On Monday, September 16, English 7 students will visit Rauner Library, Dartmouth College’s archive, for hands-on work with Caleb Bingham’s Columbian Orator. First published in 1797, Bingham’s anthology introduced Frederick Douglass to rhetoric, and Douglass carried this book with him on his journey north to freedom.
Because Caleb Bingham was a Dartmouth graduate (and the valedictorian of the class of 1782), Rauner Library has nearly 20 copies of this text. Our students will work in pairs to decode, read, and recite from 200-year-old editions. We will focus on two sections, Bingham’s “General Instruction for Speaking” and “Dialogue Between a Master and a Slave.” Douglass studied and mastered the principles outlined in the first section, and he read the second section again and again and again. In fact, this passage set the tone for Frederick Douglass’s life work: arguing for the abolition of slavery.
