Kate Alexander

The Campbell Assignment
America of the 1840s will provide the timeframe for an assignment in rhetoric to be completed by university students. Historical events and philosophy of the time include the overreaching concept of “manifest destiny,” an idea originally espoused by Jacksonian followers, but embraced by William Henry Harrison and his successor, John Tyler. Americans believe that the God of Christianity supports their movement westward. This colonialist movement, unfortunately, has no consideration for the Native American’s already occupying the land. The annexation of Texas sparks the Mexican American war. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organize the first American women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Harriet Tubman escapes to the North and begins working with Underground Railroad. In the meantime, Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his essays including “Self-Reliance,” Frederick Douglas begins publishing, and Henry David Thoreau publishes his “Resistance to Civil Government.” The 40s are thus a time of vibrant philosophical thoughts, many of which are at odds with each other. Anticipation of the future and a new hope for rights of all are in the air. At the antislavery convention in London, William Henry Harrison and others walk out when women abolitionists are not allowed to be seated as delegates. The Amistad mutineers are allowed to return to Africa.
The students who are to complete the assignment will be situated at Oberlin College in Ohio. This college is significant because of its early acceptance of African American students and its support of the abolitionist movement. This college is also significant because it produced the first four women in the nation to receive the four-year degree. Among these graduates were Lucy Stone (1847), one of the first women to keep her own name after marriage, and Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1847). Of note is the enrollment of Margru, known as Sarah Kinson, former Amistad captive, who returns to the United States to take classes at Oberlin (1846-1848) (http://www.oberlinheritage.org/timeline2.html). Although many African American women attend Oberlin, Mary Jane Patterson is the first to receive the A.B. degree in 1862 (http://www.oberlin.edu/archive/holdings/finding/RG5’SG4/S3/catalogue).
A search of the Oberlin Archives produced a catalogue listing trustees, faculty, students, and curriculum of the time. The junior class curriculum includes Olmsted’s Natural Philosophy, Herschel’s Astronomy, Chemistry, Physiology and Anatomy resume and extended, Cicero’s De officiis, Greek Testament, Epistles reviewed, Plato’s Phaedo, Hebrew Bible, Isaiah and other prophets, Milton’s poems, lectures on law, political economy, Erskine’s Internal Evidences, and Leslie on Deism, Stewart’s Elements of Intellectual Philosophy, Demosthenes’ Oration on the Crown, and, of particular important to this assignment, Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric. The sophomore curriculum includes the study of Whately’s Logic and Rhetoric. Although the female students have a female principal, Mrs. Alice W. Cowles, they study rhetoric with James Dascomb, M.D. who teaches chemistry, mathematics and natural philosophy, law, sacred music, and rhetoric. The size of the junior female class is about 36 students. The ratio of men to women at Oberlin in 1836 is 92 to 310. The male students need to present evidence of good moral character, and those studying theology need to bring certificates of good standing in an evangelical church. The female students have to present evidence of character and usefulness and their ability to perform domestic labor, along their intention to pursue a program of study for at least two years. Men and women are separated in classes except in cases where course availability is limited. In this case, classes are coeducational.
The Assignment
This assignment will span a month’s time with different assignments due each week.
Weeks One and Two: Students will read Book I of Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric and will be prepared to recite primary ideas expressed by Campbell during the first week. During the second week, students will be examined on the ideas gleaned from the readings and recitations of the first week. In summary, this is what the young ladies will be expected to know:
• Campbell calls upon the treatise of his fellow Scotsman, David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature), to formulate his own philosophy of rhetoric. Both Hume and Campbell are phenomenologists or empiricists, that is to say, they rely upon experience for their view of reality. This is contra Immanuel Kant who, in very simple terms, proposed that phenomena received through the senses provide means to the noumena, a state attainable by reason.
• Definition of Rhetoric
o That talent by which the discourse if adapted to its end
o The grand art of communication, not of ideas only, but of sentiments, passions, dispositions, and purposes
o The art of speaking, in the extensive sense in which Campbell employs the term (this will be answered in the reading)
• Stages of Rhetoric as follows:
o First and primitive stage consists of what an individual derives from an awareness of what operates on his own mind, aided by sympathetic feelings derived from experience.
o Second stage distinguishes between types of discourse and arguments. The idea of logic and the syllogism enter the rhetorical picture.
o Third stage involves the perfection of this “science” by scientific investigation of the experiential element.
o Philosophy of rhetoric becomes the fourth stage.
• Theory of Human Nature:
o Mental contents: These are entities that we cannot question because they are immediately present to the mind.
§ The first of these are sensations because they reveal internal sensations such as pleasures and pains or qualities such as color and figure derived from external objects. All perceptions, Campbell posits, originate in sensations, thus again classifying him as a phenomenologist or empiricist.
 Ideas of memory derive also from sensations as they are prints left by sensible impressions§
§ The third component of Campbell’s “mental contents” is imagination which derives from memory and thus from sensation. Included here are ideas of golden cities and centaurs, unreal things never observed
o Vivacity—Campbell believes that mind distinguishes between kinds of perception by relative degrees of vivacity, a concept which includes liveliness, force, energy brightness, brilliancy, steadiness and luster.
o Association of Ideas—The most important associations are resemblance, contiguity, and causation. The mind associates ideas which are similar, contiguous in space and time, and ideas related as to causes and effects.
o Experience and Method—Causation is the most important since this is the basis of everything we know by inference about real existence. Campbell believes that the purpose of the syllogism (Barbara, particularly) is to clarify language and to be applied to mathematics and geometry. He also finds fault with the rationalist method of strict demonstration. In accordance with the teachings of Hume, Campbell then makes experience and the form of moral reasoning based upon it as the fundamental method of inquiry and proof.
o Other elements in the Campbell’s philosophy include sympathy because it is the method by which passion is transferred from one person to another. It attaches us to the concerns of others.
In summary, students should know:
• The vivacity or liveliness of ideas-the quality primarily responsible for attention and belief
• Of the kinds of perceptions, sensations are typically the most vivid, ideas of memory are less vivid, and ideas of the imagination are the least vivid.
• There is an attraction or association among the ideas of the mind
Week Three: The male professor of rhetoric will ask the female students to consider the 1832 Lecture at Franklin Hall of Maria Stewart with particular consideration of the following passages:
“Why sit ye here and die? If we say we will go to a foreign land, the famine and the pestilence are there, and there we shall die. If we sit here, we shall die. Come let us plead our cause before the whites: if they save us alive, we shall live—and if they kill us, we shall but die.

