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THE STORY OF 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Soldier of the Common Good 
 
 BY 
 CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL 
 
 Author of "Stories of the Great Railroads," 
 "Why I am a Socialist," etc. 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 
 
 CO-OPERATIVE 
 

 Copyright 1914 
 By CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL 
 
 JOHN F. HIGGINS 
 
 PRINTER AND BINDER 
 
 376-382 MONROE STREET 
 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 
 
 DEC 26 1914 '-''■'•ro 
 
 i)CI.A391131 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I The Enlistment 5 
 
 II The First Battles 34 
 
 III On the Firing Lines 47 
 
 IV The Interests Then and the Interests 
 
 Now 68 
 
 V Stripping Off the Masks 83 
 
 VI John Brown and Harper's Ferry ... 97 
 
 VII The Man Unafraid Enlists for Labor . 114 
 
 VIII Phillips the Socialist 131 
 
 IX The Modern War Against Privilege . . 149 
 
 X The Attack on the Citadel of Reaction . 165 
 
THE STORY OF 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 THE ENLISTMENT 
 
 Men and women, all under the sway of a pas- 
 sionate excitement, many half maniacal with 
 rage, have crowded the hall to the limit of its 
 capacity. All are upon their feet, surging, 
 shouting, screaming, gesticulating. On the 
 platform before them is a tall, grave, handsome 
 man, waiting to be heard. Without bravado, 
 without concern, he stands and waits. Part of 
 the audience desires to hear him; part desires 
 to drown his voice with clamors ; part is deter- 
 mined to take his life. 
 
 He stands and waits. Even his foes, look- 
 ing upon him there, admit it is a remarkable 
 figure against which they storm. His stature 
 suggests strength and repose, but something 
 
 more than bulk impresses the men gazing here 
 5 
 
b THE STOEY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 upon him. What moves them in spite of them- 
 selves is the manifest attitude of a man un- 
 afraid, sincere and intent upon his message, not 
 upon himself. 
 
 After a time a lull comes in the rioting tor- 
 nado of noises that has shaken the building. 
 Instantly, this man, standing there so quietly, 
 shoots into the opening a shining arrow of a 
 sentence, straight, barbed, and singing as it 
 flies. At the sound of it, uproar redoubles. 
 On the platform, the speaker stands and waits, 
 an archer with bow drawn. At the next lull, 
 almost before the crowd is aware, he has loos- 
 ened two of his burning shafts ; at the next, 
 three ; at the next, the clamor dies away and 
 friends and foes stand under the charm of a 
 silver voice that rings forth one fascinating pe- 
 riod after another. Hostile forces cease to 
 contend on the floor. After a moment or two 
 comes a ripple of involuntary applause. Be- 
 fore long the whole rapt audience is cheering. 
 At the end of two hours it thinks the man may 
 have been speaking ten minutes. He bows and 
 leaves the platform amid thundering cheers, 
 and sown behind him are conviction and unper- 
 ishing seeds of thought. 
 
 At any time between 18^ and 1861 such 
 a scene was common in the life of this man. 
 
THE ENLISTMENT 7 
 
 Of no other orator that ever lived are such 
 triumphs recorded. Wherever he goes he 
 sways men with a new necromancy. Audiences 
 the most bitterly hostile seem unable to with- 
 stand his peculiar eloquence ; the beautiful bell- 
 like voice is wings to lofty thought, invincible 
 logic and soul-searching words ; even the minds 
 fortified against reason learn from his lips. 
 Yet, in his long life of ceaiseless activities, he 
 debated for no crown, argued for no fees, strove 
 for no reward, sought no place nor any fame, 
 cared for no achievement for its own sake, and 
 used his unequaled gifts only for some cause of 
 justice or freedom in which he could earn noth- 
 ing but obloquy, hatred and isolation. 
 
 This is the career of Wendell Phillips, the 
 most marvelous and the most inspiring in his- 
 tory. Here was a man endowed with every con- 
 ceivable advantage for the winning of what we 
 call success : a brilliant and powerful mind 
 trained in the best schools ; a gift of extem- 
 poraneous and moving eloquence, an attractive 
 presence, great personal magnetism, a famous 
 lineage, social standing and prestige; entered 
 upon a profession he loved and for which he 
 had every qualification, with hosts of powerful 
 friends, a taste for public affairs and public 
 life, an almost unequaled aptitude for debate; 
 
8 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 a young man with every avenue of preferment 
 and distinction open to him. He deliberately 
 abandoned them all, and like a religious enthu- 
 siast rising above every thought of self, made 
 of his life one long sacrifice on the altars of 
 righteousness. 
 
 Xo man ever gave up more for the sake of 
 his faith. All his brilliant career was wrecked 
 in an instant. His friends and his family de- 
 serted and repudiated him. Some of his rela- 
 tives declared that he was insane and planned 
 to have him confined in an asylum. His 
 mother, to whom he was most tenderly attached, 
 condemned his course. The press covered him 
 with ridicule and abuse ; he became a social 
 pariah. For more than twenty years he lived 
 in daily danger of his life, with a price on his 
 head ; to face such gatherings as I have de- 
 scribed and worse, to stand and defy mobs that 
 were thirsting for his blood, became his all but 
 daily experience. At old Faneuil Hall in Bos- 
 ton men will show you now the little back stair- 
 case down which he was whisked to safety' after 
 his speeches, while the street in front was filled 
 with those that waited to h'nch him. So late 
 as Januar3% 1861, after preaching in Theodorc 
 Parker's church, bodyguards of young men must 
 needs surround and protect him to his doors 
 
THE ENLISTMENT 9 
 
 that he might not be murdered for quoting the 
 word of God against human slavery. 
 
 Through all tliis, as I hope to show, he 
 walked with a beautiful serenity, at peace with 
 God and his own conscience. Without a word 
 of compkiint he accepted the place he had made 
 for himself, closed his law office, shut the 
 door upon his profession, took full in the face 
 whatever blows passionate hatred could give 
 him. I think he even had foreknowledge that 
 the maHce he aroused in his later years would 
 pursue him after death ; that it would deny him 
 his place among the world's orators and belit- 
 tle his achievements. Yet his philosophy of 
 conscience never failed him: to the end of his 
 life he never ceased from the task he had laid 
 upon himself. 
 
 When a cause was won, and in the natural 
 revulsion of popular feeling men sought to make 
 him its hero, he put aside their tributes and de- 
 manded their attention to the next unpopular 
 reform. 
 
 Compared with such a career, the stories of 
 the men that on grounds of material triumph 
 have won places in the world's regard seem but 
 poor indeed. They toiled for themselves, or 
 for the glory of achievement, for party or fac- 
 tion, or at best for what is called national 
 
10 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 success. This man's single and unselfish pur- 
 pose was to win better conditions for the un- 
 fortunate, wherever they might be, to strive 
 against injustice, to further brotherhood, to 
 spread liberty. As ardently as other men 
 sought wealth or power he sought the Common 
 Good. When to this singular and noble aspira- 
 tion we add a life so pure that he seemed to 
 his contemporaries to be without a human weak- 
 ness, surely we have a radiant figure before 
 which the statues of our military champions 
 shrink and the records of greasy and self-seek- 
 ing statesmen grow merely contemptible. In 
 an age half-mad about material success and po- 
 litical honors, such a life is the only model for 
 the young, and the only light worth following. 
 As much as conscience is above appetite he 
 shines above all heroes tainted with a selfish 
 purpose. For reasons that I shall deal with 
 hereafter, every possible effort has been made 
 to conceal and suppress the story of his life ; 
 yet none other is so valuable to an American, 
 for none other begins to reveal so clearly how 
 great a power for good is but one man stand- 
 ing alone, if he be not afraid, if he be conse- 
 crated to a worthy cause, and if he rise above 
 a personal aim. 
 
THE ENLISTMENT 11 
 
 Mr. Phillips was by faith and conviction the 
 most ardent of democrats, but his lineage and 
 all his antecedents were what is called aristo- 
 cratic. His family was, in the snobbish phrase, 
 one of the best in New England; certainly it 
 was one of the most distinguished. It dated 
 in America back to 1630, when the Rev. George 
 Phillips, who had been rector of Buxted, Eng- 
 land, left his charge on some issue of faith and 
 conscience and settled at Watertown, in the 
 colony of Massachusetts Bay. From him Wen- 
 dell was in the seventh generation of descent. 
 All the men between had been eminent in colonial 
 or early American affairs, being noted patriots, 
 clergymen, lawyers, orators or public servants. 
 One was lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts, 
 one was a colonel, one a member of the gover- 
 nor's council, two founded the famous Phillips 
 Academies at Exeter and Andover and a chair 
 of theology at Dartmouth College. Wendell's 
 father, John Phillips, was a graduate of Har- 
 vard, a leader of the bar and in the legislature, 
 the first mayor of Boston, and held by the com- 
 munity in profound and deserved respect. He 
 lived on the aristocratic Beacon Hill, where 
 Wendell, a fifth son, was born November 29, 
 1811, and where he was reared in an atmosphere 
 
12 THE STORY OF WENDELI- PHILLIPS 
 
 of decorum, culture and as much luxury as 
 seemed consistent with the strict piety of his 
 parents. 
 
 The Puritan household was serious but 
 kindly; the children were early trained to be 
 self-respecting, self-reliant and faithful to cer- 
 tain rather lofty conceptions of duty and con- 
 duct. One of the rules in John Phillips's fam- 
 ily was " never ask another to do for you what 
 you can do yourself, and never ask another to 
 do for you what you would not do for yourself 
 if you could." The father was never so much 
 of an aristocrat that he did not believe in work- 
 ing with the hands ; each of the boys must learn 
 the use of tools ; and under this tuition Wen- 
 dell became something of a carpenter, a craft 
 for which he never quite lost his preference. 
 Acute observers have pointed out that in 
 America the greatest peril lies in the second 
 generation of the rich, whose members, never 
 trained to labor and reared in parasitic sloth, 
 grow up with a conviction of their superior 
 caste more arrogant and poisonous than can be 
 found elsewhere upon earth. His own native 
 convictions and good sense would have saved 
 Wendell Phillips in any event from such a 
 taint, but there was also a practical grace in 
 the fact that he had learned to work with his 
 
THE ENLISTMENT 13 
 
 hands. In after years he saw that without 
 such work, without the trained hand as well as 
 the trained mind, there cannot be for individ- 
 uals or society the most wholesome conditions, 
 whether mentally, physically, or spiritually; 
 and he never forgot the respect he gained at 
 the bench for the men that create the world's 
 wealth and furnish the world's onward impulse. 
 
 In his boyhood days he had amusements that 
 showed the unusual bent of his intellect. His 
 near neighbor and playmate was a lad named 
 John Lothrop Motley, himself destined to a 
 distinguished career, and the greatest fun they 
 knew was to get into the Phillips attic, dress 
 themselves in the discarded finery of another 
 generation and enact scenes from dramas of 
 their own and other contriving. Even then 
 Phillips had a taste for declamation, and, it is 
 said, a noticeably fine voice. When he was five 
 years old he was wont to play church, with 
 chairs for auditors and himself in an extem- 
 porized pulpit as the preacher. When his 
 father asked him if he did not get tired of 
 preaching (his harangues being apparently of 
 a great length), he said, with a twinkle of dry 
 and characteristic humor: 
 
 " No, I don't get tired, but it's rather hard 
 on the chairs." 
 
14 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 He was fitted at the famous Boston Latin 
 School (where one of his chums and dearest 
 friends was Charles Sumner) and went thence 
 to Harvard. In college he was distinguished 
 as the most brilliant man in his class and the 
 leader of the aristocratic set. The position 
 and fame of his family gave him a certain pres- 
 tige, but his wit and talent would have made 
 him conspicuous anywhere. He was a noted 
 athlete; in college, the champion boxer, oars- 
 man, fencer and horseman of his time. He 
 loved these things for their own sake and had 
 pursued them under difficulties, for in those 
 days the Boston schools sternly discouraged 
 athletics. All through his college course men 
 prophesied- great things of his after career. 
 Every good gift of nature seemed to be his; a 
 powerful frame, perfect health, a winning pres- 
 ence, a capacious mind and a natural disposi- 
 tion toward things clean and good. His hab- 
 its were always right; he went through college 
 without a smirch. 
 
 When he had been graduated he entered the 
 law school under Judge Story, who seems to 
 have been greatly taken with his pupil and 
 predicted for him an extraordinary career at 
 the bar. From Judge Story's tutelage he 
 went to a law office in Lowell, where he spent 
 
THE ENLISTMENT 15 
 
 six months and first met Benjamin F. Butler, 
 then an errand boy in another office. Thence 
 he returned to Boston, opened an office of his 
 own in Court Street and began at once to have 
 a large and profitable practise. He was al- 
 ready noted equally for his eloquence and his 
 learning; his friends clearly foresaw that there 
 was no high place in the nation to which he 
 might not reach. 
 
 The time was 1833. The nation was sleep- 
 ing serenely upon a volcano and the few that 
 suspected the fact took pains not to betray 
 their suspicions. About 3,000,000 Americans 
 w^re held as chattel possessions by about 
 300,000 other Americans, and that one tremen- 
 dous fact constituted the volcano. At the 
 time of the founding of the country, all men, 
 North and South, were agreed that slavery was 
 wrong and must some day be abolished, but 
 neither the United States nor any other nation 
 had then awakened to the unspeakable iniquity 
 of the institution. The first slaves in the 
 American territory had been convicts, or white 
 men kidnaped in England and sold to the colo- 
 nial planters ; slavery was therefore a thing 
 familiar and viewed as a sanctioned cus- 
 tom; it had always existed somewhere on earth 
 and against an institution so ancient and re- 
 
16 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 spectable the country was disposed to move 
 slowly, even after the eloquent warnings and 
 appeals of Washington and Jefferson. Still, 
 it did move and slavery was well on its way to 
 disappear when Eli Whitney changed all this 
 with his invention of the cotton gin. 
 
