The Passionate Empiricist : The Eloquence of John Quincy Adams in the Service of Science [1 ed.] 9780791477137, 9780791476994

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The Passionate Empiricist

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The Passionate Empiricist

The Eloquence of John Quincy Adams in the Service of Science

Marlana Portolano

State University of New York Press

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2009 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Portolano, Marlana. The passionate empiricist : the eloquence of John Quincy Adams in the service of science / Marlana Portolano. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–7914–7699–4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Adams, John Quincy, 1767–1848—Oratory. 2. Adams, John Quincy, 1767–1848—Language. 3. Eloquence—Case studies. 4. Adams, John Quincy, 1767–1848—Political and social views. 5. Science—Political aspects—United States—History. 6. Science—Social aspects—United States— History. 7. Science and state—United States—History. 8. Rhetoric—Political aspects—United States—History. 9. United States—Politics and government— 1815–1861. 10. United States—Intellectual life—1783–1865. I. Title. E377.P67 2009 973.5⬘5092—dc22 2008017376

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Cui doro lepidum novum libellum? To Joe

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Contents Preface

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Acknowledgments

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Chapter 1

A Classical Voice for American Science

Chapter 2

An American Cicero

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Adams the Professor of Rhetoric/The Lectures on Rhetoric: An Outline of Adams’s Theory/Competing Rhetorical Teachings in Adams’s Time/ Twentieth-Century Rhetorical Theory: An Aid for Contemporary Readers Chapter 3

Toward a Democratic Science: Institution-Building and the Statesman Orator

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Adams’s Early Development as an Orator for Democratic Science/ The Presidency as Pulpit for Science/Appealing to the Audience: Early American Attitudes toward Science Chapter 4

Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge: Setting the Stage for the Smithsonian Debate The Question of James Smithson’s Intentions/ The Smithsonian and the Ethos of Scientific Discovery/Early Scientific Institutions as Models in Deliberative Rhetoric/The Smithsonian as Locus for Common Knowledge/ An Imperious and Indispensable Obligation/The State of the Controversy vii

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Chapter 5

Contents

Adams’s Arguments in the Smithsonian Debate: A Rhetorical Analysis

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An Inventive Stage: Letters, Learned Advice, and Private Conversations/Asher Robbins and the National University Plan/Adams’s Refutations and His First Arguments for an Observatory/ Two Particular Audiences and Adams as Impartial Judge/ Financial Delays to Action: “Catch the bear before you sell his skin”/Resistance to Argumentation/ Arguments for a Natural History Museum and the Agricultural Influence/ The Grand Library Plan/Compromise Chapter 6

The Queen of Sciences and Her Democratic Champion: Adams’s Promotion of Astronomy

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Adams’s Congressional Arguments for an Observatory/Adams’s Public Speaking Tours on Astronomy Chapter 7

Invention and Discovery, Rhetorically Speaking

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Appendix A The Will of James Smithson

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Appendix B An Act to Establish the Smithsonian Institution as It Passed into Law on August 10, 1846

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Preface

I

n 1810, John Quincy Adams published a book of Harvard lectures he had delivered on the history and theory of rhetoric—the art of eloquence. After staying up one night until dawn to read the first published volume, Adams wrote to his mother that he wished just one other person might be moved to do the same. I am almost embarrassed to say it, but I am that person. Several years ago, while I was an editorial assistant at the Smithsonian Institution, I met an astronomer there who told me about John Quincy Adams’s role in the public elevation of his science to a subject deserving the attention, and the resources, of federal government. Soon, as a student of rhetoric, I read Adams’s lectures, and with them scores of other books in a long tradition of the art of persuasion—a practical art for discovering ideas and composing words that could move the hearts and wills of whole populations or establish a system of beliefs for a nation. I discovered that rhetorical theorists, like political scientists, are professional generalists who study the abstract side of a practical art. And I learned that “rhetoric,” as an academic discipline, explains conventions of value and practical reason, emotion, and circumstance, and describes how writers and rhetors use these systems to move audiences to action in the course of events. John Quincy Adams, being both an academic rhetorician and a political orator, struck me as a figure who practiced what he preached about the art of rhetoric, and therefore someone whose practice of oratory in public life might make a good introduction to rhetorical theory’s applied role in the process of American history. Readers familiar with the history of science will not be surprised to find Adams the subject of a book on early promotion of science and the foundations of science policy in America. He was the first president to propose federal funding for scientific research as part of the overall plan for his administration. Like many children of the Enlightenment, Adams was also an amateur scientist; he loved to make botanical ix

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experiments in his homestead garden in Quincy, Massachusetts. But he was no amateur in the field of rhetoric: here, he was a lifelong scholar. It is through self-conscious practice of this art that he made his most important contributions to the course of scientific discovery in America. Rhetoric as Adams understood it was far removed from the popular conception of rhetoric as manipulative language, the misuse of emotions, or the moral degenerate of the liberal arts. In the classical tradition embraced by Adams, rhetoric was a system of deliberative invention and social engagement, one that he consistently used to introduce the cause of pure scientific research to pragmatic-minded nineteenth-century America and to negotiate the conceptual groundwork needed for founding scientific institutions. How do we know that he used rhetorical theory so deliberately? John Quincy Adams’s voluminous diary, which he kept almost daily from the time he was eleven years old until he died at age eighty, chronicles his ongoing engagement with the ideas of classical and contemporary rhetorical theorists. In his diary, Adams engaged regularly in the application of rhetorical theory to current events and to his own speaking engagements. As an ongoing avocation, he engaged in rhetorical criticism of almost every political speech or Sunday sermon he heard. In imitation of his constant role model Cicero, he wished to perpetuate a tradition that combined wisdom and eloquence in an ideal-driven practice of statecraft. He often tested ideas for speeches in his diary, while in the same entry he reflected on some passage from Cicero or some technique of his art. Since these matters are more often the sphere of literary scholars than of historians, one might reasonably ask: what do Adams’s private methods of composition have to do with the history of science? The history of science is about more than the installation of laboratories and professional scientists in universities and government establishments. Before there were dedicated professional scientists, there had to be a myriad of persuasive and promotional actions that would set the stage for science in America. This book illustrates John Quincy Adams in his role as a devoted spokesman for the development of pure science. As a politician, Adams shared with many scientists of his age an early vision of a grand scientific establishment for his country, one that would transcend its limited origin in meeting immediate needs— such as populating the frontier, strengthening agriculture, or founding new cities. In addition, this book shows not so much the conflict of classical notions and modern scientific ideas but their interdependence in public discourse as America moved into the industrial age. John Quincy Adams offers one of the clearest examples of how America’s

Preface

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neoclassical, oratorical origins of public discourse actually facilitated the awkward beginnings of a modern worldview, including our valuing of scientific knowledge as one of the highest sources of authority in democratic decision-making. The study of rhetoric is inevitably an interdisciplinary undertaking, for it is a body of knowledge with no subject matter of its own. It is, rather, a methodology, and at times even a philosophy, for organizing and communicating the values and the practical needs of a culture. Readers who come to this book informed about the history of science or nineteenth-century politics and lawmaking will receive a critical introduction to the tradition of classical rhetoric, a tradition that formed the norms of public debate and even the private development of arguments in this period. This includes specific techniques of argumentation upon which Adams and his contemporaries patterned strategies for advancing their causes, terminology that was commonly used to explain these methods of inventing ideas and composing discourse, and perhaps most importantly, a vision for the use of the art of rhetoric in moral leadership. For readers interested in Adams as a statesman and politician, this book further provides an introduction to how immersion in the classical rhetorical works of Aristotle and Cicero deeply informed everything that Adams did to reshape attitudes about science and improve the general intellectual tenor of his audience. As his diary, congressional records, and public speeches show, Adams’s thought was deliberately structured by these time-honored heuristics, even as he advanced what would lead to a new worldview of progressive empiricism. Interdisciplinary approaches such as this one expand and enrich what we know about the early history of American science. In these pages we will explore what role rhetoric had in Adams’s oratorical promotion of science, and how it contributed to the ways in which attitudes in 1830 differed from those in, say, 1850, when many of the institutions and observatories Adams imagined had been founded, solidifying and materializing the new realities of American scientific practice.

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Acknowledgments

I

t would be impossible for me to remember in this short note how abundantly I’ve been blessed by the support and encouragement of friends, colleagues, and editors during the researching and writing of this book. I would, however, like to say that no one has taught me more about endurance and grace in scholarship than my mentor, Dr. Jean Dietz Moss. Also, when some of the early research for this work was published as an article in ISIS, editor Dr. Margaret Rossiter took the time to introduce me to important works in the history of astronomy as I learned to speak about my own discipline to members of another one. Many librarians at the Library of Congress, George Washington Special Collections, and the Massachusetts Historical Society offered indispensable advice and help during the archival stages of research. Thanks also to my colleagues at the United States Naval Academy and Towson University for the solidarity and community of support I found in each place, including both moral and financial encouragements. My friends and colleagues John Hussey and Rand Evans put in serious time and effort to offer editorial comments on several chapters. Meaghan Russell used her keen eye to proofread my index at the last minute. And undoubtedly, without the many gifts that my husband’s partnership provided me, there is no way I could have met the demands of home, family, work, and written a book, too. Portions of chapter 6 were previously published as an article, “John Quincy Adams’s Rhetorical Crusade for Astronomy,” in ISIS 91 (2000) 480–503, copyrighted by The History of Science Society. Likewise, portions of chapters 4 and 5 were published in an article, “Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge: Ethos of Science and Education in the Smithsonian’s Inception,” in Rhetoric Review, 18, 1 (Autumn 1999): 65–81. And the Adams papers, administered by the Massachusetts Historical Society, granted use of the quotations from manuscripts of John Quincy Adams’s Diary that are reprinted from the aforementioned publications.

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CHAPTER

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A Classical Voice for American Science Your natural science itself, your mathematics, and other studies which you reckoned as belonging peculiarly to the rest of the arts, do indeed pertain to the knowledge of their professors, yet if anyone should wish by speaking to put these same arts in their full light, it is to oratorical skill that he must run for help. —Crassus in Cicero, De Oratore, Book I, Chapter XIV

A

t the turn of the nineteenth century in America, the exemplary man of science viewed knowledge as an organic whole from which he could freely draw useful substance. Disciplinary divisions between special subjects were not barriers at all, and knowledge, from history and politics to medicine and biology, was a matter of public consensus characterized by fluid interconnectivity. There were no professional scientists, but instead any well-educated man might dabble with botanical experiments or astrophysical observations in his own backyard. European science, particularly in Germany and France, began earlier than its counterpart in America to move toward modernity as instrumentation, scientific publication, and above all government patronage encouraged a new organization of empirical science and the foundations of professionalism. But in America, science was still best represented by an individual in the cast of a Franklin or a Jefferson, someone with not only an amateur’s curiosity about physics or natural history, but also a high political profile and public influence in the development of America’s infrastructure. Not only was America preoccupied with developing infrastructure, but also with the staggering work of expanding across a vast and uncivilized wilderness. Trade, agriculture, transport of goods, control of disease, invention of new technology—these were among the practical applications of science needed to make the nation grow and prosper. These practical developments, dubbed “internal improvements” in the political discourse of the day, were the popular fuel for public sup1

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port of science policy in the federal government. Pure or theoretical science still seemed, to the American mind, too far removed from the pressing needs at hand. For these reasons, at the turn of the century, the well-rounded democratic statesman was more important than either the laboratory scientist or the paradigm-shifting theorist for the development of American science. No seat of deeply productive scientific research would exist in America without the blessings of a forwardthinking government ready to strengthen and extend the links between scientific knowledge and national prosperity. Yet, at the same time, the spokesmen for this progressive government needed to speak to the people, and even to each other, in the idiom of a much older tradition of statecraft. America in the early nineteenth century still depended on an elite cadre of well-rounded statesmen, ones who could steer a provincial, agrarian citizenry at the edge of a sprawling frontier toward national coherence and international respectability. In the aftermath of the Revolution and during this formative period for American identity, classical modes of education provided the model for this type of statesman—the statesman orator. As Americans imagined Greek democracy and Roman republicanism to be a kind of golden age, the statecraft and political practices of this idealized past became civilizing icons to steer the sometimes-chaotic business of nation building. Largely Ciceronian by tradition, the model statesman orator was a person conversant in all areas of the arts and sciences, who was at the same time committed to civic virtue. He was, in principle at least, unfettered by party politics but not powerless in the political fray. He represented unswerving identification with his cause, which was always for the public good. In his highest offices, he was an architect of society, making laws, building institutions, investing his nation with a set of driving principles. But above all, the statesman orator was a master of the art of eloquence. In fact, the ideal of the statesman orator itself came from the classical teachings of one of the seven liberal arts, namely rhetoric, the infamous art of public persuasion that had been at the same time a deeply influential core of education in Western civilization.1 America at the turn of the nineteenth century, as historians of rhetoric Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran have aptly put it, was still an oratorical culture.2 The New England colleges of this period designed their curricula so that the older norms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European education for the cultured man of action became the rule of formation for American lawyers, politicians, and clergymen—the presumed leaders of the country as it developed and turned toward internal improvements as the way to mature nation-

A Classical Voice for American Science

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hood. It was in this tradition that science would gain any sanctioning or support from the federal government—the tradition of members of Philadelphia’s National Academy of Sciences, of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and others who championed the arts and sciences as essential for the future flourishing of the new republic. In his seminal work on the subject fifty years ago, A. Hunter Dupree argued that the development of institutional science in America depended as much on the cultural and political climate as the discoveries of individual practitioners of science.3 In perhaps the greatest age of oratorical culture in American history, it would be a great oversight to underestimate the importance of rhetorical conventions on the initiation and advancement of science policy. Early nineteenth-century America, however, was not entirely ready to lend national resources to the progress of science, particularly where it had no immediate promise of material gain. Even the patent office, a regulatory agent of science and technology that was specifically sanctioned in the Constitution, was not assigned its own full-time staff or a permanent physical location until 1836, when a commissioner of patents was established to examine the usefulness and originality of inventions. Although this task was practical and increasingly necessary, it required the expert application of scientific principles by a staff of examiners.4 Only a decade earlier, John Quincy Adams’s efforts to establish such an office and staff had seemed to most Americans dangerously close to overcentralized government. The prospect of a national research university, a government body like Britain’s Royal Society, or a national observatory seemed far removed from large-scale plans and expenses involved in building banks and railroads, digging canals, and transforming a swampy collection of boarding houses into a modern nation’s capitol. But the century progressed, and Andrew Jackson’s presidency, beginning in 1829, ushered in a period of rapid growth in the conditions that would demand a simultaneous furtherance of scientific investigation. Science in Europe exploded in an accumulation of knowledge acquired experimentally and through observation, and specialization became increasingly necessary. America, with her republican principles of limited powers of government, and without funds from aristocratically entrenched sources, seemed hopelessly unable to catch up to the new standards of modernity. Furthermore, America was still rooted in the oratorical culture of the founding fathers: important public knowledge was still assumed in many circles to be a matter of existing consensus, even though the Founding Fathers had indicated the need for central support of an increase in knowledge to facilitate the growing nation. Ironically, plans

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for research and the diffusion of knowledge that were a priority for George Washington in his inaugural address, such as the founding of a national university, had grown disconnected from the mainstream of Constitutional interpretations. The time was ripe for a public servant who was rooted in Constitutional foundations but had an eye on the inevitable progress of science, a statesman orator who could labor for strong involvement of federal government in the human impulse toward science, both in Congress and in grassroots public forums, without a vested interest in personal gain or historical accolades. As the son of one of the nation’s leading families, John Quincy Adams was groomed from boyhood to be both a tireless statesman orator and a promoter of advancements in science and learning. From the time he graduated from Harvard in 1787 until literally the moment of his death in his seat in Congress in 1848, Adams held public and elected offices. The list of positions he held is a record of influence and tireless public service: ambassador to the Netherlands, to England, and the first minister to Russia, secretary of state, U.S. senator, sixth president of the United States, and nine terms in the House of Representatives. Efforts to explain the lasting effects of his policy-making, however, have led historians to reexamine the contributions of Adams’s public life across the boundaries of offices he held, tracing his influence widely in such spheres as human rights and foreign policy. While his presidency was less than successful in many ways, the causes he supported, from Westward expansion and internal improvements to America’s presence and conduct in foreign policy, spanned his long career and developed throughout his life, fuelling some of the most compelling biographical—and autobiographical—narrative in American history. The private Adams has also garnered significant attention in recent scholarly writing.5 What remains to be explored, however, are John Quincy Adams’s contributions to the intellectual foundations and academic life of the United States in the formative period of nationhood in which he lived. Adams was a scholar in his youth and a scholar in public service, and he never ceased to keep a humanist’s motives and priorities alive in his mind—before, during, and after his tenure as president (some might even say in spite of his tenure as president). Largely because of his early submersion in works of classical literature and statecraft, he developed a lifelong habit of looking for opportunities to cultivate intellectual and moral conditions in the republic as it took its first steps toward modernization. This book is concerned in particular with Adams as a promoter of science—one of his most efficacious yet underexamined roles.

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In his wish to shepherd a pragmatic people toward advancement in both arts and sciences, Adams was an orator in the Ciceronian tradition. His letters and diary document meticulous and self-conscious formation as a “good orator,” both in the sense of being skilled and wise in public speaking and in the sense of moral discipline and habit. This is unsurprisingly similar to his father’s education before him, but Adams’s devotion to rhetoric in the philosophical tradition surpassed his father’s general respect for the subject. Before his careers as senator and president, the younger Adams was briefly the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. Fulfilling his lifelong dream of being a scholar, he wrote the first complete rhetorical theory produced in the United States. Not only does his Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory represent an important glimpse into conventions of public speaking during the first half of the nineteenth century, it also documents the model of the oratorical statesman that Adams conscientiously used in his career as secretary of state, president, and promoter of arts and sciences. Neoclassical rhetoric and Ciceronian ideals were at the core of Adams’s strategies to promote science for both government and public audiences. As he employed the classical system of rhetoric to develop arguments, he aimed at transplanting Cicero’s ideal of statecraft and leadership, the orator perfectus, to American soil. At the same time, he was a passionate supporter of empirical sciences and discovery. In his statecraft and in his international policy, Adams can be described as having one foot in the eighteenth century and one in the nineteenth, and this is equally true in his promotion of science. Among the orations and rhetorical productions that fall into this category are his State of the Union addresses and other speeches calling for a national university and development of the arts and sciences; his research and report on weights and measures; his statements of support for a United States Naval Academy; and an influential speaking campaign on astronomy to promote the founding of observatories in the United States. Perhaps his most important contribution to government-funded science came in the last years of his career. In 1838, Adams’s hopes for science in America were put to the test when the United States inherited a large sum of money from British nobleman James Smithson, to be used “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” Seeing Smithson’s motive as providentially aligned with his own, Adams appointed himself rhetorical guardian and visionary of the bequest’s purpose when he was newly elected to the House of Representatives. For ten years he shepherded this debate through Congress, which resulted in the founding of America’s own scientific society in the Enlightenment tradition—

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the Smithsonian Institution. He has also been called the father of the United States Naval Observatory. These and other rhetorical campaigns demonstrate that Adams was uniquely equipped to speak for scientific progress in the language and character of the Founding Fathers, even at a time when Americans lacked European sophistication in learning and were skeptical of expenditures for anything not immediately practical. The combination of classical modes of communication with Enlightenment scientific ideals was not unique to the Adamses. One of the benefits of studying John Quincy Adams’s oratory and persuasive writings in support of scientific research is that he provides a prominent example of the role that neoclassical forms of rhetoric played in the advancement of empirical science in general. Others who spoke for and against scientific research used Ciceronian methods and rhetorical norms to communicate their ideas in such cases as the Smithsonian debate, or for the public promotion of astronomy, or to make arguments about a national university. This is an indication not only of the speaker’s bases of thought, but also of the audiences of the period and their readiness for change and, ultimately, progress. This should be of interest as an untapped but essential interdisciplinary development in the history of science. Historians of rhetoric such as Richard Rorty, Herbert Simons, Alan Gross, and Randy Allen Harris have lately drawn attention to the role of rhetoric in shaping the public’s perception of science.6 In addition to stressing rhetoric’s place in promoting science, these scholars have shown its influence even in the discourse and development of hard sciences as disciplines. Adams was no scientist, but the governmental funding of science and its public support are arguably inseparable from the course that scientists steer in discovery. In short, this book attempts to reexamine Adams in his role as a conscientious statesman orator with a long-held passion for the inclusion of science in democratic government. Adams was one of the most important early American promoters of science policy, and the primary tool of his trade was an explicitly developed, sometimes anachronistically classical theory of public speaking and persuasion. Of course Adams’s generation did not initiate the combination of classical persuasive reasoning with Baconian empirical ideas of scientific knowledge. The European combination was two hundred years older. Bacon himself showed inclinations toward this division of mental labor in his Advancement of Learning. By defining rhetoric as “the application of reason to the imagination for the better moving of the will,” Bacon had not turned entirely from the classical tradition of rhetoric, but only limited its scope to promotion and persuasion rather than creation of arguments. The philosophies of both Aristotle and

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Bacon contributed to the foundations of nineteenth-century American intellectual life, but they pulled audiences in two different directions. The conscious combination of ideological traditions in Adams’s thought and writing makes him a prominent example of the transitions that were representative of his age in America. Moreover, Adams is unique in the combination of high political office and deliberate rhetorical theorizing for academic audiences. No other American has had such broad experience across multiple offices of state, including the presidency, and also incidentally taught the subject of rhetoric as a Harvard professor. Nor was Adams’s interest in rhetorical theory and principles limited to the classroom. He continued to follow his own carefully developed neoclassical ideas of the art in every political office he held when public speaking or leadership through democratic persuasion were involved. More broadly, therefore, I am proposing that Adams’s neoclassical theory of rhetoric as it is described in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory was more influential than historians have assumed, because Adams’s prolific statecraft and moral leadership bore the stamp of his well-defined theory in its every act. In order to understand the argumentative strategies that Adams and others used in public debates about science, it is necessary to draw on influential rhetorical theories of the day, in addition to Adams’s own theory. Familiarity with these schools of thought can add to the history of science a new dimension of the cultural context during the conception and formation of scientific institutions. In the early nineteenth century, the classical discipline of rhetoric was still an essential part of liberal education. Traditional forms of public speaking, which had been the norm since the Revolutionary period, self-consciously followed the models of Roman rhetoric, especially in the speeches and teaching of Cicero and Quintilian. John Quincy Adams’s theory and teaching of rhetoric closely adhered to this classical ideal. Moreover, in his practice of eloquence, he predictably began with the classical assumption that moral authority resides in public consensus of the community. In this tradition of rhetoric, as it was taught in Harvard and other early American colleges, students learned that persuasion was an art not only of expression and style, but also of invention. Thoroughly developed heuristics were taught to students so that they would be able to find general lines of practical reasoning and apply them to any issue they might encounter in any academic, legal, or political forum. Rhetoric was taught as a practical art that worked hand-in-hand with logic and ethics. The orator was an important indicator of moral virtues to the public at large, and this role was taken as a serious responsibility for the young perspective public

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leaders who studied these ideas. In America’s particular oratorical culture, Christian and deist conceptions of what it meant to be a good citizen naturally colored the ethical tone of classical rhetoric. New nineteenth-century practices of rhetoric, however, were beginning to uproot the classical ideal in American colleges and public forums and were replacing it with a discourse that secularized and further democratized the forum. In these new theories, authority resided not in public consensus, but in compromise between individuals with different convictions. Enlightenment thinkers who valued scientific observation, faculty psychology, and the “natural laws” of taste influenced this breed of rhetoric. In addition, the new theories of rhetoric de-emphasized classical methods of practical reasoning and rhetorical invention and favored the romantic ideal of personal genius. Yet, classical rhetoric was not abandoned by the new rhetoricians, who retained its emphasis on moral responsibility and stressed the need for careful consideration of the audience. My discussion of Adams’s promotion of science draws on both classical and nineteenth-century studies of rhetoric that would have been familiar to him and to his opponents. What I aim to describe is how John Quincy Adams contributed to a rhetoric of the American scientific establishment. Because there was no significant scientific community when he began work in this area, the cumulative effects of his and others’ rhetorical efforts to promote such a motive are important for a clear a picture of how a “scientific establishment” came to be. Just as Adams played an important role in laying the foundations of our concepts of civil rights (in the Amistad case), government-supported infrastructure, expansionism, and foreign policy, so he set in place significant groundwork that would later support the development of strong relations between federal government and science. It was already apparent that the government needed to play a strong role in securing and encouraging technology for military and agricultural needs, but without John Quincy Adams, the American public and her new federal government may have taken much longer to develop an understanding of a modern democratic government’s role in fostering pure scientific research, in other words, pursuit of knowledge that was beyond the immediately practical and economically profitable. Adams had a paternalistic attitude about propagating knowledge in a new nation, so he used his rhetorical skills to locate authority in an ethos of scientific discovery. This was, and continues to be, a kind of knowledge that needed institutional support and expensive apparatus for instrumentation and observation. Not that Adams believed that the efforts of private citizens toward scientific discovery were unimportant in the overall advancement of knowledge—quite the opposite was true.

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A good comparison is Adam Smith’s understanding of the relationship of commerce to the federal government: he believed that certain standards and guides must be established as institutional in order for any private freedom and advancement to occur across the broader structure of society. It is important to note here that, like Aristotle in his Art of Rhetoric, Adams did not see the point of rhetoric as winning the election, winning the debate, or otherwise having power over his opponent or audience. Influence was inevitable and necessary in the cultural context, but it was not the only point of his employing the art of rhetoric. In his treatise on rhetoric, Aristotle explains that, just as a doctor may practice every means of preserving life on a patient and still the patient may die, so an orator may find and use all the means of persuasion at his disposal, yet fail to persuade. Such an orator is nonetheless still practicing the art of rhetoric, and through cumulative efforts, the art will have a shaping influence on the cultural climate, perhaps even for posterity. My approach to Adams’s use of rhetoric is similar. It is not my aim to prove that Adams’s use of classical rhetoric caused the founding of the Smithsonian or the U.S. Naval Observatory, but rather to show rhetoric at work in the course of human events. In other words, this study is praxis centered rather than outcome centered. In particular, my focus is on certain persuasive acts and debates that were key to the development of science policy in America, and their immediate rhetorical contexts. These are most applicable to showing the use of classical rhetorical theory in the oratory for promoting science and will serve as good case studies with which to draw comparisons across the history of science and statecraft in this period. The chapters that follow examine Adams’s theory of rhetoric in relation to his speeches, diary entries, and correspondence during the invention and composition process of his various works promoting science and learning. Chapter 2 presents the rhetorical theories that I use later to examine persuasive texts in support of science. It should also serve as a general introduction to the formal art of rhetoric for readers who are unfamiliar with this tradition. I begin with the lectures Adams wrote for his Harvard students in 1801. In a close explication of these lectures, especially those pertaining to political oratory and argumentation, I highlight those teachings that seem to direct his later practice of the art of rhetoric in the promotion of science. I look especially at Adams’s attention to the role of the orator as described by his hero Cicero, since the moralism and ideals of his rhetorical practice come directly from his formation in this tradition. I discuss Adams’s placement in the history of rhetoric, especially in comparison to contemporaneous Enlightenment

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approaches to rhetoric, which were increasingly influential in America as the nineteenth century progressed. Lastly, the chapter discusses the twentieth-century rhetorical theories I use in analyzing the debate as a whole, including schematic ways to describe the interaction of arguments over time and the development of whole bodies of established knowledge. Chapter 3 explores the development of Adams’s early appreciation of hard science as a young man and his work in promoting scientific learning until 1829, roughly the end of his presidency. In addition to his father’s promotion of scientific discovery and involvement in early scientific societies, I describe other influences on Adams’s thinking about the advancement of hard science. Scientific societies such as the British Royal Society and the French Jardin de Plantes were important in Europe during these years, a state of affairs that left its impression on the young Adams during his travels abroad and his ambassadorship to Russia. Education was also evolving to more closely resemble its modern forms, as the German thrust for empirical research took hold and began to expand into curriculums across the continent. The main purpose of chapter 3 is to discuss the effects of these experiences and institutions on Adams’s writing and speaking about science during his years as secretary of state and then president. In the course of these sections, I examine his idea of a national university, support of a naval academy, and the Report on Weights and Measures in light of his carefully applied rhetorical principles and methodology. Each of these early efforts to promote science helped to accumulate Adams’s wealth of invention for later arguments that would be more efficacious in establishing the relationship between federal government and science. Chapter 4 covers background issues that influenced all of the speakers and debaters during arguments over the Smithonian bequest to found an institution for the “increase of knowledge,” Adams chief among them. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of the conditions of the bequest and James Smithson’s life and scientific preferences, then provides a brief survey of other institutions in Europe that were considered as models for the Smithsonian and therefore important as sources for rhetorical invention. Close readings of key speeches, letters, and other documents of the debate confirm that Adams practiced carefully the same rhetorical principles he taught at Harvard. I examine the formative effect of Adams’s rhetoric on the beginning of the debate. For example, Adams’s self-appointed role as a patriarchal guardian of the Smithsonian trust can be traced to his Ciceronian ideals and to classical rhetorical principles. The entire debate may, in a sense, be read intertextually as one organic whole, with Adams’s first speeches serving

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as an introduction to those made during the following eight years. Throughout the course of the debate, Adams and his opponents assess their audience in terms of the probable reception of various proposals, and then use their rhetorical skills accordingly. Adams’s emphasis throughout is on a serious moral obligation to honor the will of the testator and block individual congressmen’s attempts to use the fund for personal gain. In chapter 5, I examine the inventive and compositional stages Adams underwent while developing his arguments for a particular type of Smithsonian. Here is the heart of the debate. Adams believed scientific research and discovery to be Smithson’s sole intent in specifying an institution “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” He began by promoting scientific research and introducing several proposals that would use the interest on the fund first to found a national observatory, then later to initiate a series of other projects that were equally aligned to scientific discovery and observation. Throughout the debate, Adams gave speeches steadfastly opposing the use of Smithson’s money for any kind of school or university. His resistance was based on the nineteenth-century definition of a university, which excluded scientific research and discovery. In the course of my examination of Adams’s efforts to rule out an educational interpretation of Smithson’s will, chapter 5 treats Senator Asher Robbins’s popular plan to found a national university, also informed by classical theory. Adams’s speech refuting Robbins’s proposal was a pivotal event in the debate. Other opponents whose speeches I include in the analysis of the debate are Joel Poinsetts’s effort to place the Smithsonian under the care of the newly organized National Institute for the Promotion of Sciences, Benjamin Tappan’s vision of a natural history museum, Rufus Choate’s argument for a national public library, and Robert Dale Owen’s successful efforts at compromise for the Smithsonian bill—all variously influenced by classical, Enlightenment, and nineteenth-century socialist ideas and rhetorical strategies. Adams publicly refuted or approved each of these proposals in turn. I conclude my discussion of the Smithsonian debate in chapter 5 with some comments on what form the institution finally took when it came into being, and how Adams’s Ciceronian rhetoric, after a lifelong struggle, finally contributed to the material existence of institutional science in America. Chapter 6 discusses Adams’s speaking crusade for the promotion of astronomy in the United States. The chapter first looks back to Adams’s initial proposals for an observatory during the Smithsonian debate, since these were the seeds that grew into a broader promotion of the science of astronomy to the general public. During two separate

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tours, through Ohio and Massachusetts, he gave speeches on the importance of research using astrophysical observatories. These scientific instruments were then numerous in Europe, where new discoveries were being made in an expansion of the discipline. In the United States, however, freestanding observatories were nonexistent. Adams knew that in order to stand with the independent and economically viable nations in the Western world, America would have to invest in knowledge of space for the future. Although he included the growth of pure research science in astronomy under his failed presidential attempts at “internal improvements,” the need for this kind of advancement was really more than domestic sophistication. Navigation for trade and for the military were dependent on knowledge of the stars, and agricultural acumen was linked to such knowledge in many nineteenth-century minds. Moreover, Adams’s rhetoric promoting astronomy shows that it is not only the immediately practical that he aimed to enhance. Being a true scholar and a humanist, he nourished the drive to know mankind’s place in the universe, and the desire for mankind to learn more about our environment beyond the planet. Although the Smithsonian would not have its own observatory until the twentieth century, Adams’s role in the founding of the U.S. Naval Observatory (1842) is also considered as an effect of his rhetorical efforts in promoting astronomy and government-supported science in general. I end with a chapter on the legacy of classical thought that Adams left in and through his eloquence in the service of science. His diary and letters plainly document the painstaking efforts he took in applying neoclassical rhetorical theory to inventing and delivering speeches for both public and political audiences. The minds of men and women in nineteenth-century America were opening to the modern age of science ahead, and Adams was able to contribute to this change by speaking to audiences in the language of their existing values and traditions. In orations and persuasive writing throughout Adams’s long career, classical rhetoric is bound up with the history of American science, particularly federally funded research. In this period of cultural transition, Adams is a prime example of the role that the statesman orator played in creating a cultural environment where science could be practiced as a discipline integral to modern life.

CHAPTER

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An American Cicero There is to my mind no more excellent thing than the power, by means of oratory, to get a hold on assemblies of men, win their goodwill, direct their inclinations wherever the speaker wishes. . . . What function is so kingly, so worthy of the free, so generous, as to bestow security, to set free from peril, to maintain men in their civil rights? —Crassus in Cicero, De Oratore, Book I, Chapter V

J

ohn Quincy Adams was never a wealthy man, so in his patronage of science he expended certain immaterial things that he had in abundance: rhetorical know-how, a dogged will to do well by the American republic and its people, endurance, and unbudgeable loyalty to principles. His patriotic moral sentiment and endurance were traits instilled in him by his illustrious mother and father, but the know-how and the principles had a much older model in Marcus Tullius Cicero. To trace the influence of ancient rhetorical principles and art in the writings of an individual man is to follow a path where biography merges with the history of ideas. Adams’s deliberate emulation of his intellectual and political hero, Cicero—an imitation that for him was almost religious in practice—demonstrates the importance of this ancient liberal art in the practical workings of civic life. That Adams imitated Cicero was no secret. He kept a volume of the master’s work with him wherever he went, so that he could refer to the texts for inspiration in public speaking and service, and as a time-honored model of excellence in eloquence. On May 10, 1819, while serving as secretary of state under President Monroe, Adams wrote that “living without Cicero at hand would be as a privation of one of my limbs.”1 At times in his speeches or letters, the wording and ideas come across as so similar to the Roman orator’s that Adams might be accused of the Renaissance weakness of “Ciceronianism,” a 13

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slavish imitation of Cicero’s style and genre that was by this time long forgotten in the public discourse of Europe. The quality that prevents this old-fashioned malady in Adams is his American viewpoint. He sought to apply the public image and communicative techniques that worked for Cicero as a statesman scholar in a republican context, but in a manner thoroughly translated to American democracy. In rhetorical theory, and in dutiful application of that theory to writing and speaking for the public, Cicero’s concept of the orator perfectus inspired Adams most. This concept is an ideal to reach for, a perfection to aim for, that Cicero developed most fully in his treatises De Oratore and Orator. The perfect orator, in effect, would know all things useful and philosophical pertaining to his public speaking, and be well versed in all liberal arts: “In an orator we must demand the subtlety of the logician, the thoughts of the philosopher, a diction almost poetic, a lawyer’s memory, a tragedian’s voice, and the bearing of the consummate actor. Accordingly no rarer thing than a finished orator can be discovered among the sons of men.”2 John Quincy Adams Americanized Cicero’s ideal orator. As an American statesman and public figure, he was certainly no ideal himself; in fact, he was not naturally a charismatic speaker. But in following a vividly developed ideal based on the traditions of classical rhetoric, Adams brought together the liberal arts and public policy on matters ranging from slavery to astronomy. Adams explained his rhetorical theory in detail in a book of lectures on the subject, composed for Harvard sophomores whom he taught from 1806 to 1809. The ultimate aim of Adams’s rhetoric was not to win arguments at any cost or even to speak in a certain style (although he undoubtedly had the classically influenced penchant for ornamentation). Like the classical rhetorical arts of Aristotle and of Cicero, Adams’s rhetoric aimed to invent all the possible proofs for a given argument and a specific audience. These proofs—including artfully constructed demonstrations of the speaker’s good character, appeals to the emotions of the audience, and logical reasoning—were “invented” by the speaker as he systematically assessed the audience’s attitudes toward claims and expressed them in spoken language. Because of a speaker’s process of audience evaluation, it is possible to uncover and trace the rhetorical principles that govern a particular text. The results of such a study are a means of understanding specific instances of communication as cultural artifacts. Such a critical tool has the power to provide interdisciplinary access to less tangible objects of historical scholarship: attitudes, motives, emotional and ethical tenor, and relationships between subgroups in public and political audiences. In effect, a rhetorical text is a linguistic record of its writer’s perspective

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on the many-layered psychological state of the audience at a given moment, and a commentary on that audience’s disposition to act at that moment in history. What may be gained from an examination of a text’s rhetorical art is not so much empirical evidence about cause and effect but, rather, a clearer picture of the intellectual processes involved in the social workings of history that a text is part of. Rhetoric gives voice to an audience’s collective identity and values, indicators that historian of astronomy John Lankford has described as formative in scientific communities and crucial to their acceptance in the general cultural sphere. Nathan Reingold and Robert Bruce similarly describe the development of early American science as a private social phenomenon that grew into a collective enterprise in large part because of enthusiasm and genius for publicity and government interaction.3 Because John Quincy Adams was a scholar and teacher of rhetoric, an avid rhetorical critic, and a lifelong scholar of the art’s theory and practice, the evidence of audience evaluation present in his public speaking has much to teach us about the social and cultural conditions that shaped the issues he addressed. From his promotion of science in particular, we can learn about changes and developments in the reception of scientific ideas for the American public in this period. It is through this social and cultural fabric that the broader, more human and essential aspects of the history of science in America begin to take form. Although Adams was not a naturally talented speaker, his fellow congressmen in the House of Representatives nicknamed him “Old Man Eloquent,” borrowing from Milton’s description of Isocrates: Till the sad breaking of that Parliament Broke him, as that dishonest victory At Chaeronea, fatal to liberty, Killed with report that Old man eloquent. Such a reputation was hard won. The process by which Adams invented arguments and his complicated style were the result of conscientious study and practice of the rhetorical principles described not only by Cicero, but by scores of other ancient and contemporary European theorists. Having researched the subject in preparation for his lectures at Harvard, Adams formed a lifelong habit of practicing ancient techniques of invention, composition, and delivery. It is important to remember that the study of rhetorical theories is a history of ideas. In order to present even a cursory picture of rhetorical ideas in early nineteenth-century America, therefore, we cannot limit the picture to Adams’s own Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory at

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Harvard. After a thorough explanation of Adams’s theory of the art, I provide in this chapter a brief view of their broader context: the rhetorical theories and pedagogies of the Enlightenment in Europe and nineteenth-century treatments of the subject by Adams’s contemporaries. In addition, twentieth-century rhetorical theories are introduced at the end of the chapter to aid in the examination of Adams’s promotion of science later in this work.

ADAMS THE PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC Like James Smithson’s legacy to the United States, John Quincy Adams’s appointment as the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard4 depended on the tangled skeins of kinship and the generosity of an affluent man. A wealthy Boston merchant named Nicholas Boylston endowed the chair for the teaching of classical rhetorical theory, and practice through declamations, in his will. Boylston died in 1771, but Harvard president Samuel Webster did not establish the professorship until 1804. During this unfortunate delay, Ward Nicholas Boylston, the testator’s nephew, threatened to file suit if Harvard did not put the money to its intended use. As part of an informal settlement, Boylston requested that his friend and distant kinsman John Quincy Adams be named the first professor.5 The resemblance of James Smithson’s bequest to Boylston’s endowment—including a legacy of knowledge and a controversial delay at the outset—is a curious coincidence. It is no accident, however, that in Adams’s later years classical rhetorical theory informed his campaign for federally funded science. In 1801, four years before Adams was appointed to the position, a committee at Harvard prepared the statutes of the Boylston chair. The requirements of the professorship relied on traditional rhetorical pedagogy, which included the study of theory and of exemplary speeches as well as exercises in imitation. The chair’s second incumbent, Joseph McKean, explained that these requirements were modeled on John Ward’s A System of Oratory, which was an overview of classical rhetoric popular during the eighteenth century. The Boylston professor would meet with freshmen twice a week to discuss a classical text. He would also meet with sophomores twice a week, during which time they would study an English text for the first half of the year and do declamations, translations, and original compositions for the second half of the year. He would meet with juniors fortnightly to discuss the English text begun the previous year and meet with both juniors and seniors fortnightly to correct written compositions. He would preside at

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weekly declamations and assist students who were to speak at public exhibitions. And finally, he would deliver weekly public lectures on the classical art of rhetoric to juniors, seniors, and graduates. The statues outlined rigid requirements for the content of the lectures. The professor was to begin with a historical treatment of ancient oratory and orators, then explain the nature and object of the art, and describe the kinds of rhetoric and their connection to the powers of the human mind. The statutes named four parts of rhetoric: invention, disposition (organization), elocution (style), and pronunciation (delivery). Finally, the professor was to discuss the sermon, the methods of improving eloquence, and the “good orator” maxim, which was Quintilian’s assertion that the orator be both a skilled speaker and a virtuous man. When Harvard offered Adams the position in 1805, he was delighted. His responsibilities as a Massachusetts senator, however, would not allow him to fulfill all the statutes of the Boylston chair, so the officers of the Boylston trust offered him the position on a part-time basis. From 1806 to 1809, Adams delivered the public lectures to the upperclassmen, presided at declamations, and helped students prepare for exhibitions. In 1809, he accepted an appointment as ambassador to Russia and resigned from the Boylston chair.6 Adams’s extensive readings while composing the Lectures helped to form his rhetorical theory. Fortunately, we have a record of some of that exploration because of the meticulous comments he made about rhetorical works in his diary during this period. These notes, his lectures, and his public oratory offer striking evidence that his theory shaped his practice of rhetoric in public life. Adams’s preparation for the Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory illustrates the breadth of neoclassical and contemporary influences on his oratory. As soon as he got word of his appointment on June 26, 1805, Adams began research for his Lectures. J. Jeffery Auer and Jerald L. Banninga, editors of the 1962 edition of the Lectures, note that Adams checked out Leland’s three-volume Demosthenes and Guthrie’s translation of Quintilian from Harvard’s library the very next day.7 This was the beginning of an extensive program of self-education in Greek and Roman rhetoric, fields which Adams knew he “must for years to come (if my life be spared) explore and cultivate with unabating industry.”8 Adams probably had been forewarned of his friend Ward Nicholas Boylston’s desires even earlier than this, since his diary reveals that he had already been reading and translating classical treatises such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric during the summer of 1804.9 Six years later, and five years after his initial sketchy drafts of the first lecture, he sat down after dinner one evening to read the newly

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published edition of his Lectures. He accidentally found himself so absorbed that he was up until two in the morning to finish the first volume. “What a portion of my life I would give,” he confided in his diary, “if [the Lectures] could afford the same accident to one other human being.”10 Having spent years of study and much midnight oil on numerous revisions, Adams believed the lectures exemplified his skills as a scholar and measured his abilities as a writer. He planned an additional volume of lectures on the criticism of oratory to accompany the published volumes, primarily on the subjects of rhetorical history and theory, but his duties as a politician never allowed him the time to complete this second work.11 Numerous critical commentaries on public speeches old and new, sermons, and written treatises cover this topic amply in his diary. Adams had already acquired considerable knowledge of the classics while preparing for admission to Harvard as a younger man. Under the guidance of his father, he developed a lifelong habit of reading classics in the original Greek and Latin, as well as in French and English translations. By 1785, John Adams wrote to his friend Benjamin Waterhouse that seventeen-year-old John Quincy had “translated Virgil’s Aeneid, Suetonius, Tacitus’s Agricola a great part of Horace, a number of Tully’s orations, Aristotle’s Poeticks, Plutarch’s Lives, Lucian’s Dialogues, and several books in Homer’s Iliad.”12 His early formal education, under his father’s tutelage and at Harvard, exposed him to several classical and contemporary treatises in rhetoric, but his appointment to the Boylston chair, at age thirty-nine, marked his specialization in the field. Adams’s diary during this period is a record of his progress during the research and composition of the lectures. At the risk of seeming tedious, I will name several of the works he read during this period, including those he translated into English. The catalog is an impressive example of a nineteenth-century professor of rhetoric’s depth and breadth of knowledge on the subject. In his diary between the summer of 1804 and July of 1808 when the last lecture was completed, Adams summarizes and analyzes such works as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; Plato’s Gorgias, Phaedrus, and Protagoras; Aristotle’s Rhetoric; Rhetorica ad Herennium; Cicero’s De Oratore. De Inventione. Orator. Brutus, and Orations; Plutarch’s Lives; Longinus’s On the Sublime; Lucian’s Dialogues; and the orations of Isaeus, Aeschines, and Demosthenes. He began his own translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric on August 22, 1804, and completed it on November 8, 1805. From this he prepared an eight thousand-word abstract. In June, 1805, he began reading Guthrie’s English translation of Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, and on July 21 he began Abbe Gedoyn’s French translation.

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Among the classical works Adams studied in translation during his preparations were Nicholas Boileau’s Longinus, the Old English translation of Plutarch’s Lives, Leland’s Demosthenes and Aeschines, Athanase Auger’s orations of Demosthenes, Sir William Jones’s Isaeus, and Dinsdale’s Isocrates.13 After reading this last translation of Isocrates, Adams wrote: I have now read all that is left of Isocrates though in so wretched a translation that it can give scarcely any idea of the orator. He is full of egotism, and of morality. There are orations of all the three classes; deliberative, judicial, and demonstrative. Some of them are apparently fragments. The Exordium, when there is one, is always upon one topic, the orator himself. One of the orations only seems to be regularly composed, with the formal partitions. They are all in the calm and unimpassioned manner; and with a very moderate use of imagery.14 Thirty years later and near the end of his life, while Adams debated the function of the Smithsonian Institution in the House of Representatives, his colleagues would ironically compare him to Isocrates. “Calm and unimpassioned” are not attributes Adams chose to bestow on what now is considered his own best oratory, even on the subjects of hard science and empirical research. Being as fluent in French as in his native English, it is natural that Adams also studied contemporary French neoclassical works during this period: Court de Gebelin’s Origine du language et de l’écriture, Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique, Johann Jakob Reiske’s Oratorum Graecorum, Bridel Arleville’s Abrège de la Rhétorique Françoise, René Rapin’s Réflexions sur l’éloquence, Jean-Francois de La Harpe’s Lycée ou, Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne, Cesar Chesneau Demarsais’s Traite de le construction oratoire, the speeches of Henri-Francois Daguesseau and the sermons of Jean Baptiste Massillon, The Port Royal Grammar, and Gerardus Johannes Vossius’s Elementa Rhetorica.15 Nor did Adams neglect English rhetoricians. He paid particular attention to the popular Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres of Hugh Blair, a book he had first encountered while delivering declamations as a Harvard student. In his diary, Adams admires Blair, although he disagrees with the Scotsman as often as he praises him, a fact that will become significant in the rhetorical analysis of Adams’s debates with some of his more belletristic opponents in the Smithsonian controversy and his promotion of astronomy. For instance, Blair treated

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Gerardus Joannes Vossius’s work (1820) with contempt, but Adams considered his rhetoric “a very valuable one; and his method very good.” On the other hand, when commenting on La Harpe’s work, he wrote, “the whole will not be worth Blair’s lectures.” He believed that Blair borrowed too freely from John Lawson, and complained that Blair’s style is “plain, easy, and often incorrect” though the “opinions are in general judicious.”16 Other English works Adams read during this period include John Lawson’s Lectures Concerning Oratory, Francis Bacon’s On Evidence, Edmund Burke’s speeches and On the Sublime and Beautiful, George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, Thomas Gibbon’s Rhetoric, John Walker’s Elements of Elocution, Thomas Sherridan’s Lectures on Elocution, Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism, Isaac Watt’s Logic, and the sermons of John Tillotson, Joseph Butler, and John Sterne.17 Because of his senatorial duties, he could spend only spare moments in this course of study and the composition of his lectures. Adams was a meticulous and self-critical writer, and he generally revised several times before presenting a final copy. He began the first informal sketches of the lectures in autumn of 1805. The final draft of the first lecture was completed in June of 1806, but the full set would not be completed until the early summer of 1808. During the first period of composition, Adams devoted the morning hours to drafting chapters and the afternoon to jotting down notes on a new lecture. On July 8, 1806, however, he reversed this schedule, finding the rough draft to be the most “toilsome” task. At times Adams delighted in his work, but at other times writing seemed too great a burden while still serving as senator.18 On May 19, for instance, he wrote, “the cares of a family, multiplied in the minutest and most miserable details of drudgery, scarcely leave me the due command of my patience or of my temper.”19 During the summer of 1808, he finally finished the Lectures as he delivered them to his Harvard students. Yet he noted in letters to his mother and in his diary that further revision would be necessary for a truly publishable work.20 There are three primary sources for the Lectures, as his inaugural oration for the Boylston professorship tellingly proclaimed: A subject which has exhausted the genius of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quinctilian [sic], can neither require nor admit much additional illustration. To select, combine, and apply their precepts, is the only duty left for their followers of all succeeding times, and to obtain perfect familiarity with their instructions is to arrive at the mastery of the art.21

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Although the bulk of Adams’s lectures follows this injunction closely, he did a great deal more than simply recount the words of these three ancients. His lectures on the history and development of the art of rhetoric demonstrate knowledge of a broad range of Greek and Roman as well as contemporary French and English treatises. In addition, he leaves his own mark on some areas of the subject matter. For example, he did not agree with the statute’s leaving memory out of the parts of the art of rhetoric. He objected in general to the rigidity of the statutes, and remarked in his diary: “The minuteness of detail into which this same Article [the one prescribing the content of the lectures] enters, to prescribe the particulars of this course, appears to me to be altogether unnecessary, and if to be adhered to, according to the letter, would impose upon me shackles, to which I am not inclined to submit.”22 It is clear that while Adams truly valued the ancients, he did not write about them merely to fulfill the statutes of the Boylston chair. He provides his own “take” on them in relation to nineteenth-century American needs. Some members of the faculty complained, for instance, when Adams ignored the custom of delivering his inaugural oration in Latin. Because he intended his opening remarks to be an introduction that his entire audience could understand, he spoke in English.

THE LECTURES ON RHETORIC: AN OUTLINE OF ADAMS’S THEORY The published edition of Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory contains thirty-six lectures in two volumes. My discussion is based on the original 1810 edition because Adams kept it in his own library. As the Boylston statutes stipulated, the first six lectures, together with Adams’s inaugural oration, introduce the origin and history of rhetoric and oratory, including separate lectures on Cicero and Quintilian. The next ten lectures deal with invention, including chapters on the “state of the controversy” or stasis theory; the topics; inventive strategies for each of the three varieties of classical oratory, demonstrative, deliberative, judicial and, in addition, Christian sacred oratory; intellectual and moral qualities of the orator; and the excitation and management of the emotions. These portions of the lectures, on rhetoric’s history and on the process of inventing arguments, take up 389 pages, almost an entire volume and nearly half of the lectures as a whole. The rest of the lectures are devoted to the remaining four parts of the art of rhetoric, which Adams divides according to classical tradition: disposition, elocution, memory, and delivery or “action.” In the

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treatment of disposition, he includes lectures on each of the parts of an oration according to Cicero: exordium, narration, division, confirmation, refutation, conclusion. He claims he does this in accordance with the statutes of the professorship, but also explains that Aristotle’s simple “state your case and prove it” is really the more useful and practical approach. Also included under disposition are lectures on the parts and species of argument: confirmation, confutation, transition, ratiocination, and induction. These argumentative sections are particularly relevant to the analysis of Adams’s promotion of science, which follows in chapters 4 and 5. The sections on elocution describe eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concepts of purity and perspicuity (or a simplicity and clarity of expression); the order and methods of composition, including sentences, figures, and tropes; and “number,” which refers to classical rules for the juxtaposition of letters and syllables in sentences. Since this last section pertains to Latin composition, Adams explains that it is a technical methodology presented for its historical value in the study of ancient speeches and letters. There are separate chapters on allegory, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. Finally, he treats memory and delivery in one chapter each. The following sections expand and comment on the portions of the Lectures that particularly pertain to Adams’s promotion of science in the American republic. Where it is helpful for a fuller understanding of Adams’s Ciceronian ideals and methods, I discuss the treatment of these subjects in Adams’s original sources.

