Albert R. Kitzhaber, writing about Adams Sherman Hill in Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850–1900, states:

 

It is difficult to find out much about Hill…. Except for occasional passing references, none of the men directly associated with him seems to have written about him; and though his imprint on rhetorical instruction in the last quarter of the century was pronounced, he seems not to have been the sort of teacher who has a large personal following among his students. (60) [1]

 

Indeed, it is difficult to find out much about Hill. Besides Hill’s birth in 1833 and death in 1910, both in Boston, Massachusetts, the details one can find out about Hill are generally the barest of facts regarding his career. For instance, Bruce Herzberg’s entry on Hill in the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition  informs that Hill received a law degree from Harvard in 1855 (320), and the Civil War Interactive website reveals that Hill then became a law reporter, working many years for the New York Tribune. Hill, it is said, favored an impartial style of journalism, but the Tribune’s publisher, Horace Greeley, was very partisan. Because of their differences, Hill resigned in 1863 and founded a competing publication, Independent News Room, which lasted until the end of the Civil War (www.civilwarinteractive.com).

 

Charles W. Eliot had graduated from Harvard the same year as Hill, and according to Kitzhaber, both Eliot and Hill shared an interest in “giving more prominence to English studies, and particularly training in composition.” Thus, in 1872, a few years after Eliot had became president of Harvard, he hired Hill as an assistant professor of rhetoric (60). In 1876 Hill was named the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, an office he held until 1904 (Herzberg 320). Paul E. Ried, in his article “The First and Fifth Boylston Professors: A View of Two Worlds,” says that while at Harvard “Hill withdrew from an active career as a writer-journalist to undertake the scholar’s life” (233). During his scholar’s life Hill published The Principles of Rhetoric in 1878 (and a revised version in 1895), Our English in 1889, Foundations in Rhetoric in 1892, and Beginning of Rhetoric and Composition in 1903. Hill also published articles on the need for the English language’s equal status with Latin and Greek in schools (Kitzhaber 60) and, as Maureen Daly Goggin and Steve Beatty note, Hill is credited with the creation of the first composition program in 1874. The course, taught by Hill and based off his textbook The Principles of Rhetoric, was a two-semester, two-hour course for sophomores. From the beginning, however, Hill argued that the class should be required of freshmen. Finally, in 1885, the course was moved to the freshman level (43).

 

Ried, who addresses Hill’s career situated in its time and culture as no other scholar has done, claims that Hill’s rhetoric is a direct reflection “of the times in and for which [it was] produced” (233). A brief history of the Boylston chair, provided by Edward P. J. Corbett, offers the beginnings of an understanding of Hill’s situation: Harvard’s Boylston chair began in 1806 and the first two chairs, John Quincy Adams and Joseph McKean, were classical rhetoricians, focusing on eloquence in persuasion; Edward T. Channing abandoned classical traditions, focusing instead on literary criticism and aligning rhetoric with belles lettres, but “he gradually shifted the emphasis from speaking to writing” (625); Francis James Child turned rhetoric studies towards philology, Chaucer, and Anglo-Saxon; and finally, during Hill’s tenure, “the term rhetoric fell out of fashion” and was replaced by the term “composition,” severing rhetoric from communication and rooting it instead to oral discourse (626). According to Ried, Hill focused on “a studied, carefully polished precision of expression” which thus logically “led Hill away from such matters as vocal and visual symbolization in delivery” (237). Why this shift to composition during Hill’s term? A look beyond the sphere of academia offers an understanding of how this change in rhetoric came to be.

 

According to Ried, the transition from oral (classical) rhetoric to written (practical) rhetoric—Hill’s rhetoric—is due to external social and historical elements. By Hill’s time, for example, Americans shard a sense of nationhood; life was changing due to the typewriter, the mail system, and the many newspapers and magazines easily accessed by the public regardless of class (231); Americans were linked by rail and the telegraph (233); and schools were advancing toward a unified system of teaching (231). This well-linked America enjoyed such a proliferation of printed mass media that focus was directed away from the orator’s platform and toward the printing press (231). Thus, in his course and in his book, claims Ried, “Hill was calling for a writer-specialist whose message was so informed or insightful that it could stand apart from its author, in print, to enlighten readers wherever they encountered it” (237). What Hill emphasized to his students, in other words, were the skills needed for written mass communication: “economy and clarity of writing, the standardization of form, and factual accuracy, without editorial comment…” or, in a word, “correctness” (233). Says Robert J. Connors, “the culture was calling for a new sort of educated man, and the ‘Freshman English Course’… with its emphasis on error-free writing and the ability to follow directions, was born during this period in response to the call” (284). America was also in a “Golden Age” of literature, notes Ried, so, he says, it is “little wonder, really, that Hill wrote for writers” (232).