 That brought in the tremendous power of 
 profits, the greatest force in modern life. 
 Cotton became the staple of the whole South- 
 ern country, slave labor was employed in cul- 
 tivating the cotton, in a short time it was 
 discovered that the annual average profit of a 
 slave's labor was about 35 per cent., and in the 
 face of such enormous returns all moral consid- 
 erations and all the arguments of the wisest 
 of the fathers naturally were forgotten. The 
 South came to look upon slavery as the one 
 source of its sacred prosperity. The North, 
 getting its share of the cotton business, came 
 to acquiesce in the same view, and for many 
 years the necessity of slavery was not ques- 
 tioned. Many men in the North and some 
 even in the South did not in their souls believe 
 in the thing, but over the average conscience 
 the great fact of 35 per cent, profit rolled an 
 extinguishing flood. 
 
 From this state of lethal acquiescence the 
 country began slowly to awake chiefly because 
 
THE ENLISTMENT 17 
 
 of the ceaseless denunciations of one remarkable 
 man. 
 
 William Lloyd Garrison had begun life as 
 an obscure printer, penniless and without ad- 
 vantages of education, and, by dint of repeat- 
 ing his own passionate protest against slavery, 
 had drawn about him a small following of men 
 and women, universally deemed to be crazy. 
 After the passage of the Missouri Compromise 
 in 1820, anti-slavery agitation had been sup- 
 posed to be silenced. Garrison made himself 
 intensely hated by reviving it. 
 
 All the " better elements " at the North sym- 
 pathized with the South about slavery. Lead- 
 ers of Northern capital and wealth ardently 
 championed it as beneficent and necessary; 
 Northern commercial classes were united in its 
 support ; Northern pulpits found that it was 
 specially ordered and commanded in the Bible 
 and to oppose it was a form of blasphemy; 
 Northern politicians contended in subserviency 
 to the slave-owning element ; all the power of 
 Northern Society was exerted in its defense, it 
 being definitely and forever settled that to own 
 slaves was good form, and to object to slave- 
 owning was to read oneself out of the social 
 register. Beyond these were classes that tried 
 to prove by excess of devotion to the slave- 
 
18 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 owners' cause the certainty of their own social 
 eminence ; classes that violently aped their su- 
 periors, and classes that did not care. These 
 latter were generally of an ardent profession 
 of patriotism. Slavery did not concern them ; 
 what they wanted was to be left alone and to 
 contemplate undisturbed the surpassing gran- 
 deur and greatness of their country, knowing 
 quite well that whatever it did was right 
 
 Nothing else in history is so extraordinary 
 as the one fact that all of this condition of 
 moral turpitude, and all of the succeeding tur- 
 moil that ended in an appalling war, were based 
 upon the profits of an inconsiderable number 
 of persons. 
 
 In 1855, when the total population of the 
 United States was about 30,000,000, the num- 
 ber of persons that owned slaves was 348,214. 
 Only two persons owned so many as a thousand 
 slaves each ; and nine owned each between five 
 hundred and a thousand. It was for the sake 
 of the 35 per cent, profit of 348,214 persons 
 that the country came to civil war after years 
 of practical anarchy. Contemplating this stu- 
 pendous fact, it is evident that we ought to 
 learn history over again ; certainly nothing in 
 the existing method of instruction will avail to 
 explain such an anomaly. 
 
THE ENLISTMENT 19 
 
 But if we can once come to understand it 
 aright there is no other chapter of history that 
 is so valuable for instruction, and principally 
 because of the startling parallel it affords with 
 the national situation to-day. 
 
 In 1833 there was no obvious reason why 
 the North should have been particularly alert 
 in championing the cause of the comparatively 
 small band of Southern slave owners ; or at 
 least no reason that a just man could deem to 
 be sufficient to excuse support of a crime so 
 hideous as slavery; and yet as to-day millions 
 of men are enrolled in defense of the wage sys- 
 tem that have no interest in it, so in those da3^s 
 millions of the bitterest opponents of Abolition 
 were to be found among Northern business men. 
 For these strange facts the hidden reasons then 
 and now are identical. Capital and money 
 sympathized with the South because slaves 
 were property, and when slavery was attacked 
 all property was thought to be attacked ; also, 
 because all about the world, capital stands to- 
 gether. The commercial classes sympathized 
 because the Northern mills lived on Southern 
 cotton and Southern cotton was grown by slave 
 labor; therefore, to attack slavery was commer- 
 cial high treason ; it was bad for business. The 
 pulpit naturally followed tlie lure of the big 
 
20 THE STORY OF WENDELI. PHILLIPS 
 
 pew rents. The politicians naturalh' followed 
 the political sutlers' wagons ; they always do. 
 These affinities are in a way understandable, 
 however grotesque and silly. But the weirdest 
 aspect of all was this thing I have before re- 
 ferred to, the attitude of what is called So- 
 ciety ; the weirdest and the most pernicious. 
 Society set the example and pace for all the 
 other elements, far exceeded them in bitterness, 
 inspired them with murderous hatred, ap- 
 plauded the mobs when it did not actually lead 
 them, filled the press with fury, ringed the 
 noses of clergymen and dragged them behind, 
 indurated the public conscience, blasted any 
 agitator with the dauuiation of its disapproval, 
 and instigated its millions of bourgeois imi- 
 tators to amazing acts of violence. And the 
 sweet and adequate reason that animated So- 
 ciety was that the South had all the social 
 prestige and was the social dictator. Do you 
 know why? It was furthest removed from 
 damning labor, always the badge of social deg- 
 radation. The South was more idle than the 
 North ; and although slavery made it more idle, 
 it was by virtue of its superior idleness our 
 liereditary and highest a^'istocracy. North- 
 ern Society looked upon Southern Society with 
 such awe-struck reverence as that wherewith all 
 
THE ENLISTMENT 21 
 
 our Society now regards the English nobility. 
 To be in touch with Southern social leaders 
 was the certificate of gentility ; the more you 
 hated the Negro, the more vehemently you de- 
 fended the institution of slavery, and the more 
 laboriously you argued for the 348,214 and 
 their 35 per cent, profit, the brighter shone 
 3^our certificate. 
 
 Every feature of this situation we have since 
 seen reproduced with marvelous fidelity in the 
 conflict against the wage system. 
 
 As to-day we see business men forming 
 " Citizens' Alliances " to uphold the employers 
 in strike difficulties wherein business men have 
 no direct concern, so in 1833 the same element 
 formed voluntary associations to suppress any 
 agitation of the question of slavery. As to-day 
 the business men in a strike zone form the mob 
 that shoots and deports the head of a labor 
 union, so in 1833 and later the same element 
 formed the greater part of the mobs that broke 
 up anti-slavery meetings and tarred and 
 feathered anti-slavery speakers. As to-day 
 every person that agitates the labor issue is 
 blacklisted by the press and shunned by So- 
 ciety, so in 1833 men that objected to slavery 
 found, in the very heart of the North, a taboo 
 raised against them, their families and their 
 
22 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 business. As to-day the whole force of com- 
 merce is arrayed in defence of the profits 
 arising from the wage system, so in 1833 sim- 
 ilar forces were determined there should be no 
 attacks upon chattel slavery. 
 
 The close parallel does not fail even when 
 we come to labor, for it must be admitted that 
 in 1833 as to-day labor was often singularly 
 blind to its own injuries. In a material way 
 it suffered from slavery more than any other 
 element, and yet it often seemed indifferent. 
 Not always, for among the strongest oppo- 
 nents of slavery came many from this class ; 
 but still the spectacle was sometimes witnessed 
 of working people violently attacking men that 
 were only striving to end a condition inimical 
 to labor. This is not quite the anomaly it 
 seems. We are to remember that the whole 
 subject was most ably and persistently be- 
 fogged or distorted by practically the entire 
 press, so that the very name of anti-slavery 
 agitation became invested in the public mind 
 with merely hateful and grotesque significance. 
 To be an anti-slavery agitator was to be a pes- 
 tilent demagogue, an enemy of peace and pros- 
 perity, and a traitor to the proud American 
 nation and its flag. 
 
 Under the stress of this hysteria very strange 
 
THE ENLISTMENT 23 
 
 things were said and done. Public men of emi- 
 nence seemed to be always on their knees to the 
 348,214 slave owners. Northern governors 
 like Edward Everett professed pride and pleas- 
 ure in the capture of runaway slaves fleeing 
 toward Canada and freedom. The Rev. Dr. 
 Dewej^, a prominent Unitarian clergyman, de- 
 clared that he would return his own mother to 
 slavery if to do so would help to preserve the 
 Union. The President of Brown University 
 denounced the agitation of the question of 
 slavery and said that for Congress to pass an 
 Abolition act for the District of Columbia 
 would be bad faith. Practically the entire col- 
 lege and university element of the North was 
 of his opinion and strenuously opposed any 
 talk of Abolition. All about the North, known 
 Abolitionists were assaulted, driven from their 
 homes, hunted, tarred and feathered, stripped, 
 beaten, shot at, and sometimes killed. The 
 Governor of South Carolina declared slavery to 
 be the corner-stone of the Republic and de- 
 manded that laws should be passed to punish 
 with death any interference with or discussion 
 of it. Edward Everett wished Massachusetts 
 to make a penal offense of any spoken or 
 printed utterance against slavery. Four 
 Southern legislatures demanded of the North- 
 
S4 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 ern States that all Abolition societies should 
 be suppressed. More than one Northern State 
 started dutifully to obey. The State of 
 Georgia kept a standing reward of five thou- 
 sand dollars for the kidnaping of William 
 Lloyd Garrison. A wealthy planter circulated 
 a hand-bill offering rewards for the killing of 
 anti-slavery leaders, the prices varying accord- 
 ing to the prominence of the man designated. 
 The Congress of the United States, with the 
 aid of Northern votes, passed a law forbidding 
 the offering of petitions to abolish slavery in 
 the District of Columbia or elsewhere. 
 
 All for the sake of the 35 per cent, profits 
 of the 348,214! persons that held slaves! 
 
 The ncAvspapers, preachers, editors, teach- 
 ers, news agencies, college presidents, social 
 reformers, philanthropists and tradesmen that 
 in our own day have championed the 500,000 
 persons deriving benefit from the wage system 
 have never displayed a more touching fidelity. 
 
 Against this iron-clad fortress of prejudice 
 Garrison began to hammer with his bare hands. 
 At first nobody heeded him. Then the commer- 
 cial gentlemen looked down the wall side, saw 
 him at work all alone and laughed. Then he 
 began to annoy their fat souls by disturbing 
 their quiet, so they undertook to kill him. It 
 
THE ENLISTMENT 25 
 
 was one of their genial attempts in this direc- 
 tion that started Wendell Phillips upon the 
 work of his life. In Washington Street, Bos- 
 ton, a mob of " gentlemen of standing and 
 property," a broadcloth mob of the leaders and 
 saviors of Society, had seized Garrison and was 
 about to hang him. In Boston; cradle of lib- 
 erty and that sort of thing; in Boston, on Oc- 
 tober 21, 1835. Garrison had been saying in 
 Boston a few words in favor of human free- 
 dom, and so a mob of gentlemen had a rope 
 around him and was dragging him along Wash- 
 ington Street to hang him. He had said his 
 few words to a company of about thirty women 
 that sat in a hall they had hired and paid for 
 to hear him, and the mayor of Boston had 
 burst into the room and had driven the women 
 into the street ; whereupon the mob of gentle- 
 men seized Garrison, and was dragging him 
 along with the rope around him to hang him 
 for talking in favor of human liberty. In 
 Boston, fifty-nine years after the Declaration 
 of Independence. 
 
 Phillips was sitting in his office nearby and 
 heard the uproar the gentlemen made, for of 
 course they were very angry. He went forth 
 to learn the occasion. There was Garrison 
 with the rope around him being dragged down 
 
S6 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 the street. Phillips looked attentively upon 
 his face, for he had never seen the like before. 
 It was very pale, but calm and sweet, as if the 
 man were sustained to his death by some noble 
 and lofty passion, like that of a Christian mar- 
 tyr. The lips uttered no protest and the 
 hands were not lifted against the rope ; the man 
 strode along, erect, resolute and self-contained. 
 
 "Who is that?" said Phillips to another 
 spectator of this scene. 
 
 " Why, that's Garrison — the damned Abo- 
 litionist, and they're going to hang him ! " 
 
 The mob and the violence shocked and ap- 
 palled Phillips's fastidious sense of decency and 
 reciprocal rights. He thought that the Bos- 
 ton regiment, a famous militia band of which 
 he was an officer, ought to be called out to dis- 
 perse the rioters. His colonel pointed out to 
 him that the regiment was in the mob. 
 
