De Tocqueville helps us see American democracy as a way of life shaped by individualism and a dislike of theatrical display. In John Adams, the ideals of Protestant Christianity and Roman republicanism collided. Adams believed in personal integrity, but was unashamed to perform a social role, inspired by the Roman republican orator Cicero. In the nineteenth century Hugh Blair repositioned rhetoric as a way to speak truth, in a language that in practice confined truth-speaking to the elite. When working-class Irish Americans sought a more inclusive democracy, they found a symbolic representative in the actor Edwin Forrest, and many died in the ensuing riot outside a new opera house in 1849. Black Americans first found a public voice through the person of Frederick Douglass, whose oratory was founded both on preaching and on the old flamboyant republican tradition. Women first demanded a voice in the context of Quakerism and the campaign to abolish slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton later argued for female suffrage in terms that were more secular, more individualist and ultimately more elitist.

Quakers, originally from The Netherlands and Germany, were the first to formulate criticism of slavery in the Caribbean and North America in the Germant0own Declaration of 1688. Only in the late 18th century Quakers also had political influence in the UK, e.g. through the discourse of Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, describing the horrors of the Middle Passage. At the same time in France, some Enlightenment philosophers also critical of slavery, though often ambiguously. Most explicit was the discourse of Condorcet.