My answer begins in the context of speech, not writing, because direct instruction in eloquence was often conducted through oral interpretation in the nineteenth century, but I will add some comments specific to writing throughout.

First it is important to define what eloquence is and what it is not. Eloquence is fundamentally a felicity with language. Language and its uses vary greatly over time, and by definition eloquent writing today will look different from eloquent writing in the past. It depends largely on what we value in communication. Today there is considerable value placed on simplicity, directness, and clarity in prose writing, whereas the “abundant” style popularized by Erasmus may have been more eloquent for an eighteenth-century Englishman, which in turn might have appeared garish to Aristotle in 400BCE Athens. In its common usage, eloquence is often conflated with stylistic choices like ornate description or figurative allusion, whose overwhelming popularity was unique to certain historical periods.

I think the question would be better phrased this way: why did people write the way they did in the nineteenth century, and why don’t we still write like that today? You’re essentially asking for a history of communication norms in the U.S., which is a huge undertaking. But there are some places to begin.

First, there’s an excellent book by Carolyn Eastman called A Nation of Speechifiers that explores the various roles of speaking in U.S. culture in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Suffice it to say that American culture was decidedly oral in this period, and learning to speak well was a cornerstone of American education. Training in eloquence primarily took place through (a) memorizing/reading and performing great speeches, works of literature, or poetry in the classroom; (b) listening to similar performances; (c) reading. Every student would study/perform verbatim speeches at length, or they might read a novel to the family at night, or they might read passages from the bible in Sunday school. There was a lot of reading out loud, which reinforced the relatively florid style of speech inherited from Renaissance interpretations of Quintilian’s rhetorical manual Institutio Oratoria (cf. Erasmus’ De Copia), which was fashionable at the time.

There is a significant ideological component to what counts as eloquence in a given moment. For American English speakers in the nineteenth century, mastery of language was indexed to class—and that’s true today, although we value class presentation differently now than we did in the past, for better or for worse. Part of appearing educated was to learn to speak and write in the ways that you thought educated people spoke or wrote. Rhetorical education flourished in eighteenth century England, for example, because people outside of London wanted to learn to speak and write like someone educated in the metropole. Given the continuous repetition of a relatively stable canon of speeches in early oral education, the style among educated Americans 150 years ago was homogeneous and stable.

Thus, to put it simply: people in the past spoke and wrote like that because they were trained to, not because they were better educated or more literate. They were differently educated and differently literate. But I think there’s good reason to think of eloquence more capaciously than style, because media of communication have changed drastically in the past 150 years. There’s an excellent book by Kathleen Hall Jameson called Eloquence in the Electronic Age, and she argues that changes in communication technology have actively deprecated styles of eloquence that were favored in the past. For example, modern television (and, I would add, the pressures of late capitalism) have changed our structures of attention dramatically from what we believe they were in the nineteenth century. We are less willing to sit and listen to a speech in its entirety (Jameson has empirical data to support this claim), much less listen to our little sister repeat the Gettysburg Address as entertainment ‘round the fire after dinner. And so short, repeatable messages are far more important for effective persuasion now than long, expressive ones. This doesn’t mean that television destroys eloquence, it means that terms of eloquence—felicity with language—have changed. “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit” is a beautifully eloquent phrase, not because it rhymes, but because it establishes clear criteria for deciding a complex legal case in eight (or nine, depending on the contraction) words.

From the post-bellum period forward there has been significant attention given to the development of a “plain” (or ordinary, or common, or colloquial) style in American education. I don’t know the origins of the movement well enough to explain it with much confidence, but I would speculate that it has something to do with democratizing of education (cf. Dewey), the ideals of the progressive movement (the success of Mother Jones's style, for example), and a rebalancing of civic and economic commitments for education broadly speaking. A good starting point might be Robert Cooper’s Language Planning and Social Change.

Edit: See [this comment](from https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/io37co/why_did_people_write_much_more_eloquently_150/g4daxwa/) from /u/Impersonating-Cactus, which fills in lots of holes in the academic composition side of this story.

Edit: One additional piece of this that I had planned on including but forgot was that whereas the 19th-century school's commitment to oral communication was decidedly civic, as per Eastman, today I think there is significantly more emphasis placed on professional/business communication when we think about good writing. That's another reason the plain style might be favored.

