iii I LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, UNITED STATES OF AMEEIOA. ^kx.o^<^ \- C •v-in WENDELL PHILLIPS. MEMORIAL SERVICES UPON THE SEVENTY-FOURTH BIRIIIDAY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS, HELD AT THE RESIDENCE OF WILLIAM SUMNER CROSBY, ^ No. 517 Broadway, South Boston, Nov. 29TH, 1885. pritttcb for priratc iltrculation oitly. BOSTON: PRINTED BY JAMES COOPER, No. 29 Oliver Street. MDCCCLXXXVI. Ts54 n Peace if possible ; Justice at any rate. Wendell Phillips. INCIDENTAL PROCP:i:niNGS. On the t-vening of the seventy-fourtli birthday of Wendell Phillips, November 29, 1885, a large number of his friends assembled in the parlors of William Sumner Crosby, in South Boston, to render in reverent love and admiration their homage to his character, and to commemorate by memorial services his life- long consecration to universal humanity in its extremest needs. It was peculiarly fitting that the memorial address should be given by Theodore D. Weld — one of the last of the early aboli- tionists, r>nd the life-long friend of Wendell Phillijjs. Among the hundred guests ])rescnt were — Thk Rkv. 15ROOKK IIERFORD. Hon. JAMES M. KUP^FUM. The Rev. M. J. SAVAGE. Mr. henry B. BLAClvWELL. Dr. DAVID THAYER I Mr. Phillips's physician). Dr. JOHN P. REYNOLDS (Mr. Phillips's nephew). Mk. WHXIAM warren (the comedian, who " never missed an oppor- tunity in thirty years to hear Mr. Phillips/'). The Rev. Fr. CORCORAN. The Rev. GEO. H. YOUNG. Mr. M. ANAGNOS. The Rev. I'ITT DILLINGHAM. Mr. JOHN W. HUTCHINSON (the last of the Hutchinson family of singers). Mr. J. M. W. YERRINGTON (the reporter of Mr. Phillips's speeches). Mr. WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. Mr. a. H. GRIMKfi (Mr. Phillips's eulogist at Tremont Temple, Ajiril 9, 1884). The Rev. EDWARD V. HAYWARD. The Rkv. WILLIAM H. SAVARY. Mr. E. T. BILLINGS (the portrait artist). The Rev. WM. H. LYON. Mr. THOMAS HILLS Miss ABBY W. MAY. Miss ALICE STONE BLACK WELL. The Rkv. CHRISTOPHER R. ELIO r. The Rkv. C. B. ELDER. Mr. Crosby, who presided, opened the exercises by reading the twenty-third Psalm from a Bible, a present of Mr. Phillips's mother to her son, and given by him to Mrs. Crosby a short time before his death. Mr. Crosby also read the twelfth verse of the fifteenth chapter o First Corinthians : — " Now IF Christ he preached that he rose from THE DEAD, HOW SAY SOME AMONG YOU THAT THERE IS NO RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD?" This Psalm and this verse Mr, Phillips had marked in the Bible, and requested that both should be read at his funeral. The Broadway Unitarian Choir, in charge of Mr. William R. Baker, then sang the twenty-third Psalm, after which the Rev. M. J. Savage offered the following prayer : Father, we know that no words of ours can adequately name Thee. It is Thy might in the infinite universe of which we seem so small a part. We are overwhelmed by Thy majesty in the heavens above us, and lost in the mystery of Thy presence about us and beneath us. But though Thou art manifested as power and might and glory, we believe also that there is that in Thee which responds to our trusting hearts when we call Thee "Our Father." We do not believe our cry is lost in empty space; but rather that all we know as human tenderness and pity ar.d helpfulness and love are only finite manifestations of what is infinite in Thee. We do not pray because thou needest to be told anything, or because we think we can persuade Thee to be kinder than Thou already art. Did we dream that our prayers had power to interfere with or alter Thine eternally wise and loving purposes we should not dare to pray. We pray because we must, pouring out our inmost hearts before Thee, as children think aloud their childish hopes and fears in the presence of father or mother. But chiefly our prayer is gratitude and trust. We thank Thee that man has always been feeling after Thee, though sometiines blindly groping, and that thou hast never been far from any one of us. Thou didst seek us before we could seek Thee. Forever has it been true that Thou hast stood at the door and knocked, ready at the opening of the door to come in and abide with us. As fast and as far as we have made room for Thee, Thou hast come into the brain as truth, into the heart as love, and into the life as noble action. And never hast Thou left any age without a witness of Thee, a teacher, a leader, an inspiring and uplifting power. Always has some noble one been Thy voice, calling men to duty ; always has some seer been Thy light to show the way And not only in ancient times have Thine inspired ones spoken Thy truth to the world. For Thou art the living God — as truly living and leading in the grand forward and upward movements of the modern world as at any period in the past. Thou hast sent to our time also seers and prophets to rouse the people from their indifference, and to lead them in the way of righteousness. In our day, as well as in the past, hast Thou sent a voice to cry in the wilderness, " Prepare ye the way of the Lord! " In our day, as we as in the past, hast thou sent one to undo the heavy burdens, to proclaim liberty to the captive, and to break the shackles of them that were bound. And to-night we especially thank Thee for him whom we are gathered to commemorate; — for his clear eye that saw the truth, for his brave heart that did not falter, and for his disturbinf;j voice that would not cry peace so long as the people were at rest in the wrong. May we prove worthy of the honor we pay to him by being ourselves true to the duty that calls to us to-day. May we render him no mere lip-homage; but, in his spirit, do the work that this hour needs. So shall we make our own lives his fitting monument, and carry on still further the work of human deliverance and uplifting to which he devoted his life. Thus shall come on earth "the kingdom of God," that is the kingdom of a perfected humanity. When that grand consummation is reached, may we be fit to join in the paean of victory because we have done some little thing at least to help on that victorv. And Thine shall be the honor and the glory forever and ever. Amen ! At the close of this j^rayer the Choir chanted : If I were a voice, a persuasive voice, That could travel the wide world through, I would fly on the beams of the morning light, And speak to men with a gentle might, And bid them to be true. I would fly, I would fly over land and sea, Wherever a human heart might be, Telling a tale, or singing a song. In praise of the right — in blame of the wrong. If I were a voice, a consoling voice, I'd fly on the wings of the air; The homes of sorrow and guilt I'd seek. And calm and truthful words I'd speak, To save them from despair. I would fly, I would fly o'er the crowded town And drop like the happy sunshine down Into the hearts of suffering men. And teach them to look up again. If I were a voice, an immortal voice, T would fly the eartii around, And wherever man unto error bow'd I'd publish in notes both long and loud The truth's most joyful sound. I would fly, I would fly on the wings of day, Proclaiming peace on my world-wide way, Bidding the saddened ones rejoice — If I were a voice — an immortal voice. Mr. Crosby then read letters from friends of Mr. Phillips, which will be found at the end of the pamphlet. In introducing the speaker of the evening, Mrs. Crosby said : " 1 have great pleasure in presenting to you Mr. Theodore D. Weld. At the age of eighty-two he comes to speak to us as no living man can of Wendell Phillips. Mr. Phillips always spoke of him as the most eloquent and impressive of the early anti-slavery orators, and cherished for him always the closest friendship and most reverential regard. Let us never^ forget how much we owe to him and his noble wife, Angelina Grimkd." The exercises closed by the Choir singing Rev. M. J. Savage's " Ode to Truth" : — r. No power on earth can sever My soul from truth forever - In whatever path she wanders, I'll follow my commander. All hail ! All hail ! beloved Truth ! II. Whate'er the foe before me. Where'er the flag flies o'er me, I'll stand and never falter. No bribe my faith shall alter. Lead on ! Lead on ! thou mighty Truth III. And when the fight is over, Look down upon thy lover, He asks, for well-done duty. To see thy heav'nly beauty. Reveal thy face, celestial Truth ADDRESS. Lessons from the Life of Wendell Phillips. Of all greatness, the greatest is a great soul, great in the divine self-forgetting, that lives for others, to cheer, cherish and uplift, to help, befriend, bless and save ; lives to right wrongs, to lighten burdens, ease pains, assuage ills, and calm passions ; ever serving needs and soothing griefs ; glad in others' joy, sharing others' woe ; in all doing, daring, and self-sacrifice consecrated to univer- sal right, truth, duty, aspiration, and progress. Such souls recast the race, illumine and inspire it ; wake up its latent life, and launch it into noble action. They marshall its array, lead its advance, and beat the time of its movement as it marches on. Their voices ring out the glad tidings, that the old earth's hoary wrongs pass fast away, and fast the new earth cometh wherein dwelleth righteousness. They are God's embassadors. His credentials, written out on their lives, are His loving despatches to the children of His care. Bom with these gifts and graces, they are saviours by birthright, commissioned to breathe through all their breath of life, giving eyes to the blind, feet to the lame, speech to the dumb, healing to the bruised and broken, freedom to the slave, succor to the tempted, rescue to the wandering, and to the lost safe guidance home to their Father's house. 