ABSTRACT
Samuel Phillips Newman, born on June 6, 1797, was reared and educated to follow in his father’s footsteps as a minister. In 1816, Newman graduated with honors from Harvard College and then studied the next year at Andover Theological Seminary. In 1818, he tutored at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, while continuing his theological studies. In 1820, he was licensed to preach as a Congregational minister (Malone, 1934). Although Newman occasionally practiced his theological vocation, it was as a teacher of rhetoric, English, Latin, and Greek that he most distinguished himself. In fact, at least three of his students—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Franklin Pierce—became prominent in American letters and politics. A writer as well, Newman left two instructional books as a legacy to future teachers. The first simplified Adam Smith’s treatise on economics for a general audience. The second, his major contribution to rhetorical education and the subject of this study, is A Practical System of Rhetoric or The Principles and Rules of Style Inferred from Examples of Writing (APSR). First published in 1827, it was reprinted in more than 60 editions, affecting the understanding and teaching of rhetoric in multiple schools and colleges throughout the 19th-century United States (Malone, 1934). 1 Newman died on February 10, 1842.
