Approximately what accents/dialects these people have:
Jonathan Edwards
George Washington
Patrick Henry
Alexander Hamilton
Charles Spurgeon
Jefferson Davis
Abraham Lincoln
Daniel Webster
Abraham Lincoln was a great speaker with a terrible voice:
Lincoln’s voice was, when he first began speaking, shrill, squeaking, piping, unpleasant; his general look, his form, his pose, the color of his flesh, wrinkled and dry, his sensitiveness, and his momentary diffidence, everything seemed to be against him, but he soon recovered.
–William H. Herndon letter, July 19, 1887
The [second] inaugural address was received in most profound silence. Every word was clear and audible as the ringing and somewhat shrill tones of Lincoln’s voice sounded over the vast concourse.
–Noah Brooks in Washington in Lincoln’s Time
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/speaker.htm
What is the furthest back President we have an audio recording of?
I didn’t look very hard but here’s Theodore Roosevelt in 1919 talking about The Farmer and the Businessman. I’m sure there’s older stuff, though.
edit: This youtube video says the audio’s from 1896. McKinley giving a campaign speech.
There have been a number of interesting threads over the years about the development of the various American accents. You can search for them but here is a start but I can give you more if you want. The regional accents started fairly early and the Southern accent had over 150 years to develop by the time George Washington died. Many of the founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson spoke with a Southern accent. There are no recordings of them of course but you can infer a lot about their native accent by written accounts from their less literate contemporaries who spelled more phonetically. There is also the concept of generation jumping which is basically just degrees of separation going back a really long way through only a few leaps. I personally knew people born shortly after the Civil War like many people alive have and they knew some people who grew up around the time of the founding of the U.S. in turn. The various American accents took shape a long time ago and they were certainly not remotely British at the time any of the people on your list lived.
Recording technology only goes back to the 19th century and only became widespread in the early 20th century but there are some recording of much older people captured in the older recordings. I will try to find some because I have heard them on the web before. Southern people born in the mid to early 1800’s sound fairly similar to people from the same area born 100 years later and wouldn’t seem out of place just due to accent but probably due to vocabulary. I believe the same idea applies to most of the people on your list.
They mainly sounded like pirates.