8 They are humanity's pathfinders, exploring its way ; engineers drawing its lines and laying its course ; pioneers casting up its highway and smoothing the rugged route ; torchbearers, lighting, guiding, and cheering it on ; guardian-angels hovering over it by day with songs of deliverance, and by night encamping round about it in loving watch and ward. They open for its thirst fountains in the desert, and minister to its hunger that mystic manna, which to the faithful never faileth. Such souls are God's apostles to man, buoying him upward by the inspiration of their lives, and quickening torpid natures by the magnetism of supernal ideas. Thus from age to age they have been his pilots through night and storm, over raging seas ; pioneers out of Egypt's bondage through the wilderness to the promised land. Fifty-six years ago, just such a soul, the moral hero of his time, bearing God's mandates to this slave-holding nation and church, its abject ally, went forth thus commissioned. Alone, God-sent, he lifted up his prophecy against a generation of oppressors, dead in trespasses and sins. Far and long his warning voice rang out, "Repent !" " Break every yoke ! " Let the oppressed go free ! " His trumpet-blast died in the dull ears of a besotted nation and church. To them he seemed as one who mocked. At length here and there a kindred soul — a man, a woman — caught his inspiration. Those near pressed around him ; those afar shouted back their glad all-hail. Very slowly their numbers grew. At length, after years of stniggle, the charmed circle widened, till thousands wrought exult- ing together. Then came among them one in earliest manhood, whose fervent soul drew him by irrepressible affinities to the leader's side. Thenceforth they twain were one. Together with ecjual step they marched, leading the van in a moral warfare against infinite odds. Divinely they magnified their office. How ihcy wrought, wrote, spoke, lived, agonized and conquered ! No lips so touched by altar-coals as theirs, no pens like theirs flashed truth's electric fires, till, life's last forces spent, they rested from their labors ; and in might and multitude their works have followed them, till now. from sea to sea, myriads rise up and call them blessed. Let us for this hour commune with the younger of these anoint- ed souls as he traversed his great career. A life wrought out in all daring and sacrifice for the poorest of earth's poor, desolate out- casts, guiltless victims, the plundered and forsaken of every realm. A life so sublime in its devotion to man's intensest needs chal- lenges our reverent pondering of the lessons it teaches. Twenty-two months ago all of Wendell Phillips that could die was borne to Boston's most ancient place of burial. There, at the centre of the old puritan city, his majestic form, lowered tenderly to its final rest, sleeps with his kindred dust. Yet this lapse of time has hardly, if at all, dulled that keen sense of loss borne to us upon his latest breath. No event, topic, or name lives more vividly to-day in the best thought and heart of his native New luiglantl than the memory of that grand career. Pulpits, platforms and the press have lavished spontaneous homage upon his genius and character. From ocean to ocean, cities, villages and hamlets, even the thinly peopled frontiers skirting our far West and North, uprose, uncov- ered as the wires sped on those drear death-tidings ; while with choked utterance those whose hearts his life had won whispered brokenly the name they loved. Even the late slave-holding South hushed for a while its dis- 10 cordant note, while some in New Orleans, Charleston and Rich- mond let fall tender words as they read upon their bulletins, " Wendell Phillips is dead." But it was not his genius alone, and the vast service it had ren- dered to man, that kindled this loving admiration. They who out- poured those eulogies had felt the thrill of his heart-beat ; its pulses had throbbed through them in words that burned. Thus inspired they spake. What our common speech calls genius is some special faculty overshadowing all others and ruling the realm of mind. Not such was the genius of Wendell Phillips. It was no king over his other powers, but a ruler among rulers, each co-ordinate with each in a balanced equality. It was no single element, but all the higher elements forming a common unit, equal forces blended in an inseparable whole. Some minds are great in a single faculty ; others in kindred faculties with mutual affinities ; others still in the general range and elevation of all the higher powers. Such pre-eminently was the genius of Wendell Phillips. Strong in each of its elements, ethic, aesthetic, logical, philosophic, criti- cal, emotional, imaginative, all these with conscience and indomita- ble will were the rounded man himself. The large stature of his powers, their exalted level, thus making each a vital constituent of his genius, made him in their combination what he was. This aggregation ot great mental and moral forces crystallized into character, were the grand way-marks which shaped and signal- ized his lite-career. Some of these stand out so far in Iront that each seems almost the man himself. I name first, intuitive insight into rights and wrongs, the nature, relations and fitnesses of things. Second : An absolute self-poise, never jostled, however rude the 11 shock or confounding the (]uandary, whatever friends estranged or associations sundered. Third : A heroism that nothing could daunt, converting each danger into new strength to dare. Fourth : A serene independence, standing upon its own footing, and content to stand alone. Fifth : A fidelity to conviction, never swerving from its line for cross, loss, struggle, peril or self-sacrifice, whatever the onset or the odds. Sixth : A moral courage unmoved by scoff or taunt, threats or curses, by faces averted in disgust or scowling in scorn, pale in hate or ablaze with rage, while calmly confronting stormy clamor and universal ostracism. Seventh : All these elements were pioneered by a conscience sensitive as quicksilver, true as needle to pole, impelled to univer- sal right by an indomitable will, and wrought out in a stringent logic, philosophy and rhetoric, compact in tersest phrase, proverb, epi- gram, invective, poetic conception and eloquence ; in natural, simple speech of common words, and flowing in a style of trans- parent strength and beauty. To these were added the charm of rare personal attractions, a majestic presence, an air of blended grace and dignity, a gentle, winning manner, with never a trace of self-display, or hardly of self-consciousness, his face alive with soul, his eye serenely benig- nant to right, but darting lightnings at incorrigible wTong, his speech resonant with those wonderous tones which once heard were heard always ; while over all his supremely unselfish life was a crown of glory. His Boston birth was to him a cherished boon. Speaking of it he said, " I love inexpressibly the streets of Boston, over which my mother bore up my baby feet, and if God grants me time enough 12 I will make them too pure for the footsteps of a slave." \Vhen an old man he wrote, " I was born in Boston, and the good name of the old town is bound up with every fibre of my heart." Why did Boston so nestle in his heart ? Not because it was renowned for those splendors which strike the eye, marvels which have made famous many cities. In those scores have surpassed Boston. It was because the grand old town sat crowned with glorious memories, his joy and pride. While life lasted they stirred him heart and brain, Boston's sublime example in extremest peril, when every portent foreboded downfall, in the grapple with England's usurpation, that grand defiance lived deathless in his memory, and cast in its own mould the plastic boyhood of the young devotee. That old heroic mould of revolutionary Boston holds its own to-day, and will ever, despite its later degeneracy. True, her per- fidy to liberty, Oct. 21st, 1835, trailed across her escutcheon, spot- less till then, a stain indelible. Yet jet-black as that stain was and will be forever, it can never dim the glory of Boston's revolutionary renown. That grand old revolution, its thronging difficulties met and mastered, its trials and