The Orator Perfectus American Style Although Adams’s readings were broad during his research for the lectures, direct citations in the lectures generally are limited to Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, and references to Cicero outnumber both of the others combined. Adams so venerated Cicero that eventually he owned fourteen different editions, containing fifty-three titles, of the orator’s works.23 This admiration and emulation of the Roman orator and statesman furnished the Adams family with a paradigm for character development; Cicero had also served as a model and inspiration for Adams’s father.24 In his Harvard lecture on Cicero, John Quincy Adams tells his young students: I cannot conclude this account of the rhetorical writings of Cicero, without once more urging upon your attention all the works, as well as the life and character of this extraordinary man. . . . As a rhetorician, we have seen, that he is unrivaled by

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the union of profound science with elegant taste; by the extent, the compass, the variety of his views, in which he has exhibited the theory of his favorite art; by that enchanting fascination, with which he allures the student into the deserted benches of the Grecian schools. . . . He is the instructor of every profession; the friend of every age. Make him the intimate of your youth, and you will find him the faithful and incorruptible companion of your whole life. . . . But to the modern detractors of his fame it may be justly replied, that his failings leaned to virtue’s side; that his heaviest vices might put the blush to their choicest virtues. Of his own age and nation he was unquestionably the brightest ornament. But he is the philosopher, the orator, the moralist of all time, and every region. . . . Let us make this the standard of moral and intellectual worth, for all human kind; and in reply to all the severities of satire, and all the bitterness of misanthropy, repeat with conscious exultation, “we are the same species of beings, as Cicero.”25 In both his public and his private life, there is no question that Adams attempted to follow his own advice about Cicero. As his biographer Samuel Flagg Bemis writes: “The old Roman’s stamp of style and feeling shows through many a passage of Adams’s letters and Diary and throughout his controversial writings. His letters to his son Charles on books and men and measures take on something of the tone of Cicero’s letters De Officii to his son Marcus.”26 Adams would continue to emulate Cicero for the rest of his life, as William Seward noted in Adams’s “Eulogy”: The model by which he formed his life was Cicero. Not the living Cicero, sometimes inconsistent; often irresolute; too often seeming to act a studied part; and always covetous of applause. But Cicero, as he aimed to be, and as he appears revealed in those immortal emanations of his genius which have been the delight and the guide of intellect and virtue in every succeeding age.27 During Adams’s summer of temporary retirement before his election to the House of Representatives, he had finished rereading the entire works of Cicero in Latin, which he had begun the previous December.28 This is potentially significant, since this time would be his most rigorous period of promoting science through oratory and

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persuasive writing. The Naval Observatory and the Smithsonian both may owe a debt to Cicero through Adams. Having meditated so deeply on the life and works of Cicero, Adams would not have failed to notice some similarities between his own life and that of his idol. Cicero came from an old and distinguished family of prestigious though not aristocratic leaders who heavily influenced political decision-making. He inherited from his family certain ideas of the attributes of a good statesman: high ability, initiative, moral integrity, dedication to the welfare of the republic. L. Lincinius Crassus, the Roman consul of 95 BC, was a particular source of inspiration for Cicero throughout his life. He identified with Crassus’s style and motives, so that in De Oratore, Cicero’s exploratory dialog on the art of oratory, he made the character of Crassus a representation of the ideal civilian statesman, using his influence, experience, wisdom, and above all eloquence to build and steer public policy. Although he was compelled to an active life in law and the Senate, Cicero consistently yearned for the life of the mind. When his situation allowed it, he produced a small canon of philosophical works and literary letters, and it is these that are considered his true contribution to posterity. The similarities between Cicero’s and Adams’s families and public positions are easy to ascertain at a glance, but the private motives and values of each man also reflect in interesting ways. Like Cicero, Adams strove to achieve a masterful eloquence enriched by self-directed learning. Like Cicero, the works that Adams saw as his primary literary compositions and teachings, though fewer in number, were also in the tradition of rhetoric. Like Cicero, Adams often wrote speeches for multilayered audiences that included a future of literate readers. He hoped that his writing skill could perpetuate his personal influence, allowing his argument to be framed in a larger social and historical situation—as in the Amistad case or his promotion of astronomy. Like his model, Adams’s theory of rhetoric deeply influenced his practice of the art. And personally, both men, though idealistic and driven in public, shared a private strain of introspectiveness, accompanied by a common temperament that was subject to grouchiness and mood swings, yet both remained dedicated and dutiful statesmen to the last days of their lives. Given these similarities, it is no wonder Adams saw in Cicero a kind of historical-archetypal model worthy of emulation, not unlike a religious calling. In one letter to his son Charles, he seems to meet Cicero in his deepest, meditative moments almost as in a prayer, or as if conversing with a saint: “Every one of the letters of Cicero is a picture of the state of the writer’s mind when it was written. It is like an evoca-

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tion of shades to read them. I see him approach me like the image of a Fantasmagoria—he seems to be opening his lips to speak to me and passes off, but his words as if they had fallen upon my ears are left stamped deep upon my memory.” The concept of the orator perfectus, who possessed the moral and intellectual qualities of the orator described by Cicero and Quintilian, is undoubtedly the guiding concept of Adams’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory. Being a classical scholar, he goes straight to the source of the “good orator maxim” as a model for the republican statesman orator. The concept of the orator perfectus is developed throughout the Ciceronian canon but is made especially clear in De Inventione, De Oratore, and De Optimo Genere Oratorum. The role and responsibilities of the orator as an abstract, perfect ideal originate in the duties or officia of rhetoric as Cicero defines them: probare, concilare, movare (to teach, to please, to move). From these “offices” arises a fully developed conception of the perfect orator to fulfill them, a truly mythical human being with vital roles in the origin and ordered continuation of civilized society. In De Inventione, Cicero’s earliest work, written when he was only twenty, the opening passage presents a myth that might be named “the prime orator”: For there was a time when men wandered at large in the fields like animals and lived on wild fare; they did nothing by the guidance of reason, but relied chiefly on physical strength; there was as yet no ordered system of religious worship nor of social duties. . . . And so through their ignorance and error blind and unreasoning passion satisfied itself by misuse of bodily strength, which is a very dangerous servant. At this juncture a man—great and wise I am sure—became aware of the power latent in man and the wide field offered by his mind for great achievements if one could develop this power and improve it by instruction. Men were scattered in the fields and hidden in sylvan retreats when he assembled and gathered them in accordance with a plan; he introduced them to every useful and honorable occupation, though they cried out against it at first because of its novelty, and then when through reason and eloquence they had listened with greater attention, he transformed them from wild savages into a kind and gentle folk.29 Although De Inventione is considered formulaic and prescriptive in comparison to his mature works, this passage sets up Cicero’s idea of the orator as the founder of civilization itself and the highest possible

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moral standard. It imagines an origin of cities in which the benevolent orator, a man of superior mind and verbal skill, is the one who creates laws, organizes civil institutions, and brings out every possible art and science in the undisciplined but inherent potential of mankind. The concept of the orator perfectus is developed formally and most fully in De Oratore, his philosophical dialog written in the manner of Plato’s dialogs. The character of Crassus, the exemplary statesman, argues that rhetoric is the most difficult art to master—“For when we consider the very large number of learners, the rich supply of teachers, the exceptional abilities of the persons engaged . . . where else can we look for the explanation of the fact, except in the really incredible greatness and difficulty of the subject?”30 In extended discussion between Crassus and the more pragmatic Antonius, Cicero develops the breadth of what the perfect orator would need to know. In addition to natural ability, intelligence, art, and diligence, he must possess nearly all existent knowledge—an education encompassing philosophy, law, history, deep reading of the Greek classics, skill in amplification and style, humor, and the ability to direct the audience’s psychological state. In addition to this knowledge and skill, he must possess an intuitive understanding of human nature, including the emotions, cultural habits, and socially driven states of mind.31 In the classical tradition of uniting ethics and politics, Cicero considered that the practice of rhetoric in court and in the legislature make it quicker and easier to learn philosophy than it is for those who spend a lifetime contemplating and never acting. Finally, Cicero’s perfect orator is a master of style who is able to amplify ideas and secure the sympathies of the audience through figures of thought, and he must have supreme technical skill in generating and delivering arguments. In a modern, scientific world, the goal of attaining all knowledge seems beyond ridiculous, but the scope of this statement was considerably different for Cicero, representing a traditional wisdom and a collection of practical skills limited by the times. Still, even for Cicero’s contemporaries, Crassus emphasizes that this perfection is not something that has actually been achieved by orators: “You must remember I was not speaking of my own attainments, but of those of the ideal orator.”32 Framing the concept of the orator perfectus this way, the practice of eloquence itself becomes the greatest virtue. When John Quincy Adams introduced the subject of oratory to his Harvard audience, he emulated his master’s approach to an orator “mythos,” but also drew upon the Christian ethical touchstones of his own culture. In his inaugural oration as professor, later printed as a preface to his Lectures, Adams emphasizes the degree to which duty

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becomes a moral compass to guide speakers as leaders in a democratic society. The biblical story of Moses’s brother Aaron becomes an archetypal blueprint for the role of the orator in society, because God said he could “speak well.” Like Quintilian, Adams interprets “well” both in the sense of eloquence and in the sense of moral rightness, but he spiritualizes the interpretation by adding a religious quality. He explains that power was the result of mastery of the rhetorical arts in ancient times, and that the same holds true for his own students, who would become politicians, statesmen, and ministers in their own time and who would shape the opinions of the nation. However, responsibility and moral vision must always go hand-in-hand with this power: In the flourishing periods of Athens and Rome, eloquence was power. It was at once the instrument and the spur to ambition. The talent of public speaking was the key to the highest dignitaries; the passport to the supreme dominion of the state . . . . Oratory was taught, as an occupation of a life. . . . Sons of Harvard! Remember the reason, assigned for the appointment of Aaron to that ministry, which you purpose to assume yourselves. I know that he can speak well; and, in this testimonial of Omnipotence, receive the injunction of your duty. . . . Under governments purely republican, where every citizen has a deep interest in the affairs of the nation, and, in some form of public assembly or other, has the means and opportunity of delivering his opinions, and of communicating his sentiments by speech; where government itself has no arms but persuasion . . . the voice of eloquence will not be heard in vain. Gather fragrance from the whole paradise of science, and learn to distill from your lips the honeys of persuasion. Consecrate, above all, the faculties of your life to the cause of truth, of freedom, and of humanity. So shall your country ever gladden at the sound of your voice, and every talent, added to your accomplishments, become another blessing to mankind.33 Similarities with Cicero’s ideal orator are immediately apparent. This theme of rhetoric as the lifelong art of the Christian republican leader surfaces throughout the lectures but is especially prominent in the first volume, covering the history of the art and rhetorical invention. In this passage of his inaugural oration, before offering a series of reasons for studying the art of rhetoric in contemporary American leadership, Professor Adams invokes a “testimonial of Omnipotence” as the ultimate authoritative proof for his neo-Ciceronian ethical approach to the orator’s role. While debating the Smithsonian’s purpose, Adams often

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used references to God or Omnipotence to sway nineteenth-century audiences about the value of astronomy. The technique may remind one of the work of a later nineteenth-century practitioner and promoter of science, Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species described his evolutionary theory by suggesting it was the work of the mysterious hand of Providence. Seen in this context, Adams’s political and public promotion of science helped to set a precedent for writing about scientific discoveries in a way that courted audiences of government officials and laypeople. Adams contends in his Lectures that the first principle of human association in ancient Greece was liberty through common consent, but in Rome it was force. He compares the United States to the Greece of ancient Athens, when oratory flourished because of the spirit of democracy: [Youthful Americans] cannot fail to remark, that their own nation is at this time precisely under the same circumstances, which were so propitious to the advancement of rhetoric and oratory among the Greeks. Like them, we are divided into a number of separate commonwealths, all founded upon the principles of the most enlarged social and civil liberty. Like them, we are united in certain great national interests, and connected by a confederation, differing indeed in many essential particulars from theirs, but perhaps in still higher degree favorable to the influence and extension of eloquence. . . . Persuasion, or the influence of reason and of feeling, is the great if not the only instrument, whose operation can affect the arts of all our corporate bodies.34 This direct application of classical rhetorical theory to the practice of statecraft in America is one of Adams’s most important original contributions to the teaching of rhetoric. In fact, the assertion he makes about American democracy being in a “higher degree favorable to the influence and extension of eloquence” is often made by rhetoricians today, especially in the vast “democracy” of the media. His statement about persuasion as perhaps the only instrument “whose operation can affect the arts of all our corporate bodies” particularly rings true in his practice of rhetoric for the cause of the Smithsonian and for the science of astronomy. Like his three ancient teachers of rhetorical theory, Adams addresses the misuse of rhetoric in causes that conflict with the public good. He agrees with the Roman orators that power is one of the benefits of mastering rhetoric and oratory, but that it is therefore important to do battle against those who use eloquence for their own

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aggrandizement rather than for the common good of the republic. This moral purpose of the orator would become a recurring theme in his Smithsonian arguments, especially in combatting self-seeking competitors for the legacy. Continuing this emphasis on the ethical duties involved in public speaking, Adams develops his definition of rhetoric in accordance with his guiding concept of the orator perfectus. In agreement with Quintilian, he maintains that Aristotle’s definition, “finding out the means of persuasion,” includes only logical argument, emotion, and character, leaving out style and disposition. Cicero’s definition, which he sees simply as “persuasion,” is in his view too broad, so that it would include almost everything— Persuasive speech, and more persuasive sighs, Silence, that speaks, and eloquence of eyes.35 Quintilian’s definition, he explains, is the best: rhetoric is the science of speaking well, including moral character of the speaker and excellence in speech itself. In order to master this science, therefore, and to practice with proficiency the corresponding art of oratory, the student must acquire a strong moral sense along with his intellectual development. Lecture fifteen deals specifically with the intellectual and moral qualities needed for the orator-leader. Here he relies almost exclusively on Cicero and Quintilian, dividing the character of the orator into three parts: the heart, the understanding, and the temper. He writes: “In mere speculation we cannot separate the moral character from the oratorical power. If we assume as a given point, that a man is deficient in the score of integrity, we discard all confidence in his discourse, and all benevolence to his person. We contemn [sic] his argument as sophistry.”36 He counsels his students to imagine what Truth, Honor, and Virtue would say in person, if they could speak with a human voice. The orator must have “formed a correct estimate of good and evil,”37 and the ability to overcome obstacles, because a reputation for integrity and ingenuity are required in Congress, in the bar, and in the pulpit. The student of rhetoric and oratory must acquire a lifelong habit of learning, and a broad introduction through university education to the “elements of useful knowledge,” followed by judicious inquiry and research into the various branches of knowledge that most determine his particular profession. Genius, he says, is not absolutely necessary, and in fact it cannot be the subject of much discussion in the science of rhetoric. Nature either supplies it or does not, and it should neither be suppressed where it exists nor required where not needed. The only areas where natural aptitude is required are in “boldness of

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heart,” fluency of speech, and “strength of lungs.” Adams himself, lacking in any particular genius for speech-making, serves as his own example for these injunctions to work hard and study. All of these qualities should be the constant, ongoing aim of the good public leader, as he carries on his quest to embody the ideal orator. Adams explains to his students that this concept of the perfect orator is itself an ideal, like the concepts of beauty and goodness. It can never actually be attained, but striving to meet it continually moves both the orator and his listeners to improve: “It appears to have been the study of [Cicero’s] whole life to form an idea of a perfect orator. . . . It is the idealized image of a speaker, in the mind of Cicero; what a speaker should be; what no speaker ever will be; but what every speaker should devote the labors of his life to approximate.”38 Adams urges his students to make Cicero’s pursuit of ideal excellence their unending source of virtue and happiness, “through all the struggles of human opposition,” into the reflections of maturity.39 Clearly, this is exactly what Adams himself strove to do.

The Orator and His Audience Adams conceives of rhetoric in the classical sense as predominated by practice in three types of audiences: political, judicial, and ceremonial. Like his classical sources, he designates utility as the end of political rhetoric, justice as the end of judicial rhetoric, and virtue as the end of ceremonial rhetoric. Like some of the eighteenth-century neoclassical rhetoricians, Adams adds pulpit oratory to the three traditional genres, including a chapter specifically for future clergymen and their critics. Adams’s treatment of ceremonial oratory, which is also called epideictic or demonstrative oratory, is pertinent to some of his activities in the promotion of astronomy. He gave a handful of talks on his Smithsonian proposal for an astrophysical observatory to audiences of small learned societies. These talks resembled encomiums of astronomy more than lectures on the topic. His political rhetoric on Smithson’s gift and on astronomy also seemed to borrow tactics from epideictic oratory. His treatment of the genre in the Lectures is very traditional: the method of epideictic oratory is to praise or blame some particular person or subject, with the aim of inculcating virtue. He adds that God is the highest object of praise, but concerning men the highest praise is for qualities of mind. In terms of the practice of his rhetorical principles in Congress, the most relevant parts of Adams’s advice in the Lectures occurs in connection with deliberative oratory. Again, his notion of deliberative rhetoric

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emphasizes the importance of the speaker and his character. The goodwill of the hearers, always sought by an orator, depends on the speaker’s ability to project his character and adapt his subject and style to the forum: The eloquence of deliberation will necessarily take much of its color from the orator himself. He must be careful to suit his discourse to his own character and situation. In early life he may endeavor to make a strong impression by the airy splendor of his style, contrasted with the unaffected modesty of his address. If advanced in years, and elevated in reputation and dignity, the gravity of his manner and the weight of sentiment should justly correspond with the reverence, due to his station. It is in deliberative assemblies, more than upon any other stage of public speaking, that the good opinion of his auditory is important to the speaker . . . the particular province of the deliberative speaker is to advise; and what possible effect can be expected from advice, where there is no confidence in the adviser.40 This concept of prepon or appropriateness was stressed repeatedly by classical rhetoricians. Adams the orator, on the floor of the House, certainly achieved this ethos of gravity and dignity. In typical, neoclassical form Adams explains that demonstrative orators appeal to the prevailing opinions of the audience; and judicial orators to the audience’s judgment of past actions; but deliberative orators appeal directly to the will, aiming to produce future action as a result of believed utility or expediency. Because of this facility, “only here are eloquence and persuasion synonymous,” and “the objects of deliberative eloquence then are almost co-extensive with human affairs.”41 Whenever one is called upon to give advice, counsel, or petition, even to a single person, the object is deliberation, according to Adams. Adams draws extensively from Aristotle in his lecture on political or deliberative oratory. He explains that the Greeks, including Aristotle, mastered deliberative rhetoric, whereas the Romans perfected judicial rhetoric. In the course of the lecture, he elaborates on the functions of possibility and necessity, amplification and approximation, and the importance of observing the character of the audience, whether rude or honorable—much as Aristotle does in his Art of Rhetoric. Congress, Adams asserts, is composed of the honorable type, and is representative of a larger population. He dwells on the use of examples, both fables and parables, but urges especially the use of Christian

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gospel, whose founder “delivered his incomparable system of morality altogether through the medium of fables and parables.”42 Adams pays particular attention to the deliberative assemblies in Congress, modifying his lessons to fit the current structure of these legislative bodies: From the preponderancy of democracy in the political constitutions of our country, deliberative assemblies are more numerous, and the objects of their consideration are more diversified than they ever have been in any other age or nation. From the formation of a national constitution to the management of a turnpike, every object of concern to more than one individual is transacted by deliberative bodies. National and state conventions for the purpose of forming constitutions, the Congress of the United States, the legislatures of the several states, are all deliberative assemblies. Besides which, in our part of the country, every town, every parish or religious society, every association of individuals, incorporated for the purposes of interest, of education, of charity, or of science, forms a deliberative assembly, and presents opportunities for the exhibition of deliberative eloquence.43 As he continues his discussion, Adams persistently keeps an eye on legislatures as the ultimate forum for deliberative rhetoric in the United States: The most important scenes of deliberative oratory however in these states are the congress of the union, and the state legislatures. The objects of their deliberation affect the interests of individuals and of the nation, in the highest degree. In seeking the sources of deliberative argument I shall therefore so modify the rules . . . as to bear constant reference to them.44 The means of persuasion for a speaker of this sort are of three types: those drawn from the subject under consideration, those related to the people deliberating, and those having to do with the speaker himself. In this way, Adams introduces logos, pathos, and ethos, which Aristotle and later Cicero saw as the three artistic or internal proofs of rhetoric.45 Adams treats both ethos and pathos, in the practice of the art of rhetoric, in his lecture “Excitation and Management of the Passions.” He maintains that any accomplished orator should have a “steady and unvarying command over his own passions,”46 but also some method or means of exercising influence over the emotions of his hearers. He argues that manipulating the emotions of the audience is less important to contemporary orators than it was to the ancients. He quotes

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Quintilian, who is in agreement with Cicero on use of emotions: “The proofs and the reasons serve indeed to convince the judge, that our cause is the best. But by means of his passions he is made to wish it such; and he will soon believe what he once wishes.”47 Adams notes that Quintilian’s advice here has to do with the realm of ancient judicial eloquence, and that it applies to deliberative oratory only by weak analogy. Another difference he points out, in comparison with the ancients’ treatment of the passions, that “the christian [sic] system of morality has modified rhetorical principles concerning the passions.”48 Christian morality, he writes, has commanded us to suppress the angry and turbulent passions in ourselves, and forbids us to stimulate them in others. This precept, like many others proceeding from the same source, is elevated so far above the ordinary level of human virtue, that it is not always faithfully obeyed. . . . Would to heaven that [such uses of anger] were as universally abandoned in practice. Of this there is but too much still remaining. It is only too easily learned and too frequently employed, for the worst of purposes.49 His treatment of a system of invention for the rhetorical passions is taken from a combination of sources, but he calls Aristotle’s discussion of it in the Rhetoric “one of the profoundest and most ingenious treatises upon human nature—that has ever issued from the pen of man.”50 He explains that the Greeks divided emotions into two types: pathos and ethos. The former he continues to call passions, and the latter he names “habits,” a manner of distinguishing ethos and pathos that he derives from Quintilian. He cites Aristotle on the habits of character, which he says are more peaceable and permanent impulses than the passions, but which can be estimated according to the age and class of the audience. Adams centers his method of exciting emotions on the faculty of imagination or fantasy, the power of presenting to the mind images of absent things: By the power of imagination the orator undergoes a virtual transformation. He identifies himself either with the person, in whose behalf he would excite the sentiment of compassion, or with the antagonist, against whom he is to contend, or with the auditor, whom he is to convince or persuade; or successively with each of them in turn. In the deep silence of meditation he holds an instructive dialogue with every one of these personages.51

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This approach shows the important relationship in Adams’s mind between the invention of emotional proofs and the audience. For deliberative oratory, the “master passion” is jealousy, which emanates from the spirit of party often involved in this genre. Adams tells his students that this passion is aroused by raising suspicions against the opponent’s integrity and motives. It is usually the last resort in an argument plagued by faction, when the speaker is unable to support his arguments by reason; it is effective only if the audience is sufficiently prejudiced and ignorant of the question at hand. Adams is generally disdainful of orators who overuse emotional proof, warning that “to retain its efficacy, it must be rarely employed.”52

The Classic Art of Argument Adams urges the deliberative orator to use all the means of persuasion and the techniques of invention that are common to the other two kinds of rhetoric. In separate lectures he treats stasis theory and the topics. He considered these to be of primary importance to rhetorical training. Because of its importance in Adams’s own practice of oratory, and in the rhetorical tradition in general, it will be useful to explain the origins of stasis theory here. The second-century rhetorician Hermagoras of Temnos is widely considered the first to have codified stasis theory in its pedagogical form. Hermagoras’s original work is lost, but it was carried down through the Western canon primarily in Cicero’s De Inventione and parts of his later works, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, and the anonymous Roman work Rhetorica ad Herennium. Basically, stasis is a system of questions designed to assist the orator in identifying the real issue at hand in a given controversy. It grew out of Roman law and procedures for framing the conflict of accusation or claim and defense in court cases. Reconstructions of Hermagoras’s earlier theory suggest that it was more multilayered than Cicero’s or Quintilian’s versions, containing a two-tiered set of questions. First, the four stasus rationales or generales: 1. 2. 3. 4.

The The The The

issue issue issue issue

of of of of

fact or conjecture (an sit) definition (quid sit) quality (quale sit) process53

These were followed in Hermagoras by four more technical questions of legal interpretation addressing the relationship between the controversy and the intricacies of interpreting written and codified law. In

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Cicero and Quintilian, these stasus legales are subsumed under the general questions. The questions were used successively in a legal case to determine the central issue and then organize the direction of argument. For example, in a murder trial, the question of conjecture would determine agreement on whether or not someone was indeed dead (and not just missing, for instance). This being determined as a fact, the next question concerns the issue of how to define or classify the act. If there are likely proofs to show that the death was an accident or a suicide, then the very issue of whether or not the death was murder must be argued. If, however, there is agreement on both sides that it is murder, the argument proceeds to the third question, concerning the quality, or what kind of act the murder in question was. What extenuating circumstances or motives characterize the act, such as premeditation, selfdefense, a fit of rage, additional mutilation? Such argument would determine the degree of seriousness of the crime and its punishment. Finally, the fourth question of procedure or jurisdiction might be needed, particularly if one side believes that proper legal procedures were not followed in the case. In Cicero’s work, this final, more technical question of legal jurisdiction is omitted, so that the remaining three stasus rationales (conjecture, definition, and quality) can be used in any argument or controversy, not only in the legal genre. Adams used this order of invention often in constructing his own plan of action in long debates such as the one in Congress over the definition and founding of the Smithsonian Institution. In his Lectures, Adams draws on both his legal profession and his classical readings to explain the use of the stases, but he is also careful to expand it as an appropriate guiding principle for legislative assemblies. The state of the controversy or stasis, he contends, is nothing but “another word for the subject,” yet its simplicity does not prevent deliberative bodies from abusing this rule of thumb: In all our legislative bodies rules of order are established for the purpose of confining the speakers to the subject before them; and certain forms even of phraseology are adopted, into which every question must be reduced. Yet even this is not sufficient to restrain the wandering propensities of debate. There is a formal rule in the British house of commons, that “no member shall speak impertinently, or beside the question.” A rule, which I believe none of the legislative assemblies in our country has thought proper to adopt.54 The three main states of controversy he names are Cicero’s: conjecture, definition, and quality. As in Cicero, the status legales are omitted.

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Once the subject of a deliberative assembly is established, an orator will be able to persuade his hearers only if he is experienced in the process of invention. For this, the ancient method of training was the use of argumentative topoi, or topics (loci in Latin). The topics are tools for the invention of arguments, and although Adams tells his students that “almost all the modern writers upon rhetoric have concurred to explode them from the science,” Adams is under the impression that they are “not so entirely useless.” As rhetorical scholar Michael Leff explains, the topics are a systematic method for analyzing the event or controversy in question, including a thorough investigation of motives and attributes of persons and actions involved.55 The orator would apply this system—used as a kind of mental checklist or grid of questions—to a specific court case or deliberative problem in order to generate all the possible supporting arguments to be made from his or her perspective on the issue. Adams sees the topics as an optional tool for training the mind in the art of argumentation, but also a method that had been historically important and culturally formative. He compares them to the categorizing system of an apothecary’s shop: You ask the attendant at the shop for the medicinal article you want; he goes to one of his boxes, and in a moment brings you the drug, for which you applied; but which you never would have discovered from the names upon the boxes. Now the topics are, as I conceive, to the young orator, exactly what the apothecary’s painted boxes are to his apprentice. . . . A perfect master of the topics may be a very miserable orator; but an accomplished orator will not disdain a thorough knowledge of the topics.56 He names the topics in a Ciceronian manner, describing both internal topics that arise “from the bosom of the subject itself”57 and external or inartificial topics that arise from sources outside the subject, such as witnesses or written documents. He explains that there are sixteen internal topics, but of these three are overarching topics that apply in any genre of argument. These he calls definition, enumeration, and notation or etymology. Definition, whether the orator is defining things or ideas, involves differentiating the subject or act from others that are similar to it, so that it becomes clear what properties are peculiar to itself; enumeration is a division of the subject or act into its constituent parts; and notation elucidates the meanings of words by tracing them to their original sources, a method of explication that is especially useful in judicial questions. The other internal topics, directly from

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Cicero, he names as follows: genus, species, antecedents, consequents, adjuncts, repugnances, similitude, dissimilitude, and comparison. The orator may, for instance, systematically explore “antecedents, consequents, and adjuncts” as attendant to the acts under scrutiny in relation to past, future, and present time. Some of these relations may be deemed causal, and others not. The orator may then look to “similitude” as an exercise in drawing resemblances to other acts and objects that may be familiar or vivid to the audience, or “comparison” to mark their differences. Explained this way, it is possible to see stasis theory as simply an orderly arrangement of topics for unpacking the vagaries of an issue in a procedural order. Both systems are pedagogical tools deeply rooted in classical teachings, which over time became embedded in the very conventions of how we argue in public life. The experienced orator or statesman will probably not resort to using them, but early familiarity with them can only improve one’s ability, in the fray of a debate, to invent as many rhetorical proofs as possible in a disciplined and orderly way. Perhaps more relevant to our task in this book, the topics in twentieth-century scholarship have often served as the basis for forms of rhetorical criticism and analysis of an argumentative discourse. Like Cicero and Quintilian, Adams approaches the types of an argument as another means of invention. He does not address these in terms of order or relation to other parts of the speech, but rather in terms of their natural forms in language and in thought. He includes separate lectures on each of four species of argument: confirmation, confutation, ratiocination, and induction. Transition and digression he treats together, not because of any similarity in their function, but because they do not easily fit into any special order with the others. With Aristotle, he claims that the types of argument traditionally called confirmation and confutation are essentially the same; both are modifications of the proof upon which conviction depends. A certain sign eliminates the need for argumentation, but uncertain signs “furnish possibility and probability” and “depend upon the ingenuity of the speaker.” Again he agrees with Aristotle that “signs, if certain, form the basis of a syllogism; if uncertain, of an enthymem [sic]; and that examples lay the foundation of induction.” 58 The method for each of these three types of reasoning (syllogism, enthymeme, examples or induction) is basic to the understanding of public argumentation as a whole. In fact, Adams sees probable argument as the element of rhetoric to which all the rest is subservient: “The argumentative part of rhetoric is its living soul. It is to true eloquence what charity is to true christianity [sic]” . . . “Here you will

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observe, that rhetoric resolves herself into logic. Here it behooves the orator to be a perfect master of the art of reasoning.”59 He especially saw this aspect of rhetoric as essential to judicial cases, insisting that “the administration of justice is in substance a strict logical syllogism, of which the written law forms the major proposition, the verdict of the jury the minor, and the sentence of the court the conclusion.”60 It is an understanding of certitude in forensic interpretation that was common in the nineteenth century. This overarching structure, however, is not limited to the judicial genre and may be applied in deliberative debates where the outcome rests on the interpretation of a document, as in the case of James Smithson’s will. The two basic forms of logical reasoning, induction and deduction, have special forms in classical teachings on rhetoric. In traditional rhetorical lore, beginning with Aristotle, logical induction manifests as inferences drawn from examples, which are concrete aspects of the situation or issue. Deduction, or ratiocination as Adams calls it, evolves purely from linguistic and rational forms used to build chains of conclusions from agreed-upon propositions, which conclusions are then used as premises to draw the next set of conclusions and so on. Adams explains the difference between inductive reasoning and ratiocination or deductive reasoning thus: Ratiocination is that exertion of the mind, by which a proposition is inferred by way of conclusion from certain other propositions, which are laid down as premises. Induction is the inference of a conclusion from admitted facts or examples. Ratiocination is exclusively the act of the person, who reasons. Induction is an appeal to the consciousness, or a result from the concession of the person, with whom the argument is held. Ratiocination derives all its resources from itself. Induction carries on the war upon enemy’s territories. Ratiocination achieves all its victories by its own overpowering energy. Induction obtains many triumphs from the weakness or treachery of the enemy’s troops. Ratiocination proceeds in a lineal descent from truth to truth. Induction proves one truth by collateral kindred with others.61 Both forms of probable reasoning are useful to the deliberative orator. In addition to these two main divisions, each type can be divided into smaller species of argument. The simple syllogism, Adams asserts, is not of much use in rhetoric, since its conclusions are linguistic facts and logical certainties; the syllogism belongs in the philosophical realm of positive demonstration. Still, it is helpful to review its basic parts here,

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as it is the purest form of deductive reasoning, by comparison to which the other two may be defined. Typically, the syllogism contains three statements: two premises and a conclusion. A general first premise, combined with a more specific second premise containing information or categories that limit the set contained in the first premise, entails the conclusion. For example: All astrophysicists are scientists. Dr. Johnson is an astrophysicist. Therefore, Dr. Johnson is a scientist. The “middle term” that links the two premises necessitates the syntactical nature of the conclusion. Logical topics are often drawn into syllogistic structures as a way of providing categories or other attributes in the statement of the second premise. The method is simple and clear, but entirely unlike natural speech. The enthymeme (“enthymem” as Adams spells it) is, according to Adams’s interpretation, an imperfect syllogism used in rhetorical discourse. In Aristotle, the enthymeme is considered the soul of rhetorical argument, and not so much imperfect as it is based on the necessarily uncertain fluctuation of human events, of time and place. As Adams puts it, “The difference is that, as the domain of rhetorical argument is not certainty but probability, the propositions are not absolute, but always in some degree problematic.”62 Adams’s explanation of it is simplistic, but it contains many of the important aspects of Aristotle’s enthymeme. Basically, Adams sees the enthymeme as a syllogism with one or more of the premises suppressed—a two-statement deduction. Adams’s treatment follows Cicero’s discussion in De Inventione, without noting the corruption of Aristotle’s teaching on the enthymeme, that popular audiences cannot follow a lengthy argument with many steps. In natural forms of human discourse, he contends, there is no mode of reasoning more common than the enthymeme. It is much more flexible than the syllogism because it can reverse its parts or leave them out entirely when the audience is certain to intuit the missing information. From this audience participation, the enthymeme draws its persuasive power. Adams gives the Beatitudes in Jesus’s sermon on the Mount as an example of a series of regular enthymemes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” could be converted to a formal syllogism if the suppressed premise is inserted: Blessed are they who enjoy the kingdom of heaven. The poor in spirit enjoy the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, blessed are the poor in spirit.

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An epichirema, as Adams explains it from Cicero, is an expanded rhetorical syllogism in which one or more of the premises require more propositions before it can be accepted by the audience as probably true: The epichirema however is the form, in which the essential parts of the syllogism may be applied with efficacy to public discourse. A syllogism, as you know, consists of three propositions. . . . And these propositions all belong alike to the epichirema. . . . If both premises require proof, the epichirema consists of five parts. If, while one of the premises is so clear, that it may stand upon its own feet, the other requires the aid of a staff, the whole consists of four [parts]. And when the two premises are deemed so obvious, as to require no illustration, the conclusion is left to be supplied by the imagination of the hearer, and the epichirema consists of only two parts. . . . In rhetoric, syllogism, by sliding into the enthymem or spreading into the epichirema, seems to change its nature. It retains all its powers, but is emancipated from all its restrictions.63 These rhetorical forms of deduction or ratiocination, Adams claims, are the most common forms of reasoning in the discourse of society and in every kind of literary composition. His arguments promoting science and the diffusion of knowledge often employ this form, as following chapters will illustrate. The other mode of reasoning, induction, Adams describes as inference of a general conclusion from a multitude of particular instances, or else as inferring a conclusion from one or more particular experiences.64 Of the forms of induction Adams describes in the Lectures, one is particularly interesting and often used by Adams in his speeches. This is a method of ensnaring the adversary in a trap of his own faulty arguments. Socrates, Adams points out, sometimes uses this form of reasoning in Plato’s dialogues. The rules to follow in practicing this form or argument are as follows: First that position, upon which . . . you propose to build the proof of that which is in dispute, must not be itself questionable. It must be such, as that you may safely calculate upon the answer. Secondly the position, which you obtain as a datum, must be of striking similarity to that, which you are desirous of proving. . . . Thirdly yet your adversary must not perceive where his first admissions are to land him. . . . You must lead him blindfolded from his concessions to his strong-hold, and eventually reduce him to silence, to full concession, or precise

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denial. In case of denial you must prove the controverted similitude, or commence a new train of induction. His concession is your victory, and puts an end to the argument. . . . This form of argumentation therefore consists of three parts. The first is formed of one or more similitudes; the second of that, for which they are adduced; and the third is the conclusion, drawn from the whole series of your questions.65 This method of arguing through similitude was a favorite of Adams’s, one he used often and with fruitful results in his congressional arguments for the promotion of science. While it may resemble a deductive chain of linear argument, it is actually a type of induction that produces an inference from a set of particulars or admitted facts, which the adversary cannot refute. Its resemblance to deduction, however, rings true in Adams’s comment that induction “has sometimes been called a syllogism without a middle term.”66 After these definitions, he goes on to provide numerous examples of the different types of probable reasoning in literature and oratory, including excerpts from Cicero, Homer, Demosthenes, Junius, Johnson, Addison, Edmund Burke, and from scripture. He does this not only for the sake of informing his students, but also to provide for his own topic a rhetorical dose of sweetness and illustrations of various styles: “We are traveling in paths, where the rugged and the barren region must occasionally succeed to that of pleasantness.”67 But perhaps most importantly, the references to Cicero’s speeches and letters provide Adams with another opportunity to urge fervent devotion to “the instruction of all ages, the legislator of human kind.”68 For Adams, Cicero’s use of ratiocination, learned from the philosophers, united him in practice with the ethicist and the moralist, and provided a key to his role as the ideal statesman orator. If practiced earnestly, this art of ratiocination could enable the orator to acquire a “new and more venerable character,” in which he would no longer speak publicly as an individual, but would plead the further reaching cause of “human improvement.” This transcendent quality of ratiocination can also affect the level of style in deliberative oratory, depending on the scope of the audience addressed. Normally, deliberative style should be simple and plain: although the speaker should “bury himself in the subject,” he should endeavor not to “smell too much of the lamp,” a bit of advice which Adams is not always able to follow. Yet, when the cause of such rhetoric is great and the fate of a nation hinges upon it, . . . the orator may fairly consider himself, as addressing not only his immediate hearers, but the world at large; and all

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future times. . . . He makes the question of an hour a question for every age and every region; takes the vote of unborn millions upon the debate of a little senate, and incorporates himself and his discourse with the general history of mankind.69 This vision of posterity requires the orator, in Adams’s view, to assume a solemnity and dignity suitable to the “grandeur of the cause.” The science of astronomy, for example, was undoubtedly a cause of “considerable grandeur,” and one which would inspire instances of addressing “the world at large” from Adams the mature orator. It is at moments like this, and in the service of causes like these, that deliberative oratory seems to take on some of the qualities of ceremonial rhetoric—but I must save discussion of particular rhetorical events for chapter 4.

Reception of the Lectures Adams’s lectures were well received by his students, who petitioned him to publish the whole series before he left Harvard for his appointment as ambassador to Russia. This gave him no time for the revision he had intended. The criticism of his contemporaries often failed to take this into account, and no doubt was often prompted by political bias. Testimony to a politically based criticism comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson: When he read his first lectures in 1806, not only the students heard him with delight, but the hall was crowded by the Professors and by unusual visitors. I remember, when, long after, I entered college, hearing the story of the number of coaches in which his friends came from Boston to hear him. On his return in the winter to the Senate in Washington, he took such grounds in the debates of the following session as to lose the sympathy of many of his constituents in Boston. When, on his return from Washington, he resumed his lectures in Cambridge, his class attended but the coaches from Boston did not come, and indeed many of his political friends deserted him.70 Modern criticism of Adams’s Lectures in the early part of this century did not look much deeper. In 1946, before the resurgence of interest in classical rhetoric and its influence, Donald Goodfellow remarked, “Unappealing though we may find these lectures today, they represent his best efforts as the first incumbent of America’s first chair of rhetoric and oratory.”71

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Although some modern readers have found his style overly dramatic and long-winded, reading Adams’s Lectures today gives us a hint of what it was like to hear them in Harvard Hall’s chapel. Adams summed up this quality in a letter to his mother, addressing some of the harsh criticism of his reviewers: “For a book of instruction the lectures are in a style too oratorical, or if you please too declamatory. I purposefully indulged myself and my hearers in some excesses of this kind, for the sake of riveting their attention to the subject.”72 It is clear that Adams’s purpose in the lectures was to convince his immediate hearers of the vitality of rhetoric and its particular usefulness in nineteenth-century America. At the same time, he strove to present his subject as a theoretical art whose basic principles had already been presented by the ancients. Adams did not often refer to contemporary rhetoricians in his lectures, perhaps because he wanted to preserve the classical art. This does not mean that he was ignorant of the belletristic or psychological-epistemological approaches to rhetoric, as we have seen. Although not an original thinker, Adams was a principled thinker, and he believed that classical rhetoric contained the essence of the art of public speaking. Clearly, his neoclassical ideals were one reason for his appointment as the first Boylston professor. Criticism of his close adherence to Boylston’s rules misses this point entirely.

COMPETING RHETORICAL TEACHINGS IN ADAMS’S TIME Adams’s neoclassical approach to rhetoric was one among many competing approaches to the study of this art. To place Adams’s theory in the context of other approaches requires a brief look at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments in Europe and America. In particular, Enlightenment approaches such as “Belletrism” and “Elocution” were highly popular during the time of Adams’s public service in politics. This section introduces these variations on the teaching of rhetoric. Since different orators were influenced by different rhetorical teachings, an awareness of other ideas of rhetorical practice will be useful for the reader later, when I describe speeches and arguments by orators who used more “modern” approaches to compete with Adams’s classical strategies for the promotion of science. While Adams’s conception of rhetoric retained classical ideas, in Europe the Enlightenment had altered views of the art in the century preceding his composition of the Lectures on Rhetoric. Of course Adams, who was well traveled and partly educated in Europe, was well aware of this context. In European universities and other institutions

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for promoting knowledge, the philosophies of René Descartes and John Locke had already elevated empirical science and mathematical logic to the status of absolute truth. This new way of thinking about truth permeated teachings even in what we now think of as humanities subjects. Classical rhetoric, in the Aristotelian and Ciceronian vein popular in the Renaissance, had emphasized probabilistic and deductive reasoning, but these now became suspect because they dealt only with accepted knowledge and did not rely on quantifiable observations. Many eighteenth-century rhetoricians abandoned classical invention, which included techniques for the discovery of ethical, emotional, and logical proofs (ethos, pathos, and logos) to persuade a particular audience. The heuristic system of topics or loci was discarded as mechanical and unnecessary. Syllogistic proofs and value-based reasoning were also rejected in favor of inductive methods that relied on experience and observation. Enlightenment scholars saw a veritable gulf between language and thought, and they believed that classical rhetorical invention exacerbated this split and thwarted the scientific search for truth.73 This was a deeply substantive change in how the art of rhetoric was taught, since in the classical system logical invention of arguments and discovery of emotional and ethical appeals had been the core of rhetoric. As Enlightenment rhetoricians accepted the seventeenth-century philosophy of Francis Bacon and adopted his ideas about language, the perceived split between thought and language deepened. The function of rhetoric, as Francis Bacon saw it in his approach to the faculties of the human mind, was “to apply reason to imagination for the better moving of the will.”74 Stylistic figures and tropes and other compositional strategies that had been a part of classical rhetoric were acceptable in Bacon’s schema, but only as they advanced communication and not for mere ornament, which could lead to deception.75 Rhetoricians who followed Bacon also believed invention to reside in each separate science, and rhetoric to be simply the art of communicating clearly and effectively.76 By far the most popular book on rhetoric in eighteenth-century Europe was Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), originally delivered at the University of Edinburgh.77 As Adams noted in his diary, he was familiar with the works of Blair and admired them to some extent, although unlike Blair, he retained classical teachings for rhetorical invention. Blair’s approach to rhetoric is dominated by the notion of “taste,” which he defines as the power of getting pleasure from beautiful things—a faculty of human nature he believed to be under the management of reason. For Blair, as for many of his contemporaries, rhetoric had become nearly synonymous with literary criti-

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cism. The Enlightenment’s requirements for scientific observation had caused rhetoric to turn in on its own subject matter, now broadened from persuasive oratory to all belles lettres (poetry, history, and philosophy). Rhetoric moved from being the practice of oratory to being the study of effectiveness in language, oral or written. Literature of the day became the object to be observed, and certain models of style were considered stronger and naturally better than others. Blair’s book reflects this turn by including several lectures on figurative language and style, with a great number of literary illustrations from Addison, Burke, or Milton used as models for good taste. Blair also emphasized prescriptions and rules for taste, usage, and style, feeding the Enlightenment appetite for undisputed truth. Invention of arguments, in Blair’s rhetoric, was divorced from classical, probable reasoning and the topoi because knowledge of the subject itself determined the best arguments to use. Blair’s specialized, subject-based invention and static, textual models for style became widely popular throughout Europe and later in nineteenth-century America.78 A notable historian of rhetoric, Winifred Ryan Horner, ascribes the nineteenth-century popularity of Blair’s Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in America to a colonial inferiority complex and a desire to imitate English tastes. Horner explains, “The American Universities in the nineteenth century were moving toward expansion to serve their population in an upwardly mobile society, which now equated a college degree with material success.”79 Another group of European rhetoric scholars who became very influential in nineteenth-century America developed teachings on a single part of rhetoric: delivery, which they renamed “elocution”— appropriating the Latin term for style. The Elocutionists retained a classical bent, but their focus was on reviving the classical art of delivery in politics, the bar, and the pulpit. Thomas Sheridan, an Irish actor, was the leading figure in this area of rhetorical studies. He argued in British Education (1756) that a revival of the ancient art of oral delivery would also bring improvements to religion, government, and culture in general. Because of the impulse to nationalize—really to Anglicize—a diverse pool of immigrants, elocution became a popular study in nineteenth-century America, influencing even grade school curriculums, as the popularity of such elocutionary readers as The Columbian Orator attests. Along with teachers of the new approaches, there remained a few advocates of Ciceronian rhetoric in eighteenth-century Europe. These books made their way into colleges in nineteenth-century America, and became part of the context in which Adams taught the subject. John Ward of Gresham College and John Lawson of the University of

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Dublin, for example, defended classical invention, disposition, and the topoi. His book was the basis of the statutes of the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. In France, René Chapin merged classicism and the empirical developments by pointing out that poetry, history, and philosophy also appeal to the classical rhetorical proofs (ethos, pathos, and logos). In the early part of the nineteenth century, Richard Whately (Elements of Rhetoric, 1828) wrote about the psychological motivation in Cicero’s rhetorical system and introduced the concept of “burden of proof” for argumentation. His book was widely read in America during the second half of Adams’s public career, as it underwent seven editions between 1828 and 1846.80 Through the influence of European neoclassicists and elocutionists, rhetorical studies at the dawn of the nineteenth century in America were still neoclassical, arising from a culture that was primarily oral and collective in expressing its values. Although the influence of belletrism and Baconian faculty psychology were creeping into college curriculums, elocution remained the most popular “advance” in the art until later in the century. John Witherspoon at Princeton and Timothy Dwight at Yale, for instance, were influenced primarily by the ancient rhetoricians in developing their college curriculums for the country’s future leaders. John Quincy Adams’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard (1806) was among the most classical of these early American rhetorics, especially in his extensive treatment of invention. During the period of transition from the Jacksonian Era to what is known as the American Enlightenment, rhetorical education and oratorical practice entered a state of flux. This is the period, during the 1830s, in which the debates over the founding of the Smithsonian and Adams’s promotion of astronomy occurred. During this time, eighteenth-century European approaches to rhetoric, particularly belletrism and elocution, began to have a sweeping influence on university education in the United States. The works of Blair, Campbell, Whately, and Sheridan contained enough classical influence to satisfy Americans’s desire for a society modeled after ancient democracy; yet, because of the influence of the new faculty psychology, they also contained a scientific flavor that appealed to students in the New World. Through the course of the nineteenth century, rhetoric in America gradually abandoned the classical tradition of persuasive speech, first by turning to belles lettres and then, after the Civil War, by embracing written composition as a technical job skill needed in an industrial and commercial society.81 The result was a rhetorical practice in public life that was more associative and informal in making arguments.

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The fragmentation of long-held Western traditions of rhetoric during the latter years of the nineteenth century is sometimes described as the decline of rhetoric as a coherent discipline. One of the frequently cited early proponents of this view is Albert Raymond Kitzhaber, whose 1953 dissertation concluded that “after 1880, American rhetorical theory splintered into many separate emphases, each having its day of popularity and its enthusiastic supporters, but none being enough to furnish the basis for a significant new tradition.”82 More recently Halloran and Clark describe this change as a decline in the dominant oratorical culture of the early nineteenth century.83 As had happened in Europe a century earlier, criticism became synonymous with rhetoric, and rhetoric lost its definition as the art of inventing or discovering persuasive proofs. Finally, as a consequence of this emphasis on criticism, the art of rhetoric ironically lost its meaning as a teachable practice. Adams was among the last of his kind, both as a statesman orator and as a professor of rhetoric.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY RHETORICAL THEORY: AN AID FOR CONTEMPORARY READERS Twentieth-century commentators on the art of rhetoric have furnished some new insights and additional distinctions that enable the reader to discuss elements of persuasion at work in discourse. In the textual analysis in chapters 4 and 5, I use some of these insights to supplement the classical or neoclassical concepts and principles available to Adams. In the discussion that follows, I have described those twentieth-century ideas that have helped me to understand additional persuasive elements at work in Adams’s promotion of science. Primarily, I rely on the work of Chaim Perelman and L. OlbrechtsTyteca, whose work became a wellspring for the resurgence of interest in classical rhetoric during the twentieth century. In their book, The New Rhetoric (1969), the authors explain the “starting point of argument” (broadly speaking) as agreement: “The unfolding as well as the starting point of argumentation presuppose indeed the agreement of the audien . . .from start to finish, analysis of argumentation is concerned with what is supposed to be accepted by the hearers.”84 Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca go on to define and describe the various objects of agreement, including facts, truths, presumptions, and concrete and abstract values. This conception of argument, if not the terms, they derive mostly from the dialectical and rhetorical treatises of Aristotle, with some added elements from the works of Cicero and Quintilian.

