Red Jacket was a sachem or civil chief among the Senecas. He seems to have been of no family, and to have won his way to the first place in the councils of his people, by his tact, his patriotism, and, more than all his eloquence. Few men have ever lived who surpassed him in oratory, if we may judge his proficiency in that art by the effect he produced on his hearers. All that has been related of Demosthenes and Cicero among the ancients, or of Bolingbroke and Chatham among the moderns, may be applied with equal truth to this great orator of the Senecas. When he rose to speak not a word was heard—when he took his seat his enthusiasm infected all. He was even able to carry his point when superstition, in its darkest guise, was arrayed against him. Some specimens, at least, of such wonderful powers of eloquence may naturally be expected to have come down to us; yet, with but one or two exceptions, his printed speeches are tame to mediocrity. Much of this, no doubt, is to be attributed to incompetent translations: indeed, our author lays the whole fault at this door. But there is another and simpler reason, to which Colonel Stone has not alluded.
Every nation has its distinctive spirit, or, to speak more plainly, its peculiar mode of thought. To this the orator must accommodate himself. The same style of eloquence which affects an Englishman, falls cold on the ear of an Italian. Even the Philippics of Demosthenes, or the orations of Cicero, were unrivalled, only so far forth as they were adapted to the peculiarities of an Athenian or Roman audience; and, had the situation of either of these orators been changed, there is great chance that, unless they altered their style, they would have been hooted from the forum, or at least listened to in silence. So with the oriental orators, whose most celebrated passages seem turgid to us. We take it, then, that one of the great secrets of this apparent tameness in Red Jacket’s orations, arises, as much from our different appreciation of his style, as from the inadequacy of the translations. We admit that there exists no perfect transcript of a harangue by him, but could one of his speeches be handed down to us, word for word, we predict that it would seem to us little better than turgid bombast or inflated allegory. Yet that Red Jacket was a great _Seneca_ orator, we have the concurrent testimony of more than fifty years—to say nothing of the evidence, in the book before us, of his vigorous intellect and grace of manner, the two most important requisites for oral eloquence.