of, 21, 267n.30;

production of, 102, 110; reputations, lecturers at, 41, 272n.72; male

36-38, 89, 90-92, 97, 111, 186 members of, 24, 267n.30; meeting

Chapin, Edwin Hubbell, 90, 102, 109, sites, 22; membership, 21, 25; music

205, 296nn.73-74 in, 41; Phillips spoke at, 29,

Charleston, South Carolina, 30 271n.62; topics heard at, 28, 29, Charlestown Chronicle (Massachusetts, 268n.41, 269n.47

newspaper), 155 Condit, Celeste, 262n.30

Chautauqua Institution, 10, 191 constitutive rhetoric, 14, 17, 47, 178, chautauqua movement, 10, 44—45, 189; as creative public practice, 184,

191, 276n.108 187; defined, 2, 7, 316-17n.14; in

Chicago, Ulinois, 78, 79, 286n.1; “Whited Sepulchres,” 146, 162, 165; lyceum bureau, 40, 82, 93; lyceums, and YMA leadership, 92 21; railroads, 80, 191; YMA, 286n.2. — controversiae, 270n.51

See also railroads; Ward controversy, 19, 27; Dickinson on

Cicero, 22, 54, 120, 176 women’s, 183, 245; and lyceum, 5,

354 Index 14, 106, 119, 138; managing, 46-47, democracy, 17, 18, 19, 263n.1. See also

66, 69, 107, 111; as public education; franchise

entertainment, 41-44, 148; Roman, Democrats, 69, 321n.6

270n.51 Demosthenes, 22, 204

conversation, and knowledge, 50, 58, Demosthenian Institute, 30

62, 65-66, 68 Deseret, Utah, 253-54, 322n.13;

Conwell, Russell, 40 newspaper, 311n.5, 323nn.16-17

Cornish, Samuel E., 31 Detroit, Michigan, 39, 78, 82, 263n.3, Cowper, William, 126, 320n.16 274n.90

Cox, S. S., 93 Detroit Lyceum, 263n.3

critique, 11, 14, 143, 144, 146, 164 Dickens, Charles, 43 Crocker, Hans, 80, 287n.5, 289n.17 Dickinson, Anna E. (personal life), 145,

Crogman, William Henry, 122-23 315n.68; and Allison, 151, 251, culture: “American,” 46, 138; of 311n.24, 322n.13; born, 143; celebrity, 14, 40, 95, 103, 180; education, 147; family, 147, 152-55; defined, 257n.2; and democracy, jobs, 147; Quaker, 147, 152, 171. See

263n.1; elitist, 6, 86; and also Dickinson, Anna E.: professional entertainment, 17, 260n.17; lecturer; rhetoric and style; Salt Lake lyceums controlled, 44-47, 76, 110, City visit; travels; works 176, 177, 186; lyceums made, 8-12, Dickinson, Anna E. (professional

13-14, 86, 177; mass, 7; New lecturer): and abolition, 147, 148; as England, 7-8, 12; and norms, 7-8, assimilationist, 178; audiences of,

12, 51-52; public, 6-8; and 148, 149, 177-78, 310n.11; as

rhetorical practice, 6; of westward celebrity, 1, 11, 142, 147-52; and

expansion, 35, 86. See also Civil War, 36, 147; congressional constitutive rhetoric; lyceum; New speech of, 148, 323n.15; on

England “contentment,” 166, 232, 233,

Cummins, Judge, 25 234-35; and controversy, 183, 245; Curry, Leonard, 32 criticized, 154-55, 160, 169; Curtin, Andrew, 148 descriptions of, 148-49, 167, 180,

Curtis, Anna, 40 183, 188, 238, 253-55; and Curtis, George William, 37, 41, 44, 82, entertainment, 183; errors by, 162; 247, 315n.69 extant texts of, 11, 151, 160, 169, 221-38, 239-50; at Franklin

Daggett, O. A., 93 Lyceum, 144; and gender norms,

Davenport, Iowa, 4, 21, 25, 28 142, 148, 159-60, 165; as Davenport Lyceum, 4, 21, 28 groundbreaking woman speaker, Davis, Paulina Wright, 310n.12 312n.34; heckled or hissed by

Davy, Humphrey, 54, 70 crowds, 148, 310n.11; income of,

Dayton, Ohio, 154, 161 40, 147-48, 150; on integration,

debate(s), 260n.18; clubs, 1; decision- 171, 306n.78; “lay pulpit” of, 41-42, making, 270n.53; Douglass’s, 115; 148; lecture tours by, 39, 42, 144,

history of, 27; intercollegiate, 147, 150, 154-55; in Massachusetts,

269n.46; 270n.53; lyceum, 2, 26, 312n.26; in Milwaukee, 111; moral 27-28, 47, 174, 270n.53; as process, tone of, 148, 310n.12; on Mormons,

270n.54; public, 2. See also 314n.53; on motherhood, 146,

controversy; rhetoric; suasoriae 168-69, 178, 236-38, 241, 243,

debating societies, 30, 33 248-50; performance style of, 149,

declamatio, 270n.51 159, 187; politics of, 36, 147-48,

De Cordova, Rafael J., 308n.3 150, 323n.15; on polygamy, 148; Delany, Martin R., 31, 118, 317n.4 popularity of, 144, 148-49, 154,

Delaware, 263n.3 172; praised, 149, 151, 152, 154-55,

Index 355 172, 311n.25, 314n.63; and print works; “Mormonism”; Salt Lake media, 148, 152, 154-55; Protestant City; “Whited Sepulchres” sermonic lectures of, 11, 152-54, Dickinson, Anna E. (travels): in 166, 183; as reformer, 144, 146-48, California, 11, 150-51, 158, 254-55,

152-54, 171-72; represents 311n.25, 313n.48; in Elko, 251-52;

womanhood, 154-55, 159, 165, described Utah, 221, 225, 227, 238, 167-68, 171; on Richardson- 239, 250, 251—55; on horseback, McFarland case, 324—25n.20; social 160, 250-54; in Kansas City, 1;

critiques by, 143, 144, 146, 164; letters to family, 1, 150, 157-59, sources used by, 162; success of, 251-55, 311nn.19,24, 313n.48, 144, 148, 154; and suffrage, 150, 322n.13, 325nn.23-24; in Missouri, 151, 325n.20; topics of, 5, 144, 148, 1; in Nevada, 150, 251-54, 315n.69;

150-52, 178: on women, 150: as travel narratives, 143, 144, 150-51, woman’s rights advocate, 11, 146, 157, 183, 252-55, 310n.16; in Utah, 150, 151. See also Dickinson, Anna 150-51, 311n.24, 320n.1, 322n.13; E.: personal life; rhetoric and style; in Yosemite, 158, 254-55, 313n.48. Salt Lake City visit; travels; works See also Dickinson, Anna E:: personal Dickinson, Anna E. (rhetoric and style): lite; professional lecturer; rhetoric

allusion used by, 153, 320n.2, | and style; Salt Lake City visit, works 325—-26nn.22,25-26; androgyne Dickinson, Anna E. (works): Flood

form used by, 170, 313n.47; Tide, i Ly Home Thrusts, Hd,

dialogues of, 149; eloquence of, 149; Hospital Life,” 147, Idiots and extant texts of, 11, 151, 160, 169, Women," 42; “Jeanne d’Arc," 148,

221-38, 239-50; imagery of, 159, 150, 310n.13, 313n.47,

; lyceum an221-38, guage sty Lo: ” “and Register, 311n.19; “Rights of, 146, 157-59, 239-50, Wrongs of Women,” 147; “To the

161-62: 1 d lancuage stvle Mormonism, 11, 239-50; A Ragged

314n.50; metaphors of, 156, 161, ”

Rescue,” 151; What Answer? 171; 221; moral tone of, 148, 310n.12; “Wh ” 11, 151, ited Sepulchres,”

performance style ot, 149, 159, 187; 221-38: “Words for the Hour,” 148. Protestant sermonic lectures of, 11, See also Dickinson, Anna E.: personal 152-54, 166, 183; rhetoric ol, 146, life; professional lecturer; rhetoric 153, 156-58, 160, 161-62; scripture and style; Salt Lake City visit; use by, 320n.2, 325—26nn.22,25-26; travels; “Mormonism”; Protestant transcendence of, 156, 166-70, 238, sermonic lecture; rhetoric; “Whited

250; travel narratives by, 143, 144, Sepulchres” 150-51, 183, 252-55, 310n.16. See Dickinson, John (brother of AED), 147;

also Dickinson, Anna E.: personal trips with sister Anna, 144, 150, lite; professional lecturer; Salt Lake 151, 251, 254, 320n.1, 322n.13

City visit; travels; works Dickinson, John (father of AED), 147

Dickinson, Anna E. (Salt Lake City Dickinson, Mary Edmondson (mother

visit), 150-51, 311n.24, 320n.1, of AED), 1, 147; letters to, 150, 322n.13; described the landscape, 157-58, 251-55, 311nn.19,24,

