Oratory

In the antebellum era and well into the twentieth century, oratory flourished in South Carolina as the expression and reflection of the values of the white male population. Orators described and defended those values in ways that were appreciated by their audiences; they were respected and at times revered as folk heroes. Throughout the South, oratory was the focus of southern life for rural and small-town audiences who had few other entertainments and little connection to the larger world. The impact of oratory was evident, from frequent joint debates held in most political campaigns, to Sunday sermonizing and summer camp meeting revivals, to courtroom lawyers arguing before their juries and large audiences of spectators, to ceremonial occasions such as the Fourth of July. In sum, oratory was a prime means of public education in the issues of the day, religious instruction, and public commemoration. South Carolinians practiced it as well as any other southerners, and better than most.

The love and practice of oratory did not emerge full-grown in antebellum South Carolina. South Carolina College, where training and experience in public speaking was a central focus of higher education, was a hothouse for developing orators. Within a year of the 1805 opening of the college, the first literary and debating club, the Philomathic Society, was organized. Less than a year later it was split into two nearly identical fraternal groups, the Clariosophic and the Euphradian societies. Over the next half-century, virtually every student at South Carolina College belonged to one or the other of these societies, where they heard and presented many a declamation or original oration and debated timely political, social, religious, and historical questions. Students understood, as did most educated southerners, that the supreme skill for a leader was oratory. An early historian of the college called the societies “the nursery of eloquence” and asserted that they provided a strong career start for “many of the distinguished men of Carolina.”

One of those distinguished men of Carolina was William C. Preston, called by some South Carolina’s Cicero. Preston was considered the “most finished orator of the Southern school.” But Preston was only one among many stars in the South Carolina oratorical gallery. In a region that held eloquence in the highest regard, the Palmetto State set the standard for the rest of the South. Probably no other southern state had as many outstanding well-known speakers in the antebellum years. Preston, Hugh Swinton Legaré, John C. Calhoun, James H. Hammond, James Hamilton, Dr. Thomas Cooper, Robert Y. Hayne, William Harper, and George McDuffie held their large and appreciative audiences enthralled by their rhetoric. The large issues of states’ rights, nullification, slavery, and impending war provided more than enough impetus for their oratory.

The tradition continued long after the Civil War, focusing primarily on political stump speaking and ceremonial oratory; it was the era of the “southern demagogue” and the “Lost Cause.” After Wade Hampton’s oratorical recollections of the Civil War helped to “redeem” South Carolina from Reconstruction, Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, Coleman Blease, and Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith held forth on the hustings, defending the small farmer and upholding white supremacy and racial separation. Their oratory, based on fear tactics and emotion rather than reasoning and valid evidence, exploited the poor whites’ ability to vote, their deplorable economic conditions, and their long-standing fear of their black neighbors who were just below them on the economic ladder. Attacking scapegoats such as Wall Street, corporations, railroads, Jews, immigrants, and especially blacks, their language was violent and unrestrained, but they spoke for the little guys in the state who, up to that point, had felt they had no spokesmen.

Another prime venue for oratory in postbellum years, extending well into the twentieth century, was the ubiquitous ceremonial address proclaiming the “Lost Cause.” Delivered at countless Confederate veterans’ reunions, monument dedications, and Confederate Decoration Day ceremonies throughout South Carolina and the South, this oratorical genre created, glorified, and sustained a mythology of the Old South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction that remained alive long after the last veteran and commemorative orator were in their graves. Remnants of this oratory were still being heard in debates across the state over the placing of the Confederate flag on the State House grounds at the end of the twentieth century.

While radio, television, mass entertainment, and the Internet have made oratory mostly obsolete as a form of education and entertainment, it does continue in perhaps the only, certainly the leading, example of the old tradition of “stump” speaking left in America: the Galivants Ferry Stump Meeting. This popular political event is held every two years on the first or second Monday in May and is highly important in the tradition of South Carolina politics. Begun by Wade Hampton in 1876, this affair has continued unabated and in the early twenty-first century still drew as many as five thousand South Carolinians.

Braden, Waldo W., ed. Oratory in the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970.

Logue, Cal M., and Howard Dorgan, eds. The Oratory of Southern Demagogues. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

Towns, W. Stuart. Oratory and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century South: A Rhetoric of Defense. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998.

–––. Public Address in the Twentieth-Century South: The Evolution of a Region. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999.