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Their treatise is an effort to study the methods of probabilistic proof used to secure “adherence of minds” or assent, as opposed to the selfevident demonstrations of Cartesian reason and science. That is to say, their work examines how speakers and writers engage audiences in mental contact, and how they form a “community of minds” in order to increase the intensity of adherence to particular theses through opinion-based argument. Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theoretical schema enables us to examine the rhetorical starting point of Adams’s arguments concerning government support of science as an intersection in a complex matrix of the real (including the facts, truths, and presumptions of the participants), on the one hand, and the probable (including the debater’s values, conceptual hierarchies, and lines of practical argument), on the other hand. This starting point, and progress in the argument from this point, is entirely dependent on audience opinion about what is real and what is probable. In order to communicate and to persuade, the orator must constantly keep the audience in mind as he argues, accommodating his practical reasoning process and modes of expression to their opinions and beliefs. The various lines of argument in Adams’s promotion of science shifted rapidly, as Adams’s and his opponents’ conceptions of their congressional and public audiences changed. Such changes resulted from the advancement and reception of proposals for scientific institutions, schools, observatories, and so on, along with other historical variables. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca offer a means of describing the speakers’ conceptions of their audiences. Their concepts of the “particular audience” and the “universal audience” are especially helpful. A speaker has in mind a “particular audience” when he addresses a specific group in order to persuade them of some opinion. But each individual speaker also has an ideal concept of the perfect, rational audience, which he or she assumes is changeless and universal, “the whole of mankind.” This concept is the “universal audience.” Theoretically, a universal audience could not be persuaded to take some action in a specific time or place, but could be rationally convinced of a speaker’s argument: “Argumentation addressed to a universal audience must convince the reader that the reasons adduced are of a compelling character, that they are self-evident, and possess an absolute and timeless validity, independent of local or historical contingencies.”85 I interpret Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s particular and universal audiences as binary poles measuring a spectrum of audience types, ranging from a particular individual to the whole human race. Between the two poles, there are various degrees of division or agree-

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ment perceived by the speaker. The study of particular audiences requires constant attentiveness to a rhetorical element that Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, calls prepon: the appropriateness of the proofs offered for a given place, a given time, and a particular audience.86 Due consideration is given throughout my analysis, therefore, to descriptions of the shifting political and interpersonal climate. Such conditions helped to form Adams’s and his opponents’ conceptions of their particular audiences. On the other hand, some arguments, while physically addressed to a limited audience in a particular place, may nevertheless be considered “more universal” than others because they address an audience of posterity and do not aim at immediate action. An audience of posterity resembles Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s description of an audience perceived by the speaker as “independent of local or historical contingencies,” even though the argument may not be rationally self-evident in the Cartesian sense. In Adams’s Lectures, he describes such an audience when he argues that some topics of deliberative rhetoric have a certain quality of grandeur, so that “the orator may fairly consider himself, as addressing not only his immediate hearers, but the world at large; and all future times. . . . He makes the question of an hour a question for every age and every region . . . and incorporates himself and his discourse with the general history of mankind.”87 In his promotion of science, there are times when Adams addresses this type of audience. At these times, his deliberative rhetoric resembles epideictic rhetoric, which aims not at immediate action, but at a broad tendency to belief, possibly leading to changed attitudes or unspecified future actions. Of relevance here is Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s view that the division of rhetoric into three genres was one cause for the disintegration of classical rhetoric in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They argue that theories of judicial and deliberative rhetoric were absorbed by philosophy and dialectic, while epideictic rhetoric was captured in general “literary prose.”88 The artificial nature of the division seems apparent in Adams’s practice of rhetoric. For example, in his promotion of astronomy, Adams gave some lectures to public audiences that were actually epideictic speeches, but he also used them to invent arguments for his congressional speeches on the Smithsonian bequest. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca allude to this closeness between epideictic rhetoric and the universal audience when they write, “Epideictic speeches are most prone to appeal to a universal order, to a nature, or a god that would vouch for the unquestioned, and supposedly unquestionable, values.”89 Another useful rhetorical concept for my purpose from Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca is their examination of “conceptual pairs.” In

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The New Rhetoric, they write that the need for compromise is inherent in certain pairs of ideas. When these “conceptual pairs” become separated from each other through various other, conflicting associations made by orators in the course of an argument, the result is “dissociated pairs” of ideas and an inability to sway an audience to one side of the argument. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca write: At the theoretical level, it is the compromise-solution to incompatibilities which calls for the greatest effort . . . because it requires a new structuration of reality. On the other hand, once it is established, once the concepts have been dissociated and restructured, compromise tends to appear as the inescapable solution and to react on the aggregate of concepts into which it is inserted.90 Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s treatment is drawn primarily from philosophy, but it applies to the practical realm of legislative assemblies as well. The prototypical dissociated pair, Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca explain, is “appearance vs. reality.” This is one method of establishing what the audience will consider real and treat as factual in an argument. I use this pair of concepts in my analysis of the compromise that eventually resolves the Smithsonian debate and enables the institution to come into existence. Each “structure of reality,” according to Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca, consists of a hierarchical system of values. Other twentieth-century commentators on rhetorical theory have described the pinnacle of these conceptual hierarchies as “god-terms.” These terms contribute to my discussion of Adams’s promotion of science in a pragmatic era. In A Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke describes a “god-term” as the ultimate principle of transcendence in a hierarchy of values: We are not discovering “God” here, in the theologian’s sense. God, in the theologian’s sense, must be much more than an “Idea” dialectically arrived at. . . . But going by the verbal route, from words for positive things to titles, thence to an order among titles, and finally to the title of titles, we come as far as rhetoric-and-dialectic can take us.91 Taking his cue from Burke, Richard Weaver has also written on ultimate topics of agreement or “god-terms” in the twentieth century: Despite variations in fashion, an age which is not simply distraught manages to achieve some system of relationship among the attractive and among the repulsive terms, so that

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we can work out an order of weight and precedence in the prevailing rhetoric once we have discerned the “rhetorical absolutes”—the terms to which the highest respect is paid. . . . By “god-term” we mean that expression about which all other expressions are ranked as subordinate and serving dominations and powers. Its force imparts to the others their lesser degree of force, and fixes the scale by which degrees of comparison are understood. In the absence of a strong and evenly diffused religion, there may be several terms competing for this primacy.92 For Adams, as for most of his nineteenth-century audience, the ultimate principle of transcendence was literally the Christian God, whom he acknowledges as an absolute authority in his practice of rhetoric. But for some of his opponents, new ultimate orders in social thought were developing, so that competing rhetorical “god-terms” were also used to appeal to particular audiences. One such overarching value was “knowledge.” As John Quincy Adams set out to promote the growth of science, the competing rhetorical norms of his age located the authority for knowledge in two closely related value terms: education and the passing on of tradition, and the human activity of scientific discovery.

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CHAPTER

3

Toward a Democratic Science: Institution-Building and the Statesman Orator And we may well ghess, that the absolute perfection of the True Philosophy is not now far off. . . . For methinks there is an agreement, between the growth of Learning, and of Civil Government. —Thomas Sprat, A History of the Royal Society

I

n his influential work Science in the Federal Government, A. Hunter Dupree calls John Quincy Adams’s first annual message to Congress “the clearest statement ever made by a President of the government’s duty toward knowledge.”1 At the time of this report, the American public was wary of allowing too much power in the federal government and scornful of elitism that echoed the conventions of European monarchy. Adams’s presidential record reveals an America surprised, even shocked by his aggressive valorization of science and the domestic improvements that would result from it. Yet, his efforts to initiate modern attitudes toward science were the seeds of advancement, politically buried for only a short time. The language that links American science in the government to the notion of progress—the rhetoric of science in the American federal government—begins with Adams. This chapter turns temporarily from demonstrating John Quincy Adams’s strategic textual and oratorical use of Ciceronian rhetoric, instead positioning him more broadly as a statesman orator with a particular commitment to government-supported science. Both Adams’s lifelong development as a statesman, and his painstaking practice of oratorical art, contributed to the fruitful campaigns of his post-presidential years as his promotion of science finally began to take root. A 53

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look at the rhetorical composition of those culminating efforts will comprise the remaining chapters of this book. As we examine Adams’s development as a statesman orator, we will not abandon the spirit of Ciceronian ideals, as Adams’s diary reveals that he constantly kept this model in mind as a measurement for his growth on both personal and public levels. The classical tradition of the statesman orator, embraced in America by the founders and the Federalists, had envisioned an elite class of public servant-leaders consisting of only “the best men.” They were the “best” both in being highly educated and in being scrupulously virtuous in their public and private lives. These early statesmen were devoted with a sacred fervor to duty, country, and the well-being of the people as a whole.* Such traditions encouraged an exclusive, paternalistic attitude toward republican government. It was an ethic that suited America as the nation began to build an infrastructure and found government institutions that would specialize in the development of transportation, trade, health, and geographical expansion. Like Cicero’s “good orator,” the good statesman was one who strove for the fullest understanding of what was true in every area of knowledge, practical and philosophical, so that he may quickly and accurately secure wise choices for the nation. Many of these qualities of the ideal statesman were passed down through Ciceronian moral treatises—an equally important counterpart to Cicero’s rhetorical works. Cicero’s mature work De Officii (On Duties) was widely popular in moral education in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as it had been in the Western tradition for Renaissance Humanists like Erasmus, and even earlier in the moral philosophy of Augustine and Ambrose. As in De Oratore, the aim in De Officii is the ideal goodness of a hypothetical “good man,” an elite model to strive for but something that was too strenuously perfect to be achieved in actuality. De Officii also provides an interesting model for equating wisdom with the practical knowledge of science, one that Adams would not have failed to note as he set out to encourage basic scientific research: [One] error is that some people devote too much industry and too much deep study to matters that are obscure and difficult and useless as well. If these errors are successfully avoided, all the labor and pains expended upon problems that are morally —————— *A good description of the tradition of the statesman orator as it was passed down through generations of scholarly-inclined leaders can be found in Robert Alexander Kraig, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost World of the Oratorical Statesman (College Park: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), pp. 3–43.

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right and worth the solving will be fully rewarded. Such a worker in the field of astronomy, for example, was Gaius Sulpicius; in mathematics, Sextus Pompey; in dialectics, many; in civil law, still more.2 True to his Stoic schooling, Cicero warns that abstract science or philosophizing could interfere with the practical development of a well-run state. This is a caution that Adams had occasion to consider as, over time, he cultivated the persuasive proofs and pragmatic motivations best suited to promote his aim of government-funded basic science. Adams’s early development as a political speaker for science—and for the growth of knowledge in general—can be traced back to the Adams family’s multigenerational interest in the role of learning in society. His connection to the intellectual commitments of his family fueled his dedication to scientific advancement as a speaker later in life, while his family’s Revolutionary roots contributed to an honorable reputation that was almost an aura of American nationalism and tradition. Because Adams’s most vigorous and apparently fruitful efforts in establishing government funding for scientific research came only during his later career in Congress, the time frame for this developmental stage covers his younger years and ends with the plans for “internal improvements” in his presidential oratory. Because of the poor reception of his Report on Weights and Measures (1821) and his annual messages to Congress as President (1826–1829), the first half of Adams’s career was not marked by any accomplishments in the promotion of science that could rival his contributions in statecraft and foreign policy. But his arguments for science were not buried forever. By the time of Adams’s death in his seat in Congress in 1849, every one of the scientific institutions or programs, proposed unsuccessfully during his presidency, were established by succeeding administrations. The rhetorical work of his early years informed his (and others’) mature arguments about the relationship between American government and scientific knowledge, as I will show in succeeding chapters.

ADAMS’S EARLY DEVELOPMENT AS AN ORATOR FOR DEMOCRATIC SCIENCE In chapter 2 I gave ample evidence for John Quincy Adams’s lifelong desire to imitate Cicero in his role as a public orator, yet also to adapt this ideal into a particularly American version. For Cicero, the statesman’s development of wisdom and learning were necessary for moral

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political leadership. In addition to tireless devotion to moral obligations and justice in the courts and the legislature, Cicero promoted a cultivation of learning through broad reading in the Greek philosophers, particularly Plato and the Stoics. In America, many youths destined to be politicians and orators still studied these classic works of moral philosophy, but even in the nineteenth century, ancient books were no longer considered the sole source for an expansive wisdom about society and learning about the material world. What would a modern Cicero promote in America, in order to provide future democratic leaders with the best way to make informed and educated decisions? John Quincy Adams’s proclivities suggest that an expanded Ciceronian spirit would turn to scientific research as the extension of mankind’s quest for knowledge and wisdom that might finally secure the blessings of modern democratic liberty. Perhaps John Quincy Adams first began to appreciate learning’s importance to a developing nation at age eleven, when he accompanied his father to France on the Continental frigate Boston. John Adams was then commissioner to France and on his way to join Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee who were in Paris promoting the cause for foreign recognition of America’s nationhood. The young Adams learned French from Dr. Nicholas Noel, a surgeon in the French Army; this was an experience that began a lifelong devotion to languages and fluency in French in particular that equaled his own native English. After such a positive introduction to scientific and literate learning in military officers, it is no wonder that he would later champion a U.S. naval academy and science policy to support navigation. Tellingly, it was on this trip that he studied Cicero for the first time under his father’s tutelage and also saw several of France’s highly esteemed museums, scientific academies, and zoos. We might imagine the older Adams instructing his son with Cicero’s words to his own son Marcus in De Officii: “People have high expectations that you will work hard, as I have. They also trust that you will have a career like mine; and perhaps they look to you to win the same sort of reputation. [Your travels to] Athens and Cratippus add to these responsibilities. You went to them in order to take on board, if one may put it in this way, a cargo of education.”3 The earnest young Adams, being groomed for his career as a statesman and public servant, would easily have seen Europe as his Athens, the nations there being more mature not only in sciences and learning, but also in the formation of government institutions. On a later trip to Europe, while serving as his father’s secretary at the age of sixteen, John Quincy received a rare introduction to public practices of demonstrative rhetoric in the workings of government. He

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sat and listened to debates in Britain’s House of Commons and was present while his father, along with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, negotiated treaties of amnesty and commerce with several European powers. This time, while in Paris and elsewhere abroad, he viewed all the scientific and artistic exhibitions he could manage to visit, all of which made a grand impression on his young mind as standards for institutional science and the search for knowledge. His very existence as John Adams’s son provided him with firsthand understanding of America’s lack of development compared to the older European nations in the areas of scientific sophistication and in fostering education across all disciplines for responsible democratic citizens. In his youthful observations of French and British national science during travels with Franklin, Jefferson, and his own father, the younger Adams formed a positive opinion of government-funded science and its immigration from Europe to the United States Adams’s identity and rhetorical ethos as a speaker for science had its origins in this early exposure and formation. Throughout his career, he would take time to cultivate scientific knowledge that could lead to the intellectual development of his nation, not only to follow the advice of the founders, but also in deliberate emulation of the Ciceronian political ideal of an orator’s education, continually acquiring all useful knowledge for the benefit of citizens, and (he believed) of mankind. With the elder Adams as an example, it is no surprise that John Quincy was a progressive in terms of the development of scientific research in America. Like his son after him, Adams senior had been particularly attracted to math and science as a student at Harvard. His favorite professor had been John Winthrop, the leading American astronomer of the period. Certainly John Adams had told his son about viewing the satellites of Jupiter from the roof of Harvard Hall through Winthrop’s small telescope. Associating science with education helped establish the characteristic Adams family position on scientific institutions in the federal government. John Adams had an abiding faith in education as the stronghold of a good and strong society. He believed that the permanence of human rights and liberties in a democratic nation depended on the spread of knowledge, both moral and scientific, among all the people of all walks of life: a national university and a federally supported scientific society were two possible institutions for carrying out this purpose. One telling example of the Adams family penchant for patriarchal government in terms of its support of knowledge is the Constitution for the state of Massachusetts, which John Adams wrote in 1779. According to his biographer David McCullough, certain language in

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this document was different from that found in any constitution ever written, even to this day. Reviewing his own Thoughts on Government as preparation for composing the document, he wrote section II of chapter 6, a paragraph headed “The Encouragement of Literature, Etc.”: Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.4 He wrote the passage in a moment of inspiration, and worried that it would not pass the committee’s scrutiny; when it passed unanimously and without amendment, he was overjoyed.5 John Adams’s commitment to the preservation and dissemination of established knowledge, as well as his belief in the value of new knowledge developed through research, are clear in this legislative action. The surprising part of the Massachusetts Constitution for many readers then and now may be its assertion that promoting knowledge for its own sake is not enough for a morally good country. It is the “duty” of government to “countenance and inculcate” such virtues as humanity, charity, industry, frugality, honesty, and good humor. To be good, the country must be taught from its infancy to use knowledge with the measured moral reasoning of wisdom and virtue. The resemblance of these beliefs to positions passed down through the Ciceronian tradition is unmistakable, particularly the union of arts and sciences with a growth in wisdom and virtue. These were values of the well-educated statesman orator, which Adams taught his son from the youngest age, probably with direct reference to Cicero. They were the same values and ideals that

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would inspire John Quincy when he crafted legislation of his own on the federal level. The way the Massachusetts Constitution lumped together science, literature, and moral virtues may perplex modern readers who live in a world where science is considered the opposite of faith. Yet, in John Adams’s lifetime science had not separated from other fields of knowledge, as it has in the specialized and partitioned way we view it today, or even as it began to do in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the neoclassical tradition still dominant for the American populace, knowledge was considered to be a holistic human enterprise, developing and progressing from its ancient roots in human civilization to a fuller and more accurate understanding of the contemporary world. Science was not partitioned from philosophy, mechanical craftsmanship, the arts, or literature. In fact, members of scientific societies, through the middle of the nineteenth century, were almost never professional scientists. Among early scientific organizations, Benjamin Franklin’s Philosophical Society is a prime example of the nonspecialist character of early American science, with a membership of doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and politicians. The scope of the society, described in the founding proposal, demonstrates the all-encompassing spirit of the age: All philosophical experiments that let light into the nature of things, tend to increase the power of man over matter, and multiply the conveniences or pleasures of life . . . all new-discovered plants, herbs, trees, roots, and methods of propagating them. . . . New methods of curing diseases. . . .All new arts, trades, manufacturers, etc. that be proposed or thought of.6 John Adams and later John Quincy Adams both were invited to become members of Franklin’s Philosophical Society on the basis of their involvement in public life and their interest and writings in the sciences. Adams senior had the most involvement in the scientific society scene, in 1780 becoming a founding member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at Boston, which was at that time a counterpart to the Philadelphia Academy. He was president of this academy in 1796 when Count Rumford of the British Royal Society wrote a letter offering to fund a new biennial medal for “useful discoveries.”7 This fruitful correspondence set a precedent that John Quincy would continue as he encouraged the use of government resources for the support of scientific research. Both men also tinkered with scientific experiments in their gardens and kitchens, as did many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gentlemen. Men involved in public affairs, like the Adamses, were

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valued by these scientific communities in their first years of development, not for the great contributions they made to research, but for bringing science into consideration in government councils at all levels. The membership of this most influential of early American scientific societies included names that would figure prominently in Adams’s efforts to promote and establish scientific institutions. Among them were David Rittenhouse, a clockmaker and self-taught astronomer who first studied the transit of Venus in 1769 with an observation deck erected on the roof of the Massachusetts State House; John Bartram, who developed the first American botanical garden west of Boston; and Benjamin Rush, physician and social reformer. Mr. Dupree describes the state of science succinctly: “Science, thus unspecialized in intent as well as in fields of knowledge, was at the same time useful and ceremonial, specific and universal.”8 This was a philosophical approach to science stemming from the older tradition of the European Enlightenment. As the acceptance of institutional research began to take hold in nineteenth-century American minds, the philosophy of one man in particular was the unchallenged though rather antiquated inspiration: Francis Bacon, inventor of the ideology behind the British Royal Society. In an 1823 issue of North American Review, Massachusetts politician Edward Everett—reputedly the greatest statesman orator in the country—remarked, “At the present day, as is well known, the Baconian philosophy has become synonymous with the true philosophy.”9 Historian of science George H. Daniels remarks that this standard was practically universal: “The Baconian philosophy so dominated that whole generation of American scientists that it is difficult to find any writer during the early part of the nineteenth century who did not assume, with Everett, that his readers knew all about it.”10 Bacon held a place in early American science in general that was similar to the place Darwin held in twentieth-century evolutionary science; as rhetoricians of science Michael Halloran and Carolyn R. Miller describe it: his ethos guaranteed a seal of approval.11 The mixed character of these times, then, began to dictate the action that was required. In order for John Quincy Adams to succeed in advancing the cause of science in the federal government, he would need to harness the language and empirical understanding of science particular to Bacon and his philosophical followers, and adapt them to the elevated, neoclassical conventions of eloquence that comprised the rhetorical norms of the golden age of American oratory. This is precisely what Adams did with his combination of privileged background and awareness of science. Beyond his rich family tra-

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dition of innovations in linking democratic governments with the increase of knowledge in both arts and sciences, John Quincy Adams took every opportunity presented by his diplomatic appointments to learn about European scientific standards and establishments. Between 1809 and 1814, while serving as minister in the court of Russia, he developed many of his ideas on weights and measures and on astronomy. He witnessed firsthand the growth in astronomy that led to building the Pulkovo Observatory, which contributed to Russia’s new eminence in astronomy. In this experience and in his bold, if frustrating, proposals for scientific institutions as secretary of state and president, John Quincy Adams was truly central to the first modest steps toward science policy in the United States. While he was secretary of state under President Monroe, Adams prepared his lengthy Report on Weights and Measures, as Jefferson had done years before. It was in his promotion of weights and measures that Adams discovered his first rhetorical foothold for arguments to establish strong federal support of science and learning in the nation. If weights and measures, which were so essential to the development and sharing of knowledge in the geophysical sciences—and by extension astronomy and navigation—were an obligation of the government, then how could science in general be denied its essential place in the corporate pursuit of human happiness? Another of Adams’s ill-fated masterpieces, the report had little effect on policy, but its depth and range of content attest to long hours spent in its preparation. Time spent collecting and assessing material for the report helped to make Adams keenly aware of the primitive quality of scientific resources and knowledge in the United States capital. The experience would only add to his commitment to improve and energize the sciences in America. With his characteristic passion and vehemence for learning in a democratic nation, he connected the need for standard weights and measures to the basic mental fabric of the citizens. Without a government office for weights and measures, the development of American society would suffer and commerce could never thrive: Weights and measures may be ranked among the necessaries of life to every individual of human society. They enter into the economical arrangements and daily concerns of every family. They are necessary to every occupation of human industry; to the distribution and security of every species of property; to every transaction of trade and commerce; to the labors of the husbandman; to the ingenuity of the artificer; to the studies of the philosopher; to the researches of the antiquarian; to the

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navigation of the mariner, and the marches of the soldier; to all the exchanges of peace, and all the operations of war. The knowledge of them, as in established use, is among the first elements of education, and is often learned by those who learn nothing else, not even to read and write. This knowledge is riveted in the memory by the habitual application of it to the employments of men throughout life.12 Adams’s understanding of the basic cognitive and educational value of standard weights and measures comes from his scholarly approach to the subject. In this same vein of logic and consistency he recommended consideration of the metric system. As a statesman and legal advisor, however, his focus was on the Constitutionality of the federal government’s support of an institution to standardize weights and measures and promote an international uniformity for the sake of commerce and the dissemination of knowledge across national boundaries. As he would argue in his first State of the Union address, the establishment of standard weights and measures was not only allowable by the Constitution, it was a profound obligation upon which the well-being of the nation depended. Linking his own ideas with the ethos of the Founding Fathers rhetorically cements this connection to philosophical considerations and the duty of government: The establishment of an uniform standard of weights and measures was one of the specific objects contemplated in the formation of our Constitution, and to fix that standard was one of the powers delegated by express terms in that instrument to Congress. The Governments of Great Britain and France have scarcely ceased to be occupied with inquiries and speculations on the same subject since the existence of our Constitution, and with them it has expanded into profound, laborious, and expensive researches into the figure of the earth and the comparative length of the pendulum vibrating-seconds in various latitudes from the equator to the pole. These researches have resulted in the composition and publication of several works highly interesting to the cause of science. The experiments are yet in the process of performance. Some of them have recently been made on our own shores, within the walls of one of our own colleges, and partly by one of our own fellow citizens. It would be honorable to our country if the sequel of the same experiments should be countenanced by the patronage of our Government, as they have hitherto been by those of France and Britain.

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This sense of duty to the nation’s development and to the progress of the human mind in general are precursors of arguments Adams would use again and again in attempts to develop and promote science, so they are substantially a part of his lifelong practice of rhetorical “invention” of arguments on the subject. The building blocks of such basic conventions are clearly, in his view of the matter, necessary for the fulfillment of mankind’s nature. For sources in his Report on Weights and Measures, Adams went straight to a proponent of economic progress who also, as it happened, was a keen scholar of rhetoric himself.13 In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith laid out a plan for promoting free trade, but not, however, banishing government from any regulatory control whatsoever. Smith, like Adams, believed that standards such as weights and measures could not be left up to the natural proclivities of the free market. The government had an obligation to guarantee just measurement of goods by establishing common units and instruments. Without this role of government, neither trade nor scientific research could be trustworthy or even meaningful in supporting the general welfare. It was the duty of the responsible statesman orator to construct, through the unifying practice of rhetorical art, arguments that would lead his fellow citizens to the development of institutions for the fulfillment of national needs that increasingly combined science and federal government. Although it never passed into law, the report and Adams’s research for it were not entirely lacking in fruitful outcomes. As an indirect point of departure, Adams’ promotion of standard weights and measures helped to establish the first government-employed scientist in the United States. In the appendix of the Report on Weights and Measures is a memorandum by Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, a Swiss geodesist skilled at making surveys and astronomical observations. Hassler would go on to become the American government’s first professional scientist. He had been engaged by President Jefferson to purchase instruments for a coast survey, beginning in 1807. In 1815, when Adams was in London as American foreign minister, Hassler introduced him to the Astronomer Royal of Greenwhich, who would later provide research and details for Adams’s proposals for a Smithsonian observatory. When Adams became secretary of state under Monroe, however, he was not in a position to repay him in kind. Hassler was removed from his position in 1818 when an act of Congress stipulated that only military and naval officers could be employed in carrying out the coast survey. Yet, without the direction of a qualified scientist, the navy could not complete the survey.14 After Andrew Jackson defeated Adams in the election of 1828, Hassler returned to the United States as

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a government-employed scientist. The coast survey was reestablished with Alexander Dallas Bache at its head, and Hassler was hired as a contractor to build a specific set of instruments: the standard weights and measures for distribution to customs houses in the states. Without actually intending to set up an institution, the government had founded the first federal scientific institution, an Office of Weights and Measures consistent with Adams’s advice in the report of 1821.15 Adams’s early rhetorical forays in promoting the basic science behind weights and measures, therefore, had some consequences in short-term action, but their main historical value was as necessary groundwork for his later eloquence in the service of science.

THE PRESIDENCY AS PULPIT FOR SCIENCE If the success of a president is judged by the fruits of his labors during his term, John Quincy Adams was an unsuccessful president. To appreciate his contributions, Adams’s public life is better seen as comprised of two magnificent careers as a public servant: one as a developer of foreign policy, in the roles of senator and secretary of state, and the other as an energetic representative in the House—with a brief and unimportant interval as president in between. The groundbreaking rhetorical arguments he made for science in his annual addresses, however, are not as inconsequential as the administration itself. During his presidency (1825–1829), Adams launched his grand program for “internal improvements” in the nation. Because of his long experience in ambassadorships he had made a careful study of the domestic development of European nations, and as a result he was keenly aware of the need for development in America’s infrastructure. He wished to build new roads, canals, and other transportation systems; to initiate new policy in education and the improvement or establishment of colleges and universities in all parts of the Union; to found a national university to represent the nation’s commitment to and involvement in knowledge and education; to improve the overall quality of life and intensify moral and intellectual development of private citizens; to found a naval academy to educate technically astute, lettered, and morally upright officers to represent the nation abroad; and to establish a national observatory, securing the nation’s interest as a future leader in scientific research and knowledge. He also became an advocate for the United States exploring expedition by ship to the northwest coast, a cause that would come to fruition sooner than the rest. After his presidency, the Jacksonian administration immediately

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took up its opponent’s proposal and commissioned what would become known as the U.S. “Ex. Ex.,” or the Wilkes expedition. During his administration, however, Adams’s efforts to enhance the knowledge and learning of the United States faced a political atmosphere that was anything but favorable to the idea of science policy— any kind of science policy, much less support of pure scientific research. John C. Calhoun and others were a persistent force against developing spending in the federal budget at all, and there were arguments that spending for the support of science and education was unconstitutional. There was a general fear that individuals would use government funds to enrich themselves if any grant were given for the benefit of research and development. Such fears were not entirely unfounded, as there had already been instances of such misuse. A. Hunter Dupree illustrates one such event. After the introduction of cowpox vaccine in the United States, Dr. James Smith of Baltimore successfully made a proposal to Congress to distribute the vaccine without charge to citizens in exchange for free postage services. In 1821, Smith accidentally sent out a package of diseased scabs instead of the vaccine, resulting in an outbreak of the cowpox and a swift repeal of the law by Congress.16 For Calhoun and his political associates, the gaff was an indicator of what was to come, if stern argument did not prevent the federal government’s direct support of scientific advancement, even for immediate practical benefit of the citizens. Centralized government support of science was presented as a fundamental error that could sweep out of control—a nineteenth-century dystopian nightmare. As Adams understood it, the framers of the Constitution, in setting up the powers of the three branches of the federal government, had a distinct intention to foster a relationship between science and government. Yet, despite the inclusion of provisions which would require high technical and scientific ability—the setting of standards for weights and measures, coining money, and a census—no direct clause was included to launch institutional relations between science and government. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson specifically advised the founding of a national university on numerous occasions, and there were discussions during the Congress about including this, along with rewards or grants for the promotion of agriculture and commerce. However, these did not reach the final document. As a result, the early attempts to establish U. S. science policy were slow and laborious, fraught with political suspicions. Adams’s inaugural address and his annual messages to Congress chronicle his attempt to use the presidency as a pulpit for the promotion of science in this atmosphere of hostility toward his most earnest

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hopes and aims for the nation. If his message about science in the federal government can be crystallized into a single assertion, it is that federal support of learning and advancement in knowledge was not simply allowable under the Constitution; it was a requirement in a kind of covenant, and therefore paramount in his duties as a leading statesman orator. Adams knew something about garnering authority and emotion in persuasive writing, and all his skills as a rhetorician and orator were put to the test for these messages. The outcomes of the messages are not the only means to judge them, however, since as a rhetorician Adams’s aim was to use his art to gather and select from all the available arguments and emotional proofs. As with the Report on Weights and Measures, arguments created now could be useful later in his lifelong practice of rhetorical art in devotion to his principles. Political rhetoric, for Adams, was an inventive and experimental art, both practical and visionary because of its connection to the future. The arguments he made in support of science were risky, politically speaking, but the proofs he authored and the public memory of his promotion became a sturdy part of the rhetorical scaffolding that would develop over time into an American idea of scientific progress, a kind of democratic dominion in international competition for the advancement and control of knowledge. Adams’s inaugural address on March 4, 1825, began with an appeal to the Founding Fathers of the previous generation and a reference to his Oath of Office: In unfolding to my countrymen the principles by which I shall be governed in the fulfillment of those duties my first resort will be to that Constitution which I shall swear to the best of my ability to preserve, protect, and defend. That revered instrument enumerates the powers and prescribes the duties of the Executive Magistrate, and in its first words declares the purposes to which these and the whole action of the Government instituted by it should be invariably and sacredly devoted—to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to the people of this Union in their successive generations. Since the adoption of this social compact one of these generations has passed away. It is the work of our forefathers.17 Calling to mind his treatment of “notation” in the Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Adams establishes the meaning of his own principles of governance by quoting the Constitution at length and using these

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words as grounding for his own rhetorical purpose. Of course it seems commonplace to us now, but in Adams’s use it was a deliberate technique borrowed from classical legal rhetoric. He extends his oath in this oration, by promising not only to defend the Constitution, but to apply all the responsibilities of federal government to himself as president—to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare. Since he perceives the oath to equate his role as executive with the duties of government itself, it is no wonder he projects a weighty, paternalistic ethos. His choice of Constitutional interpretation as the basis for administrative action is also, as in other early executive messages in general, an example of stasis theory applied as it is described in Adams’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory: “The state of the controversy [stasis] is [like] the quod erat domonstrandum of the mathematicians. It is the mark, at which all the speaker’s discourse aims; the focus, toward which all the rays of his eloquence converge; and of course varies according to the nature and subject of the speech.”18 The central issue is easily established as a matter of the highest law and the most sacred devotion, and then the direction of argument is determined by questions of definition and quality. Once the Constitution has been established as his beacon, Adams next turns to the stasis of definition, expounding on groundwork laid by the first generation of Americans—an ever-expanding “dominion of man over physical nature”: “Since that period a population of four millions has multiplied to twelve. A territory bounded by the Mississippi has been extended from sea to sea. . . . The forest has fallen by the ax of our woodsmen; the soil has been made to teem by the tillage of our farmers; our commerce has whitened every ocean.” In the classic style of ceremonial oratory, he lists images that appeal to the collective pride and nationalism of America. Adams defines this control of the natural world as a kind of divine right of the nation, in a providentially ordained covenant of both responsibility and the fulfillment of ancient humanistic ideals. The next steps in argumentation naturally follow the topical line of antecedents and consequents in general, and ways and means in particular. A dominion of man over nature, already begun and involving such vast geographical expansion, of necessity must make use of and develop scientific instruments and expertise in the future: the Floridas have been peaceably acquired, and our boundary has been extended to the Pacific Ocean; progress has been made in the defense of the country by fortifications and the increase of the Navy, toward the effectual suppression of the

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African traffic in slaves; in alluring the aboriginal hunters of our land to the cultivation of the soil and of the mind, in exploring the interior regions of the Union, and in preparing by scientific researches and surveys for the further application of our national resources to the internal improvement of our country.19 In this way Adams links physical expansion of the nation and the necessity for advancement in learning and science in the definition of his catch phrase for the administration, “internal improvements.” At the same time, he appeals to the self-esteem of the nation by encouraging the emotions of pride and patriotism. If some development of the land and industrialization has been good for national pride, then by rhetorical extension more of the same can only be better. Bolstering the confidence of the citizens in their strong, young, and democratic country was strategic for his forthcoming proposals to expand learning and mastery over the physical world. The success of the nation would prove its redeeming qualities over the imperialistic monarchies of old Europe through the implementation of science and technology. This was a theme Adams expanded in his annual messages about the state of the nation. Adams’s first annual message to Congress on December 6, 1825, is his strongest argument for the general authority of government to initiate, encourage, direct, and organize the progress of science on a national level—not as a monopolistic entity or totalitarian rule, but as a benevolent protector and paternalistic patron, very much in the Ciceronian tradition of virtuous statehood and institution-building. The government’s duty toward knowledge, in Adams’s eyes, was equivalent to the protection of freedom and the pursuit of happiness, morally defined as the benefit of mankind. It was, in the words of this address, “among the first, if not the first, instrument of the improvement and condition of man.” He named roads and canals as the immediate goals for improvement of the nation’s infrastructure during his administration, but the persistent underlying aim of his message was to vest authority for the pursuit of knowledge in the government. The obligation to do so came from above, as “moral, political, and intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the Author of our Existence to society no less than individual man.” The Christianized Ciceronian precepts of moral leadership, assigned as a kind of guardianship over society, are easily discerned in this high-minded language, but also present are the seeds of a new kind of modern democratic government that would use its scientific instruments to help inform and direct its decisions.

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Although Adams did not deliver the address himself (it was not yet the custom for presidents to do so) the report uses the typical emotional and persuasive conventions of an oration and was read aloud in that style in Congress. Adams’s use of emotional appeals is rather heavyhanded in this speech, given his advice in the Harvard Lectures to moderate violent passions such as shame and jealousy. Clearly fueling his assertion with a persuasive use of shame, he once again drew on the ethos of the Founding Fathers for support of his interpretation of the Constitution. Washington had desired a national university, “but in surveying the city which has been honored with his name he would have seen the spot of earth which he had destined…as the site for a university still bare and barren.” For the first time in a political speech, he sought to arouse interest in a national observatory by appealing to American patriotism and awakening in his hearers a jealousy of European nations that were more advanced in scientific endeavors: It is with no feeling of pride, as an American, that the remark be made that, on the comparatively small territorial surface of Europe, there are existing upward of one hundred and thirty of these lighthouses of the skies; while throughout the whole American hemisphere there is not one. If we reflect for a moment upon discoveries which, in the last four centuries, have been made in the physical constitution of the universe by means of these buildings, and of observers stationed in them, shall we doubt of their usefulness to every nation? And while scarcely a year passes over our heads without bringing some new astronomical discovery to light, which we must fain receive at second hand from Europe, are we not cutting ourselves off from the means of returning light for light, while we have neither observatory nor observer upon our half of the globe, and the earth revolves in perpetual darkness to our unsearching eyes?20 Biographers have focused on Adams’s role as a minority president during the time of this speech, and on how his opponents misrepresented his Baconian metaphor for observatories—“lighthouses of the skies”—by misquoting it “lighthouses in the skies.”21 In conjunction with his simultaneous efforts to make immediately useful “internal improvements” such as roads and actual lighthouses, this phrase was a valiant, if untimely, attempt to appeal to the utilitarian mindset of the audience. Yet, an analytical approach to Adams’s rhetorical language is incomplete if it is limited to the immediate effects on the hearers. Much

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can be learned about America’s predisposition toward science at the time from an understanding of his rhetorical proofs and their sources. Adams’s long, balanced sentences, typical of neoclassical oratory, combined with his passion for new scientific endeavors involving observation and research, reveal two competing nineteenth-century trends in American political language at the time: one stemming from classical democratic models and the other from science and progress. Adams combined them, during his presidency and later as a debater in Congress, by using classical rhetoric in the service of scientific research and progress. Although Adams was not the only speaker demonstrating this combination, his speeches are unique in the presidency and therefore in their place in the history of science in America. Adams’s first annual report was not a message most Americans were ready to hear, but it was a message that told much about his understanding of his audience and its many challenges. By the third year of his administration, Adams’s annual report to Congress reflected much more of his work in international affairs and foreign policy, but domestic work on surveying and building roads was advancing to his satisfaction. Once again, he calls upon the authority of the Founding Fathers and their purposes in penning the Constitution: “To preserve, to improve, and to perpetuate the sources and to direct in their most effective channels the streams which contribute to the public weal is the purpose for which Government was instituted.” In his description of work done by the corps of engineers and surveyors working on the network of national roads and canals, he emphasized the gains in scientific knowledge they were making: “Were no other advantage to accrue to the country from their labors than the fund of topographical knowledge which they have collected and communicated, that alone would have been a profit to the Union more than adequate to all the expenditures which have been devoted to the object.” As always, Adams emphasizes the higher standard and obligation of pure science and collection of empirical data before he connects it to wealth and growth of commerce, as his audience expected him to do. He does not neglect the practical when he handles the cost of these works. The surveyor’s work “may be considered rather as treasures laid up from the contributions of the present age for the benefit of posterity than as unrequited applications of the accruing revenues of the nation.” This recasting of his audience in a broader, long-term perspective applied not only to the cumulative work of surveyors and mapmakers, but also to Adams’s rhetorical efforts to build up science over time at the institutional level. Adams had learned from his hands-on experience of trying time and again to appeal to abstract motives of the improvement of all mankind

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and a divine custodianship of creation that made scientific research imperative for intelligent awareness. Because of resistance to his promotion of the government’s authority to direct science in the course of his presidency, he shifted his rhetorical strategy to a focus on the audience’s immediate desires for growth as a prosperous manufacturing nation. In this way, the cooperation of science with a informed statesmanship would be more easily accepted, and practical advances such as steam, railroads, machinery, and exploration would lead to acceptance of permanent federal agencies in which scientific research could be conducted. One of the most notable items of specific advice in the third annual report is his argument for the establishment of a naval academy. The combination of scientific knowledge and moral education he envisions for this institution once again calls to mind the Ciceronian combination of practical wisdom and ideal virtue in the “good man,” or in this case “the best and the brightest” as the Naval Academy’s midshipmen are often still called today, sometimes with a degree of irony. The establishment of a naval academy, furnishing the means of theoretic instruction to the youths who devote their lives to the service of their country upon the ocean, still solicits the sanction of the Legislature. . . . A competent knowledge even of the art of ship building, the higher mathematics, and astronomy; the literature which can place our officers on a level of polished education with the officers of other maritime nations . . . and, above all, that acquaintance with the principles of honor and justice, with the higher obligations of morals and of general laws, human and divine, which constitutes the great distinction between the warrior-patriot and the licensed robber and pirate—these can be systematically taught and eminently acquired only in a permanent school, stationed upon the shore and provided with the teachers, the instruments, and the books conversant with and adapted to the communication of the principles of these respective sciences to the youthful and inquiring mind.22 Science and scientific research was easily connected with practical purposes of the military for the American public, who recognized the need for a national defense more intuitively than the need for federally supported schools. Adams praises West Point in two of his messages to Congress, and his persistent support of the Naval Academy eventually helped to lead to its founding in Annapolis. In these proposals, as in his arguments for the development of learning and science in general,

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Adams calls upon “higher obligations” and “moral laws.” It is this flavor that gives much of Adams’ oratory a heavy-handed and, some may have thought, antique quality aligned with not only his father’s generation, but also the ancient rhetorical theorists and political philosophers he idealized as wellsprings for American ideals. These institutions, in his mind, were precisely what a modern statesman in the Ciceronian tradition would be aiming to promote. By the end of his presidency, however, it is the appeal to commerce that Adams judges the most persuasive in the short-term arc of his administration. In his fourth and final message to Congress as president, he turns completely from his higher motives and ideals in promoting science, and emphasizes instead the necessity of government control over basic infrastructure and the knowledge needed to develop it. “The great interests of an agricultural, commercial, and manufacturing nation are so linked in union together that no permanent cause of prosperity to one of them can operate without extending its influence to the others. All these interests are alike under the protecting power of the legislative authority, and the duties of the representative bodies are to conciliate them in harmony together.”23 While some in Adams’s audience may have seen his words as overly paternalistic and influenced by his many years abroad in contact with the courts of European monarchs, his economic motives were actually deeply rooted in the ideas of free trade put forward by Adam Smith. In a manner reflective of Smith’s understanding of economic structure, Adams advocated a government science policy that would be both conservative, in not giving government any unnecessary powers, and also of maximum benefit to freedom of commerce. This early envisioning of a particularly American, democratic science policy was a decade ahead of its time, but in it we see the seeds of a symbiosis between informed, skillful government and scientific research. What might be buried through most of the Jacksonian administration could not be stifled forever.

APPEALING TO THE AUDIENCE: EARLY AMERICAN ATTITUDES TOWARD SCIENCE Examining nineteenth-century government’s relationship to science from the vantage point of rhetorical criticism requires a change of perspective from the way historians have typically investigated science. Examining the strategies for persuasion in specific speeches is a closely textual activity, yet it presupposes a contextual, rhetorical situation in which the audience is already predisposed to participate at some level.

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In order for oratory to be received well, the orator must begin with his or her perception of what the audience already believes about the subject and advance from agreement on that plane to further arguments that extend benefits the audience can already imagine. While it is true that John Quincy Adams’s audience was not entirely ready for his early efforts to promote basic science, there was still some social and cultural basis for Adams’s belief that his public and congressional audiences could share his vision. This can help us to refine our understanding of attitudes toward science early in the nineteenth century. In particular, the American emphasis on applied science and technology for the purpose of civilizing the frontier was not, as some have presumed, an automatic rejection of basic science. Modern scholars are often dismissive of the general attitude of early nineteenth-century Americans toward science, labeling it simply as “indifference,” especially to basic research. Nathan Reingold has insightfully described this point of view as the work of historians who practiced an “internalist” history of science—the study of the development of scientific knowledge ordered by scientists of that period themselves, inside their discipline.24 The classic work initially propounding this attitude is Richard Shyrock’s 1948 article, “American Indifference to Science.”25 The point of view that led to this characterization of “indifference,” however, is in opposition to a more socially and culturally situated study of intellectual and cultural history as the context of science. This broader point of view, the imaginative construction of society as it intersects with action, is the natural realm of rhetoric. During the twentieth century, the history of science in early nineteenthcentury America was largely narrated and described by internalist historians. Shyrock and Cohen both favored colonial science as almost a golden age of potential in basic science, through major figures such as Franklin, John Winthrop, John Logan, and David Rittenhouse. After the colonial period, the biographical focus on almost mythical major figures is replaced by a focus on struggling scientific societies who are unable to gain financial support until the great advances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Reingold aptly puts it, “From this position is derived a view of the history of science in America as being like a Bactrian camel, a nineteenth-century trough between colonial and twentieth-century humps.”26 But is this an accurate description of nineteenth-century attitudes toward science? Twentieth-century historians tended to focus on the internal positions of scientists themselves. Because these sources show scientists complaining about the lack of public interest in basic science and the lack of governmental funding, the attitude toward science was characterized as

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“indifference.” Many indifference-themed historians make no distinction between the attitudes of scientists and the society in general. But what were the motives for such statements? In their social and cultural context, the complaints of those working in science in the nineteenth century may be more accurately viewed as rhetorical strategies for attracting patronage and attention from the European scientific establishment—or from sympathetic politicians like John Quincy Adams. The complaint is designed to evoke a sympathetic emotional response from the audience. Because John Quincy Adams shared scientists’ belief in the advancement and diffusion of basic science, his oratory in promotion of science may be viewed from the same rhetorical perspective. Of course, Adams had ambitions of leading the nation in great technological advances as well—the connection of west to east through railroads and north to south through roads and canals, for example—but he never lost sight of his understanding of basic science as the driving force of these and later, unforeseen innovations. Rather than indifference, the position of America in the first half of the nineteenth century represents a stage in development that cannot be compared to European science of the same period. Americans did not have the government funding or institutional structure to support basic scientific research, and American society was much more focused on material development and expansion in the new land. It is realistic that applied research would spark the most public interest; providing health, and crops and transporting goods were understandably the priorities of statesmen and citizens alike. Astronomy is a good example of a growing discipline that had little practical application during its early development in America, regardless of its rhetorical representation as historically linked with navigation. While both private and public astrophysical observatories were springing up, no significant practical applications for astronomy really evolved until the pursuit of space science in the twentieth century. Adams’s rhetorical work in promoting the Naval Observatory and other observatories during his later career as a congressman is a case in point. The emphasis on the navigational benefit of astronomy in the political oratory of Adams is really just a rhetorical tactic appealing to the desires of the audience for nationalistic growth and establishment, but not, by extension, any opposition to a scientifically informed government. The internalist position on history of science in this period is largely a misinterpretation of a rhetorical strategy held in common between scientists and John Quincy Adams as a statesman promoter of government funding for science. Both had similar motives: to attract funding, to inspire patronage, and to establish institutions they con-

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stantly pointed to America’s inferior scientific development, in conjunction with her brave democratic experiment. The implication was that the cause of science could be the vehicle for social progress and national prestige. Institution-building was, on the governmental level, the job of the oratorical statesman, not (at first) the job of the scientists themselves. The general public was not as literate as the educated science enthusiast or potential professional. In order to establish science as a possible norm in democratic government, a statesman like Adams had to turn to traditional oratorical skill to reach the public and translate to them the usefulness and intrinsic value of science. With long-standing membership in scientific societies such as Franklin’s Philosophical Society, John Quincy Adams saw science as a natural development of human potential to be safeguarded and encouraged by government. This he maintained as a deeply held value, despite the political resistance he faced from a public wary of attachment to any cultural activity resembling monarchy or aristocratic culture. In Adams’s presidential addresses, the development of an infrastructure and “internal improvements”—clearly practical motives with which his audience could agree—served as the vehicle for advancing the relationship of science to government. Finally, and with thanks to Adams’s oratorical tirelessness, America would begin to entertain ideas of institutional science and its benefits to nationhood. Although American citizens were not quite ready to act on his persistent message about science, Adams’s inserting it into public discourse from his high political vantage point opened the subject for deeper consideration. The reality that Adams and others believed they could make a difference through oratorical campaigns in support of founding scientific institutions is evidence that there was enough latent interest in American audiences to receive such a message for future consideration. Even if the immediate results did not include large sums of federal money dedicated to scientific research, the conversation about the place of science in a democratic government had begun. In a work relevant to both rhetorical studies and the history of science, Benedict Anderson has argued that nations are not so much facts of ethnicity or race, but are imagined communities. Anderson pays particular attention to the role of a national discourse that establishes and amplifies this imagined community and (I would add) is presumably guided by the rhetorical norms of the period. He identified three persuasive yet scientific uses of power—the census, the map, and the museum—that together allow a state to imagine the body of citizens, the land under its control, and finally the nature of its legitimacy in the international stores of historical and scientific knowledge.27 The census,

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the map, and the museum are all dependent on the nation’s initial establishment of institutions to facilitate the contributions of science to the workings of government—in this case, American democratic government. In the early American Republic, the oratorical norms of society required the rhetorical imagination of the statesman orator, like John Quincy Adams, to turn the national discourse toward establishment of institutions that would, later in the nineteenth century, be the sites of construction for this aspect of national identity. John Quincy Adams saw his country and the accomplishments of its people and its government as God’s agents of human progress. Although the beginning of the nineteenth century witnessed a fiscally conservative and primarily agricultural set of motives for public policy, John Quincy Adams was unwilling to let die the Founding Fathers’ initial image of a knowledgeable citizenry who valued learning. As a result, he was at the forefront of continuing arguments for the national university recommended by George Washington, and he supported a United States naval academy. It was only natural that, years later in the House of Representatives, Adams would take up the cause for the first government institution of scientific research in America, the Smithsonian Institution. Doing so was the culmination of all his efforts to use public office for the improvement and benefit of mankind and the life of the mind. It would be one arena in the public promotion of science where he would finally get the satisfaction of seeing fruits of his labors—but only after years of effort.

