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WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
BY LORENZO SEARS, L.H.D. 
 
 The History of Oratory from the Age of 
 Pericles to the Present Time 
 
 The Occasional Address: Its Composition 
 AND Literature. A Study in Demon- 
 strative Oratory 
 
 Principles and Methods of Literary 
 Criticism 
 
 American Literature in the Colonial and 
 National Periods 
 
 Seven Natural Laws of Literary Compo- 
 sition 
 
 Makers of American Literature 
 
 Wendell Phillips, Orator and Agitator 
 
Wendell Phillips 
 
 Orator and Agitator 
 
 By 
 
 LORENZO SEARS 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 New York 
 
 Doubleday, Page & Company 
 
 1909 
 
b^4<^ 
 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION 
 INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1 909 
 
 sEp:4:fW9 
 
TO 
 
 RALPH CURTIS RINGWALT, ESQUIRE, 
 
 AT WHOSE SUGGESTION THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN 
 
*' Public sentiment is everything. With ptihlic sentiment 
 nothing can fail ; without it nothing can succeed. Conse- 
 quently, he loho moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he 
 who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes 
 statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.'' 
 
 — ^Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 "Agitation is the marshalling of a nation^ s conscience 
 
 to mould its laws'' 
 
 Sir Robert Peel. 
 
 "y4n Agitator's purpose is to throiv the gravest questions 
 upon the conscience and intellect of the masses, because they 
 are the ultimate governors in a republic." 
 
 — ^Wendell Phillips. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Wendell Phillips was so closely identified with the 
 most important episode of American history in the last 
 century that his life must be considered largely in 
 connection with it and its consequences. Known as 
 the anti-slavery agitation, it assumed as one of its early 
 phases the demand for immediate and unconditional 
 abolition. To this cause Phillips gave his best years 
 as the preacher of a crusade against an institution, at 
 first national and later sectional, which finally came to 
 be regarded as bad anywhere. Agitation of a disputed 
 question was the method, untrammeled speech before 
 the people the means, and superlative eloquence the manner 
 of his warfare. In his later years he became the champion 
 of other causes. 
 
 To do him and his work justice, both should be contem- 
 plated from the present as the day of an accomplished purpose 
 which was not generally approved in his own time nor 
 correctly estimated. Yet, to be just to his contemporaries, 
 it should be borne in mind that the progress of reforms 
 is slow and the appreciation of them a gradual growth. The 
 difference between him and most men of his generation was 
 in his early apprehension of justice, humanity, and national 
 consistency in a country calling itself free. The interest 
 of his biography gathers around this difference, as well as 
 around the later acceptance and endorsement of his main 
 
 vii 
 
viii WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 purpose by a large part of the nation. In both periods he 
 should be accorded a fair presentation of convictions whose 
 sincerity was equalled by their courageous and uncom- 
 promising utterance in the face of sufficient antagonism to 
 make his persistence heroic. 
 
 Aside from his interest to one and another as a reformer, 
 his oratory is of exceptional value to all who are interested 
 in the art of public speaking. Two volumes have been 
 published, one with his own endorsement, giving all that type 
 can preserve of some fifty examples of his speeches, lectures, 
 and addresses. Besides these there are hundreds more 
 printed in two weekly journals throughout a period of forty 
 years, which have been read in order to trace the course of 
 his thought on national, sectional, and other questions of 
 importance. The drift of his comment is given in such 
 abridgments and extracts as the limits and design of this 
 book permit, together with examples of his oratory on widely 
 differing occasions. To those who desire further acquain- 
 tance with entire addresses the volumes mentioned and files 
 of the Liberator and Anti-Slavery Standard afford ample 
 opportunity. 
 
 Besides the privilege of listening to him on several occasions 
 and reading information and comment in contemporary sheets 
 by friend and foe, the author has found particulars of home 
 life in the early biographies of Austin and Martyn, to which 
 have been added reminiscences and letters by some who knew 
 him well. Grateful acknowledgments are especially due to 
 Colonel T. W. Higginson, Messrs. Frank B, Sanborn, Francis 
 J. Garrison, William I. Bowditch, John P. Reynolds, Jr., 
 Edward J. Carpenter, Mrs. Julia G. Blagden, and to others 
 who have done what they could to add to memorials which 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 are remarkably few of a man who was oftener before the 
 people and for a longer period than any other public speaker 
 of his generation. ^' ' 
 
 Providence, R. I., 
 Memorial Day, 1909. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface . ....... vii 
 
 Chapter I. Childhood and Schoolyears . . 3 
 
 Ancestry — Home influences — Boston Latin School — Oratorical 
 promise — Companions — Harvard instructors — Studies and read- 
 ing — Athletic sports — Social leanings — Moral and religious 
 character — A law student — Collateral reading — Admitted to 
 the bar — Early practice. 
 
 Chapter II. The Cause 19 
 
 An unpopular movement — Introduction of slavery — Early opposi- 
 tion — Emancipation and colonization projects — Garrison and the 
 Liberator — Immediate abolition urged — New England Anti- 
 slavery Society — Garrison mobbed — Views of slavery — Condi- 
 tions of slave life and labour — Cost and profits of slaveholding — 
 Wrongs and barbarities — Recoiling evils — Estimates of the coloured 
 race — The cause of freedom from bondage and its justification. 
 
 Chapter III. An Advocate of Rights ... 31 
 
 Phillips witnesses mob — Previous convictions — Influence of one 
 woman — Meets Garrison — Idealism — Declaration of alliance — 
 First anti-slavery speech — Tribute to John Quincy Adams — 
 Defends right of petition — Inconspicuous at first — Renunciation. 
 
 Chapter IV. Freedom of the Press . . .49 
 
 Strictures on printing — "Incendiary presses" — The Observer of 
 St. Louis and Alton — Riot and murder — Faneuil Hall meeting — 
 Phillips's speech a revelation — Recognition of his power and promise 
 — Eft'ect of the speech — Dramatic element. 
 
 Chapter V. Labours Afield ..... 63 
 
 Increase of anti-slavery societies — Another defence of Lovejoy — 
 On annexation of Texas — Forms Boston Anti-slavery Society — 
 On slavery in District of Columbia — A\\ organizer — Embarrass- 
 ments — Associates. 
 
 xi 
 
xii WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chapter VI. In Europe 76 
 
 Tribute to Mr. and Mrs. Phillips on their departure — Winter in 
 Rome — Convention in London — A disturbing question — Phillips's 
 position — Speech on British cotton raising in India — On the 
 Continent and a winter in Italy — Return and reception — Home 
 life at 26 Essex Street. 
 
 Chapter VIL On the Platform .... 89 
 
 Readiness of speech — The Lyceum lecture — Noted lecturers — 
 Phillips's early topics — The Lost Arts and Street Life in Europe — 
 Preliminary to anti-slavery subjects — Advantages of lecture system 
 
 — On Irish appeal to Americans — O'Connell's tribute to Phillips — 
 A fugitive slave in Boston — Speech in Faneuil Hall uproar — Com- 
 promise in the Constitution — An oratorical victory — Talk of dis- 
 union — The nature of it North and South — The Constitution, Union, 
 and slavery — The ministry and abolition — Comment on Phillips's 
 eloquence. 
 
 Chapter VIII. Recognition and Leadership . 112 
 
 An address to President Tyler — General agent of the Massachusetts 
 Anti-slavery Society — Addresses, arguments and pamphlets — A 
 Massachusetts envoy in South Carolina — Second Irish address — 
 Admiration of O'Connell. 
 
 Chapter IX. Protests Against Politics . .117 
 
 Disturbing questions — Primitive abolition methods — Address to 
 the people — Politicians and reformers — Steadfastness to orig.inal 
 principles — Peaceable methods — Appeal to conscience. 
 
 Chapter X. Northern Alarm . . . .122 
 
 A muck-rake speech on Annexation of Texas — A new party in the 
 North — Boston officials capture a fugitive — Abolition protest — 
 On war with Mexico — Remarks on Scotch Address — On right of 
 petition for disunion — Calhoun and Garrison as disunionists — 
 Phillips's position — Cites British statesmen — Emerson's views 
 
 — Father Mathew's silence — Phillips's progress in fifteen years — 
 Growth of anti-slavery sentiment. 
 
 Chapter XI. Pacification and Agitation . .135 
 
 An era of good feeling — Webster's Seventh of March speech — 
 Phillips's review of it — Faneuil Hall meeting and further criticism 
 by Phillips — The Rynders mob in New York — Speech in Plymouth 
 Church — In Boston convention on the press — On Fugitive Slave 
 Bill — Shadrach a fugitive, and Sims — Phillips addresses mass 
 meeting on the Common — Criticism of Kossuth's silence about 
 slavery. 
 
CONTENTS xiii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chapter XII. Darkness and Daybreak . . 148 
 
 Quiet by compromise attacked by Phillips — Stemming the tide 
 against abolition — Defeat imminent — Resistance and non-resist- 
 ance — Obituary of Webster — Defence of denunciation — Litera- 
 ture of abolition — A hopeful sign — Strife in Congress — Lowell and 
 Whittier — Other men of letters. 
 
 Chapter XIII. Protest Against the Fugitive 
 
 Slave Act 161 
 
 Northern awakening — Effect upon Phillips — Legal arguments — 
 On capital punishment — Rhetorical examples — Mutual criticism 
 by abolitionists — Individualism — No party politics — Schools 
 opened to coloured children — Non-conformity. 
 
 Chapter XIV. The Main Issue . . . .172 
 
 Depression and doubt — Brooks assault upon Sumner — Fore- 
 gleams of dawn — Politics in the anti-slavery field — Political 
 limitations — Remote position. 
 
 Chapter XV. Disintegration .... 179 
 
 Disunion threats — Value of Union — Diverse views — Dred Scott 
 decision — Reviewed by Phillips — Party leaders criticized — Ora- 
 tion at Yale. 
 
 Chapter XVI. Recall to First Principles . .190 
 
 Grounds for encouragement — Forecasts — Endurance as a speaker 
 
 — Interpretation of States rights — Insurrection useless — Eulogy 
 
 — Reproof of public drinking — On woman's position — John 
 Brown and Harper's Ferry — Address on the Lesson of the Hour — 
 Press comment — Eulogy of Brown. 
 
 Chapter XVII. War Imminent .... 208 
 
 Spread of anti-slavery sentiment — Ballots rather than bullets — 
 Republican party and abolition — Criticism of absorption — On the 
 election of Lincoln — Outlook brighter — Eulogy of Theodore 
 Parker — A mob — Secession to end slavery — A Northern con- 
 federacy proposed — Lincoln's overtures to the South — Phillips's 
 optimism. 
 
 Chapter XVIII. The Culmination of Contro- 
 versy 223 
 
 Fort Sumter — Phillips speaks on the situation — Consistency — 
 
 — A public censor — Criticizes the Administration — The abolition 
 issue in war — Contrabands — On the war — Ripened opinion from 
 radical sowing — Phillips at the capital — Larger views — Military 
 emancipation — A proclamation of partial freedom — A look forward. 
 
xiv WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chapter XIX. Reflections on Government 
 
 Policy 241 
 
 The proclamation by the people — Northern allies of the South — 
 Negro soldiers — Toussaint I'Ouverture — A temperance lecture — 
 The state of the country — Hopeful vigilance — The press on aboli- 
 tionism — Strictures on the Government — English attitude — Sud- 
 den gains to the cause — Looking toward reconstruction — Dis- 
 solution of Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society — An historic fort- 
 night — Tribute to Lincoln — Work of abolitionists not ended — 
 Total abolition decreed. 
 
 Chapter XX. Continuing the Contest . .261 
 
 Phillips as an editor — Address to Boston schools — Freedmen's 
 rights disregarded — Phillips endorsed by Congressmen — Refusal 
 of nomination to Congress — A lecture trip — Attacks Andrew John- 
 son — Doubt of Grant — Vital questions — Creating public opinion. 
 
 Chapter XXI> Reconstruction and Other Issues 273 
 
 On release of Jefferson Davis — Criticism of Grant and Congress — 
 Motives in criticizing men and parties — Abolition success by defeats 
 
 — Religion and social science — Rights of coloured citizens — Negro 
 suffrage — Labour question discussed — Backward movement — 
 On Fifteenth Amendment — American Anti-slavery Society disbanded. 
 
 Chapter XXII. New Causes and Old . . . 290 
 
 Thirty- three years of service continued. — Intemperance taken up — 
 Christianity and Social Science — Nomination for Governor — Pro- 
 hibition and Cooperation — Support of General Butler — A coloured 
 Senator — Favours Republican party — Froude and Phillips on 
 Ireland — Questions of finance — Tribute to O'Connell — Rescue 
 of Old South Church — Heroic spirit. 
 
 Chapter XXIII. Last Years and Labours . . 307 
 
 Nomination to Congress again proposed — Eulogy of Garrison — 
 Religious belief — On liquor trade and Irish question — Oration at 
 Harvard — Courage to the last — Lecturing on labour and capital 
 
 — Address in Old South Church — Illness and death — Honoured 
 by thousands. 
 
 Chapter XXIV. The Substance of Phillips's 
 
 Oratory 318 
 
 Value of brief citations — As a lecturer — An exordium — Argumen- 
 tative discourse — Address expository — Judicial argument — Abolition 
 speeches — Denunciation — Defensive and aggressive speech — 
 Eulogy — Academic orations — Dramatic features of his eloquence. 
 
CONTENTS XV 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chapter XXV. The Form of His Oratory . . 345 
 
 The lecturer and his audiences — Voice — Dehvery — Moods of 
 hearers — Diction — Modes of address — Invective — Versatihty — 
 Perorations — Natural gifts and education — Qualities suggested 
 by classic orators — As an epigrammatist — Friendliness and 
 benevolence. 
 
 Chapter XXVI. Remainders .... 364 
 
 Items of minor interest — Home life — Library — Reading — On 
 lecture trips — Advice to speakers — Table-talk — Readiness — 
 Value to students of oratory. 
 
WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 I 
 
 CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL YEARS 
 
 (1811-1834) 
 
 ON MANY accounts it was pleasant and profitable to be 
 a Boston boy in the early years of the nineteenth 
 century. Some will say that it is better to be one at the 
 beginning of the twentieth; but happiness does not neces- 
 sarily increase with the progress of decades. Advantages of 
 several kinds are not augmented by steam heat, electric 
 lio-hts, and gasolene locomotion. Nature and art, thought 
 and affection have not essentially changed in a hundred years, 
 and the sources of material prosperity and of intellectual 
 eminence lie now, as they did then, in natural gifts and 
 abilities employed in wise ways. Many things, too, that 
 contribute to a wholesome satisfaction with life were common 
 a century ago in the Bay City. There were accumulations 
 of wealth with an unostentatious luxury, and a commercial 
 life accompanied by intellectual habits, with Long Wharf 
 on one side and Harvard College on the other. Old South 
 Church and Faneuil Hall standing between as the symbols of 
 religion and liberty. 
 
 By 1810, 33,000 inhabitants were living on the peninsula 
 over which William Blackstone had solitary domain when, 
 in 1630, he invited John Winthrop and associates to come 
 from Charlestown and taste his spring water, then selling 
 
 3 
 
4 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 out to them and removing toward the Narragansett country. 
 But the purchasers throve in their generations, and after one 
 hundred and eighty years' trade in fish and timber, rum and 
 furs, with an occasional cargo of Negroes — under general 
 protest — comfortable fortunes were amassed in many fami- 
 lies. Of these the Phillips family was one of the most 
 prosperous. 
 
 The Reverend George Phillips, a graduate of Cambridge 
 University and rector of Boxted, Essex, falling into disagree- 
 ment with some of his parishioners about conformity to the 
 ritual of the national Church, joined Winthrop's company 
 and landed in Salem in June, 1630. For fourteen years he 
 was pastor of the church at Watertown when that village was 
 as large as Boston then was. His son was the minister at Row- 
 ley. Then a goldsmith is found in the succession, although a 
 younger brother entered the ministry. Next, tAvo merchants 
 follow, and then a lawyer appears who, by 1809, had risen 
 through minor offices to the dignity of judgeship in the Court 
 of Common Pleas. Two years later his fifth son, Wendell, 
 was b)orn, November 29, 1811, who was to uphold the family 
 name through a good part of the century, but not after the 
 manner of his forefathers. They had filled prominent posi- 
 tions in the standing order of the Puritan Church and State, 
 in commercial affairs, and in social life. He was to distin- 
 guish himself and the family name outside these spheres of 
 influence. 
 
 Into this inheritance of a good name, ample wealth, and 
 social standing came the child Wendell, who early began to 
 give promise of the man. Those who trace personal qualities 
 and abilities back through a long line of distinguished ances- 
 tors can find enough to account for a great deal that is to 
 
HOME INFLUENCES 5 
 
 appear if they look over the records, clerical, legal, military, 
 and civil of the "Phillips (xcnealogies." There were 
 ministers and deacons, judges and captains, legislators and 
 governors; but they were also the progenitors of the five 
 brothers and three sisters of this eighth child in a family of 
 nine, whose distinction is that Wendell was one of them. 
 And if he was the highly favoured legatee, may it not be 
 truly said that he repaid his inheritances in full and even, 
 according to Shinto doctrine, ennobled his honourable 
 ancestry by retroactive and augmented distinction ? In any 
 case, this was sufficient to warrant the above brief summary 
 of ancestral achievement. It is more to the present purpose 
 to note influences that were direct and immediate/ 
 
 A century ago the family was the first school and parents 
 the earliest teachers. From his father this boy heard wise 
 counsels of self-dependence, and from a Bible-reading mother 
 lessons of steadfastness to righteousness which became prin- 
 ciples of conduct in after life. Instead of the amusement by 
 which instruction is now made palatable in kindergartens, 
 sundry boys of that time in the neighbourhood of the Phillijjs 
 mansion, at the lower corner of Beacon and Walnut Streets, 
 gathered in the garret of Lothrop Motley's home, and, 
 arraying themselves in the cast-off costumes of other days — 
 "cloaks, doublets, and plumed hats, as heroes and bandits, 
 enacted more or less impromptu melodramas." To this 
 
 ^The name, Wendell, was the family name of his grandmother, Margaret, daughter of 
 Hon. Jacob Wendell, merchant, and member of the Governor's Council. She became 
 the wife of William Phillips in 1761. Their only son, John, father of Wendell, graduated 
 from Andover and Harvard, became the first public "prosecutor" of the Municipal Court 
 on its establishment in 1800, representative to the General Court in 1803, and Senator for 
 the rest of his life. On the incorporation of the City of Boston in 1822 he was chosen its 
 first Mayor. He died before the close of his term of office in 1823. The children of John 
 and Salley (Walley) Phillips were: i. Thomas Walley, b. Jan. 16, lygV, d. iSsg. 2. Sarah 
 Hurd, b. April 24, 1709; d. 1837. 3. Samuel, b. 1801; d. 1817, a member of the Class of 
 1820, Harvard. 4. Margaret, b. Nov. 20, 1802.5. Miriam. 6. John Charles, b. Nov. 15, 
 1807; d. 1878. 7. George William, b. Jan'. 3, 1810; d. 1880. 8. Wendell, b. Nov. 29, 181 1; 
 d. Feb. 2, 1884. 9. Grenville Tudor, b. Aug. 14, 1816; d. 1863. 
 
6 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 entertainment the lad Phillips added private exercise at home 
 in the direction of his personal bent, arranging chairs for 
 auditors and discoursing to them at a length worthy of his 
 clerical forebears in the Puritan age. When asked if he did 
 not tire of it, he answered, "No; but it is pretty hard on the 
 chairs," an indication that ancestral rigours had softened 
 since Samuel Sewall tried to equal his contemporaries in his 
 single sermon of two and a half hours. Thus the future 
 orator began to educate himself, without a priggish anticipa- 
 tion of his destiny, but simply because it was a natural gift 
 whose exercise was play. Nor, in subsequent years, did time 
 dispel this morning dew of oratorical promise. Even in 
 boyhood, his friend Thomas Appleton said, "Wendell's 
 voice was a very pleasant one to listen to, and his gestures 
 as graceful as could be. He was a fine, manly little fellow, 
 and I was very proud of him as a playmate." 
 
 The Boston Latin School, which he entered in his eleventh 
 year, was his first public educator. His father had pre- 
 pared for college at Andover, where he had been sent to 
 live with an uncle whose predecessors had founded Phillips 
 Academy there and another at Exeter, N. H. This, how- 
 ever, was not a sufficient reason to send the son from home 
 and away from the school which had been one of the 
 features of the city since Ezekiel Cheever from London 
 established it in 1G70, having already taught in New Haven, 
 Ipswich, and Charlestown, thirty-two years in all. Cheever 
 was a veteran of fifty-six when all the dignitaries of the town 
 united in calling him to take charge of a hundred and fifty 
 boys, a task in which he won distinction for thirty-eight 
 years, passing off the academic platform at the age of 
 ninety -four, being buried from his schoolhouse where he 
 
ORATORICAL PROMISE 7 
 
 li had trained the most eminent citizens of an entire generation; 
 i "a skilful, painful, and faithful schoolmaster," as Cotton 
 I Mather said of him in his funeral discourse. After his 
 I demise no successor made his place good until Mr. B. A. 
 i Gould came in 1816. When young Phillips entered the 
 school Gould had been master six years. Although an Eng- 
 lish department had been started in 1821, instruction was 
 chiefly in Latin and Greek, which since the revival 
 of learning had formed the basis of a liberal education, 
 and so far as this young pupil was concerned, was 
 admirably adapted to give him that command of language 
 for which he became noted. 
 
 His oratorical bent became at once apparent. In a land 
 governed by town meetings and legislatures and educated 
 by pulpit, forum, and platform, the school would be a 
 failure that did not teach boys to declaim. Doubtless it 
 is unnatural to assume the position of great orators even for 
 a few moments, and the sense of incongruity is often the 
 cause of much embarrassment, but much is learned by 
 imitation. At any rate, declamation days do not appear 
 to have been dreaded by the boy Wendell, and it is on 
 record that they were anticipated with pleasure by his com- 
 panions when he was to speak. A fellow student said: 
 *'What first led me to observe him and fixed him in my 
 memory was his elocution; and I soon came to look forward 
 to declamation day with interest, mainly on his account; 
 though many were admirable speakers." Of his appear- 
 ance it is remarked that he was a finely formed boy, vigorous 
 and tall for his age, and, in connection with his friend 
 Motley, "both ranked high among their fellows on account 
 of their beauty, elegant manners, and social position." 
 
8 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Many who have been schoolboys will recall the 
 leading declaimer of their platform and the admiration 
 with which they heard him recite Patrick Henry's *'Call 
 to Arms," or Webster's "Appeal for the Union," or as 
 a triumphant achievement, Cicero's "Arraignment of 
 Catiline" in the original Latin. Years afterward they 
 have asked what became of the juvenile orator and 
 the great promise of his boyish eloquence. Rarely he 
 attained distinction; oftener mediocrity or nothing. Not 
 necessarily, as the career of Phillips showed. The root 
 of the matter was in him, and his marvellous endow- 
 ment increased with the years in symmetry, beauty, and 
 irresistible power. 
 
 It was next to inevitable, after five years at the Latin 
 School, and from his antecedents, that the youth, now 
 nearly sixteen, should enter Harvard College. In 1827 
 the Rev. Dr. John T. Kirkland was President, to be suc- 
 ceeded in two years by the Hon. Josiah Quincy, with whose 
 son, Edmund, though older than himself, Phillips formed 
 a friendship which was to last through a lifetime. Lothrop 
 Motley had returned from the historian Bancroft's Round 
 Hill School, at Northampton, to enter as the youngest member 
 of the class, which he would have led had he shown the 
 diligence in study that afterward made him the historian of 
 the Dutch Republic. Charles Sumner was in the next 
 class above, a hermit student taking himself seriously, 
 and later to be associated with Phillips in a friendly way. 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the next class, was to be its poet 
 for thirty years. Of the faculty, Edward T. Channing 
 was professor of rhetoric and oratory, important studies 
 to the future orator, and of still greater value under the 
 
INSTRUCTORS AT HARVARD 9 
 
 direction of an instructor whose fitness for his work through 
 thirty-two years was exceptional and memorable, main- 
 taining, as he did, high standards of purity and elegance in 
 composition and delivery, and also directing the reading 
 and influencing the literary taste of an entire generation 
 of students. George Ticknor was professor of modern 
 languages and belles-lettres, dispensing the treasures which 
 he had gathered in a five years' residence abroad and by 
 acquaintance with leading authors of Europe. Other 
 distinguished scholars occupied chairs in their several 
 departments; and the personal factor was greater in their 
 relations to pupils than is now possible with larger classes. 
 The class of 1831 numbered only sixty-five at graduation, 
 and there had been but one larger class. 
 
 It was with such advantages as these, belonging to an 
 earlier time, that a pupil younger than the present average 
 entered college. Although multiplied courses were not 
 then offered to students to their distraction or delight, a 
 good basis was furnished for an education which was to be 
 continued beyond its collegiate beginnings. Four walls 
 were begun, most often for a plain structure at least, but 
 there were not, as now, a dozen outlying blocks placed 
 on which temple columns can never be reared in a single 
 lifetime. Nor was much time wasted on fragments of 
 ornamentation and decoration to the damage of the essen- 
 tial substructure. Neither did some Simeon Stylites build 
 a solitary pillar on whose top he should expound a specialty 
 for the rest of his days. Minds, nevertheless, were as 
 strong and active then as now, and if they ran in fewer 
 channels at once these were likely to be deeper in conse- 
 quence, with fewer shallows of mental dissipation. The 
 
10 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 sciences of mind and of ethics, of nature and of human 
 nature, and as the vehicle of conveying thought about these 
 and related themes the continual study of language, con- 
 stituted the basic education of that day, conducted on a 
 few broad and definite lines. Yet there was a margin for 
 personal aptitudes and preferences. Phillips used to say 
 that his own were for history and mechanics, the latter 
 possibly as a useful diversion. 
 
 In history he gave during one year all the time he could 
 spare to the study of the English Revolution of 1640, reading 
 memoirs, speeches, novels, and plays that could illustrate 
 Clarendon and other writers. Another year was devoted to 
 biographies and memoirs of George III.'s reign and the 
 years of our war for independence. Dutch history also had 
 great interest for him as the story of a republic. Among his 
 heroes were Cromwell, Vane, Pym, and Raleigh in England; 
 in America, Jay, Franklin, Samuel Adams, and Eli Whitney. 
 If he could have foreseen his own need of illustrative material 
 in the future he could not have chosen better examples. In 
 literature his favourites were Tacitus and Juvenal, Roche- 
 foucauld, Pascal, Tocqueville, Guizot, and Victor Hugo; 
 in English, Ben Jonson, Jeremy Taylor, Massinger, Milton, 
 Southey, Lamb, Disraeli the elder, and Horace Walpole. 
 Richardson and Scott were his favourite earlier English 
 novelists. It was characteristic of the later advocate of the 
 mentally unappreciated sex that he should consider Elizabeth 
 Barrett Browning the first of modern poets, and Charlotte 
 Bronte and George Eliot profounder writers than Dickens 
 and Thackeray. But this was long after his college days. 
 Taking these together, he read widely outside the academic 
 curriculum. Nor did he neglect its routine, ranking high 
 
ATHLETICS 11 
 
 in his class, an all-round student with predilections for history 
 and natural science/ 
 
 With regard to anticipation of his later distinction as an 
 orator the gist of testimony is that it manifested itself in 
 debate rather than orations, as would naturally happen where 
 these were less frequent than discussion. Still, a classmate 
 wrote that '* there was always the same remarkable power of 
 eloquence, whether in extempore debate or studied declama- 
 tion. It was a great treat to hear him declaim as a college 
 exercise. He was always studying remarkable passages as 
 an exercise in composition and to secure the most expressive 
 forms of language."- In addition, he took pains to learn })y 
 example from such speakers as Harrison Gray Otis and 
 Edward Everett, Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, the last 
 of whom he must have heard somewhere in the North, else 
 he could not have compared the voices of the two great orators 
 as he did, saying that Clay's w^as musical and Webster's full 
 of strength, his statement argument, and his eloquence sub- 
 lime — on a great occasion. At other times he thought him 
 ponderous or even dull. It took a crisis to rouse him — 
 then he was sublime.^ 
 
 In view of the large and wise use Phillips made of academic 
 opportunities, matters of minor employment sink into their 
 proper insignificance. Athletics had not taken their present 
 conspicuous place among student activities; at least they were 
 
 ^Based upon the testimony of his roommate, Rev. John Tappen Pierce, of Illinois. 
 Mr. Roscoe Conkling Bruce in the Harvard Illustrated Magazine, April, looi, quotes one 
 of Phillips's college friends as saying that he "sauntered and gently studied; learned easily 
 and rapidly; was deeply interested in history and chemistry; had a passion for mathe- 
 matics and attained a standing moderately high; was interested in debating more than 
 oratory and was the easy master of the college platform." 
 
 2Rev. Dr. Morrison, sometime editor of the Unitarian Review. 
 
 3F. B. Sanborn's "Recollections of Wendell Phillips" (MS.) in Martyn's "Life," p. 48. 
 Phillips's admiration for Webster's gifts should be borne in mind later when that statesman's 
 political course is condemned by him. 
 
12 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 not counted among the motives for entering college. Yet: 
 there were boats on the Charles, saddles, boxing gloves, and 
 fencing foils — ancient and honourable devices for manly 
 sport; having their values in a rough-and-tumble world in 
 which sudden difficulties sometimes start up to embarrass 
 the unready. In these particulars it is possible that the 
 student of seventy-five years ago may have had an advantage 
 over the abnormally developed specialist of the present time. 
 In any case, it is told of Phillips that as he was known in 
 school as a manly fellow of fine physique, a contrast to some 
 of the prim boys who feared to risk traditional dignity in play, 
 so in college "he was a lover of outdoor sports and helped 
 others to enjoy them, continuing his boating, boxing, fencing, 
 and horse riding, becoming an expert in these manly accom- 
 plishments." For the last three he had special fondness.^ 
 Socially he belonged to the patrician class, and according 
 to common assent felt his responsibility to maintain the 
 respectability of his birth and breeding. But he had no 
 scorn for democracy if it was not tainted with vulgarity, envy, 
 and bad manners. In the inevitable divisions of college 
 society a small feud was at one time developed, through which 
 he failed of an election to the captaincy of the Harvard 
 Washington Corps, a student from the South being the 
 successful compromise candidate. Nevertheless, though 
 frequent leadership of the aristocracy was forced upon him, 
 he was admired and loved by those who knew him best as an 
 open-hearted, generous, and chivalrous fellow. His own 
 
 iMartyn, on the "united testimony of his classmates," adds, " Life," p. 35: "He was a 
 champion boxer and marksman, fencer, oarsman, and horseman in a day when Boston 
 discouraged athletics; his passion was for horses, and later he was a personal friend of Rarey, 
 the horse tamer." By his own account he sometimes practised shooting at a mark in mature 
 years when on vacations. His diversions belong to a modern age of chivalry, and his spirit 
 in them was agreeable to it. 
 
MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CHARACTER 13 
 
 appreciation of these qualities in Southern students, and the 
 admiration he received from them in turn as their ardent 
 champion, were recalled in later years when he became a 
 strong opponent of their political principles. 
 
 To these qualities of mind, body, and disposition it is 
 natural to ask what moral and religious elements were added 
 to complete his early character. Theodore Weld, in his 
 "Eulogy of Wendell Phillips," states that he "had been the 
 subject of a religious revival before entering college," and 
 Martyn asserts that Phillips not long before his death 
 answered a friend's inquiry to the effect that when he was 
 fourteen, after hearing a sermon of Dr. Lyman Beecher's, 
 he consecrated himself to God and his service. In college. 
 Dr. Buckingham, class secretary, wrote: 
 
 The excitement of the revival gradually passed off — 
 that is, in a few years. But his conversion for quite a while 
 made a deep impression on his companions, awakening 
 their reverence (the word is not too strong) for this religious 
 boy. I remember well his appearance of deep devoutness in 
 the chapel services. I suppose he needed no conversion 
 from the moral education his mother had given him; but 
 he probably obtained clearer ideas of duty and consecration 
 from the instruction he received and the excitement through 
 which he passed, and became, for the most part, fixed in some 
 ideas of a great, important life. At any rate, his conversion 
 exercised no narrowing influences over him, nor did it make 
 him uninterested in people's welfare in the present life, nor 
 render his theology superior to philanthropy. I have not 
 learned that he ever changed his theological opinions. At 
 one time, in his middle life, he renounced the church as at 
 present constituted or conducted [on account of its position 
 on the slavery question], but kept his practical faith and belief 
 in prayer as well as in works of beneficence. 
 
14 ^ WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 As fragmentary lines of record and tradition are traced 
 they point to what may fairly be regarded as an ideal ex- 
 ample of academic life, labour, and character. Here 
 was a young man whose birth and antecedents entailed 
 obligations to noble conduct. If he was naturally sensible 
 of his inheritances, he was more heedful of consequent 
 responsibilities than vain of his environment. If he did 
 not stoop to efface inborn distinction for the sake of cheap 
 popularity, he never failed to recognize the essential equality 
 of man with man, and was always ready with a good word 
 for the minority. Generations of intelligence and right 
 living culminated in a noble manhood. His manner was 
 full of grace, his mind of light, his soul of purity. Revered 
 by his classmates, he was their recognized leader and 
 spokesman when a common sentiment was to be voiced. 
 His conversation was replete with information and thought, 
 seasoned with humour and spiced with wit. His morality 
 was unblurred; his religion was based upon the Bible 
 which lay on his study table and was reverenced as a 
 mother's gift. Of his special capacity for public speech 
 he made the most without dwarfing other endowments. 
 Therefore, if one were to search the records of collegiate 
 life for an example of well-rounded attainment, for a gen- 
 tleman, for a scholar who was neither a pedant nor a recluse, 
 a princely man among his fellows, of vigorous body, right 
 mind, and wholesome soul, it would be hard to find one 
 who comes so near a symmetrical assemblage of graces 
 and excellences as Wendell Phillips of the Harvard Class 
 of 1831. 
 
 The day of graduation divides boyhood from manhood. 
 To be sure, some continue their education in professional 
 
A LAW STUDENT 15 
 
 or graduate schools, which do not appear to be greatly 
 diverse from academic departments in universities; l)ut 
 those who have been in both know the difference, and that 
 college years end on Commencement Day, which, by a 
 singular inversion of meaning ever since the day was set 
 back into the summer from autumn, marks the end instead 
 of the beginning of the academic year. Nothing quite like 
 the college years again comes into the student's life. They 
 remain only as a fading memory, to be revived with less and 
 less distinctness as decreasing numbers return to tell how 
 the world and time are treating them and to renew old 
 companionships for a day. 
 
 So, when the graduate went the destined way of his set, 
 to the Harvard Law School, he began the life-work that 
 seemed decreed, the study and practice of the law. The 
 circumstance that the first part of his preparation was in a 
 professional school did not make the learning of legal 
 principles to differ radically from subsequent acquisition 
 in a friend's office in Lowell, or, later, in his own in Boston. 
 He had the eminent jurist, Judge Story, for an instructor, 
 in whose method daily recitation was a prominent feature; 
 and an excellent one it was, making study less a matter 
 of pre-examination stuffing than it is under a system of 
 lectures alone. 
 
 In these three years, the law student absorbed the custo- 
 mary amount of legal lore from books, and something 
 more if not better from the profound learning and strong 
 personality of his preceptors. In a school numbering at 
 that time only forty pupils personal relations between the 
 dozen or so students in each class and their instructors was 
 intimate and profitable; and, at the end of three years, 
 
16 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 knowledge of the rudimentary principles of law should have 
 been correspondingly complete. As might be expected 
 from previous indications, Phillips looked upon statutes 
 and codes as an embodiment and interpretation of human 
 justice, and found in the larger principles of law more 
 satisfying features than in its minute technicalities. It 
 is possible that at this stage of study he sometimes had 
 doubts about his future devotion to professional routine 
 beyond the demands of its inevitable obligations. Indeed, 
 to many of the young men of his neighbourhood and time 
 and since, the law, like teaching, afforded an opportunity 
 to discover if their real calling were waiting in the shadow 
 or perhaps approaching from some unknown quarter. 
 Motley, after two years study in Germany, took to reading 
 law until he could determine what branch of history he 
 would follow. Parkman did the same before he settled 
 down to writing the story of France in America. Ticknor 
 and Longfellow and Lowell combined teaching and writing 
 until they devoted themselves to the more congenial labours 
 of literature alone. It would be difficult to enumerate 
 all those who have found a little law-study the lobby to 
 political activity and success. 
 
 At this time, however, Phillips saw nothing beyond the 
 opportunities which spare hours in professional schools 
 afford for marginal pursuits, social, industrial, or special. 
 He did not neglect athletics, although in that day they 
 were not, as now, a "business with assets," which graduates 
 sometimes find more remunerative to pursue than the law, 
 the ministry, or medicine, or especially teaching. Nor 
 did he discontinue his miscellaneous reading, but made 
 it wider and deeper as time, opportunity, and broader vision 
 
ADMITTED TO THE BAR 17 
 
 inclined him to add to treasures already amassed. There 
 was, doubtless, a frequent wavering between these attractive 
 studies and the pages of Coke and Blackstone, although 
 the latter were not neglected. Still, he could not have 
 been unmindful of the part which jury trials take in an 
 advocate's labours, and the difficult and uncertain elements 
 which they precipitate into professional success. He also 
 knew that the lay mind, when it supposes itself an impar- 
 tial judge of evidence, and sometimes of what the law 
 ought to be, is extremely liable to be insensibly warped 
 by an historical instance which it takes to be parallel or 
 even an anecdote which seems to be illustrative, and is, 
 at least, more easily apprehended than legal abstractions 
 or doubtful testimony. Accordingly, he had good reasons 
 in the midst of professional study to lay in store whatever 
 might be useful in forensic argument or appeal. 
 
 Yet he did not find the drudgery of legal study burdensome, 
 nor its details uninteresting. Charles Sumner and Judge 
 Thomas Hopkinson are quoted as testifying to his loyalty to 
 whatever belongs to the profession. As he looked about him, 
 he saw it honoured by illustrious names and crowned with 
 honour from an historic past and with renown from its greater 
 lights. After the three conventional years of instruction and 
 study, he was admitted to the Suffolk Bar with as fair a future 
 before him as could be presented to a young man with every- 
 thing in his favour except the advantage of a place in his 
 father's office and succession to his practice — made impos- 
 sible in his case by his father's death just before the son 
 entered college. A partnership had been offered him by 
 his classmate Hopkinson, who had started in Lowell, but he 
 preferred to take his chances in Boston, where he opened an 
 
18 
 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 \P' 
 
 office and entered upon that period of waiting which affords 
 so much time for reading and meditation. This was 
 more and more disturbed by appHcations to draw a contract 
 or a will or by some case in court. / He measured his success 
 by the remark made later, "In' those two opening years 
 I paid all my expenses, and few do it now." Friends endorse 
 his statements and add their own to the effect that both in his 
 office and in court his business was increasing and his practice 
 as remunerative as a young lawyer could reasonably expect^ 
 The brook is satisfied if it has a fair chance to become a river. 
 
II 
 
 THE CAUSE 
 
 SO FAR, what had come to the young man of twenty-two 
 was as inevitable as consequent from antecedent. He was 
 walking in the steps his fathers trod, and there was every 
 indication that he would follow the customary lines of social 
 and civil, professional and political activity, with fair prospects 
 of preferment. A moderate radicalism even was not fatal 
 to success in a province which had broken with traditions in 
 government and religion, and independents were generally 
 sure of a respectable following. 
 
 But in the early 'thirties a movement was under way which 
 was so unpopular that its promoters might as well have been 
 paroled convicts. To understand its meaning and purpose 
 a few well known conditions may be recalled. They are the 
 key to Wendell Phillips's career. 
 
 It is not necessary to detail minutely how human bondage, 
 the old habit of the nations, was fixed upon the new world by 
 the greed of Spaniards, and later by Dutch traders at James- 
 town in the year of the Pilgrim landing at Plymouth, until by 
 1776 some thirty thousand slaves had been landed in the thir- 
 teen colonies, and as many more had been born into servitude. 
 The apparent inconsistency with the Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence and Equal Rights made at this time was in a fair way of 
 removal when the invention of the cotton gin marvellously 
 
 19 
 
20 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 increased the profits of slave labour, smothering the South- 
 ern conscience beneath a fleecy cloud, while the North gradu- 
 ally dispensed with a profitless service. Yet there were those, 
 both in the North and the South, who did not forget the early 
 sentiment of the nation's founders against slavery, and who 
 did not let wholly die the many anti-slavery societies that had 
 sprung up. Organized opposition, however, had run low 
 through Southern antagonism to it, and Northern acquies- 
 ence grew apace, for commercial and political reasons, until 
 at the end of the first third of the last century he who spoke 
 openly against the domestic institution was regarded as a 
 fanatical disturber of national peace and an enemy of the 
 Union and a violator of the Constitution. Upon the passage 
 of the Missouri Compromise, 1820, the two sections of the 
 country had tacitly consented to a discreet silence after an 
 outbreak that was ominous. This silence was well observed 
 throughout a hushed decade, save for an unheeded voice here 
 and there like Lundy's, a peripatetic printer who published 
 his Genius of Universal Emancipation, read chiefly by 
 Quakers. 
 
 -' Then William Lloyd Garrison, a Massachusetts printer, 
 who had been associated with Lundy in Baltimore, returned to 
 Boston and on the 1st of January, 1831, began to issue a little 
 sheet, nine by fourteen inches, called The Liber ator,deina,ndmg 
 immediate emancipation of all slaves. Gradual emancipa- 
 tion had been talked of by some, and colonization in Liberia 
 had commended itself to Southerners as a good project 
 for getting free Negroes out of communication w^ith the 
 enslaved. Instead of these and similar schemes, this man 
 in a garret, without a dollar or a single subscriber or a dozen 
 sympathizers with his undertaking, set up and struck off 
 
IMMEDIATE ABOLITION DEMANDED 21 
 
 with his own hands sheets that were considered incendiary. 
 Like burning flakes borne on the winds they fell in remote 
 Western towns and as far south as the Gulf. Where they 
 lighted other flames were kindled, a few of philanthropy 
 and more of rage. New England for the most part stamped 
 upon the inflammatory paper. In South Carolina a reward 
 of $1,500 was offered for the conviction of any white person 
 circulating it, and the Georgia Legislature promised $5,000 
 for the arrest and conviction of the publisher. Hostile enact- 
 ments and threatening letters followed thick and fast in the 
 South and deprecatory appeals in the North. The mails 
 were illegally closed in slave states to the circulation of the 
 Liberator, as if it were made of gun cotton. Never was a pub- 
 lication cursed with such maledictions or an editor assured of 
 such a profusion of hemp if he could be drawn southward. 
 x\n attempt to kidnap him was feared, not without some 
 reason. To all threats, whether reeking with profanity or 
 couched in legal phrases. Garrison replied : " I will not retreat 
 a single inch, and I will be heard. Tell a man whose house 
 is on fire to give a moderate alarm . . . but^urge me not 
 to use moderation in a cause like the present/^_7 
 
 Immediate emancipation was, then, the phase which anti- 
 slavery opinion assumed under his leadership. It has been 
 said that the immediate element was derived from the 
 revival preaching of the time, demanding instantaneous 
 surrender of the heart to God. Be this as it may, the doc- 
 trine was turned upon ministers and churches inconveniently 
 when they tried to show the abolitionist how much better 
 gradual emancipation would be, accompanied by deportation 
 to Africa. Foreign missions received a new impulse in that 
 direction, while at home bishops, college presidents, and 
 
22 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 professors of theology thumbed their Bibles to find sanctions 
 for the patriarchal institution. Meantime the lone editor 
 reiterated his demand in the weekly missive, and in 
 speaking whenever a few dared to listen. 
 <;" It was the day of organizing societies and holding 
 conventions. Toward the close of the year 1831 fifteen 
 men got together in the office of Samuel E. Sewall, 
 Esq., a descendant of the Colonial judge and diarizer 
 who, 131 years before, wrote the first American anti- 
 slavery tract, "The Selling of Joseph." On the 6th of 
 January, 1832, the New England Anti-Slavery Society 
 was organized by a dozen men, of whom it was said that 
 not more than one or two could have put a hundred dollars 
 into the treasury without bankrupting themselves. Great 
 amusement was afforded by these "nobodies" undertaking 
 to abolish a system recognized by the Constitution, rooted 
 in the interests of half the nation and in the prejudices and 
 fears of the other half; but the little band of so-called 
 fanatics quoted a saying about the slighting of the wise 
 and noble in a certain reform, and with enthusiasm entered 
 upon a task which the least sanguine thought would be 
 accomplished in ten years. With added supporters, agita- 
 tion spread, until the entire country began to be conscious 
 that a struggle was impending. The new society published 
 tracts, sent out lecturers, and appealed to the churches — 
 generally in vain. The Emancipator and the Evangelist 
 were established in New York, a signal for the secular and 
 religious press to denounce the movement and malign its 
 supporters. In time came the announcement that on the 1st 
 of August, 1834, Great Britain had emancipated 800,000 
 slaves in the West Indies. This gave some respectability 
 
VIEWS OF SLAVERY 23 
 
 to emancipation here, but no great impulse. Instead, 
 loyalty to the Union, which was in danger from extremists 
 in the North and South, led by Garrison and Calhoun, and 
 fear of consequent derangement of business and interrup- 
 tion of prosperity made head against the growing heresy. 
 Opposition ran so high that in default of available statutes 
 against unlicensed printing and unaccustomed speech, 
 mob law appeared to be the only recourse. 
 
 It was natural that this should first fall upon the leader 
 of the abolition movement. His publications had been 
 taken from Southern post offices and burned — a sort of 
 lynching by proxy, which was servilely endorsed by public 
 meetings in the North, apologizing for the aggressive 
 impertinence of a few fanatics who were getting dangerous 
 out of all proportion to their number and social importance. 
 Faneuil Hall had been refused to them, although opened 
 to their opponents, who addressed the respectability of the 
 city in August, 1835. On October 21st, a crowd of "gentle- 
 men of property and standing," incited by newspaper 
 appeals to put down all denouncers of slavery, assailed the 
 Liberator office, seized Garrison and dragged him through 
 the streets with half his clothes torn off. Rescued at length 
 by the police, he was sentenced to jail as a disturber of 
 the peace, and after another pursuit by the mob was landed 
 in a cell just vacated by a murderer. Released the next 
 day, he left the city till the public mind should become 
 quieted. When it was, the mob, clothed in broadcloth 
 and its right mind once more, began to suspect that it had 
 violated the city's traditions of liberty and free speech. ) 
 
 American slavery has thus far been referred to in so 
 general terms that it may seem to some readers an 
 
24 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 insufficient cause for the zealous antagonism it encountered 
 Historical knowledge of its character during the first half 
 of the last century will not need refreshing in many minds; 
 but the majority of the present generation necessarily 
 thinks of African bondage in the South as a thing of the past 
 which had its redeeming features. Now and then, too, 
 Southern writers and speakers present the sunny side of 
 the system as it was in the years before the war — the white 
 side of luxury and ease, with so much of irresponsibility 
 and comfort as fell to the blacks — citing examples of affec- 
 tionate relationship between master and servant. The 
 Old Mammy especially lingers as a delightful memory of 
 childhood to be handed on in tradition and literature. It 
 was but yesterday that a prominent Southerner raised a 
 storm of prolonged applause when he remarked, in effect, 
 that he had no patience with those who said that the Con- 
 federates thought they were right in fighting for slavery; 
 they kneiv they were right. There are indications now 
 and then that the remembrance of the institution is not so 
 abhorrent to all persons that there is no need of recalling 
 some of its features which may show that it was its own 
 reason for its "abolishment," to use Lincoln's word. 
 
 In any brief portrayal of its prominent characteristics 
 allowance should be made for the inherited convictions of 
 those whose fathers grew up under its shadow. Although 
 slaveholders were a minority of the white population in the 
 South, they were leaders of opinion and were taught by 
 statesmen, of whom Calhoun was chief, that slavery was 
 both a divinely ordered and humane condition for the Negro;. 
 Northern opinion, formed largely by personal narratives 
 of fugitives from bondage, differed from the Southern view. 
 
FEATURES OF AFRICAN BONDAGE 25 
 
 Travellers, as a rule, confirmed Northern impressions. 
 If "St. Clair" represented the kindlier side, "Legree" 
 stood for inhuman possibilities. It is what can be safely 
 committed under any code that stamps it as good or bad. 
 
 To begin with the general conditions of slave existence, 
 apart from exceptional incidents, it is fair to say that they 
 were undesirable. If a compulsory absence of liberty was 
 offset in a measure by an assured subsistence to the 
 Negroes, it may be asked what kind of living was fur- 
 nished them. Trustworthy accounts and statistics place 
 the cost of food for the plantation hand at from seven- 
 teen dollars and fifty cents to twenty dollars per year, 
 or from two and a half to five cents a day — mostly for 
 cornmeal, sometimes with bacon and molasses. Clothing 
 in quality was cheap and coarse; in quantity it grew less 
 with parallels of latitude. Comfortable cabins were not 
 uncommon, but huts that were a mere shelter for the night, 
 foul and wretched, were the rule. There was little time 
 or inclination to clean house after a long day's work. 
 This, on cotton and sugar plantations, was from fifteen 
 to eighteen hours in length, according to the season; the 
 toilers' only stimulus a gang-driver's lash, as admitted 
 by the Southern author of the "Pro-slavery Argument," 
 and corroborated by the general testimony of planters. 
 Nor was the whip discarded at the house among a higher 
 grade of servants as guests often testified. In general, 
 the management of slaves did not greatly differ from that 
 of animals, according to intelligence and tractability. 
 Doubtless their understanding was dull and their tempers 
 provoking, but two hundred and forty years of toil and 
 degradation imposed upon a race was not an eminently 
 
26 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 exalting or Christianizing process. If the African in rice 
 swamps, cane brakes, and cotton fields was reduced to 
 almost a brute, the genuine religious spirit prevailing in the 
 South in other matters ought to have established something 
 nearer to the ideals of the Society for the Prevention of 
 Cruelty to Animals than the slave codes and their 
 observance in Southern states. 
 
 The fact that in return for such food, housing, and treat- 
 ment as they received, the labour of slaves under duress often 
 netted their owner 35 per cent, annually on his investment 
 does not establish the equity of slaveholding, as it did not 
 improve its conditions so much as might be expected. It was 
 a recommendation for the generally despised overseer if he 
 added to the profits of a large crop by reducing outlays for 
 provisions and clothing to the lowest figures. If the hands 
 deteriorated in consequence, it was counted cheaper to buy 
 a new lot once in seven years and wear out the old. Large 
 profits accordingly went to new investments in land and 
 Negroes, but with high interest on crops often mortgaged in 
 advance and extravagant prices on supplies furnished on long 
 credit. Yet, in spite of wasteful methods, large fortunes could 
 be accumulated when slave labour cost less than ten cents a 
 day. Meantime the increasing price of Negroes with dif- 
 ficulty prevented the revival of the slave trade, and made suc- 
 cessful ventures to the Guinea coast as profitable to smugglers 
 as they were disastrous to their living cargoes. If supplies 
 were drawn from slave-breeding states, another kind of misery 
 followed in the breaking up of families, to which was added 
 a fate which the Virginia or Kentucky Negro dreaded as 
 death in his consignment to labour in Gulf states. Worse 
 than threats of flogging was that of selling him farther south. 
 
BARBARITIES AND WRONGS 27 
 
 Soon or late both commonly were made good; the sale 
 because a prime field hand brought from a thousand to 
 fifteen hundred dollars. Local traffic in market towns or by 
 private bargain brought its discomfort in removals to strange 
 surroundings, even if a change of masters happened to be for- 
 tunate. If it was not, the terrors of Red River might be ad- 
 ded to the loss of comparative happiness on Lake Ponchar- 
 train. The average Negro might not resent being sold with 
 horses and mules, cattle and hogs, but dealers who adver- 
 tised that " families are never separated " betrayed the better 
 sense of their communities about a not uncommon practice. 
 However, time adjusts human beings to expected misfor- 
 tunes, the Negro perhaps sooner than the white man. But 
 there was one disaster that was always lurking along his daily 
 path. His master sometimes called it by the euphemism 
 "correction"; he knew it as flogging. It might be the 
 whipping the youngster got who had run wild and was to be 
 broken into work; no worse than some Northern farmers 
 are said to have given their disobedient sons in the last century 
 or severe schoolmasters their idle pupils. Again it might be a 
 chastisement that disabled the slave for some days; or it was 
 sometimes a scourging that killed him. To be sure, there 
 were laws on some statute books against such crime, but 
 their recorded violation without penalty proves the liability 
 of death to the slave by fiendish torture. Incidentally, the 
 master's temper was exhibited; also the barl)arity of a 
 lauded institution. This was no doubt, in some of its aspects, 
 patriarchal and parental; but a backward look through 
 twenty centuries is required to find a code which practically 
 overlooks the murder of a servant, if not of a son or a 
 daughter born of a slave mother. 
 
28 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Instances of burning alive may be passed over on the 
 ground that the practice survived the system, being then and 
 now the work of a mob rather than of a master. The evil that 
 an institution does may live after it, set a bad example, and 
 die slowly. In one respect an old condition is improved, as 
 amalgamation at the South is said to have diminished some- 
 what since Negroes have become owners of their persons. 
 
 In the face of these greater wrongs to a race it seems trivial 
 to mention minor ones, such as the forbidding of instruction 
 to those who may have desired it, and of some other improv- 
 ing privileges. Nor is it necessary to observe at length the 
 reflex influences of slavery upon the morals and manners, 
 the ambitions and disposition, and even the dialect of the 
 ruling oligarchy, fostering arrogance, political dictation, and 
 imperious command, while the majority, the poor whites, 
 subserviently followed, upholding and defending a system 
 that was their bane. 
 
 These recoiling evils, however, were not the most apparent 
 ones to reformers. Those which fell directly upon the sub- 
 ject slave, calling out protests from leaders of opinion South 
 and North in the early years of the Republic, appealed to 
 later advocates of emancipation. A few whose eyes had not 
 been blinded by the golden dust of profitable trade, whose 
 vision was as open and clear as their forefathers' had been, 
 believed that the cause of freedom had grown more important 
 with the growth of slavery and its increased rigours. These 
 crimes against human rights they deemed great enough to 
 demand desperate attack. Hence the immediate emancipa- 
 tion phase of anti-slavery.^ 
 
 ipor a fuller account of Southern slavery see Rhodes's " History of the United States," 
 i., chap, iv., with reference to the full sources of information about it. 
 
RACE PREJUDICE 29 
 
 Before some of the features of this onset are noticed it may 
 be well at the present distance from it to observe the race pre- 
 judice which survives and sometimes belittles the contest. 
 It is difficult to define the ideas which mention of the Negro 
 raises in different minds, especially when it is remembered 
 that few persons can contemplate five or ten individuals or 
 objects at once. Hence, a class or a race becomes as confused 
 a picture as a distant crowd, or resolves itself into one speci- 
 men after another — usually those best known, good or bad. 
 Opinion of the average black man should be based upon the 
 same observation as in the instance of other races, the white 
 included, namely, of good, bad, and indifferent examples. 
 There are noble and degraded natures in all; but even the 
 Caucasian family has not as a whole reached heights where 
 in matters of sobriety, integrity, patriotism, and good citizen- 
 ship it can be no pharisee when it says, ** God, I thank thee 
 that I am not as this publican " — this black republican. 
 If the complexion of any of the sunburned peoples could be 
 bleached much of race distinction would vanish. According 
 to the recent declaration of biological science the blood of all 
 men is the same, whatever their difference in colour or 
 feature. As St. Paul declared to the men of Athens in 
 A. D. 48, "He hath made of one hlood all nations of men."^ 
 It was the human being beneath the Ethiopian's skin which 
 Phillips and his co-philanthropists saw, and Avhich Southern 
 men always recognized more readily than Northern. The 
 bone of contention between the two sections was the natural 
 
 i"I am not aware that Wendell Phillips or William Lloyd Garrison ever claimed that the 
 Negro race was equal in its capacity for improvement to the white race." W._ F. Poole, 
 "Anti-slavery Opinions Before 1800," p. 16. This should be borne in mind in view of 
 charges often made against the two agitators as contending for equality of the two races in 
 all respects. P>eedom and citizenship were what they demanded for the blacks rather 
 than social commingling. 
 
30 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 rights of the coloured man despite his native and imposed 
 limitations and his colour. 
 
 In summing up the cause which is the explanation of a 
 life, it may be said that to the Negro it would not have 
 seemed extravagant if General Sherman had coupled 
 slavery with war in his famous and sulphurous metaphor. 
 Doubtless the planter, in the shade of his broad veranda, 
 would have deemed such a lurid comparison over- 
 heated, and textile manufacturers in the North, with 
 ministers and deacons in churches, would have agreed with 
 him. But if they had all been herded under the blazing 
 sun for a long day in a cotton field, working under the 
 stimulus of a driver's lash, they would have discovered a 
 new and vivid illustration of the place of torment. Those 
 who first descried it from afar were called wild fanatics and 
 incendiaries. They simply saw a sufficient reason for 
 unusual protest. The cause of freedom from such a bon- 
 dage they deemed worthy of labour and sacrifice in the 
 face of opposition and persecution. Time justified their 
 opinion and rewarded their efforts. 
 
Ill 
 
 AN ADVOCATE OF RIGHTS 
 
 (1835-1837) 
 
 'TT HAS been needful to outline the growth of opinion 
 -■- adverse to American slavery up to the year 1835 and 
 to portray its features as a sectional and domestic institution 
 in order to understand anti-slavery sentiment, and what the 
 acceptance of its extremes signified to Wendell Phillips. 
 If he did not fully comprehend their radical character, he 
 could foresee some of the early consequences of his decision. 
 By every token he should have been one of those whom 
 James L. Homer, editor of the Commercial Gazette, called 
 "gentlemen of standing and property," constituting a large 
 portion of the Garrison mob. He was sitting in his office* 
 on Court Street, that October day when he heard the tumult 
 and saw a crowd hurrying toward the City Hall. Following 
 it, he became a witness of its riotous acts. He soon met 
 John C. Park, colonel of the Suffolk regiment in which 
 he also was an officer, and said, "Why not call out the 
 guards?" Pointing to the mob. Park replied, "Don't 
 you see that the regiment is in front of you.^" The mer- 
 chants' clerks and other young men of the city militia 
 would not have donned their uniform to shoot their friends 
 for attacking an abolitionist who was imperilling Southern 
 trade, even if the Mayor had statute authority to call out the 
 
 31 
 
32 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 military, about which there was doubt and discussion 
 afterward. Doubtless the young lawyer informed himself 
 further respecting the suppression of riots. At least such 
 knowledge would be useful in subsequent years^> 
 
 r[t is not possible to say how far Phillips had become 
 an abolitionist before this outbreak. His friend Weld 
 thought that his conversion dated from 1831, four years 
 before. He certainly had not shown great sympathy with 
 reformatory movements while in college, particularly in 
 his speech against the formation of a class temperance 
 society, which he succeded in preventing. He could not 
 have failed to hear something of the anti-slavery agitation 
 which followed the publication of the first number of the 
 Liberator on the New Year's Day of his Senior year; but 
 college politics and approaching Commencement, to say 
 nothing of the Gentleman's Club and its aristocratic senti- 
 ments, would have more interest for him than the vagaries 
 of a few uneasy philanthropists. In the Law School, where 
 the nature and formation of the Constitution was a topic 
 of study, it is likely that its clauses protecting slavery were 
 discussed, since Judge Story, as early as 1822, had offered 
 resolutions favouring colonization in a meeting where 
 Daniel Webster left the room, saying that "it was a scheme 
 of slaveholders to get rid of free Negroes." In Phillips's 
 middle year at the school several books and tracts were 
 published, one of which came to his attention, Mrs. Childs's 
 "Appeal in Favour of That Class of Americans Called 
 Africans." 
 
 The first anti-slavery pamphlet, however, he "received 
 from Ellis Gray Loring, marked with his familiar writing, 
 the record of his appearance before the Massachusetts 
 
INFLUENCE OF ANN TERRY GREENE 33 
 
 Senate to protest against the attempt to punish meetings 
 like these with the state prison." Loring, a school friend 
 and companion of Emerson, a young lawyer with thriving 
 practice, had espoused the unpopular cause to the sacrifice 
 of fees and social standing; but he never regretted his 
 course nor wavered in his adhesion. x\t least half of Dr. 
 Channing's anti-slavery reputation belonged to Ellis Gray 
 Loring. \ Some have dated Phillips's conversion to aboli- 
 tionism from the day of the Garrison mob. It is more 
 probable that his principal sentiment then was one of indig- 
 nation at the outrage perpetrated against the right of free 
 speech, which was shared by the best citizens when they 
 came to their senses. Moreover, one of his first public 
 utterances two years later at an abolition meeting where 
 he openly allied himself with the cause was a defence 
 of the ancient right of petition and free discussion. Unre- 
 strained speech was always his main dependence in 
 reformatory efforts/) 
 
 /in the meantime there was another more direct agency 
 in Wendell Phillips's conviction of the merits of the move- 
 ment. Miss Ann Terry Greene, daughter of Benjamin 
 Greene, a wealthy shipping merchant of Boston, had been 
 left an orphan at an early age, and was living with an uncle 
 and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Henry G. Chapman, friends of Mr. 
 Garrison, and devoted to his philanthropic purposes. 
 In the early winter of 1836, Miss Greene was to accompany 
 home to Greenfield a cousin of hers. Miss Grew, who had 
 just become the fiancee of Mr. Alford, a friend of Phillips 
 and Charles Sumner. These two were invited by the lover 
 to join the stage-coach party in order to divert the other 
 
 *"Life of William Lloyd Garrison," by his sons, ii., 55. 
 
34 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 lady, ** giving him a better opportunity for that exclusive 
 devotion which became a part of his new condition." 
 Sumner was the first to promise to go ; but the next morning's 
 storm sent him back to bed with the remark that "on such 
 a day he would not go on a stage ride with any woman," 
 a natural observation from a man who did not find a wife 
 for thirty years. But Wendell was more chivalrous than 
 Charles, and found himself assigned by his friend to the 
 girl who had been described as "the cleverest, loveliest, 
 most brilliant young woman, but a rabid abolitionist. Look 
 out or she will talk you into that 'ism, before you suspect 
 what she is about." She herself said that she "talked it 
 all the way to Greenfield and while he was there; that he 
 listened and [afterward in Boston] came again, and that 
 his fate was sealed." In two particulars, as the event 
 proved; for within a year their engagement was announced, 
 and they were married on October 12, 1837. As for the 
 other particular, Phillips used to say over and over, "My 
 wife made an out and out abolitionist of me; and she 
 always preceded me in the adoption of the various causes 
 I have advocated." Yet, to all her zeal in making a new 
 convert may be added a woman's reason for some of it, 
 not concealed from herself it appears; for she confessed: 
 "When I first met Wendell I used to think, 'It can never 
 come to pass; such a being as he could never think of me.' 
 I looked upon it as something strange as a fairy tale. I can- 
 not help thinking how little I have acquired, while Wendell, 
 only two years older, seems to know a world more." 
 
 Still, as the story goes, she had the heroism to ask him, when 
 he offered himself, if he was fully persuaded to be the friend 
 of the slave, a question that might have been unsafe to ask of 
 
PHILLIPS MEETS GARRISON 35 
 
 most of the young men in his circle. She did not have to wait 
 long for the answer: "My life shall attest the sincerity of my 
 conversion." V An invalid through some defect of nervous 
 organization, she was compelled to keep her room and much 
 of the time her bed by reason of weakness and pain. Rarely 
 to be seen by any except a few intimate friends, she was joy- 
 ous in disposition, with unfailing good spirits and fond of fun 
 and stories; in which respect her husband matched her, 
 so that "hilarity was with them an abiding guest." His 
 unwearied devotion to his wife, however, was one of the 
 features of his life which withdrew him from many social and 
 civic activities. By no means a recluse from choice, or of a 
 retiring disposition, and always interested in public affairs, 
 he was more mindful of the enforced solitude of one to whom 
 his companionship was the almost sole relief, yet who could 
 rarely accompany him on social occasions, and scarcely ever 
 hear him speak in public. In every sense he had to be, and 
 was glad to be, all the world to her, and to acknowledge in 
 turn that she was the inspirer of his best efforts and a w^ise 
 counsellor. 
 
 I Phillips's first acquaintance among abolitionists was in and 
 through the Chapman family, when he was a privileged 
 visitor to Miss Greene, meeting such sympathizers in the 
 cause as happened in. One day Garrison called when the 
 suitor was on an errand of his own, and the two men met who 
 were to be, each in his way, the foremost apostles of freedom 
 for an oppressed race. Garrison, the elder by six years, the 
 organizing and executive head, had already been in the work 
 seven years, lecturing and printing newspapers and tracts for 
 
 i"Ann Phillips," by Mrs. Alvord, quoted by Martyn, p. 86; also "Ann Phillips, A Memo- 
 rial Sketch," Anon., in library of Harvard University. 
 
36 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 the information of any who would read them. The younger 
 man just at that time was taking his first lessons; but the 
 day was not far off when he should be the chief speaker of a 
 growing sect, as one Paul of Tarsus had been. But, unlike 
 the Lycaonians, Bostonians did not say of these two, "The 
 gods are come down to us in the likeness of men." They 
 said things antithetical instead, which were further empha- 
 sized all the way from New York to New Orleans. And each 
 one of the two returned compliments in his own effective way.\ 
 
 [ The meeting of these early leaders had interesting features. 
 The circumstance that one was born poor in everything 
 belonging to worldly advantages, had educated himself, and 
 made himself a power aggressive and resistant, and was win- 
 ning his way despite obstacles that were greater than had 
 confronted any other American, appealed to a kindred spirit 
 whom fortune had loaded with every gift; wealth, social posi- 
 tion, academic privileges, professional business, and an out- 
 look toward political honours. If the older man had some- 
 thing to gain and not much to lose, and was gaining something 
 every week and every year, the younger saw that in this 
 alliance he, for his part, was throwing to the winds everything 
 that had made life sweet and honourable, save his faith in 
 Deity and the supreme object of his affection. On these 
 two foundations he must build the superstructure of his life 
 and labour. It is possible that to these he added a third, as 
 he certainly had good reason to, namely, confidence in him- 
 self. Thus armoured, it was fitting that the younger should 
 receive the accolade of knighthood from the elder by the 
 hearthstone of his well-beloved. 
 
 /^If, however, he had not been possessed by a chivalrous 
 spirit, all favouring influences might have been of no 
 
HIS IDEALISM 37 
 
 permanent efficacy. Many a man has given good hope and 
 made fair promises of noble endeavour in love's roseate morn- 
 ing whom the dust and heat of the day has turned back to 
 plodding in commonplace ways, or at best in paths that lead 
 to goals of ordinary ambition. Rare spirits only hold fast to 
 ideals that are revealed in better moments and attain supreme 
 results. .Without such an idealism Phillips might have been 
 satisfied with the prizes which a legal or political career 
 held out to a man of his inheritance, tastes, and trainins:. 
 But beyond the emoluments of professional and civic success 
 stood the ideal of a republic more than Platonic in its adjust- 
 ment of rights and privileges among all its inhabitants. To 
 help establish such a state he was ready to surrender personal 
 advantages which are counted great and to labour for this 
 ideal kingdom of righteousness with no thought of self- 
 aggrandisement. There was no possibility of this in the 
 crusade he was joining. Instead, there was the certainty of 
 immediate deprivation with no reasonable prospect of 
 recompense in a lifetime. Such a chivalric idealism explains 
 much of his early career and accounts for some of his later 
 and less successful undertakings. At all times it impelled 
 him beyond the customary beliefs of contemporaries and 
 ^nto positions far in advance of them. 
 
 vThe first of these was taken at a meeting of the Massa- 
 chusetts Anti-slavery Society, held at Lynn on March 26,1837. 
 Evidently he felt that it was time to make public profession of 
 alliance with the few who had espoused the cause of imme- 
 diate emancipation. It should be remembered that this 
 announcement antedates by nearly a year his appearance 
 in Faneuil Hall, which is sometimes taken as his entrance into 
 the lists. 
 
38 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 There was deliberation enough about this first confession 
 of his purpose to result in a "Resolution" which he took with 
 him or drev/ up after his arrival. In either case, there is no 
 sign of unpreparedness in the speech with which he supported 
 it. This has the marks of a maiden speech in an avowal of 
 consecration to a cause needing the help of all, and, by con- 
 sequence, having the speaker's sympathy and promise of 
 support. The report of it three weeks later, doubtless w^ith 
 the orator's sanction, gave as its title, "Special Consecration," 
 and the Resolution read before the speech was as follows: 
 
 Resolved, That, having a great work to do, and but com- 
 paratively feeble means wherewith to do it, our influence and 
 effort should be devoted mainly to the cause of abolition. 
 
 The sentiment is appropriate but general; a broad base 
 for a comprehensive survey of the task before a small but 
 devoted band; and, therefore, the demand upon each and 
 every member of it imperative to do aU that he can. After 
 summing up the difficulties in their path, the weight of public 
 opinion, the prejudice of centuries, the present interest of 
 almost every man in the Union, the passions of one half of it, 
 the indifference of the other, he asked : 
 
 And what have we to offer against all this — ^ Interest, 
 counting his dollars; Lust gloating over his gratification; 
 Ambition numbering up his votes; Prejudice rushing 
 forward with closed eyes; Political power, rooted deep 
 as the Union, controlling its policy and movements by 
 slave votes ; Love of power, increased by the use of it — all 
 these common to North and South. . . . We are not 
 contending for the liberties of the slave alone. Free 
 discussion, the right of petition, and freedom for ourselves 
 and posterity. 
 
DECLARATION OF ALLEGIANCE 39 
 
 He then turned to the plea that slavery has been and 
 is dying. 
 
 Dead is it? How comes it then, if you but touch 
 it, that it rocks the Union to its .centre and V)ase? 
 You say wait and it will die away. Why, then, does it 
 ask for more territory.? ... If our work be not 
 done imrq.ediately, it may be that it cannot be done at 
 all. We should come up to this work with our whole 
 hearts because the sin of slavery taints the whole atmosphere, 
 corrupts the life-blood of the nation, and renders all its liber- 
 ties insecure by destroying the basis on which they rest: 
 because it is a national sin and exposes us to the judgment 
 of heaven. He who sees nothing in the signs of the times, 
 in the state of public sentiment which the discussion of this 
 subject has revealed, that leads him to doubt the duration 
 of our government, must be blind indeed. . . . Slavery 
 is a national sin — and I address New Englanders, who 
 believe that God judges the nations. How long may we 
 linger, when his thunderbolts are already hot over our heads ? 
 Every other eye may have been closed to the cruelty and 
 blood which have stained our escutcheon — every other 
 ear may have been deaf to the cry of the oppressed; but the 
 eye which never sleeps has watched the prosperity which 
 grew fat on the tears and toil of the slave, that ear has 
 listened to the sighing of the prisoner, and him who had 
 none to help him — and the arm of Omnipotence may even 
 now be stretched out to avenge. . . . Let no man in 
 the coming year grudge his labour in furthering our peti- 
 tions. Now is the crisis. Meet it like men. Spare no 
 labour. Waste none on other causes. This work must 
 be done now or not at all. Let others wait. Your interest 
 demands it. Your duty commands it. Do your duty 
 now, and the crisis may never come. The helm of the 
 gallant vessel is for a moment in the hand of the North. 
 If the steersman slumber we are lost. Only wake, only be 
 active, we have passed the breakers, and are safe. 
 
40 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 The entire speech, of which the above gives the tenour, 
 could not have occupied over twenty minutes ; but the assem- 
 bly did not fail to discover the promise of an advocate of 
 its purposes and interests witli such oratorical gifts 
 as had not hitherto appeared. Nor could it have been 
 insensible to the character and position of the recruit. 
 
 Later in the day, it was seen that this declaratory address 
 was not all that he could say upon the subject. At the 
 evening session he offered another resolution as follows: 
 
 Resolved, That the exertion of John Quincy Adams and 
 the rest of the Massachusetts delegation, who sustained 
 him in his defence of the citizens' right of petition, deserves 
 the deepest gratitude and the warmest admiration of every 
 American. 
 
 John Quincy Adams as a factor in the movement against 
 slavery should not be overlooked in the attention which 
 abolitionists necessarily compel. They were not numerous 
 at first, though they soon became so; he stood alone in 
 Congress in the midst of general opposition. He had, at 
 first, not even the full support of abolitionists; for he was 
 not in entire sympathy with their policy. As early as 1820, 
 when he was Secretary of State, he foresaw an irrepressible 
 conflict between slave and free states with the possible 
 dissolution of the Union. Slavery he termed "the great 
 and foul stain upon the nation, and the contemplation of its 
 abolition worthy of the most exalted soul. Never since 
 human sentiments and human conduct were influenced 
 by human speech was there a theme for eloquence like 
 the free side of this question. If but one man could arise 
 with the genius capable of comprehending, and an utter- 
 ance capable of communicating those eternal truths that 
 
A TRIBUTE TO JOHN QUINCY ADAMS 41 
 
 belong to this question, to lay bare in all its nakedness that 
 outrage upon the goodness of God, human slavery; now 
 is the time and this is the occasion, upon which such a 
 man would perform the duties of an angel upon earth." 
 This was ten years before the crusade began to be preached. 
 Five years later, when he became President, there was little 
 opportunity to give a practical turn to his sentiments. It 
 was the decade of hush before a coming storm, for which 
 the South was beginning to draw together, and, especially, 
 to become united in its opposition to him, a league which 
 he took no particular pains to conciliate. He early com- 
 mitted the unpardonable offence of proposing to send 
 delegates to the Panama Congress where they would meet 
 Haytiens of colour. The open battle, however, did not 
 begin until after his presidential term was over, and he 
 was sent to Congress as Representative from the Plymouth 
 district. He was then placed where he could meet all 
 comers in his own way, or their way. They were glad of 
 the opportunity, and so was he. They came singly, in 
 squads, and the whole host together. They retired in the 
 same order, and disorder. He did not fight for a party, 
 but for a principle. He loved the joy of battle. If the con- 
 flict flagged he provoked his foes into ungovernable wrath; 
 then he held them up to withering scorn, showed them their 
 blunders, and sent them home humiliated, but hating him 
 with fresh intensity. 
 
 These contests were oftenest waged on his side from 
 the firm ground of a fundamental principle of human 
 government — the right of the subject to petition the ruling 
 power, be it King or Congress. Taking his seat in Congress 
 in December, 1831, he began to present petitions against 
 
42 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 slavery and the slave trade until the famous "gag rule" 
 was passed to lay all such petitions upon the table without 
 further action. Upon this Mr. Adams renewed his defence 
 of a right older than Norman and Saxon dominion. Oppo- 
 sition from enemies and ill-timed aid of friends did not 
 disconcert him. When the attempt to expel him was made 
 he met it with a speech to which no one wished to reply. 
 Then he pursued his routed adversaries with defiance and 
 contempt, retorts, and taunts. 
 
 It was when Mr. Adams was in the thickest of the fight on 
 the right of petition and the threatening question of annexing 
 Texas that Mr. Phillips introduced his resolution of commen- 
 dation and gratitude and supported it by a second speech at 
 the Lynn meeting. 
 
 This speech is denominated as his first in the second 
 series of his collected speeches. It was so placed in the 
 columns of the Liberator, but, in an account of the meeting, 
 it is remarked that this resolution was discussed in the even- 
 ing. Also the Lynn Record of March 29, 1837, says: 
 
 In the evening Resolutions were debated in the First 
 Methodist Meeting House by Mr. Phillips and others in sup- 
 port of a Resolution in favour of J. Q. Adams. Mr. Phillips 
 spoke with great eloquence and effect. His remarks were 
 entirely extemporaneous. 
 