221, 225, 227, 238, 239, 250, 313n.48

251-55; described the people, Dickinson, Susan (sister of AED), 150,

224-26, 228-30, 233-35, 243; at 158

tabernacle, 228, 242; by rail, 144; Dietz, William, 132, 133, 134 Todd angered, 170-71, 231, 242, diffusion. See expansion; manifest 243; produced “Whited Sepulchres,” destiny; railroads 144. See also. See also Dickinson, diversity, 211-12 Anna E.: personal life; professional Dodge, Mary Abigail (pseud. Gail

lecturer; rhetoric and style; travels; Hamilton), 324n.17

356 Index Douglas, Stephen A., 214, 318n.9 130, 136; papers of, 120, 121; as Douglass, Anna Murray (wife of FD), performer, 122, 187; politics of, 137;

116 on popular lectures, 123-24, 136;

Douglass, Frederick (personal life), 117; popularity of, 43, 119; power of, assisted by Ruggles, 271n.66; born 116, 120-21, 122; praised, 122-23; as Frederick Bailey, 115; education, scripture used by, 302n.44, 317n.1,

115, 116; intelligence of, 116, 320nn.18,20; as self-made man,

304n.63; marriage of, 116; mixed- 130-31, 135, 141, 178, 183, race ancestry of, 304n.63; as self- 305n.75; self-reflection, 142, made man, 130-31, 135, 141, 178, 300n.25; on slavery, 11, 123, 125, 183, 305n.75; self-reflection, 142, 127, 133, 142, 302nn.37,44; 300n.25; as slave, 115-16, 118, 125, stereotypes used by, 127, 128, 131, 142. See also Douglass, Frederick: 141; themes of, 114, 115, 118,

professional editor; professional 136-39, 142, 178; on woman’s

lecturer; rhetoric and style; works rights, 118, 128. See also Douglass,

Douglass, Frederick (professional Frederick: personal life; professional editor), 116; newspapers published editor; rhetoric and style; works by, 118, 141-42. See also Douglass, Douglass, Frederick (rhetoric and style): Frederick: personal life; professional allusion of, 125, 302n.44, 317n.1,

lecturer; rhetoric and style; works 318n.6, 320nn.18,20; as Douglass, Frederick (professional assimilationist, 178; and “common lecturer): abolitionist, 115, 116, 118, sense,” 125, 126, 127, 128, 134, 126-29, 142; on African Americans, 140-41, 187; descriptions of, 120,

123, 126, 127, 128, 131: on 134, 180, 188; as educator, 115,

“Americanness,” 114, 136, 139, 123, 142; and hegemony, 141; 140-42; on antislavery, 320n.18; humor of, 122, 124, 140, 183, audiences of, 113, 118-19, 122, 305n.69; imagery of, 121, 133, 140,

123-24, 130, 177-78; 183; metaphors of, 129, 140; parody

autobiographies by, 116, 118, 125; used by, 301n.33; pedagogy of, 129; as celebrity, 113, 119, 121, 188; on as performer, 122, 187; rhetoric of, Civil War, 306n.88; and “common 116, 120-22, 124-25, 127, 132-35,

sense,” 125, 126, 127, 128, 134, 137-38, 140, 183; scripture used by, 140-41, 187; complimented Phillips, 302n.44, 317n.1, 320nn.18,20; 301n.27; critics of, 305n.69; debates stereotypes used by, 127, 128, 131,

by, 115; descriptions of, 120, 134, 141; themes of, 114, 115, 118, 180, 188; on diversity, 211-12; and 136-39, 142, 178. See also Douglass,

elites, 141; entertainment in Frederick: personal life; professional

lectures, 113, 123-24, 183; errors editor; professional lecturer; works by, 304n.62; on ethnology, 212, 215; Douglass, Frederick (works):

income of, 118, 120; inconsistent, “Assassination and Its Lessons,” 141; on integration, 132, 134-35, 111, 119, 129, 136; “Brotherhood 139, 306n.78; intelligence, 304n.63; of Man,” 123; “Claims of the on learning as freedom, 116, 128; Negro, Ethnologically Considered,” on learning’s value, 114, 129, 140; 123, 126, 128, 137, 302n.37; lecture topics of, 11, 37, 113-14, “Equal Rights for the Freedmen,” 116, 118-23; lecture tours by, 39, 119; “John Brown,” 120, 129, 42, 119, 120, 130, 220; letters to 301n.28; Life and Times of Frederick Kirk, 304n.63; letters to Redpath, Douglass, 118, 119, 121, 130; 124, 142; lyceum speaker, 118-19; “Mission of the War,” 128, 129, manager of, 119-20; on Mexico, 136; My Bondage and My Freedom, 214; in Milwaukee, 111; as model, 118; Narrative of the Life of Frederick 122-23, 130, 142; on moral courage, Douglass, 116, 118, 133; “On Some

Index 357 Dangers to the Republic,” 43, 119; with models, 50-52, 53, 57-58, 129; “Our Composite Nationality,” 11, and morality, 15, 17; and politics, 114, 119, 120, 135, 137-39; “Our 20; of poor, 277n.4; as practical

National Capital,” 120, 124; instruction, 32; public, 33, 49, 57,

“Pictures and Progress,” 124, 136, 121; and recitation, 66; reformers, 142; “The Races” (also known as 14, 15; Roman, 269n.51; textbooks,

“The Races of Men” and “The 285n.70; universal, 62-63; Brotherhood of Man”), 11, 114, utilitarian, 13, 283n.56; value of, 121, 123-28, 130, 138, 207-20; 114; in “Whited Sepulchres,” 146,

“Recollections of the Anti-Slavery 151-52, 167; women’s, 281n.34. See Conflict,” 120; “Santo Domingo,” also debate; Hall, Samuel Read; 120, 140; “Self-Made Men,” 11, Harvard University; Holbrook; 114, 119, 120, 121-22, 128, 129, learning; lyceum; mutual education;

130-36, 140, 220, 305n.64, science; Yale University

305n.75; “Sources of Danger to the _ Elgin, Illinois, 286n.1

Republic,” 136-37; “William the elites, 14, 15, 17, 19, 34, 134, 260n.17; Silent,” 119, 120, 129, 142. See also as lecturers, 93; wealth centers of, Douglass, Frederick: personal life; 79. See also culture; lecturers; professional editor; professional lyceum; Milwaukee; New England

lecturer; rhetoric and style Elizabeth J, 54, 61 Douglass, Sarah Mapps, 31 Elko, Nevada, 251-52

Douglass Institute, 118-19, 299n.14 elocution, 115, 120 Douglass’ Monthly (Douglass’s eloquence, 101-2, 120, 149, 182, 210,

newspaper), 118, 141-42 295—-96n.7 3-74

Downingtown, Pennsylvania, 24, 28 Emerson, Edward Bliss, 268n.41

Downingtown Lyceum, 24, 28, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 21, 36, 247;

267n.30, 269n.47 lectures by, 1, 29, 38, 39; in

“drawing in,” 101, 102, 108, 182, 186 Milwaukee, 82

“drawing out,” 101 empire. See expansion; manifest

Dred Scott case, 317-18nn.5,9, 319n.14 destiny; Nicholas J; railroads

Du Chaillu, Paul B., 43 enactment, 1, 86, 135, 175, 176, 246 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 135 “enchainment” of eloquence, 102, Dwight, Theodore W., 90, 93, 99, 105, 296nn.73-74

204 endoxa, 7, 187. See also knowledge England, 15, 278n.7

East Baltimore Mental Improvement Englishness, 59

Society, 115-16 entertainment: controversy as, 41-44;

Eastport, Maine, 25 and culture, 17, 260n.17; and

Edmondson Dickinson, Mary (mother Dickinson, 151-52, 183; and of AED), 1, 147; letters to, 150, Douglass, 113, 123-24, 183; and

157-58, 251-55, 311nn.19,24, education, 2, 3, 6, 94, 188; function

313n.48 of lyceum, 3, 40-41, 45, 174-75,

educare, 17, 264n.9 182, 188, 260n.17, 261n.24; lectures education: British, 278n.7; collective as, 40-41, 43, 94; and personal learning, 15-17, 18, 19-20, 27; income, 267n.32; as popular, 95. See continuing, 260n.18; democratic, also education; lyceum

264n.9; elitist, 17, 19; and epideictic (rhetoric), 185, 186, 290n.23 entertainment, 2, 3, 6, 94, 188; “Equal Rights for the Freedmen”

German, 268n.39; and lecture- (Douglass), 119

demonstration, 66, 68, 75, 184; and Erasmus, 54 lyceum ideals, 3-6, 15-19, 27, 33, ethnology, 126, 212, 215, 317n.3,