 He went back to his office and began to 
 think profoundly about " the damned Abolition- 
 ist " and his cause. He had never before paid 
 much attention to the slavery issue; in a gen- 
 eral way he was opposed to slavery, but, like 
 all other young men in his station, he deemed 
 it settled by the Missouri Compromise and not 
 a vital question of the day. But to hang a 
 man for his opinions — that assaulted the very 
 
THE ENLISTMENT ^7 
 
 foundations of the faith he had built for him- 
 self. Because the key note of his character 
 and to a great extent the explanation of his 
 career, la}^ in this one fact, that mentally he 
 was a child of revolution. He had made close 
 and sympathetic studies of the American and 
 French revolutions and arrived at the con- 
 clusion that in all secular history these were the 
 most important events. His researches had 
 not revealed to him the theory later day think- 
 ers have discovered, apparently by clairvoy- 
 ance, that the American struggle was carried 
 on by smugglers and other depraved men for 
 merely selfish ends ; that Samuel Adams was a 
 trickster and Washington and LaFayette a 
 pair of congenial land thieves. To his mind 
 the American revolution represented a great 
 forward step in the human advance and the men 
 that took part in it were soldiers in the eternal 
 cause of man. Among these his favorite hero 
 was James Otis standing forth to defy the king 
 and to risk his life for free speecli. Free speech 
 seemed always to Phillips the most important 
 of human rights, for it was the right by which 
 man defended the others. But, seventy years 
 after the heroic achievement of James Otis, a 
 mob takes the place of a king and denies the 
 same right that Otis upheld. Neither the king 
 
jeo THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILIJPS 
 
 nor the mob could possibly be right ; Garrison 
 was a still more heroic figure than Otis. As 
 to the cause that he spoke for, how could hu- 
 man slavery be defended or even excused? 
 Thus he pondered, that day and many days 
 afterward, while he tried to adjust some balance 
 between the accepted state of society and the 
 principles he knew for truth. 
 
 He was in fact, close upon the first great 
 turning point in his life and as so often hap- 
 pens in such cases a mere accident brought in 
 the deciding factor. Not long after the day 
 of the respectable mob in Washington Street, 
 Phillips and Sumner were invited to join a 
 coaching party to Greenfield and to meet a 
 young woman described as charming, talented 
 and brilliant, by name, Ann Terry Greene. 
 The morning dawned cold and stormy and 
 Sumner refused to go forth, declaring that no 
 young woman was worth braving such a storm 
 to meet. Phillips kept the engagement. Ann 
 Terry Greene proved to be one of the thirty 
 women that the mayor of Boston had driven 
 from their hall on the day that Garrison so 
 narrowly escaped lynching. She was a fervent 
 Abolitionist ; she talked Abolition to Phillips all 
 the way to Greenfield and back. He became 
 fully converted to the cause, fell in love with 
 
THE ENLISTMENT 29 
 
 his instructress, married her October 12, 1837, 
 and took into his life one of its most powerful 
 influences. 
 
 As a rule, a man that does anything unusual 
 in this world does it under the inspiration of 
 some woman. Whether what he does makes for 
 good or ill commonly depends upon the woman's 
 nature. It happened that Ann Terry Greene 
 was one of the most extraordinary women of 
 her times. She was a natural insurgent and 
 natural reformer. To some women the world 
 is a mere parade ground for dress patterns. 
 To her it was a battlefield resounding with 
 ceaseless conflict. All about her she saw wrong 
 and injustice; she yearned and burned to have 
 every wrong abolished and every injustice cor- 
 rected. Hers was no limited field of vision ; 
 any kind of injustice, anywhere, was enough to 
 stir her resentment. By some irony of fate, 
 being a soul so combative, she was, or thought 
 she was, a helpless invalid, so that her part in 
 the conflict must be exerted through others. 
 She made of her husband her capable soldier 
 and he testified that all his life she went before 
 him into every cause he espoused. 
 
 At the house of Miss Greene's uncle, Henry 
 G. Chapman, not long after the coaching party, 
 Phillips made! the acquaintance of Garrison. 
 
30 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 The two were irresistibly drawn to each other. 
 Phillips perceived that here was a prophet bear- 
 ing the fire of a great cause and upon him 
 slowly settled the conviction that his place was 
 at the side of this pure-souled apostle of right- 
 eousness. In such an issue he could not palter 
 with his conscience, nor refuse to be honest with 
 himself, nor count the cost of being true. De- 
 liberately he came to this decision ; having 
 reached it, weighing all together, he gave him- 
 self up to follow it without reservation. On 
 March 28, 1837, he attended the quarterly 
 meeting at Lynn of the Massachusetts Anti- 
 Slavery Society and there he made his first 
 Abolitionist speech. 
 
 Next day the strange news went about aris- 
 tocratic Boston as of a great and appalling 
 disaster that men could hardly credit. Noth- 
 ing in the history of the American Brahmin 
 caste had so shaken its moldy fibres. Wendell 
 Phillips had been its pet, its pride, the example 
 of heredity and lineage to which it pointed, 
 the brilliant son of its first family. He might 
 have rolled di-unken in the gutter, or wasted 
 himself in dissipation, or committed crimes, and 
 held his caste unimpeached. ^ But to attack ex- 
 isting conditions and to range himself with the 
 
THE ENLISTMENT 31 
 
 victims of those conditions was to be indeed 
 beyond hope. 
 
 In the face of the self-made pariah, Society 
 indignantly slammed the doors, while his family 
 writhed in the agony of an ineffable shame. If 
 he had only died ! said his relatives ; the grave 
 had no pang like this. At the present dis- 
 tance and to souls not perfectly attuned to 
 Society's distinctions there appears a certain 
 element of the comic in their distress, but 
 it was to them very real and tragic. Some 
 tried to parry the blow by saying he had gone 
 suddenly insane ; you can not blame Respectable 
 Persons for the acts of a madman. In the 
 house of Worldly Wiseman the puzzle was un- 
 readable. That a young man with every ad- 
 vantage and every chance of success should cast 
 away his life was inconceivable folly. Some 
 commentators found relief in the fortunate fact 
 that his poor, dear father had not lived to see 
 this day. All the cost of his education wasted, 
 all the traditions of his family dishonored, a 
 young life already in ruins — how melancholy 
 was this spectacle ! But such were the fruits 
 of the spirit of social unrest abroad in the land, 
 and thus was youth misled by pestilent agi- 
 tators. 
 
S2 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Upon the young man thus sadly gone astray 
 these comments fell without visible effect. 
 Having determined which way his duty led, 
 thither he went rejoicing. The storm of crit- 
 icism he faced with the same composure with 
 which he faced mobs ; no one ever saw that un- 
 der that faultless bearing he was hurt ; but 
 beyond doubt he paid the price, full measure. 
 He loved friendship, he was among the most 
 companionable of men, he valued highly the 
 approval of his family ; it was not without a 
 wrench that he took himself outside of his caste. 
 For almost fifty years there poured upon his 
 head a ceaseless flood of hatred, ridicule and 
 misrepresentation; no man heard him complain 
 nor repine at his lot, and the bitterest personal 
 attack seldom provoked any retort, even when 
 he was outrageously lied about. All he took 
 in silence, looking far ahead to the goal and 
 thinking of himself as an instrument of reform ; 
 an instrument whose feelings and fame were of 
 no importance. Silently he withdrew from the 
 old scenes and the old circles and took for his 
 new friends Garrison and the men and women 
 that, like Garrison, held that in the face of mon- 
 strous injustice the just man has no right to 
 a life ofi ease and pleasure. Other historic 
 figures have enrolled themselves in unpopular 
 
THE ENLISTMENT 33 
 
 causes, but usually, I think, for the sake of 
 personal aim or a personal hate. Wendell 
 Phillips remains the one conspicuous example 
 of unstained purity of motive. From the 
 causes he espoused he had nothing to gain but 
 loneliness, obscurity and disgrace. 
 
II 
 
 THE FIRST BATTLES 
 
 His real entrance as orator and agitator 
 upon the turbulent stage of his day was made 
 in dramatic fashion. On December 8, 1837, 
 when he had just passed his twenty-sixth birth- 
 day, a mass meeting was called at Faneuil Hall 
 to protest against the murder of the Rev. 
 Elijah P. Lovejoy, at Alton, Illinois; an event 
 that was to be great in American history, 
 though at the time no one so deemed it. Love- 
 joy, who was not an Abolitionist, by the way, 
 had been the editor of a religious newspaper at 
 St. Louis. A Negro in St. Louis killed an offi- 
 cer that was trying to arrest him and a mob 
 broke into the jail where the Negro was con- 
 fined and burned him alive. Lovejoy, in his 
 journal, commented severely upon the farcical 
 judicial proceedings that followed this event 
 and the mob wrecked his printing office. 
 
 He moved what was left of his enterprise to 
 
 Alton, on what was called Free Soil, where he 
 34* 
 
THE FIRST BATTLES 35 
 
 believed he would be safe. Two presses that 
 he landed were successively destroyed by mobs. 
 He obtained a third and asked protection of 
 the mayor. The mayor said he was unable to 
 preserve order, but authorized Love joy to de- 
 fend himself. A mob gathered, killed Lovejoy 
 and threw his press into the river. 
 
 In Boston, the number of persons that de- 
 sired to protest against this outrage was not 
 large but was fairly courageous. To lessen 
 the extreme likelihood of bloodshed the meeting 
 was held in the morning. Faneuil Hall was 
 filled, more than half of the audience being 
 without sympathy with the purpose of the 
 meeting and many disposed to make trouble if 
 they could. William Ellery Channing and 
 others spoke ; resolutions were offered de- 
 nouncing Love joy's murder; when James 
 Tricothie Austin, attorney-general of Massa- 
 chusetts, well known, able and popular, pushed 
 his way to the edge of the gallery and delivered 
 a skilful and bitter attack upon the resolutions 
 and the previous speakers. He defended the 
 mob at Alton, likening it to the men that threw 
 the tea into Boston Harbor and to other 
 patriots of the American Revolution. Love- 
 joy, he said, had brought his death upon him- 
 self and had died as the fool dieth ; and he 
 
36 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 fiercely rebuked Dr. Channing, who was a cler- 
 gyman, for taking part in the present meet- 
 ing. 
 
 At Austin's first sentence, the pro-slavery 
 element in the hall cheered vehemently, and as 
 he proceeded it was evident that he was carry- 
 ing with him the majority of his hearers. The 
 defeat of the resolutions was imminent, as the 
 contending factions roared and struggled. 
 Phillips was standmg among tlie spectators 
 on the main Hoor. for in those days Faneuil 
 Hall had no seats. As Austin ended amid 
 tremendous cheering, Phillips unexpectedly 
 leaped upon the platform and stood forth to 
 answer him. The crowd saw before them a 
 young man, tall, fair, with face and form ex- 
 pressive of power and resolution, waiting to 
 speak. Its sheer curiosity silenced it and, in 
 a moment, out boomed, in that strange, melodi- 
 ous voice, the tirst piercing sentence. 
 
 Clamor redoubled at once : there were cries 
 of *• Question I " ** Go on 1 "' " Hear him I '' 
 and so on. With the next lull in the storm 
 came the next sentence ; in another moment the 
 young orator was launched upon one of his 
 most famous orations. It ^vls a faultless speci- 
 men of his style: compact, restrained, direct, 
 without a wasted word, and in spite of the re- 
 
THE FIRST BATTLES 37 
 
 straint, burning with feeling. It contained 
 some immortal sentences. 
 
 Sir, when I heard the gentleman lay down prin- 
 ciples which place the murderers of Alton side by 
 side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and 
 Adams, I thought those pictured lips [pointing to 
 the portraits in the hall] would have broken into 
 voice to rebuke the recreant American — the slan- 
 derer of the dead! 
 
 In one passage he struck in this, his first 
 great public address, a keynote to which in the 
 closing years of his life he was often to return, 
 and I think it is interesting that he had found 
 so early a broad, sociological basis for his faith. 
 
 Presumptuous to assert the freedom of the press 
 on American ground ! Is the assertion of such 
 freedom before the age? So much before the age 
 as to leave one no right to make it because it dis- 
 pleases the community.^ Who invents this libel on 
 his country? It is this very thing which entitles 
 Lovejoy to greater praise; the disputed right which 
 provoked the Revolution — taxation without rep- 
 resentation — is far beneath that for which he 
 died! 
 
 At this, the audience, which had been hang- 
 ing intent upon his words as they came flying 
 forth without halt in the perfect mastery of his 
 art, broke into a violent clamor of protest and 
 tlie disorder began again. Possibly Phillips 
 had stirred it for the express purpose of quell- 
 
38 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 ing It with one of his irresistible climaxes. At 
 the first cessation of the noise he said : 
 
 One word^ gentlemen. As much as thought is 
 better than money, so much is the cause in which 
 Lovejoy died nobler than a mere question of taxes. 
 James Otis thundered in this hall when the king 
 did but touch his pocket. Imagine, if you can, his 
 indignant eloquence had England offered to put a 
 gag upon his lips ! 
 
 That was the turning point of the battle. 
 Thenceforward he carried his audience on the 
 surge of his eloquence and when he made an 
 end the resolutions were carried overwhelmingly. 
 
 The impressions made by this speech upon 
 the persons who heard it seem to have been 
 extraordinary. Dr. Channing frequently re- 
 ferred to it as an amazing flight of eloquence, 
 the power of Phillips's voice over the angry 
 crowd seeming to be almost inexplicable. Oli- 
 ver Johnson, who was present that day, thought 
 that the report of it was only a pale reflection 
 of the lightning that came from the orator's 
 lips. One effect of it was to put Phillips into 
 a commanding position in the anti-slavery 
 movement, and another was to accelerate the 
 isolation that had been coming upon him from 
 the time he announced his adhesion to Garri- 
 son's cause. His law practise was dwindling; 
 
THE FIRST BATTLES OV 
 
 a man cannot very well practise law in a com- 
 munity, part of which regards him as a lunatic 
 and the' rest as a dangerous firebrand. He had 
 become the idol of the little band of Abolition- 
 ists, but he had the intense hatred of the aris- 
 tocracy for he had committed what is in all 
 ages the unpardonable crime. He had turned 
 against his own caste. 
 
 In 1839 he took his wife abroad for her 
 health and in London was the hero of a singu- 
 lar episode that I must tell later. In 1841 he 
 returned to Boston. Soon afterward occurred 
 there one of the first of the famous fugitive 
 slave cases that were subsequently the occasion 
 of some of his most searching eloquence. A 
 Virginia Negro named Latimer, having made 
 his escape from his owner, was detected and 
 arrested. An effort was made to prevent his 
 return to slavery and a Boston judge ruled 
 that the slave was property, the Constitution 
 of the United States authorized the owner of 
 slave property to seize it wherever he found it, 
 and Latimer must be returned. The event 
 struck deep at Phillips's basic faith. To his 
 mind the people of Massachusetts were impelled 
 by reverence for a piece of parchment to com- 
 mit an act of abhorrent wrong and injustice, 
 violating natural conscience and the rights that 
 
40 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 are above all constitutions. He vehemently 
 protested at Faneuil Hall, but he did more than 
 protest. In accordance with his belief that a 
 man's life should in every way square with his 
 convictions, he closed his law office and aban- 
 doned his profession. A lawyer swears to up- 
 hold the Constitution of the United States. 
 To Mr. Phillips, that Constitution, inasmuch 
 as it recognized and defended man's ownership 
 in a fellow man, was " a covenant with death 
 and a league with hell." Therefore he could 
 not consistently uphold it. He took a small 
 house at No. 26 Essex Street, and thenceforth, 
 isolated except for his fellow Abolitionists, he 
 devoted all his life to battling for the reforms 
 in which he believed. 
 
 One of these in which he was a conspicuous 
 leader sought to improve the status of women. 
 His mind was so constituted that against any 
 condition of injustice, anywhere, in Ireland or 
 Russia, in the attitude of men toward women 
 or of the State toward prisoners, it instinc- 
 tively revolted. In the view of Mr. Phillips, 
 as of Mr. Garrison, women were entitled to 
 every right enjoyed by men, and the laws and 
 customs based upon the alleged inferiority of 
 women were fossils remaining from the barbar- 
 ous ages. Many women were in the anti- 
 
THE FIRST BATTLES 41 
 
 slavery movement; indeed, its women were often 
 abler than its men. Lydia Maria Child, Lu- 
 cretia Mott, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, and 
 Abby Kelly Foster were clearly the intellectual 
 equals of any living men. But the custom was 
 very rigid that women should take no part in 
 public affairs ; they could not vote and appar- 
 ently it was held that they had properly no 
 other rights. Garrison and Phillips strove to 
 give them equal place with men in the Abolition 
 movement, and it is an odd fact that this 
 was the first rock upon which the anti-slavery 
 movement split. 
 
 Those that believed woman's part in life to 
 be silence and knitting withdrew and flocked 
 by themselves. Presently they became involved 
 in schemes of compromise and political action 
 (to which Garrison and Phillips were opposed) 
 and trickled into the short-lived and futile 
 Liberty party, finally emerging from that bar- 
 ren waste to rejoin their former comrades with 
 actual Abolition in sight. 
 
 But the issue about women came sharply to 
 a head while the Phillipses were in London. 
 They had been appointed delegates to an inter- 
 national anti-slavery conference organized by 
 the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. 
 In Great Britain the prejudice against admit- 
 
42 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 ting women to any share in public affairs was 
 even stronger than in America, and woman's 
 position in general was worse. The men in 
 charge of the convention refused to allow Mrs. 
 Phillips and the other American women dele- 
 gates to be admitted. As soon as the delib- 
 erations were opened, Mr. Phillips sprang at 
 the face of British conservatism with a resolu- 
 tion for the seating of all delegates with cre- 
 dentials from any anti-slavery society. British 
 conservatism was painfully shocked. Mr. Phil- 
 lips shocked it again by delivering, in the de- 
 bate upon his resolution, a powerful argument 
 in behalf of equality for women. It was heard 
 far beyond the convention hall, for the press 
 took up the issue it raised and a fierce discus- 
 sion arose that can hardly be said to have 
 ceased again until it came to flower in the 
 great British suffrage movement of this day. 
 
 But in the convention hall Mr. Phillips was 
 defeated. The strength of British conserva- 
 tism was too great. For no other reason than 
 custom, the women delegates were not admitted 
 to the floor of the convention but were herded 
 into the gallery as spectators, where, when 
 Garrison came, he insisted .upon taking his 
 place among them. He would not sit as a del- 
 egate in a convention that declared men to be 
 
THE FIRST BATTLES 43 
 
 better than women. Phillips continued to fight 
 from the floor. He and Garrison became ex- 
 ceedingly unpopular in consequence and at' the 
 close of the conference were conspicuously 
 slighted at the final meeting in Exeter Hall. 
 Incidentally, the conference failed to be of any 
 use to the anti-slavery movement, which it was 
 intended to foster, but proved of much use to 
 the woman suffrage, movement, which it was in- 
 tended to discourage — a pleasing illustration 
 of the eternal futility of the reactionary mind. 
 
 It was when her husband left her to make 
 his argument in behalf of women that A;nn 
 Terry Phillips addressed to him a remark that 
 subsequently became famous. She said: 
 
 " Wendell, don't shilly-shally." 
 
 There was, in fact, the smallest likelihood 
 that he should ever shilly-shally about any- 
 thing, but the mind of Mrs. Phillips, shut in an 
 apparently frail body, was of such uncompro- 
 mising resolution that she sometimes frightened 
 the casual listener, and what was unpardon- 
 able weakness in her view would have seemed to 
 the average person no more than an agreeable 
 amenity. 
 
 In his arguments for woman suffrage Phil- 
 lips, in his usual lucid way, stated the whole 
 case and seeing far beyond any of his contem- 
 
44 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 poraries foreshadowed tlie industrial woman of 
 tlie Twentieth century. One of his admirable 
 addresses contained this: 
 
 The subject is so large, that it might well fill 
 days instead of hours. It covers the whole sur- 
 face of American society. It touches religion, 
 purity, political economy, wages, the safety of 
 cities, the growth of ideas, the very success of our 
 experiment. If this experiment of self-govern- 
 ment is to succeed, it is to succeed by some saving 
 element introduced into the politics of the present 
 day. You know this: your Websters, your Clays, 
 your Calhouns, your Douglases, however intel- 
 lectually able they may have been, have never 
 dared or cared to touch that moral element of our 
 national life. Either the shallow and heartless 
 trade of politics had eaten out their own moral 
 being, or they feared to enter the unknown land 
 of lofty right and wrong. 
 
 Neither of these great names has linked its fame 
 with one great moral question of the day. They 
 deal with money questions, with tariffs, with par- 
 ties, with State law; and if, by chance, they touch 
 the slave question, it is only like Jewish hucksters 
 trading in the relics of saints. The reformers — 
 the fanatics, as we are called — are the only ones 
 who have launched social and moral questions. I 
 risk nothing when I say, that the Anti-Slavery dis- 
 cussion of the last twenty years has been the salt 
 of this nation: it has actually kept it alive and 
 wholesome. Without it our politics would have 
 sunk beyond even contempt. So with this ques- 
 tion. It stirs the deepest sympathy; it appeals to 
 the highest moral sense; it inwraps within itself 
 the greatest moral issues. Judge it, then, candidly. 
 
THE FIRST BATTLES 45 
 
 carefully, as Americans; and let us show ourselves 
 worthy of the high place to which God has called 
 us in human affairs. 
 
 And again, on another occasion, speaking of 
 the ballot, he said: 
 
 We claim it therefore, for woman. The reply 
 is that woman has not sense enough. If she has 
 not, so much the more shame for your public 
 schools, — educate her! If God did not give her 
 mind enough, then you are brutes; for you say to 
 her: " Madam, you have sense enough to earn 
 your own living, — don't come to us ! " You make 
 her earn her own bread, and if she has sense enough 
 to do that, she has sense enough to say whether 
 Fernando Wood or Governor Morgan shall take 
 one cent out of every hundred to pay for fire- 
 works. When you hold her up in both hands and 
 say: "Let me work for you! Don't move one 
 of your dainty fingers ! We will pour wealth into 
 your lap, and be ye clothed in satin and velvet, 
 all ye daughters of Eve ! " — then you will be con- 
 sistent in saying that woman has not sense enough 
 to vote; but if she has sense enough to work, to 
 depend for her bread on her work, she has sense 
 enough to vote. 
 
 Then, again, men say, " She is so different from 
 man that God did not mean that she should vote." 
 Is she? Then I do not know how to vote for her. 
 One of two things is true: She is either exactly 
 like man — exactly like him, teetotally like him, 
 — and if she is, then a ballot box based upon brains 
 belongs to her as well as to him; or she is differ- 
 ent, and then I do not know how to vote for her. 
 If she is like me, so much like me that I know 
 just as well how to vote for her as she knows how 
 
46 THE STORY OF WENDEI.L PHILLIPS 
 
 to vote for herself, then — the very basis of the 
 ballot box bemg capacity — she, being the same as 
 I, has the same right to vote. And if she is so 
 different that she has a different range of avoca- 
 tions and powers and capacities, then it is neces- 
 sary she should go into the legislature, and with 
 her own voice say what she wants, and write her 
 wishes into statute books, because nobody is able 
 to interpret her. Choose which horn of the di- 
 lemma you please. 
 
 More than half a century has elapsed since 
 Phillips made this point, and in all the discus- 
 sion there has been on the question of woman 
 suffrage nobody has been able to refute or 
 evade its logic. But he would have been 
 amazed if at that time any one had assured 
 him that half a century would pass before his 
 countrymen awoke to an act of justice so ob- 
 vious and necessary as equal and universal 
 suffrage. 
 
Ill 
 
 ON THE FIRING LINES 
 
 The first great fact persistently thrust 
 upon the attention of every investigator of the 
 story of slavery in America is the tremendous 
 and wide-spreading power that always pertains 
 to great profits. 
 
 Profits seem to breed their own power and 
 miraculously to emanate it ; and from small 
 profits to great the degree of power generated 
 seems to increase in geometrical ratio. In our 
 own day we have seen clearly enough and often 
 enough how apparently irresistible is the power 
 put forth by the Controlling Interests that 
 reap most of the huge profits of the existing 
 system; and the power exerted by the 35 per 
 cent, profits of slavery was akin to this. As in 
 our own day, secret, insidious influences started 
 from the seat of profits and ran out of sight 
 across the country until they echoed in some 
 print or pulpit for the benefit of the profit- 
 makers and the injury of anybody that at- 
 47 
 
48 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 tacked them. Exactly what the Socialists are 
 to-day in the columns of the kept press the 
 Abolitionists were sixty years ago. The 
 spirit of profits has changed not at all and 
 the tactics have changed but little. Every 
 man that offends them is still a liar and a 
 scoundrel; still every exposition of their 
 thievery and graft is extravagance, falsehood 
 and vituperation ; and still all Ihe forces of 
 education, the press, literature and the church 
 are employed to overwhelm with discredit 
 whomsoever shall stand and clamor for justice. 
 Exactly so it was with the Abolitionists, and 
 the heaviest burden of the hatred they aroused 
 fell upon Phillips. To read now what was said 
 of him, even in the Northern press, between 
 1837 and 1861, you would think, if unenlight- 
 ened, that you were reading of a man in- 
 capable of telling the truth about anything and 
 given over to depraved and wanton designs 
 against the prosperity of his country and the 
 fame of its best and purest citizens. It is a 
 very curious fact that in all ages the means of 
 directing public opinion and of writing history 
 are almost exclusively in the hands of reaction- 
 ary influences. Phillips was at the mercy of 
 these. Naturally he belonged to the educated 
 and literary circles. North and South they 
 
ON THE FIRING LINES 49 
 
 turned upon him with a ferocity of hatred only 
 to be paralleled in the case of the leader of a 
 labor union that threatens profits with a strike 
 or of a literary man that allies himself with 
 the cause of the toilers. 
 
 The power of the slave-holders' profits was 
 as absolute in all branches of the national gov- 
 ernment as the power of the Controlling Inter- 
 ests has ever been in our time, and then as now 
 it was a power that rotted the courts and made 
 a travesty of justice. As in these days the 
 Federal bench is filled from the ranks of the 
 railroad and corporation attorneys, so in those 
 days no man could hope to become a judge un- 
 less he was known to be sound in his subserviency 
 to the slave-holding Interests. This was nec- 
 essary because court cases affecting issues of 
 slavery w^ere as common then as railroad cases 
 are now. 
 
 In all this the North, controlled by its busi- 
 ness men and their affiliations, tamely ac- 
 quiesced, although sometimes it was a condition 
 that reacted severely upon individual business 
 men. Of this I must cite here one example 
 for the sake of its many-sided illumination of 
 conditions North and South and for its light 
 upon the career of Wendell Phillips. 
 
 In the early forties, free-born colored men, 
 
50 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 natives and citizens of Massachusetts, that 
 were sailors on Northern ships, were exposed 
 to great danger in Southern ports. Especially 
 in Charleston they were liable to be arrested 
 on fictitious charges, to be thrown into jail and 
 to be sold into slavery, whence they could sel- 
 dom be rescued. In the farcial courts of jus- 
 tice presided over by the slave-owners' puppets 
 a man thus seized had as little chance as a 
 labor union has in a State court now. 
 
