Charles Manly's 1838 Literary Address

I'm deep, deep in things antebellum and literary, getting my Hutchins lecture ready for March 16.  I'm dealing with thirty-some addresses given to the joint meetings of the Philanthropic and Dialectic Societies at UNC and an occasional address to alumni and one or two graduation sermons, as well.  These addresses were common at schools throughout the country.  One of my key UNC orators is William Gaston, who spoke at Princeton as well.  I'll be talking about him again very soon.

I'm going to be talking a bunch about individual lectures at UNC and about trying to tease out some common themes from them, as well as issues where orators diverged.    On the common end of the spectrum is talk about individual duty, Union, the technological, intellectual, economic, and moral progress of the era.  Who could disagree with any of that?  Well, at least on the Union part -- a lot of people, just not the orators at UNC (by and large, at least until the late 1850s).  

But what about the places where there was division, where orators said controversial things?  Enter the Whig lawyer Charles Manly, who spoke in 1838.  A decade later he was governor of North Carolina, but at this point, he was just a regular old practing lawyer from Pittsboro.  I eat lunch in Pittsboro sometime, so guess what?  I've got a photo of his law office, which the good folks at the Chatham County Historical Society have restored.  (Pittsboro is the county seat of Chatham County.)  The office is small, obviously, but beautifully restored.  Below right is a picture of the back of Manly's office.

And because Pittsboro is a county seat, you know what's next.... I've also got a picture of the Confederate statue out front of the Pittsboro Court House.  Not quite the best picture, but they were having a sidewalk sale that day and I was sort of pushed out into traffic.

Be all of that as it may, Manly's address is really interesting for this reason: a major part of it is an attack on Indian removal and, thus, on Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren.  (Have I spoken recently about Gerard Magliocca's really good book on constitutional thought in the age of Jackson? If you're interested in this stuff, you should read his book.)

 Charles Manley's address isn't the most exciting of the ones I'll be talking about, but it is an important illustration of one key Whig theme--equal protection of the law.  And also the attack on Jackson's Indian removal policy, which Van Buren followed through with, with a vengeance.

What's even more interesting to me is that Charles Manly is the brother of another very important antebellum thinker -- Basil Manly, who was president at the University of Alabama before the Civil War.  President Manly was a Democrat and a minister; Governor Manly was a Whig and a lawyer.  Makes for some mighty interesting speculation about the differences between professions.  (It's not quite the Benjamin Rush, Jacob Rush contrast -- the physician Benjamin was a leading Democrat and the lawyer/judge Jacob was a leading Federalist.  That's a long story, which I'll tell another time.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Marc Roark]

Al -- This is really interesting. Thanks for posting.