Ohio History Journal

AN EXAMPLE OF POLITICAL ORATORY IN 1855 BY MRS. ARTHUR G. BEACH Mr. Albert Beveridge has painted a vivid picture of the decade 1850-1860 as a background to his study of Abraham Lincoln. There have been preserved at Ma- rietta, Ohio, a border town, some letters and papers,

written during those years by a student at Marietta Col- lege. Search through them brought to light an account of one of the stump speeches of Mr. Henry A. Wise, of Virginia, which furnishes evidence that the work of Mr. Beveridge is authentic. The young man, Henry Ma- nasseh Dawes, was a great grandson of Manasseh Cut- ler, the politically skillful preacher who lobbied the Vol. XXXIX--43.     (673)

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Ordinance of 1787 through Congress, so that his interest

in political events was in accordance with family tradi-

tion. He was a senior in 1855 and was much aroused

over the political situation. Among the books that he

owned were several volumes of the Congressional Globe,

He liked oratory and intended to make an orator of him-

self if he could. Clippings in his scrap-book show that

he wrote more fiery articles for the newspapers. It is

entirely natural that he should have improved an oppor-

tunity to hear one of the famous stump speakers of the

day and it was according to his habit to have commented

on the occasion in letters to his friends, and in a com-

munication to some paper.     In March before young

Dawes graduated (1855) he wrote to one of the girls of

his home town, McConnelsville, some forty miles up the

Muskingum river from Marietta. His letter was writ-

ten from his room in the College dormitory.

 

DEAR MOLLIE:

A week ago last Monday I had the pleasure of hearing the

celebrated Accomac orator, the great champion of Slavery, Henry

A. Wise. He is a Democratic candidate for Governor of the State

of Virginia. He spoke in Parkersburgh. A large number went

from Marietta to hear him. I have given my opinion of the

speech in an article which I have sent to the McConnelsville En-

quirer. He is by far the most powerful orator I have ever heard

with the exception of John B. Gough. I tell you, Mollie, I would

rather be an orator and wield the power that Wise does when he

speaks than have all the gold that slumbers in the mines of Mexico.

It is possible that if Henry Dawes had lived he might

have realized his ambition to be an orator, for love of

oratory was wide-spread and opportunities for practice

were not lacking. Three months after he heard Mr.

Wise, he was invited to give the Fourth of July oration

at the town celebration in Marietta. The fact that the

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An Example of Political Oratory in 1855  675 committee asked a college student and not one of the many vocal citizens of Marietta seems to indicate that he was considered a good speaker even then. He died of typhoid fever in 1860, when he was twenty-eight years old, and two towns, Marietta and McConnelsville,

grieved for him and believed that a life of brilliant promise had ended prematurely. Mr. Dawes wrote Mollie a long description of his Parkersburg trip, in the rather dignified style that char- acterized all his communications to young ladies. It is in decided contrast in tone to the letter he wrote on the same subject to a young man, also of McConnelsville.

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The letter to Marcus Corner (an older brother of Tip)

is more interesting because it is livelier. It begins with

a picture of Parkersburg, a small town twelve miles be-

low Marietta on the Virginia side of the Ohio river.

Mr. Beveridge refers many times to the influence of the

burning Liquor Question on political affairs. It was

sometimes called Temperance and is now spoken of as

Prohibition and has always commanded a capital letter.

Mr. Dawes' letter to Mr. Corner offers a bit of evidence

that it was at least a subject of constant remark. Places

for social drinking had not yet acquired the Frenchy

name saloon, they were called doggeries. Liqueurs were

dog-leg and rot-gut. The letter shows, too, the prevailing

influence of Know-Nothingism, for although Mr. Dawes

hated the Know-Nothing doctrines he reflected the cus-

tom of the time when he spoke slightingly of the Irish,

and of the Germans whom he called "Dutch," an epithet

commonly used to express amused condescension. After

commenting on the rumor that Mr. Corner was "in pos-

session of a thrifty pair of whiskers," which at that time

were as prevalent as "whiskey blossoms," the letter

reads:

