America’s Great Age of Rhetoric, 1770–1860: Advocacy, Conceptualization, Institutionalization, by Merrill D. Whitburn

With America’s Great Age of Rhetoric, 1770–1860: Advocacy, Conceptualization, Institutionalization, Merrill D. Whitburn recovers and revitalizes an overlooked and underresearched period in American rhetorical history. Building on his work in Rhetorical Scope and Performance (2000), Whitburn notes the need to pay particular attention to rhetoric as it was developed through three institutions—what are now known as Harvard University and Yale University and the Andover Theological Seminary—and traces the rise of rhetoric alongside the intellectual movements and key historical figures that shaped rhetorical education as it exists in our modern university context.Unlike Mark Longaker’s Rhetoric and the Republic (2007) or Carolyn Eastman’s A Nation of Speechifiers (2009), both of which situate American rhetorical theory and pedagogy in the tumultuous context of revolutionary and early national politics, America’s Great Age of Rhetoric emphasizes the early republic’s theological context, especially the rise and dominance of evangelism during the first two Great Awakenings (ca. 1730–50 and 1790–1810). Unlike Thomas Miller’s The Evolution of College English (2011), which focuses on literacy as it progressed from sacred to secular and finally to academic contexts, it highlights the influence that German intellectuals and institutions had on American higher education. Finally, unlike a host of studies, such as the recently published Rhetoric, Independence, and Nationhood, 1760–1800 (Lucas 2022), which highlights political discourse, it attends to pulpit oratory, extending the realm of rhetoric to the persuasive dimensions of ministers’ lives and charitable works.In the introductory first chapter, Whitburn lays the groundwork for the argument: the key advocates of rhetoric’s institutionalization were men who also played important roles in religious and secular movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Burgeoning religious movements, such as pietism as well as America’s First Great Awakening, grew alongside the need for support of revolutionary efforts and new systems of governance. Championing these efforts were the book’s two main characters, Eliphalet Pearson (1752–1826) and Ebenezer Porter (1772–1834). Whitburn introduces Pearson and Porter in chapter 1 via their intellectual genealogy, which includes the revivalist preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards as well as Edwards’s grandson and the eighth president of Yale University Timothy Dwight.Chapter 2, “Pietism and the First Great Awakening: Preludes to the Rise of Rhetoric,” previews key figures to which Whitburn returns throughout the book, focusing on the relationship between pietism in America and religious education movements in Germany. Halle, the German university that the Andover Theological Seminary aimed to emulate, “was founded to revitalize religion and became Germany’s first great reform university,” a fact that allowed it to serve as a model for Andover (13). In his discussion of the University of Halle, Whitburn emphasizes two figures: Philipp Spener (1635–1705) and August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), whose pietist revivalism influenced early American thinkers by arguing that direct contact with the scriptures was essential to “transform humans through a new birth that would enable them to attain salvation” (22). Their influence, argues Whitburn, led colonial Americans to emphasize biblical interpretation and pulpit eloquence, precursors to later oratorical and rhetorical education.Education is the topic of chapter 3, “Rhetoric at Yale,” which traces the development of preaching as a learned skill especially in the context of Jonathan Edwards’s theological legacy and the Second Great Awakening. Whitburn devotes particular attention here to ministerial education, which was, he argues, associated with the revolutionary rise of rhetoric in the early nineteenth century. Educators at Yale, one of America’s largest colleges at the time, and Andover, America’s premier graduate institution, used the commonplaces of rhetorical education to conceptualize the teaching and practice of clerical work. During and after the First Great Awakening, preaching communicated to congregations, precipitated mass conversion, and resulted in good works; therefore, the skills preachers needed informed college curricula.When—in chapter 4, “Rhetoric at Harvard and Its Beginnings at Andover”—recounting the life, work, and rhetorical teachings of Eliphalet Pearson, Whitburn focuses especially on the institutions at which Pearson taught: Phillips Academy and Andover. Previous histories of rhetorical theory and pedagogy in the early republic feature Timothy Dwight, John Witherspoon, and John Quincy Adams since these men wrote explicitly about rhetoric in the belletristic tradition. Whitburn’s cultural biography of Pearson moves beyond the legacies of Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, contending that institutions like Andover and men like Pearson were equally important in America’s golden rhetorical age. According to Whitburn, Pearson not only promoted rhetoric as “a complex of ideas to inform preaching” but also laid the groundwork for those who used rhetoric to inform secular endeavors including governance and law (131).While recovering overlooked figures, Whitburn shines a revealing light on already-studied institutions when—in chapter 5, “The Further Rise of Rhetoric and Importation of German Learning at Harvard”—he chronicles the influence of German curricula on rhetorical education at Harvard. He argues: “The most important contribution of the importation of German learning to the rhetorical revolution in the Harvard community was a more rigorous application of the concept of historicism to biblical interpretation and ecclesiastical history” (223). This chapter contains sections on various members of the Harvard community important in the historical ecology of the school’s development, including Christoph Daniel Ebeling (a correspondent of Pearson’s and a researcher in Hamburg on the geography and politics of the United States) and John Quincy Adams (who was stationed in Germany as a US plenipotentiary minister to Prussia and later a Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard). Looking past the standard litany of professorial lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, Whitburn surveys a wide range of often underappreciated sources—the Anthology Club; education abroad; exchanges of books and the expansion of library holdings; correspondence, reviews, translations, and travelogues; and methods of elementary and college instruction—thereby demonstrating the depth of the German influence on American rhetorical education (304).While Whitburn’s attention to Harvard and Yale enriches the present-day scholarly narrative about these two institutions and their outsize influence on American rhetorical education, in chapter 6 (“Andover’s Encounter with Rhetoric and Philosophy from Germany”), he most substantively expands our understanding of this period when chronicling America’s first major graduate institution, Andover Theological Seminary, which, Whitburn contends, laid the foundations of the American university and influenced American education for generations. Continuing to emphasize the impact of German learning while attending to rhetoric-adjacent disciplines such as theology, literary criticism, and classics (307), Whitburn challenges the typical story about German influence coming to American shores in the mid-nineteenth century. Long before the German model of the “research university” inspired institutions like Johns Hopkins, Whitburn finds at Andover “a rich complex of German ideas in the works of both rhetoricians and philosophers that both reinforced and informed American rhetoric” (307). Moreover, Whitburn explores Andover’s contribution to “the acceptance of academic freedom as one of the major characteristics of the modern university” (384).Chapter 7 (“Ebenezer Porter’s Cosmic Rhetoric”) complements the institutional history of Andover with an intellectual biography of Ebenezer Porter, a professor of sacred rhetoric (1812–27) and, later, president of Andover (1827–34). Just as he addressed the importance of homiletics in early American rhetorical education, in this chapter Whitburn reviews Porter’s influential lectures on the subject while also attending to his role in the Second Great Awakening. He underscores Porter’s views on the relationship between preaching and rhetoric, thereby bolstering his claim that Porter pioneered a “new area of rhetoric” that takes the minister’s life as a type of lived or embodied persuasion, which Whitburn calls organization or sociological rhetoric. Porter is, thus, an important figure owing to his “devising a sacred rhetoric that constituted the first major homiletics in America,” one that “reflected the scope of the ancient rhetoricians that Porter so revered” (386). After demonstrating Andover’s importance in and Porter’s influence on early American rhetorical education, in chapter 8 (“Andover’s Contributions to the Modern University”) Whitburn details their legacy, identifying Andover as the keystone of rhetorical education and history (468) while showcasing specific aspects of the modern university’s history: financial aid, the library, research, and publication via university presses and journals.Whitburn concludes his thorough study with a final chapter about the 1828 Yale Reports, often imagined by historians of higher education as an atavistic defense of the classical curriculum. He argues that historians who have “heaped contempt on the Reports” fail to understand the context—secular, religious, and rhetorical—of the early nineteenth century and, therefore, have failed to “appreciate the extent to which the report was perfectly in tune with its times” (634).Overall, America’s Great Age of Rhetoric is a rigorously researched and fact-forward work of historical recovery. Painstakingly piecing together histories from across archives, institutional documents, family papers, and other primary sources from rhetorical history’s main characters, Whitburn’s project is novel in several ways. In uncovering an overlooked time period in the history of rhetoric in America, the book reorients historians toward the early republic’s theological context, which deeply shaped rhetorical education and institutional goals. It is certainly not a book for beginners; nevertheless, it is a deep dive for researchers and a vital text for historians invested in this period of American history.