47, 175, 188, 260n.18, 261n.24; 319n.10

358 Index ethos, 86, 130, 170, 178, 186, 290n.23 knowledge in, 49, 71, 72; and

Euclid, Ohio, 1 women’s issues, 57, 61-62. See also

Euclid Lyceum, 4, 176, 270n.55 Holbrook; Light; New England Everett, Edward, 91, 275n.93 Family Lyceum articles and series:

Every Saturday (magazine), 259n.15 “anatomy extra,” 284n.64, 285n.70; expansion, 2, 11, 21, 35, 86, 106, 136, “Arts,” 53; biographies, 54, 61; 307n.1. See also manifest destiny; “Book of Nature,” 55, 72, 75,

railroads 284n.60, 285n.65; “Common

Things,” 53; “Geology,” 54, 66;

Fall, George L., 39 history, 69; “Insects,” 53, 61; Native

Family Lyceum (magazine): abolitionism Americans, 61, 280n.29: science, 50,

in, 280n.30; and African Americans, 53-55, 56, 61, 67-69, 75, 284n.64:

61; as “American,” 57; and “Self-Made Men,” 134; “School

anthropomorphism, 184; apparatus Globe,” 50-54, 57-59, 63-71, 72-74,

in, 51, 54, 63, 73-74, 277n.3, 179

285n.70; audience of, 57-63, 65, Family Magazine, 285n.70

; (OF mass Pera commen ne Federal Writers’ Project, 115

oon , ’ om Felton, Cornelius Conway, 90, 97, 98, _ ow oe 070 ane Female Literary Society, 30 and education, 90, 55, 61, 62, 67, 101, 109, 204, 293n.47 “experiments” in, 63, 66, 68, 75, Finley (lecturer), 267n.35 179; extracts printed in, 50, 53-54, ase, A Tones 43

56, 61; focus of, 49, 53, 55, 59; , feline

format of, 54; and general Flood Tide” (Dickinson), 111 knowledge, 68-72, 75; geology in, Flower, Frank, 83 50, 65, 69, 75; on Hall, 278n.11:; Forten, Charlotte, 1, 32, 113

humor and comedy in, 56, 62; Forten Purvis, Harriet, 31 Holbrook published, 10, 49, “forty-parson power,” 95, 293n.48 297n.86; human potential in, Foster, Stephen 5+, 2970.90

316n.9; on Humboldt, 282n.48; Foucault, Michel, 8, 18

illustrations, 50, 54, 61, 284n.64: franchise: bases of, 17-18; criticized, and knowledge, 178-79, 182, 184: 325n.21; Dickinson on, 168, 238,

language use in, 55; learning by 249; and disenfranchisement, 6; models in, 50-53, 55, 57, 61, 63, Douglass on, 303n.48; laws, 6, 176, 69-71, 74-75; and mental exercise, 260n.19; in Utah, 222, 240, 181: as model, 10, 57, 75-76; 311n.26, 321n.5; in Wisconsin, 107 mutual instruction in, 68, 75, 179; Franklin Lyceum (Providence, Rhode and norms, 75-76; origins of, 49-50, Island): closing of, 45; Dickinson at,

74; philanthropy in, 73, 74; and 144; fees, 24; founding of, 22;

politics, 70; public education focus lecturers at, 29, 42-43; meeting

of, 49, 57; quiz sections in, 55, sites, 22; membership, 24; music in,

66-67; and race, 57; recommended 41; topics heard at, 269n.47; women

by others, 279n.17, 283n.53; lecturers, 144

religious tone in, 57-58, 64, 71; as Frederick Douglass’ Paper (newspaper),

rhetorical representation of lyceum 118 vision, 49, 75, 184; on schools, Freeland, William, 115 278n.11; and “self-knowledge,” 75;

series in, 53; and slavery, 60; and Galaxy (magazine), 45 social roles, 61; style of, 52-57; and Galveston, Texas, 21 transmission of knowledge, 184; and Gardiner, Maine, 263n.3 “universal education,” 62—63:; useful Garnet, Henry Highland, 122

Index 359 Garrison, William Lloyd, 133, 134, 147; 90, 92, 97, 205, 291n.28; topics of,

abolitionist, 37, 116, 280n.30; on 105, 179, 205

Douglass, 120; lecture tours of, 32, Greenwood, Grace. See Lippincott

42 Grigg, William, 268n.41

Gasparin, Agénor Etienne de, Comte, Grimke, Francis J., 122 222, 240, 321n.3

Gates, Jacob, 323n.17 Hall, James A., 42 gender norms, 142, 148, 159-62, 165, Hall, Samuel Read, 55, 278n.11,

171. See also culture; Mormonism; 285nn.70, 73

New England; women Hall, Stuart, 8, 188, 261n.25, 301n.33, Gentile Sunday school, 321n.8 316n.14, 317n.16 geology, 26, 54, 55, 73, 181; in Family | Hallam, Anthony, 282n.48

Lyceum, 50, 65, 69, 75; in Hamilton, Gail. See Dodge Milwaukee, 94, 104, 179; Werner- Hamilton College, 90, 93

Hutton rock dispute, 66, Harnett, Stephen John, 263n.1

282-83n.48. See also Hitchcock Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 42, 43,

George IV, 1 113, 119, 144 George W. Light and Company, Harvard University, 277n.5, 284n.56; 279n.20, 280n.30 alumni, 90

Georgia, 67-68, 70 Hathaway, George, 40, 300n.20 Germany, 232, 268n.39 Hayes, Cecil B., 265n.19 Gilbert Lyceum, 31 “heavy Thunder, 92, 102, 295n.72 Gliddon, George Robins, 215, 317n.3, Hedge, William K., 268n.4]

319nn.10-11 hegemony, 52, 86, 141

Goddard, E. H., 93, 292n.38; lecture Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 5, 34,

receipts of, 97; lectures, 98, 105, , 3, 173-74, 189, 259n. 1 ?

505. 297n 82 Historical Discourse” (Smith), 323n.17

Godwin, Parke, 38; as editor, 90, Hitchcock, Edward, 90, 293nn.46,47, 102-3; popularity of, 98, 294n.64; Milwaukee, 97, 98, 99, 204; praised ticket sales, 97; topics of, 105-6, 203 104: topics of 94-95, 97, 98, 104,

Oe gf Joan Be 280) anda 179, 204; and visual aids, 94, 174 income of, 40; lecture tours by, 39, Hoelie, Oke Hh o74n.90 , 42, 89; in Milwaukee, 89, 90, 92, Hoffman, Edward, 41

97, 99, 101-2, 106, 204, 205, Holbrook, Josiah: 3, 4, 16, 170, 174, popularity of, 40, 99, 101-2, 119, 259n.12; apparatus of, 51, 175, 144, 295n.70; power of, 101-2; on 277n.3, 285n.70; “Associations of temperance, 89, 90, 101, 106, 107, Adults for Mutual Education,” 15, 179, 295n.70, 296n.81; topics of, 17, 191, 193-96; chastised, 285n.70; 134, 204, 205; works by, 44, 134, death of, 191; edited Family Lyceum,

179 49; education, 3, 15, 52, 191; and

Gould, George H., 97, 105, 205, education as entertainment, 94;

293n.47 | expenses of, 265n.20; metaphors of,

Graham, Sylvester, 36 297n.86; lyceum plan of, 32, 41, 55, Grand Rapids,5.,a n. Se264n.6, 59; lyceum promotion on by,Lyceum 3, 27, rant, Ulysses 265nn.19-—20; Great Salt Lake Valley, 157, 160, 161, Village, 27; and mutual-education

22] societies, 193-96; and republican

Greeley, Horace, 134, 150; on lyceums, 18, 19-20; and science, 67; Dickinson, 165; Douglass on, and Silliman, 281n.38; universal 305n.69; spoke in Milwaukee, 82, lyceum idea of, 94, 265n.19. See also

360 Index Boston; Family Lyceum; Millbury Jarvis, Edward, 268n.41

Lyceum “Jeanne d’Arc” (Dickinson), 148, 150,

Holland, Josiah G., 37, 39 310n.13, 313n.47

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 34-35, 36, 177 Jefferson, Thomas, 133, 134, 302n.44,

“Home Thrusts” (Dickinson), 111 305n.64

Hooper, Samuel, 227, 322n.14 Jesus, 73, 153, 156, 320n.2, 325n.22

Hopkinsville, Kentucky, 21 Joan of Arc, 148, 149. See also Horner, Charles Francis, 274n.92 Dickinson, Anna E.

horseback travel, 160, 254-55 “John Brown” (Douglass), 120, 129,

Hosmer, Cyrus, 268n.4] 301n.28

Hosmer, George Washington, 268n.41 Johnson, Andrew, 136, 259n.15

“Hospital Life” (Dickinson), 147 Johnson, Bishop, 229, 243

Houston, Texas, 21 Johnson, Nan, 313n.38 Howe, Daniel Walker, 18, 58 Johnson, Samuel, 122 Howe, Julia Ward, 42 Jonson, Ben, 59 Hoxie, Mr., 252, 254 Josephine, 54, 61