Methinks I heard a spiritual interrogation—'Who shall go forward, and take off the reproach that is cast upon the people of color? Shall it be a woman? And my heart made this reply —'If it is thy will, be it even so, Lord Jesus!'

I have heard much respecting the horrors of slavery; but may Heaven forbid that the generality of my color throughout these United States should experience any more of its horrors than to be a servant of servants, or hewers of wood and drawers of water! Tell us no more of southern slavery; for with few exceptions, although I may be very erroneous in my opinion, yet I consider our condition but little better than that. Yet, after all, methinks there are no chains so galling as the chains of ignorance—no fetters so binding as those that bind the soul, and exclude it from the vast field of useful and scientific knowledge. O, had I received the advantages of early education, my ideas would, ere now, have expanded far and wide; but, alas! I possess nothing but moral capability—no teachings but the teachings of the Holy spirit (sic).

I have asked several individuals of my sex, who transact business for themselves, if providing our girls were to give them the most satisfactory references, they would not be willing to grant them an equal opportunity with others? Their reply has been—for their own part, they had no objection; but as it was not the custom, were they to take them into their employ, they would be in danger of losing the public patronage. And such is the powerful force of prejudice. Let our girls possess what amiable qualities of soul they may; let their characters be fair and spotless as innocence itself; let their natural taste and ingenuity be what they may; it is impossible for scarce an individual of them to rise above the condition of servants. Ah! why is this cruel and unfeeling distinction? Is it merely because God has made our complexion to vary? If it be, O shame to soft, relenting humanity! "Tell it not in Gath! publish it not in the streets of Askelon!" Yet, after all, methinks were the American free people of color to turn their attention more assiduously to moral worth and intellectual improvement, this would be the result: prejudice would gradually diminish, and the whites would be compelled to say, unloose those fetters!