CHAPTER

4

Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge: Setting the Stage for the Smithsonian Debate Whoever shall solely profess, to be willing to put their shoulders, under the burthen of so great an enterprise, as to represent to mankind, the whole Fabrick, the parts, the causes, the effects of Nature: ought to have their eyes in all parts, and to receive information from every quarter of the earth: they ought to have a constant universall intelligence: all discoveries should be brought to them: The Treasuries of all former times should be brought to them: the assistance of the present should be allow’d them: so farr are the narrow conceptions of a few private Writers, in a dark Age, from being equall to so vast a design. —Thomas Sprat, A History of the Royal Society

I

n 1829, after losing the presidential election to Andrew Jackson, sixty-three-year-old John Quincy Adams retired quietly to his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, to heal his bruised self-esteem in his library and his garden. But the lifelong public servant was not destined to spend even one year as a private citizen. When friends proposed that he run for Congress, Adams accepted the challenge and soon became the only former president ever to serve in the House of Representatives. For nine consecutive terms until his death in 1848, he energetically and laboriously continued to emulate the Ciceronian ideal of the orator— the orator perfectus—as he had, first in the Senate, and then as president. As a former professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard, and author of a series of lectures on the subject, Adams was uniquely equipped among American presidents to use the art of rhetoric in advancing causes he saw as worthy and beneficial to the nation. During this last and perhaps most remarkable phase of his career as a public servant and national leader, Adams conducted several more 77

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oratorical crusades for “internal improvements,” including efforts to cultivate the intellectual and moral conditions of the young republic. Most of these proposals continued plans that Adams had initiated with his first annual address to Congress as president. In addition to federal aid for scientific and learned societies, Adams championed causes such as the right of all people, including slaves, to petition Congress; and the repeal of the “gag rules” that had limited legislation on slavery. Scholars concerned only with the immediate historical effects of Adams’s public speaking during this period often overlook his remarkably disciplined, classically informed rhetorical practice. Because it is possible to trace historical principles of rhetoric in a text as a cultural artifact, such analysis can provide interdisciplinary insights into the social and cultural contexts of historical speech-making. Few of Adams’s speeches in the House have been analyzed from a rhetorical standpoint, even though they are some of his finest, issuing from an ethos fortified by lifelong, iron adherence to his principles.1 As a result of this general neglect, one of Adams’s most important rhetorical efforts during his later years as a congressman has not been given the careful attention it deserves. During the Twenty-fourth Congress, shortly after his election to the House, Adams became chairman of a committee appointed to investigate the half-million-dollar bequest to the United States left by British aristocrat James Smithson. When Smithson died on June 27, 1829, he left the whole of his property to his only surviving relation, his nephew, Henry James Hungerford. But in the last sentence of his will, this eccentric nobleman had written a curious, conditional clause: In the case of the death of my said Nephew, or the death of the child or children he may have . . . I then bequest the whole of my property . . . to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of Knowledge among men.2 In 1835, this nephew died childless. In a two-sentence message to Congress on December 17, 1835, President Andrew Jackson reported the existence of the will to Congress, but he claimed he had no authority under the Constitution to accept it himself. The two houses of Congress, therefore, appointed separate committees to work on the problem of securing the money. Benjamin Watkins Leigh of Virginia led the Senate committee, and in the House John Quincy Adams headed what was termed the Select Committee on the Smithsonian Bequest.3 This was the beginning of

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Adams’s passionate advocacy and guardianship of the bequest, which would continue for another decade. Adams, more than anyone else, believed he had a strong sense of the testator’s intentions. Like Smithson, Adams was an amateur scientist, as evidenced by his leadership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and his 1821 Report on Weights and Measures. The years spent in Europe had inspired him with the scientific fervor of the Enlightenment and had sparked and fanned the flames of his interest in astronomy. His presidential plans for “Liberty with Power,” including the institutional advancement of knowledge, had been a political failure, and his defeat in the election of 1828 had left him less than satisfied with the state of learning in the Union. With his characteristic endurance (some would say single-mindedness), Adams saw this generous bequest given by the half-brother of Lord Percy as a perfect opportunity to fulfill his plans for improving the intellectual caliber of the nation. He had the perfect ethos for the job: he championed learning, and as the son of the nation’s second president, he had an almost mythical Revolutionary appeal. In his first report to Congress about the bequest, he declared his resolve to secure it only for the highest cause, and to treat it as a sacred trust and a tribute to the testator’s noble reverence for science—the destiny, as he saw it, of the “knowledge-seeking human race.” As L. H. Butterfield, editor in chief of the Adams papers, puts it, “The Smithsonian Institution is the most visible and flourishing product of John Quincy Adams’s lifelong dedication to intellectual endeavor.”4 During the debate, however, several congressmen gave Adams a run for the money. His abstract appeals to human advancement, knowledge, and the higher purposes of God were countered by arguments proffering more practical and utilitarian ideals. Others opposed acceptance of the gift under any circumstances. Representative William C. Preston of South Carolina thought the bequest “too cheap a way,” and that if Congress accepted it, “every whippersnapper vagabond that had been traducing our country might think it proper to have his name distinguished in the same way.” In the Senate, Preston’s fellow South Carolinian John C. Calhoun said it was “beneath the dignity of the United States to receive presents of this kind from anyone.”5 Eventually, Congress did accept a bill proposed by Adams, which enabled the United States to claim the money, appropriate $10,000 for expenses in the English Chancery courts, and most importantly in terms of the debate to follow, solemnly pledge the use of all money received from the bequest to endow an institution for the increase and diffusion of knowledge. Richard Rush, son of Philadelphia statesman Benjamin

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Rush, was appointed special agent to pilot the case through the Chancery Courts and bring home from England the £104,960 in gold coins, which when melted down and minted in Philadelphia equaled $508,318.46. This amount was in turn sent to the United States Treasury in Washington, where it remained only a short while before Secretary of State Levi Woodbury invested the money in Arkansas and Michigan state stocks bearing 5 percent per annum. The state of Arkansas promptly defaulted, making it impossible for Congress to secure interest until the money could be appropriated for a tangible institution.6 With the brief words of Smithson’s will as its only guide, Congress began one of the most unusual debates in U.S. history: a debate about the nature of knowledge itself, about the relationship of knowledge to the growing nation and government, and about what “increasing and diffusing” it might mean in practice. The bequest’s sizable sum of money, amounting to one and one-half the federal budget in 1835 and having the spending power of over seven million dollars today,7 attracted as many greedy partisans as it did genuine champions of science and the arts. There were proposals to join the money with the funds of existing universities, to put it under the management of scientific societies founded especially to gain control of the bequest, and to buy a grand library to rival those in Europe. Private groups of scientists, farmers, common-school advocates, and historians vied for influence over the congressmen participating in the debate. Faced with this disparate range of opinions, Adams became the self-appointed guardian of the bequest—“to secure, as from a rattlesnake’s fang, the fund and its income, forever, from being wasted and dilapidated in bounties to feed the hunger or fatten the leaden idleness of mountebank projectors and shallow and worthless pretenders to science,” as he wrote in 1838 to Secretary of State John Forsyth.8 He confided in his diary that after his failed efforts as president to improve the life of the mind in the United States, he saw Smithson’s gift as the work of providence granting him a time and a place to carry out his unfulfilled purposes for the improvement of the nation’s intellectual resources.9 The Smithsonian bequest and the eight-year-long debate in Congress over its acceptance and implementation have since been objects of scrutiny for scholars of nineteenth-century institutional and intellectual history. The debate has been treated by historians of the Smithsonian Institution such as George Brown Good, Wilcomb Washburn, and Paul H. Oehser;10 and by biographers of congressmen with major roles in the debate.11 Upon the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Smithsonian’s founding in 1997, there was a new flurry of popular attention to the events leading up to the institution’s

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inception.12 All of these treatments, however, have neglected to investigate Adams’s role in the argument over the Smithsonian in terms of the classical rhetorical theory he used to shape his discourse. This is what I have attempted to do. Because Adams was a scholar of rhetoric, his persuasive strategies were seldom accidental or off the cuff. Not only does his life’s experience support this, but hundreds of comments in his diary leave a trail of his composing and inventive process. My analysis of Adams’s role in the Smithsonian debates permits a closer look at his practice of rhetoric and its relation to neoclassical rhetorical theory. Of course, a direct cause and effect relationship between Adams’s rhetoric and the outcome of the Smithsonian debate cannot be proved with absolute certainty, but neither can it be disproved. The point of rhetorical analysis, in this case, is to demonstrate classical rhetorical principles that Adams used in these unusual speeches promoting the cultural relations of science, and to consider how his practice of rhetoric helped construct the debate as a whole. Generally, histories dealing with the Smithsonian’s inception begin with an examination of the infamous but all-too-brief instructions in Smithson’s will, or with the spectacle of Senator Richard Rush sailing from England with an enormous chest full of gold coins. For a simple historical narration of events, these are interesting and logical starting points, but the events I examine in this study take place specifically in the rhetorical forum of the Twenty-fourth through the Twenty-ninth Congresses, and in public forums such as lecture tours or newspapers, which also addressed the issue of Smithson’s gift. In order to understand the argumentative strategies that Adams and his opponents used in the debate, it is necessary to draw on the influential rhetorical theories of the day that I discussed in chapter 2, especially Adams’s own theory. The final Act to Establish the Smithsonian Institution, passed in 1848,13 was the result of proposals and refutations delivered to both congressional and public audiences. The texts of these arguments reveal each debater’s strategy for persuading audiences to adopt a particular proposal. As the debaters engaged in the art of rhetoric, they worked within distinct the rhetorical conventions of the day. While many of the debaters were naturally talented in persuasive writing and public speaking, the rhetorical conventions they used were not merely intuitions about how to communicate in a public forum. Because rhetorical theory was a mainstay in nineteenth-century education and culture, most congressmen had studied it in one form or another, either in the college lecture hall or through practical example. Except for some scant knowledge of Smithson’s life and scientific work, the brief phrase “increase and diffusion of knowledge among

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men” in his will was the only clue that congressmen had in attempting to carry out his intentions (or, in some cases, in attempting to use the bequest for their own intentions). To understand the reception of his bequest, it is important first to consider the variety of meanings attributed to this phrase by Adams and his opponents. In this way the speakers’ motives in the Smithsonian debate become apparent, as they associate different plans with the “increase and diffusion of knowledge” in particular speeches. The details of Smithson’s life, both his scientific projects and his personal history, were the only facts Congress had as it sought grounds for agreement about what the wording in his will might portend in concrete terms. Beyond this slight background, there were two broad fields to which Congressmen turned for guidance in developing their proposals. The first field was the realm of institutional science, particularly the history and practice of the British Royal Society and succeeding European and American scientific organizations. The second field that Congressmen culled for models was the realm of American educational reform, including the development of public schools, universities, and professional schools. Through the interaction of these opposing fields of interest, the rhetoric of the Smithsonian debate represents a uniquely American version of the Western struggle between ethos as a value system passed on through education and ethos as a value system embodied in the new science of discovery. This debate forced congressmen and citizens to address directly the question of where intellectual authority should reside in the developing nation. Rhetorical scholars Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran argue that early nineteenth-century America was an oratorical culture: one in which a tradition of citizenship and public argument relied on tacit agreement about the commonality of knowledge. This oratorical culture, according to Clark and Halloran, underwent an individualistic transformation in the middle of the nineteenth century, exemplified by Andrew Jackson’s defeat of John Quincy Adams in 1828. While the debate of the formation of the Smithsonian does not entirely support the theory of a rhetorical paradigm shift or transformation, it does dramatize a creative struggle between multiple ideological approaches.

THE QUESTION OF JAMES SMITHSON’S INTENTIONS The ambiguity and imprecision of the language in Smithson’s will proved to be an invitation to multiple interpretations from the outset.

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On July 1, 1835, Smithson’s bankers Clarke, Fynmore, and Fladgate sent the will to the American charge d’affaires in London, along with a letter complaining that On reference to the will it will appear that it is not very clearly defined to whom, on behalf of the United States, the property should be paid or transferred; indeed, there is so much doubt that we apprehend that the attorney-general must, on behalf of the crown of England, be joined in the proceedings which it is requisite that the United States should institute.14 There was even some uncertainty regarding Smithson’s soundness of mind in making his will. Yet, the vagueness of Smithson’s words concerning the parameters of the institution provided America’s fledgeling democratic government the freedom to exercise its problem-solving ability. When Congressman Richard Rush finally secured the bequest in the Chancery Courts, the question remained: what actions should be taken to fulfill the noble but obscure purpose of the will? What did Smithson mean by “increase and diffusion of knowledge among men”? Turning to examine Smithson’s life for clues about his intent, some congressmen, such as John Calhoun and William Preston, believed that the bequest was simply a means to placate Smithson’s envy of his father’s noble title and estate.15 It is true that Smithson had harbored some resentment about his illegitimate status, and in Adams’s House committee reports on the matter, Congress was made well aware of the conditions of the benefactor’s origins. Hugh Smithson, James’s father, had acquired great wealth, property, and political power by marrying the daughter of the Earl of Northumberland and later was awarded the dukedom of Northumberland from King George III. There is no evidence that Hugh Smithson ever acknowledged or even met his son, who was one of several natural children he had fathered. His mother, Elizabeth Hungerforde Keate Macie, was of more aristocratic lineage than the boy’s father, being the great-grandniece of Charles, Duke of Somerset, and a cousin of Hugh Smithson’s wife. James Smithson was born in Paris, where his mother had taken refuge from social embarrassment, and he became a naturalized citizen of Britain at age nine. Because of his illegitimate parentage, however, he was barred from serving in the military, the church, the civil service, or politics.16 Acutely aware of his status, he wrote in one of his private manuscripts: “The best blood of England flows in my veins. On my father’s side I am a Northumberland, on my mother’s I am related to kings, but this avails me not. My name shall

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live in the memory of man when the titles of the Northumberlands and the Percys are extinct and forgotten.”17 For other members of Congress, Smithson’s accomplishments offered better guidance than his origins. When Smithson gained an inheritance from his mother’s family, he began at a young age to use his money to pursue amateur but well-conceived scientific studies. He studied chemistry and mineralogy at Pembroke College in Oxford. In 1787, at the age of twenty, he became the youngest member of the Royal Society of London, nominated by renowned chemist Henry Cavendish. He spent most of his life traveling in Europe, especially France, surrounded by great scientific minds of the age, such as Sir Joseph Banks, Andre-Marie Ampere, Jons Berzelius, and the astronomer and physiscist Dominique François Arago. As a member of the Royal Society, he wrote over two hundred scientific papers and had twenty-seven of these published. He was the first to distinguish between separate traces of carbonite and zinc silicate in what had been known as the mineral, “calamine.” Today this carbonite is known as “smithsonite.” You may find a sample in the Smithsonian Institution’s Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. Smithson opposed monarchy and spent five years in prison in France for openly criticizing Napoleon Bonaparte after he had become emperor. He was moved by the ideals of the Enlightenment and read the works of the philosophers John Locke, David Hume, and Voltaire, and the American Revolutionary writers Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin.18 His library contained a book by Royal Society secretary Isaac Weld entitled Travels Through North America, in which the author writes about Washington, D.C., “If the affairs of the United States go on as rapidly as they have done, it will become the grand emporium of the West, and rival in magnitude and splendor the cities of the whole world.”19 Other nineteenth-century scientists also saw the New World as the next frontier for science and the advancement of knowledge; Smithson would have been aware of this. For example, the chemist Joseph Priestly, who was forced to leave England for his political beliefs, took refuge in America, where he believed the future of science lay.20 Benjamin Franklin’s American Philosophical Society was also attracting the attention of scientific-minded Europeans in the eighteenth century, so it could have contributed to Smithson’s hopes concerning the advancement of learning in the New World. Some congressmen, learning the particulars of Smithson’s interests from the few documents that could be gathered about the man, persisted in seeing the bequest as an attempt to gain immortality and glory where none could be found by birthright. Historian of science George Daniels claims that this mind-set was indicative of the Jacksonian

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democratic trend toward anti-intellectualism and individualism.21 Yet, the bequest’s ready and relentless defender, John Quincy Adams, saw Smithson’s great gift not as the one-upmanship of a forsaken nobleman, but as “generous and noble devotion to the improvement of scientific learning” for the benefit of mankind.22 For Adams, there was no mistaking the intention of the phrase “increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” It was the same objective that had inspired the founding members of the British Royal Society and continued to influence the activities of original scientific researchers in Europe for two centuries. As a statesman orator, Adams was devoted to Ciceronian ideals, but as an advocate of science, he upheld the same principles adopted by the Royal Society and probably by Smithson, who was a member. In this mind-set, Adams resembled the Founding Fathers of the United States, who for the first several generations of the nation’s existence consciously modeled it after much older Western nations. Politically, and in terms of education, early nineteenthcentury Americans still idealized the classical writers of ancient Greece and Rome. In terms of science, however, they were practical and strove to find productive uses for technological and experimental knowledge.

THE SMITHSONIAN AND THE ETHOS OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY The idea of a general, private society for improving and enlarging scientific knowledge has its roots in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with such groups as the Academia dei Lincei in Rome and the Academia del Cimento in Florence. These and other short-lived groups in Italy and Germany took their organizational examples from earlier associations that formed during the Renaissance to support language and antiquarian studies. But the early nineteenth-century American approach to science remained grounded in the philosophy of Francis Bacon and the British Royal Society. Next to Bacon himself, the history and purposes of the British Royal Society were a primary association that Congress would make while considering the meaning of Smithson’s will. For these debaters, the Smithsonian was to be an immigrant son of the Royal Society— uniquely American and yet resembling its ancestor in character and custom. The language of this side of the debate illustrates two “vantage points” of ethos, the rhetorical use of authority to persuade. In these congressmen’s arguments, ethos reflects the mythologized “voice” of an individual (Bacon himself) on the one hand, and the location of a

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“group character” in a place or community on the other. Proposals favoring a scientific interpretation of Smithson’s will borrowed language from Bacon and his followers. These speeches narrated possible events for the founding of the Smithsonian that resembled the origins of the venerated Royal Society. As Congress became the forum for the debate over a new scientific institution, it consequentially became a surprising meeting place for history and science. Often borrowing the language of Bacon, these arguments confirm the observation of Halloran and Miller that this form of historical ethos requires a “story telling” voice.23 The first history of the Royal Society was written five years after the organization of scientists received its royal charter. Thomas Sprat wrote his 1667 History of the Royal Society under close supervision of John Wilkins and Henry Oldenburg, who were the secretaries of the Society at the time. Sprat identifies the prototype of the Society as an informal club of scientists and other “Gentlemen of Philosophical Minds” who had met in Oxford beginning about 1648 to begin a “free way of reasoning.” John Wilkins, who was then warden of Wadham College, led this early group. In 1658, the club moved to London at Gresham College and received royal patronage, initiating a new era in scientific exploration and discovery.24 Sprat’s History dwells at length on the philosophical indebtedness of the Society to Francis Bacon’s conception of scientific investigation, particularly in Novum Organum and New Atlantis. The title page of Sprat’s History faces an etching depicting Wilkins and Bacon sitting on each side of a bust of King Charles II. He includes as a dedication for his volume an ode by metaphysical poet and botanist Abraham Cowley in praise of the Royal Society and its conceptual father: Some few exalted Spirits this latter Age has shown, That labour’d to assert the Liberty (From Guardians, who were now Usurpers grown) Of this Old Minor still, Captiv’d Philosophy; But ’twas Rebellion call’d to fight For such a long oppressed Right. Bacon at last, a mighty Man, arose, Whom a wise King and Nature chose Lord Chancellour of both their Laws, And boldly undertook the injur’d Pupils caus [sic] . . . In his first chapter, Sprat calls Bacon the “one great Man, who had the true Imagination of the whole extent of this Enterprise, as it is now set on foot.”25

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As John Quincy Adams understood it, the language of Smithson’s will came from the spirit of scientific inquiry that the Royal Society embodied, since Smithson was an active member of the Royal Society.26 Being his contemporary, Adams may have been a better judge of Smithson’s worldview than the younger generation of congressmen with whom he argued. This worldview was derived for the most part from Bacon’s attempts to critique and overthrow the system of Aristotle’s Organon that dominated the universities of his day— thus his title Novum Organum. Perhaps both Smithson and Adams had contemplated its title page decorated with an image of ships passing through the Pillars of Hercules, which according to the ancient Greeks represented the western boundary of the known world. Beyond these pillars the legendary island of Atlantis was said to exist. For Bacon, this image symbolized the limits of classical science and the means of passing beyond it into a new world of discovery through induction.27 Identifying this metaphorical new world with the actual New World of the United States would have been easy for Smithson and his contemporaries. In his History, Sprat inadvertently points in that direction when he writes, “And we may well ghess [sic], that the absolute perfection of the True Philosophy is not now far off. . . . For methinks there is an agreement, between the growth of Learning, and of Civil Government.”28 From its beginning, the members of the British Royal Society believed that the classical disputations and Aristotelian worldview, which still permeated European universities in the seventeenth century, worked only to order old knowledge and not to advance new discovery.29 Although the experimental and observational works of Galileo and others were generally known, the grounding philosophy of the age was primarily still Aristotelian. Sprat is careful to explain the Society’s rejection of the old philosophy in favor of the new experimental philosophy of the moderns. Concerning the proponents of scholasticism and their admirers in contemporary universities he writes: The Subjects about which they were most conversant, were either some of those Arts, which Aristotle had drawn into Method, or the more speculative parts of our Divinity. These they commonly handled after this fashion. They began with some generall Definitions of the things themselves, according to their universal Natures: Then divided them into their parts, and drew them out into severall propositions, which they layd down as Problems: these they controverted on both sides: and by many nicities of Arguments, and citations of Authorities,

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confuted their adversaries, and strengthened their own dictates . . . yet [this Notional Warr] was never able to do any great good towards the enlargement of knowledge: Because it rely’d on generall Terms, which had not much foundation in Nature [sic].30 For the Royal Society, the source of “true knowledge” rested in a “vast design” of observation, carried out by a large organization of experimental scientists: There are indeed some operations of the mind, which may be best performed by the simple strengths of men’s own particular thoughts; such as invention, and judgement, and disposition: But there are other works also, which require much aid, and as many hands, as can be found. And such is this of observation: Which is the great Foundation of Knowledge: Some must gather, some must bring, some separate, some examine.31 The Royal Society saw this new “free way” of reasoning as nothing less than heroic; they were breaking free of the confines of deductive argument, and expanding into a boundless enterprise of discovery. It may at first seem unlikely that the American Congress in 1836 would follow in the footsteps of an organization founded in England two centuries earlier and based on the views of a seventeenth-century philosopher, when so much advancement in science had taken place since then. But America, with all her frontier spirit and Puritan adherence to the practical, was behind Europe in developing an appreciation for scientific discovery that might not have an immediate, practical end. Many congressmen in the Smithsonian debate, however, were committed to Enlightenment ideals and felt the U.S. needed to move beyond the solely utilitarian approach to science and the conservative classicism still governing American universities. This position resembles similar difficulties faced by the Royal Society at the time of its founding, as Thomas Sprat explains: It is strange that we are not able to inculcate into the minds of many men the necessity that distinction of my Lord Bacons [sic], that there ought to be Experiments of Light, as well as of Fruit. . . . If they will persist in contemming [sic] all Experiments, except those which bring them immediate gain, and a present harvest: they may as well cavail [sic] at the Providence of God, that he has not made all the seasons of the year to be times of mowing, reaping, and vintage.32

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It was this mind-set in which Adams, following in the footsteps of his father, saw in the Smithsonian bequest an avenue for advancing true science. The Royal Society, following the advice of Bacon, had argued against applying science for the glorification and profit of individuals, and insisted instead on benefiting all human kind by their discoveries. The American founders of the Smithsonian intended to follow suit. A simple comparison should illustrate the similarities. Sprat proclaims the ultimate goal of the Royal Society on the first page of his History: I shall here present to the World, an Account of the First Institution of the Royal Society; and of the Progress, which they have already made; in hope, that this Learned and Inquisitive Age, will either think their endeavors worthy of its Assistance; or else will be thereby provok’d (if such can be found out) for the Benefit of human life, and the Advancement of Real Knowledge.33 Similarly, Adams addresses Congress during the Smithsonian debate: The attainment of knowledge is the high and exclusive attribute of man, among the numberless myriads of animated beings, inhabitants of the terrestrial globe. On him alone is bestowed, by the bounty of the Creator of the universe, the power and the capacity of acquiring knowledge. Knowledge is the attribute of his nature, which at once enables him to improve his condition upon earth and to prepare him for the enjoyment of a happier existence hereafter. . . . To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is therefore the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence.34 The intent to benefit humankind through the advancement of knowledge is clear in the language of both men, and the popularity of this view of man’s place in the universe proved persuasive to many in the Smithsonian debate. Not only does Adams’s language in the Smithsonian’s founding debate resemble the language of the early Royal Society, it also accords with the language of Bacon himself. In Novum Organum, when Bacon used the word “science,” he used it with the then-common general meaning of “knowledge,” all divisions of the arts and sciences, but particularly the realm of natural philosophy. He saw natural philosophy as “the foundation upon which to build” all other branches of knowledge,

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including moral and political philosophy.35 Like the founders of the Royal Society and, in turn, like many of the congressmen in the Smithsonian debate, Bacon saw the compilation of a “Natural History,” as a part of natural philosophy, to be one of the most important tasks of a scientific institution. Increasing knowledge through induction and scientific experimentation was the theme of his entire work in Novum Organum. This kind of advancement of knowledge Bacon described as experiments of “Light,” that is, pure research and discoveries, which are meant to prepare the way for further experimentation to benefit mankind in more practical ways. A great deal of this general research would necessarily come before the useful experiments of science for the improvement of man’s condition, which he distinguished as experiments of “Fruit.”36 In this context, Bacon’s “Light” metaphor calls to mind John Quincy Adams’s description of astrophysical observatories as “lighthouses of the skies” two hundred years later, in his first annual address to Congress as president. Bacon’s New Atlantis contains an important section that has long been assumed a model for the Royal Society and that prefigures the language of the Smithsonian’s founding debate. The “House of Salomon” forecasts a modern scientific institution for the advancement of knowledge. In it, the researchers, or “Merchants of Light,” collect observations for the house itself, using the experimental method and engaging in cooperative activity. Furthermore, there are ample public funds to subsidize the work, a division into areas of specialization, and reliance upon equipment and books to gather information. The experiments are conducted both for present usefulness and for future possibilities. Bacon sums up the ultimate goal of his plan in New Atlantis: “The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”37 This language implicitly calls for the increase and diffusion of knowledge, and many of the proposals for the Smithsonian Institution bear a distinct resemblance to Bacon’s description of the House of Salomon. Martha Ornstein has called this work “Bacon’s last will and testament to his century,”38 and it was arguably part of Smithson’s (and Adams’s) legacy to the United States. Sprat’s History adopts the language of Bacon’s House of Salomon in explaining the Royal Society’s purpose of increasing knowledge progressively, over a long period of time: They have try’d, to put it into a condition of perpetual increasing; by settling an inviolable correspondence between the hand, and the brain. They have studi’d, to make it, not

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onely an Enterprise of one season, or of some lucky opportunity; but a business of time; a steddy, a lasting, a popular, an uninterrupted Work. They have attempted, to free it from the Artifice, and Humors, and Passions of Sects; to render it an Instrument, whereby Mankind may obtain a Dominion over Things, and not onely over one anothers Judgements. [sic].39 Adams, along with other Smithsonian debaters, also strove to create an institution that would continue indefinitely in increasing knowledge—whether through various experimental projects or through teaching and education. As to diffusion, Sprat seems to imply it in the building up of knowledge for future generations to use as they continue to make discoveries: The Society has reduc’d its principal observations, into one common-stock; and laid them up in publique Registers, to be nakedly transmitted to the next Generation of Men; and so from them to their Successors. And as their purpose was, to heap up a mixt Mass of Experiments, without digesting them into any perfect model: so to this end, they confin’d themselves to no order of subjects; and whatever they have recorded, they have done it, not as compleat Schemes or opinions, but as bare, unfurnish’d Histories. [sic].40 Adams, throughout the eight years of argument over the Smithsonian’s purpose, held unswervingly to this very conception of diffusing knowledge. His ethos in the Smithsonian debate combined the Baconian “voice” with the need for an American location or storehouse for scientific discoveries. For Adams, in the Baconian tradition of the Royal Society, diffusion of knowledge meant publishing and storing up scientific findings for future generations to build upon in an actual progress or “march” of science. This was a break from approaches to science then in place in American universities. Education of youth, or the passing on of the basic foundations of knowledge through any form of schooling, would not secure Smithson’s intentions, from this point of view.

EARLY SCIENTIFIC INSTITUTIONS AS MODELS IN DELIBERATIVE RHETORIC Scientific societies in the United States followed closely the examples of older institutions in Europe, particularly the British Royal Society,

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chartered in 1662, and the French Académie des Sciences, established in 1666 by fiat from Jean Baptiste Colbert and Louis XIV. These two institutions had been the primary models for European development of learned societies through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These examples, however, had little effect in the United States until the nineteenth century. Both the Royal Society and the Paris Academy had actively supported the practice of science through grants, publications, and research projects. Organizations modeled after the Royal Society, however, depended on support from a large and diverse membership and received only partial support from the state, while institutions based on the Paris Academy functioned more as governmental bureaus for science and technology. By the nineteenth century, European scientists began to turn to specialized societies and professional organizations for particular branches of science, but Americans were only beginning to imitate the Royal Society and the Paris Academy.41 In their proposals, speeches, and letters, the Smithsonian debaters mention European and American societies based on both the English and the Continental types, but the Smithsonian was unique among its antecedents in that it needed a congressional act, but no money at all from the state to found it. Since Smithson had willed the new institution to be devoted to the “increase and diffusion of knowledge among men,” however, most congressmen assumed that this meant all of mankind, without regard to national borders. Therefore, the Royal Society, with its more diverse membership, was the primary ancestor. Smithson’s emphasis on the diffusion of knowledge among all mankind points to the influence of another, privately funded British society that was newly formed during his lifetime, the Royal Institution. Established in 1781 by 331 charter members, 54 of whom were also Royal Society members, the stated purpose of the organization was: “Diffusing the knowledge, and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical inventions and improvements, and for teaching, by courses of philosophical lectures and experiments, the application of sciences to the common purposes of life.”42 The primary organizer was Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society at the time. Smithson was also in the founding group, along with other members of the British elite who wished to improve the quality of life for the masses, such as William Blake and the abolitionist William Wilberforce. The institution emphasized cooperation of all nations in enlarging the bounds of human knowledge, regardless of

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political, social, or educational barriers. It was devoted to making knowledge available to the general public, as the Smithsonian Institution would be sixty years later.43 Most of the European models for the Smithsonian resembled the Royal Society more closely than the Royal Institution, however, in that their funding did not depend entirely on private wealth. Almost all of them depended at least partially on governmental patronage. Since the protection and growth of the federally governed fund was one of Adams’s essential roles in promoting the institution, these models were important to him as he conceived and wrote his own proposals. During the throes of the Smithsonian debate, a handful of learned societies formed in the United States for the express purpose of obtaining and controlling the Smithsonian bequest. One of these, New York’s American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, published a prospectus at the time of its founding in 1839, which contains a large section of “Brief Sketches of European Literary and Scientific Societies,” intended to be examples of ways to frame the Smithsonian Institution. This prospectus provides an almost complete list of contemporary European learned societies that were used as examples in the context of the Smithsonian debate.44 Adams had firsthand experience of many of these because of his years abroad and his specific interests in scientific research. Besides the Royal Society, this prospectus lists and gives brief descriptions of several British organizations, including: the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (chartered in 1754); the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1800); the London Institution (1807); the Surrey Institution (1824); the Mechanic’s Institution (1823); the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1823); and others. For all of these societies, founding charters and prospectuses are quoted that bear the same register of language used in Smithson’s will and in congressional proposals during the debate—in some cases the words are almost identical. The objects of the London Institute, for example, are “the acquisition of an extensive library of the most valuable books in all languages, ancient and modern;—the establishment of rooms for newspapers and other periodical journals, foreign and domestic;—the general diffusion of Science, Literature, and the Arts.” The Surrey Institution was founded simply “for the general Diffusion of Literary and Scientific Knowledge.”45 There are also several French societies offered in the prospectus for the American Society for the Useful Diffusion of Knowledge as examples for the Smithsonian’s groundwork. The Paris Institute discussed previously is listed, and its Academy of Science is described as it was,

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by then, divided into eleven sections including Geometry, Mechanics, Astronomy, Geography and Navigation, Philosophy, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Botany, Rural Economy and Veterinary Art, Anatomy and Zoology, Medicine, and scientific prizes. The Smithsonian bills in Congress would eventually include several divisions in much the same way. Also listed in the prospectus are the Athenaeum of Arts, the Athenaeum of Paris, the Royal and Central Society of Agriculture, and the French Society of Universal Statistics. Many of these were limited to encouraging science and its practical uses for the French population, though the French Society of Universal Statistics existed to aid the progress and development of “every branch of human knowledge.”46 For both British and French societies, the prospectus describes the board of directors or council members, membership fees (if any), the nature of their governmental endowment and any supplements received by private bequests, along with their activities to promote and diffuse general and useful knowledge. It is important to note that all of the models listed are European. The lack of American societies on the list illustrates the competition between the Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and other small American societies at the time. Also, Americans’ sense of inferiority and envy of European culture probably contributed to the choices of models. Adams, too, would look to European models for his organizing principles and for inventing arguments, since he had an accurate sense of the then-primitive nature of American science. A few other European learned societies, not mentioned in the prospectus of the Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, come up repeatedly in the course of the Smithsonian debate. The Jardin des Plantes in France was a particular favorite of congressmen proposing natural history organizations and museums, or who were effected by the strong agricultural influence in the United States. Congressmen with a more utilitarian viewpoint cited such organizations as Scotland’s Andersonian Institution at Glasgow, France’s Polytechnic School and School of Mines, and Prussia’s Gewerbeverein at Berlin. Though few, American predecessors of the Smithsonian Institution existed as precedents and groundwork for scientific culture, and Adams’s long-standing involvement in them established his authority to speak on the matter. For the most part, they were centered around the purpose of advancing science as it could be applied to utilitarian ends, such as mapmaking, engineering, agriculture, mining, and manufacture. As historian James McClellan explains, the American Philosophical Society was not much more than a weak and provincial institution at the time of its founding in 1769, but Franklin’s renown made it well known among both Americans and Europeans. In organization, it was

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similar to the Royal Society of London. Admission fees and dues provided its main source of funds, though the patronage of the English and later Pennsylvania state legislature provided funds for larger expenses.47 The second-oldest American scientific society is Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was similar in organization to the American Philosophical Society and the Royal Society of London, but tensions with the British after the Revolution caused the founders to adopt the French-influenced name “Academy.”48 In addition to these two American societies, the later eighteenth century saw the rise of a handful of other, short-lived scientific societies, such as the Connecticut Society of Arts and Sciences, the Trenton Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge, and the Virginia Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge.49 But most American learned societies associated with the Smithsonian were organizations that actually formed for the purpose of obtaining Smithson’s money, such as the aforementioned American Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and most importantly the National Institution for the Promotion of Science, which received a national charter in 1839. Since the charters of these two groups and some of the arguments made by their important members are actually persuasive texts designed to propose solutions to the Smithsonian problem, I discuss their rhetorical strategies along with Adams’s in the following sections. Another important kind of model for the Smithsonian, especially for Adams, was the sort of astrophysical observatory that had been established in several European countries in the late eighteenth century, with resident astronomers, a press for publication of findings, and continuous government support. Chair of the Committee on the Smithsonian in the House, Adams’s early bills proposed the construction of a national observatory in Washington. In his committee reports, and in his frequent public lectures and private correspondence on the subject, Adams often cites the Royal Observatory in Greenwich as the model for his proposals. In the appendixes of these reports Adams included letters he had written to the Astronomer Royal, Reverend George B. Airy, asking questions about the founding, history, cost, maintenance, duties, instruments, and activities of the Royal Observatory, along with a detailed, six-page letter answering these questions. He also discusses new observatories in France and in Russia.50

THE SMITHSONIAN AS LOCUS FOR COMMON KNOWLEDGE In a tenor of language completely separate from the trend of scientific institutions and societies, the “increase and diffusion of knowledge”

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was for some congressmen an invitation to expand reforms of public education. Benjamin Rush, the famous physician, Philadelphia statesman, and father of Richard Rush who brought the Smithsonian bequest from England, wrote in a 1786 essay on what was then termed “common-school” education: In the education of youth, let the authority of our masters be as absolute as possible . . . by this mode of education we prepare our youth for the subordination of laws and thereby qualify them for becoming good citizens of the republic. I am satisfied that the most useful citizens have been formed from those youth who have never known or felt their own wills till they were one and twenty years of age. . . . I consider it as possible to convert men into republican machines. This must be done if we expect them to perform their parts properly in the great machine of the state.51 Similarly, in a 1797 prize-winning essay, Washington newspaper editor Samuel Harrison Smith listed several reasons for the “broad diffusion of knowledge” in the United States: 1. An enlightened nation is always most tenacious of its rights. 2. It is not in the interest of such a society to perpetuate error. 3. In a republic the sources of happiness are open to all without injuring any. 4. If happiness be made at all to depend on the improvement of the mind and the collision of mind with mind, the happiness of an individual will greatly depend upon the general diffusion of knowledge . . . [my italics] 5. Under a republic . . . man feels as strong a bias to improvement as under a despotism he feels an impulse to ignorance and depression.52 Rush, Smith, and others who had set the ideological framework for public education maintained that moral training in the responsibilities of citizenship was of vital importance to the developing republican nation. Thomas Jefferson had proposed a public system of free elementary schools and regional academies.53 In this argument for the use of Smithsonian funds, Adams found a formidable opponent, especially since he was not in principle against public education—just not as a result of the Smithsonian fund. During the nineteenth century, economic development fostered commerce, the spread of population to Western and Southern states,

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and a need for improved communication. These developments went hand-in-hand with a demand for schooling in literacy and mathematics. At the same time, industrial capitalism contributed to the need for greater discipline in the work ethic.54 Education for assimilation was one of the central preoccupations of nineteenth-century school reformers and officials. American-born Protestants were growing increasingly suspicious of the views of immigrants now arriving in great numbers. They felt a need to protect republican ideals of individualism, liberty, and virtue, and to promote a sense of social morality. Education of the young, they believed, could foster and preserve these principles.55 As early as 1790, Noah Webster had written that “The national character is not yet formed,” and that common schools were needed to instill in American children “an inviolable attachment to their own country.”56 By the 1830s, there was still a great deal of resistance to the establishment of compulsory common schools, but at the same time, manufacturing, foreign immigration, and the fragmentation of Protestantism led to a renewed emphasis on the republican ideal of self-sacrifice and a framework of common beliefs and respect of laws. Historian Carl Kaestle remarks, “By the 1830s, the fall of the American republic seemed less likely. Economic progress, diplomatic stability, and new religious currents gave rise to a general atmosphere of optimism about human nature and the moral potential of properly constructed institutions.”57 Robert Dale Owen, coauthor with Adams of the Smithsonian bill that eventually became law, was a keen supporter of common schools and saw the Smithsonian Institution as the perfect opportunity to expand them. The theme of national integration in educational reform also took the form of movements for a national university, especially early in the debate. Benjamin Rush urged the creation of a national university “where the youth of all the states may be melted (as it were) together into one mass of citizens.”58 Many congressmen cited the final State of the Union address of George Washington, in which he had remarked [italics are mine]: It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular governments. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it, can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric? Promote, then, as objects of primary importance, Institutions for the General Diffusion of Knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a

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government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.59 While Adams himself was a supporter of a national university, he did not see this as the intention of James Smithson’s will. He insisted early in the debate that none of the money should be used for a school, university, or seminary of any kind, but several proposals called for an institution of education in one form or another, as we shall note in the next chapter. Laboratory research was not yet a part of university education in America, and would not be until Johns Hopkins University received its charter in 1867 (or perhaps not until 1876, when it opened). The Smithsonian debaters, however, did propose several hybrid institutions containing both general and technical education in combination with research facilities. For historians of science and of rhetoric, the text of these proposals and refutations provides an unusual opportunity for studying the development of competing ideologies concerning the discovery and diffusion of knowledge. In the debaters’ interpretations of Smithson’s commonplace “increase and diffusion of knowledge,” there is a focused, analyzable record of two opposing discourse strategies, each with separate traditions and contemporary associations: one embodying an Old World culture in which neoclassical educational systems thrived, and one embodying the new epistemology of quantifiable science, research, and progress: the awakening of the modern. The intersection of the two yielded rhetorical complexities that still concern academics and educators today. John Quincy Adams was both a rhetorician and an orator: after studying and teaching the art of rhetoric as a scholar, he spent the rest of his life practicing the art of public speaking as ambassador, senator, president of the United States and, finally, as a member of the House of Representatives. He had a scholar’s love of science and learning, and he strove for a civic leader’s wisdom in public life. More than any other congressman, he was suited to protect the sacred trust of Smithson’s will from political and financial ruin. In his mind, only the highest and noblest aims of science could fulfill the “Great Design,” as he called it, of an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among all mankind.60 His efforts in this debate built the foundation for the continually growing and multifaceted institution we have today. As an orator in these debates, Adams faced a wide range of opponents who emphasized various aspects of the art of rhetoric: the precepts of elocution, belletrism, and the romantic strain of rhetoric rooted in American Transcendentalism. Adams was chief among the small group of aging congressmen trained in classical rhetoric who con-

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tributed to what has been termed the “Golden Age of American Oratory.” The primary question for this rhetorical analysis of the debate is: what can the oratory of John Quincy Adams reveal about the role of rhetoric in this debate? The answer to this question has three parts: first, the extent to which classical theory influenced his practice; second, the effect of other approaches to rhetoric on his refutations and, in some cases, his concessions; and finally, how twentieth-century theories of rhetoric can explain the interaction between Adams and others in the nineteenth-century congressional forum. Related to the focus of this rhetorical analysis is Adams’s skill as a rhetorical critic, which permitted him to function as an acute judge of the arguments of others. As mentioned in chapter 3, Adams had intended to write a separate volume of Lectures on Oratory once he finished his Lectures on Rhetoric, but he never found time to complete the series. The additional volume would have contained criticism of great speeches, both ancient and contemporary. According to Jerald Banninga, Adams was “the rhetorical critic in the Golden Age of American Oratory”; he was [the] one man who was thoroughly trained in rhetorical principles, who had a highly developed sense of appreciation of the power and importance of the spoken word, who was provided with a place in history from which to observe the speechmaking in the pulpit, at the bar, in the legislative assembly, and on the lecture circuit, and who took advantage of his opportunity by compiling a body of rhetorical criticism.61 Furthermore, Adams fulfilled this role in an age when the criticism of oratory (as opposed to the growing criticism of literature or belles lettres) was seldom practiced outside of brief newspaper coverage of public speeches. The entirety of Adams’s criticism of fellow debaters’ speeches on the Smithsonian is contained in his voluminous Diary, along with comments and ruminations about the bequest. At times criticism served as a means of invention for his own arguments. In a sense, Adams was his own trial audience. As Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca explain in The New Rhetoric, “The deliberating subject is often regarded as an incarnation of the universal audience,” since “the secrecy of self-deliberation seems to guarantee its value and sincerity.”62 As a consequence, Adams’s Diary serves as remarkable evidence of his inventional process for the persuasive techniques employed during the course of the debate. According to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, “It is indeed the audience which has the major role in determining the quality of argument

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and the behavior of orators.”63 To a great extent, the audience for each rhetorical act shapes a good speaker’s rhetorical approach. For this reason, the kinds of audiences Adams and his opponents addressed were important factors in the debate. They were made up of fellow congressmen with both similar and dissimilar opinions and differing attitudes toward Adams. For the most part, they considered Adams a venerable character, respecting him for his experience as president and associating him with the Revolution and with the founding of the nation through his father’s presidency. There were some groups, however, who were politically predisposed to quarrel with Adams. In addition to the immediate forum, Congress as a nineteenthcentury institution was more immediately dependent than today upon popular approbation. As a result, the audience was often expanded to include groups within the general public. Readers of newspapers such as the National Intelligencer were one such audience, as reports and letters to the editor gave the public an inside view of the arguments. Such public exposure encouraged interested educators, scientists, agricultural specialists, and philanthropists to petition Congress for their favorite Smithsonian proposals—and this in turn helped to shape Adams’s rhetoric and the movements of the debate. In a few instances, audiences of learned societies outside of Congress heard Adams or his opponents give lectures.64 These audiences were informed constituents of the congressmen involved in the debate; they had opinions about the Smithsonian’s potential effects on their own lives or the lives of their children, and they rallied popular support for competing proposals. During all parts of the debate, therefore, the audience was multifaceted. Nevertheless, as Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca remark, “There is only one rule in this matter: adaptation of the speech to its audience, whatever its nature.”65 In this they reflect ancient and neoclassical rhetorical lore, which sees the primary function of the art as adaptation of the message to the audience. This task was multiplied for congressional orators by the variety of audiences they had to convince.

AN IMPERIOUS AND INDISPENSABLE OBLIGATION True to the principles evidenced by “Liberty with Power” programs during his presidency, Adams had a paternalistic attitude about the propagation of knowledge in a democracy. Furthermore, he saw the Smithsonian bequest as the dying wish of a magnanimous and generous man. His first rhetorical approach to the subject in Congress set a

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strong moralistic tone for the debate—a tone that would carry through to its resolution. In light of Adams’s veneration of Cicero, it is not surprising to find this moral motive working hand-in-hand with Adams’s persuasive strategies. The definition of rhetoric given in the beginning of his Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, that it is the science of speaking well both in terms of excellence in speech and in moral character, depends on the Ciceronian ideal of the orator perfectus, for whom truth, honor, and virtue are the rule in constructing any argument worthy of trust from the audience. With a religious zeal lacking in ancient rhetorics, Adams claims in his Lectures that the “testimonial of Omnipotence” is the ultimate authoritative proof for maintaining an ethical stance in rhetorical argumentation. Since ethical implications and matters of honor continued to concern Congress throughout the debate, especially in terms of fulfilling the testator’s dying wish, Adams’s stance undoubtedly resonated with other congressmen. Nevertheless, no common opinion regarding Smithson’s purpose prevailed. On January 19, 1836, Adams read his first report to Congress as chairman of the House committee on the Smithsonian. He had collected and studied all the documents he could find about Smithson and his bequest, and he was convinced that the nation should accept Smithson’s noble gift. The report Adams made on the bequest to the Senate had stated conservatively that there was nothing in the Constitution to prevent the acceptance of the money—that it was possible for Congress to accept it. Adams, moreover, attributed Smithson’s gift to his great generosity toward mankind and to his foresight concerning the benefits of scientific discovery for all future generations. In his view, the bequest was a sacred trust, and he hoped to convince Congress of America’s solemn responsibility not only to accept the bequest, but also to safeguard and bring to fruition its purpose of increasing and diffusing knowledge among mankind.66 The report, delivered as an oration, dwelled at length on the noble British lineage of the testator, and the even higher nobility of his gift to benefit all nations in the world. Adams then turned to a discussion of the honorable character of the American nation. Lastly, he argued that Americans were faced with the obligation to secure a new age of benevolent relations with England by carrying out a dying man’s wish to benefit all people, thus transcending the strictures of national or political jealousies.67 Adams’s Memoirs indicate his perception of the variety of opinion residing in his audience, and this provides clues about his construction of arguments:

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So little are the feelings of others in unison with mine on this occasion, and so strange is this donation of half a million dollars for the noblest of purposes, that no one thinks of attributing it to a benevolent motive. Vail intimates in his letter that the man was supposed to be insane. Bankhead thinks he must have had republican propensities; which is probable. Colonel Aspinwall conjectures that Mr. Smithson was an antenuptial son of the first Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, and thus an elder brother of the late Duke, but how he came to have a nephew named Hungerford, son of a brother named Dickinson, and why he made this contingent bequest to the United States of America, no one can tell.68 Adams made this comment in his Memoirs during the composition of this first House committee report in January of 1836. Considering his own doubt about the openness of the audience to his purpose, and his clear indication that the audience was mostly against him on this issue, the strategy he takes seems to appeal to the highest, shared ethical sensibilities of his audience—qualities he is sure they will all admire, despite their differences of opinion on Smithson as a man. In terms of Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory, Adams was appealing to universal values that rise above the concerns of his particular audience. It is a tactic used in epideictic oratory when “The speaker tries to establish a sense of communion around particular values recognized by the audience, and to this end he uses the whole range of means available to the rhetorician for purposes of amplification and enhancement.”69 The Senate committee report by Benjamin Watkins Leigh, two weeks earlier, had simply claimed that founding the institution would indeed “comport with the dignity” and the competency of the government, since it would not involve appropriating general revenue from citizens.70 But Adams’s report in the House expresses no doubt about the money’s acceptance. Adding necessity to what was merely a possibility in the Senate report, Adams’s introduction claims, “Your committee believe not only are they thus competent [to accept the bequest], but that it is enjoined upon them by considerations of the most imperious and indispensable obligation.” To prove this ethical obligation, he divides his persuasion into three main arguments, employing a classical partition: But your committee think they would imperfectly discharge their duty to this House, to their country, to the world of mankind, or to the donor of this most munificent bequest were they to withhold a few brief reflections which have

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occurred to them in the consideration of the subject . . . reflections arising from the conditions [or lifestyle] of the testator, from the nature of the bequest, and from the character of the trustee to whom this great and solemn charge has been confided.71 Adams was seldom brief, and the arguments that follow are no exception. They are thorough and deliberate, and reveal his careful inventive strategies and classical style. Each of the three main considerations named in the aforementioned passage—the life of the testator, the nature of the bequest, and the character of the trustee (the United States)—are predicated on the assumption of the legacy rather than the mere ability to accept it. This presumption furnishes the ground of his argument in the speech. Instead of focusing on the possibility of accepting the fund in the future, as the Senate committee had done, he emphasizes the unique quality of Smithson’s fund as an object already in the hands of the U.S. government. This presumption tends to make the fund seem more specific and concrete and serves to move the issue from a state of possibility to a state of timely necessity. As Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca explain it, “There is a close connection between the value attached to what is concrete and to what is unique: by displaying the unique character of something we automatically increase its value,” and, moreover, “. . . the notion of obligation . . . is of this kind.”72 First, Adams focuses on the life and scientific interests of the testator. The assumption is: the more noble the testator’s character, the more honorable his intentions. In Adams’s and his audience’s hierarchy of values, honor implies obligation, so the government’s obligation to fulfill an honorable man’s will is higher than it would be for an “ordinary” donor. He starts by associating “nobility” with the European, aristocratic notion of the word. He traces Smithson’s aristocratic ancestry as a descendant of the Percys and the Seymours and reminds his audience that Smithson’s father was the first Duke of Northumberland. He notes that “the brother of the testator was known in the history of our Revolutionary war at Lexington and at the battle of Bunker Hill, and was the bearer to the British Government of the dispatches from the commander in chief of the royal forces announcing the event of that memorable day. . . .”73 This day, as most of this particular audience knew, was a conscious memory for Adams. As a small boy at his mother Abigail Adams’s side, he had witnessed from a distant cliff the cannons flashing in the battle of Bunker Hill. Adams’s childhood, through the guidance of his father, had been immersed in the values

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associated with the cause of the Revolution. This allusion is an astute move in terms of ethos because Adams draws on what his audience already accepts about him as a speaker. As Adams evoked the triumphant beginnings of the country’s independence and freedom, he stood before them a living voice of the new nation as it came into existence. Such a powerful and actual presence of ethos would have been hard for the nineteenth-century Congress to discount or resist. Adams continues his remarks on the bequest with a grand amplification of the connection between the name Percy and the Revolutionary War. Percy, he notes, is a name renowned both in history and in poetry, but if the new institution accomplishes the increase and diffusion of knowledge, “a wreath of more unfading verdure shall entwine itself in the lapse of future ages around the name of Smithson.”74 The poetic laurels Adams refers to in this passage come from Fitz-Greene Halleck’s “Alnwick Castle,” a popular poem at the time: Home of the Percys’ high-born race, Home of their beautiful and brave, Alike their birth and burial place, Their cradle and their grave! . . . The present representatives Of Hotspur and his “gentle Kate,” Are some half-dozen serving-men In the drab coat of William Penn; A chambermaid, whose lip and eye, And cheek and brown hair, bright and curling, Spoke nature’s aristocracy. . . .75 The allusion to this poem supports Adams’s argument for moral reconciliation through glorification of Smithson’s name for actions that were truly noble rather than falsely aristocratic. In a sense, this rhetorical strategy uses the Smithsonian as a medicine for American growing pains. Visitors from Europe, particularly England, Adams notes, “have exhibited no flattering or complacent pictures” of the manners and opinions of the American people. Yet, no longer should America see England as a “jealous and envious rival,” because Smithson’s bequest would engender a positive “moral effect of our political institutions upon the opinions” of foreign countries. Adams implies that Smithson’s dying wish is a kind of sacrifice meant to repair the rift between the United States and her mother country. Twentieth-century rhetorical theory illuminates the persuasive power of Adams’s argument here. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca explain that, in an argument, a sacrifice establishes interaction between

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opposing parties by suggesting three things: the need for compensation, the maintenance of balance, and the idea of a totality. Furthermore, they write, “[t]he meaning of this sacrifice in the eyes of others depends on the esteem enjoyed by the person. . . . The greater the prestige, the greater the force of the argument.”76 In his treatment of Smithson’s character and family history, Adams invokes the force of destiny. In his diary, he recorded his belief that Smithson’s scientific background and relation to Lord Percy were providential connections to his own unfinished struggles for the nation’s moral and intellectual improvement.77 His first report to Congress reflects this belief, as he assures his audience that founding such an institution would occur “under the smile of an approving Providence.”78 By introducing providence in this speech, Adams initiated a theme that would have a growing hold on the debate over this “noble cause.” The force of Adams’s personal beliefs, expressed with Ciceronian self-consciousness about the moral qualities and reputation of the orator, combine with the accepted Christian values of his nineteenth-century audience. The result is an emphasis on Christian virtue rather than on the classical notion of breeding or decorum, as Adams calls his audience to identify with providential motives (and, by association, with Smithson’s motives). In Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory of argument, extolling the life of a single person is a strategy often adapted by a speaker “ . . . according as some particular aspect of the perfect Being is singled out and offered to men for imitation.”79 In this case, that aspect is the “noble magnanimity” required to establish an institution for increasing and diffusing human knowledge. In the second division of his arguments, the nature of the bequest, Adams claims an obligation to fulfill Smithson’s will because of the nobility of the bequest itself and the honorable quality of its motivation. He implies that Smithson is noble in action (not just in heritage) because he desired to benefit not just a few people but all mankind. Adams’s praise in this section is unabashedly superlative: “Of all the foundations of establishments for pious or charitable uses which have ever signalized the spirit of the age or the comprehensive beneficence of the founder, none can be named more deserving” than the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.80 He goes on to amplify the nobility of the bequest by associating it with a divine spark present in mankind: The attainment of knowledge is the high and exclusive attribute of man, among the numberless myriad of animated beings, inhabitants of the terrestrial globe. On him alone is bestowed, by the bounty of the Creator of the universe, the

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power and the capacity of acquiring knowledge. Knowledge is the attribute of nature, which at once enables him to improve his condition upon earth and to prepare him for the enjoyment of a happier existence hereafter. It is by this attribute that man discovers his own nature as the link between earth and heaven; as the partaker of an immortal spirit; as created for a higher and more durable end than the countless tribes of beings which people the earth, the ocean, and the air, alternately instinct with life and melting into vapor or moldering into dust.81 The chain of values climbs up to the Creator. For Adams and for his audience, God the Grand Original furnished the hierarchical pinnacle that in modern critical literature operates as various “god-terms.”82 Throughout the early phases of the debate Adams continued to stress the source of abstract values concerning “knowledge”—its nature and its expansion—in their divine origin. Later, he would put this association to work for his own proposal to found an astrophysical observatory. Although Adams does not mention an observatory anywhere in this first speech on the Smithsonian, it is possible that he intended this kind of rhetoric to pave the way for his arguments on astronomy, since there he tells his audience that astronomical knowledge supplies “the link between earth and heaven.” In addition to emphasizing ideals, Adams frames the idea of “knowledge” in the eighteenth-century language of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on human nature. He uses enthymemes to make Smithson’s bequest conceptually equal to the improvement of man as he strives for perfection: To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is therefore the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence. The earth was given to man for cultivation, to the improvement of his own condition. Whoever increases his knowledge multiplies the uses to which he is enabled to turn the gift of his Creator to his own benefit and partakes in some degree of that goodness which is the highest attribute of Omnipotence itself.83 Beginning with the unspoken assumption that Smithson’s gift is the means to increase knowledge, Adams reasons deductively: If: Whatever furnishes the means to increase knowledge is a benefit to mankind,

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and: Smithson’s gift furnishes that which increases knowledge, then: Smithson’s gift is a benefit to mankind. And continuing with this enthymematic reasoning, he uses the assumption that the earth exists to be used for the improvement of man’s condition, a premise he was sure his audience accepted. If:

Whatever permits the increase of knowledge multiplies man’s participation in the goodness of God, and: Smithson’s gift is that which permits the increase of knowledge, then: Smithson’s gift multiplies man’s participation in the goodness of God. The final step in this deductive sequence identifies goodness with its source, Omnipotence, thereby associating Smithson’s gift with man’s efforts as he strives for perfection. To his nineteenth-century audience, Adams was not only using the familiar and respected language of the Enlightenment, he was also drawing on an American legacy of Protestant ideology and the American notions of progress and frontiers to be conquered. Finally, Adams argues that there is an obligation to honor the legacy because of the character of the recipient, the American government. He praises American democracy as “a new experiment in the history of mankind,” which has survived “the vicissitudes of peace and war, amidst bitter and ardent party collisions, and the unceasing changes of popular elections,” to continue a “steady course of prosperity.”84 He ends with an appeal to the character of his listeners, claiming that it is their duty to treat the trust of this noble, deceased man with the utmost respect: In the commission of every trust there is an implied tribute of the soul to the integrity and intelligence of the trustee; and there is also an implied call for the faithful exercise of those properties to the fulfillment of the purpose of the trust. . . . The weight of duty imposed is proportioned to the honor conferred by confidence without reserve. . . . The United States, in accepting the bequest, [should] feel, in all its power and plenitude, the obligation of responding to the confidence reposed by him with all the fidelity, disinterestedness, and perseverance of exertion which may carry into effective execution the noble purpose of an endowment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.85

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At last he repeats those key words from the will, having publicly devoted himself to the role of moral referee and mentor in the coming debates over the testator’s intention. Adams was ready to uphold the moral seriousness of this “imperious and indispensable obligation” against all those who would use the noble bequest for less than noble purposes. This speech, the first of several Adams would give on the Smithsonian, acted as an introduction to the subject in Congress and a call for deliberation on the use of the fund. Five thousand copies were printed and distributed to congressmen and the press.86 In his mastery of the conventions of the nineteenth-century Congress, Adams opened the forum with a speech that acted as an overarching exordium for the debate, capturing Congress’s attention and setting the tone for all the arguments to follow. Although the speech was in the deliberative mode, aiming to prove the necessity of future action, it did so not through the usual medium of expediency, but through moral obligation, an appeal more often found in epideictic oratory. In some ways, the speech resembled an epideictic eulogy of Smithson, since praise of the nobility and virtue of the bequest and its benefactor furnish the arguments that Adams uses in this speech. In essence, he argued that the increase and diffusion of knowledge will bring honor to the United States as a democratic nation. Democracy, he reminded his listeners, is the most honorable form of government because it aims at freedom for its people. Assuming his audience would tacitly identify the increase and diffusion of knowledge as a component of freedom, he directed praise to the agent (James Smithson), action (his bequest), and object (U.S. government) of the gift.