struggles, burdens and losses, privations , hardships and sufferings, intense, long-drawn and heroically borne ; its dangers confronted, grappled and defiantly dared ; that im- mortal seven-years' struggle, an agony of desperation, crowned victor at last, while the land still smoked with slaughter, these kindling memories were all household words in the diction of the heroic boy. That wonderous story his heart had garnered word by word. To him it was a living inspiration in all the air. He drew it in with his breath and thundered it forth in declamation from the platform of Boston's Latin School, as the fiery words of Otis, Quincy, Adams and Patrick Henry leaped glowing from his fervid lips. 13 But though by birth native to Boston, and counting that nativity a precious boon, Wendell Phillips caught in his earliest young manhood vivid foregleams of a higher nativity than that according to the flesh. This was in due time born of soul-travail in birth- throes of the spirit. Pondering the vision and bitiing his time, he felt within him new yearnings, his inner eye fast opening, his inner ear unsealing, his whole being expanding and exulting in its new- found inlets and outlets, giving it freer course, fuller pulses, wider scope and higher aspirations. As he mused there came to him inklings of a birthright unknown before. Clearer and more clear the light shone, till full-orbed at last it rose upon him, revealing his life-clientage of earth's plundered millions, poorest of the myriad poor, victims foredoomed to disfranchisement from birth, dehu- manized by human laws, whelmed under direst wrongs, stripped of all rights, robbed of themselves and thus of all besides, the tortured victims of all atrocities wrought by man upon man. Forlorn, out- casts ! desolate, forsaken, forgotten and left to perish ! Thus called of God he counselled not with man. Hailing the vision, he bowed to its sacred baptism and felt laid upon him an ordaining hand, consecrate with the anointing of a divine apostle- ship to bind up the broken-hearted, set at liberty the bruised, proclaim deliverance to the captive, the opening of prisons to the bond, and to deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor. Straightway, strong of heart, he girded his loins, buckled on his armor and left all, looking never backward except in joy to shout his deliverance. Then exulting in his summons, his mission and his message, he sprang to the toils, scorns, perils, alienations, con- flicts and hair-breadth escapes of his life-career. At this, his first great crisis, let us turn back to note the special stages which marked thus far the scenes of his life. 14 Born November 29th, 181 1, he graduated at fifteen from the Boston Latin School, at nineteen from Harvard College. I have recently received letters from two of his classmates, de- scribing his college-career. The first is from his roommate, the Rev. John Tappan Pierce, of Illinois. Mr. Pierce says : " Our acquaintance began at Harvard in i82 7> when we first met to be examined. I was then a lad of fifteen, but two weeks younger than Phillips. Though I had never seen him before, I was drawn to him by irresistible attraction, and I always found him true as magnet to steel. I had engaged a room- mate, otherwise we should have roomed together the first year ; but, just before entering the Sophomore Class in 1828, Phillips came to my room and proposed our partnership, which I joyfully accepted ; and here began our life-intimacy, a sweet and enduring tie. " I will speak first of his moral traits. He was not then a profess- ing Christian, yet he never said or did anything unbecoming the Christian character. What President Kirkland said in his life of Fisher Ames was eminently true of Phillips : " He needed not the sting of guilt to make him virtuous." His character shone conspic- uous. He was above pretence, a sincere, conscientious, devoted friend. He had a deep love for all that was true and honorable, always detested a mean action. His Bible was always open on the centre-table. His character was perfectly transparent ; there were no subterfuges, no pretences about him. He was known by all to. be just what he seemed. " Second, his social traits : He was the favorite of the class. If any class-honor was to be conferred, who sp likely to have it as he ? Nor would any dispute his claim. Though very modest in his self-estimate, every one wiUingly yielded him the palm. Upon the death of a valued classmate, Thompson, none but Phillips must pronounce the eulogy. 15 " Third ; His standing as a scholar was among the first in a large class. This is saying not a little when we recall the names of Motley, the historian ; Simmons, the distinguished orator ; Eames, United States charg^ d'affaires ; McKean, a true son of genius ; the Rev. Dr. Morrison, late editor of the " Unitarian Review ;" Mayor Shurtleff, and Dr. Shattuck, of Boston ; Pickering, the Boston lawyer ; Judge Darrell, of New Orleans ; Joseph Williams, Lieut.- Ciovemor of Michigan and president of a state college there. " As an orator Phillips took the highest stand of any graduate of our day. I never knew him to fail in anything or hesitate in a recitation. In mathematics he was facile princeps; natural and moral philosophy, history, the ancient languages, in all pre- eminent, equally good in all branches. " He hated oppression and always defended the defenceless. He had great power of reasoning, and easy mastery over those with whom he grappled. He was laborious, patient under trials, and of a cheerful disposition that could never be discouraged." Another of his classmates, the Rev. Dr. Morrison, speaks thus of him : " Wendell Phillips in college and Wendell Phillips six years after were entirely different men. In college he was the proud leader of the aristocracy. From what he then was no one could possibly predict what he afterwards became as the defender and personal friend of the helpless and desi)ised. There was always the same grace and dignity of personal bearing, the same remarka- ble power of eloquence, whether in extempore debate or studied declamation. 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, as well as an exercise in elocution, to give to language its greatest possible effect. In this he did not accept the aid of teachers. His method was his own. 16 Before entering college he had been the subject of a religious revival. Previous to that he used to give way to violent outbursts of temper, and his schoolmates would sometimes amuse themselves by deliberately working him up into a passion. But after his con- version they could never succeed in getting him out of temper. " His classmates would have selected him as one born to be a power among men. No other student in those days would com- pare with him in that respect. He had already been distinguished for his unsullied purity of character. But it was not easy to un- derstand how this aristocratic leader of a privileged class could cast in his lot with the most despised of his race. The simple and true explanation is that a new thought had come in as the central motive of his life. His attention was drawn to the great national curse and crime of his day, and he gave himself heart and soul to the cause. " It is not my purpose to justify every word or act of his ; but this I would say, that, having known him in the pride of youthful ambition and the opening consciousness of great powers, and having followed him through fifty years of great events in which he took a distinguished part, I cannot doubt that ' in his heart of heart ' he was profoundly in earnest, and that the deepest sympa- thies of his nature were on the side of those whom the world despised. He made mistakes. In the fierceness of the fight he sometimes did injustice to those who could not join his standard. But his exaggerations were those of one mainly intent on the weapons that could be used most effectively in a righteous cause. Where he erred the error would be found associated with his intense interest in those whom he regarded as peculiarly his clients. He was so entirely taken up with the sense of their sufferings and wrongs that he could act only as their advocate irrespective of what might be due to those who seemed to stand in his way." 17 At twenty- two he was through his hiw studies. At twenty-three PhilHps was admitted to practice at the bar, and opened his office in Boston, where we are told that for three years he waited in vain for chents. Mr. Curtis, in his Boston oration, speaks of his sitting in his office and jesting about the clients that did not come, and also of his sitting there a year later still expectant of clients. Mr. Austin, in his life of Wendell Phillips, minute in its personal details, gives no intimation that he ever made a speech at the bar or had a client. These facts would seem to set the question at rest. But the sketch of Phillips's life in the last edition of his speeches speaks thus of his professional business : " A large and increasing practice