Though black their skins as shades of night, Their hearts are pure, their souls are white.”
--In With Pen and Voice. Ed. Shirley Wilson Logan,
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois U. Press, 1995.
Students will apply Campbell’s rhetorical terms and philosophy to the speech. They will begin by identifying passages of vivacity or liveliness of ideas. For example:
o Maria Stewart juxtaposes life and death against the ideas of action and inaction as she employs the rhetorical device of antithesis in a Ciceronian sense as found in his Tusculan Disputations. In other words, we can look life in the eye and confront the issues or we can simply die. Stewart thus challenges her audience to become active.
o She next invokes God’s selection of her as a woman to carry the torch under the protection of the Holy Spirit

Students will be required to identify two additional examples of vivacity in the passages from Maria Stewart’s speech.

Each student will then recite the speech before the class.

Next, students will consider perception in terms of sensations they are experiencing while reading and delivering the speech. These might include thoughts about death, thoughts about God, and thoughts about injustices done to those in slavery. Then, students will consider impressions left following initial reading of the Stewart passages. In an invocation of memory, students will be asked if the speech brought up any impressions previous to their reading it? The next part involves imagination for those students not directly involved in the ravages of slavery who have only read about it. This group will be asked to write about these impressions. Those from the African American population will write as well. However, their writing will most surely be based on direct experience. I want all students to look particularly at the last line of the passage which presents today as very controversial, but not terribly unusual at the time. William Blake has a similar statement in his poem, “The Little Black Boy” (Songs of Innocence): “Though black their skins as shades of night, Their hearts are pure, their souls are white.”
All students will then read their essays in class.
Week Four: Students will read the following passages from a speech delivered by Frederick Douglas at the Plymouth County Anti-Slavery Society, November 4, 1841):

THE CHURCH AND PREJUDICE : “At the South I was a member of the Methodist Church. When I came north, I thought one Sunday I would attend communion, at one of the churches of my denomination, in the town I was staying. The white people gathered round the altar, the blacks clustered by the door. After the good minister had served out the bread and wine to one portion of those near him, he said, "These may withdraw, and others come forward;" thus he proceeded till all the white members had been served. Then he took a long breath, and looking out towards the door, exclaimed, "Come up, colored friends, come up! for you know God is no respecter of persons!" I haven't been there to see the sacraments taken since.”
“The slaveholding ministers preach up the divine right of the slaveholders to property in their fellow- men. The southern preachers say to the poor slave, "Oh! if you wish to be happy in time, happy in eternity, you must be obedient to your masters; their interest is yours. God made one portion of men to do the working, and another to do the thinking; how good God is! Now, you have no trouble or anxiety; but ah! you can't imagine how perplexing it is to your masters and mistresses to have so much thinking to do in your behalf! You cannot appreciate your blessings; you know not how happy a thing it is for you, that you were born of that portion of the human family which has the working, instead of the thinking to do! Oh! how grateful and obedient you ought to be to your masters! How beautiful are the arrangements of Providence! Look at your hard, horny hands--see how nicely they are adapted to the labor you have to perform! Look at our delicate fingers, so exactly fitted for our station, and see how manifest it is that God designed us to be His thinkers, and you the workers--Oh! the wisdom of God!"--I used to attend a Methodist church, in which my master was a class leader; he would talk most sanctimoniously about the dear Redeemer, who was sent "to preach deliverance to the captives, and set at liberty them that are bruised"--he could pray at morning, pray at noon, and pray at night; yet he could lash up my poor cousin by his two thumbs, and inflict stripes and blows upon his bare back, till the blood streamed to the ground! all the time quoting scripture, for his authority, and appealing to that passage of the Holy Bible which says, "He that knoweth his master's will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes!" Such was the amount of this good Methodist's piety.
Students will consider this speech with special emphasis on Campbell’s categories of cause and effect as well as sympathy and write a two-page essay delineating their responses. They may also call upon any material used in their analysis of the Stewart speech. They will read their essays before the class.