With precise phrasing and dramatic flourish, Laura Mielke's Provocative Eloquence1 invites us into the performance cultures of the late antebellum era, showcasing the interplay between theater and oratory, politics and entertainment, ethical imperative and prevailing opinion. Violence suffused culture, language, and everyday experience in a time that found melodrama, minstrelsy, and spectacle in the ascendant, racial hierarchies and American slavery at the epicenter of political debates and popular culture, and a troubled white masculinity asserting its heroism. Mielke's book documents anti-Black oppressions of the antebellum stage and oratorical platform, and it also takes a fresh perspective: Mielke argues persuasively that theatrical forms offered strategic resources for abolitionist argument, that oratorical provocations permeated the stage, and that the theater and the rostrum provided sites for antebellum Americans to think together about the power of words and the justifications for force in the cause of freedom.This nuanced argument challenges assumptions that form is conjoined to stable ideologies and instead highlights creative adaptation, recitation, revision, and “political portability.”2 Drawing evidence from a wide variety of source material, Mielke develops compelling, intricate case studies of print and performance that instruct and surprise. Before turning primary attention to the late 1850s, she sets the stage two decades earlier with Edwin Forrest, entertainingly described as a “theatrical star and noted egomaniac”3 best known for “yoking articulacy to brawn.”4 A deft, deeply contextualized analysis of Forrest's calm, reasoned 1838 Fourth of July address at New York's Broadway Tabernacle shows the intertextual and interperformative dimensions of Forrest's Democratic partisanship, available for audience interpretation in light of his heroic, explosive roles like Spartacus, Metamora, and Macbeth. The orator recommended deliberation and gradualism; the actor regularly linked speech to revolt. Forrest's varied performances probed free expression, white working-class populism, and militancy in word and deed, while they resonated with staged rebellions, Romantic poetry, and defiance of all sorts. Mielke asks of the “stubbornly elusive”5 Forrest and of U.S. performance cultures more broadly: “Does one who speaks of liberty for all necessarily attack slavery, even if inadvertently?”6With the stage thus set—with an analytic focus on paradox and opposition and an analytic method characterized by deep historicization and sophisticated, imaginative readings across genres—Mielke moves on to the 1850s. The dramatic readings of Mary Webb and William Wells Brown highlight the suasory potentials of African American performance in what Mielke elucidates as the “rhetorically strategic recasting of the antislavery lecture into the drama.”7 In an increasingly menacing political climate, performers like Webb and Wells Brown began to signal the potential for physical resistance to slavery. As they vocalized a range of tragic or comedic characters—enslaved captives, cruel slaveholders, or overwrought white abolitionists—these artists adapted popular caricature and imitative form to their own ends while exemplifying control, decorum, and performative skill. Mielke compellingly shows how the form of the dramatic reading created conditions for the presentation of highly incendiary words while deflecting physical threat.The viciousness of proslavery political argument crystallized in 1856 when Preston Brooks took a cane to Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate the day after Sumner's “Crime against Kansas” speech had maligned proslavery argument and proslavery senator Andrew Butler, Brooks's cousin. The famous lithograph of this scene by John Magee, which Mielke aptly identifies as a theatrical tableau, efficiently encapsulates a drama of violent villainy and oratorical martyrdom. Building from this scene—reproduced on the book's cover—Mielke analyzes the political oratory of Sumner and Butler before turning attention to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Dred and its stage adaptations. Whereas the senators drew analogies and interpretative frameworks from dramatic literature, Stowe's novel incorporates a significant amount of public speaking, “from school recitation and revival preaching to courtroom address and lynch mob inducement,”8 in service of a wide array of perspectives on slavery and violence. The stagings of Dred, whether they reinforce calls to action or suppress radical potential, whether they play for laughs or highlight prophetic voice, embody the oxymoron of a slaveholding democracy.John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry grounds Mielke's investigation of legal discourse as the nation pressed ever forward toward war. Dexterously combining Portia's ironic eloquence in Merchant of Venice with abolitionist argument and nineteenth-century racial melodramas like Neighbor Jackwood and The Octoroon, Mielke shows how Portia's “redirection of legal violence and challenge to the contractual claim on another's flesh”9 were adapted in the late antebellum period to interpret physical violence, from armed revolt to capital punishment. Readily available in educational texts of the time, Merchant's trial scene offered the possibility