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The Columbian Orator taught nineteenth-century Americans how to speak

For strivers like Lincoln, guides to rhetoric had a special currency in the nineteenth century.

“She was portrayed as a goddess, draped in a neoclassical gown and holding a sword, an olive branch and a laurel wreath as metaphors for justice, peace and victory,” journalist Cari Shane noted in a 2023 history of Columbia. Friends and fellow-citizens, the period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government to the United States, being not far distant; and the time actually arrived, when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person, who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those, out of whom a choice is to be made. An obvious bone of contention among many nineteenth-century readers was a selection in The Columbian Orator called “Dialogue Between Master and Slave,” a conversation in which an enslaved person wins his freedom by calmly and eloquently making the case for justice.

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