 From this testimony it seems that the other speech, already 
 commented upon, must have been, instead of this, the one 
 which "marked his entrance upon the anti-slavery move- 
 ment." It should be added that the second series of his 
 speeches was compiled and arranged after his death. 
 
 It was a forceful speech of approbation and of admiration 
 for the intrepid defence of the right of petition by Mr. Adams 
 
A SECOND SPEECH 43 
 
 in the face of an enraged opposition delegation from the South 
 and a subservient one from the North supporting it. Of 
 ** the old man eloquent " he said : 
 
 His course during the last session deserves the gratitude of 
 every American ; for in that contest, he was not the represent- 
 ative of any state or party, but the champion of the funda- 
 mental principles of the Constitution. The right of petition 
 we had thought as firmly fixed in the soil of America as the 
 Saxon race which brought it here. It was the breath of life 
 during our colonial history, and is recognized on every page 
 of our history since as the bulwark of civil liberty. 
 Antiquity and the historical associations of our mother 
 country had rendered it so sacred that we looked con- 
 fidently to that for protection and redress when all other 
 means should fail. . . . 
 
 And who does not recollect the thrill of enthusiastic feelino- 
 with which we heard that Adams had thrown himself into the 
 gap, and was contending, at first single-handed, for the right 
 of the citizen to petition, no matter what his creed, his colour, 
 or his party ? The effort was the nobler in that he was not a 
 member of the body of men in whose persons this right had 
 been invaded. No interest of his or his friends had been 
 touched. Against our efforts he had all along protested; 
 but, statesmanlike, he saw the end from the beginning. 
 When rights were invaded, he was willing to side with any 
 who rallied to protect them. We hail him as the champion 
 of free principles. We accord to him the high merit of a pure 
 attachment to civil liberty which would not permit her to be 
 attacked, even when she appeared in the garb of a party 
 which it was his interest, and he felt it to be a duty, to oppose; 
 of a clear-sighted, far-reaching wisdom, which discovered the 
 first approach of corruption and snuffed oppression in the 
 tainted breeze; of a noble disregard to party lines, when to 
 have adhered to them would have compromised the funda- 
 mental principles of our Government. 
 
44 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 The main portion of his speech may be regarded as a 
 lawyer's advocacy of a great principle of human rights, and 
 the other part of it as a reformer's insistence that it be allowed 
 to hold in the case of a particular wrong to be presented for 
 consideration and removal. As the morning speech was a 
 declaration of his new allegiance, so the evening remarks 
 may be considered as the announcement of the firm and 
 reasonable ground upon which the conflict was to be waged, 
 namely, the enlightenment of the people, and the exercise 
 of their right to petition the representatives of their will to 
 make the nation what it pretended to be, but was not. There 
 was no fanaticism and no unreasonableness in this initial 
 position. It rested on an inherited right, and on an asser- 
 tion made by the fathers of the Republic; on the English 
 Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The 
 Constitution of the United States, and the Union under it 
 were later provisions, to be discussed later in the stress and 
 storm that should be hereafter; but now, fundamental prin- 
 ciples of law and liberty were the base upon which the 
 neophyte began to build. 
 
 It is not amiss to take the two speeches of that spring day 
 of 1837 as a single symbol of a maturing purpose. Standing 
 side by side on the time-browned pages of a newspaper^ of 
 seventy -two years ago they have a unity of their own . So appear 
 to us as one the two distant suns which we call the North 
 Star — itself the guide of fugitives from bondage, through free 
 states where they were not freed, to an inclement province 
 where they were no longer slaves, and whence they could not 
 be dragged back to servitude. In these two speeches Phillips 
 had announced the choice that he had deliberately made, to 
 
 iThe Liberator. 
 
INCONSPICUOUS AT FIRST 45 
 
 the great gratification of the Httle company who attended 
 the Lynn meeting — and to the profound disgust of everybody 
 else, his mother and her family included. To be sure, they 
 heard that Wendell made two eloquent addresses. So much 
 the worse that they were on a subject about which he had 
 better have kept silence, or at least remained non-committal 
 until the tide of opinion had begun to turn. He would have 
 needed to wait only eight months. 
 
 During these months he was not conspicuous in the meet- 
 ings of the Society. His name does not appear on the list 
 of officers. He served on two committees to find a church 
 that would harbour an anti-slavery convention, meeting with 
 ingenious but firm refusals from most of those to whom 
 application was made. Some consistently replied that their 
 churches were for religious purposes only; some that the 
 peace and harmony of their societies would be disturbed; 
 others, like the committee of the Old South Church, " deemed 
 it inexpedient to grant the request." However, the fourth 
 annual meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society 
 convened in the Methodist Church on Church Street on 
 Tuesday, May 30th, and in the Park Street Church on Thurs- 
 day; an event thought worthy of mention as "a significant 
 sign of the times." The Salem Street meeting house was also 
 occupied on two evenings. At these meetings the name 
 of John G. Whittier occurs in a committee on business. 
 There were no less than thirteen public anti-slavery meetings 
 in Boston during the week. No note of Phillips's presence 
 at any of them appears, although it is probable that he was 
 a listener at some. On the Fourth of July, according to the 
 Salem Register, in response to an invitation after his speeches 
 at the May meeting he addressed " friends of the cause of 
 
46 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 abolition in this city in the Howard Street Church, and was 
 Hstened to with very great attention. It was a spirited and 
 sensible performance, and parts of it were truly eloquent. 
 There was nothing in it which ought to be objectionable to 
 any New England audience." At Worcester, September 
 27th, at a quarterly meeting of the Massachusetts Society, 
 Phillips appears among the speakers, with no published 
 comment on what he said. In the main, it may be inferred 
 that he did not covet prominence in the ranks, nor was he 
 pushed forward. Friends in his social circle may have said 
 that he could not immediately adjust himself to some of the 
 companions in arms whom he found in the militant band. 
 Or it may be that, like truly great orators, he needed the 
 spur of an inspiring occasion, as did his greatest predecessor, 
 Daniel Webster, to bring out the best that was in him. Such 
 an occasion was near at hand. 
 
 The renunciation which accompanied his consecration 
 to the anti-slavery cause was of a kind which showed that 
 his devotion to it was complete. He must have foreseen 
 that friends would desert him through no fault of his own 
 beyond a personal view of what was just and humane; 
 and it was a real grief to him that they forsook him and 
 called him a deluded fanatic. Besides the loss of friends 
 and companions there was the voluntary surrender of a 
 profession for which he had been educated and in the prac- 
 tice of which lay large hopes. He abandoned it because he 
 could not conscientiously follow it under a Constitution 
 which recognized property in human beings and sanctioned 
 their return to bondage after escape from it. By this 
 abdication he could commit himself to an unreserved 
 advocacy of human rights in the broader forum of the 
 
RENUNCIATION 47 
 
 country and before the people as jury and judge. His 
 legal learning availed him much, especially in arguments 
 before legislators. But pecuniary compensation, forensic 
 triumphs, great occasions for public address, and political 
 honours must all be surrendered. 
 
 In this renunciation the young man encountered a question 
 that comes to most men at some turning point in their 
 lives, as to whether they are pursuing their proper vocation 
 or an avocation. Circumstances of inheritance, necessity, 
 chance, or inconsiderate choice place many Avorkers in 
 situations for which they have not an aptitude or a liking. 
 Phillips, however, by all testimony, seemed to be in his 
 appropriate sphere, and to be more truly "called" to it 
 than many of his acquaintances to the occupations they 
 had taken up. But to some a voice comes out of the cloud 
 that overhangs a busy world; it may be no louder than that 
 which the prophet heard after the wind and the earthquake 
 and the fire, or that other word which said, "This is the 
 way, walk ye in it." Saul of Tarsus heard such a voice 
 on the road to Damascus, Peter of Picardy heard one in 
 his hermit cell, Joan of Arc in the pastures of Domremy, 
 and many another has listened to an "inward call" that 
 summoned him away from siren voices, from promises of 
 gain and distinction, to self-abnegation, to inconspicuous 
 toil, and to meagre compensation. Added to these in 
 Phillips's instance were misunderstanding and strife, the 
 hostility of enemies, and the desertion of friends. The 
 voice within was the only abiding certainty, seconded by 
 that of his best friend, and reechoed by a few comrades, 
 with varying tones of approbation, according to their own 
 notions of what was desirable and feasible. The small 
 
48 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 consideration which he paid to these inharmonious coun- 
 sellors indicates the definite clearness of the call to whicli 
 he listened and gave loyal heed. To him the war-trumpet 
 gave no uncertain sound, and he obeyed its summons 
 without cavil and without fear. 
 
IV 
 
 FREEDOM OF THE PRESS 
 
 (1836-1837) 
 
 THE position which PhiUips took in the first year of 
 his alKance with the anti-slavery movement was 
 upon the broad ground of universal freedom and the ancient 
 English right of petition. His next step was in defence 
 of another general right which had been held sacred since 
 Milton wrote his great argument in the " Areopagitica " for 
 the liberty of unlicensed printing. 
 
 The policy of repression which Congress had employed 
 toward petitions was beginning to be directed against the 
 freedom of the press. Andrew Jackson, in his message of 
 December 7, 1835, had made the first adverse presidential 
 allusion to abolitionism, voicing the sentiments which were 
 uttered by state legislatures and Southern newspapers, 
 calling upon the North to silence abolition tongues. Then, 
 attention was turned to the more dangerous work of "in- 
 cendiary" printing presses, whose pestilent sheets were 
 found in Southern states, with woe to those in whose hands 
 they were found. 
 
 In the face of all this, James Gillespie Birney, an Ala- 
 bama lawyer who had freed his slaves, and had been driven 
 from the bar of the state and other positions of honour, 
 determined to establish an anti-slavery paper in Dan- 
 
 49 
 
50 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 ville, Ky. Violence being threatened by a meeting of citizens 
 he crossed the river to Cincinnati, where no better hos- 
 pitaUty awaited him. Then he settled in the Quaker town 
 of New Richmond, twenty miles up-stream, where in the 
 summer of 1835 he issued the Philanthropist. The following 
 spring he risked removal to Cincinnati. In three months 
 his press and types were damaged by a mob, and on the 
 twenty-first of July a committee was appointed to inform 
 him that if his paper were not promptly suppressed a mob 
 would visit him, in which two-thirds of the property holders 
 of the city would join. A mild but fearless man, he declined 
 to yield to this demand. On the night of August 1, 1836, 
 his ofiice was pillaged, and press and types thrown into 
 the river. The Philanthropist passed into the hands 
 of Dr. Gamaliel Bailey, and twice afterward its press was 
 demolished. 
 
 The next attack upon the freedom of the press occurred 
 fifteen months later, with more serious result. St. Louis 
 was the scene of it. In the spring of 1836 a Negro who 
 had killed an officer arresting him was taken from jail by 
 a mob, chained to a tree, and burned alive. One Judge 
 Lawless exculpated the miscreants as moved ''by some 
 mysterious, metaphysical, and almost electric frenzy," and 
 told the grand jury that the case was beyond the reach 
 of human law, and therefore transcending their jurisdiction. 
 The editor of the St. Louis Observer, Rev. Elijah Parish 
 Lovejoy, commented upon the lynching, as editors still 
 do upon similar incidents, each from his own point of view. 
 Lovejoy was not a full-fledged abolitionist, but he had a 
 Northern man's aversion to roasting any animal alive. 
 This one being nothing but a "nigger," the editor's remarks 
 
PUBLIC COMMENT 51 
 
 were offensive to the people of the Missouri city. Called 
 to account, he displayed inconvenient ideas about the 
 freedom of the press; accordingly, his office was destroyed 
 by a gang of citizens. He removed across and up the river 
 into Alton, in the free state of Illinois, but as soon as his 
 press was landed it was broken to pieces. Certain citizens 
 furnished funds to buy another. In August, 1837, office 
 and press were again destroyed. Another was purchased, 
 broken up, and thrown into the Mississippi. Then, friends 
 rallied and resolved that "the cause of human rights, liberty 
 of speech and the press, demand that the Alton Observer 
 be reestablished with its present editor." A fourth press 
 arrived on November 7th. The Mayor superintended its 
 transfer to a warehouse, and, great excitement prevailing, 
 he appointed a special force to guard it. Seeing no sign of 
 an assault, most of the guard left at nine in the evening, 
 intrusting the care of the press to the editor and a dozen 
 friends. Soon thirty or forty roughs, who had imbibed 
 valour at neighbouring grog-shops, attacked the building 
 with stones and shots. Cries were raised to "Fire the build- 
 ing"; "Burn them out"; "Shoot every abolitionist as he 
 leaves!" The firing was returned and one rioter killed. 
 A torch was applied and as the defenders came out Mr. 
 Love joy fell pierced by five bullets. The press was then 
 broken in pieces and thrown into the river. 
 
 This act set a thousand other presses humming, a million 
 Americans reading, and many men speaking strong words. 
 But the words which were printed, read, and spoken were 
 -by no means the same. In the North there was general 
 unanimity on the freedom of speech and the press, some 
 disagreement about slavery, and more with regard to aboli- 
 
52 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 tionism. In the Ohio country there was a strong feeHng for 
 freedom of speaking and printing if it did not touch Southern 
 interests. In the South the incident at Alton was regarded 
 as a just retribution upon a meddler, but with apprehension 
 as to what it might do for anti-slavery sentiment. Certainly 
 it did not contribute to the diminution of membership in 
 societies formed to disseminate abolition principles. And, 
 as these were published more and more, controversy grew 
 bitter throughout the nation. In the Northern heavens, 
 sullen clouds were driven by contrary winds; in the South- 
 ern sky, heat lightening flashed from the Atlantic to the 
 Mississippi River, and there were mutterings of a threatened 
 storm. 
 
 Tidings of the tragedy reached Boston after twelve days, 
 on Sunday forenoon, November 19th — such was the speed 
 with which news travelled in 1837. "The Rev. Mr. Brown- 
 son, in the afternoon, preached an impressive sermon on the 
 occurrence"; but most of the ministers did not pronounce 
 upon the subject at once. Early in the week Dr. Channing, 
 at the instigation of Ellis Gray Loring, circulated a petition 
 asking the city government to allow the use of Faneuil Hall 
 for a meeting of citizens in reprobation of the Alton riot. 
 The aldermen declined, "lest the sense of the meeting be 
 taken as the opinion of the city in other places," presumably 
 to the southward. An appeal from this decision to the 
 people was followed by a meeting in the Common Council 
 room, where sundry resolutions were passed, which the city 
 fathers respected enough to grant petitioners permission to 
 hold a meeting on December 8th — " in the daytime, lest 
 if it should he held in the evening Boston might see another 
 mob," 
 
MEETING IN FANEUIL HALL 53 
 
 The Huguenot hatred of despotism which Peter Faneui) 
 built into the hall that he gave to the city in 1742 was con- 
 tinued in the town hall which rose from its ashes in 1763; for 
 in the decade before the Revolution, patriots made its walls 
 echo with denunciations of British tyranny. Since then, the 
 old " Cradle of Liberty " had been so unreservedly open to free 
 discussion (except by abolitionists) that in the drift of public 
 opinion a pro-slavery meeting had been held in it on August 
 21, 1835, in the sixtieth year of American independence. 
 At this meeting the most respectable citizens vied with one 
 another in supporting resolutions deprecating disturbance 
 of the South by Northern agitators, and reaffirming the pro- 
 slavery compromise of 1789; this however, did not satisfy 
 the demand which the South had made for repression of free 
 speech and printing. Penal legislation, with hanging for 
 agitators, was what was desired. The Garrison mob, two 
 months later, was the first result of this meeting. But populai' 
 sentiment had been changing slowly since that outbreak, and 
 had received sufficient acceleration by the iVlton affair to make 
 a turning point somewhere between the refusal and the grant- 
 ing of the hall. At ten o'clock on the morning of December 8th 
 five thousand people packed the hall to overflowing. The 
 Hon. Jonathan Phillips, as chairman, stated that the meeting 
 was not in favour of any party, but to maintain the spirit oi 
 universal freedom, the essential and fundamental principles 
 of civil liberty. After an invocation of the divine blessing by 
 Rev. E. M. P. Wells, Dr. Channing replied to those who 
 thought him out of place in such a meeting as well as to those 
 who had expected him to discuss the tragedy in his pulpit; 
 adding that he preferred to join the citizens of Boston in 
 expressing in a public manner their abhorrence of lawlessness ; 
 
54 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 and he spoke at length in a similar strain. Resolutions drawn 
 by Dr. Channing, and offered by B. F. Hallett, Esq., were 
 seconded by George S. Hillard in a speech which deplored 
 the increasing frequency of mobs deliberately organized. 
 So far, the meeting appeared to favour law and order. Then 
 the Attorney-General of the state, James Trecothic Austin, 
 from the rear gallery addressed the assembly. After a 
 thrust at the "abstractions" that had been uttered, and a 
 laudation of the Bill of Rights, he declared that this meeting 
 had been convened for an application of these rights to events 
 in the State of Illinois, and to sympathy for the death of an 
 editor there. He sympathized with the people of slave states 
 who lived in constant fear of their lives through danger of 
 slave insurrection. The free state in which the disturbance 
 had occurred was trying to exercise a neighbourly duty of 
 upholding the laws and prejudices of a slave state, and in the 
 process a man was killed and died "as the fool dieth." 
 Liberty of speech and the press were to be used with reference 
 to others' rights. What can we expect than that an abolition 
 press will be destroyed if it is established in a slave state or on 
 its borders ? — and so on for two reported columns. 
 
 The opposition element in the crowd, reinforced by the 
 indifferent and unreasoning, shifty applauders of every 
 speaker, nearly created a stampede from the hall. The 
 assembly was beginning to resemble that at Ephesus when 
 the city's trade was endangered by a certain reformer — 
 " Some cried one thing and some another : for the assembly 
 was in confusion; and the more part knew not wherefore 
 they had come together." 
 
 Phillips, standing with the multitude, for there were no 
 seats, remarked that such assertions ought to be answered; 
 
A REVELATION OF POWER 55 
 
 and someone suggested that he do it, to whom he repHed, 
 "I will if you will help me toward the platform." This 
 was the "lecturn" from which Dr. Channing had spoken. 
 The fact that Phillips was in the crowd and not near the 
 chairman has given the impression that his speaking was 
 upon an impulse of the moment. On the contrary, it is more 
 than probable that he had been invited to be one of the 
 speakers, and that it had been arranged that he should follow 
 Mr. Hillard,^ when Austin broke in from the gallery, and left 
 the hall as soon as he had finished his speech. There was no 
 time for an introduction to the audience, unknown as the 
 young man was to most of it. He introduced himself by 
 saying: "Mr. Chairman: We have met for the freest dis- 
 cussion of these resolutions and the events that gave rise to 
 them." He had struck the American note of fair play, and, 
 despite cries from Austin's following for putting the question, 
 he elicited others of, "Hear him," "Go on," and "No gag- 
 ging." In a single sentence he had captured the attention of 
 the majority by his presence and personality. He then 
 went on to say : 
 
 I hope I shall be permitted to express my surprise at the 
 sentiments of the last speaker — surprise not only at such 
 sentiments from such a man, but at the applause they have 
 received within these walls. A comparison has been drawn 
 between the events of the Revolution and the tragedy at Alton. 
 We have heard it asserted here, in Faneuil Hall, that Great 
 Britain had a right to tax the colonies, and we have heard the 
 mob at Alton, the drunken murderers of Love joy, compared 
 to those patriot fathers who threw the tea overboard! 
 
 ^So stated in the Liberator's report of the meeting. Yet I have been told that Phillips assured 
 the father of my informant that he did not expect to speak when he entered the hall. Upon 
 which a friend of Mr. Phillips remarked to me, "It might have been an instance of his 
 memory failing him." It is also an example of the contradictions of testimony. 
 
56 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Fellow-citizens, is this Faneuil Hall doctrine ? The mob at 
 Alton were met to wrest from a citizen his just rights — met 
 to resist the laws. We have been told that our fathers did 
 the same: and the glorious mantle of Revolutionary prec- 
 edent has been thrown over the mobs of our day. To make 
 out their title to such defence, the gentleman says that the 
 British Parliament had a right to tax these Colonies. . . . 
 Sir, when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which 
 place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Han- 
 cock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips 
 would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant Ameri- 
 can, the slanderer of the dead. Sir, for the sentiments he has 
 uttered, on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and 
 the blood of patriots the earth should have yawned and 
 swallowed him up. 
 
 From this point the speech bears less reference to what the 
 Attorney-General had said, and more to the talk of some in 
 the community, including editorials and sermons. It is 
 possible that this would have been the burden of his discourse 
 if the man in the gallery had not spoken. Expressions like 
 "The statement which has been made," "It has been asked," 
 "Some persons seem to imagine," and similar introductory 
 sentences appear to preface what he intended to say if he 
 had spoken according to the announcement that he was 
 expected to speak and that he was to follow Mr. Hillard. 
 A note of premeditation is evident in the scoring of Rev. 
 Hubbard Winslow, pastor of the Bowdoin Street Church, who 
 had gone out of his way to define republican liberty as "the 
 liberty to do what the prevailing voice of the brotherhood will 
 allow and protect." 
 
 By such contemporary testimony as can be obtained it 
 must be concluded that this speech was considered a most 
 remarkable one in a day when oratory of a high order was 
 
CONTEMPORARY RECOGNITION 57 
 
 common. Webster, Everett, and Choate, each in his own 
 way, had accustomed the citizens of Boston to dehberative, 
 occasional, and forensic eloquence, generally the result of 
 premeditation and preparation. But, so far as the audience 
 could see, this speech by a new man was impromptu. He had 
 sprung from the throng uncalled, unannounced, and unknown, 
 except by a few. He apparently had no time to consider what 
 he should say in reply to an unexpected harangue which had 
 nearly defeated the purpose of the meeting. One more such 
 would have accomplished this result. It was plain that 
 the young man had turned the wavering assembly back to the 
 original sentiment of the majority, and had recalled the 
 better sense of the multitude to the vital issue that had been 
 imperilled in Illinois, and had now been nearly abandoned in 
 Massachusetts. He had headed off an inglorious stampede 
 from independence to subserviency, from liberty of speech 
 and of printing to the gag-law and censorship of the press. 
 To do this in the way it was done was more than to charm an 
 audience for an hour with periods which voice its concurrent 
 beliefs. It was an exceptional triumph of oratory under 
 adverse conditions, and it will stand among the very few 
 instances when the speaking man, and his personality behind 
 his words, have together been stronger than the collective 
 mind of a multitude.^ 
 
 Recognition of the extraordinary achievement was spon- 
 taneous and unstinted. But it was not unqualified ; for with 
 great praise for the wonderful performance, material enough 
 
 1" Phillips was already a favourite public speaker before Sumner had given any promise 
 of future distinction as an orator." Pierce's "Life of Sumner," i., 155. But in ii., 7 the 
 author remarks that Phillips "began his career as an orator in his reply to Austin." Sumner 
 began his in a Fourth of July address on "The True Grandeur of Nations," ten years later, 
 1845. ■^^■. »•. 384- 
 
58 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 was at hand for the detraction with which people love to 
 interlard their commendation, and show how well balanced 
 their own judgments are. Therefore, after the vociferous 
 applause was over, and the favourable comments of the 
 departing crowd had been uttered, and glowing reports of it 
 given at many dinner tables, and soberer mention made in 
 one newspaper after another, notes of regret followed quick 
 and often that the young lawyer should have sacrificed such 
 talents and prospects to the unpopular cause which lay back 
 of the one which he had defended so well, but upon which 
 (abolitionism) all the speakers had been pledged not to touch. 
 Doubtless, too, there were some who said that he could never 
 do so well again, and that with "one-speech Hamilton" he 
 would earn his reputation by a single effort, but never add 
 to it afterward. 
 
 As the biographic imagination is sometimes charged with 
 extravagance in its interpretation of events long past, it may 
 be well to note how contemporaries viewed the occurrence. 
 First, the resolutions were carried with unexpected unanimity 
 — "after the whirlwind of applause had died away," one 
 says. It was better than this. A Mr. Bond followed Mr. 
 Phillips in a speech long enough and ordinary enough to 
 allow the enthusiasm of the audience to cool; accordingly, 
 conviction must have been produced sufficiently abiding to 
 secure a vote of "unexpected unanimity"; although the 
 parenthetical clause — "a considerable number not voting at 
 all" — indicates that conservative Boston had its doubts on 
 the subject of unlicensed printing, as the forefathers had in 
 the days of the Cambridge press which gave them so much 
 trouble despite its appointed censors. Mr. Garrison's paper 
 said that "Mr. Phillips replied with great effect," and 
 
EFFECT OF THE SPEECH 59 
 
 includes him among those who made "admirable speeches." 
 But Mr. Garrison did not think that the object of the meeting 
 went far enough in not insisting upon discussion of the 
 slavery question. The same paper quotes from the Daily 
 Advocate's correspondent a most enthusiastic description of 
 "the torrent of eloquence of irresistible force, which was 
 cheered from every quarter of the hall and echoed and 
 reechoed through its arches when he sat down." The 
 Westminster Review of December, 1838, in an article by 
 Harriet Martineau, observed: 
 
 The crisis to which this meeting brought the fate of the 
 abolitionists hung at last for the space of three minutes 
 upon the lips of one very young speaker, who was heard 
 only because of his rank. It came to the turn of a hair 
 whether the atrocious mob-speech of the Attorney-General 
 should be acted upon, or whether liberty of speech and 
 the press should prevail. Happily the eloquence of young 
 Mr. Phillips secured the victory.^ 
 
 Similar testimony to his impromptu address occurred in 
 other publications. It was chiefly remarkable for the power 
 to adapt readily to the demands of an occasion the conclusions 
 at which the speaker had arrived by meditation. They were 
 to him what their "commonplaces" were to the old Roman 
 orators, but of more vital consequence. This is the best 
 explanation of his immediate power. It was what he saw 
 imperilled that gave force to the skill of his deliberate speech. 
 The man was behind the orator. And beyond the man was 
 the principle of freedom to discuss any proposition, not 
 excluding the inscription on the bell that swung over Indepen- 
 
 ^This speech was ranked by George William Curtis with Patrick Henry's farewell oration 
 at Williamsburg and with Lincoln's at Gettysburg. 
 
60 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 dence Hall, to "proclaim liberty to all the inhabitants of the 
 land." 
 
 But after all contemporary testimony has been taken there 
 remains an uncounted factor which is as volatile and power- 
 ful as an ethereal force of nature. This may be called the 
 dramatic element which sometimes attends effective speech. 
 Evolved from the occasion, the speaker, and the audience it 
 becomes pervasive like a spirit of the air and of the storm, 
 and its doings cannot be accounted for by the principles of 
 common experience. There was nothing intentionally 
 dramatic in this sudden appearance upon the stage of a 
 young man comparatively unknown, but many occurrences 
 have had a dramatic ending that was unexpected. One event 
 that made this speech scenic was the immediate turning of the 
 prevailing sentiment away from its direction on account of 
 a few words calmly spoken by a young attorney who hap- 
 pened to have the rarest power given to man — the control of 
 other men's minds. This can best be measured by com- 
 paring it with physical prowess. A trained fighter of mar- 
 vellous strength might oppose the fore-front of a mob with 
 temporary effect in a hand-to-hand encounter, but would 
 certainly be overwhelmed by numbers in their growing anger. 
 Yet here was a man who in a dozen quiet sentences stilled 
 the stormy impulses of five thousand, tdrned prejudice to 
 favour, and led the forces which inspire action and direct 
 away from one purpose to another and different determina- 
 tion. There have been frequent instances where the previous 
 disposition of a multitude has been augmented and hurried 
 into precipitate acts by inspiring appeals; but there have 
 been so few examples of reversing the current of resolve that 
 Shakespeare made his great orator's triumph to lie in turning 
 
A DRAMATIC ELEMENT 61 
 
 the people's hatred of Caesar into fury against his patriotic 
 assassins. He thought it dramatically necessary to accom- 
 plish this by deliberate and progressive play upon the hearts of 
 the populace, urging on and holding back their resentment in 
 prolonged discourse. In a single paragraph, addressed to 
 nothing beyond the audience's sense of a comparison of their 
 forefathers' resistance to taxation by mobbing tea ships to the 
 Alton destruction of a printing press with the murder of its 
 owner, this man brought about a change of opinion in the 
 face of deep-seated prejudice which was more dramatic in its 
 suddenness among a throng of intelligent and educated people 
 than the hounding on to vengeance of a Roman rabble. It 
 was a dramatic end to Demosthenes's speech when the 
 assembly cried out, "Up, let us march against Philip," but 
 they hated him before the orator fanned their animosity into 
 flames. This man turned the assent of the throng to the 
 words of his predecessor into repudiation of them, with loud 
 acclaim of his branding the recreant American as a slanderer 
 of the dead. It was a masterly stroke of oratory — the 
 precursor of many such feats — unpremeditated, bold, 
 efficacious. The immediate recognition it won was another 
 feature of its scenic character, voiced in the tumultuous 
 applause that followed, and in the approval of shouted 
 agreement with the speaker's sentiments. Citizens went out 
 into the winter noon knowing that whatever their opinions 
 had been or still were, they had witnessed a dramatic act in 
 the old Hall of Patriots such as could not be reproduced on a 
 theatrical stage; for the protagonist had set a thousand minds 
 in a new direction and recalled thousands more from 
 momentary deviation back to the principles of free speech 
 and personal liberty for which their forefathers had 
 
62 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 contended. They felt also that an orator of great promise 
 had sprung up in the city, and many asked who he was. An 
 aristocrat of twenty-six years, who had left his law office and 
 the courts, abandoned great prospects, and lost his friends 
 and general favour, all for the visionary cause of universal 
 liberty in the land — another factor in a career that promised 
 to be dramatic in the future. 
 
V 
 
 LABOURS AFIELD 
 
 (1838-1839) 
 
 AS THE South feared, abolitionism was greatly helped 
 by the Alton murder and the comments upon it by 
 Northern speakers and writers. The British, who had 
 shaken themselves clear of slaveholding in their colonies, 
 were now free to denounce it here. Accordingly, anti- 
 slavery societies multiplied. Eight hundred of them had 
 been formed before 1837, and at the rate of one every day 
 during the two previous years. In Ohio, alone, there were 
 three hundred, one with a membership of four thousand. 
 But, relatively to the entire population, the abolitionists were 
 few. In Massachusetts even, there were more than a 
 hundred towns where there was no anti-slavery society, 
 and Boston itself, where the first one was started six years 
 before, was by no means converted to its purposes or con- 
 vinced of its usefulness. No immediate results followed the 
 Faneuil Hall meeting, since its speakers had been restricted 
 to reaffirming the ancient right of free speech, without open 
 reference to slavery, the remote cause of assembling. The 
 time had not arrived when the city would open the " Cradle 
 of Liberty " to speakers who carried the doctrine of Adams 
 and Otis and Hancock beyond the white race limit. 
 
 63 
 
64 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Phillips himself, with his knowledge of men and the hour, 
 knew that something more than a single address was needed 
 to bring many persons to a new view of an old condition of 
 things. If, too, he remembered that the occasion, rightly 
 improved, is a large contributor to oratorical success, he could 
 hardly hope for another so propitious to occur in the near 
 future. However, he improved an opportunity that soon 
 presented itself to supplement his Faneuil Hall speech 
 with an address on Forefathers' Day, December 22, 1837, 
 at a meeting in Marlborough Chapel commemorative of 
 Lovejoy. In this he reviewed unfavourable comments 
 that had been made on the murdered man's defence 
 of his rights, chiefly by non-resistant abolitionists, some 
 of the clergy, and pro-slavery advocates. He argued 
 as a lawyer, that the Alton editor stood upon his 
 constitutional rights; that he was one of the force 
 enrolled by the Mayor to sustain the laws; cited the 
 precedent of the men who were assembled to protect the 
 library of Harvard College at the time of the Mount Benedict 
 mob; asserted that Lovejoy's paper was not an abolition 
 sheet; that only three out of fifteen or twenty in the build- 
 ing were abolitionists; that they took arms, not to vindicate 
 slaves' rights, but their own; that the rioters fired first; 
 that the ministerial profession confers no right to neglect the 
 duties Of a citizen, and forfeits no right to protection; that 
 Lovejoy fled from place to place and suffered thrice patiently; 
 that insulted law called for justification. In closing he 
 touched upon the cause of it all: 
 
 With what an answer has he furnished us to the oft repeated 
 question. What has the North to do with slavery.^ Point 
 to the grave of Lovejoy and utter no word. The tree of 
 
SPEECH ON ANNEXATION OF TEXAS 65 
 
 slavery may be planted in Southern soil, b«t its cold and 
 blighting shadow, its death-distilling branches, are mildewing 
 all our free institutions. " Nothing to do with it," when it 
 can chill the free speech of Faneuil Hall and make us forget 
 that freedom of speech was our fathers' guiding star over the 
 ocean ? 
 
 I have one word to add, which shows our immediate duty 
 and our city's responsibility. It is said the rioters at Alton 
 were heard encouraging each other by reference to old Boston. 
 Alas, my native city, art thou indeed so fallen ? To be 
 praised by praiseworthy men, was once pronounced the 
 highest honour. To what depth of degradation must she 
 have fallen, whose time honoured name has become the 
 motto and war-cry of a mob ! 
 
 Marlborough Chapel had been built for a rallying place of 
 the agitators, and although Phillips's defence of Lovejoy and 
 his liberty to speak and print was as restrained and logical as 
 a legal argument need be, there were no restraints of speech 
 promised. Hence his malediction of the evil influence of 
 slavery at the close of this address, and his lament over 
 Boston's example on the mob of 1835. 
 
 It became evident to his associates that they had gained 
 something more than an enthusiastic philanthropist when, 
 on January 26, 1838, he made a still more argumenta- 
 tive plea before a committee of the Massachusetts Legisla- 
 ture on the unconstitutionality of annexing Texas to the 
 Union. He could argue a question of national importance 
 before the legislators of a state whose influence was a power 
 throughout the North and West. He referred the committee 
 to a consideration of the nature of the Constitution as estab- 
 lished by the people of the United States for the entire nation, 
 and not for one state or section only, tracing the growth of 
 this view through the several declaration compacts. He 
 
66 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 discussed at length the question which had been considered 
 by the framers of the Constitution regarding the admission of 
 new states from territories beyond the hmits of the Union 
 fixed by the treaty of 1783. Then he took up the matter 
 of acquiring territory by conquest or treaty, and asked if in 
 the exercise of the treaty-making power the Government could 
 be totally regardless of all other provisions of the Constitu- 
 tion. His citation of the opinions of jurists, statesmen, and 
 of legislative acts shows what attention he had given %p the 
 issue which was becoming of alarming importance; as was 
 indicated by this closing paragraph of an hour's argument : 
 
 Sir, Jefferson, when performing what he confessed was an 
 unconstitutional act, remarks, "I confide in the good sense of 
 our country to correct the evil, when it shall "produce ill 
 effects.'' I submit to this committee whether this time has 
 not arrived. 
 
 To ally ourselves with Texas, is to hoist the banner of the 
 Republic over a slaveship, and become partners in the 
 voyage. "To uphold slavery in a new country," said Daniel 
 Webster, in 1819, "what is it but to encourage that rapacity, 
 fraud, and violence, against which we have so long pointed 
 the denunciations of our penal code ? What is it but to 
 tarnish the proud fame of our country ? What is it but 
 to throw suspicion on its good faith, and render questionable 
 all humanity and the liberties of mankind .P'* 
 
 Incidentally it may be noted here that Phillips per- 
 fectly understood the value of quoting authorities having 
 weight with his hearers; and none could be of more value, in 
 addition to that of early statesmen, than Daniel W^ebster's. 
 His opinions of twenty years before were more serviceable to 
 the speaker than those of a later date. Doubtless there 
 were members of the legislative committee who regretted that 
 
FIRST YEAR IN ABOLITION RANKS 67 
 
 so promising an advocate and interpreter of the Constitution 
 as Phillips had shown himself should espouse a view 
 of its powers and limitations that Avould be sure to affect 
 unfavourably the trade and manufactures of New England 
 by opposing the Southern scheme of annexing Texas. 
 
 Detail work incidental to his new alliance soon began. 
 In three months he was appointed one of a delegation 
 from Boston to an anti-slavery convention in New York. In 
 June he was reported as one of the "interested and animated 
 debaters among those who usually attend our meetings." 
 On July 4th he delivered the address of the day in Lynn; 
 August 30th he was present at a convention in Worcester; on 
 September 21st he attended a peace meeting in Marlborough 
 Chapel, at which he opposed a resolution in favour of the 
 doctrine and practice of non-resistance, which was becoming 
 a disturbing question in abolition circles, and of which more 
 would be heard later. At Worcester, in October, as chair- 
 man of a committee, he reported resolutions "to vote for no 
 man who was not opposed to slavery, and to keep out of all 
 political party affiliations," another tendency which was to 
 become a further cause of dissension in years to come. These 
 were his principal appearances during the first complete year 
 in abolition ranks. He had attended other meetings and 
 served on committees and discussed measures of minor 
 importance. It was of more consequence that he closed the 
 year 1838 by forming a city anti-slavery society on Christ- 
 mas Day in Boston, and was chosen its first president. For 
 a recruit and a young man his record ought to have been 
 eminently satisfactory to his co-workers. There is no 
 evidence, however, that they were inclined to make a leader 
 of him, or that he aspired to leadership. That position was 
 
68 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 occupied by Mr. Garrison, and the younger man would not 
 have wished to disturb him. Moreover, there were other 
 things to be done besides the speaking in which he excelled. 
 Even his oratory had to be in the line of information and 
 instruction as much as in eloquent persuasion. 
 
 The year 1839 opened with an opportunity to the orator 
 almost as favourable as that of his first appearance before 
 a representative city audience. On January 24th the 
 public opinion of Boston had advanced so far as to permit 
 Faneuil Hall to be opered for a meeting in favour of abolish- 
 ing slavery in the District of Columbia. This measure had 
 been broached ten years before by Lundy, who urged petition- 
 ing Congress — a suggestion that was taken up by Garri- 
 son in Bennington, Vermont, three months later, resulting in a 
 petition, bearing over twenty-three thousand names, being sent 
 to Congress in January, 1829. It was received and referred 
 to a committee, which brought in such an adverse report 
 that Congress considered no legislation for abolishing slavery 
 at the Capitol until the South seceded, thirty-two years after- 
 ward. Southern men saw in this proposal to free slaves in 
 the District of Columbia the beginning of emancipation 
 throughout the South; but Northern people considered that 
 they had rights enough in the District to warrant them in 
 asking that a sectional evil be removed from national 
 ground. Accordingly they kept on memorializing Con- 
 gress for an entire generation. Still, it had taken Boston 
 a third of this period to endorse the movement suffi- 
 ciently to allow its Liberty Hall to be used for a discussion 
 of the subject. At length the doors were unbarred and 
 Wendell Phillips, one of a dozen speakers, offered the fol- 
 lowing resolution: 
 
ON SLAVERY IN DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 69 
 
 Resolved, That whether the members of Congress sustain 
 freedom of speech in the Capitol or not — Massachusetts and 
 Faneuil Hall are never gagged. 
 
 It was a declaration for the present and the future rather 
 than of what had been true during the last decade. Then he 
 said: 
 
 Two things we have certainly done; we have opened these 
 doors, and we have pictured that man's features [John 
 Quincy Adams's] on these walls, not to honour him as the 
 ex-President of the United States, but as the man who alone 
 has dared, on the floor of Congress, to maintain that slaves 
 have a right to petition. It is fitting that we should meet here. 
 We have united to finish what our fathers left unfinished 
 when they declared that all men are born free and equal. 
 . The patriot as well as the abolitionist is concerned 
 in the struggle. When we first commenced the contest for 
 the rights of the coloured man, we supposed that all our 
 own rights were safe. The right of petition was a right 
 which our fathers brought over with them. It is of 
 English, not of American, origin. But we have learned 
 another lesson : we have found that in order to establish 
 the rights of the slave, we must first establish our own. 
 
 He then touched upon other rights that were endangered : 
 
 It is said that our efforts will dissolve the Union. . . . 
 We may preserve the form of the Union, but it will be value- 
 less, if bought at such a cost [of free speech]. There is 
 no Union at this moment for any man in this hall that will 
 sustain our own rights. He cannot set his foot in Virginia. 
 . . . It was the boast of ancient Rome that she had 
 thrown over her citizens the shield of her own powerful 
 protection. No matter in what remote or barbarous land 
 he might be found, as a Roman citizen he was sure of 
 protection. Not so with Massachusetts; her citizens are 
 seized in sister states and sold into slavery; a Senator of 
 
70 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 the United States threatens wholesale hanging, while her 
 Webster is dumb and her Fletcher is gagged. 
 
 Webster had held that the Constitution was a compact 
 between the states, and that the North must accept it with 
 the unfortunate permission of slavery and let it alone. 
 Phillips continued: 
 
 How did Massachusetts understand the compact ? That 
 we were to be free under the Union as we were free before. 
 If the thoughts and suppositions of the parties, and not 
 their words, are to settle the nature of compacts, let Massa- 
 chusetts speak, as well as Virginia. Let her tell the thoughts 
 of her Heaths and her Sedgwicks, her Quincys, and her 
 Otises, and other leaders of the revolution.^ 
 
 Alluding to the meeting that had been held for the 
 defence of slavery in Faneuil Hall in 1835: 
 
 That meeting spoke for oppression, and it ought to 
 have been silenced, as it was, in forgetfulness and dis- 
 grace. They said they were seeking to prevent the 
 dissolution of the Union. Love the Union as we may, 
 and cherish it as we do, equally with the loudest of our 
 opposers — ^we say, perish the Union if we must aban- 
 don the slave. God has so bound us to the slave that 
 we cannot abandon him. We are embarked in the 
 same vessel, and must be saved or perish together. So 
 let it be our firm determination this day that we will live 
 or die with the slave. 
 
 If there had been any uncertainty about Phillips's | 
 position, it was dispelled by this speech. The Constitution 
 and the Union had been the two pillars on which the 
 
 ^With regard to the opinions of eminent Virginians those of Washington are well stated 
 in Lodge's " Life of Washington," pp. 105-108; of Henry in Tyler's " Life," p. 388; of Jeffer- 
 son in his "Works," as indicated by indexes. 
 
AS AN ORGANIZER 71 
 
 prosperity and the existence of the Nation rested; and no 
 state had furnished so eloquent an advocate of this axio- 
 matic doctrine as Massachusetts. Whatever Calhoun had 
 threatened or Clay deplored, Daniel Webster had stood 
 by the Constitution, as a compact indivisible. Philan- 
 thropic persons might be carried aAvay by their pity for 
 bondmen, but to assail the entire Constitution for an unfor- 
 tunate article, without which it would not have been adopted, 
 and to split the Union in two because one section of it 
 would not abolish an inherited Avrong, was demanding 
 more than Boston would make haste to admit fifty years 
 after the compact was made. It had been wise in per- 
 mitting free speech. Abolition speeches, a dozen of them, 
 had been made; but it is probable that more followers 
 would have been secured by a refusal of the hall. Even 
 Phillips lacked the spur of opposition, and apparently 
 added nothing to the fame he had won. Possibly it 
 was difficult to be enthusiastic under conditions re- 
 vealed by a reporter's note — " When it is considered 
 that the reporter was taking notes in a room without 
 fire or seats, and that the thermometer was below zero, 
 that his paper was full, and all the pencils he could 
 borrow used up, he humbly asks to be forgiven for the 
 remainder of the remarks" — made after the sixth 
 speaker had finished. 
 
 Phillips did not fail to discover that the success of the 
 cause must be accomplished by hard work, with its petty 
 details; by information, instruction, and exhortation from 
 humble platforms and before audiences of dozens and 
 twenties. If he "enlisted for the war" he would have to 
 forget the distinction won in the first encounter, and descend 
 
72 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 to the commonplace task of recruiting, organizing, and 
 drilling, with now and then an address at a general muster 
 of officers. But this was what many a blue-and-gold 
 hero had done in the beginning of his career; besides, it 
 is demanded by any new movement, and old ones, too, 
 for that matter. For this sort of work he found abundant 
 opportunity as general agent of the Massachusetts society, 
 an office to which he was appointed early in 1839. J His duties 
 were similar to those of a state missionary — to organize 
 stations wherever there were schoolhouses. Meetings were 
 to be held in churches, halls, and vestries, when they could 
 be had; committees appointed and lecturers assigned. To 
 him it was a new and strange undertaking, not without 
 its disagreeable features, as all itinerants know. The 
 welcome offered by country villages was often doubtful 
 and sometimes dangerous; the hospitality of the faithful 
 was equally dangerous in respect to diet and lodging. 
 Nevertheless, Phillips braved things that were perilous, 
 and persons who were far from congenial, going up and 
 down the state among the hundred towns where no 
 societies had been established, and in which old preju- 
 dices had to be overcome and a new sentiment created. 
 The measure of his devotion to the cause he had es- 
 poused is best estimated by the disagreeable conditions 
 of such an undertaking to a man of his tastes and way 
 of life. Jonathan Edwards among the Stockbridge 
 Indians was not much more out of place. Even he had 
 his own roof and his own table for refuge when night 
 came — and the presidency of Princeton was his early 
 reward, though brief. 
 
 Phillips's reward — he received no pecuniary compensa- 
 
EMBARRASSMENTS 73 
 
 tion — was in the slow growth of opinion among what is 
 often the flighty element in commimities — [)eople who are 
 ready for any new 'ism; frothy folk who mark the farthest 
 advance of some chance wave up the beach before the 
 general tide arrives. They are the uncomfortable accom- 
 paniment of far-sighted pioneers and reformers, light- 
 headed enthusiasts who flank a stately procession and 
 detract somewhat from its dignity, as do small boys on the 
 sidewalks from the splendour of military reviews. More- 
 over, those who recall Lowell's essay on Thoreau will 
 remember that the beginning of the second third of the 
 last century teemed with eccentricities of all sorts. In 
 the revolt from a Puritanism that had served its purpose, 
 there was a sense of freedom which cropped out in queer 
 directions : 
 
 Every form of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought 
 forth its gospel. Wild -eyed enthusiasts rushed from all 
 sides, each eager to thrust under the bird that chalk egg 
 from which a new and fairer creation was to be hatched 
 in due time. Presartorial simplicity, plainness of speech, 
 even swearing, disuse of money (unless earned by other 
 people) — all had their evangelists. Communities were 
 established where everything was to be common but common 
 sense. All stood ready at a moment's notice to reform 
 everything but themselves. 
 
 It was this long-haired, hare-brained minority in commu- 
 nities that was always in the front seats when any apostle 
 of new thought appeared, and often to his discomfiture. 
 They did not help any cause to which they gave their effu- 
 sive assent. The wise speaker spoke over their heads, 
 addressing more deliberate thinkers of retiring mien. 
 
74 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 This head-foremost element Lowell termed ''the whistle 
 and trailing fuse of the shell." But having depicted the 
 humorous side of that period of ferment, he adds : " But 
 there was a very solid and serious kernel, full of the most 
 deadly explosiveness. Thoughtful men divined it, but 
 the generality suspected nothing." 
 
 One by one these "thoughtful men" saw the force of 
 what Phillips had to say about the entailed inconsistency 
 between the Declaration of Independence and the Consti- 
 tution; between a free republic and a slave-holding Union. 
 They asked, " What can we do ? " He answered, " Band 
 yourselves together, agitate, discuss, read, petition, write 
 your representatives, and vote. By and by your ballots 
 will settle every question and right every wrong." Separa- 
 tion was the extremest measure and disunion the greatest 
 disaster that had occurred to statesmen. And yet, was it 
 pure rhetoric, or a statesman's prophetic vision, that made 
 Webster speak in January, 1830, of "the broken and 
 dishonoured fragments of a once glorious Union; of states 
 dissevered, discordant, belligerent; of a land rent with 
 civil feuds, or drenched it may be with fraternal blood " ? 
 No such vision was possible to the pioneer abolitionists. 
 Indeed, so contrary to the thought of civil strife was 
 Garrison, that his non-resistant doctrine was one of the 
 germs of later disagreement in the camp. Votes were 
 the ultimate appeal; and he himself would not even vote. 
 But he would always agitate; and agitation was the business 
 of the general agent, Wendell Phillips. As a consequence, 
 societies sprang up here and there in his circuit of the 
 states. They were so many centres of information and 
 proselyting. Their influence rippled out to other towns, 
 
AGGRESSIVE POLICY BY PEACEFUL METHODS 75 
 
 and these joined in county associations, to be represented 
 in state conventions. The man was beginning to fulfil 
 his mission.* 
 
 iThe assistance which the leaders received from many devoted associates, which both 
 Garrison and Phillips were always forward to acknowledge, should not be passed over without 
 mention. Their names and labours cannot be recounted at length within the limits of this 
 sketch, but it is mere justice to say that they have been generously remembered in the "Life 
 of W. L. Garrison," by his children. 
 
VI 
 IN EUROPE 
 
 (1839-1841) 
 
 A LITTLE later Phillips's work was interrupted. Mrs. 
 Phillips's health, never the best, declined so rapidly, 
 that her puzzled physicians advised a European trip. It 
 is possible that they thought a temporary absence from the 
 arena of that early contest might be beneficial to the 
 woman who was waiting and watching at home while her 
 husband was working in the field. Neither of them was 
 willing to desert the cause for a day; but the doctors, backed 
 by the Phillips family — who hoped that he might be 
 " cured of his fanaticism " — hastened the departure. 
 The two delayed only long enough to attend the annual 
 meeting of the New England Anti-slavery Society, held 
 in Boston May 30, 1839. 
 
 Extracts from a letter addressed to Mr. Phillips on his 
 departure by the Massachusetts society indicate the esteem 
 in which he and his work were held at the time and what, 
 in a measure, he had accomplished. 
 
 We feel that in a worldl}^ sense few have made larger sac- 
 rifices upon the altar of humanity than yourself. Descended 
 from a highly respectable lineage, connected with an ele- 
 vated class in society, possessed of rare abilities which 
 qualified you to reach and to fill high and respectable 
 
 76 
 
TRIBUTE AND COMMENDATION 77 
 
 offices in the gift of the nation, in the springtime of manhood 
 when the love of popular applause, rather than of doing 
 good, generally inflames the youthful mind, you turned your 
 back upon the blandishments of a seductive world, repu- 
 diated all hope of political preferment and legal eminence, 
 made yourself of no reputation for the Ijenefit of the perishing 
 bondman, and became the associate of those who, for seeking 
 the abolition of slavery by moral and religious instrumen- 
 talities, are up to this hour subject to popular odium, to 
 violent treatment, to personal insult. You buckled on the 
 abolition armour when there were blows to take as well 
 as to give, and from that hour to the present we have ever 
 found you in the front rank of the conflict, reckless of all 
 consequences growing out of a faithful adherence to princi- 
 ple, and giving yourself as a freewill offering to the sacred 
 cause of human liberty. In the most difficult and trying 
 periods your vision has been clear, your faith unfaltering, 
 your course unswerving from the strict line of duty. 
 We shall regard your absence, as a real loss to the board, to 
 the society we represent, and to the great anti-slavery organi- 
 zation in the land — a loss which cannot be made up. 
 As the general agent of the society for the last five months 
 your labours have been arduous, indefatigable, and in a 
 high degree successful. For those labours you have re- 
 fused to accept even a slight compensation. 
 
 We bid you an affectionate farewell. We trust that your 
 amiable partner (whose generous donations to our cause 
 have greatly helped to advance it) will be fully restored to 
 health, and that you both will be safely returned to us 
 through the mercy and goodness of God. 
 
 To this personal commendation was added a summary 
 of the growth and condition of abolitionism for the infor- 
 mation of British friends. A brief abstract may serve to 
 show its status at the close of the first decade of tlie 
 organization : 
 
78 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Ten years ago there was only one advocate of imme- 
 diate emancipation ; now hundreds of thousands are in league 
 for it. In 1829, not an anti-slavery society, of a genuine 
 stamp, was in existence; in 1839 there are nearly two thou- 
 sand. Then, scarcely a newspaper open to discussion; 
 now multitudes, and pamphlets are issued by the million. 
 No lectures then; now, they cannot be estimated, with con- 
 ferences, associations, and societies. Seven hundred thousand 
 persons have memorialized Congress. Ten times as many 
 slaves find their way to Canada as in 1829. The revolution 
 in public sentiment has even been more extraordinary. 
 
 With such commendation and credentials Mr. and 
 Mrs. Phillips sailed from New York in the packet Welling- 
 ton, on June 6, 1839, and arrived in London in July, whence 
 they proceeded by slow stages through Paris and Lyons 
 to Italy, intending to pass the winter in Rome. In January 
 they were writing home about a city which was familiar 
 to fewer Americans in those days than in these — about 
 the Palace of the Csesars and the Pantheon, Trajan's Pillar 
 and the Colosseum, Titus's Baths and Nero's Golden 
 House, St. Peter's and the Vatican. Amidst all this came 
 the news of what interested them more — that a world's 
 anti- slavery convention had been called to meet in 
 London the following June, and that they had been 
 appointed delegates with a number of other men "and 
 women." The last two words look natural and inoffensive 
 in the commission, but they contained an element of intestine 
 commotion that produced immediate ferment, and came 
 near bursting asunder the compact body which had just 
 completed so triumphantly the tenth year of its existence. 
 To be sure, little rumblings had been heard, and some 
 
IN THE LONDON CONVENTION 79 
 
 dissent between brethren of Individualistic temperament; 
 but the need of unity in the common cause had hushed 
 discordant voices. Women worked with men, as in the 
 days when their grandmothers loaded muskets for the 
 grandfathers to fire. They also did a share of the talking, 
 and letter- writing to the newspapers, and were enrolled 
 with the men on committees and delegations. From 
 1835, American women, aside from their natural sympa- 
 thies for human suffering, had been inspired by the example 
 of English women who had laboured for immediate 
 emancipation of slaves in the West Indies.^ 
 
 The efforts of the English, however, had resulted mainly in 
 petitions to Parliament. In this country the "woman 
 question " crept into the anti-slavery cause at the convention 
 which formed the American Anti- slavery Society in 1833. 
 It met with opposition and, in 1840, caused a division in 
 anti-slavery ranks, resulting in the New Organization, 
 which lived thirteen years, sadly crippling the general 
 cause. 
 
 If there was a marked difference of opinion on the 
 woman question in this country, there was practically none 
 in England. When the mixed delegation reached London 
 they found that the committee on credentials declined to 
 admit women delegates to seats on the floor. They were 
 welcome to the galleries. " It was not according to British 
 custom," was the substance of the reply to American 
 remonstrance. When the Convention assembled Phillips 
 moved that the list of delegates be decided upon, and opened 
 the discussion of female representation. The call, he urged, 
 
 ^They also had an example nearer home, not so well known, in the petitions by V'irginia 
 women to the House of Delegates, after the Southampton insurrection of 1831, "to devise 
 a method for the abolition of slavery." 
 
80 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 embraced the friends of abolition everywhere. The Massa- 
 chusetts and American societies had admitted women to 
 a share in their dehberations. Their delegates had, under 
 the call, the right to a place in the t]!onvention. [Cries of 
 "No," "No."] Professor Adam, of Harvard, declared 
 that if women had no right there he had none, since his 
 credentials were from the same society. Dr. John Bow- 
 ring, afterward Sir John Bowring, M. P., endorsed these 
 views. 
 
 William H. Ashurst, a London lawyer, and George 
 Thompson, who had lectured in America, and for fifteen 
 years had been a labourer in the cause of emancipation 
 in England, and here by invitation of the abolitionists, 
 took sides with Mr. Phillips; but the other speakers voiced 
 the general English conviction and custom. The fact 
 that one of these entreated the Convention to be calm, 
 suggests that it was getting excited over the question. 
 Another delegate, Rev. Nathaniel Colver, asserted that a 
 large portion of the American abolitionists thought as the 
 English did on this subject. Rev. Elon Galusha, also a 
 delegate from America, confirmed this statement. James 
 G. Birney said that the question had led to a split in the 
 American Society and to the forming of a new organization 
 from which women would be excluded; and he ventured 
 to add that those who favoured woman's rights advocated 
 certain heresies about government. 
 
 To this Phillips replied with a denial, and the stormy 
 debate of several hours was closed by an overwhelming vote 
 to exclude female delegates. Their chief advocate, Wendell 
 Phillips, responded with good nature to George Thompson's 
 "hope that we shall proceed with one heart and one mind," 
 
PHILLIPS'S POSITION 81 
 
 by saying, "All we asked was an expression of opinion, and, 
 having obtained it, we shall now act with the utmost 
 cordiality." It was said, however, that certain women of 
 the company did not agree to his assurance that they would 
 "sit with as much interest behind the bar as if the original 
 proposition had been carried." It was to this meeting that 
 Phillips went with the admonition from his beloved Ann: 
 "No shilly-shallying, Wendell." ^ 
 
 It cannot be denied that this World's Convention was 
 disappointing. It turned out to be little more than a con- 
 ference with, and under the control of, the British and 
 Foreign Anti-slavery Society, Avhich distinguished itself 
 mainly by emphasizing English, and, largely, American 
 sentiment on the place of woman in public assemblies. A 
 protest against its action, drawn up by Professor Adam, 
 signed by several American delegates and presented to the 
 Convention, was laid on the table and ordered not to be 
 printed among the proceedings. In a meeting of the British 
 society held directly after the adjournment of the Con- 
 vention, the protesting Americans, Phillips among the rest, 
 were not invited to speak. Instead, Birney and Stanton 
 were assigned parts, and Remond, a coloured man, stepped 
 forward of his own accord, and w^as repeatedly cheered by 
 the audience. Garrison, who had arrived late at the Con- 
 vention, took his seat in the gallery, which he could not be 
 induced to leave, thus making his silent protest against the 
 rejection of his female co-workers. On this account, he 
 was not included among the Exeter Hall speakers. He would 
 have been likely to say things on the rising issue not agreeable 
 
 iln an undated letter to Colonel T. W. Higginson Phillips wrote: "The old world is not 
 ready for our question (woman), but acts without thinking, generally, on the rule of admitting 
 both sexes." Higgmson MS. 
 
82 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 to English ears. And it is safe to say, that before the vast 
 London audience PhilHps might have had the second great 
 opportunity of his Hfe; that he would have dropped the 
 minor question and left it where the Convention had buried 
 it in its British grave; and that on the greater issue of eman- 
 cipation, on which English and American opinion was then 
 and there a unit, he would have delivered an address that 
 would have given him international fame. He must 
 have foreseen the likelihood of such an opportunity, for 
 which he would not be unprepared. If he also foresaw the 
 loss of it through his championship of women who were help- 
 ing in the abolition movement, this sacrifice must be added 
 to the others he had made for the cause. But it could not 
 but be doubly great in not being allowed to speak for it in the 
 world's metropolis. No note of personal complaint or dis- 
 appointment escaped him in his letter to the public at home 
 about all that had taken place, which he closed by saying: 
 *' Circumstances, we think, make it our duty to remain on 
 this side the water another winter. . . . You will believe 
 us when we say, we had rather be with you, and enjoy the 
 privilege of sharing your labours." 
 
 An invitation to address the first annual meeting of the 
 British India Society in Freemason's Hall, July 6th, did not 
 afford him an opportunity equal to the one of which he was 
 deprived. The probable damage to cotton raising in the 
 South from British competition in India was a theme only 
 indirectly inspiring. This scheme might possibly make 
 slave labour in America unprofitable through penny-a-day 
 tillage by the Ganges, but there was a lurking suspicion that 
 even free labour might be unrequited. The speaker did 
 well with a topic which meant more for British prosperity. 
 
IN ITALY 83 
 
 rivalling American, than for emancipation; but he must 
 have felt hampered by the twofold nature of his subject. 
 His best statement was: " Deliver America from the incubus 
 of slavery, and her beautiful prairies will beat the banks of 
 the Ganges; and Yankee skill in the fruitful valleys of the 
 South will beat England and British India in any market in 
 the world." But it was not the speech that he would have 
 made in Exeter Hall. 
 
 In a few weeks Mr. and Mrs. Phillips turned their faces 
 toward the Continent again, notwithstanding the solicitations 
 of English friends urging a longer stay. Medicinal springs 
 in Bavaria were tried to little purpose, but the travellers lost 
 nothing by the way in their leisurely progress from place to 
 place through Germany, Switzerland, and Northern Italy. 
 In October they were in Milan, and settled in Florence by 
 November; thence to Leghorn for sea breezes in midwinter, 
 and afterward to Naples and Rome in the spring, whence they 
 journeyed to Paris in the early summer, and to London once 
 more after almost a year's absence. What all this was 
 to them can best be summarized by a letter to the Liberator 
 of May 28, 1841, from which the following paragraphs are 
 taken with necessary condensation: 
 
 'T is a melancholy tour : and I do not understand how 
 any one can return from it without being, in Coleridge's 
 phrase, a sadder and a wiser man. Every reflecting mind 
 must be struck, at home, with the many social evils which 
 prevail around ; but the most careless eye cannot avoid seeing 
 the painful contrasts which sadden one here at every step, 
 — wealth and poverty, refinement and barbarism, cultiva- 
 tion and debasement. . . . There is much to admire in 
 the democratic method of Catholic worship. The beggar in 
 rags, the peasant in his soiled and labour-stained homespun, 
 
84 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 kneel on the broad marble, side by side with fashion 
 and rank, seemingly unconscious of any difference between 
 himself and his fellow worshippers. . . . Italy, however, 
 is truly the land '' where every prospect pleases, and only man 
 is vile." All Europe is, indeed, the treasure house of rich 
 memories. Mayence, the mother of printing and free trade, 
 Amalfi, with her Pandects, the fountain of law — her 
 compass of commerce — her Masaniello of popular freedom; 
 Naples, with her galaxy of genius; Rome, whose name is at 
 once a history and a description, will ever be the Meccas of 
 the mind. But all the fascinations of art, all the luxuries of 
 modern civilization are no balance to the misery which bad 
 laws and bad religion alike entail on the bulk of the people. 
 For even when she marries a matchless sky to the Bay of 
 Naples, the impression is saddened by the presence of 
 degraded and suffering humanity. 
 
 I am glad to have had the opportunity of holding up 
 the cause calmly before my mind, of being able to look back 
 upon the course we have taken; and having done so, I am 
 convinced more and more of the claims it has upon each 
 one of us; and I hope to be permitted to return to my 
 place, prepared to urge its claims with more earnestness, and 
 to stand fearlessly by it without a doubt of its success. . . . 
 
 When Paul's appeal unto Caesar brought him into this 
 Bay of Naples he stood a prisoner of a despised race in the 
 presence of the pomp and luxury of the Roman people. 
 Even amid their ruins I could not but realize how strong the 
 faith of the apostle to believe that the message he bore 
 would triumph alike over their power and their religion. 
 Struggling against priest and people, may we cherish a like 
 faith. 
 
 After a fortnight's stay in London and the vicinity, Mr. and 
 Mrs. Phillips celebrated the Fourth of July, 184-1, by embark- 
 ing from Liverpool on a steamer — at that time regarded as 
 hazardous as some other ways of observing the anniversary 
 
RETURN HOME 85 
 
 of our independence. In thirteen days, on July 17th, the 
 Caledonia reached Boston, and, in the papers of the 23d the 
 Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society's officers announced a 
 social meeting to welcome Wendell and Anne G. Phillips 
 and three others, two of whom, the Cha})mans, had recently 
 returned from Hayti. This reception took place in Chardon 
 Street Chapel in the afternoon of August 2d, at which (jarri- 
 son, Phillips, and others, made speeches of welcome and reply. 
 
 The principal object of their two years' stay abroad had 
 not been accomplished; Mrs. Phillips's health was little 
 improved. However, they brought home a store of memories, 
 as only they can who have the antecedent knowledge around 
 which treasures of history and art may cluster. To Mr. 
 Phillips such a pilgrimage was what similar travels have 
 been to many whose education has been begun by the texts 
 and preliminary chapters of university courses, but finished 
 only with the completed years of life. This second stage 
 of it, taken as a matter of course by his English contem- 
 poraries, was of more value to him, as it was to some of his 
 associates here, by reason of the difficulty and rarity of the 
 tour in his day. All lovers of Longfellow, for instance, will 
 recall what he brought out of Europe for America, and gave 
 back to the Old World with the interest which talent pays. 
 And no one can read the speeches of Wendell Phillips from 
 this date without observing their enrichment by spoils from 
 the old empires beyond the sea. 
 
 For the remainder of the summer the two stayed with 
 Madam Phillips in her commodious house at Nahant. The 
 wife wrote to an English friend: 
 
 The village of Nahant is about a mile from our house; 
 there Dame Fashion struts about three months in summer. 
 
86 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 but we have the blessing of being out of her way, doing as 
 we please. . . . We are considered as heretics and 
 almost infidels, but we pursue the even tenor of our way 
 undisturbed. Sometimes Wendell goes off abolitionizing 
 for two or three days, but I remain on the ground. 
 
 In the autumn they took possession of a small house, No. 
 26 Essex Street, which Mrs. Phillips had inherited from her 
 father. It was in a neighbourhood to which the names of 
 Garrison, Jackson, Chapman, and Loring gave an abolition 
 complexion ; and in the social ostracism of the company such 
 association was congenial, or at least all that was left them. 
 In this new domicile Phillips found opportunities to use 
 his mechanical skill, from planing a door to sawing soap- 
 stone; but by Thanksgiving Day he was at leisure to describe 
 the feast to an English woman, historically, religiously, and 
 gastronomically : 
 
 To worship where their fathers knelt, and gather sons and 
 grandsons under the old roof -tree, to — shall I break the pic- 
 ture ? — cram as much turkey and plum pudding as possible; 
 a sort of compromise by Puritan love of good eating for deny- 
 ing itself that " wicked papistrie," Christmas. . . . Ann 
 gets tired out every day trying to oversee " keeping house," 
 as we Americans call it when two persons take more rooms 
 than they need, buy double the things they want, hire 
 two or three others, just, for all the world, for the whole 
 five to devote themselves to keeping the house in order. 
 I long for the time when there '11 be no need of sweeping 
 and dusting, and when eating will be forgotten. 
 
 Of herself the wife writes: 
 
 She laughs considerably, continues In health In the 
 same naughty way, strolls out a few steps occasionally, 
 calling it a walk; the rest of the time, from bed to sofa, 
 from sofa to rocking-chair, reads the Standard and Liberator^ 
 
HOUSEKEEPING 87 
 
 sees no company and makes no calls, looks forward to 
 spring and birds. . . . Wendell speaks whenever he 
 can leave me, and for his sake I sometimes wish I were 
 myself again, but I dare say it is all right as it is. AYhat 
 anti-slavery news I get, I get second hand. 
 
 This might be taken as the daily record of a life which 
 was to be prolonged through forty-four weary years more 
 of increasing invalidism, outlasting the life of her husband 
 by two years and two months. Yet, in suffering and en- 
 forced seclusion, her joyous disposition, unfailing spirits, 
 and keen sense of humour kept the house from being 
 gloomy to her constant companion and the few friends 
 who could be admitted to its needful privacy.' Neither 
 was there any diminution of interest in the cause, nor of 
 
 ^Without children, Mr. and Mrs. Phillips adopted, in 1851, Phcebe Garnaut, only 
 child of an estimable friend of Welsh birth who had married a native of France and come 
 to Boston, where her husband soon died. From her thirteenth year the girl "was a bright 
 and loving companion to Mrs. Phillips until her marriage to Mr. George H. Smalley took 
 her to another city and finally to London." Mr. Phillips's namesakes, Wendell Phillips 
 Garrison and Wendell Phillips Blagden, were the constant recipients of affectionate remem- 
 brance, several expressions of which in unpublished letters reveal the fondness of both Mr. 
 and INIxs. Phillips for children, in the latter amounting to a devotion to her little nephew 
 that was almost pathetic. And in the letters which the husband wrote "for Ann and Wendell 
 Phillips" the charm and tenderness of his affections are revealed. In a proportionate degree 
 this was true of his regard for any who had been or were his friends. One of the letters 
 on the occasion of the baptism of a grandnephew and namesake, Wendell Phillips Blagden, 
 must stand alone as an example of many: 
 
 "My dear Niece: How near did you ever come to scolding Sam? I 've no doubt he has 
 sometimes richly deserved it, for that 's a way our family has. / have come as near getting 
 all I deserved of late, as I ever did, for not writing you. But I could n't. Did you ever hear 
 of the swearing Worcester County man, famous for the poetry, eloquence, and pathos of his 
 oaths? Well, one day the folks saw that the tailboard of his cart had fallen down as he drove 
 up hill and all his potatoes were dropping out. They ran along in the fields, behind the 
 wall, to hear how he 'd swear when he first saw his mishap. Finally, glancing back, he saw 
 the vegetables scattered along the hillside behind him. Alighting, his arms dropped nerve- 
 lessly by his side as he said quietly: 'I feel wholly unequal to the occasion!' 
 
 " Now, that 's just my case. You see, Ann was so elated, overcome, and delighted with 
 'her baby,' as she called him — found out such eulogies on his beauty, manliness, weight, 
 and general perfection, showed him to all comers and rated their sense according to the 
 extent to which they went crazy over the photo — that I gave up being secretary to the family. 
 But she won't let me off — insists that I shall expose myself in the vain attempt to daguerreo- 
 type her ecstasy. 
 
 "Seriously, I have not seen her so charmed and thoroughly delighted for years as when 
 she opened the box and saw the photograph. I thank you most sincerely for many happy 
 hours in that weary room where she lies in patient helplessness. She never parts with the 
 
88 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 material aid which her competence enabled her to render; 
 nor was ever less the inspiration she afforded the knightly 
 man who, with solicitude for her hourly comfort, fared 
 forth into a world of strife to return often from scenes of 
 insult and peril, with hopeful answer to the old, old question, 
 " Watchman, what of the night ? " — " The morning 
 cometh." 
 
 picture, keeps it near her and expatiates to everybody. I cannot say that I blame her very 
 much (I) or that she has not good cause. He is a noble fellow in spite of his name, and I 
 don't believe that even that will ever keep him down. 
 
 "I haven't been out of the house but once of an evening for months, but I believe if 
 Ann had not been so wholly helpless that she would have insisted on my coming on to the 
 christening. Indeed, she began to debate how it could be done. But assuming for once(!!) 
 a pretence of authority, T crushed that madness out before it came to a head. 
 
 "With all serious and hearty earnestness we congratulate you on your beautiful boy and 
 wish him all the good, sweet things, all the grand, useful purposes and powers that will fulfil 
 your aspirations. God bless him life-long. 
 
 " Love to you and yours 
 
 "Ann and Wendell Phillips." 
 — BlagdenMSS. 
 
VII 
 ON THE PLATFORM 
 
 (1842) 
 
 THE pursuits which had been interrupted by two years' 
 absence in Europe were now taken up once more. 
 To a young and active man with a Hberal education and 
 recognized abihties, a mere existence, even with a com- 
 petence, could not be satisfying. His legal profession 
 counted for little with this one, on account of certain scruples 
 about practising under a government whose Constitution 
 contained articles against which he protested. For author- 
 ship he believed that he had no aptitude; the use of a pen 
 was distasteful to him, as his letters indicate, and even in the 
 preparation of addresses he usually discarded it. 
 
 In mental processes of composition, whether in blocking 
 out general lines of discourse, or in the arrangement of 
 paragraphs and the construction of sentences so carefully 
 that they might seem, like Everett's, to have been written 
 and memorized — for this head-work he had no superior. 
 Nor was it a matter of slow and painful preparation altogether 
 and always. No man was readier with a quick reply to 
 an unexpected interruption to the course of his argument. 
 Rejoinders had the same unhesitating flow of thoughts 
 and pertinent words as if they had been foreseen in the 
 privacy of his study. Not often a prisoner there for more 
 
90 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 than a day or two, not bound to desk and inkstand, he 
 acquired the habit of composing whenever and wherever 
 his mind was in a working mood. This was as hkely 
 to be on the platform as in the quiet of his home. His 
 thinking was clear, therefore his statements were plain; 
 his sense of proportion and emphasis keen, therefore he 
 wasted nothing on irrelevancies, and gave the grace of 
 symmetry and the force of pungency to his discourse. 
 For such a mind and such a man, there was, in his time, 
 an admirable arena — the lecture platform. 
 
 It was an outgrowth of the lyceum or debating society, 
 as this, in turn, was the product of the disputatious, in- 
 formation loving, and literary disposition of a people who 
 had practised freedom of speech and of thought, within 
 certain limits, for two hundred years. There was hardly 
 a village schoolhouse in New England that had not its 
 winter evening debates; and in the larger towns and cities 
 these were diversified by lectures from such celebrities as 
 could be afforded. In cities, courses of lectures were often 
 maintained apart from debating clubs, or at least from 
 their performances. 
 
 As early as 1830 the lyceum lecture was fairly started 
 as an educational factor among a people thirsting for 
 knowledge, and also relishing its presentation in oral and 
 literary form. This appetite had been inherited from 
 forefathers whose chief intellectual entertainment had been 
 Sunday sermons two or three hours long, and Thursday 
 lectures in which a more secular complexion was admissible, 
 especially in times of political excitement. To a large 
 extent these pulpit performances took the place of present- 
 day books and newspapers — Sunday papers included. 
 
NOTED LYCEUM LECTURERS 91 
 
 So, in the thirties and forties, did the popular lecture. On 
 the topic of the evening the attentive listener absorbed 
 knowledge which the speaker had been storing up during 
 weeks of study or years of experience. Sometimes the 
 hearer got an uplift through a moral or eloquent appeal, 
 especially if the lecturer had a purpose, a cause, or a reform 
 to promote. Such speakers, if they had graces of 
 oratory, found many opportunities to promulgate views 
 which otherwise might have gone begging for a hearing. 
 Doubtful doctrines escaped from sources regarded with 
 apprehension by staid communities who were proof against 
 heresy but not against oratory. If eloquence once got the 
 better of orthodoxy it was apt to be called back for another 
 hearing winter after winter. Emerson was particularly 
 liable to recall, as the elders were not always sure that 
 they understood exactly what he said, and the surer young- 
 sters were always willing to risk hearing the same again. 
 First and last, for about forty years, the lyceum lecture 
 was a great and entertaining educator. Successive lectures 
 were anticipated with eager expectation and listened to 
 with as much pleasure and more profit than the modern 
 play. The best speakers of the generation were in constant 
 demand, and every man who had a gift for popular exposi- 
 tion found a place on the lists of agencies known as "lecture 
 bureaus," with which associations and committees arranged 
 for intellectual supplies according to their pecuniary ability. 
 Among the greater lights and earlier was Edward Everett, 
 who could not be had for ordinary occasions, but whose 
 eulogy on Washington may be regarded as preeminently 
 the first in rank of its class and the most widely heard. 
 It was welcome all over the land, with its purpose of making 
 
92 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Mount Vernon a national possession, to which it contributed 
 over fifty-three thousand dollars, two thousand more being 
 added by the author of it. Rufus Choate illustrated 
 American history by addresses somewhat above the taste 
 of the average audience, but not above the intelligence 
 of the best. Horace Mann delivered a volume of lectures 
 on Education, and Ralph Waldo Emerson two volumes 
 on a variety of themes, which appeared in print afterward 
 as essays. Rev. Drs. Bellows and Chapin, clergymen of 
 New York, were speakers who carried audiences along 
 the lines of their topics almost by bodily force, as also did 
 Henry Ward Beecher by an immense magnetic power, coupled 
 with humour and a sympathetic delivery. George William 
 Curtis's literary addresses, and particularly those on the 
 relations of education to citizenship, were always of the 
 highest class, drifting into advocacy of universal freedom 
 as the war years approached . All together these distinguished 
 men, and others almost their equals, with some specialists 
 in science, art, and travels, made the lecture period one of 
 great value and renown. Like the oratorical age, of which 
 it was both the product and in part the creator, it passed 
 away with the reactions that followed the Civil War, having 
 served a purpose which neither pulpit nor press could 
 accomplish with their then limited sectarian, or party, 
 ministries. 
 
