Of barren boulders and glowing granite: Natural metaphors in Daniel Webster’s commemorative orations

Abstract

New England struggled throughout the 1800's to maintain its place as the nation's anchor while competing forces of progress and uncertainty, slavery, and westward dispersal of the population threatened the country's unity. Leaders worried that national unity would dissolve as the memory of America's founding and struggle for nationhood faded. To contribute to the body of work examining Daniel Webster's epideictic rhetoric and gain a better understanding of his construction of a conservative, reassuring public memory of America's origins, this work explicates texts of the 1820 Plymouth and 1825 Bunker Hill Orations with an eye to his use of natural and light-dark archetypal metaphors. The natural place and light-dark metaphors resonated with the era's Presbyterian worldview, despite their ability to limit agency, allowing Webster to reaffirm the status quo and reestablish New England's place as the nation's moral and philosophical epicenter by substituting intellectual and affective effort for physical action.