One day in 1830, Frederick Douglass bought a book that changed his life. Douglass, then known as Frederick Bailey, was a twelve-year-old child enslaved in Baltimore. After hearing a group of white boys recite from The Columbian Orator, a grade-school textbook for teaching rhetoric, Douglass decided to get a copy for himself. Against stiff odds for slaves of the time, he learned to read, and words were his prevailing passion.
Douglass used 50 cents he’d earned working odd jobs and bought The Columbian Orator at a local bookshop. He fell in love with the volume and was seldom without it, carrying the book with him when he eventually escaped to freedom. With the textbook as his guide, Douglass became, in the words of biographer David W. Blight, “the greatest African American leader and orator of the nineteenth century.”
Though the legendary abolitionist read as much as he could from other sources, it’s likely that “nothing had a more immediate or lasting effect on the young Douglass’s intellectual and spiritual growth than his fortuitous discovery of The Columbian Orator,” Blight adds.
“Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book,” Douglass recalled. The textbook also helped shape the destiny of Douglass’s contemporary Abraham Lincoln during Lincoln’s early days in New Salem, Illinois. With little formal education, the twenty-one-year-old Lincoln “studied with relish the classical and Enlightenment-era oratory in The Columbian Orator during his first winter (1831–32) in New Salem on the Illinois prairie,” Blight tells readers.
In Giants, his 2008 book about striking parallels between Douglass and Lincoln, historian John Stauffer notes the big impact that The Columbian Orator had on both of their lives. Like Douglass, young Lincoln “was hungry for knowledge, and it was one of the few books he read during his formative years, along with a spelling book, the Bible, and one or two others,” Stauffer observes in recounting the role of the classic textbook in forming the future president.
For strivers like Lincoln, guides to rhetoric had a special currency in the nineteenth century. “Lincoln was born into a national culture in which language was the most widely available key to individual growth and achievement. It dominated public discourse,” scholar Fred Kaplan tells readers of his book, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer. “No TVs, DVDs, computers, movie screens, radios, or electricity, and no sound bites. Language mattered because it was useful for practical communication and for learning and because it could shape and direct people’s feelings and thoughts in a culture in which spoken or written words had no rival. In Lincoln’s case it also mattered immensely because it was the tool by which he explored and defined himself.”
Douglass and Lincoln were far from alone in embracing The Columbian Orator, which was first published by New England educator Caleb Bingham in 1797. “The Orator was one of the most popular books in the new nation,” Stauffer points out. “From 1797 to 1860, it went through some 23 editions and in many American homes it was one of a handful of essential books, along with the Bible, a spelling book, and a farmer’s almanac.”
To get some idea of The Columbian Orator’s important role in early America, it’s perhaps best to start with its title. Although the textbook’s name might sound strange to modern ears, it would have resonated with people in Douglass and Lincoln’s time. In 1790, Congress had created the District of Columbia as the new seat of government, a nod to explorer Christopher Columbus. Even earlier, Americans had evoked a mythical heroine, Columbia, as a symbol of the emerging nation. “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. “As Lady Columbia’s image spread across the country, particularly after the Revolution, she came to embody the nation’s highest aspirations—and its colonial ambitions. Though largely forgotten today, she reigned for two centuries as our collective emblem, and her biography offers a tale in miniature of the development of a young democracy.”
Before she was eclipsed by the Statue of Liberty as a national symbol, Columbia personified the ideals of a young republic trying to reconcile the virtues of classical antiquity with the dynamism of a country on the move.
The great emancipator, Abraham Lincoln (with Lady Columbia in the background), counted the pro-abolitionist Columbian Orator among his closely studied collection of books.
—Wikimedia
Few seemed better suited to strike that bargain than The Columbian Orator’s creator, Caleb Bingham. He was a leader deeply shaped by the learning of past centuries but not constrained by it. Born in Salisbury, Connecticut, in 1757, he grew up along the frontier with Native Americans, “an experience,” says Blight, “that seems to have given him a lifelong sympathy with their plight.”