that eloquence in the courtroom might conquer opponents without bloodshed. This theatrical form, whether explicitly cited or only presented in “family resemblance,”10 offered scripts for thinking through speech and violence even as battle beckoned.Mielke's concluding chapter is less a conventional summation than a final act, rehearsing key questions and arguments presented throughout the book and then comparing instances of theater and oratory that responded to Brown's raid, trial, and execution, climactic scenes in the drama of word and violence of the 1850s. Developing an interpretive framework through analysis of statements of Brown's detractors and defenders, Mielke explores themes of oath-taking, vengeance, aggression, and martyrdom in Kate Edwards Swayze's play Ossawattomie Brown and Henry David Thoreau's speech “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Here, again, forms like the theatrical tableau and the speech of moral principle occur in multiple genres, and when they recur, revised and recited, they help to constitute a performance culture and a basis for belief and action.Mielke's Provocative Eloquence will be of abiding interest to scholars of rhetoric and performance as it offers compelling insights into the ways that cultures are created, maintained, and changed in and through performance practices and as it centers the fraught histories of eloquence and violence in the deeply racialized context of U.S. history. Mielke's analytic perspective offers instruction for scholars and students since her book enacts an adroit blending of history, theory, and practice as simultaneously text and context. The comparative analysis of Forrest's theatrical and oratorical productions, the thoughtfully imagined presentation of Mary Webb's polyvocal dramatic readings, and the demonstration that Portia's irony haunts so much nineteenth-century public commentary on the law—these were favorite sections of mine, although I learned much from every chapter. Mielke's book, engagingly written and filled with dramatic historical nuggets, provides foundational arguments and analytic methods, and it prompts further reflection on topics like the scope of an identifiable theatrical (or rhetorical) form and on the range of spectatorial response. Reading this book will also inspire questions about continuity and change in the enactments of eloquence and violence up to our own time, in the persistent struggles to realize the hope of Black freedom and democratic equality. Mielke asks, “Can a true distinction be maintained between rhetoric and force? Can words alone provoke or justify violence, and under what conditions and for whom?”11 Such questions, pertinent to the 1850s, reverberate today.

As the bicentennial of the momentous 1824 election approaches, Andrew Jackson is as relevant as ever. Jackson's shadow looms large over contemporary discussions regarding populism, democracy, and America's history of racism and colonization. Moreover, interest in Jackson has grown thanks to President Trump's efforts to frame Jackson as a precursor to his own brand of nationalist populism. A variety of analysts, from historian Mark Cheathem in The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson to Fox News personality Brian Kilmeade in Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans, have recently revisited the Jacksonian period both to enrich our understanding of that unique historical moment and to offer insights about present day affairs. Amos Kiewe's Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal of Presidential Leadership is a welcome addition to the conversation that provides valuable perspective about Jackson's presidency and the rhetorical nature of presidential authority in general.Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal aims to “give voice to the seventh president” by creating “an account of major addresses’ development, the reasoning and constraints behind them, and ultimately, their impact on the polity” (1–2). The book represents the most comprehensive rhetorical examination of Jackson's public remarks to date. Kiewe not only provides a window into the inner machinations of Jackson's administration and the painstaking process of crafting a public address; he challenges existing understandings of the presidency as an institution. Although Jeffrey Tulis, in The Rhetorical Presidency, argued that the presidency became a seat of popular (rather than constitutional) leadership in the twentieth century, Kiewe persuasively demonstrates that Jackson may have in fact been “the first rhetorical president,” arguing that Jackson's public addresses changed the trajectory of his administration and fundamentally altered the presidency itself (243).Kiewe accomplishes this through in-depth rhetorical histories of Jackson's public addresses. In chapter 1, Kiewe argues that Jackson's 1824 campaign was innovative; Jackson debuted a novel campaign strategy of “writing letters to private individuals for public distribution” (16) and inaugurated a “new era” of party politics featuring populist appeals (36). In chapters 2 through 9, Kiewe conducts case studies of Jackson's inaugural addresses, his first annual message to Congress, his rhetoric regarding the Nullification Crisis and Indian removal policies, and his rhetoric supporting his veto of