Lincoln and the Forms of Legal Rhetoric: A Response to Robert A. Ferguson
| Autor: | Bruce P. Smith |
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| Rok vydání: | 2009 |
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| Zdroj: | American Literary History. 21:725-729 |
| ISSN: | 1468-4365 0896-7148 |
| Popis: | Accomplished orators, as Robert Ferguson incisively observes, "couch thought in an identifiable form." 1 Although an orator's words are critically important, the form in which those words are expressed can serve to clarify, emphasize, and eternalize the speaker's message. The political and legal career of Abraham Lincoln testifies to the inextricable linkage between content and form. Described by his law partner, William Herndon, as an "ungainly" and "awkward" figure with a "shrill, piping, and unpleasant" voice, Lincoln achieved his eloquence, as Ferguson notes, more through his mastery of rhetorical style than through his natural gifts (331-32). In this respect, Lincoln resembled his fellow lawyer Thomas Jefferson, whose words, according to one eulogist, too often "sank into his throat" or emerged "guttural and inarticulate" (qtd in Fliegelman 5). 2 Despite these limitations, Jefferson achieved enduring greatness by drafting the Declaration of Independence as a document to be spoken, against the backdrop of an "elocutionary revolution" that "made the credibility of (a speaker's) arguments contingent on the emotional credibility of the speaker," whose "tones, gestures, and expressive countenance" could render the words particularly credible and moving (Fliegelman 2). As the legal historian Brian Simpson has argued, the forms of expression adopted by lawyers such as Lincoln and Jefferson also reveal much about the way that law is conceived and prac- ticed. If the rhetorical forms used by Lincoln help explain his enduring eloquence, such forms also reveal much about the shift- ing roles of lawyers in nineteenth-century America. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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