Public Argument in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract

In the township of Euclid, Ohio, in an agricultural area on Lake Erie, east of Cleveland, the members of the Euclid Lyceum vigorously debated various public issues during the winter of 1839-40. The Euclid Lyceum was a quasi-civic arena in which the European American men (and occasionally women) of Euclid gained practice in preparing, conducting, and judging while also providing themselves with weekly social interaction and entertainment. Questions discussed on chilly Wednesday evenings included Ought the right of suffrage in the United States to be farther [sic] restricted? (the president and the membership both decided in the affirmative), Does the present form of United States government possess the elements of perpetual duration? (negative), Has nature done more than Education for mankind? (affirmative), and Are [sic] the influence of the females superior to [that of] the males? (negative). (1) Such a forum can be construed as one site of U.S. public argument, a location in which members of the polity performed a ritual of democratic participation through an enactment of public conflict. The characteristics of this quotidian ritual-who could participate and in what ways, what questions were judged appropriate for discussion, what decisions were reached, what persons and themes were absent-also reveal a great deal about the cultural milieu in which such discussions occurred. Grasping this thread of public practice thus allows a scholar to tug at nineteenth-century dominant culture and ideology, to examine the ways in which the national fabric was created, maintained, resisted, and experienced. Within rhetorical studies, the close examination of ordinary events, with a sharp eye cast toward questions of cultural myth-making, appears to characterize our own historically situated moment. Four recent book-length studies, although highly variable in subject matter and in analytical approach, do share a common theme. The days of a myopic celebration of the golden age of U.S. oratory are over. In articulating public argument, contemporary rhetorical scholars foreground the lives of those who lacked political power, even when they are writing about texts produced by elites. They depict the U.S. nineteenth century as a time of enormous conflict over issues of race, gender, and class that has continuing repercussions. Scholars are examining the correlation between public argument-produced by elites and nonelites alike-and the formation of cultural myths, as well as how such myths were correlated with material human experience. Such work owes much to the flowering of social and cultural history, critical race studies, and women's studies, but scholars publishing book-length investigations of nineteenth-century rhetoric and civic culture are also demonstrating the unique fruitfulness of rhetorical approaches to questions of history and culture. The four books examined herein are (listed alphabetically by author) Stephen John Hartnett's Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America, Nan Johnson's Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, Jacqueline Jones Royster's Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women, and Kirt H. Wilson's The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place, 1870-1875. This review essay describes and evaluates these four books, while highlighting both connections and points of conflict among them. To that end, I will describe each book in turn, noting the continuities and variations in the ways that the authors imagine and study nineteenth-century public argument. The books appear, not in chronological or alphabetical order, but in the order of the scope of their primary objects of study. That is, Wilson concentrates on a relatively bounded phenomenon, the debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1875; Johnson's focus is on conduct literature of the post-Civil War period; Hartnett selects objects of study from antebellum documents and contemporary social theory that help explain the creation of U. …