 Upon this instruction from the platform Phillips had 
 entered as early as 1836; at first, with subjects from the 
 domain of natural science, according to his intellectual 
 bent. In 1838, he produced a lecture on the "Lost Arts," 
 which was destined to be delivered hundreds of times; 
 probably the most popular discourse of any kind that 
 
PHILLIPS'S LECTURE ON THE LOST ARTS 93 
 
 belonged to the lecture age; of which he said in the opening 
 paragraph: "This lecture belongs to that first phase of 
 the lyceum system, before it undertook to meddle with 
 political duties or dangerous ethics; when it was a merely 
 academic institution, trying to win busy men back to books, 
 teaching a little science, or repeating some tale of foreign 
 travel, or painting some great representative character, 
 the symbol of his age. I think I can claim a purpose 
 beyond a moment's amusement in this glance at early 
 civilization." His purpose in this lecture was to show 
 that the customary mood of self-veneration and conceit 
 which impels us to take off our hats to ourselves — like 
 Coleridge's German whenever he spoke of himself — 
 may be rebuked by observing some things in which the 
 ancients surpassed us. 
 
 His enumeration of these and comments upon them under 
 the heads of glass, medals, colours, fabrics, masonry, and 
 the mechanical devices employed in pyramid building 
 and obelisk raising was doubtless interesting to the people 
 of a former generation and limited cultivation; but a large 
 share of the lecture's attractiveness must be attributed to 
 the colloquial ease and dignified grace with which the 
 speaker discoursed of seven wonders that perished with 
 antiquity. There was no opportunity for reformatory 
 eloquence, although he did introduce allusions to the "irre- 
 pressible Negro" and the American politician, comparing 
 the latter to the Damascus blade "which could be put into 
 a scabbard like a corkscrew, and bent every way without 
 breaking." Whatever may be the value of this lecture 
 as reading matter — and it is still not without interest — 
 the persistent demand for it through many years determines 
 
94 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 its worth as a spoken address, as delivered by its author 
 to the hundreds of thousands who heard it. It was never 
 written out by him, but by a reporter, and presented to 
 him by friends with the words: "We have not done it for 
 your sake, Mr. Philhps, but for posterity." Such was the 
 contemporary estimate; and such, it may be remarked, 
 is often the difference between the effect produced by the 
 hving voice and magnetic presence, and that by cold type 
 and the lapse of years. It is possible that the lecturer 
 himself often wondered why it was so popular. Since 
 it was, however, he had his own use for it in the direction 
 of a larger purpose. He made it an advance agent in 
 doubtful territory, which might secure for him a second 
 invitation to speak, when it would be safer to introduce 
 something on his chosen theme of abolition. 
 
 An instance of this preparatory method occurred the 
 winter after his return from abroad, when he was invited 
 to deliver a lecture in old Concord on "Street Life in Europe." 
 He kept fairly well to his subject, giving slavery a few 
 thrusts by the way. The effect of them was to obtain for 
 him an invitation to speak on slavery the next winter. But 
 a respectable minority, as the time approached, pronouncing 
 his allusions, "vile, pernicious, and abominable," urged 
 that he be asked to speak on some other subject. The 
 majority voted otherwise, and, encouraged by the ruling 
 sentiment, he was particularly severe upon Church and 
 State. At the next meeting of the lyceum his lecture and 
 himself were the subjects of denunciation by two of the 
 village squires, who called him an "audacious stripling" 
 who had proclaimed "monstrous doctrines"; and while 
 they complimented his eloquence they warned the young 
 
INTRODUCTORY TO ANTI-SLAVERY TOPICS 95 
 
 against its insidious charm. The orator had been notified 
 by his friends of what was hkely to happen at this meeting, 
 and as it was an open one he would have an opportunity 
 to reply. Asking permission to do so, he said, in part: 
 
 I agree with the last speaker that this is a serious subject; 
 had it been otherwise I should not devote my life to it. 
 *' Stripling" as I am, I but echo the voice of the ages, of 
 our venerable forefathers, of statesmen, poets, philosophers. 
 The gentleman has painted the dangers to life, liberty, 
 and happiness that would be the consequence of doing 
 right. These dangers now exist by law at the South. 
 Liberty naay be bought at too dear a price; if I cannot 
 have it except by sin, I reject it. But I cannot so blaspheme 
 God as to doubt my safety in obeying Him. The sanctions 
 of English law are with me; but if I tread the dust of law 
 beneath my feet and enter the Holy of Holies, what do I 
 find written there ? "Thou shalt not deliver unto his master 
 the servant who is escaped to thee; he shall dwell with you, 
 even among you." I throw myself, then, on the bosom 
 of Infinite Wisdom. Even the heathen will tell you, "Let 
 justice be done though the heavens fall"; and the old re- 
 former answered when warned against the danger of going 
 to Rome, "It is not necessary that I should live; it is necessary 
 that I go to Rome." But now our pulpits are silent — 
 who ever heard this subject presented until it was done 
 by silly women and striplings ? The first speaker accused 
 me of ambition; let me tell him that ambition chooses a 
 smoother path to fame. And to you, my young friends, 
 who have been cautioned against exciting topics and advised 
 to fold your hands in selfish ease, I would say. Not so; 
 throw yourselves upon the altar of some noble cause. To 
 rise in the morning only to eat and drink, and gather gold 
 — that is a life not worth living. Enthusiasm is the life 
 of the soul. 
 
 This incident may be taken as an example of the channels 
 
96 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 which were open, or sometimes closed, to the agitator, 
 and of the methods he employed to disseminate doctrines 
 whose character is indicated by the above remarks. His 
 spirit is also exhibited by them — fearless, confident of 
 the ground on which he stood, and of the ultimate verdict 
 of the North when it should come to its better sense, and 
 get the better of its commercial greed. 
 
 He embraced the lecture system as giving him an oppor- 
 tunity to reach the people of almost every town and city 
 in his own and other states year after year for nearly an 
 entire generation before the main purpose of his life was 
 accomplished — from 1836 to 1866, and for eighteen years 
 more, during which he advocated other causes. When it 
 is remembered that the audience in each place was made 
 up of persons from all the church congregations, and of 
 many who belonged to none; of citizens from all political 
 parties or no party; of old and young, male and female, it 
 will be admitted that no preacher or association of preachers, 
 no newspaper of a single class, nor all of a single party or 
 creed together, could reach so many thinking people the 
 country over as the lyceum lecturer. He might not have 
 the general assent to his propositions that the preacher 
 expects; nor the unquestioning absorption of his statements 
 that the editor's type favours; but if he had the art of per- 
 suasion, itself resting on personal conviction, he would 
 have the opportunity on many platforms of making ten 
 converts where the denomination's pulpit and the party's 
 newspaper made one. These, in the main, confirmed 
 and fortified the beliefs of the faithful; the other reached 
 those who strayed for an hour from their customary haunts 
 and were listening to unfamiliar ideas and views of which 
 
IRISH APPEAL TO AMERICANS 97 
 
 they had never heard, unless as heretical. If the lecturer 
 had the magician's skill, as Phillips had, to make black 
 white, and convince in the face of rooted prejudice, at least 
 while he was speaking, the chances of unsettling old opinions 
 were multiplied. He might not eradicate them at once; 
 but the roots were loosened and the soil that had been 
 settling around them for generations was shaken as if in 
 the line of an earthquake. Sometiuics men felt that the 
 everlasting foundations of things, especially of the Nation, 
 were being broken up, or at least assailed, and they cried 
 out at the sacrilege and hurled epithets at the speaker. 
 
 Enough has been seen of the trend of Phillips's opinions 
 and their expression to indicate the use he would soon 
 make of the platform. More and more the anti-slavery 
 cause was engaging his attention, and any favourable occa- 
 sion was likely to call him out. 
 
 The first of these after his return from Europe was afforded 
 by the reception of an appeal from seventy thousand Irish- 
 men to their countrymen in America, urging them to identify 
 themselves with the abolition movement. ' Aside from 
 containing the names of Father Mathew and Daniel O'Con- 
 nell, the chief distinction of the memorial was its size. Even 
 this could not have surprised one who knows how easy it 
 is to obtain signatures recommending philanthropy three 
 thousand miles away. The Irish ignorance of conditions 
 surrounding their countrymen in America was more aston- 
 ishing. Perhaps they could not understand in Ireland 
 what it was to be a Democrat here in the 'forties ; and how 
 the party stood on the slavery question. But, whoever 
 set the snowball rolling, the voluminous petition was here, 
 and the abolitionists determined to make the most of it 
 
98 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Society in Faneuil 
 Hall on January 28, 1842. Two or three speakers discovered 
 enough Irish blood in their descent to commend them to 
 as many of their five thousand cousins in the city as hap- 
 pened to be present; but Wendell Phillips could not fall 
 back upon a Celtic pedigree. Acquaintance with O'Connell 
 and admiration for him as the leading agitator of the day 
 was the conciliatory note of his address, together with 
 reference to Emmet and Curran and Grattan. Referring to 
 the devoted earnestness and untiring zeal with which Ireland 
 had carried on for so many years the struggle for her freedom, 
 and to the men who lost no faith in the cause, he spoke 
 of the generous isle and the valour of its heroes and states- 
 men, of the catholicity of a church which allowed men 
 of colour in St. Peter's at Rome and beneath the portals 
 of the Propaganda College, with none to sneer at their 
 complexion or repulse them from society, and cited the 
 protests of a long line of Popes denouncing the sin of making 
 merchandise of men. He spoke of Ireland as a land of 
 agitators from whom we may learn a lesson in the battle 
 for human rights, and of the welcome that American 
 abolitionists received in Dublin (of which O'Connell was 
 then mayor). His appeal was to the love of liberty which 
 every Irishman brings to this country, exhorting him to 
 cast no vote without asking if the hand to which he intrusts 
 political power will use it for the slave. 
 
 Will you ever return to his master the slave who once 
 sets foot on the soil of Massachusetts ? [No, no !] Will 
 you ever raise to office or power the man who will not pledge 
 his utmost effort against slavery.^ [No, no, no!] Then 
 may we not hope still for freedom ? Thanks to those noble 
 
ANSWER TO IRISH APPEAL 99 
 
 men who battle in her cause the world over. The ocean 
 of their philanthropy knows no shore; humanity knows no 
 country; and I am proud here in Faneuil Hall, fit place to 
 receive their message, to learn of O'Connell's fidelity to 
 freedom and of Father Mathew's love for the real interests 
 of man. 
 
 The entire speech was an early manifestation of 
 Phillips's breadth of sympathy, notwithstanding an intensity 
 of feeling which sometimes incurred the charge of narrow- 
 ness. To be sure, his immediate concern was to win Irish 
 sympathy and cooperation; but he asked nothing for bond- 
 men here that he was not willing to give to the oppressed 
 in Ireland. This feature of his philanthropy, which appeared 
 at the outset of his struggle for human rights, reappeared 
 from time to time in his advocacy of other causes than that 
 of the slave. 
 
 O'Connell made handsome return by pronouncing this 
 speech "the most classic short one in the English language," 
 and added, "I resign the crown. This young American 
 is without an equal." But his immigrant countrymen 
 here, after roaring their applause, went out and read what 
 their newspaper had to say on the other side of the question 
 and accepted the counsel of a New York archbishop. 
 Thenceforward, as before, they voted the straight Demo- 
 cratic ticket, and hated their black labour competitors 
 for the next twenty years. After the war broke out they 
 made amends. 
 
 So far, Phillips's advocacy of the anti -slavery cause had 
 contemplated prior and fundamental issues, as the right 
 of petition, a free press, and unhampered discussion. A more 
 direct defence was now to be made, marking his entrance 
 
100 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 upon a hand to hand strife with the slave power, to be 
 continued until that power fell. 
 
 George Latimer, a fugitive slave from Norfolk, Virginia, 
 had been pursued to Boston and arrested on a nominal 
 charge of theft. As a runaway, his case was referred to 
 the United States Circuit Court, coming under Article IV., 
 Section 2, of the Constitution: "No person held to service 
 or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into 
 another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation 
 therein, be discharged from such service or labour; but shall 
 be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service 
 or labour may be due."^ 
 
 There was no reason to suppose that Judge Story could 
 reverse the plain intent of this article as agreed to by the 
 several states and by the decisions of the Federal Court 
 in those states. But there was a growing opinion among 
 the citizens of Northern states that this part of the compact 
 was a violation of the rights of man, and of a higher law 
 of humanity which had been gradually coming into recog- 
 nition century by century since the beginning of the Christian 
 Era. An open meeting of citizens was called, for the 
 expression of their opinion on the subject of returning 
 fugitive slaves, and, incidentally, of the agreement by 
 which it must inevitably be done. Faneuil Hall was the 
 place; the time, nine o'clock Sunday evening, October 30th. 
 The abolition leaders took charge of the meeting and 
 appointed speakers; but such a rabble took possession of 
 the hall as made the turbulent crowd at the Lovejoy 
 meeting five years before to be remembered as a Sunday- 
 
 *For a discussion of the introduction of this article into the Constitution see G. T. Curtis's 
 "History of the Constitution," ii., 449. 
 
A FUGITIVE IN BOSTON 101 
 
 school in comparison. It did not look as if Boston was 
 being rapidly converted to abolition doctrine and practice. 
 Speeches were delivered in sections and fragments, as the 
 speakers could get a chance between hisses and howls, 
 cat-calls and cursing. Respectable citizens had attended 
 church that day; it was too late for the usual evening meetings, 
 and the godless element who had been under customary 
 Sabbath restraint were having a meeting after their own 
 hearts to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the land 
 with respect to slaves and slaveholders. Taken together, 
 it could not have been a fair representation of the average 
 sentiment of the city, unless that upon the platform be 
 regarded as a counterweight. But the intelligence, humanity, 
 and justice displayed there under difficulties got a better 
 and wider hearing next day in the press, whose tone was, 
 that whatever might be the opinions of speakers who could 
 obtain Faneuil Hall, they had a right to be heard without 
 interference from a mob of which the city ought to be 
 ashamed. 
 
 So much has been said of the character of this riotous 
 assembly as prefatory to a speech by Mr. Phillips, which 
 has not always been considered in connection with these 
 exasperating provocations. 
 
 Fellow-citizens, I will ask your attention but a single 
 moment. I wish only to bear testimony in favour of liberty. 
 [Uproar.] No generous man will try to drown my voice 
 when I plead the cause of one not allowed to speak for 
 himself. . . . The swarming thousands before me, 
 the creators of public sentiment, bolt and bar that poor 
 man's dungeon to-night. [Great uproar.] I know I am 
 addressing the white slaves of the North. [Hisses and 
 shouts.] Shake your chains; you have not the courage to 
 
/ 
 
 / 
 
 102 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 break them. This old hall cannot rock as it used to with 
 the spirit of liberty. It is chained down by the iron links 
 of the United States Constitution. [Hisses and uproar.] 
 Many of you, I doubt not, regret to have this man given up, 
 but you cannot help it. There stands the bloody clause in 
 the Constitution — you cannot fret the seal off the bond. 
 The fault is in allowing such a Constitution to live an hour. 
 . . . When I look upon these crowded thousands, and 
 see them trample on their consciences and the rights of their 
 fellow-men at the bidding of a piece of parchment, I say 
 my curse be on the Constitution of these United States. 
 [Hisses and shouts.] . . . Shall our taxes pay men 
 to hunt slaves ? Shall we build jails to keep them ? [Up- 
 roar.] If a Southerner comes here to get his lost horse, 
 he must prove title before a jury of twelve men. If he 
 comes to catch a slave, he need only to prove title to any 
 Justice of the Peace whom he can make his accomplice. I 
 record here my testimony against this pollution of our native 
 city. The man in the free state who helps hunt slaves is 
 no better than a bloodhound. The attorney is baser still. 
 But any judge who should grant a certificate would be the 
 basest of all: 
 
 "And in the lowest deep, a lower deep. 
 Still threatening to devour him, opens wide." 
 
 Of course, many were shocked at this outburst against 
 the Constitution — a sacred compact, and the embodiment 
 of the Nation's law. To denounce it on account of a sentence 
 or two about property in slaves, and its protection, was to 
 make a small part greater than the whole. Moreover, to 
 let the discussion of it alone was a most necessary condition 
 of commercial prosperity. To malign the precious document 
 was to revile the wisdom of statesmen and patriots, and to 
 pronounce a curse upon it was deemed next to cursing 
 Deity. Apparently, to Mr. Phillips and his co-workers, 
 
COMPROMISE IN THE CONSTITUTION lOS 
 
 the Constitution was a compromise with a part of the 
 Nation, which had determined to maintain and perpetuate 
 a great wrong, at first generally admitted to be an evil 
 element in the body politic, but later a profitable factor in 
 trade. Yet one who should disturb the foundations of gov- ■" 
 ernment and commerce for a sentiment about an institution 
 which had its beneficent features — such a one was a . 
 fanatic, if not a traitor, in the eyes of the mixed multitude.^ 
 
 It was remarkable, therefore, that anything came of this 
 turbulent meeting beyond rescuing the fugitive Latimer 
 by the payment of four hundred dollars to his pursuer. 
 But this precedent was not likely to discourage other slave- 
 holders from similar pursuit, besides making Boston a 
 market for light-footed slaves. Consequently a "convention 
 of freemen" was held November 19th, and a petition drawn 
 up, praying the Legislature to "forbid all persons holding 
 office under the laws of the State of Massachusetts from 
 aiding in the arrest or detention of persons claimed as fugi- 
 tives from slavery; to forbid the use of jails or other public 
 property, for their detention; and to prepare amendments 
 to the Federal Constitution that should forever separate 
 the people of the state from all connection with slavery." 
 This Personal Liberty Act was passed March 24, 1843.^ 
 
 In the speech which he made it is to be observed that 
 Phillips's indignation at the slave hunt under the Constitu- 
 tion was intensified by the mob's noisy defence of the arrest. 
 With the Love joy meeting in mind, he must have felt that 
 
 i"The Constitution, a bundle of compromises, all needful." — Roosevelt's "Life of Gouver- 
 neur Morris," p. 122. 
 
 2 Later, the Legislature passed resolutions addressed to Congress recommending an amend- 
 ment to the Constitution whereby the "three-fifths representation for slaves" should be abol- 
 ished. These resolves were presented to Congress by John Quincy Adams, December 21, 
 1843. 
 
104 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 his commanding power over an audience was to be severely 
 tested. Defeat threatened him for a while in this second 
 encounter with the masses. He won by interrupted onsets 
 /• and sheer persistence. Another feature also of this speech 
 is noteworthy — that he took no pains to conciliate the 
 crowd. Instead, he employed a method of attack which 
 became common with him, namely, to launch his unwel- 
 come theses in their most repellent terms at the outset, 
 stirring up the ire of opponents and making the situation 
 / as difficult for himself as possible. This, then, became the 
 joy of battle, and to convince and silence his adversaries 
 all the greater triumph. In time, those who were familiar 
 with his tactics learned to accept his startling assertions 
 unmoved, and to wait for the proofs, real or apparent, 
 which were sure to follow. 
 
 Once more: it was no ordinary feat of oratory to stem the 
 tumultuous tide that surged up from the rabble. Great 
 praise is often accorded speakers when a sympathetic 
 audience listens breathlessly to eloquent periods, as did 
 the distinguished assembly to Webster's second reply to 
 Hayne, or the hushed multitude to Lincoln's encomium 
 of the slain at Gettysburg. But there was no sympathy 
 or interest or reverence in the senseless crowd in Faneuil 
 Hall that Sunday night when a young orator of thirty- 
 three first maddened and then held in check a many-headed 
 monster called an audience by courtesy. He met in the 
 early years of his career the worst trial and severest test 
 of a speaker. If he had shown the white feather or con- 
 ducted a graceful retreat, he would have betrayed the 
 secret of their possible success to every mob that should 
 follow. It was a critical juncture, a thousand against one. 
 
TALK OF DISUNION 105 
 
 For the one to prove himself superior to the thousand was 
 not only a personal triumph, but a victory for the only 
 art by which one man can baffle a raging multitude. 
 
 The sharpness of Phillips's invective set people to 
 thinking, as it certainly did to talking. A new view of 
 the Compact had been published, and one and another 
 inquired if there was a particle of truth or reason in it. 
 It took many years to convince the majority that there was. 
 The last clause in the above resolutions, to ''forever separate > 
 the people of the state from all connection with slavery, '* may 
 be regarded as the first note of dissolving the union between 
 free and slave states that had been formulated in the North. ^ 
 Disunion had been in the hearts of one extremist and 
 another, in the North as well as in the South; it had been 
 spoken by one neighbour to another, advocated in the 
 freedom of anti-slavery gatherings, and printed among other 
 extravagances in the journals of the coterie. At last it had 
 appeared in the scarcely less responsible utterance of a 
 small public meeting, attempting to formulate the resulting 
 opinion of the Latimer incident. It was a stake driven to 
 show how far extreme sentiment had moved forward on 
 the flood of excitement. The general public regarded it 
 with abhorrence, and as the wild dream of malcontents, 
 revolutionists, and fanatics. 
 
 But what was the disunion they advocated, and how ' 
 did it differ from that which was afterward effected by the 
 South ? Holding with the fathers of the Nation that slavery 
 was an evil to be extirpated and a wrong inconsistent with 
 
 1 Unless the conditional prophecy of the ninth resolution of the "Irish Address" meeting, ^ 
 drawn up by Garrison, be taken as precedent: "If the South be madly bent upon perpetuating 
 her atrocious slave system ... the American Union v/ill bo dissolved in form as it is 
 now in fact." — "William Lloyd Garrison," Garrisons, iii., 46. 
 
106 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 the character of a repubUc, they saw but two ways of dealing 
 with it — by amending the pro-slavery provisions of the 
 Constitution, as provided by the instrument itself; or, in 
 case this should be impossible through Southern refusal, 
 by withdrawal of the North in order to have no further 
 responsibility and complicity in slaveholding. The latter 
 was the only possible escape from a share in wrong-doing. 
 Moreover, so long as union between the two sections stood, 
 the North was powerless to touch slavery where it existed; 
 nor would it ever have been abolished had not the South, 
 by seceding, dissolved the bond and made it possible for 
 Lincoln to reach slavery in territory abandoned by states, 
 and Congress to make emancipation universal. But even 
 if the North had withdrawn first, it would have had the 
 justification of its purpose to clear itself from sharing in a 
 crime against humanity; while the South seceded through 
 fear of losing its share in the immediate advantages and 
 profits of that wrong. In the final event the North avoided 
 separation, and the abolitionists saw their desire accom- 
 plished in an unlooked-for way. 
 
 Meantime, disunion feeling was continually breaking 
 out in the South over large areas. It was Southern policy 
 to keep the Constitution inviolate, since it was the segis of 
 their interests. So far, they seem to have had the reason- 
 able side of the conflict. If this Compact was sacred and 
 practically unalterable, as it had come to be considered in 
 distinction from the early views of its framers,^ its defenders 
 were loyal to the Union. But if a clause in it of doubtful 
 justice and humanity should be attacked and repealed, 
 
 lAs late as 1812, separation was a question of expediency merely. — Lodge's "Life of 
 Webster," pp. 176, 177. 
 
DISUNION TENDENCY 107 
 
 they would go for disunion. Moreover, if the Constitution 
 and the later enactments under it could not be made to 
 cover new territory for the extension of slavery, the threat 
 of disunion was immediately heard. "Texas or Disunion" 
 was a South Carolina toast on the Fourth of July, 1844, 
 and a convention of slaveholding states was demanded 
 by South CaroHna and Alabama in order " to count the cost 
 and value of the Federal Union." Their loyalty to the 
 Union was conditioned upon the integrity of an elastic 
 Constitution which should be made to cover a growing evil, 
 whose germ the makers of that Constitution deplored, 
 but admitted in 1789, for the sake of unity. At this time, 
 the points of agreement between the North and South 
 were, among the producing and trading classes, that slavery 
 was commercially profitable; among conscientious and 
 reflecting people, that it was unjust, inhuman, and corrupting; 
 among extremists in both sections, that it was hastening 
 separation and dissolution of the Union. This last radical 
 view was terrifying to conservatives, who were beginning 
 to accept the possibility of such disaster. Schemes were 
 invented to save the Union with slavery and without it; 
 but those without it were stifled on presentation to Congress. 
 Let alone, the Constitution and Union and slavery would 
 save themselves; but, by 1843, on the introduction of the 
 recommendation from the State of Massachusetts, that the 
 three-fifths representation for slaves be abolished, there 
 was a feeling that disagreement had got beyond a 
 band of radicals. The war had been carried into 
 Africa, and was likely to be congressional and national, 
 as well as personal and sectional. In accordance with 
 this forward movement some abolitionists thought that it 
 
108 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 was time to make the cause a political one and win by 
 legislation of their own, eventually, what they had been 
 asking others to legislate for them. 
 
 Against this policy of allying abolition with politics the 
 two principal leaders threw the weight of their irtfluence. 
 Phillips had surrendered his legal practice because he 
 would not stand sworn to support a Constitution which 
 protected slave hunters. Later, he had given up voting 
 under the civic sj^stem until it should be reorganized free 
 from any taint of association with injustice. Starting the 
 discussion in anti-slavery circles, he published in 1844 an 
 argument entitled, " Can Abolitionists Vote or Take Office 
 Under the United States Constitution ? " The negative 
 of this question was unanimously endorsed by the American 
 Anti- slavery Society in the same year by a resolution, 
 written by Phillips: ''Resolved, That secession from the 
 present United States Constitution is the duty of every 
 abolitionist; since no one can take office under the United 
 States Constitution without violating his anti-slavery 
 principles, and rendering himself an abettor of the slave- 
 holder in his sin." It is not necessary to detail divisions 
 of Reuben for which there were great searchings of heart. It 
 was a question of ways and means with some; of conscience 
 with others. Garrison and Phillips kept the high ground 
 of educating the popular mind and heart up to voting 
 for reforming men and measures, without setting them 
 any example at the polls, except that of so great an abhor- 
 rence of present conditions that they would not exercise 
 rights of franchise conferred by these. This was con- 
 sistent with their position as pioneers and road breakers. 
 Their place was far in advance of the host. If they some- 
 
THE MINISTRY 109 
 
 times struck an impossible trail and blazed the wrong trees, 
 it was what other surveyors had done. With a dark forest 
 before them, it is remarkable that they ran their line so 
 close to what afterward became the Nation's way through 
 the wilderness. Their conscience was their com[)ass; and 
 if they did not allow for variations, their purpose was 
 polar. 
 
 It was at this time that Phillips directed his attention 
 to an influence which was obstructing the abolition move- 
 ment. Five or six years before, as has been observed, 
 the clergy of Massachusetts and Connecticut had demurred 
 against the intrusion into their churches and parishes of 
 zealots in a cause about whose merits there was much 
 difference of opinion, and pastoral appeals to the congrega- 
 tions had been issued to dissuade them from encouraging 
 such intruders. These addresses drew down strong words 
 of condemnation from the abolition press, whose editors 
 in turn were stigmatized as infidel and blasphemous — 
 Garrison being charged with saying that every day was 
 a Sabbath, and every man a minister. It was no trifling 
 matter to antagonize the clerical element in New England 
 during the last century; and the men who were having hard 
 work to get a peaceable hearing for a philanthropic cause 
 felt that the class from which they should have received 
 their chief support had turned against them. When, there- 
 fore, Phillips offered his resolution at a meeting in New 
 York about the opposition of a pro-slavery church and 
 priesthood, it was in recognition of their identity with 
 the most respectable element in communities and its opinion, 
 sanctioned by religious beliefs or associated with them. 
 He himself had lost none of his early faith, which was of 
 
110 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 the orthodox Calvanistic type, although he had not become 
 a member of a church or parish society. These organiza- 
 tions represented the rehgion and morahty of the upper 
 and middle classes, and their views on the slavery question 
 would be reenforced by religious and ecclesiastical authority. 
 Whoever should speak of this lightly or adversely needed 
 to have weighty reasons for his animadversion. He would 
 be expected to defend with uncommon arguments such a 
 resolution as this, offered in a New York convention: 
 
 Resolved, That anti-slavery is only to be advanced by 
 trampling under foot the political and ecclesiastical links 
 which bind slavery to the institutions of this country. 
 
 After remarking on the progress that the gause had made 
 and that there was room for still more, Phillips said 
 that the pulpit teachings of the country did more toward 
 the preservation of slavery than statesmen and politicians 
 in a Nation that is called Christian. The Constitution 
 and the Church are in the way of emancipation. The 
 framers of the Constitution had no idea that it could be used 
 for the protection of slavery, which they thought had received 
 its death-blow by the prohibition of the slave trade. And 
 as for the Union, we have no right to sacrifice the liberties 
 of one class to the fears of another. Of the entire speech 
 a passer-by, John Neal, editor of Brother Jonathan, dropping 
 in, wrote for his paper: 
 
 Having very little interest in the subject under discussion, 
 we were meditating an escape to the street, when a gentleman 
 with light hair and a countenance remarkable for its intel- 
 lectual expression took the platform. He had scarcely opened 
 his lips, when we were wide awake, and listening to a burst 
 
ORATORY 111 
 
 of eloquence perfectly startling. The man was faultless 
 in his elocution, graceful in his action, and his argument 
 was sustained with a language vivid and full of that generous 
 power of feeling which is the life and soul of true oratory. 
 His voice broke a little before he closed, but the speech 
 was every way worthy of the best orator of any Nation. 
 
VIII 
 RECOGNITION AND LEADERSHIP 
 
 (1843) 
 
 PHILLIPS was now recognized as one of the principal 
 champions of aboKtionism. As such he was chosen 
 to draw up a respectful address to be presented to President 
 Tyler, a slaveholder, on the occasion of his visit to Boston 
 in June, 1843, when Bunker Hill monument was dedicated. 
 
 This protest reminded the Chief Magistrate that he had 
 subscribed to the Declaration of Independence and had 
 sworn to support the Constitution, whose design was to 
 secure the blessings of liberty to the people, and that he 
 was to join in commemorating the services of those who 
 had bled and died in the cause of human liberty. There- 
 fore he was asked to acknowledge the rights of man by 
 breaking the chains of his own slaves, an example which 
 would go far toward the emancipation of three millions of 
 American people, and render his name illustrious to the 
 latest posterity. As might have been expected, this appeal 
 received no consideration, but it served to advertise the 
 abolition movement in papers which published the address. 
 
 Further recognition had been accorded Phillips in his 
 appointment as General Agent of the Massachusetts Society, 
 entailing the practical work of lecturing here and there, 
 
 •112 
 
ADDRESSES AND ARGUMENTS 113 
 
 introducing abolition doctrines in places where they had not 
 been published, and organizing clubs and societies. Occa- 
 sionally he wrote an open letter or pamphlet which might be 
 used as a tract for thoughtful people to read and discuss; 
 notably one on the binding nature of oaths to support the 
 Constitution so long as one held office, practised law, or even 
 voted; the alternative being to surrender these rights rather 
 than endorse the document by which they were conferred. 
 This abnegation of privilege, he held, would give abolitionists 
 a stronger hold on the community. A little later he sent out 
 another argument entitled, " The Constitution a Pro-slavery 
 Contract; or, Selections from the Madison Papers." 
 
 Fifty years passed under this Constitution show us slaves 
 trebling in numbers; slaveholders monopolizing the offices, 
 dictating the policy of the Government to the support of 
 slavery, trampling on the rights of free states and making the 
 courts of the country their tools. We demand that every 
 honest man join the outcry — *' No Union with Slavery.'* 
 
 This was one of the advanced pronouncements of disunion 
 at the North to match threats in the South by a party which 
 wielded a wider influence than the radicals of New England, 
 because led by men prominent in national politics, respected 
 and followed at home, feared and obeyed in Congress, and in 
 the North by the majority of citizens. Southern threats of 
 dissolution were met by servile deprecation and compromises. 
 Suggestions of disunion by abolitionists encountered maledic- 
 tion and persecution. Calhoun and Yancey were regarded 
 as men who had a grievance; Garrison and Phillips as 
 fanatics and disturbers of the peace. Reviling disunionists 
 of its own section, the North encouraged the South to make 
 demands which eventually dissevered the Nation. 
 
114 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 At the same time anti-slavery sentiment was gaining ground 
 in Northern states. It was helped on by the reception which 
 the Legislature of South Carolina gave to Hon. Samuel Hoar, 
 whom the State of Massachusetts had sent to test in the United 
 States courts the constitutionality of a law by which coloured 
 sailors were imprisoned while in the port of Charleston. The 
 Governor was called upon to expel the Massachusetts envoy 
 from the state; an act in which a hotel keeper took the initia- 
 tive, and an escort completed, protecting Mr. Hoar from 
 threatened violence. Officially, Massachusetts did not at 
 once demur, but separation from offensive states received an 
 impulse in the North. It was an opportunity which Phillips 
 seized, presenting resolutions at a meeting of the Massa- 
 chusetts Society, recommending that the Governor of the 
 state demand of the President of the Union that Mr. Hoar 
 be sustained by the Federal Government in his constitutional 
 right of residence in the port of Charleston. If this were 
 refused, Massachusetts, on all principles of national law, 
 would become sovereign and independent. 
 
 This interstate discourtesy rankled in Massachusetts mem- 
 ories, and for a while dampened zeal to propitiate slave- 
 holding interests; but profits of trade soon healed wounded 
 pride, and the affair might have been forgotten if abolitionists 
 had let it die. It was one of the freaks of political fortune 
 that Phillips should incidentally become the champion of an 
 official who would not have returned the compliment, and 
 who is reported to have remarked, forty years later, that 
 though he could not attend the agitator's funeral he approved 
 of it. So slow did prejudice die in the last century. 
 
 On the arrival of a second address from Ireland, in 
 November, 1843, Phillips once more appealed to the 
 
SECOND IRISH ADDRESS 115 
 
 countrymen of O'Connell in behalf of the enslaved. 
 He quoted the bull of Pope Gregory XVI. in 1839 against 
 slavery and the slave trade, which he had seen affixed to the 
 door of St. Peter's the winter he was in Rome, and then 
 asked where the sect could be found that had so condemned 
 slavery as the Catholics, proposed three cheers for the 
 aboHtionist, Pope Gregory XVI., and showed the incon- 
 sistency of a pro-slavery Irish immigrant from an oppressed 
 land riveting the chain from which he had just freed his own 
 neck. He should have no prejudice against the Negro. 
 Thanks were due O'Connell for rallying sixty thousand 
 Irishmen at home and for bidding his countrymen this side of 
 the Atlantic to stand by the cause of human rights. 
 
 The vice-president of the Repeal Association venturing to 
 remark that there was a difference between being a foe to 
 slavery and an open abolitionist, and another following in 
 similar strain, Phillips showed his readiness in rejoinder in a 
 reply which elicited applause, laughter, and cheers. If he 
 had conciliated the Irish element in the hall, he did not spare 
 the two speakers who had attempted to divert the sentiment 
 of the meeting from its natural course. It cannot be con- 
 densed with justice to the orator. Only the last of it can 
 be given : 
 
 Sir, our chairman asked if a slaveholder could help repeal, 
 if a tyrant could aid liberty. Some answered. Yes. I 
 want their names. I want a responsible person to say here 
 that repeal overrides humanity; that the slaveholder of 
 Carolina is a worthy second to O'Connell at the Corn 
 Exchange. Give me a name and I promise to send it 
 to Dublin; and if the satire with which its wearer is 
 scathed does not make all that was poured on the unlucky 
 
116 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Brougham milk and water in comparison, I do not know 
 Daniel O'Connell. 
 
 Phillips's admiration for the eloquent advocate of freedom 
 for the oppressed of his native island won little beyond a 
 noisy response from Irish citizens of America. They had 
 made sure of their own freedom and franchise. What need 
 of liberty, competitive labour, and franchise for another 
 race, especially if belonging to another political party .^ 
 The difference between emancipation in Dublin and Charles- 
 ton was as wide as the Atlantic ocean in the mind of the 
 immigrant. 
 
IX 
 PROTESTS AGAINST POLITICS 
 
 (1844) 
 
 UP TO 1840 the anti-slavery movement had preserved an ' 
 apparent unity among its many-minded supporters. 
 Other questions, however, at length intruded themselves, 
 such as woman's rights, non-resistance, and participation in 
 government, which finally split the fraternity into two bands 
 — the Old and the New Organizations. One of these 
 adhered to the original methods of moral suasion; the other 
 began to court alliance with the Church and the world in 
 order to use both for its benign purposes and thus to hasten 
 the day of their fulfilment. Out of this sprung the germ of ^ 
 a political party, having the removal of slavery as its chief 
 object. Incidentally, its growth was favoured by an increas- » 
 ing opposition to the extension of slavery in the Southwest, 
 manifested in the ranks of both the Whig and Democratic 
 parties. As early as 1840, despite New England protests, 
 the seceded faction had been committed to political warfare, 
 and 7,000 votes were cast for Birney, its candidate, in the 
 Harrison campaign. Four years later this number was 
 increased to 69,000 by voters who called themselves the 
 Third Party, which afterward became the Liberty Party, 
 then Free Soil, at length to be absorbed into the Republican 
 host after sixteen years. 
 
 117 
 
118 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Mention of this divergent action is needed to make clear 
 the position of a primitive abolitionist like Phillips. He 
 held to the necessity of convincing one person and another, 
 one community and then another, of a national crime. 
 When conviction should become general he believed that it 
 would find its own mode of expression, either through exist- 
 ing parties or a new one. To form one earlier was to make 
 abolitionism the butt of more ridicule than if it kept solely to 
 its instructive and persuasive methods. These had produced 
 some results, but not sufficient to warrant political organiza- 
 tion of a few thousand voters. It was playing politics before 
 coming of age. 
 
 In this position Mr. Phillips was consistent with that 
 ground which was taken by the reformers at the start — to 
 keep clear of all political entanglements. They were at 
 least freed from suspicion of coveting the delights of leader- 
 ship and the rewards of office-holding, while possessing entire 
 freedom of action when occasion demanded independence of 
 all hindering alliances. Such an emergency was approaching. 
 
 The disunion sentiment North and South was augmented 
 by the threatened annexation of Texas. Slaveholders saw 
 new states in the broad belt of fresh territory stretching west- 
 ward, blooming with prosperity and wealth in limitless cotton 
 fields, and insuring the balance of power in Congress. If 
 they could not have this, there was room enough for a South- 
 ern republic of their own. Calhoun spoke for them when 
 he discovered that they were already a minority in the House 
 and evenly balanced in the Senate. 
 
 Sir, the day that the balance between the two sections of 
 the countiy is destroyed is a day that will not be far removed 
 from political revolution, anarchy, civil war, and widespread 
 
ADDRESS TO THE NATION 119 
 
 disaster. The balance of this system is in the slaveholdin^ 
 states. They are the conservative portion, and, with due 
 balance on their part, may uphold this glorious Union of ours. 
 But if this policy [of excluding slavery from the new territory 
 wrung from Mexico] should be carried out, woe, I say, to this 
 Union. 
 
 In Massachusetts an anti-annexation convention of 
 delegates from its ten congressional districts had been held 
 on the 29th and 30th of January, 1845, in Boston. Its 
 members were of the highest standing in their respective 
 neighbourhoods. 
 
 A committee "to correspond with such committees as 
 might be appointed in other states" was appointed, as in 
 Revolution days, and an Address to the People of the United 
 States w^as adopted setting forth the moral, political, and 
 social objections against annexation. The prevailing tone 
 of discussion was moderate, but Calhoun's threats^ had their 
 counterpart in President Allen's remark that, "rather than 
 have Texas annexed, he was for a dissolution." Garrison 
 would have the state look upon the Union as dissolved " if 
 the infamous plan should be consummated, and proceed to 
 form a new government for herself and such of the free states 
 as w ill aid her in carrying out the great purposes of our fathers 
 in behalf of civil liberty." The Address itself, however, called 
 for nothing stronger than hostility and denunciation. The 
 next day, Phillips presented his view of the subject in a 
 resolution to the effect that the annexation of Texas was 
 unconstitutional and in itself a dissolution of the Union, the 
 last of a long series of aggressions and usurpations on the part 
 
 iCalhoun said in the Senate in 1837: "There is but one question that can dissolve the 
 Union and that is involved with slavery."— McMaster's "History of the American People," 
 vi., 478. On agreement of the North to let it alone. — Ibid, p. 178. 
 
120 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 of the South, making it the duty of Northern states to organ- 
 ize a new National Government. 
 
 As usual, the pioneer was in advance of the main army; 
 but that it was following at a respectful distance is seen by 
 the resolves of the anti-annexation meeting, as well as by act 
 of the Massachusetts Legislature February 3, 1845, in a long 
 protest against the treatment of Mr. Hoar by South Carolina 
 addressed to state governors throughout the country two 
 years after the indignity was suffered. However, nothing 
 more desperate than retaliation is suggested, with emphasis 
 upon the virtue of patience. 
 
 To the ever-recurring question, "Why not marshal your- 
 selves into a political party ? " he replied that radical reforms 
 could never be carried on by political organizations, since the 
 politician must conceal half his principles to carry forward 
 the other half and is always looking back over his shoulder 
 to see how many are following. The reformer's object is 
 duty, not success. He can wait. The two consistent men 
 in the country, Calhoun and Garrison, no party could bear. 
 Parties delight in trimmers. 
 
 The entire speech, made in New York in May, marked the 
 steadfastness with which Phillips adhered to the principles 
 of the original abolition movement as opposed to political 
 schemes and to ecclesiastical alliances when they were not 
 whole-hearted in their opposition to the sin of the nation. 
 Concession and compromise he believed prolonged the evil 
 and put off the day of its eradication. The remedy must 
 kill the roots of a cancerous disease, else it would reappear. 
 Anything except total abolition and emancipation was merely 
 surface healing and salving over a sore whose cause was in 
 the blood of the body politic. The medicine to cleanse it 
 
PEACEFUL METHODS 121 
 
 was costly; a part of the states had given up their slaves 
 before the surrender should become greater. For those 
 states that had kept them and profited by them the sacrifice 
 would be proportionately greater, but ought to be made. It 
 is doubtful if at this time he foresaw the magnitude of the 
 loss not only of slaves in the South but of lives, South and 
 North, when the disease was finally removed by the knife. 
 
 To the charge that he was fomenting serious dissension 
 must be opposed the optimistic view which he took of the 
 peaceable methods advocated and pursued by himself and 
 his associates. He used the weapons of persuasion and 
 conviction only, without threat or bluster. His arguments 
 made for peaceable withdrawal from complicity with the 
 South in slaveholding, but there was no advocacy of retalia- 
 tion for intrusion into Northern territory and trespass 
 upon the rights of coloured men who had acquired citizen- 
 ship. The natural privilege of self-defence was as far 
 as he went in advising them about a possible emergency, 
 and flight was always safer. If he stirred up strife it was 
 first the struggle that he made men have with their own 
 consciences, which finally grew to be a discord between the 
 consciences of two sections of the land, without entire unanim- 
 ity in either one. Each always had its sympathizers, open 
 or secret, in the territory of the other, embittering the main 
 contention by secondary dissent, alienating neighbours and 
 dividing households. 
 
X 
 NORTHERN ALARM 
 
 (1845-1849) 
 
 DANIEL WEBSTER had attacked Phillips and his 
 co-workers for their disturbance of the general con- 
 tentment which prevailed, saying: "You that prate of dis- 
 union, do you not know that disunion is revolution ? " To 
 which Phillips replied : " Yes, we know it, and we are for a 
 revolution in the character of the American Constitution 
 and a change of the face of society in the South from mediaeval 
 to modern conditions, and from love of lucre in the North to 
 a sense of political honour." This and much more was the 
 tone of his remark at a meeting of the citizens of Massachu- 
 setts, without distinction of party, to protest against the 
 annexation of Texas. Hon. Charles Francis Adams pre- 
 sided; the historian and secretary of the state, John 
 G. Palfrey, Charles Sumner, George S. Hillard, Rev. 
 William H. Channing, Wendell Phillips, and others, spoke 
 on resolutions which protested against perpetuating slavery 
 in the new state. A single paragraph from sixteen is cited 
 to show the drift of Phillips's remarks, and as containing an 
 allusion to an implement which has recently attracted much 
 attention to John Bunyan and the "Pilgrim's Progress." 
 His employment of the figure is exact. 
 
 122 
 
ANNEXATION OF TEXAS CONDEMNED 123 
 
 We have seen the allegory of the muck rake of Biinyan 
 made a reality by men of our own times, who sufl'er the temp- 
 tation of the sticks and straws beneath their feet to divert 
 their eyes from the freeman's crown that hangs above their 
 heads. We have seen men spellbound by the mean magic 
 of place and gain, even while over the mirror of the present 
 steals the giant shadow of coming despotism. . . . No 
 partial efforts can save us now. The slave power is, and 
 always has been, mighty in the land. It has scattered to the 
 winds the mightiest parties — it has laid low the fairest repu- 
 tations, it has thrown down the bulwarks of Saxon liberty 
 covered with the hoar of innumerable ages, and now it looks 
 on this last triumph as a checkmate. God grant that it may 
 overleap itself, and that this effort to rally all honest men to 
 the conflict may be crowned with complete success. 
 
 It did overleap itself six weeks later when Texas was 
 admitted with slavery and the prospect of a war with 
 Mexico. A new party sprung up in the North to check 
 Southern aggression. Abolitionists, however, saw no reason 
 for joining it, since it did not demand immediate emanci- 
 pation. Other men might combine and vote for political 
 safeguards; these few who had begun the long warfare on 
 humanitarian lines were going to hold their course straight 
 on, though it should lead them through fens and over 
 mountains, as it had done and was doing every year. 
 Other surveyors might squint and consult about circuitous 
 ways that were feasible and grades that were easy; these 
 men, like Nicholas, had drawn a straight line for 
 their road to Moscow and nothing could deflect them 
 from it. Sometimes outsiders were drawn in to work 
 with them, as on the occasion when the abolitionists 
 held a meeting in Faneuil Hall, September 24, 1846, >y 
 to protest against the return to New Orleans of a slave 
 
124 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 stowaway who had reached Boston, and escaping from the 
 ship, was recaptured by city officials and put in irons on a 
 Massachusetts vessel bound South. 
 
 John Quincy Adams had by this time become enough of an 
 abolitionist to preside, and Dr. Samuel G. Howe, the philan- 
 thropist, stated the object of the meeting, John A. Andrew 
 presenting resolutions, and Charles Sumner supporting them. 
 The road breakers were getting into good society, or else it 
 was itself in bad company, according as the rest of the city 
 divided its opinions. 
 
 Phillips's view of the affair that had called the citizens 
 together is of more interest here. A full report of it is lacking, 
 but an editorial note observed that "the speech of Wendell 
 Phillips revealed the advanced state of public opinion on this 
 great and fundamental principle of withdrawal from slave- 
 holders." It was the only way that then seemed possible to 
 haters of human bondage, and all the more possible in that 
 its supporters likewise were ready to withdraw. Upon the 
 issue which made for this separation and was stirring all the 
 North, the war with Mexico, he declared his sentiments in an 
 address on December 29, 1846, in Faneuil Hall. After 
 remarking upon the small beginnings of the movement, its 
 unexpected success, the necessity of strong measures in 
 Church and State, the timidity of the Constitution framers 
 in dealing with the crime of the colonies, the inefficiencv of 
 compromises, the failure of the Church, and the resort to 
 political methods which avail little, he comes to the political 
 war with a neighbouring republic and asks: 
 
 War for what ? Poor Mexico ! We want her territory ; 
 we want it for slavery. The parties say, "The President 
 made it, and must support it." I say that in politics there is 
 
SCOTCH ADDRESS 125 
 
 no root which reaches deep enough to grapple with slavery. 
 As for the Chiu'ch, we believe that in it lies the only [)ower to 
 which we can appeal for strength deep seated enough to 
 grapple with slavery — the deep, vital idea of duty. We must 
 speak strongly, because the crisis demands plain talking. Let 
 the Church of our times deal with the slavery of our day as she 
 anciently dealt with national sins when she came across them. 
 
 Early in 1847 Calhoun summed up the political status 
 of the North as follows: "1. Abolitionists — about 5 per 
 cent, of the voting population. 2. Sober people, willing to 
 see slavery abolished, but not by overthrowing the Constitu- 
 tion — 70 per cent. 3. Highly respectable people who 
 sympathize with the South — 5 per cent. 4. The remainder 
 — 20 per cent. — who care less for principles than for the 
 spoils. Yet the abolitionists hold the balance of power from 
 the nearly equal division of Democrats and Whigs. Hence 
 the danger to the South should any party unite with the 
 abolitionists." 
 
 As a companion piece to this outlook may be presented 
 the remarks of Phillips on January 26, 1848. Forty 
 thousand women of Scotland had addressed the women of 
 America in the customary manner of a ponderous roll of 
 signatures to a written appeal. It elicited from him the 
 tribute he was always glad to give to the assistance women 
 were rendering to the cause, adding that "from a woman's 
 lips the Old World first heard the doctrine and learned the 
 lesson of immediate emancipation. Ah! that little word 
 immediate. What an amount of meaning it has, and how 
 potent to show the real character of a man's opposition to an 
 evil which he is combating!" 
 
 The little band which Calhoun had reckoned as 5 per cent, 
 of the voting force of the North was not to be identified with 
 
126 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 the Liberty Party by Phillips nor with any voting contingent. 
 He was bent on keeping genuine reform limited to the most 
 difficult methods and to those people only who would hold 
 to the original policy, even if its triumph should be a genera- 
 tion distant. Therefore, he clung to his maxim that, "With 
 God one is a majority." Numbers meant a letting down 
 of a high standard. To keep this he would wait a lifetime. 
 Any other victory was not worth winning. The handful of 
 fighters for it were nearer 1 per cent, of the country's voters 
 than 5; nor would they vote at all. Their power was that 
 of a single idea, slowly spreading, gradually growing — the 
 little sapling that by and by should split the rock. A hint of 
 how this would be done is contained in this very speech, show- 
 ing that to its author had not yet occurred the way in which 
 it would come about at last almost twenty years later. In 
 fact, no one of that day believed that slavery could be 
 abolished and the Union saved. 
 
 The question had been raised here and there as to what 
 the North would do in the event of a servile insurrection. 
 It was one that was generally evaded as unpleasant to dis- 
 cuss or even contemplate. Phillips evidently had no 
 disposition to interfere with any race that should make 
 a desperate rising for its deliverance from despotic bondage. 
 He feared that it might come. If it should, he wanted 
 the North to stand still — to give it no encouragement, 
 but also to have no part in sending its men to help desolate 
 the hovel of the slave. 
 
 That the abolitionists were taking in earnest the matter 
 of disunion appears from Phillips's remarks before the com- 
 mittee on disunion petitions which were coming before 
 the Legislature. The morning papers had suggested 
 
DISUNION SENTIMENT 127 
 
 that any attention paid to these petitions was a waste of 
 time which is paid for by the pubHc. After intimating 
 that it would be well for the press to touch with a reverent 
 hand anything that relates to the right oj 'petition, just as 
 the grave had closed over Adams, amidst testimonies of 
 national respect but once before equalled on this side the 
 ocean, he proceeded to say that these tributes were paid 
 on account of his defence and practice of this right of the 
 few and the humblest to be heard by the Government. Then 
 he turned to his topic, disunion. 
 
 It is not a rare word in our national history. Disappointed 
 ambition has often, for a moment, longed for separate 
 confederacies, in which there should be more presidential 
 chairs than one. And sometimes even a state, thwarted 
 in its favourite purpose, has threatened to shoot madly 
 from its sphere. But the abolitionists are the only men 
 who have ever calmly, soberly, and from their mature 
 conviction, proclaimed at the outset their purpose to seek 
 the dissolution of this American Union; and this from no 
 bitterness of personal or party disappointment, but solely 
 at the bidding of principle and from a sense of duty. 
 These petitions are called revolutionary. They are 
 intended to be. We hope they are akin to the meas- 
 ures and principles of our 1776. Wise lawyers doubt 
 whether a state can constitutionally secede from the 
 Union. We do not propose this as a constitutional 
 measure. The right of a people to alter their form of 
 government has never been denied here. It is upon 
 that right we stand. The right of each generation to 
 govern itself. 
 
 The year of the great hegira to California, 1849, was full 
 of ferment. Its determination to be free had clouded 
 I Southern expectations of the Pacific coast, while Northern 
 
128 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 subserviency to slaveholding interests was growing slack. 
 Agitation of the engrossing question was invading state 
 legislatures and becoming persistent in Congress. Calhoun 
 wrote a long address for his colleagues to send to their 
 constituents, setting forth the difficulty of catching fugi- 
 tives in free states and charging the North with bad faith 
 in declining to support pro-slavery articles of the Consti- 
 tution, and Garrison chimed in with the statement that if 
 the North could not keep its part of the compact it should 
 withdraw. Middle states papers thereupon deplored the 
 secession which extremists of both sections threatened, 
 and moderate journals on both sides joined in conciliatory 
 propositions. For his own coterie Phillips wrote in the 
 Liberty Bell, under the caption, "Everything Helps Us": 
 " Success is no test of the merit of an individual and 
 defeat no argument against him. An enterprise, enclos- 
 ing a right principle, always triumphs. It meets with 
 nothing but victories. It passes itself into the bosom of 
 its seeming conqueror and silently it becomes its vassal. 
 It may yet come to pass that it will be given 
 out as a subject for themes at Harvard, 'Which did the 
 most, Garrison or Calhoun, for the downfall of American 
 slavery ? ' " 
 
 At this time he pronounced the Free Soil movement 
 the result of anti-slavery agitation carried into politics; 
 half-hearted as yet, and therefore constituting no reason 
 for modifying advanced views which insisted on the right 
 of petition, and even revolution, when the Constitution 
 antagonizes public opinion, ranging itself with the law 
 ^ of God. But political parties, supporting the Constitution, 
 could do nothing against its provisions for slavery; only 
 
ADVANCED POSITION 129 
 
 fanaticism, so called, could work effectively for emancipa- 
 tion, and therefore abolitionists do not join political parties. 
 Christianity might, if it would, equalize and renovate 
 society and be a pioneer of humanity for a sixth part of the 
 population now in bondage. 
 
 There is no misunderstanding what Phillips's position 
 was at this time. It is easier to understand now, however, 
 than in 1849. Even then it was seen to be consistent, but 
 with what was regarded as treason or next to it. In simple 
 terms, he considered that a noxious weed had overrun the 
 land. Its baleful bloom and poisonous fruit were in the 
 South; its roots ran in Northern soil, above which once it 
 thrived moderately but not profitably. Some said. Keep 
 it where it is; others. Let it run into fresh fields; others still. 
 Remove it gently and gradually, by emancipation, trans- 
 planting slaves to Africa, after their purchase from owners. 
 The thoroughbred abolitionist said to the slaveholder. 
 Uproot it now. Free your slaves to-day. You have no 
 property rights in them that you are not stealing. Give 
 up your stolen goods. 
 
 The strangest thing of all is that these ultra-reformers 
 kept their faith in an unconditional surrender strong enough 
 to labour on without any sign of gain in the South. Their 
 view, by no means general in the North, must possess an 
 entire half the country before such a sacrifice could be 
 thought of. Even then every inherited belief and every 
 present interest was against it. Full payment for slaves 
 would not have provided with certainty for future cultiva- 
 tion of crops. Moreover, instead of emancipation sentiments 
 growing in the South, they were diminishing through Northern 
 increase of them and of agitation. Slaveholders were rising 
 
130 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 up in wrath and combining for resistance to aggression, 
 uttering threats of secession with more probabihty of 
 carrying them out than the little band of disunionists at 
 the North could show. In the face of all this, Phillips, now 
 President of the New England Society, could say at its 
 annual meeting of 1849: "We shall do it yet. The times 
 have changed. We have changed the tone of public senti- 
 ment, or, rather, events have changed it for us. Massachu- 
 setts is an asylum for the flying bondman, to some extent. 
 Put that down to our credit." 
 
 The third of August, a day of fasting for prevailing 
 cholera appointed by President Taylor, Phillips, in a 
 long speech at Worcester, was inclined to consider as a day 
 of humiliation for the national sin of slavery, with which 
 abolitionists had nothing to do, since they had spent their 
 lives in protesting against it. Instead, it should be a day 
 of feasting to celebrate the freeing of nearly a million slaves 
 in the West Indies, the first effort of the English people 
 to effect a national change by moral means. Discussing 
 the difference between their methods and our own, British 
 statesmen and American, he observed that no man worth 
 remembering failed to record his protest against the crime, 
 citing Burke, Pitt, Brougham, Romilly, O'Connell, and 
 Wilberforce. The social prejudice against colour was 
 not powerful as it is here, even in the North where we are 
 the jailors and constables of the institution, as Channing 
 said. He wanted legislative rebellion against this bondage 
 to the South. The Constitution and Union are fetters 
 to us and weapons to our foes. To the stock objection of 
 danger in freeing American slaves, he brought the example 
 of eight hundred thousand West Indian blacks and their 
 
ENGLISH ABOLITIONISTS 131 
 
 peaceable conduct when they might have wiped out their 
 white masters, who were only one-tentli of their number. 
 The experiment was successful if there was one of them 
 left alive, if anarchy did not reign. Not only was the 
 freedman quiet, but just as much was raised and exported, 
 if that must be counted as an element of success. "Do 
 not hesitate to follow the English example. Educate the 
 slumbering conscience. We are still a noble people. Show 
 them their duty to get rid of slavery and they will spring 
 to the work with the energy of a people waking new and 
 fresh to their duties. You have it in your power to stir 
 up your statesmen, and to call out their talent to do your 
 work." 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson's appearance at this meeting 
 and his philosophical view of the general subject of American 
 slavery are both interesting and instructive. He rejoiced 
 in the march of events and the progress of the great universal 
 human genius which turns even our vices to the general 
 benefit. He regarded the planters of the South as bar- 
 barous people in the process of improvement, not ac- 
 countable like those whose eyes have been opened to 
 the best Christianity. Enervated by their climate, 
 demoralized by their habits, still they are as innocent in 
 their slaveholding as we in our Northern vices. But as 
 man rises in civilization the institution will become dis- 
 creditable, and perish, as the old institutions which have 
 gone before it. 
 
 An echo to the sentiment of this meeting came back 
 from the WVst Indies soon after in resolutions adopted 
 here and there on the same anniversary, proposed and 
 passed by the very planters who had resisted the purchased 
 
132 WENDELL PHILLIPS j 
 
 . i 
 
 emancipation of their slaves and had denounced the aboli- 
 tionists of England. They also broadly suggested to other 
 "countries in close commercial relations with Great Britain" 
 that they imitate their example of emancipation. In two 
 weeks after the Worcester celebration Phillips addressed 
 a long letter to James Haughton, of Dublin, Ireland, 
 on the inconsistency of Father Mathew's silence about 
 slavery when in America — a greater evil than intemperance 
 — a silence all the more observable in view of his prominence 
 in the Irish Address of 1842, when he said that "no one 
 could be neutral"! In seeking to save his influence he 
 has lost the confidence of reformers. Every Northern 
 Doughface sees the great Teetotaller belittled to his own 
 level. He has got so humbly upon his knees before the 
 slave power that our editors cannot get low enough to be 
 level with him. Silence from such a visitor is most signifi- 
 cant support; and he quoted Howard's fearless denunciation 
 in Vienna of the prisons of Austria, despite the warning 
 that his words would be reported to the Emperor, adding, 
 "God grant the world another Howard, and may he visit 
 these states." 
 
 Phillips had now been connected with the anti-slavery 
 movement some fifteen years. Beginning with the advo- 
 cacy of rights which were to be secured as preliminary to 
 the abolition of slavery — the rights of free discussion, of 
 a free press, and of petition to law-making bodies — he had 
 gone on to assert the natural rights and to condemn the 
 wrongs of the enslaved, and to attack the articles of the 
 Constitution under which these wrongs were possible. He 
 had presented appeals from Great Britain, and pointed to 
 the peaceful emancipation of its slaves in the West Indies. 
 
GROWTH OF ANTI-SLAVERY SENTIMENT 133 
 
 He had called on the South to imitate this act, and had 
 denounced the North for its apathy and comj)licity in a 
 national crime. Despite all, he saw the intention of the 
 South to extend slaveholding into new territory; but as a 
 hopeful sign he observed in the North a growing opposition 
 to such extension. To threats of disunion in slave states 
 he was ready to oppose the withdrawal of free states, de- 
 claring that separation was better than a union which en- 
 dorsed human bondage. 
 
 In these years he had devoted himself entirely to public 
 discussion of this disturbing question, and others of less con- 
 sequence, before representative audiences that received him 
 and his proposals with varying degrees of disapproval. He 
 had never failed to gain attention by the charm of his 
 eloquence, and usually conquered opposition before he 
 ceased speaking. Many had been made to think soberly of 
 a national inconsistency, and the promise of a harvest in the 
 far future from a diligent sowing of wholesome truth was fair. 
 At the age of forty, he was in the midst of a movement which 
 was spreading from a little band of enthusiasts to an increas- 
 ing number in every Northern state. Its voting power 
 commended it to political consideration, and the voters 
 themselves saw the value of united action. Although Phillips 
 himself discountenanced political alliances, he knew that 
 ballots would eventually win. Meantime it was his business 
 to educate voters wherever they would hear him. As 
 an orator he had learned by long practice to do what 
 the old style of speakers could not do so well as he in the free- 
 lance methods which he followed. He was armed at all 
 points and ready for every attack. He had discovered the 
 cost of maintaining unpopular doctrines, but this had given 
 
134 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 him the loftiness of a reformer. Standing alone, or with a 
 pitiable minority, and leaning upon none, he gained the 
 strength of the independent, and trusted to the power of right 
 when once accepted by an instructed people. He had need 
 of all his faith and hope and courage as the first half of the 
 century closed. 
 
 J 
 
 V 
 
XI 
 
 PACIFICATION AND AGITATION 
 
 (1850-1851) 
 
 THE middle of the century marked the end of the first 
 period of anti-slavery strife. Its results were seen in 
 a wide-spread conviction that slavery ought not to be 
 extended be^'ond its limits at the time; but this opinion was 
 not efficient enough to prevent the annexation of Texas. 
 This advantage gained, the supporters of the institution were 
 willing to join with upholders of the Union in bringing about 
 a second "era of good feeling"; and the leaders of the two 
 sections, Webster and Calhoun, both addressed themselves 
 to the question, How can the Union be preserved ? Cal- 
 houn had given his solution of the problem in the Senate on 
 March 4th — the South to have more territory, her runaway 
 slaves to be returned by Northern assistance, all agitation of 
 the disturbing question to be stopped, and the " equilibrium " 
 restored to slave states — that is, the balance of power. 
 
 Three days after, Webster pronounced his famous Seventh 
 of March Speech, otherwise, his political death chant. If it 
 had been as positive and uncompromising for his half of the 
 nation as was Calhoun's for his, doubtless the Union which 
 he counted dear above all else might have been endangered. 
 His opponent's threat of secession was ringing in his ears, and 
 he w^ent more than half way with apologies and concessions 
 
 135 
 
136 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 to a disgruntled South for the sake of peace and the Union 
 as it had thus far been maintained. It is not necessary 
 to charge that he was bidding .for the presidency. Let it 
 stand that a united country was the end and aim of all his 
 poHtical hfe, and that he actually represented the views and 
 interests of a large and respectable constituency, who hastened 
 to send him testimonials of their accord. Nevertheless, he 
 soon found that he had struck a note to which the general 
 Northern feeling did not respond, and that he had won noth- 
 ing from the South. All that had been secured was tempor- 
 ary quiet. Men went back to their farms and merchandise 
 and there was a clearing sky. It looked as if the abolition 
 question were to be laid aside for the want of such a leader as 
 Daniel Webster might have been, and in his failure to seize 
 a passing opportunity. Many were glad that he did not ally 
 himself with abolition, while losing their pride in him for his 
 lack of courage, or for prizing the Union and Constitution 
 above national righteousness and good repute among the 
 nations. The few radicals meanwhile lowered not an inch 
 their banner on which was emblazoned, " No Union with 
 Slaveholders." 
 
 Within a fortnight after its delivery Phillips had written 
 a review of Webster's speech almost as long, which showed 
 that on occasion he could handle the pen to some purpose, 
 distasteful as this method of address was to him, as com- 
 pared with public speech. At the outset he defines his own 
 position as a disunionist, not from any love for separate con- 
 federacies, or as ignorant of the thousand evils that spring 
 from neighbouring and quarrelsome states; but he would 
 get rid of this Union because experience had shown it to be, 
 in its character and construction, an insurmountable obstacle 
 
REVIEW OF WEBSTER'S SPEECH 137 
 
 to the harmony of the nation. He would substitute for it 
 one that would insure harmony of all the races and all the 
 states. With this view, he says, Mr. Webster has no sym- 
 pathy. "He has nothing to propose on the removal of the 
 disturbing element. A true friend of the Union would seize 
 this moment to propose some grand and comprehensive plan 
 of abolition, instead of shutting his eyes to the future, not 
 daring to look impending danger in the face. No man can 
 tell by his three hours' speech whether he loves slavery or 
 hates it. His argument is that we are pledged by the Con- 
 stitution and acts of Congress to let slavery alone, and to let 
 it spread in the new Texan states, five of tliem, that may be 
 admitted by a gross breach of the Constitution." This is 
 considered at length; also Mr. Webster's surrender of the 
 Wilmot Proviso, quoting his former pronouncements, and 
 observing his recent change. The alleged impossibility of 
 slavery in Calif ornian territory is discussed, with the admis- 
 sion of justice in Southern complaints against the North^ 
 indicating another sudden change of front. His chief offence, 
 however, is the baseness of endorsing slave-hunting in free 
 states. "Villain is not too harsh a name for a man who is 
 ready to return fugitive slaves. It is a poor excuse that he 
 squared his morality by the statute book of his time. Great 
 men refuse to be confined by a country's fashion. He could 
 see clearly enough when he was looking at Kossuth and not at 
 a Negro. He also volunteers to support other thoughtless 
 and cruel regulations; to surrender any person claimed as 
 a slave, according to the atrocious provisions of Mr. Mason's 
 bill; he is non-committal in his reference to the imprisonment 
 of Northern coloured seamen in Southern ports; resents 
 instructions from his constituents; passes over tamely and 
 
138 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 pusillanimously the unconstitutional acquisition of so much 
 Southern territory since 1803 ; is silent on the subject of mis- 
 chievous compromises, and suddenly favourable to a scheme 
 of colonization which he formerly regarded as a slaveholder's 
 trick." To Webster's question, "What is to remain Ameri- 
 can?" Phillips replies: "In our opinion, whatever clings to 
 the great American idea of taking pains to reenact, and prac- 
 tise, so plain a law of God as that all men are created equal/' 
 
 In this condensation of eight newspaper columns nothing 
 more than the stakes on the plain can be noted, showing the 
 general direction of comment and criticism. In his reproba- 
 tion of the great statesman's last effort Phillips spoke for the 
 extremists, as Whittier did in his verse entitled — "Ichabod" 
 — whose glory had departed. But both these condemnatory 
 utterances echoed a feeling which the North and South had 
 in common, that the chief Senator of the free states had 
 truckled to the slave power to save the Union intact. On 
 the street it was called "the best bid that had been made for 
 the Presidency." Instead, it might have been remarked that 
 he was one of the three political leaders who were too great to 
 occupy the presidential office, according to the standards and 
 requirements of the mid-century. 
 
 In the same week that this review of Webster's speech was 
 published a meeting was held in Faneuil Hall of "citizens of 
 Boston and vicinity who have read with surprise, alarm, and 
 deep regret the speech of Hon. Daniel Webster in the 
 United States Senate."^ 
 
 At this meeting, Phillips supplemented his strictures in 
 print by a speech in which he arraigned the Senator who had 
 
 'For Mr. Webster's final position among his Northern friends, see Lodge's "Life" in 
 chapter on the "Seventh of March Speech," p. 301, first edition. 
 
FURTHER CRITICISM 139 
 
 struck a false note that jarred upon the general sentiment of 
 the free states. He likened this course to an impossible 
 desertion of Sam Adams to the British or a defection by John 
 Hancock. "Grant his premise; it is the cause of liberty 
 on the one hand and of tyranny on the other. He gave aid 
 and comfort to the enemy and tended to make slavery per- 
 petual. His present doctrine is inconsistent with his past; 
 is apostate to his pledges. Surrendering one of his constitu- 
 ents to the terms of Mason's bill, he surrenders him to slavery. 
 The defender of the Constitution forgets its guaranty of trial 
 by jury, which Southerners tell us is inconsistent with slavery. 
 He accuses Northern legislators and apologizes for Southern; 
 and changes his speech for readers in each section." Such 
 are a few points in an hour's discussion of which the following 
 is one of the closing paragraphs: 
 
 If he has so little knowledge of the moral sense of New 
 England as to think that he can stand up in the face of this 
 community after he has pledged himself to be a slave-hunter, 
 let him learn to respect the intelligence of New England, 
 which knows at least when it is betrayed. Let him learn that 
 we have been too good disciples not to carry out his lessons 
 into deeds; that we mean to stand by the principles of the 
 ordinance of 1787; that where the South clings to the right to 
 carry their slaves into the territory of the West, just there we 
 will be vigilant. 
 
 Press comments upon Webster's speech varied according 
 to interests represented; but the general condemnatory 
 character of them in his own state was heightened by his 
 Revere House remarks to friends assembled to welcome him 
 on his return from Congress. His exhortation to Massa- 
 chusetts to overcome her prejudices and support recent 
 
140 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 enactments sunk him still lower in the opinion of his oppo- 
 nents. He had turned his back upon the North and was 
 facing South, as they thought. He thought, it is to be 
 charitably presumed, that he was boxing the compass to save 
 the Ship of State. 
 
 At the May meeting of the American Anti- slavery Society 
 in New York, in 1850, Pb.illips and other speakers with 
 great difficulty were able to get a hearing, the famous Rynders 
 mob taking possession of the hall and dividing attention with 
 the delegates. The chief interest of this meeting now is in 
 a letter of sympathy to Garrison written by Whittier, and the 
 appointment of Lowell on the executive committee for the 
 ensuing year. Literature was coming to the help of reform. 
 Subsequently, a meeting was held in Plymouth Church, 
 Brooklyn, since there was danger of interruption at the 
 advertised hall. Rev. Henry Ward Beecher took the 
 responsibility of opening his church and called the meeting 
 to order, saying that it was in his blood and in his bones to 
 stand up for free speech. He then introduced Wendell 
 Phillips, who continued the discussion of this right and also 
 that of severe speech when the occasion demands it. 
 
 From Luther down, the charge against every reformer 
 has been that his tongue is too rough. Be it so. Rough 
 instruments are used for rough work. To lift up our voice 
 against slavery has been called blasphemy and infidelity. 
 I say this — that with forty thousand pulpits, seven hundred 
 thousand slaves have grown into three millions, and that 
 statutes so bloody have been enacted under their teaching 
 that those of Draco are light in comparison. While in the 
 old country every great man desires to place on record his 
 sentiments in favour of lil^erty and progress, Websters can 
 be bought up here faster than nature can make them. An 
 
BEECHER AND THE PLYMOU IH CHURCH 141 
 
 American's logic is as clear as the sun upon every subject 
 in the world except one. If it relates to a white man, it is 
 lucid and bright; but the moment you touch on a black man, 
 it veers about like the needle of a compass when it comes near 
 a mass of iron. Would to God that one night would sweat out 
 all the black from the skins of slaves, and tlien there would 
 be no difRculty about the question. You love the American 
 banner. But every sixth man under its stars and stripes 
 is a slave, with whose blood its folds are stained. With 
 regard to the fugitive slave, the turning point on which so 
 much hinges at present, I would say, Constitution or no 
 Constitution, God has given us a conscience superior to all 
 law, and whenever a slave touches our free soil, let him be 
 free beyond the reach of a tyrant. A mighty question is now 
 involved in this, namely, whether an immoral Constitution 
 ought to be obeyed; but I have not time to discuss it now. 
 Remember that the Bible is heavier than the statute book. 
 
 Mr. Bcecher, at the close of this lecture of an hour and a 
 half, thanked the assembly — not for being gentlemanly — 
 but for conceding the right of liberty of speech, which had 
 been denied in New York.* 
 
 In Boston, a few weeks later, the New England Conven- 
 tion was not treated so well. During day and evening 
 sessions endeavours were made repeatedly to disturb, insult, 
 and break them up. Seven newspapers of the city joined 
 in ridiculing the whole affair with scurrility and caricature. 
 It looked like a reversion to the original type of opposition 
 twenty years before. The explanation is found in the 
 tense-strung condition of public feeling. Sentiment was 
 getting more evenly divided and more generally aroused. 
 The recent encroachments of the Slave Power, its exactions 
 
 lOf the audience it was recorded by a correspondent of the Hartjord Republican that they 
 hissed at first, then partly cheered — but the last three-quarters of an hour was one storm 
 of deafening cheers. This was the usual conduct of Phillips's audiences for thirty years. 
 
142 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 in Congress and demands upon the North were making 
 aboHtionists and free-soilers every day. On the other side, 
 conservatives and business men were conceding everything 
 to save the Union and Southern trade. Strife in Northern 
 cities was greater than it could be in Southern; yet harmony 
 in them also was by no means entire. 
 
 The points which Phillips emphasized in his speech at 
 the Boston meeting were, at first, in answer to the old charge 
 of abuse and denunciation made against abolitionists, saying, 
 in substance, that words are made for us; if abusive, the 
 fault lies in deserving them; the abuse in applying them 
 unfairly or unkindly. To arrest the attention of the masses 
 the plainest speech must be used. If you dislike our words, 
 show us that they are not true. The best thing for an honest 
 man is to speak that which comes uppermost. Why is it 
 that no daily press in New York, Boston, or New England 
 reports us with the slightest fidelity, but always interlards 
 its sketch of our meetings with abuse in order to make it 
 palatable? "Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart all bark at 
 us." The littlest press is of importance to us, just as 
 Daniel Webster's speech is of importance to us. When 
 anti-slavery articles are really wanted, depend upon it, 
 the Respectable Daily will furnish them; as when the hand 
 touches eleven on the dial the Websters and Winthrops 
 will make their great anti-slavery speeches. IMr. Webster 
 says that the Constitution orders the return of fugitive 
 slaves. So say we; and that is the reason why we hate 
 the Constitution. Let posterity be our judge. Harvard 
 College once trampled on Dr. FoUen for his anti-slavery 
 principles. Ten years later how anxiously did the college 
 attempt to explain away the ugly fact! 
 
THE FUGITIVE SLAVE BILL 
 
 The rest of the speech is devoted to Webster and 
 unhappy retainers in Boston. He judges him by his form 
 pronouncements and by his highest law — the Constitution 
 "The Northern side of his memory is paralyzed," as 
 Beecher says. 
 
 On the 18th of September the climax of slaveholding 
 encroachment was reached by the enactment of the Fugi- 
 tive Slave Bill. It had already passed the Senate, and now 
 received in the House 109 yeas to 75 nays. In a modified 
 form it was already a part of the Constitution, but not 
 very effective. To make it more efficient, additional provi- 
 sions now required the appointment of slave-catching 
 commissioners and assistants in the states and territories, 
 who, upon the claim of any master or his agent, should 
 seize a fugitive, his own testimony not to be allowed. Persons 
 hindering the execution of the law were to be fined $500 
 and imprisoned six months; for causing an escape, $1,000; 
 an officer permitting an escape was to be held for the value 
 of the slave; and for default of duty, in his capture, a fine 
 of $1,000 recoverable by law was imposed. For a slave 
 returned, his fee was to be $10; and $5 in any case. 
 
