Episode 01 covered the speller, the book that taught a child to read at all. This episode covers what came next: the reader, the book that taught a child to speak in public, to argue, to recite. Two readers dominated the field. What one of them did to one specific reader is among the most consequential things any American schoolbook ever did.
Caleb Bingham, a Dartmouth graduate who had run the college's free school for Native American students before opening a private school in Boston, published The Columbian Orator in May 1797. Its full title described exactly what it was for: A Variety of Original and Selected Pieces, Together with Rules, Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence. It became a standard, widely imitated text in American schoolrooms from the late 1790s through 1820, with some 200,000 copies sold by 1832.
View the full digitized copy at the Internet Archive →
The book opened with practical instruction in how to speak, gesture, and project before an audience. It then moved into the actual material to be memorized and recited: speeches by George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, dialogues attributed to Socrates and Cato, and selections from British orators including Charles James Fox and William Pitt. It was, by design, a training manual for public argument, built for a republic that expected its citizens to speak in town meetings, courtrooms, and legislatures.
All exclamations should be violent. When we address inanimate things, the voice should be higher than when animated beings; and appeals to Heaven must be made in a loftier tone than those to men.
Frederick Douglass was enslaved in Baltimore, taught the alphabet in secret by his enslaver's wife before her husband forbade it, and continued his own education afterward by trading bread for reading lessons with poor white children in the street. At around twelve years old, he used fifty cents he had saved from polishing boots to buy a copy of The Columbian Orator at a local bookstore.
Just about this time, I got hold of a book entitled The Columbian Orator. Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book.
One selection in particular struck him: a dialogue, written by the British author John Aikin and originally published in England, depicting a recaptured runaway slave who wins an argument with his master and earns his freedom through reasoned debate alone. Douglass described its effect on him directly.
View the full digitized copy at the Internet Archive →
The moral which I gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder.
Douglass later became, in the judgment of his biographers, the most prominent African American orator of the nineteenth century, delivering an estimated two thousand speeches over his lifetime. The training manual for republican eloquence, written by a Boston schoolmaster to teach white schoolchildren how to argue for liberty in the abstract, had reached an enslaved twelve-year-old who used it to argue for his own.
Lindley Murray, an American-born lawyer and merchant who had relocated to England, published The English Reader in 1799. Where Bingham's book leaned toward political oratory, Murray's leaned toward moral instruction and literary taste, prose and verse selections organized to teach both elocution and what Murray considered correct sentiment. It became the dominant American reader of the early nineteenth century, the direct predecessor to the McGuffey Readers that eventually displaced both it and Bingham's book after 1836.
Together, Bingham's and Murray's readers represent the bridge between the speller's basic literacy and the classical academy's Latin grammar, the stage where an American child went from being able to read a sentence to being expected to stand up and deliver one. Both books shared the same underlying assumption: a citizen of a republic needed to be able to speak in public, persuasively, on his feet, and that skill had to be taught the same way reading was, through memorization, recitation, and repetition.
"I now understood the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom."