Choate, Rufus

Rufus (1799-1859), an American lawyer, orator, and statesman. He was born at Essex, Massachusetts, October 1, 1799, and died at Halifax, Nova Scotia, July 13, 1859. He was graduated at Dartmouth in 1819. He took up the practice of law at Danvers, but removed to Salem in 1828. He was elected to Congress in 1830 and again in 1832. He resigned in 1834 to enter an office in Boston. He succeeded Daniel Webster in the United States Senate in 1841, and served the unexpired term. Mr. Choate was a brilliant public speaker. After Mr. Webster's death he was considered the orator of the state and the leader of the Massachusetts bar. His style was florid, his sentences long and involved. Webster himself once said, "When I was a young man, and first entered the law, my style of oratory was as round and florid as Choate's. I do not think it the best. It is not according to my taste." Mr. Choate's style may be inferred from the following passage from his Eulogy on Webster:

But there were fields of oratory on which, under the influence of more uncommon springs of inspiration, he exemplified an eloquence in which I do not know that he has a superior among men. Addressing masses by tens of thousands in the open air, on the urgent political questions of the day, or designated to lead the meditations of an hour devoted to the remembrance of some national era, or of some incident marking the progress of the nation and lifting him up to a view of what is and what is past, and some indistinct revelation of the glory that lies in the future, or of some great historical name, just borne by the nation to his tomb--we have learned that then and there, at the base of Bunker Hill, before the corner stone was laid, and again when from the finished column the centuries looked on him; in Faneuil Hall, mourning for those with whose spoken or written eloquence of freedom its arches had so often resounded; on the rock of Plymouth; before the capitol, of which there shall not be one stone left on another, before his memory shall have ceased to live--in such scenes, unfettered by the laws of forensic or parliamentary debate; multitudes uncounted lifting up their eyes to him; some great historical scenes of America around; all symbols of her glory and art and power and fortune there; voices of the past not unheard; shapes beckoning from the future, not unseen--sometimes that mighty intellect, borne upwards to a height and kindled to an illumination which we shall see no more, wrought out, as it were, in an instant, a picture of vision, warning, prediction; the progress of the nation; the contrasts of its eras; the heroic deaths; the motives to patriotism; the maxims and arts imperial by which the glory has been gathered and may be heightened--wrote out, in an instant, a picture to fade only when all record of our mind shall die.