Bingham’s social causes were notably progressive for their time. After graduating from Dartmouth College, he ran Dartmouth’s free school for Native Americans, later moving to Boston and opening a private school for girls. He became active in school reform, arguing for more intellectually demanding curriculums. Bingham championed better pay for teachers, later leaving the classroom to open a bookstore and publish textbooks. He scored several publishing successes, but The Columbian Orator has endured as his masterpiece, his biggest legacy since his death in 1817. Even now, Bingham’s irrepressible sense of experiment winks at today’s readers from The Columbian Orator’s pages.
After offering a general introduction outlining basic principles of rhetoric, Bingham lets his textbook unfold in a spirit of improvisation. The selections, which draw on everything from the ancient Greeks to proceedings of the British Parliament to comic poetry, are a bracing exercise in free association. As Blight explains, “Bingham organized the 84 entries in The Columbian Orator in a random manner, without regard to chronology or topic. Such a disregard for system was actually a pedagogical theory of the time designed to hold student interest.”
The unpredictable variety of The Columbian Orator is one of its chief charms. Flipping through the selections is like walking a grand boulevard of rhetorical tradition, not quite sure who’s waiting for you on the next block. You might wave at Cato or shake hands with John Milton, then squint into the distance to see Napoleon Bonaparte heading your way. At its best, the book is great fun.
For readers in Bingham’s day, The Columbian Orator also shimmered with the luster of political celebrity. George Washington, who makes an appearance in the book, was still alive when it was first published, serving his last year as president when Bingham’s masterwork made its 1797 debut. At the time, Benjamin Franklin, another presence in The Columbian Orator, had been dead just seven years. Napoleon was still in his prime.
Granted, a book as old as The Columbian Orator inevitably gives off a bit of attic must. With more than two centuries of hindsight, today’s readers might reasonably wonder whether George Washington’s 1796 address in which he declined to run for a third term should still be remembered as a rhetorical gem. Here’s how it opens:
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.
A single sentence of some hundred words announcing one’s political retirement doesn’t land too well on modern ears. With all of its solemn throat-clearing and verbal curlicues, Washington’s phrasing can seem grandiloquent, though a tone of modesty was probably what he was after. It’s rhetoric as a form of self-effacement, the man himself quietly shrouded beneath a veil of parenthetical asides.
Other selections in The Columbian Orator are more direct. The book includes 11 dialogs, most of them written by David Everett, a teacher and writer in Bingham’s circle. In one, a Mohawk is initially described as a “savage” but is revealed to be more virtuous than the supposedly civilized Englishman he’s conversing with. In another selection, “Dialogue Between a White Inhabitant of the United States and an Indian,” a Native American bluntly states his grievances. “You call us brothers,” he says, “but you treat us like beasts; you wish to trade with us, that you may cheat us; you would give us peace, but you would take our lands, and leave us nothing worth fighting for.”
The language is short, clear, and simple, pointing to a different way of speaking from Washington’s florid style. So much of The Columbian Orator is like that, the book alternately tipping its hat to formal tradition and pointing its period readers to something new. America back then was a young country trying to figure out how to talk to itself, striving to balance polish with authenticity. As Stauffer puts it, “Leaders were supposed to sound democratic, refined but not excessively so, like a gentleman but not an aristocrat. Caleb Bingham told his readers how to accomplish this feat.”
Blight makes a similar point. “By 1800,” he observes, “Americans, reaping the fruits of the Age of Revolution, were being pulled in contradictory directions over the idea of proper speech. The distance between what might be judged ‘vulgar’ and ‘refined’ language was narrowing in a land with ever-increasing numbers of newspapers and printed books, the popularization of politics, and the steady spread of schooling and textbooks.”
As those boundaries blurred, The Columbian Orator served as a kind of arbiter of discourse, helping to nurture the national conversation.
In an opening chapter, “General Instructions for Speaking,” Bingham stressed the importance not only of what is said, but how it’s said. “There is as great a difference between one who lays his emphasis properly, and one who pays no regard to it, or places it wrong,” he told readers, “as there is between one who plays on an instrument with a masterly hand, and the most bungling performer.”