so occupied his time that he forgot all else. In the trial of cases at the bar he was training his eloquence, and before juries he was modulating that voice so soon to thrill humanity." This conflict in the testimony hitherto available is point-blank ; and hero I rest the case, saying only that the preceding extract seems in the light of all the counter testimony of half a century very like the play of imagination irrespective of facts, rather than an authentic sketch of things known. Since writing the foregoing I have received from my young kins- man, Mr. A. H. Grimke, explicit testimony upon this point from Mr. Phillips himself. He has kindly given me the following details : "It was at a suffrage festival in Horticultural Hall in 1S78 that Wendell Phillips told me the story of a case which he conducted when an attorney at the Boston bar. I cannot recall the character of the case, nor the incidents as he related them. All I remember, and this is vivid, is that the young lawyer had shown unusual skill in handling his client's interests, and that the recollection of the event was a source of undisguised satisfaction." Long after the date of Mr. Grimkt^'s letter, explicit information 18 came to me, giving in detail Mr. Phillips's own testimony about his legal practice, with the antecedents and corroboratives incident thereto. These were sent in a letter written by a lady whose anti- slavery enthusiasm at five years old so charmed Mr. Phillips that he said to her, " You are my blessed child ;" and ever after the same token of affection followed her as she grew to womanhood through years of intimacy at his home, till " my blessed child " was garnered among his household words. No marvel that, when he felt life's close drawing near, he gave her, with other souvenirs, his mother's Bible, and that his last words to her in his last hours were, " You are a blessed child, remember always that I said it." No other except his own wife has received from Mr. Phillips such minute details of his life-career. I subjoin the following extracts from her letter : " Since Mr. Phillips's death, statements have been made in print, that he said he had no success as a lawyer. These statements, like many others concerning Mr. Phillips, are mistakes. I remem_ ber, some two years before his death, calling his attention to an article in one of our magazines, written by a person who assumed to give the particulars of Mr. Phillips's life in the Essex-street house during the forty years he had lived in it. When I asked him what he thought of the article, he said, ' It is a well-written article, an exceedingly well-written article, when you consider how little the man knows about what he is writing. He says that the two most distinguished persons ever under my roof were Daniel Webster and Edward Everett. Now neither of these gentlemen ever visited me and I had no acquaintance with them ; and if viy opinion is worth anything, the two persons most famous who ever visited me were John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison, and the writer does not seem to know that either of these has lived.'" " Every one who was intimate with Mr. Phillips, knows, that when 19 he was graduated from Harvard College he had but one especial end in view, and that was the study of law. During the last fifteen years of his life he frequently spoke to me of those early days, and all he said is still very fresh in my memory. After leaving college he never contemplated being anything but a success in his chosen profession. He never thought of giving up his practice until his clients left him, qftei- his Famieil Hall speech ; and tlien, but not till then, he gave up his office on Court street, and gave himself, heart and soul, to the cause of abolition. "Wendell Phillips was the favorite child of his mother. By his father's early death she had the controlling influence over his edu- cation and life-purposes. She was a woman of no mean gifts, had great energy and great strength of. character. She early saw the great possibilities that lay before her gifted son, and sacrificed much that he might have every facility for furthering his professional success. Wendell entered fully into the spirit of his mother in his resolve, as his diary kept at that time will show, to win eminence as a lawyer. He was warranted in expecting much, for Harvard Col- lege had given him all her honors. He often spoke to me of his practice and the nature of it. ' Very much,' he said, ' was office work, drawing up legal papers, wills, &c.' He would say sometimes with a smile, he did better then as a young lawyer than young men do to-day upon entering the profession. ' Those two years I paid all my expenses, and few do it now.' It was only within a year of his death that he gave me the sign that had hung over his office window, and which he had kept all these years, saying, ' I think you will see that it is never destroyed.' " Mr Sumner, a short time before his death, speaking to me of Mr. Phillips, said, ' When Mr. Phillips became an abolitionist he withdrew from the roll of Massachusetts lawyers the name of one who would have been amongst her greatest.' He told me also 20 that, as young men, law-students together, Phillips and he fre- quently discussed the horrors of slavery, and how this country could be freed from the curse. ' Little,' said Mr. Sumner, ' did I then dream what an active part we were both to take on this great question.' " Phillips's abolition opinions date back to 1831. These opinions were kindled into a burning conviction when in 1835 he saw that pro-slavery mob dragging and driving Mr. Garrison bare-headed and half-nude through the streets of Boston. To an intimate friend he said, " I never could have been anything but an aboli- tionist after witnessing that spectacle." That the anti-slavery leaven previously kneaded into Phillips's conscience was already in ferment is shown thus in Mr. Austin's life of Phillips : " When he put his name to the oath to protect the United States Constitution that threw a partial protection round the master of a slave, he writhed in shame at his weakness." This was in 1 834, a year before those barbarians in broadcloth gibbeted themselves in infamy along with the municipal authorities of Boston on the twenty-first of October, 1835. From that hour Phillips's relation to the little band of hunted abolitionists was no longer that of mere opinion, but one of intense conviction. Thenceforth mind, heart, soul and tongue lived out the faith which had been till then hardly more than a speculative creed. His first anti-slavery speech was before the Young Men's Anti- Slavery Society in Lynn, May, 1837. That speech so took the Society by storm that they forthwith engaged him for their Fourth of July orator, two months afterward. Those who heard that speech insist that the best speeches of his ripened years hardly surpassed it. Five months later, December 8th, 1837, came that memorable scene in Fanueil Hall. There in the old Cradle of Liberty, a great 21 birth was bom for freedom's trial-hour. There the frenzy of a pro-slavery mob was, for the first time, confronted, and with a sub- lime audacity defied and wliclmed in defeat ; an assault as trium- phant in its issue as it was daring and resistless in its victorious grapple. That victory pioneered to the American platform a power unknown to it before, and thenceforth to tread it alone, monarch of the realm. The immediate occasion of that scene which immortalized anew the old Cradle of Liberty, December 8th, 1837, was the series of tragedies enacted by pro-slavery mobs in St. Louis, Mo., and Alton, 111., destroying successively two printing-offices, four presses and sets of type, and murdering the editor of the St. Louis " Observer," who, despite threats and curses, branded slavery as sin. For this mobs hurled to destruction offices, presses, types and editor Pierced with five balls he lay in his blood, his murderers scoffing over him. While these atrocities were the special occasion of that Fanueil-Hall meeting, its logical antecedents, grown then to a mul- titude, compelled those who called it to instant action. Public sentiment had long threatened vengeance against all anti-slavery speaking and writing. These threats were soon flying missiles and blows. Abolitionists were virtually oudawed. This public sentiment, begotten by the slave-power, was endorsed by all the free states. It held sul)jcct Congress and the Covern- ment, dominated all political parties and religious denominations, all literature, science and art, all general pursuits, industries and interests. This subjection was, barring individual exceptions, uni- versal, all were overmastered. In the craven spirit of slaves they crouclicd at the feet of their masters. This fact stands indel- ible on our annals. Those stains, grimed into the escutcheons of the states called free, are burning their way down the generations compelling our posterity to wear the brand of ancestral infamy 22 Do any demur