 

Ried insists that “the influence of the fifth Boylston professor’s rhetoric on curricular developments in departments of English in the United States has been monumental” (238). Hill’s influence on the curriculum of colleges is clear: he created the freshman composition class, which is still taught in colleges across the country. Hill also devised the English entrance exams that college freshmen are required to take. Hill’s first exam, in 1865, was based on oral proficiency in English, and in 1873 the first test to judge written communication in English was administered (Goggin and Beatty 42). Kitzhaber explains the importance of the exams, stating that they “exerted strong pressure on preparatory schools and high schools to increase the quantity of work in English” (200). Today, universities continue to press high schools to provide students with abundant (and adequate) work in English composition. Likewise due to Hill’s influence, these English exams focus on English literature. This is because Hill, who was responsible for framing the exams (Kitzhaber 200), tied them to English literature (Goggin and Beatty 43).[2]

 

Aside from Hill’s courses and exams, his textbook was also widely influential. Donald C. Stewart states that The Principles of Rhetoric was “the principal freshman rhetoric text at Harvard for more than thirty years” (148), yet Hill’s influence did not end with Harvard students. As Nan Johnson says in Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America, Hill’s textbook was not only used at Harvard, but between 1880 and 1900 it was one of the most popular throughout the country, used also at Virginia, Alabama, Brown, Indiana, Dartmouth, and Yale (269 n11). Ried believes that due to the wide use of his textbook, Hill’s philosophy on rhetoric “has affected literally millions of students… maintaining a following to the present day” (238). Such far-reaching influence is due in part to the fact that “Harvard became one of the foremost leaders… in educational reform” around the 1850s and “helped to establish the pattern that nearly all other colleges would be following by the end of the century” (Kitzhaber 32–33). Thus, Hill’s freshman English class, which was based off of his book, was “the parent of all later courses in freshman composition… regarded as a model course in rhetoric and widely imitated throughout the United States” (61).

 

According to Stewart, however, Hill “exerted more influence on late nineteenth-century rhetorical theory and practice than he should have” (148). The Principles of Rhetoric, Stewart says, “does not contain a single fresh idea about rhetoric” (149). For example, Hill used Alexander Bain’s modes (Bizzell and Herzberg 1140). Hill also freely quoted from Coleridge, Aristotle, John Quincy Adams, Swift, Locke, Herbert Spencer, Emerson, Quintilian, and others to use or expand on their various ideas. Kitzhaber criticizes The Principles of Rhetoric as being “not properly a rhetoric but a book on usage” (127). Indeed, half of Hill’s textbook focuses on grammar and proper usage. He claims that “the foundations of rhetoric rest upon grammar; for grammatical purity is a requisite of good writing” (3). According to Corbett, Hill “made such a fetish of grammatical correctness that he soon reduced rhetoric to a set of ‘do and don’t’ prescriptions” (626). However, claims Herzberg, this “gospel of style” greatly expanded the university system post-Civil War. He explains, “this stripped-down rhetoric was a necessity because of the large number of students and the constant turnover of new instructors who needed clear guidelines on how to teach a subject that they generally hoped to leave behind has soon as possible” (321).

 

Hill’s style- and usage-focused rhetoric is still being taught in English composition courses across the country. His type of rhetoric is useful not so much because new teachers hope to leave freshman composition behind them (as Herzberg claimed of the new instructors that emerged after the civil war), but because of the increased and increasing diversity of students in the classrooms. Not only are many non-native English speakers attending American universities, but freshman composition classes are also filled with students focusing on different disciplines. In order to both teach English to non-native speakers and to foster a common understanding of English across multiple disciplines, a standard “correctness” of English is required. States Hill in The Principles of Rhetoric, “[the writer] should remember that, as far as attention is called to the medium of communication, so far it is withdrawn from the ideas communicated” (qtd. in Johnson 192–93). This means that a reader’s attention should be focused on what is presented, not distracted by errors in how it is presented. Thus, as there was in Hill’s time, in our ever more connected world (linked now by more than just the mail and rail systems of Hill’s day) there is still a necessity for the focus on clarity and efficiency. Writing centers and composition instructors throughout the United States stress this need for clarity, which inevitably revolves around grammar and usage (Bizzell and Herzberg 1140). Many of Hill’s lasting influences apply to composition, but one also approaches a postmodernist stance: Hill argues that rhetoric, as “the art of efficient communication by language” (1), always implies more than one person (the writer and the audience), and that “the ways of communicating truth are many” (4). This position fits easily with postmodern theories that not just one but multiple voices and truths exist. Whether in curriculum, composition, or postmodern thought, Hill’s rhetoric of style and usage undoubtedly has had and will continue to have lasting effects on the study and practice of rhetoric.

 

Works Cited

 

Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001.

Civil War Interactive. Did You Know?: Questions From the Trivia Archives. 23 Jan 2004. <http://www.civilwarinteractive.com/trivia082102.htm>.

Connors, Robert J. “The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse.” Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries. Eds. William A Covino and David A. Jolliffe. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995. 282–293.

Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. New York: Oxford UP, 1965.

Goggin, Maureen Daly and Steve Beatty. “Accounting for ‘Well-Word Grooves’: Composition as a Self-Reinforcing Mechanism.” Inventing a Discipline: Rhetoric Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Young. Ed. Maureen Daly Goggin. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2000. 29–66.

Herzberg, Bruce. “Hill, Adams Sherman (1833–1910).” Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Communication from Ancient Times to the Information Age. Ed Theresa Enos. New York: Garland, 1996. 320–321.

Hill, Adams Sherman. The Principles of Rhetoric. New York: American Book Company, 1895.

Johnson, Nan. Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

Kitzhaber, Albert R. Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850–1900. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1990.

Ried, Paul E. “The First and Fifth Boylston Professors: A View of Two Worlds.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74.2 (1988): 229–40.

Stewart, Donald C. “The Nineteenth Century.” The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric. Ed. Winifred Bryan Horner. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983. 134–158.