Bingham envisioned a nation in which the ability to speak well was a widespread skill, and he tried to break ground in other ways. “In subject matter it was a radical book, for it used stories, speeches, and poems to teach boys that all men are created equal and entitled to the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and happiness,” Stauffer writes. “It was considered so radical, in fact, that in the 1850s, during the height of the slavery crisis, the most prominent Southern newspaper included it on a blacklist of abolitionist books, effectively banning it from Southern schools and homes.”
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. When his enslaver cites custom as a reason for slavery, the captive offers a rejoinder:
You cannot but be sensible, that the robber who puts a pistol to your breast may make just the same plea. Providence gives him a power over your life and property; it gave my enemies a power over my liberty. But it has also given me legs to escape with; and what should prevent me from using them? Nay, what should restrain me from retaliating the wrongs I have suffered, if a favorable occasion should offer?
As the debate concludes, the slave owner, compelled by the logic he’s heard, lets his captive go. In real life, of course, those who were enslaved had little chance of talking themselves out of bondage.
Even so, “Dialogue Between Master and Slave” had a profound effect on Douglass. What he “at least discovered here,” Blight emphasizes, “is that slavery was something subject to ‘argument,’ even between master and slave; that the slave would convince the master to liberate him might seem unlikely in reality, but this did not tarnish the piece’s fundamental point—the slave won the moral debate.”
While the progressive tone of The Columbian Orator can seem remarkable for its time, the book also displays some pretty obvious marks of its period. The contributors are uniformly white and male. Selections such as the poem “Christ’s Crucifixion” by seventeenth-century cleric Richard Cumberland are a reminder that even in public-school readers of the time, the line between church and state could be vague.
Even so, the book “is much more than a collection of stiff Christian moralisms for America’s youth,” Blight writes. “It was the creation of a school reformer of decidedly antislavery sympathies, a man determined to democratize education and instill in America’s youth the immediate heritage of the American Revolution [and] the habits and structures of republicanism.”
More than two centuries after its arrival, The Columbian Orator continues to draw fans. Blight brought out a bicentennial edition in 1998, welcoming new readers into the fold. Ossie Davis, the celebrated actor who died in 2005 at age eighty-seven, counted himself among the admirers. “I read it now,” Davis said about the Orator, “and the words still inspire and inflame.”
Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of America’s leading academics, calls The Columbian Orator “a must read for scholars of American and African American studies,” noting that the book “was of profound importance to the shaping of the African American canon.”
Freeman Hrabowski III, a former president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who’s spoken across the country and is known for his galvanizing speeches, counts The Columbian Orator as an influence. Hrabowski’s intimate bond with listeners underscores Bingham’s sense of public speaking as a deeply human experience. “I never want to speak to a dark room,” Hrabowski said in a 2022 interview. “I need to look into the faces of the people I’m speaking to. A speaker is only as effective as the audience. I am a better speaker when I can connect with the audience. It doesn’t mean that we always have to agree with each other.”
After the passage of two centuries, the book has become countercultural in a different way. Its measured insistence on the value of public speaking as a broadly shared civic skill now seems very much of another time. Rhetoric isn’t something frequently taught in grade school, and, in an era defined by social media, skill behind a podium or lectern might not have quite the cachet it once did.
But ideals of rhetoric developed over thousands of years don’t die easily. In their own way, new champions of that tradition are doing their part to extend Bingham’s legacy. For several years now, Ward Farnsworth, dean of the University of Texas School of Law, has been editing a series of books celebrating the art of discourse, including Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric and Farnsworth’s Classical English Argument.
“It’s sobering to consider the examples of thought and expression that young people learn from on social media today, and to compare them to what their counterparts were learning 200 years ago from books like The Columbian Orator,” Farnsworth told Humanities. “We feed our minds a great deal more junk food now, which no doubt helps to explain why public discourse has gone into a tailspin. The Classical English books are indeed meant to be in the same broad tradition as The Columbian Orator and perhaps to offer some modern resources for people who like the concept of that one.”
In the meantime, Blight suggests that newcomers to The Columbian Orator experience it as earlier readers did—by reading it aloud.
“As Douglass did,” Blight notes, “they will find both music and political meaning in the language.”