THE STATE OF THE CONTROVERSY In terms of classical rhetorical theory, the confusing state of affairs surrounding the Smithsonian bequest set the stage for debaters to determine status, a framing and establishment of the “state of the controversy.” Immediately, the debate began to focus on the question of what issue was at hand. Arguments about the use of the Smithsonian fund began simultaneously with arguments about whether or not the United States could even accept Smithson’s money. The debaters had to agree upon the primary point to argue, since nothing could be accomplished unless congressmen could engage a clearly defined issue. Adams devotes an entire chapter (chapter 8) in his Harvard Lectures to the stasis, the state of the controversy, which he calls “the

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mark, at which all discourse aims; the focus, towards which all the rays of eloquence should converge.”87 As I have explained in chapter 3, his treatment of stasis, the technique that helped orators determine focus, envisions the three main states of controversy: conjecture (whether or not a thing exists), definition (what it is), and quality (what kind of thing it is). Adams’s introductory speech on the Smithsonian bequest evinces his strong control over the issue of conjecture in the debate. He ignored the question of whether it was within the rights of the government to accept the bequest and argued instead that it had an obligation to do so. Because of Adams’s judgment, the question of whether Congress could accept Smithson’s gift ceased to be an arguable issue for most of his audience, and the issue of what the Smithsonian should become came quickly to the fore. In other words, Adams moved the focus of the debate from conjecture to definition. This defining phase of the debate revolved around the meaning of the words in Smithson’s will, “an institution for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” To borrow an explanation from Cicero, such general words in an official document “appeal differently to different people, and for that reason different people [would] describe it in different terms.”88 Most congressmen moved on to considering various proposals for what an institution for “increasing and diffusing knowledge” ought to be. Yet, for two senators, the question of whether it should be remained a sticking point. Three months after Adams’s first report to Congress, Senators John Calhoun and William Preston of South Carolina took up the subject assuming that Smithson actually meant to found a university, and as a consequence they became embroiled over the question of whether to accept the bequest at all. Both Calhoun and Preston were dead set against a national university. Moreover, Preston argued that Congress could be only the agent, not the beneficiary, of the money, since the Constitution did not allow the government power to receive money for national objects. Alluding to Adams’s description of Smithson’s genealogy, Preston said that “there was danger of imaginations being run away with by the associations of Chevy Chase ballads [by Fitz-Greene Halleck],” and that he “had no idea of this District being used as a fulcrum to raise foreigners to immortality. . . . If they accepted this donation, every whippersnapper vagabond that had been traducing our country might think proper to have his name distinguished in the same way.”89 Calhoun simply stated, “It is beneath the dignity of the United States to receive presents of this kind from anyone”; and although the government had done so to establish an orphanage, a penitentiary, and a lunatic asylum, some states had opposed those bills all along.90 He

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thought Congress should return the money to Smithson’s nearest relatives rather than found a national university. Apparently, Adams’s opening tactic to finesse the conjectural question had not worked on this segment of the congressional audience, but it was a small segment after all. Most members of both houses had already taken for granted acceptance of the money. Calhoun’s and Preston’s assumption that the words of Smithson’s will, “the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” implied establishment of a national university, however, pervaded the rest of the assembly as proposals for the fund’s use began to form. Chiam Perelman’s and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca’s discussion of facts and assumptions in rhetoric serves to explain this difference of opinions surprisingly well: We do not hope to find a criterion that enables us, under all circumstances and independent of the hearers’ attitude, to affirm that something is a fact. Nevertheless, we may recognize that there are certain conditions favoring this agreement, rendering the fact easily defensible in the face of an opponent’s mistrust or ill will. This will be the case, in particular, when there is agreement on conditions for verification. However, by the time such an agreement has to be brought into effective operation, argumentation is in full swing. A fact serving as a premise is an uncontroverted fact.91 For the majority of congressmen, the acceptance of the money was a presumed fact and was already serving as a premise in argumentation. On the other hand, Senators James Buchanan and R. J. Walker refused to discuss the university issue at this time, claiming that the question at hand was how to accept the donation in the English chancery courts, not how to use it once accepted.92 Senator John Davis noted that the will did not contain the word “university,” and that there were other ways to increase and diffuse knowledge, and that these should be the subject of a separate debate. But, after being questioned by Calhoun, Davis admitted that he “deemed the establishment of institutions for the diffusion of knowledge a vital principle of a republican government.”93 Calhoun agreed then that the question of a university issued from a broader question as a part represents a whole: if Congress denied the right to establish a university, they denied the right to establish all nationally funded “institutions of charity,” as Calhoun called them. Despite the reservations of some of the members, on June 25, 1836, Congress passed a joint resolution to prosecute the United States’ right to Smithson’s legacy in the British courts. This resolved the prob-

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lem, and the act set in motion more arguments about the use of the bequest and the kind of institution to create. Predictably, when the debate began a bill was introduced that would establish a national university. Soon afterward, an opposing bill was proposed that would devote most of the fund to a national public library. Then, yet another bill was proposed giving the money to the aptly named American Society for the Useful Diffusion of Knowledge. This was only the first in a parade of bills designed to benefit special interest organizations, which were determined to take advantage of the open-ended wording of the will. Given so many conflicting interpretations of James Smithson’s will, Adams needed powerful tools of persuasion to lead Congress out of chaos and into agreement on what was important—and even morally imperative—in the foundation of the Smithsonian Institution. No man was more capable of piloting the debate than Adams. Not only was he knowledgeable and passionate about the potentials of scientific discovery, he was also a scholar par excellence and an experienced master craftsman in the only means of forming opinions in the American democratic government: the art of rhetoric.

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CHAPTER

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Adams’s Arguments in the Smithsonian Debate: A Rhetorical Analysis

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his chapter contains a detailed rhetorical reading of Adams’s contributions to congressional proceedings that determined the precise purpose and structure of the Smithsonian Institution. The analysis uses not only Adams’s own theory of rhetoric as it is developed in his 1801 Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, but also classical theories such as those of Aristotle and especially Cicero, which Adams himself habitually read and reread throughout his life. All stages of the rhetorical process are examined here, with special emphasis placed on invention and audience analysis. As his diaries show, it is in the art of invention that Adams’s rhetoric differed from many of his younger contemporaries. In addition to these classical approaches to persuasion, this chapter uses contemporary theories of rhetoric that have grown out of modern reexaminations of Aristotle and Cicero. These provide a framework for examining how the many debaters’ arguments worked together for the founding of the institution. The analysis progresses in the order of topics argued in the debate. The first stage of argumentation took up the university plan versus Adams’s observatory plan; the next, the library and natural history museum plans versus Adams’s observatory plan; and finally, a return to the motives for a nationally supported college and the culminating compromise that resulted in an act to found the Smithsonian Institution.

AN INVENTIVE STAGE: LETTERS, LEARNED ADVICE, AND PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS For several months after his introductory speech, Adams was conspicuously silent on the Smithsonian issue in public. True to his classical 113

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principles, he watched and listened, gathering information on the situation and his opponents’ lines of argument before committing himself to any persuasive action. For Adams this was an inventional stage, and invention for Adams involved not only discovery but also prudence, which according to his own rhetorical theory, “consists of finding whatsoever is proper to be said, and adapted to the purpose of his discourse; of selecting from the whole mass of ideas.”1 In order to uncover a mass of ideas, Adams initiated several conversations with others who had taken interest in the fund. Each time Adams had a private conversation with someone interested in the Smithsonian issue, he recorded the details in his diary, sometimes focusing on the other person’s arguments and sometimes writing out his own responses and comments. Some of the earliest conversations recorded in Adams’s diary on the use of the fund were with Henry Chapin, president of the newly chartered Columbian College (the future University of the District of Columbia). Adams spoke with Chapin on June 22, 1838, and again on January 5, 1839, both times about the financial difficulties facing Columbian College and the possible effects that the Smithsonian might have on the school.2 Adams’s diary also records conversations about the Smithsonian with the new president, Martin Van Buren, during this period.3 Shortly after Adams’s first conversation with the president, Secretary of State John Forsyth solicited letters from several learned men in different fields, including Adams, to collect the best opinions on what an “Institution for the increase and diffusion of knowledge” should be. In October of 1838, before his second conversation with Chapin, Adams penned two letters of advice to John Forsyth that outline the arguments he had been developing through dialogues with Chapin and the president.4 On the day of Chapin’s first visit, Adams recorded in his diary that Chapin was worried by the popular interpretation of Smithson’s will, that the bequest should be used to found a university. He had told Adams that such an institution “must surely effect the total destruction”5 of his college. The college was in debt, and Adams had already made a loan to his friend Chapin for the benefit of the college the year before. Adams was a strong supporter of a national university, independent of the Smithsonian issue. Yet, his diary reveals that he told Chapin: I have not permitted myself to think on the subject till the money should be in the Treasury. I hope, however, that no disposal of the fund will be made which will in any manner injure the Columbian College. I do not think the Smithsonian

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Institution should be a college, or a university, or a school of education for children, but altogether of a different character. . . . I hope the President will in his next message propose some plan. . . . I advise you to see the President and converse with him on the subject.6 The fact that he recorded this conversation in his diary reveals the careful thought he was giving to the matter, and the order in which his arguments began to emerge. His first concern was that the money itself should be protected, before its use was decided upon. He was also beginning to see the need for a refutation of the university idea. Two days after this conversation with Chapin, Adams reported in his diary that he made a visit to President Van Buren. Adams urged the president to advise Congress to take some particular course of action. The shrewdness of this move should be noted, since Adams attempted to secure presidential assurance that the way was clear to launch his own arguments. Not only was Adams building up future arguments and refutations, he was also looking for means of persuading Congress through the president’s ethos. In his diary he recorded his recommendations to the president: to use the first earnings of the fund to begin an astrophysical observatory and to expand later earnings on a regular course of lectures on natural, moral, and political sciences. “Above all,” he warned Van Buren, “no jobbing . . . no sinecures—no monkish stalls for lazy idlers.”7 Adams wrote in his diary that the president seemed open and agreeable to his advice, but also asked for the names of other learned individuals who might be consulted. Five months later, Adams’s hopes for a positive reception for the proposal he was planning were raised when the president casually told him that the observatory idea seemed well received to all with whom he had discussed it.8 Meanwhile, letters in response to John Forsyth’s general request for advice began to come in. Among the replies, one Professor Wayland proposed a graduate-level university for Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Oriental languages, and for other subjects, including rhetoric, poetry, philosophy, and law. A bill was drafted based on Wayland’s suggestions, but it was quickly defeated in both Houses, as Congress generally agreed that the money should not be used to increase knowledge as far removed from science as ancient languages and rhetoric. Richard Rush proposed a building and grounds for agricultural experiments, along with a course of lectures on physical and moral sciences, government, and public law. The salaries of the lecturers, he argued, should be high enough to attract the best in each field. Rush also proposed a press to publish the lectures. Chapin suggested a graduate school for astronomy, chemistry, botany,

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and agriculture in his letter to Forsyth, reasoning that such a school would not damage his undergraduate facility.9 Adams’s own two letters to Forsyth developed the thoughts he had used to introduce the bequest in his congressional report, and in addition laid out the three areas of argument to which he would return repeatedly in his role as protector of the fund. These three principles or three points, as they came to be called, were the special topics Adams would use throughout his arguments in the debate: 1. That the fund shall be preserved inviolable and entire, exceeding half a Million of dollars, and so invested as to secure a perpetual annuity of more than thirty thousand dollars of appropriation every year, for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men. 2. That no part of this fund shall be applied to any institution for the education of children or of youth. By which I do not mean however to exclude all provision for courses of Lectures, in every department of Science. These may hereafter form very important branches of the establishment. 3. That the first appropriations should be applied to the erection of an Astronomical Observatory, and to the creation of a fund from the interest of which all the expenses of such an establishment may be constantly maintained without any charge upon the People or upon the capital of the Smithsonian fund whatever.10 Just as Adams’s first report to Congress on the Smithsonian served as an overarching exordium for the entire debate, these three points became a kind of division in Adams’s mind for the areas of argument he would engage as he defended the fund from “projectors” and “sinecures.” During the years ahead, he would use them to pull the debate away from digressions (as he perceived them) and guide the discussion back to more essential and productive lines of argument. Adams’s inventive efforts became immediately useful when Dr. Chapin visited him again, this time with a plan to form an alliance between the Smithsonian and the Columbian College. The school was near bankruptcy, and Chapin was desperate. He wanted it to be funded by the government and the new institution. With his usual care, Adams took pains to record the conversation in his diary. As inventional material for future arguments on the floor of Congress, the dialogue appears to be a dialectical and rhetorical rehearsal for many of the argumentative moves Adams would later make. He records that his opening

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remarks to Chapin were, “Without knowing what the views of others are, mine are that no part of the Smithson Fund shall be applied to any school, college, university, or seminary of education; but that equal care should be taken to avoid doing any injury whatever to any such institution.”11 Next Adams records Chapin’s objection, a prototype of many objections to come: “The condition of the College at present is such that unless it can receive assistance from some quarter it must go down and its concerns must be closed.” Adams’s reply, as he recorded it in his diary, perhaps to aid his memory for use in future arguments, draws directly from the three points he had established in his letter to John Forsyth. In addition, it develops an ethical stance that would continue to clothe all of his arguments on the Smithsonian issue: If the Faculty think there is any prospect of their obtaining anything from the Smithson Fund, they might apply to the President of the United States, or to any other member of the committee [on the Smithsonian]; and if there should be any disposition in Congress to aid the college from the fund, I will immediately withdraw from the committee and leave the whole arrangement to be made by others. As I deprecate above all things the application of the fund to purposes for the benefit of individuals, I am determined at least to be disinterested myself, and will in no shape or form receive one dollar of the fund myself. And as the principal debt of the Columbian College is to me, I can be instrumental to no arrangement which could result in the payment of the college debt from the Smithsonian Fund.12 Again Chapin offered an objection, which Adams transcribes, “We are aware there is some delicacy in your position in regard to the college debt, but we have ample means for the payment of our debt as preliminary to the receiving of any assistance from the Government.” Adams remains firm, and invokes presidential authority: “At all events, it is a subject in which I can have no agency, though if you obtain encouragement to your wishes from the president, I will cheerfully withdraw from the committee.”13 Chapin’s visits to Adams and many of the letters to Forsyth were clearly motivated by private gain and advantage. This state of affairs led Adams to remark in his diary that he “proceeded work on the committee with a heavy heart, from a presentiment that this noble and most munificent donation will be filtered away to nothing, and wasted upon hungry and worthless political jackals.”14 Adams was not against the idea of a national university in general. In fact, he had tried unsuccessfully to

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found a national university when he was president. But he persistently argued that a national university would be an inappropriate use of Smithson’s fund, according to Smithson’s will. Furthermore, in light of the money Chapin’s college owed him, Adams did not want to appear to benefit privately from any portion of the money himself. Adams’s moral principles concerning this issue and his commitment to the testator’s true intention evoked the steady admiration of his audience. Over the next two years, Adams’s ethos would work to his advantage, disposing his audience to heed his persistent argument on the three points.

ASHER ROBBINS AND THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY PLAN The greatest support for the university project took place during the Twenty-fifth Congress (1837–1839). After Congress voted to accept the money, Senator Asher Robbins offered a resolution in the Senate that became the backbone of subsequent arguments to use the Smithsonian fund for a national university. On January 10, 1839, Robbins gave an important speech on his resolution, which was also to be the last speech of his career as a senator. His speech called both for an imitation of the educational ideas of Francis Bacon, and a renewal of the literary and rhetorical traditions of ancient Greece and Rome.15 After Robbins’s speech, a short-lived joint committee of both senators and representatives was formed, and Robbins was elected chairman. Two bills were authored in this committee: Robbins’s plan to found a university and Adams’s plan to spend only the interest of the fund on rotating research projects, starting with an astrophysical observatory.16 During these committee meetings, Adams developed and presented his refutation of the university proposal.17 Robbins was a conservative Whig and former U.S. district attorney who had been famous for his practice of law in Rhode Island. He graduated from Yale College in 1782, and the texts of his speeches have a conventional Ciceronian flavor. He was one of the only congressmen in the debate besides Adams who worked conscientiously to further classical ideals of knowledge and education. Like the arguments in Adams’s introductory speech, the arguments in Robbins’s speech on the Smithsonian are grounded in ethos. Yet they differ in that Adams’s arguments are based on the ethos of moral responsibility, while Robbins’s are based on the ethos of authority and tradition. Appealing to the ideals of science, he briefly alludes to Bacon’s New Atlantis, but his ultimate aim is for the nation to emulate the democracy and greatness of Greece by improving the quality of its education:

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Such an institution [for the increase and diffusion of knowledge] . . . may be devised . . . giving such a course of education and discipline as would give to the faculties of the human mind an improvement and power far beyond what they afterwards attain in any professional pursuits. Such an institution, as to its principle, suggested itself to the sagacious and farseeing mind of Bacon as one of the greatest importance. . . . The idea, however, was not entirely original with Bacon, for it would be in effect but the revival of that system of education and discipline which produced such wonderful improvement and power of the human mind in Greece and Rome, and especially in Greece.18 His comparison of America to ancient Greece moved sympathetic hearers. For those primarily interested in scientific discovery, however, the allusion to Bacon stirred hopes that Robbins’s arguments left unfulfilled. His speech claims that excellence in education would yield an American literature comparable to the classics. The Latin quotation that serves as his theme needed no translation for most of his audience: Vis consili expers, mole ruit sua; Vim temperatam, Dii quoque proverbunt, In majus.19 The quotation, like Robbins’s overall approach, embodies the Ciceronian ideal of wisdom combined with eloquence. He argues that without the wisdom provided by a classically modeled education, eloquence in the United States will degenerate and die, bringing political prowess down with it. By “eloquence,” Robbins means rhetoric enriched by the belles lettres—history, philosophy, and literature. Where Adams’s first committee report ties freedom to responsibility, Robbins’s speech ties Greek freedom (and analogously, American freedom) to scholastic achievement, and with it, wisdom: “For freedom was the breast at which that love [of knowledge] was fed; freedom was the element in which it lived and had its being; freedom gave to it the fields where its most splendid triumphs were achieved.”20 The unstated premise of his rhetorical syllogism is that America has the freedom to develop eloquence and literature to match or surpass Greece and Rome. To support his premise, he claims that an animus acer exists in daily acts of courage carried out by American countrymen and frontiersmen, and he mentions that Washington had urged a national university in his farewell address to Congress.

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Although Robbins mentions Bacon’s ideas as a model for his proposed enterprise, his description of a Smithsonian university is hardly Baconian. Like Bacon, he claims that knowledge and ability are the objects of education, and that ability is more important because it is useful to human society and can “wield the scepter over the human heart and the human intellect.” Knowledge, he says, does not “impart ability of course,” so in order to increase and diffuse knowledge, ability must first be nurtured and bolstered among the young. Yet, literary and rhetorical ability are more important in his plan than the scientific method that Bacon imagined for the New Atlantis. He privileges letters over the sciences in his comparisons with the Greeks’ education, and his plan of education begins with “the principles of art, whatever that art may be.”21 He does not leave science out entirely, but in his proposal for a public university, “pure original science” (presuming the Latin scientia, meaning perfect knowing or knowledge) is emphasized over the practical sciences. He calls exercises the “Alpha and Omega” of his system, the pedagogy of a classical education. He closes by suggesting that Smithson be made the “patron saint of education.”22 This plan is directly contrary to Bacon’s utopian vision for a research institution in the “House of Salomon,” where experiments are carried out to stretch the reaches of scientific discovery, rather than to impart already acquired knowledge and skill to the young. Moreover, Robbins’s belletristic insistence on a grand and sublime literature and oratory, while not completely at odds with Baconian ideas, does not reflect the philosopher’s insistence on simple clarity in a scientific sense, nor his emphasis on observation and experiment. Moreover, the style that Robbins used to deliver his proposal was highly ornate. This apparent conflict in Robbins’s style and sense—his verba and res— recalls a similar problem faced by the Royal Society during its inception. To wit, some members of the Royal Society believed that classical, Ciceronian rhetoric was the best means of presenting new scientific ideas to the popular audience, while others wanted to develop a new rhetoric that would not contradict the methods of the new science (among them Thomas Sprat and John Wilkins).23 A similar dilemma now faced the Smithsonian debaters. It is possible that Robbins did not see incongruities between Bacon’s research institution, on the one hand, and a Greek-inspired university for imparting traditional knowledge and rhetorical skill, on the other. After all, the concept of government-funded education is Baconian. Given Robbins’s education and experience as an orator, however, it is more likely that his use of Bacon in combination with the idea of a traditional, non-research university was an appeal to what he

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conceived as a universal audience. The fact that more than half of his Senate audience assented to his arguments at the time of this speech legitimates his view. Some, no doubt, were swayed by the traditional ethos of a classical education, while others were probably attracted to the useful science envisioned and symbolically represented by the authority of Bacon’s name. Robbins’s rhetoric unconsciously reflects the transformations occurring both in the audience’s attitudes toward education and experimental science, and in rhetorical conventions. His views on education, with the emphasis on belles letters and the invocation of the New Science, seem especially to reflect the Elocutionist approach to rhetoric. Robbins’s speech was received with accolades. William C. Preston, who was appointed chair of the new Senate committee when Robbins’s resolution24 was adopted, praised Robbins’s learning and thanked him “for introducing those elegant and elevated topics which carry us for a moment into regions of calm and serene air, above the smoke and din of our accustomed and more strenuous efforts on this floor.”25 For the remaining eight years in the Smithsonian debate, the goal of education would be a strong contender for the money, and Robbins’s speech would be quoted many times by supporters of both national universities and common school education. Robbins and his followers were the first major opponents to Adams’s efforts to convince Congress that Smithson’s “increase and diffusion of knowledge” meant something entirely different from government-supported education. After Robbins’s speech, the joint committee on the Smithsonian convened. Unfortunately, there are no extensive records of what went on in this committee, but it is clear that Adams’s influence in the House and his hard work in inventing convincing arguments kept the committee from adopting Robbins’s bill as a sure answer to the Smithsonian problem. Among the scant notes that are left, one telling sheet of paper demonstrates Adams’s quit sit process, that is, his process of defining what the Smithsonian ought to be. Carefully written out by a secretary are the following resolutions (emphasis in manuscript): 1. Resolved that the education of the children and youth of these United States has for its object, not the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men, but the endowment of individuals of both sexes with useful knowledge already acquired, and suited to their respective conditions. 2. That the declared object of the bequest of James Smithson to the United States of America being the

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foundation at the City of Washington of an establishment “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men,” no appropriation of any part of the fund to the purpose of the educating of children or youth of these United States would fulfill the intent of the testator. 3. That the education of the children of these United States is a duty of solemn and indispensable obligation incumbent upon their parents and guardians, not for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men, but to qualify them for the enjoyment of their rights, and the performance of their duties throughout life. 4. That the United States of America having by their Congress, accepted as a trust of a large and liberal bequest from a foreigner, for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men; and having pledged their faith for the application of the proceeds of that bequest for the declared purpose of the testator, would neither fulfill that purpose, nor redeem their pledge, by appropriating a fund devised for the benefit of mankind, to the education of their own children. 5. Resolved, therefore, that no part of the Smithsonian fund ought to be applied to the education of the children or youth of the United States, nor to any school, college, university, or institute of education. In his own cramped handwriting, Adams added at the top: “[Resolutions offered July 1839 to the joint Committee on the Smithsonian bequest.]” It is easy to see the classical influence on Adams’s reasoning behind these resolutions, since they are written in the precise form of a classical epichirema. Adams’s Lectures at Harvard identify an epichirema as an expanded rhetorical syllogism with five parts. The two premises, based on opinion rather than the certainty required by a logical syllogism, would each need to be proven before the rhetor offers a conclusion. Adams begins with the basic assumption, shared by all and therefore unstated, that the Smithsonian bequest is “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” Then, in epichiremic form, Adams’s reasoning follows a careful process of definition (quid sit): Part one: The education of children and youths is not intended to increase and diffuse knowledge among men. Part two: Smithson’s fund is not intended for the education of children or youths.

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Part three: Parents’ duty to educate their own children is not aimed at the increase of knowledge among men. Part four: Increasing and diffusing knowledge among men is the duty of the United States in accepting Smithson’s fund. Part five: Therefore, Smithson’s fund should not be used to educate the children of the United States. Parts one and two support the basic unspoken premise, Smithson’s fund is for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men; parts three and four yield the premise, parents’ duty to educate their own children is not the duty of the United States in accepting Smithson’s fund; and the conclusion or fifth part of the epichirema follows from these two probable premises. Of course, there are various assumptions that Adams makes in reasoning with these premises, which are determined by both his audience and the form of reasoning itself. For instance, a modern reader may read his first resolution with the emphasis on men, and feel that Adams excludes women from the Smithsonian’s purpose. But this is not the case. He emphasizes the already- educated state of fully grown men in contrast to his definition of education, “the endowment of individuals of both sexes” with existing knowledge to prepare them for life. He also assumes that universities and colleges have the same purposes as schools: the education of the young. Adams converted several committee members to his side of the argument with these refutations of Robbins’s plan. As a result, the joint committee reached no agreement on the issue and dissolved at the end of the Twenty-fifth Congress. Separate House and Senate committees handled the Smithsonian problem for the remainder of the debate.

ADAMS’S REFUTATIONS AND HIS FIRST ARGUMENTS FOR AN OBSERVATORY At the beginning of the Twenty-sixth Congress (1839–1841) Adams was again chair of the House committee on the Smithsonian. On March 5, 1840, he stood before the House and delivered another report on the issue. This time Adams developed arguments on the three main points that would guide his rhetoric throughout the debate. First, he argued that it was necessary to preserve the capital sum in the U.S. Treasury and spend its interest only. Second, he argued that Robbins’s university plan was not in accord with Smithson’s bequest. And third, he recommended an astrophysical observatory as the best use of the

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bequest. He dwelled at length on how the purpose of an observatory was in accordance with Smithson’s intentions and gave several examples of the benefits to mankind that resulted from astronomical discovery in the past.26 The report is presented in the six parts of a classical oration, which Adams in his Lectures named as Cicero did: exordium, narration, partition, confirmation, refutation, and conclusion. The exordium of Adams’s 1840 report explains that the bequest involves “considerations and principles, other than those which usually regulate the Legislation of Congress,” and that he will relate its history for those who are unfamiliar with it. This opening leads immediately into a long narration summarizing the fund’s history. Notably, he presents the first two of his three fundamental principles, which had been “agreed upon” at least by House committee members “. . . from the earliest meetings”—that the fund should not be used to found any school or establishment of learning, and that the principle of the fund should be preserved and only the interest used.27 The factual information Adams chose for the narration emphasizes previous agreement on these two points and distances his position from that of Asher Robbins. This shows keen assessment of the grounds of agreement in an audience that, beyond these two points, would be expected to differ. As he advances into the confirmation section of the report, he appeals to praise, honor, and virtue rather than gain or thrift. Furthermore, he draws on the three means of persuasion outlined under deliberative rhetoric in the Lectures: that of the subject, the audience, and the speaker—logos, pathos, and ethos. The refutation and confirmation of his speech address each of his three principles in order. Beginning with preservation of the capital, he refutes his opponents using logos, which the Lectures claim is indispensable in deliberative rhetoric. He reasons: “The increase and diffusion of knowledge is in its nature progressive to the end of time. An institution which would exhaust [the whole bequest] in its first establishment . . . would gradually sink into insignificance and apathy, or require continual support.”28 The enthymematic structure of this deductive argument is apparent. In fact, deduction from popularly established definitions, followed by inductive exclusion or negation of opposing views in relation to these definitions, is the approach Adams most often uses in the Smithsonian arguments. As Sean O’Rourke has pointed out, this strategy lends Adams’s oratory a strong ethical flavor throughout his career.29 In the Lectures he addresses this method in a discussion of how to achieve “dissimilitude,” a strategy drawn from Ciceronian and classical Greek practice considering both

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sides of an argument. Typically, Adams runs through each opposing view from many different angles, using classical topoi to expose alternative views.30 He next addresses the matter of a national university. Adams thought that using the Smithsonian bequest for this purpose would be immoral because it ignored the benefactor’s intent. He elaborates upon this argument in a carefully balanced Ciceronian period (emphasis in manuscript): The increase and diffusion of knowledge among men present neither the idea of knowledge already acquired to be taught, nor of childhood or youth to be instructed; but of new discovery; of progress in the march of the human mind; of accession to the moral, intellectual, and physical powers of the human race; of dissemination throughout the inhabited globe.31 Since American universities were not yet conceived to be institutions dedicated to research and discovery, as well as instruction in acquired knowledge, Adams’s argument could make this distinction convincing. He adds that Smithson’s purpose was “entirely different” from that of mere education, that it “assumed . . . an interest . . . [which would] command grateful acclamations of future ages and illuminate the path of man upon earth with rays of knowledge still gathering with the revolving lapse of time.”32 With this metaphor as the end of his series of deductions, he sets up a pattern of amplification that he will follow throughout his Smithsonian orations. Finally, he deals with the ethical proof of Smithson’s motivation: the American capitol was Smithson’s choice because it was the seat of democratic government and could superintend the benefits not only for the United States but also for the whole world. Adams’s use of a guardian ethos prophetically presents the United States as a guardian of other nations, this time in terms of scientific knowledge rather than foreign policy. As he nears the final section of his confirmation, Adams turns to his proposal for an astrophysical observatory. In the arguments for astronomy that follow, Adams metaphorically associates the magnitude and mystery of the heavens with the work of the Creator. To the appreciation of God’s creation, he adds honor and glory that would naturally follow astronomical discovery. He briefly reviews the history of astronomy with an aim of extolling the greatness of Old World astronomers such as Copernicus, Kepler, and Gallileo. And finally, employing what he considered in his 1801 Lectures to be a morally questionable tactic, he invokes his listener’s jealousy by pointing out Europe’s 120 existing observatories—in comparison to America, where

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there is “not one.” The arguments are lofty and carefully crafted, but I will save a closer examination of some of the proofs and figures of speech he uses for my next chapter on his promotion of astronomy. Next he argues that, as opposed to the national university plan, a national observatory would have a purpose completely in compliance with the universal nature of Smithson’s plan. In the original document, no branch or discipline of science was to be excluded from the whole undertaking of expanding “knowledge.” Adams concludes his arguments by contrasting the smallness of the educational proposal to the magnificent expanse of astronomy, given its association with rising technology and the scientific revolution. He explains that “all the benefits [of the university proposal] would necessarily be confined to a very small number of students from the city of Washington . . . together with those few who were wealthy enough to move from distant parts.” The fund is for all people, not for one location or class or time. His final sentence brings his hearers down from the heights of a sublime vision to the simple, practical means-and-ends special topics of a governmental committee: “The bequest of James Smithson fortunately furnishes the means, without needing the assistance of any contribution from public funds of the nation.”33 In chapters on deliberative rhetoric in the Harvard Lectures, Adams had discussed the arguments of contingency, necessity, facility, possibility, and legality. His 1840 report on the Smithsonian, and most of his speeches on astronomy in this debate, make purposeful use of all of these arguments.

TWO PARTICULAR AUDIENCES AND ADAMS’S ROLE AS IMPARTIAL JUDGE The enthusiastic attention given to Smithson’s will by Adams and his early opponents brought it to the attention of groups and individuals outside Congress. Two special interest groups were responsible for major strains of argument in the debate. First, the American Society for the Useful Diffusion of Knowledge promoted the use of the Smithsonian fund for a large library. The series of proposals in Congress for such a library eventually came to be known as the Grand Library Plan. Secondly, the National Institute for the Promotion of Sciences was a newly founded scientific research association in the tradition of the British Royal Society. It emphasized useful knowledge, progress in natural sciences, and technology. The arguments put forward by these two groups are recorded in the documents of their orga-

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nizational transactions. The American Society for the Useful Diffusion of Knowledge distributed a prospectus to its members and to Congress; this document explains the society’s purposes and history, and attempts to show how the objectives of the society suited Smithson’s intentions.34 The National Institute published several papers as proceedings of their first annual meeting in 1840. Among these was a “Discourse on the Objects and Importance of the National Institute,” written by the organization’s director, Joel Poinsett.35 The spokesmen of these groups often seemed to address Adams and his congressional opponents, directly or indirectly, as an audience. By attempting to gain congressional support, these groups parlayed for popular influence in the Smithsonian debate. Adams voiced reservations about both of these groups, but each in turn influenced the language of the debate and the composition of bills to found the Smithsonian Institution.36 Almost immediately after the arguments for a Smithsonian University began in Congress, a group of individuals interested in diffusing knowledge through promotion of literacy and by the distribution of books founded the appropriately named American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in New York. They elected as their president Stephen Van Rensselaer, future founder of New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The organization sent their charter document to Congress in 1839, where it was referred to the Senate’s Committee on the Library, which handled the Senate’s investigation of the Smithsonian issue throughout the debate.37 The society’s thirty-five-page prospectus is a carefully crafted persuasive document, which was sent to congressmen and other influential people across the nation. While there is no overt claim to the Smithsonian fund, the wording of the document echoes not only Smithson’s will, but also assertions that had thus far gained support of the congressional audience. The general language concerning the promotion of knowledge echoes Adams’s first committee report to the House, which had been broadly distributed. The description of the new library promoted by this society, for example, contains a list of several subjects for books, from “the progress of knowledge” to “the opening prospects of society,” to “the wide range of science and philosophy, material, intellectual, and moral; in short, the moving worlds of mind and matter, [which] furnish inexhaustible materials for useful publications, adapted to improve and elevate the mind, and to promote the best social and moral interests of society.”38 The prospectus acknowledges the “influence of the Christian religion,” that “Its principles can alone inspire that purity, charity, and order, which are

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essential to freedom.” But deferring to Adams’s respected principle on schools and ecclesiastical institutes, “It is . . . no part of this plan or design, to propagate particular religious doctrines or theories.” Instead, its purpose is: to disseminate such useful practical knowledge, as may not only instruct, but exert among all classes a pure and elevated moral influence in respect to individual duty. . . . The Committee are [sic] impressed with a sense of the importance of such an institution, from the great and increasing influx of foreign population, for whose intellectual culture no suitable provision is made. . . . They are cut off, in a great measure, from the use of books and other vehicles of information, circulated in their native tongue at home. . . . This institution hopes to render the invaluable service to them and to our country, by providing books of elementary instruction and general information on all subjects, expressly for foreigners and their children; and thus to diffuse among them right views of their relations and duties as men, and as American citizens; of the nature of our government and civil institutions, and the obligations they impose on all who enjoy their blessings.39 The charter provides the origin of ideas that appear in later congressional speeches, when the Grand Library Plan began to gain momentum. At the end of the debate, when the education of common school teachers became an issue, notions of education for assimilation also resurfaced. The proposal contained in the American Society’s prospectus ends with a call to action: Our government is one purely of public opinion; our institutions, our laws, our Republic itself must be sustained, if sustained at all, by the “voice of the people,” and what that voice shall be, is to be determined by the general intelligence and virtuous principle, which may be diffused through the community. Let us give heed to the almost prophetic admonition of the father of his country. . . .“Promote, then, as objects of primary importance, Institutions for the General Diffusion of Knowledge.” After quoting Washington’s farewell address, the prospectus concludes with an appendix of “Brief Sketches of European Literary and Scientific Societies,” with the first societies on the list being: the Society for

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Promoting Christian Knowledge, the Religious Tract Society, and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in London. The societies listed in the appendix and offered as examples for the Smithsonian’s organization and management carried an appeal to tradition and authority. Those who pushed for research organizations and a science museum used the same tactic of evoking European models. The persuasive power of these models was twofold: it appealed to the respect audiences had for British and French institutions of learning, and it held out the means for audiences embarrassed by American inferiority in science and letters to see the United States increase its prestige. To some nineteenth-century Americans, founding societies and institutions parallel with European standards was one way to compete as a growing national power.40 Adams himself had stressed this tactic in his arguments for an astrophysical observatory. The second group founded in part to claim the Smithsonian bequest was the National Institute for the Promotion of Sciences. The National Institute can be traced to the earlier Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences, which first formed a group of Washington citizens “impressed with the importance of forming an association for promoting useful knowledge” on June 28, 1816. This included many prominent members, including John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and Henry Clay. Despite a lack of significant funds, the Columbian Institute founded a botanical garden and a museum, which housed zoological, botanical, and archaeological specimens— notably those collected in an important early scientific voyage, the Wilkes expedition.41 These specimens would eventually be given to the Smithsonian Institution after its formation. Beginning in 1825, the Columbian Institute arranged to deliver weekly scientific and literary papers during sessions of Congress, but this continued for only a short time, as attendance was sparse. Eighty-five papers were given, over half of them pertaining to astronomy or mathematics.42 The Columbian Institute’s charter expired in 1838, but its spirit continued in the National Institute for the Promotion of Sciences [referred to hereafter as the National Institute], founded in 1840 and fostered by the ideals emergent in the Smithsonian debate. The National Institute was founded with many of the same purposes as the Columbian Institute, with one exception: the founding documents have an overt focus on obtaining the Smithsonian bequest. Joel Poinsett, director of the National Institute, was also secretary of war at the time. No stranger to rhetoric in the aid of federally funded science, Poinsett had been the primary political advocate of the Wilkes expedition. He was also an amateur naturalist, and had

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brought the first poinsettia plant to the United States during his ambassadorship to Mexico. Poinsett’s “Discourse on the Objects and Importance of the National Institution for the Promotion of Sciences,” published in the proceedings of their first annual meeting, is another persuasive document urging a wide but affluent audience, both congressional and public, to take action in gaining control of the Smithsonian legacy. The document first explains the National Institute’s purposes, including the promotion of useful sciences, useful arts, and antiquities. Poinsett’s focus is on the idea of progress: The rapid and extraordinary improvements which the world has experienced, during the last half century, in commercial intercourse, in manufactures, and in all that contributes to civilization and to the comforts and conveniences of life, are due altogether to the application of science to useful purposes, and of the useful arts to the progress of science.43 Among all the sciences, he writes, astronomy is the most instrumental to progress: at no period has the vault of heaven been explored with so much genius, profound knowledge, ability, and physical means, as at this day; and never has been commenced a monument to the glory of science and human intellect more sublime than that of which astronomy is now laying the foundation. Shall we not add one stone to this structure? Will we expose ourselves to be denied our just title of a moral, religious, intelligent, and enlightened people, by refusing to inscribe the United States of America among the names of the civilized nations of the earth which will be found engraved upon the columns of this magnificent temple?44 Poinsett’s rhetoric on astronomy is similar to Adams’s in that it promotes an awareness of astronomy in the United States and points to the fruitfulness of this science in Europe. In the context of the debate, however, Poinsett is making a direct political appeal to Adams and his supporters. If Adams could be convinced that giving the money to the National Institute would be an efficacious route to an observatory, then almost half of Congress would probably follow suit. For this reason, Poinsett’s reference to the opportunity open to Congress to catch up with Europe and found an observatory appears to be especially crafted to draw on Adams’s efforts. He directly addresses that project:

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I believe it to be only necessary to point out to the intelligent people of this country the usefulness, not to say the necessity of such an establishment, for them immediately to appreciate the object, and, so far as the powers of the Government extend, to furnish the means to carry it into effect. I am aware that this has already been ably done in a report on the proper application of the Smithsonian bequest, presented to Congress, at its last session, by a gentleman with whom I am happy to be associate in promoting the progress of science. His long continued efforts to establish a national observatory will, I trust, be finally crowned with success, and I shall always reflect with satisfaction on having, on the first occasion that presented itself, seconded, however feebly, his liberal and enlightened views.45 Poinsett’s rhetoric, with its emphasis on the usefulness of astronomical observations, reflects the Baconian ideal that was so influential at the time. As the Smithsonian debate progressed, Poinsett’s influence over other scientifically minded congressmen would, ironically, contribute to both sides of Adams’s arguments. On the one hand, Adams’s opponents, the natural history museum advocates, gained momentum from Poinsett’s support; on the other hand, Poinsett strengthened Adams’s respected ethos in his role as protector of the fund. In seeming to address Adams, Poinsett and other spokesmen for special interest groups were actually addressing the large portion of the audience in agreement with Adams. His approval—or even the implication of his approval—could increase popular support for particular proposals. Adams, however, appears to have avoided partisan propensities in his attitudes toward the Smithson will. While he recommended that the fund’s first seven years of interest should be used for an astrophysical observatory, he had no strong preferences for specific uses beyond that project, except that each proposal should be based on scientific discovery. Moreover, protection of the fund from misuse or waste was his primary goal from the time he gave his first speech on the “imperious obligation” to use the Smithsonian fund wisely. He strove to remain a disinterested judge in regard to individual projects proposed for the future institution, for the sake of rational and ethical judgment on this important issue. By taking this relatively impartial stance, he set himself up as an audience figurehead. Spokesmen for special interest groups within the larger audience would imagine what they needed to say in order to win Adams

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over. Although he did not represent a universal viewpoint (he was too partial to astronomy for that), he became an ideal target: what might be called an auditor perfectus, with a relationship to vying groups in the Smithsonian debate that compliments the function of the orator perfectus for a speaker. In a deliberative debate such as the Smithsonian controversy, the lines defining speakers and audiences are often blurred, and members of the audience periodically become orators and opponents themselves. Although Adams was made an honorary member of the National Institute,46 he adamantly argued against Poinsett, maintaining that the Smithsonian needed new and original management, not an established governing body with preexisting prejudices and purposes. As in his approach to the proposal for a national university, Adams’s detachment served to bolster his ethos as he continued his rhetorical campaign as moral guardian of the bequest. Adams’s good reputation and enthusiasm for the Smithsonian issue never wavered during the course of debate, but several obstacles developed that would prevent the timely founding of an institution. Investment of the fund in state stocks with defaulted interest prevented access to the money until a law was passed founding the institution. Adams spent two sessions in Congress drafting and defending legislation that would move the fund and its interest into the U.S. Treasury, but as a result of this he was not able to spend the time on his observatory proposal. In an effort to pressure Congress by swaying public opinion, Adams redirected his rhetorical campaign toward public addresses on the Smithsonian bequest and on the science of astronomy, described in the next chapter. As the debate progressed, deadlock loomed. Some congressmen still doubted the validity of Smithson’s will and the constitutionality of its acceptance. Those who did accept the bequest’s validity could not agree on how to use it. Three new proposals developed late in the debate, complicating the issue and obscuring some of the early agreement reached in Adams’s committee meetings. Senator Rufus Choate and Representative G. P. Marshall proposed to use the fund for a “Grand Library,” while Senator Benjamin Tappan proposed to link the Smithsonian with the National Institute for the Promotion of Sciences and to use the money for a natural history museum. Senator Robert Dale Owen adopted Tappan’s natural history museum proposal and added an educational program to train common school teachers. With no single solution in sight, a compromise between Adams and his opponents would finally become unavoidable.

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FINANCIAL DELAYS TO ACTION: “CATCH THE BEAR BEFORE YOU SELL HIS SKIN” Adams’s role as guardian of the Smithsonian fund in the area of financial safekeeping was as instrumental in founding the institution as his more proactive promotion of scientific research. He believed it was important to keep the Smithsonian money separate from any organization requiring appropriations of public money. He also wanted to guarantee that the capital sum would be preserved from any diminishment whatsoever. In fulfilling his personal pledge to protect the fund, he felt an urgent obligation, as he early wrote to Secretary of State John Forsyth, to first “secure, as from a rattlesnake’s fang, the fund and its income, forever, from being wasted and dilapidated in bounties to feed the hunger or fatten the leaden idleness of mountebank projectors and shallow and worthless pretenders to science.”47 Seven years earlier, after Richard Rush brought the Smithsonian legacy to the United States in a chest full of gold sovereigns, Secretary of State Levi Woodbury had invested the money in state stocks bearing 5 percent interest per annum. These stocks were issued primarily by the state of Arkansas, but there were also some from Michigan and Illinois. Woodbury accomplished this transaction, which he claimed would benefit the struggling new states, through a “piggyback” section he wrote for a bill that funded the struggling U.S. Military Academy at West Point.48 The state of Arkansas then defaulted in paying the interest due on its bonds, and the other states soon followed suit. This made it impossible for Congress to secure the income, until it could take steps toward investing the money in an institution. This financial snare delayed action on the fund for several years. Much of Adams’s energy in promoting scientific research had to be redirected toward pushing legislation to secure the defaulted funds and regain lost interest. Outraged by Woodbury’s mistake, Adams felt that the sacred trust of the United States to the will of James Smithson had been abused and wasted before it was even attempted.49 Because of Woodbury’s unwise investment, Adams’s attention increased toward the first of his three principles, “that the capital should be preserved in the Treasury, and only the 6% annual interest should be appropriated for expenditures.” Adams labored to protect the sacred trust of Smithson’s will by urging prompt action, reporting every detail of Arkansas’s and Michigan’s accounts during his committee reports and drafting legislation.

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On March 5, 1840, during the Twenty-sixth Congress, Adams presented another Smithsonian committee report in the form of a speech, this one with heavy emphasis on the financial and moral dangers of having the money in state stocks. After a long narration of the background and acceptance of the Smithsonian fund for those representatives who were uninformed, he explains the investment of the fund in state stocks effected by the 1838 bill that provided support for the U.S. Military Academy. He tells his audience that five hundred Arkansas bonds and eight Michigan bonds had been purchased in September of 1838. Most importantly, he reasons that through these investments, the United States became creditors of the states of Arkansas and Michigan. These two states, he argues, unwittingly became responsible for payment to the Smithsonian fund.50 On June 7, 1844, during the Twenty-eighth Congress, Adams’s committee report was again dedicated to the financial state of the legacy and its moral consequences. Again he begins with a brief narration of the reception and disposition of the funds, but this time he includes only the dates of the will and acceptance, with more emphasis on the action of Richard Rush in accepting the money and bringing it to the U.S. mint (this had lately been discussed in Congress, when Rush petitioned to fund his activities in the English court of chancery). During his delivery of this report, Adams read aloud the last section of the U.S. Military Academy act of July 7, 1838: “And be it further enacted, That all the money arising from the bequest of the late James Smithson . . . is hereby appropriated and shall be invested by the Secretary of the Treasury with approbation of the President of the United States in stocks of States, bearing interest at the rate of not less than five per centum per annum. . .” He then gives figures for the losses caused by defaulted stocks. He writes, “This—[$15,634] is the whole amount of interest received at the Treasury in the space of two years and four months . . . from a fund which in that space of time should have yielded little less than $80,000.”51 He also reminds his audience that while interest is suspended and the principal is not available till 1850, some not even till 1870, neither “is it available for application by Congress to the purpose of the bequest—the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”52 Finally, he reminds Congress that by accepting the fund, they had pledged the solemn faith of the United States to use all the bequest and any other funds received on account of it only to the “generous purpose prescribed by the testator.” He implies that Congress had broken an oath sworn by the United States. Using pathos, specifically an appeal to shame, he warns that the breech of contract needs correction immediately before consequences multiply:

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For the redemption of this pledge it is indispensably necessary that the fund now locked in the treasury in the bonds of these States, and the accruing interest of them . . . should be made available for the disposal of Congress to execute the sacred trust which in the name of the United States they have assumed. For this purpose the committee report a bill appropriating the sum of $800,000, to be invested in certificates of stock of the United States, bearing interest at the rate of 6 per cent a year.53 This sum was to make up for the lost interest. Not forgetting his other two points, he also stipulates in this new bill that the first seven years’ interest should be used for an astronomical observatory, with astronomer, four assistants, publications, and an annual nautical almanac.54 As the congressional debates about the Smithsonian neared their end, Adams multiplied his efforts on this important point of financial protection. On April 21, 1846, during the Twenty-ninth Congress, Adams proposed bill H. 5, which stipulated “That the President of the United States be requested, by the use of suitable means of moral suasion, and no others, to obtain from the governments of the States of Arkansas, Illinois, and Michigan payment of the arrears of interest due from the said States to the United States.” The bill was referred to the Committee of the Whole, but no action ever came of it.55 Adams drafted two pieces of legislation to regain the Smithsonian legacy that did pass into law. First, an act of September 4, 1841,56 to distribute proceeds from the sale of public lands among all the states, contains a section authored by Adams. It states that the payment coming to any state must first be used for the payment of any debt or interest owed to the United States government. Second, an act of September 11, 1841,57 repealed the earlier law requiring investment of the Smithsonian fund in Arkansas, Michigan, and Illinois stocks and instead required that all interest accrued from the Smithsonian fund in the future, or from any other trusts held by the U.S. government, be invested only in the U.S. Treasury. While Adams was successful in passing these laws through Congress, they did not actually recover any of the past interest due the Smithsonian fund. Moreover, the tariff of 1842 overruled the distribution of proceeds from the sale of public lands.58 In addition to his persuasive and legislative efforts in Congress, Adams also informed the public about the Smithsonian funds invested in state stocks. In his Quincy Lycium lecture, he scolded the government for this investment:

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I hope the wrong done by this first misapplication of the Smithsonian funds is not irreparable, and I yet hope that in the future application of them the sacred faith of the nation, pledged with the acceptance of the bequest, will never be tarnished by the application of them to objects other than the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.59 When the Act to Establish the Smithsonian Institution finally passed on August 10, 1846, it fulfilled Adams’s rhetorical pleas to advance the principal of the fund from state stocks so that an actual institution could be founded. Until that point, however, Adams told Congress, he “was in favor of carrying out the principle of the ancient proverb, ‘Catch the bear before you sell his skin.’”60 As the debate progressed, Adams modified the way he carried out his role as guardian of the fund according to the most pressing needs at the time, showing himself to be a master of to prepon—using the right proofs at the right time—in the practice of rhetoric of public life. He began his crusade as an orator, both on the floor of Congress and in lecterns before public audiences. By the midpoint of the debate, as he worked to secure the defaulted state stocks, he acted primarily as a legislator. By the end of the debate, however, he often reversed his rhetorical role, becoming the esteemed audience, a judge to whom proposals were directed. Adams’s authority as a judge in the final Smithsonian arguments was an indispensable rhetorical influence in the formation of the institution, as the following sections illustrate.