 The temper with which this law was received in free 
 states is indicated by one of the resolutions passed the next 
 day at a meeting in Salem, Ohio, a state which, with Massa- 
 chusetts and New York, had been in the front rank of opposi- 
 tion to the Slave Power for twenty years. In substance 
 it urged the principle of death to kidnappers for the defence 
 of personal rights and liberties. Massachusetts spoke in 
 more measured language in resolutions adopted at a mass 
 meeting in Faneuil Hall on the 14th of October, Josiah 
 Quincy presiding. Their substance was, that our moral 
 
WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 revolts against the law; which we denounce as con- 
 
 '.lictory to the Declaration of Independence; that we can- 
 jt believe any citizen of this city will take part in returning 
 I fugitive; and that we ought to demand instant repeal of 
 the law. 
 
 At this meeting the appearance of Wendell Phillips is 
 mentioned, as might be expected, "who spoke for about an 
 hour in his usually clear, forcible, and eloquent style." 
 
 To the question of danger under the Fugitive Slave Law 
 to numerous coloured folk living in Boston, and as to what 
 they had best do, he said that he was unprepared to reply. 
 He could not talk of violence. " In this law the bulwarks 
 of liberty are all broken, and it is a base libel to call it a 
 constitutional law. We must trample it under our feet. 
 It expects and provides for disobedience; God forbid that 
 it should be disappointed. By peaceful resistance we must 
 interrupt the slaveholders and say that the fugitive who 
 has breathed Massachusetts air shall never go back. Many 
 have been here from twelve to twenty years, and we are 
 not going to people Southern plantations with men born 
 in Massachusetts. Disobey this law until the courts rule 
 it unconstitutional." 
 
 Coloured citizens, however, were not divested of their 
 fears, and froni Boston, as from the Northern cities and states, 
 there was a general exodus to Canada, adding to the twenty 
 thousand negroes already living in the Dominion. Mean- 
 time arrests were multiplying, often of blacks who had 
 acquired citizenship and were getting their living in New 
 York, Philadelphia, and Western cities. They were not 
 allowed to say why they should not be surrendered to any 
 claimant on the flimsiest of demands. 
 
ADDRESS ON THE COMMON 145 
 
 In Boston an instance occurred five months after the 
 passage of the act, February, 1851, when one Shadrach 
 was haled before the Commissioner. At liis citation before 
 the court, a crowd of coloured persons attended and mana^red 
 to get him so mixed with them that all at once he could not 
 be identified, and was suddenly passed out and hurried 
 off in a "black cloud," which a white one could not overtake 
 this side the Canada line. 
 
 Great outcry against Massachusetts was made by the 
 South for this open violation of the Compromise of 1850 
 and for the disturbance of the era of tjood feelinef which 
 was to follow it. This was partly restored by a different 
 issue in the next arrest. Thomas Sims, a slave who left 
 Georgia on Washington's birthday, 1851, had l^een in Boston 
 a month when he was taken and lodged in the court-house 
 on the evening of April 3d and brought before Commissioner 
 Curtis the next day; Charles Sumner, Richard H. Dana, Jr., 
 and Samuel E. Sewall appearing for the prisoner. After 
 the hearing of his pursuer's testimony that he was the slave 
 of one James Potter, and after further legal proceedings, 
 he was remanded, to be escorted under a military guard 
 of some three hundred, led by the Mayor, to the brig Acorn, 
 bound for Savannah. Boston had begun to redeem her 
 reputation at the South. The city press congratulated 
 citizens that the affair had terminated in such a way as to 
 deserve credit from Southerners and to discourage aboli- 
 tionists. But they were not silenced. 
 
 On the day following the arrest of Sims Phillips 
 addressed a great public meeting on the Common, and 
 another in Tremont Temple three days later, and still 
 another four days afterward in Washington Hall on the 
 
146 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 day of rendition. The burden of his speeches was the 
 subserviency of Boston with all its traditions of liberty to 
 pro-slavery enactments for fear of alienating Southern trade. 
 The seizure and return of slaves in the streets of a free city 
 had roused the liberty-loving spirit of the middle class, 
 but cotton and commerce were too important factors to be 
 overlooked in State Street. Moreover, to side with aboli- 
 tionists would have been an ignoble way of asserting the 
 old doctrine of liberty. But there was no lack of its presen- 
 tation by Phillips and others, not only on this immediate 
 occasion, but in the following January and on the succeeding 
 April anniversary of Sims's rendition. The speeches on 
 these two occasions were placed by Phillips's consent early 
 in the first volume of his addresses. They are followed 
 by a notable one on the Philosophy of the Abolition Move- 
 ment, which may be considered as an exposition of his atti- 
 tude on the question which was then agitating the entire 
 nation. 
 
 The Fugitive Slave Law was now doing its worst, not 
 without opposition in some places, and causing the flight 
 of about ten thousand Negroes from their homes in free 
 states to the Dominion of Canada. Few besides abolitionists 
 were more greatly stirred by this sudden migration than 
 they would have been by the flight of geese to Northern 
 lakes. Egypt generally was glad at their departing, espe- 
 cially the common labourers in the field and in the simpler 
 trades. They made wages higher for the new immigrant 
 by their absence. A greater indignity was needed to stir 
 greater numbers in the North. It was to be perpetrated 
 shortly. 
 
 Meantime there was an occasion to provoke remark 
 
CRITICISM OF KOSSUTH 147 
 
 from Phillips in the coming of Kossuth to enlist the sympathy 
 of Americans for his native Hungary, oppressed by Austria, 
 which was marked in his speeches by no discrimination 
 between different sections and no word for the enslaved. 
 The inconsistency of such silence did not escape the leaders 
 of emancipation. Phillips arraigned the Hungarian on 
 the 27th of December, 1851, in an address of great length 
 and power in which he applied the principles of liberty, 
 justice, and humanity, for which Kossuth pleaded, to a 
 race that he had avoided mentioning. In this speech are 
 seen his milder methods of dealing with a person whose 
 chief desire, like his own, was for freedom, but whose 
 partial advocacy was repellent to one who never did any- 
 thing by halves. It was a criticism rather than a diatribe, 
 based upon the consistency and whole -heartedness which 
 he had a right to expect, but which, by the way, would 
 have been fatal to Kossuth's hopes of general assistance 
 if he had preached deliverance to the captive in the United 
 States. But Phillips spared no man who was politic in 
 his qualified devotion to a principle; and when he offered 
 resolutions a month later at the annual meeting of the 
 New England Society he condemned Kossuth's course 
 in praising American statesmen indiscriminately, and in 
 endorsing the Mexican War and the Fugitive Slave Bill, 
 as falsehood to his high professions and treason to the cause 
 of human rights, injurious to his nation and fatal to his own 
 fame. This time he forsook the calmness of his first speech, 
 and even of his customary discourse, and for once became 
 violent in manner as well as denunciatory in his address.^ 
 
 lAn open letter to Kossuth by Garrison printed (in part) in the Liberator, and in full in 
 a pamphlet of sixty pages, contrasted the Hungf.rian's subserviency to slavery with the att'tuae 
 of some other notable foreigners, and recounted the atrocities of the system about which he 
 had chosen to be silent. See "Life of Garrison," iii., 351- 
 
XII 
 DARKNESS AND DAYBREAK 
 
 (1852-1853) 
 
 THE force with which aboHtionists had chiefly to contend 
 in the mid-century years of truce between the North 
 and South Avas represented by Daniel Webster, the advocate 
 of quiet by compromise. Consequently, this man who had 
 been the pride of the Whigs and of New England became a 
 target for Phillips on account of his recent unfriendly attitude 
 toward the growing anti-slavery sentiment, and because he 
 represented the non-interference policy of commercial and 
 political interests, which had made haste to endorse his 
 conciliatory position. It was the latest stand taken by 
 wealthy and influential neighbours. In dealing with Webster, 
 Phillips was addressing them also, and combating the 
 power that belongs to vested interests and social preeminence. 
 Besides, Webster had condescended to cast a slur upon 
 the abolition movement, calling it a "rub-a-dub agitation, 
 whose only result was a little noise." Phillips retorted 
 by saying: 
 
 He knew better. He knew better the times in which he 
 lives. . . . Any name, however illustrious, which links 
 itself to abuses is sure to be overwhelmed by the impetuous 
 current of that society which is potent to clear its own channel. 
 Thanks to the printing press, men now do their own thinking 
 
 148 
 
STEMMING THE TIDE 149 
 
 and statesmen have ceased to he either the leaders or the 
 clogs of society. 
 
 "The Revere House statesman," as he calls his latest 
 opponent, he then proceeds to dissect and com]>are with the 
 Webster that once was, and his statesmanship in 1852 with 
 what it ought to be. 
 
 Let the statesman take care lest this "morbid philanthropy** 
 beat all his dead institutions to dust. He is but a feather's 
 weight in the balance against the average of public sentiment 
 on the subject of slavery. I believe in the twenty millions — 
 not that live now, necessarily — to arrange this question which 
 priests and politicians have sought to keep out of sight. 
 When the nation sees that the interests of a class only are 
 subserved by human bondage, then the change will come. 
 
 With such sentiments did Phillips stem the quiet but strong 
 current that was setting against the cause in 1852 with greater 
 effect than the noisy mobs of a score of years before. With 
 philosophy based upon historic movements, and illustrated 
 by English and French examples in particular, did he brace 
 the energies and buoy up the hopes of his associates in New 
 England and wherever their weekly sheets, the Liberator and 
 the Standard, bore the reports of his addresses or the articles 
 he sometimes penned as a contributory or an associate editor. 
 But they were especially favoured who heard his voice and 
 saw his presence, although they could not account for his 
 marvellous power. It was not in what Webster had called 
 the sum of eloquence — "godlike action," nor in the organ 
 tones of a voice like his own — sometimes, his contem- 
 poraries said, clothing nonsense with thunder. It was the 
 conversation of one with a hundred or a thousand, so quiet, 
 so direct, so clear, that each hearer felt himself addressed. 
 
150 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 and often forgot the multitude around him until some tumul- 
 tuous response told him that a thousand hearts had been 
 struck like his own. Had the orator been in the ranks of 
 either of the two great parties his fame would have been still 
 greater in all the Nation. But the inspiration of a humane 
 cause would have been lacking in politics, which took little 
 account of it at that time. 
 
 The speech from which a few lines have been taken was 
 made on January 28, 1852, and was followed by another on 
 the 30th in which he attacked the other great obstacle that 
 for twenty years had stood in the way of freedom — impartant 
 commercial interests, otherwise Southern trade. 
 
 Property has been regarded as the great element the Govern- 
 ment is to stand by and protect — the mills of Lawrence, the 
 ships of Boston, the mines of Pennsylvania. If placing one 
 dollar on the top of another be the chief end of man, be it so. 
 Dr. Johnson said of a certain Scotsman that if he saw a 
 dollar on the other side of hell, he would make a spring for 
 it at the risk of falling in. The Yankee character seems too 
 near /that. Massachusetts representatives have always looked 
 to the Southern Cross; not to the North Star. They never 
 looked to the state that sent them. They are beginning to 
 look toward Faneuil Hall; not like Webster, to the " October 
 sun of the Old Dominion." In this hall has been the rebuke 
 of the City Government and of the commercial interest whose 
 servant it stooped to be. 
 
 Three months later, on t«he first anniversary of Sims's 
 rendition, he struck a new note of desperation at the working 
 of the Fugitive Slave Law. A great defeat had befallen the 
 cause of abolition. For the moment his sadness might have 
 been mistaken for despair. 
 
 The delusion cannot be kept up that fugitives can be pro- 
 
OBITUARY OF WEBSTER 151 
 
 tected in Massachusetts. Therefore tell them to fly — or to 
 arm themselves. I am willing to wait for the abolition of 
 slavery; it must proceed slowly. But the return of a fugitive 
 is a different thing. If circumstances prevent flight, there is 
 a course left if you have the courage to face it. I do not 
 advise it. I can only tell what I would do in your case. The 
 appeal to a Massachusetts jury for a man's right to liberty 
 and self -protection might not be in vain. It is the launch- 
 ing of a new measure in our enterprise; but I know of no 
 pledge against it. No, I am not a non-resistant. I have 
 no defence except I make it. If I do, who will cast the 
 first stone ? 
 
 Although Phillips had never committed himself to the 
 non-resistant tenet of Garrison, this open suggestion of self- 
 defence shows to what extremities the progress of pro-slavery 
 legislation had brought the sons of liberty. And yet for a 
 white citizen of the North to shoot a Southerner who was 
 forcibly dragging him to a tobacco, cotton, or rice field for a 
 lifetime of unpaid labour and its accompaniments, if it had 
 been possible, would have been justified by the entire Nation. 
 A black citizen somehow was not the same sort of a citizen, 
 and if he had escaped from bondage he was simply property, 
 like a strayed mule — in Southern eyes and national law. 
 Abolitionists did not see it so; therefore they were political 
 and social outlanders. Even among themselves there were 
 grades of outlandishness. The non-resistant extremist ought 
 to have satisfied the slave-catcher in making his kidnapping 
 easy by not resisting him. Phillips proposed to make it as 
 dangerous in the instance of the black as the white; but this 
 was an unpopular view in Charleston and Richmond; also 
 in Boston and New York in the middle of the last century. 
 
 In the IsLsi week of 1852 Phillips wrote a two-column 
 
152 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 obituary of Daniel Webster, who died on the 24th of October. 
 Its tenor may be gathered from scattering sentences. 
 
 We are sometimes blamed for our judgments of men whose 
 general characters are good. The examples of bad men are 
 of little importance. It is the faults of popular idols that are 
 dangerous. It does not concern us here whether he was a 
 great man. As a whole his life was a failure — he failed to 
 impress any great or original idea upon his times — has stood 
 on both sides of most national questions — talked against 
 slavery up to 1850 without stirring one heart against it, 
 and then supported the fatal compromise. In siinple intellect 
 no American has ever equalled him, but he contented himself 
 with saying common things uncommonly well. He never 
 piloted the people into broader and deeper life. He made 
 great speeches. He may live in print; Washington, Jefferson, 
 Hamilton, Garrison, will live, print or no print. Had he led 
 the van of American ideas he would have been tenfold more 
 than the President he wished to be. He was fated to live 
 long enough to see all the plans of his manhood become 
 obsolete ideas, except just those he had abandoned. His 
 latest and ablest argument was the duty and rightfulness of 
 slave catching! He is mourned in ceiled houses and in the 
 marts of trade. Fugitives thank God they have one enemy 
 the less. Grant all his merits. The friendless and the 
 hunted cannot help rejoicing at his death! 
 
 Phillips answered the objections to radicalism in his annual 
 review of the cause's progress in January, 1853, which was 
 the dark hour before day. His note is defensive and boldly 
 explanatory of adhesion to the abolitionist position and pur- 
 poses when the legislation of the country had ranged itself 
 in battle array against them. On their own platforms new 
 converts were offering advice which lacked the wisdom of 
 experience, and showing a zeal that was without knowledge. 
 
DEFENCE OF DENUNCIATION 153 
 
 To these he gave the counsel and instruction of a veteran. 
 Then he pictured the institution of bondage, as it existed, in 
 colours that were as clear and strong as those of an Egyptian 
 charnel house. It was no doubt the reverse side of the 
 Gobelin tapestry, Avhose fair front was most often kept before 
 visitors and authors from the North, but the ragged side 
 could be seen by any who cared or dared to find it, or read its 
 frequent disclosures in Southern papers. 
 
 We are charged with denunciation when declaring the 
 enormity of making merchandise of men — of separating 
 families — selling daughters to prostitution — forcing unre- 
 quited toil — making torture possible, if not common, 
 and death a thing to be welcomed. Prove to me that harsh 
 rebuke, indignant denunciation, scathing sarcasm, and piti- 
 less ridicule are unjustifiable, any weapon which ever 
 broke up the crust of prejudice, roused a slumbering con- 
 science, shamed a proud sinner. Our aim is to alter public 
 opinion — to induce every one to aid in the abolition of 
 slavery. We do not j)lay politics: anti-slavery is no half- 
 jest with us. We speak of the dead as of the living. We 
 are now out-talked, out- voted. But our words bide their 
 time. 
 
 He then reviewed the literature of the movement from 
 Lundy and Adams to Sumner's last speech and "Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin," and vindicated the original methods, which time had 
 justified by what had been accomplished despite opposition 
 and ceaseless criticism. "If there was no great revolution or 
 reformation apparent, no other course could have accom- 
 plished these ends. If they had been defeated in Congress, 
 the creators of Congress had been enlightened." X ground- 
 fire had been smouldering and spreading which needed only a 
 breeze to make it blaze. And the wind was rising in the West. 
 
154 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Soon after, Phillips, speaking in New York, saw no 
 hope of a Union without slavery, and no deliverance except 
 through the demolition and rebuilding of it or a separation 
 of the North and South. Therefore Henry Ward Beecher 
 exhibited the greater faith a few minutes later when he said : 
 
 I do not believe that the half of these United States will 
 always stand as slaveholding. By all the victories of Chris- 
 tianity in the past I am inspired with hope for the future; 
 and I have faith in a public sentiment which in spite of 
 recreant clergymen, apostate statesmen, venal politicians, 
 and trafficking shopmen, shall fall upon this vast and unmiti- 
 gated abomination and utterly crush it. I would rather see 
 Christianity destroy it in seventy-five years than Mammon 
 in fifty and do that which legislation could not do, and which 
 the commerce of the country could not do. 
 
 It is not strange that neither the despondent man nor 
 the hopeful one saw how the event was to be brought about 
 within the next decade. It was a year of discouragement 
 and gloom. In Congress there were not over ten out of 
 three hundred who would oppose the extension of slavery, 
 and fewer still who would attack it in its strongholds. 
 President Fillmore could congratulate the Nation that agita- 
 tion was subsiding and a general acquiescence in measures 
 of peace prevailed. 
 
 Amidst this mutual reassurance and congratulation there 
 was a little cloud arising seaward. From the Society of 
 Friends in New England a humble request appeared in 
 Congress in May, 1852, asking for the repeal of the Fugitive 
 Slave Law. Presented by Senator Sumner, it was attacked 
 by Senators from Mississippi and Georgia as threatening 
 the dissolution of the Union, if its purpose were carried 
 out in the repeal of that law. 
 
A HOPEFUL SIGN 155 
 
 It was near the close of the session before Sumner 
 could get an opportunity to defend his celebrated thesis 
 that "slavery is sectional and freedom national; and that 
 the Fugitive Slave x\ct lacks that essential support in 
 the public conscience of the states where it is to be en- 
 forced which is the life of all law, and without which any 
 law must become a dead letter." 
 
 He closed his argument from legal and historical points 
 of view with a letter from Washington about the return of 
 a fugitive, saying in effect, that he would yield the point 
 rather than create any disturbance or uneasy sensations 
 in the minds of well-disposed citizens. In this four hours 
 of his first elaborate speech in the Senate, Sumner won 
 great praise as uttering an emphatic protest against the 
 notion that the compromise act was a final settlement of 
 agitation about slavery. The mutterings against the 
 Fugitive Slave Law and the resistance to its execution in 
 the North had at length found a voice in Congress to repeat 
 and reenforce the sentiments which abolitionists had been 
 disseminating among the people for over thirty years. To 
 be sure, the measure advocated received but four votes; 
 but the silence had been broken, the lid had been lifted, 
 and the kettle was found ready to boil over. The dreaded 
 agitation was not subsiding after all. Sumner had only 
 to move an amendment to an appropriation bill intended 
 to pay the expenses of slave hunters, and the cauldron 
 was full of toil and trouble. 
 
 To Phillips the renewal of strife in Congress contained 
 the promise of a larger interest in the question at issue, 
 which would become national instead of local. Yet he did 
 not give up his claim that the reappearance of congressional 
 
156 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 antagonism, interrupted since John Quincy Adams's 
 day, was due to Northern sentiment implanted by himself 
 and his associates. Not over sanguine about political 
 assistance from half a dozen legislators, he did not fail to 
 discover the dawn-streaks of a new day in which anti- 
 slavery opinion would grow stronger with the law makers. 
 This would have its reflex influence with the people who 
 got their politics from Congress rather than a lecture plat- 
 form. But he kept his faith in this agency and hoped more 
 from state action than from the Nation; from the people 
 than their chief men. Still, there was hope in what had 
 been begun toward renewed agitation in Congress. The 
 truce of silence had been broken. 
 
 There was another group of leading men that might 
 have been of g-reat service to the cause who were slow to 
 endorse it. From his Harvard associates and the company 
 of writers who were contributing to American literature 
 Phillips soon found that he could expect little immediate 
 assistance or sympathy, with two exceptions — Lowell 
 and Whittier.. 
 
 Lowell, from his college days, had strong humanitarian 
 leanings. His note-book for the year of his graduation, 
 1838, is full of passages about slavery, and a letter com- 
 miserating factory workers in England ends with the remark, 
 "The abolitionists are the only ones with whom I sympa- 
 thize of present parties." As with Phillips, this sympathy 
 was strengthened by the encouragement of a young woman 
 who eventually became his wife. Also a certain " Band " 
 of kindred spirits seconded and supported this philanthropic 
 influence. By 1840 Lowell was heartily committed to a 
 cause which he had derided in his class poem two years 
 
LOWELL'S SYMPATHY 157 
 
 before in common with several other 'isms. In November 
 of this year he was a member of an anti-slavery convention 
 in Boston, and from this time the slavery cjucstion appears 
 frequently in his poems and letters. He even exhorts a 
 Virginia classmate to join the abolition ranks. It is to be 
 noted, however, that the poet never belonged to the extreme 
 wing of the radicals, and in the years when he was corre- 
 sponding editor of the Anti-slavery Standard he did not 
 entirely satisfy some of the more rigid managers in the 
 abuse they wished heaped upon slaveholders, whom he con- 
 sidered human. Yet his moderation reached some readers 
 who had no liking for violent assaults upon their mistaken 
 countrymen. Worn with the drudgery of fortnightly 
 contributions, he wrote in 1850 that he had decided to 
 turn for a time from politics to poetry, and two years later 
 his official connection with the Standard had ceased. 
 
 With his growth as a professional man of letters and upon 
 a larger acquaintance with the guild, following his appoint- 
 ment as a professor in Harvard, his early zeal became 
 dissipated in the stress of his new occupation. Still, the 
 primitive enthusiasm of the Biglow Papers period had not 
 vanished so much as it had settled into an abiding principle 
 of humane sympathy, which was to be enshrined in some 
 of the noblest poems in our literature. As early as 1844 
 he had written the lines which Phillips never tired of re- 
 peating : 
 
 " Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne — 
 Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim 
 
 unknown 
 Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above 
 
 His own." 
 
158 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Through all the poems of war time, culminating in the 
 Commemoration Ode of 1865, runs the same lofty patriotism, 
 a broader stream from the fountain which bubbled noisily 
 in the decade of ferment and unrest. 
 
 The support which Whittier gave to anti-slavery illustrates 
 the differences of method that were employed by abolition- 
 ists. As a young journalist, inclined to politics, he was 
 not at first greatly interested in this reform beyond others, 
 all of which he regarded as tokens of a moral revolution 
 that was setting in. Yet as a philanthropic movement its 
 claim at length began to assert itself in the growth of public 
 sentiment. Moreover, Garrison by a strong appeal aroused 
 him to serious consideration of what he might accomplish 
 for the cause. Still, he did not deem it needful to follow 
 the leader in his uncompromising demands, nor to employ 
 the severity of his language, nor even to join the "Boston 
 clique." As a natural politician, who had already been 
 of service at the State House, he had a practical sense of the 
 value of time in all important changes, and of the gradual 
 preparation of public opinion, and of its effective expression 
 at the polls. By 1833, however, he was sufficiently committed 
 to the cause to write a tract on Abolition as the Remedy of 
 Slavery, urging its safety and justice, and that free labour 
 would be more advantageous to the planter than slave 
 labour. It was a moderate and reasonable argument, 
 but it did not fail to stir up Southern resentment that any 
 word should be spoken against the domestic institution 
 of the section. 
 
 He had not been without political ambitions, but when 
 he went as a delegate from Massachusetts to Philadelphia 
 at the founding of the American Anti-slavery society he 
 
WHITTIER 159 
 
 necessarily broke with politics and with the journalism 
 which was its ally. Although he continued to write as a 
 contributor or editor for several papers, they were not 
 organs of the two great existing parties. Indeed, his health 
 during the period of the great contest did not allow him 
 to be in the thick of the fight. An occasional article or a 
 stirring poem, struck off when the day permitted, amounted 
 to much in twenty years, but to little month by month. 
 Yet these occasional efforts did good service by their sin- 
 cerity and inoffensive presentation of a cause which was 
 oftener associated with narrow methods and violent words. 
 Later, the poet himself cared more for the reformatory 
 quality of his verse than for its artistic form, which 
 was not so severely judged in those stirring times as 
 afterward. 
 
 As a politician who had a keen sense of values he may be re- 
 garded as a connecting link between the theoretical aboli- 
 tionism of the early period and the practical emancipation 
 through legislation of the final period. The first agitation was 
 needful in order to bring about the methods which are 
 essential to lasting reform in a republic. Whittier must have 
 the credit of pointing his radical companions to the legiti- 
 mate way in which their high purpose could finally be ac- 
 complished. On the other hand, he could not have had 
 reasonable hopes of the result by the customary political 
 management. The plow and the harrow were needed in the 
 springtime, and the sowing of the seed. The autumn 
 brought its own ways of gathering the harvest. Between, 
 something was to be done which looked backward and 
 forward ; and Whittier, more than any other man of letters, 
 stood for that intermediate time and work. 
 
160 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 From the literary coterie that gave Boston and its vicinity 
 distinction leading abolitionists did not fail to observe that 
 they received little encouragement at first. Longfellow 
 was occupied with introducing Old World literatures to 
 New England and the Nation ; Emerson was absorbed in a 
 philosophy with which he was startling his orthodox neigh- 
 bourhood and parts adjacent; Hawthorne was musing on 
 the severities of his ancestors in the Bay Province more 
 than on those of the South; Holmes was busy with his 
 medical lectures and Harvard anniversary poems, and 
 confining: his attention within the rim of the Boston Circle. 
 Thoreau, indeed, added to the rest of his eccentricities, as 
 they were reckoned, protests against human bondage, and 
 upbraided a zeal for Kansas which he thought should 
 have been turned against home indifference for the slave. 
 After a time, when the war broke out, all of this company who 
 were then living awoke to the importance of the issue which 
 had precipitated strife, and fell in with its requirements 
 with various degrees of assent and devotion; as did the 
 chief men of the city, their associates. The same can be said 
 of men of letters in New York and other Northern cities. 
 
XIII 
 PROTEST AGAINST THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT 
 
 (1854-1855) 
 
 ACCORDING to the Missouri Compromise of 1820 
 slavery was to be forever excluded from the North- 
 west Territories. In 1854 an attempt was made to cancel 
 this agreement. Simultaneously, raiders from Missouri 
 undertook to make Kansas a slave state. Free Soilers in 
 Congress protested, and petitions flowed in from the entire 
 North against the violation of a sacred pledge. 
 
 It is of great interest to note the effect upon abolitionists 
 of this sudden awakening of Northern people. It was a 
 surprise party, disturbing the family somewhat. Phillips did 
 not pay much attention to the cause of it — Kansas troubles — 
 being occupied with the arrest of Anthony Burns and his 
 rendition to slavery under a guard of Massachusetts militia. 
 For appealing to citizens to prevent this, he and Theodore 
 Parker were indicted by the Grand Jury for *' obstructing 
 the process of the United States" in slave catching, but noth- 
 ing came of it. 
 
 Evidently the great Northern awakening did not appeal 
 to him. For one thing, it had been started at the political 
 centre of the country and by men who were reckoned as 
 politicians, if they were not statesmen. They had appealed 
 
 161 
 
162 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 to their constituents, instead of petitions coming from the 
 people to their representatives in Congress, as had hitherto 
 been the custom. Reform was not proceeding in the normal 
 direction. A current had suddenly set in from the other pole. 
 It started before its time, and threatened to make agitation 
 useless. Besides, anything savouring of political methods 
 or action in this abolition reform had been decried from the 
 first by its pioneers. Therefore it is not strange that they 
 looked askance at the crowd that all at once came flocking 
 in their direction. An extremist wrote Phillips from 
 *'Cornville" deploring his mild toleration of political action. 
 
 Of course, there was the consolatory reflection that the way 
 had been prepared for the new-comers by the labours of thirty 
 years, and that the seed for this up-springing wheat had been 
 sown long before, and had been lying in an apparent death, 
 which was the condition of its life when the winter was over. 
 But even this comforting assurance was not offered yet. 
 
 Instead, in a lecture in Tremont Temple in the last week 
 of 1854 on the Character and Extent of Anti-slavery Feel- 
 ing in New England, Phillips spoke in a strain of high 
 faith in the future rather than in any immediate prospect 
 for the present. " It is a question of free speech, all that the 
 South has not beaten us in during its successive stages of 
 political aggression — the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, 
 Louisiana and Texas, the compromise measures of 1850, 
 and the abolition of the Missouri Compromise." But this 
 last measure, which had aroused the North, he passed by 
 in silence, keeping to his home theme of the North leagued 
 with the South in perpetuating the profitable system of 
 slavery. 
 
 The most Southern sheet in Boston said of this speech that. 
 
LEGAL ARGUMENTS 163 
 
 " Never were the splendid abilities of this most accomplished 
 and able fanatic more amply displayed than on this occasion. 
 Sentiments most repugnant to the feelings of every patriot 
 were absolutely applauded when clothed in the graceful and 
 magnificent diction of this anti-slavery Cicero. The gross 
 injustice of the matter and the exquisite felicity of the manner, 
 topics such as the dissolution of the Union and destruction 
 of the Constitution, were dwelt upon with such unparalleled 
 force and beauty that disapprobation of the subject was 
 lost and overwhelmed in admiration of the man. The 
 vast hall rang again and again to rounds of enthusiastic 
 applause. Great as has been the change since 1850, it is 
 insufficient to explain the favour with which this abolition 
 oration was received by an audience such as is seldom col- 
 lected, even in this city." 
 
 In March of the next year, 1855, Phillips gave evidence of 
 what he might have attained in the legal profession by an 
 extended argument before the Committee on Federal Rela- 
 tions of the Massachusetts Legislature in support of petitions 
 that had been presented for the removal of Judge Loring, 
 who had issued the warrant to arrest Anthony Burns and was 
 responsible, Phillips held, for his return to slavery. 
 
 A Commissioner of humane and just instincts would be 
 careful to remember that he was both Judge and Jury. No 
 jury would have sent Burns back to his master. The state 
 declares that the fugitive is constitutionally entitled to a jury 
 trial. Mr. Webster once prepared an amendment to the act 
 of Congress securing jury trial. A judge who consents to 
 act at all as Slave Commissioner should be removed from 
 office. The hunting of slaves, then, is a sufficient cause for 
 removal from a Massachusetts bench. For the sake of 
 Justice, in the name of Humanity, we claim his removal. 
 
164 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 This argument, occupying fifteen newspaper columns, 
 closed with an appeal worthy of the orator's best perorations/ 
 His narration of circumstances and citation of authorities 
 were skilfully managed, but in closing he massed all their 
 weight and force in an address to the legislators that would 
 have moved a jury to let any bondman go free. " It is in your 
 power to-day to redeem the judiciary of Massachusetts from 
 the disgrace which this case has flung upon it. You will 
 render it impossible that any but unprincipled and shameless 
 men shall aid in the enforcement of a wicked clause in 
 the Constitution." A few days later, at a third hearing, 
 Phillips went over the ground again in reply to Mr. R. H. 
 Dana, Jr.'s, review of the case, in a speech an hour in length. 
 His recapitulation was spoken of as especially eloquent and 
 powerful, and was listened to with profound attention. He 
 said : " Judge Story and Professor Greenleaf used to point 
 to the Bible and say to the students, * Gentlemen, that book 
 is the origin of all law, and its foundation. When you find 
 a law which conflicts with that, it is no law!'" He then 
 pointed out that the principles which the people held in their 
 hearts had been defied by judges, until one had overstepped 
 the limit, who, having had fair warning, should be removed 
 for the execution of a law which was offensive to the majority 
 of the Commonwealth. 
 
 Those who heard these arguments before the " Great and 
 General Court " knew that they were not the extravagances 
 of a wild fanatic. But some of them must have speculated 
 on a possible career at bar and bench and in halls of legis- 
 lation that had been surrendered for a cause unpopular and 
 ridiculed. 
 
 ^Afterward included in " Speeches, Lectures, and Addresses," First Series, p. 154. 
 
ON CAPITAL PUNISHMENT 165 
 
 By this reproof of a judge, who, as Slave Commissioner, 
 had returned the last fugitive to be remanded to slavery from 
 Massachusetts, the state had nullified the Fugitive Slave Law 
 in all its progressive stages. And then it had the audacity 
 to pass an " Act to protect the rights and liberties of the people 
 of the Commonwealth " — without respect to their complex- 
 ion. The Latimer case had secured a Personal Liberty Bill 
 forbidding officers henceforward to take and detain fugitives; 
 and now the law was made to match the Compromise of 1850. 
 Habeas corpus was secured; burden of proof thrown upon 
 the pursuer; issuing a warrant, assisting the claimant, or 
 presiding at trial were fatal to official and professional careers. 
 Counsel was to be furnished; police, sherifi's, jailors, and 
 troops were to keep their hands off. Phillips led in presenting 
 and supporting this bill, which was vetoed by the Governor, 
 but passed by the Legislature over his veto on May 21st, the 
 vote standing in the Senate^ thirty-two for, to three against; 
 in the House two hundred and twenty-nine to seventy-six. 
 Thus did the Bay state defy the South and the Constitution. 
 
 Phillips's third argument before legislative committees 
 within a month was a long one on the abolition of capital 
 punishment. Of the two common pleas in its favour he 
 answered the first — to restrain the murderer from repeating 
 the offence — by saying that a prison will do that ; and the 
 second — hanging a man for an example, as the forefathers 
 did on the Common — loses its force because it is now done 
 within prison walls in comparative privacy. The entire 
 argument bristles with historical citation and legal learning. 
 In closing, he enumerated barbarous practices that have 
 given place to others more merciful — crucifixion, impaling, 
 tearing by horses and hot pincers, the rack, the stake. 
 
166 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 *' Now we ask you to abolish the gallows. It is only one step 
 further in the same direction. Take it because the civilized 
 world is taking it, in many quarters! Take it because it is 
 well to try experiments for humanity, and this is a favourable 
 community to try them in." 
 
 As president of the New England Anti-slavery Convention 
 (since June, 1847,) he becomes retrospective at its May 
 meeting, saying : 
 
 For the twenty years these meetings have been held 
 in the city of Boston no clergyman, no officer of the state, no 
 man of any social standing or position of influence, has stood 
 on this platform, Henry Wilson excepted — the first ray of 
 light breaking over the mountains. Great men would have 
 come in and swamped us by the magnificence of their aid 
 long ago if slavery had left them any soul. 
 
 The next day he opened a long speech in the same strain 
 with the words : " Mr. Chairman — Our distinctive policy is 
 the necessity of a dissolution of the American Union, in order 
 to abolish slavery. It is the one essential point of the anti- 
 slavery movement out of which conduct and purpose and 
 system must grow. " For an hour he proceeded in his ampli- 
 fication of this proposition, showing why and how it should 
 be done. " Dissolution was not an uncommon problem. 
 The fathers dissolved two Unions. We can dissolve another 
 by taking Massachusetts out. South Carolina threaten to 
 leave the Union ! Why, she cannot walk ! She has not yet 
 stood alone! Nobody will go out unless we go." 
 
 The value of these significant fragments is to show that the 
 only remedy for the chronic malady appeared to him to be in 
 amputation, six years before it was begun at the other end 
 of the body politic in the South. But no man was prophet 
 
RHETORICAL EXAMPLES 167 
 
 enough to see how Liberty and Union, in a fuller sense than 
 was contemplated by Webster, was to be accomplished. 
 
 As examples of persuasive and convincing speech, and all 
 the more because one-half his audiences did not accept their 
 doctrines, these arguments stand in their unabridged ful- 
 ness as models of popular exposition. They read well even 
 now. That they were spoken well, contemporary testimony 
 affirms by the notes of applause in the reports of them which 
 mark the responses of throngs that were by no means sym- 
 pathetic before or after his discourse. Built upon lines of 
 strong logic, they were enlivened by frequent anecdote, 
 illustrated by historical examples, and varied by question 
 and answer, personal allusion, pointed reference and startling 
 assertion. The effects of every rhetorical device are secured 
 without the appearance of art. It is the sparkling conversa- 
 tion of a full mind, before a full house, on a subject of which 
 the speaker's heart is full. 
 
 An interesting note occurs in remarks at a Fourth of July 
 celebration at Framingham, which Hon. Henry Wilson 
 had been invited to attend, but owing to other engagements 
 he had sent a letter instead, deprecating mutual criticism 
 and reproach in the working for a common cause. To this 
 Phillips put in a demurrer, to the effect that criticism of 
 action or principle is a great benefit, securing the cause 
 against the possibility of being diverted out of its proper 
 course. 
 
 Abolitionism is not like an old and organized political 
 party, but made up of men who think each one for himself, 
 who must welcome criticism even from their associates. 
 Principles are to be maintained, whatever becomes of men. 
 When the time comes that the advocates of anv reform cease 
 
168 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 to criticize each other its efficiency is gone. Harmony and 
 peace are not essential. Where confederates come in, 
 criticism necessarily follows. If harmony is desired, it will be 
 found in political parties where men's heads are cut off to 
 make them all of the same regulation stature. Not so 
 among independent reformers. 
 
 This announcement will explain some occurrences which 
 threatened to shatter a loose organization a dozen times 
 in the course of one generation. It was their cordial agree- 
 ment to a guerilla warfare that kept various independents 
 within sight of an occasional rallying place where they 
 met, each one with his own musket, rifle, club, or fists, 
 and in regimentals as unlike as Continental buff and blue, 
 Quaker drab, and Indian toggery. In only one respect 
 did they agree — that slavery must be abolished. Exactly 
 how, was a question not so clear or so unanimously settled 
 In the early 'fifties, disunion, by the withdrawal of the voter 
 and politics, the separation of one state and another from 
 the Union, and finally of the entire North from the South, 
 appears to have been the programme, so far as it was formu- 
 lated and endorsed. But immediate work and endeavour 
 was by the individual citizen with his neighbour, from 
 house to house, from village to village, county to county, 
 city to city, state to state. 
 
 An example of this method is seen in one of Phillips's 
 " abolitionizing trips," as his wife called them. Starting from 
 home on November 20, 1854, he spoke in Lee that eve- 
 ning and on successive evenings as follows: Utica, Pen Yan, 
 Rochester, Syracuse, Rome, Syracuse again, Hamilton, C. W., 
 Detroit, Cleveland, Zanesville, Cincinnati, Elmira, Bing- 
 hamton, Middletown, and three evenings in Philadelphia, 
 
NO PARTY POLITICS 169 
 
 ending December 10th. In this circuit of three weeks 
 he made a dozen and a half speeches, which varied as the 
 places and with the remarkable diversity which was a 
 part of his oratorical skill; but the theme was always the 
 same and as constant as his single purpose. Ten or 
 twenty thousand persons meantime heard a voice they 
 would not soon forget, and words to be remembered for 
 years, and saw a presence that was photographed upon 
 their vision, intent and fascinated as by a Periclean statue 
 living and thinking and speaking before them, bearing 
 them far away from their environment and out of their 
 habitudes of life and thought. 
 
 It might be inferred that this one man alone sowed seeds 
 that would spring up abundantly when the season should 
 come. The temptation must have been great to attribute 
 a new movement in political circles at this time to the 
 agitation of thirty previous years. But as yet there was 
 little boasting. On the contrary, it seemed to the leaders 
 that no great advantage had been won beyond free speech 
 and a doubtful difficulty thenceforward in returning fugitives 
 to the South from Boston. Even men of good will toward 
 abolition said. What care we about it ? The Constitution, 
 the Party, the Church are against us. Such half-hearted 
 friends Phillips addressed at a celebration not far from 
 Plymouth Rock in August of this year, 1855, telling them 
 to stand "clear of party politics, of churches that were not 
 disgracefully anti-slavery, and not to vote under a Consti- 
 tution that protected the slave-catcher." Salmon P. Chase 
 had just asked Dartmouth students to pledge themselves 
 to " no slavery — outside the slave states ! " " No slavery 
 in those states was the only effective principle, and 
 
170 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 conscience the only living power against the institution," 
 was Phillips's reply. 
 
 One thing upon which he congratulated himself and his 
 co-workers was the admission of coloured children to the 
 schools of Boston, a movement which was begun by himself 
 and a few others petitioning the city government; and that 
 had been kept up until it reached the state Legislature 
 fourteen years later and was made law in 1854. Then 
 the city followed the state's example. At the cele- 
 bration of this event by a meeting on the 17th of December 
 Phillips remarked that it was one of those rare days in 
 the history of a hard struggle when there was something 
 palpable to rejoice in. Men were always asking, What 
 has the anti-slavery agitation done ? He was glad they 
 had this answer to make now, It has opened the schools! 
 Without this agitation they would never have been opened. 
 The best thing learned by these struggles is, how to prepare 
 for another. They were in for the war. He should never 
 think Massachusetts a fit state to live in until he saw one 
 man, at least, as black as the ace of spades, a graduate of 
 Harvard College. He did not go for annexing territory 
 only, but all sorts of races and all sorts of customs. 
 
 Beyond this there is little congratulation. Closing the 
 year with a speech at a dinner of the Pilgrim Society at 
 Plymouth, he remarked that — 
 
 What the Puritans gave the world was not so much new 
 truth as action. They planted, and the oak is the answer 
 to all criticism. They are to be regarded in their possibili- 
 ties. If Elder Brewster could appear to-day he would not 
 be contented with the five points of Calvin. He would add 
 to his creed the Maine Liquor Law, the Underground Railway, 
 
NON-CONFORMITY 171 
 
 and the thousand Sharpe's Rifles, addressed " Kansas " and 
 labelled "Books." To be as good as our fathers, we must 
 be better. Plymouth Rock underlies all America. It 
 cropped out at Bunker Hill, at the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence; Lovejoy rested his musket upon it when they would 
 not let him print at Alton and said, " Death or free speech! " 
 The Pilgrims said death rather than the compromise of Eliza- 
 beth. They voted that each man should build his own house. 
 So, now; each one his own mental house, without having 
 too much uniformity in the architecture and keeping clear 
 of shams and delusion, smothering phrases and compromises. 
 
 This final sentence is most characteristic of Phillips. 
 There was no conformity in his mental structure to that 
 of other men of his time, nor did he make any apology for 
 his idiosyncrasy. He was never blind to shams, nor open 
 to suggestions of compromise, nor did he ever soften words 
 that could expose and brand a popular delusion. In his 
 desperate warfare he asked no quarter, and he certainly 
 gave none. Yet he never descended to low abuse nor used 
 language that was beneath Ciceronian invective. His spear 
 was like Ithuriel's, his sword like the Saracen's, his shield 
 unblurred, his armour radiant, and a knightly spirit per- 
 vaded all his strife. 
 
T 
 
 XIV 
 THE MAIN ISSUE 
 
 (1856) 
 
 HE Kansas struggle between Eastern Immigrants 
 and Missouri raiders did not divert Phillips's atten- 
 tion from the greater contest for general emancipation. 
 At first he was inclined to be supercilious about the minor 
 issue of territorial occupation, saying that "Yankees had 
 gone into a half-barbarous West to dispute their way inch 
 by inch with the bowie knives and revolvers of vagabonds. 
 What are the squabbles around the ballot-boxes of Kansas ? " 
 Reform was needed at the centres, where the root of the evil 
 is more than on the outskirts, and by the agency of legisla- 
 tures and the judiciary rather than by common politics and 
 bayonets. 
 
 It is in this memorable year that the efficiency of Phillips's 
 methods begins to get clearer, and to bridge over the dark 
 chasm between his steadfast purpose and its accomplish- 
 ment. First, he was for educating the individual and the 
 community into the sense of an evil and the wish to remove 
 it, in some way which would be discovered when the public 
 conscience should be sufficiently awakened. Next, for 
 disunion by withdrawal and separation of one state and 
 another. This was to be hastened by checkmating the Gov- 
 ernment through an anti-slavery judiciary elected by the 
 
 172 
 
DEPRESSION AND DOUBT 173 
 
 people. But this consummation must have appeared 
 far off. However, it was something to have devised a 
 possible way. 
 
 One disadvantage to extreme abolitionists in the score 
 of years hitherto had been the destructive policy they felt 
 obliged to advocate. Delenda est Carthago had been their 
 battle cry; but how to destroy it, and what to build on its 
 ruins, were equally indefinite visions. They held that it 
 was first of all necessary to destroy; but this is always an 
 unpopular process — in this instance exceedingly unpopular 
 in the South, and in much of the North as well. If to the 
 latter section it seemed a practicable or possible way to pull 
 down and uproot an evil that from Colonial days had not 
 ceased to be national in various degrees, it is^doubtful if it 
 would have been regarded with favour for a moment, except 
 by the little band of abolitionists. Certainly, the destruction 
 of slavery was not the purpose of the Northern rising in 1861. 
 If in addition to a definite destructive method, the reformers 
 could have shown a constructive plan, the question would 
 have been more than half settled. But if they could have 
 done this, their wisdom would have surpassed the teachings 
 of experience during the forty years in which the Nation 
 afterward wandered in the wilderness of reconstruction. 
 It was enough for the early pioneers to determine to go 
 forward. It might not be in the straightest line, but it was 
 in the right direction. In any case, it was not sitting down 
 in despair. Agitation was better than that. Doubt, 
 however, was still brooding over one of the leaders, despite 
 the open struggle for freedom in Kansas. 
 
 In what may be regarded as his annual report of progress 
 — the customary address at the May anniversary of the 
 
174 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 New England Society, Phillips was not jubilant. He 
 doubted if there was public principle enough to save the 
 experiment of civil government. Ignorance of true liberty 
 prevailed and indifference to all but national interests, and 
 even to the striking down of Senator Sumner, and to making 
 a protest by the best of the city — the milk-and-water men 
 that did not dare offend the South. "We, at least, can 
 protest. When this generation is gone and a better one 
 come, they will be glad to trace through us the line that 
 connects them with an ever living protest against infamous 
 tyranny. It is a great thing to keep alive a protest. The 
 anti-slavery cause does not seem to move; like the shadow 
 on the dial you cannot see it move, but it gets to twelve 
 o'clock at last." 
 
 In his inmost heart Phillips did not think that the night 
 had wholly passed. If there were dawn-streaks, there 
 was a cloud-bank of materialism in the East; and the red 
 and lowering sky in the West of yesterday was not a promise 
 of fair weather. It was from a prairie fire on the plains 
 of Kansas. 
 
 If Phillips could upbraid the half-hearted Northern 
 denunciations of the assault upon Sumner by Brooks, he 
 had just then no words strong enough for the Southern 
 adulations of the outrage which were published in the 
 majority of pro-slavery papers, nor for the chivalry of the 
 South which sent the assassin gold-headed canes and silver 
 plate with its endorsement of his cowardly and brutal attack 
 upon an unarmed man, writing at his desk. A Faneuil 
 Hall indignation meeting was addressed by "eminent 
 speakers of all political parties." The most distinguished 
 speaker of Boston, and of the Nation, being of no political 
 
FOREGLEAMS OF DAWN 175 
 
 party, was not invited. His sentiments, if not his language, 
 must therefore be gathered from the anniversary speech 
 three days later, the drift of which has been noted. In- 
 wardly, he regarded the disgraceful attack upon the Senator 
 as a surrender by slaveocracy of argument and a resort to 
 club and knife, and therefore one step downward toward 
 its final doom. Undoubtedly it hastened this event with 
 the North at large. 
 
 By the Fourth of July he was ready to take a broad view 
 of the situation in 1856, and out of the general gloom to 
 extract a spark of light. On the Southern side every barrier 
 to the extension of slavery in the Southwest had been thrown 
 down : the Northwest, once consecrated to freedom, had been 
 divided, and Kansas had been overrun by armed invaders 
 backed by the Administration, who had driven Northern 
 settlers from their farms and ballot-boxes. Nebraska would 
 be the next ground to be occupied. In Congress, knock- 
 down arguments had displaced the logic of Calhoun, while 
 his prophecy of disunion was often repeated. This threat 
 did not displease extremists at the North, although they did 
 not take much stock in it. 
 
 Phillips had more hope in the formation and trend of the 
 Republican party, because it was a strictly sectional party. 
 Whigs, and especially Democrats, had belonged to the 
 Southern states as well as the Northern. No Republican 
 contingent could exist in slave states; and in the division of 
 parties he saw the beginning of separation. He did not call 
 the Republican an anti-slavery party; it had not risen to 
 that, he said. But he hailed it as a sign — a little crack in 
 the iceberg. In that light, recent political movements were 
 a gain — a great gain — which had come unexpectedly early. 
 
176 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Aside from this, he regarded it as an absurdity. It was 
 agitating for a poHtical result when the times demanded 
 Revolution. 
 
 In placing moral agencies before political, Phillips saw 
 in the success of the latter nothing beyond the restriction of 
 slavery to the states it already occupied, and with its bonds 
 tightened by reason of this bargain for limitation. But he 
 also saw, with everybody else, that it was not to be confined 
 to its worn-out stamping ground, nor was the political equi- 
 librium of power to be destroyed by giving the North an 
 equal advantage with the South. This had never been and 
 was never intended to be allowed. "Disunion first!" said 
 the Slave Power. 
 
 The encroachments of politics upon the anti-slavery field 
 in the form of the new Republican party was on Mr. Phillips's 
 mind at the August anniversary of West India Emancipation, 
 a day which had been observed off and on for twenty-two 
 years. He valued politics for the discussion raised, more 
 than for the men it put in office. The canvass was worth 
 a hundredfold more than the election. 
 
 Two months later the opinion of the South with regard to 
 Free Soilers was uttered by Preston S. Brooks on the occa- 
 sion of receiving canes and goblets from his constituents in 
 token of his bravery in striking down Sumner. "I hate 
 them [Free Soilers] just as much as I hate abolitionists; nay, 
 worse. I hate them worse than I hate the rattlesnake; for 
 unlike it they give no warning of their approach, and seek 
 to conceal their objects." And, further on, he overmatched 
 the rankest Garrisonian: "The only mode of meeting the 
 present issue is, just to tear the Constitution of the United 
 States, trample it underfoot, and form a Southern confeder- 
 
POLITICAL LIMITATIONS 177 
 
 acy, every state of which will be a slave-holding state." 
 [Loud and prolonged cheers.] The infant party was having 
 hard usage from the tips of the right and left wings of the bird 
 of freedom. However, it was getting beaten into shape and 
 vigour for sundry efforts of its own in a similar direction. 
 And so the war of words went on until the election of James 
 Buchanan, which in South Carolina w^as regarded as 
 " emphatically a Southern victory — fought on Southern 
 grounds. . . . The Constitution reigns supreme . 
 and the South will rule the Union." "Through one more 
 administration," should have been added; "and then" — 
 but prophesying w^as unsafe, although there had been much 
 of it for many years and with ominous agreement North 
 and South. 
 
 Phillips closed the addresses of the year with a short speech 
 in New York at a woman's convention in which he uttered 
 some historical and social generalities, and advocated more 
 education and the franchise, if women were to be taxed. 
 He also lectured in Detroit for the third time, on the 
 " Philosophy of Reform." The press of the city agreed in 
 admiring his oratory, but questioned its useful tendency. 
 The reign of conservatism had been disturbed by his coming, 
 and " Republicanism, though far from being anti-slavery, 
 had opened many eyes to see the light." This evidently 
 had been the first advantage which it had brought to the 
 radicals, as the abolitionists were sometimes called; and 
 generally they were willing to accord this revealing power to 
 a growing political movement that was spreading along the 
 Northern border. But it was not after their own hearts by 
 any means. It did not go far enough. ♦ 
 
 As for Phillips himself, his idealism allowed him to take little 
 
178 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 comfort in the progress of any movement in his direction, 
 since he always kept so great a distance between himself 
 and the following host. To be just to him it should be said, 
 that his remote and high standpoint was taken at the outset 
 of his career, and for thirty years any approach toward his 
 position by any party whose vote was worth counting was as 
 slight as that of the earth toward the sun in the predicted 
 swallowing up of the one by the other. At last there was an 
 apparent absorption, so sudden that the radical had hardly 
 time to realize it; but through all his fighting years he had 
 little encouragement, on account of his discouraging distance 
 from the army he was beckoning on. If some of the wild- 
 eyed thought they had almost reached his standard, they 
 presently discovered him at the end of its forecast shadow 
 seemingly planting another. But it was always the same 
 that he set up at the beginning of his crusade — the stars, 
 without the stripes of the national ensign. These last, he 
 used to say, represented its legalized bondage. 
 
XV 
 DISINTEGRATION 
 
 (1857) 
 
 FANEUIL HALL, on the second day of 1857, must have 
 presented a singular spectacle to conservative Boston- 
 ians. A chosen four hundred abolitionists assembled at a 
 dinner to celebrate the founding of the Massachusetts Anti- 
 slavery Society twenty-five years before. Mr. Garrison began 
 the after-dinner speaking by reviewing the growth of the 
 movement from colonial societies and later ones looking 
 toward emancipation in some indefinite period, and the 
 subsequent declaration for immediate emancipation promul- 
 gated in Baltimore in 1829, followed by the publication 
 of the Liberator, in Boston, January 1, 1831. He spoke of 
 the organization of two thousand societies in the next decade 
 before the unhappy divisions of 1840 upon the woman ques- 
 tion, from which the cause had never recovered. Never- 
 theless, there was occasion for rejoicing in view of the 
 wonderful progress that had been made, as would be shown 
 by the speakers that were to follow. The only one whose 
 remarks can be noticed here was Wendell Phillips, and 
 the substance only of these. 
 
 He insisted that the abolition movement had been one of 
 education, revealing the state to itself. While politics had 
 
 179 
 
180 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 advanced, it was still on the defensive; but abolitionism 
 was aggressive, not apologizing, nor like congressmen, 
 trying to explain its position. . Massachusetts should be 
 made too hot for slaveholders and doughfaces to tread 
 her soil. 
 
 The chief note of the new year was not congratulation 
 but disunion. The Slave Power, South and North, had 
 won the country for its purposes in electing Buchanan; 
 there was little or nothing to hope from the defeated Repub- 
 lican party; its chief speaker had been stricken down in 
 the Senate Chamber; its fight for freedom in Kansas was 
 uncertain, and if victorious would not touch slavery in its 
 own states. The disunion threats which extremists in the 
 South had made in case Fremont were elected were now 
 echoed at the other end of the coast line when a Disunion 
 Convention was held in Worcester on January 15, 1857, 
 in reply to a call " to consider the practicability, probability, 
 and expediency of a separation between the free and slave 
 states." Letters from Amasa Walker, Henry Wilson, 
 Theodore Parker, and Joshua R. Giddings were represen- 
 tative of as many personal views of the question. Senator 
 Wilson wished to hold the Union together in order to protect 
 the territories from the encroachments of slavery and to 
 prepare the way for peaceful emancipation. Parker believed 
 that the question would have to be settled by bloodshed. 
 Giddings fell back upon the statement that "whenever any 
 form of government becomes destructive of the ends for 
 which it was formed it is the right of the people to alter 
 or abolish it, and institute a new government," as the 
 fathers of the Republic had done. 
 
 Phillips made his answer upon the platform as usual: 
 
VALUE OF UNION 181 
 
 He was no worshipper of a Union which had merely pre- 
 served the peace between thirty-one states. " It had pro- 
 duced wealth but not men — greater than Daniel Webster, 
 Caleb Gushing, and Franklin Pierce; fair weather sailors 
 till the Kansas storm, and now men are skulking into harbour 
 for fear of being sunk! Free speech endangers the Govern- 
 ment! Then the sooner it goes to pieces the better. The 
 Union has made slavery triumphant and has brought the 
 country to a lower point than the lowest in English history 
 — when Gromwell put his military boot on the speaker's 
 mace in the House of Gommons — in the barbarism of the 
 assault on Sumner, mildly rebuked by the North and 
 applauded by the South. Take away Northern sympathy 
 and the South will set about getting a government, and 
 anarchy will not result." It must have seemed to the iron- 
 clad listener — if there could be such so long as Phillips 
 was speaking — that he failed to show how slavery would 
 necessarily disappear after the Union between the North 
 and South should be dissolved. Disunion was advocated 
 by Southern extremists for the very purpose of continuing 
 and extending slavery undisturbed and unrestricted. It 
 was the Union that still kept the bane within bounds, and 
 a Northern confederacy w^ould not of necessity hold all 
 the territories free. 
 
 In 1857 the Union was not sure of a free Kansas. With 
 two independent confederacies, the war which w^as begun 
 there in 1856 might not have been delayed five years, as it 
 was, before it broke out between two sections of one country. 
 But abolition by force and arms was not a part of the aboli- 
 tionists' purpose. The leaders were still holding steadfastly 
 to their hope of aw^akening the Nation's conscience, and so 
 
182 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 changing its attitude toward an inherited evil that in some 
 other way it would purge itself of the taint and corruption. 
 Still, the way itself was not clear. Even the withdrawal 
 of one state or several would give others more satisfaction 
 than mortification. Therefore, Northern disunionists, while 
 washing their hands of complicity in a national crime, 
 were losing their hold upon the best hope and way of keeping 
 it within present limits and possibly of exterminating it, 
 if it became unbearable in its arrogance. Indeed, recent 
 demands and encroachments were so fast hastening oppo- 
 sition to it that the South feared the result of the campaign 
 of 1860, and foresaw plainly the end of their domination. 
 Accordingly, they made the most of the four remaining 
 years in getting ready for disunion in their own favour 
 and for their own interest — as their leaders thought, but 
 as many of the people did not think. 
 
 Against this meeting and its disunion sentiment there 
 were opposing voices, calm and screaming. Sober-minded 
 anti-slavery men preferred waiting for the progress of opinion 
 and renovation of the Government; while conservative 
 or pro-slavery newspapers ran the entire scale from the 
 grumblings of caution to the screechings of ridicule. It 
 was immediately evident that in Massachusetts a vote for 
 withdrawal from the Union would be far from unanimous. 
 The general sense of the Commonwealth would have damp- 
 ened the zeal of any reformer who had not had cold water 
 thrown upon him steadily for twenty years. Hydropathy, 
 however, had been a favourite treatment with some radicals 
 and a necessity with others — if they got nothing worse 
 than a shower of water they were fortunate. More sub- 
 stantial and fouler descents sometimes fell. Therefore 
 
DRED SCOTT DECISION 183 
 
 their sublime faith and undiminished effort in the face 
 of another rebuff must be placed to their credit as indicating 
 the elements of which notable reformers are made. Un- 
 daunted, Phillips said: "Cherish these meetings; repeat 
 them; sound on in the discussion of this question; let the 
 plummet down; try all the formulas of logic; it may be that, 
 at last, as in the Arabian story, some fortunate tongue may 
 pronounce, accidentally, the magic charm that will make 
 the door of the Bastile to fly open." 
 
 President Buchanan's inaugural address voiced the de- 
 termination of the slave interest, of which he was the figure- 
 head, that every state and territory should have slavery 
 within its borders, marking a long governmental stride 
 from the constitutional restrictions of 1789, keeping the 
 territories free from it forever. Nor was there any possible 
 doubt to which alternative this Administration was committed. 
 Kansas affairs were an open comment upon its pro-slavery 
 bias and intent. 
 
 Two days later, March 6th, the immense weight of the 
 judiciary was added to Executive pronouncements. Not 
 of the full bench, but of a bare majority committed to the 
 policy of the Administration, and who, through Chief 
 Justice Taney, rendered the infamous decision in the 
 notorious Dred Scott case, by which it was determined 
 that a slave taken by his master into a free state and living 
 there for years with his consent did not, as had hitherto 
 been held, become free, but could be returned to bondage, 
 and, inferentially, making every state a slavery-promoting 
 or -protecting commonwealth. Incidentally, it produced 
 a sentence, attributed to Justice Taney, which was the dis- 
 tilled essence of a long document, that "the black man 
 
184 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 has no rights which white men are bound to respect." It 
 was regarded as fixing the high -water mark of a series of 
 slaveholding aggressions for seven years, beginning with 
 the compromises of 1850. 
 
 That PhilHps's voice was heard beyond his own state, 
 and that he was a surprise to some, appears from notices 
 of lectures in Yonkers, New York, and Waukegan, 111. 
 In these places they had supposed that he was "a ferocious 
 ranter, a blustering man of words, a bigoted, treasonable, 
 self-righteous fanatic, full of caustic bitterness" Instead, 
 they found him far from their preconceptions of an agitator; 
 " an embodiment of refined sensibilities, calm in temper, 
 polished in manner, full of common sense, logical in argu- 
 ment, concise and choice in language, a polished scholar and 
 a dignified gentleman." While deprecating the principles 
 and purposes of abolitionists, the local press generally 
 conceded that "all of them were not fools and fanatics, 
 but that there were men pure-hearted and noble-minded, 
 whom an over-acuteness of moral sensibility may have 
 impelled into the ranks." Such an estimate represents 
 the general view of a fair-minded journalism, free enough 
 from partisan animosity to appreciate qualities inherent 
 in the man and the orator, if not able to indorse his doctrine. 
 
 He was now being heard on other than anti-slavery 
 topics, as is seen in brief reports of a discourse one Sunday 
 in Music Hall, Boston, on a Living and a Dead Christianity, 
 relating to the treatment of criminal and perishing classes 
 in society, delivered to three thousand listeners. A week 
 later he spoke on Temperance. On both occasions the 
 halls were crowded. *' Twenty years ago," he said, "you 
 had only to enter a hotel to see the character of an American 
 
DRED SCOTT DECISION REVIEWED 185 
 
 gentleman; now you had to go down stairs. Much had 
 been gained in twenty years; a drinking Hfe had come to 
 be looked upon with disgust, public opinion was the con- 
 troUing power in this country; — get the ideas right, and 
 the customs will follow." 
 
 On the 26th of May Phillips took up the Dred Scott 
 decision at the annual meeting of the New England Society. 
 
 When the Supreme Court lays down a Dred Scott decision 
 on the anvil of the American heart, we want an energy and 
 fixedness of purpose in that heart which shall shape it into 
 a tool that will pierce the very heart of the Union. In 1789 
 the Government was launched with the whole territory 
 free. At that same moment the devil hovered over Charles- 
 ton and dropped a few cotton seeds into the soil. Presto! 
 sixty years and the cotton seeds have annihilated the Con- 
 stitution, the Revolution, and everything else, and we are 
 nothing but a cotton-bag to-day. A generation rolled away 
 to 1819 and another struggle, and our fathers yielded up 
 half the territory for slavery, half for freedom. Another 
 struggle in 1852 — the whole territory for slavery! That 
 is the history of the Union. The South had not hardened 
 into despotism twenty years ago — was not certain of victory. 
 To-day the triumph of the Slave Power is written on the 
 forehead of the Government! and that is why the necessity 
 of the hour is revolution. There is the law made by the 
 Supreme Court, and the North bows to this final interpreter 
 of the Constitution. There is no course between submitting 
 and rebelling but to say to the people. You must be ready 
 for revolution. When they are ready, then you are ready 
 for the first attempt to carry that decision into effect by 
 refusing to submit to it. Convince Massachusetts men 
 that it is not law^ to which they are bowing — that it is 
 despotism, and they will not submit. Rebellion ! — it is 
 epidemic here. Hancock caught the disease and inoculated 
 
186 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 us all. Remove the state from pro-slavery influences and 
 you will see her true character. 
 
 On the following Fourth of July he uttered once more 
 his independent sentiments in a grove meeting, to the effect 
 that abolitionism, like the grove meeting, had no roof, 
 with no institution or party to serve — a John the Baptist 
 in the desert to awaken conscience and stir thought, to 
 make the North love liberty, to make a highway for the 
 future to walk over to triumph. 
 
 With these utterances there is also an abundance of 
 criticism bestowed upon party leaders, from Banks in the 
 state to Wilson in Congress; but their usefulness is admitted, 
 and, despite their partial service, their education to higher 
 usefulness is hoped for. Furthermore, there is more than 
 a suspicion that the purpose which Phillips and his friends 
 had been labouring to accomplish might be effected, if at 
 all, by the imperfect, half-way measures of political action. 
 But not immediately. For in the call for a Northern dis- 
 union convention, issued four days later, July 8th, it was 
 printed: "From mere Politics there is little to be expected. 
 The Slave Power has always carried its measures and 
 always will. The attitude of Republican leaders is now 
 one of timidity and compromise, though the mass of voters 
 in many states is becoming more radically anti-slavery." 
 To create a united North was the chief hope and dependence. 
 Accordingly, three shades of opinion on the subject of 
 separation were appealed to: 1. Those who repudiate the 
 Constitution as essentially pro-slavery, and hence abjure 
 all union under it. %. Those who, not accepting this view 
 of it, believe that there can be no permanent union between 
 free and slave states. 3. Those who believe in the ultimate 
 
PARTY LEADERS CRITICIZED 187 
 
 triumph of Freedom, without disunion, and still approve 
 of agitation of the subject to strengthen and consolidate 
 the North! ^ 
 
 The customary First of August Emancipation Address 
 of Phillips was a skilful appeal for friends in a time 
 of need and discouragement from those who were pledged 
 for the long war — " between New England and the Caro- 
 linas." Massachusetts, he said, was not half so anti-slavery 
 as it pretended to be, and therefore all the greater sacrifice 
 and labour were demanded. He scored the inconsistency 
 of asking the slaveholder whose social position, wealth, 
 ease, and future consequence depended upon slavery to 
 obey an abstract, rigid rule of right when its advocates 
 were so reluctant in its service. Even the pulpit would be 
 beggared if it preached radical anti-slavery, and politics was 
 in fetters. Public opinion and Democracy were the worst 
 of tp-ants; commercial interest needed a resisting force of 
 fanaticism to keep it from dulling the heart of the Nation. 
 Therefore there was no rest ahead, and the day of agitation 
 would never close in clouds of purple and gold. 
 
 It was in this long speech that he turned aside to answer 
 the Unitarian clergymen who were "always pecking at him 
 because he was Orthodox." He did this by comparing 
 the free spirit displayed at a recent Yale Commencement 
 with the restraint at Harvard, which he attributed to its 
 affiliation with the commercial interests of Boston, and the 
 silence they imposed on anti-slavery sentiments was illus- 
 trated by the striking out from an oration an inoffensive 
 allusion to Kansas. Yale, too, had honoured Charles 
 
 iThis call was signed by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, WendeU Phillips, Daniel Mann, 
 William Lloyd Garrison, and F. W. Bird. The financial panic of 1857 prevented the holding 
 of the meeting. 
 
188 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Sumner with a degree before Harvard had remembered 
 her son and Senator. It was an ingenious and effective 
 method of getting even with "the cloud of Unitarians who 
 used to call him the one poor black sheep, the only one 
 to represent all the swelling Orthodox sects." In it, also, 
 as is to be observed in his recognition of the slaveholders' 
 position, he could make allowance for a class of men while 
 condemning the system which they inherited ; and though he 
 said that he "loved the pavement of his native city as Milton's 
 Mammon loved the golden pavement," his broad mind 
 admitted the virtues of the South and the West and particu- 
 larly of the Northwest, " where they are all young, and, as 
 Dr. Johnson said of Scotchmen, you might make something 
 of them if caught when young." 
 
 At the Yale Commencement to which he alludes he had 
 been invited to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration at so 
 late a moment that he could not accept unless permitted 
 to take for his theme, "The Scholar, in a Republic, Neces- 
 sarily an Agitator." Some thought it of doubtful propriety 
 to send for such a speaker where so many Southern men 
 were likely to be present, but a good opportunity was afforded 
 them to see the notorious abolitionist who had been often 
 exploited in their newspapers in terms more graphic than 
 classic. Nor was he sure to go beyond the license taken 
 by sundry recent orators, one of whom had defended duelling. 
 His own defence was of his chosen vocation — the Agitator's, 
 "whose purpose is to throw the gravest questions upon the 
 conscience and intellect of masses, because they are the 
 ultimate governors in a republic, and therefore should be 
 educated by agitation up to the idea of national and universal 
 freedom. If the people do not rule it is because they are 
 
ADDRESS AT YALE 189 
 
 willing to have politicians rule instead. It is their indolence 
 which has allowed the Government to drift toward despotism. 
 This is the present danger in a country which is not homo- 
 geneous. One-half is seventeen hundred years behind the 
 times, where the faggot and tortures rule. Argument only 
 is found in an entirely Republican country, and its only 
 safety is in agitation, and distrust of politics." 
 
 Whatever doubts had been expressed about the fitness 
 of his topic, there were none with respect to the masterly 
 way in which he handled it. Reporters wrote to New York 
 and Boston journals : " His long practice has made him as 
 nearly perfect in the art of eloquence as any other living 
 man. We have never seen an audience charmed into a 
 more absolute attention than the one which listened for 
 an hour and a half. His eloquence has taken the town 
 by storm. Much as people had heard about him, they did 
 not anticipate so much pure oratory. He is undoubtedly 
 the most brilliant man thrown up to celebrity by the abolition 
 passion."^ 
 
 ^An aggrieved Tennesseean graduate protested in the Richmond Enquirer against Mr. 
 Phillips's extreme views and President Wolsey's moderate remarks; as also did a corres- 
 pondent of the Boston Courier the next week, when a similar oration was delivered by Phillips 
 at Brown University, whose former president, Wayland, had inclined to the South side of the 
 disturbing question. But the local press gave unstinted praise to the thought, diction, and 
 delivery. An outcome of the Yale oration was a letter to President Buchanan on his Kansas 
 policy by Professor Silliman and others, which was replied to by the President; to whom 
 a rejoinder was sent, signed by most of the Faculty of Yale and the principal clergymen of 
 New Haven. 
 
XVI 
 RECALL TO FIRST PRINCIPLES 
 
 (1858-1859) 
 
 EARLY in the year 1858 Phillips attempted to stir up 
 the flagging zeal and to rouse the failing courage of 
 Massachusetts abolitionists by recounting the victories 
 they had won. It had been recommended that they be 
 indicted, and a certain Governor had urged sending them 
 to prison. Instead, they came to the State House, where 
 they had obtained one by one everything they had ever 
 asked for in removing qualifications from universal freedom. 
 Now, they wanted Massachusetts to stand up for her rights 
 in Congress and to protect her representative on legal busi- 
 ness in South Carolina and to redress the wrong inflicted 
 on her Senator Sumner. 
 
 From sundry strictures made on the Republican party 
 it was plain that Phillips had little expectation that it would 
 follow his suggestions within the next twenty years, but the 
 thought of political action was growing more familiar to 
 him, and if it could be brought up to abolition standards 
 something might be done to produce a catastrophe. If it 
 could not uproot an institution, the North might be with- 
 drawn from support of slavery and responsibility for it. 
 But abolition by Congress, if it were possible, would be 
 
 190 
 
GROUNDS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT 191 
 
 preceded by disunion. Therefore, the main result must 
 have appeared to be hopelessly receding, and the slave 
 system to be intrenching itself in its strongholds. This 
 would have been still plainer if preparations which were 
 being made in its favour had been known to the North 
 as they were to the South. But just then Buchanan was 
 diverting attention by his message recommending the 
 admission of Kansas on the pro-slavery basis of the Lecomp- 
 ton constitution, which was " to put a final end to the slavery 
 agitation in Congress." This finality had been attempted 
 several times already, but never secured. It was not in 
 1820, nor again in 1850, and the last experiment in 1858 
 was far from quieting. 
 
 Before the month of January was over, the question of 
 politics Avas once more introduced into the counsels of the 
 old-time abolitionists. Some of the later accessions were 
 looking with hope toward the growing Republican organiza- 
 tion and its prospects for carrying the next presidential 
 election. But Phillips placed no dependence upon the new 
 party, nor did he wish his friends to be drawn into it, or 
 to be deluded by uncertain, half-way policies and methods. 
 He did not deny that a political movement might grow 
 out of their own; but other men should inaugurate it. Their 
 own mission was still to create public opinion, without which 
 all politics is vain. Therefore they must stick to the old 
 method — that alone could rightly attack the wrong-doing 
 of the whole country. Agitation, as preliminary to politics, 
 was their work. It was slow work, — perhaps for generations. 
 
 In all the darkness of their discouraging position three 
 faint possibilities had dimly outlined themselves, which 
 he stated more definitely in this speech than he had hitherto 
 
19^ WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 done. First, if in any corner of slave territory there should 
 be any considerable rising of slaves, it might inaugurate 
 some methods of emancipation. The institution that 
 sleeps on the edge of a volcano has doubtful permanence. 
 Second, if the South should stamp her iron heel on Kansas, 
 the Northwest might light the torch of war, as it was ready 
 to do twenty months before but for the timid counsels of 
 Republicans in the Fremont campaign. Third, when 
 the Northern people are educated to abolish slavery at all 
 hazards, and to construe the Constitution to suit themselves 
 and to defy it, they may abolish slavery in the Southern 
 states by a law of the Union violating all compromises and 
 judicial decisions. 
 
 Thus did this man, who had given his hours and his days 
 for twenty-three years to thinking and speaking on a mo- 
 mentous question, come at last within a few points of the 
 way in which it was finally settled four years later " by a 
 law of the Union" which repealed all compromises and 
 reversed judicial decisions instead of violating them. He 
 was also correct when, not knowing that civil war was immi- 
 nent, he admitted that this last alternative of overriding 
 the Constitution by the will of a reformed public was in 
 the natural course of things far away. It is furthermore 
 interesting to note that he and his friends either did not 
 anticipate or were unwilling to foresee, as contemporary 
 publicists did apprehend, that strife was brewing. If 
 Phillips had admitted this, as Calhoun and Clay and Webster 
 did, he would not have excluded the dire vision from the 
 manifold aspects of the question which he was continually 
 presenting. His non-resistant principles were not strong 
 enough to blind him, although his faith in moral suasion 
 
ENDURANCE AS A SPEAKER TESTED 103 
 
 was greater than his trust in poHtics or arms. As yet 
 his disunion sentiment did not contemplate anything beyond 
 peaceable separation. If it had included civil war, he 
 would doubtless have turned to some other method of aboli- 
 tion. If, however, freedom to the slave could not have been 
 secured without war, it is probable that he would have said, 
 Let it come. 
 
 An instance of the occasional variety which came into a 
 somewhat monotonous career, and of what he could endure 
 upon such occasions, is found in a visit to the town of Cort- 
 land, New York, in February, where he lectured on " Street 
 Life in Europe " on Saturday evening; on " Woman's Rights" 
 Sunday forenoon; "Toussaint I'Ouverture" in the after- 
 noon, and in the evening on "American Slavery." A 
 correspondent wrote: "Such an intellectual treat is rare, 
 at least, in the country." No doubt. It would have been 
 a great city that would have got so much out of him; but 
 trust a country town to exhaust a privilege, and a celebrity. 
 
 The anniversary of the Boston Massacre, considered as 
 the dawn of the Revolution, and observed by the town 
 for thirteen years as a precursor of the Fourth of July — 
 which took its place in 1783 — was revived in 1858 by 
 certain coloured persons in honour of the Negro, Crispus 
 Attucks, one of the first men to fall by British bullets on 
 the night of March 5, 1770. In front of the platform in 
 Faneuil Hall were displayed a number of relics and tokens 
 recalling the services and sufferings of several coloured men 
 in the War for Independence. An excellent occasion was 
 afforded for showing that the black race whose cause had 
 been espoused deserved some consideration on account 
 of what it had done for the freedom of white citizens. 
 