Humboldt, Alexander von, 282n.48 judgment: criteria for lecture quality, humor, 41, 45, 101; Douglass’s, 122, 78, 79, 86-88, 97, 103, 105, 108-11; 124, 140, 183, 305n.69; in Family of good popular lecture, 109-11,

Lyceum, 56, 62 177, 186; in newspapers, 87-88, Hutton, James, 66 86-87, 90-102. See also audience; Hutchinson, Nellie, 155 98-109; three stages of, 79; YMA, lecture; Milwaukee “Idiots and Women” (Dickinson), 42

llinois, 37, 38, 286n.1; lyceums, 93; Kansas, 21

railroads, 79, 80, 82, 191 Kay, John M., 321n.8

illustration: lantern slides, 1, 41, 174, Kelley, William Darrah, 251, 322n.13,

275n.95; woodcuts, 50, 54, 61, 94, 322—23nn.15-16 174, 284n.64. See also apparatus Kemble, Frances Anne (Fanny),

Ilsley, Charles FE, 289nn.17—-18; at Yale, 291n.28, 308n.4

84 Kennedy, George A., 258n.8

Ilsley Brigham, Mary, 84, 289n.19 Kentucky, 21, 56, 147, 262n.28, 317n.2 imagery: Dickinson’s, 159, 161-62; Kerber, Linda K., 281n.34 Douglass’s, 121, 133, 140, 183 Kett, Joseph F, 266n.21 immigrants, 137-38, 148, 150, 224, Kimball, Heber C., 162, 226, 241,

241 314n.51, 322n.12

Indiana, 37, 38, 324nn.19-—20 King, T. Starr: complimented, 106; instruction, 4—5, 15, 18, 32, 41, 43, criticized, 100, 109; as lyceum 61-63; and Family Lyceum, 50, 55, staple, 38, 121; in Milwaukee, 92, 66, 68, 181, 184; lyceum, 174-75; 203, 204; popularity of, 98, 99; and popular lectures, 110; public, 2, ticket sales, 97; Unitarian elite, 90; 17, 44, 142; and YMAs, 94. See also voice quality of, 108; works of, 93,

mutual education 100, 106, 121, 203, 204

integration: Dickinson on, 171, Kirk, Anne T., 304n.63

306n.78; Douglass on, 132, 134-35, knowledge, 188, 194; and Family

139, 306n.78 Lyceum, 178-79, 182, 184; general,

Iowa, 4, 21, 28, 37, 40 68-72, 75; and lyceums, 26, 27,

Ireland, 121, 214, 304n.59 181-82: of self, 75; transmission of,

Isocrates, 51 184; useful, 49, 71, 72 |

Know-Nothings, 107, 297n.91

Jackson, Andrew, 6, 69, 70, 191 Kohrs Campbell, Karlyn, 8

Jackson, William, 268n.41 Kossuth, Louis, 1, 132

Index 361 Ladies Literary and Dorcas Society, 30 personal experience, 143, 180; Ladies’ Magazine, 61, 279n.17, 283n.53 power of, 101-2, 182; religions of, Lake Tahoe, California and Nevada, 158 90; as rhetors, 91, 101-2, 108; role

Lampe, Gregory, 116, 120 of, 174-75; topics of, 43, 93-94,

Lapham, Increase, 80, 289n.17 174; and travel narratives, 104, 143;

lay pulpit, 41-42, 148 and weaving/shuttle metaphor,

learning: collective, 15-17, 18, 19-20, 174-75, 189; women as, 36, 119, 27; Douglass on, 114, 116, 128, 129, 143-44, 154, 290n.26. See also by 140; with Family Lyceum models, specific lecturer name; Brigham, 50-53, 55, 57, 61, 63, 69-71, 74-75; Jerome Ripley; bureau; Dickinson, as freedom, 116, 128; value of, 114, Anna E.; Douglass, Frederick; 129, 140. See also education; Family judgment; Milwaukee

Lyceum; knowledge Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres lecture(s): attendance, 32, 97, 98; (Blair), 52, 277n.5

audiences, 25-26, 34-38, 176-78; Lectures on School-Keeping (Hall), 55, 73,

circuits, 5, 13; commercial, 39-40, 285n.70

45, 175; content control, 78, 90-95; Lectures to Young Men, on Various

as entertainment, 40-41, 43, 94; Important Subjects (Beecher), 264n.10 “experimental,” 281n.38, 282n.46; Lefevre, George, 84, 289n.18 by experts, 179-80; extant versions Leff, Michael C., 9 of, 239; fees, 39, 40; forms of, 1], Levine, Lawrence, 94 109-10, 187; and hecklers, 25, Liberator (magazine), 31, 147

310n.11; judgment criteria for library, 82, 260n.18

quality of, 78, 79, 86-88, 97, 103, library associations, 1, 22, 30. See also

105, 108-11; and packaged tours, 7, Milwaukee 78; popular, 109-11, 123-24, 136; Library of Congress, 120, 121 Protestant sermonic, 11, 110, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass 152-54, 166, 183, 232-36; public, 2, (Douglass), 118, 119, 121, 130 13, 260n.18, 288n.10; rhetorical Light, George W., 272n.73, 279n.20,

evolution of, 175-86; as social 280n.30

function, 177; speaker invitations to, Lincoln, Abraham, 21, 129, 132, 134,

38, 291n.30, 294n.54; ticket prices, 148, 318n.9, 320n.17

34, 36-37, 175, 293n.47, Lincoln, Mary Todd, 148 294nn.55—56, 59-60; topics, 29, 43, Lincoln, Massachusetts, 21 93-94, 144, 153; versus recitation, Lincoln Lyceum, 21, 24, 267n.35,

281n.38, 282n.46; versus a speech, 270n.58

109, 110-11. See also bureau; debate; Linnaeus, Carolus, 54

Dickinson, Anna E.; Douglass, Lippincott, Sara Jane Clarke (pseud.

Frederick; lecturers; lyceum Grace Greenwood), 290n.26,

281n.38 literacy, 115

lecture-demonstration, 64, 66, 75, 184, 308nn. 3,4

lecturers, and presenters, 7; African literary societies, 38, 39, 260n.18,

American, 113, 119; agents, 37; 266n.21; African American, 30-31,

with celebrity reputations, 89, 32; debates in, 270n.53

90-92, 97, 111, 186; elite, 90-91, Littlejohn, Abram Newkirk, 90, 97, 98, 93, 177, 182; ethos of, 186; fees, 37, 105, 203, 294n.64

39-40, 95; invitations, 35, 38; Livermore, Mary Ashton Rice, 34, 42,

judged, 86-88, 97-109, 177, 182, 43, 144

185-86, 188; lists of, 37-41, 42, 119, Locke, John, 281n.41 120, 171, 197-202; as occupations, Logan, Olive, 34 36, 37, 90-91; as performers, 122, Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 259n.15 149, 159, 184, 187-88, 261n.24; of Lord, John, 41

362 Index Louisiana, 22, 29 evolution of, 76, 175-86; rhetorics

Louisville Journal (newspaper), 30 of, 184-87; ritualistic patterns in, Lowell, James Russell, 177, 204, 174; as schools, 26; science as root 259n.15, 294n.64; described, 90, of, 45; segregation in, 32, 119, 176; 297n.92; works of, 42, 105, 204 as social institution, 15, 18—20;

Lycaeum of Delaware, 263n.3 ticket costs, 45; universal, 265n.19,

Lycée, 3 278n.7; women members, 24, 26,

Lyceum (Aristotle’s), 3, 185, 258n.8 267n.35. See also American Lyceum;

Lyceum (magazine), 40 apparatus; bureau; culture; debate;

lyceum (term), 1, 3-5, 82, 365, 260n.18 Dickinson, Anna E.; Douglass, lyceum, the: activities, 2, 4, 5-6, 24-30, Frederick; education; entertainment;

33, 46, 181-83; advertising, Family Lyceum; Holbrook; lecture; 265n.20; African American, 26, lecturers; lyceums; Milwaukee;

30-32, 34, 60, 118, 176-77, performance; rhetoric

268n.42; and “Americanness,” 186; Lyceum and Library Society, 22, 29 audiences, 25—26, 34-38, 176-78: lyceum buildings, 21-22, 23, 45, 60, 70,

buildings, 21-22, 23, 45, 60, 70, 285n.73

285n.73; as celebrity forum, 26, 46, lyceum bureaus, 5. See also bureau 94, 102; as Christian, 19; and class, Lyceumite and Talent (magazine),

4: commercialism of, 2-3, 8, 38-41, 276n.108

42, 89-90, 110-11, 119, 175, 179; Lyceum of Natural History, 3-4

compared to chautauqua, 45, “lyceum practice,” 8-9, 183, 188

276n.108; constitutions, 24, 176, Lyceum Press, 279n.20

194-95, 207; controlled our culture, lyceums, regional, 4, 20-21, 266n.23;