But I did not take up my pen to write about whiskers, but it

was to tell you of Mr. Henry A. Wise. I heard him speak in

Parkersburgh last Monday. I was one of a company of some 16

or 18 that went down on the Steamer Wm. Knox. I believe that

you have never been in Parkersburgh. Well! it is the meanest

place you have ever seen. Take Windsor, [a lock hamlet of low

repute on the Muskingum River] and put 18 low Dutch and Irish

taverns, and about forty lower, Dutchier and Irisher doggeries

and add about six or eight times the number of houses, low-frame,

with about one whole window to three houses on an average and

inhabit it with fleas, bed-bugs, lousy looking curs and drunken

Irish and Dutch, and you will have a paradise in comparison with

Parkersburgh. That is no fancy sketch. I counted on two streets

alone 16 taverns and thirty bars and remember that Parkersburgh

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is not more than a third larger that Mc-. [Therefore, less than

2000 people.] If I were Neal Dow I would manage somehow to

get Parkersburgh epitomized on a small scale and carry it around

with me as a Temperance argument. It is a perfect whiskey

blossom. You may think that I am down on this place rather too

severely, but if you had been compelled to sleep in the darned place

as I was and had been half devoured by bed-bugs as I have been

you wouldn't blame me. But I would wade through bed-bugs

belly deep to get to hear another such speech as I heard there.

Henry A. Wise, you know, was returned to Congress in 1840

from the Accomac district (Randolph's old district) as a Whig.

He was a celebrated Whig stumper during the campaign of '40

and gained an enviable reputation as an orator. When Tyler went

off on a tangent, cursed by the Whigs and despised by the Demo-

crats, Wise was one of the Whig renegades that followed him,

and as a reward for his treachery received the Brazil mission,

which he held during Tyler's administration. I knew all this

when I went to P--- to hear him speak and I believed and do

now believe him to be one of the veriest demagogues that ever

crouched at the feet of the sovereign people and whined for office.

But I was anxious to see a display of those powers of oratory with

which he was said to be so pre-eminently gifted. When we

reached Parkersburgh we learned that W---    had arrived and

was stopping at the American. We posted up in hopes that we

should get a glimpse of the lion before dinner, he was to speak at

1 o'clock P. M. A gentleman whose acquaintance I happened to

make offered to take me up to Wise's room and introduce me to

the "distinguished Virginian" as he called him. I most gladly

accepted his proffered kindness and in company with three or

four of our party was introduced to Henry A. Wise.

Well now Marcus, what kind of looking man should you

imagine him to be? A noble looking man?---with an eagle eye

and princely bearing?--that is what I expected--but most griev-

ously was I disappointed.

At this point apparently Mr. Dawes stopped writing

to his friend and wrote a letter to the McConnelsville

Enquirer.

 

I laid this letter aside before finishing it and on taking it up

again I find that I have only to refer you to an article in the

McConnelsville Enquirer for a description of the personal ap-

pearance of Wise and from that you can get a general idea of the

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speech. But I will tell you Marcus, you cannot realize the power

of a great orator unless you feel it--you cannot tell how he speaks

unless you hear him.

I don't know how it affects you but there is nothing in this

world that stirs me up so much as an eloquent address, whether

it be from the pulpit or the stump it matters not. One little

incident that fell under my own observation will illustrate the ab-

sorbing influence of his oratory. There was an old baldheaded

Virginian sat directly before the stand and within some half-dozen

feet of the speaker, just in front of him. His head was thrown

back, with hands and chin resting upon his cane, his eyes fixed

upon the speaker, listening with every sense. Wise always speaks

with his tobacco in his mouth and when he becomes excited his

words come rushing out, they bring torrents of tobacco spit with

them. This old gentleman sat just within the reach of this shower.

Yet his whole soul was so completely swallowed up in the speaker,

his attention so absorbed that he sat in the shower of tobacco spit

for three long hours without having the faintest knowledge of the

fact that the speaker was actually spitting in his face all the while.

I saw that with my own eyes. The old man's head was as the back

of a trout.

Mr. Dawes begins his long letter to the Enquirer

with a description of Mr. Wise.

 

PARKERSBURG, (VA.,)

March, 1855.