 For this aggression, utterly lawless as it 
 was, the slave-holding element was not without 
 its pretense of an excuse. Slaves were contin- 
 ually escaping to the North and their owners 
 found increasing difficulty in recovering them. 
 Many thousands of such fugitives had made 
 their way through the Northern States to 
 Canada, where they were safe under the pro- 
 tection of the British flag. Abolitionists like 
 Garrison and Phillips were frankly engaged in 
 aiding these escapes, and, as the center of the 
 Abolitionist movement was in Massachusetts, 
 the slave-owning interests retaliated by kidnap- 
 ing Massachusetts colored men that ventured 
 into Southern ports — a fact aptly pointing 
 Garrison's assertion (subsequently appropriated 
 by Lincoln) that the nation could not endure 
 half slave and half free. 
 
ON THE FIRING LINES 51 
 
 So long as the slavery issue was one of ab- 
 stract right and wrong, the better element of 
 Massachusetts, the business men and the com- 
 mercial classes generally, sided with the South. 
 But the seizure of these seamen affected them 
 differently. They owned ships. Sometimes a 
 ship that left Boston full-handed for Charles- 
 ton would return half-manned because its Negro 
 sailors had been seized and imprisoned. On its 
 voyage it must pass Cape Hatteras, a danger- 
 ous place for under-manned shipping. Prop- 
 erty — sacred property — was therefore put 
 in peril of loss. Consciences that cared noth- 
 ing about the wrongs and sufferings of three 
 million slaves awoke to action and Massachu- 
 setts loudly protested. 
 
 Mr. Samuel Hoar, founder of a famous fam- 
 ily, was then an eminent citizen of the State. 
 With other commissioners he was sent on a 
 peaceful embassy to Charleston to see if the 
 slave-holding Interests could be induced to give 
 over slave-catching and kidnaping when these 
 practises affected Boston pocket-books. As 
 soon as Mr. Hoar's presence was known in 
 Charleston his life was in danger. A mob gath- 
 ered about his hotel, and if the Governor of the 
 State had not ordered his deportation under an 
 armed guard he would have been lynched. 
 
52 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Mr. Phillips, eagerly watching every day's 
 developments for texts, seized this occasion for 
 one of his most famous speeches. He pointed 
 out that in refusing protection to Mr. Hoar, 
 South Carolina had violated the express pro- 
 visions of the Constitution and that for the 
 insult put upon Massachusetts no redress was 
 obtainable within the Union. He therefore 
 demanded that since citizens of Massachusetts 
 were deprived of their constitutional rights in 
 South Carolina, and the national Government 
 would not protect them therein, Massachusetts 
 should protect herself and decline to recognize a 
 Union thus already nullified by one of the 
 States. 
 
 Officially, Massachusetts was still dominated 
 by the influences that sympathized with slave- 
 holding. In silence it swallowed the insults, 
 but upon the masses of its people the effect 
 was otherwise. State pride was touched, and 
 from the time that Mr. Hoar so narrowly es- 
 caped the Charleston mob, a growing sentiment 
 questioned the righteousness of a slave-owning 
 oligarchy that had cast aside all pretense of 
 civilized restraint and openly returned to the 
 methods of the jungle. In all these progres- 
 sions it seems to be true that the uttered word 
 of truth must be reinforced by some object les- 
 
ON THE FIRING LINES 55 
 
 son, patent to all men's eyes ; neither is wholly 
 effective alone. Phillips's speech, in spite of 
 the usual efforts to suppress or ignore it, 
 served to carry home the significance of Mr. 
 Hoar's narrow escape from the savages of 
 Charleston, and from that date Boston as a 
 whole was never again utterly indifferent on the 
 slave question. 
 
 Yet observe how strange was the sequel this 
 story was to have in other days. Phillips had 
 used the power of his eloquence in behalf of 
 Samuel Hoar's cause. Forty-two years after 
 Mr. Hoar's escape, Wendell Phillips died in 
 Boston. Samuel Hoar was still alive. So 
 great and so savage was the hatred Mr. Phil- 
 lips had drawn upon himself in the closing 
 years of his life that not even his death could 
 soften it. Among the bitter taunts flung upon 
 his grave was one from Samuel Hoar. He 
 said that he did not attend Wendell Phillips's 
 funeral, but he approved of it. 
 
 After the decision in the fugitive slave case, 
 to which I referred in the first chapter of this 
 chronicle, he was out of Society, out of his pro- 
 fession, out of the church, out of all old ties 
 and associations ; out, to a great extent, of the 
 view of the community that generally abhorred 
 him. He no longer looked upon himself as an 
 
54 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 American nor upon the Constitution as a thing 
 to which he owed allegiance. He was become 
 a man without a country. In later years he 
 resumed his civic duties, but to his death his 
 isolation remained and grew. Hatred seems to 
 have been allotted to him as fame to other men. 
 Year after year his figure, the loneliest in his- 
 tory, rose upon the scene like that rock in the 
 Indian Ocean that is so strange and solitary a 
 monument in a wide range of empty sea. 
 
 So situated, he labored incessantly in the 
 causes to which he had given over his life. He 
 became the general agent of the Massachusetts 
 Anti-Slavery Society and largely directed its 
 campaigns; he wrote and published pamphlets, 
 some signed and some anonymous, attacking 
 slavery from every possible angle of advan- 
 tage; he furnished articles to the small but 
 vigorous Abolitionist press ; he used his modest 
 income in the support of the movement ; he made 
 his house a refuge for Abolitionists and fugi- 
 tive slaves ; and wherever and whenever he could 
 find opportunity he raised his voice in those 
 eloquent protests that no man can read now 
 with unquickened pulses. Behind his most in- 
 nocent address, as a masked battery, he car- 
 ried Emancipation. Thus he had a lecture 
 with the attractive title " Street Life in 
 
ON THE FIRING LINES 55 
 
 Europe," made from his observations abroad. 
 But when a rural Ijceum or lecture course was 
 induced to accept it, men heard behind the 
 street scenes of Europe the strenuous insist- 
 ence against slavery in America. In at least 
 one famous instance he managed in this way to 
 break through the crust of Northern culture 
 and indifference and to drag before the con- 
 science of a reluctant Northern community the 
 great moral issue of the day. The place was 
 probably the last on earth to suggest itself to 
 you. It was Concord, Massachusetts, sacred 
 in American literature and famous for one of 
 the most heroic deeds of the American revolu- 
 tion. 
 
 In our day we sometimes wonder that influ- 
 ences in the community apparently isolated 
 from the Interests, should nevertheless be 
 ardent in their defense. Even this mystery 
 had its counterpart in the day of the Abolition 
 struggle, for in many a remote New England 
 village, where no commercial concern could be 
 pleaded, the spirit was hot for the South and 
 slavery, and men were not safe if they talked 
 for Abolition. Venerable ministers of the Gos- 
 pel maintained from the pulpit the righteous- 
 ness of the slave market and its divine 
 sanction. In behalf of the principle of 
 
56 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 slavery, men otherwise of peaceful walk were 
 ready at all times to fight and to shed blood, 
 although no interest of theirs, near nor remote, 
 was menaced, but only of the 348,214 persons 
 in the South, that for an annual profit of 35 
 per cent, held slaves. 
 
 It was against a flood of hysteria like this 
 that Phillips made incessant war, going for 
 inspiration again and again to the spirit of the 
 French and American revolutions. His utter- 
 most conviction was that there could be no such 
 thing as a republic where equal rights were 
 denied to any part of the population, and, in 
 his own powerful phrase, a government that 
 tolerated human slavery was only a pirate ship. 
 While he thundered against the evil as a whole, 
 he lost no chance to attack its ramifications 
 and by-products, and through one of these 
 ramifications he now struck effectively at that 
 snobbery in so-called social circles that had 
 closed their doors to him. 
 
 It was then the custom throughout the North 
 for persons of social eminence or social ambi- 
 tions to prove their superiority and right to a 
 seat among the elect by showing bitterness 
 against the colored race, just as to-day per- 
 sons of similar mentality and similar ambitions 
 make a point of sneering at labor unions and 
 
ON THE FIRING LINES 57 
 
 scorning " the lower orders." This was in all 
 communities an easy badge of gentility. In 
 Boston, the highest circles of society had se- 
 cured a condition under which colored children 
 were not allowed to go to the public schools 
 used by the white children, but were herded by 
 themselves in inferior buildings where they re- 
 ceived inferior tuition. Mr. Phillips, most con- 
 scientious of democrats, despised the distinction 
 of color made by the School Committee, de- 
 spised its origin, w^hich he knew well enough to 
 be a smug and greasy snobbery, and declared 
 war upon it. First he presented a petition 
 that colored children be admitted to the white 
 schools. Some element of chance seemed al- 
 ways to fight on his side ; he could hardly have 
 foreseen what was to happen to his advantage 
 in this case. The Committee, in denying the 
 petition, made the blunder of offering its so- 
 called reasons, backed by the opinion of dis- 
 tinguished but foolish counsel. Nothing could 
 better have suited Mr, Phillips's purposes. 
 He tore into the " reasons," shattering them 
 with his terrible sarcasm, and then, using his 
 great legal knowledge and powers of argument, 
 he made of the city solicitor's opinion a thing 
 of shreds and patches. Here, too, shone forth 
 another of his dominant traits, for no man was 
 
58 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 ever more relentless in his cause or less knowing 
 of discouragement. In his steady, pertinacious, 
 unflinching way, he brought up the same issue 
 next year and the next, always defeated and 
 always making headway. At last he got his 
 case before the Legislature, and in 1854 he 
 forced it through to victory. The law of the 
 State was changed to make impossible the dis- 
 crimination he opposed and he had the satis- 
 faction of seeing colored children . admitted to 
 the schools on equal footing with the white. 
 
 Fourteen years passed from the beginning of 
 that struggle until his steady fighting won suc- 
 cess. 
 
 Meantime, living his own life in his own way 
 at his Essex Street home, and engaged daily in 
 the anti-slavery struggle as the business of his 
 Soul, he had many other activities similarly in- 
 spired. To him any injustice anywhere de- 
 manded from a just man all possible protest. 
 He looked upon the human race as no more than 
 beginning to emerge from bondage ; the typical, 
 complacent American view was that here, at 
 least, it had topped the summit of its journey. 
 This difference and one other make him stand 
 out so sharply against his times ; the other be- 
 ing that with all the heart of him he abhorred 
 
ON THE FIRING LINES 59 
 
 compromise, and compromise was the choicest 
 idol of his day. 
 
 " Who can not hate can love not " 
 
 sings Swinburne. Phillips had an extraordi- 
 nary capacity for hating all things evil, but 
 first of all he hated the idea of striking a bar- 
 gain with conscience. Right was right to be 
 followed purely for its own sake and for no 
 other reward. Wrong was wrong and not to 
 be trafficked with. In the midst of the furious 
 conflict with slavery that he tried to provoke 
 and to aggravate he found time to deliver pow- 
 erful arguments in favor of other causes he 
 held to be right and just: in favor of woman's 
 suffrage, against capital punishment, for the 
 removal of an unjust judge, in behalf of Ire- 
 land, against the sodden public conscience that 
 views with indiff'erence the lost souls of the 
 street. Amid all these efforts and still giving 
 his unflagging assistance to Garrison in the de- 
 tails of the anti-slavery campaign he found time 
 to prepare and deliver scholarly orations like 
 that on " The Lost Arts " ; biographical trib- 
 utes, like those on " Daniel O'Connell ^' and 
 " Toussaint L'Ouverture," and stimulating ad- 
 dresses on Christianity and morals. His mind 
 
60 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 seemed a prodigious engine that rested not 
 but at all times labored full steam ahead. 
 
 His private walk was no less extraordinary. 
 Mrs. PhilHps, to whom he was wholly devoted, 
 was a chronic invalid and for forty-six years 
 he was her nurse, attendant and always cheer- 
 ful companion. He did much of his work at 
 night while she slept in an adjoining room. 
 She had a bell at her hand with which she was 
 wont to summon him. One night he made 
 count of her calls and they totalled twenty-six. 
 Yet it is the unvarying testimony on all sides 
 that he never once departed from the one atti- 
 tude of kindly devotion; he was invariably the 
 gallant and attentive lover. In a season when 
 she seemed to be more than usually ill he did 
 not leave the house for sixty days, spending 
 all his waking hours about her bed side. 
 Surely an exceptional man! 
 
 The charm of his wonderful oratory and the 
 magnetism of his presence sometimes won him 
 a hearing from assemblies that detested his 
 opinions. Thus *' The Lost Arts " spread his 
 fame and enlarged his audiences. It is re- 
 corded of many communities that with trepida- 
 tion and misgiving they engaged him to deliver 
 this lecture, expecting to see some raging per- 
 son, full of sound and fury and bellowing like 
 
ON THE FIRING LINES 61 
 
 a bull ; for newspapers had created and per- 
 sistently spread the belief that he was a fire- 
 eater, a dangerous maniac and an unqualified 
 liar. When he stepped upon the stage, so 
 evidently a man of learning and refinement, and 
 with his bell-like voice began so quietly to ad- 
 dress them in polished phrases, speaking in- 
 dubitable truth, they were stricken with a 
 comical amazement. 
 