RESISTANCE TO ARGUMENTATION Adams encouraged fruitful deliberation in the Smithsonian debate and strove to foster the conditions necessary for argumentation. In this way, Adams embodies Chaim Perelman’s conception of the productive intellectual contact that is inherent in the act of rhetorical argumentation. Yet, a “contact of minds” can be delayed or deterred when certain conditions are not met. To engage in argument, most importantly, the opponents must be willing to listen to one another. As Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca write, “We must not forget that by listening to someone we display a willingness to eventually accept his point of view.”61 Aside from the groups arguing about proposals for the Smithsonian, there remained one group of congressmen consistently unwilling to listen. They opposed the institution no matter what form the proposals took. Senator John C. Calhoun headed this group, interject-

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ing at regular intervals comments such as, “We accept a fund from a foreigner, and would do what we are not authorized to do by the Constitution. We would enlarge our grant of power derived from the States of this Union.”62 He called the university bill “a species of meanness which I cannot describe, a want of dignity wholly unworthy of this Government,” and he claimed that any “national literary institution” would be unconstitutional. Calhoun and the states’ rights supporters never granted the assumption behind the controversy that the gift had been accepted. As a result, a few congressmen did not enter the debate. They refused to have a hand in shaping the Smithsonian as the institution began to materialize. Despite this small faction of the congressional audience, most congressmen expressed their belief that the earlier decision on the acceptance was sound, and that there was no danger of the Smithsonian taking power away from the states. Calhoun did represent an established and popular point of view, however, even if he failed to engage the issue. Adams had something of an elitist attitude toward this faction of his audience, preferring to see their conscious resistance to argument as mere prejudice. He wrote of Calhoun in his Memoirs, “The reasoning of Mr. Calhoun appears to me shallow and sophistical; but [he] speaks to popular prejudices, and it is true of great masses of men as it is of individuals—he who is convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. The task of eradicating prejudices seems to be desperate.”63

ARGUMENTS FOR A NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM AND THE AGRICULTURAL INFLUENCE During the Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Congresses, proposals to fulfill Smithson’s will by building a natural history museum began to sway debaters. As Adams was preoccupied with preserving the fund itself, he did not get directly involved in this stage of argumentation. Yet the stamp of his earlier arguments, as authoritative and established support as well as opposition to be overcome, are everywhere to be found in the arguments of other congressmen. An intertextual examination of the earlier and later texts will easily demonstrate this influence. The main proponent for the natural history plan was Benjamin Tappan, a member of the Senate’s Library Committee who defended the views of the National Institute and its director, Joel Poinsett. Tappan submitted a series of bills proposing that the National Institute manage the Smithsonian funds.64 His interpretation of Smithson’s will focused on the useful fruits of science, a theme that proved to have a

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strong appeal for newspapers and the public audience. Tappan was not an eloquent political speaker, but he discovered other means of gaining support for his bills. His utilitarian approach attracted supporters of agriculture, a special interest group that had strong political influence in many states.65 Tappan presented petitions from agriculturists and advocates of a natural history museum as testimony. Furthermore, he had an anonymous ally who wrote a series of letters to the editor of the National Intelligencer, praising both Tappan’s bill and the National Institute.66 Prior to Tappan’s bills to found the Smithsonian under the direction of the National Institute, several bills and acts during the Twentysixth and Twenty-seventh Congresses demonstrated the institute’s efforts to gain control over the bequest. On February 17, 1841, a bill was presented to incorporate the National Institute in Washington, D.C., as a nationally funded scientific organization, and on that same day another bill was submitted to establish the Smithsonian Institution under the superintendence of the institute, with its officers as a board of management, along with some elected officials.67 The institute won its charter, but a majority in Congress remained opposed to establishing the Smithsonian under the National Institute’s management. Yet, the institute continued to encourage proposals for a natural history museum. In 1842, an act was passed to publish an account of the discoveries made by Naval Lieutenant Wilkes on his exploring expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas. As mentioned earlier, Poinsett had organized this expedition and considered the natural history specimens collected by Wilkes to be the special enterprise of the National Institute. Under the National Institute’s direction, the specimens were exhibited on the upper floor of the U.S. Patent Office (which is now the Smithsonian’s Portrait Gallery) until permanent arrangements for their safekeeping could be made.68 Senator Tappan was sensitive to this pressure from the National Institute, but he was also attentive to various groups who petitioned Congress in favor of using the Smithsonian funds to advance agriculture. Since the time of John Forsyth’s request for advice and Richard Rush’s answer near the beginning of the debate, several groups from around the country had petitioned Congress to use the bequest for agricultural research and education. One such petition, from the citizens of Massachusetts, was presented to Congress in June 1844, during the session when attention to the National Institute was at its peak.69 On June 6, 1844, Senator Tappan reported his bill for a natural history museum, with a significant agricultural emphasis; this generated some heated opposition in Congress, especially from supporters of the

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Grand Library Plan. Tappan’s bill would appropriate ten acres on the National Mall for agricultural experiments and designated that Congress “shall cause to be erected a suitable building, of plain and durable materials and structure, without unnecessary ornament, and of sufficient size with suitable rooms for the reception and arrangement of objects of natural history, a library, a chemical laboratory, and lecture room or rooms.”70 Once the building was completed, all objects of natural history belonging to the United States, including the Wilkes specimens, would be arranged and classed for study by the institution’s professor of natural history. In addition to a professor of natural history, the bill provided for professors of chemistry, agriculture, geology, and astronomy. The board of directors would also designate lecturers on other arts and sciences, “Provided, that no professorship shall be established or lecturer employed to treat or lecture on law, physic, or divinity, it being the object of the Institution to furnish facilities for the acquisition of such branches of knowledge as are not taught in the various universities.”71 This last article in Tappan’s bill, concerning the subjects taught in universities, acknowledges the agreement to exclude support for a university that Adams had initially secured in the House. Yet, Tappan’s bill shows some confusion lingered in the Senate about what defined a university. Was a university defined by the aim “to teach,” in itself, rather than “to acquire” new and as yet undiscovered knowledge, or was it distinguished by the areas of knowledge taught? Tappan seems to subscribe to the second definition, as his proposal included an institution containing both educational and research facilities. While he was catering to popular interests in his proposal for the Smithsonian, he became a forerunner in a trend that would change the conceptual foundations of universities in America. Not until thirty-two years later would Johns Hopkins become the first American university to follow the German example of a research institution with a university press to publish its findings. On December 12, 1844, Tappan presented some amendments to his bill. These deal specifically with the diffusion of knowledge by giving further stipulations for the course of lectures that each appointed professor should give. The focus of the revisions is on the practical and useful results of science, in accordance with the needs of American farmers at the time. The additions also draw on a widely held impression of Smithson’s own preference for practical knowledge: [The board of directors] shall direct experiments to be made by the professor of agriculture, horticulture, and rural economy to

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determine the utility and advantage of new modes and instruments of culture, to determine whether new fruits, plants, and vegetables may be cultivated to advantage in the United States; and they shall direct the distribution of all such fruits, plants, seeds, and vegetables as shall be found useful and adapted to any of our soils and climates, so that people in every part of the Union may enjoy the benefit and advantage of the experiments made by the institution. They shall also direct the professor of chemistry to institute a chemical analysis of soils from different sections of the United States. . . . They shall also direct the professor of natural history especially to refer his course of lectures to the history and habits of such animals as are useful, or such animals and insects as are injurious, including the best means of taking care and improving the one and of protecting grain and other products from the other. . . . They shall also direct the professor of astronomy to include in his lectures a course on navigation, including the use of nautical instruments.72 His interpretation of “diffusion” included physical distribution of the fruits of agricultural practice, such as plants and seeds, among the American public. The concrete nature of his thought is an indication of the utilitarian ideology he represented. Like Adams before him, Tappan also provided for the publication of all findings as a means of diffusing less tangible knowledge.73 Although Tappan was not renowned for his oratory, he was able to generate public testimony to his views that he used as a rhetorical proof. On January 8, 1845, he presented a petition of Thomas Johnson and others, citizens of Huron County, Ohio, in support of a museum of natural history. Senator Foster of New York read another petition of General N. V. Knickerbocker and two hundred others from Steuben County, New York, for passage of Tappan’s bill. Much of this public response grew out of press coverage of Tappan’s role and that of other supporters of the National Institute in the debate. Between December 1843 and May 1844, one “Mr. J. C. B.” wrote a series of letters to the editor of Washington’s National Intelligencer, chronicling and championing the efforts of the National Institute to gain control of the Smithsonian bequest. In Mr. J. C. B.’s first letter, he proclaimed: I propose . . . to devote a brief space to the History of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science; to enter into some detail in relation to the National Observatory, under the

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superintendence of Lieutenant Gillis, of our Navy, and that of Georgetown College, assigned to the care of the Rev. Mr. Curley, both in course of construction; to urge the necessity, justice, and policy of some final and prompt action on the part of Congress in the matter of the Smithsonian Bequest, and the propriety and expediency of entrusting, under proper control, the execution of that sacred legacy to the National Institute; to show that the inhabitants of the District, if alive to their own interests and desirous of doing good to the community at large, should support and foster, by pecuniary and other aid, the said association, and throw their weight into any effort which may be made to obtain for it the life-giving notice of Congress.74 It is evident that the press had an active role in conditioning the public audience on the Smithsonian issue. Mr. J. C. B. writes that he applies to the editor “to aid me in the performance of my task.” His belief that the newspaper would help him in his rhetorical efforts stems “from the impression that it is important for the people at large to have their notice attracted to the subject”75 and from the National Intelligencer’s reception to cultural topics before. The author of these letters carefully crafted a series of proposals calling the public to support the National Institute with money and political suasion. One of these proclaimed: Now is the fit time for a well-informed and intelligent community to come to the rescue, and to redeem their character from the charge of indifference and neglect. . . . Will the citizens of this District be so dead to their own interests and to the promptings of an honorable spirit, as to stand with their arms folded when so much is to be done, and so good an agent is presented?76 He debunks Adams’s accusations that the National Institute is after power and gain for itself: The officers of one year are often not those of the succeeding. An unceasing supervision is exercised over the acts of the Society . . . and it is not at all probable that among so many highly respectable and disinterested individuals, not one of whom have any thing to gain or hope for, in a pecuniary point of view, by any impulse to the prosperity of the Institute, any set of men should be found to dream of putting their privileges or power to bad use.77

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In addition to giving what he calls a “eulogium” of the National Institute, he points out the authoritative support of “such venerable and powerful names as Washington, Jefferson, and Madison” in support of a national university, which the Smithsonian-cum-National Institute resembles in that it would take on the teaching of college-age students in the sciences. He quotes from several speeches of these three men at length and remarks, “I cannot conceive how any public man can be so presumptuous as to assert and support doctrines opposed to the opinions of such patriots as Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.”78 These letters illustrate the nature of the ambiguity in definitions of a “national university” among debaters of the Smithsonian issue, both in and outside of Congress. While all in the House committee and many in the Senate had agreed with Adams’s early point that none of the money should be spent for any school, university, or seminary, some continued to present arguments in favor of a professional scientific school—or at least a series of lectures, with students accepted by application and tuition paid by the Smithsonian fund. Most of the congressional bills that name the National Institute as a governing body contain a proposal of this kind, and rhetoric supporting these bills continued to call the potential institution a national university. Adams, conspicuously silent during parts of these debates in Congress, continued to hold firm to his original three principles about the bequest and to gather inventive means for refutations. To Adams, a university or school, whether nationally supported or private, meant an institution for imparting knowledge already received, regardless of whether it trained scientists or educated common school children. To Tappan and his supporters, however, the idea of a national university was more flexible. Many envisioned a scientific research institution attached to a school for training scholars, who would there (or elsewhere) discover new knowledge. Adams’s opposing claim, that the testator’s intention was not educational in nature, was sustained in the last arguments of the debate by the spokesmen of the Grand Library Plan.

THE GRAND LIBRARY PLAN On January 8, 1845, during the Twenty-eighth Congress, Senator Rufus Choate of Massachusetts spoke in refutation of Tappan’s bill for a natural history and science facility. Choate, like Adams, was a practitioner of the “spacious” rhetoric taught in classical treatises.79 His refu-

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tation rested on Adams’s early point, that the Smithsonian fund should not be used to found a school or university. His speech reviewed the early arguments between Adams and Asher Robbins, then argued that a better alternative to a natural history museum would be a grand national library.80 Choate and Tappan continued to argue in the Senate the next day, focusing Congress’s attention on the precise wording of the bill.81 Since Adams’s fervor for a Smithsonian observatory was dampened by the planned construction of a naval observatory and a Georgetown University observatory, “Old Man Eloquent” was finally a persuadable member of Choate’s audience. More than that, a close examination of his speech shows that Adams was the primary audience for Choate’s arguments, as a result of his authority in this issue and his recognized his role as guardian of the Smithsonian bequest. Choate introduces his subject by emphasizing once again what his fellow Massachusetts congressman, Adams, had called “an indispensable obligation”: the implicit pledge that Congress had made by accepting Smithson’s bequest and the solemn duty of carrying out his wishes. “We shall differ more perhaps than could be wished or than can be reconciled about the mode of administering this noble fund,” he admits, “but we can not differ about our duty to enter at once on some mode of administering it.”82 He agrees wholeheartedly with the first section of Tappan’s bill, which would invest the principle with the U.S. Treasury and use the interest in construction of buildings, purchase of instruments, and maintenance of the institution—as Adams had argued from the beginning. “This, all, is exactly as it should be,” Choate remarks definitively, and, in fact, these parts of the bill, including Adams’s early amendments for the protection of the capital sum, had reached a consensus by this point in the debate and would remain unchanged even in the final version. As Choate continues, however, the speech becomes a scathing refutation of Tappan’s project based on acceptance of the three points Adams had established in his first report as Chair of the House Committee on the Smithsonian. He begins his arguments with a question: “I speak of what the fund, however managed, is to be made to do. The bill assumes, as it ought, to apply it ‘to the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.’ Well, how does it accomplish this object?” Answering his rhetorical question, he names and defines Tappan’s proposed institution as a kind of college: It proposes to do so, for substance, by establishing in this city a school or college for the purpose of instructing its pupils in

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the application of certain physical sciences to certain arts of life. The plan, if adopted, founds a college in Washington to teach the scientific principles of certain useful arts. That is the whole of it.83 He notes that the salaried permanent professors and auxiliary lecturers in Tappan’s proposal would teach about agriculture, geology, astronomy, and the other sciences named in the bill—“Now, I say that this creates a college or school, such as it is, on the basis of a somewhat narrow utilitarianism—to be sure, erroneously so called, but a college or academical institution.” He cites the bill’s rules for admitting students and argues, “This surely is a school, a college, an academical institute of education, such as it is, or nothing.” Like Adams, Choate maintains that the “increase and diffusion of knowledge among men” does not involve education, not even technical training for scientific practices. Choate’s refutation of Tappan’s proposal first refers to the disagreement in 1838 between Adams and Robbins on the founding of a national university; he calls these two gentlemen “persons of the most profound and elegant acquisition; both of them of that happy, rare class who ‘grow old still learning.’” Then he quotes the decision reached at that time in bill S. 293, sec. 4: “That no part of the said Smithsonian fund, principal or interest, shall be applied to any school, college, university, institute of education, or ecclesiastical establishment.”84 He quotes also from Robbins’s university proposal, recalling its strong but short-lived support. He explains that the Senate already debated and decisively rejected Robbins’s idea of using the money for a university. His arguments against such an institution are the same ones that Adams used in the earlier exchange—that it would use up the whole fund, that it would require more government aid, that there were already universities in the United States that would be harmed by the existence of a national university, and that only the wealthy could afford to come to Washington to attend. Choate’s ability to refute Tappan’s proposal solely by means of authoritative quotes from Adams 1840 and 1841 reports shows that Adams’s proofs had fostered considerable belief among the congressional audience. What the Smithsonian should not be had now the force of commonly held opinion, so that anything contradicting it was no longer arguable. Choate does adopt the idea of lecturers for his bill, but not permanent professors. Only visiting scholars, as Adams had suggested in his letter to John Forsyth. Choate characterizes the audience of these lec-

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tures and their purpose, which is to diffuse knowledge in the Baconian sense of appropriate and informative communication: Who would their audiences be? Members of Congress with their families, members of the Government with theirs, some inhabitants of this city, some few strangers who occasionally honor us with visits of curiosity or business. They would be public men, of mature years and minds; educated, disciplined to some degree, of liberal curiosity, and appreciation of generous and various knowledge. He further explains that a library’s lecturers should not be limited to three or four practical sciences: Would it not be as instructive to hear a first-rate scholar and thinker demonstrate out of a chapter of Greek or Italian history how dreadful a thing it is for a cluster of young and fervid democracies to dwell side by side, independent and disunited, as it would to hear a chemist maintain that to raise wheat you must have some certain proportion of lime in the soil? But the subjects of lectures would of course be adapted to time, place, and circumstance, and varied with them.85 His examples clearly show that he identifies “diffusion” with a rhetorical function, that of speaking to a certain audience and adhering to the proprieties of time and place. Moreover, this rhetorical function could be put to political use, as his historical allusions suggest. Finally, Choate reaches the core argumentative section of his speech, in which he presents the benefits of the Grand Library Plan. Here he cannot rely on Adams’s precedent. Yet, he does use as special topics the touchstone ideas of increasing and diffusing knowledge. He proposes that $20,000 per year for twenty-five years should be spent, “not by a bibliomaniac, but by a man of sense and reading” to purchase a library that would rival the great libraries in Europe—the Royal Library at Paris (the largest in the world); Munich’s Library; the libraries of Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Copenhagen; the Vatican’s at Rome; and the Bodleian at Oxford. He argues that there should not be as many volumes as there are in those esteemed libraries, but only the very best books, for “a general and indiscriminate system of accumulation gathers up, necessarily, so much trash.”86 Such an institution would serve to increase the number of learned men in the country, and thereby increase knowledge:

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There it would be—durable as liberty, durable as the Union; a vast storehouse, a vast treasury, of all the facts which make up the history of man and of nature, so far as that history has been written; of all the truths which the inquiries and experiences of all the races and ages have found out; of all the opinions that have been promulgated; of all the emotions, images, sentiments, examples of all the riches and most instructive literatures: the whole past speaking to the present and the future; a silent, yet wise and eloquent teacher; dead, yet speaking—not dead! for Milton has told us that a “good book is not absolutely a dead thing—the precious life-blood rather of a master spirit; a seasoned life of man embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”87 He shifts in this section from the more straightforward style to periodic sentences, a method that had impressed the audience of Adams’s 1840 report, and a method that Adams himself was known to admire in the orations of others. In content, the language echoes the prospectus of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.88 He also alludes to Milton more than once, assuming his audience’s intimate familiarity with Paradise Lost. Specifically, in support of distributing knowledge among the people, he quotes: Hither as to their fortunes other stars Repairing, in their golden urns, draw light. Like Asher Robbins in his earlier speech on the idea of a national university, Choate does not feel the need to credit the source of this quote, but assumes that his audience will be able to identify as its context the creation scene of Paradise Lost (Book VII, ll 359–366): Of light by far the greater part he took, Transplanted from her cloudy shrine, and placed In the sun’s orb, made porous to receive And drink the liquid light; firm to retain Her gathered beams, great palace now of light. Hither, as to their fountain, other stars Repairing, in their golden urns draw light, And hence the morning-planet gilds her horns. He elucidates the literary allusion by explaining that researchers and scholars could push as far as they were able at home, then travel to this “grand storehouse” in Washington, D.C., in order to return home to teach and diffuse their knowledge.89 This would probably be inter-

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preted by his audience as Baconian: the metaphor of knowledge as storehouse and divine spark or light in the human being. It is significant, also, that Adams had used the same kinds of metaphors and loftier style in his well-received early proposals for an observatory. Not all of Choate’s arguments rely on Adams as an audience builder, however. Choate assuages opposing minds by adding that if a national university were to be founded in the future, there would be no better way to prepare for it than by accumulating a library. He also addresses the objection that a Library of Congress already existed: “I think it already quite good, and improving; but its existence constitutes no sort of argument against the formation of one such as I recommend.” At the time, the Library of Congress was strictly a professional library for government use, while Choate’s library would be a “general public library of science, literature, and art.”90 This notion of a general but exhaustive library testifies to both the growing influence of belles lettres and science in the United States. Choate and others like him—even Adams, by the end of the debate—saw the scholarly study of texts in history, literature, and philosophy (including “natural philosophy” and the sciences) as the necessary foundation and inspiration for new discovery. He ends, as Adams often does in Ciceronian style, with an appeal to pathos. Unlike Adams, however, the appeal is not to the loftier motives of charity and duty, but to the coarser emotion of envy: I do not suppose that I desire any more than you . . . to introduce here those vast inequalities of fortune, that elaborate luxury, that fantastic and extreme refinement [of the older civilization of Europe]. But I acknowledge a pang of envy and grief that there should be one drop or one morsel more of the bread or water of intellectual life tasted by the Europeans than by the American mind.91 At the end of Choate’s speech, the congressional record states that Benjamin Tappan “next addressed the Senate, but in so low a tone of voice that only detached sentences of his remarks could be heard in the gallery.”92 The note on Tappan’s delivery seems to indicate the emotional impact of Choate’s refutation on his opponent. Tappan was “understood to argue” that there was no need to strike out the eighth section of the bill if a library were deemed important; simply add another section. He also did not agree that a “vast and costly miscellaneous library” could contribute to the increase and diffusion of knowledge as Smithson must have meant it. Congressional documentation paraphrases his comments:

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Mr. Smithson was an eminent practical philosopher, intimately acquainted with the practical sciences—such as chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and natural history—to the minute study of which he mainly devoted his life. His favorite resort was the Jardin des Plantes at Paris. . . . There could be little doubt that in making this bequest to the United States he had in view the establishment of some such institution as the Jardin des Plantes.93 Tappan’s main objection to Choate’s library plan rested on his views of the character and intentions of the donor. The heated debate between Tappan and Choate resumed the next day in Congress with a closer discussion of the precise wording of the bill. Sections 7 and 8, on the kind of institution to be founded and the immediate use of the accumulated interest, were the focus of argument from this point in the debate until its end. The first six sections had finally been established and agreed upon.94 Choate proposed to strike out section 8 in Tappan’s bill, and insert: SEC. 8. And whereas an ample and well-selected public library constitutes one of the permanent, constant, and effectual means of increasing and diffusing knowledge among men: Therefore, Be it further enacted, That a sum not less than $20,000 be annually expended, of the interest of the fund aforesaid, in the purchase of books and manuscripts for the formation of a library of the institution aforesaid, which, for its extent, variety, and value, shall be worthy of the donor of the said fund, and of the nation, and of the age.95 The preamble phrase of section 8 became the specific place for each bill’s statement about the best way to “increase and diffuse knowledge,” over and above the general wording in Smithson’s will and his personal inclinations, which were dealt with in the first several sections of each bill. The second, enacting clause of section 8 then gave details about how much money was to be spent for this special purpose. This basic order was retained in the final act to establish the Smithsonian.96

COMPROMISE On April 23, 1846, when Choate’s bill passed to the House, Representative G. P. Marsh of Vermont took up the bill and made a

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speech on it.97 The text of his speech begins with the commonplace— for by then it was a commonplace—of urgency and time wasted since Congress accepted Smithson’s money. He then identifies the problem that Choate’s bill was designed to solve. In so doing, Marsh is the first to explicitly describe a Smithsonian bill as a conglomeration of many opinions and many proposals [my emphasis]: the bill now before us is a compilation, an anthology, so to speak. . . . The bill is reported by the special committee as a compromise, and probably no one of the gentlemen concerned in its preparation is quite satisfied with its provisions; no one believes it to be the best plan that could be devised; but they felt the necessity of deferring to each other, as well as to the probable opinion of Congress, and were nearly unanimous in thinking it more likely to harmonize discordant views than any other plan suggested.98 Marsh describes Choate’s bill not only as a compromise, “but rather an experiment . . . than a complete working model.”99 Throughout his speech, he urged the members of Congress to “harmonize their discordant views” by using the entire income “for a reasonable period” to collect both a public library and a natural history museum.100 Yet, the purpose John Quincy Adams had steadfastly promoted, experimental science, was not included in his compromise. In fact, Marsh vehemently refuted the laboratory portions of Tappan’s bill. In his refutation of experimental science, Marsh argued that theoretical science better fulfilled the intentions of the testator: Researches in such branches as were the favored objects of that [Tappan’s] bill, have in general little of a really scientific character. Geology, mineralogy, even chemistry, are but assemblages of apparent facts, empirically established; and this must always be true, to a great extent of every study which rests upon observations and experiment alone. True science is the classification and arrangement of necessary primary truths, according to their relations with each other, and in reference to the logical deductions which may be made from them.101 Far from aligning himself in agreement with Adams, he argued against the idea that progressive improvement is a result of experimental science: “Sir, modern chemistry, metallurgy, and machinery have multiplied, cheapened, and diffused—not improved—the products of industrial art; and herein lies our superiority, not that we can do better,

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but, by bringing to our aid the obedient forces of nature, we can do more, than our predecessors.”102 Like Choate, he refuted the utilitarianism of scientific experimentation: Sir, a laboratory is a charnel house. Chemical decomposition begins with death, and experiments are but the dry bones of science. It is the thoughtful meditation alone of minds trained and disciplined in far other halls than can clothe these with flesh, and blood, and sinews, and breathe into them the breath of life . . . sir, the knowledge of what are called the physical sciences is of far less importance, even in reference to the very objects which they are supposed especially to promote, than is generally believed.103 A library alone, he argued, could provide the environment for such discipline. What Marsh does in this speech, after his initial call for compromise, is to stand against the tide of empirical science and discovery that had begun to rise in American minds. He accomplishes this through an association of ideas that makes the reasoning process of theoretical science appear closer to truth than “mere” collections of factual data—the result of the experiments so esteemed by Baconians. Marsh denounces the growing tendency to consider empirical science the god-term of the future and instead invokes the older hierarchy of theoretical science, in the tradition of the old Aristotelian system. He stands in the way of progress, as it was defined in the Baconian views of the American Enlightenment. This was not a popular move. Clearly, Marsh was not to be the spokesman of the compromise, even though he had pointed to the need for it and given it a name. Marsh’s speech retained the language that associated him with the library plan in his listener’s minds. This would never pass muster with the debate’s distinguished judge by reputation and long-standing dedication, John Quincy Adams. In addition, his rhetoric was still too confrontational, too oppositional, to bring the debate to an end. Yet, Marsh had given voice to a long and lingering disagreement in the Smithsonian debate and had set the stage for a climax and resolution to the story. “Harmonizing discordant views” became the object and end of the argumentative process, which had of late focused so closely on the actual wording of the bills in a struggle to reach some kind of closure. Adams’s reaction to the Grand Library Plan is a bit surprising, considering his earlier, adamant rhetoric about scientific discovery and the march of the human mind. The congressional record summarizes his response to Marsh:

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He had heard with great delight the learned and ingenious remarks of the gentleman from Vermont . . . and especially that portion which advocated the application of that fund ultimately to the only purpose of erecting a great and magnificent library, instead of the paltry application of 5k a year out of the more than 30k [sic] which this sum ought to give us. There was no other object to which it could be more worthily applied to promote the object of the testator.104 As planning for the naval and Georgetown observatories got underway, Adams’s oratory as guardian of the fund centered on moving the capital sum to the National Treasury. Yet, both Choate’s speech in the Senate and Marsh’s speech in the House demonstrate the close attention given to the earlier arguments by Adams on the Smithsonian bequest. In Choate’s case, it is clear that Adams still represented the primary authority on this issue. Adams’s shift from orator to judge was still influencing the formation of the bill. Despite Adams’s readiness to agree, the Grand Library Plan was not without adversaries. Senator J. M. Niles of Connecticut, echoing Adams on the national university plan, protested that if Smithson had intended a library, he would have said so. Finally, there were still congressmen who upheld Senator Calhoun’s opinion, such as John S. Chipman from Michigan, who spoke urgently that it was “a stain upon the history of the country, an insult to the American nation” to accept this gift from an Englishman. He objected to the bill’s forming a corporation, which seemed to him no different from incorporating a United States bank, “carrying with it all the features of an aristocracy, the most offensive that could be established. . . .”105 If there was any agreement among the members of the congressional audience on the issue of the Smithsonian, it was that there would be no agreement. With this recognition, the forum was open for a new kind of progress and an unexpected conclusion. There was now a readiness among the debaters to agree to some argument even if it meant conceding parts of their own arguments. Strangely, this readiness arrived at the point of greatest and most varied disagreement on the best way to fulfill Smithson’s trust, when no single debater’s plan seemed to satisfy a majority of the audience. This ironic phenomenon is explainable with Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s help. As noted in chapter 2, their theory of the power of dissociated pairs is based on the prototypical opposition between appearance and reality. Persuasive power naturally resides in what the audience believes to be real. For the Smithsonian debates, this translates into various proposals and refutations of the pair:

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apparent increase and diffusion of knowledge vs. real increase and diffusion of knowledge But by association, this pair was linked and used persuasively with a variety of other, particular pairs: unknown vs. known theory vs. facts doing vs. teaching

abstract knowledge vs. concrete knowledge practice vs. theory truthful vs. useful

Each speaker’s arguments were based on his assessment of the audience, and his judgment concerning their valuation of one side of each pair over the other. Based on conflicting assessments of the speakers, the arguments progressed in opposition to each other. By the end of the Twenty-eighth Congress, the result of the debate was a web of tangled and opposing concepts of what the Smithsonian should be and do. There was so much disagreement that it seemed impossible for any single solution to gain assent from a majority in the audience. It is precisely at this point, and not before, that compromise became a necessity for any legislative action to be accomplished at all. Even Adams seemed close to compromising his firebrand for empirical research. Both honorable men and fortune seekers had entered the argument to control the Smithsonian bequest, but in the end the common motive for argumentation was to eliminate division among the debaters. The ideas that came to be most important in the final negotiations were rhetorical constructions made up of the most popular parts from key speeches and bills delivered throughout the decade-long debate. In terms of Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory of rhetoric, this final movement of the Smithsonian debate is a “convergence of arguments.” They write: “If several distinct arguments lead to a single conclusion, be it general or partial, final or provisional, the value attributed to the conclusion and to each separate argument will be augmented”106 This method of concluding a debate with a “convergence argument” is the best explanation for the final rhetorical event in Congress that led to the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution. It is a complex resolution to a multilayered rhetorical process, governed every step of the way by the ever-changing audience appealed to in each argument. Clearly, the rhetorical process of a debate is more complex than the considerations for any single speech. Almost all congressmen involved in the Smithsonian arguments agreed on the need for a compromise, but even this agreement had its factions. As Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca explain, “what for one side is the end of the debate is for the other merely a step toward a later conclusion.”107

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At the beginning of the Twenty-ninth Congress in 1845, the tension surrounding the Smithsonian bequest had reached its peak. Smithson’s treasure was waiting to be captured, and many skillful orators had eyes trained on it, while Adams reminded them sternly of their moral responsibilities and the consequences of their actions. Newly elected Robert Dale Owen, thirty-six years Adams’s junior, finally prepared a new kind of bill that would break this pattern and become an act of incorporation for the Smithsonian Institution. Robert Dale Owen was a peacemaker within the tempestuous scene of the Smithsonian debate. The motives of cooperation and compromise had a strong history in his family. His father was British reformer Robert Owen, whose driving ideology had been that men’s characters are shaped by their surroundings, and that they can be improved in a society based on cooperation. The younger Owen had worked hard to promote this socialist ideology, both as a common school teacher in his father’s Scottish utopian community for coal miners, New Lanark, and as one of the founders of the New Harmony community in the United States. He also had a natural talent for persuasion; fifteen years after the Smithsonian inception he would write an impassioned letter to President Lincoln, urging him to emancipate the slaves of the South. This powerful document prompted Lincoln to say, “It thrilled me like a bugle call.”108 Five days later, the Emancipation Proclamation was signed and issued. The primary purpose for Owen’s Smithsonian bill was to bring about a state of compromise that would actually cause the institution to come into being and commence its business of “increasing and diffusing knowledge” among mankind. Owen’s Smithsonian bill contains the fruits of passionate and often morally driven arguments over the previous eight years. He gives credit to John Davis, Joel Poinsett, Rufus Choate, Asher Robbins, Richard Rush, and of course Adams in his speech as he discusses each contribution. But in addition to these elements of compromise, Owen took a risk and proposed a new section 7, which would establish a school for training common school teachers. Adams, of course, squashed it immediately. The section reads: [W]hereas the most effectual mode of promoting the general diffusion of knowledge is by judiciously conducted common schools . . . be it further enacted that the board shall establish some suitable person as professor of common school instruction, with such other professors, chiefly of the more useful sciences and arts. . . . Provided that, however, there shall not be established in connection with the Institution, any school of

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law, or medicine, or divinity, nor any professorship of ancient languages.109 Without having experienced firsthand the long and heated arguments over education, Owen had no way of predicting his audience’s exasperated response to this haggard issue. The bill also included a close alliance with the National Institute, of which Owen was a member. He would have two of the directors on the board from this institute, which, he argued, was already engaged in original scientific research. Adams, who believed the institution should stand on its own to avoid any danger of being overshadowed by a sister or managing organization, could not agree with this. Furthermore, before referring the bill to his colleagues, Owen remarked: “I hope the House will suffer me to say one word on the subject. The money appropriated by this bill has been in our Treasury between seven and eight years; and, in all that time, not a dollar of it has been used in accordance with the will of the testator. We can not suppose Congress unwilling to act in such a matter.”110 Of course not all the money had been in “our Treasury” during that time; the interest had been invested in state stocks now in default. Owen’s lack of thorough knowledge about these financial details, at the time he made this statement, betrays his recent acquaintance with the arguments and especially Adams’s guardianship of the bequest. Nevertheless, his attempt to gather and assemble multiple threads of earlier rhetoric in the debate gained the respect of his peers. With such widely varying qualities in his bill and oration, Owen’s contribution to the debate shows the rhetorical benefits of his fresh and conciliatory perspective, on the one hand, but also some impropriety resulting from a lack of direct experience in the previous arguments. As plans for the Naval Observatory in Washington neared completion, Adams became ready and willing to listen to Owen’s proposal for a compromise, for the sake of putting the fund to some good use rather than leaving it to the greedy wrestling of Congress. Furthermore, Adams was now seventy-nine years old. As Aristotle reminds us in his Art of Rhetoric, our elders can sometimes “show an excessive lack of energy” as listeners and judges.111 To his commendation, however, the tired and ailing Adams still maintained his personal quest to guard the sacred trust against misuse. It was Adams who embodied the “final say” about Owen’s bill, both as judge—and as opponent on the lingering issue of education. It would be his last great political accomplishment. Owen’s Smithsonian bill and corresponding oration incorporated enough of what each congressman identified as his own purpose to

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bring the group into a moment of compromise, agreement, and fertile harmony. Not that the struggles would end there—the interpretation of Smithson’s words would be hotly debated outside of Congress, among the newly founded institution’s Regents, for many more years—even to this day. But the time had come in Congress’s founding debate to allow some action, that aim of all political rhetoric in public life, to take the place of words. Owen, who had replaced Adams as the new chair of the House committee on the Smithsonian, asked to schedule a special order of the day for the Smithsonian bill—April 22, 1846. In his speech, Owen returned to the early debaters’ tactic of interpreting the meaning of Smithson’s specific words, “increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” This was a last attempt in Congress to get to the heart of a matter that had over the years become so complicated and obscure. As he began, Owen takes time conditioning his audience with shame about the years spent arguing. He induces the emotion by stressing the neglect of a duty imparted in a generous man’s last testament. This neatly draws on the initial energy Adams spent in praising the honor of the bequest and its donor, and in specifically pledging the “sacred trust” of the United States to apply the fund. Furthermore, Owen stresses the years that have passed since the bequest first came into American hands. This is a tactic, as Aristotle tells us, to increase the emotion’s intensity. The longer the trust lies fallow, the greater the shame of the U.S. government. Owen implies that Congress’s delay and lack of responsibility will damage the reputation of the United States He scolds them, “Small encouragement is there in such tardiness as this to others as wealthy and as liberal as Smithson and Girard to follow their noble example; small encouragement to such men to entrust to our care bequests for human improvement.”112 To clinch the amplification in this emotional proof, he returns to the transcendent motives Adams used in the beginning of the debate: What, then, shall we say of a great Government that accepts, solemnly accepts before God and man, a bequest for a purpose sacred and holy, if any such purpose there be upon earth, and then, indolent or indifferent, so braves the just censure of the world, so disappoints the generous confidence reposed in it, as to neglect and postpone year after year every measure for the administration of that bequest? . . . Delay is denial. . . . Nonuse works forfeiture as surely as misuse.113 The appeal here to a higher purpose is clear. The many factions in Congress, each having a purpose in mind for the money, are all united

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in one hierarchically supreme purpose, “sacred and holy,” “accepted before God and man.” Is Owen drawing on a supernatural motive, as Adams undoubtedly does when he appeals to providence? Probably not the same God, since Owen had been a member of a group of agnostics in France. The appeal from divine purpose he uses here is a rhetorical construct designed to convince his Christian audience. At this point, he moves formally into the theme he has been leading up to: the government’s responsibility and morality, a motive used in socialist discourse throughout history, and one in line with Adams’s message for the promotion of science. “We are not legally accountable,” he states; “The heavier, for that very reason, is our moral responsibility.” He compares Congress to a gambler who does not meet his promises, pointing out the shame in “hiding behind our sovereignty” rather than paying the debt of public service with this money. He concedes that the intentions of Congress are on the whole good, that “there is a right feeling on this subject, “but as is so often the case, the sentiment has not ripened into action.” Owen’s job, then, is to move them to action. Following some original efforts at interpreting Smithson’s will, Owen provides a brief history of the legislative proceedings on the fund, up to the point when Adams had defeated Professor Wayland’s proposal for a college of ancient languages. From this point in the debate, Owen explains, the increase of knowledge was assumed by the speakers to be synonymous with original scientific research, which, Adams had argued, was the epitome of discovery. Following this plan, Owen claims, his own bill excludes “mere literature,” Latin and Greek, medicine, and law. Richard Rush was the first to propose a building with grounds enough to seed. His proposal also included publications; a course of lectures on physical and moral sciences, government, and public law; and salaries ample enough to attract the best in each field. Most of this Owen includes in his bill. Finally, “the venerable gentleman from Massachusetts [Adams], who had labored in this good cause with more zeal and perseverance than any other man,” believed that the fund should not endow any “school, college or ecclesiastical establishment.” Owen claims he adopts this, as well as “the improvement of all arts and sciences,” which Adams had indicated as the best motive in his 1840 report. Owen also followed Adams’s recommendation to use only the interest of the Smithsonian fund, and to keep the principal in the U.S. Treasury, where it would supposedly be safe from those who might abuse it. By giving a selective historical narrative of the debate up to this point, Owen draws on the key ideas and group associations that would cause the greatest number of congressmen to identify with his plan. In

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his father’s spirit of social cooperation, he was determined to negotiate a middle ground. In a sense, he wanted to embrace all the contraries, to please everyone just enough to break the gridlock and initiate some action on the fund, even if it remained indeterminate and vague in terms of its execution. Time, as I have mentioned, was one of his primary means of persuasion, so that getting a bill passed, any bill that met his ideals of social responsibility, was a point he pressed repeatedly throughout the speech. He seemed to promise that the details would work themselves out later; all that Congress needed to do, to placate their warring attitudes, was to agree on this plan, which would, ironically, still leave room for hope on almost every side of the argument. A long argument refuting the Grand Library Plan follows Owen’s historical narration of the debate. Although there are gems within all of these volumes that are unequaled even today, he contends, “But then, also, what clouds of idle verbiage! What loads of ostentatious technicalities! It is but of late years that even the disciple of science has deigned to simplify and translate; formerly his great object seems to have been to obscure and mystify.”114 In this appeal to the class of thinkers molded by the Enlightenment, Adams among them, Owen bows to the Baconian influence on rhetorical expression so prevalent at the time. The sharp opposition Owen creates in terms of the library bill redefines the social responsibility he has in mind. He implies that such a plan is an elitist abuse of class structure. Only a few scholars could benefit from a library, when this large sum of money should actually be used to help the many. He argues that so many books would remain unused, “And so of these vast and bloated book-gatherings that sleep . . . in Europe.”115 In a turn to patriotic ethos, Owen claims that our own objects of pride—freedom and equality—should erase entirely any “pang of envy and grief”116 that Choate feels over Europe’s better intellectual life; in fact, they dwarf these “petty antiquarian triumphs.” Freedom and, especially, equality: these are Owen’s new god-terms, vast titles that stretch to envelop even the “social responsibility” behind his earlier appeals to shame. “Look abroad over our far-spreading land, then glance across to the monarchies of the Old World, and say if I speak not the truth,” Owen advises his audience. Then, in an almost Whitman-like passage that builds poetic passion as it turns to the common man, he leads from the touchstone of American democracy to the overarching god-term of equality: Far other is it even in the lowliest cabin of our frontier West. It is an equal you meet there; one to whom honors and office,

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even the highest, are as open as to yourself. . . . I have heard in many a backwoods cabin, lighted but by the blazing log heap, arguments on government, views of national policy, judgments of men and things, that, for sound sense and practical wisdom, would not disgrace any legislative body upon earth.117 .

This, Owen exclaims, should never cause grief and envy, but only pride, because money cannot buy equality. Democracy, party politics, American economics, all of these are included under the great conceptual umbrella of equality. Owen then states that he holds the quest for equality in education to be a “republican obligation”—echoing once more the theme of social responsibility. By this point in Owen’s argument, the discussion of equality justifies (at least in his mind) the inclusion of a normal school section in his bill. This is the only new and unaccounted for item. The Smithsonian’s normal school, he advises, should not take the place of state schools, but it should supplement them and provide training for their own teachers. Finally, he is careful to include a smattering of promotion for scientific research in his bill, and in fact implies that there is a moral imperative to do so by quoting Adams’s 1840 report: “In the commission of every trust there is an implied tribute of the soul to the integrity and intelligence of the trustee; and there is also an implied call for the faithful exercise of these properties to the fulfillment of the purpose of the trust.”118 In his conclusion, Owens attempted to appropriate Adams’s key term for scientific research, progress of the mind, for his common school plan. It is children, he argued, who will fulfill the liberal desire to improve man progressively: Thanks to the stirring spirit of progressive improvement [my italics], all this, in our age, is changed . . . reaching the masses and awakening a consciousness of deficiency, a spirit of inquiry. . . . The essential is that, if little we can do, that it be well done, be done faithfully, in the spirit of the trust, in the spirit of the age, in a spirit not restrictive, not exclusive, but diffusive, universal.119 Proving to be something of an idealist and a contributor to a more progressive worldview than even Adams could prescribe to, Owen leaves his audience thirsting for a realization of perfection. His rhetoric seems to reach above even the idea of compromise, the usual congressional means of obtaining order among spokesmen competing for conflicting principles. As Burke explains it:

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The “dialectical” order would leave the competing voices in a jangling relation with one another (a conflict solved faute de mieux by “horse trading”); but the “ultimate” order would place these competing voices themselves in a hierarchy, or sequence…with a “guiding idea” or “unitary principle” behind the diversity of voices.120 This is precisely what Owen attempts to accomplish with an almost mystical reference to the universal spirit of the trust and of the age. James Berlin, in his writings on the rhetoric of nineteenth-century America, describes the influence of a “romantic” strain of rhetoric. He claims that romantic rhetoric had an impact on public discourse throughout the century, even though it was ignored in universities until the early twentieth century. He traces its popularity to the Transcendentalist movement in the United States.121 Of all the speeches in the Smithsonian debate, Owen’s seems most to reflect Berlin’s description of romantic ideals in nineteenth-century American rhetoric. His controlling idea of a universal spirit of equality resembles the Emersonian ideals of the Transcendentalist movement, and his problem seems to be, as Berlin writes of romantic rhetoric, “to find a way of expressing through language what itself transcends language.”122 Yet, the tropes Berlin describes as the tools of this “new strain” of rhetoric—analogical method and metaphor used to express a unity of the ideal and the material—are firmly rooted in the classical tradition. Whether or not Owen was actually influenced by an American form of romantic rhetoric, he does, in any case, turn to a conciliatory and unitive function of rhetoric. This turn itself implies that the several individuals in the debate, each with their own subjectively constructed ideas of the “spirit of the age,” could never reach an agreement on reality, much less the best use for the fund. Compromise is the only solution for this kind of rhetoric. But, as I have shown in my analysis of Owen’s speech, the rhetorical methods he uses to reach this conclusion show a consistent neoclassical influence. Like Adams, Owen uses traditional rhetorical techniques to appeal to opinions and emotions present in his nineteenth-century audience. Of the dozens of Smithsonian proposals presented in Congress up to this point, Owen’s was undoubtedly the most well received. Whether this was because of exhaustion or because of the force of Owen’s eloquence, it is hard to say. Adams response would clench the compromise. Although he was willing to abandon his plan for an observatory, he would not give up on the principles behind it. His final speech on the Smithsonian

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Institution once again touched on the three points with which he had launched the debate in 1836. Unfortunately, neither the congressional record nor Adams’s collected manuscripts contain the entire text of Adams’s closing speech in the House. Congressional documentation does, however, summarize the important points of Adams’s refutation of Owen’s common school proposal. Adams noted that two or three principles should be maintained in administering the fund. One was that it should support itself and never cost the people of the United States a dollar. Another was that no part should ever be used for the ordinary education of children. Adams said he felt that it was unworthy of the people of the United States to receive foreign aid for the education of their children. It was their own duty to do it for themselves. Another ground on which he opposed using the fund for ordinary education was the inequality of the benefits it would confer. The states of New York, Virginia, and Massachusetts (a fact of which he was proud) had already made provision for the education of their children, so that they would not thank Congress for this application of the fund.123 Nothing, Adams was certain, was further from Smithson’s intentions than the simple education of children; “the communication of knowledge already possessed” had nothing whatsoever to do with discovery. “Old Man Eloquence” gruffly told Congress that he would rather see “the whole money thrown in the Potomac” than to spend a single dollar on a normal school.124 On his remaining two points, namely the observatory and the protection of the fund’s capital sum, the record notes that Adams “was delighted that the bill applied a portion of the interest to the science of astronomy,” and that the original sum would be a perpetual capital. He referred to his efforts in the House to found an observatory, and the delay that indecision and poorly invested funds had caused. Referring to the financial status of the Smithsonian fund, the record stated: He proposed that no appropriation for the purposes of this institution should be made a tax on the people of the United States. Should this be agreed to and become a part of the act, he believed that it would be more effectual in persuading the people of Arkansas to pay this money than would the thunder of the line-of-battle ships with which we have lately been threatened in the British Parliament.125 Adams also disapproved of the National Institute’s management of the fund. He was of the opinion that that organization served the political interests of its members. Apparently as eager to be done with the debate as to satisfy the relentless old man, the House approved Owen’s revised bill on April 29,

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1846, with Adams’s amendments striking the normal school and a stipulation that no tax should be appropriated for the benefit of the institution. The final vote was 72 to 42.126 Adams’s observatory plan was nowhere to be found in the final bill, as it had disintegrated four years before due to a curious chain of events to be described in chapter 6. Many of his contemporaries acknowledged Adams’s influence, not so much as an administrative power behind the Smithsonian and new observatories founded during this period (including the U.S. Naval Observatory), but as a primary ideological inspiration for both. This was not an insignificant role during the Jacksonian Era. In the final Smithsonian act, the value that prevailed was the one Adams had set up in the beginning: a sacred trust and obligation to increase the total quantity of human knowledge through discovery rather than education. While Adams’s rhetoric in support of science may not have been the only cause of either legislation regarding the naval observatory or the Smithsonian’s focus on scientific research, he certainly had led the long and formidable resistance to opponents of these ideas. On August 10, 1846, the Smithsonian Institution was established “to increase and diffuse knowledge among men.” The full text of the act and its amendments is in appendix B of this volume. According to the “Digest of the Act of Congress Establishing the Smithsonian Institution”127 prepared by Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian, the principle results of the act can be broken down as follows. The name “Smithsonian Institution” was given to an organization consisting of certain government officials: the President of the United States, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of the Navy, the Postmaster General, the Chief Justice, the Commissioner of Patents, and the Mayor of Washington, D.C. These government officials could meet for the purpose of supervising the institution and advising the Board of Regents, which was to be the managing arm of the institution. The Board of Regents was (and still is) composed of the Vice President of the United States; the Chief Justice; the Mayor of Washington; three members of the Senate and three of the House. Two of the congressional members were to be both residents of the city of Washington and members of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, although this later stipulation was repealed in 1865 after the National Institute dissolved.128 The Regents, whose duties would be gratuitous, would conduct the business of the Smithsonian, although they could be subject to the censure of the aforementioned government organization. They were to elect a secretary of the board, a chancellor, and three members to be an executive committee. The first duty after organization of the Regents

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would be to erect a building, which would house all collections of art and scientific specimens belonging to the United States. Special provisions were made to keep the property of James Smithson (books, manuscripts, mineral specimens, etc.) apart from other property of the institution. And lastly, Congress retained the right to alter or amend any provision in the act.129 Because of this last stipulation, rhetorical deliberations continue to be an essential part of the Smithsonian today. When Joseph Henry was elected the first secretary of the Smithsonian, he took on the duties required of him in the Smithsonian act, including the supervision of the new Smithsonian Library and Smithsonian Museum. The new museum was founded in order to exhibit objects from all areas of knowledge, from the arts to the physical sciences, but there was a distinct emphasis on natural history. All government-owned objects of art and of “foreign and curious research,” and all plant and mineral specimens, including the natural history specimens from the Wilkes expedition, were soon moved to the new Smithsonian building on the National Mall, where resident scientists arranged and classified them to facilitate ongoing study and research. In addition to funding for the museum, an annual appropriation of $25,000 was devoted to the gradual formation of a library “composed of valuable works pertaining to all departments of human knowledge.” Thanks to the protection, promotion, and guidance of John Quincy Adams, the Smithsonian Institution had taken its first important steps in the pursuit of knowledge, under the protective wing of the United States government. His paternalistic support of institutional science and federal involvement in research for the sake of progress of the mind had finally borne fruit. His emphases on natural history, original research, and exhibitions for the public, which had been so hotly debated in Congress, would continue to influence the development of an institution destined to become the largest museum complex in the world.

CHAPTER

6

The Queen of Sciences and Her Democratic Champion: Adams’s Promotion of Astronomy

W

hile the practice of astronomy in America lagged behind Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it retained a certain distinction. Other scientists judged the state of their fields in comparison with the European example of astronomical observations, used to improve the quality and productivity of life. Classified as a subfield of geography, astronomy was particularly relevant to the ongoing development of navigation, an art that was essential for increasing trade.1 Before 1830, however, a permanent observatory was something Americans lacked. Where there was interest, there was virtually no public patronage and little knowledge of new theoretical and mathematical developments that were taking place in Europe. Adams’s father had encouraged some research in astronomy in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, such as the work of Nathaniel Bowditch, and the results appeared in the academy’s Memoirs. Franklin’s American Philosophical Society also published astronomical observations in its Transactions, most notably the contributions of David Rittenhouse and Andrew Ellicott. For the most part, however, these observations were conducted not in observatories but by individuals using their own small telescopes.2 David F. Musto has explained the demise of the first American observatory, built by astronomer David Rittenhouse in Philidephia in 1781 and given to the American Philosophical Society in 1796. Because of its growing urban location, the use of this observatory became increasingly difficult, and the building was returned to the Rittenhouse family in 1810. After this, attempts by the American Philosophical Society and Harvard College failed to secure enough private funding to construct a building or purchase instruments.3 Adams had wanted Harvard to have the first permanent observatory in the United States, 163

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and had even pledged one thousand dollars for the purpose in 1823, but Harvard never collected the money because other donations could not be secured.4 With funding from its president, Joseph Caldwell, the University of North Carolina finally built a small observatory in 1831, but unfortunately it burned down seven years later.5 The United States relied almost exclusively on British almanacs for navigation during this period, and federal legislators remained opposed to appropriating public funds for research in astronomy. There was strong aversion to Adams’s attempts to win federal support for an observatory during his presidency. The majority of Congress believed that support for scientific research was a breach of the federal constitution, unless it posed little financial risk and could produce immediate utilitarian results for the agrarian economy. The memory of this political aversion haunted Adams ten years later, during his continued efforts to benefit American astronomy in the House of Representatives. Public interest in astronomy, however, had meanwhile begun to show signs of life. A brief list of observatories founded between 1830 and 1840 confirms that Adams’s rhetoric was part of a trend toward general curiosity about this science, which he had helped to nourish with his public speaking. The University of North Carolina built the first college observatory in 1831. Construction of the oldest observatory in the United States today, the Hopkins Observatory at Williams College, was finished in 1836. Shortly after construction of this observatory, permanent mounted telescopes in dome structures were erected at Western Reserve College at Hudson, Ohio (1837); the Military Academy at West Point (1839); and at Central High School in Philadelphia (1840).6 Important publications such as the “Report on the Progress of Astronomy in This Century” (1832) of Britain’s Astronomer Royal George Biddle Airy and John Herschel’s Treatise on Astronomy (1833, reprinted in America in 1834) sparked more public interest, as did lecture series by scientists such as Cincinnati’s Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel.7 During the 1840s, the active practice of astronomy came to fruition with several community and college observatories, the most famous of which was the Cincinnati observatory, founded in 1843 primarily due to of the work of Ormsby Mitchel. Among other observatories founded in the 1840s were ones at Tuscaloosa, Alabama (1843), Georgetown (1843), Amherst (1847), and Shelby College (1847).8 As chair of the committee on the Smithsonian in the House, Adams submitted several bills to Congress in the 1830s and 1840s proposing the construction of a national observatory in Washington. In his committee reports, and in his frequent public lectures and private corre-

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spondence on the subject, Adams often looked to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich as the model for his proposals. In the appendixes of these reports Adams included letters he had written to the Reverend George B. Airy, asking questions about the founding, history, cost, maintenance, duties, instruments, and activities of the Royal Observatory, along with a detailed, six-page letter from Airy answering these questions. He also discussed new observatories in France and in Russia.9 Despite political bias against Adams himself, the effect of these descriptions on his audience was to water the seed of desire, already planted by the unfulfilled efforts of small communities and colleges before 1830, to catch up with Europe in the international pursuit of knowledge. In this way, Adams’s contributions to the Smithsonian debate in Congress during the 1830s and 1840s, especially the publication of both his committee reports and his public lectures on the bequest, played a part in the growing public interest in astronomy after 1830.10 In the following sections, I analyze specific examples of Adams’s oratory promoting astronomy in terms of his classical rhetorical theory. I pay particular attention to his own advice to Harvard students, as well as to voluminous diary entries, that show his invention and composing process in action. With knowledge of his rhetorical theory, the purposes of Adams’s speeches become clearer, providing a fuller picture of his audiences’ attitudes toward astronomy and their disposition to act accordingly.