44-47, 76, 176, 186; controversy’s California, 21; Delaware, 263n.3;

role in, 106, 138; costs, 74; Illinois, 21, 93; Indiana, 30, 38;

criticized, 26; as culture-making, 2, Iowa, 4, 21, 28: Kansas, 21; 8-12, 13-14, 86, 177; debates, 2, 26, Kentucky, 21; Louisiana, 22, 29; 27-28, 47, 174, 270n.53; decline of, Maine, 25, 263n.3; Maryland, 44-47; defined, 1, 3-7; early history 263n.3; Massachusetts, 14-15, of, 2, 3-9, 10, 14-30, 33, 266n.23, 19-22, 24-26, 60, 191, 263n.3, 272n.73; and education, 3-6, 15-19, 265n.21, 267n.35, 270n.58;

27, 33, 47, 175, 188, 260n.18, Michigan, 29, 33, 263n.3, 269n.48; 261n.24; and elites, 4, 32, 46, 176; Minnesota, 21, 45; Mississippi,

entertainment as function of, 3, 263n.3; Missouri, 21; Nebraska, 21; 40-41, 45, 174—75, 182, 188, New Hampshire, 118, 263n.3; New 260n.17, 261n.24; exchange York, 30, 31; Ohio, 1, 4, 21, 27, 42, programs, 73; fees paid by, 39; 93, 176, 270n.55; Pennsylvania, 24, German, 26, 268n.39; ideals, 15-20, 28, 30-31; Rhode Island, 22; Texas,

25, 32, 121, 278n.7, 285n.73; 21; Wisconsin, 21, 82, 89. See also invitations to speak, 35, 38; and Concord Lyceum; Downingtown

knowledge, 26, 27, 181-82; lectures, Lyceum; Franklin Lyceum; Lincoln 2, 5, 6-7, 10, 13, 26-30, 33-34; for Lyceum; Millbury Lyceum;

male members, 22-30, 76, 176, Milwaukee Lyceum; Salem Lyceum 267n.30; membership costs, 22-24; Lyceum Village, 27, 191 as movement, 15, 19, 21, 33;

mutual education in, 177; as MacAloon, John J., 261n.24 organization, 20, 260n.18; as Macmillan’s Magazine, 259n.15

phenomenon, 1; promotion of, Maine, 25, 263n.3

18-19, 20, 27, 177; as pulpit, 41-42; manifest destiny, 2, 11, 35,

reformers in, 41-44, 46-47; 318-19nn.7,9; Douglass’s use of,

regional, 4, 20-21; rhetorical 136; Taylor on, 106. See also railroads

Index 363 Mann, Horace: in Milwaukee, 82, 90, lawyers, 84; as lecture network 92, 97, 107-8, 204, 294n.64; topics node, 78; and lecture popularity

of, 105, 108, 204 criteria, 77-111, 177; lecture

Mapps Douglass, Sarah, 31 seasons, 78—90; lecture sites in, 95; marriage, 171, 233, 314n.51. See also lectures in, 10, 97-99, 105-8, 203-5,

“Mormonism”; polygamy 292nn.34,38,42, 295n.70; lyceums Marshall, Samuel, 289n.17 in, 11, 21, 185-86; newspapers, 78, Martin, Waldo E., Jr., 118, 123, 129, 87-88, 98-99, 177, 178-79;

130, 304n.63 population, 79; wealth of, 287n.5;

Maryland, 263n.3 YMA, 76, 78, 287n.6, 288n.10. See Maryland Institute, 263n.3 also by specific lecture season or

Massachusetts, 191; early, 14-15; newspaper name; Brigham, Jerome lyceums, 19-22, 24-26, 60, 263n.3, Ripley; Isley, Charles; Milwaukee 265n.21, 267n.35, 270n.58. See also Lyceum; Young Men’s Association of

by specific town name the City of Milwaukee Maynard, Horace, 251, 322n.13 Milwaukee American (newspaper), 100, McArthur, Arthur, 289n.17 108, 109

McClellan, George, 147 Milwaukee 1853-54 lecture season, 82, McFarland, Abby Sage, 324n.20 92 McFarland, Daniel, 151, 324n.20 Milwaukee 1854—55 lecture season, 88,

McGee, Michael Calvin, 261n.21, 90, 100, 104; Lecture Committee,

316n.14 84; lecturer expertise in, 90, 92-93;

Mead, David, 12, 42 newspaper critiques, 107-8;

Mechanics’ Institute, 4 radicalism, 106; schedule, 203-4; media, 265n.20, 279n.20. See also ticket sales, 83, 97-98

Milwaukee; New York City; print Milwaukee 1855-56 lecture season, 88,

media 90; Lecture Committee, 84; lecturer

Melville, Herman, 37, 273n.88 expertise in, 90, 92; radicalism, 106; Mercantile Library Association, 4 reviews, 99, 100-101, 103-5, 108-9;

Merian, Maria Sibylla, 62 schedule, 204—5; ticket sales, 97-98

metaphor(s), 297n.86; Dickinson’s, Milwaukee 1856-57 lecture season, 88, 156, 161, 221; Douglass’s, 129, 140; 90, 100, 101, 179; and celebrity Jecturers’, 174—75; railroad, 184; names, 89; and “drawing in,” 108;

weaving/shuttle, 189 Lecture Committee, 84, 94; lecturer

metonym, 133 expertise in, 90, 92; radicalism, 106; Metropolitan Literary Union, 292n.42 schedule, 205; ticket sales, 97-98

Mexico, 106, 191, 214, 232, 318n.7 Milwaukee Free Democrat (newspaper), Michigan, 29, 33, 37, 263n.3, 269n.48. 295n.68, 295n.73, 297nn.83,92; on

See also Detroit audiences, 95, 99, 100, 101, 102;

Milburn, William H., 109 debate with Mann, 107-8: on Millbury Lyceum (Massachusetts), 5, Phillips’s radicalism, 106, 108;

14-15, 20-21, 170, 191, 263n.3 reviews in, 104-5, 109; on rhetorical

Miller, Hugh, 132 power, 101-2

Miller, Lewis, 44 Milwaukee Lyceum, 21, 80. See also Miller W. Stewart, Maria, 31 Milwaukee; Young Men’s

Milton, John, 105 Association of the City of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 286n.1; Milwaukee

Beecher on, 290n.22; cemetery, Milwaukee News (newspaper), 98, 99

290n.19; described, 286n.3, Milwaukee Public Library, 82

290n.22; economy, 79; education in, Milwaukee Sentinel (newspaper),

80; elites, 76, 80, 177; and geology, 100-101, 290n.22; on audiences, 98, 94, 104, 179; history, 79-88, 81, 85; 100, 102; on Dickinson, 154, 164;

364 Index on Gough, 89, 98; on Phillips, 99, 177, 260n.18; and Family Lyceum's 109; reviews in, 104, 108; on Taylor, mutual instruction, 68, 75, 179: in

104, 297n.92 lyceums, 4, 177; societies, 5, 7, 15,

Milwaukee Sentinel and Gazette 17, 179, 181, 191, 193-96. See also

(newspaper), 179 education; knowledge; learning

Milwaukee Wisconsin (newspaper), 98, My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass),

99, 102, 297n.92, 316n.13; on 118

lecture quality, 103, 104; on Phillips’s radicalism, 106; reviews in, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

109 (Douglass), 116, 118, 133

Minerva Literary Association, 31 Natchez, Mississippi, 263n.3

Minnesota, 21, 45, 120 nationalism, 317n.2, 317n.4

“Mission of the War, The” (Douglass), National Woman Suffrage Association

128, 129, 136 (NWSA), 324n.20

Mississippi, 263n.3 Native Americans, 60, 61, 127, 139,

Missouri, I, 21, 321n.7 176, 232, 280n.29

mixed race, 133 nativism, 8, 138

modeling, as educational strategy, nature, as source of knowledge,

50-52, 53, 57-58, 129. See also 282n.44 Family Lyceum; learning Nebraska, 21

monogenesis, 123, 126, 128, 317n.4 Nevada, 150, 251-54, 315n.69 morality, 15, 17, 264n.10; Dickinson New Bedford, Massachusetts, 116 on, 148, 152-56, 162-64, 310n.12; Newburyport, Massachusetts, 25

Douglass on, 130, 136 Newburyport Herald (newspaper), 25

Mormonism, 321nn.4,7—8; and anti- New England, 21; as “American,” 185;

Mormon discourse, 146, 152-54, class values, 188-89; cultural norms, 160, 162-65; Dickinson on, 162, 47, 51, 57, 60, 70-71, 74, 76; 221-38, 239-50, 314n.53; Kimball culture, 7-8, 12; education in, 14; converted to, 322n.12; and Taylor, elites, 47, 75, 177; models, 189; and 324n.19; and Todd, 228; on women, the West, 86, 173-74. See also

230-31. See also “Mormonism”: culture; lyceum polygamy; Salt Lake City; Smith, New England Magazine, 42