 The very style of his oratory was a startling 
 innovation. At that time and for long after- 
 ward, the common conception of an orator was 
 of a man violently swinging his arms and sing- 
 songing rhetorical and flowery phrases in a 
 way that burlesqued nature. Mr. Phillips 
 used very few gestures and these most modest ; 
 he never shouted; he never seemed to be ex- 
 cited ; he never sing-songed ; he spoke to five 
 thousand exactly as he would speak to one. 
 His compelling power lay in the force of his 
 ideas, in his simple, direct language, in the 
 compact and mighty phrases into which he 
 wrought his words. He revolutionized orator}^ 
 in America. Since his time it has never been 
 easy for Bombast to carry off^ the fustian noise 
 that alone had been popular among us. Some- 
 thing most extraordinary, and to this day un- 
 equaled, lay in the mere arrangement of his 
 
62 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 sentences. They could not have been studied, 
 for he never wrote out anything he was to say, 
 and in his most extempore addresses the same 
 quahty appears. I mean he could always so 
 marshal his words, nervous, swift, vital, sting- 
 ing as they were, that they had a subtle 
 rhythm and melodic import aside from their 
 burning verbal significance. He was, I sup- 
 pose, the clearest-minded man that ever con- 
 fronted an audience and swayed it to his will. 
 Analyzing his speeches now, it appears that his 
 mind worked simultaneously in two divisions. 
 One was supervising and directing the immedi- 
 ate utterance; the other was arranging his 
 argument far ahead. Greater intellectual feats 
 than these are not recorded of any other orator. 
 Webster, Chatham, Burke, Fox, Sheridan, 
 Clay, prepared with great care the periods 
 with which they charmed their hearers. This 
 man at a moment's notice would speak with all 
 the perfection of form and beauty of married 
 thought and word attainable by any prepara- 
 tion. 
 
 A Virginia slave named Thomas Sims es- 
 caped to Boston and was captured there. In 
 spite of the most strenuous efforts of Garrison, 
 Phillips, Edmund Quincy and other good men, 
 a Massachusetts judge returned him to slavery. 
 
ON THE FIRING LINES 63 
 
 This event brought forth two of Phillips's 
 most celebrated orations ; one when the judge's 
 decision was made known, one upon its first 
 anniversary — a daring thought to celebrate 
 such an event! English literature has no 
 passages more tremendous than those in which 
 Wendell Phillips poured forth on these two oc- 
 casions the liquid fire of his indignation, and 
 in " The Sims Anniversary," particularly, that 
 noble paragraph beginning " Take the broken 
 hearts, the bereaved mothers," seems to me to 
 represent the highest flight reached by this or 
 any other orator of our race. 
 
 Here are some extracts from this great 
 speech. They will indicate the unflinching 
 courage of the man as well as the eloquence of 
 the orator: 
 
 Thomas Sims is the first man that the city of 
 Boston has openly bound and fettered and sent 
 back to bondage. I have no heart to dwell on 
 so horrible an outrage: that sad procession in the 
 dim morning through our streets — the poor youth 
 — his noble effort to break his chains — mocked 
 with one short hour of freedom and then thrust 
 back to the hell he had escaped, by brother men, 
 in the prostituted names of justice and religion. 
 We sit down with the single captive and weep 
 with him as the iron enters into his soul — too 
 sad for the moment to think of the disgrace of 
 our city or even the wickedness of its rulers. Pity 
 
64 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 swallows up indignation. We might be forgiven 
 if for the moment we mistook our sadness for 
 despair, and even fancied the event disastrous to 
 others than the victim. But not so. Liberty 
 knows nothing but victories. In a cause like ours 
 to which every attribute of the most high is pledged, 
 everything helps us. . . . 
 
 I go further. I do not believe that if we should 
 live to the longest period Providence ever allots 
 to the life of a human being we shall see the total 
 abolition of slavery, unless it comes in some critical 
 conjunction of national affairs, when the slave, tak- 
 ing advantage of a crisis in the fate of his mas- 
 ter, shall dictate his own terms. How did French 
 slavery go down ? How did the French slave trade 
 go down? When Napoleon came back from Elba, 
 when his fate hung trembling in the balance, and 
 he wished to gather around him the sympathies of 
 the liberals of Europe, lie no sooner set foot in 
 the Tuileries than he signed the edict abolishing 
 the slave trade, against which the Abolitionists of 
 England and France had protested for twenty 
 years in vain. And the trade went down, because 
 Napoleon felt that he must do something to gild 
 the darkening hour of his second attempt to clutch 
 the sceptre of France. How did the slave sys- 
 tem go down? When, in 1848, the Provisional 
 Government found itself in the Hotel de Ville, 
 obliged to do something to draw to itself the 
 sympathy and liberal feeling of the French nation, 
 they signed an edict — it was the first from the 
 nascent Republic — abolishing the death penalty 
 and slavery. The storm which rocked the vessel 
 of state almost to foundering snapped forever the 
 chain of the French slave. Look, too, at the his- 
 
ON THE FIRING LINES 65 
 
 tory of Mexican and South American emancipa- 
 tion; you will find that it was, in every instance, 
 I think, the child of convulsion. 
 
 The hour will come — God hasten ij; ! — when 
 the American people shall so stand on the deck 
 of their Union, " built i' the eclipse and rigged 
 with curses dark." If I live to see that hour 
 I shall say to every slave, " Strike now for Free- 
 dom! The balance hangs trembling; it is un- 
 certain w^hich scale shall kick the beam. Strain 
 every nerve, wrestle with every power God and 
 nature have put into your hands, for your place 
 among the races of this Western world " ; and that 
 hour would free the slave. 
 
 The Abolitionist who shall stand in such an hour 
 as that and keep silence, will be recreant to the 
 cause of three million of his fellow men in bonds. 
 I believe that, probably, is the only way in which 
 we shall ever, any of us, see the downfall of Ameri- 
 can slavery. I do not shrink from the toast with 
 which Dr. Johnson flavored his Oxford port — 
 " Success to the first insurrection of the blacks in 
 Jamaica ! " I do not shrink from the sentiment 
 of Southey, in a letter to Duppa — " There are 
 scenes of tremendous horror which I could smile 
 at by Mercy's side. An insurrection which should 
 make the Negroes masters of the West Indies is 
 one." I believe both these sentiments are dictated 
 by the highest humanity. I know what anarchy 
 is. I know what civil war is. I can imagine the 
 scenes of blood through which a rebellious slave 
 population must march to their rights. They are 
 dreadful. And yet I do not know that, to an en- 
 lightened man, a scene of civil war is any more 
 sickening than the thought of a hundred and fifty 
 years of slavery. 
 
66 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Take the broken hearts, the bereaved mothers, 
 the infant wrung from the hands of its parents, 
 the husband and wife torn asunder, every right 
 trodden under foot, the blighted hopes, the im- 
 bruted souls, the darkened and degraded millions, 
 sunk below the level of intellectual life, melted in 
 sensuality, herded with beasts, who have walked 
 over the burning marl of Southern slavery to their 
 graves, and where is the battle-field, however 
 ghastly, that is not white, — white as an angel's 
 wing — compared with the blackness of that dark- 
 ness which has brooded over the Carolinas for two 
 hundred years? Do you love mercy? Weigh out 
 the fifty thousand hearts that have beaten their 
 last pulses amid agonies of thought and suffering 
 fancy faints to think of, and the fifty thousand 
 mothers, who, with sickening senses, watch for the 
 footsteps that are not wont to tarry long in their 
 coming, and soon find themselves left to tread the 
 pathway of life alone — add all the horrors of 
 cities sacked and lands laid waste — that is war. 
 Weigh it now against some young, trembling girl 
 sent to the auction block, some man like that taken 
 from our courthouse and carried back into Georgia ; 
 multiply that individual agony into three millions ; 
 multiply that into centuries, and that into all the 
 relations of father and child, husband and wife; 
 heap on all the deep moral degradation both of 
 oppressor and the oppressed — and tell me if Wa- 
 terloo or Thermopylae can claim one tear from the 
 eyes even of the tenderest spirit of mercy com- 
 pared with this daily system of hell amid the most 
 civilized Christian people on the face of the earth ! 
 
 No, I confess, I am not a non-resistant. The 
 reason why I advise the slave to be governed by a 
 policy of peace is because he has no chance. If 
 
ON THE FIRING LINES 67 
 
 he had one — if he had as good a chance as those 
 who went up to Lexington seventy-seven years 
 ago — I should call him the basest recreant that 
 ever deserted wife and child if he did not vindi- 
 cate his liberty by his own right hand. 
 
 Later in the same remarkable speech he re- 
 curred to this topic and expressed clearly his 
 fundamental faith that there are conceivable 
 conditions under which there is nothing left 
 but violence. 
 
 You will say this is bloody doctrine — anarch- 
 ical doctrine; it wdll prejudice people against the 
 cause. I know it will. Heaven pardon those who 
 make it necessary! Heaven pardon the judges^ 
 the merchants and the clergy who make it neces- 
 sary for hunted men to turn when they are at 
 bay, and fly at the necks of their pursuers ! It 
 is not our fault ! I shrink from no question, how- 
 ever desperate, that has in it the kernel of pos- 
 sible safety for a human being, hunted by twenty 
 millions of slave-catchers in this Christian repub- 
 lic of ours. I am willing to confess my faith. 
 It is this, that the Christianity of this country is 
 worth nothing, except it is or can be made capable 
 of dealing with the question of slavery. I am 
 willing to confess another article of my faith: that 
 the constitution and government of this country 
 is worth nothing, except it is or can be made 
 capable of grappling with the great question of 
 slavery. 
 
IV 
 
 THE INTERESTS THEN AND THE IN- 
 TERESTS NOW 
 
 The great strength of the real Abolition- 
 ists, of Phillips, Garrison and their followers, 
 lay in the fact that they would never compro- 
 mise. 
 
 This was all the more remarkable in a coun- 
 try where compromise is as natural and easy 
 as dining. It may, in fact, be described as 
 the national American vice ; we all practice it. 
 Except independence in 1776 and chattel 
 slavery after 1863 we can hardly name a na- 
 tional issue that has been fought through to 
 the end relentlessly. The good nature that is 
 so charming at home and in some other places, 
 and a bore when it induces us to submit w^ith 
 such unapproachable patience to strap-hang- 
 ing in street cars and to extortion by railroads, 
 is a nuisance wlien it gets into public affairs. 
 A thing is either right or wrong. When it is 
 
 an issue to be decided by public action the 
 68 
 
THE INTERESTS THEN AND NOW 69 
 
 favorite good natured American way is to try 
 to make it both; which is not only impossible 
 but imbecile. 
 
 It was so about chattel slavery previous to 
 1863 and it is so to-day about wage slavery. 
 
 As Garrison and Phillips and the rest stead- 
 ily drove the national conscience before them 
 on the slavery issue there arose a vast body of 
 men that knew in their hearts and souls that 
 slavery was wrong, but were too cowardly or 
 too good natured to say so. These incessantly 
 proposed compromises of different kinds with 
 a doddering idea of staving off the inevitable 
 conflict. They left behind an innumerable 
 progeny industriously engaged to-day in the 
 same endeavor. In the old days they said that 
 of course things were not exactly as they ought 
 to be but we must not talk about Abolition; 
 the thing to do was to restrict slavery. Keep 
 it out of the new territories but leave it alone 
 in the South. How this would help the men 
 and women then held in a terrible and degrad- 
 ing bondage, no one could say, but such was 
 the platform of millions of men that must have 
 known better. To-day their intellectual de- 
 scendants, knowing equally well that basic con- 
 ditions are wrong, dally similarly with feeble, 
 footless proposals of reform. " Tell us not of 
 
70 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 abolishing wage slavery," say these of little 
 faith and less courage ; " rather let us strive 
 to better the condition of the slaves." So we 
 have the social settlement, the playground as- 
 sociation, the anti-child labor league, the tene- 
 ment reform societies, and other gropings for 
 betterment, while the system that manufactures 
 every evil condition continues to work overtime 
 and burden society with its poisonous prod- 
 ucts. 
 
 The laws passed by the Southern states mak- 
 ing it a crime to teach a slave to read, with a 
 few other civilized devices of that kind, includ- 
 ing the ready shot gun, discouraged in Phil- 
 lips's day some of the manifestation of this 
 snivelling spirit of the uplift. The rest 
 showed itself in a scheme to buy the slaves one 
 at a time and deport them to Africa (a bril- 
 liant suggestion that was the foundation of the 
 present republic of Liberia), and in some feeble 
 protests against allowing slavery to engulf 
 every corner of the land as well as to adminis- 
 ter every part of the government. So exact 
 is the parallel with present day conditions that 
 someone should develop it to the end, merely 
 as a historical study, if for no other reason. 
 The perfect counterpart of the Progressive 
 party of these days was the Free Soil party 
 
THE INTERESTS THEN AND NOW 71 
 
 of those, which figured in three successive presi- 
 dential elections and once cast a very significant 
 vote. That anyone should think it worth while 
 to have free soil until we had free men seems 
 now strange enough, but it was an idea ex- 
 tremely popular among certain orders of dough- 
 faces in 185S. The avowed principles of the 
 Free Soil party were not to abolish chattel 
 slaver}^ any more than the avowed principles 
 of the Progressive party are to abolish wage 
 slavery to-day; but merely to regulate the evil, 
 a fact from which we can estimate the antiquity 
 of the regulative school of political quackery. 
 
 With the Free Soil fake neither Phillips nor 
 Garrison would have aught to do — which was 
 well ; otherwise slavery might have lasted much 
 longer. The point with these two extremists 
 and their followers was that on a matter of 
 conscience there can be no compromise; it is 
 either fight or surrender. They believed that 
 slavery was a wrong for which all the words 
 in all the tongues spoken by man could find 
 no adequate expression. They were perfectly 
 willing to die fighting it, but they would not 
 for one instant admit that it was a thing to be 
 " regulated." 
 