the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. Kiewe also devotes attention to addresses of seemingly “minor importance,” such as the Maysville road bill veto, which involved a proposal to improve a sixty-mile stretch of road in Kentucky and foreshadowed the pro-Union rhetoric that would define Jackson's response to the Nullification Crisis (77).Chapter 10 takes a step back from Jackson's rhetoric to analyze public images of Jackson. Kiewe, using a visual rhetoric approach, argues that Jackson's popular leadership was reinforced by his supporters’ construction of Jackson as a military hero and populist icon through political cartoons and other portraits. This chapter is a detour from the book's main line of argument, but a welcome one that provides enlightening context about how audiences of the time understood Jackson's leadership. In chapter 11, Kiewe analyzes Jackson's farewell address and credits him with further developing the farewell address as a unique genre of presidential rhetoric.Through these case studies, Kiewe develops several insights about Jackson and his rhetoric. First, Kiewe challenges portrayals of Jackson as “brute, rough, savage, and backward” by documenting his rhetorical skill, strategic acumen, and principled devotion to the Union (4). Second, Kiewe sheds light on the “cumulative effort” that underpinned Jackson's rhetorical presidency (68). Jackson's most famous addresses often underwent several stages of drafting. Jackson would create a first draft that would undergo subsequent vetting and revision from his inner circle, such as Andrew Jackson Donelson, Amos Kendall, Martin Van Buren, John Eaton, James Hamilton, Roger Taney, and others. Kiewe describes Jackson's initial drafts as containing partisan and “forceful language” (75), whereas the revised final forms are “moderate relative to his initial points” (90, 248). These detailed accounts of the administration's speechwriting colorfully illustrate Jackson's behind-the-scenes struggle to balance popular leadership with adherence to the norms of his office. Third, Jackson is revealed to be a rhetorical president cognizant of the extra-constitutional powers of his office, who frequently “appealed directly” to the public and “used his rhetoric as a political tool . . . for governing purposes” (243).Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal provides a granular look at a crucial chapter of American history, using a rhetorical perspective that highlights how presidential authority is in part constructed through discourse. Given the book's nineteenth-century subject matter, Kiewe's meticulous account of Jackson's governance and speechwriting process is impressive. Nonetheless, Kiewe's characterizations of Jackson are occasionally questionable. At several points, he describes Jackson as a “progressive” (164, 178), an interpretation that is hard to sustain in light of Jackson's vigorous opposition to policies that would utilize government on behalf of national development and his plainly regressive attitudes and actions towards Indigenous peoples and the abolitionist cause. Kiewe's choice to analyze Jackson in the context of his times bolsters the book's primary strength; it allows for a thorough account of the dynamics and constraints of the era and how Jackson responded to them. However, some readers may be frustrated by Kiewe's hesitance to more forthrightly acknowledge Jackson's complicity with genocide and chattel slavery or to criticize the exclusionary definition of “the people” imagined by Jackson's populist rhetoric. For instance, Kiewe's recognition of Jackson's condescending, paternalistic attitude towards Indigenous peoples in chapter 6 may have been strengthened by conversing more extensively with texts such as Michael Rogin's Fathers and Children that explain the colonialist attitudes that underpinned Jackson's paternalism.As a book that sits “at the intersection of history, politics, and rhetoric,” Kiewe's Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal will prove useful to a variety of readers (1). Historians and scholars interested in the nineteenth-century United States may find this rhetorical study of Jackson a complement to other accounts of the era, as the book's special attention to the development of Jackson's addresses and their impact on the public is relatively unique. Scholars of the presidency may appreciate the book's intervention into the debate about the extent to which the rhetorical presidency is a twentieth-century affair or a phenomenon that can be traced back into the nineteenth century. Rhetorical scholars should appreciate the central place that Kiewe assigns rhetoric in the process of governance, even in an era where communication mediums were considerably more limited in reach and scope than today. Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal suggests that scholars should pay attention to how rhetoric can strengthen or weaken institutions such as the presidency, and how presidents influence and are influenced by evolving modes of mass communication. Above all, Kiewe's book highlights the need for scholars to conduct rigorous rhetorical analyses of other nineteenth-century rhetorical presidents, to enrich understanding of the era and to illustrate how rhetorical choices made centuries ago exert influence on the present-day institution of the presidency.