and ask what that infamy was ? Answer : Civiliza- tion presupposes a government of law. If law is abolished, society sinks into barbarism. Sunk thus was this nation then in its rela- tions to abolitionists. Mobs had been for years every\vhere in out- burst against them. They were the victims of an indiscriminate ostracism, everywhere they were doomed because they hated slavery and lived out that hate. Their property, liberties and lives lay at the mercy of mobs. In thousands of cases they were sub- jected to personal assaults, beatings and buffetings, with nameless indignities. They were stoned, clubbed, knocked down and pelted with missiles, often with eggs, and, when they could get them, spoiled ones. They were smeared with filth, stripped of clothing, tarred, feathered, ridden upon rails, their houses sacked, bonfires made in the streets of their furniture, garments and bedding, their vehicles and harnesses were cut and broken, and their domestic animals harried, dashed with hot water, cropped, crippled and killed. Among these outrages, besides assaults and breaches of the peace, there were sometimes burglaries, robberies, maimings and arsons ; abolitionists were driven from their homes into the fields and woods, and their houses burned. They were dragged and thrust from the halls in which they held their meetings. They were often shot at, and sometimes wounded. In one mob a number were thus wounded and one killed. Vitriol was thrown upon them. Cayenne pepper, assafcetida and other substances intolerable to eyes and olfactories were used to disperse their meetings. For a quarter of a century our civihzation was thus sunk to bar- barism. The law, which to others was protection, to abolitionists was sheerest mockery. Yea, more, it singled them out as its victims. Professing to protect, it gave them up to ravage and beckoned the spoilers to their prey. Of the tens of thousands 23 who perpetrated such atrocities not one suffered the least lega penalty for those astounding violations of law ! This is that ancestral infamy of which our ill-fated posterity must forever wear the brand. Of the multiform illustrations of our civilization sunk thus to savagism, I select the monster crime named in the summons to the Fanueil-Hall meeting. Its murdered vic- tim was the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, a man of noblest mould. Born at Albion, Maine, then Massachusetts, he was graduated at Waterville College with its highest honors. Settling in St. Louis, he first edited a political paper, and afterward became a preacher, and in 1833 was selected by the Presbyterians to edit their paper, the St. Louis " Observer." In the fall of '36 a mob tore down its printing-office and hurled its press and types into the Mississippi. Then the paper was removed to Alton, 111., where during that year Mr. Lovejoy had three presses successively broken up and their fragments thrown into the river. When the mob rushed to destroy the last press, they were summoned by horn-blowing throughout the city announcing its arrival. They began by smashing the windows of the storehouse which held the press, then set it on fire, shot down the editor, and fired upon the abolitionists as they ran from the burning building. Mr. Lovejoy had published articles against slavery, avowing himself no immediate abolitionist, but a gradual emancipationist and colonizationist. These articles stirred the rage of slaveholders. Threats came fast. " Lynch him ! " " Tear down his office ! " " Pitch his press into the river !" " Drive him out of the city ! " are specimens of the street-cries. Public meetings denounced him and passed inflammatory resolutions threatening vengeance. Upon this Mr. Lovejoy published an appeal to liis fellow-citizens. The following extract reveals the man : " I cannot surrender my convictions, and so long as life lasts I declare my de- termination to maintain this ground. I am ready to suffer and to 24 die for these principles. My blood shall flow freely as water rather than surrender my right to plead the cause of truth in the face of all its opposers. With God I cheerfully rest my cause. I can die at my post, but I cannot desert it." These pro-slavery mobs were all fresh in the thoughts and fore- bodings of those who summoned that Fanueil-Hall meeting. Its special object was to express the horror felt at those atrocities in St. Louis and Alton, and to brand with infamy the perpetrators and the legal authorities, false to their trusts, when law and justice were successfully trampled and defied. Though those were the special horrors named in the call, yet a deeper horror shadowed those who signed that petition. The slave-power had long dominated the public sentiment of the free states. Finding at length the abolitionists denouncing slavery and organizing against it, they had come down upon them in wrath, stirring up anarchy and striking down law by spurring on the law- less to usurp it, nullify it, and foist into its place the rage of the hour. The summoners of that meeting knew that pro-slavery mobs, multiplying for years, were then all abroad hunting down their victims, trampling every safeguard of property, liberty and life. In this universal ravin and ravage, constitutions, bills ol rights, civil and penal codes, grand and petit juries, free speech, and freedom of the press were all trodden as mire by these dehumanized beasts of prey. Never in the nation's straits had there come a crisis so momen- tous, never had portents, foreboding doom, so thickened and thun- dered over the nation as then. The foundations were shaken ; Government had a name to live, but only in words that scoffed at its shadow. Anarchy rampant drove baffled liberty and law before it. The roar of riot and the tramp of mobs hurtled in all the air. In its mad onset upon 25 personal rights Wendell I'hillips beheld slavery's deadly grapple with liberty and law, and high al)ove the clangor of battle heard freedom's tocsin ring out its wild alarum. Instant at the rallying summons he appears upon the scene. Long before this he had learned the folly of gradualism, the inadequacy and falseness of the colonization scheme, and the duty and safety of immetliate aboli- tion. But no mere opinions can fathom the soul's dejjths. They ~1 may lie dormant a lifetime. Half dormant Phillips's anti-slavery opinions were till he saw slave-holding horrors ablaze in the frenzy of pro-slavery mobs. Then his latent anti-slavery beliefs new-born became living inspirations. Then only could he " remember those in bonds as bound with them." Such thoughts and purposes set astir in brain, heart and will soon grew into convictions that flamed in speech and act. True they had smouldered long, but when they burst ablaze the flame was cjuenchless evermore. Before recalling that flame-burst of Phillips's in Fanueil Hall, let us trace it from its first kindling until it set all his powers on fire. Great moral reforms are all born of soul-travail. Their growth is slow and long, when the roots of monster crime are deep-shot and strike far out around. Such reforms compel desperate struggles to wrench out false principles embedded in public sentiment till pet- rified into chronic prejudices, bigotries, superstitions, greeds, judges, hates, moral gangrenes and passions, inherited and im- memorial, the fossils of ages. To do this, all possibilities of mind, soul and spirit must be wrought in utmost outlay. To launch a vast radical reform with such momentum as shall crown it victor is the sublimest of human achievements. What ponderings, wrestlings and spirit-throes in those who set it in motion ! W1iat traversings, e.xplorings, siftings, testings, analyzings ! What pains in gathering the underlying facts with ail they involve ! Then follows that long brooding over 26 ' details, casting and recastiii^ till plans ripened and souls fired, with what might and main the reform is pioneered into being ! The starting point and power of every great reform must be the reformer's self. He first must set himself apart its sacred devotee, baptised into its s}nnt, consecrated to its ser\ace, feeling its pro- found necessity, its constraining motives, impelling causes, and all reasons why. Then his kindled soul will enkindle others, and never till then. Such sublime intensities fired William Lloyd Garrison when he kneeled, his open Bible before him, and consecrated his life to the abolition of slavery. This consecration was absolute and utter. Thenceforth that life was never his own. Well might this greatest reform of these later ages hail him alone, as it does reverently to-day, as its prime originator. Garrison's magnetic contact and kindling example inspired in Wendell Phillips that same soul- yearning, rapt devotion, heroic daring, unconquerable will and self- consecration, which first burst into flames at Fanueil Hall, gilding anew the revoiutionary Cradle of Liberty with its old-time glory. "To that man," Phillips used to say, " I owe all my anti-slavery inspi- ration." Seven