 To all the members of the Free Soil party, 
 therefore, Phillips became an object of dislike 
 
*72 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 almost as much as he was to the truckhng 
 Whigs whom he so mercilessly lashed with his 
 savage sarcasms. To them he was a wild and 
 half-mad enthusiast, an eccentric, irrational 
 fanatic, and above all, a detestable dealer in 
 extravagances. That is the word in all ages 
 beloved of the dough-face. Whatever he lacks 
 the courage to do or say is " extravagance." 
 Cowering far out of danger of even stray shots, 
 he points to the man on the firing line and de- 
 nounces him as extravagant. Why can't he 
 keep cool as we do, here back of the sutlers' 
 wagons and out of range? Slavery isn't half 
 as bad as he paints it. I know many of the 
 slave-holders and they are mighty nice fellows. 
 He so exaggerates everything! And then he 
 always appeals to the mob and the spirit of 
 social unrest ; he has none of the spirit of im- 
 partial inquiry; there is nothing nice and re- 
 fined about his methods and nothing scholarly. 
 Having transacted all of which they would be- 
 take themselves to the passing of innocuous reso- 
 lutions and the choosing of candidates for the 
 best offices. 
 
 But Phillips knew well enough that the great- 
 est and only eventual force in the world is the 
 power of a moral idea and that it was lost the 
 instant it fell to lasciviating with a compro- 
 
THE INTERESTS THEN AND NOW 73 
 
 mise. He knew that, however men might be 
 swerved and seemingly obsessed by the madness 
 of much profits, at bottom the masses were 
 moral and the way to abolish any evil was to 
 appeal to their consciences about it. They 
 would not respond to the first appeal nor to the 
 tenth, perhaps, but in the end the response was 
 inevitable if only those that were banded 
 against the evil were steadfast and hnplacable, 
 caring nothing about weapons but fighting al- 
 ways. 
 
 This is another respect in which he was the 
 greatest figure of his times, that he saw all this 
 so plainly while what were called the best minds 
 never seemed to suspect a truth so great and 
 vital. While they fooled and fiddled about, 
 wasting time in deeds analogous to the trust 
 busting and regulative fol-de-rol of our own 
 times, he kept incessantly repeating his simple 
 talisman, " This thing is wrong, it is absolutely 
 wrong, it is utterly wrong ! " and lo, at last the 
 walls fell and the evil vanished. 
 
 But he did this at a cost to himself, and he 
 knew it, and knew it would be so from the be- 
 ginning, and no man ever heard him complain 
 about it. Therefore, I hail him as the great- 
 est American, because he put service above all 
 other considerations and then stood unshakable 
 
74 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 in that creed. If you are as sick as I am of 
 having the galumphing military heroes and the 
 faking augurs of statecraft crammed down 
 your throat, come and consider for a time a real 
 man and have refreshing for your soul. 
 
 Next to the national appetite for compro- 
 mise, the deadest weights on social progress in 
 America are the timidity of its champions and 
 their failure to grasp the simple little fact that 
 what they are enlisted in is not an afternoon tea 
 party but a war. In war you must take blows 
 as well as give them. But we seem to think 
 that we can deal with a situation as terrific as 
 now confronts modern society and still keep on 
 good terms with the bandit beneficiaries of that 
 system we are trying to dispossess. 
 
 For instance, we have always had an almost 
 superstitious terror for the printed word if it 
 appears in a newspaper, and we have never been 
 able to understand that a large part of our 
 press is controlled absolutely by the powers of 
 evil that keep it ; consequently its hostility to 
 men or measures is without real significance. 
 To be abused by the newspapers that in former 
 days were kept by the slave owning power was 
 a badge of honor equalled only by abuse from 
 the newspapers that in our own time are kept 
 by the gatherers of huge profits and the culti- 
 
THE INTERESTS THEN AND NOW 75 
 
 vators of the financial melon patch. Nothing 
 that such journals can say of an honest man 
 can harm him, unless by some misfortune they 
 should say good of him. In that case he should 
 utilize the comment for the narrow observation 
 of his walk and ways, for assuredly he has been 
 doing something he should not do. 
 
 All this is perfectly obvious to anybody that 
 will take the time to consider carefully concern- 
 ing newspapers and the sources of their opin- 
 ions ; but the average man still continues to 
 allow himself to be affected by press attacks 
 and the average leader to fear adverse com- 
 ment. 
 
 Mr. Phillips had none of these delusions. He 
 had learned the first great lesson every re- 
 former must learn if he is to be of the slightest 
 effect with his reforms. He had learned to dis- 
 regard criticism. He knew well enough that 
 the beneficiaries of the system of 35 per cent- 
 profits on slave labor would not yield without 
 a struggle the fatness of their pleasant arrange- 
 ments, and he knew that their power would be 
 suflicient to array against their assailants a 
 wide variety of influences. He knew too that 
 one of the favorite weapons of reaction is to 
 attack the methods of those that strive for pro- 
 gress. He understood all this and estimated it 
 
76 THE STORY OF WENDELT. PHILLIPS 
 
 at its true value. One of the things for which 
 we owe him undying gratitude is that he never 
 hesitated for a moment to speak the plain, un- 
 varnished truth about any situation and never 
 cared what lies were set afloat about him the 
 next day by the kept press of that period. His 
 views on this subject were so clear that I think 
 they ought to be remembered by every person 
 interested in securing better conditions. In his 
 great lecture on Daniel O'Connell, one of his 
 most eloquent utterances, he said this: 
 
 O'Connell has been charged with coarse, violent, 
 and intemperate language. The criticism is of 
 little importance. Stupor and palsy never under- 
 stand life. White-livered indiiFerence is always 
 disgusted and annoyed by earnest conviction. 
 Protestants criticised Luther in the same way. It 
 took three centuries to carry us far off enough to 
 appreciate his colossal proportions. It is a hun- 
 dred years to-day since O'Connell was born. It 
 will take another hundred to put us at such an 
 angle as will enable us correctly to measure his 
 stature. Premising that it would be folly to find 
 fault with a man struggling for life because his 
 attitudes were ungraceful, remembering the Scyth- 
 ian king's answer to Alexander, criticising his 
 strange weapon, — " If you knew how precious 
 freedom was, you would defend it even with axes,'* 
 — we must see that O'Connell's own explanation 
 is evidently sincere and true. He found the Irish 
 heart so cowed, and Englishmen so arrogant, that 
 he saw it needed an independence verging on inso- 
 
THE INTERESTS THEN AND NOW 77 
 
 lence, a defiance that touched extremest limits, to 
 breathe self-respect into his own race, teach the 
 aggressor manners, and sober him into respectful 
 attention. It was the same with us Abolitionists. 
 Webster had taught the North the 'bated breath 
 and crouching of a slave. It needed with us an 
 attitude of independence that was almost insolent, 
 it needed that we should exhaust even the Saxon 
 vocabulary of scorn, to fitly utter the righteous 
 and haughty contempt that honest men had for 
 man-stealers. Only in that way could we wake 
 the North to self-respect, or teach the South that 
 at length she had met her equal, if not her master. 
 On a broad canvas, meant for the public square, 
 the tiny lines of a Dutch interior would be in- 
 visible. In no other circumstances was the French 
 maxim, " You can never make a revolution with 
 rose-water," more profoundly true. The world 
 has hardly yet learned how deep a philosophy lies 
 hid in Hamlet's, — 
 
 " Nay, and thou'lt mouth, 
 I'll rant as well as thou." 
 
 From the very beginning of his career he 
 saw that whoever stopped to pay heed to criti- 
 cism would never get anywhere. To his mind 
 the only important thing was that a man should 
 strike at wrong and injustice with whatsoever 
 weapon he could command and care naught 
 what might be said of the posture of his blows. 
 Unless he did his best without compromise and 
 without counting the cost to himself he could 
 never be on good terms with that conscience that 
 
78 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 to Phillips was the strongest and highest of hu- 
 man influences. He said something like this far 
 back in the early days of his anti-slavery en- 
 listment, on that occasion when he shocked and 
 dismayed the placid town of Concord: 
 
 I do not care for criticisms upon my manner of 
 assailing slavery. In a struggle for life it is 
 hardly fair for men who are lolling at ease to re- 
 mark that the limbs of the combatants are not 
 arranged in classic postures. 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 dan- 
 gers to life, liberty, and happiness that would be 
 the consequence of doing right. These dangers 
 now exist by law at the South. Liberty may be 
 bought at too dear a price; if I cannot have it 
 except by sin, I reject it. But I cannot so blas- 
 pheme 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 writ- 
 ten there? " Thou shalt not deliver unto his mas- 
 ter the servant which is escaped to thee; he shall 
 dwell with you, even among you." I throw my- 
 self then on the bosom of Infinite Wisdom. Even 
 the heathen will tell you, " Let justice be done 
 though the heavens fall " ; and the old reformer 
 answered when warned against the danger of go- 
 ing to Rome, " It is not necessary that I should 
 live; it is necessary that I go to Rome," But now 
 our pulpits are silent — whoever heard this sub- 
 
THE INTERESTS THEN AND NOW 79 
 
 ject 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. 
 
 The difference between the time-serving, timid 
 souled, American Congressman and the men 
 that are real factors in progress he once de- 
 scribed in an article in the Liberator, and the 
 description is as good to-day as it was when 
 it was written. If we substitute the present 
 struggle against wage slavery for the struggle 
 against chattel slavery that was uppermost in 
 Phillips's mind when he wrote this comparison, 
 no observer of these times will note any differ- 
 ence. He said: 
 
 The reformer is careless of numbers, disregards 
 popularity, and deals only with ideas, conscience, 
 and common-sense. He feels, with Copernicus, 
 that as God waited long for an interpreter, so he 
 can wait for his followers. He neither expects 
 nor is over-anxious for immediate success. The 
 politician dwells in an everlasting Now, His 
 motto is "Success" — his aim, votes. His object 
 is not absolute right, but, like Solon's laws, as much 
 right as the people will sanction. His office is. 
 
80 THE STORY OF WENDET.L PHILLIPS 
 
 not to instruct public opinion, but to represent it. 
 Thus, in England, Cobden, tlie reformer, created 
 sentiment, and Peel, the politician, stereotyped it 
 into statutes. 
 
 This very idea of the power of determined 
 men, however few, in a cause of righteousness 
 he expressed far better than any of us could 
 attempt to express it in an address he made in 
 April, 18T2, before the International Grand 
 Lodge of the Knights of St. Crispin. The 
 shoemakers' trade union used to bear this name, 
 so it appears that in nomenclature, anyway, we 
 have made some progress. Mr. Phillips said: 
 
 I am told that you represent from 70,000 to 
 100,000 men, here and elsewhere. Think of it! 
 One hundred thousand men ! They can dictate the 
 fate of this nation. Give me fifty thousand men 
 in earnest, who can agree on all vital questions, 
 who will plant their shoulders together, and swear 
 by all that is true and just that for the long years 
 they will put their great idea before the country, 
 and those 50,000 men will govern the nation. So 
 if I have 100,000 men represented before me, who 
 are in earnest, who get hold of the great question 
 of labor, and having hold of it, grapple with it, 
 and rip it and tear it open, and invest it with 
 light, gathering the facts, piercing the brains about 
 them and crowding those brains with the facts — 
 then I know, sure as fate, though I may not live 
 to see it, that they will certainly conquer this na- 
 tion in twenty years. It is impossible that they 
 should not. And that is your power, gentlemen. 
 
THE INTERESTS THEN AND NOW 81 
 
 And again he saw always this great truth 
 that entrenched privilege is not to be dislodged 
 by passing resolutions and devising polite 
 measures of reform, but by sheer, brutal, 
 straight-out fighting; and he saw that the very 
 uncouthness of the weapons of progress against 
 which lady-like and perfumed reformers were 
 always objecting was in itself a product of the 
 conditions it combated. Thus to workingmen 
 he said once: 
 
 I know labor is narrow; I know she is aggres- 
 sive; I know she arms herself with the best weap- 
 ons that a corrupt civilization furnishes — all true. 
 Where do we get these ideas? Borrowed them 
 from capital, every one of them; and when you 
 advance to us on the level of peace, unarmed, we'll 
 meet you on the same. While you combine and 
 plot and defend, so will we. 
 
 But Mr. Johnson says, " Come into the world 
 with the white banner of peace/' Ay, we will, 
 when you disarm. . . . Labor comes up and says, 
 " They have shotted their cannon to the lips ; they 
 have rough ground their swords as in battle; they 
 have adopted every new method; they have in- 
 vented every dangerous machine — and it is all 
 planted like a great park of artillery against us. 
 They have incorporated wealth; they have hidden 
 behind banks; they have concealed themselves be- 
 hind currency; they have sheltered themselves in 
 taxation ; they have passed rules to govern us — 
 and we will improve upon the lesson they have 
 taught us. When they disarm, we will — not be- 
 fore!" 
 
STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 
 
 From 1840 to 1859 the whole anti-slav- 
 ery cause seemed to move in immitigable 
 gloom. Most of its advocates, including 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, had no hope that 
 in their time they should see chattel slavery 
 overthrown. While the Abolitionists were di- 
 vided and quarreling about woman suffrage and 
 political action, the united slave-holding inter- 
 ests swept from victory to victory, increasing 
 every year their hold upon the nation. They 
 dominated all branches of the government, most 
 of the courts, both of the great parties. Be- 
 tween the Whigs and the Democrats of that day 
 was only this difference, that the Democrats 
 went a little further in abject servility to the 
 Interests — an achievement by no means easy 
 and due to superior ability, not to surpassing 
 desire. 
 