194 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Several spoke, among them Wendell Phillips. He reminded 
 his hearers of the difference between reading history and 
 making it ; between imagining • what one would have done 
 and springing out of common life and doing it; that though 
 Emerson had said the first gun heard round the world 
 was that of Concord, the 5th of March, 1770, was when 
 the Revolution begun with the populace, where revolution 
 always begins; with Crispus Attucks and his four com- 
 panions who fell in the affray that made the American 
 Revolution something besides talk. It was right to remem- 
 ber him, because the coloured man has but one thing to 
 remember in his life, that is, slavery. 
 
 There is no race that has not been enslaved at some period 
 — Saxon was the mark of slavery for five hundred years. 
 So of the Slav and the French race; and none of them 
 won freedom by their own sword. The coloured race is 
 the only one that has ever yet abolished slavery by the 
 sword — in St. Domingo. The villeinage of France and Eng- 
 land wore out; so may that of the South. As for his courage, 
 the black man may cite Africa's independence for two thou- 
 sand years; Egypt and the arts; St. Domingo with the 
 sword. In that company he may hold up his head. Or 
 nearer home; for the captain of a coloured company was 
 the ancestor' of the richest family in Boston, and was rescued 
 from imminent death by the devotion of his coloured 
 troops, who made it possible for that family to exist to-day. 
 They ought to be grateful. And John Hancock in giv- 
 ing a banner to coloured men recognized them as citizens 
 and soldiers. 
 
 The entire speech was an illustration of the varied re- 
 sources which the orator could bring into the service of his 
 
 ^The father of Abbott Lawrence. 
 
INTERPRETATION OF STATES RIGHTS 195 
 
 constant theme without tiresome repetition. No occasion 
 was too insignificant, no occurrence too trifling, no historical 
 incident too obscure to be made useful in setting forward 
 the work of his life. All the gales might blow and all the 
 zephyrs might breathe from every quarter in succession; 
 he made them drive or drift him on his steadfast course. 
 
 The doctrine of States Rights has commonly been sup- 
 posed to belong chiefly to the South. But Phillips found 
 a use for it that matched the extremest view of Southern 
 statesmen. This he set forth in a speech in New York 
 on a Resolution asserting that, "Whereas, a central des- 
 potism exists at Washington whose purpose is to uphold 
 and extend slavery; and Whereas, one of the readiest means 
 to resist it is the machinery of State Government; therefore, 
 Resolved, That we urge the Northern states to assume every 
 attribute of unlimited sovereignty for effectual resistance 
 to the Slave Power." It was turning the tables on the 
 time-honoured dogma of Southern politicians. They had 
 not supposed that it could be applied to the North. Its 
 perpetual theme was the Union and the Nation. All at 
 once this agitator had discovered that State Sovereignty 
 existed north of Mason and Dixon's line, and that the 
 Southern sword, which was always threatening to cleave 
 asunder the Union, had a double edge. This the South 
 had held over the united Nation from time to time; now 
 he attempts to put it into the grasp of the new Northern 
 party, which he admits is the prominent representative of 
 civil resistance to slavery; but which "commits the capital 
 mistake of letting the enemy choose when and how to fight, 
 which is half the battle." He appealed to the Northern 
 states to make their governments the refuge of liberty. 
 
196 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 and to use the loyalty of citizens to them, stronger than 
 the love of Union, to checkmate the Administration in its 
 support of slavery. 
 
 It is plain that a force was in the field which could not be 
 overlooked, however far short it came of his own uncom- 
 promising position outside of all political methods. In 
 all his speeches at this time the Republican party comes 
 in for his criticism, with occasional and partial commenda- 
 tion. However, he admitted that it was improving. He 
 was willing to acknowledge its moderate help in a sphere 
 outside his own, into which he did not intrude. 
 
 In the beginning of the year 1859, casting about for 
 some sign of progress in the movement for emancipation,^ 
 he notes the presence of insurrection in the air. It had been 
 talked for the last five years in whispers of dread or hope in 
 the South and the Southwest. The volcano and the earth- 
 quake were at work and they smelled the gas. Newspaper 
 articles were drifting toward the subject and, like the flight 
 of birds, it augured something that was coming. But, after 
 all, it was only a sign of the general unrest and disquiet — 
 one little flock prematurely dashing southward and ending 
 in the discomfiture of Harper's Ferry. Ossawattomie 
 Brown was not of the race of Toussaint I'Ouverture, 
 nor were the blacks of the whole South so easily unified 
 as in St. Domingo. The insurrection hope only showed 
 to what desperate straits the pioneers were driven in trying 
 to find a way out of the woods. A forest fire might make 
 a clearing, but what would have been left if it could have 
 swept from the Ohio River to the Gulf and from Mississippi 
 
 iJVlany Southerners, even, had cherished the idea of gradual emancipation ; Benton, for 
 instance. See Roosevelt's " Life of Benton." 
 
NO HOPE FROM INSURRECTION 197 
 
 to the sea! But he soon turned back to the better hope 
 of the people's educated conscience and the adjustments 
 of time. "There is not a Gibraltar rocky or fiery enough 
 to stand against the united public opinion of the American 
 people. They have acquiesced in bad measures enough 
 for the slave interest ; let them demand good ones for freedom 
 and the state will enact them with an Amen, and the Supreme 
 Court will cry ' Cuckoo ! ' " 
 
 On the 17th of February Phillips and others appeared 
 before the Committee on Federal Relations in the hall 
 of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts with a 
 petition asking for a law to prevent the recapture of fugitive 
 slaves. All made able arguments, each in his own dis- 
 tinctive manner. Phillips based his plea upon the traditions 
 of the State of Massachusetts, the first either in Europe or 
 America to abolish negro slavery immediately and uncon- 
 ditionally. Yet four hundred fugitives had fled from the 
 state within a few years. With regard to the constitu- 
 tionality of such a law, he cited Webster's early opinion 
 and Adams's in 1819, the Federalist and other authorities 
 to show on what unstable foundation the opposing provision 
 in the Constitution rested, and that the acquiescence of 
 the people is the surest sanction for a new enactment in a 
 state that was a sovereignty one hundred and fifty-seven 
 years before the Constitution was framed with its concessions 
 and compromises. "And as for the Supreme Court, re- 
 enact your law over its adverse decisions." 
 
 This movement received strong condemnation from at 
 least two of the principal journals in Boston, which pro- 
 tested that it " is wrong to our sister states, which 
 have a right to reclaim their property wherever found.'* 
 
198 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 And by a few votes the proposal was lost In the Legis- 
 lature. 
 
 Another speech on Education in Massachusetts is note- 
 worthy as containing no allusion to slavery. It is also an 
 instance of his versatility in discussion, itself marked by 
 breadth of view and illumined by learning. He did not 
 fail, however, to advocate another cause — the equal privi- 
 leges of women in state provision for education. Altogether 
 the address was good, but not comparable with the average 
 of his speeches. He lacked the stimulus of opposition 
 and of a great wrong to be righted. 
 
 Soon after, another example of his adaptation to the 
 spirit of any occasion was afforded in a fitting tribute to 
 the life and character of Charles F. Hovey, a Boston merchant 
 who had been a generous and steadfast friend in the common 
 cause. He possessed in a remarkable degree that quality 
 of independence of which his eulogist admiringly said: 
 "To be independent of the world, it has been well said, 
 is little. To differ, when reason bids, from our immediate 
 world, is the test of independence." This, it may be added, 
 was a cardinal point and one of the first principles in the 
 faith and practice of the band to which both belonged. 
 In one thing only were they all agreed — the abolition of 
 human slavery. How and where and by whom were ques- 
 tions about which there was great opportunity to differ, 
 because these ways and means had in them so much of 
 uncertainty and impracticability, improbability and impossi- 
 bility. According to newspaper reports of the May anni- 
 versary in New York this year, difference of opinion, tending 
 to general discouragement, and incidentally to criticism of 
 fellow- workers, prevailed more than ever. The very broad- 
 
REPROVES PUBLIC DRINKING 199 
 
 ening of the movement disquieted them because it could not 
 be kept within pristine Hmits. Each man had his own 
 theory and laboured to establish its soundness. All together 
 they had stirred up some antagonism to the inhuman system 
 in forty years — and about as much toward themselves — 
 possibly more, when it is remembered that the South hated 
 abolition more than the North disliked slavery, and often 
 sympathized with slaveholders. 
 
 There is, however, little token of discouragement revealed 
 in Phillips's speeches at this time. He admitted that the 
 political and religious world were still antagonistic; that a 
 gulf divided the abolitionist from the sympathy of his 
 countrymen. But there had been an immense growth in 
 public sentiment. " Men are ashamed of the word slavery, 
 and call the thing 1 )y softer names, as * economic subordina- 
 tion ' and ' unenlightened labour.' There is hope for a cause 
 when a certain man, who never allows his name to be mixed 
 up with a hopeless cause, permits himself to be a candidate 
 of the Republican party. In so far he was to be taken as 
 a good sign. Nevertheless, no clergyman or politician of 
 repute puts his foot upon an anti-slavery platform; and 
 the great Christian societies do not commit themselves as 
 yet. There are political movements for territorial purposes 
 and state purposes; but only one to take a state out of a 
 slave-system Union." At the close of this speech he pre- 
 sented a petition for signatures, asking the state to put an 
 end to slave-hunting in Massachusetts. 
 
 If in his college days Phillips had thrown a wet blanket 
 on the temperance movement, he had made frequent amends 
 since, but never so conspicuously as liy the open rebuke 
 in a letter to the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, the President 
 
200 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 of Harvard, and the company who did homage to Paul 
 Morphy, the chess player, at the Revere House. The first 
 is reminded that intoxication is the cause of three-fourths 
 of the crime which he is called to pass sentence upon. The 
 second is told that the untimely end of many students is 
 due to the use of intoxicants. "Yet I find you both at a 
 midnight revel, doing your utmost to give character to a 
 haunt which boasts its open and constant defiance to the 
 moral sense of the state, solemnly expressed in its statutes." 
 In a crescendo of accusation the letter arraigns two of the 
 principal dignitaries of law and learning for lending their 
 sanction to a custom and an interest which the Common- 
 wealth was trying to discourage. It could not be said 
 that the reformer confined his efforts to a single cause or 
 his rebukes to its adversaries far or near. Woman's position 
 and four sources of education — talk, literature, govern- 
 ment, and religion,— was the subject of a lecture delivered 
 before a church fraternity in September. Under these 
 topics several men and measures get comments that are 
 spicy and adorned with illustrations from history, biography, 
 and literature in the profusion which marked Phillips's 
 lectures even more than his speeches. But underneath 
 such an effort as this, at home and among his friends, the 
 same cause of humanity comes to the surface as he moves 
 on through historic incident, English law, Greek art and 
 letters, closing with Jilschines' words: " Beware, therefore, 
 Athenians, remembering that posterity will rejudge your 
 judgment, and that the character of a city is determined 
 by the character of the men it crowns." He had in mind 
 a statue of Daniel Webster recently erected — an honour 
 which the later policy of that statesman had greatly qualified. 
 
JOHN BROWN AND HARPER'S FERRY 201 
 
 not only in the speaker's estimation, but in that of recent 
 biographers, representing the changed views of the Com- 
 monwealth on a great issue. 
 
 Sundry journals intimated that Phillips was running low 
 for topics and resorting to criticism of persons instead of 
 institutions. The language used to denounce this criticism 
 appears to have been picked up in the gutter, and has long 
 since been discarded by respectable sheets. His sharp 
 invectives against specific features of slavery were turned 
 by his foes against himself, but lost their edge by their 
 added foulness. Therefore the man with the rapier was 
 not greatly harmed by the slingers of slime. Nor did they 
 have long to wait for a fresh topic to which he could turn 
 with the ready fulness of speech that characterized his 
 treatment of every important stage in the movement for 
 freedom. 
 
 The raid upon Harper's Ferry by John Brown and his 
 handful of comrades is now too well understood in its purpose, 
 and its immediate result too well known to need more than 
 passing mention. Its relation to greater events which folloAved 
 has given it an importance that has been repeatedly observed. 
 But, as in other critical junctures, it should be remembered 
 that the view-points to be taken must be the ones occupied 
 by the men of the time, and from the positions in which 
 they stood to the disturbing cause. They differed as 
 widely as the poles. Of them all it is only necessary here 
 to define Wendell Phillips's attitude. He made it clear In 
 a speech on the Lesson of the Hour, which he begged to 
 substitute for a lecture that he had been preparing on a 
 literary theme for the young men of Plymouth Church, 
 Brooklyn, a fortnight after the raid, 
 
202 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Its introductory thought was, confidence in the pubHc con- 
 science when the responsibihty of deciding a great question 
 is thrown upon it, after it has. been educated up to a high 
 moral plane; that education is the insurrection of ideas 
 toward the absolute essence of truth and right which lives in 
 the sight of God. 
 
 The natural result of this starting of ideas is like people 
 who get half awaked, and use the first weapons that lie at 
 hand. The element that John Brown has introduced into 
 American politics makes them crystallize into right and 
 wrong and marshal themselves on one side or the other. He 
 has revealed a new element in the Northern mind. It is 
 called madness. It will not be fifty years hence when it will 
 possess, not a small band of abolitionists, but the civilization 
 of the twentieth century. Free thought, in the long run, 
 strangles tyrants. This is not an insurrection of slaves. 
 Redemption will come from the interference of a wiser, higher, 
 and more advanced civilization. Its first cropping out is in 
 such a man as John Brown — his defeat the first step to some- 
 thing better. Your soldiers shot him, sixteen marines of 
 the Union, "the sincerest, bravest, most resolute man I ever 
 saw," says the Governor of Virginia, and the state has for him 
 nothing but a scaffold! His deed was the opening of the 
 sixth seal, the pouring out of the last vial but one on a corrupt 
 and giant institution. His act was not spoken of as it would 
 have been twenty years ago, but — " What a pity he did not 
 succeed." Sympathy was wide-spread. The American 
 people are beginning to be educated. Ideas strangle statutes. 
 What is fanaticism to-day will be a creed to-morrow. There 
 is hope everywhere. It is only the universal history. 
 
 "Right forever on the scaffold. Wrong forever on the throne ; 
 But that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown 
 Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own." 
 
 This address and the favour with which it was received 
 
PRESS COMMENT 203 
 
 caused much comment throughout the country. Southern 
 papers began to talk of Northern conservatives as cowed by 
 abohtionists and of disunion as inevitable. x411 at once the 
 agitator was getting an unexpected tribute from the accusa- 
 tion of his enemies. He had not insisted upon so much credit 
 for himself as the responsibility for the invasion of Virio-inia, 
 charged upon him by Southern journals. The hopeful tone 
 of his last utterance was having an immediate fulfilment. 
 Northern papers occasionally joined in the charge against 
 him of exciting insurrection, and extreme Southern presses 
 belched sheets of flame; but he turned this to account in the 
 Boston meeting for the relief of the Brown family when he 
 said, " Men say that he should have remembered that lead is 
 wasted in bullets, and is much better made into types. Well, 
 John Brow^n fired one gun, and has had the use of the press 
 to repeat its echoes for a fortnight." 
 
 To those who said that the result would not be worth the 
 sacrifice, he cited the example of the few farmers who flung 
 themselves against the phalanx of the British Government: 
 " It was the beginning of the end. Now and then some sub- 
 lime mad man strikes the hour of the centuries — and 
 posterity wonders at the blindness which could not see in it 
 the very hand of God himself." 
 
 Phillips did not appear at the meeting in Boston on the 
 day of the execution, Friday, December 2d, but the next day 
 he was in New York waiting to take charge of the body on its 
 way to North Elba, where its burial took place dn the 8th. 
 With the surviving members of the family before him and 
 with friends and neighbours who had gathered in the moun- 
 tain home Phillips, following Mr. McKim of Philadelphia, 
 said : 
 
204 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 How our admiring, loving wonder has grown, day by day, 
 as he has unfolded trait after trait of earnest, brave, tender. 
 Christian life. Your neighbour farmer went to tell the slaves 
 that there were still hearts and right arms ready and nerved 
 for their service. From this roof four, from a neighbouring 
 one two, to make up that score of heroes. He has abolished 
 slavery in Virginia. You may say this is too much. Men 
 walked Boston streets when night fell on Bunker Hill and 
 pitied Warren, saying: "Foolish man! Thrown away his 
 life! Why did n't he measure his means better ? " That night 
 George III. ceased to rule in New England. History will 
 date Virginia Emancipation from Harper's Ferry. John 
 Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system and has 
 proved that a slave state is only Fear in the mask of Despot- 
 ism, and men are trying to frame excuses for hanging an 
 honest, heroic man. Others have fought for themselves and 
 died for their own rights. This man died for a race in whose 
 blood he had no share. This hour was the flowering of fifty 
 years of single-hearted devotion. Could we have asked for 
 a nobler representative of the Christian North putting her 
 foot on the accursed system of slavery ? I do not believe it 
 will go down in blood. Ours is the age of thought. His 
 words are stronger than his rifles. They have changed the 
 thoughts of millions and will yet crush slavery itself. Stand- 
 ing here, let us thank God for a fuller faith and firmer hope. 
 
 The next Sunday Mr. Phillips spoke in Music Hall on the 
 Puritan Principle as illustrated by the life purpose of John 
 Brown. 
 
 Like the Puritans of two hundred years ago, the muskets 
 are on one side and the pikes on the other. He flings him- 
 self against the gigantic system which trembles under his 
 single arm. What does Virg-inia fear ? Conscience. She 
 stands on a volcano. Thought, the earthquake, is below her. 
 She erects a gibbet and says it is necessary. One man goes 
 
EULOGY 205 
 
 up from it to God with two hundred thousand broken fetters 
 in his hands and henceforth it is sacred forever. 
 
 The Puritans formed a state and achieved hberty for them- 
 selves and their posterity. John Brown goes a stride beyond 
 them and dies for a race that was not his own. They taught 
 him to trample wicked laws underfoot. He has taught us 
 to practise the same principle. "If the crisis becomes 
 sterner, meet it ! If the battle is closer, be true to my memory ! 
 Men say that my act was a failure. Prove that it was not by 
 showing a North ready to stand behind it. I am ready to 
 plunge into the chasm that opens in the forum; only show 
 yourselves ready to stand upon my grave. " 
 
 Foolhardiness ! was the exclamation with which many 
 concealed their admiration for the motive of a rash attempt, 
 often adding, "What a pity he did not succeed!" "Why 
 did he not take his victory and march away with it.^" 
 But a few months revealed a significance in the wild venture 
 which the mad prophet himself may have dimly foreseen, 
 cast, like the spectre of the Brocken, as a portentous shadow 
 of his heroic figure upon a gathering war-cloud, through 
 which swelled the chorus of advancing regiments — 
 
 "John Brown's Ijody lies mouldering in the grave. 
 But his soul goes marching on." 
 
 Among diverse judgments at the time and since, only 
 Phillips's has been given here, which is, of course, that 
 from his own perspective, and not that of the country at 
 large. 
 
 No question can be raised about John Brown's bravery, 
 sincerity, and general purpose to organize some sort of an 
 exodus of slaves out of bondage as peaceably as possible, 
 but effectively. He found at once that they were not 
 
206 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 inclined to second his quixotic attempt. Judged by standards 
 of law and order it was most culpable. The best way to 
 have shown him how futile it was might have been to let 
 him go on into the mountains as he proposed, and to see 
 how few would have joined him, and that his enterprise 
 was unappreciated and ridiculous. Instead, a frightened 
 state, recalling Turner's insurrection, conferred on him 
 the crown of martyrdom and gave him the success which he 
 would have lost in trying to carry out his plan. He was 
 thus saved from ignominious defeat by his natural enemies. 
 Later, men who would have scoffed at his wild scheme 
 in its failure remembered only the daring and the heroic 
 purpose which had survived his death, and were enshrined \ 
 in a war song that inspired them with a more reasonable 
 courage. So Virginia, building his scaffold, unwittingly 
 raised for him an Arch of Triumph. 
 
 The following are from the Blagden MSS.: 
 
 Norfolk, ^2d Nov., 1859. 
 Wendell Phillips, Esq. 
 
 Sir: Enclosed please find a lock of Old Jo^^n Brown's 
 hair who is to be executed on 2d Proximo. 
 
 A Slave Holder. 
 
 Charlestoivn, Va., 2d December, 1857. 
 I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes 
 of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with 
 Blood. I had, as I noiv think, vainly flattered myself that 
 without very much bloodshed it might be done. 
 
 On this envelope John Brown, the night before his 
 death, wrote the names of hotel and towns as directions for 
 
EULOGY 207 
 
 his wife to return home. He gave it to her. McKim 
 and I got it as our guide in going with her. 
 
 Wendell Phillips. 
 
 On an envelope inclosed in Mr. Phillips's letter was 
 written : 
 
 Mrs. John Brown, 
 
 Present. 
 American House, Troy. Get ticket to Morean Station, 
 Glens Falls, or go by Railroad by White Hall to Vergennes, 
 Vermont. 
 
XVII 
 WAR IMMINENT 
 
 (1860-1861) 
 
 THE attitude of Phillips and some of his comrades 
 when war clouds were gathering was of interest 
 to those who believed these men to be precipitators of 
 sectional strife. Agitators themselves had not failed to 
 observe that anti-slavery sentiment was spreading, if it 
 was not deepening under their peaceable efforts to inform 
 the public mind and to create antagonism to slavery. 
 At last this was getting to be strong enough to uphold 
 methods not sanctioned by themselves, although they might 
 prove more efficient than their own. The Republican party, 
 by advocating non-extension instead of abolition, had 
 discouraged some radicals and turned them from the polls 
 to the rifle. This, Phillips declared, was not the way to put 
 down slavery. "Give us the ballot-box and a church that 
 is Christian and an honest press and the people will cleanse 
 the nation."^ 
 
 Here was an instance of Phillips's steadfast faith in the 
 ideals of thirty years holding, and of patience and hope 
 for years to come, with some tolerance for those who could 
 not bide the delays of the time, and a qualified commendation 
 
 1" During the war the opposition to slavery, which originally had been abolitionist and 
 political, gradually permeated the whole Church and made the conflict a crusade for the 
 freedom of the slaves." — Hamilton's "Reconstruction Period," p. 461. 
 
 208 
 
BALLOTS RATHER THAN BULLETS 209 
 
 of the Republican party as "the twihght dawn of a better 
 day, whose sun was to be a radical abolitionist with lips 
 as unfettered as John Randolph's, an Arab in the United 
 States Senate with no President on his back." But there 
 was no open vision of strife, nor even in passages of rhetorical 
 fervor any presage of bloody conflict. It was in some 
 other Northern extremists' minds, and threats were made by 
 Southern fire-eaters ; but either from respect to the peaceable 
 doctrines of non-resistants, or fidelity to his own methods 
 of intellectual and moral suasion, addressing the head 
 and heart, Phillips sounded no note of war. The failure 
 of force at Harper's Ferry warranted silence, whatever 
 prophecies might be inwardly deduced from the influence 
 of this foray upon the Northern and Southern relations, 
 already strained and tense. Probably a remark made in 
 his speech in New York before the American Society's 
 meeting in May, 1860, reveals his real sentiment as in a 
 flash-light gleam, with the obscurity of irrelevance prevailing 
 on either side of it, when with reference to a previous speaker's 
 words he said, " I should be disposed to say with Mr. Brown- 
 ing: 
 
 "'Shout for the good sword's ring! 
 Shout for the thought still truer!' 
 
 I go for the sword; but I go for the thought which ploughs 
 deeper and lasts longer than the sw^ord-blade in a reading 
 and thinking Nation like ours." But with the rest of the 
 inhabitants of the land he had little thought of how far 
 the sword might go when once it was drawn. Just then 
 the Republican party was uppermost in his mind and also 
 Sew^ard, whose softening of the "irresistible conflict" idea 
 
210 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 in his Rochester speech two years before encouraged Phil- 
 lips to believe that the mission of abolitionists would not be 
 ended until mere restriction of slavery to its present bounds 
 should be supplemented by its total abolition ; since fertilizers 
 would prevent its hoped-for extinction on its old ground. 
 He believed that the Republican party had the heart of the 
 North behind it, and that it meant to strangle slavery as soon 
 as it could; but that it must not think that the slaveholder 
 or the abolitionist believed the lies it called speeches. " Jeffer- 
 son Davis and Mr. Mason were not listening to Seward's 
 real opinions when he said that John Brown was justly 
 hung. The South paid him the compliment of believing 
 that he lied. He must have other metal than that to draw 
 sixteen million of hearts." Presumptively, Seward was 
 to be the next President. 
 
 This partial overtaking of abolitionists by an anti-slavery 
 movement in politics was heavy on Phillips's mind, as is 
 evident in an address the next month, in Boston. His criti- 
 cism of Republicanism is repeated, and his assertion of its 
 shortcomings in not declaring its intention to attack American 
 slavery. With it he contrasted the thirty years' war of aboli- 
 tionists, despite which the Slave Power continued to have such 
 a hold on the Nation that no politician or party dared to 
 declare a purpose to overwhelm it. This speech was made 
 two weeks after the Chicago convention, in which Abraham 
 Lincoln passed William H. Seward on the third ballot 
 and was unanimously nominated as the Republican candi- 
 date for the next presidency. Phillips's attention was at 
 once turned to him and the platform of the party. Of 
 this he said, that with a few changes on the territorial ques- 
 tion Douglas might as well have stood upon it; and of 
 
CRITICISM OF POLITICAL ABOLITION 211 
 
 Lincoln, proclaimed to be the only man ca})able of uniting 
 the anti-slavery sentiment of the North, he had arrived 
 only at the point that he would favour the gradual abolition 
 of slavery in the District of Columbia when the slaveholders 
 asked for it! This represented the high- water mark of 
 Northern anti-slavery sentiment. Sumner and Wilson, the 
 best specimens, had never attacked the institution in its 
 strongholds. Therefore no reliance could be placed on 
 anything outside radical abolitionism. It would be better 
 to elect Douglas and let Lincoln and Seward agitate, free 
 from the restraints of office, and create a public sentiment 
 able to deal with the great question. As it happened, 
 the people said to Seward after he called John Brown a 
 felon and said that the worst of our states was better than 
 the best of Europe : You are not available ; we want a cleaner 
 man. "And they took Lincoln, an infinitely more hopeful 
 sign. His past is a blank. Seward's is not. He said what 
 he did not believe. Men are politically dead when they 
 whisper in Washington what they would not have heard 
 at home, and vice versa'"' 
 
 If Phillips had looked up Lincoln's record he would not 
 have found it much more promising. Before his election 
 he was not in favour of the unconditional repeal of the 
 Fugitive Slave Law; was not pledged against the admission 
 of any more slave states into the Union; nor of a new state 
 with slavery, if the people choose; nor against the prohibition 
 of the slave trade between different states. "Impliedly," 
 he said, " Lincoln was pledged to a belief in the right and 
 duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in all the territories. 
 This was a very mild, safe, and available political creed 
 in 1860. Northern Democrats might have swallowed it." 
 
212 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 But it was a red rag in Southern pastures, as was the Chicago 
 platform; and the candidate who stood upon it was a black 
 Republican, or a red one, according to the lights reflected 
 from different sections of an inflamed South. And there 
 were dire threats of what would happen if he were elected 
 in November. 
 
 On the seventh of that month Phillips spoke at length 
 upon the election of Abraham Lincoln the day before. 
 His opening sentence was characteristic: 
 
 If the telegraph speaks the truth, for the first time in our 
 history the slave has chosen a President of the United States. 
 We have passed the Rubicon, for Mr. Lincoln rules to-day 
 as much as he will after the 4th of March. It is the moral 
 effect of this victory, not anything which his administration 
 can or will do, that gives value to this success. Not an 
 abolitionist, hardly an anti-slavery man, Mr. Lincoln 
 consents to represent an anti-slavery idea. He is before 
 the curtain: John Brown behind it. A freedom-loving 
 Whig, to bring back the Government to where it stood in 
 1789, who does not believe that the Negro is his political 
 or social equal, nor that he should sit on juries, nor vote, 
 nor be considered a citizen. But this standard bearer is 
 enough gain for once. First the blade, then the ear, then 
 the full corn! His election is a milestone marking prog- 
 ress. There are hopes in growth. The Republican party 
 will be forced on to abolition, and to believe with Napoleon 
 that there is no power without justice. But for us, the 
 pioneers of a Christian future, it is for us to found a Capitol 
 whose corner-stone is Justice, and whose cap-stone is 
 Liberty, where One shall dwell who is no respecter of 
 persons, but hath made of one blood all Nations of the 
 earth to serve him. 
 
 The significance of this entire speech may be gathered 
 
BRIGHTER OUTLOOK 213 
 
 from these lines. It is hopeful and ungrudging. The new 
 party got all the praise it then deserved, and though its 
 proposals were below the orator's own advanced standard, 
 he believed that the people had reached the foot-hills and 
 were beginning to set their faces toward the mountain 
 tops. But not all of them, as he could see in his own neigh- 
 bourhood. For although the mass was turning, there 
 was the inevitable clashing and the desperate resistance 
 by those who could not all at once be moved from the 
 holdings of a lifetime. Proof of this was near at hand. 
 
 On the anniversary of John Brown's execution " a number 
 of young men unconnected with any organization " under- 
 took to hold a meeting in Tremont Temple, and had invited 
 leaders and representatives of anti-slavery societies to be 
 present and speak on the question, " How Can American 
 Slavery Be Abolished } " The account of a long and stormy 
 meeting may be given in a few words. It was broken up by 
 a mob, hissing and howling, jeering and interrupting, no 
 one able to utter five sentences, the police indisposed or 
 not caring to keep order, and finally commanded by the 
 Mayor to clear the hall after three and a half hours of pande- 
 monium. The orderly element adjourned to Joy Street 
 Church, where Mr. Phillips appeared as one of the speakers, 
 although his name does not appear in the account of what 
 he termed "the morning's convulsive spasm of mercenary 
 scoundrelism." H^ took up the mayoralty of Boston, 
 remarking; that abolitionists were accustomed to live without 
 government. With two exceptions there was not a city 
 north of Baltimore in which abolition meetings had not 
 been broken up. In regard to the main question, he was 
 in favour of all methods of abolishing slavery, but principally 
 
214 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 of free discussion. "Free speech is what we want and 
 what we will give." 
 
 His adhesion to this peaceable method of working out 
 a great reform cannot be observed too often. In all the 
 phases of political progress, or of sectional violence, he 
 held fast to the efficacy of ideas and ideals, presented without 
 fear or apprehension. His words were as strong and his 
 vision of sin as clear at first as now, and at last as in the 
 beginning, twenty-five years before. And, judging by the 
 way his speech was received in December, 1860, the broad- 
 cloth mob, for such it was, had not advanced much beyond 
 the malignancy of their fathers in 1835; it was more violent 
 than on the occasion of the Alton riot meeting. It cursed 
 negroes, cheered at mention of the Slave Power and slave states. 
 The best explanation of a seemingly retrograde movement, 
 in a generally forward one throughout the country just 
 after the election of Lincoln, must be found in the final 
 wrath of commercialism over its impending loss of Southern 
 trade. Like the demon in the gospel story, when it saw 
 the end coming it threw the possessed down, tore him, and 
 he wallowed, foaming. It pursued Phillips returning from 
 the Joy Street meeting by a side street, but finding him 
 guarded by a cordon of forty men, vented its wrath in yells 
 of execration. 
 
 A fortnight later Phillips addressed the late Theodore 
 Parker's congregation — as had been his frequent custom 
 since the death of their minister in Florence on the 
 10th of June — and upon whom he pronounced a fitting 
 eulogy, quoting Mr. Parker's words: "When I am fifty, 
 I will leave the pulpit and finish the great works I have 
 planned." 
 
EULOGY OF THEODORE PARKER 215 
 
 God ordained it so. He has gone to finish the great 
 works that he had planned — gone full of labours if not 
 years; "old in hours, for he lost no time." Of his theology 
 it is not for me to speak. Mine is the old faith of New 
 England. The lesson of his preaching was love: his 
 pulpit a live reality and no sham. His criticism not 
 so much censure as the creation of a nobler pattern, broad 
 as humanity, frank as truth, stern as justice, and loving as 
 Christ. 
 
 Other qualities were enumerated in terms that the eulo- 
 gist so well knew how to employ in portraying the character 
 of one who had served and sacrificed in the unpopular 
 cause. Despite differences of belief, the people had asked 
 Phillips to supply the pulpit when he could do so. On 
 the morning of Sunday, December 16th, he found policemen 
 stationed in the ante-rooms and a detachment in the hall, 
 in consequence of a rumour that the speaker was to be 
 mobbed and assaulted. Requesting the audience of thirty- 
 three hundred to abstain from expression of sympathy with 
 his sentiments by applause — hisses never troubled him — 
 he proceeded to speak on " Mobs and Education." He 
 characterized the recent mob as " made up of young rogues» 
 society snobs, rotten before they were ripe. Like the two 
 tailors who undertook to tear down the throne of George 
 the Third, calling themselves 'We the people of England,* 
 these are the House of Nobles whose leave we are to ask 
 before we speak. And the city government — small men 
 with not grasp enough for business and therefore with leisure 
 for politics, could not quell the mob which attempted to 
 silence men who were forcing this question of freedom 
 upon statesmen. To avoid such disorders in the future, 
 
216 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 plant in the heart of masses the conviction that the right 
 of free speech is sacred." 
 
 During the discourse the speaker was frequently interrupted 
 by hisses and clamour from the rear of the hall and upper 
 balcony; but these sounds died away before the masterly 
 eloquence to which the great assembly was compelled to 
 listen. But as Phillips left the building accompanied by 
 friends a crowd cried out, "There he is! Down Avith the 
 abolitionist! Bite his head off," etc., surging toward him. 
 His friends, aided by the police, finally forced the crowd 
 to give way and proceeded up Washington Street, followed 
 by a yelling and hissing mob until they reached the house 
 in Essex Street, where by the request of the deputy chief 
 of police the pursuers reluctantly dispersed. One of the 
 two hundred policemen who assisted in guarding Phillips 
 said that they were all needed to get him home alive through 
 a crowd of merchants' clerks whose interest and very living 
 compelled them to trample him down in the street. The 
 cotton trade was behind them in a city where, as one of 
 its clergymen said in the same month, " it had been a source 
 of pride that all might speak. Its halls are open to Senator 
 Toombs, Yancey, or Jefferson Davis. If men did not wish 
 to hear what they said, they remained at home; but if slavery 
 is discussed, the mob cries, Stop! When it strikes down the 
 right of free speech, it strikes down all of us and we are at 
 his mercy. But this one was composed of Boston gentlemen, 
 men of wealth, church members, a gray-haired deacon 
 among them, and a candidate for whom twenty thousand 
 people voted to put him in the Governor's chair." And 
 prominent journals endorsed the two mobs of December, 
 1860. It was the last argument of a weak cause, the desperate 
 
SECESSION TO END SLAVERY 217 
 
 upholding by force of a system which was tottering to its fall, 
 anticipating a final rally for its defence by armed states. 
 
 A month later Phillips again addressed a great congre- 
 gation in the same hall on the I^esson of the Hour. Reckon- 
 ing years as minutes, he said that the clock of the century 
 was striking twelve, and signs of dissolution were patent 
 to observers at home and abroad — in January, 1861, the 
 year of secession and rebellion. There were more lessons 
 than any one man could read or expound ; but the man 
 who had watched the Union for thirty years told what he 
 saw plainest, although he Avas the last to see or to predict 
 the worst, as he exclaimed: 
 
 The Lord reigneth, let the earth rejoice. The chain 
 which has held the slave system since 1787 is parted. Who 
 dreamed that success would come so soon ? South Caro- 
 lina flings her gauntlet at the feet of twenty-five millions 
 of people in defence of an idea. I would New England 
 could count one state as fearless among her six. The 
 mistake is in fancying there is more chance of saving slavery 
 outside than inside. Three states have followed her ex- 
 ample. If the rest of the slave states follow, the whole 
 merciless conspiracy of 1787 is ended. Before the Union 
 was formed nine out of ten were proud to be called aboli- 
 tionists, and Washington and Jefferson uttered anti-slavery 
 opinions for which they would be mobbed to-day in every 
 great city of the North. The best way to get rid of this evil 
 is not by the slow progress of Government jiatronage, which 
 the South has controlled for sixty years, but to let all connec- 
 tion with it be severed immediately and it will die for lack 
 of Northern support. The North pays for the plantation 
 patrol, and other expenses. Launch South Carolina out 
 and let her see if she can make the year's ends meet. Slavery 
 will drop to pieces by the competition of the century. That 
 
218 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 is what we mean by disunion! That is my coercion: 
 Southern pulpits commanding the Southern conscience; 
 Northern competition emptying its pockets; educated slaves 
 awaking its fears; Civilization and Christianity beckoning 
 the South into their sisterhood. 
 
 Such was Phillips's view of settling the question which 
 was dividing the Nation and states, disturbing sections 
 and neighbourhoods, creating feuds in families and alien- 
 ating friends. It was a method as good as any where 
 none could avail anything. Compromise had been the 
 sedative hitherto, and the leaders of the Republican party 
 were now desperately trying every form of it, knowing 
 that it was not a cure, but hoping to induce quiet until 
 they could be as high-handed as the Slave Power had 
 been for half a century. This oligarchy saw the inevitable 
 turn in control, and that its only assured dominion was by 
 itself and over its neighbours in its own domain. The day 
 of compromises was gone forever, because the South would 
 no longer accept them. In its coming kingdom of self- 
 sufficiency it had no use for a Northern partner whose sense 
 of justice and human rights was struggling with its commer- 
 cialism, and whose willingness to permit the existence of 
 slavery did not include its extension. 
 
 Therefore the lower states were seceding and trying to 
 draw the upper ones with them. Abolitionists began to 
 rejoice over the prospect of a Northern confederacy, freed 
 from longer responsibility for the protection and continuance 
 of a system of bondage — a republic made consistent 
 through the simple and peaceable process of sloughing off 
 a diseased section by its own choice. It seemed all at once 
 to be an unlooked-for solution of a question which had 
 
DISSOLUTION THREATENED 219 
 
 vexed anti-slavery people for years. There was no longer 
 need to withdraw Massachusetts and Ohio and the rest, 
 since they and all the Northern states were to be left in the 
 lurch. Slavery, to be sure, might be })rolonged when the 
 growing Northern opposition to it could not attack the 
 slaveholding power in Congress; but it would die of starva- 
 tion and competition. So they reasoned and so they talked 
 and wrote for five months. 
 
 The next time Phillips spoke in public, on the first of 
 February, 1861, the disturbance in the galleries was so 
 great that for over an hour he could get only an occasional 
 sentence heard until the appearance of policemen secured 
 comparative quiet — that is, for an anti-slavery meeting. 
 The most noteworthy remark made by him was, that "time 
 would bring South Carolina back into the Union a free 
 state. Economic reasons would bring her back when the 
 poison of slavery that causes a temporary convulsion is 
 gone." Its casting out he also expected would be by similar 
 reasons of profit or loss, not at present by any high moral 
 view of a long-standing system of injustice. " How could 
 South Carolina be expected to take higher views than 
 Massachusetts, which was then considering a repeal of 
 her Personal Liberty Bill as interfering with th6 working 
 of the Fugitive Slave Law ? " This concession to the Slave 
 Power Phillips opposed in a long argument before a legis- 
 lative committee as late as the 29th of January. It was one 
 of a number of propitiatory offerings after secession had 
 begun, to keep the integrity of the Union on any terms. 
 The Personal Liberty Bill had greatly offended the South 
 and had hastened disruption. It provided that the Supreme 
 Court might command that whoever holds a person in 
 
220 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 custody should come before the court and tell why he holds 
 him. If the arrest was illegal, he should be discharged; if 
 facts were disputed, a jury would be summoned. This was 
 well enough for a white man, but it might interfere with catch- 
 ing a fugitive slave. Accordingly, Massachusetts on the eve of 
 secession was holding out a repeal of habeas corpus in black 
 letter to bait back disgruntled pursuers of runaway slaves, 
 who, however, were now scorning the proffered concession. 
 
 The argument which Phillips made before the legislative 
 committee, crowded as it is with legal and historical lore, 
 is another instance showing to what eminence he might 
 have attained, and what he surrendered for the cause he 
 had chosen to champion. If not more than an agitator, he 
 could be something besides an abolition orator. 
 
 His optimism, which had prevailed in varying degrees 
 through twenty-five years of slow advance, was strong and 
 encouraging a fortnight before Lincoln's inauguration, 
 when in an address to four thousand people crowding 
 Music Hall to overflowing, he asked: 
 
 Why is the present hour sunshine ? Because, for the 
 first time in our history, we have a North, asserting and 
 claiming, no longer cheating and buying. Out of the pop- 
 ular heart is growing a Constitution which will supersede 
 the on:; made in 1787. The North elects the President, 
 the South secedes. Despite the danger of compromise 
 and the belief that disunion is ruin, twenty millions of 
 people are loyal to the idea of justice to a dependent, helpless, 
 hated race. Notwithstanding mobs in every Northern city, 
 no man wishes to be charged with a willingness to extend 
 slavery. Now the North is willing to compromise to gain 
 time; but that delays emancipation. A thousand slaves 
 are born each day. Hurry emancipation three years and 
 
LINCOLN'S OVERTURES TO THE SOUTH 221 
 
 you raise a million into freedom. Delay risks insurrection 
 — the worst door at which freedom can enter. The ballot 
 should supersede the bullet. Let there be a peaceful solu- 
 tion of this question. But war is no more sickening than a 
 hundred and fifty years of slavery. With the Union ended 
 we part friends, and the South no longer hates the North. 
 Laws of trade will bind them together as they do other 
 lands, and disunion could not make them any more at war 
 than they are now. The South cannot make war on any 
 one; they will have enough to attend to at home, and slave 
 states will soon be fewer. Disunion is honour and profit. 
 Why then offer the South a whole bundle of compromises 
 and beg her to condescend to indicate her preference ? 
 
 But the South was beyond offers of compromise. She 
 either saw the incidental delay for Northern purposes or 
 was too busy with the scheme of secession, upon which 
 some states were engaged in enlisting others, to pay attention 
 to Northern proposals for reconciliation. Nor had Phillips's 
 optimistic vision of peace a sound basis. The hope of 
 years was father to a prophecy which men less studious of 
 the times than he were not making;. Mr. Lincoln's inausf- 
 uration was at hand, and threats of his assassination were 
 heard, with plots that made necessary a change of route to 
 Washington and military surveillance of tha city on March 
 4th. And yet in the first paragraph of his inaugural address 
 the Republican President declared that he had "no purpose, 
 directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of 
 slavery in the states where it exists"; that he had no lawful 
 right or inclination to do so; and that he was elected with 
 this understanding. In the second paragraph he defended 
 the returning of fugitive slaves as a Constitutional obligation, 
 recommending care that free men be not surrendered as 
 
222 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 slaves. He spoke of disruption of the Union as formidably 
 attempted, but not to be lawfully accomplished without the 
 consent of all parties concerned. He asserted that resolves 
 and ordinances to secede are legally void and acts of violence 
 revolutionary or insurrectionary; that he should consider 
 the Union unbroken, and that it would defend and maintain 
 itself without bloodshed or violence unless it were forced 
 upon the National authority. Secession might be repeated 
 in a seceded section. Its central idea is the essence of 
 anarchy, the rule of the minority. Slavery is the only 
 substantial dispute, and would be worse after separation 
 than before. Aliens cannot make treaties easier than friends 
 can make laws. If two sections go to war, after much loss 
 on both sides and no gain on either, the identical questions 
 are again upon you. "In your hands, my dissatisfied 
 fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the monstrous issue 
 of civil war. You can have no conflict without yourselves 
 being the aggressors." 
 
 Lincoln did not refuse to see what was imminent; but his 
 vision did not penetrate far beyond Phillips's in these first 
 days of disturbance. He evidently thought of an evenly 
 matched strife and the old question unsettled in the end. 
 It was not easy to prophesy in the spring of 1861. Boasting 
 was easier when men were putting on the harness for a 
 three months' war. When they put it off after four years, 
 they had learned that it is as unsafe to boast as to predict. 
 The new President surveyed the entire country with sadness 
 and misgiving, but also with calm determination to stand 
 for the plainest rights of the Government, the letter of the 
 Constitution, and the integrity of the Union. Doubtful 
 questions might be settled later — slavery among them. 
 
XVIII 
 THE CULMINATION OF CONTROVERSY 
 
 (1861-1862) 
 
 IN FORTY days from the inauguration war had begun 
 by the attack upon Fort Sumter, April 12th. Three 
 days before, rumours of impending strife reached New 
 England. Phillips, lecturing in New Bedford on the eve- 
 ning of the ninth, commented on the tidings in these 
 words, which are at least consistent with his position for 
 a quarter of a century: 
 
 I am sorry that a gun should be fired at Fort Sumter 
 or from it. A series of states think that their peculiar insti- 
 tutions require a separate government. They have a right 
 to decide that question. Standing with the principles of 
 '76 behind us, who can deny them the right, and what good 
 to deny it ^ Years hence we shall have gone through a war, 
 spent millions, required the death of a hundred thousand 
 men, and be exactly where we are now. There is no longer 
 a Union. My proposition is: Go out, gentlemen: you are 
 welcome to your empire; take it. Let them try the experi- 
 ment. But there is another element in the problem: we 
 can then no longer extend to the black race in the South 
 our best sympathy and our best aid. 
 
 Furthermore he thought that the North would not endorse 
 such a war; that sympathy for the South would follow; that 
 
 223 
 
2^4 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 it could injure the North more than the North could harm 
 it; that provoking war was to bring about another compro- 
 mise, and that the end would be another Union under a 
 worse Constitution. Altogether there was not much to choose 
 between his outlook and the President's; and other prophets 
 saw no clearer through the war-cloud that was rising. 
 
 Twelve days later, and nine after the first shot was fired, 
 Phillips addressed four thousand people in Music Hall, 
 where he was still occupying the place left vacant by the 
 death of Theodore Parker. In these few days his position 
 on the question of armed conflict to which he had always 
 closed his eyes was materially changed. For the first time 
 he was with the majority and the majority was with him. 
 Together they had been swept into a solid phalanx by the 
 cannon blast from Charleston. Throughout the North the 
 uprising was as general as it was unlooked for; volunteers 
 were assembling by thousands, and three hundred millions 
 of dollars had been offered to the Government. 
 
 It was a question of curiosity or concern to his fellow-citi- 
 zens how Wendell Phillips would meet the flood of popular 
 excitement. Would it move him from the rock on which he 
 had stood for a quarter of a century ? Would he be sur- 
 prised and a little disturbed by the sudden throwing down 
 of the barriers that had kept back accumulating waters? 
 Could he keep ahead of the wild rush and direct its course ? 
 These and other questions, thousands flocked to hear 
 answered on that Sunday morning of April 21st, and other 
 thousands more who could not be admitted to the hall. 
 
 Many times this winter, here and elsewhere, I have coun- 
 selled peace — urged the expediency of acknowledging a 
 Southern confederacy, and the peaceful separation of these 
 
PHILLIPS ACCEPTS THE SITUATION ^25 
 
 thirty-four states. It has been announced that I come here 
 to retract those opinions. No, not one of them! I need 
 them ail, every word I have spoken this winter — every act of 
 twenty-five years of my Hfe, to make the welcome I give this 
 war hearty and hot. The only mistake I have made was 
 in supposing Massachusetts wholly choked with cotton dust 
 and cankered with gold. The South thought our patience 
 and willingness for peace were cowardice; to-day shows the 
 mistake. Any man who loves either liberty or manhood 
 must rejoice at such an hour. The anti-slavery enterprise 
 started with peace written on its banner, believing that the 
 age of ideas had come; that if statesmen would devote them- 
 selves to a great issue it might be accomplished. Our mis- 
 take was in counting too much on their wisdom and on the 
 intelligence of the masses. It is the nineteenth century in the 
 North; the fourteenth in the South, baron and serf, noble 
 and slave. The struggle is between barbarism and civiliza- 
 tion, to be settled only by arms. The war is not aggressive, 
 but defensive. For thirty years the North has exhausted 
 conciliation and compromise, has left the helm of govern- 
 ment to the Southern states. It offered in vain to meet in 
 convention the sister states and manage the terms of peace- 
 ful separation. The South knew that the Government could 
 not acknowledge secession. It is revolutionary. The Nation 
 offered in convention to meet the question. It was declined; 
 an evidence of intention to provoke war. Let it be short and 
 thorough. We are to rebuild the Union down to the Gulf. 
 War means one of two things — Emancipation or Disunion. 
 Establish Justice and secure Liberty. It is Freedom against 
 Slavery. 
 
 In this address there was no indication of veering from his 
 course toward emancipation, steadily pursued for twenty-five 
 years. The only change was in accepting the arbitrament of 
 war for the persuasive methods which he had vainly hoped 
 would prevail in some far future when the educated conscience 
 
V 
 
 226 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 of the majority should vote slavery out of the Union, with 
 or without compensation to slaveholders. Plans could 
 not be clear with the day of deliverance so remote. These 
 he trusted to the coming time. The present duty had been 
 to create the right sentiment, and much had been done; but 
 all at once, before the people were half convinced or converted, 
 they had started up with one accord and were marching an 
 armed host to defend the integrity of the Nation; but in a 
 direction and possibly with a half-formed purpose that 
 together made the perpetuity of African bondage in the South 
 extremely uncertain. Therefore the agitator said, "If it is 
 to be swept away by war instead of peaceful methods, let the 
 shortness of the process and the early coming of the kingdom 
 of righteousness compensate for the violence of the means." 
 Speedy amputation might be surer than slow and unwhole- 
 some absorption. Nor was there any note of regret that the 
 credit of victory was likely to pass to those who had arrived 
 at the eleventh hour to carry by force what milder methods 
 had not more than begun to accomplish. Instead, he fell 
 in with the new movement and did what he could to shape 
 its direction and add to its efficiency. This work, tributary 
 to his constant purpose, gives a new phase to his future utter- 
 ances, which are as independent in their criticism of policies 
 and politics as in the days when he stood alone or with a 
 forlorn hope against the sentiment of the entire country. 
 And it was sometimes as unpopular and dangerous to disagree 
 with the new fervour as with the old prejudice. But in this 
 address of April 21st, the multitude was with him, and the 
 mob outside that threatened his life three months before now 
 wanted to draw him home in triumph. Nevertheless, 
 Boston papers, having a full report of the address, did not 
 
A PUBLIC CENSOR 227 
 
 publish it. An extra edition of the Liberator containing it 
 was struck off and nearly sixteen thousand copies sold. The 
 press was waiting to be led by the people, who were for once 
 nearer in accord with the orator than ever before or even 
 afterward, at least for a long time. All had been uplifted as 
 by a tidal wave of patriotism, which soon swept printing 
 presses also to a higher level. 
 
 There was no attempt at reticence in the Southern press. 
 Virginia papers spoke of besotted fanatics, including now the 
 entire North, bloody and brutal abolitionists desecrating her 
 sacred soil, who were to be welcomed with bullets and 
 bayonets as a horde of thieves, robbers, and assassins. In 
 Tennessee journals. Northerners were a rabble of vagabonds 
 and cut-throats, mercenaries and murderers. In Louisiana, 
 a greater sanity was shown in admitting disappointment of 
 the expectation that a conservative element in the North and 
 West would overwhelm the Administration and extend aid 
 and succour to the South, or at least decline to take up arms 
 for the Government. Jefferson Davis fell into a similar 
 strain when he told the citizens of Richmond, June 1st: "To 
 the enemy we leave the base acts of the assassin and incen- 
 diary; to them we leave it to insult helpless women; to us 
 belongs vengeance upon men." Wise and Wigfall dis- 
 coursed with equal truth and valour, assuring the crowd that 
 a Yankee would never face cold steel, and that genuine cour- 
 age was a Southern monoply. And Beauregard's fling, in 
 his proclamation on June 5th, was the charge that "Beauty 
 and Booty was the war-cry of the abolition hosts"; all of 
 which was the bluster, bravado, and falsehood of apprehen- 
 sive Southerners. 
 
 With his inflexible and advanced ideas, Phillips found 
 
228 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 much to criticize in the conduct of affairs, and on the Fourth 
 of July, 1861, he took up the role of public censor once more. 
 Events, not men, were the objects of interest. These events 
 were brought about by the masses rather than by statesmen. 
 Seward, in his opinion, was not honest enough, Lincoln not 
 bold enough, and there was no statesmenship anywhere in 
 the sense of understanding the times. He had advocated 
 disunion as a peaceable method of freeing the North from the 
 guilt of slavery and of planting in the South the seeds of 
 emancipation, but no man should flatter himself that he can 
 mould the world exactly in his method. 
 
 Discussion is over; war has begun. The South has pre- 
 ferred bullets to debate, which I shovdd have chosen. I bow 
 to the masses and welcome emancipation by war. The South, 
 in its ruling elements at least, is in earnest. The North is 
 only awake, not yet in earnest, groping its way, like the 
 Administration, saying, What shall I do ? but proposes 
 nothing. It should scan the cause of the disease, and indi- 
 cate the remedy. iVssure that half of the South who would 
 be rid of slavery that the Nation will shield them from ruin, 
 free the slaves, and success is sure. War is a stain on the 
 country if it means only the Union as it was. The Govern- 
 ment is not strong enough to announce emancipation now; 
 but let it declare its purpose not to propitiate the Slave Power 
 and to secure liberty. Shut the Administration up to its 
 duty of emancipation. Give it sympathy and all the con- 
 fidence you can. It means Union at present and is willing 
 to mean anything now. Change the Republic from hypocrisy 
 to honour. Point your muskets at the Slave Power. Shame 
 England. Help Lincoln. In five years the slaves will be free. 
 
 Phillips continued his criticism after the first battle. The 
 Bull Run blunder and disaster, murder and butchery was in 
 all minds. He scored the Administration. 
 
THE ABOLITION ISSUE APPEARS IN WAR 229 
 
 The Government deserved to be defeated. Its half-wav 
 measures, its traitor subordinates in every department of the 
 Capitol furnishing information and aid to the enemy, delay- 
 ing emancipation — the only way out of the war and the only 
 refuge for the future, demanded by the North because 
 Slavery is the kernel of this dispute — all this is to be ordered 
 anew. The blacks not to be returned to bondaire, but 
 received within army lines and armed. ^ Public offices to be 
 cleared of men who have refused to take the oath of alleo-iance. 
 hoping for the defeat of Union soldiers, making duplicates of 
 plans for rebels to inspect — what is such a campaign but 
 sending regiments to be butchered. Let the Government 
 dare to give free rein to the ardour of the people and strike 
 at the cause of rebellion by protecting fugitives and freeing 
 the slaves. 
 
 Within five months from the opening of the strife the lead- 
 ing journals of the North were voicing a general conviction 
 that there ought to be a definite purpose rather than a 
 divided policy. Compromise, concession, and strict observ- 
 ance of property-rights in the Negro had failed to have a 
 modifying influence on Southern war policy. Instances of 
 rebel barbarity worthy of aboriginal savages were reported 
 in letters and reprinted in newspapers, convincing pro- 
 slavery or indifferent people in the North that the Slave Power 
 was more earnest than chivalrous -^— an opinion which at 
 length began to possess the composite brain of a mixed 
 ^Administration, but not entirely or immediately. Southern 
 leaders fired soldiers' hearts with the duty of striking for the 
 sanctity of their homes, as if there were any need of it, and the 
 safety of wives and children, not much mentioning their slave 
 interest; while the Northern leaders held up a Union of all 
 
 ^Twelve or fifteen thousand Negroes were already employed by the Confederates in throwing 
 up intrenchments and digging trenches. 
 
230 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 sorts of states and a National Government to be kept intact. 
 Both sides said little about four million blacks who had been 
 the irresponsible occasion of a growing alienation, culminat- 
 ing in fratricidal war/ Gradually this disturbing cause was 
 coming to be recognized, and the opinion to prevail that it 
 must be removed. Abolitionists had always insisted upon it; 
 and now in the first year of the war influential journals in the 
 chief cities were telling the Government what the better por- 
 tion of the North had concluded ought to be done: Strike 
 down slavery and the Union will take care of itself when the 
 disintegrating canker is removed. But the President, bent 
 as he was on the suppression of the rebellion, had not begun 
 to entertain this measure as tributary to his purpose. Peti- 
 tions were circulating in Middle and Western states as early 
 as August that he would proclaim abolition under war power. 
 Fremont in Missouri had declared slaves of the enemy free, 
 for which, however, he was rebuked by Lincoln, but justified 
 by his later action; and Marshal McDowell of Kansas was 
 instructed to execute the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law. 
 If Lincoln was moving in the same direction as the Nation, 
 it was slowly and in the rear of press and people. He was 
 still careful of slaveholding interests in September, 1861, as 
 was Congress. 
 
 As early as May, General Butler at Hampton had interro- 
 gated three Negroes who had entered his camp, and deciding 
 that they were what their rebel master claimed — his prop- 
 erty — confiscated them as "contraband of war." By 
 the 30th of July he had nine hundred more of them on his 
 
 i"The Negro was the cause of the war and the subject of three amendments to the Con- 
 stitution." — Thorpe's "History of North America," p. 405. "The cause of the great War 
 of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery." — " Personal 
 Memoirs of U. S. Grant," p. 659. See also Chadwick's Causes of the Civil War, "American 
 Nation," xix. 
 
PHILLIPS ON THE WAR 231 
 
 hands, when he applied to the War Department for further 
 instructions. 
 
 Twenty daj^s before the able-bodied had been set to work 
 upon military works of the army at $10 per month with rations 
 and clothes, and had become heirs to American citizenship 
 and all its chartered rights without all of its privileges. Eman- 
 cipation had begun in the army as a war measure before it 
 was proclaimed at the Capitol.^ There, property in slaves 
 was still regarded as Aiore sacred than in cattle and provisions. 
 The domestic institution was kept out of sight while war was 
 discussed. Putting down a rebellion was considered more 
 than the conditions of a perpetual peace. It was the first 
 thing to be done. 
 
 Meantime there was one more outcry against abolitionists 
 as enemies of the Government, dissatisfied grumblers, and 
 obstructionists, or as prodders of the Administration. In 
 turn, they regarded spurring as their special duty. 
 
 There was little bitterness in Phillips's address on The 
 War before the Mercantile Library Association of Boston 
 on the 27th of November. As a mere abolitionist his inter- 
 est in the war had ceased, for slavery had received its death 
 wound, and the rest of its life would be a process of dying. 
 Whether conc|uest or compromise ensued, the slave would 
 go free and there would be a peace born of justice. iVbolish 
 slavery and save the Union. He had been a disunionist in 
 order to take nineteen states and consecrate them to justice. 
 He would rather take thirty-four. 
 
 Phillips closed his speaking for the fateful year of 1861 
 with a lecture at the Cooper Institute, New York, on the 
 
 ^See an article in the Atlantic Monthly, November, 1861, by the first superintendent of this 
 auxiliary labour, Edward L. Pierce. 
 
232 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 19th of December with The War for his subject. He came 
 upon the platform no longer as a despised abolitionist, but 
 as a national man above political creed and party, the cham- 
 pion of human rights and the advocate of whatever measures 
 would soonest secure their respect by the country at large. 
 At the opening of his address he recognized that the old 
 work of creating public opinion was over, and the time come 
 for making evident and intense the matured purpose of the 
 Nation that slavery as the cause of the war should be extermi- 
 nated; a result that would follow either one of two possible 
 issues of the strife. He did not accept war as the best solu- 
 tion, nor even as a good thing, except as compared with the 
 standing evil of the craven past. A debt of three billions of 
 dollars and a disbanded army were evils to be dreaded, with 
 tendencies toward unlimited domination at Washington. 
 
 The alternative is that the country remain as in the last 
 thirty years under Southern control. It means that some 
 three hundred thousand slaveholders befooling seven million 
 poor whites into being their tools shall dictate terms to mil- 
 lions more in the North, with our commerce and foreign 
 relations at the mercy of Southern demagogues. If the South 
 should emancipate, England would make haste to recognize 
 and help her. If we could have one hundred thousand blacks 
 we could cut the rebellion in halves. Congress has all 
 powers to carry on a war, despotic, if need be; power to root 
 up an evil which has culminated in rebellion. Let it abolish 
 slavery throughout the Union, with compensation to loyal 
 slaveholders. A Union fovmded upon justice, existing for 
 the liberty of all, is the only permanent Union. Democracy 
 accepts the struggle, confident that she has power to execute 
 her will, she sends her proclamation down to the Gulf — 
 Freedom to every man beneath the stars and death to every 
 institution that threatens the future of the Republic. 
 
ON THE ADMINISTRATION 233 
 
 Eight months' reflection on the kaleidoscopic shif tings of 
 events had not greatly changed Phillips's position. He 
 was an abolitionist still, but one who saw his teachings of 
 thirty years suddenly s})ringing up like seed that has waited 
 a generation for deep plowing to bring it to the surface soil. 
 He was talking disunion no longer because he was in good 
 hopes that the Union would come out of the war purged of 
 slavery. The country was moving toward his standard, 
 and while it loved to say that Mahomet was at last approach- 
 ing the mountain, the reverse was true; and the multitude 
 was drifting like clouds l^efore the "slow, unwilling winds" 
 to conclusions which were once regarded as the height of 
 wild fanaticism. The logic of events corresponded with 
 his word of prophecy. But the Administration was lagging 
 behind the people and holding them back.^ 
 
 This was Phillips's charge when he reviewed the nine 
 months of strife in the first week of 1862. 
 
 The Cabinet could explain why Sumter fell, and why 
 Norfolk Navy Yard and Harper's Ferry were lost, and why 
 the defeat at Manassas happened — through the timidity, 
 incapacity, and ill-timed ambition that has brought the eager 
 country into humilation and jeopardy. If the Nation sur- 
 vives, it is because the people are vital and sufficient for the 
 hour. The Government's purpose, so far as can be learned, 
 is to put back the Nation to 1789 and 1860, and save slavery. 
 The South so far has shown the better right to succeed and 
 more statesmanship, subsidizing every press and court in 
 Europe. She fights for her idea — slavery. Liberty is our 
 idea, and the Government is trying to tread on eggs without 
 breaking them. We must avoid war with England and 
 
 iPhillips's advanced position is recognized in a letter from George William Curtis, written 
 December 25: "If I differ from you, it is never at the bottom, but only on the top; and if 
 sometimes it seems to me that you want a law before you have the public opinion which 
 makes law valid and practicable, why — I am sometimes singularly mistaken." — Biagden MSS. 
 
234 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 servile insurrection. Say to Europe, We can manage this 
 quarrel. We can ask Congress to override this Cabinet, 
 to give it courage to blot out the disgrace of '61 and conquer 
 with better cannon than McClellan's. 
 
 In March Phillips started on a six weeks' lecturing tour 
 through Washington and westward. At the Capitol he 
 was graciously received by Mr. Lincoln and welcomed on 
 the floor of the Senate by the presiding officers of both Houses ; 
 speaking at the Smithsonian on Seizing the Opportunity. 
 At Philadelphia he was hissed, but at Cincinnati a paid crowd 
 of whiskey-filled ruffians made such a disturbance that the 
 papers of every party made haste to efface the stain of the 
 city's record for vulgar and dangerous demonstration. A 
 bottle of vitriol was left behind unthrown, but a paving-stone 
 from the third tier of boxes crashed among the footlights near 
 the speaker and rotten eggs decorated the platform. The 
 police had been told by the Mayor to keep away from the 
 expected scene. The speaker was not in the least disturbed, 
 and of his discourse, constantly interrupted, a leading paper 
 said : " It is due to him to say that his speech was inoffen- 
 sive in terms, dispassionate, argumentative, and patriotic. 
 The infuriate mob was stirred by the presentation of the 
 fact that the poor whites have been degraded and oppressed 
 to sustain the despotism by which they are debased." It 
 was himself more than his sentiments that the mob attacked. 
 In Chicago no attempt at disturbance was made, ample 
 police force being provided by the city on the two evenings 
 in which he lectured to the delight of decorous and appre- 
 ciative audiences, as also the}^ were in Madison and Mil- 
 waukee. It was the general impression throughout his 
 circuit that the orator had abandoned disunion sentiments 
 
LARGER VIEWS 235 
 
 and was now for the Union because it would cast out slavery 
 and also keep its own integrity. But sundry pro-slavery 
 sheets, West and East, kept up the old howl, as dogs do 
 after the object of their hate has passed by, turning to their 
 kennel with a growl at the remembrance of their foe. 
 
 By the 17th of April Mr. Phillips was speaking again in 
 Boston on Washington and the West. The day before, 
 the first step toward emancipation had been taken by the 
 abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia after twenty- 
 eight years of agitation. He had not expected to live to 
 see so much, and it gave him good hope that those in middle 
 life might see the whole continent free. "The bold word 
 that the President's message had spoken telling the South 
 that now was the time to sell slaves to him: he would buy 
 — v/as the first anti-slavery act of the Government. Enough 
 to accomplish in a year. He is appealing to the people. 
 How far may I go ? Answer him. The Gulf states want 
 slavery without the Union. The Border states want slavery 
 and the Union. The North wants Union without slavery. 
 You cannot save slavery and the Union. Support the 
 President; endorse Sumner and sa}^ Death to every insti- 
 tution that makes war upon the Republic and liberty to 
 every man under its flag." 
 
 The speaker's recent tour of Western states had enlarged 
 his vision and given him national views, which made preju- 
 dices and policies of his home city appear narrow and 
 timid, and its support of the war, while loyal, was without 
 enthusiasm and tempered by cautious conservatism. He 
 feared they were not moving now so fast as the slow Presi- 
 dent. He tried to move them to speed the Administration, 
 while they in turn were "looking back toward burning 
 
236 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Sodom to see if there were a possible chance of saving dry 
 goods and bad debts." 
 
 He spoke in New York next, declaring that the abolition 
 of slavery was a foregone conclusion through the military 
 action of the Government, which had already suspended 
 the Fugitive Slave Law and offered to buy slaves. The 
 heart of the people was set on emancipation and would 
 accomplish its purpose. The help of the blacks was needed 
 as a breakwater against the barbarism of the South. They 
 only ask justice; "use us to save your liberty." Everybody 
 in Washington looks forward to ten years of military des- 
 potism. Shorten the time. Hasten the Government in 
 order to save it, uphold and strengthen it in declaring 
 the liberty of a race." 
 
 The next day Phillips made another long speech in New 
 York in which he remarked that the Nation after a year had 
 discovered that this was a war and not a family quarrel 
 merely; that the anti-slavery movement had always held 
 that we were a civilized people and could lift the slave into 
 liberty without a drop of blood, but forgot that the North 
 was linked to a barbarous South. But the Nation is one, 
 though part of it is under military governors, in two camps, 
 one of which will go to the wall. 
 
 Two days after this speech was made Gen. David Hunter, 
 at Hilton Head, S. C, proclaimed, May 9th, that, "Slavery 
 and martial law being incompatible, the slaves in Georgia, 
 Florida, and South Carolina are therefore declared forever 
 free." Ten days later the President annulled this order 
 and held up to the rebellious states the offer of gradual 
 "abolishment" with compensation, urging them to accept 
 it as the change which would not wreck or ruin anything. 
 
MILITARY EMANCIPATION 237 
 
 Once more he told the army men to wait his time, and once 
 more begged the South to consider a last offer, thirteen 
 months after the firing upon Sumter, May 19, 18G2. But 
 in this appeal there was an intimation that it might be 
 indispensable to the maintenance of the Government to 
 follow the example set by commanders in the field, although 
 as Commander-in-chief he could not allow them to ante- 
 date him. He pulled ardent generals back and behind 
 him while he called to the Davis Cabinet, like an auctioneer, 
 ''Going, going," but before he said "gone!" he called for 
 three hundred thousand men in response to the suggestion 
 of nearly all the governors of the loyal states. But this 
 voice of the people President Lincoln waited for, as Phillips 
 said in his 11th of July address in closing Music Hall for 
 the summer. Remarking upon the time as the first real 
 trial of Democracy and the delay in decisive action, he 
 believed in the President's honesty and good intention; 
 but being what most presidents before him had been and 
 had to be — followers rather than leaders — he was 
 waiting for the demand of the masses to go forward. 
 These, in turn, had not quite made up their mind for 
 emancipation, but if he would proclaim it they would say. 
 Amen. And so between President and people the only 
 measure that could crush the rebellion and save the Union 
 was halting. 
 
 Meanwhile the same waiting policy kept a fine army 
 decimating itself by its own picks and spades until its training 
 in swamps and trenches should enable it to sustain a morti- 
 fying reverse instead of taking Richmond, all the while 
 refusing the help of the only men that could stand the 
 climate. The demand upon the Government to employ 
 
238 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 them soon began to be positive, and to admit this race among 
 the three hundred thousand recruits now called for/ 
 
 On the 26th of July the President issued his proclamation, 
 in accordance with an act of Congress approved nine days 
 before, entitled, "An act to suppress insurrection and to 
 punish treason or rebellion," — by seizing and confiscating 
 the property of rebels and freeing the slaves of such persons. 
 Fines, however, were to be levied upon other property than 
 slaves. By this proclamation. President Lincoln had pro- 
 vided for the emancipation of those bondmen only who were 
 held by rebels, and incidentally recognized slaves as no longer 
 property. But between the act of Congress and the welfare 
 of the country, the lives of loyal soldiers and the sentiment of 
 families all over the free states demanded such a proclama- 
 tion. The nation was pushing him forward. 
 
 Phillips voiced the impatience of the majority in his speech 
 of August 1st, when he said of the Administration's partial 
 emancipation act: 
 
 I do not think that the Government has any purpose to 
 get rid of slavery; only to end the war and save it. It is a 
 political war and its policy is to extend that clemency to the 
 South which they call cowardice. We all need courage to 
 use the weapon ready at our hands — a million negroes. 
 There are bright signs — when people begin to believe that 
 McClellan is made of mud and answers no question ; and that 
 Lincoln has no backbone and cannot say. No. Banks does 
 not know how to handle an army, but he would have pressed 
 it against something, and that is all it needed. With five 
 chances to enter Richmond he would not have sat down and 
 dug. AVhen the war makes us all over into men we shall 
 conquer. 
 
 lOn the difference of attitude toward slavery among army oflBcers see Henry Wilson's " Rise 
 and Fall of Slave Power," iii., 384. 
 
PARTIAL FREEDOM PROCLAIMED 239 
 
 On the 22d of August Lincoln, in reply to Greeley's 
 open letter, stated his position at that time: "If I could save 
 it [the Union] by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if 
 I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I 
 would also do that." But whether his ])reference was in the 
 order indicated cannot be said. Possibly the second and 
 third hypotheses should change places to make an orderly 
 climax — no freedom, partial freedom, complete freedom for 
 slaves. There was a significant sentence that followed: "I 
 shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear true views." 
 To find the truth and advisability of all the propositions 
 urged took time and caused the delay which made many 
 impatient. 
 
 By the 22d of September he showed that his mind 
 was moving on toward the crowning act of the war and 
 his own career, when he proclaimed freedom of the slaves in 
 states which should be in rebellion on the first day of January, 
 1863. Slow as his progress toward this war measure had 
 been, the country was surprised in different ways when it 
 was at last announced. Some rejoiced, many were doubtful, 
 and a strong minority cried out against it. The Confederates 
 went wild, and talked of retaliation under the black flag. 
 Its effects were seen later to justify the wisdom of the act. 
 
 It was as late as the 19th of November when Phillips spoke 
 on public affairs — at the opening of the Mercantile Library 
 Association Lecture Course. He did not dwell upon the 
 President's Proclamation, for a wonder, but instead insisted 
 upon the necessity of carrying Northern civilization into the 
 South. He believed in the President but not in his Cabinet, 
 who were not supporting him. He believed most of all in 
 planting the vacant slave states with schools, churches, 
 
240 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 primers, and sewing machines. "After long inaction what 
 is needed is a Cabinet, a General, and Confiscation." 
 
 It is plain that, as always, Phillips was looking forward 
 beyond the present to the future; beyond the war to recon- 
 struction. Like the halcyon day in February, he suggested 
 the coming hopes of April long before the stormy days of 
 winter had passed. Possibly, too, he was waiting for the 
 President's message, and to see what it would do with the 
 threat of emancipation before the recent proclamation should 
 go into effect. It held out one more offer of delaying emanci- 
 pation for thirty-seven years, or till 1900, with compensation 
 to slaveholders. From them there was no answer but that 
 of contemptuous rejection of all proposals. 
 
 Therefore by the terms of the Proclamation slavery went 
 out with the year 1862. The long protracted, "going,'* 
 became " gone. " But the institution lingered on till the end 
 of the war. 
 
XIX 
 REFLECTIONS ON GOVERNMENT POLICY 
 
 (1863-1865) 
 
 THE Emancipation Proclamation seemed to many of 
 Phillips's friends to announce the successful issue 
 of his labours for twenty-six years. He did not himself 
 regard it as a victory so completely won as to need no further 
 attention. On the first week of 1863 he spoke in Music Hall 
 to a crowded house, from which hundreds were turned 
 away who wished to hear how he would take the triumph 
 of his life. After reading the Proclamation he discoursed 
 for an hour on How to Make it Efficient. He called it 
 the retort of Freedom upon the onset of the slave system 
 against our nationality. The people had driven the 
 Government to abandon its policy of conciliation and 
 submission and to abolish an institution inconsistent with 
 the perpetuity of the Republic. With no slavery there 
 can be no disunion. But there must be vigilance and 
 work to secure the freedman his new liberty, lest it be 
 set aside by the next iVdministration. "To three millions 
 of slaves this Proclamation is sunlight, scattering the 
 despair of centuries, and the blessings of the poor bear it 
 up to the throne of God." 
 
 An even more enthusiastic audience of four or five thousand 
 intellectual people assembled in Cooper Institute on the 
 
 241 
 
g42 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 evening of January 22d in a howling storm, crowding the hall 
 to Its aisles and platform to hear Mr. Phillips say Amen to 
 the Proclamation. "It does not annihilate the system. 
 In the gospel the devils come back to the swept and 
 garnished chambers. Unless free institutions are put 
 in the South, the old order will return in some form. 
 Confiscate the lands and colonize them with Northern men 
 and schools, ploughshares and seeds. Send a new Govern- 
 ment there. Organize the South anew if you can have the 
 right leaders." 
 
 A week later, in Boston, he called attention to that minority 
 in the North which was industriously using every means to 
 restore the supremacy of the Southern states over the Nation. 
 He cited outbreaks in Harrisburg and Albany, the press in 
 some places opposing the Government, a threatened change 
 in the House and Senate to block the action of the Executive, 
 and beyond all, the Supreme Court and its possible adverse 
 decisions about war measures. In view of such possibilities 
 his hope was in a proclamation which, while it covered only 
 half the ground, planted the whole idea — that slavery is 
 incompatible with the safety of the Union. This idea would 
 grow and bear its own fruit. The future would reveal the 
 danger from treasonable pilots through which the country is 
 passing, which should be defeated by the Government assum- 
 ing control of the territory and using the blacks for its pur- 
 poses. It had made mistakes and they were all in the interest 
 of the South. The rebels had been treated as if they were 
 half right. Twenty thousand Negroes had been returned to 
 slavery since the war began. Two hundred thousand were 
 now to be armed by a Government at last in earnest, and 
 beginning to assert that there is but one power in the Nation 
 
"TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE" 243 
 
 — the North. PubHc opinion was to insist upon this, con- 
 gressmen to back the President. 
 
 General doubt prevailed with regard to the ability of the 
 blacks to be of much service to the Government, unless in 
 throwing up defences. Spades and shovels rather than 
 muskets were considered their only weapons. To disabuse 
 the popular mind of this prejudice Phillips began to repeat 
 the address on Toussaint I'Ouverture — a sketch made some 
 years before, which its author called "at once a biography 
 and an argument," a comparison and weighing of races, in 
 which he placed the black close by the side of the Saxon; an 
 unmixed black, his father stolen from Africa, who by the 
 testimony of enemies relating his achievements, accomplished 
 under adverse conditions results w^hich had been honourable 
 to Cromwell and Napoleon, with a spirit of noble generosity 
 which contrasts most favorably with the malignant jealousy 
 of Bonaparte. 
 