But to extend Jameson’s argument (which is now 30 years old), I would argue that our relationship to written language has changed significantly even since the advent of television. Communication in general, and writing in particular, is much more disposable now than it was, and also far more abundant. Our composition habits are different, too. We write constantly, in many different forms, and eloquence is not identical across all of them. What composes eloquent academic writing is fundamentally different from eloquence in a tweet (cf. academic twitter, which is awful). Text messages used to have literal word-count constraints, and thus you couldn't write like John Quincy Adams if you were texting your buddy in 2009. Because of this and other changes in social organization, we often spend little time composing our writing. We simply write and move on. Thus we are much more comfortable reading informal prose, and we value things like brevity, clarity, and plainness. We also have to be eloquent in other forms of communication, like photography. The huge diversity of texts we encounter on a daily basis has meant that one particular style—like the florid style of the early nineteenth century—no longer metastasizes in our rhetorical culture.

Eloquence in the nineteenth-century sense was learned, and the historical record only contains the writing of people educated enough to write (obviously) or those whose prose was so significant that it was otherwise recorded (e.g., Sojourner Truth). And so I suppose the most basic answer to your question is that we no longer write like they did 150 years ago because we don’t see much use in learning to do it.

To add one small element in support of r/PSUProfOnGrindr’s analysis about the importance of what kind of eloquence was taught in any particular era, probably the most influential American schoolbook of the first half of the 19th century was Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator, whose subtitle announced that it was “calculated to improve youth and others in the ornamental and useful art of eloquence.” A Boston educator, Bingham published the work in 1797, and it rapidly went through about 23 editions. (It was a sequel to his earlier textbook, The American Preceptor: Being a Selection of Lessons for Reading and Speaking, which likewise sold several hundred thousand copies and was still being taught in 1875.)

The Orator was a collection of 84 excerpts from famous speeches, essays, poems, and plays from orators and writers such as Cicero, Cato, John Milton, David Garrick, William Pitt, George Washington, Ben Franklin, and others plus some original dialogues. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass wrote about how he encountered it in 1830 as a 12-year-old Baltimore slave boy recently forbidden to learn to read by his masters. He pored over the copy he managed to buy and was profoundly struck by both its lessons in the power of language and its abolitionist sympathies, particularly in the “Dialogue between a Master and a Slave.” “Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book,” he wrote. When he escaped to the north in 1838, it was probably the only book he took with him. Its training in oratory surely left their mark on Douglass, one of the 19th century's great orators and writers. At about the same time Douglass discovered it, Abraham Lincoln was absorbing its oratorical lessons from his own copy of the Orator in New Salem, Illinois, with a similar effect on his own powerful oratory. Horace Greeley, the famous newspaper editor who popularized (though not originated) the slogan “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” wrote in his autobiography (1868) that "The first book I ever owned was The Columbian Orator, given to me by my uncle Perry . . . as I lay very sick of the measles . . . when about four [!] years of age.” To be fair, he adds “This Orator was my prized text-book for years, and I became thoroughly familiar with its contents; though I cannot say that I ever learned much of value from it, — certainly not oratory.”

As historian David Blight, who edited and wrote the introduction to the bicentenary re-issue of the book, notes, the Bible, an occasional almanac, and the Columbian Orator were “the only books in many homesteads.” It became “one of the primers through which thousands of American youth improved their reading and practiced syntax and speaking.”

For Blight’s introduction see its bicentennial edition (New York University Press, 1998), pp. xiii-xxix. A free copy of the Orator is here. EDIT: Corrected FD's escape, 1838, not 1848. EDIT 2: Fixed possessive - "country's"

Answer divided. 1/2 -

This is an interesting question - not because your premise is necessarily right or wrong (though I do believe it to be incorrect) but because it forces us to dig into the nature of language, the idea of the well-written (or what that means to us - in our time and place - in prose anyway), the composition of the archive, and our notions of our own writing. I want to address these points, and then use a few historical examples. I believe that, by the end of this, you will think differently about the premise of your question.

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I ought to note at the outset that because you ask specifically about writers of all educational backgrounds, I have ignored the now less common practice of providing training in rhetoric. While it was once commonplace amongst the well-educated, you have asked about a more general set of authors who might have been far less likely to have received this formal rhetorical training. Nevertheless, this is likely to account for a non-trivial part of the disparity between the speech/writing of the well-heeled of the past and our own apparently more modest rhetorical abilities. I have addressed it in a roundabout way where I allude to older writers mimicking even older styles - such as Lincoln.

