The Columbian Orator taught nineteenth-century Americans how to speak

Douglass used 50 cents he’d earned working odd jobs and bought The Columbian Orator at a local bookshop. He fell in love with the volume and was seldom without it, carrying the book with him when he eventually escaped to freedom. With the textbook as his guide, Douglass became, in the words of biographer David W. Blight, “the greatest African American leader and orator of the nineteenth century.” Though the legendary abolitionist read as much as he could from other sources, it’s likely that “nothing had a more immediate or lasting effect on the young Douglass’s intellectual and spiritual growth than his fortuitous discovery of The Columbian Orator,” Blight adds. “Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book,” Douglass recalled. The textbook also helped shape the destiny of Douglass’s contemporary Abraham Lincoln during Lincoln’s early days in New Salem, Illinois. With little formal education, the twenty-one-year-old Lincoln “studied with relish the classical and Enlightenment-er ... Read full article.