American Eloquence, Volume I | Page 3

occurred in spite of careful consideration and anxious desire to be
scrupulously impartial.
Very many of the orations selected have been condensed by the omission of portions
which had no relevancy to the purpose in hand, or were of only a temporary interest and
importance. Such omissions have been indicated, so that the reader need not be misled,

while the effort has been made to so manage the omissions as to maintain a complete
logical connection among the parts which have been put to use. A tempting method of
preserving such a connection is, of course, the insertion of words or sentences which the
speaker might have used, though he did not; but such a method seemed too dangerous
and possibly too misleading, and it has been carefully avoided. None of the selections
contain a word of foreign matter, with the exception of one of Randolph's speeches and
Mr. Beecher's Liverpool speech, where the matter inserted has been taken from the only
available report, and is not likely to mislead the reader. For very much the same reason,
footnotes have been avoided, and the speakers have been left to speak for themselves.
Such a process of omission will reveal to any one who undertakes it an underlying
characteristic of our later, as distinguished from our earlier, oratory. The careful
elaboration of the parts, the restraint of each topic treated to its appropriate part, and the
systematic development of the parts into a symmetrical whole, are as markedly present in
the latter as they are absent in the former. The process of selection has therefore been
progressively more difficult as the subject-matter has approached contemporary times. In
our earlier orations, the distinction and separate treatment of the parts is so carefully
observed that it has been comparatively an easy task to seize and appropriate the parts
especially desirable. In our later orations, with some exceptions, there is an evidently
decreasing attention to system. The whole is often a collection of disjecta membra of
arguments, so interdependent that omissions of any sort are exceedingly dangerous to the
meaning of the speaker. To do justice to his meaning, and give the whole oration, would
be an impossible strain on the space available; to omit any portion is usually to lose one
or more buttresses of some essential feature in his argument. The distinction is submitted
without any desire to explain it on theory, but only as a suggestion of a practical
difficulty in a satisfactory execution of the work.
The general division of the work has been into (1) Colonialism, to 1789; (2)
Constitutional Government, to 1801; (5) the Rise of Democracy, to 1815; (4) the Rise of
Nationality, to 1840; (5) the Slavery struggle, to 1860; (6) Secession and Reconstruction,
to 1876; (7) Free Trade and Protection. In such a division, it has been found necessary to
include, in a few cases, orations which have not been strictly within the time limits of the
topic, but have had a close logical connection with it. It is hoped, however, that all such
cases will show their own necessity too clearly for any need of further ex-planation or
excuse.

I.
COLONIALISM.
THE FORMATION OF THE CONSTITUTION.
It has been said by an excellent authority that the Constitution was "extorted from the
grinding necessities of a reluctant people." The truth of the statement is very quickly
recognized by even the most surface student of American politics. The struggle which
began in 1774-5 was the direct outcome of the spirit of independence. Rather than submit
to a degrading government by the arbitrary will of a foreign Parliament, the
Massachusetts people chose to enter upon an almost unprecedented war of a colony
against the mother country. Rather than admit the precedent of the oppression of a sister
colony, the other colonies chose to support Massachusetts in her resistance. Resistance to
Parliament involved resistance to the Crown, the only power which had hitherto claimed

the loyalty of the colonists; and one evil feature of the Revolution was that the spirit of
loyalty disappeared for a time from American politics. There were, without doubt, many
individual cases of loyalty to "Continental interests"; but the mass of the people had
merely unlearned their loyalty to the Crown, and had learned no other loyalty to take its
place. Their nominal allegiance to the individual colony was weakened by their
underlying consciousness that they really were a part of a greater nation; their national
allegiance had never been claimed by any power.
The weakness of the confederation was apparent even before its complete ratification.
The Articles of Confederation were proposed by the Continental Congress, Nov. 15, 1777.
They were ratified by eleven States during the year 1778, and Delaware ratified in 1779.
Maryland alone held out and refused to ratify for two years