Edward Everett was one of the most accomplished Americans of the nineteenth century. He was a preacher and orator, a classical scholar, an editor and critic, and a politician and diplomat. Oliver Wendell Holmes commented only half facetiously, "We [in Boston] all carry the Common in our heads as the unit of space, the State House as the standard of architecture, and measure off men in Edward Everetts as with a yard-stick."

Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, on 11 April 1794, Edward Everett was the son of the Reverend Oliver Everett, pastor of the New South Church in Boston from 1782 until 1792, and Lucy (Hill) Everett. Edward's younger brother, Alexander Hill Everett, became a writer and diplomat. In 1807, at age thirteen, Edward entered Harvard College, graduating in 1811 and delivering the valedictory English oration. A year after graduation, on 27 August 1812, he delivered the annual Phi Beta Kappa poem, "American Poets," which gave evidence...