Joseph; Todd; Utah; “Whited New Hampshire, 54, 68, 84, 118, 148,

Sepulchres’” 263n.3

“Mormonism” (Dickinson), 11; extant New National Era (Douglass's

text of, 239-50; “I” voice in, 239, newspaper), 118

242-43, 250; on marriage, 248-50; New Orleans, Louisiana, 1, 22, 29, 71 on motherhood, 241, 243, 248-50; New York (state), 18, 35, 73, 79, 80 on polygamy, 241-49; Salt Lake City New York City, 30, 39, 321n.6; lyceum

in, 239, 241-42; transcendence in, bureau, 40; newspapers, 148, 152, 250; as travel narrative, 193-96, 214, 290n.22, 324n.19; Ward 239-42, 250; Yosemite in, 250 Societies, 31. See also American Mormon Question, The, 324n.19 Literary Bureau; New York Tribune

Morse, Edward S., 43 New York Herald (newspaper), 148, 214 Morton, Samuel George, 126, 215, New York Independent (newspaper),

317n.3, 319nn.10-11 290n.22, 324n.19

motherhood, 168-69, 178, 236-38, New York Observer (newspaper), 214

241, 243, 248-50 New York Tribune (newspaper), 37, 151,

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 54 173, 273n.86, 290n.22,

mutual education: “Associations of 324nn.19-20; on Dickinson, 161; Adults for Mutual Education,” 15, editor, 134; lecturer list in, 37, 38, 17, 191, 193-96; and audiences, 77, 119, 171, 197-202

Index 365 Nicholas I, 214, 318n.8 152, 180-81; Douglass’s, 116, 125,

Noffsinger, John S., 266n.23 129, 140

norms. See culture; Family Lyceum; Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 51, 277n.4

gender norms; New England Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 30-31, 40 Northampton, Massachusetts, 25 Philadelphia Library Company of North Plato Philoglossian Society, 45 Colored Persons, 30 North Star (Douglass’s newspaper), 118 Philadelphia Union League, 323n.15 Northwestern Lecture Association, 39 philanthropy, 50, 52, 60, 61, 64, 69, 73,

Nott, Josiah Clark, 215, 317n.3, 196

319nn. 10-11 Phillips, Wendell: p abolitionist orator,

Novalis, 250 29, 32, 37, 90, 106; audiences of, nuclear family, 279n.24 99; complimented by Douglass, 301n.27; at Concord Lyceum,

O’Connell, Daniel, 121, 131-32, 271n.62: condemned U.S.

304n.59 institutions, 316n.13; criticized, 101,

O01 Pn “5 Dy 03 i ayceums, 180; described by Dickinson,

pee eB ey D1 BA A ’ 315n.69; lawyer, 90; lecture tours

270n.55. See also by specific town name by, 39, 42; oa Milwaukee 90. 99

Ohio Mechanics’ Institute, 42 101 106 1 80. 204: popularity of Old Northwest, 10, 11, 14, 33; defined, 144, 305n 66; power of. 10l: as

wautee into, 77. See also radical, 106-7; topics of, 180; works 4“oy of, 99, 101. Works: “Duty of

opouglass) 3. 119 Republic Thoughtful Men in a Republic,” 97,

137-39 ; , ; Philomathean “l | |” D Society, , , ,30

“ordeal of the gaslight,” 87, 290n.21 re rgeannt vO venae” 133

“Our Composite Nationality” 305n.66; “The War; i The Times °

(Douglass), 11, 114, 119, 120, 135, ee co

ee atona Capital” (Douglass), 120 Phoenix Society, 30, 31-32

oxymoron, 122, 175 “Pictures and Progress” (Douglass), 124, 136, 142

panic of 1837, 21, 191 Pierpont, John, 105, 203, 295n.64; panic of 1873, 10, 44, 150, 191, . described, 90, 102, 295n.74

267n.32 Pillsbury, Parker, 312n.33

paraphrase, 122, 320n.17 Pittman, John P.,, 114 —

Park, O., 287n.7 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 31

Parker, Theodore, 32, 42, 92 Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 14, 15

Paul, 73, 125, 204 Dickinson’s, 36, 147-48, 150, pedagogy, 109-10, 277n.4; Douglass’s, 323n.15; Douglass’s, 137; of race, 114, 129: Family Lyceum, 50-51, 54, 316n.15. See also Democrats;

63: Greek, 27 Republicans; Whig Party Philadelphia denounced, 162-64; Dickinson on,

Pennsylvania, 24, 26, 28, 31. See also polygamy, 322n.12, 324n.19;

performance, 122, 149, 159, 184, 148; as lecture topic, 43, 144, 153;

187-88, 261n.24 in “Mormonism,” 241-49; restricted

persona: Dickinson’s, 149, 153-56, 164, by law, 151, 226; as slavery, 153, 180, 188; Douglass’s, 123, 180, 188; 162; in “Whited Sepulchres,”

gendered, 167, 169. See also voice 153-54, 161-66, 225-27, 229-38 personal experience, 87, 92-93, 104, polygenesis, 123, 126, 128, 317n.3,

108, 111, 180; Dickinson’s, 143, 319nn.10-11

366 Index Pond, James Burton, 40, 43, 276n.104, “Races, The” (also known as “The

300n.20 Races of Men” and “The 152 11, 114, 121, 123-28, 130, 138,

popular lectures, 109-11, 123-24, 136, Brotherhood of Man”) (Douglass),

popular sovereignty, 318n.9 207-20

Porter, Dorothy, 30, 32 Ragged Register, A (Dickinson), 311n.19

Potowski Rose, Ernestine, 37 railroads, 268n.41; aided lyceums, 179;

Potter, David, 270n.53 building of, 35, 170-71, 191, Potter, Helen, 148-49, 295n.71 323n.17; Chicago, 80, 191;

Powell, E. P,, 42 Dickinson described, 251-53; and practical expansion, 80, 144, Prentice,instruction. George D.,See 30education 307n.1; metap Ors,ae184; Uta ,| oe 151, Prichard, James Cowles, 317n.4 R | tae tea See also Wisconsin

Princeton University, 90 and, Asa, 1O-

print media, 25, 173, 265n.20, Ravenna Democrat (newspaper), 314n.63

276n.105; criticized lectures, Ray, Charles B., 31

100-101; and Dickinson, 148, 152, Rey ran Swany, re anae

154-55; promoted lectures, 7, 20, cading KOOM Society, 35, 37, 87-88, 99-100, 177: reviews Ream Rene-Antoine Ferchault de,

P , , 11 ’

by, 97-109, 153; on womenitation, n. 66, 67, 281n.38, 282n.46 speakers, 148. See also byof specific rec aan aa , “Recollections the Anti-Slaver

magazine and newspaper name Conflict” (Douglass), 120 Y

roctor, Jenny, T)? Redpath, James, 39-40, 119-20, 124,

progymnasmata, 269n.51 142. 191

Protacoras of aueuence, 2 73n.>1 Redpath Lyceum Bureau, 40-42, 191,

6 a 259n.16, 260n.18, 275n.92; director,

Protestant sermonic lecture, 110; 274n.92: and Douglass, 119-20:

Dickinson s, 11, 152-54, 106, 183, fees, 120; lecturer list, 42, 120; and “Whited Sepulchres,” 146, 147, managed lecturers, 5, 39; sold by 132-54, 1606-71, 223, 225, 232-36 Redpath, 40, 191, 300n.20. See also Providence, Rhode Island, 1, 22, 24, 28, Hathaway; Pond

29, 2090.47 reformers, 8, 14, 15, 182, 188; in

public events, 7; as lectures, 2, 13, lyceums, 41-44, 46-47. See also 260n.18, 288n.10. See also debate; Dickinson, Anna E.; Douglass literary societies; lyceum Frederick

Purvis, Harriet Forten, 31 religion: and allusion, 302n.44; in

Purvis, Robert, 31 Family Lyceum, 57-58, 64, 71; |

a Protestant, 7-8, 19; and Protestant

Quarles, Benjamin, 32 sermonic lecture, 11, 110, 152-54, Quincy, Josiah, 90, 97, 98, 104, 203, 166, 183; and science, 284n.58. See

294n.64 also Jesus; Mormonism

Quincy, Massachusetts, 144, 146-47, Remond, Charles Lenox, 118, 119

151, 160, 169, 221-38 Remond, Sarah P., 119 Quintilian, 120, 176 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 284n.56

race: Douglass on, 302n.44; origin republicanism, 14, 18, 75, 106, 162 theories, 317nn.3—4, 319nn.10-11; republican motherhood, 281n.34

politics of, 316n.15; and rights, Republicans, 69, 148, 227, 320n.17,

319n.14; and whiteness, 57, 322n.14, 323n.15. See also Colfax; 279n.18. See also Dred Scott case; Kelley

Nott; “Races”; slavery “republican virtue,” 14

Index 367 Revolution (newspaper), 152, 312n.33 Rush Library and Debating Society, 30