MR. EDITOR:

I have heard the redoubtable Henry A. Wise, the "Virginia

fire-eater," the distinguished standard-bearer of the unterrified in

the Old Dominion. I listened more than three consecutive hours

to one of the first, if not the first popular orator, South of Mason's

and Dixon's line, on the soil of his own State, addressing himself

to an assemblage of slave-holders, appealing to their Southern

proclivities and sectional prejudice.

I was disappointed in the personal appearance of the man. I

had expected, in Henry A. Wise, to see a person of commanding

stature, upright bearing, with flashing eyes and noble forehead;

but he is no such man. He is below the medium height; not more

than five feet seven or eight, very spare, would not weigh more

than a hundred and thirty, probably not that.

There is nothing prepossessing about him. He is, in fact,

positively ugly. Very gentlemanly and courteous in his bearing

towards others, but in his dress he is almost a sloven. His cravat

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was awry; his linen was soiled with tobacco; his chin unshaven

and flecked with streaks of yellow saliva; his clothing rather hung

around him than otherwise. I could see no physical indications

of greatness. A low forehead, overshadowing a pair of dull,

lustreless gray eyes, that rolled with a nervous uneasiness in their

deep sockets; high cheek bones, and a complexion saffron-hued

from his inordinate use of tobacco; a stooping carriage and

shambling gait did not indicate the great man.

When he was introduced to the audience, he rose leisurely

from his seat, arranged his notes, drew his tobacco-box from his

pocket and placed it on the stand before him. He took a prelim-

inary chew, gave a pair of consumptive shoulders a shrug, and

opened his batteries. "I have come," he said, "thundering amid

the ice, down the beautiful Ohio from the Vulcan City of the Old

Dominion, to meet you, fellow-citizens of Wood County, and

address you on the great political questions of the present cam-

paign."

In this preparatory strain he continued a few minutes saying

some fine things in a very common-place manner; but as he gath-

ered headway, and warmed with his subject, his eye began to

kindle, and nostrils to dilate. The tones of his voice swelled out

clear and bold; his whole manner was vehement and passionate.

His words came rushing out in a rapid, fiery torrent. You could

not help listening if you would; and you would not if you could.

There was an indescribable something about his manner that held

the attention of the audience riveted upon him in spite of them-

selves.

Before entering the house I provided myself with pencil and

paper with the intention of taking notes, and had taken consider-

able pains to secure a convenient seat; but my attention was so

entirely taken up with the speaker that I did not think of my pencil

and paper once during the whole three hours and a quarter. For

the first half hour he spoke eloquently of the present condition of

Virginia.

Few would listen now to the endless oratory of Mr.

Wise. None would read the long report of it. After

several quotations, Mr. Dawes continues:

He advocated internal improvements; a vigorous prosecution

of those which had already been commenced, and the speedy com-

mencement of others on a scale commensurate with the greatly

increasing wants of the State. He favored a perfect system of

common school education, as the only true foundation of all

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progress. In closing the discussion of these questions he made his

passionate appeal to the freemen of Virginia: "Come! ye de-

scendants of Henry, Lee, Washington, Jefferson, Monroe and

Madison, lay aside your sectional bickerings, your local jealousies!

come! from the East and West--from the lowlands and high-

lands--sea-shore and inland; come! let us go, side by side, hand

in hand, to the common altar of our State--come! ye nine hun-

dred thousand freemen of Virginia, come! let us work all together

as one man to lift the head of the Old Dominion, the mother of

Presidents, our own beloved Virginia, from THE DUST IN

WHICH IT GROVELS."

It must be remembered that Mr. Dawes was only a

college student and his enthusiasm over the touching sen-

timentality of Mr. Wise may be excused on that score.

It is, however, a curious fact that men of remarkable

ability were pouring forth torrents of just such "sound

and fury" all over the United States. Mr. Lincoln him-

self included absurdly rhetorical passages in more than

one speech during that decade.

When, with a voice that rung as clear as the notes of the war

clarion, he made this thrilling appeal with a passionate intensity

of manner, I thought him eloquence incarnated. Never in my life

have I listened to such an appeal; it set the blood dashing through

my veins like a mountain torrent. It went right home to the

hearts of every Virginian present. You could see in their glisten-

ing eyes, and heaving chests, and could hear in the response that

made the walls tremble to their very foundations, the effect that it

had upon that multitude. There was not one there who did not

long to lend a helping hand to life the head of the eldest sister of

the commonwealth from the ground and brush the dust from her

aged locks.

