A popular political speaker.
The lion. W. R. Thompson, of Indiana, one of the most popular stump speakers of the day, addressed a large meeting of Whigs from the stoop of Barnum's Hotel, Baltimore, in support of the nominations of the late Whig Convention.--Letter from Washington, N. Y. Herald, June 21, 1848.
The New York Commercial Advertiser, in giving the requisites of a good stump speaker, says
A less objectionable pre-requisite is self-reliance. A man may be pardoned for faltering in delivering a lecture; or for showing sweet confusion and charming hesitation in addressing a fashionable audience on manners and taste; a man may even be agitated by the conflict of natural bashfulness and a desire to advocate a good cause; but woe, confusion and utter rejection as an instrument of power await him who breaks down in a political stump speech. Right or wrong, well-informed or ignorant, he must be bold in speech and dogmatical in his assertions, and the weaker he feels his cause to be, the more vehemently and confidently he must advocate it. His self-reliance had better rise into impudence than sink into modesty, if he desires to make an impression; at least we have heard speakers who seemed to act on this principle. Seriously however, nerve, and energy, and self-reliance of a high order, are pre-requisites for those who enter upon the work of itinerant speech-makers among either party.
But we cannot longer dwell on this view of the matter. Other pre-requisites there are, as experience has shown, but they must be summarily dismissed: a good, meaning thereby a convenient, memory, that will retain the slightest incident or the most apocryphal anecdote that will tell in favor of the speaker's candidate and against his opponent, but will prove a very open sieve in the matter of a favorite's follies or an opponent's virtues. Then the campaigner should have the last edition of the political jest book; a vocabulary of hard names; a dictionary of offensive epithets; a text book of political phrases and clap-trap expressions; with a general assortment of "principles," "issues," "consequences," and a package of "patriotism," "devotion," "free republics," "enlightened people," &c. &c., and thus armed he may go forth to political war.--June 23, 1848.