Valerie   Campbell Assignment:

Background:
My research last semester focused on a Canadian missionary, Isabel Crawford, who completed a two-year course of study for women at the Missionary Training School in Chicago. Crawford started school in 1891, following “a rigorous program of instruction” that included theology and Bible study, “rules of order, physical and vocal culture, kindergarten methods, and temperance” (Mondello 327). During school, Crawford was expected to “go out into the world,” which meant trips to the Chicago slums. In her diary, Crawford discusses the obstacles she faced bringing Jesus’ message to “the Black Hole,” a neighborhood replete with saloons, brothels, and poverty.

Also during her stay in Chicago, Crawford had the opportunity to attend the 1892 Chicago World’s Fair and the “Women’s Congress” in 1893. She wrote that Susan B. Anthony was “’clever and shrewd with lots of wit’ Crawford found the remarks “’commonplace.’” Crawford enjoyed Lucy Stone “’a dear old lady’” and Ellen Foster. Her highest praise was reserved for Julia Ward Howe: “’she spoke nicely and in a refined manner but when she recited The Battle Hymn of the Republic I could scarcely keep my seat. It was grand and she did it with so much feeling.’”

After completing her course of study, Crawford was sent to the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache territory in Oklahoma as a missionary to the Kiowa. The writings in her diary indicate that she adopted many Kiowa expressions in her “Jesus talks,” often imagining what Jesus would say to the Kiowas.

During her service, Crawford wrote hundreds of letters to financial supporters affiliated with the Women’s Baptist Home Mission Society. These letters included “news” and “updates” primarily in the service of validating her work; she was arguing for the continued financial support of her mission.

Crawford later became a speaker, employed by the Women’s Baptist Home Mission Society, who traveled around North America, calling on her (promiscuous) Christian audiences to “help the Indians.”

Genres:
Through my summary, I hope it is clear that Crawford received a rhetorical education.

• She “witnessed”/ gave her testimony to a wide range of people: alcoholics, prostitutes, and other “unmarketables” in the slums of Chicago
• She preached to and lived among the Kiowa as a “professional spinster” and missionary
• She wrote hundreds of letters to individual sponsors and/or financial supporters through Women’s Baptist Home Mission Society and the American Home Baptist Mission Society
• She traveled the country on speaking engagements as was called, in at least one newspaper account, an accomplished orator
• Additionally, she taught Sunday school, sewing/quilting, published her diary (Kiowa: Story of a Blanket Indian Mission) and an autobiography, Joyful Journey

Undoubtedly, Crawford and those like her would have picked up a great deal about rhetoric “on the fly.” In her case, we have evidence that she saw many influential women speak publicly; she learned from watching. What was her formal training like? How might she have been prepared for these opportunities and challenges?

Assignments:
We’ll pretend, for a moment, that “vocal culture,” a course in the Missionary Training School, is a course in rhetoric.

As the instructor of this course, I wish to prepare Miss Crawford and my other young ladies for the myriad rhetorical tasks and challenges awaiting them. And, as a Campbellian, I assume that moral reasoning must appeal to what is human in the audience. Because human beings depend upon their senses to know and understand the world, my pedagogy seeks to ground students in utilizing energetic, descriptive language to describe their observations, perceptions, and experiences: “[S]he must find ways to make [her] ideas as lively and vivid as sensations or ideas of memory because ideas of imagination, when give the power (vivacity) of sensible impressions or ideas of memory, will tend to compel attention, induce belief, and arouse passion” (81).

• A Testimony (Speech)
A first and important assignment would be to deliver a testimony: a short speech about how each woman came to become a Christian. Each student would have to deliver this testimony aloud to her classmates (in preparation for her work in the Chicago slums and future missionary employment). The women would first have to remember that pivotal moment, that transformation, for without such a memory, they could not advance in their endeavors: “It must be solely by the aid of memory, that they are capable of producing conviction in the mind” (58). The memory of the transformation must be recorded step by step; the students must pay attention to every accompanying remembered sensation, perception, and detail. The sensory perceptions and details will bring “vivacity” to their testimony. In cases of moral reasoning, it is from the particular to the general that the argument moves; therefore, by particularizing their conversion experience and recounting it, they may incite their audiences’ imagination and move the sympathy and the passions.

• A Reading
As Campbell states in Section IV, “Men considered as endowed with Passions,” you must keep in mind that it is “specious nonsense” to believe that an audience can be persuaded without being passionately moved. You will not earn your financial support unless you can convince your audience (your home mission society) that those you are helping are worthy and in need. How do you engender sympathy, pity, and action? Campbell answers this question for us: “It is evident, that though the mind receives a considerable pleasure from the discovery of a resemblance, no pleasure is received when the resemblance is of such a nature as familiar to everybody. Such are those resemblances which result from the specific and generic qualities of ordinary objects” (74).

To prove the veracity of this point, my students will read the speech of Maria W. Stewart delivered at The Franklin Hall (1832) and will underline every concrete detail that evokes, in the mind of the audience, a clear picture of an ordinary object:

“Do you ask, why are you wretched and miserable? I reply, look at many of the most worthy and most interesting of us doomed to spend our lives in gentlemen’s kitchens. Look at our young men, smart, active and energetic, with souls filled with ambitious fire; if they look forward, alas! What are their prospects? They can be nothing but the humblest labors, on account of their dark complexions; hence many of them lose their ambition, and become worthless. Look at our middle-aged men, clad in their rusty plaids and coats; in winter, every cent they earn goes to buy their wood and pay their rents; the poor wives also toil beyond their strength, to help support their families. Look at our aged sires, whose heads are whitened with the frosts of seventy winters, with their old wood-saws on their backs!” (Logan 9).

• A Writing
After carefully noticing the way Maria Stewart uses generic qualities of ordinary objects to such great effects, students will be asked to write a letter to the Women’s Baptist Home Mission Society asking for additional bread, medicines, and pamphlets to distribute to the “Black Hole” neighborhood. In the course of the request letter, the women will recount a single, remembered visit to a brothel, pub, or home in that neighborhood. In their letter, the women will describe the experience, using, of course, particular, “ordinary” details, so as to move the passions - excite the sympathy and the pity - of the audience.