ADAMS’S CONGRESSIONAL ARGUMENTS FOR AN OBSERVATORY Adams’s congressional promotion of astronomy began with a shortterm failure to secure a Smithsonian observatory but ended with the gratifying origins of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Although his plan for a Smithsonian observatory did not become a reality until after his death, the arguments he began to construct in promotion of science during this time became the basis of a larger motive to impart in the American public an interest and esteem for astronomy. He would later use the material in these deliberative arguments for other, grassroots audiences as his motive shifted to praising astronomy for a pragmatic public. When Congress accepted Smithson’s bequest in 1838, it agreed to preserve the capital sum and reinvest the interest until a decision could be made concerning the bequest’s allocation. Working under the

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assumption that the first few years’ interest would fund scientific and educational projects, congressmen began to argue over what particular uses the fund should have. Adams, who saw astronomy as the queen of all sciences, proposed that the first seven years’ interest be used to build an astronomical observatory—simply a telescope and domed structure for physical observations—and to secure the means to publish navigational and other useful discoveries related to astronomy.11 An amateur astronomer himself, Adams had visited several observatories in his travels to Russia and Europe. He believed that knowledge of the stars was important to the economic, political, and international development of the nation. According to Deborah Jean Warner, nineteenth-century supporters of astronomy saw this science not only as a practical aid to navigation and sea trade, but also as a benefit to the prestige and cohesion of the young nation, as “conducive to independent thought and a valuable ally of democracy.”12 Adams made use of all of these benefits in his political promotion of astronomy. Unfortunately, his efforts fell on unsympathetic ears, at least in his congressional audience, for many years. At the beginning of the Twenty-sixth Congress (1839–1841), as chair of the committee on the Smithsonian bequest, Adams delivered his first report. The purpose of this speech was twofold: first, to refute Senator Asher Robbins’s popular proposal to use Smithson’s money to found a national public university, and second, to introduce his proposal to found an observatory. Adams’s 1840 report on the Smithsonian, as did all of his speeches on astronomy, made use of the systematic art of classical rhetorical invention and argumentation that he had taught in his Harvard Lectures on Rhetoric years before. In addition, he drew on the image his audience had of him as a mature and ethical civic leader, following the Ciceronian principles of the ideal statesman orator. The benefactor’s intent was the primary reason behind Adams’s belief that the fund should be used for scientific discovery and not for public education. Since American universities were not yet conceived to be institutions dedicated to research and discovery, as well as instruction in acquired knowledge, Adams’s argument could make this distinction convincing. Adams also emphasized the benefits of building up a store of new knowledge for future generations of Americans, using a light metaphor for this knowledge, since the “illumination” of wisdom would certainly result from close study of the heavens. Adams’s use of a guardian ethos prophetically presented the United States as a self-designated guardian of other nations, but in terms of scientific knowledge.

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As he neared the climactic section of his speech, Adams prepared the audience for his arguments for an observatory. Conscious of his listeners’ disparaging opinions on the use of the fund, he first established common ground on the general subject of knowledge: no [personal] preference . . . is indicated by [Mr. Smithson’s] will. It is knowledge, the source of all human wisdom and of all beneficent power; knowledge, as far transcending the postulated lever of Archimedes as the universe transcends this speck of earth upon its face; knowledge, the attribute of Omnipotence, of which man alone in the physical and material world is permitted to partake; the increase and diffusion of which among men is the result to which this . . . fortune is devoted. . . . Let not, then, any branch or department of human knowledge be excluded from its equitable share. But it is believed that no one science deserves or requires the immediate application of the…accruing income of the fund so urgently as practical astronomy.13 A change in voice from the active to a generalized, passive “it is believed” accompanies his turn from a universal treatment of knowledge to the more controversial subject of astronomy. This passage also linked astronomy with an “attribute of Omnipotence”—an identification he used again and again. As opposed to the national university plan, a national observatory would have a purpose in legal compliance with Smithson’s will. With this premise, Adams launched into a deductive proof of the purpose of astronomy, finally amplifying the subject with a chain of examples and a metaphorical crescendo. The purpose of this use of ratiocination was to prove that the object of Smithson’s will would be expediently fulfilled by an observatory: The express object of an observatory is the increase and diffusion of knowledge by new discovery. . . . The influence of the moon, of the planets, our next door neighbors of the solar system, of the fixed stars, scattered over the blue expanse in multitudes exceeding the power of human computation, and at distances of which imagination herself can form no distinct conception; the influence of all these upon the globe which we inhabit, and upon the condition of man, its dying and deathless inhabitant, is great and mysterious. . . . But to the vigilance of a sleepless eye, to the toil of a tireless hand, and to the meditations of a thinking, combining, and analyzing mind, secrets

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are successively revealed . . . which seem to lift him from the earth to the threshold of his eternal abode, to lead him blindfolded up to the council chamber of Omnipotence, and there, stripping the bandage from his eyes, bid him look undazzled at the throne of God.14 The deductive reasoning in this line of argument may be represented as a syllogism: The object of an observatory is the increase and diffusion of knowledge. The increase and diffusion of knowledge is the object of Smithson’s will. Therefore, an observatory is the object of Smithson’s will. The middle premise, as in most enthymemes, is unstated, because Adams assumes the audience already believes it to be true. Not only would an observatory be expedient, but it would also greatly expand the potential of Smithson’s gift in the future. By associating the telescope with the author of Creation, Adams draws on a traditional viewpoint advanced since Antiquity—that astronomy elevates those who study it because its object is God’s handiwork. Astronomers since Ptolemy, Galileo, and Copernicus had argued that achieving greater understanding of the universe and the mysteries of time and space would add to our appreciation of God’s creation. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural theologians, such as the English William Paley and the American Edward Hitchcock, taught that evidence drawn from the mechanisms of the universe could establish the existence of God and allow inference of his characteristics.15 Framed this way, Adams’s identification of the heavens with knowledge of God also reflects Psalm 19, “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge”16—an allusion that added to the authority of Adams’s rhetoric for his nineteenth-century audience, many of whom were eager for ways to see science and religion in harmony. After these appeals to tradition, Adams turned to inductive reasoning to present an example of the potentials of astronomical discovery, as it related to research in geography and navigation. Continuing his metaphor of spiritual mysteries to be discovered, he suggested that the study of magnetism promised to be a vast and interesting topic of study for Smithsonian astronomers:

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What an unknown world of mind, for example, is yet teeming in the womb of time, to be revealed in tracing the causes of the sympathy between the magnet and the pole . . . that unseen, immaterial spirit, which walks with us through the most entangled forests, over the most interminable wilderness, and across every region of the pathless deep, by day, by night, in the calm serene of a cloudless sky, and in the howling of the hurricane or the typhoon.17 Evoking the geophysical tradition of Alexander von Humboldt, Adams authors a metaphor that endows the nineteenth-century astronomical study of the Earth and its atmosphere with a certain wonder and grandeur, over and above its usefulness for mapmaking and navigation.18 While his style differed from the simple, direct “perspicuity” already used by some congressmen in the middle of the nineteenth century, Adams’s 1810 Lectures on Rhetoric permitted an expansive style on occasion—a style that twentieth-century critic Richard Weaver terms “the spaciousness of the old rhetoric.”19 When the cause is great, Adams advised, “. . . the orator may fairly consider himself, as addressing not only his immediate hearers, but the world at large; and for all future times. . . . He takes the vote of unborn millions upon the debate of a little senate, and incorporates himself and his discourse with the general history of mankind.”20 The style of these arguments also calls to mind Adams’s comments on the ethos of a mature orator: “If advanced in years, and elevated in reputation and dignity, the gravity of his manner and the weight of his sentiment should justly correspond with the reverence, due to his station.”21 But Adams’s arguments for astronomy were not all so lofty. Drawing on his Jacksonian audience’s preference for the practical and the useful, Adams dwelled on the history of astronomy and its benefits to the practical arts of timekeeping and navigation. He paid particular attention to authoritative precedent in this section, explaining that “the discoveries of Newton were the results of calculations founded upon the observations . . . of Copernicus, of Tycho Brahe, of Kepler, of Flamsteed. . . .”22 He named several successful observatories in Europe and the practical and theoretical fruits of these institutions, drawing on the American sense of inferiority to the intellectual institutions of the Old World. Using simple quantitative comparison, he informed his hearers that European governments had almost invariably funded observatories, “the number of which in that quarter of the globe is not at this time less than 120, while throughout the whole range of these United States there is not one.”23 In the Lectures on Rhetoric, Adams

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claimed that jealousy was the passion particularly suited to use in ceremonial praise (that is, in epideictic oratory). The fact that he invented epideictic arguments for this report indicates that the purpose was not only political expediency and usefulness, but necessarily also a better appreciation among his audience for the observations made by astronomers. Adams concluded his arguments by contrasting the smallness of the educational proposal to the magnificent expanse of astronomy, given its association with rising technology and advances in science. He explained that “all the benefits [of the university proposal] would necessarily be confined to a very small number of students.” Smithson had intended the fund to benefit all mankind, not only one city or class of people. He ended by listing the benefits of an observatory— international prestige, navigational improvement, increase in geographical knowledge, and commercial opportunity. His final sentence brought his hearers down from the heights of a sublime vision to the simple, practical means-and-ends rhetorical topics of a governmental committee: “The bequest of James Smithson fortunately furnishes the means, without needing the assistance of any contribution from public funds of the nation.”24 While Adams lengthy arguments praising astronomy sometimes “smelled too much of the lamp,” as his Lectures on Rhetoric had warned about bookish compositions, they did have a lingering effect on many listeners. Most congressmen and many private individuals in the astronomical community acknowledged Adams’s persistent work at promoting the science, and his role as the primary political and cultural spokesman for the new observatories founded during this time. In fact, it was Adams’s arguments for a Smithsonian observatory that largely provided the rhetorical fuel necessary to achieve the founding of the U.S. Naval Observatory. In 1842, Lieutenant James Gilliss of the U.S. Navy, inspired in part by Adams’s efforts to promote astronomy in the Smithsonian debate, succeeded in his attempts to appropriate funds for a naval observatory in Washington, D.C. Congress had remained skeptical of Adams’s persistent attempts to found an observatory, probably because of the memory of political bias against his program as president. So, why did it now vote to fund an observatory for the Navy, after years of argument over the Smithsonian? According to Steven J. Dick, the reason for this apparent contradiction was precisely because it was not proposed by Adams, and it was not called an “observatory.” By naming it the Depot of Charts and Instruments, Congress avoided giving Adams credit for this first national observatory. A Depot of Charts and Instruments would clearly signal the

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functional purposes of astronomy for navigation, while avoiding overt association with Adams’s interest in astronomy’s ideological usefulness for building a national identity. The support of Senator W. C. Preston (South Carolina), in particular, was crucial in passing Gilliss’s proposal. At the time of Gilliss’s proposal, Preston was also presenting a bill to place the Smithsonian under control of the National Institute for the Promotion of Sciences, in opposition to Adams’s observatory bill.25 The poor legislative timing of Adams’s concrete political aim, however, should not rob him of credit for his epideictic rhetorical purpose: to lay groundwork for a national identity that could accept the value of original astronomical research. In the light of this cultural contribution to the history of American science, his immediate political purpose appears less significant. Although the Smithsonian, after it’s founding in 1846, had little to do with astronomy until its astrophysical observatory opened in 1890, the naval observatory gave him great satisfaction. In respect to his cherished hope for the construction of a national observatory, the congressional record shows that Adams told Congress: he was delighted that an astronomical observatory—not perhaps so great as it should have been—had been smuggled into the number of the institutions of the country under the mast of a small depot for charts. There was not one word about it in the law . . . [but] he was very glad to hear that [his presidential plan to erect “lighthouses of the skies”] had grown into popular favor. He claimed no merit for the erection of the [naval] observatory; but in the course of his whole life, no conferring of honor, of interest, of office, had given him more delight than the belief that he had contributed, in some small degree, to produce these astronomical observatories, both here and elsewhere. He no longer wished any portion of this fund applied to an astronomical observatory.26 With the last year of his life (1848) close on the horizon, Congress finally approved Adams’s dream of “lighthouses of the skies.”

ADAMS’S PUBLIC SPEAKING TOURS ON ASTRONOMY As the public became more aware of James Smithson’s bequest to found an institution for the advancement of knowledge, organizations hoping to make use of the money began to make requests. Petitions were tendered to Congress favoring a library, a university, an agricultural station, and many other projects. Adams was a champion of the right of

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all citizens to petition Congress, and of advancement of learning in general, so he respectfully and patiently presented many of these petitions himself.27 However, his own hope for the money was to use the first seven years’ interest for a national observatory. He continued to present committee reports and a bill in an attempt to put his plan into action, but opposition was strong, and the debate was going nowhere. In the meantime, to generate more public interest in the science of astronomy, Adams made several public speaking engagements during which he told the story of the Smithsonian bequest and praised astronomy as the worthiest means of increasing and diffusing knowledge. In 1839, he gave a series of lectures at Quincy and Boston, at the invitation of the Lyceum of the Apprentice Mechanic’s Association. Although the audiences at these lectures were expecting a general address on a scientific or trade-related topic, Adams decided to take the opportunity to compose a lengthy narrative about the struggles in Congress concerning the Smithsonian bequest.28 Near the end of the debate, in 1843, he accepted another invitation to speak, this time at the dedication ceremony for the Cincinnati observatory. Again, he decided to use the occasion to stir popular interest in his plans for the Smithsonian bequest, but also to excite widespread esteem for astronomical discovery. When he accepted this invitation, he also accepted several other invitations along the way, so that the trip became a speaking tour headed westward to Ohio.29 In the process of composing the 1839 lectures to be given in Quincy and Boston, Adams endured not only the pressures of political opposition to his proposal, but also the stresses of great personal crisis. His youngest granddaughter, Georgiana Frances Adams, was ill with tuberculosis and near death. Often he sat up late into the night, listening to the child’s every labored breath.30 His own health was hardly robust at the time. In addition to rheumatism, he suffered a severe cold. But Adams was a man who knew no bounds to perseverance: as president, he had swum for an hour every morning in the Potomac, against the current, even in winter, despite painful arthritis in his arms and legs.31 There was little chance of his giving up on the Smithsonian debate, regardless of personal tribulations. Adams used his public speaking engagements in Quincy and Boston for both political and epideictic rhetorical purposes. His method of composing the lectures reveals more about this dual purpose than the speeches themselves. On the one hand, he used them to practice exhaustive political arguments in favor of an observatory but against spending the capital of the fund. He planned to use these arguments later in Congress. On the other hand, his praise of both the

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Smithsonian bequest and the science of astronomy served to rally popular enthusiasm, which could both intensify political pressure and educate the public on the importance of astronomy to the nation. On October 26, 1839, during the composition of the first lecture, Adams confided in his diary: This subject weighs deeply upon my mind. The private interests and sordid passions into which that fund has already fallen fill me with anxiety and apprehensions that it will be squandered upon cormorants or wasted in electioneering bribery. The apparent total indifference of Mr. Van Buren to the disposal of the money, with his general professions of disposition to aid me . . . the opposition, open and disguised, of John C. Calhoun, W. C. Preston [a member of the Senate committee], Waddy Thompson [a member of Adams’s own committee], even to the establishment of the Institution in any form; the utter prostration of any public spirit in the Senate, proved by the encouragement which they gave to the mean and selfish project of Asher Robbins to make a university, for him to be placed at the head of it . . . are so utterly discouraging that I despair of effecting anything for the honor of the country, or even to accomplish the purpose of the bequest— the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men. It is hard to toil through life for a great purpose with a conviction that it will be in vain; but possibly, seed now sown may bring forth some good fruit hereafter. . . . If I cannot prevent the disgrace of the country by the failure of the testator’s intention, by making it the subject of a lecture, I can leave a record for future time of what I have done, and what I would have done, to accomplish the great design, if executed well. And let not the supplication of the Author of all good be wanting.32 Adams’s comments reveal his dual purpose for the lectures, both to invent arguments for the present and to speak to future times. As he considered the future readers of his lectures and diary, he wanted to leave a “record” to protect his reputation, but he also hoped that there might be “some good fruit” produced from the seeds of his arguments. In classical rhetorical theory, epideictic rhetoric is a form of ceremonial praise or blame that aims not at immediate action, but at a change in the audience’s disposition that may lead to future action. The epideictic purpose of the lectures, as explained in his diary, seems to transcend the moment and encompass an audience of posterity. If his motive now seems a bit self-righteous, it is only because he knew that petty schemes

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continued to gain supporters, and that his advanced age might put an end to his promotion of short-term goals for the Smithsonian. He truly believed he was right on this issue, and he appealed to the public beyond the scope of special interests in Congress. Adams was certain that future readers of these public lectures, unbiased by contemporary partialities, would see the same universal goal of the Smithsonian bequest—the benefit of all mankind by scientific discovery. Twentieth-century rhetorical theorists Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca assign a special importance to epideictic rhetoric. Their description of this mode of oratory easily describes Adams’s purpose in these public lectures: “Being in no fear of contradiction, the speaker readily converts into universal values, if not eternal truths, that which has acquired a certain standing through unanimity. Epideictic speeches are most prone to appeal to . . . the supposedly unquestionable values.”33 Adams did not intend to make the subject of his lectures appear controversial, but rather to relate a simple narrative and to praise his subjects in terms of values that his audience would accept as universal. As Adams became absorbed in preparing his lectures for the tour, he realized he could not say everything in one lecture. He used his notes to himself to direct and refine his political purpose in relation to his audience: “My main object must be to prepare for action upon it [the Smithsonian bequest] at the approaching session of Congress, and to gather facts and arguments for a last effort to save the fund from misapplication, dilapidation and waste.”34 The text of the lectures reveals the shifting focus of their invention, caused by the pressure of the approaching deadline in Congress. At times, the purpose and audience seem confused—one moment he is engaged in an encomium on the timeless virtues of astronomy, and the next he argues deliberatively for a practical issue facing Congress, such as the use of only the interest of the Smithsonian fund. Adams’s diary shows that he hounded himself with self-criticism about the composition of these lectures. He worried about their effects on the public audience and the possible need to modify them if he failed in Quincy or in Boston. He considered the possibility of giving more lectures elsewhere at a later date: “If I can possibly rouse the public mind to take some interest in this foundation, it may save the fund from being utterly wasted and lost, and the more frequently I go before the public upon it, the more chances will there be for connecting public sympathies with it. The experiment is desperate, but with a blessing it may succeed.”35 Yet, as he finished writing his lectures, he confided in his diary, “I finished this day, my second Lecture upon the Smithsonian

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bequest. But they have been written under the harrow of such distress of mind, that they are unfit to go before the public, and I fear will be found insupportably tedious and dull.” His evaluation of the political arguments finds them lacking: I have done scarcely anything that I intended. I have not set forth at large the reasons for objecting to the application of any portion of the funds to purposes or institutions of education . . . [or] for devoting the appropriations for a series of years to an astronomical observatory. There are points upon which it will be important to dwell with power in the argument to be maintained before Congress, the preparation of which will be much more laborious and difficult than that of these Lectures. The arguments against the application of the funds to education are the multitudes of such institutions already existing, and the impossibility of equalising its benefits to all the people of the Union—State and Sectional jealousies, and no prospect of any evident and palpable increase of knowledge. The arguments in favour of an observatory, the history of that of Greenwich, and superadded facts.36 In his diary, however, Adams continued his inventive efforts even as he criticized them. His comments to himself, assessing the worth of his rhetorical composition, acted as a self-deliberating counterbalance to the audience at hand. Adams was always, it appears, a member of his own audience, perhaps the most difficult member of all to please. As he had explained in his Harvard Lectures on Rhetoric: By the power of imagination the orator undergoes a virtual transformation. He identifies himself either with the person, in whose behalf he would excite the sentiment of compassion, or with the antagonist, against whom he is to contend, or with the auditor, whom he is to convince or persuade; or successively with each of them in turn. In the deep silence of meditation he holds an instructive dialogue with every one of these personages.37 Although he fretted over the quality of his rhetoric, the 1839 Quincy and Boston lectures were not wasted efforts in promoting the Smithsonian and the science of astronomy. In content, they were primarily a narrative of Smithson’s will and the deliberations in Congress to date. In tone, they resembled personal testimony, an ethical proof described by many neoclassical rhetorical theorists, particularly those in the elocutionary school, which favored the close study of delivery and

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the qualities of the orator. This approach takes full advantage of his morally driven role since the beginning of the debate. For instance, as he began with the transactions in Congress, he wrote: I cherish the hope that this subject may be considered as divested of all intermixture of party politics—and I have thought it proper to avail myself of the occasion [of speaking before the Mechanics’ Association] to lay before you a narrative of the transactions in the Congress of the United States, upon this subject hitherto—of the parts I have taken in them, of my opinions, with regard to the solemn duties incumbent upon this Nation, and upon their Rulers and Servants, by their acceptance of this magnanimous bequest, and of what I still propose to do in this behalf, with fervent prayer to Divine Providence for his blessing upon a design, the express object of which, is for improving the condition of mankind on earth.38 In the course of the two addresses, he explained his bill that accepted the fund and pledged solemnly to fulfill the testator’s wishes; his letters to Secretary of State John Forsyth on the observatory proposal; and even conversations with private citizens on the subject of a national university. The lectures were in an almost purely narrative form. In effect, Adams put himself on the witness stand for these lectures, drawing not only on the conventions of epideictic but also of judicial rhetoric. “A single error of judgment, a single false step now made. . . .” he soberly told his present and future judges, “might totally defeat one of the noblest benefactions ever made to the race of man . . . and turn to the disgrace of this Nation.”39 With the self-imposed ethos of his understanding and moral rectitude on the matter of the Smithsonian, he implicitly accepted the burden of proof, showing through his narrative that he is doing all he can to keep the nation’s promise to James Smithson. If Congress failed to settle on noble principles for the institution’s foundation, he had shown that it was not his fault. This rhetorical practice, burden of proof, would have been familiar to many in his wider audience after the publication of the lectures, since Richard Whately popularized it in the 1830s in his Elements of Rhetoric.40 It is important to note a probable and important source for Adams’s speaking tour here, although it is not mentioned anywhere in the descriptions of his composition process in the Diary. Being an avid student of Adam Smith, John Quincy Adams had read not only The Wealth of Nations but also a tract entitled “The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of

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Astronomy,” a piece Smith had written as a young man in Glasgow. The historical narrative and details about the development of astronomy come almost directly from Smith’s tract.41 This influence from Smith is significant in light of Adams’s efforts to build an institutional relationship between science and the government, similar and related to the groundwork that government must lay for commerce to be successful and beneficial to the public. The reception of the first lecture at the Quincy Lyceum was not as deplorable as Adams had anticipated. The lectures were open to the public, and the people of Quincy were eager to hear the distinguished speaker—particularly the women, a point that seems to illustrate the interest of a general lay community in astronomical developments. The Boston Evening Transcript reported, “Though laboring under a heavy cold, Mr. Adams spoke with a firm voice, and with his characteristic earnestness and interest, for an hour and a half. The hall was crowded with ladies and gentlemen of his native town, who are ever glad to listen to the voice of the old man.”42 Adams described the delivery in his diary: At 7 o’clock this Evening I walked to the Town Hall, and though labouring under great hoarseness, and a hacking cough delivered the first of my two lectures on the Smithsonian bequest, which took me one hour and twenty minutes. The hall was crowded to its utmost capacity with two or three women to one man. The attention of the auditory was well sustained, though parts of the discourse were evidently tiresome. . . . I rode home, shortly before the Evening bell, and retired to bed with a cup of spearmint tea.43 He was not able to deliver the second of the two lectures himself, as his granddaughter’s illness worsened. On the evening of November 2, 1839, he gave the text of the second address to William P. Lunt, the family’s minister, and told him to wait until 7:00 p.m. His diary records the instructions he gave Lunt: “If the child should become so that I could attend, I would come and deliver the Lecture myself. But if I should not be there at 7, I wish him to read it.” By 5:15, Georgiana’s breathing was short. She died at 5:50, after which, Adams writes in his diary, “I retired for the remainder of the evening to my chamber in a state approaching to stupefaction.”44 Despite Adams’s inability to deliver the second lecture, Lunt’s delivery received respectable reviews. Adams agreed to publication of the first lecture in Boston’s Christian Register after editor Rufus A. Johnson printed a glowing account of the address and “a personal panegyric for

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which,” Adams later wrote, “I ought to humble myself before God, with confusion of face.”45 Four years later, in 1843, near the end of the Smithsonian debate, Adams received another invitation to speak, this time at the cornerstone ceremony for an observatory belonging to the new Cincinnati Astronomical Society. Previously unimpressed with the work of the society’s president, Professor Ormsby M. Mitchel,46 Adams saw the invitation as the tenacious hand of providence guiding him once again to take advantage of the new popular interest in his favorite science.47 He drafted a speech on the relationship between scientific research and the American democratic government, with special emphasis on the field of astronomy. By this time in the debate, his astronomical observatory proposal was losing ground, as new plans were under way for both a naval observatory in Washington, D.C., and a college observatory at Georgetown. However, by this time Adams saw a much broader purpose for this lecture tour. In his diary, he wrote: The people of this country do not sufficiently estimate the importance of patronizing and promoting science as a principle of political action; and the slave oligarchy systematically struggle to suppress all public patronage or countenance to the progress of the mind. Astronomy has been specially neglected. . . . My task is to turn this transient gust of enthusiasm for the science of astronomy at Cincinnati into a permanent and persevering national pursuit, which may extend the bounds of human knowledge and make my country instrumental in elevating the character and improving the condition of man upon earth. The hand of God Himself has furnished me this opportunity to do good.48 Here his strongest epideictic tactic emerges, an aim to instill the values of his rhetoric in future generations. The oration Adams wrote for the Cincinnati Astronomical Society was, again, primarily a long narrative. This time he tells the story of astronomy from ancient times to the nineteenth century, with bursts of praise for the nobility and virtue of this queen of sciences: “The music of the spheres is the chorus of Angels conveying to man the inspiration of the Almighty, which giveth him understanding.”49 The printed version is sixty-three pages long (twenty-five thousand words), but he delivered only half of this. After reviewing the most important astronomical discoveries from Anaxagoras to Herschel and the contemporary discoveries of the science in Europe, he asks his audi-

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ence: “. . . but what, in the meantime, have we been doing” since the foundation of our enlightened nation in 1776? His answer: The God in whose name they [our founders] spoke, had taught them that the only way in which man can discharge his duty to Him is by loving his neighbor as himself, and doing with him, as he would be done by—respecting his right, while enjoying his own, and applying all his emancipated powers of body, and of mind, to self-improvement, and improvement of the race.50 To Adams, the science of astronomy was nothing less than a fulfillment of America’s duty to her forefathers and, above all, to God. Adams suffered fewer political tribulations during his 1843 lecture tour than he had in 1839, but his health continued to degenerate. At the age of seventy-six, he traveled for a month by train, steamboat, ferry, coach, and foot through dozens of towns including Erie, Pennsylvania; Springfield, Dayton, Akron, and Newark in Ohio; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Marysville, Kentucky; Cumberland, Maryland; and Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, among others. Everywhere he was greeted by admiring crowds and invitations for more speaking engagements, some of which he graciously accepted but many of which his strength simply would not endure. Although he was racked by a constant cough, he often would stay awake until one or two in the morning composing additional addresses for eager audiences.51 Adams’s reputation and character at this stage in his life resound in the newspaper coverage of his tour. Often the praise centered more on the man than on what he said—a point that accords well with his Ciceronian view that an orator’s character is essential in persuasion. The audience continued to garnish Adams’s ethos by identifying him with the birth of the nation through his father. The Cleveland Herald reported, “Blessings on thee, Patriot, Statesman, and Sage! . . . No two men have ever lived and filled so large a space in our public life, whose names will be transmitted to future ages with more true greatness and patriotism than John Adams, and his illustrious son.”52 Unfortunately for Adams, the popular adoration could not revive his Smithsonian proposal for an observatory. The remaining two points on his agenda, however, were still defensible in the congressional forum—preserve the capital sum of the bequest and prevent its use for simple education of the young—and furthermore he had a new understanding of his purpose: to increase national acceptance of astronomy on a cultural level, using his respected public image as a symbolic stamp of national approval.

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These public speeches and Adams’s final congressional rhetoric on the Smithsonian observatory took the form of ceremonial praise for science and astronomy, which he hoped would awaken the nation’s desire for astronomical discoveries. In accordance with the ethical principles of classical rhetoric, he used the art for what he believed to be the greater benefit of the citizens, rather than simply to win the immediate congressional argument at any cost. The publication of these lectures and the congressional reports on the Smithsonian were Adams’s contribution to the public interest in astronomy that was finally beginning to develop in communities across the nation. The political efforts of the former president were a unique and important example of the increasing interest in astronomy in the later half of the nineteenth century. The Cincinnati observatory, for which Adams laid the cornerstone in 1843, is an example of a project that is primarily the work of a whole community, including private citizens.53 As John Lankford demonstrates, the early development of a lay audience was essential to cultivating and funding the conditions for research in the sciences.54 Adams’s well-received public lectures on astronomy were a remarkable effort to encourage the community spirit that eventually led to a thriving astronomical scientific community, a cultural change that could only be brought about by the use of the rhetorical norms of the period. His purposeful use of epideictic rhetorical invention to praise astronomical discovery, in both his congressional rhetoric and in his public speaking tours, indicates the role that hardworking Adams played in the history of American science. Although it is often overlooked because of Adams’s political disappointments, the longer-lasting cultural precedent that Adams stood for is significant, especially in light of the general esteem with which his public audiences viewed him.

CHAPTER

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A

dams was a classical rhetorician at a time when the complete system of classical rhetoric was taught with less frequency in schools and colleges, and new disciplines were developing in universities that would gradually hybridize and replace the ancient formal methods of oratory. What Richard Weaver described as the “spaciousness of the old rhetoric” was quickly becoming the directness of the new rhetoric as Enlightenment ideals of speech and philosophy made their way to the New World. In this context of changing rhetorical conventions, Adams’s uses of the art of rhetoric in the Smithsonian debates and in his promotion of astronomy are case studies of neoclassical rhetoric in one of its last forums in American public life. Most interesting for the history of science is the fact that these instances of old-style, spacious oratory coincide with the beginnings of government-funded science and institutional practices of research. The modern ways did not suddenly appear on the scene and overtake the old ideologies and rhetorical norms all at once. The first steps were made by public figures at the forefront of American politics, such as John Quincy Adams, in the tradition of the statesman orator. With his genealogical and political links to the era of the Founding Fathers, and his scholarly passion for the ancient sources of eloquence, Adams was able to communicate the value of the new emphasis on science to a conservative public. In this manner he paved the way for shifts of authority as the government’s relationship to knowledge changed, and as the American public gained experience with more public, institutional development and regulation of science. The concluding thoughts I have to offer are divided into three categories: the manner in which Adams’s self-identification with the statesman orator tradition influenced his use of classical rhetorical practice to promote science; the effects on his oratory that resulted from other 181

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rhetorical practices and ideas such as criticism, belles lettres, elocution, and other theories of rhetoric; and finally, the benefits of analyzing Adams’s and his opponents’ practice of rhetoric using the terminology of modern theories of rhetoric. John Quincy Adams’s theory of rhetoric is largely ignored by historians—sadly even by historians of rhetoric. James Berlin, for example, makes the unlikely assessment that Adams’s lectures were “without influence even in his own time.”1 The extent of his theory’s involvement in the Smithsonian’s inception, however, shows the historical importance of his training in the classical art of rhetoric. Its influence is in rhetorical practice, in the public leadership of Adams and his students, and in the teaching of rhetoric at Harvard after his professorship ended. Surely other important efforts in Adams’s life were also guided by this knowledge of the rhetorical art—his presidency, the repeal of gag rules, his role in the antislavery movement— because all of these political labors relied on persuasion and political argumentation, they must have been touched in a formative way by his training in the art of rhetoric. Critical remarks about rhetoric in Adams’s diary evince his conscientious practice of classical principles in several instances, especially at times of rigorous rhetorical invention and preparation, such as the lecture tours to Western states for the purpose of promoting astronomy. It is true that the height of Adams’s promotion of science took place thirty-five years after his in-depth academic study of the art of rhetoric. There had been countless occasions for Adams both to refine his theory and to reconsider it. As one might expect, the advice he gave to his inexperienced college students differs at times from his mature practice of the art after decades of engaging in politics. Yet, it is remarkable how closely his practice of rhetoric seems to adhere to his theory. In five particular areas of the art, upon which I will comment further on, Adams was still a classical rhetorician in the strictest academic sense. These areas are: the qualities necessary for a successful statesman orator; the means of invention needed to find all the ways to persuade any given audience; types and forms of argumentation from the classical tradition; the order in which eristic argumentation typically proceeds; and his consistently expansive and amplified neoclassical style. Until he died in 1848 of a stroke suffered in his seat in Congress, Adams strove to shape himself after the intellectual and moral qualities of an orator in the tradition of Cicero and Quintilian. In the Smithsonian debate, his ethos as a speaker reflects these deeply held ideals. Duty, for Cicero, was a moral compass to guide the speaker in his oratorical acts. Similarly, Adams framed his arguments about the

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Smithsonian fund as an “imperious and indispensable obligation” to the last wishes of a noble man. In the art of rhetoric, ethos refers not only to the ethical character of the speaker’s intentions, but also to ethical implications and revelations of character in the words themselves. According to Adams, “The eloquence of deliberation will necessarily take much of its color from the orator himself.”2 This is a principle that Adams seemed to follow more forcefully in his old age than he did as a younger orator, a development which is also in accordance with his theory in the Lectures. In his congressional committee reports on the Smithsonian, Adams carefully identified the Smithsonian with the name of Percy and Revolutionary struggles, thereby drawing on his own almost mythical figure in the eyes of younger congressmen who associated Adams with the Revolution. Adams’s name was inseparable from his father’s in the minds of his audience members, and he encouraged this identification for its positive persuasive power. During his public lecture tours to promote astronomy, his venerable reputation was evident in newspaper reviews of his speeches. His reputation multiplied the occasions of his public speeches, as more invitations to speak followed each engagement. On the level of specific arguments, Adams’s persuasive use of values had a distinctive Ciceronian flavor. He almost always emphasized honor and knowledge over utility or gain, as does Crassus in De Oratore, Cicero’s philosophical dialogue on the nature of rhetoric and the qualities of a good orator. Adams’s effort to secure James Smithson’s trust from jobbers who merely wished to use the money for personal gain is one example of this value-centered approach, and his insistence on using the fund for projects that enabled empirical research in the hard sciences, rather than educational projects for passing on existing learning, is another—even though it shifts the Ciceronian understanding of knowledge from the deductively based ancient philosophies to the inductive pursuit of “natural history.” In the later stages of the debate, his stance as “impartial judge” showed his stalwart ethical foundation. Even when he was not actively arguing, his ethos as a speaker lingered as an influence, swaying the votes of Congress at the end of the debate. As he had told his junior sophisters at Harvard, “the particular province of the deliberative speaker is to advise, and what possible effect can be expected from advice, where there is no confidence in the adviser?”3 Above all, Adams strove to earn the trust of his audience. He did this actively by presenting his opponent’s proposals promptly and respectfully in his role as chair of the committee on the Smithsonian; by keeping high expectations for America as she developed into a leading

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international presence; by keeping the practical needs and advancements of citizens in mind with domestic and technological improvements; and by artfully presenting himself as a concerned, fatherly figure easily associated with his Revolutionary parentage. The three aspects of ethos, according to classical rhetorical theory, are: presenting one’s arguments as ethical and moral in nature; demonstrating through one’s words and actions a good reputation and connection with others who have good reputation; and having goodwill toward the audience. Adams strove to emulate Cicero’s orator perfectus in this regard. In the area of rhetorical invention, Adams thoroughly fulfilled his theoretical injunctions. Invention of arguments was generally ignored in belletristic, psychological, and transcendental approaches to the art, since the proofs and material for the arguments were assumed to come from empirical proof, subject matter, or logical reasoning outside of probability or public opinion. Therefore, in the composition of his speeches, adherence to classical theory is most evident here. The documentation of his invention process in voluminous diary entries over the years of his public career are concrete evidence of the influence of classical rhetoric on his methods of arguing and assessing issues. From the overt use of enthymeme and epichirema in his committee resolutions to his use of public speeches to develop arguments for his congressional appeals, Adams was constantly engaged in a formally trained, classical art of invention. It is evident that he habitually used classical topoi to gather a broad range of arguments for specific speeches, as the order and method of his arguments in the speeches themselves show. Perhaps most tellingly, he used his diary as a practice ground for his arguments, privately listing and weighing both sides of each argument and developing criticism of his opponent’s approaches before he composed each speech or letter. For example, when the proper use of the Smithsonian fund first came into question, he faithfully narrated even private conversations with Henry Chapin of Columbian College and personal letters from Richard Rush and John Forsyth, upon which he then commented extensively with ruminations and practice in counterarguments. In a sense, he staged the debate in his mind over and over again as the actual argumentation progressed. The strategies and forms of his rhetoric drew heavily from the classical tradition. Typically, he began his appeal to an audience by reasoning from popularly established definitions, such as “nobility” or “science.” In his Lectures, he addresses this strategy in his discussion of ratiocination and enthymemes. Then he would proceed to a rebuttal of his opponents, often by using the topic his Lectures call “dissimilitude.” That is, he would offer inductive examples following from each

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opposing argument, until it became clear to the audience that an opponent’s conclusion was doubtful. For the key passages emphasizing his proposals for an astrophysical observatory, he combined deductive reasoning from established values with amplification, which he crafted through a wealth of images, extended metaphors, analogies, and examples both familiar and imagined. His Lectures treat all of these methods, along with the stipulation that a deliberative speech on a particularly grand topic might take special liberties in amplification, so that the orator “makes the question of an hour a question for every age and every region; takes the vote of unborn millions upon the debate of a little senate, and incorporates himself and his discourse with the general history of mankind.”4 Also in his Lectures, Adams emphasizes reason as a more persuasive and more ethical means of proof than emotion, and so in his practice of rhetoric he strove, often in the face of great personal struggle as his diary reveals, to maintain a “steady and unvarying command over his own passions.”5 He most often limited his pathetical appeals to his conclusions, a strategy in agreement with Cicero’s advice. The ordering of Adams’s arguments, or in the Lectures’s terms, their “disposition,” almost always follows the standard parts of a classical oration. A comparison of Cicero’s parts of a classical oration with Adams’s oratory illustrates his use of the classical forms of his teacher. In his inaugural addresses and his state of the union speeches as president (as I demonstrate in chapter 3), Adams always began with an attention-getting exordium designed to put his subject matter in an ethical perspective and connect citizens directly to his office through shared history and Constitutional ideals. This he invariably followed with a brief division into parts of his arguments and discussion in the speech, a praise-filled narration of events during the period in question, and a confirmation of arguments on the merit and obligation of new projects he intended to undertake in the coming year. Conclusions often appealed to pride, satisfaction, and desire for an expanding and stronger nation. This form seems so ingrained in his practice of rhetoric that it became second nature: just as he orders his writing this way, so he orders his planning and thinking this way. In Cicero’s and Quintilian’s theories, these parts of a rhetorical text require different inventive tactics in the process of composition. Adams’s attempts to guide the Smithsonian debate in Congress can be understood analogically as similar to an orator’s progression through the six classical divisions and their respective inventive tactics. His initial speech on the “imperious and indispensable obligation” to fulfill Smithson’s will, became an

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exordium for all the succeeding arguments, and his three points on the use of the fund became a partition by which he divided his own arguments and attempted to rein in the tangential arguments of others during the full eight years of the debate. In the end, even though the debaters’ arguments turned from specific use of the fund and began to focus on immediate compromise, Adams’s inventive work as an orator was so formative in the minds of the debaters that the debate could only achieve a sense of conclusion after final remarks from him. In terms of style, it is clear that Adams deliberately imitated Cicero in his writing for many years. Samuel Flagg Bemis points out that even his letters to his son Francis bear a striking resemblance to the De Officii.6 His Smithsonian orations are no exception to this lifelong effort, and in fact they are evidence that this imitation eventually molded Adams’s habitual style. Like Cicero, he was particularly fond of using long, balanced periods in opening passages and at controversial points in the argument. His climactic arguments on the vast and uplifting nature of human knowledge of astronomy are particularly memorable examples of this style, which he had encouraged in his Harvard Lectures on Rhetoric. In sentence after majestic sentence, he would build up the many mysterious and grand objects of knowledge that this science would lay open to the seeking human mind, and then with a classical turn toward balance, associate each with some honorable and awe-inspiring quality of the Creator. Although his classical style seems at odds with a few of the other debaters’ approaches to the art of rhetoric, particularly the plain, straightforward style of Poinsett and his supporters, Adams’s own theory was never overtly anti-belletristic or opposed to psychological interpretations of the art. On the contrary, he seems to court these influences in his own rhetorical practice, perhaps because he understands the common classical influences present in all the contemporary approaches to the art. For example, in his speeches on astronomy, Adams often catalogued praises of great discoverers in the past of this science, a practice that seems to compare with the emphasis on personal genius in psychological approaches to rhetoric. Figures of speech, an aspect of classical style cultivated with fervor by Adams, were also of great interest to the belletrists. More broadly, the empirical approach to science that he so energetically promoted during his whole public life is precisely the basis for the “new” Enlightenment rhetorical theories being imported from Europe. Measuring and using the values of the audience in persuasion is a classical principle shared by neoclassical, belletristic, and psychological theories of rhetoric. Following this principle, Adams made use of a

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wealth of literary and biblical allusions in his rhetoric. Even contemporary poetry, such as Fitz-Greene Halleck’s work, could add appeal to an audience who valued belles lettres. The criticism in his diary shows an appreciation for literary appeal and poetic eloquence in the orations of others, such as Robbins and Owen. He often comments on the delivery of speeches given by others, a habit he has in common with elocutionary rhetoricians. Moreover, Adams uses many types of literary figures and tropes in his speeches to add grace and attraction for audiences who admired these flowers of rhetoric. His expanded metaphors of heavenly grandeur and glory in the science of astronomy are a particularly vivid example of this tendency. After all, the belletristic tendency was, except for its lack of systematized invention, compatible with a Ciceronian fusion of wisdom with eloquence. Those in his audience who valued perspicuity above all may have been alienated by Adams’s more extravagant compositions. Yet, in the meaning of his compositions—the res beneath the verba—there was a kernel of shared interest in Baconian science. Adams did not fail to use this to his advantage in his orations. The subject matter of the debate and the American intellectual climate of the day invited constant comparisons, direct and indirect, with the scientific and educational theories of Bacon. Here is where Adams’s duality as an orator becomes most apparent, where he is, in the eyes of his audience, a man with one foot in the eighteenth century and one in the nineteenth century. In his attitudes about science and original research, he looked to the future and to progress. But rhetorically, politically, and ethically, he was a product of the eighteenth century. During the decades of change that framed the Smithsonian debate, politics and rhetoric began to see new influences from psychological, educational, and social theories. Adams’s later audiences were moved by his arguments, but often had trouble appreciating or identifying with his rigorous invention and his amplified, Ciceronian style, which may sometimes have come across as just a respected curiosity of times past. By the end of the Smithsonian debate Adams had exhausted his arguments, much as the teaching of neoclassical rhetoric would soon be exhausted in American higher education. The practice of neoclassical rhetoric, however, did not suddenly disappear when its pedagogy went out of style. Belletrism continued to spread the influence of classical rhetoric, and the Smithsonian debates offer several specific examples of classical orations with belletristic flourishes. But what about the strain of rhetoric that Berlin terms “romantic”? While it was not addressed in formal education, Transcendental or romantic ideals arguably had an effect on the practice of American political discourse. The emphasis on

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the American frontier and on rugged individualism fed and perpetuated this ideology. Yet, the lack of any systematic approach to this kind of rhetoric in universities until a half-century later would make the influence of a separate romantic technique of rhetoric difficult or impossible to prove. Moreover, the use of Transcendental ideals does not disable an orator’s ability to employ classical rhetorical techniques. The conclusion of the debate, and Adams’s role in its conclusion, is clearly explained through the lens of New Rhetorical theories such as Perelman’s, and Olbrechs-Tyteca’s, and Burke’s. The approach of these contemporary scholars builds on the classical study of the art by theorizing not only about single oratorical situations in conflict with each other, but about the larger, encompassing rhetorical processes in whole areas of discourse. In their New Rhetoric, Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca note that any analytical study of arguments is bound to look at individual arguments as separate texts, but in reality they are isolated only for the purpose of study: They are in constant interaction at more than one level: interaction between various arguments put forward, interaction between arguments and the overall argumentative situation, between the arguments and their conclusion, and, finally, between the arguments occurring in the discourse and those that are about the discourse.7 Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory of a “convergence argument,” in response to dissociated pairs of ideas in a discourse, takes this interaction of arguments into account and helps to explain the outcome of the Smithsonian debate. Too often historical approaches to debates and political struggles overlook or disregard the presence of an art of rhetoric, which orators of the nineteenth century studied in schools and college classrooms and practiced in their public professions. When contemporary rhetorical method is used to interpret rhetorical events in the past, one need not disregard approaches to the art of rhetoric as they were understood by the debaters. Furthermore, contemporary theories of rhetoric provide a means of examining how political arguments in public life work, whether or not they are overtly influenced by theories of the art. In the present study, it would have been more difficult to come to an understanding of the rhetorical climax of the Smithsonian debate and the resulting compromise without modern theoretical touchstones such as Burke’s god-terms and Perelman’s universal audience. These terminologies offer modern readers one way of describing how competing values come into contact with each other during rhetorical exchanges,

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and how a larger and more encompassing rhetorical value can realign the rest. The use of contemporary rhetorical theories to achieve a better understanding of rhetoric’s role in public life offers great opportunities for future research and investigation. From studies of historical speeches like this one to contemporary applications in ongoing public controversies in the media, the criticism of practical, rhetorical argumentation is an area that deserves systematic study. The presence of the art of rhetoric in public forums is a perpetual reminder of its powers to stir nations to action, move warring factions to agreement, and shape the institutions that carry on our culture. The classical legacy that John Quincy Adams left the American scientific establishment is the lasting and influential precedent of democratic argument for the purpose of deciding the direction and scope of government-funded science. It can even be argued that federal funding of science in any form is largely a result of the rhetorical efforts of Adams and others like him in a highly practical age. As Adams’s Ciceronian principles had informed him, natural history and the disciplines of scientific research each had their own fields for increasing the scope of human knowledge, yet it was to rhetoric that Americans turned to establish the cultural foundations that would enable systematized practice of these sciences. The resulting mix of ideologies and methods is a history of ideas that traces the early tracks of the American scientific establishment and the public origins of an American rhetoric of science.

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APPENDIX

A

The Will of James Smithson

I

JAMES SMITHSON Son to Hugh, first Duke of Northumberland, & Elizabeth, Heiress of the Hungerfords of Studley, & Niece to Charles the proud Duke of Somerset, now residing in Bentinick Street, Cavendish Square, do this twenty-third day of October, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-six, make this my last Will and Testament: I bequeath the whole of my property of every nature & kind soever to my bankers, Messrs. Drummonds of Charing Cross, in trust, to be disposed of in the following manner, and I desire of my said Executors to put my property under the management of the Court of Chancery. To John Fitall, formerly my Servant, but now employed in the London Docks, and residing at No. 27, Jubilee Place, North Mile end, old town, in consideration of his attachment & fidelity to me, & the long & great care he has taken of my effects, & my having done but very little for him, I give and bequeath the Annuity or annual sum of One hundred pounds sterling for his life, to be paid to him quarterly, free of legacy duty & all other deductions, the first payment to be made to him at the expiration of three months after my death. I have at divers times lent sums of money to Henry Honore Sailey, formerly my Servant, but now keeping the Hungerford Hotel, in the rue Caumartin at Paris, & for which sums of money I have undated bills or bonds signed by him. Now, I will & direct that if he desires it, these sums of money be let remain in his hands at an Interest of five per cent, for five years after the date of the present Will. To Henry James Hungerford, my Nephew, heretofore called Henry James Dickinson, son to my late brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Louis Dickinson, now residing with Mr. Auboin, at Bourg la Reine, near Paris, I give and bequeath for his life the whole of the income arising from my property of every nature & kind whatever, after the payment of the above Annuity, & after the death of John Fitall, that Annuity likewise, the payments to be made to him at the time of the 191

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interest or dividends becomes due on the Stocks or other property from which the income arises. Should the said Henry James Hungerford have a child or children, legitimate or illegitimate, I leave to such child or children, his or their heirs, executors, & assigns, after the death of his, or her, or their Father, the whole of my property of every kind absolutely & forever, to be divided between them, if there is more than one, in the manner their father shall judge proper, or, in case of his omitting to decide this, as the Lord Chancellor shall judge proper. Should my said Nephew, Henry James Hungerford, marry, I empower him to make a jointure. In the case of the death of my said Nephew without leaving a child or children, or the death of the child or children he may have had under the age of twenty-one years or intestate, I then bequeath the whole of my property, subject to the Annuity of One hundred pounds to John Fitall, & for the security & payment of which I mean Stock to remain in this Country, to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men. I think it proper here to state, that all the money which will be standing in the French five per cents. at my death in the names of the father of my above mentioned Nephew, Henry James Hungerford, & all that in my names, is the property of my said Nephew, being what he inherited from his father, or what I have laid up for him from the savings upon his income.1 James Smithson.