 This address, delivered in New York on the 11th of 
 March, was repeated in many Northern cities at a time when 
 public confidence in the Negro needed to be strengthened. 
 The question was arising, What can be done with four mil- 
 lion inhabitants who have inherited the traditions and received 
 the crushing treatment of their race for eight generations? 
 Was it safe and expedient to give them freedom and put 
 arms in their hands, to say nothing of the rights of citizen- 
 ship .^ It was not so easy to answer this confidently in 1863 
 as to-day, nor has the entire problem been solved after forty- 
 six years. But if the possibilities of a race are to be esti- 
 mated by the attainments of its best examples, the African 
 made a fair showing in the hands of his advocate and cham- 
 pion. The eulogy was received with delight and acclaim by 
 
244 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 thousands, and their confidence in the future of the Negro 
 during war time and after was amazingly strengthened. 
 As a piece of rhetorical art, the closing paragraphs of this 
 address have never been surpassed by anything which the 
 writer has had the fortune to hear, nor has the aspect of the 
 orator on that occasion been greatly dimmed by the subse- 
 quent years. It was a vision of lofty inspiration under 
 masterly control. And the assembled throng was powerless 
 except to thunder its applause.^ 
 
 Another instance of the readiness with which Phillips could 
 turn his attention to local needs was seen in his address on the 
 5th of May, when he spoke in Music Hall on the need of a 
 Metropolitan Police for Boston. The laws, he said, had 
 failed of execution when great and grave interests were 
 involved, and the city had failed to do its duty. Its officials 
 were a committee appointed by its grog shops. Restraining 
 laws on the sale of liquors had been enacted; the city did 
 not execute them, and three thousand shops were open, pro- 
 ducing poverty and crime. Every known vice was fostered 
 by drunkenness, and twenty-five thousand men were reduced 
 to poverty or relieved by the public every year. Shut up 
 the grog shops and throw a third of a million dollars into the 
 sea and the city would be better off. Free speech was not 
 protected. For five years he had been able to make a speech 
 in New York, with the unsolicited protection of the police, 
 which he could not make in Boston without being surrounded 
 by armed friends. 
 
 "Liquor shops are responsible for this. City officials are 
 their servile tools. Liquor dealers are on our juries and laws 
 are made of no effect. The Mayor cannot put down riots — 
 
 ^Printed ini the first voliimQ of Speeches, p. 468, 
 
ON THE STATE OF THE COUNTRY 245 
 
 when they do not wish to. Latimer, Sims, and Burns were 
 arrested illegally. The entire state has interests in this 
 city and ought to regulate its conduct. London and New 
 York have been saved by the states of which they are the chief 
 cities. Agitate! and we shall see the laws of Massachusetts 
 rule over Boston." 
 
 It looked as if Phillips was at last getting entangled in poli- 
 tics when he spoke before the Sixteenth Ward Republican 
 Association in New York on the 11th of May, 1863. But it 
 was in Cooper Institute, to a crowded audience, and on The 
 State of the Country — **a very respectable ward meeting," 
 as he remarked. The topic of the hour was broad and full 
 of interest. In this depressing time he asserted that he had 
 no doubt and no despair in this strife, which was, a part of 
 the great struggle between free and caste institutions the world 
 over. But the South rebelled against a divided North, which 
 surprised it by rallying for the Union and then for emancipa- 
 tion. He believed in the Northern conscience, in events, 
 in the tendency toward liberty and union. "Our leaders 
 have lacked earnestness — did not want to fight, and the 
 generals did not know how. There has been but one 
 general, and he a Democrat, who has dared to hang a rebel. 
 The President is hampered by half-hearted politicians. A 
 Massachusetts general mutinied, and Massachusetts senators 
 made him a brigadier-general.^ Lincoln may do anything 
 to save the Union. Let them put the blacks in the field before 
 the Rebels do it as their last chance to secure the assistance 
 of England. Never otherwise shall the North deserve 
 victory." 
 
 The war had been dragging wearily on for two years, 
 
 ^T. G. Stevenson. 
 
246 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 The return of Independence Day was not celebrated with 
 boisterous confidence as of old. The Republican experiment 
 was plainly on trial and many were beginning to doubt its 
 issue. Phillips at the usual Framingham gathering felt the 
 need of cheering the despondent in his address. 
 
 It is a day of hope. There is hope in the newly appointed 
 generals, sober, brave, and able, three qualities never before 
 united in the field. Thirty thousand black troops are now 
 under the flag, giving colour to an idea. Time has brought 
 round its revenges. Justice must conquer. Even the Cabi- 
 net cannot resist events. Iron in the current of Niagara is 
 tossed like a chip. Our second enemy is at Washington 
 arranging for the next election by saying that the Negro may 
 fight for us and work for us and afterward be kicked out, 
 and the whites enjoy what he has won. The New Zealand 
 chief said, " I have a clear title to this land, for I ate the former 
 proprietor." That is the compromise bid for the next 
 nomination to peace Democrats and half-awake Republicans 
 who would be glad of any way out of the strife. Negro- 
 phobia is the worst enemy the Union has, and a speech 
 recently made at Concord, N. H., aimed to keep it alive in 
 order to make a base and ungrateful use of it. General 
 Butler said, " Before I ask a Negro to fight for me he shall have 
 his rights." Remember that the people rule; let them have 
 the facts and checkmate the Cabinet. The next year will 
 decide whether this is a revolution or a political war. Hold 
 Lincoln to his pledge and discard this political bid for office. 
 
 Phillips was watching with tireless vigilance every scheme 
 that was alien or secondary to the main issue of a war for 
 liberty to all the inhabitants of the land. No speech was 
 made, no editorial of consequence printed, that he did not 
 measure by this standard. Nor were there any forms of 
 criticism or invective unused by this master of public speech. 
 
DENUNCIATIONS OF ABOLITIONISM 247 
 
 Men high in the Administration were scored as if they were 
 ward pohticians. A watchman on the citadel, he descried 
 the approach of danger afield and caught with quick ear 
 the whisperings of conspiracy beneath and within the walls. 
 The close of the year was marked by his address at Cooper 
 Institute on the danger of nullifying the President's 
 Proclamation by decisions of the Supreme Court, and on 
 its limited reach in declaring slaves free instead of abolishing 
 slavery as an institution. As beyond the possibility of its 
 return he would have an amendment to the Constitution 
 demanded by the people, providing that "no state shall 
 make any distinction among its citizens on account of 
 race or colour"; and, further, to provide the Negro 
 with land and education as the first steps toward good 
 citizenship, and, incidentally, the cotton crop would be trebled. 
 He was already looking forward to the problems of recon- 
 struction when the war was, in his opinion, but half over; 
 and with a prophet's vision he discerned the drift of events 
 and saw the channels through which the tide of affairs 
 must flow. Few men had their predictions more faithfully 
 fulfilled. Not all of them, to be sure, but enough to justify 
 him as a wise observer of the times. 
 
 On the first day of 1864 a Boston paper said: *'If ever 
 there was season of dire distress, it is now. Victory flutters 
 on our standard, but sorrow and gloom sit on the heart of 
 the people. As long as Negroes are the principal class for 
 whose interests the Government contends, so long will 
 public discontent continue. Abolitionism has ridden into 
 power and promises to enthrall all those true friends 
 of the Union who dare desert from its revolutionary doc- 
 trines." A Milwaukee paper asked, "Will the American 
 
248 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 people never give over their systematic worship of humbug 
 and look upon preachers and lecturers who seek to over- 
 throw the Union as moral monstrosities ? " A New York 
 journal charged them with "preserving the Union only 
 to help the Negroes," and an Albany sheet declared that 
 "Radical Abolitionism and Radical Democracy were of one 
 accord in denouncing the conduct of the war, but for differ- 
 ent reasons." Certainly the entire North was not in accord 
 with the agitator. 
 
 Phillips's view of affairs is clearly set forth in his speech 
 of January 25th, supporting resolutions to the effect that, 
 " In our opinion, the Government, in its haste, is ready to 
 sacrifice the interest and honour of the North to secure 
 a sham peace; risking the introduction into Congress of a 
 strong Confederate minority to embarrass legislation, and 
 leaving the freedmen and the Southern states under the 
 control of the late slaveholders, embittered by their defeat 
 in war, entailing feuds for another dozen years; and we 
 listen in vain to the Republican party or press for any 
 protest sufficient to avert the sacrifice. The Southern 
 quarrel is for aristocracy — it is a war of ideas. Let it be 
 ended by cannon, not politics. Overbearing pride expects 
 to govern if it comes back, not to cooperate. What will 
 become of the black men who have been tempted to the 
 unpardonable sin of helping the North ? Their technical 
 liberty is of little worth. Unless slavery and the aristocratic 
 element that gave it birth be rooted out the cause goes back- 
 ward. Let the rebel have anything the Nation can give him 
 in safety to itself." 
 
 Among the newspaper comments on the times, a 
 Hartford journal declared that a discussion between Phillips 
 
ENGLISH ATTITUDE 249 
 
 and Garrison on the merits of the Administration was con- 
 sidered of sufficient consequence to be telegraphed all over 
 the country, and added that the policy of the war was 
 shaped to suit the abolitionists. Doubtless this assertion 
 of their influence at Washington had more of truth than 
 other newspapers were willing to admit. Certain it is that 
 in the war years Phillips had interviews with the 
 President and conveyed to him his ideas of public ques- 
 tions without reserve. The difference between the two lead- 
 ers of abolition was small, Phillips contending that the 
 Administration was not moving so fast as popular opinion 
 and Garrison believing that it was. The temperament of 
 the two men was somewhat pessimistic and optimistic, 
 respectively; but there was no such radical disagreement 
 as sundry public sheets proclaimed. 
 
 A reception given to the old-time friend from England 
 on his third visit to this country, George Thompson — who 
 was the indirect cause of the " mob in broadcloth " of twenty- 
 nine years before — gave Phillips an opportunity to speak 
 of the English attitude toward this country, and particularly 
 of its opinion-making press. But Bright in Great Britain 
 and Grant here, he observed, were fast settling that opinion 
 right. Even the English abolitionists had sympathized 
 with the rebellion, having been taught by their American 
 co-workers that disunion meant the overthrow of slavery; 
 and they had not unlearned the lesson so fast as Ameri- 
 can agitators had discovered another way out of the difficulty. 
 Thompson could understand and explain this better after 
 his visit in 1864. 
 
 About this time a great miscegenation outcry had been 
 raised out of sundry " amalgamation-of-the-races " remarks 
 
250 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 by Phillips on the 4th of July in the year before. The whole 
 matter was best disposed of by the Boston JournaVs remark, 
 that it knew of no abolitionists who advocated it, but it 
 was widely practised in that portion of the Union where 
 an abolitionist, if caught, would be hung to the nearest tree. 
 
 In his review of the year at the annual meeting of the 
 American Society in Cooper Institute, Phillips remarked 
 upon the recent gain which once would have required a 
 quarter of a century to secure. The work had almost been 
 taken out of anti -slavery hands, and the laurel was worn by 
 a man whom the world believed was an abolitionist. The 
 President was moving but had not reached the goal; the 
 army was subjugating but not converting; Russia was the 
 only foreign power on our side; all Unionism was gone in 
 an exasperated but not conquered South; half every man's 
 income from capital was going to pay war expenses; and 
 the issue doubtful. Therefore he demanded of his fellows 
 to push on the Administration by the minority which always 
 rules in a Nation — as slavery had for seventy years. He 
 was not speaking for the rights of the Negro, who was linked 
 with the future and will share the country's fortunes. Alto- 
 gether he took a cheerful and hopeful view, believing that 
 the goal of universal freedom and equality would be reached. 
 
 A few days later he asserted that he had not an element 
 of despondency, but was as full of faith in God and Democ- 
 racy as ever, and believed that the North would eventually 
 give law down to the Gulf and make the South over in its 
 own image and establish not a seeming Union but a perfect 
 Republic. And then followed an example of that extrava- 
 gance of speech into which his personal preferences some- 
 times led him. "It would have been done already, if the 
 
LOOKING TOWARD RECONSTRUCTION 251 
 
 man who is asking to be reelected in November had not 
 lagged behind public opinion. If Fremont or Butler had 
 been at the head of affairs the rebellion would not have 
 lasted twelve months. The people panted to be allowed 
 to act while they submitted to the dull burden of McClellan 
 — and now the war is waged with a view to the next presi- 
 dential election. What does Mr. Lincoln mean to do in 
 the future? Let him build the State; give the black man a 
 vote, education, and land; look up to justice, to the rights 
 of every man under the law." 
 
 Meantime Lincoln was receiving commendation from 
 abroad and at home for his steady advance, though slow, 
 toward an abiding peace through complete victory, although 
 condemned by Copperhead leaders who nominated Mc- 
 Clellan; and maligned by rebels as a despot whose policy 
 had separated the Union into two nations essentially foreign. 
 
 After four months of silence, on the eve of the election, 
 October 20th, Phillips spoke in Tremont Temple on the 
 issues of the presidential campaign. Of the war he 
 said, that it was the death grapple of irreconcilable ideas 
 brought face to face in 1789, which had contended with 
 arguments and votes for weapons for seventy years, with 
 at last an appeal to arms by slavery; a struggle that would 
 go on until it or freedom should gain a complete victory, 
 how soon none could tell. The present question was to 
 see that the Nation reaped the greatest possible advantage 
 from the war and secured freedom forever for every one. 
 Lincoln's plan of reconstruction put all power into the 
 hands of the unchanged white race, making black free- 
 dom a sham, continuing the war at Washington after 
 it was over in the field. Lack of purpose had brought 
 
252 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 about a united South and a divided North; an aristocracy 
 versus a Democracy. 
 
 Leave a square inch of the slave system and we shall be 
 ruled as before. The South in '61 expected Northern 
 submission as usual; but the abolitionists by thirty 
 years of agitation have lifted the people to a higher level, 
 who clutched at the opportunity to reconstruct the 
 Union on an anti-slavery basis for permanence; and now 
 the fight is for Union and the liberty of the Negro. But 
 Mr. Lincoln's halting policy for the last four years is not to 
 be desired in the next four. Positive and vigorous in 
 everything else, he has been wavering on the slave question 
 and may be still tender toward the slaveholder and unjust 
 to the Negro. His emancipation act he knows might be 
 easily set aside by a Supreme Court. He will obey the 
 strongest if elected. Support any man who is resolved to 
 end this war so as to establish justice for all men of 
 every race. 
 
 It is plain that there was no candidate adapted to Phil- 
 lips's standard except Fremont, whose resignation from the 
 army to accept nomination the great agitator could not 
 approve, in view of the temper that his hero had at last 
 displayed, although with some justification. Moreover, his 
 criticism of Lincoln was regarded by Garrison as ill-timed 
 and unjust in representing the President in the worst light ; 
 damaging his chance of reelection, and tending to further 
 the schemes of the Copperheads. 
 
 Notwithstanding Phillips's strictures the President was 
 reelected, and in his message gave great encouragement to 
 the abolitionists by his avowal that he would not permit 
 the return of slavery in his administration. On the 31st of 
 January, 1865, the House concurred with the Senate in 
 
DISSOLUTION OF ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY 253 
 
 passing the amendment to the Constitution which abohshed 
 and prohibited slavery in every part of the Repubhc. 
 
 Although Phillips saw difficulties in the way of immediate 
 realization of a hope long deferred, he turned at once to the 
 coming question of reconstruction in his address before the 
 annual meeting of the Massachusetts Society, in which he 
 criticized the unfairness to the Negro in what he called 
 "Banks's Freedom" in the Louisiana plan of reconstruction, 
 with no liberty for the freedman to make a contract for his 
 own labour and the time and place of it. "This was not 
 liberty according to Northern interpretation. Freedmen 
 are not apprentices." 
 
 In view of the approaching fulfilment of their hopes and 
 labours for a generation there was some talk of dissolving the 
 Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society at its meeting on the 28th 
 of January, 1865. Garrison had prepared a resolution call- 
 ing a special meeting to commemorate the passage of the 
 abolition amendment to the Constitution after it should be 
 ratified, and then to terminate the Society's existence. Bron- 
 son x^lcott, in a short speech intended to be complimentary 
 but also discriminating, pointed out Phillips as the leader in 
 new methods, and that Garrison was falling behind the times. 
 This criticism called out protests from both men. But in 
 Garrison's the note of dissolution was given plainly in these 
 words : " AYhat do we want of an anti-slavery society when 
 there is no slavery in the country ? The thing is an absurdity. 
 There will be other w^ork to be done, but we shall unite with 
 great mass of the people in carrying forward the struggle for 
 equal political privileges." Phillips disclaimed any pleasure 
 in allusions to himself and Garrison as antagonists, and ac- 
 corded all praise to the pioneer w^ho had been the inspiration 
 
254 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 of the movement and was still its leader. He then called 
 attention to his view of the main question before the meeting: 
 The ballot for the Negro to be demanded of any rebel state 
 as the condition of its return to the Union. He wanted not 
 only emancipation but the ballot; and the anti-slavery body 
 to stand behind the weak Republican party. " We who have 
 given thirty years to the study of one question understand it 
 better than the converts of yesterday. Shall we now sit down 
 and trust everything to novices ? They may help or hinder 
 the great question of righting a race. Justice and absolute 
 equality before the law is the high-water level of American 
 politics and no Nation can be safe till its labouring class is 
 contented." 
 
 In the midst of continued advocacy of freedmen's rights he 
 could take up other issues, as when on the 8th of February he 
 appeared before a legislative committee to urge the enforce- 
 ment of the law against the sale of intoxicating drink, showing 
 how old such enactments were, and that the special tempta- 
 tion of country towns was strengthened by nearly two 
 thousand open places for the sale of liquors. "Hide their 
 sale and men are saved." In a different strain and an 
 example of his versatility was an address of welcome to Rev. 
 David A. Wasson on his becoming successor to Theodore 
 Parker. 
 
 April was to be filled with historic events for abolitionists 
 and the rest of the country. The fall of Richmond on the 3d ; 
 Garrison's sailing on the 8th as a guest of the Government to 
 be present at the re-raising of the flag at Fort Sumter on the 
 14th, four years from the day when Major Anderson was 
 compelled to lower it; the surrender of General Lee on the 
 9th; the last speech of the President discussing the questions 
 
TRIBUTE TO LINCOLN 255 
 
 of Reconstruction on the 11th, in which he expressed hopes 
 of a righteous and speedy peace, and announced the prepara- 
 tion of a call for a National Thanksgiving — which was 
 suddenly turned into a day of mourning by his assassination 
 on the evening of the 14th — these were more memoral)le 
 occurrences than had been crowded into any fortnight or 
 single year of American history. The chief event, however, 
 was the last of personal demonstrations in behalf of the 
 " domestic institution." The opening act of private hostility 
 was the cowardly assault upon a Senator; the final, the 
 greater cowardice of murdering a President. And all the 
 acts between were not entirely chivalrous. It was fitting 
 that Garrison should pronounce its doom, when, standing 
 by the tomb of Calhoun he said, " Slavery has gone 
 down into a deeper grave than this, and there is no resur- 
 rection for it."^ 
 
 Phillips was not among the notables who went to Charles- 
 ton. At the mass meeting in Tremont Temple, April 23d, 
 " to consider the great question of our country and its perils, " 
 he began by remarking that these were sober days when the 
 judgments of God have found us out. The sin of the Nation 
 had been passed by, but God had set it before the world in 
 
 ^What it cost to bury it may be noted here. In reply to an inquiry of the War Department 
 it is stated that " the whole number of deaths among officers and enlisted men as shown by 
 official records was 359,528. The actual number must be somewhat larger because many of 
 the records, especially those of Southern prisons, are far from complete. The wounded on 
 the Union side is estimated from surgical reports at 280,040, also below actual number. No 
 statement can be made concerning Confederate losses that would be at all reliable." Dated, 
 Washington, D.C., March 9, 1907. 
 
 From the careful and tnistworthy computations of Colonel Thomas L. Livermore in his 
 "Numbers and Losses in the Civil War," Boston, 1901, p. 63, the following summary is taken, 
 in abridged form: Number of enlistments in the Union army, 2,898,304; in the Confederate 
 army, 1,239,000. Killed and wounded in the Union army, 385,245; in the Confederate army, 
 329,000. A total of 714,245. 
 
 In reply to an inquiry of the Treasury Department as to the financial cost of the Civil War 
 the following was received: " In the year 1879 it was estimated, and reported to Congress, that 
 the expenditures then amounted approximately to $6,190,000,000. This sum has been 
 increased since that date by payments for pensions, interest on the Civil War debt, and for 
 miscellaneous charges and claims growing out of the war to approximately $10,000,000,000, 
 Dated January 4, 1908. 
 
256 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 dazzling light. Barbarism had culminated in assassination 
 of the President. 
 
 The martyr sleeps in the blessings of the poor whose fetters 
 God commissioned him to break, and he has sealed the 
 triumph of the cause he loved with his own blood. Who 
 among the living may not envy him ? leaving a name immor- 
 tal in the sturdy pride of one race and the undying gratitude 
 of another, withdrawn at the moment when his star touched 
 the zenith, and the Nation needed a sterner hand for the work 
 God gives it to do. . . . With prejudices hanging about 
 him, he groped his way very slowly and sometimes reluctantly 
 forward; let us remember how patient he was of contradiction, 
 how little obstinate in opinion, often forgetting justice 
 in mercy. Coming time will put him in that galaxy of Ameri- 
 cans which makes our history the day-star of the nations, 
 with a more loving claim on our gratitude than those who 
 were not called upon to die for their cause. 
 
 The entire tribute^ is characteristic of its author. He 
 could praise virtues for which he himself was not distin- 
 guished, and while he did not recant his criticism of official 
 tardiness — as he understood it — he showed the fullest 
 appreciation of Mr. Lincoln's personal qualities of patience 
 and kindheartedness, all the time bating no fraction of his 
 own inflexible consistency. Men and brethren alike, living 
 or departed, were measured or remembered by their con- 
 formity to his own inexorable standard of righteousness and 
 humaneness. 
 
 In his unflinching gaze at the course of events he was 
 not blinded by the fearful tragedy. He saw an impending 
 amnesty, approaching compromise — the old weakness of 
 the Nation — put aside, and a sterner regime promised, if 
 
 ^Printed in the second volume of his Speeches. 
 
WORK NOT COMPLETED 257 
 
 not secured. As a Copperhead journal in New York said, 
 "We are now twenty-five millions of abolitionists." The 
 trumpet had sounded a final note, gathering in the entire 
 North and some of the South, repudiating the plot of a few 
 barbarians. Its recoil finished the rebellion and its chances 
 of resuscitation. All this has been more evident to the Nation 
 since April, 1865, than it was then; but the man who had 
 pressed straight on for thirty years toward a goal which 
 even then was not quite attained saw just how far the race 
 was run and that complete success was still an arm's 
 length away. 
 
 For this reason he protested against two measures advo- 
 cated by his abolition comrades — the dissolution of anti- 
 slavery societies and the discontinuance of their organs. 
 In a card addressed to the members of the American Society 
 he asked, "What right, under its pledges, has the Society 
 to disband while the system of slavery remains legal under 
 the Constitution, or while slavery remains, both substantially 
 and technically, and before any decisive action has been 
 had on the Constitutional Amendment ? When every 
 slave is freed and the system itself legally ended, it will be 
 time to consider what is then our duty." To this the editor 
 of the Standard replied in substance, that the Nation had 
 taken up the work which the Society had prosecuted for 
 thirty years, and that there was little left for it to do alone 
 except by making distinctions without a difference from 
 the work of the country at large. 
 
 The question at issue between Phillips and his followers 
 on the one side and the editors of both the principal anti- 
 slavery journals and their followers on the other was as to the 
 sufficient completeness of their work, and if nothing more 
 
258 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 could be done by the Society as such. Time showed that 
 there was need for the efforts of every agency. This question 
 was thoroughly thrashed out at the annual meeting of the 
 Society. There it was proclaimed by the advocates of 
 dissolution that Negro suffrage was not one of the primary 
 purposes of the Society, but emancipation only. This 
 being practically accomplished, it was absurd to continue. 
 Abolitionists were not the special and only advocates of 
 ballot for the Negro. 
 
 On the other side, Phillips held that the Government 
 of the United States did not at that date acknowledge the 
 existence of the Constitutional Amendment, and slavery 
 was a logical element of the Constitution. Moreover, the 
 system of slavery lived still in the statute book. In the eye 
 of the law it was untouched; and as a matter of fact there 
 were hundreds of thousands still labouring under the lash 
 and in the same bonds as in 1860. 
 
 Neither the sword nor proclamations have reached them. 
 We shall reach them, but we have not yet. It is no time 
 to disband while there is a slave to free on any plantation 
 this side the Gulf of Mexico, and land and the ballot to be 
 given him. Continue the persistence and devotion of 
 thirty years. There is no substitute for it in the new organi- 
 zations. While there is a single slave and one act to be 
 done to ratify the Amendment, this Society has no right to 
 dissolve. 
 
 After further discussion, which came near being heated, 
 it was voted to continue the Society, and Garrison was 
 elected president. He declined the compliment as incon- 
 sistent with the position he had taken, and Phillips was 
 elected, as the chief advocate of continuing the organization. 
 
TOTAL ABOLITION DECREED 259 
 
 His next appearance was at the annual meeting of the 
 Emancipation League in Boston on the 29th of May, when 
 he discussed "the great question of the hour " — How large 
 a step forward will give absolute security? — and advocated 
 demanding of the Administration "reconstruction on a 
 basis of equality for both races." 
 
 On the 19th of December the announcement was made 
 upon official authority that the abolition of slavery and its 
 prohibition forever were engrafted upon the United States 
 Constitution and had thus become a part of the law of the 
 land. The Senate had adopted this measure in x\pril, 
 1864, by a vote of 37 yeas to 6 nays; the House of Represen- 
 tatives passed it on the 31st of January, 1865, by a vote of 
 119 to 56. The year closed with ratification by twenty-nine 
 states, mone than the required three-fourths; California, 
 Oregon, Iowa, and New Jersey being added later. Of it 
 the Liberator said: "It is the final crowning and completion 
 of the labours of the American abolitionist as such. It is 
 that great end for which they have toiled so earnestly, so 
 perseveringly, so uncompromisingly in dark days, in evil 
 days, amidst obloquy, persecution, ridicule, violence, and 
 amongst an unbelieving and unwilling people. It is a 
 triumph which they saw in the distant future, but never 
 expected to see in the mortal body. . . . We cannot 
 express the feelings of gratitude and joy with which we 
 think upon this grand result of all anti-slavery effort. 
 We repeat, the anti-slavery work is done. The Nation, by 
 a vast majority, has confessed the principles of the move- 
 ment to be just, and has overthrown slavery." It added, 
 that though so much had been accomplished there was no 
 warrant to relax diligence, and that the emancipated 
 
260 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 must be shielded from the suffering which must accompany 
 the transition from bondage to manhood and to the rights 
 and opportunities so long withheld, and in making freedmen 
 freemen and citizens. 
 
 This change in the Constitution would mark the close of 
 the Liberator's thirty-five years of labour. Accordingly, in 
 the issue of the 29th of December, 1865, Mr. Garrison 
 wrote his valedictory, reviewing its history from humble 
 beginnings as a *' disturber of the peace," maligned by the 
 South, and repudiated by the North, while opening its 
 columns to opposition and denunciation and vilification, 
 and also to free discussion of all sides of every question. 
 Meantime, he had the satisfaction of frequent testimony 
 to its elevating and quickening influence upon many lives 
 and its aid in abolishing a gigantic evil in the Nation. This 
 extermination of chattel slavery having been consummated, 
 it was best to let the paper's existence end, and leave the 
 rest of the work to other instrumentalities under new auspices, 
 with millions instead of hundreds for allies. 
 
 Better to be in a minority of one with God — branded 
 as madman, incendiary, fanatic . . . mobbed by the 
 populace, in defence of the Rights than like Herod, hearing 
 the shouts of a multitude crying, "It is the voice of a god 
 and not of man!" 
 
 And then, with a paragraph of affectionate and grateful 
 farewell to friends and patrons, he dropped his pen. 
 
XX 
 
 CONTINUING THE CONTEST 
 
 (1866-1867) 
 
 AS Hx\S been observed, Phillips did not think the time 
 had come to discontinue organized effort for the 
 welfare of the Negro, nor to suspend publication of a recog- 
 nized organ of the movement. To be sure, there was not 
 so much to be done in the way of freeing blacks from bond- 
 age as before the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, 
 although in several remote districts they were still practically 
 in thraldom; but there was much to be accomplished before 
 their condition could be compared to that of the poor whites 
 even. So, likewise, there was no public journal that quite 
 filled the place of the Liberator and the Anti-slavery Standard. 
 Accordingly, as Phillips had consented to be president of 
 the surviving Society, he also became the sponsor for its 
 surviving organ, the Standard, of which Aaron M. Powell 
 took editorial charge. 
 
 The question of dissolving the Massachusetts Society 
 also came up at the annual meeting in Boston, at 
 which Phillips again prevailed over all opponents, thus 
 saving it for special service during the stormy period 
 of reconstruction. It was a cloudy time for abolitionists 
 on account of their divided host and differing counsels, 
 when the old approach to unanimity would have been 
 
 261 
 
262 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 better for their common object, whatever their methods. 
 But PhilHps kept cheerful and charitable till the end 
 was atta^ined; and then everyone could afford to follow 
 his example. 
 
 Meantime, a noteworthy change occurred in the attitude 
 of the city of Boston toward him. His fellow-citizens, 
 represented by the School Committee of his native city, 
 had in 1865 recognized him in a public way for the first 
 time by asking him to address twelve hundred children of 
 the schools at their annual festival. It was a good intro- 
 duction to a new generation, which would be in greater 
 harmony with his purpose than the one to which he had 
 been a wild prophet of an impossible kingdom of the future, 
 as they believed. Both generations together listened with 
 delight to an address which the older hearers were afraid 
 might contain something incendiary. But it did not. It 
 was reminiscent of his own school days; of the welcome 
 to Lafayette, of the Latin School, of the good name Boston 
 had borne from the Revolution down, enforcing the obliga- 
 tion of upholding its fame by being better citizens than the 
 fathers and making the city stand for good learning and 
 character, love of liberty and a refuge for the oppressed of 
 all lands. The children were delighted and parents were 
 relieved that nothing more radical had been uttered than 
 the generality of the closing sentence about "the oppressed 
 of all lands. "^ 
 
 The policy of Lincoln's successor justified Phillips's 
 feeling that organized effort for freedmen's rights could 
 
 ^In this address occurs one of the remarkable prophecies which he made in science as well 
 as in politics: "We have invented a telegraph, but what of that? I expect if I live forty years 
 to see a telegraph that will send a message without wire, both ways at the same time." If 
 he had lived thirty years he would have seen the old problem of Winckle^, 1746, and his 
 successors, solved by Marconi, in 1895. 
 
FREEDMEN'S RIGHTS DISREGARDED 263 
 
 not safely be abandoned. The sudden change that came 
 over Andrew Johnson's repubhcanism, such as it had been, 
 was as disappointing to his party as it was encouraging to 
 the Confederacy. Whether he feared his predecessor's 
 fate by the assassin, or was ])lanning to succeed himself, 
 or had both contingencies in mind, he certainly entertained 
 only as a second or third purpose any advantage to the race 
 which had been formally declared free. "Johnson govern- 
 ments," set up with unseemly haste in several Southern 
 states, not only excluded coloured people from deputations 
 to frame constitutions, but regarded loyal men in the South 
 as enemies, and white men from the North, who were exer- 
 cising their right to settle anywhere in re-united country, 
 as intruders. With malign ingenuity codes were framed 
 to keep Negroes under the control of planters, and secluded 
 from the reach of any who could tell them of their new privi- 
 leges as citizens of free commonwealths. Once more 
 all blacks in the Gulf states were practically bondmen 
 and subject to stripes and the pillory; all their friends were 
 vagrants liable to fines and imprisonments. The shadow 
 had gone backward on the dial of freedom, and reconstruc- 
 tion needed reconstructing from the start. Congress 
 undertook the difficult task with no little hesitation, on 
 account of the superhuman wisdom needed, but also with 
 no long delay, because the headstrong and partisan precipi- 
 tancy of the Chief Magistrate had made immediate and 
 corrective measures imperative. Even then, his obstinate 
 partiality to rebel states vetoed wholesome legislative acts 
 as often as they were passed, which, in turn, were re-passed 
 over his vetoes. 
 
 While the majority in Congress was trying to neutralize 
 
264 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 the waywardness of the President, himself backed by a 
 minority in the Cabinet, Senate, House, and by a South | 
 from which he hoped support in the next election, and while 
 the whole country was in dissension and distraction about 
 the future, Phillips, with his unwavering and lifelong principle 
 of justice for all men, laid his course unchanged; helm and 
 prow were in the line of the long, straight wake behind him, 
 and the haven for which he was making was the same as 
 in 1835. In that year he put forth with a little company 
 derided by everybody else; now, a Nation was looking on 
 as he neared port and all were asking, What will he say and 
 ,do ? From Congress a Massachusetts Senator called to 
 him, *'Hold the Societies together; the crisis is grave. You 
 and they are doing indispensable work; in this I express the 
 conviction of every Senator and Representative on our side 
 of pending questions."^ Thus by the highest authority 
 his determination to prolong the Societies' efforts and life 
 was justified. The situation they were to meet was pointed 
 out in one of his resolutions offered in May, 1866: 
 
 The Rebellion has not ceased; it has only changed its 
 weapons. Once it fought, now it intrigues; once it 
 followed Lee in arms, now it follows President Johnson 
 in guile and chicanery; once its headquarters were in 
 Richmond, now it encamps in the White House. The 
 President has betrayed the loyal North, is bent on giving 
 it over into the hands of its unconquered foe; he should 
 long ago have been impeached for the use of his powers 
 to aid rebellion, etc. 
 
 Hn a letter to Mr. Phillips dated "Senate Chamber, ist May, 1866," Mr. Sumner wrote: 
 " I trust that the Society, which has done so much for Human Rights, will persevere until 
 these rights are established throughout the country on the impregnable foundation of the 
 Declaration of Independence. This is not the time for any relaxation of the old energies. 
 Slavery is abolished only in name. The slave oligarchy still lives and insists upon ruling 
 its former victims." — Blagden MSS. 
 
REFUSAL OF NOMINATION TO CONGRESS 265 
 
 In his speech on these resolutions he noted the 
 hindrances to the complete reaping of just results of the 
 war by reason of disagreements between Congress and 
 the President who, if he had fulfilled the hopes of his 
 party, would have settled the questions of rights for the 
 freedmen in addition to the privileges which had been won 
 for them. 
 
 At this time Phillips's signed editorials were frequently 
 appearing in the Standard. That of August 4th on the 
 Adjournment of Congress preferred against it the charge 
 that, having full power in its hands, it left the Negro without 
 protection in the rebel states and that the Freedmen's 
 Bureau was checkmated by the traitor President. 
 
 The exhortations that came to him from congressmen 
 to keep straight on with his life work were echoed by the 
 North at large in calls to tell towns and cities what he 
 thought should be done in that time of perplexity and 
 disquiet. Turning his back on solicitations to accept a 
 nomination for Congress from his district in 1866,. pre- 
 ferring the wider range of the lecture platform and the 
 independence which no political alliance should hamper, 
 he went forth once more, early in 1867, on a circuit of 
 twelve thousand miles, in which he delivered over 
 sixty discourses on the crisis, interspersing them with 
 temperance lectures on Sundays. To have accom- 
 plished this tour and what it involved entitles him more 
 than any other man of his time, if not of all time, to the 
 distinction of public instructor at large, especially when 
 the size and variety of his audiences are considered; not to 
 mention the exceptional charm of his eloquence, which 
 won him engagements months in advance, and hundreds 
 
266 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 more of invitations to speak than there were days in the 
 year. 
 
 There were diverse views of PhiUips's decision in Sep- 
 tember, 1866, not to accept the nomination for Congress by 
 the Workingmen's Convention. He preferred the inde- 
 pendence of irresponsibihty to a constituency, and the 
 freedom to criticize those who were responsible. His friends 
 thought that the position of congressman would add to 
 the weight of his utterances, and his foes expected that, 
 plunged in practical work with legislators, his extreme views 
 might be modified; especially since he had shown wisdom 
 and caution equal to the best politicians whenever occasion 
 had required deliberation. Others hoped that the severity 
 of his words might be lessened, to accord with the genuine 
 benevolence of his disposition and character, if he were 
 associated with other Representatives. He himself feared 
 such restraints upon his freedom as the leader of public 
 opinion which he chose to be, rather than an interpreter 
 by legislation. The press of his section urged his accept- 
 ance; that of remoter regions, for different reasons, com- 
 mended his declination. 
 
 The words he spoke on a hundred platforms now found 
 thousands of readers in many journals, but the Anti-slavery 
 Standard had become the recognized and authorized reporter 
 of his speeches. A bequest of $10,000 by Francis Jackson 
 might have gone to this paper in its battle for the enfran- 
 chisement of the blacks; but a minority of the executors 
 diverted its funds to the Freedmen's Union prematurely, 
 and added to Phillips's burdens a financial responsibility 
 which would have been relieved by another interpretation 
 of Mr. Jackson's will. Fortunately, his private resources, 
 
ATTACKS ANDREW JOHNSON 267 
 
 which had helped him in all the years of his warfare, were 
 sufficient to keep the Staridard from extinction; while his 
 contributions to its columns on important questions in that 
 disturbed time became increasingly frequent, as well as 
 upon the minor but ever-present topics of intemperance 
 and labour troubles, the one often causing the other. He 
 could, however, turn aside upon occasion to academic 
 address; as when he charmed the literary societies at Vassar 
 College with a talk on Street Life in Europe. But the 
 doings of Congress were his chief concern, and his criticism 
 of them sharp and bold. It is probable that the speeches 
 and opinions of no one of the national legislators were so 
 read and heeded as those of this free-lance, faring forth 
 alone to attack whatever wrong provoked his righteous ire, 
 and to defend whatever cause or person needed protection 
 and friendly help. 
 
 It was not an extraordinary feat to attack Andrew John- 
 son, whom his own party was ready to impeach for obstructing 
 legislation which was working to complete the destruction 
 of slavery and to reestablish the peace and integrity of the 
 Union. Naturally, the busy vetoer did not escape Phillips's 
 tongue and pen. 
 
 If Andrew Johnson had done his duty, if he had stood 
 where the country supposed he would stand when they 
 placed him in power, this question would have been settled 
 at once. But he has endeavoured to provide for himself 
 a special place in the future of the Nation, and the battle 
 is between himself and Congress. He does not look upon 
 the South as conquered territory. The public has stood, 
 until within sixty days, affecting to believe that Johnson 
 was a leader to be followed, whereas he was an enemy to 
 be hated, a snake to be crushed, an obstacle to be removed. 
 
268 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Meantime one and another are defying the power of the 
 Administration, a spectacle in Congress such as has never 
 before been seen by the American people, a party standing | 
 up against its own President, with an unbroken front. 
 
 At the Cooper Institute, October 25, 1866, he said that the 
 South had resumed her old purpose, and failing In the 
 fight against the flag, meant to rule beneath it, to be the 
 Government, with Johnson her willing and avowed tool, 
 betraying the Republic to rebels. "Hand and glove with 
 Jeff Davis, a prisoner in Fortress Monroe, the President 
 has been the agent of leading rebels to continue the war 
 on the phase of politics. . . . The real friends of the 
 South are the radicals, who for a quarter of a century 
 have stood upon her borders and told her that she was 
 running a race that would end in bankruptcy and blood. 
 They now stand ready to help her to prosperity, but not to 
 make bank presidents of state prisoners." Then followed the 
 suggestion to " Impeach the rebel at the White House, the 
 Inspirer of mobs, and depose him, that the loyal part of the 
 Nation may manage Its own Government without waiting 
 for two years for a mobocrat to build up Southern aristoc- 
 racy and put it back in the Senate and House to manipulate 
 us into submission." He was only a little in advance of 
 the foremost Republicans, proclaiming in public what they 
 were whispering among themselves. A petition for John- 
 son's Impeachment was already circulating In the West. 
 
 One thing Johnson accomplished to the satisfaction of 
 the party which had elected him Vice-president, whose 
 policy of reconstruction he had steadily opposed, namely, 
 his own political death. Who should succeed him, became 
 a question of Immense consequence in view of the unsettled 
 
DOUBT OF GRANT 269 
 
 state of the South. Battles were over, but the spirit 
 which inaugurated them was only scotched and still stirring 
 and vengeful. Its chief demonstrations were made by a 
 secret, mysterious order called the Ku-Klux Klan that for 
 two years had committed outrages upon loyal citizens 
 and Negroes with impunity. In Tennessee alone its member- 
 ship was estimated at forty thousand, and included promi- 
 nent rebels in that and other states. A reign of terror was 
 established whose extent and malignity is partly indicated 
 by the incomplete summary of five hundred and twenty-six 
 murders and two thousand and nine whippings in different 
 states, besides other methods of intimidation and torment. 
 A committee of Congress stated that in Louisiana alone in 
 the year 1868 there were more than a thousand murders, 
 most of them chargeable to this atrocious confederacy of 
 ghouls.^ 
 
 In view of these and other evidences of a rebellious 
 temper the loyal pa,rt of the Nation demanded a strong 
 hand to hold what had been saved at great cost, and the 
 man who had settled the first difficulty was considered as 
 best able to regulate the second. The storm was over, 
 but Andrew Johnson had shown that it was not time to put 
 the helm into a civilian's hands. The waves were still high 
 and the troubled sea was casting up mire and dirt. Besides, a 
 natural sentiment of gratitude won much support for General 
 Grant. Phillips was not sure that he was all that could 
 
 iFor detailed account of the organized "ghosts of the old Confederate army" see Hamilton's 
 " Reconstruction Period," pp. 434-442. 
 
 In his new paper, The Issue, of Jackson, ISIiss., ex-Governor Vardaman urges the erection 
 of a monument in honour of the Ku-KIux Klan, and would have its history taught to Southern 
 boys and girls. It was, he says, " the most orderly, law-respecting, law-loving body that was 
 ever organized and maintained in violation of the law, and drove from power a band of human 
 vampires who, under the guise of law, robbed and plundered and oppressed an outraged 
 people." That is a strange view of law. — Independent, April 30, 1908, 
 
270 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 be desired, but trusting his long-tried theory of educating 
 the people the agitator believed that they would force the 
 nominee to follow the advanced position, up to which 
 he himself strove to lead them. At first, however, he was 
 opposed to Grant's candidacy because the soldier had been 
 trained in military rather than in civil affairs. Moreover, 
 the General's taciturnity had not permitted him to declare 
 his position on vital questions. He was not in the 
 habit of making promises. His policy was revealed most 
 often by its issues. 
 
 Coupled with his opposition to Grant was the more popular 
 advocacy of Negro suffrage, which was soon to be secured 
 by the Fifteenth Amendment, an improvement upon the 
 Fourteenth, which had left each state to determine the 
 privilege of ballot. Without this, the condition of the 
 coloured citizen was unlike that of any other, and to be 
 regulated by everybody but himself. It was the final 
 question of great importance, still unsettled after forty years. 
 But all that could then be done by national legislation was 
 accomplished. The execution of constitutional provisions 
 and obedience to them are responsibilities belonging to the 
 present generation of rulers and citizens. To the initiative 
 legislation Phillips's voice and pen contributed more than 
 any other single influence of the day, as they had to the 
 effecting of the two preceding changes in the Constitution, 
 which recognized the manhood of the blacks as distin- 
 guished from their old status, either as creatures or prop- 
 erty. 
 
 The year 1866 had been full of work for Phillips. The 
 dangers of reconstruction on a bad basis, with little gain, 
 for the coloured population, and its abuse by former 
 
CREATING PUBLIC OPINION 271 
 
 slaveholders, Johnson's schemes, and cono^ressional le^risla- 
 tion kept him alert and active. On the platform he was as 
 ubiquitous as ever, helping more than any other man 
 to create public opinion; in the Standard his editorials 
 appeared with increasing frequency and were copied, quoted, 
 and commented on by leading journals of wider circulation. 
 In the most of them, whatever the point of view, there 
 was the admission of leadership and of an advanced position 
 which would presently be occupied by the Republican 
 party. He was no longer standing alone on the mountain 
 top, calling afar to indifferent or hostile throngs below. 
 These had always admired his silver speech and wondered 
 at its far-reaching power, and for the time some had be- 
 lieved in his sincerity; but they now saw that his predictions 
 had been fulfilled and his demands justified by events; 
 accordingly they followed him faster than before. 
 
 Early in 1867 the press of the country was publishing 
 Ashley's resolutions for the impeachmen-t of President 
 Johnson, "for combining with the South to resist the lawful 
 legislation of Congress and other high crimes and misde- 
 meanors." He now had the Supreme Court as his coad- 
 jutor; Congress only, through its Republican majority, 
 backed by the best of the North, standing for the just 
 results of the war through loyal reconstruction. Meantime 
 slavery was being reestablished upon the foundation of a 
 clause in the Fifteenth Amendment whereby persons con- 
 victed of crime were excepted; and it was easy to trump 
 up a charge against any likely Negro without money to pay 
 his fine, and to sell him for the amount of it, until gangs 
 of slaves were at work under the lash on many plantations, 
 with no court to favour them. 
 
27^ WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 In the spring Phillips sent editorial contributions from 
 Grand Rapids, Michigan, Muscatine, Iowa, Alton, of Love- 
 joy fame, and from Fort Wayne, Indiana, in which he com- 
 mented on the Southern situation, the restraining of the 
 President, and the question of his successor. "If he should 
 be a Democrat, two-thirds of the fruit of the war would be 
 lost; if a compromiser, one-half; if a radical, two-thirds 
 might be saved. Would Grant's military record encourage 
 trust for a similar civil performance.^" The reason of the 
 tour is found in reports of lectures which he was delivering, 
 published in the papers of many cities. One of them 
 remarked: "An opinion of his speeches should not be 
 passed until twelve hours after their delivery. His words 
 grow more effective and convincing hours and hours after 
 you have gone out from his presence. You are pleased 
 and interested while he speaks; it is not till afterward that 
 he becomes wonderful to you. His great strength is his 
 transcendent apperception of principles, and his clearness in 
 stating them; the most entirely plain, common-sense, and 
 practical man we ever heard." 
 
XXI 
 RECONSTRUCTION AND OTHER ISSUES 
 
 (1867-1870) 
 
 "TJHILLIPS, as President of the American Anti-slavery 
 -■- Society in the thirty-fourth year of its existence, 
 called it the advance guard behind which was the great body 
 of earnest people determined to support its principles. He 
 reverted to the beginning of his career when he pronounced 
 the shibboleth of the Society with buoyant enthusiasm, 
 perfectly ignorant of what slavery was and how strong its 
 system. In those days he regarded Webster as a great 
 statesman and almost an orator; and from afar worshipped 
 Clay as a great orator and almost a statesman. Mobs 
 and the murder of Lovejoy made him conscious of a Slave 
 Power whose motto was Victory or Death, living as a tree 
 whose trunk was in Southern soil, not yet realizing that its 
 wide-spreading roots ran as far as New England. By 
 and by he saw the death grapple into which abolitionists 
 had been drawn. "Thirty years of fighting revealed the 
 depth of the disease and prepared the North to understand 
 the struggle to which it had been summoned. Now that 
 it is over, we are told to take off our armour and be content. 
 But with an interest as broad as humanity all great questions 
 still concern an American. Momentous issues are before 
 this and the next generation. The race question, ten>- 
 
 273 
 
274 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 perance, woman's position, capital, and labour furnish toil 
 for years.'* 
 
 The release of Jefferson Davis furnished Phillips's pen, 
 as it did many other writers whose memories were over 
 two years long, with a stirring theme. 
 
 Davis at large and Wirtz in his grave proved the Admin- 
 istration a cowardly murderer, wreaking its spite on the 
 miserable tool instead of his master. Treason is no crime 
 if he goes unpunished. He can be overlooked; but what 
 sort of a future this course will make for the Nation cannot 
 be doubted. In the event of another civil war there will 
 be no risks to rebellious leaders; and no amount of barbarity 
 will harm any man who orders it. He knew of attempts 
 to burn Northern cities, poison communities, of plots to 
 assassinate. Belle Isle and Libby prison were within his 
 sight and Andersonville existed by his order, a chief of a 
 savage horde, rivalled only by fiendish aborigines in his 
 warranted atrocities. Now Horace Greeley goes to Rich- 
 mond to contribute to a $100,000 bail and congratulate 
 him on the Administration's cowardice. Crime ceases to 
 be something to be checked and punished. 
 
 The motive of this clemency is indicated in one of the 
 resolutions at a meeting in May: ''Resolved, That in the 
 release of Jefferson Davis, we see proof that the South is 
 still triumphant in the Executive council; and lamentable 
 evidence of a disposition to pqstpone the safety of the Nation 
 to the supposed interests of a party." In a speech upon 
 these resolutions Phillips asserted that the Republican 
 party did not dare exclude the Southern states from the next 
 election, hoping that they would support its candidate, 
 who would be suited to their level — a non-committal 
 man would do. Instead, it was the business of agitators 
 to keep the people up to the demand that there shall be 
 
CRITICISM OF GRANT 275 
 
 no recognition of race by the United States or state law, 
 accomplishing the work begun in 1831 by securing the 
 ballot for all citizens, with law, land, and the spelling book. 
 
 His fears for the immediate future are prophetic of a more 
 distant future than ever he imagined. "Demagogues will 
 be just as bad in the thirty years to come. After forty years 
 the crop of Andrew Johnsons is not exhausted. We must 
 expect such men to grow out of the South in the future. 
 How shall we make them do justice to the Negro as the 
 Northern politician does to labouring men from Europe ? 
 Through fear of the German or Irish vote. Give the Negro 
 franchise and he will be well treated." 
 
 By July, the Raymond-Weed Club of New York had 
 inaugurated the question of the next President by naming 
 General Grant. As Secretary of War, taking Stanton's 
 place by Johnson's act, the General became a target for 
 Phillips's criticism as a candidate for the Presidency. If 
 Grant was a Republican, by what rule of party fidelity, 
 he asked, did he accept the office out of which Stanton had 
 been turned simply for being a Republican ? By this accept- 
 ance he declared himself not a Republican and accordingly 
 should not be a candidate of that party. Meantime every 
 political move was for campaign purposes. The burning 
 question of persecution of Southern Unionists and freedmen 
 was growing worse through the delays which Johnson's 
 double-dealing encouraged. Anarchy and assassination 
 were rife. Whippings and hanging were common. "Regu- 
 lators" and desperadoes prolonged a reign of terror.' Con- 
 gress was timid and the Southern states hoped to get back 
 
 iQn the guerrilla evil see Speed's "Union Cause in Kentucky." On the Ku-Klux Klan 
 and Knights of the White Camelia. Hamilton's "Reconstruction Period," p. 434 
 
276 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 and so shape the laws that the coloured race would be 
 thrown back into substantial serfdom, as had been re- 
 peatedly declared on the floor of the Senate. The "Dawd- 
 ling Congress" Phillips arraigned in a lecture with this 
 title in Music Hall, Boston, on the 31st of October, in 
 which he said that Congress allowed the President to defy 
 its power and encourage rebellion — the man who stands 
 in the most prominent position as the next candidate says 
 nothing and nobody knows what he thinks. "Impeach 
 Andrew Johnson, clean out the nest of unclean birds, the 
 Cabinet. Grout down into the Constitution the principle 
 that the Negro has every right that any white man has on the 
 continent. Do it now! Do it at once! Be just to the dead. 
 Register by the faith of their memories the entire success of 
 the Nation for which they died. Exact to the uttermost all 
 that the South lost and the North gained in that fearful 
 struggle." x\nd in an editorial he urged a resumption of for- 
 feited lands returned by Johnson's pardons to men who were 
 driving freedmen from their neighbourhood and the ballot-box. 
 The President's message urged repeal of reconstruction 
 acts, withdrawal of military from the South, repudiation 
 of Negro suffrage, and intimated forcible resistance if an 
 attempt were made to depose him. This failed by a small 
 vote despite a majority report in its favour from the com- 
 mittee on impeachment. Phillips, in an editorial on 
 "Congress Surrenders," came nearer billingsgate than in 
 any of his printed utterances hitherto. 
 
 Convinced that he is guilty and deserves Impeachment, 
 the Fortieth Congress refuses to impeach on the ground that 
 Johnson is too strong for the Republican party. . . . 
 If the lackey who bloomed out into a Democrat only after 
 
CRITICISM OF PARTIES 277 
 
 a long and fruitless effort to make slave-owners admit him 
 into their society; if the drunkard of March 4th, the swinger 
 round the circle, the mobocrat of New Orleans, the dema- 
 gogue, the pardon broker, coxcomb, second-hand rebel — 
 if this is the Conqueror, how shall we describe the three- 
 score Republican Shallows and Aguecheeks who disgrace 
 the consistency of their Democratic brothers in the rebel 
 109 of the state vote? 
 
 The Republican press seemingly deplored the surrender 
 of the Capitol to the White House. 
 
 In an address in Philadelphia, November 8th, on The 
 Perils of the Hour, he defined his method of criticizing 
 parties and men as having no motive beyond benefitting 
 the Republic and to secure the end which every good citizen 
 had in view. He believed that the South had not been made 
 over by the war; death only could remove mistakes, to be 
 followed by new ideas in time — perhaps a long time. 
 
 Just now it is hoping for compensation for its slaves, if 
 elections go to suit them. Grant, the reticent, is the coming 
 man; but one who either has nothing to say, or dares not 
 tell what he thinks; neither is good timber to make a Presi- 
 dent of. Why was he not in New Orleans quelling the riot 
 with Sheridan ? 1 would impeach the President, pass a 
 law that his pardons are void, and that the land south of 
 Mason and Dixon's line belongs to the Nation. A radical 
 measure ? Yes, a measure to teach one section that never 
 again should the land be filled with widows and orphans, 
 nor Libby and Andersonville make idiots of sons that came 
 out half alive. 
 
 Phillips enlarged upon this theme in a lecture at the 
 Brooklyn Academy of Music on December 19th, in which he 
 said that the Republican party had made its record, but not a 
 Union man holds his life safe in the South, because the 
 
278 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 White House is held by a second-hand Jeff Davis. And 
 this with Grant as Secretary of War and the press engaged 
 for two years in explaining his reticence! Butler, Sumner, 
 Wade, and Stevens do not need explaining. He knew he 
 was treading on hot ashes when he touched the great soldier, 
 but the harvest of his lavish sacrifice of men ought not to 
 be risked by hapless confidence in any man. iVnd in his 
 next editorial in the Standard he upbraided a reassembled 
 Congress for not restoring Stanton, whose removal a sub- 
 servient press was justifying because Grant was lessening 
 expenses. But Johnson had his own reasons for keeping Grant 
 in the War Office, a willing or unwilling cat's-paw, and the 
 Senate its own for reinstating Stanton at the next session. 
 
 Phillips was often criticized for his strictures on General 
 Grant. To this he replied that he dealt with men as they 
 were true or false to the principles he advocated, freedom 
 for freedmen first and temperance next. The freedom 
 of the blacks was still the subject of controversy, and the 
 struggle for it had passed from the battlefield to the sphere 
 of politics, where it was losing ground under Johnson's 
 administration. Therefore the agitator saw no reason for 
 slackening his efforts and his vigilance so long as misrule 
 and murder were rife in some Southern states and reconstruc- 
 tion was lagging in Congress. By his editorials in the 
 Standard, and, as in the early spring of this year, 1868, on 
 the platform in several cities of the West, as far as St. Paul, 
 he was stirring up the country to reap the full earnings of 
 the war for national freedom. 
 
 These were fast being wasted by the policy of the 
 President toward those lately in rebellion, when he was at 
 last impeached for resisting the acts of Congress, and other 
 
ABOLITION SUCCESS BY DEFEATS 279 
 
 crimes and misdemeanors, escaping conviction by one vote. 
 His second removal of Secretary Stanton precipitated this 
 action, though far from the chief cause of it, on the part 
 of a thoroughly incensed Congress, which, however, materially 
 weakened on the vote to convict. 
 
 At this time, according to Republican metropolitan 
 journals, anarchy and unrest prevailed in the South, where 
 there was no safety nor assurance of personal liberty. Capital 
 did not dare to meet the enmity awaiting it; rebels looked 
 to the President for help, and loyal men leaned upon Con- 
 gress; the strife of the bullet was followed by the strife of 
 the ballot. The Democratic press opposed impeachment, 
 a Western paper urging renewed rebellion in terms that were 
 too bloody to be of any account, the frothy rage of extrava- 
 gant partisanship. 
 
 Technical failure to impeach by one vote was disappoint- 
 ing to the hopes of Phillips, but the encouragement he 
 extracted from a bare defeat was characteristic. 
 
 Our whole success for thirty years past has been fed by 
 just such defeats as this. The annexation of Texas, the 
 Compromise of 1850, Kansas trampled in blood, Bull Run, 
 the second election of Lincoln, his mvu'der; all these seeming 
 defeats were victories in disguise. The traitors who 
 plotted them were the only men who died by them. Polk, 
 Seward, Pierce, Webster, Clay, and their fellow-conspirators 
 all died by their own hands. In the light of such history 
 we should read this hour. 
 
 His explanation of this failure of the Republican senators 
 from Maine and Illinois, and others, to seal the conviction 
 of Johnson was their eye to the next election, political prefer- 
 ment, and safety of the party, with the suggestion of femi- 
 nine spite and ambition in the background, as had happened 
 
280 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 before in political history at home and abroad. Of the 
 President he said: "The question is not whether Johnson 
 is a sinner. He is an obstacle. There is no pathway 
 down South except through the White House; he bars the 
 door and I want it open to the farmer, the merchant, the 
 mechanic, the schoolhouse, and New England ideas, to 
 men who create and invent, surrounding human nature 
 with comfort and lifting it up into the sunlight." 
 
 The nomination of Grant was regarded by Phillips as 
 the expression of the mixed motives represented at the 
 Chicago convention. Therefore the duty of radicals 
 was the same as in the last twenty years — to rouse and 
 educate the people, and with fearless criticism of parties 
 and their leaders to put blocks under the wheels to keep 
 the carriage from going back and to drag it up higher if 
 possible. He accepted Grant and the probable success 
 of the Republican party as the salvation of the Union and 
 the best hope for the Negro, with the loyal North in the 
 saddle, to ripen the problem of reconstruction day by day, 
 with justice and equal rights for all. Meantime seven 
 Southern states had been admitted with the voting privilege 
 restored, to l)e used by white voters chiefly, since control 
 of the polls was in their hands and of legislative assemblies, 
 as in Georgia, where twenty-four coloured members were 
 expelled on the third of September, not without good reason.^ 
 
 Phillips was not so completely occupied with wrongs of 
 the black man that he could see no other. It was in the 
 midst of all the perplexities and perils, after failure to oust 
 
 'That there was another and a white side to reconstruction rights and wrongs cannot be 
 denied by any who know the history of the period. In brief, it is a story of violent reactions: 
 first, by freedmen from two hundred and fifty years of bondage; second, by whites against the 
 unwise abuse of unaccustomed privilege by ignorant Negroes and their unprincipled instigators 
 to partisan legislation. The Northern carpet-bagger was a poor successor to the Northern 
 soldier, and came near undoing his work for the Union, 
 
RELIGION AND SOCIAL SCIENCE 281 
 
 Johnson, that another plot against certain Indian tribes 
 called out a vigorous protest and arraignment of the white 
 man's policy toward so-called savages. By felicitous 
 examples he showed how much more chivalrous had been 
 their treatment of white captives than our soldiers' instant 
 murder of red men; and also cited sundry treacherous 
 dealings with friendly Indians who were watching the roads 
 at the request of United States troops. A brief summary 
 of our general treatment of a vanishing race is concluded 
 with comparisons which closed with the remark, "What 
 a scene for Christianity! God bless such barbarians and 
 make us like them ! " In the removal of troops to the plains 
 he also saw rebels freed from military rule and loyalists left to 
 the mercies of the Ku-Klux Klan — another Johnson move. 
 An instance of the breadth of Phillips's sympathies 
 and of the reach of his thinking occurred when he delivered 
 an address in Tremont Temple on The Relation of Religion 
 to Philanthropy and to Social Science. Organized Chris- 
 tianity he regarded as the ice formed above the flowing 
 river, a fixed principle embodying this dogma and that, 
 good to stand on and walk over, but the force is in the 
 moving current below it, and when that falls the ice breaks, 
 or if it rises it breaks up the binding crust and carries 
 it aw^ay. Religion is principle applied to every social 
 need of the average man to make his life worth living, 
 dividing his day into thirds for labour, rest, and sleep, 
 giving mind and soul a fair chance; helping him to be 
 temperate and to use the opportunities that are offered, 
 and to share the profits and leisure that result from the 
 combined industry of labour and capital. The Church 
 had come to recognize this because the sentiment of the 
 
282 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 people had lifted it up to this level, as the anti-slavery 
 sentiment had raised it to a plane to which it never came 
 of its own accord, but instead, protesting against such radi- 
 calism for thirty years. Therefore in the Republican 
 party, faulty and defective as he regarded it, was the only 
 chance of safety, since the loyal masses of the Nation were 
 within its ranks. Behind Grant, its candidate, was a broad- 
 ening purpose and resolve, and his election meant progress. 
 If not elected, the spirit of slavery would reverse the results 
 of the war. Negroes were now voting the Democratic 
 ticket and saying, *'Do not blame us — we had to do so, 
 else be shot or starve." 
 
 When, in spite of seven rebel states and their compulsory 
 votes. Grant was elected by about 6 per cent, majority of 
 the whole vote. Republican success did not diminish the 
 agitator's vigilance and his efforts in educating the masses 
 to demand every right thing of the victorious party. He 
 did not expect that the eflfects of slavery could be razed 
 out in one generation. It would require a century of civili- 
 zation of Christianity to remodel the complex social or 
 political system arranged around it. Many Southerners 
 were blindly honest, living in darkness; they needed light, 
 not honesty. We should be patient fifty years, if forces 
 are allowed to ripen their minds. His appeal in this move- 
 ment was to the people rather than their religious and 
 political rulers, just as Christ addressed the common people 
 who heard him gladly, Avhile Pharisees and the Sanhedrin 
 lagged behind and opposed every advance. 
 
 This need of principles underlying our Government Phillips 
 emphasized after the election of Grant — a clear, square, une- 
 quivocal statement of the relation between men and laws, 
 
RIGHTS OF THE COLOURED CITIZEN 283 
 
 capital and labour, and a full repudiation of any legal recog- 
 nition of race distinctions. The moment our laws take note 
 of Negro, Indian, Chinese, Irishmen, and forget the man hid 
 behind each, the seeds of discord and weakness are planted. 
 "Forget the race, remember only the man. Contrast Ca- 
 nadian treatment of the Indian by the laws and ours by arms 
 — statesmanship with folly. So, too, hasten the day 
 when cooperation shall make every capitalist a labourer 
 and every labourer a capitalist. Anchor these principles 
 in the Constitution." 
 
 It was now six years from the act of emancipation, and 
 Phillips said that he had no particular reason to rejoice 
 over January 1, 1863, and while there rested such a cloud 
 upon the present and future condition of the coloured race 
 his anxiety was greater than his joy. The Negro had 
 suffrage as a man has the rights of going to law — if he care to 
 pay for it. He had voted at the risk of starvation and death. 
 It was impossible for him to outweigh all the forces ranged 
 against him. He stood alone against the Government. 
 And there was no protection for person or property in the 
 South to induce men or capital to go to the help of the 
 blacks. Still, he did not despair. He had fair faith that 
 justice would triumph, but was not absolutely certain 
 that it would in the next forty years. "It all depended 
 upon public opinion, upholding the radical element in the 
 Republican party in amending the Constitution to guarantee 
 suffrage beyond any possible state legislation. Chattel 
 slavery is gone, but political slavery still remains." 
 
 At last an amendment which Phillips had been urging 
 upon Congress was passed by the Senate on the 9th of 
 February, 1869: "No discrimination shall be made in 
 
284 AVENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 the United States among citizens of the United States in the 
 exercise of the elective franchise, or in the right to hold 
 office, in any state, on account of race, colour, nativity, 
 property, education, or creed." 
 
 Phillips had frequently complained of General Grant's 
 reticence, but when the brief inaugural was published he 
 found little to criticize. Endorsement of the Fifteenth 
 Amendment, the promise of a vigorous execution of law, 
 the policy of citizenship for the Indian, the payment of the 
 national debt, were measures to be thankful for, and he 
 added, " Now, Soldier of the Wilderness, hammer the 
 rebellion to pieces so that the name of a 'Union man' 
 may be as ample protection even on the Del Norte as that | 
 of a 'Roman citizen' was to St. Paul at Jerusalem." Then 
 he turned to urging the ratification of the x\mendment by 
 state legislatures. "The peace of the whole section and 
 nation demands it. Congress, three to one, recommends it. 
 The President begs for its ratification. Besiege your legisla- 
 tures. One effort now is worth months of common work." 
 
 In the winter between General Grant's election and 
 inauguration, 1868-'69, Phillips was pleading on the plat- 
 form for Negro suffrage. So, too, as he had turned aside 
 to advocate the cause of Crete against Turkish despotism 
 in the preceding summer, now in April, the Fifteenth 
 Amendment having been passed, he could listen to the appeal 
 of sundry women, whom he had put off until greater questions 
 were settled, and appeared for them before the Massachu- 
 setts Legislature to set forth their claims for female suffrage. 
 This was not altogether intended as a gallant reparation 
 for postponing their request. As far back as the defence 
 in London of delegated women he had declared his cham- 
 
THE LABOUR QUESTION DISCUSSED 285 
 
 pionship of feminine assertion of civic rights, thus proving 
 himself in one more respect in advance of his age and 
 Nation; farther indeed than in the matter of shivery, as the 
 lapse of time has proved, since in no large part of the land 
 has woman suffrage been established, or even greatly 
 desired by the majority of the sex, who seem to be uncertain 
 or unconcerned about their rights and wrongs, despite 
 occasional instructors. With respect to his position on 
 the subject he had said in May, 1866, before the Eleventh 
 National Woman's Rights Convention in New York, that 
 he did not feel by any means that keen agony of interest 
 in this question that he did in the slavery question or the 
 temperance cause. He placed the difficulty of woman's 
 advancement not in lack of legislation, but in the sentiment 
 that made it unfashionable for women to make their own 
 living, and the starvation wages with no chance of rising 
 in the future. Fashionable women could take off the ban 
 from their poorer sisters and could dictate the legislative 
 policy of their husbands and fathers if they would. *' AVo man's 
 influence does not need to be increased, but educated and 
 made responsible, counted, and criticized. She ties her own 
 limbs, corrupts her own sisters, demoralizes civilization, 
 and then folds her arms, and calls it religion, or steps back 
 and christens it taste. She could make her own opportunity 
 if the women of a state so determined." 
 
 This courtesy performed, he took up another cause 
 which he had previously espoused, and addressed the Massa- 
 chusetts Legislature on the labour question, to get a com- 
 mission appointed to inquire into the condition of labour 
 in the state — rates of wages, rent, prices of living, hours 
 of employment. He urged that a labouring class divided 
 
286 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 from the rest is inconsistent with the safety of the Repubhc. 
 It has to com}3at corporations to which legislatures are 
 subservient. The Legislature of New York sits in the 
 counting-rooms of its railroads. Corporations cannot be 
 spared, but they should be made consistent with the welfare 
 of the state. Workmen had to defend themselves by co- 
 operating, which they could not do without more education 
 than ten hours of work would give them. Eight hours 
 would give them a chance at the night schools. Trades- 
 union, though a great power, has provisions which are 
 indefensible — makes slaves of its members and interferes 
 with business and has a bad spirit behind it. The proper 
 resort is a commission to learn, discuss, and decide this 
 question. Cooperation will end all quarrels between 
 the capitalist and the labourer. But the only consideration 
 that could be expected to have weight with the committee 
 was this: You must show that a man can do as much work 
 in eight as he can in ten hours. He might have added, 
 and that he icill do as much. 
 
 A month later in New York Phillips spoke in a 
 reminiscent strain, contrasting with the present the 
 days when indifference toward the abolition cause was 
 so great that the press did not condescend to 
 notice its meetings; when men said, The work is too 
 vast; all your waiting a dream. 
 
 And now they are saying, " AVhat is there left to do ? 
 What can be your pretence for coming together.^" It is 
 a great change. Literature, the Government, the Church, 
 so tardy in coming to our help, all are on our side. To be 
 sure, as the Tory sentiment lingered in England and the 
 Bourbon in France, so in sly corners, in the musty study 
 
BACKWARD MOVEMENT 287 
 
 of a Doctor of Divinity, in the empty attic which fashionable 
 woman calls her mind, there will remain for a very long 
 while an unexpressed prejudice against the black race. 
 For fifty years you will find the ghost haunting his old 
 home. But national forces are all moving in one direction 
 — the equality of all races. Therefore the wisest work 
 to-day is to go forward to teach the American people the 
 absurdity of trying to found an empire on a single race. 
 The great forces of society — not the brainless boys and 
 aimless girls, the self-conceited set who imagine they are 
 the fashionable world — but the men that work, mould, 
 achieve, and manage the brains of the Nation, will compre- 
 hend this. Somewhere there is a power that has put this 
 Nation forward infinitely faster than its leaders either pur- 
 posed or dared to go. We will have a politics as broad as 
 humanity. Nothing that interferes with the rights of a 
 great class deserves the name of government. No state 
 deserves it until it acknowledges the Fifteenth Amendment. 
 
 Phillips began an editorial in the Standard of July 3, 
 1869, with this sentence: " Grant has now been President four 
 months; still there is no safety for loyal men in the South.'* 
 He closed it as follows: "The blood of murdered loyalists 
 is on the skirts of this Administration. Why is not martial 
 law proclaimed ? Is the promise forgotten .^ Is it a King 
 Log with a paper sceptre that sits in the White House 
 while loyal men flee for safety and rebels fire salutes under 
 the Confederate flag V In a single county in Texas there 
 were ten murders in three weeks of July, 1869. With 
 inactivity at Washington, while diplomatically "accepting 
 the situation," the South was passing under rebel control 
 again; the new voters surpassing their fathers in rebellious 
 feeling. Almost discouraged, Phillips called for vigilance 
 and preparation for the next election, in the betrayal of the 
 
288 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 freedman's cause by Grant — "a second Buchanan, tem- 
 porizing while the enemy gets into battle array." 
 
 On the 23d of March, 1870, Revels, a coloured Senator 
 from Mississippi, in the first paragraph of his first speech 
 said : " Sir, I stand to-day on this floor to appeal for protec- 
 tion from the strong arm of the Government for her loyal 
 children, irrespective of colour or race, who are citizens of 
 the Southern states, and particularly of the great State of 
 Georgia." After citing the Negroes' fidelity to their masters 
 and their families during the war instead of fomenting 
 insurrection, and their services in the army after their 
 emancipation, thus proving their loyalty to the entire Nation 
 and their help, he reviewed their subsequent treatment in 
 being disqualified to hold office, and depicted the persecu- 
 tions to which as a people they had been subjected. At 
 the close, Morton, of Indiana, joining in congratulations 
 of many senators, remarked that in the exchange that had 
 been made in the place once occupied by Jefferson Davis, 
 the Senate had lost nothing in intelligence, while it had 
 gained much in patriotism and loyalty. 
 
 On the 30th of March, 1870, the President proclaimed 
 that the Fifteenth Amendment had been ratified by the 
 requisite three-fourths of the states and in a special message 
 called upon Congress to take all means within their power 
 to promote and encourage education, and upon the people 
 to see to it that all who possess and exercise political rights 
 shall have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge which 
 will make their share in the Government a blessing and not 
 a danger. 
 
 Then Phillips wrote: "For the President we have 
 hardly any words but those of gratitude. He has done 
 
DISBANDING OF ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY 289 
 
 more than his friends pledged him for. We wish he could 
 see his way to a more prompt and decisive method of dealino- 
 with Southern murderers; and think he has full powers. 
 He has done his full share to give coloured men the ballot. 
 May he soon draw the sword to protect them in its use." 
 In the next and last number of the Anti-slavery Standard 
 are the remarks he made at the disbanding of the American 
 Society in New York, April 9, 1870. 
 
 I congratulate you that we are met at last in the full 
 noon of that day whose very dawn hardly any of us believed 
 we should live to see; that at last the nation in its orofanic 
 law adopts the original pledge of this Society to secure to the 
 coloured race of the United States all the rights and privi- 
 leges which belong to them as men and as Americans. 
 Our work as an organization is accomplished, our pledge 
 redeemed, our promise fulfilled, and we have nothing to 
 do but to thank God and to throw our exertions henceforth 
 into channels more fitting the hour which dawns upon us. 
 
 Later in the day he made a concluding address of 
 similar import, adding: 
 
 When I was absorbed into this great movement I remem- 
 ber well that it found me a very proud man; proud of the 
 religious, proud of the civil institutions of the country. 
 Thirty years have not brought back the young pride nor 
 renewed the young trust. I go out with no faith whatever 
 in institutions. I see a Government lashed by the iron hail 
 of necessity to a great step. I see a Church shamed by the 
 rising public opinion about it, at last, into a decent obser- 
 vance. My only joy to-day is that I can look into the face 
 of the world and read the first line of the Declaration of 
 Independence without a blush and say in the presence of 
 Nations: At last there is no enormous, portentous crime 
 which you can point at to mar that declaration. 
 
XXII 
 NEW CAUSES AND OLD 
 
 (1871-1876) 
 
 IT WAS natural that Phillips should not be entirely carried 
 away by the enthusiasm of his audience at the last 
 meeting of the American Anti-slavery Society. He after- ^ 
 ward recalled the ovation he then received as the crowning 
 joy of his career and a compensation for all its labours. 
 But, as his speech declared, and as subsequent events have 
 proved, the equality of rights which the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence asserted, after the manner of French Revolutionists, 
 and which the Constitution repeated in an amendment 
 almost a century later, was far from reality — a promise 
 and a hope only, which have not even yet been fully realized. 
 All that legislation could then accomplish had been secured; 
 the rest must be left to forces and influences of another 
 kind and to time, the gradual moulder of peoples. As long 
 as he lived the champion of one race's rights would concern 
 himself about them; but henceforth he would also turn 
 his attention more fully to other issues which were assuming 
 a new importance. 
 
 After thirty-three years of unwearied activity, without 
 much encouragement in the first two-thirds of that time, 
 he might consider the eventide triumph of his main purpose 
 
 290 
 
INTEMPERANCE 291 
 
 a signal to retire from active service at the age of sixty. 
 But the habit of a hfetime was as strong as his mind and 
 body. He was in the prime of maturity when the accumu- 
 lated wisdom of years was for him at the disposal of an 
 intellect undimmed and of a vigorous physique. He 
 could not stop so long as there were evils to be discovered 
 and wrongs to be righted or thoughts to l)e spoken. The 
 inertia of the cannon ball keeps it rolling after it has slain 
 the foe, sometimes to the harm of other foes in its way. 
 Phillips could always find them. To a friend he said, 
 "Now that the field is won, do you sit by the camp-fire, 
 but I will put out into the underbrush." 
 
