“It is doubtful if there ever has been a society in which the orator counted for more than he did in the Cotton Kingdom,” observed historian William Garrott Brown in his 1903 cultural history, The Lower South in American History. Permeating all sectors of antebellum southern culture, this oral tradition, according to southern historians and commentators, produced a passion for rhetoric that effectively impeded the production of a distinctly southern literature. Because of an “intense desire to master the spoken word,” early-twentieth-century historian Virginius Dabney concludes, “the cherished ambition of almost every young Southerner was for a public rather than a literary career.” Nineteenth-century southern novelist William Gilmore Simms concurs, attributing southerners' inability to “produce a national literature” to the fact that they are a “purely agricultural people” and therefore tend to produce “great orators” instead. Yet in this chapter I show that the southern oratory that flourished over the forty-year period preceding the Civil War, rather than impeding the development of a southern literary tradition, in fact shaped southern women's pro-slavery and abolitionist writings. While in the preceding chapter I illustrated how Monk draws upon general interest in the female voice and nativist anxieties about immigrants' impact on it to produce anti-Catholic sentiment, in the following pages I will show how writers contribute to the slavery question by focusing their narratives on the southern oral tradition and its effect on both the female voice and women's public speech.