APPENDIX

B

An Act to Establish the Smithsonian Institution as it Passed into Law on August 10, 1846 PREAMBLE. James Smithson, esquire, of London, in the kingdom of Great Britain, having by his last will and testament1 given the whole of his property to the United States of America, to found, at Washington, under the name of the “Smithsonian Institution,” an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men; and the United States having, by an act of Congress, received said property and accepted said trust; therefore, for the faithful execution of said trust, according to the will of the liberal and enlightened donor, Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled: SEC. 5579. That the President, the Vice-President, the Chief Justice, and the heads of Executive Departments are hereby constituted an establishment by the name of the Smithsonian Institution for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men, and by that name shall be known and have perpetual succession with the powers, limitations, and restrictions hereinafter constrained, and no other. SEC. 5580. The business of the Institution shall be conducted at the city of Washington by a Board of Regents, named the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, to be composed of the Vice-President, the Chief Justice of the United States, and three members of the Senate and three members of the House of Representatives; together with six other persons, other than members of Congress, two of whom shall be resident in the city of Washington; and the other four shall be inhabitants of some State, but no two of them of the same State. SEC. 5581. The regents to be selected shall be appointed as follows: The members of the Senate by the President thereof; the members of the 193

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House by the Speaker thereof; and the six other persons by joint resolution of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The members of the House so appointed shall serve for the term of two years; and on every alternate fourth Wednesday of December a like number shall be appointed in the same manner, to serve until the fourth Wednesday in December, in the second year succeeding their appointment. The Senators appointed shall serve during the term for which they shall hold, without re-election, their office as Senators. Vacancies, occasioned by death, resignation, or otherwise, shall be filled as vacancies in committees are filled. The regular term of service for the other six members shall be six years; and new elections thereof shall be made by joint resolution of Congress. Vacancies occasioned by death, resignation, or otherwise may be filled in like manner by joint resolution of Congress. SEC. 5582. The regents shall meet in the city of Washington and elect one of their number as chancellor, who shall be the presiding Officer of the Board of Regents, and called the chancellor of the Smithsonian Institution, and a suitable person as Secretary of the Institution,2 who shall also be the secretary of the Board of Regents. The board shall also elect three of their own body as an executive committee, and the regents shall fix on the time for the regular meetings of the board; and, on application of any three of the regents to the Secretary of the institution, it shall be his duty to appoint a special meeting of the Board of Regents, of which he shall give notice, by letter, to each of the members; and, at any meeting of the board, five shall constitute a quorum to do business. Each member of the board shall be paid his necessary traveling and other actual expenses, in attending meetings of the board, which shall be audited by the executive committee, and recorded by the Secretary of the board; but his service as regent shall be gratuitous. SEC. 5583. The Secretary of the Board of Regents shall take charge of the building and property of the institution, and shall, under their direction, make a fair and accurate record of all of their proceedings, to be preserved in the institution; and shall also discharge the duties of librarian and of keeper of the museum, and may, with the consent of the Board of Regents, employ assistants. SEC. 5584. The Secretary and his assistants shall, respectively, receive for their services such sum as may be allowed by the Board of Regents, to be paid semi-annually on the first day of January and July; and shall be removable by the Board of Regents whenever, in their judgement, the interests of the institution require removal.

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SEC. 5585. The members and honorary members of the institution may hold stated and special meetings, for the supervision of the affairs of the institution and the advice and instruction of the Board of Regents, to be called in the manner provided for in the by-laws of the institution, at which the President, and in his absence the VicePresident, shall preside. SEC. 5586. Whenever suitable arrangements can be made from time to time for their reception, all objects of art and of foreign and curious research, and all objects of natural history, plants, and geological and mineralogical specimens belonging to the United States, which may be in the city of Washington, in whosesoever custody they may be, shall be delivered to such persons as may be authorized by the Board of Regents to receive them, and shall be so arranged and classified in the building erected for the institution as best to facilitate the examination and study of them; and whenever new specimens in natural history, geology, or mineralogy are obtained for the museum of the institution, by exchanges of the duplicate specimens, which the regents may in their discretion make, or by donation, which they may receive, or otherwise, the regents shall cause such new specimens to be appropriately classed and arranged. The minerals, books, manuscripts, and other property of James Smithson, which have been received by the Government of the United States, shall be preserved separate and apart from other property of the institution. SEC. 5587. The regents shall make, from the interest of the fund, an appropriation, not exceeding an average of twenty-five thousand dollars annually, for the gradual formation of a library composed of valuable works pertaining to all departments of human knowledge.3 SEC. 5588. The site and lands selected for buildings for the Smithsonian Institution shall be deemed appropriate to the institution, and the record of the description of such site and lands, or a copy thereof, certified by the chancellor and Secretary of the Board of Regents, shall be received as evidence in all courts of the extent and boundaries of the lands appropriated to the institution. SEC. 5589. All laws for the protection of public property in the city of Washington shall apply to, and be in force for, the protection of the lands, buildings, and other property of the Smithsonian Institution. All moneys recovered by or accruing to, the institution shall be paid into the Treasury of the United States, to the credit of the Smithsonian bequest, and separately accounted for. SEC. 5590. So much of the property of James Smithson as has been received in money, and paid into the Treasury of the United States,

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being the sum of five hundred and forty-one thousand three hundred and seventy-nine dollars and sixty-three cents, shall be lent to the United States Treasury, at six per centum per annum interest; and six per centum interest on the trust-fund and residuary legacy received into the United States Treasury, payable in half-yearly payments, on the first of January and July in each year, is hereby appropriated for the perpetual maintenance and support of the Smithsonian Institution; and all expenditures and appropriations to be made, from time to time, to the purpose of the institution shall be exclusively from the accruing interest, and not from the principal of the fund. All the moneys and stocks which have been, or may hereafter be, received into the Treasury of the United States, on account of the fund bequeathed by James Smithson, are hereby pledged to refund to the Treasury of the United States the sums hereby appropriated. SEC. 5591. The Secretary of the Treasury is authorized and directed to receive into the Treasury, on the same terms as the original bequest of James Smithson, such sums as the regents may, from time to time, see fit to deposit, not exceeding, with the original bequest, the sum of one million dollars. Provided, That this shall not operate as a limitation on the power of the Smithsonian Institution to receive money or other property by gift, bequest, or devise, and to hold and dispose of the same in promotion of the purposes thereof. SEC. 5592. The regents are authorized to make such disposal of any other moneys which have accrued, or shall hereafter accrue, as interest upon the Smithsonian fund, not herein appropriated, or not required for the purpose herein provided, as they shall deem best suited for the promotion of the purposes of the testator. SEC. 5593. Whenever money is required for the payment of the debts or performance of the contracts of the institution, incurred or entered into in conformity with the provisions of this Title, or for making the purchases and executing the objects authorized by this Title, the Board of Regents, or the executive committee thereof, may certify to the chancellor and Secretary of the board that such sum of money is required, whereupon they shall examine the same, and, if they shall approve thereof, shall certify the same to the proper officer of the Treasury for payment. The board shall submit to Congress,4 at each session thereof, a report of the operations, expenditures, and conditions of the Institution. SEC. 5594. Congress may alter, amend, add to, or repeal any of the provisions of this Title; but no contract or individual right made or acquired under such provisions shall be thereby divested or impaired.

Appendix B

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References August 10, 1846. Act of organization (original). (Statutes, IX, 102). February 5, 1859. Amendment (copyrights). (Statutes, XI, 379). January 10, 1865. Amendment (regents). (Statutes, XIII, 420). April 5, 1866. Act (transfer of Smithsonian library). (Statutes, XIV, 13). February 8, 1867. Amendment (residuary legacy and increase of fund). (Statutes, XIV, 391). March 20, 1871. Amendment (regents). (Statutes, XVII, 1). June 22, 1874. Act of organization. (Rev. Statutes, XVIII, pt. 1, 1875, 16, 1088). February 27, 1877. Amendment (establishment). (Statutes, XIX, 253). March 2, 1877. Act of organization. (Rev. Statutes, pt. 1. 2nd ed, 1878, 1082). March 3, 1879. Act (free postage). (Statutes, XX, 360, 362). May 13, 1884. Act (acting secretary). (Statutes, XXIII, 21). March 3, 1885. Act (printing reports). (Statutes, XXIII, 520). October 2, 1888. Act (reports of expenditures, exchanges, ethnology, museum). (Statutes, XXV, 529). August 5, 1892. Act (reports of expenditures, Zoological Park). (Statutes, XXVII, 360). March 12, 1894. Amendment (change of membership of “Establishment.” Power to receive and dispose of money, etc.). (Statutes, XXVIII, 41).

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Notes CHAPTER 1. A CLASSICAL VOICE FOR AMERICAN SCIENCE 1. For an excellent description of the statesman orator as a neoclassical convention in later American oratory, see Robert Alexander Kraig, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost World of the Oratorical Statesman (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994). 2. Gregory Clark, and S. Michael Halloran, Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). 3. Hunter A. Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957). 4. Dupree, p. 47. 5. Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 6. See, for example, Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Herbert Simons, The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Alan G. Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Randy Allen Harris, ed., Landmark Essays on Rhetoric of Science: Case Studies (Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press, 1997).

CHAPTER 2. AN AMERICAN CICERO 1. Adams manuscript diary, May 10, 1819, Adams family papers (microfilm reel 43), Massachusetts Historical Society. 2. De Oratore I. xxviii, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942). 3. Nathan Reingold, ed., Science in Nineteenth-Century America: A Documentary History (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1985); and Robert

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Bruce, The Launching of American Science 1846-1876 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). 4. The history of the Boylston chair can be found in: Ronald F. Reid, “The Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory, 1806–1904: A Case Study in Changing Concepts of Rhetoric and Pedagogy,” reprinted in Essays on Rhetoric in the Western World (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1990), pp. 261–82; Paul E. Reid, “The Philosophy of American Rhetoric as It Developed in the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University,” PhD. diss. Ohio State University, 1959; and Paul E. Reid, “The Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory,” in Readings in Rhetoric, ed. Lionel Crocker and Paul A. Carmack (Springfield, Ohio: Charles C. Thomas, 1965). 5. Donald M. Goodfellow, “The First Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory,” New England Quarterly 19 (1946): pp. 372–74. 6. Ronald Reid, pp. 262–65. 7. Jeffery J. Auer and Jerald L. Banninga, “The Genesis of John Quincy Adams’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 49 (1963): 119–32. 8. Adams diary, quoted in Auer and Banninga, p. 119. 9. Goodfellow, p. 374. 10. Adams diary, August 8, 1810, quoted in Auer and Banninga, p. 119. 11. Auer and Banninga, pp. 119–21. 12. Adams to Waterhouse, April 23, 1785, quoted in W. C. Ford, ed., Statesman and Friend: Correspondence of John Adams with Benjamin Waterhouse (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1927), p. 6. 13. Auer and Banninga, pp. 119–22. 14. Adams manuscript diary, December 10, 1811. 15. Auer and Banninga, p. 123. 16. Adams’s diary, July 31, 1801, and March 16, 1797, quoted in Auer and Banninga, p. 124. 17. Adams’s diary, March 16, 1797, quoted in Auer and Banninga, p. 124. 18. Auer and Banninga, pp. 124–25. 19. Adams manuscript diary, May 19, 1806, Adams Papers, microfilm, Library of Congress, reel 30. 20. Auer and Banninga, p. 131. 21. John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Delivered to the Classes of Senior and Junior Sophisters in the Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.: Hillard & Metcalf, 1810), pp. 28–29. 22. To the Corporation of Harvard University, Cambridge, June 26, 1806; Letterbook, reel 135, quoted in Ronald Reid, p. 264. 23. W. C. Ford, in Henry Adams, A Catalogue of the Books of John Quincy Adams (Boston, 1938), p. 25.

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24. James M. Farrell, “John Adams’s Autobiography: The Ciceronian Paradigm and the Quest for Fame,” The New England Quarterly 62, 4 (1989): 505–28. 25. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, pp. 132–38. 26. 27. William H. Seward, “Eulogy,” The Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams, Sixth President of the United States (Auburn, N.Y.: Derby, Miller and Co., 1849), pp. 397–98. 28. Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York: Knopf, 1956), p. 204. 29. Cicero, De Inventione, I.ii.2. trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), p. 5. 30. De Oratore, I.5. 31, De Oratore, I.15. 32. De Oratore, I.18. 33. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, pp. 29–31. 34. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 70. 35. Pope’s Iliad XIV. ll. 250, quoted in Adams’s Lectures, vol. 1, p. 37. 36. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 345. 37. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 356. 38. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, pp. 109–10. 39. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 113. 40. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 268. 41. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, pp. 254, 258. 42. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 272. 43. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, pp. 256–57. 44. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, pp. 258–59. 45. Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge: Harvard, 1982), I.ii., p. 16–17. 46. Adams, Lectures, vol. 2, p. 367. 47. Adams, Lectures, vol. 2, p. 370. 48. Adams, Lectures, vol. 2, p. 373–74. 49. Adams, Lectures, vol. 2, pp. 373–74.

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50. Adams, Lectures, vol. 2, p. 368. 51. Adams, Lectures, vol. 2, p. 382; this method of using the emotions resembles George Campbell’s notion of “vivacity,” described in book III of Philosophy of Rhetoric. 52. Adams Lectures, vol. 2, pp. 384–85, 377. 53. For a good description of how stasis theory relates to earlier topical theories, see J. R. Fahnestock, and M. J. Secor, “Grounds for Argument: Stasis Theory and the Topoi,” in Argument in Transition: Proceedings of the Third Summer Conference on Argumentation (Annandale, Va: Speech Communication Association). 54. Adams, Lectures, vol. 2, p. 189. 55. Michael Leff, “The topics of Argumentative Invention in Latin Rhetorical Theory from Cicero to Boethius, Rhetorica (1983): 27. 56. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, pp. 227–28. 57. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 209. 58. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1,p p. 33, 34. 59. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, pp. 34, 49. 60. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 200. 61. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 35. 62. Adams, Lectures, vol. 2, p. 38. 63. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, pp. 37–40, 43. 64. Adams, Lectures, vol. 2, p. 62. 65. Adams, Lectures, vol. 2, pp. 65–66. 66. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 62. 67. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 46. 68. Adams, Lectures, vol. 2, p. 57. 69. AdaAdams,ms Lectures, vol. 1, p. 274. 70. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Eloquence,” Letters and Social Aims, pp. 119–20, quoted in Goodfellow. 71. Goodfellow, p. 389. 72. Adams to Mrs. Abigail Adams, October 14, 1810, quoted in Auer and Banninga. 73. Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) pp. 443–46. 74. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, book 2.18.2. 75. Howell, pp. 6–7.

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76. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present (Boston: Bedford Books, 1990), pp. 639–41; Howell, p. 92. 77. Edward Corbett and James Golden, eds., The Rhetoric of Blair, Campbell, and Whately (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), pp. 1–17. 78. Hugh Blair, in Corbett and Golden, pp. 23–128. 79. Winifred Ryan Horner, Nineteenth-Century Scottish Rhetoric—the American Connection (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), p. 171. 80. George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 232–45. 81. Kennedy, pp. 132–245. 82. Albert Raymond Kitzhaber, Rhetoric in American Colleges 18501900, PhD diss., University of Washington, 1953, p. 346. 83. Halloran and Clark. 84. Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), p. 65. 85. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 32. 86. Aristotle, III.vi.7, pp. 377–78. 87. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 274. 88. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 51. 89. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 51. 90. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 415. 91. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 276–77. 92. Richard Weaver, “Ultimate Terms in Contemporary Rhetoric,” in The Ethics of Rhetoric (Davis, Calif.: Hermagoras Press, 1985), p. 212.

CHAPTER 3. TOWARD A DEMOCRATIC SCIENCE: INSTITUTION-BUILDING AND THE STATESMAN ORATOR 1. Dupree, p. 39. 2. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officii, trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913), I.vi.19. 3. Cicero, De Officii, III.ii.6.

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4. “A Constitution for Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” quoted in David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), p. 223. 5. McCullough, p. 223. 6. Benjamin Franklin, Proposal for the Founding of the American Philosophical Society, The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2, ed. Albert Henry Smyth (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1970), p. 230. 7. McCullough, p. 143. 8. Dupree, p. 67. 9. Quoted in George H. Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 63. 10. Daniels, p. 63. 11. Carolyn R. Miller and S. Michael Halloran, “Reading Darwin, Reading Nature; or, on the Ethos of Historical Science,” in Understanding Scientific Prose, Jack Selzer, ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). 12. John Quincy Adams, Report of the Secretary of State upon Weights and Measures, Prepared in Obedience to a Resolution of the House of Representatives of the Fourteenth of December 1819 (New York: Arno Press, 1980). 13. For a discussion of Adam Smith’s rhetoric, see Steven McKenna, Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Prosperity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 14. The letters from Hassler to Adams containing the proposals are now housed in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s archives. 15. A. Hunter Dupree, “Science Policy in the United States: The Legacy of John Quincy Adams,” Minerva, Science and Business Media, (September 1990): 259–71. 16. Dupree, pp. 258–59. 17. John Quincy Adams, inaugural address, March 4, 1825, Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States, Printed by House Resolution No. 726, House Committee on Administration (Washington, D.C.: 1952), p. 43. 18. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1 ch. 8, p. 187. 19. Adams, inaugural address, p. 44. 20. John Quincy Adams’s first annual address to Congress, The State of the Union Messages of the Presidents, 1790–1966, vol. 1 (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1967), pp. 232–49. 21. See particularly Bemis, p. 501–23.

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22. John Quincy Adams, third annual address to Congress, December 4, 1827, The State of the Union Messages of the Presidents, 1790–1966, vol. 1 (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1967), pp. 264–78. 23. John Quincy Adams, fourth annual address to Congress, December 2, 1828, The State of the Union Messages of the Presidents, 1790–1966, vol. 1 (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1967), pp. 278–92. 24. Nathan Reingold, “American Indifference to Basic Research: A Reappraisal,” in Nineteenth-Century American Science: A Reappraisal, George Daniels, ed. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 50–65. See also introduction to same volume, by Daniels. 25. Archives internationals d’histoire des sciences, XXVIII (1948), pp. 50–65. 26. Reingold, “American Indifference,” forty-three. 27. Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991).

CHAPTER 4. INCREASE AND DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE: SETTING THE STAGE FOR THE SMITHSONIAN DEBATE 1. William Lee Miller’s work Arguing about Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) gives a detailed account of Adams’s arguments in congressional debates over slavery, but his treatment is in historical terms rather than in terms of rhetorical principles. Two scholars have analyzed the rhetorical principles at work in particular speeches given by Adams. Jerald Banninga has examined rhetorical principles in three specific orations: Adams’s first annual address to Congress and his first State of the Union address, in “John Quincy Adams’s Doctrine of Internal Improvements,” Central States Speech Journal 20 (1969): 286-93; and “John Quincy Adams’s Address of July 4, 1821,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 53 (1967): 44-49. Sean O’Rourke analyzes Adams’s neoclassical rhetoric in “Cultivating the ‘Higher Law’ in American Jurisprudence: John Quincy Adams, Neoclassical Rhetoric, and the Amistad Case,” Southern Communication Journal 60 (1994): 33–43. 2. Will of James Smithson, in The Smithsonian Institution: Documents Relative to Its Origin and History, Vol. I: 1835–1887, ed. William J. Rhees (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901). In 1879, Smithsonian historian William J. Rhees collected several of the legal documents, congressional records, entries from the diary of John Quincy Adams, and public and private correspondence having to do with the founding of the Smithsonian into a single volume—The Smithsonian Institution: Documents Relative to Its Origin and History (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1879). This edition was reprinted in 1880 as volume XVII in the series Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections.

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The two-volume, 1901 Smithsonian Institution: Documents Relative to its Origin and History reprints and expands the legal documents and congressional records in the 1897 edition, but omits the Adams diary and much of the correspondence. I use the 1901 edition, which I refer to hereafter as “Smithsonian documents,” unless otherwise noted. James Smithson’s will is printed in full in appendix A. 3. Smithsonian documents, House and Senate records, pp. 127–28. 4. Foreword by L. H. Butterfield, editor in chief of the Adams papers (Massachusetts Historical Society) in The Great Design: Two Lectures on the Smithsonian by John Quincy Adams. Wilcomb Washburn, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1965), p. 11. 5. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, pp. 138, 139. 6. George Brown Goode, The Smithsonian Institution, 1846–1896: The History of Its First Half Century (Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Institution, 1897), pp. 1–10. 7. This estimate is calculated based on an “Index of Prices Paid by Vermont Farmers for Farm Living” in 1836, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The comparison with the federal budget is taken from President Clinton’s “Proclamation on the 150th Anniversary of the Smithsonian Institution,” quoted in the Smithsonian’s brochure, “Smithsonian’s 150th Birthday Party on the Mall,” 1996. 8. Letter from Adams to John Forsyth, Quincy, October 11, 1838, Adams papers manuscript, Library of Congress, reel 153. 9. Smithsonian documents, report on the House Committee on the Smithsonian, pp. 130–34; Adams manuscript diary, January 10, 1836, reel 43. 10. Wilcomb Washburn discusses the debate in “The Influence of the Smithsonian on Intellectual Life in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Washington” (Washington, D.C.: Columbia Historical Society, 1966); Paul H. Oehser, Sons of Science: The Story of the Smithsonian Institution and Its Leaders (New York: Henry Schuman, 1949). 11. The most important of these are the works of Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, and Richard William Leopold, Robert Dale Owen: A Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940). 12. Two glossy, color-illustrated coffee-table books appeared to celebrate the 150th anniversary: James Conaway, The Smithsonian: 150 Years of Adventure, Discovery, and Wonder (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books; New York: Knopf, 1995); and Margaret C. S. Christman, 1846: Portrait of the Nation: In Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Founding of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1996). 13. See appendix B.

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14. Smithsonian documents, p. 7. 15. Smithsonian documents, pp.7–15. 16. Leonard Carmichael and J. C. Lang, James Smithson and the Smithsonian Story (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965), pp. 45–85. 17. Quoted in Oehser, p. 3. 18. Carmichael and Lang, pp. 45–85. 19. Quoted in Conaway, p. 24. 20. Conaway, p. 24. 21. Daniels, pp. 1–20. 22. Adams, manuscript diary, January 10, 1863, Adams papers, Microfilm, Library of Congress, reel 44. 23. Miller and Halloran, p. 119. 24. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones, eds. (St. Louis: Washington University Studies, 1958), pp. 53–94. 25. Sprat, p. 1–35. 26. Adams, manuscript diary, January 10, 1863, reel 44. 27. Purver, Margery. The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), p. 28. 28. Sprat, p. 29. 29. Sprat, pp. 15–22. 30. Sprat, pp. 16–17. 31. Sprat, p. 20. 32. Sprat, p. 245. 33. Sprat, pp. 1–2. 34. Smithsonian documents, House records, p. 132. 35. Bacon, Novum Organum I, XCIX: Works, vol. IV, James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglass Devon Heath, eds. (St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1976), vol. IV, trans. vol. VIII, p. 134. 36. Bacon, Novum Organum, p. 135. 37. New Atlantis. Works, vol. III, p. 156. 38. Martha Ornstein, The Role of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), p. 43. 39. Sprat, p. 62.

208

Notes to Chapter 4

40. Sprat, p. 115. 41. David S. Lux, “The Reorganization of Science, 1450–1700,” in Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the European Court, 1500–1750, Bruce Moran, ed. (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 1985), pp. 185–94; and James E. McClellan III, “The Age of Scientific Societies: A Taxonomy,” in Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 42. Quoted in Carmichael and Lang, p. 33. 43. Carmichael and Lang, pp. 94–100. 44. Prospectus, American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (New York: 1839), pp.13–36. U.S. National Archives, Joint Committee on the Library records. 45. Prospectus, American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, pp. 13–15. 46. Prospectus, American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, pp. 15–16. 47. McClellan, pp. 140–42. 48. McClellan, p. 143. 49. McClellan, p. 144. 50. Smithsonian documents, pp. 220–21. 51. Benjamin Rush, quoted in David B. Tyack, “Forming the National Character: Paradox in the Educational Thought of the Revolutionary Generation,” Harvard Educational Review 36 (Winter 1966): 37. 52. Samuel Harrison Smith, “Remarks on Education,” in Rudolph, Essays on Education, pp. 188–89, quoted in Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983). 53. Kaestle, p. 7. 54. Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the U.S.: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981). 55. Kaestle, pp. 7–10. 56. Quoted in Kaestle, p. 7. 57. Kaestle, pp. 79–80. 58. Quoted in Tyack, p. 37. 59. George Washington’s farewell speech, quoted in Living American Documents, Isidore Starr, Lewis Paul Todd, and Merle Curti, eds. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961), p. 105.

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60. John Quincy Adams, The Great Design: Two Lectures on the Smithsonian Bequest, Wilcomb Washburn, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1965), p. 43. 61. Jerald Banninga, John Quincy Adams: A Critic in the Golden Age of American Oratory, (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1963), pp. 106, 104. This study contains an exhaustive index of Adams’s rhetorical criticism of contemporary political speakers. 62. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, pp. 40–41. 63. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 24. 64. Adams, The Great Design: Two Lectures on the Smithsonian. 65. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 25. 66. John Quincy Adams, manuscript diary, January 10, 1836, Adams papers, Microfilm, Library of Congress, reel 43. 67. House records, January 19, 1836, in Rhees, ed., The Smithsonian Institution, Vol. I pp. 131–35. 68. Adams, manuscript diary, January 10, 1836, reel 43. 69. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 51. 70. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, January 5, 1836, p. 128. 71. Smithsonian documents, House records, January 19, 1836, p. 131. 72. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 77. 73. Smithsonian documents, House records, January 19, 1836, p. 132. 74. Smithsonian documents, House records, January 19, 1836, p. 133. 75. In Anthology of American Poetry, George Gesner, ed. (New York: Gramercy Books, 1994). 76. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 249. 77. Adams manuscript diary, January 10, 1836, reel 43. 78. Smithsonian documents, House records, January 19, 1836, p. 132. 79. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 371. 80. Smithsonian documents, House records, January 19, 1836, p. 131. 81. Smithsonian documents, House records, January 19, 1836, p. 132. 82. In modern scholarship, Kenneth Burke and Richard Weaver have written on the uses of god-terms, particularly in Burke’s Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945), and Weaver’s “Ultimate Terms in Contemporary Rhetoric” in The Ethics of Rhetoric (Davis, Calif.: Hermagoras Press, 1985). 83. Smithsonian documents, House records, January 19, 1836, p. 132.

210

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84. Smithsonian documents, House records, January 19, 1836, pp. 133–34. 85. Smithsonian documents, House records, January 19, 1836, p. 134. 86. Smithsonian documents, House records, January 19, 1836, p. 134. 87. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 187. 88. De Inventione, I.viii.11, p. 23; also II.xi-ii. on cases involving interpretation of a document. 89. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, April 30, 1836, p. 137. 90. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, April 30, 1836, p. 139. 91. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 68. 92. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, April 30, 1836, p. 140. 93. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, April 30, 1836, p. 140.

CHAPTER 5. ADAMS’S ARGUMENTS: THE SMITHSONIAN DEBATE: A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS 1. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 167. 2. Adams manuscript diary, Memoirs X, June 22, 1838, reel 23; January 5, 1839, reel 45. 3. Adams manuscript diary, Memoirs X, June 24, 1838, reel 25. 4. John Quincy Adams to John Forsyth, October 8 and 11, 1838, quoted in Wilcomb Washburn’s introduction to The Great Design: Two Lectures on the Smithsonian Bequest, p. 25. 5. Adams manuscript diary, Memoirs X, June 22, 1838, reel 23. 6. Adams manuscript diary, Memoirs X, June 22, 1838, reel 23. 7. Adams manuscript diary, Memoirs X, June 24, 1838, reel 25. 8. Adams manuscript diary, Memoirs X, November 29, 1838, reel 36. 9. Although these letters are not printed in full in Rhees’s Smithsonian documents, they are reviewed and quoted at length in the speeches of several congressmen, most fully in the speech of Robert Dale Owen in Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 325. 10. Adams to John Forsyth, October 8 and 11, 1838, quoted in The Great Design: Two Lectures on the Smithsonian Bequest. 11. Adams manuscript diary, Memoirs X, January 5, 1839, reel 45. 12. Adams manuscript diary, Memoirs X, January 5, 1839, reel 45. 13. Adams manuscript diary, Memoirs X, January 5, 1839, reel 45.

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14. Adams manuscript diary, Memoirs X, January 5, 1839, reel 45. 15. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, January 10, 1839, pp. 164-68. 16. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, January 10, 1839, p. 164. 17. Manuscript Report 181, House Committee records, National Archives. 18. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, January 10, 1839, p. 164. 19. “Brute force bereft of wisdom falls to ruin by its own weight. Power with counsel tempered, even the gods make greater.” Horace, Odes, trans. C. E. Bennett, Loeb Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934). 20. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, January 10, 1839, p. 166. 21. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, January 10, 1839, p. 165. 22. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, January 10, 1839, p. 168. 23. Sprat, pp. 39–40; Howell, p. 456. 24. Senate Bill Number 7, Smithsonian documents, Senate records, 1839. 25. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, January 10, 1839, p. 169. 26. Manuscript Report 181, House committee records, National Archives. 27. Manuscript Report 181. 28. Manuscript Report 181. 29. O’Rourke, pp. 36–37. 30. Adams, Lectures, pp. 226–28. In the Lectures Adams addresses classical topoi and describes them as a useful tool for mastery of rhetorical practice. 31. Manuscript Report 181, House Committee Records, National Archives. 32. Manuscript Report 181. 33. Manuscript Report 181. 34. Prospectus for the American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, National Archives, Senate Library Committee Records. 35. Joel Poinsett, “Discourse on the Objects and Importance of the National Institution for the Promotion of Science” (Washington, D.C., 1840), George Washington University Special Collections Library. 36. Adams, The Great Design, p. 44. 37. Prospectus for the American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, pp. 1–4. 38. Prospectus for the American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, p. 4.

212

Notes to Chapter 5

39. Prospectus for the American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, p. 6. 40. For a thorough, recent treatment of American attempts to mimic Europe in their intellectual and social endeavors, see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992). 41. Documents pertaining to the Wilkes expedition can be found in Nathan Reingold and Ida Reingold, eds., Science in America: A Documentary History, 1900–1989 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981). 42. Constitution of the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences (Washington, D.C., 1817) George Washington University Special Collections Library, microfilm reel 506. 43. Poinsett, “Discourse on the Objects and Importance of the National Institution for the Promotion of Science,” p. 8. 44. Poinsett, pp. 13–14. 45. Poinsett, p. 15. 46. Bemis, p. 511. 47. Letter from Adams to John Forsyth, Quincy, October 11, 1838, Adams papers manuscript, Library of Congress, reel 153. 48. Passed July 7, 1838. 49. Smithsonian documents, House records, April 28, 1846, p. 409; Adams manuscript diary, Memoirs X, January 5, 1839, reel 45. 50. Smithsonian documents, House records, p. 186. 51. Smithsonian documents, House records, p. 271. 52. Smithsonian documents, House records, p. 271. 53. Smithsonian documents, House records, pp. 269, 272. 54. Smithsonian documents, House records, pp. 272–73. 55. Smithsonian documents, House records, p. 332. 56. U.S. Statutes at Large, V, 454, quoted in Bemis, p. 512. 57. U.S. Statutes at Large, quoted in Bemis, p. 512. 58. Bemis, p. 512. 59. Adams, The Great Design, p. 59. 60. Smithsonian documents, House records, April 28, 1846. 61. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 17. 62. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, February 25, 1839, p. 173. 63. Adams manuscript diary, Memoirs, April 10, 1835, reel 42. 64. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, pp. 267, 279.

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65. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 240. 66. Pamphlet of Letters published in the National Intelligencer on the subject of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science and the Smithsonian Institution, Letter I, (Washington, D.C.). 67. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, bills S. 258 and S. 259, respectively, pp. 217–20. 68. Smithsonian documents, p. 240. 69. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 240. 70. Smithsonian documents, June 6, 1844, p. 243. 71. Smithsonian documents, p. 267. 72. Smithsonian documents, p. 279. 73. Smithsonian documents, p. 279. 74. Pamphlet of Letters published in the National Intelligencer, p. 6. 75. Pamphlet of Letters published in the National Intelligencer, p. 6. 76. Pamphlet of Letters, Letter II, pp. 9–10. 77. Pamphlet of Letters, p. 9. 78. Pamphlet of Letters, Letter III, p. 15. 79. Richard Weaver discusses the spacious and stylized qualities of Choate’s rhetoric in an analysis of his address, “The Position and Function of the American Bar as an Element of Conservatism in the State,” delivered before the Law School in Cambridge, July 3, 1845; The Ethics of Rhetoric, pp. 179–182. 80. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, January 8, 1845, pp. 280–93. 81. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, January 8, 1845, p. 293. 82. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 280. 83. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 281. 84. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, pp. 281–83. 85. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 285. 86. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 286. 87. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 287. 88. See discussion in chapter 3. 89. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 291. 90. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 292. 91. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 293. 92. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 294.

214

Notes to Chapter 5

93. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 294. 94. See appendix B: An Act to Establish the Smithsonian Institution as It Passed into Law on August 10, 1846. 95. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, January 9, 1845, p. 293. 96. In the final act to establish the Smithsonian, these sections evolved into the contents of sections 5586 and 5587 (see appendix B). 97. Smithsonian documents, House records, April 23, 1846, pp. 372–87. 98. Smithsonian documents, p. 373. 99. Smithsonian documents, p. 373. 100. Smithsonian documents, p. 376. 101. Smithsonian documents, p. 373. 102. Smithsonian documents, p. 386. 103. Smithsonian documents, p. 386. 104. Smithsonian documents, House records, April 28, 1846, p. 398. 105. Smithsonian documents, House records, April 28, 1846, p. 391. 106. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 471. 107. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 461. 108. Leopold, p. 356. 109. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 325. 110. Smithsonian documents, Senate records, p. 322. 111. Aristotle, II.viii, p. 251. 112. Smithsonian documents, pp. 333–34. 113. Smithsonian documents, p. 334. 114. Smithsonian documents, p. 341. 115. Smithsonian documents, p. 340. 116. Owen, Smithsonian documents, p. 341 quotes this from Choate’s speech. 117. Smithsonian documents, p. 343. 118. Smithsonian documents, p. 346. 119. Smithsonian documents, p. 349. 120. Burke, Grammar of Motives, p. 187. 121. James Berlin, Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges (Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 10. 122. Berlin, p. 11. 123. Smithsonian documents, House records, p. 399.

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124. Smithsonian documents, House records, p. 399. 125. Smithsonian documents, House records, p. 409. 126. Smithsonian documents, House records, p. 412. 127. Smithsonian documents (1879), pp. 758–62. 128. Smithsonian documents, p. xxxiii. 129. Smithsonian documents (1879), pp. 758–62.

CHAPTER 6. THE QUEEN OF SCIENCES AND HER DEMOCRATIC CHAMPION: ADAMS’S PROMOTION OF ASTRONOMY 1. Michael Mendillo, David De Vorkin, Richard Berendzen, et al., “History of American Astronomy,” Astronomy 4 (July 1976): 41–42; Nathan Reingold, Science, American Style, pp. 103–104. 2. John C. Green, American Science in the Age of Jackson (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1984), pp. 128–56; I. Milham, Willis, Early American Observatories: Which Was the First Astronomical Observatory in America? (Williamstown, Mass: Williams College, 1938). 3. David F. Musto, “A Survey of the American Observatory Movement, 1800–1850,” in Vistas in Astronomy: New Aspects in the History and Philosophy of Astronomy, vol. 9, Arthur Beer, ed. (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1967), pp. 87–88. 4. Bessie Zaban Jones and Lyle Gifford Boyd, The Harvard College Observatory: The First Four Directorships, 1839–1919 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971), p. 32. 5. Musto, p. 89. 6. Musto, p. 89. See also Stephen G. Brush, “Looking Up: The Rise of Astronomy in America,” American Studies 20 (Fall 1979): 43–45. 7. Deborah Jean Warner, “Astronomy in Antebellum America,” in The Sciences in the American Context: New Perspectives, Nathan Reingold, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979), pp. 55–65. 8. Jones and Boyd, p. 38. 9. Smithsonian documents, pp. 208–14. 10. See discussion in Bemis, p. 514. 11. Smithsonian documents, Adams’s committee report to the House, March 5, 1840, pp. 195–206. 12. Warner, pp. 55–76.

216

Notes to Chapter 6

13. Manuscript report 181, HC 29, record group 233, series COMPAPERS, House committee records, National Archives. 14. Manuscript report 181, HC 29, record group 233, series COMPAPERS, House committee records, National Archives. 15. Bruce, pp. 120–24. 16. Psalm 19, The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 668. 17. Manuscript report 181, HC 29, record group 233, series COMPAPERS, House committee records, National Archives. 18. Reingold, Science, American Style, p. 104. 19. Richard Weaver, in The Ethics of Rhetoric (Davis, Calif.: Hermagoras Press, 1985), examines the rhetoric of some congressional leaders of the midnineteenth century. He writes of this type of rhetoric in general, “Its very spaciousness shows a respect for the powers and limitations of his audience” (p. 184). 20. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 274. 21. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 269. 22. Manuscript report 181, HC 29, record group 233, series COMPAPERS, House committee records, National Archives. 23. Manuscript report 181, HC 29, record group 233, series COMPAPERS, House committee records, National Archives. 24. Manuscript report 181, HC 29, record group 233, series COMPAPERS, House committee records, National Archives. 25. Steven J. Dick, “John Quincy Adams, the Smithsonian Bequest and the Founding of the U.S. Naval Observatory,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 22 (1991): 31–44. 26. Smithsonian documents, House records, April 28, 1846, p. 399. 27. Smithsonian documents, pp. 241, 242, 273. 28. John Quincy Adams, The Great Design: Two Lectures on the Smithsonian Bequest, ed. and introduction by Wilcomb Washburn (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1965), p. 44. These lectures were published by special exception; a complete set of the Adams papers is being prepared for publication by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 29. Bemis, pp. 515–21. 30. John Quincy Adams, manuscript diary, the Adams papers (microfilm in Library of Congress) November 18, 1839, reel 45. 31. Bemis, p. 120. 32. Adams manuscript diary, October 26, 1839, reel 45.

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33. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 51. 34. Adams manuscript diary, October 29, 1839, reel 45. 35. Adams manuscript diary, November 6, 1839, reel 45. 36. Adams manuscript diary, November 12, 1839, reel 45. 37. Adams, Lectures, vol. 2, p. 382. 38. Adams, The Great Design, p. 44. 39. Adams, The Great Design, p. 44. 40. Richard Whately, The Elements of Rhetoric in Edward Corbett and James Golden, eds., The Rhetoric of Blair, Campbell, and Whately (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), pp. 342–43. Whately’s widely used Rhetoric was first published in 1828, and underwent several revisions throughout its seven editions, the last of which was published in 1846. 41. Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, pp. 265–66. 42. Quoted in Washburn’s introduction to The Great Design, p. 20. 43. Adams manuscript diary, memoirs, November 13, 1839, reel 45. 44. Adams, The Great Design. Washburn’s narrative of Adams’s personal struggles during this lecture tour is excellent. It appears in his introduction to the volume. 45. Adams manuscript diary, November 24, 1839, reel 45. 46. Bemis, p. 515. 47. Adams manuscript diary, memoirs, November 24, 1843, reel 47. 48. Adams manuscript diary, memoirs, November 24, 1843, reel 47. 49. Adams, “An Oration Delivered before the Cincinnati Astronomical Society on the Occasion of the Laying of the Cornerstone of an Astronomical Observatory on the 10th of November, 1843,” quoted in Bemis, p. 519. 50. Adams, “An Oration Delivered before the Cincinnati Astronomical Society,” quoted in Bemis, p. 519. 51. Bemis, pp. 515–21. 52. Cleveland Herald, November 1, 2, 1843. Annals of Cleveland (Cleveland: Works Progress Administration, Project 16823; 1938), XXVI, pp. 206–207. 53. David F. Musto, “A Survey of the American Observatory Movement, 1800–1850” Vistas in Astronomy: New Aspects in the History of Philosophy & Astronomy, vol. 9, ed. Arthur Beer (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1967), p. 90.. 54. John Lankford, pp. 11–17.

218

Notes to Appendix B

CHAPTER 7. INVENTION AND DISCOVERY, RHETORICALLY SPEAKING WRITING INSTRUCTION IN NINETEENTHCENTURY AMERICAN COLLEGES (CARBONDALE: SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1984) 1. Berlin, James, p. 9. 2. Adams, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 286. 3. Adams, Lectures, p. 286. 4. Adams, Lectures, p. 274. 5. Adams, Lectures, vol. 2, p. 367. 6. Bemis, p. 513. 7. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 460.

APPENDIX A. THE WILL OF JAMES SMITHSON 1. Will of James Smithson, in The Smithsonian Institution: Documents Relative to Its Origin and History, vol. I: 1835–1887, William J. Rhees, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901), pp. 5–6.

APPENDIX B. AN ACT TO ESTABLISH THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION AS IT PASSED INTO LAW ON AUGUST 10, 1846 1. Will of James Smithson, in The Smithsonian Institution: Documents Relative to Its Origin and History, vol. I: 1835–1887, William J. Rhees, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901), pp. xxi-xxvi. I have included amendments to the act through March 3, 1899 in following endnotes. 2. Acting Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Be it enacted, etc., That the Chancellor of the Smithsonian Institution may, by an instrument in writing filed in the office of the Secretary thereof, designate and appoint a suitable person to act as Secretary of the Institution when there shall be a vacancy in said office, and whenever the Secretary shall be unable from illness, absence, or other cause to perform the duties of his office; and in such case the person so appointed may perform all the duties imposed on the Secretary by law until the vacancy shall be filled or such inability shall cease. The said Chancellor may change such designation and appointment from time to time as the interests of the Institution may in his judgment require. (May 13, 1884. Statutes, XXIII, 21)

Notes to Appendix B

219

3. The Smithsonian library was transferred to the Library of Congress under act of April 5, 1866: Be it enacted, etc., That the library collected by the Smithsonian Institution under the provisions of an act approved, August 10, 1846, shall be removed from the building of said Institution, with the consent of the Regents thereof, to the new fireproof extension of the Library of Congress, upon completion of a sufficient portion thereof for its accommodation, and shall, while there deposited, be subject to the same regulations as the Library of Congress, except as hereinafter provided. SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That the Smithsonian Institution, through its Secretary, shall have the use of the library of Congress, subject to the same regulations as Senators or Representatives. (Statutes, XIV, 13) By act of April 5, 1866, as give in Revised Statutes, 1875: SEC. 99. The library collected by the Smithsonian Institution under the provisions of the act of August 10, 1846, chapter 25, and removed from the building of that Institution, with the consent of the Regents thereof, to the Library of Congress, shall, while there deposited, be subject to the same regulations as the Library of Congress, except as hereinafter provided. SEC. 100. The Smithsonian Institution shall have the use thereof in like manner as before its removal, and the public shall have access thereto for purposes of consultation on every ordinary week-day, except during one month of each year, in the recess of Congress, when it may be closed for renovation. All the books, maps, and charts of the Smithsonian library shall be properly cared for and preserved in like manner as are those of the Congressional Library; from which the Smithsonian library shall not be removed except on reimbursement by the Smithsonian Institution to the Treasury of the United States of expenses incurred in binding and in taking care of the same, or upon such terms and conditions as shall be mutually agreed upon by Congress and the Regents of the Institution. (Statutes, XVIII, pt. 1, 1875, 16) 4. The Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution shall submit to Congress at its next session a detailed statement of the expenditures of the fiscal year, under appropriations for “International Exchanges,” “North American Ethnology,” and the “National Museum,” and annually thereafter a detailed statement of expenditures under said appropriations shall be submitted to Congress at the beginning of each regular session thereof. (October 2, 1888; Statutes, XXV, 529)

220

Notes to Appendix B

A report in detail of the expenses on account of the National Zoological Park shall be made to Congress at the beginning of each regular session. (August 5, 1892; Statutes, XXXVII, 360) The annual reports of the Smithsonian Institution shall be hereafter printed at the Government Printing Office, in the same manner as the annual reports of the heads of the Departments are now printed, for submission in print to the two Houses of Congress. (March 3, 1885; Statutes, XXIII, 520)

Bibliography PRIMARY SOURCES Adams, John Quincy. First annual address to Congress, December 6, 1825. The State of the Union Messages of the Presidents, 1790–1966, vol. 1. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1967. ———. The Great Design: Two Lectures on the Smithsonian Bequest. Ed. Wilcomb Washburn. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1965. ———. Inaugural Address. Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States. Printed by House Resolution No. 726. House Committee on Administration. Washington, D.C.: 1952, pp. 43–48. ———. Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory. Introduction by Jeffery J. Auer and Jerald Banninga. New York: Russell and Russell, 1962. ———. Manuscript, Diary, Letterbook, and Lectures in Rhetoric and Oratory. Adams family papers. Microfilm reels 23, 25, 26, 30, 43–45, 47. Massachusetts Historical Society. ———. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1785–1848. Ed. C. F. Adams. 1874–1877, reprinted 1969. ———. Writings of John Quincy Adams. Ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford. New York: Macmillan, 1913–1917. ———. Report of the Secretary of State upon Weights and Measures, Prepared in Obedience to a Resolution of the House of Representatives of the Fourteenth of December 1819. New York: Arno Press, 1980. “Constitution of the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences.” George Washington University Special Collections microfilm reel 506. Washington, D.C.: 1817. Cleveland Herald. November 1, 2, 1843. Annals of Cleveland. Vol. XXVI. Cleveland: Works Progress Administration, Project 16823, 1938. 221

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Index Adams, John, 3, 18, 56–59, 179 Adams, John Quincy, 3–6, 7, 8, 13–16, 26, 46, 51, 53, 55, 56, 59–61, 64, 73–79, 82, 85, 87, 90, 98, 99, 129, 149–150, 162, 176, 181, 189 addresses in Congress, 71, 72, 78, 89, 90 annual messages to Congress as President, 53, 55, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72 reputation in the House of Representatives, 77 Inaugural Address as President, 65, 66 internal improvements, policies on, 1, 3–4, 12, 55, 64, 68, 69, 75, 78 Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, 5, 15, 17, 21, 25, 46, 66, 101, 113 Memoirs, 101, 102, 137 Presidency, 64 Report on weights and Measures, 10, 55, 61, 63, 66, 79 speaking tours on astronomy, 176–177, 183 Anderson, Benedict, 75 argument, theory of, 34, 108–109, 113, 122–123, 136–137 Aristotle, 6, 9, 14, 17, 18, 20, 22, 29, 31, 33, 37, 38, 39, 44, 47, 49, 87, 113, 154, 155 astronomy, 6, 11–12, 14, 15, 19, 24,

28, 30, 42, 46, 49, 55, 60, 61, 71, 74, 106, 115, 125, 126, 129, 130–132, 139, 144, 160, 163–175, 177–183, 186, 187 audience analysis, rhetorical, 30, 31, 47–49, 99–103, 105–110, 120, 124, 127, 129, 131, 143–147, 151, 152, 155, 158, 165, 166, 170 Auer, Jeffery, 17 Bacon, Francis, 6, 7, 20, 44, 60, 87, 90, 85, 86, 89, 91, 118–121, 187 Banninga, Jerald, 17, 99 belletrism, 19, 43–46, 98, 119, 120, 147, 182, 184, 186, 187 Berlin, James, 159, 182, 187 Blair, Hugh, 19, 20, 44–46 Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, 5 Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory, 5, 16–18, 20–22, 43, 46 Burke, Kenneth, 50, 158–159, 188 Burke, Edmund, 20, 41, 45 Calhoun, John, 65, 79, 83, 109, 110, 136, 151, 173 Chapin, Henry, 114–118, 184 Chapin, Rene, 46 Choate, Rufus, 11, 132, 142–151, 153, 157 Cicero, 1, 5–7, 9–11, 13–15, 18, 20–27, 29–30, 32–37, 40, 41, 46, 47, 53–58, 109, 113, 124, 182–187

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230

Index

Clark, Gregory, 2, 47, 82 Columbian College, 114, 116, 184 De Inventione, 25, 34, 39 deliberative oratory, 19, 21, 30, 31–34, 36, 38, 41, 42, 49, 124, 126, 132, 165, 174, 183, 185 De Oratore, 1, 14, 24–26, 54 Dupree, A. Hunter, 3, 53, 60, 65 elocution, 17, 20–22, 43, 46, 121 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 42 Enlightenment, 6, 8, 9, 11, 16, 43–46, 60, 79, 84, 88, 106, 107, 150, 157, 181, 186 enthymeme, 37, 39, 184 epichirema, 39–40, 122, 123, 184 epideictic oratory, 30, 49, 102, 108, 170–174, 176, 178, 180 ethos, 8, 32, 33, 44, 46, 57, 60, 62, 67, 69, 79, 82, 85, 91, 104, 115, 118, 121, 131, 166, 169, 176, 179, 182–184 exordium, 19 Federalists, 54 Forsyth, John, 80, 114–117, 133, 138, 144, 176, 184 Franklin, Benjamin, 1, 56, 57, 59, 73, 75, 84, 94, 163 Gilliss, James, 170, 171 god-term, 50, 51 Good, George Brown, 80 Goodfellow, Donald, 42 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 104, 109, 187 Halloran, Mark, 2, 47, 82 Hassler, Ferdinand Rudolph, 63 Henry, Joseph, 161, 162 Hermagoras, 34 history of science, role of rhetoric in, ix–xi, 2–4, 8–9, 187–9 Horner, Winifred Ryan, 45 invention, rhetorical, 7, 9, 10, 17, 21,

27, 33–37, 44–47, 63, 88, 99, 113, 166, 174, 175, 182, 186, 187 Isocrates, 15, 19 Jackson, Andrew, 3, 63, 77, 78, 82, 129 Jacksonian Era, 46, 161 Jefferson, Thomas, 3, 57, 65, 96 Kitzhaber, Albert Raymond, 47 Lawson, John, 20, 45 Marsh, G.P., 148– 151 Milton, Paradise Lost, 45, 146 Musto, David F., 163 National Institute for the Promotion of Sciences, 11, 95, 126, 127, 129, 130, 132, 140, 161, 171 observatories, 3, 5, 11–12, 48, 50, 64, 69, 95, 106, 113, 115, 116, 118, 124, 126, 129, 130–132, 135, 143, 160, 161, 165, 163–172, 175, 176, 178, 180, 185 Naval Observatory, 6, 9, 12, 24, 74, 143, 154, 165, 170, 178 Oehser, Paul H., 80 orator, role of, 27 the orator perfectus, 5, 14, 22, 25, 26, 29, 77, 101, 132, 184 the statesman orator, 2, 4, 6, 12, 25, 41, 47, 53, 58, 60, 63, 66, 70, 85, 166, 181, 182 Owen, Robert Dale, 11, 97, 132, 153–160 pathos, 32, 33, 44, 46, 134, 147 Perelman, Chaim and Mme. Olbrechts-Tyteca, 47–50, 99, 100, 102–105, 110, 136 Philosophical Society, 59, 75, 84, 94, 163 Poinsett, Joel, 11, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 137, 153, 186 Preston, William, 79, 83, 109, 110, 121, 171, 173

Index

Quintilian, 7, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 27, 29, 33–35, 37, 47, 182, 185 ratiocination, 38, 40, 104 Reingold, Nathan, 15, 73 rhetoric classical, 5, 7 Enlightenment, 7 definition of, 29 John Quincy Adams’s theory of, 21 nineteenth century, 8 offices of, 25 twentieth century theories of, 47–51 Robbins, Asher, 11, 118–121, 123, 124, 143, 144, 146, 153, 166, 173, 187 Royal Society, 3, 10, 53, 59, 60, 77, 82, 84–93, 95, 120, 126 Rush, Richard, 79–80, 81, 83, 96, 115, 133, 134, 138, 153, 156, 184 Rush, Benjamin, 60, 96, 97 science in the nineteenth century, 1, 73 rhetoric’s role in promoting, 2, 5–8 Sheridan, Thomas, 45, 46 Smith, Adam, 9, 63, 72, 176 Smithson, James, 5, 10, 11, 16, 30, 38, 78–87, 90–93, 95, 98, 101–111, 114, 120–121, 122–127, 131–134, 137, 139, 143, 148, 149, 151, 153, 156, 160, 162, 167, 168, 170–171, 175–176, 183, 185, 191–193, 195–196 Smithsonian Institution, 6, 9, 10–12, 19, 24, 27–30, 35, 46, 49, 50, 63,

231

76, 78–82, 84–86, 88–91, 93–95, 97, 99, 101, 104, 106, 116–118, 123, 127, 129, 130, 132, 135–139, 141–143, 151–153, 155, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164–166, 168, 170–171, 174–176, 180–183, 192–196 Act to Establish the Smithsonian, 193 “increase and diffusion of knowledge”, 4, 5, 10, 11, 40, 80–83, 85, 90–92, 96–98, 104, 105, 109–111, 119, 121, 123–129, 134, 136, 139, 143–145, 147, 148, 152–155, 167, 168, 172, 173, 175, 192, 193 Smithsonian debate Grand Library Plan, 126, 128, 139, 142, 145, 150, 151, 157 National Institute for the Promotion of Sciences proposal, 129 Observatory proposal, 176, 178, 179 university proposal, 97, 114 Sprat, Thomas, 53, 77, 86–91, 120 stasis, or state of the controversy, 21, 34, 35, 67, 108 Tappan, Benjamin, 11, 132, 138–144, 147–149 topoi, or topics of argument, 36, 45, 46, 125, 184 Van Buren, 114, 115, 173 Ward, John, 18, 45 Washburn, Wilcomb, 80 Whately, Richard, 46, 176

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