 First, he found intemperance, and without going far. 
 It was not a new evil nor the first time he had met and 
 attacked it. Prohibition he regarded as the best remedy for 
 general drinking, and he pleaded frequently for the enactment 
 and enforcement of laws to stop the sale of liquor at every 
 tenth door in Boston and in the taverns of every village. 
 Yet he was broad enough to state the other side; that the 
 saloon was the workingman's club-room, and that his twelve 
 hours of labour left him but twelve more for eating, sleeping, 
 and such diversion as he might get, which was not likely 
 to be intellectual. Beer with the boozy at nightfall was 
 the height of his anticipation. Excessive labour was one 
 of the causes of common drinking, and this, in turn, of the 
 poverty which made continuous toil imperative. Prevention 
 was connected with shorter hours, giving a margin for better 
 things than dram-shops — opportunity to make a home 
 attractive, to read, to see interesting and improving sights, 
 to think about something higher than grog, and for the 
 younger to obtain the elements of education in the evening 
 
292 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 schools. To obtain all this he urged the value of organiza- 
 tion, notwithstanding the ability of capital to wait longer 
 than labour. It could control the nation if it were in earnest 
 and kept united. This was forty years ago and a newer 
 doctrine than it is to-day; but progress beyond his panacea 
 has been slow, and the best achievements have been in the 
 direction of his recommendations. 
 
 That he could view social and reformatory movements 
 from the highest point was seen in a lecture on the topic 
 of In Christianity No Substitutes and No Mustering Out, 
 given in June, 1870, at the closing of a Sunday afternoon 
 discourse. 
 
 There are many grave issues which the community 
 must grapple with in the coming years needing all the 
 reserve forces of social science and religion. Once man 
 was regarded as a wild beast to be restrained; later, to be 
 developed by implanting a motive principle and giving him 
 opportunities, lifting him from subjection to temptation; 
 opening to woman fields of labour that shall remove the 
 necessity of vice, and bringing into society the reserve 
 power of womanhood. Social science is wise selfishness. 
 It does n't teach religion. I want to add to it a higher 
 lesson. In the presence of the New Testament every 
 human being is sacred and infinitely precious. Ten men 
 are not to be ground up in order that nine hundred and 
 ninety may be happy. Children are to be put right at 
 home, not in houses. Young men, not in one Christian 
 Association Building, but in as many and as costly as the 
 devil's palaces on every corner. Newspapers to be as 
 good as one which Wall Street consults, without its immoral 
 tone. Give your millions and your presence in the lobby, 
 in the suffering street, and supplement law with your sym- 
 pathy and religion, and wherever the devil is go to fight 
 him, without asking him to come up on level ground. Under- 
 
RELIGION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE 293 
 
 neath you is surging the immense power of human vice; 
 how rotten civiHzation is! Then fight the devil with his 
 own weapons; fight him with greater inducements, grapple 
 with the same element of human nature. In order to do 
 this I want all Boston, in the court, in the prison, in the 
 grog-shop, every man and woman, not substitutes bought 
 by money. Give me that, and I will show you a city re- 
 deemed from vice. 
 
 These lines are only as the occasional words that might 
 be heard through a door ajq,r, needing all the rest to show 
 their full import; but they indicate the thoroughness of his 
 reformatory spirit and the absolute surrender which he 
 demanded for effectual saving of society. It was no 10 per 
 cent, method. Moreover, he practised what he preached, 
 whether in benefactions or in rescue from evil ways. 
 
 An immediate result of his agitation of social questions 
 was his nomination for Governor by the Prohibition Con- 
 vention on September 4, 1870, and four days later by the 
 Labour party. It was an appreciation of his services in 
 behalf of the two causes he had championed; but the hope 
 of success was so forlorn that he cannot be said to have 
 at last indulged in politics after a lifetime of abstinence. It 
 only gave him an opportunity to publish his sentiments 
 in a political creed whose first sentences were: "We affirm, 
 as a fundamental principle, that labour, the creator of 
 wealth, is entitled to all it creates. Affirming this, we avow 
 ourselves willing to accept the final results of a principle 
 so radical, such as the overthrow of the whole profit-making 
 system, the extinction of monopolies, the abolition of privi- 
 leged classes, universal education or fraternity, and the 
 final obliteration of the poverty of the masses. Resolved, 
 therefore. That we declare war with the wage system and 
 
294 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 the present system of finance, with lavish grants of pubHc 
 land to speculating companies. . . . We demand a 
 ten-hour day for factory-work, and eight hours hereafter; 
 that women receive the same wages as men when employed 
 at the public expense to do the same kind of work." 
 
 In a speech supporting these demands and in his letter 
 of acceptance he placed the value of the movement chiefly 
 in its attempt to protect human rights, to insure peace, 
 and as a guarantee against the destruction of capital; since 
 labour and capital are partners, not enemies, and their 
 interests are identical, in order to bring about a fair decision 
 of the common profits. The best minds should give 
 themselves to the work of changing the vast inequalities 
 in the social system. And to the Prohibitionists he wrote: 
 "The law cannot make men temperate, but it can shut 
 up dram-shops which feed intemperance, double our taxes, 
 treble the peril to property and life. The use of liquors 
 rests with each man's discretion. But the trade in them 
 comes within the control of law. Whatever lifts the masses 
 to better education and more self-control and secures 
 them their full rights, helps the temperance cause. Thor- 
 oughly as I dislike to have my name used in a political 
 canvass I have not the right to refuse it if it will strengthen 
 your party." 
 
 As the candidate of two parties Phillips received over 
 twenty thousand votes, enough to show that temperance 
 and labour reform were issues that had begun to be of 
 some interest in the Commonwealth, which was his reward 
 for consenting to a predestined and expected defeat. Doubt- 
 less among these voters there were many who wished to 
 conipliment him for services to another cause. Others 
 
SUPPORT OF GENERAL BUTLER 295 
 
 did not let the opportunity pass to malign one who had 
 exposed himself to attack by entering the political arena. 
 Worse than the onsets of those who denied his fitness to be 
 a political leader was the provocation given him to strike 
 back. The violence with which he did this confirmed the 
 wisdom of his hitherto unbroken resolutions to keep out 
 of politics. He did not need their rough methods to call 
 out his own sharper words, which were sometimes pointed 
 with bitterness and feathered with unwarranted fancies. 
 The lists which he had entered were unworthy of his steel, 
 and ward-meeting tactics did not become the hero of a 
 thirty years' war. 
 
 Nor in the opinion of his friends did Phillips gain anything 
 by urging the claims of General Butler in 1871 as a guber- 
 natorial candidate who had allied himself with temperance 
 and labour reform, and who at least represented an idea, 
 but also was a disturbing element in the Republican party. 
 This, however, was his recommendation to the agitator of 
 labour interests and the "great question of money against 
 legislation." It is noticeable that Phillips already foresaw 
 dangers that would threaten the social fabric in the next 
 generation, as he predicted in words like these: 
 
 Republican institutions will go down before moneyed 
 corporations. Rich men die; but banks are immortal, 
 and railroad corporations never have any diseases. In the 
 long run with Legislatures they are sure to win. This is 
 the battle which General Butler represents, the battle of 
 Labour. He has been charged with about every sin that can 
 be imagined, except of not doing what he said he would do. 
 
 On this account Phillips gave his support to the candi- 
 date who was pledged to work for his favourite reforms. 
 
296 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 although he was again deserted for a time by friends and 
 comrades. But this was an old story, and he kept on his 
 way unswervingly without them until they chose to come 
 back. 
 
 He appeared to better advantage in a newspaper con- 
 troversy over Mayor Lyman's attitude toward the Garrison 
 mob of 1835, having been an eye-witness of the occurrence. 
 The dispute served as a landmark to show how far the 
 city had advanced in one generation, recalling the year 
 when it was neither respectable nor safe in Boston to speak 
 against Southern slavery. Thirty-five years later a coloured 
 Senator, occupying Jefferson Davis's seat, was the guest 
 of the Governor of Massachusetts and of the Speaker of the 
 House of Representatives, and was received with distin- 
 guished consideration by the Senate and the Judges of the 
 United States Court. Phillips being called for, after an 
 address by Senator Revels, reminded the large audience 
 of an attorney-general who, thirty-three years before, 
 spoke of emancipation as a letting loose of hyenas, and 
 added, " Gentlemen of Boston, I introduce you to a hyena." 
 The applause that followed was another token that the 
 city had moved on from the day when this attorney-general's 
 remarks in Faneuil Hall gallery incited Phillips to make 1 
 the Lovejoy speech which made him famous in a day. 
 
 Not discouraged by Butler's rejection by two-thirds of i 
 the Republican Convention, Phillips gathered up the 
 substance of his campaign speeches into an elaborate 
 address on the Labour Question which he delivered in 
 Boston and New York before the close of the year 1871, 
 and published it later under the above title. He saw the 
 same drift of wealth into the hands of a few here as in 
 
FAVOURS REPUBLICAN PARTY 297 
 
 England; and that tlie survival of republican institutions 
 depends upon a successful resistance of this tendency by 
 the masses roused to grapple with this danger through 
 political action. His remedy was graded taxation, doubled 
 riches to be taxed fourfold, and corporations made co- 
 operative for associated labour and capital. "One-third 
 of Christendom never had food enough to make them 
 what they should be; they spend the day merely in getting 
 bread enough to live, with a stunted mind and no aspira- 
 tions beyond supper, grog, and sleep. The system that 
 makes five thousand dependent upon one is faulty in its 
 foundations. Coal is double its value because of corpora- 
 tions. Labour is too poor to own a journal, but its votes 
 can command the press. Organization and education of 
 the masses will win in the future." 
 
 Phillips lent his voice and pen to the Republican party 
 in the campaign of 1872. Neither its politics nor its candi- 
 date suited him in all particulars, but Grant had done 
 better in his first term than the abolitionists feared, and the 
 great issues were now embodied in party measures. Perhaps 
 the President's critic of 1868 was ready to atone for his 
 strictures of that year; at any rate, his opinion of Horace 
 Greeley, the opposition candidate, was as unfavourable as 
 it was freely pronounced. Sumner had urged coloured 
 men to vote for Greeley; and while Phillips sympathized 
 with Sumner's injured feelings, he would not restore " the 
 scandal and wrangle of Andy Johnson's years, with seces- 
 sion encamped in Washington." His acquaintance with 
 Greeley in the old anti-slavery contest had not prepossessed 
 him with the Democratic candidate's courage and political 
 honesty; and he believed that principles were now being 
 
298 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 traded for the Presidency, and that the Negro was being 
 decoyed into danger to be left doubly defenceless. This 
 and more, in a long letter, was his answer to the coloured 
 people who had asked his counsel in a year when their two 
 best friends differed in a way they could not understand. 
 He made his own position unmistakably clear, and also 
 the risk they ran in voting for the great editor of the Tribune, 
 who was snowed under in November, 1872. 
 
 James Anthony Froude volunteered, in 1873, to cross the 
 Atlantic and explain to Americans in a series of lectures 
 the ill success of England in dealing with Ireland. The 
 reason which he mainly urged was the dogged incapacity 
 of the Irish; that God left them unfinished, and that no wit 
 of man can make citizens out of them; that the Celtic race 
 lacks the elements that go to make up self-government, 
 statesmanship, and a law-abiding community willing to 
 associate with the great movements of the British people, 
 who have furnished a government for the poverty-stricken, 
 demoralized millions of Ireland for the last three hundred 
 years. 
 
 If the eminent historian and pamphleteer had not heard 
 that an able and eloquent defender of Ireland lived in the 
 city where his explanation began, his unfortunate ignorance 
 was presently revealed to him. Possibly he had assumed 
 that all knowledge of the Irish question that was to be 
 credited belonged to a certain Parliamentary party, and 
 that American opinion was the outgrowth of immigration 
 and needing correction by himself. Phillips dispelled 
 that illusion without delay. Taking the platform as the 
 defender of Ireland once more, he drew some Inferences 
 from Froude, as he entitled his address, which were ex- 
 
FROUDE AND PHILLIPS ON IRELAND 299 
 
 tremely disastrous to the purpose of that expounder and 
 his statements. Thanking him for Hfting the Irish question 
 into pubHc notice, he was not surprised that any EngHshman 
 should clutch an opportunity of wiping away the eclipse on 
 the good fame of his country, and of explaining its lack of 
 justice and statesmanship toward the sister island. 
 
 If Mr. Froude could convince the world that Endand 
 had accepted the obligation which had been forced upon 
 her, it would have gone half-way to wipe out the blots on 
 his country's fame. No wonder that he did not make the 
 attempt. Ireland has made itself the pivot on which the 
 destiny of England turns. The would-be intermeddler 
 in the affairs of all Europe did not dare draw her sword 
 in the Franco-Prussian war for fear of Ireland behind her 
 back. She knows that she would be checkmated if a 
 foreign power should land men and arms on the opposite 
 coast. The wickedness of the Tudors and Stuarts is pun- 
 ished by the weakness of Victoria. In the essential state- 
 ment of the case Ireland has conquered England. And 
 Mr. Froude comes here to explain the situation on the 
 ground of Irish incapacity — a bad choice of a jury, for 
 since July 4, 1776, our political faith has been that all men 
 are capable of self-government. 
 
 The distinguished apologist for English government in 
 Ireland had not counted on an antagonist of Puritan 
 descent, and, surprised and discomfited, soon abandoned 
 his enterprise of enlightening America. 
 
 Phillips appeared with some of his fellow-reformers at 
 a meeting of the New England Woman's Suffrage iVssocia- 
 tion in Faneuil Hall in December, and closed his year's 
 work in a speech appropriate to the occasion. 
 
 Temperance and the labour question were frequent 
 themes with him in the lectures which he delivered in the 
 
300 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 early part of 1874, showing that the grave issues now before 
 the nation were clearly foreseen by this far-sighted observer 
 of events and tendencies. A temperance lecture of his 
 brought together the largest audience in Tremont Temple 
 that he had seen there since the outbreak of the war. He 
 hoped it foretold the rebellion of New England against the 
 tyranny of the grog-shop. More likely it was the tribute 
 of Boston to his eloquence on any subject in which he was 
 deeply interested. A letter to George J. Holyoake indi- 
 cates the start which incorporated wealth had fully a genera- 
 tion ago: 
 
 Two or three united railways {one president) will subject 
 a state to their will. It is cheaper and surer to buy legis- 
 latures than voters. This is the peril of universal suffrage; 
 rum rules our great cities. One hardly sees whence the 
 cure is to come. I believe, I don't see. I never expected 
 to see any success of our anti-slavery struggle. The 
 gods made men mad and hastened them on their way 
 to destruction. I shall not live long enough to see any 
 marked result of our labour movement. I trust there will 
 never be a class-party here, labour against capital; 
 for three-fourths of our population are to some extent 
 capitalists. Limitation of hours is almost the only special 
 measure. 
 
 Southern ferment recalled Phillips's attention to the 
 Negroes whose position was full of doubt and danger along 
 the Gulf. The Governor of Louisiana had been elected 
 by them and stood by them before an opposition Legis- 
 lature, but finally had to call upon the President to 
 help him keep the peace in New Orleans. Sheridan was 
 sent down and order was restored. Whereupon Southern 
 sympathizers in Massachusetts, for the tribe was not 
 
QUESTIONS OF FINANCE 301 
 
 extinct in 1875, called a meeting on January 15th, 
 in Faneuil Hall, to denounce Grant and Sheridan. 
 Phillips in the gallery listened to one speech after another, 
 interspersed with calls for himself, which at the close grew 
 so vociferous that he rose in his place, to be summoned to 
 the platform, where he vindicated the administration and 
 the commander in a speech that was applauded by Repub- 
 licans and hissed by Democrats, after the former fashion. 
 But the orator turned the tables on the promoters of the 
 meeting, and an amendment to the denunciatory resolutions 
 was passed, commending the course of Grant and Sheridan. 
 He was certainly doing effective service for the cause at 
 sixty-four, the military age of retirement. Also for the 
 Government when he took up the currency question, which 
 at this time was becoming a serious one when a gold dollar 
 would buy two or three greenbacks, and when financial 
 disturbance prevailed. 
 
 Without pretending to be a political economist, he urged 
 the plan for relief which seemed to him most promising 
 before the American Social Science Association meeting 
 in Boston March 3, 1875. It was, in short, to make the 
 nation's currency good as gold, and its bonds a good invest- 
 ment for capital, with interest at low rate for borrowers, 
 who would thus develop the resources of the country. 
 These principles of finance he set forth in a lecture 
 with this title here and there for some time, not without the 
 controversy which attends all economic theories, not all of 
 which, however, are enforced with the vigour and plausible 
 logic of his sincere argument. Even sincerity itself, he 
 admits, may be at fault when tried by the wisdom of 
 experience; as in the instance of his early belief in free trade 
 
302 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 contrasted with his later behef : '* Any boy can see an abstract 
 principle. Only threescore years and ten can discern 
 when to make an exception to it. This explains the influx 
 of college boys into politics with marvellous and delightful 
 ignorance of affairs." 
 
 The world-wide celebration of the hundredth anniver- 
 sary of Daniel O'Connell's birthday on August 6, 1875, 
 afforded one agitator an opportunity to eulogize another, 
 and one orator to characterize another. It was not the 
 first time that Phillips had extolled his compeer when 
 speaking upon kindred themes, but this occasion and audi- 
 ence permitted undivided attention to a favourite character. 
 As an eloquent appreciation it is unsurpassed, and stands 
 as one of the highest achievements of his oratory. His 
 sympathies were with the Irish reformer and his work; 
 his admiration sincere for his methods, and for the power 
 of his masterly eloquence. The man and his cause, his 
 purpose and abilities, appealed to one of similar aims and 
 powers, who of all men found it easy to render such a tribute 
 as one man seldom gives another. Faithful, generous, and 
 without reserve, it stands, all in all, as one of the best ex- 
 amples in the language of true and honourable eulogy. 
 For the eulogist himself it may be regarded as the acme 
 of a climax, reached just as he had passed his grand climac- 
 teric year.* 
 
 Yet he found at this summit no signal to slacken his 
 hand. If the causes he championed lacked the stimulus 
 of anti-slavery discussion, their number and variety com- 
 pensated in part and must have afforded a certain relief. 
 Temperance, Labour, and Woman were themes on demand 
 
 ^Printed in the second series of his speeches, p. 384. 
 
RESCUE OF OLD SOUTH CHURCH 303 
 
 for his lyceum audiences, and sometimes united as a compos- 
 ite subject of a single discourse, which was deHvered when 
 called for. The Indian problem also interested him as 
 that of another race wronged by American greed, with a 
 sadder destiny awaiting it than that of the Negro. 
 
 Under military restraint, provoked to useless revenge, 
 robbed of one reservation after another, decimated by 
 whiskey and bullets, the remnants of aboriginal tribes were 
 vanishing into the mists of sunset. In Canada a white 
 man could ride unharmed from Quebec to Vancouver. 
 Gall and Rain-in-the-Face trying to reach the Canada 
 line were attacked in their wigwams, and when the worms 
 turned, a Christian nation grew indignant over General 
 Custer's death. He might have been better employed in 
 restoring law and order farther south. But he was obeying 
 orders of a Government whose barbarous policy had cost 
 hundreds of millions, many lives, and more dishonour — 
 all to be repaid in land seized, largely for immigrants and 
 speculators. 
 
 After the winter's lecturing tours Phillips hastened 
 to the rescue of the Old South Church, a landmark of 
 Colonial and Revolutionary times, whose destruction was 
 threatened by the commercial value of its situation. The 
 appeal he made on June 14, 1876, for its preservation was 
 addressed to the historic spirit and civic pride of Boston, 
 and as revised by himself remains among his published 
 speeches as a choice example of what he could frame for 
 an occasional address with an immediate purpose in view. 
 It was a persuasive beginning in raising the requisite $400,000 
 that saved the venerable building. As a contribution to 
 the same purpose he opened a lecture course in May, 1877, 
 with an address on Sir Harry Vane, repeating it with 
 
304 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 great success before many audiences. In full sympathy 
 with his hero, he placed him in the constellation of worthies 
 whom Massachusetts delights to honour, and his personal 
 admiration produced a memorial discourse of whose 
 charm only newspaper reports remain. 
 
 In the opinion of many contemporaries — some of them 
 his personal friends — Phillips would have left a more de- 
 sirable record of his declining years if he had hung up his 
 armour and had withdrawn from the field at the military 
 age of retirement. The cause which he had championed 
 had triumphed so far as legislation could give freedom to 
 an enslaved race and the privileges of citizenship; but 
 laws, like wealth, cannot endow men with capacities, abili- 
 ties, and qualities essential to eminent social and civic 
 attainment. In his later warfare he was opposed by hin- 
 drances as obstinate as natural laws which no amount of 
 benevolent intention can overcome. Of these he could not 
 have been entirely unconscious, although it was a part of 
 his heroism to banish the thought of them. It might have 
 been better to admit the limitations of a good purpose and 
 to contend only for what is possible. At the same time it 
 must be said that the most of his contention was for rights 
 which are conceded to every grade of immigrant as soon 
 as he can be naturalized, even if he is not denatured. As 
 a rule, the African whose ancestors were here three hundred 
 or one hundred years ago will make as good a citizen as 
 the exile, voluntary or otherwise, from the slums of Europe, 
 Asia, or the Orient. 
 
 There were other causes and reforms, however, in which 
 Phillips was not so proficient a fighter and to whose success 
 he did not so largely contribute. He always was ready to 
 
a 
 
 KNIGHTLY SPIRIT 30 
 
 enter the lists in behalf of any worthy movement, but his 
 ideas of it were sometimes too impracticable to be of the 
 greatest value. Often they belonged to a future too far 
 removed, to the present day more than his own; views and 
 measures which time has vindicated, but not the best 
 for his own day. And yet something ought to be accorded 
 the prophet who discerns and advocates ideals that lift 
 men's eyes to the hills while they are plodding along the 
 lowland road which leads to the delectal)le heights. This 
 idealist was sometimes impatient that the laggards did not 
 mount up with wings as eagles. 
 
 Worse than this, the ideal which he proposed was not 
 always absolute, and lacked the sanction of successful 
 experiment. The element of friction is frequently left 
 uncounted in mechanism that looks perfect on paper, and 
 many airships have fallen by the weight of their driving 
 engines. 
 
 The reforms advocated by Phillips were all good, but the 
 methods he proposed were not in every instance as com- 
 mendable as the causes; still, they usually had features that 
 saved them from utter repudiation and uselessness. In 
 conference with other men he might have furnished valuable 
 suggestions; but as a lone dictator of policies from an irre- 
 sponsible platform his opinion on debatable matters of 
 currency and finance, labour and capital, for example, was 
 ideal rather than practical. What is to be most admired, if 
 it cannot be commended, is the continuance of the brave 
 spirit which sent him abroad in quest of adventure. That 
 which had kept him in the field engaged in single-handed 
 conflict for forty years did not die when Giant Despair 
 was slain. Other men turned to the pursuits of peace; 
 
306 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 he could not. There might be left for them no foes more 
 dire than windmills and fulling mills, than currency and 
 tariff, consumer and manufacturer; but in this veteran knight 
 was an undying flame which made him charge upon shadows 
 in his path, cast by ogres of more or less reality. But the 
 warrior zeal was genuine and the sense of duty unfailing. 
 
XXIII 
 LAST YEARS AND LABOURS 
 
 (1877-1884) 
 
 rriHE unflinching justice and courage with which PhilHps 
 ■*• could meet an occasion comphcated by the differ- 
 ences between his friends was illustrated by his eulogy of 
 Sumner, and, incidentally, of Motley, after the death of 
 the latter in 1877, both of whom he considered had been 
 treated unfairly by Grant, for whom in turn he had great 
 respect. But on this occasion he could arraign the Presi- 
 dent and Secretary Fish for stooping to a meanness, quoting 
 Sumner's own plain words to the Secretary of State. "Sir, 
 you are a tool of the President for base purposes; and this 
 removal [of Motley from the British mission] is out of 
 spite"; adding, "And it is true. The testimony is on the 
 files of the diplomatic service itself." 
 
 In the fall of this year Phillips was again approached 
 with a proposal regarding a nomination for the Governor's 
 office, which he declined to consider, as he did a nomination 
 to Congress the next year. His friends wished to show 
 him how widely his labours and character were appreciated ; 
 but he decided to continue his service to good causes in the 
 way that a lifetime of practice had made familiar. The 
 public platform, trammeled by no party direction or policy, 
 
 307 
 
308 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 where speech was restrained by nothing more powerful 
 than hisses and missiles, was to him more inviting than 
 legislative halls and government offices where an agent of 
 a party must keep within regimental lines. 
 
 Instead, he still preferred to be an independent scout, 
 discovering where a foe to humanity was lurking, and to be 
 the first to warn, to attack, and to summon the laggard host/ 
 Just at this time his sleepless vigilance encountered sundry 
 attempts to put persons undesirable to their relatives in 
 insane asylums ; and as he himself was once in similar danger 
 from his family in early abohtion days, he checked the present 
 movement by calling a public meeting and making a speech, 
 which resulted in memorializing the Legislature to pass 
 laws for the better protection of persons charged with the 
 malady about which there was no recourse to the customary 
 process of law, and to secure for inmates of retreats the 
 right of frequent and fair examinations and timely release. 
 
 The death of his co-worker. Garrison, in New York 
 City, May 24, 1879, was the occasion of another eulogy, 
 such as he might be expected to pronounce on the life, 
 labours, and character of the elder partner in long years of 
 service together in a common cause. "The hour is for 
 the utterance of a lesson, to contemplate an example, a rich 
 inheritance, a noble life worthily ended, and to emphasize 
 what it teaches. The remarkable elements in his career 
 were his consecration to a great idea; the earnestness and 
 vigour of his carrying it out ; the sagacity of his discernment 
 of hidden forces; the loftiness of his motives; his grasp on 
 
 ^That congressional life had its attractions for him, and was one of the prospects which he 
 surrendered for an independent career, I am assured by one of his friends, who writes: "That 
 which really attracted him was public life and not the bar, and nothing attracted him more. 
 His dream would have been a life in the United States Senate, as he himself told me." 
 
EULOGY OF GARRISON 309 
 
 American character; his courage in facing obstacles; his 
 few mistakes; his happy hfe; his unflagging hope and 
 serene faith; a leader, brave, tireless, unselfish; 'the blessing 
 of him that was ready to perish' is his eternal great re- 
 ward." The cause in which they had laboured tocrether 
 
 t.' o 
 
 was still demanding the watchfulness and advocacy of the 
 survivor. Oppressed by white domination, thousands of 
 the subject race were fleeing the Southern states until their 
 former masters, fearing a scarcity of labourers, attempted 
 to turn back the exodus from their own tyranny. To 
 help the fugitives, a meeting was held in June to protest 
 against interference with freemen's right to emigrate, and 
 to raise funds to help them. PhiUips was foremost in the 
 movement and spoke with his old-time interest and power. 
 The Administration heard the protest and took some action ; 
 but it was not possible to head off the stampede or stop it 
 so long as the white over-lords could make conditions 
 uncomfortable for the blacks. 
 
 When the Radical Club of ultra-liberal Unitarians drew 
 the radical reformer into their meetings at the house of his 
 life-long friend, Rev. John T. Sargent, and into theological 
 discussion, they found that his reformatory spirit did not 
 extend to the faith of his fathers. His religious belief was 
 consistent with all his efforts at bettering human society, 
 and did not need to be improved to match amendments of 
 any kind in the social fabric. Therefore, whether the 
 traditional conception of the Christian religion, its Founder, 
 or Edwards, its greatest New England exponent, were 
 attacked, they all found a defender in the agitator and 
 political reformer, the man who attacked everything else. 
 He drew the limiting; line of destructive criticism and recon- 
 
310 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 structive at the portal of orthodoxy, while he often lamented 
 that its members and ministers did not see how compre- 
 hensive its principles of benevolence and charity were, 
 and how all-persuasive its benign and reformatory activi- 
 ties ought to be. It was his open criticism of such short- 
 comings that brought upon him the charge of disloyalty to 
 religion, whereas he was its reproving prophet for righteous- 
 ness' sake. 
 
 An instance of this occurred in January, 1880, in a famous 
 controversy with the liberal clergy of Boston* on the liquor 
 question, after he had addressed a committee at the State 
 House on the license system, in which he pleaded for closing 
 rum shops and scored the city authorities and the police 
 for complicity with the trade. When Dr. Bartol apolo- 
 gized for some sorts of drinkers, he cited the example of 
 Mr. Pierpont, who was driven from his pulpit for agitating 
 the temperance question, and was ostracized by his profes- 
 sional brethren. Dr. Crosby, in 1881, fared no better 
 after his notable lecture against total abstinence. "His 
 own city, with license laws, is yet so ruled and plundered 
 by rum that timid statesmen advise giving up Republicanism, 
 and borrowing a leaf from Bismarck to help us." The 
 entire reply, given by request of certain clergy of Boston 
 before a large audience, is to be found in the second volume 
 of his speeches. 
 
 A crisis in Irish affairs led him to speak on this topic 
 at a Land League meeting in February, in which he 
 made the startling statement that separation from England 
 was the only solution of a problem which English and 
 Irish statesmanship had been trying to solve for more than 
 a century. He proposed to cut the knot that bound the 
 
ORATION AT HARVARD 311 
 
 two islands together, so great are the difficulties in the 
 way of their union. He did not attempt to predict what 
 would become of a state of only ten millions of people 
 among the powers of Europe. Not long after, he was 
 invited to advocate their cause in Ireland itself, but was 
 obliged to refuse on account of declining health. 
 
 In June, of his seventieth year, he delivered what may be 
 considered his valedictory oration, on the hundredth anni- 
 versary of the Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard College. His 
 alma mater liad contemplated his radical career with cool 
 reserve, but after Boston had begun to appreciate the 
 nation's recognition of her citizen, Harvard ventured to 
 permit him to speak for himself — not without risk, some 
 must have thought who recalled Emerson's famous oration 
 of 1837, and no one had become literary bondsman for 
 Phillips on this occasion, as when he addressed the public 
 schools of Boston. There was much curiosity and some 
 apprehension as to how he would use the academic opportu- 
 nity of his life, although he had spoken on similar occasions 
 at Williams, Dartmouth, and Yale. Nevertheless, he was 
 loyal to the traditions of elegant and scholarly address, 
 although colloquial and seemingly extemporaneous; but he 
 was also faithful to his own convictions of what the Scholar 
 in a Republic should be and to his sense of what scholar- 
 ship in American colleges actually is — "cowardly, timid, 
 and selfish." A few sentences will explain the surprise 
 that the whole caused. 
 
 History is, for the most part, an idle amusement, the day- 
 dream of pedants and triflers. Journals [diaries] are the 
 magnets that get near the chronometer of history and 
 make all its records worthless. Of what value are its 
 
312 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 minutiae ? Law has no atom of strength only so far as 
 pubHc opinion endorses it. We Hve under a government 
 of men and newspapers — not of law. The first attempt 
 to storm dominant opinions will reveal this to you. Educa- 
 tion is not book learning. New England learned more 
 from sundry discussions and events than from a hundred 
 colleges, more from Fremont's campaign and Harper's Ferry 
 than from a thousand academic chairs. Timid scholarship 
 shrinks from these agitations or denounces them. Distrust 
 of the people pervades the book-educated class, which 
 shrinks from that free speech which is God's school for 
 educating men. Trust the people and you educate the race. 
 Therefore all attempts against universal suffrage are bad. 
 If the interests of the best are endangered let the worst be 
 educated to see their mistake. College bred men should 
 be agitators to tear a question open and riddle it with light 
 and to educate the moral sense of the masses. Intemperance 
 is making universal suffrage a failure and a curse in every 
 city, and scholars have given it nothing but a sneer. So 
 in the law's non-recognition of woman, and in the rule 
 of Ireland through fear of it, scholarship stood afar off. No 
 government is rightful unless resting on the consent of the 
 people, and one which assumes to lead in asserting the 
 rights of humanity. At last that disgraceful seal of slave 
 complicity is broken. Let us inaugurate a new departure. 
 We must be better than our fathers. Prohibit temptation 
 if it rots great cities. Intrench labour against that wealth 
 which wrecked the Grecian and Roman states. Sit not, 
 like the figure on our silver coin, looking ever backward. 
 New occasions teach new duties. 
 
 Anyone who will read the entire oration in the second 
 series of his speeches will see that only here and there a 
 line has been taken to show the drift of his address, which 
 was, in a way, a thought here and a sentence there from the 
 discourses of a lifetime as fearless, uncompromising, and 
 
COURAGE TO THE END 313 
 
 consistent on the Commencement stage as in Faneuil Hall 
 or the lyceum platform of a country town. As usual, he 
 presented an aggressive front and measured men by their 
 approach to his advanced outpost. His friends said that 
 he remembered only the lapses of scholarship and forgot 
 Sumner and Lowell, C banning and Emerson, Parker and 
 Palfrey, Adams and Quincy. It was his lifelong way to 
 let good men's deeds stand as their eulogies, while he was 
 Cato the censor for the shortcomings of his friends and 
 the great accuser of all who opposed the largest liberty 
 of speech or of life under the laws. His admirers — and 
 they were many — felt that he himself was the living refu- 
 tation of his charge against the cowardice of scholarship; 
 but not many could say that they themselves had been 
 so courageous or so valiant in a long strife as he had been. 
 Later, they saw more clearly what he endured and how 
 great his achievements were. To comments at the time 
 he replied: "Well, I suppose they wanted me to bring 
 myself .^^ When was he ever known to bring any other 
 man's opinion or manner of speech? 
 
 It w^as a custom of Greek orators to continue a little 
 while after the climax of discourse and descend to a close 
 approaching the level of their opening paragraphs. With- 
 out intention Phillips's last years had a similar movement. 
 He believed that they could be but few after the threescore 
 and ten; and although he was strong in mind and body, 
 and was in undiminished demand by the public, there was 
 a note of grim endurance in his " working hard and battling 
 with snow-storms and drifts as I used to ten years ago, 
 and hoped I should n't now," — in the December after the 
 June day at Harvard. Then, in the next spring, came the 
 
314 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 necessity of removing from the house he had occupied for 
 more than forty years, to make room for widening Harrison 
 Avenue; and although the old home was reproduced as far 
 as possible at No. 37 Common Street, near by, it was not the 
 same for the two who had been peculiarly at home at No. 26 
 Essex Street. This breaking up was for Phillips the begin- 
 ning of the end. "It is no matter," he remarked as he 
 stood looking upon the vacant corner lot where his house 
 had stood. *'I am almost through with it all." He kept 
 on, however, lecturing here and there as far as Philadelphia 
 in the winter of 1882-83 on Labour and Capital, but felt 
 obliged toward the end of the latter year to decline attending 
 the fiftieth anniversary of the American Anti- slavery 
 Society in Philadelphia. In his reply to the invita- 
 tion, he spoke of the completion and triumph of a 
 movement which in its progress touched all the great 
 questions of the age — and now that its first purpose 
 was accomplished it seemed wasteful that the skill 
 and experience got from such labour and agitation should 
 be lost. Freedmen would need the protection of a 
 vigilant public opinion for a generation. "Labour and 
 finance claim our aid in the name of humanity and 
 justice. Let it not be said that the old abolitionist stopped 
 with the Negro and was never able to see that the same 
 principles he had advocated applied to every claim of down- 
 trodden humanity." This broad philanthropy, which he was 
 always practising, ought to have been a constant rebuke to 
 the charge of fanaticism and narrow sympathies. 
 
 Five days before the close of the year 1883 Phillips 
 spoke in the Old South Church at the unveiling of the 
 statue of Harriet Martineau. It was his last public utter- 
 
ILLNESS AND DEATH 315 
 
 ance. The same essential breadth characterized it that 
 underlay all his discourse. 
 
 In moral questions, I say, there are no nations. We 
 should endorse this memorial because the service of Harriet 
 Martineau transcends nationality, a woman who has the 
 great honour of having always seen the truth one generation 
 ahead. She saw here, in 1834, the grandeur of the great 
 movement just opened, whose proportions and results 
 will be seen in time to come. We want our children to see 
 the statue of this woman who came to observe and remained 
 to v/ork, and having put her hand to the plough persevered 
 until she was allowed to live where the paean of the emanci- 
 pated four millions went up to heaven, showing the attain- 
 ment of her great desire. 
 
 If his hearers had been told that this tribute was to be 
 his last public utterance, they would have said that the 
 spirit of it was as true of himself as of the reformer he was 
 eulogizing. The last half of the final sentence might, 
 with the change of person, be placed beneath his own 
 statue; but to it could be added an expression of the philan- 
 thropy which embraces every race and every man, and of 
 the heroism that shrinks from no sacrifice and counts 
 nothing as a reward except the triumph of right over wrong. 
 
 During the month of January, 1884, he was kept at home 
 by the serious illness of Mrs. Phillips. On the 26th he was 
 suddenly seized with the form of heart trouble known as 
 angina pectoris, whose first attack is premonitory of death. 
 To a friend asking him about his faith, he spoke of Christ 
 as the centre and solution of the history of humanity; of 
 his more than human nature, and of his spirit as enabling 
 him to do and suffer; and of the future life as sure as to- 
 morrow. With returns of paroxysms and agony he lingered 
 
316 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 through the week, until on Saturday evening, February 2d, 
 after a day of comparative rest, he fell into the sleep whose 
 waking is in the next stage of life. 
 
 The death of a man of national and international fame 
 was an affliction to his friends and a calamity to the city, 
 state, and nation, which all made no delay in recognizing. 
 In hearts and homes, in halls and churches, in city councils 
 and state Legislature, in the West, and even in the South, 
 there were tributes of affection for a kindly heart, of ad- 
 miration for surpassing ability, and of respect for a coura- 
 geous life. Mention of him was made in pulpits on Sunday; 
 the press recorded its estimates the next day. On Wednes- 
 day the funeral service at the Mollis Street Church was 
 followed by the gathering of a vast throng, and by a con- 
 tinuous procession through Faneuil Hall where the body 
 lay in state, thousands doing homage to a name which had 
 been canonized by death. Thousands more followed the 
 guard of honour to the grave in the old Granary Burying 
 Ground, where in the family tomb was laid the form of him 
 whose familiar places should know him no more, but 
 whose works should follow him.* 
 
 On the Saturday evening following the funeral a com- 
 memorative meeting was held in Faneuil Hall by friends 
 and admirers of the departed, at which tributes of affection 
 and honour were pronounced by one and another. And 
 on the 18th of April, under the auspices of the city govern- 
 ment of Boston, memorial services were held in Tremont 
 Temple, where George William Curtis delivered a eulogy 
 that was worthy of the subject of it. No survivor of that 
 
 'On the death of Mrs. Phillips a little more than two years later both were buried in Milton, 
 where they had frequently passed the summer. 
 
EULOGY BY CURTIS 317 
 
 group which had made the mid-century a famous period 
 in the history of eloquence could have rendered a more 
 sympathetic and faithful tribute to the life and character 
 of Wendell Phillips. Both had laboured together in the 
 same cause, often in the same way, and with a marked 
 similarity in their experience with audiences, and to some 
 degree in their manner of address. Boston could not 
 have better honoured its illustrious orator and reformer, 
 atoning for its tardiness in recognizing, or at least in ac- 
 knowledging, the loftiness of his aim, the sincerity of his 
 purpose, and his faith in an instructed public conscience- 
 Ten years later the city placed a tablet on the outer 
 wall of the building which stands on the site of the Phillips 
 homestead on Essex Street, bearing the following inscrip- 
 tion: 
 
 HERE 
 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS RESIDED DURING FORTY YEARS, 
 
 DEVOTED BY HIM TO EFFORTS TO SECURE 
 
 THE ABOLITION OF AFRICAN SLAVERY IN THIS COUNTRY. 
 
 THE CHARMS OF HOME, THE ENJOYMENT OF WEALTH AND LEARNING, 
 
 EVEN THE KINDLY RECOGNITION OF HIS FELLOW- CITIZENS, 
 
 WERE BY HIM ACCOUNTED AS NAUGHT COMPARED WITH DUTY. 
 
 HE LIVED TO SEE JUSTICE TRIUMPHANT, FREEDOM UNIVERSAL, 
 AND TO RECEIVE THE TARDY PRAISES OF HIS OPPONENTS. 
 THE BLESSINGS OF THE POOR, THE FRIENDLESS, 
 AND THE OPPRESSED ENRICHED HIM. 
 
 IN BOSTON 
 HE WAS BORN 29tH NOVEMBER, 1811, AND DIED 2d FEBRUARY, 1884. 
 
 THIS TABLET WAS ERECTED IN 1894, BY ORDER OF THE 
 CITY COUNCIL OF BOSTON. 
 
XXIV 
 THE SUBSTANCE OF PHILLIPS'S ORATORY 
 
 IN THE brief extracts from Phillips's speeches and the 
 condensations that have been given the main purpose 
 has been to show what his sentiments were upon the issues 
 paramount. Incidentally, also, is often seen the intensity 
 of his convictions and the fearless earnestness of his expres- 
 sion. Moreover, where the quotation has been direct 
 and continuous, even of a fragment, much can be learned 
 of his sentence and paragraph construction, his vocabulary, 
 his figures of speech and thought, his illustrating anecdotes 
 and historical allusions, his mastery of irony and invective, 
 with his perfect control of himself and his audience, two 
 powers that are not always found together. Furthermore, 
 the variety of citations made will be found to exemplify a 
 wide range of rhetorical principles and oratorical precepts. 
 But beyond these qualities that may be illustrated by such 
 brief citations as the limits of this volume permit, there are 
 characteristics which belong to the framework of entire 
 discourses and to the class to which they must be assigned. 
 It is in this last particular that the great orator's versatility, 
 variety, and adaptation to the subject and the occasion 
 are exhibited, and in which it is conspicuously evident that 
 he was much more than the mere abolition lecturer of tradi- 
 tion and men's memories. To illustrate his constructive 
 
 318 
 
AS A LECTURER ON GENERAL TOPICS 319 
 
 i 
 
 ability adequately nothing less than entire speeches should 
 be read and analyzed. The two volumes of these fortunately 
 permit such study/ but even one example cannot be ex- 
 amined in the space assigned to the substance of the speaker's 
 oratory, as distinguished from its form, treated in another 
 chapter. It will therefore be necessary to illustrate a few 
 classes of his discourse by reference to eminent instances 
 of each, and to note his management of a few important 
 rhetorical divisions, which have grown out of a long experi- 
 ence of speaking men with listeners. 
 
 First in the order of time — and he would have said in 
 other respects — Phillips was a lecturer, with instruction 
 as his main purpose. Not in the academic sense of a 
 reader of formal discourse on themes of greater or less 
 profundity and interest — sometimes associated with dul- 
 ness on the part of the reader and the hearer likewise. 
 Instead, his topics were not difficult to understand, and he 
 was never commonplace nor his hearers sleepy. The 
 continuous call for one of his earliest popular lectures, that 
 on The Lost Arts, throughout his lifetime, shows that he 
 remained a lecturer upon occasion to the end. Delivered 
 from hastily assembled notes at first, to meet sudden sum- 
 mons, it met also a certain thirst for the curious until it 
 had been repeated — according to the editor of the second 
 volume of Addresses — over two thousand times. Mention 
 of this lecture has been made already in Chapter VII, 
 in connection with his entrance upon the platform. An- 
 other popular lecture, on Street Life in Europe, was of 
 great interest when foreign travel was less common than 
 it now is. In the first period of his career Phillips often 
 
 1" Speeches, Lectures and Addresses," two volumes, Boston, Lee and Shepard, 1902. 
 
320 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 spoke upon subjects taken from the domain of science, 
 invention, and discovery; but as it was not his habit to 
 read a manuscript, no reports of these early discourses 
 remain. 
 
 Soon, however, PhiUips's lectures began to have a purpose 
 beyond popular information in science, art, and travel. 
 With reforms in his mind it was not always certain whether 
 his utterances could be called lectures, addresses, or speeches. 
 Strictly speaking, the instructive element prevails in a lecture, 
 and with it is associated the thought of premeditation and 
 preparation; and as Phillips himself should be the best 
 authority it is fair to accept his classification in the volume 
 which was prepared in his lifetime — the first. ^ In it the 
 following are called lectures: Idols, Harper's Ferry, Lincoln's 
 Election, Disunion, The War for the Union, Toussaint 
 rOuverture. In the second volume, compiled after his 
 decease, only one title — The Lost Arts — heads what is 
 termed a lecture. Like this one, the others mentioned 
 were delivered in courses of lectures or upon special invita- 
 tion, sometimes in different places, and bear the marks of 
 orderly and careful thought and as if with the local character 
 of an audience in mind. Such was the Fraternity Lecture 
 delivered in Boston, largely a review of the city's "Idol" — 
 Webster — and of his eminent eulogists, as also was that 
 on Harper's Ferry, with his own eulogy of John Brown 
 and his arraignment of Virginia and its governor, closing 
 with the lines he loved so well — "Right forever on the 
 scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Disunion and 
 
 ^To the publisher of this volume Phillips wrote: 
 
 "Four or five of them ('Idols,' 'The Election,' 'Mobs and Education,' 'Disunion,' 
 ' Progress') were delivered in such circumstances as made it proper I should set down before- 
 hand, substantially, what I had to say. The preservation of the rest you owe to phonography." 
 
AN EXORDIUM 321 
 
 The War for the Union are two remaining lectures, 
 which ought to be read on the same day, dehvered as they 
 were in the same memorable year of 1861, before and after 
 the opening of the war, the one indicating what he meant 
 by disunion and the other his position with regard to war 
 as an arbiter of the sectional dispute. 
 
 As an example, however, of that kind of lecture which 
 he oftenest delivered after the early period of scientific 
 information, the half biographical, half political one on 
 Idols is a good illustration. The opening paragraph 
 is as informal as the first sentences of a skilled after-dinner 
 speaker who takes his cue from the toastmaster, as Phillips 
 himself evidently did from the presiding oflficer, or from 
 some preliminary speaker. 
 
 Mr. President and Ladies and Gentlemen: I feel half 
 inclined to borrow a little wit from an article in a late number 
 of the Atlantic Monthly — "My Double, and How He Undid 
 Me" — and say, "I agree entirely with the gentleman who 
 has just taken his seat. So much has been said, and so 
 well said, that there is no need of my occupying your atten- 
 tion." But then I should lose the hearty satisfaction it gives 
 me to say with what delight I stand upon this platform, 
 and how sincerely I appreciate the honour you do me, 
 Mr. Chairman, by allowing me to aid in opening this course 
 of lectures. 
 
 While the topic of exordium is being considered it should 
 be said that Phillips was always a gentleman on the platform 
 and off, and knew^ how to conciliate an audience from the 
 start, as in this instance. But he did by no means always 
 follow this cardinal precept of the rhetoricians. If he was 
 reasonably sure of their agreement with him at the close 
 of his discourse, he cared very little for their favour at its 
 
322 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 beginning. Indeed, their hostility was as inspiring to him 
 as a refractory steed was to his friend Rarey, the horse- 
 trainer. Sometimes, if his hearers lacked this inspiriting 
 opposition, he provoked it immediately. In this lecture, 
 after two gracious and appreciative paragraphs, he might 
 have felt that acquiescence was not stimulating enough, 
 for he began the third in this way: 
 
 There are men who prate about "nationality," and the 
 "empire," and "manifest destiny" — using brave words, 
 when their minds rise no higher than some petty mass of 
 white states making money out of cotton and corn. My 
 idea of American nationality makes it the last, best growth 
 of the thoughtful mind of the century, treading under foot 
 sex and race, caste and condition, and collecting on the 
 broad bosom of what deserves the name of an empire, 
 under the shelter of noble, just, and equal laws all races, 
 all customs, all religions, all languages, all literature, and 
 all ideas. I remember, a year or two ago, they told me of 
 a mob at Milwaukee that forced a man to bring out the 
 body of his wife, born in Asia — which, according to the 
 custom of her forefathers, he was about to burn — and 
 compelled him to submit to American funeral rites, which 
 his soul abhorred. The sheriff led the mob, and the press 
 of the state vindicated the act. This is not my idea of 
 American civilization. . . . They will show you at 
 Rome the stately column of the Emperor Trajan. Carved 
 on its outer surface is the triumphal march of the Emperor, 
 when he came back to Rome, leading all nations, all tongues, 
 all customs, all races, in the retinue of his conquest; and 
 they traced it on the eternal marble, circling the pillar 
 from base to capital. Just such is my idea of the empire, 
 broad enough and brave enough to admit both sexes, all 
 creeds, and all tongues in the triumphal procession of this 
 great daughter of the West of the Atlantic. 
 
NOT ALWAYS CONCILIATORY 323 
 
 This single paragraph might stand as an epitome of the 
 substance and form of the orator's discourse. His compre- 
 hensive political and humanitarian creed is here; a hint of 
 his wide information; and an example of his apt use of a 
 noble figure in illustrating a lofty sentiment, combined with 
 outspoken, if unwelcome, truth at first, which was received 
 with "loud applause" as he closed a paragraph classic in 
 its construction. But, as a rule, the first sentences which 
 he uttered were such as to secure silence and a hearing, 
 and accorded with the general sentiment on the introduc- 
 tory topic, which did not always relate to the line of remark 
 to follow. x\s in this lecture, when he made the Ivceum 
 one of the four sources of education, and woman's influence 
 upon society and literature was asserted, there was a pleased 
 assent and the audience went with the speaker, and even 
 applauded when he said that "New England, with tolera- 
 tion written all over her statute-book, has a pope in every 
 village; and the first thing that tests a boy's courage is to 
 dare to differ from his father." When, however, he pres- 
 ently remarked of Webster that he was the bankrupt chief 
 of a broken and ruined party and added sundry other 
 uncomplimentary statements, hisses began to be heard; 
 which was always the sure sign that Phillips was getting 
 into the body of his discourse. 
 
 On this occasion — in Boston, 1859 — he was intending 
 to speak to its citizens about one of its "idols." He had 
 laid a foundation for his remarks by dealing broadly with 
 good literature and government, but as he drifted from 
 these into personal criticism of "the opposition," it is better 
 to look for a more representative example of what is called 
 "the argument," 
 
324 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 One can be found in his Boston and New York lecture 
 on The War for the Union in which was answered the 
 question as to his position after hostihties began. 
 
 I will not speak of war in itself — I have no time ; I will 
 not say, with Napoleon, that it is the practice of barbarians; 
 I will not say that it is good. It is better than the past, 
 but there is not an element of good in it. I mean, there is 
 nothing in it which we might not have gotten better, fuller, 
 and more perfectly in other ways. And yet it is better 
 than the craven past, infinitely better than a peace which 
 had pride for its father and subserviency for its mother. . . . 
 
 Some men say they would view this war as white men. 
 I condescend to no such narrowness. I view it as an Ameri- 
 can citizen, proud to be the citizen of an empire that knows 
 neither black nor white, neither Saxon nor Indian, but 
 holds an equal sceptre over all. If I am to love my country, 
 it must be lovable; if I am to honour it, it must be worthy 
 of respect. What is the function God gives us — what 
 the breadth of responsibility he lays upon us ? An empire, 
 the home of every race, every creed, every tongue, to whose 
 citizens is committed the grandest system of free govern- 
 ment. Tocqueville tells us that all nations and all ages 
 tend with inevitable certainty to this result; but he points 
 out, as history does, this land as the normal school of the 
 nations, set by God to try the experiment of popular educa- 
 tion and popular government. 
 
 The war power of Congress is not an unconstitutional 
 power, but the moment it comes into play it rises beyond 
 the limit of constitutional checks. I know it is a grave 
 power, this trusting the Government with despotism. But 
 what is the use of Government, except to help us in critical 
 times ? All the checks and ingenuity of our institutions 
 are arranged to secure for us men wise and able enough to 
 be trusted with grave powers — bold enough to use them 
 when the times require. Lancets and knives are dangerous 
 instruments. The use of surgeons is, that, when lancets 
 
AN ARGUMENT 325 
 
 are needed, somebody may know how to use them and save 
 Hfe. One great merit of democratic institutions is that, 
 resting as they must on educated masses, the Government 
 may safely be trusted, in a great emergency, with despotic 
 power, without fear of harm or of wrecking the state. No 
 other form of government can venture such confidence 
 without risk of national ruin. 
 
 Now this Government, which abolishes my right of habeas 
 corpus — which strikes down, , because it is necessary, 
 every Saxon bulwark of liberty — which proclaims martial 
 law, and holds every dollar and every man at the will of 
 the Cabinet — do you turn round and tell me that this 
 same Government has no rightful power to break the cob- 
 web — it is but a cobweb — which binds the slave to his master 
 — to stretch its hands across the Potomac, and root up the 
 evil, which, for seventy years, has troubled its peace, and 
 now culminates in rebellion ? I maintain, therefore, the 
 power of the Government to inaugurate such a policy; and 
 say, in order to save the Union, do justice to the black. 
 
 I would claim of Congress — in the exact language of 
 Adams — of the ''Government'' — a solemn act abolishing 
 slavery throughout the Union, securing compensation to 
 loyal slave-holders. As the Constitution forbids the states 
 to make and allow nobles, I would now, by equal authority, 
 forbid them to make slaves or allow slave-holders. 
 
 This has been the usual course at such times. Nations, 
 con^allsed and broken by too powerful elements or institu- 
 tions have used the first moment of assured power — the 
 first moment that they clearly saw and fully appreciated 
 the evil — to cut up the dangerous tree by the roots. So 
 France expelled the Jesuits, and the Middle Ages the Tem- 
 plars. So England, in her great rebellion, abolished the 
 nobility and the Established Church; and the French Revo- 
 lution did the same, and, finally, gave to each child an 
 equal share in his deceased father's lands. For the same 
 purpose, England, in 1745, abolished clanship in Scotland, 
 
326 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 the root of the Stuart faction; and we, in '70, abohshed 
 nobles and all tenure of estates savouring of privileged 
 classes. 
 
 We grapple the Union together with hooks of steel — 
 make it as lasting as the granite which underlies the con- 
 tinent. 
 
 I would have the Government announce to the world 
 that we understand the evil which has troubled our peace 
 for seventy years, thwarting the natural tendency of our 
 institutions, sending ruin along our wharves and through 
 our workshops every ten years, poisoning the national 
 conscience. We know well its character. But Democracy, 
 unlike other governments, is strong enough to let evils work 
 out their own death — strong enough to face them when 
 they reveal their proportions. It was in this sublime 
 consciousness of strength, not of weakness, that our fathers 
 submitted to the well-known evil of slavery, and tolerated 
 it until the viper we thought we could safely tread on, at 
 the touch of disappointment, starts up a fiend whose 
 stature reaches the sky. But our cheeks do not blanch. 
 Democracy accepts the struggle. After this forbearance 
 of three generations, confident that she has yet power to 
 execute her will, she sends her proclamation down to the 
 Gulf — Freedom to every man beneath the Stars, and 
 death to every institution that disturbs our peace or 
 threatens the future of the Republic. 
 
 In this lecture Phillips was instructing a popular assembly 
 on the nature and powers of a republican government. It 
 was a critical time, demanding unusual measures, which 
 must be justified before the people, the source of all authority. 
 In two cities, centres of opinion and influence, he argued 
 the cause of the Government in its hour of extremity when 
 the Union was imperilled. He did this in plain words, 
 from admitted premises, supported by historical examples. 
 
ADDRESSES 327 
 
 His conclusion was that to which the Government came not 
 long after, thus giving the highest sanction to his discourse. 
 In its entirety it stands as a fair sample of his method in the 
 principal occupation of many years — educating the people 
 in that civic righteousness whicli exalts a nation. Informa- 
 tion and instruction, education of the mind and of the 
 conscience, was the "burden" of tliis prophet in his inde- 
 pendence, personality, and wide-reaching influence. At 
 the time this lecture was delivered he saw a growing political 
 party taking up his work and Congress beginning to adopt 
 his sentiments. 
 
 When it is said that Phillips was primarily a lecturer, it 
 should be understood that this statement does not rest upon 
 the few discourses that are entitled Lectures. The term 
 itself is inclusive and broad. So is the designation of another 
 class called Addresses. Nor is it always easy to find the 
 distinction between the lecture and the address, the same 
 quality of instruction pervading examples of each. Indeed, 
 one cannot read far in the two volumes of his speeches 
 without concluding that the designation of his discourses 
 does not always rest irpon peculiar characteristics. The 
 occasion and the place of their delivery seem to have de- 
 termined their classification. In a place of worship be- 
 fore a congregation it is a discourse or an address; before 
 a legislature, a plea or an argument; in a conven- 
 tion or mass meeting, a speech. It will be a better 
 principle of division to observe his work — under the 
 general form of lecture or address — as expository, argu- 
 mentative, eulogistic; or, once more, to regard the speaker 
 as a citizen, an abolitionist, a lawyer, a reformer, a censor, 
 a eulogist. 
 
328 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 An example of his expository ability has been given in 
 the foregoing citations from his lecture on The War for the 
 Union. In it is also revealed the high plane which the 
 speaker occupied as the citizen of his country, above a party, 
 beyond the bounds of his state and province, advocating 
 no narrow measures of relief, abandoning the cherished 
 holding of twenty years when the reason of it had passed 
 away. As a citizen of his own city he proclaimed his love 
 for it and for its good name when he made the eloquent 
 appeal that helped to save the Old South Church from 
 being sacrificed to Mammon. The basis of it was historical 
 and patriotic, for the perpetuation of memories that make 
 a people better, a city self-respecting. 
 
 Naturally in our streets and neighbourhood came the 
 earliest collision between England and the Colonies. Here 
 Sam Adams, the ablest and ripest statesman God gave to 
 the epoch, forecast those measures which welded thirteen 
 colonies into one thunderbolt, and launched it at George III. 
 Here Otis magnetized every boy into a desperate rebel. 
 Here fit successors of Knox and Hugh Peters consecrated 
 their pulpits to the defence of that doctrine which the State 
 borrowed so directly from the Christian Church. The 
 towers of North Church rallied the farmers to the Lexington 
 and Concord fights; and these old walls echoed the people's 
 shout, when Adams brought them word that Governor 
 Hutchinson surrendered and withdrew the red-coats. 
 
 On Bunker Hill let somebody point out to you the church- 
 tower whose lantern told that Middlesex was to be invaded. 
 Search till your eye rests on the tiny spire which trembled 
 once when the mock Indian whoops bade England defiance. 
 There is the elm where Washington first drew his sword. 
 Here Winter Hill, whose cannon-ball struck Brattle Street 
 Church. At your feet the sod is greener for the blood of 
 Warren, which settled it forever that no more laws were 
 
EXPOSITION 329 
 
 to be made .for us in London. . . . We cannot afford 
 to close any school which teaches such lessons. 
 
 But these walls received a real consecration when Adams 
 and Otis dedicated them to liberty. We do not come 
 here because there went hence to heaven the prayers of 
 Sewall and Prince and the early saints of the colony. We 
 come to save walls that heard and stirred the eloquence 
 of Quincy. These arches will speak to us, as long as they 
 stand, of the sublime and sturdy religious enthusiasm of 
 Adams; of Otis's passionate eloquence and single-hearted 
 devotion; of Warren in his young genius and enthusiasm; 
 of a plain, unaffected, but high-souled people who ventured 
 all for a principle, and to transmit to us unimpaired, the 
 free lips and self-government which they inherited. Above 
 and around us unseen hands have written, "This is the 
 cradle of Civil Liberty, child of earnest, religious faith." 
 I will not say it is a nobler consecration; I will not say that 
 it is a better use. I only say we come here to save what our 
 fathers consecrated to the memories of the most successful 
 struggle the race has ever made for the liberties of man. 
 . Think twice before you touch these walls. We 
 are only the world's trustees. The Old South no more 
 belongs to us than Luther's, or Hampden's, or Brutus's 
 name does to Germany, England, or Rome. Each and all 
 are held in trust as torchlight guides and inspiration for 
 any man struggling for justice, and ready to die for the 
 truth. 
 
 It is a natural sequence to consider the professional work 
 of a man after his efforts as a citizen. Although Phillips 
 abandoned his law practice in the courts, he did not lose his 
 knowledge of legal principles nor his skill in presenting 
 them before legislators. His achievements on several 
 occasions are proofs of the ability which he might have 
 brought to the bar, and which he did bring to committees 
 of the Massachusetts Legislature and to that body itself. 
 
330 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 They are also examples of his versatility, showing that he 
 could address a small number of hard-headed men as 
 effectively as a multitude, swayed by its varying impulses. 
 The Argument for the Removal of Judge Loring from 
 Office is an instance. It is in as marked contrast to his 
 speeches before vast audiences as these were to the Com- 
 mittee on Federal Relations before which it was delivered. 
 
 The people of Massachusetts have always chosen to keep 
 their judges, in some measure, dependent on the popular 
 will. It is a Colonial trait, and the sovereign state has 
 preserved it. Under the King, though he appointed 
 judges, the people jealously preserved their hold on the 
 bench, by keeping salaries year by year dependent on the 
 vote of the popular branch of the Legislature. This control 
 was often exercised. When Judge Oliver took pay of the 
 King, they impeached him. [See Washburn's Judicial 
 History of Massachusetts.] When the Constitution was 
 framed the people chose to keep the same sovereignty in 
 their own hands. Independence of judges, therefore, in 
 Massachusetts, gentlemen, means, in the words of Governor 
 Childs, "the fullest independence consistent with their 
 responsibility." 
 
 The opinions I have read you [Hallam, the Report of 
 Constitutional Convention Committee of 1829, Chief Justice 
 Shaw, Prescott, Davis, and other recognized authorities] 
 derive additional weight from the fact that all the speakers 
 were aware of the grave nature of the power, and some 
 painted in glowing colours how liable to abuse it was. 
 Still, not one proposed to take it from you. . . . 
 
 You may think, gentlemen, that I have occupied too 
 much time in proving the unlimited extent of your power. 
 But it seemed necessary, since the press which defends 
 the remonstrant, and he also, though they do not in words 
 deny your unlimited authority, do so in effect. They claim 
 that you destroy the independence of the bench, and abuse 
 
JUDICIAL ARGUMENT 331 
 
 your power, if you exercise it in any case but a clear viola- 
 tion of the law. In words said to have been used by 
 Rufus Choate in a recent case, "A judicial officer may 
 be removed if found intellectually incapable, or if he has 
 been left to commit some great enormity, so as to show 
 himself morally deranged." Has, then, a proper case oc- 
 curred for the exercise of this power .^ In other words, 
 ought you now to exercise it? The petitioners think you 
 ought for the following reasons. 
 
 Enough has been given to indicate the judicial tone of 
 Phillips's argument when the law itself was to be justified. 
 He could be as exact in citing authorities, and the constitu- 
 tional history of a state as a judge on the bench, and could 
 state clearly and calmly his own conclusions. And in his 
 final appeal for the removal of the judge he observes a 
 restraint which the importance of the case and the dignity 
 of the occasion imposed. 
 
 In his plea before another committee of the Massachu- 
 setts Legislature for the abolition of capital punishment 
 Phillips displayed a similar wealth of learning and skill 
 in presenting his arguments under the questions of the 
 right, the obligation, and the necessity of taking human life. 
 As there was no person, private or official, involved in this 
 case it is probably the best example of calm and cogent 
 reasoning in all his public speaking. Scriptural command, 
 and civil precedent are carefully weighed; also the supposed 
 restraint from crime by open or private execution. The 
 most passionate appeal in it is the suggestion of coming 
 down one more step in the series that has abolished the 
 rack, tearing with wild horses and red-hot pincers, the 
 faggot and stake. 
 
332 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 You cannot tolerate these things now. Society has been 
 forced, by the instinct of humanity, against its logic, to 
 put away these cruel penalties. Men have been crying 
 out continually against this instinct of mercy which sought 
 to make the dungeon less terrible; they feared to remove a 
 cobweb from that dungeon's cruelty, lest the world should 
 go to pieces. Yet the world swept it down, and is safer 
 to-day than ever before. 
 
 Now we ask you to abolish the gallows. It is only one 
 step further in the same direction. Massachusetts has 
 thrown it away for almost all offences; she only retains it 
 for one or two. We ask you to take one more step in the 
 same direction. Take it, because the civilized world is 
 taking it in many quarters! Take it, because the circum- 
 stances of the time prove you may take it safely! Take it, 
 because it is well to try experiments for humanity, and this 
 is a favourable community to try them in. These are the 
 arguments, gentlemen of the committee, on which we ask 
 you to abolish the punishment of death in this common- 
 wealth. 
 
 In his character as a lawyer and as an advocate of civil and 
 social reforms might be included his pleas for woman, tem- 
 perance, labour, and education; but the most of these topics 
 did not require the careful statement, citation of authorities, 
 nor the restraint of speech and reserve in personal criticism 
 demanded by legal argument. While he did not chafe 
 under the professional curb, he was not, of necessity, so 
 interesting as on the untrammeled platform and before a 
 free popular assembly. Still, there is a moderation in 
 discussing these minor causes which often disappears 
 when the insistent claims of abolition as the most needful 
 of all reforms press upon him. 
 
 Of his spirited eloquence at such times so many fragments 
 have been given in preceding chapters that the tone of his 
 
ABOLITION SPEECHES 333 
 
 discourse on the subject nearest his heart cannot be mistaken. 
 In many respects one of these speeches resembles the ma- 
 jority of them; but there were as many sides to the one 
 question as facets to the Kohinoor. One which was always 
 presenting itself to critics was the violence of abolition 
 speakers as a hindrance to their cause. The answer to 
 this charge is made in more than one address; but in the 
 Philosophy of the Abolition Movement Phillips appears as 
 the apologist of his coterie with special reference to stric- 
 tures made in England and published in the London Leader. 
 As a defender of denunciatory methods he is careful not 
 to employ these in his justification of them — on the ground 
 that a crying evil demands corresponding outcry against it. 
 But in this apology for their use his language is temperate 
 and free from the personality which he deemed necessary 
 when men became synonymous with bad measures. 
 
 What is the denunciation with which we are charged ? 
 It is endeavouring, in our faltering human speech, to declare 
 the enormity of the sin of making merchandise of man — 
 of separating husband and wife — taking the infant from 
 the mother, and selling the daughter to prostitution, — of 
 a professedly Christian nation denying, by statute, the Bible 
 to every sixth man and woman of its population, and making 
 it illegal for "two or three" to meet together, except a white 
 man be present! What is this harsh criticism of motives 
 with which we are charged ? It is simply holding the 
 intelligent and deliberate actor responsible for the character 
 and consequences of his acts. Is there anything inherently 
 wrong in such denunciation or such criticism ? This we 
 may claim, — we have never judged a man but out of his 
 own mouth. We have seldom, if ever, held him to account, 
 except for acts of which he and his own friends were proud. 
 All that we ask the world and thoughtful men to note are 
 
334 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 the principles and deeds on which the American pulpit 
 and x4merican public men plume themselves. We always 
 allow our opponents to paint their own pictures. Our 
 humble duty is to stand by and assure the spectators that 
 what they would take for a knave or a hypocrite is really, 
 in American estimation, a doctor of divinity or secretary 
 of state. 
 
 After an enumeration of the evils incident to human 
 bondage he adds: 
 
 Prove to me now that harsh rebuke, indignant denuncia- 
 tion, scathing sarcasm, and pitiless ridicule are wholly and 
 always unjustifiable; else we dare not, in so desperate a case, 
 throw away any weapon which ever broke up the crust of 
 an ignorant prejudice, roused a slumbering conscience, 
 shamed a proud sinner, or changed, in any way, the conduct 
 of a human being. Our aim is to alter public opinion. To 
 change public opinion we use the very tools by which it 
 was formed. That is, all such as an honest man may touch. 
 
 Have we not also addressed ourselves to that other duty 
 of arguing our question thoroughly ? — of using due discre- 
 tion and fair sagacity in endeavouring to promote our 
 cause ? Yes, we have. No one step has ever been gained 
 but by the most laborious research and the most exhausting 
 argument. Of that research and that argument, of the 
 whole of it, the old-fashioned, crazy Garrisonian anti- 
 slavery movement has been the author. From this band 
 of men has proceeded every important argument or idea 
 which has been broached on the anti-slavery question 
 from 1830 to the present time [1853]. . . . 
 
 Much has been said about Phillips's sharpness of tongue. 
 It is not easy to find more of it than in any earnest reformer's 
 discourse when a giant wrong is assailed. In the above 
 instance a concrete form of it was presented on the occasion 
 
DENUNCIATION 335 
 
 of the hasty and perfunctory forms of justice to one whose 
 death was a foregone conclusion; being to the speaker a 
 pioneer and doomed martyr, whose captors and slayers 
 inspired his friend's execration. Even here, however, he 
 preserves a Ciceronian dignity of sentence and phrase, or 
 even better, since he is arraigning a nation and its press 
 rather than a single conspirator. And in the entire "lec- 
 ture" there prevails a tone of moderation that dignifies and 
 justifies its character. 
 
 From Phillips on the defensive it is natural to turn to 
 him in an aggressive mood — a more common one when 
 engaged in controversy. It is best to note his invective 
 in the thick of battle as the strongest expression of his 
 aggressiveness. 
 
 We have been carrying on this insurrection of thought 
 for thirty years. When we commenced the anti-slavery 
 agitation, the papers talked about slavery, bondage, boldly, 
 frankly, and bluntly. In a few years it sounded hard; it 
 had a grating effect, as they spoke of the "patriarchal 
 institution," then of the "domestic institution," and then 
 of the peculiar institution and in a year or two of "economic 
 subordination," and baptized it by statute and warranteeism. 
 The Methodists advised their bishop, a slave-holder, to get 
 rid of his "impediment," and Rufus Choate phrased it 
 "a different type of industry." And so men have banished 
 slavery into pet phrases and fancy flash- words. This is 
 one evidence of progress. . 
 
 You will remember, all of you, citizens of the United 
 States, that there was not a Virginia gun fired at John 
 Brown. Hundreds of well-armed Maryland and Virginia 
 troops rushed to Harper's Ferry, and — went away ! You 
 shot him! 
 
 Sixteen marines, to whom you pay eight dollars a month 
 
336 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 — your own representatives ! When the disturbed state 
 could not stand on her own legs for trembling, you went 
 there and strengthened the feeble knees, and held up the 
 palsied hands. Sixteen men, with the vulture of the Union 
 above them, your representatives! . . . Soldiers and 
 civilians — both alike — only a mob fancying itself a govern- 
 ment! They do not begin to have the faintest conception 
 of what a government is. Here is a man arraigned before 
 a jury or about to be. The Chief Executive, bound to keep 
 his mind impartial as to the guilt of any person arraigned, 
 hastens down to Richmond, and proclaims to the assembled 
 Commonwealth, "This man is a murderer, and ought to be 
 hung." In the theory of English law, it was not possible 
 to impanel an impartial jury in Virginia. If Jeffries could 
 speak, he would thank God that at last his name might be 
 taken down from the gibbet of History since the Virginia 
 bench has made his worst act white, set against the black- 
 ness of this modern infamy. And yet the New York press 
 daily prints the accounts of the trial. Trial! In the 
 names of Holt and Somers, of Hale and Erskine, of Parsons, 
 Marshall, and Jay, I protest against the name. No decent 
 form observed, and the essence of fair trial wholly wanting, 
 our history and law alike protest against degrading the 
 honoured name of Jury Trial by lending it to such an 
 outrage as this. The Inquisition was heaven-robed inno- 
 cence compared with the trial, or what the New York 
 press called so, that has been going on in crazed and mad- 
 dened Charlestown. 
 
 A nearer approach to the Roman orator in personal in- 
 vective is his upbraiding of Kossuth's inconsistency in 
 pleading for his oppressed Hungary with never a word for 
 the enslaved here. 
 
 What, then, is the shadowy line by which, while he 
 claims our sympathy and aid for Hungary, he separated 
 the slave from his own ? Can he plead for liberty with such 
 
DEFENSIVE AND AGGRESSIVE 337 
 
 bated breath and whispered humbleness that to serve his 
 purpose he can always rememVjer to forget the self-evident 
 rights which God gave — to which the slave has as much 
 right as the noblest Magyar of them all ? More than this, 
 can he find it in his heart to strengthen by his silence, by 
 his example, and his name the hands of the ruthless violator 
 of those rights; cry "glorious" and "amen," while the black 
 is robbed of his hard toil, of the Bible, of chastity, wife, 
 husband, and child — only to persuade slave-holders to 
 aid in securing for the Magyar peasant the right to vote, 
 and for the "Magyar noble the right to legislate." The 
 world thought his lips had been touched by a coal from the 
 altar of the living God — and lo ! he has bargained away 
 his very utterance and presents himself before us thus 
 cheaply bought and gagged! 
 
 Just as was Phillips's view and merited as was the censure 
 of Kossuth's expedient blindness, it is remarkable that his 
 censor did not condescend to more scathing terms on this 
 single occasion when his temper is said to have come near 
 getting the mastery of him. There were times when he 
 could use epithets and comparisons that held sundry con- 
 temporaries up to ridicule and scorn, but he was provoked 
 rather than indignant, and amused his audience rather 
 than roused their resentment. From all this and every 
 form of his warfare, however, it is pleasant to turn to another 
 aspect of his eloquence and note him as a eulogist. 
 
 Brief "Tributes" to Theodore Parker, Francis Jackson, 
 Abraham Lincoln, Helen Eliza Garrison, William Lloyd 
 Garrison, and Harriet Martineau exhibit such a knowl- 
 edge of character and appreciation of different qualities 
 as belong to a loving and yet discriminating commemorator 
 of noble lives; and if he had left nothing more in this direc- 
 tion than these reminiscent remarks at memorial services 
 
338 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 and the like, he would have added another feature to his 
 versatility. But there are three or four examples of ex- 
 tended eulogy which establish his reputation as one of the 
 greatest masters of commemorative oratory. 
 
 The earliest of these memorial tributes is that pronounced 
 at the funeral of John Brown before the family and a few 
 neighbours gathered to pay respect to his memory at the 
 farm house on the border of a wilderness in a December 
 day of 1859. The simplicity and tenderness of his remarks 
 accord with the lowly surroundings, with the loving rever- 
 ence and sublime confidence that was paid the man who 
 was counted a martyr by his friends. The speaker's fitting 
 words reveal the felicity with which he could adapt himself 
 to an unwonted occasion and to hearthstone sorrows. 
 
 How feeble words seem here! How can I hope to utter 
 what your hearts are full of ? I fear to disturb the harmony 
 which his life breathes round this home. How our ad- 
 miring, loving wonder has grown, day by day, as he has 
 unfolded trait after trait of earnest, brave, tender. Christian 
 life! . . . 
 
 What lesson shall these lips teach us ? Before that still, 
 calm brow let us take a new baptism. . . . Men said, 
 "Would that he had died in arms!" God ordered better, 
 and granted to him and the slave those noble prison hours 
 — that single hour of death ; the echoes of his rifles have 
 died away in the hills — a million hearts guard his words. 
 God bless this roof — make it bless us ! God make us all 
 worthier of him whose dust we lay among these hills he 
 loved. He sleeps in the blessings of the crushed and poor, 
 and men believe more firmly in virtue, now that such a 
 man has lived. 
 
 Standing here, let us thank God for a firmer faith and 
 fuller hope. 
 
AS A EULOGIST 339 
 
 Daniel O'Connell was a man after Phillips's own heart. 
 He had met him and corresponded with him and was in 
 full sympathy with his efforts for Irish liberty, as the states- 
 man was with the American agitator's purposes for the 
 slave here. Therefore, when on August 0, 1875, the hun- 
 dredth anniversary of O'Connell's birth was celebrated in 
 Boston, Phillips was naturally the orator of the occasion. 
 
 In a swift review of recent Irish history he places his hero 
 among British statesmen as one who lifted the Island to 
 a fixed and permanent place in English affairs, putting 
 its independence beyond peril and making it the pivot of 
 British politics. He outlines his work, delineates the sterling 
 nobility of his character, and at the close passes to his 
 oratorical power. 
 
