Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

States of America in the 1800s for their own different ends but,
as a whole, in order to not simply render the young nation
competitive with the European powers but stronger than them.
And, curiously, they would all seem to find rhetoric, something
as seemingly small and simple as “writing,” to assure this end.
But before I go any further with this examination, I must
stop for a confession. I am well aware of the phrase,
“Correlation does not imply causation,” so commonly used in the
sciences and statistics. Because of that, I know that certainty
in religion or certainty in science and medicine does not so
very simply “equal” certainty in rhetoric, even despite the fact
that some of the earliest authors of those pre-“Current-
Traditional Rhetoric” texts, such as George Campbell, were
reverends who composed their treatises in order to help young
clergymen to write effective sermons or the fact that many 19 th -
Century rhetoricians, such as Alexander Bain, strove to produce
a “scientistic” rhetoric, as Berlin referred to it, by
approximating the empirical method of chemistry or physics.
That said, however, those then-contemporary social and cultural
changes spreading out from different corners of 19 th -Century
America are too conspicuous not to see the huge impact the
singular zeitgeist that they stirred would have upon rhetoric.
My return to the 19 th
century and the Current-Traditional
Rhetoric that saw its birth there is by no means setting out to
39