years after the starting of the '-Liberator," Phillips's abolition reached its furnace heat. This was after he had seen Garrison dragged and driven through the streets of Boston by that vandal mob in broadcloth, and two years before he sprang into that thickest fight in Fanueil Hall, December 8th, 1837, when he faced the attorney-general and his mob, rolled back on them their tide of battle and whelmed them under it, as the Red Sea buried their slave-holding kindred, kith and kin. From October, 1835, to December, 1837, Phillips was exploring the slavery question throughout : slavery's havoc upon slaves, its reaction- ypon slave- holders, the domination of the slave-power over the free states, holding them all in its clutch, subject, abject and servile. These 27 explorings and ponderings ripened Phillips apace for the work awaiting him. As he mused the fire burned ; as he bided his time it was gathering that momentum which soon impelled it from con- quering to conquer. That power which bore him serene through all perils is no mystery. He had studied slavery, knew its nature, ten- dencies, effects ; knew that its breath was poison and its touch palsy. The spectacle of the Nation strewn with its havoc touched his inmost and summoned out his utmost. A supernal passion fired him ; a divine magnetism lifted him exultant above all peril, loss and sacrifice, till he counted suffering and desperate struggle all joy, a glad free-will offering, free as air, to the cause of luunan- ity, freedom, and the nation's salvation. Just a hundred years to a month, almost to a day, before Phil- lips's Fanueil Hall speech, John Wesley, after living two years in the midst of slavery in Georgia, shook the dust from his feet against it, and sailed from Savannah back to England, crying out as he left, " Slavery is the sum of all villainies." The truest, tersest, strongest half-dozen words ever tabled against it. Glorious old John Wesley had a heart of flesh, //la/ voiced those astounding words, " sum of all villainies." Well he knew that language had no word that could fitly name the monster. So in despair of nam- ing it he could only define it. As he gazed at it no marvel that his eyes filled, his sight grew dim, his brain grew dizzy. He listened till shrieks stunned him. He pondered the ghastly horror till the breath he drew steamed rank with the scent of blood. That same "sum of all villainies " Wendell Phillips had now gazed at, listened to and pored over till he could gaze and pore no longer. Horrors shuddered through his musings, haunted his night-watches and peopled his dreams. Then and thus he mastered slavery, traced its track as it trailed its pestilent slime over all the free states, sting- iDg in its poison through their vital circulation. Silent, secret, 28 wide-working, that deadly leaven was everywhere in hot ferment, blinding, blunting, besotting, palsying the public mind till it knew not itself, only the frenzies of the demons that possessed it. These demons gnashed and howled under the Ithurial touch of Garrison like their prototypes of old under the exorcism of Jesus. Phillips knew that these onslaughts upon liberty and law, only brutal at first, had grown murderous ; that the great body of the free North, East and West were in their relations to the abolitionists virtually demoniac. None but those who saw and heard or were the vic- tims of those atrocities can conceive of the blind furor that seized all classes, dementalizing and dehumanizing. An insane contagion swept through the land like the sirocco of the desert, and struck down as if plague-smitten whomever it touched. In every free state, men not a few, and women many, uprose unterrified and launched their execrations against the cursed thing, denouncing in the name of law, civilization and religion those outlaws who had trampled all law and shouted all-hail to mobs and murderers. If it ever befitted any people in last extremity to cry out, " Compan- ions in peril, come to the rescue, lest the things that belong to our peace be hidden forever from our eyes," they surely were that people ; then was the time and there in the old Cradle of Liberty was of all places the place to debate that question, vital to all. For sixty years that Cradle which rocked the Revolution in its giant infancy had stood still awaiting another epoch to fill it and set in motion. That epoch had come. The old Cradle was rocking again with another birth to Liberty. ^^'iI!iam Ellery Channing, who wrote the petition to the mayor and aldermen of Boston, and the one hundred who signed it, were the men for the hour and its work. The hour had struck ; so had the mayor and aldermen, but the note they struck was not liberty's key-note, but slavery's and mob 29 law's. Then, as a peace-offering to slave-holders, they denied the prayer of the one hundred petitioners, saying that, if granted, it might be thought the voice of the city. Ignoble, coward words ! \Vell did the sworn custodians of Boston's fair fame brand thus their infamy upon their own foreheads. So they barred up the door of Fanueil Hall against free speech, liberty and law, and em- blazoned thereon the symbols of the city's new heraldry, slavery's armorial ensigns, coffle-chains, fetters, whips, gags and branding- irons. Immediately Dr. Channing issued the following appeal to the citizens of Boston : "Has it come to this? Has Boston fallen so low? May not its citizens be trusted to come together to express the great principles of liberty for which their fathers died ? Are our fellow-citizens to be murdered in the act of defending their property and of assum- ing the right of free discussion? And is it unsafe in this metropo- lis to express abhorrence of the deed ? If such be our degrada- tion we ought to know the awful truth, and those among us who retain a portion of the spirit of our ancestors should set themselves to work to recover their degenerate posterity." These trenchant words cut to the quick. No time was lost. In a trice placards in capitals flared on the street corners, summoning citizens to the Supreme Court room to discuss the reasons of the mayor and aldermen for denying the prayer of the one hundred citizens. Prompt at the hour the audience came. Discussion had free course, the decision was unanimous, A new application was decreed, drawn up on the spot and signed by hundreds more and sent. Of a sudden new light broke upon the optics of Boston's authorities and old Fanueil Hall, rekindling with its ancient mem- aries, swung wide open again to the new-born spirit of '76. But the story of that meeting cannot be fitly told without first describing those scenes that Phillips witnessed two ycirs before 30 when he saw the slave power strike dead Boston's government of law, and bend under its yoke the necks of her mayor and all her city authorities and hold them there subject, abject and servile to its bidding, thus ruling out the reign of law and ruling in the reign of anarchy and outlawry, brandishing for their sceptres the bludgeons of mobs. The lessons learned by Phillips then trained him for his achieve- ment upon that historic arena which launched his abolition career. That education for his life-work calls for a brief notice here. Two years before that meeting, Wendell Phillips, from the glowing threshhold of his young manhood, looked down upon Boston help- less in the clutches of a mob of thousands, its mayor, aldermen and police consenting and conniving, while law, justice and civili- zation itself lay trodden in the streets. He saw William Lloyd Garrison, for words spoken against slavery, pounced upon by a mob, driven and dragged half nude through the streets of Boston, while anarchy defiant shouted over its barbarian conquest. Thus Phil- lips sees his native city lock round her wrists the slave-handcuffs and its gyves round her ankles, and receive its iron gag within her lips, and clasp with eager hands its coffle-chains as she thrusts her bended neck beneath its yoke, and quick at the word take her slaves' place in the coffle, fast chained, and as it moves keep step as best she may with her fettered feet to the crack of the driver's whip. He saw that this self-sale of Boston to the slave-power in its own shambles was instant death to a government of law, and in- stant life to a reign of terror, the chaos of anarchy and blind rage. He heard its hurtle in the air, its yells and curses in the streets, and the rush of its myriad mob as they tramped along the pave. He saw the sign " Anti-slavery Office " dashed to the sidewalk and stamped into splinters. He saw the Women's Anti-slavery 81 Society in session, the president opening the meeting with prayer. Of a sudden Boston's mayor rushes in shouting, " Ladies, go home, go home !" President : '' Why should we go liome ?" . Mayor : " 1 am the mayor. I cannot now explain. Do no stop, ladies, go home. Do you wish to sec a scene of blood- shed? If not, go home." Mrs. Chapman : " Mr. Mayor, your personal friends are the in- stigators of this mob." Mayor : " I know no personal friends ; I am only an official' You must go home. It is dangerous to remain." Mrs. Chapman : '' If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere." The mob rushed in and filled the room. Failing to find Mr. Garrison they burst into another, find, seize, tie a rope around him and let him down through a window to the mob outside, who clutch their prey, tear off his coat, vest and hat, and drag and push him through the streets. " Why don't the mayor call out the troops ?" shouted Phillips. "Why does he stand there arguing? Why doesn't he call for the gims?" Then recognizing his colonel in the crowd looking on, he shouts, " Colonel, why don't you call out our regiment ! Offer our sewices to the mayor to rescue this man and put down the mob ?" The colonel shouted back, " Phillips, can't you see that our regiment are already there in the mob !" The mayor, the aldermen, the hundreds of policemen, where are they? All there. What doing? Nothing but looking on. " Why don't they arrest the mob-leaders," shouts Phillips, "and rescue their victim and scatter the mob ?" "Mob! Mob!" shouted indignant voices. " Look at them. They are respectable gentlemen of property and standing." Just what the j^ajiers said of the mob the next morning. 