We cannot argue
that question adequately here. It is sufficient to say that in
the pioneer stages of our existence oratory was necessary as a
stimulus to communal thought and feeling. The speeches of Patrick
Henry and Samuel Adams were as essential to our winning
independence as the sessions of statesmen and the armed conflicts
in the field. And in that new West which came so swiftly and
dramatically into existence at the close of the Revolution, the
orator came to be regarded as the normal type of intellectual
leadership. The stump grew more potent than schoolhouse and
church and bench.
The very pattern, and, if one likes, the tragic victim of this
glorification of oratory was Henry Clay, "Harry of the West," the
glamour of whose name and the wonderful tones of whose voice
became for a while a part of the political system of the United
States. Union and Liberty were the master-passions of Clay's
life, but the greater of these was Union. The half-educated young
immigrant from Virginia hazarded his career at the outset by
championing Anti-Slavery in the Kentucky Constitutional
Convention; the last notable act of his life was his successful
management, at the age of seventy-three, of the futile Compromise
of 1850.
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