Rhetoric (Aristotle), 185, 290n.23 Ruskin, John, 56 rhetoric: Bacon on, 316n.10; Civil War Russell, William, 15, 17, 21

impacted, 36, 308n.4; as Russia, 318n.8

constitutive, 189, 316-17n.14; and controversiae, 270n.51; as cultural Salem Lyceum (Massachusetts), 29, 32,

expression, 2, 7, 8-12, 187; culture 270n.58; Douglass at, 119; fees, 22, creation by, 86, 95; in Declaration of 24; founded, 21, 22; lecturers, 1, 43, Independence, 136; defined, 2, 187, 44, 144; sites, 22; women lecturers

257n.3; democratic, 95, 259n.13; at, 144

and “drawing in,” 101, 102, 108, Salt Lake City, Utah: Colfax visited, 182, 186; and “drawing out “ 101; 324n.19; in Dickinson’s lectures, duty of, 316n.11; and elite speaking 153, 157, 159, 162-63, 221, 225-26,

style, 91; and eloquence, 101-2, 229-30, 232; newspapers, 160, 149, 182, 296n.74; epideictic, 185, 311n.5, 323—24nn.16—-17; non-

186, 258n.8, 290n.23; fact-based, Mormons in, 321n.8; Townsend

143, 146, 152, 180; “heavy House in, 151, 164, 227, 322n.14,

Thunder” of, 92, 102, 295n.72; in 324n.19. See also Dickinson, Anna

lecture evolution, 175-86; of E.; “Mormonism”; railroads; U.S.

lecturers, 91, 101-2, 108; lyceum, Congress; “Whited Sepulchres” 47, 76, 175-86; and meaning, Salt Lake City Deseret News (newspaper),

188-89; as performance, 184, 311n.5, 323-24nn.16—-17

187-88; as phenomenon, |; and Salt Lake City tabernacle, 162, 164, power, 101-2; as public practice, 170, 228, 242, 322n.10, 323n.17 184, 187, 188; and suasoriae, Salt Lake Telegraph (newspaper), 160 270n.51; and synecdoche, 71, 87; Sandusky Commercial Register

transmits facts, 184. See also (newspaper), 38

controversy; debate; Dickinson, “Santo Domingo” (Douglass), 120, 140 Anna E.; Douglass, Frederick; Saxe, John G., 90, 92, 97, 100, 179, judgment; lecture; lecturers; lyceum; 205 “Mormonism”; public events; Schiappa, Edward, 257n.3 “Races”; “Whited Sepulchres” “School Globe, The,” 50, 52, 53, 57-59,

rhetorical criticism, 262n.31 63-71, 72-74, 179

Rhode Island, 22, 269n.47 science: education, 32; in Family

Richardson, Abby Sage McFarland, Lyceum, 50, 53-55, 56, 61, 67-69,

324n.20 75, 284n.64; and learning, 284n.65;

Richardson, Albert, 151, 324n.20 in lyceums, 45; magazines, 133, 134;

Rieser, Andrew, 8, 259n.13 and religion, 94, 95, 284n.58. See

“Rights and Wrongs of Women, The” also apparatus; ethnology; geology;

(Dickinson), 147 Holbrook; lyceum; Silliman

Ripley, Ezra, 268n.41 Scientific American (magazine), 133, 134 Robbins, William, 302n.44 Scott, Donald M., 7, 36, 265n.20 Robinson, J. King, 223-24, 321n.8 Scott, Robert L., 8, 261n.25; 316n.14 Robinson, James T., 95, 97, 98, 204, Seelye, H. E., 101

293n.47 segregation, 32, 119, 176

Rochester, New York, 30 “Self-Made Men” (Douglass), 114, 140, Rock, James Sweat, 113, 119 220, 305n.64; on centrality of

Rome, Italy, 28, 269n.51 African American life, 11, 122, 128, Rose, Ernestine Potowski, 37 129-30; delivered in Salem, 119; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 277n.4 imagery in, 133; metaphor in, 129;

Ruggles, David, 31, 271n.66 mixed-race audiences of, 122;

Rush, Christopher, 31 popularity of, 119, 120, 121, 128; on

368 Index self-improvement, 130—36; and stagecoach travel, 151, 157, 164, 165,

teaching and learning, 129, 135; 253-54, 322n.13

versions of, 133-34 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 37, 129, 144,

Semiramis, 61 155, 309n.6, 324—25n.20 Seneca (Elder), 28, 270n.51 Stanton, William, 319n.11

sermon. See lay pulpit; Protestant Stephens, Alexander H., 39

sermonic lecture. stereotypes, 231, 301n.33; Douglass’s, Seward, William H., 91-92 127, 128, 131, 141

Shakespeare, William, 42, 135, 147, Stevens, Sara, 308n.3 291n.28, metaphors 129, oat Maria Miller W., 303n.50;318n.6; popularity of, 94of, Stillwater, Minnesota, 45 31

Shaw, Anna Howard, 40 St. Louis, Missouri, 21, 286n.1 Sherman, William T., 134 Stone, Lucy, 290n.26, 325n.20 Silliman, Benjamin, 36, 66, 284n.57: Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 134, 305n.70 on science and religion, 94, 284n.58; S¥asoriae, 270n.51

at Yale, 4, 184, 281n.38 suffrage: associations, 150, 324—25n.20;

Slade, James, 325n.24 and Davis, 310n.12; debates, 42; and slavery: and Calhoun, 317n.2; Douglass Dickinson, 150, 151, 325n.20; and

on, 11, 123, 125, 127, 133, 142, Douglass, 129; Phillips on, 107-8; in 302nn.37,44; Douglass’s years in, Utah, 31 1n.26. See also Anthony; 11516, 118, 125, 142; and Dred Sumner, Charles 32, 42, 92, 259n.15

Scott case, 317—-18nn.5,9, 319n.14; ’ onan :

and Family Lyceum, 60; lectures on, same SE OTBE: > \ 77, 37 ; 80 205 27, 29, 42, 113; and literacy laws, SYBIOONS ATC SYMMONS, Ay fy Ce

polygamy

115: 153. 162: 257n.2; »; vol polygamy as, , ; Christian, 163 64; Salt Lake City,

; synecdoche, 71, 87

regional, 318n.7; Taney on, 319n.14. See also abolition; antislavery;

Smith, Charles Hamilton, 126, 317n.3, ny Hall, New York City, 222,

319n.10 | Taney, Roger B., 317n.5, 319n.14

Smith, Elizabeth Oakes Prince, 308n.3 Taylor, Bayard: as editor, 103; and

smith, George Albert, 224, 322n.10, manifest destiny, 106; in Milwaukee,

325n.17 90, 92, 97, 99, 106, 203; popularity

Smith, James McCune, 118, 119, 137 of, 38, 99, 294n.64; praised, 104,

Smith, John, 291n.34 297n.92; travel tales by, 99, 102,

Smith, Joseph, 104, 321n.4, . 104, 290n.22, 296n.78 322nn.10,12. See also Mormonism Taylor, John, 324n.19

Smith, Samuel Stanhope, 317n.4 Taylor’s Falls, Minnesota, 45

Smith, Winfield, 289n.17 telegraph, 35, 179, 191, 251, 253

social assimilation, 114, 178; of temperance, 40, 269n.47, 295n.70. See

difference, 139-41, 142, 179 also Gough

Society for the Acquirement and Tennessee, 38; Maynard of, 251, Dissemination of Useful Knowledge, 322n.13

263n.3 Tenney, Horace, 289n.17

Society for the Diffusion of Useful Terre Haute, Indiana, 30, 38

Knowledge, 263n.3, 278n.7 Texas, 21, 318n.7

Socrates, 54, 184, 204 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 1

Solomon, 54 Third Annual Convention for the “Sources of Danger to the Republic” Improvement of the Free People of (Douglass), 136-37 Colour, 31

Springfield, Illinois, 21, 286n.1 Thoreau, Henry David, 21

Index 369 Tilton, Theodore, 44 Waldstreicher, David, 7

Timmerman, David, 185 Ward, Samuel Dexter, 38, 101, 286n.2, Todd, John: Dickinson on, 228, 229, 292n.44; arranged Chicago lectures,

231, 242-43, 244; opposed to 82, 91-92; and audiences, 96; fees

Dickinson, 170-71, 188; spoke in of, 39; and “heavy Thunder,” 92, Utah, 164-65, 170, 323-—24n.17 295n.72; letters to Brigham about “To the Rescue” (Dickinson), 151 lecturers, 91-93, 95, 101, 109,

Tourgee, Albion W., 34 293n.54; as YMA officer, 79

Toussaint l’Ouverture, 132, 133 Ward Societies, 31

transcendence, 156, 166-70, 238, 250 Washington, Booker T., 40 transmission model of communication, Washington, D.C., 164