After he had finished the discussion of these topics, he leveled

his guns at that intangible, invisible, invincible Sam. He lashed

him with a whip of scorpions; showered upon him his fiery indig-

nation; hurled the thunderbolts of his terrible invective at his

devoted head. In short, Mr. Ed., he completely engulphed him in

the all-annihilating vortex of his fury.

For full two hours the poor, doomed, Heaven-forsaken Know

Nothings had to writhe under the pitiless peltings of that fiery

shower. I verily believe, Mr. Ed., that I would rather have bared

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An Example of Political Oratory in 1855     681

 

my head to that tempest which the wrath of an offended God sent

upon the cities of the plain than to have been that same Sam.

Evidently Mr. Wise berated the Know-Nothing party

in other places as thoroughly as he did in Parkersburg

for in that same year, 1855, "a Know-Nothing mob had

howled down Governor Wise of Virginia when he was

trying to make a speech in Washington" (Beveridge).

 

His first charge against Know-Nothingism was that it was

the spawn of Boston abolitionism. He made this a strong point,

and spent almost an hour in fastening Sam to the backs of Theo-

dore Parker and Freeman Clarke. He denounced them as the

head and front of this great conspiracy. He alluded to the former

in terms something as follows: "Theodore Parker! why! there is

not wool enough or looms enough in all New England to weave a

woof broad enough and long enough to hide the hoofs and horns

of that fiend incarnate."

He contended that it was unconstitutional and un-American.

That it was making religious tests of office. He dwelt eloquently

on the noble efforts of foreigners in gaining our independence.

While Lafayette, the foreign Catholic pet of a Catholic court, was

laying his almost princely possession a willing sacrifice on the altar

of our country, the native Protestant Arnold was bartering those

liberties for British gold. While the Catholic DeKalb, that noble

old foreigner, fell pierced with a dozen bayonets, the native Gates

ran sixty miles.

I believe, Mr. Ed., that I could almost write off the whole

speech, it has taken such strong hold upon my memory, but I have

already transcended my limits.

The general course of the rest of his argument was pretty

much that of all of Sam's opponents; yet all these arguments, so

old and trite, were brought forward in a manner so striking, illus-

trated so happily, that they seemed new.

He spoke more than three hours, and during that time there

was not a single person left the house, although almost all were

compelled to stand, and that too, in the most uncomfortable posi-

tion. There is an enchantment about his oratory, which it is im-

possible to resist. As a speaker, I should think that he resembled

Clay and Randolph, more than any of our great orators. He had

the impetuous eloquence of Clay, and the sarcastic bitterness of

Randolph; wanting the polished elegance of the former, and the

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logical acuteness of the latter; yet possessing a power of invective

far surpassing either.

Although I cannot say that I am very anxious to see him

Governor of Virginia, or, that I think that he has kept the jewel

of political consistency always safely treasured in his casket; yet

I do say that I have never yet seen a speaker who could obtain

such entire mastery over an audience; and could rule their passions

with a sway as despotic as Henry A. Wise.

In 1859, four years later, the people of McConnels-

ville heard of Mr. Wise again. Sentenced to hang with

John Brown at Harper's Ferry was a young Quaker,

who wrote in a letter two days before his death on the

gallows: "By the taking of my life and the lives of my

comrades, Virginia is but hastening on that glorious day

when the slave shall rejoice in his freedom."

A group of Quakers from Chesterhill, just over the

hill from McConnelsville, went to Richmond to intercede

for Edwin Coppoc, and were courteously received by

Governor Wise who tried to save the young man. The

fact that he failed did not lessen the respect and grati-

tude of the Quakers. So the people about McConnels-

ville remember Governor Wise as a kind and sympathetic

man as well as a great orator. There is, however, no

record that Governor Wise halted the pursuit of fugitive

slaves or that Ohio people were persuaded that his thesis

for slavery was correct. The whippoorwill signal con-

tinued to sound at night over the waters of the Ohio,

while the black man swam from the Virginia shore to the

Ohio side.

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