32 But let us give the mayor of Boston his due for a chivalrous act of patriotic daring. He boldly ordered in open day the arrest ot a man as a disturber of the peace and sent him to jail by due pro- cess of law, and thus he plucked up by the locks the drowning honor of Boston. Who was that notorious outlaw, arrested by the mayor and sent to jail for disturbing the peace? His name was William Lloyd Garrison. The mob being all respectable law- abiding gentlemen of property and standing, every one had, ot course, sacredly kept the peace ; andas Garrison was the only one who had broken the peace and thus shown himself a rampant mob- ocrat it was eminently fit that he alone should suffer the penalty and be sent to jail by due process of law, and thus the oppressed city breathe free again. The plague was stayed, and the heroic mayor was immortalized. Thus the majesty of law was magnified and the honor of Boston's honorable authorities kept free from stain. But enough ! Wendell Phillips had his lesson now and conned it well. He traced the lineal descent of that Boston mob direct from another mob two hundred years before, which first mobbed down black men and women into slaves, and then their posterity as fast as born • and with it thick mingled their own posterity marked by every shade from black to dark, from dark to slightest tinge, and so from mother to child he traced the onslaughts of this vandal mob upon all human rights, until free speech and press, pulpit, platform and pew, Congress, legislature, the army and navy, the bench and bar, colleges, all professions, all hotels, public conveyances and places of amusement, he saw these all, all swept under the iron in- terdict and duress of an overmastering public sentiment begotten by the slave-power and propagating everywhere its kind, A public sentiment of threat, gag and padlock, the scorpion's sting and lash, the serpent's hiss and fang, taunt, jibe, jeer and scoff, scorn's unmov- ing finger pointing, and hate's hot glances shot from flaming eyes. Though at this date these mob atrocities of the slave-power had not made young Phillips their victim, yet he well knew their name- less outrages upon abolitionists, the natural outworkings of the principle that sinks men into chattels and strikes down their self- right and with it all rights, and blots out the eternal distinction be- tween a man and a thing. He knew that the system of slaveiy is itself mob-law rampant, one class of persons clutching another and robbing them of all they have and of themselves to boot ; knew that such a social state is sheer oudawry, the blind riot of passion, lust and will, as their gusts come and go. Consequently when the city authorities sur- rendered their power to a mob they stripped Boston nude before the sun and plunged her from civilization into barbarism. Phillips traced all this to its source, the all-grasping greed of the slave-power, sanctioned by statute and sanctified by the churches, baptising it at their fonts, installing it at their altars, and in fraternal fellowship giving it cordial welcome to the tables of their com- munion. He saw it not only holding overmastered the public sen- timent of the free states, but bent upon crushing out all freedom of speech and prmt and the last pulse of life in the spirit of liberty itself. Pro-slavery mobs were ravaging ever}^vhere, pro-slavery public sentiment palsying everywhere free speech ; hosts of facts in thick array trooping up from every quarter and revealing spectacles in- tensifying the crisis. Phillips was now armed, equipped and girded, filled full and fired and eager for the summons to the Fanueil-Hall meeting. The day of the meeting came and with it the audience. Before entering upon its events current misconceptions call for correction. The common beUef is that Phillips went to the meeting not intend- S4 ing to speak. Mr. Austin, in his life of Phillips, says he had come into that meeting only to listen. The sketch of his life in the last edition of his speeches says, " Wendell Phillips, who had not expected to take part in the meeting, rose in reply." Those of Phillips's most intimate anti-slavery friends who still sunave, declare that he went intending to speak. That intent he carried out in the argument filling seven pages in the volume of his speeches. That argument was printed verbatim from notes taken as he spoke. Its logic he had thought out, its phraseology was the birth of the moment. He spoke wholly without notes. That splendid outburst upon the Attorney-General sprang spon- taneous at the instant. Further the accounts represent him as speaking from the platform of the hall. They mistake. Dr. Channing, fearing that if he spoke from that he could not be heard, had a lectern placed in front and near the middle of the hall, from which he spoke. When Mr. Phillips arose he took that for his station. The hour for the meeting came ; those in sympathy with its object filled the first floor : earnest, enkindled, determined and silent, there they stood. The gallery was packed with a crowd of another sort, lawless, turbulent, fierce, bent on riot, and lowering malign upon the law-abiding phalanx below. The Honorable Jonathan Phillips, a kinsman of young Wendell, presided. Brief resolutions drawn by Dr. Channing announced the crisis and the momentous interests at stake, and summoned all to rally in defense of law, imperilled by lawless hordes. Then came his speech, in thought and phrase lull of weight and light. Then fol- lowed Mr. Hilliard's incisive address. Then in the front gallery up rose a bold-faced man and launched into a violent harangue. His whole aspect revealed the bully, truculent, insolent and defiant, his face a sneer, his voice a taunt, his whole air threat and swagger, as he shouted, " Lovejoy died hke a fool." Then he compared the 35 drunken mob that shot him clown to the revolutionary sires, who spurned overboard that hated tea taxed by British usurpation. Thus glorifying a mob of assassins by likening their atrocities to the patriotic exploits of the men of '76, and thus dragging them down to the depths of infamy along with bandits and brigands. But not content with the infamy which his speech thus far had earned, he aspires to the role of a blackguard, and so takes for his target the venerable Dr. Channing, insulting him thus : " A clergy- man mingling in the debates of a popular assembly is marvellously out of his place." Then he compliments the slave-holders by using their pet illustration of slaves set free, and likens them to wild beasts in a menagerie ; Mr. Lovejoy as their keeper letting loose lions, tigers and hyenas upon the people. Who was this railing brawler, villifying the revolutionar)- dead by herding them with murderers? The Attorney-General of Massa- chusetts, the highest legal officer of the Commonwealth. Was this a man whom the grand old Bay State delighted to honor ? She had sunk thus low. Then it was when liberty, law and justice put on sack-cloth, cast dust upon their heads, and sat down in ashes wailing forlorn together, for truth had fallen in the streets, equity could not enter, justice stood afar off. and judgment was turned away backward. Profoundly revolving these horrors, Wendell Phillips had come up to this great consult in the old Cradle of Liberty. Musing on the drear past, brooding over the heaving present, and forecasting the portentous future, he could give less heed than he would to the wise words of the venerated Channing. But when the brutal harangue of the Attorney-General smote his ear, his half-revery broke with a crash as he heard Austin's scornful flout of Lovejoy, that he " died like a fool," his impious eulogy of his murderers, his sacrilegious