63, 184, 187. See also lyceum Washington, George, 275n.93 transportation. See horseback travel; Watkins Harper, Frances Ellen, 42, 43,

railroads; stagecoach travel 113, 119, 144

travel narratives, 104, 143. See Watt, George D., 229, 243, 324n.18 Dickinson, Anna E.; Taylor, Bayard; Waukegan, Illinois, 286n.1

Twain; “Mormonism”; “Whited Weaver, Richard L., I], 29, 269n.48

Sepulchres’” Webster, Daniel, 21, 317n.2

Truth, Sojourner, 119 Webster's Spelling-Book, 115 Twain, Mark, 39, 175, 277n.112 Weld, Theodore, 42

Tyson, Martha, 304n.63 Wells, Charles, 84

Wells, E. S., 37, 273n.84, 292nn.34,42,

universal lyceum, 265n.19, 278n.7 44

U.S. Congress, 151, 226, 320n.1, Welter, Barbara, 313n.38

322—23nn.13-16. See also Allison; Werner, Abraham Gottlob, 66

Hooper; Kelley; Maynard Western Reserve College, 121, 123 useful knowledge, 14, 15, 49, 71, 72, What Answer? (Dickinson), 171

194. See also Holbrook Whig Party, 30, 280n.30

Utah: landscape of, 151; Dickinson Whipper, William J., 31

criticized, 222, 240; Great Salt Lake White, James Boyd, 2 Valley, 157, 160, 161, 221; leaders, “Whited Sepulchres” (Dickinson),

164; as Mormon land, 223, 240; 309n.8, 312n.26, 314n.50; allusions

railroads, 151, 157, 323n.17; in, 153; androgyne form used by, statehood, 151, 311n.26; women’s 170, 313n.47; as anti-Mormon

vote in, 222, 240, 311-12n.26, discourse, 146, 152-54, 160,

321n.5. See also Dickinson, Anna E.; 162-63; audience of, 167; California

Salt Lake City; “Mormonism”; version of, 151; conflict in, 146; on

“Whited Sepulchres” “contented,” 166, 232, 233, 234-35;

utilitarianism, 13, 75, 188, 283n.56 as critique, 144, 146, 164;

death/decay and life/beauty in, 153,

Vandenhofi, George, 1, 41 156; educational aspects of, 146,

Van Dyke, John Henry, 289n.17 151-52, 167; entertainment aspects

Vermont, 321n.4, 322n.12 of, 151-52; and ethos, 146; extant Vincent, John Heyl, 44 text of, 11, 151, 160, 169, 22]-—38; voice (“I”): as Dickinson’s persona, 154, as eyewitness account, 146, 152;

155-56, 159-62, 165-66, 168; in factual errors in, 162; and franchise, “Mormonism,” 242-43, 250; in 168; gender norms in, 160-62, 165, “Whited Sepulchres,” 165-66, 168, 172; Great Salt Lake Valley in, 157,

221, 225-26, 238-39. See also 160, 161, 221; human scene in, 156,

persona 161-66; imagery in, 159, 161-62;

vote. See franchise language of, 146, 158-59, 160;

marriage in, 233; metaphors in, 156,

370 Index 161, 221; on morality, 152-56, women: antebellum expectations of, 162—64; on motherhood, 168—69, 313n.38; in audiences, 34; and 236-38; natural scene in, 146, 156, Dickinson's “representative” woman,

157-61, 166; and New England 154-56, 159, 165, 167-68, 171;

norms, 165; on polygamy, 153-54, discrimination against, 324n.17, 161-66, 225-27, 229-38; as popular 325nn.20-21; education of, 57, 61; lecture, 152; praised, 152, 154, 161; gender norms and, 142, 148, Quincy version of, 144, 146-47, 159-62, 165, 172; groundbreaking,

151, 160, 169, 221-38; 312n.34; importance of, 61; lyceum

representative woman in, 154—56, members, 24, 26, 267n.35; and 159, 165, 167-68, 171; rhetoric in, polygamy, 225-38; as lecturers, 36, 146, 153, 157, 162; Salt Lake City 119, 143-44, 154, 290n.26; in, 157, 159, 162, 163, 221, 225-26, subordination of, 143-44, 162,

230, 232; sermonic nature of, 163-64, 229, 244; white, 34. See also 146-47, 152-54, 166-71, 223, 225, African American; Dickinson, Anna 232-36; and social reform, 146-47, E.; Family Lyceum; franchise; lecture; 153-54; sources of, 143, 144, 153, lecturers; polygamy; suffrage; 157, 162; themes in, 146, 153, 163, “Mormonism”; “Whited Sepulchres”

229, 232, 236; title source, 153, 221; Women’s Suffrage (Bushnell), 164, 247,

Todd figure in, 171; Valley of the 325n.21 Great Salt Lake in, 167, 221; Woodbridge, William C., 21

transcendence in, 156, 166-70, 238; | Worcester, Massachusetts, 18, 25, 164,

as travel narrative, 146, 151, 152, 265n.21

157-63, 167, 221, 225; voice (“I”) Worcester Spy (newspaper), 164

in, 154, 155-56, 159-62, 165-66, “Words for the Hour” (Dickinson), 148 168, 221, 225-26, 238; on women, Wordsworth, William, 134 144, 146, 162-72, 229-38; Yosemite Wyoming, 321n.5 Valley in, 157-58, 161, 166-67, 238, 325nn.23-24. See also“Mormonism” Yale Reports, 90, 283n.56

whiteness, 34, 57, 279n.18. See also Yale University: alumni, 84, 170; Blair’s Dickinson, Anna E.; race; slavery Lectures at, 52, 277n.5; Holbrook at,

Whitman, Bernard, 268n.41 3, 15, 52, 191; science at, 283n.56; Whittier, John Greenleaf, 134 Silliman at, 4, 184, 281n.38 Williams, Peter, 31 Yankee Eloquence in the Middle West Williams Lecture and Musical Bureau, (Mead), 12

40 YMA. See Chicago; Milwaukee; Young

William the Silent, 129 Men’s Association of the City of

“William the Silent” (Douglass), 119, Chicago; Young Men’s Association of

120, 129, 142 the City of Milwaukee

Wisconsin, 11, 38, 79, 80, 82, 89, 98. YMCA. See Young Men’s Christian

See also Milwaukee Association

Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, 263n.3 Yosemite Valley, California, 254—55; in

woman’s rights, 37, 150, 290n.26, “Mormonism,” 250; in “Whited

309n.8. See also Anthony; Dickinson, Sepulchres,” 157-58, 161, 166-67,

Anna E.; Douglass, Frederick; 238, 325nn.23-24 franchise; Rose; Stanton Youmans, Edward L., 44

Woman's Rights (Todd), 164-65, 171, Young, Ann Eliza, 43, 276n.104

324n.17 Young, Brigham, 43, 321n.4; as evil

Woman Suffrage Association, 150 figure in “Mormonism,” 240; as evil woman suffrage associations, 150, figure in “Whited Sepulchres,” 153,

324—25n.20 162, 222-23, 229, 312n.33; power

Woman's Wrongs (Dodge), 324n.17 of, 224

Index 37] Young Ladies Literary Society, 31 and rhetoric evolution, 185;

Young Men’s Association, 4 supported by newspapers, 87-88,

Young Men’s Association of the City of 99-110, 296n.75; president, 78, 88;

Chicago (YMA), 38, 286n.2, and print media, 177; purpose of,

292n.42 82, 88; and ticket sales, 83, 96-98,

Young Men’s Association of the City of 290n.25; women members, 83; Milwaukee (YMA), 10, 38, 287n.6, woinen presenters sponsored by, 288n.10, 289n.17; Americanism of, 308n.3. See also Associated Western

86; attendance, 97, 98, 110; Literary Societies; Brigham, Jerome audience of, 83, 86-87, 89, 95-102; Ripley; judgment; Milwaukee; commercialism of, 89-90, 110-11, Milwaukee lecture seasons; 119, 175; controlled cultural values, Milwaukee Lyceum; rhetoric; Ward 110, 177; Dickinson at, 111, 164; Young Men’s Christian Association Douglass at, 111, 119; and education (YMCA), 287n.6, 288n.10 versus entertainment, 94; elites and, | Young Men’s Library Association, 40 83-84, 89, 90, 177; famous lecturers Young Men’s Literary and Moral

at, 90-91, 97-102, 180; fees, 83, 95; Reform Society of the City of

history of, 78, 80, 82, 83, 88-89; Pittsburgh and Vicinity, 31 income of, 96; and judgment of Young Men’s Lyceum, 21 lecture quality, 86-87, 90-102; Young Men’s Mental Improvement Lecture Committee, 84, 86-88, Society for the Discussion of Moral 90-95; lectures sponsored by, 10, 76, and Philosophical Questions of All

78, 82, 86, 88-90, 92, 109, 203-5; Kinds, 30

library of, 82, 86, 95, 175; male Young Men’s Mercantile Library members, 83; membership, 83, 84; Association, 1

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