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First, let’s talk about the nature of language - particularly the English language. Living languages are just that - living! That means that they are constantly changing. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that means that our lexicon (the words in the language) and our grammar (the rules which dictate how we ought to formulate language in order to be correct) are constantly in flux as neologisms enter usage, archaisms fall out of use, and certain forms and formulations become either acceptable or undesirable to suit our needs. (You’ll notice that we rarely use thou or mayhaps anymore). We also tend to shorten forms for more easy communication in informal writing and speaking, and that tends to gradually bleed into acceptability for more formal prose. Those more formal forms and now archaic diction seem more eloquent to us than they might have to the people who used them frequently due to our own lack of familiarity with them (it’s easier to be impressed the first time you see something than it is the hundred and first time you see the same thing).

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These are important points, because they bring us to the issue of what our idea of well-written prose is. Because of the changes which our language is constantly undergoing, there is always a tension which exists between the accepted and the new. That means that, for us, older forms will almost always sound more formal - and therefore more correct to use in more formal situations - than newer forms. This is important because it means that formal writing from earlier periods will almost always sound more formal/correct than formal writing from our own time/place. There are, of course, exceptions to this - mostly due to people in our own time mimicking an older style, writers in the past mimicking an even older style (such as Lincoln’s use of an early 17th century style which was meant to evoke the idea/feeling of biblical prose), or writers in the past writing in the extreme informal. We can see from comparing the register used in communication that we know was composed for formal occasions (inaugural addresses, etc.) that the type of writing you’re asking about is not a much more formal sounding version of informality. Rather, much of it is in the same register as those compositions we know to be written in a very formal/correct style. But, that raises the question: almost all of our communication - both written and spoken - occurs in this extremely informal register, so, why isn’t the bulk of what we have from the past also in that extremely informal register?

While eloquence is sometimes a matter of subjective opinion, I take your point that the 19th century and earlier writing styles did not usually meet the criteria of directness and concision evident in the 20th and 21st centuries. There is a stylistic difference though not a substantive linguistic one; that is, the difference is largely rhetorical. Rhetoric deals with eloquence relative to an audience and traditionally involves the canons of invention, arrangement, memory, style, and delivery.

Around 150 years ago, this was primarily learned through oratory and declamation (Connors 1997). Technology soon began to change, but the telegraph was still a specialized instrument. Yet, those later changes would carry changes made to higher education. Prior to the 1880s, there was little specialty in higher education study. One went and got a Bachelors Degree like everyone else in the class. There were limited opportunities to specialize in, say, Biology as opposed to Music or Business. One got a rather general education grounded in the classical humanities, though a bit of the vernacular as well. One learned Latin to prepare for such an education and was exposed to the well-wrought Latinate turns of phrase and rhetorical display. With an expanded middle class and great diversity of knowledge, the US grew its higher education system under the Morill Act and part of that followed the changes at Harvard: specialization (see Crowley 1998).

Harvard began English A, the first "freshman composition" course which is now ubiquitous across higher and secondary education. As these did not teach for any specialty, the purpose was to improve general writing skills. It was designed by a professor with a journalism background, Adams Sherman Hill, and thus the emphasis was on grammar, clarity, and directness for a mass audience (Crowley, ch 4). Both Crowley and Douglas (1976) argue that this fed into the hands of the wealthy business class, or at least those aspiring toward it. Newspapers, corporations, and other organizations needed clear and efficient communication, often in writing so it could span time and distance (not to mention be useful for legal analysis).

Much of this is part of a larger pattern of reducing rhetoric from its traditional role of inculcating habits of thinking things through in highly elaborate ways, examining multiple sides of an issue, and arriving at a conclusion or perspective to move an audience to act. This reduction began in the 18th century (Ede 1979) and remains with us today with rhetoric being equated to a simple matter of style, or worse, a matter of deception and ideology without thinking. Much of the "thinking" part is now covered by scientific reasoning and, again, its style is deliberately dispassionate. We have grown accustomed to tehse short, direct, and dispassionate messages as a result, so the lack of eloquence is often both the driver and the end result of how communication is taught, not only in writing but also in speaking.

Sources

Connors, Robert J. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh UP, 1997.

Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh UP, 1998.

Douglas, Wally. "Rhetoric for the Meritocracy." in Richard Ohmann, English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. Wesleyan UP, 1976.

Ede, Lisa. "On Audience and Composition." College Composition and Communication, 30:3 (Oct 1979), 291-295.

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