slander of the revolutionar}' dead. Indignant he 3G exclaimed, " This must be denounced on the spot." " Do it your- self," said a friend at his side. As soon as Austin's last brutal words dropped, Phillips sprang to the lectern. Then came that outburst of eloquence, in tempest, soul of fire, flashing its lighten- ings from a tongue of flame. " Sir, when I heard principles laid down that place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips would have broken into voice to rebuke that recreant American, the slanderer of the dead. Sir, for the sentiment he has uttered on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots the earth should have ya^vned and swallowed him up 1" Then from the mob in the gallery burst howls of rage, and down plunged an avalanche of yells and curses. Babel clanged jargon, and bedlam broke loose, drowning all speech. At last these mob-yells came clanging through the din, " Take that back, take that back ; make him take back that word recreant. He shan't go on till he has taken that back." At length mob-throats grew hoarse, and Phillips began : '•' I will not take back my words. Surely the Attorney-General needs not the aid of your hisses against one so young as I am." When Phillips's volcanic outburst had blown the Attorney-General out of sight he began to dissect his argument. He showed that it was neither law nor logic, had neither premise nor conclusion, was a sheer inflammatory harangue to infuriate the mob he led. At the end of Phillips's speech where was that burley swell of brag, brass and bluster? At the outset sneering, insolent, defiant, he liad burst upon the meeting with the swing and swagger of a bravado. In the role of a bully he had blurted insults at his o\vn pastor, and with swinish hoofs had trampled the ashes of the revolutionary dead. Now at the meeting's close what is left of his 8Y bloated grandiloquence? He had seen his speech hanging all slashed into tatters by Phillips's scalpel, and flung for the winds to whistle at ; had heard himself arraigned as a culprit, denounced and execrated, he had felt dashed against his brazen brow and burning into it the brand of infamy as that conquering young arm launched the bolt that smote him down. That bolt was symbolized in the stone sped to Goliath's forehead by the hand of a stripling three thousand years before, when the giant of Gath dashed to earth lay headless in the bloody dust. Thus was the Goliath of the Bay State bar struck down by another stripling who, though he never had a brief, had yet a sling and stone, an unerring aim, and an arm that drove the missile home. The bolt flew true, and down headlong went the perjured official, perfidious to highest trusts, false to liberty, and patron of mobs and murderers, and grand old Fanueil Hall rang out in a thousand echoes its loud amen ! Those plaudits were to the victim stern prophets of doom. In them he heard the tolling of his knell. He had sown the wind, now he reaps the whirlwind. Where was he now who had brandished aloft his magniloquence in eulogy of mobs and murderers? Where and what was he now ? Nowhere and nothing. Dazed, stunned, struck dumb, transfixed by fork-lightning, sic exit Austin. Thus may all foes of liberty and law be made to foam out their shame in face of the noontide sun. The arraignment which the Hebrew prophet tabled against his nation as she weltered in the pit of her abominations twenty-seven hundred years ago was true to the letter of our nation when Phillips first woke to life those echoes in Fanueil Hall that had slept for sixty years. These are those words of dread shouted by the Hebrew prophet in the ears of besotted Israel : "A horrible thing is committed in the land. The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means, and the 3S people love to have it so ; but what will ye do in the end thereof?" thundered the old prophet of God. Well may that same dread (^estion pierce the deaf ears of our generation to-day. Yea, what will ye do in the end thereof? That is the question. What will ye do in the end thereof? Does no answer come ? Hark ! A burial ground that no eye can span is astir and tossing. Myriad graves break up their sods, and from out the heaving ground this answer comes : " Here moulder the bones of a million men, but not yet, no, not yet cometh the end thereof." LETTERS. Jamaica Plain, Nov. 21, 1885. My Dear Mrs. Crosby. I am sorry not to be able to be present and to listen to Mr. Theodore D. Weld's paper on the 29th. Whatever he may say will be sure to be interest- ing and instructive. Long ago, when I lived in Kentucky, his book on the atrocities of slavery made an impression on me which I never forgot. Slav- ery, as it existed around me there, was of a mild type, and I did not realize what a mass of suffering and cruelty was caused by this poisonous fountain of evil. Of Wendell Phillips it may be said that few men have so quietly given up such fair prospects in life in order to give themselves to an apparently hope- less cause. Starting in life with the fairest hopes of success ; sure, through his ability, of attaining a high position in society and the state, he sacrificed it all, and never seemed to notice what he had done. He thus gave another proof that the spirit which actuated the great religious leaders, Francis, Benedict, and the Jesuit missionaries, can work as effectually for humanity in our day. These saints had their faults — Wendell Phillips had his — but it was refreshing in the midst of our commonplace life to find those about us who, like Sumner and Garrison and Phillips, could live for an idea. Very sincerely yours, JAMES FREEMAN CLARK. Mus. EiXANOR P. Crosby. Boston, Nov. zr, 1885. My Dear Madam. I thank you very heartily for your'kind note , and if it were possible I should rejoice to meet the friends of Wendell Phillips at your house, and to do honor to his memory. But on the evening of Nov. 29 I have a service at my own church from which I must not be absent. I regret that I cannot meet Mr. Weld. It is good that our young men should learn to honor one like Wendell Phillips, who sacrificed so much of what all men count precious for humanity and freedom. It must have been a happy life in the consciousness of earnest purpose and the consecration of splendid powers to a worthy end. If your gathering can help to impress the power of his example upon a generation which saw little if any of the best work of his life, it will do good indeed. Yours most sincerely, PHILLIPS BROOKS. Mrs. W. S. Crosby. Boston. Nov. 14, 1SS5. Dear Madam. If I am in the State on the day of the anniversary of the birth of Wendell Phillips, I will do myself the honor to accept your kind invitation to be present at your residence, when his life will be brought in remembrance ; and I desire to say that nothing will give me greater or more sorrowful pleasure. I am very truly yours, BENJAMIN F. BUTLER. Mrs. W. Sumner Crosby. Nov. 22, 1SS5. My Dear Mrs. Crosby. I am very sorry that I cannot accept your very kind invitation for Nov. 29. But as that is the date of my father's and my own birthday, we shall be celebrating it at home. My father's round of pleasures is now such a very small one that I can- not lessen it on that occasion by absence, much as I should enjoy paying my tribute of respect to dear and honored Wendell Phillips. Very truly yours, L. M. ALCOTT. Cambridge, Nov. 15, 1885. Dear Mrs. Crosby. I should be glad to join in the celebration of Mr. Phillips's birthday, but have a previous engagement that will render it impossible. His name will have permanent fame, and his birthday should be remembered. Yours very truly, T.W. HIGGINSON. 40 The Pilot Editorial Rooms, Nov, 21, 1885. Dear Madam. I thank you for your kind invitation, and I deeply regret that I cannot accept it. But I am engaged to lecture in Cambridge on that evening. Will you be so kind as to let Mr. Weld know how sorry I am that I cannot meet him and hear him talk on Wendell Phillips's work. It is pleasant and honorable to be remembered in connection with Wendell Phillips, and I thank you much, dear Madam, for the association. I am very truly yours, JOHN BOYLE] O'REILLY. Mrs. Eleanor F. Crosby. Dear Mrs. Crosby. You are very kind to remember me, and ask me to meet the friends of the noble man we delight to honor. To hear Mr. Weld is always a great treat, but I regret to be obliged to lose that pleasure now. I am going away .... and shall not return before Monday. I am sure you will be surrounded by a goodly company in the body and out of the body, and I trust it will be a memorable and delightful reunion. I know I shall say, " I would I had been there," but it cannot be. Yours very truly, EDNAH D. CHEENEY. Letters were also received from The Rev. E. Everett Hale, Mrs. Samuel E. Sewall, Mr. William I. Bowditch, Mr. Aaron M. Powell, Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Hon. John D. Long, Mr. Edward M. Davis (of Philadelphia). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 012 026 713 9 :Xi