 Broadly considered, his eloquence has never been equalled 
 in modern times; certainly not in English speech. Do 
 you think that I am partial ? I will vouch John Randolph, 
 of Roanoke, the Virginia slave-holder, who hated an Irish- 
 man almost as much as he hated a Yankee, himself an 
 orator of no mean level. Hearing O'Connell, he exclaimed, 
 "This is the man, these are the lips, the most eloquent 
 that speak English in my day." I think he was right. I 
 remember the solemnity of Webster, the grace of Everett, 
 the rhetoric of Choate; I know the eloquence that lay hid 
 in the iron logic of Calhoun; I have melted beneath the 
 magnetism of Sergeant S. Prentiss, of Mississippi, who 
 wielded a power few men ever had. It has been my fortune 
 to sit at the feet of the great speakers of the English tongue 
 on the other side of the ocean. But I think all of them 
 together never surpassed, and no one of them ever equalled 
 O'Connell. Nature intended him for our Demosthenes. 
 Never since the great Greek, has she sent forth anyone so 
 lavishly gifted for his work as a tribune of the people. 
 In the first place, he had a magnificent presence, impressive 
 
340 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 in bearing, massive like that of Jupiter. Webster himself 
 hardly outdid him in the majesty of his proportions. 
 There was something majestic in his presence before he 
 spoke; and he added to it what Webster had not, what Clay 
 might have lent — infinite grace, that magnetism that 
 melts all hearts into one. I saw him at over sixty-six years 
 of age, every attitude was beautiful, every gesture grace. 
 He had a voice that covered the gamut. The majesty of 
 his indignation, fitly uttered in tones of superhuman power, 
 made him able to "indict" a nation, in spite of Burke's 
 protest. I heard him once say, "I send my voice across 
 the Atlantic, careering like a thunder-storm against the 
 breeze, to tell the slave-holder of the Carolinas that God's 
 thunder-bolts are hot, and to remind the bondman that 
 the dawn of his redemption is already breaking." You 
 seemed to hear the tones come echoing back to London 
 from the Rocky Mountains. Then, with the slightest 
 possible Irish brogue, he would tell a story, while pU Exeter 
 Hall shook with laughter. The next moment, tears in his 
 voice like a Scotch song, five thousand men wept. And 
 all the while no effort. He seemed only breathing. 
 
 We used to say of Webster, "This is a great effort"; of 
 Everett, "It is a beautiful effort"; but you never used 
 the word "effort" in speaking of O'Connell. And this 
 wonderful power, it was not a thunderstorm: he flanked 
 you with his wit, he surprised you out of yourself; you were 
 conquered before you knew it. 
 
 One cannot read this characterization of the great Irish 
 agitator's eloquence without applying much of it to his 
 American admirer, who was yet no imitator. 
 
 "Toussaint I'Ouverture" was called by its author a 
 sketch, and a short biography, and an historical argument in 
 a lecture which was in frequent demand in the war years. 
 Essentially it was a eulogy, as truly as was Everett's famous 
 oration upon Washington. For the hour the black man was 
 
ACADEMIC ORATIONS 341 
 
 white through the magic of Phillips's citation of history and a 
 comparison of his hero with the great ones of the earth. 
 It was a marshalling of facts in a story that was eloquent 
 in its simplicity, and interesting to most of his hearers 
 through its novelty. The argument was comparative, to 
 the great advantage of L'Ouverture when placed side by 
 side with the honoured in history. 
 
 I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way 
 to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of blood. 
 This man never broke his word. ... I would call him 
 Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state 
 he founded went down with him into his grave. I would 
 call him Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves. 
 This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave 
 trade in the humblest village of his dominions. 
 
 You tliink me a fanatic to-night, for you read history, 
 not witli your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty 
 years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the muse of History 
 will put Phocion for the Greek, and Brutus for the Roman, 
 Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose 
 Washington for the bright, consummate flower of our 
 earlier civilization, and John Brown for our noonday; then 
 dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, 
 above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the 
 martyr — Toussaint I'Ouverture. 
 
 As this final paragraph may be taken as perhaps the best 
 example of his perorations, so it may also represent the 
 acme of his eulogistic compositions. Its effect upon 
 audiences was overwhelming. 
 
 If one looks for the climax of his achievements during 
 the whole of his career, the Phi Beta Kappa oration at 
 Harvard on the society's hundredth anniversary may be 
 taken as occupying that position. In his seventieth year. 
 
342 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 in 1881, his alma mater had at last come to honour the 
 chief orator of the nation with an invitation to address its 
 principal literary society; not without misgivings as to 
 what he might say. Williams, Dartmouth, Yale, and 
 Brown had risked listening to his discourse during the 
 'fifties, and the great controversy now being fifteen years 
 past it was concluded to make the venture. 
 
 It turned out to be an onslaught on the timid conser- 
 vatism of academic habits, until roused by a catastrophe, 
 and an appeal to trust, and therefore to educate, the entire 
 people, and by means of agitation of great questions to 
 inform minds and quicken consciences until the nation 
 should rule itself wisely and righteously. But there were 
 passages in this bold address that made the dry bones of 
 mere book learning rattle and the ghosts of tradition squeak 
 and gibber. Twenty years later the essential wisdom of 
 this advanced thinker was admitted with better grace. 
 
 The oration itself was not remarkable for its scholarly 
 form nor for its periodic flow. Its words were not academic; 
 its quotations were from the literature of protest. It was 
 rather a shrill call to duty amidst the perils that beset a 
 republic, that the scholar share with the citizen the burden 
 of shaping a nation. It was the final legacy of a veteran 
 instructor of the people at large as contrasted with the 
 cloistered teaching of a university. He had his own message 
 to his college, and he delivered it with the unsparing fidelity 
 that marked his discourse throughout half a century. More 
 than most of his utterances it should be read in its entirety, 
 since it was one which was written before it was spoken, of 
 which, however, there was no hint in the delivery. 
 
 In this the dramatic element appeared once more. The 
 
DRAMATIC FEATURES OF HIS ELOQUENCE 343 
 
 old man eloquent and valiant afield so long, had returned 
 to the arena of youthful contention in his collegiate years. 
 Unlike his fellows, he had not been a frequent participator 
 in class reunions and fraternity festivals. Alma mater 
 herself had no benignant smile of welcome for him during 
 five stormy decades, and no thought of crowning him with 
 academic honours who had won the highest distinction 
 in the art of arts, and had taught half a continent to do 
 justly and love mercy. With hesitation and doubt, curiosity 
 and fear, she at last permitted him, like Paul before Festus, 
 to speak for himself. The venerable crusader had fought 
 too many battles afar to play soldier at home, and he looked 
 for the vulnerable spot in the scholastic body which made 
 it indifferent and valueless in reforming eras, and pierced 
 it with Apollo's shaft. There was the customary writhing 
 and the usual protest; but also the perplexed wonder at 
 the dissent and unbounded admiration for the grace and 
 efficiency of his entrancing eloquence, and for his undaunted 
 courage of convictions. As faithful to these before univer- 
 sity dignitaries as before the commonalty, he stood for 
 what was high and heroic to the end: a censor of wrong, 
 an advocate of right; a defender of the oppressed, and a 
 prophet of a better future. 
 
 Such, in brief, was the substance of Phillips's oratory. 
 Whether it be called a lecture, address, speech, oration 
 or discourse, it was always adapted to the occasion, the sub- 
 ject, and the audience with its varying moods. In this 
 versatility of adaptation lay much of his power. People did 
 not listen to an oratorical performance on some high theme, 
 but to a personal argument or discourse of interest addressed 
 to their understanding as directly as in the conversation 
 
344 WENDELL PfflLLIPS 
 
 of one man with another, in the manner of one with a group 
 of Hsteners, and broadened and elevated as the group 
 swells to a crowd. But the speaker himself did not change 
 essentially, as the actor must. He produced his effects 
 without the artifices which belong to the stage, and always 
 with simplicity because with the utmost sincerity, yet with 
 certain characteristics which may be noted as belonging 
 to the form of his discourse as distinguished from its sub- 
 stance. Some of these are of personal interest. 
 
XXV 
 THE FORM OF HIS ORATORY 
 
 IN THE foregoing account of the life and labours of 
 Wendell Phillips sundry characteristics of the orator, 
 the agitator, and the man have revealed themselves. It re- 
 mains to gather these into the unity which belongs to a per- 
 sonality and gives it distinction. 
 
 He was known to most people chiefly as a public speaker. 
 For one person who saw him in Boston there were thousands 
 who had heard him for an hour on some platform. If alive 
 now they would recall him as he appeared in the winter 
 evenings of the old lyceum lecture years, when expectant 
 audiences watched the dial for the moment when the pre- 
 siding ofiicer should usher in the lecturer and introduce 
 him to an impatient house. It was a thankless task to this 
 prior functionary, and if overdone was trying to the assem- 
 bly, eager to hear from the chief speaker. Meanwhile 
 the lecturer had ample time to lay aside the well-known 
 gray overcoat and felt hat, and to classify the throng before 
 him with the accuracy with which a geologist makes note 
 of a stony field. The speaker on a thousand platforms 
 had learned to pick out boulders of the glacial period and 
 rocks of the carboniferous age, and could distinguish sand- 
 stone from granite at a glance. Moreover, he was quick 
 to discern fossil formations and to discover if there were a 
 
 345 
 
346 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 living organism among them. x\ll this he readily saw and 
 more, and pitched the keynote of his discourse accordingly. 
 
 What the audience first noticed as he sat waiting was a 
 head of classic mould, with clear-cut profile and assured 
 mien, slightly severe in its serenity, a person not to be 
 easily confused, suggesting defensive and aggressive quali- 
 ties not to be trifled with. Steady blue eyes, a blond 
 complexion of ruddy cast, and tawny hair betokened a 
 sanguine temperament of good hope and great courage. 
 The regulation introduction over, a tall, well-proportioned 
 man, with broad shoulders and deep chest, stepped to the 
 front of the platform with patrician grace and self-posses- 
 sion, having no manuscript or notes in hand, and needing 
 no support of desk or table. In a forehead broad and high, 
 a commanding presence, and a far-carrying voice lay the 
 resources of his art. The first impression was pleasing 
 rather than overwhelming, that of an accomplished gentle- 
 man, entirely at home on the stage, who had something 
 of serious importance that he wished to say to his listeners. 
 These he seemed to address as individuals, and as if there 
 were a dozen of them instead of hundreds. Yet no one 
 of a thousand but believed that he himself was one of the 
 addressed. Largely, this impression came from the tones 
 of voice with which the speaker began his remarks. 
 
 It is easier to recall than to portray that voice. Tech- 
 nically, it has been described as of no great range or volume, 
 and thin in the higher register, but rich in the lower notes, 
 a baritone whose distinction was in its quality or timbre 
 and the absolute purity and vibratory resonance which sent 
 it to the end of the largest halls. It has also been likened 
 to the penetrating mellowness of the flute and violin rather 
 
VOICE AND DELIVERY 347 
 
 than the blast of a bugle. Its chief value, however, aside 
 from its reaching and finding power, lay in its flexibility and 
 modulation to every shade of meaning, as in conversation. 
 In the middle notes of ordinary speech he would give a new 
 significance, distinction, and discrimination to a word or 
 phrase without raising his voice, running the entire scale 
 of emotion in colloquial tones, with neither scream nor 
 bellow, whisper nor shout. If he knew his limitations, he 
 also knew how to indemnify himself. To do this required 
 the perfection of understanding and taste to suit the tone 
 to the thought, which belongs only to the highest art or the 
 profoundest feeling. AVith this man every note was true 
 because natural, and natural because sincere and out of 
 the depths of profound conviction. From first to last he was 
 terribly in earnest, and the burden of his speech was on that 
 lower level which men naturally use when they mean what 
 they say. 
 
 Furthermore, this naturalness of sincere speech in moderate 
 tones was greatly helped in its audibility by a distinct but 
 unaffected enunciation and a deliberateness of utterance 
 which never lagged into slowness. Intensity in many 
 great speakers of his time ran into a rapid and sometimes 
 boisterous flow of words, with hardly perceptible separation 
 between the drops of the stream; his words were as distinct 
 as those of a printed page, and every vocal vowel and con- 
 sonant as clear, securing the first requisite of speech as of 
 composition — intelligibility. There was no wearying strain 
 of the listener to catch every word, as there was also none 
 to understand what he meant. Therefore he did not tire 
 his hearers, but kept them in a restful mood so far as exertion 
 on their part was concerned. Moreover, there was no 
 
348 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 appearance of bodily fatigue or mental effort on the speaker's 
 part to induce a sympathetic feeling in the sensitive listener; 
 as in the instance of certain eloquent but laborious preachers 
 in New England and Old in the last generation, whom our 
 ancestors would have called "painful." Rarely, and after 
 much speaking, he used to say that his throat would not 
 allow him to continue longer, and it is on record that at such 
 times his voice occasionally broke; otherwise the listener 
 might well have believed that public speaking was as nat- 
 urally pleasant to him as singing to the public singer. 
 
 His delivery was as natural as the tones of his voice. 
 With graceful attitude, so poised as to turn easily to right 
 and left, yet seldom changing position or walking the stage, 
 he could readily adapt action to sentiments. His gestures 
 were so in harmony with the thought and its moderate 
 tones of expression that they seemed fewer than they were; 
 and because his strong words were so forceful they did not 
 need emphasizing by violent gesticulating, which often 
 enfeebles more than it reenforces speech. The referential 
 or antithetic movement of a hand, or the placing of one upon 
 the palm of the other in asserting a proposition or establishing 
 a conclusion, all far inside the windmill sweep of the primaeval 
 American orator, were only such as are used in animated 
 conversation — outside Romance peoples. But, whatever 
 they might be, they were symbols of the sentiment uttered 
 and, like the needle of the compass, significant of polar 
 direction without reaching clear to the poles. Yet there was 
 no hint of the awkward constraint which self-consciousness 
 imposes on the unaccustomed speaker. It was reserved 
 action, itself the pledge of unemployed power. In the 
 hearer's certainty that there was such a store of unused 
 
AUDIENCES' MOODS 349 
 
 force lay a large part of Phillips's subtle attraction. Would 
 he exhibit all his strength in some supreme passage ? Or 
 would he go on in his level discourse, moulding hearts and 
 wills with an action of mind and voice, of thought and* 
 speech, as quiet and sure as the polished engine whose 
 work seems its play ? What storage of electric power un- 
 consumed lay at the radiating point of the wireless com- 
 munication which was flowing from him to his hearers ? 
 And while they waited expectant the hour flew by, the 
 speaker closed as quietly as he began, and the throng re- 
 luctantly moved away, pleased but hungering still; delighted, 
 but unable to tell why; convinced, but against their con- 
 victions; persuaded, but contrary to their will. 
 
 This contrariety of will and opinion, when the slavery 
 question was his theme, often made the temper of his hearers 
 far more unquiet than his own. Indeed, he was sometimes 
 the only unmoved person in the house, while a part of the 
 audience stormed with resentful rage, and the rest of it 
 was wrathful against the disturbers of the assembly. Oc- 
 casionally these pro-slavery and anti-slavery sentiments 
 would surge together like the Gulf and Arctic currents by 
 the Cape of the Pilgrims. In the early days forces of 
 madness and hate drove hissing and foaming against him 
 alone. Then he would stand unmoved as a sea-girt tower 
 until the storm was over; or with a flash of scornful wit 
 or a word of wisdom would calm the tempest as with a 
 "Peace, be still." Few were the turbulent and malicious 
 crowds that he could not tame into quietude enough to hear 
 what he had to say, however they might receive it or act 
 upon it afterward. Sometimes it would have been safer 
 for him if he had not compelled them to listen. When the 
 
350 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 spell was broken forty men were needed more than once 
 to protect him from the violence his speech had provoked, 
 but which his magnetic presence had controlled so long 
 as he was before the audience. This often became a mob 
 in the street, as it would have been in the hall had he not 
 subdued it. Such triumphs belong to few speakers in 
 twenty-five centuries of recorded eloquence. Many men 
 have won applause from concurrent hearers, and some 
 from divided houses; as Webster, for instance, in his reply 
 to Hayne; but only one American orator in our history 
 has been able to master hostile assemblies year after year 
 in one state after another until the tide of opposition ebbed. 
 It is one thing to ride with a storm and upon it; another 
 to stem and to quell it. Therefore the primacy must be 
 accorded to this speaker, not only for the outer graces of 
 oratory before a courteous assembly, but for supremacy 
 over such antagonism as never was met by the advocate 
 of any other cause for a long period. 
 
 Next after the exterior qualities of presence, voice, and 
 action, with the charm called magnetism, must be con- 
 sidered certain elements which belong to the mental con- 
 tingent in the compound product of oratory. The most 
 obvious of these is the language which the speaker uses. 
 The style of this, like his manner, was free from pretence; 
 simple, sincere, and therefore intelligible. Often it was 
 colloquial, bordering on the familiar and conversational; 
 but always in accord with the precept he sometimes gave 
 to young aspirants : '* Never use a word in conversation that 
 you would not use in public speech." Consequently, his 
 own diction was pure without being stilted, and free from 
 any approach to slang, which is the special temptation of 
 
MODES OF ADDRESS 351 
 
 extemporaneous speakers when thouglits outrun words. 
 So elevated was his taste that when he sometimes cHpped 
 a final g, it seemed in him like the little negligences of dress 
 or manner that often distinguish the self-assured from 
 the careful gentleman. If he occasionally pronounced 
 either and philosophy with a long i, it was not because he 
 did not know the better usage, nor because some Englishman 
 did so; and if he frequently used can't, was n't, should n't, 
 and similar colloquial forms, it was because he was talking 
 to that representative person, or a dozen of him in the audi- 
 ence, whom the old Greeks called lis — a certain man. 
 But to his common words, addressed to the common sense 
 of the multitude before him, he could give an inflection, a 
 movement, an emphasis, and a force that clothed them with 
 a new significance. If there was one element he lacked 
 it was the pathetic. Full of compassion as he was, and 
 tender hearted, he did not greatly affect pathos or move 
 an audience to tears. Perhaps his prevailing moods, de- 
 fensive and aggressive, did not much favour pathos. 
 
 His career had called for the opposite quality of invective. 
 In this he was masterful. Irony, sarcasm, ridicule, were 
 so many arrows from a full quiver, shot without rant or 
 scream, in a voice quiet and steady, but finding their mark 
 with unerring precision. And the man or measure or policy 
 that was struck seemed to wither into immediate contempt. 
 It is doubtful if any milder treatment would have served 
 his purpose so well in those stormy years of hand-to-hand 
 warfare against a giant wrong. The drawback to it was an 
 undiscriminating stroke now and then which slashed some 
 friend who had ventured out over the circle which the 
 reformer in his intensity had drawn with a short radius 
 
35^ WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 around himself and his own companions. Outside this 
 circle all were aliens, and they as much as any who 
 within it were not far away but yet not close to the central 
 standard. For them he had severe reserves of criticism. 
 Still, however violent these were, he was seldom known 
 to be thrown off his balance. When Kossuth came here 
 to plead for his oppressed countrymen, but had no word 
 of sympathy for Southern slaves, knowing that this would 
 interfere with his success, Phillips's scorn for the Hungarian's 
 restricted philanthropy transcended its customary restraints. 
 Doubtless the national encouragement that the advocate 
 of foreign freedom received here magnified the essential 
 inconsistency of his plea, and Phillips, in upbraiding a 
 partial vision of universal liberty, intended to score Kos- 
 suth's supporters as well. They were so many, both North 
 and South, that the aggregation ran away with the agitator's 
 temper for once, and he overdid the onset, as most men do 
 oftener than he upon equal provocation. It was in these 
 scornful moods, however, that he was most brilliant, and 
 was at his best when the audience treated him worst. No 
 man of them could spring a surprise on him to which he 
 did not send back a ready retort that made the interrupter 
 wish he had held his tongue. The laugh he had unwisely 
 sent rippling toward the speaker came back with a roar 
 as of the sea which engulfed Pharaoh and the Egyptians. 
 The rash wight was overwhelmed by the shouting of his 
 fellows, who could not resist the sudden turn of wit that 
 the accomplished orator had made. Those who had once 
 felt its sting learned not to venture within its reach a second 
 time. 
 
 No enumeration of the great orator's qualities would be 
 
VERSATILITY 353 
 
 complete without mention of his versatiHty. This was 
 apparent in the ease with which he could turn from one 
 theme to another, sometimes in the same hour; but it was 
 still more evident in the almost infinite variety which he 
 gave to the chief topics of thirty years' discussion. To 
 speak a hundred times in a year upon the same subject, 
 and to have verbatim re])orts of these speeches printed, 
 and keep the seeming freshness of new utterance was a 
 feat which few of the orators of the lecture period accom- 
 plished as they made the circuit of the states with two or 
 three well-worn manuscripts, which, like casks of water on 
 a long voyage, had a period when they nauseated the lec- 
 turer at least. But this agitator could draw off-hand a 
 dozen unlike draughts from the same source, albeit the basis 
 was the same acid, cleansing and caustic, but so tempered 
 to each occasion and taste that the Scriptural question 
 concerning sweet water and bitter from the same fountain 
 seemed to be answered affirmatively. He would go from 
 city to city and by some sleight of hand produce from one 
 repertory addresses on the single lesson of the hour, differ- 
 ing as widely as the names of those cities differ, and adapted 
 to the diverse moods of their people. Moreover, one might 
 compare the reports of successive speeches and find that 
 their similarity was chiefly in their common theme and 
 general tone. Occasionally an illustrative anecdote, always 
 a good one, told in an inimitable manner, would be repeated, 
 and sometimes a favourite comparison used more than 
 once; but the places were few in which the same sentence 
 and paragraph occurred, while the tone of discourse always 
 varied with degrees of longitude. The secret of this diversity 
 lay in the speaker's quick apprehension of his audience 
 
354 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 and his knowledge of public sentiment in the region. Any 
 one might guess the difference between Worcester and 
 Philadelphia on abolition ; but a keener perception would be 
 required to discriminate between the cities along the lines 
 from Boston to Chicago and further westward. A traveller 
 once heard on three successive evenings three differing 
 speeches on the same subject between and including New 
 York and Springfield which were adapted to the temper 
 and temperament of as many audiences. Such perform- 
 ance, so far as it can be explained, must be charged to a 
 mind full of knowledge about the general theme, and which 
 had brooded over it in its hundred phases, until anyone of 
 them was replete with prolific interest. Like a dweller in 
 the city of a hundred gates this man saw from any one of 
 them roads radiating wide and far, leading into territory 
 unknown and unsuspected by the home-staying and sordid. 
 Therefore the reach of his vision and speech embraced 
 every place and interest and policy that a great and central 
 wrong might corrupt by malarial winds blowing to every 
 point of the horizon. For him to turn from one aspect or 
 prospect to another was as easy as to address the right or 
 left, front or rear of an assembly; which, however, did not 
 always recognize the essential unity of his subject in the 
 diversity of his manifold exposition. 
 
 There was another and rarer but most impressive feature 
 which has sometimes been overlooked in traditional accounts 
 of his prevailing colloquial address — that is, the beauty 
 and sublime impressiveness of his closing paragraphs when 
 the subject required it. Occasionally the same perfection 
 of rhythmic speech marked the end of some division of an 
 address. The example that will first occur to most readers 
 
NATURAL GIFTS AND EDUCATION 355 
 
 is the close of the lecture on Toussaint I'Ouverture, since 
 it is now one of the oftenest declaimed in schools. Those 
 who were so fortunate as to hear him will never forget the 
 great orator delivering in clear and quiet tones the lines 
 beginning, "You think me a fanatic to-night, for you 
 read history, not with your eyes, but your prejudices." 
 And they will recall through the years the ascending steps 
 up which he led his hero past the brave and the good of 
 all time, and then wrote "in the clear blue above them all 
 the name of the soldier, the statesman, and the martyr." 
 It was a climax of biographic and historical argument to 
 which not one in a hundred of his hearers expected to assent 
 at the start, but at the close found themselves assisting at 
 the apotheosis of a "St. Domingo chief, an unmixed Negro, 
 with no drop of white blood in his veins," as the speaker 
 defined him at the start, and he was apt to make the strongest 
 statement of his proposition first, get hissed, and then prove 
 its truth. At the close, L'Ouverture appeared to outshine 
 all the stars in the bright constellation of renown. Espe- 
 cially noteworthy also are the perorations of the addresses 
 entitled "Under the Flag" and "War for the Union," 
 "The State of the Country" and "Lincoln's Election," 
 "Christianity a Battle," "The Education of the People," 
 "The Scholar in a Republic," "Daniel O'Connell," and 
 "William Lloyd Garrison." The last two, with other trib- 
 utes, show that when he chose he could rival the "classic 
 eulogies of brave old men and martyrs," which he used to 
 say he had by heart. 
 
 It is natural to ask how far education contributed to the 
 sum total of his excellence as a public speaker. No amount 
 of training would alone have made him eminent; nor would 
 
356 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 merely natural gifts if unimproved. But to his princely 
 endowment of these he added more labour and pains than 
 is commonly known. At an early day he had excellent 
 opportunities to study audiences of every grade and size, 
 from the groups in country schoolhouses and dozens in 
 town houses to the city throngs in Faneuil Hall, and others 
 in Boston, New York, and elsewhere. His immediate 
 success in these gave him confidence; but there were things 
 to be learned from hard-headed countrymen about them- 
 selves and himself and the Cause, which he was not slow to 
 catch to his profit and improvement. By near contact 
 with the crowd he found the need and cultivated the practice 
 of debate between himself and them — a most necessary 
 equipment in his unpopular crusade. So the frequent 
 repetition of such a lecture as The Lost Arts enabled him 
 to learn what was best liked, until at the thousandth delivery 
 it was as near perfection as such a popular discourse could 
 be made. In a less degree some of his abolition speeches 
 got emendations or alterations which frequent repetition 
 suggested, at the same time preventing stereotyped versions. 
 He had enough of ordinary human nature to profit by 
 mistakes, and possibly to humour the unaccountable adora- 
 tion of bosh which hearers often display to the discredit 
 of their understanding and taste. But his general effort 
 was to lift them to a higher grade intellectually, morally, 
 and politically. If he had to descend to the level of the 
 average comprehension in words and thoughts, he never 
 sunk below it; and crediting the common people with un- 
 common sense, lifted them up with the progress of his 
 discourse, and led them on year after year with the growth 
 of national sentiment for freedom. Thus he grew in his 
 
QUALITIES SUGGESTED BY ORATORS 357 
 
 own methods as a leader of thought and action by personal 
 discussion and effort in the great movement of the republic, 
 without allying himself with politics or party, creating and 
 moulding the opinion and belief which underlies all political 
 action and eventual legislation, until that which was at first 
 called heretical and fanatical became in the end sane and 
 constitutional. 
 
 There were other qualities which contributed to the versa- 
 tility of his eloquence that may be enumerated by recalling 
 the illustrious Ten of Attica, who together made oratory 
 the first of arts. It is too much to say that a modern speaker 
 could appropriate them all and retain his personality; but 
 some of his hearers might have thought that he learned 
 from Pericles directness of address and disregard of popular 
 favour, attended by restrained and majestic diction when 
 occasion demanded; or at another time the simplicity and 
 vividness of Lycias and his quick discernment of opportu- 
 nities; or most often the intense earnestness of Isseus, passing 
 to closing passages suggesting the melodious cadences of 
 Isocrates when he took oratory into the service of good 
 citizenship in a republic. And always in his extempo- 
 raneous speech there was the spontaneity attributed to 
 ^schines and his seeming freedom from laborious prepara- 
 tion, aided by a colloquial manner that placed the hearer 
 on friendly terms, while its dignity ensured his respect. 
 To all this was added a restful variety which Demosthenes 
 valued so much for securing the hearers' attention, ranging 
 from conversational vivacity to severe solemnity, with a 
 fusing current of emotion throughout, itself controlled and 
 intensified by masterful restraint, the secret of supreme 
 command. For the invective, which was so marked a 
 
358 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 feature of his discourse at times, he had provocation frequent 
 and strong; also eminent predecessors and fine examples 
 from Cicero and his Philippics, Tertullian and his bold 
 censure of the Carthaginians, Ambrose and his charges 
 against the evils rife at Milan, and many another brave 
 spirit who dared to raise his protest against the wrongs 
 of his age. Or, nearer his own, Phillips could find Fox's 
 famous diatribe, and Patrick Henry's speech on the stamp 
 act, and John Randolph's defence of slavery. Many of 
 these, however, had an undertone of bitter resentment in 
 which this orator did not indulge. He expected personal 
 abuse and took it as an incident of his mission, sparing 
 his irony for those who through greed or in fear or for 
 political advancement stood in the way of what they knew 
 was just and right. For such there were no words of a com- 
 mon scold, but such as turned deftly against them a tide 
 of opinion and even accusing consciences within. It was 
 a part of the orator's system — to enlist mightier forces 
 than his own single-handed effort, and a part of his philosophy 
 that " one on the right side is a majority." 
 
 This favourite saying of his suggests the epigrammatic 
 element which abounds in his discourse. After figures of 
 speech and thought or apt anecdotes, nothing fastens the 
 gist of a paragraph in the hearer's memory like barbed epi- 
 grams, which are not necessarily poisoned arrows. Ecclesi- 
 astes, the Preacher, had their staying quality in mind when 
 he spoke of the "words which are as nails well fastened by 
 the masters of assemblies " — or " collectors of sentences," ac- 
 cording to the later version. Phillips had a condensing in- 
 vention which could mass the weighty discourse of an hour 
 into a single sentence, point it as with steel, and drive it 
 
AS AN EPIGRAMINIATIST 359 
 
 through triple-plated armour of prejudice, greed, or wrong. A 
 long list of epigrams might be compiled, of which the follow- 
 ing are examples: 
 
 There is no republican road to safety but constant dis- 
 trust. 
 
 They have put wickedness into the statute book, and 
 its destruction is just as certain as if they had put gun- 
 powder under the Capitol. 
 
 Power is ever shifting from the many to the few. 
 
 The race is rich enough without the greatest intellects 
 God ever let the devil buy. 
 
 Popular agitation is the life of a republic. 
 
 Whether in chains or in laurels. Liberty knows nothing 
 but victories. 
 
 Never look for an age when the people can be quiet — 
 and safe. 
 
 On God's side, one is a majority. 
 
 As an agitator his hope rested on this principle. He 
 believed that the people would eventually side with righteous- 
 ness when they saw it clearly. Therefore his labour began 
 with them wherever any would listen; in a country school- 
 house, town hall, or vestry in his native state, speaking to 
 a dozen sympathizers and a hundred opposers. After years 
 of patient struggle with prejudice his audiences swelled to 
 two or three thousand, with only enough opposition to stir 
 him to his best achievement. To leaders and legislators 
 he did not pay much attention. Politicians represented 
 the average sentiment of the people and parties, mixing 
 with the masses instead of leading them. His idea of leader- 
 ship was to be so far in advance of the host that few could 
 see the outpost they were expected to reach. He took this 
 
360 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 extreme position from the first, called to the sons of men 
 to come up to it, never went back toward them to offer 
 any less stringent measure or to make a single compromise 
 in an age and country of compromises. Abolish slavery, 
 make citizens of the Negroes as you are making them out 
 of the dregs of every nation dumped on our shores. To 
 colonize men of all shades in Africa was to send mixed 
 American blood there; to pay their owners for them was 
 to repay them for their fathers' piracy and for their own 
 improvement of a stolen inheritance. This was high and 
 unpopular ground to take in the 'thirties, and even in the 
 'fifties, but in the next decade the North and the civilized 
 world came to a moral state and a conviction about universal 
 freedom that made the further existence of slavery im- 
 possible. Phillips did not ask for himself more than the 
 average of public opinion is now ready to accord him — 
 there will always be differences of view; but none can 
 deny that his work was done, not like many who received 
 their full meed of praise for an eleventh hour of labour, 
 but as one of the few who bore the burden and heat of 
 the day, when there was only scorn and hatred for the 
 same words and deeds which later won praise and honour 
 for other men. Therefore, whatever opinion is handed 
 down by tradition or gathered from contemporary records, 
 to be stereotyped as history, with regard to occasional mis- 
 takes such as all men make, those of this man may, like 
 some of his sharp words, be considered incident to the 
 intense earnestness of one who saw a great wrong early 
 in the day of its power and laboured until nightfall for its 
 removal, surrendering all other ambitions to a single pur- 
 pose, which the majority now are ready to call good or high 
 
FRIENDLINESS 361 
 
 or noble. It is the old story of the prophets — the 
 children are garnishing the sepulchres of those whom 
 the fathers stoned. It will not be strange, then, as 
 the account of a great episode of American history is 
 written and rewritten, if this agitator take his place 
 with reformers who came to their own after the dust 
 of strife was laid, and their work and motives appeared 
 in the perspective that time and disinterestedness bring. 
 This millennial year Avill not arrive for him until the 
 day of present estrangement is over, a heritage from 
 the last generation; but it will eventually come, as 
 the day of deliverance came from a national evil through 
 a conflict of which the present reminiscence is only as the 
 clouds vanishing after a storm. 
 
 As Phillips's public record will be that of an orator and 
 agitator, so his traits that will be best known are those 
 which belong to an advocate of reform; aggressive, uncom- 
 promising, insistent, incessant, perceptive, sagacious, un- 
 daunted. Those who heard of his methods or read his 
 speeches were surprised when they met the man in social 
 converse. Apart from the arena with its severities of 
 attack and defence, he met his fellow - men with a 
 warm-heartedness and gentle friendliness which lasted 
 through all the years of animosity that might have 
 embittered a smaller soul. Confident, as he had reason 
 to be, of the wisdom of his matured conclusions, he 
 was patient with those who had well-considered views of 
 their own ; and in the narrowed circle of intimate 
 friends the testimony of one of them, in a letter to 
 Mrs. Phillips, would have been generally endorsed in 
 other instances besides this one: 
 
362 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 The preeminent magnanimity of your dear husband in 
 the affair so interests me that I cannot withhold from you 
 the expression of my admiration of it. It is so entirely in 
 unison with the whole tenour of his beautiful life and 
 conduct. The dignified forbearance which he, so wisely, 
 sees fit to exercise in these issues will doubtless speak even 
 more eloquently than the article which we all know he 
 might have written, had he seen fit. . . . iVfter all, 
 there is no foresight like his, whether in his silence or utter- 
 ance or in the entire beautiful harmony of his life. 
 
 It would be possible to trace the ramifications of these 
 two prominent traits of courage for righteousness and good- 
 will toward mankind. Of the former, instances were 
 necessarily more public than those of the latter, which were 
 frequently in the direction of unmentioned deeds of charity. 
 His executor found a private memorandum of gifts to 
 needy causes and persons amounting to $64,000; and in 
 settling the joint estate discovered that Mr. and Mrs. Phil- 
 lips had spent nearly all their considerable property in charities 
 and reforms. It was then known, beyond what had been 
 believed, that the principles which had been proclaimed 
 abroad had been practised at home. Besides, there were 
 fireside virtues in the observance of which conspicuous 
 persons often drop to ordinary levels, and home becomes 
 a place of reactions from public strain. To many, a house 
 hushed for invalidism, with needful seclusion from much 
 companionship, might have its depression as the months 
 and years wore on, even if the lover period were prolonged 
 and the sympathies of young hearts were unfading, as, ac- 
 cording to unvarying testimony, they were in the two who 
 lived in retirement, without loneliness or gloom, and with 
 never a thought but for the health of the one and the happi- 
 
BENEVOLENCE 363 
 
 ness of the other. Every sacrifice did not procure the first 
 one's health: the making them seemed to be that other's 
 Ufe-long joy. Perhaps, too, the ostracism attending those 
 who encountered poHtical and commercial prejudices 
 made the hearthstone more precious; but there must have 
 been a sense of solitude in the midst of a populous town 
 and of aversion on its streets which would grate on an 
 honest and kindly heart. Only a rare manliness could 
 withstand the atmospheric pressure of disapproval, relentless 
 through half a century, without growing morose. To keep 
 a cheerful temper, a genial heart, and an open hand, to 
 forgive misunderstanding and malice, to hold fast one's 
 faith in the essential rightness of human consciences, to 
 rise above untruth, misrepresentation, slander, and the un- 
 spoken thought of evil requires the truest and most heroic 
 manliness that is given to men, or kept with all diligence 
 amid adverse conditions. Orators and reformers have 
 sometimes performed brilliant and worthy tasks without 
 these homelier and inconspicuous virtues, and have gone 
 down in history as illustrious benefactors of the race: this 
 man added unostentatious qualities to the conspicuous; 
 and because he did, under untoward circumstances, it is 
 well that the generations that follow him should know 
 how good a man he was, as well as how complete an orator 
 and how sincere a reformer. It is moderate praise to say 
 that he was a shining example of Cato the Censor's definition 
 of an orator — "A good man skilled in speaking." 
 
XXVI 
 REMAINDERS 
 
 IN THE account of any life worth commemorating there 
 is the frequent opportunity to insert trivial matters 
 that have an interest of their own, but do not belong to 
 the higher plane along which the narrative should move, 
 like a planet in its orbit. Yet often the intervening face 
 of the sky with its clouds and storms, and even the nearer 
 earth with its sunshine and shadow are of more interest 
 than wheeling worlds in the sidereal heavens. So in an 
 exalted career there are always minor features that appeal 
 to our curiosity because they reveal human elements on a 
 level with the humdrum existence which the majority lead. 
 They exhibit the phases and the routine of living which differ 
 among men no more than their occupations. 
 
 The life which has been sketched in its professional aspect 
 was no exception to this law of the common lot. Like other 
 lives it had to be maintained by the ordinary means, 
 although there was no necessity for other labour by one with 
 an income of from $10,000 to $15,000 a year and more 
 when lecturing. It was largely life in a New England city 
 and in the neighbouring countryside, or on the highways 
 and byways of travel near and far. Though preeminently 
 a home life, it was also among throngs of busy men, among 
 the needy, the unfortunate, the poor, and fugitives from 
 
 364 
 
AT HOME 365 
 
 bondage. Like his neighbour and relative, Dr. Holmes, 
 he loved the very streets of Boston, he used to say, as Mam- 
 mon loved the golden pavements of heaven. The Common 
 was his boyhood's playground and the park where he 
 walked daily for threescore years, and where, strolling with 
 Edmund Quincy once, an Englishman remarked of them 
 to Ticknor that they were the only men he had seen there 
 who looked like gentlemen. In his modern Athens he was 
 a peripatetic philosopher, not so abstracted that anything 
 worth noting escaped him, and not so absent-minded as 
 to forget on his homeward way to get the choicest delicacies 
 for the invalid wife who was waiting to hear the latest 
 news and to be read the newest book by one whose reading 
 charmed all who were fortunate enough to hear him. 
 
 Nor was the domestic life absolutely secluded. It was 
 shared occasionally by a few friends rather than by a wide 
 circle of acquaintances ; by children often when adults could 
 not be welcomed. In the modest brick house inherited 
 from her father by Mrs. Phillips there was a dining-room 
 on the ground floor where French was the language of the 
 table at the half-past seven breakfast, the two o'clock 
 dinner, and the half-past six supper, where no product of 
 the sugar cane was used, nor any cotton fabric produced 
 by slave labour, in all the house. Of the double parlours 
 above, one is said to have been used as a depository for 
 the newspapers accumulated on lecture trips and for many 
 additional journals of all shades which he subscribed to 
 and carefully read. It was also a library containing 2,500 
 volumes, stocked largely with books of the historical and 
 essay type and many pamphlets. If he had a favourite 
 author it was De Tocqueville, and his "Democracy in 
 
366 WENDELL PfflLLIPS 
 
 America" is quoted by the orator oftener than any other 
 book. In this room he would sometimes shut himself for 
 days when an important occasion called for special prepara- 
 tion; meditating upon his subject in an easy chair or on a 
 lounge, since his nature was inclined to indolence — if 
 his wife's remark in a letter to a friend that "Wendell is 
 as lazy and easy as ever" means anything. His own saying 
 that "writing is a slavery — a man chained to an inkpot," 
 and the evidence of a few surviving notes to neighbours 
 show how sincere was his aversion to a pen. But there 
 was either intense mental labour or immense talent behind 
 the continuous discourse of a lifetime, indicating the genius 
 of a great public speaker which could be independent of 
 desk and pen. He held, moreover, that few men could be 
 both good writers and effective speakers; nor did he count 
 himself as an exception. With the Hebrew poet he might 
 have said, "My tongue is the pen of a ready writer." 
 
 He was also an omniverous reader. Newspapers, pam- 
 phlets, magazines, and books furnished incidents, anecdotes, 
 facts and principles which were stored in a tenacious and 
 reproductive memory, to be summoned by association, 
 fitness, or contrast whenever needed. Therefore he was 
 always prepared to speak. When committees asked him 
 if he happened to have this or that lecture with him he 
 replied, "I carry all my lectures with me," meaning in his 
 head. Sometimes he ran two together for the thrifty who 
 wished to be sure of their money's worth, without their 
 discovery of the dividing line. He took pay for the literary 
 or scientific half only, if the other was anti-slavery. Yet 
 his income from some of the former was large: $150,000 
 from the repetition of The Lost Arts alone, it is said. 
 
ADVICE TO SPEAKERS 367 
 
 Considering the length of his career, he was on the 
 road more than any other speaker in the country; and what 
 would be remarkable in these days, without a serious acci- 
 dent in fifty years. Against stationary perils of cold rooms 
 and damp sheets he guarded himself by the blanket shawl, 
 which was every man's companion and multiform friend 
 in the 'fifties and later; while to avoid the uncertainties of 
 so-called tea he carried his own favourite brand of breakfast 
 tea which he frequently prepared to his taste, particularly 
 the three cups which with three raw eggs were his bracer 
 for an evening's speaking. It would not be safe to conclude 
 that this prescription will make an orator of every speaker. 
 
 More to the purpose is his answer to a student's inquiry 
 for helpful suggestions: "Practice is the best of teachers. 
 Think out your subject, and read all you can about it. 
 Fill your mind; and then talk simply and naturally. Forget 
 that you are to make a speech, or are making one. You 
 are to carry a purpose, effect an object; then having for- 
 gotten yourself, you will be likelier to do your best. Talk 
 up to an audience, not down to it. The commonest audience 
 can relish the best thing you can say if you say it properly. 
 Be simple; be earnest." This advice was exemplified by 
 himself, and is good for any speaker as far as it goes, but an 
 unmentioned element is necessary to such success as his. 
 He was too modest to name it, or perhaps could not define it. 
 
 Ready as he was to speak on almost any topic, he was 
 not at the beck of every occasion that was to be enlivened 
 by speeches, especially public dinners, where under the 
 dulling influence of solids and fluids, alcoholic fumes and 
 tobacco smoke, orotund commonplaces often pass for wisdom 
 and facetiousness for wit. Wine he did not drink, nor, 
 
368 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 according to Sir Walter Raleigh's phrase, did he "drink 
 tobacco." Modern table-talk, which unlike its historic 
 predecessor is postponed till all have fed, did not appeal to 
 him. He relished more keenly such conversation as was 
 heard from diners in the days of Hazlitt and Coleridge and 
 Wilson, or in his own time at the dinners of the Atlantic 
 Club. Ordinarily he was a better listener than talker, 
 learning something from everj^one, although the charm of 
 his conversation was delightful in congenial company. 
 His mood was reflective and his thoughts too constantly 
 upon serious matters which concerned public welfare in 
 the last century to favour the lighter converse tional habit 
 which sparkles and breaks like foam over the deep currents 
 of life, public and private. These he was quick to discern 
 and was not silent then; as, for example, when one morning 
 he was sitting by a Southern woman, a niece of Jefferson 
 Davis, who was returning from a lecture trip not so well paid 
 as himself, with whom he insisted upon sharing his own prof- 
 its of the evening before. As she did not know what these 
 were, she could not know that he gave her all he had received, 
 as he did to a poor student now and then. His benefactions 
 for a period of thirty years have already been mentioned. 
 
 If he was not a great talker it was for no lack of ideas 
 or readiness. For instance: a minister in Ohio returning 
 from a convention in a car full of clerical brethren, felt 
 called upon to stand up and ask him in the stillness of a 
 stopping place: 
 
 "Are you Mr. Phillips.?" 
 
 "I am, sir." 
 
 "Are you trying to free the niggers?" 
 
 "Yes, sir; I am an abolitionist." 
 
ANTICIPATION OF PRESENT PROBLEMS 369 
 
 "Well, why do you preach your doctrines up here? 
 Why don't you go over into Kentucky?" 
 
 "Excuse me, are you a preacher?" 
 
 "I am, sir." 
 
 "Are you trying to save souls from hell?" 
 
 "Yes, sir; that is my business." 
 
 "Well, why don't you go there?" 
 
 The assailant hurried into the smoker amidst a roar 
 of unsanctified laughter. 
 
 It may be superfluous to ask in closing what Phillips's 
 position would be on this and that question of the present 
 day. Several of them he anticipated in his outlook beyond 
 his own generation, generally on the line of subsequent 
 march, sometimes on one which was not followed, just as 
 population has not always followed the predictions of shrewd 
 city prospectors in the West. In the present strife between 
 labour and capital his course could be divined from his 
 alliance with the working man thirty years ago, and he 
 certainly would have no sympathy with the centralization 
 of wealth, against which he warned the nation in his 
 later years. On the ever-present but never settled tem- 
 perance question he would see his prohibition policy obtaining 
 favour in sections where he least expected legislative 
 aid, and might redouble his efforts with individuals, as 
 his own manner was from the beginning. To foreign 
 immigrants he would fling the doors wide open, even 
 if the assimilative powers of the country should be severely 
 taxed, believing that all children born here become American, 
 whatever their fathers may have been. And after, if not 
 before, hospitality to wanderers from Europe, Asia, and the 
 Orient he might be urging better protection for our dumb 
 
370 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 but steadfast friends, especially in chambers of torture 
 known as places of scientific research. On disputed issues 
 of tariff and currency he might still be not infallible, as 
 many experts have shown themselves not to be. On the 
 race question he would have a great deal to say. After all, 
 it may be doubted if he would find any problem to call out 
 his best effort as in his own day, whose stirring issues were 
 a part of the forces which made him the power that he 
 was. Moreover, he would not now find a group of speakers 
 comparable to that constellation which surrounded him 
 then, and not without its influence upon him and one 
 another, making the age one to be taken account of in the 
 history of public speech. It is not necessary, however, 
 to suppose that this art has perished forever because it is 
 in the hollow of a wave whose crests appear at wide intervals 
 along the course of twenty-four centuries. Its sweep is 
 long, but it is sure to rise again in some future period when 
 deep shall call unto deep, and when one man shall sway 
 a thousand because his heart is true, his vision clear, his 
 gifts great, and raised to their highest power by the stress 
 of the times. If such an age is reformatory, as those which 
 have produced the best oratory have always been , it is beyond 
 question that among examples in the past the one which 
 will be earliest studied, because of its own excellence and 
 its latest position, will be whatever survives of the eloquence 
 of Wendell Phillips. 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abolition of slavery, 1, 126 
 
 aggressive and educational, 180, 
 186 
 
 immediate, 129 
 
 in District of Columbia, 235 
 " Abolition movement. Philosophy 
 
 of the," 146. 
 Abolition speeches, 332 
 x\bolitionism, growth of, 77 
 
 in Boston, 101, 141, 142 
 
 shades of, 186 
 Abolitionists, 22 
 
 British, 22, 131, 140 
 
 criticism of one another, 167 
 Adam, Professor, 80, 81 
 Adams, Charles Francis, 122 
 Adams, John, 197 
 
 Adams, John Quincy, 40, 124, 127 
 Adams, Samuel, 63, 139 
 Addresses of Wendell Phillips, 327 
 Address to the nation, 119 
 Advanced positions, 37, 120 
 Aggressiveness, 361 
 Agitation, abolition, 74, 211 
 
 in Congress, 128, 156 
 
 prehminary to political, 191 
 Alcott, Bronson, 253 
 Allies, zealous, 152 
 Alton riot, 51 
 
 meeting in Faneuil Hall, 214 
 Amalgamation, 28, 249 
 Anderson, Mayor, 254 
 Andersonville,'274, 277 
 Andrew, John A., 124 
 Anti-slavery cause, 19 
 Anti-slavery societies, 20, 63 
 
 American, 79, 
 
 disbanded, 289 
 
 An ti-slavery societ i es — continued 
 
 Boston, 67 
 
 British and foreign, 81 
 
 New P^ngland, 22 
 Anti-slavery sentiment, 20, 217 
 
 growth of, 133 
 
 in the North, 211 
 Antony's speech to the populace, 61 
 Appleton, Thomas, 6 
 Argument, 324 
 
 Arguments, legal, of W. P., 330, 331 
 Athletics in the 'thirties, 12, 16 
 Attucks, Crispus, 193 
 Austin, James T. 54 
 
 B 
 
 Bailey, Gamahel, 50 
 
 Balance of power, 135, 176 
 
 Ballots vs. bullets, 221 
 
 Banks, N. P., 186 
 
 Beecher, Henry Ward, 92, 141, 154 
 
 Ljaiian, Dr., 13 
 Benevolence of Phillips, 362 
 Bowditch, W. I., viii 
 Birney, J. G., 49, 80, 81 
 Blagden, Mrs. J. G., viii, 20 
 
 MSS., 87, 206, 233, 264 
 Books and reading, Phillips's, 36 
 Boston, 151 
 
 in 1810, 3 
 
 subserviency of, 146 
 Boston Latin School, 6 
 
 massacre anniversarv, 193 
 
 mobs, 23, 100, 214,^216 
 Bowring, Sir John, 80 
 Bright, John, 249 
 Brooks, Preston S., 174 
 
 assault on Sumner, 175 
 
 commended for, 176 
 
 371 
 
372 
 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Brougham, Lord, 130 
 
 Brown, John, 196, 201, 203, 210 
 
 Buchanan, James, 177, 180, 183, 
 
 191 
 Bull Run, battle of, 229 
 Burke, Edmund, 130 
 Burns, Anthony, 161, 163, 245 
 Butler, B. F., 230, 246, 295 
 
 Calhoun, John C, 24, 71, 113, 118, 
 
 120, 125, 128, 135, 192 
 California, 127, 137 
 Canada, flight of Negroes to, 144, 
 
 145, 146 
 Capital punishment, 165, 332 
 Carpenter, E. J., viii 
 Cato the Censor's definition of an 
 
 orator, 363 
 Channing, E. T., 8 
 Channing, W. E., 52, 55, 130, 313 
 Charleston, S. C, 151, 185 
 Chase, Salmon P., 169 
 Cheever, Ezekiel, 6 
 Choate, Rufus, 57, 92 
 Church and clergy in abolition, 109, 
 
 129 
 Civil War, the, 74, 140, 199 
 
 losses in and cost of, 255 
 Clay, Henry, 71, 192, 273 
 Colloquial style, 149 
 Colonization, 20, 32 
 Coloured prejudice, 130 
 Coloured troops, 246 
 Commercialism, 214 
 Composition, Phillips's methods of, 
 
 89 
 Compromises in Constitution, 103 
 
 failure of, 225, 229 
 Conciliation of audience, 104 
 Concord squires and Phillips, 94 
 Confederacy, Northern, 218 
 
 Southern, 176 
 Congress and abolition, 68, 137, 
 
 153, 155, 162, 230 
 Constitution of U. S., and slavery, 
 
 44, 46, 128, 130, 137, 141, 143, 
 
 164, 168, 176, 183, 192, 222, 
 
 257, 290 
 
 Contemporary comment on Phillips's 
 oratory, 42, 45, 56, 57, 58, 59, 
 110, 141, 144, 163, 177, 184, 
 189, 234, 272 
 
 Cotton gin and slavery, 19 
 
 Criticism, abolition standards of, 278 
 
 Curtis, George William, 92, 233, 316 
 
 Cushing, Caleb, 181 
 
 D 
 
 Dana, R. H., Jr., 164 
 Dartmouth College, 169, 311 
 Davis, Jefferson, 210, 216, 268, 274 
 Declaration of Independence, 74, 
 
 144, 290 
 Delivery, Phillips's, 347 
 Democratic party, 99, 117, 245 
 Demosthenes, 61 
 Denunciation, 147 
 Detail work, 71 
 Disintegration, 179 
 District of Cohimbia, slavery in, 68 
 Disunion, 74, 136 
 
 convention, 180 
 
 petitions, 126 
 
 sentiment, 193 
 Douglas, Stephen A., 210 
 
 E 
 
 Eloquence, dramatic features of, 
 61, 343 
 
 overpowering mobs, 133, 216 
 Emancipation, British, 22 
 
 gradual, 20, 196 
 
 immediate, 21 
 
 in West Indies, 130, 131 
 
 total, 120, 129 
 Emancipator, The, 22 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 91, 131, 
 
 160, 311, 313 
 Epigram, 358 
 Era of good feeling, 135 
 Essex Street, No. 26, 86, 216, 365 
 Eulogy, 204, 337-340 
 
 of John Brown, 204 
 
 of Phillips by Curtis, 316 
 Evangelist, The, 22 
 Everett, Edward, 57, 89, 91 
 
INDEX 
 
 373 
 
 Exordium, 321 
 
 Exposition, 239 
 
 Extravagance of speech, 147, 351 
 
 Faneuil Hall, 3, 08, 70, 98, 100, 104, 
 123, 124, 138, 143, 174, 179, 
 193 
 
 opened to defenders of slavery, 
 
 23 
 pro-slavery meeting in, 53 
 refused to abolitionists, 23 
 
 Federalist, The, 197 
 
 Fillmore, Millard, 154 
 
 Financial problems, 301 
 
 Fort Sumter, 254 
 
 Free Soil partv, 117, 128, 176 
 
 Free speech, 63, 65, 71 
 
 Freedman, 131 
 
 Freedom of the press, 49, 51, 53, 54 
 
 Fremont, John C, 180. 230, 252 
 
 Friendliness of Phillips, 361 
 
 Friends, Society of, 154 
 
 Froude, James A., 298, 
 
 Fugitive slave act, 155 
 
 law, 146, 147, 150, 230 
 protest against, 161 
 repeal of, petition for, 154 
 
 Fugitive slaves, 100 
 
 G 
 
 Garrison, Francis J., viii, 33, 75 
 Garrison, Wendell P., 23, 75, 87 
 Garrison, William Lloyd, 20, 23, 
 
 35, 68, 74, 108, 113, 119, 128, 
 
 140, 151, 152, 158, 179, 253, 
 
 258, 309 
 Giddings, Joshua R., 180 
 Grant, Ulysses S., 269, 270, 275, 
 
 276^ 278, 285, 287 
 Greeley, Horace, 274, 297 
 Greene, Ann Terry, 33 
 
 H 
 
 Hallett, B. F., 54 
 
 Hancock, John, 63, 139, 185 
 
 Harper's Ferry, 196, 209 
 
 Harvard College, 3, 64, 128, 170, 
 187, 200 
 Law School, 15 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 160 
 Higginson, Thomas W., viii, 81, 187 
 Hillard, George S., 54, 55, 122 
 Hoar, Sanniel, 114, 120 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 8, 160 
 Home, the Phillips, 363 
 Hopkinson, Thomas, 17 
 Hovey, Charles F., 198 
 Howe, Samuel G., 124 
 Hunter, David, 236 
 
 Idealism, 37, 177 
 Indian problems, 303 
 Insurrection, servile, 126, 192, 196 
 Intemperance, 291 
 Invective, 105, 335, 336 
 Irish addresses, 97, 115, 310 
 question, 298, 310 
 
 Jackson, Andrew, 49 
 Jackson, Francis, 266 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 66, 152 
 Johnson, Andrew, 263, 264, 267, 
 268, 276, 299 
 
 K 
 
 Kansas, 161, 172, 173, 180, 181, 192 
 Kossuth, 147, 352 
 Ku-Klux Klan, 269, 281 
 
 Labour and capital, 314 
 
 question, 285 
 Latimer, George, 245 
 Latin School, Boston, 262 
 Law, as a preparatory study, 16 
 Lawless, Judge, 50 
 Lawrence, Abbott, 194 
 Lecture audiences, 96 
 Ivccture, Tlie popular, 90 
 Lecturer, Phillips as a, 327 
 Lecturer's opportunity, 96 
 
374 
 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Ijccturers, noted, 91 
 
 Lecturing trip. A, 168, 367 
 
 Lee, Robert E., 254 
 
 Liberator, The, 20, 23, 227, 260 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 104, 106, 210, 
 211, 212, 221, 222, 228, 230, 
 234, 237, 238, 251, 256 
 
 Literary men in abolition cause, 140 
 
 Literature of abolition, 153 
 
 Livermore, Thomas, L., 255 
 
 Longfellow, Henry W., 16, 85, 160 
 
 Loring, Ellis G., 32 
 
 Loring, Judge E. G., 163 
 
 Lost arts. The, 92, 319 
 
 Lovejoy, Elijah P., 50, 64 
 
 Lowell, James R., 16, 73 74, 140, 156 
 
 Lundy, Benjamin, 20, 68 
 
 Lyceum, The, 90 
 
 Lyman, Mayor, 296 
 
 M 
 
 McDowell, Marshal, 230 
 Mann, Horace, 92 
 Mason, James M., 210 
 Mathew, Father, 97, 132 
 Mexican war, 147 
 Misrepresentation, 142 
 Missouri compromise, 20, 161, 165 
 Mobs, 53, 214, 216, 234 
 Motley, Lothrop, 5, 7, 8, 307 
 Muck-rake speech, 123 
 
 N 
 
 Negro, estimates of the, 29 
 
 emancipated, 283 
 
 in Canada, 146 
 
 in Gulf States, 260 
 
 suffrage, 285 
 New England trade and manu- 
 factures, 67 
 Non-resistance, 151, 193 
 Northern subserviency, 128 
 
 O 
 
 O'Connell, Daniel, 97 
 
 tribute to Phillips, 98, 99, 115, 
 116, 130, 302 
 
 Old South Church, 3, 303 
 Oratorical age. An, 92 
 
 model, 370 
 Orators, classic, 358 
 Oratory, personal element in, 60 
 
 form of, 345 
 
 persuasive, 97 
 
 Phillips's, 133 
 
 press comment on, 42, 58, 59, 
 110, 141, 144, 163, 177, 184, 
 189, 234, 272 
 
 substance of, 318 
 Orthodoxy, 215 
 Otis, James, 63 
 Overtures to the South, 221 
 
 Palfrey, John G., 122 
 
 Parker, Theodore, 161, 180, 214 
 224, 254, 313 
 
 Parkman, Francis, 16 
 
 Peaceable methods, 181, 214 
 
 Pen, distasteful, 136 
 
 Peroration, 164, 354, 355 
 
 Personal hberty bill, 103, 219 
 
 Petition, right' of, 41, 43, 49 
 to Congress, 68, 77, ' 
 to Parliament, 79 
 
 Philanthropist, The, 50 
 
 Phillips, Ann Greene, 85, 86, 87, 315 
 362 
 
 Phillips, John, 4 
 
 PhiUips, Jonathan, 53 
 
 Phillips, Madam,, 85 
 
 Phillips genealogy, 5 
 
 Phillips, Wendell, born Nov. 29, 
 1811: Childhood and school 
 years, 3 ; antecedents, 4 ; home 
 training, 5; playfellows, 5; 
 oratorical promise, 5, 7; in 
 Boston Latin School, 7; 
 declamation days, 7; enters 
 Harvard, 8; instructors, 9; 
 studies, 9; reading, 10; 
 orators heard, 11; college 
 athletics, 12; social position, 
 12; moral and religious 
 character, 13; summary, 14; 
 a law student, 15; mis- 
 
INDEX 
 
 375 
 
 Phillips, Wendell — continued 
 
 cellaneous reading, 16 ; ad- 
 mitted to the Imr, 17; busi- 
 ness in office and courts, 18; 
 prospects, 19; early aboli- 
 tionism, 31; witness of Gar- 
 rison mob, 31; how far an 
 abolitionist before this time, 
 32; influence of Ann Terry 
 Greene, 33; engagement and 
 marriage, 31; meets Garri- 
 son, 35; contrast of condi- 
 tions, 36; his idealism, 37; 
 announces his position in a 
 resolution and a speech, 38, 
 39; second speech, 40; trib- 
 ute to John Quincy Adams, 
 41; defence of the right of 
 petition, 42; endorsement of 
 Adams, 43; fundamental 
 principles first advocated, 44; 
 inconspicuous at first, 45; 
 Fourth of July address at 
 Salem, 46; desertion of 
 friends, 46; other sacrifices, 
 46; the call, 47; renuncia- 
 tion, 48; in Faneuil Hall, 54; 
 speech on the murder of 
 Lovejoy, 55; its importance, 
 57; recognition, 57; com- 
 mendation and detraction by 
 contemporaries, 58, 59; the 
 dramatic element, 60, 61, 62; 
 labours afield, 63; Marl- 
 boro' Chapel speech, 64; 
 argument before the Mass. 
 Legislature, 65; on annexa- 
 tion of Texas, 66; detail 
 work, 67; president of Bos- 
 ton Anti-slavery Society, 67; 
 on slavery in District of 
 Columbia, 69; speech in 
 Faneuil Hall, 70; work of in- 
 struction and organizing, 71; 
 general agent of the JNIas- 
 sachusetts Anti- slavery 
 Society, 72; uncongenial 
 allies, 73; agitation his 
 method, 74; work inter- 
 rupted by European travel. 
 
 Phillips, Wendell — confiniied 
 
 76; commendation, 77; in 
 Europe, 78; delegate to 
 London convention, 78; the 
 disturbing woman question, 
 79; a stormy debate, 80; 
 Philhps's protesting position, 
 81; addresses the British 
 India Society, 82; conti- 
 nental travel and letters, 83 ; 
 returns home, 84; house- 
 keeping, 86; family letters, 
 87; dislike of writing, 89; 
 mental composition, 89; on 
 the lecture platform, 90 
 its educational value, 91 
 Phillips's early lectures, 92 
 on the "Lost Arts," 92 
 characterized, 93; its popu- 
 larity, 94 ; an abolition lecture, 
 95; character of audiences, 
 96; on Irish Appeal to 
 Americans, 97; abstract of 
 speech, 98; fundamental 
 issues before abolition, 99; 
 a fugitive slave in Boston, 
 100; speech in Faneuil Hall 
 on arrest of Latimer, 101; 
 attacks constitution, 102; 
 provocation, 103; an orator's 
 struggle, 104; invective, 105; 
 opposition to political alli- 
 ances, 108; will not vote, 108; 
 clerical antagonism, 109; his 
 orthodoxy, llO; speaks on 
 adverse influence of church, 
 110; note by Neal on his 
 oratory. Ill; recognition and 
 leadership, 112; address to 
 President Tyler, 112; pam- 
 phlets and lectures, 113; 
 resents treatment of Mr. 
 Hoar by South Carohna, 114; 
 on second Irish address, 115; 
 admiration of O'Connell, 116; 
 protest against politics, 117; 
 holds to his original methods, 
 118; on annexation of Texas, 
 119; total abolition, 120; 
 peaceable withdrawal, 121; 
 
376 
 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Phillips, Wendell — coniinued 
 
 answers Webster's attack, 
 122; muck-rake speech, 123; 
 speech on war with Mex- 
 ico; 124; tribute to women 
 helpers, 125; on servile 
 insurrection, 126; speech 
 on disunion petitions, 127; 
 free soil movement, 128; 
 advanced position, 129; 
 president of N. E. A. S. 
 Society, 130; on West Indian 
 emancipation, 131; letter to 
 James Haughton, 132; out- 
 line of work in 15 years, 132, 
 133; oratory, 133; reviews 
 Webster's Seventh of March 
 speech, 136, 137, 138; further 
 criticism, 139; speech in 
 Plymouth Church, 140, 141; 
 in Boston on charge of 
 abusive words, 142; on 
 Fugitive Slave law, 144; 
 addresses on Sims's arrest, 
 145, 146; criticism of Kos- 
 suth, 147; reply to Webster's 
 slur, 148; stemming the tide, 
 149; on Southern trade, 150; 
 non-resistance, 151; counsel 
 to new converts, 152; defence 
 of denunciation, 153; dis- 
 arrangement, 154; a hopeful 
 sign, 155; little sj-mpathy 
 from men of letters, 156; 
 Lowell an exception, 157; 
 and Whittier, 158; attitude 
 of other literary men, 158; 
 indicted for obstructing slave 
 catching, 161; faith in the 
 future, 162; tribute to his 
 eloquence, 163; legal argu- 
 ment on removal of Judge 
 Loring, 164; on capital 
 punishment, 165; distinctive 
 policy of abolition movement, 
 166; as a rhetorician, 167; 
 abohtion individuaUsm, 168; 
 an example of a lecturing 
 trip, 168; no alliance with 
 political parties, 169; agita- 
 
 Phillips, Wendell — continued 
 
 tion opens Boston schools 
 to coloured children, 170; 
 speech before Pilgrim Society, 
 170; his independence, 171; 
 the main issue, 172; progres- 
 sive methods, 172; destructive 
 first, 173; depression and 
 doubt, 173; on Southern 
 chivalry, 174; hopeful divis- 
 ion of parties, 175; limita- 
 tions of political reforms, 176; 
 advocates more education 
 for women, 177; his 
 advanced positions, 178; 
 on aggressiveness of abolition 
 movement, 179; disunion 
 Convention speech, 180; 
 value of the Union, 181; 
 rebuff, 182; Dred Scott 
 decision, 183; comments of 
 the press on the lecturer, 184; 
 speaks on various topics, 184; 
 Dred Scott decision reviewed, 
 185; abolitionists pioneers, 
 186; party leaders criticized, 
 187; defence of his orthodoxy; 
 187, breadth of mind, 188; 
 Yale Phi Beta Kappa oration, 
 189; recall to first principles, 
 190; no dependence on 
 parties, 191; ground for 
 encouragement, 192; a 
 lecturing feat, 193; enslaved 
 races, 194; on states rights 
 doctrine, 195; partial com- 
 mendation of Republican 
 party, 196; argument before 
 Legislature, 197; tribute to 
 Charles F. Hovey, 198 
 reproves public drinking, 199 
 on woman's position, 200 
 John Brown and Harper's 
 Ferry, 201; lecture on the 
 Lesson of the Hour, 202; 
 replies to criticism, 203; 
 eulogy of Brown, 204, 205; 
 letter from a slaveholder, 206 ; 
 goes to North Elba, 207; 
 war imminent, 208; advo- 
 
INDEX 
 
 377 
 
 Phillips, Wendell — continued 
 
 cates ballots rather than 
 bullets, 209; criticism of 
 Republicanism, 210; of 
 political abolition, 211; on 
 Lincoln's nomination, 212; 
 brighter outlook 213; com- 
 mercial antagonism, 214; 
 eulogy of Theodore Parker, 
 215; on "Mobs and Educa- 
 tion," 215; a Boston mob, 
 216; on the "Lesson of the 
 Hour," 217; "let the South 
 go," 218; "time will bring 
 her back," 219; his optimism, 
 220; peaceful solution, 221; 
 prophecy difficult in 1861, 
 222; on culmination of 
 controversy, 223; his atti- 
 tude, 224; accepts trial by 
 battle, 225; in the failure of 
 other proposals, 226; the 
 majority with him, 226; the 
 press not yet, 227; criticism 
 of statesmanship, 228; on 
 battle of Bull Run, 229; 
 abolition a war issue, 229; 
 insisted upon by abolitionists, 
 230; on the war, 231; 
 slavery, its cause, 232; dis- 
 union abandoned, 233; lec- 
 tures in Washington and the 
 West, 234; enlarged views, 
 235; advocates enlistment of 
 blacks, 236; on Lincoln's 
 delay, 237; and partial 
 emancipation, 238; urges 
 carrying Northern civilization 
 into the South, 239; looks 
 toward reconstruction, 240; 
 reflects on Government policy, 
 241; on Northern sjTnpathy 
 with the South, 242; "Tous- 
 saint rOuverture," 243; 
 on liquor trade, 244; on the 
 state of the country, 245; 
 cheers the despondent, 246; 
 on danger from Supreme 
 Court, 247; and Southern 
 minority in Congress, 
 
 Phillips, Wendell — continued 
 
 248; English attitude, 249; 
 recent gains, 250; on the 
 war, 251; criticized by Gar- 
 rison, 252; on reconstruc- 
 tion, 253; addresses legisla- 
 tive committee on sale of 
 liquor, 254; not in Charles- 
 ton April 14th, 255; tribute 
 to Lincoln, 256; on dissolu- 
 tion of anti-slavery societies, 
 257; elected president of 
 American A. S. Society, 258; 
 demands equality for both 
 races in reconstruction, 259; 
 contributing editor of the Stan- 
 dard 261 ; addresses schools of 
 Boston, 262; strictures upon 
 Andrew Johnson, 264; 
 endorsed by Sumner, 264; 
 refuses to consider nomina- 
 tion to Congress, 265; aids 
 the Standard, 266; criticizes 
 Administration, 267; urges 
 impeachment, 268; doubt of 
 Grant, 269; a busy year, 270; 
 editorials quoted, 271; press 
 comment on his speeches, 
 272; opinion of Webster and 
 Clay, 273; on release of 
 Davis, 274; criticism of 
 Grant, 275; the Cabinet, 
 276; and Johnson, 277; 
 standard of criticism, 278; 
 on defeat, 279; Grant's 
 nomination, 280; Indian 
 policy, 281; religion and 
 social science, 281; Republi- 
 can party, 282; the Negro 
 six years under emancipation, 
 283; on Negro suflVage, 284; 
 labour question, 285; prog- 
 ress of the abolition cause, 
 286; on the condition of the 
 South, 287; grateful to 
 Grant, 288; on disbanding 
 American Anti-slavery So- 
 ciety, 289; new causes and 
 old, 290; intemperance, 291; 
 Christianity, 292; social sci- 
 
378 
 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Phillips, Wendell — continued 
 
 ence, 293; use and trade 
 in liquors, 294; candidate 
 of Labour and Temper- 
 ance parties, 294; supports 
 General Butler, 295; on 
 corporate wealth, 295 ; Mayor 
 Lyman controversy, 296; 
 favours Republican party, 
 297; on woman suffrage, 299; 
 incorporated wealth, 300; on 
 financial questions, 301; 
 attacks Froude on Irish 
 question, 301, tribute to 
 O'Connell, 302; the Lidian 
 problem, 303; rescue of 
 Old South Church, 303; 
 limitations of advancing 
 years, 304; knightly quest 
 of reforms, 305; last years 
 and labours, 307; declines 
 nomination for governor and 
 to Congress, 307; eulogy of 
 Garrison, 308; steadfast to 
 his religious belief, 309; 
 speaks on liquor license and 
 Irish affairs, 310; Phi Beta 
 Kappa oration at Harvard, 
 311; removal from Essex 
 Street, 314; lectures on 
 labour and capital, 314; 
 eulogy of Harriet Martineau, 
 315; last discourse, 315; 
 illness, 315; death and 
 funeral, 316; eulogy upon 
 Phillips, 316; memorial 
 tablet, 317; his oratory as a 
 lecturer, 319; lecture titles, 
 320; exordium, 321; not 
 always conciliatory, 323; 
 argument, 324; before pop- 
 ular assembly, 326 ; addresses 
 327; exposition, 328; legal 
 arguments, 329; abolition 
 speeches, 332, 333; invective, 
 335, 336; tributes, 337, 338; 
 as a eulogist, 339, 340; aca- 
 demic orator, 341; dramatic 
 features of his eloquence, 
 343; form of oratory. 
 
 Phillips, Wendell — continued 
 
 345; appearance and first 
 impressions, 346; voice and 
 delivery, 347; gestures, 348; 
 moods of audiences, 349; 
 style and modes of address, 
 351; versatihty, 353; per- 
 orations, 354, 355; Greek 
 and Roman qualities, 357; 
 epigram, 358; traits, 361; 
 as a citizen and friend, 362; 
 as a reformer, 363; at home, 
 365; books and reading, 
 366, 367; on lecture tours, 
 367; readiness of retort, 367; 
 attitude on questions that 
 have become important, 369; 
 as an orator to be studied, 
 370 
 
 Pitt, William, 130 
 
 Platform, the lecture, 89 
 
 Political alliances, 108 
 
 Pope Gregory XVI. on slavery, 115 
 
 Press, Boston, 227 
 
 Press, Northern, 229 
 Southern, 227 
 
 Protest against politics, 169 
 
 Protests against slavery, early, 28 
 
 Q 
 
 Quincy, Edmund, 8 
 Quincy, Josiah, 143, 313 
 
 R 
 
 Race prejudice, 29 
 
 Radicals, 19. 73, 177, 360 
 
 Randolph, John, 209 
 
 Reading, illustrative, 17 
 
 Recognition, contemporary, 57 
 
 Rejoinder, 57, 89, 115 
 
 Religious belief, Phillips's, 315 
 
 Remainders, 364 
 
 Republican party, 117, 175, 191, 
 
 208, 209, 210, 218, 282 
 Retort, 368 
 Revels, 288, 296 
 Revere House, 149, 200 
 Rynders mob, 140 
 
INDEX 
 
 379 
 
 St. Domingo, 196 
 Sanborn, Frank B. viii, 11 
 Schools opened to coloured chil 
 
 dren, 170 
 Scotch address, 125 
 Secession, threats of, 130, 135,212,22£ 
 
 to end slavery, 217 
 "SeUing of Joseph," 22 
 Sewall, Samuel, 6 
 
 Samuel E., 22 
 Seward,WilliamH.,209,210,211,228 
 Shadrach, a fugitive slave, 145 
 Sims, a fugitive slave, 145, 245 
 Slaveholders a minority in the 
 
 South, 24 
 Slave labour, and support, and 
 
 profits of, 25, 26 
 Slave power in the nation, 218 
 Slave trade, foreign and domestic, 26 
 Slavery, barbarities of, 27 
 
 cause of abolition movement, 19 
 
 cause of ci\al war, 230 
 
 early opposition to, 20 
 
 evils of recoiling, 28 
 
 features of, 25 
 
 introduction of, 19 
 
 philanthropists' silence on, 132 
 
 Southern and other views of, 30 
 
 states opposed to, 143 
 Social science, 281 
 Southern trade, 142, 150 
 Speakers, advice to, 367 
 Standard, The, 86, 265 
 State sovereignty, 195 
 Story, Judge, 15, 100 
 "Street Life in Europe," 94 
 Sumner, Charles, 8, 17, 124, 145, 
 154, 174, 181, 188, 190, 211, 
 264, 297, 307 
 Supreme Court, 185, 197 
 
 Taney, Justice, 183 
 
 Temperance, 184 
 
 Texas, annexation of, 66, 67, 118, 
 
 119, 135 
 Third Party, 117 
 
 Thompson, George, 80, 249 
 Ticknor, George, 9, 16 
 Toombs, Robert, 216 
 Toussaint I'Ouverture, 196, 243 
 Traits, personal, of PhiUips, 361 
 Tremont Temple, 145, 213 
 
 U 
 
 "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 25, 153 
 
 Union, The, 107 
 
 and slavery, 119, 154 
 value of, to slavery, 181 
 
 Unitarians and Phillips, 188 
 
 Vane, Sir Harry, 303 
 Versatihty, 353 
 Vocation and avocation, 47 
 Voice, Philhps's, 111, 347 
 
 W 
 
 Walker, Amasa, 180 
 War for independence, 193 
 Ci\al, 74, 140, 199, 255 
 Washington, George, 70, 90, 152 
 Wayland, Francis, 189 
 Wealth, incorporated, 285, 293 
 Webster, Daniel, 32, 57, 66, 70, 74, 
 
 104, 122, 135, 139, 142, 143, 
 
 148, 152, 167, 192, 197, 200, 
 
 273 
 Weld, Theodore, 13 
 Wells, E. M. P., 53 
 Whig party 148, 149 
 Whittier, John G., 45, 138, 140, 156, 
 
 158 
 WiUiams College, 311 
 Wilmot proviso, 137 
 Wilson, Henry, 166, 167, 180, 186,211 
 Wise, Henry A., 202 
 Woman question, the, 79, 198, 200 
 
 Yale College, Phillips's Phi Beta 
 Kappa oration at, 187, 188, 
 189 
 
3477-2 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS