Page 21 - Integrity Seminars - Special Report

The research for this essay started with a question: Why and how did Frederick Douglass and Abraham

Lincoln--who knew and respected each other, even when they disagreed--become two of the most admired
thinkers, speakers, and writers in American history, when neither of them had any significant formal
education? (Douglass had none and Lincoln had less than two years).

There are many threads on the topic, but we'd like to highlight one, titled "The Columbian Orator."
The Question and Answer format below is ours.

Q. What is "The Columbian Orator"?

G.P. David Blight's book The Columbian Orator (1998) contains this explanation:

"In 1795, after producing his own geography textbook, modeled on Jedidiah Morse's famous Geography
(1784), [Caleb] Bingham resigned as a teacher in the Boston schools, opened a bookstore on Cornhill
Street in Boston, and devoted himself to producing schoolbooks. In Boston in 1797, he published the
first of approximately 23 editions of The Columbian Orator. By the first two decades of the nineteenth
century, in vast stretches of rural America, including the South, Bingham's readers joined the Bible and
an occasional almanac as the only books in many homesteads"

Full title: The Columbian Orator: Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces Together With Rules, Which
Are Calculated to Improve Youth and Others, in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence. Caleb Bingham
(Editor), 1797.

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