 Yet all this time events and conditions were 
 at work unseen, shaping the nation's course to 
 
STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS bt> 
 
 the will of the Abolitionists. Beyond their 
 knowledge, beyond their dreaming, every impor- 
 tant event was reinforcing their appeals to the 
 conscience of the nation. 
 
 The great intellectual idol of the North and 
 most conspicuous Whig was Daniel Webster, 
 then a Senator from Massachusetts. Two gen- 
 erations of American school children have been 
 reared to reverence this man, though it would 
 puzzle any impartial observer to say why. 
 There was not one thing in his career that could 
 appeal to a reflective person as worthy of ad- 
 miration. He was, to be sure, of extraordinary 
 appearance, having deep, shaggy, overhanging 
 brows, a ponderous head and deep-set eyes 
 of a remarkable brilliancy, and it must be on 
 his looks alone that his fame is founded. He 
 was for many years the oratorical model of the 
 country and yet an analysis of his speeches, if 
 anyone to-day should make such a study, would 
 show chiefly a tawdry and an over-ornamented 
 rhetoric. He held high places but his public 
 papers never revealed any conception of pub- 
 lic duty beyond a cheap sort of patriotism. 
 His " Repl}^ to Haynes " has been declaimed by 
 a million school boys, and yet, stripped of the 
 halo of artificial glory that surrounds it, is but 
 sorry stuflf". In all his career he never dcvel- 
 
84 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 oped one idea of social service, never said one 
 word for the human cause, never furthered one 
 aim except his own advancement ; and yet for 
 some reason the North was possessed of an ir- 
 rational frenzy about him. For many years he 
 had cherished the common and fatal ambition 
 of the American statesman. He wished to be 
 President, and this ambition now served in a 
 singular way to bring about the sharper clash 
 between slave Interests and freemen that was 
 needed at this juncture to revive the Abolition 
 cause. 
 
 In 1850, the 348,214 slave-owners, being 
 made drunk with power, introduced in Congress 
 a fugitive slave law far more drastic and tyran- 
 nical than had ever before been conceived. It 
 not only transformed all government officers, 
 including postmasters and deputy marshals, 
 into slave-catchers, but provided a special set 
 of slave-catching commissioners, punished citi- 
 zens that hindered captures or helped escapes, 
 and rewarded those that returned a slave. 
 
 When this astounding measure reached the 
 Senate, all men turned to Webster to see what 
 he would do. Millions of men that liked not 
 Abolition heaved the gorge at being impressed 
 as man-catchers. These hoped Webster would 
 attack the bill. In the midst of a tense and 
 
STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 85 
 
 dramatic scene in the Senate chamber, March 
 7, 1850, while even his adversaries seemed sorry 
 to see his humihation, Webster sold himself for 
 the chance of the Presidency. He supported 
 the entire measure. 
 
 Against this wallowing in shame the masses 
 of the people at the North mentally revolted. 
 The official and social North congratulated the 
 man on his abject groveling, but " Ichabod," 
 Whittier's greatest poem, struck the real note 
 of popular thought and launched at the truck- 
 ler the scorn he had earned: 
 
 "So lost! So fallen! The light withdrawn 
 That once he bore; 
 The glory of his gray hairs gone 
 Forever more ! " 
 
 Revile him not, — the tempter hath 
 
 A snare for all; 
 And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath. 
 
 Befit his fall! 
 
 O, dumb be passion's stormy rage 
 
 When he who might 
 Have lighted up and led his age 
 
 Falls back in night. 
 
 Scorn ! Would the angels laugh to mark 
 
 A bright soul driven. 
 Fiend goaded, down the endless dark. 
 
 From hope and heaven! 
 
86 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Let not the land once proud of him 
 
 Insult him now 
 Nor brand with deeper shame his dim. 
 
 Dishonored brow. 
 
 But let its humbled sons instead 
 
 From sea to lake, 
 A long lament, as for the dead. 
 
 In sadness make. 
 
 Of all we loved and honored, naught 
 
 Save power remains, — 
 A fallen angel's pride of thought, 
 
 Still strong in chains. 
 
 All else is gone; from those great eyes 
 
 The soul has fled: 
 When faith is lost, when honor dies. 
 
 The man is dead ! 
 
 Then pay the reverence of old days 
 
 To his dead fame; 
 Walk backward with reverted gaze 
 
 And hide the shame! 
 
 " The man is dead ! " the poet said. He was 
 so, indeed, though few realized the fact. To 
 Phillips, who had long distrusted and despised 
 Webster, the event merely confirmed an old 
 judgment. After his custom he used it as a 
 text for the lessons he desired to enforce. At a 
 Faneuil Hall meeting, called to denounce the 
 Fugitive Slave law, he spoke in his most im- 
 pressive style. Later he returned to the sub- 
 
STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 87 
 
 ject in his Fraternity lecture called " Idols," 
 delivered in Boston on October 4, 1859, so 
 merciless and still so moving that it leaves the 
 reader almost breathless. It contains that fa- 
 mous excoriation of Rufus Choate still de- 
 claimed by school boys. 
 
 Since re^^olutionary days no other man in 
 Massachusetts had been held in such popular 
 regard as Webster, while Rufus Choate was the 
 leader of the Massachusetts bar and mentioned 
 with reverence by the ordinary citizen. To at- 
 tack these two men was a bold undertaking; it 
 was flying in the face of that accepted public 
 opinion that Phillips himself described as the 
 tyrant of the republic. Yet he knew perfectly 
 well upon what flimsy grounds such opinion 
 existed and he knew, too, that in these cases 
 the esteem in which the men was held was with- 
 out just warrant, since neither had ever done 
 one thing for that cause of man that alone is 
 of any importance in this world. Therefore in 
 " Idols " he spared not. Webster's statue had 
 recently been ordered to be placed in the State 
 House. That was the occasion for the present 
 oration and the explanation of its title. Here 
 is one extract : 
 
 The honors we grant mark how high we stand 
 and they educate the future. The men we honor 
 
88 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 and the maxims we lay down in measuring our 
 favorites show the levels and morals of the time. 
 Two men have been in every one's mouth of late 
 and men have exhausted themselves trying to pay 
 their admiration and their respect. The courts 
 have covered the grave of Mr. Choate with eulogy. 
 We are told that " he worked hard/' " he never 
 neglected his client," " he flung over the discus- 
 sions of the forum the grace of a rare scholar- 
 ship/* " no pressure or emergency ever stirred him 
 to an unkind word." A ripe scholar, a profound 
 lawyer, a faithful servant of his client, a gentle- 
 man. This is a good record, surely. May he 
 sleep in peace! What he earned, God grant he 
 may have! But the bar that seeks to claim for 
 such a one a place among great jurists must itself 
 be weak indeed; for this is only to make him out 
 the one-eyed monarch of the blind. Not one high- 
 moral trait specified; not one patriotic act men- 
 tioned; not one patriotic service claimed. Look 
 at Mr. Webster's idea of what a lawyer should 
 be in order to be called great, in the sketch he 
 drew of Jeremiah Mason, and notice what stress 
 he lays on the religious and moral elevation, and 
 the glorious and high purposes which crowned his 
 life ! Nothing of this now ! I forget. Mr. Hal- 
 lett did testify for Mr. Choate's religion. But the 
 law maxim is that a witness should be trusted only 
 in matters he understands, and the evidence there- 
 fore amounts to nothing. Incessant eulogy; but 
 not a word of one effort to lift the yoke of cruel 
 or unequal legislation from the neck of its vic- 
 tims; not one attempt to make the code of his 
 country wiser, purer, better; not one effort to 
 bless his times or breathe a higher moral purpose 
 into the community; not one blow struck for right 
 
STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 89 
 
 or for liberty while the battle of the giants was 
 going on about him; not one patriotic act to stir 
 the hearts of his idolators; not one public act of 
 any kind whatever about whose merit friend or 
 foe could even quarrel^, unless when he scouted 
 our great charter as a " glittering generality," or 
 jeered at the philanthropy which tried to prac- 
 tise the Sermon on the Mount. When Cordus, the 
 Roman senator, whom Tiberius murdered, was ad- 
 dressing his fellows he began : " Fathers, they 
 accuse me of illegal words; plain proof that there 
 are no illegal deeds with which to charge me." 
 So with these eulogies — words, nothing but words ; 
 plain proof there were no deeds to praise. 
 
 His final flaying of Choate will probably en- 
 dure so long as anything in oratorical literature 
 endures : 
 
 Yet this is the model which Massachusetts offers 
 to the Pantheon of the great jurists of the world! 
 
 Suppose we stood in that lofty temple of juris- 
 prudence, — on either side of us the statues of the 
 great lawyers of every age and clime, — and let 
 us see what part New England — Puritan, edu- 
 cated, free New England — would bear in the 
 pageant. Rome points to a colossal figure, and 
 says, " That is Papinian, who, when the Emperor 
 Caracalla murdered his own brother, and ordered 
 the lawyer to defend the deed, went cheerfully to 
 death, rather than sully his lips with the atrocious 
 plea; and that is Ulpian, who, aiding his prince 
 to put the army below the law, was massacred at 
 the foot of a weak, but virtuous throne." 
 
 And France stretches forth her grateful hands, 
 crying, " That is D'Aguesseau, worthy, when he 
 
90 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 went to face an enraged king, of the farewell his 
 wife addressed him — * Go ! forget that you have 
 a wife and children to ruin, and remember only 
 that you have France to save.' " 
 
 England says, " That is Coke, who flung the 
 laurels of eighty years in the face of the first 
 Stuart, in defence of the people. This is Selden, 
 on every book of whose library you saw written 
 the motto of which he lived worthy, ' Before every- 
 thing. Liberty ! ' That is Mansfield, silver-tongued, 
 who proclaimed. 
 
 Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs 
 Receive our air, that moment they are free.' 
 
 " This is Romilly, who spent life trying to make 
 law synonymous with justice, and succeeded in 
 making life and property safer in every city of 
 the empire. And that is Erskine, whose eloquence, 
 spite of Lord Eldon and George III, made it safe 
 to speak and to print." 
 
 Then New England shouts, " This is Choate, 
 who made it safe to murder; and of whose health 
 thieves asked before they began to steal." 
 
 Of Webster, Phillips said: 
 
 No man criticises when private friendship moulds 
 thfi loved form in 
 
 " Stone that breathes and struggles, 
 Or brass that seems to speak." 
 
 Let Mr. Webster's friends crowd their own halls 
 and grounds with his bust and statues. That is 
 no concern of ours. But when they ask the State 
 to join in doing him honor, then we claim the right 
 to express an opinion. . . . We cannot but remem- 
 
STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 91 
 
 ber that the character of the commonwealth is 
 shown by the character of those it crowns. A 
 brave old Englishman tells us the Greeks had offi- 
 cers who did pluck down statues if they exceeded 
 due symmetry and proportion. " We need such 
 now/' he adds, " to order monuments according 
 to men's merits." Indeed we do ! When I think 
 of the long term and wide reach of his influence, 
 and look at the subjects of his speeches, — the mere 
 shells of history, drum-and-trumpet declamation, 
 dry law, or selfish bickerings about trade, — when 
 I think of his bartering the hopes of four millions 
 of bondmen for the chances of his private ambi- 
 tion, I recall the criticism on Lord Eldon, — " No 
 man ever did his race so much good as Eldon pre- 
 vented." Again, when I remember the close of 
 his life spent in ridiculing the Anti-Slavery move- 
 ment as useless abstraction, moonshine, " mere 
 rub-a-dub agitation," because it did not minister 
 to trade and gain, methinks I seem to see written 
 all over his statue Tocqueville's conclusion from 
 his survey of French and American democracy, — 
 " The man who seeks freedom for anything but 
 freedom's self, is made to be a slave ! " 
 
 Edward Everett, who was to the slave-hold- 
 ing Interests of his day such a facile and knee- 
 crooking valet as many a United States Sena- 
 tor has been to the profit-gouging Interests 
 of our times, had delivered on Webster one of 
 those eulogies that produce mental nausea in 
 every healthy reader. Mr. Phillips deals with 
 Everett too, according to his deserts: 
 
92 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Blame me not that I again open the record, Mr. 
 Chairman. His injudicious friends will not let 
 him die. Indeed, the heavy yoke he laid on inno- 
 cent and friendless victims frets and curses them 
 yet too keenly to allow him to be forgotten. He 
 reaps only what he sowed. In the Talmud the 
 Jews have a story that Og, King of Bashan, lifted 
 once a great rock to hurl it on the armies of Judah. 
 God hollowed it in the middle, letting it slip over 
 the giant's neck, there to rest while he lived. This 
 man lifted the Fugitive Slave Bill to hurl it, as 
 at Syracuse, on the trembling and hunted slave, 
 and God has hung it like a mill-stone about his 
 neck for evermore. While the echoes of Everett's 
 periods still lingered in our streets, as I stood with 
 the fresh printed sheet of his eulogy in my hand, 
 there came to me a man, successful after eight 
 attempts in flying from bondage. Week after 
 week he had been in the woods, half-starved, seek- 
 ing in vain a shelter. For months he had pined 
 in dungeons, waiting the sullen steps of his mas- 
 ter. At last God blessed the eighth effort and he 
 stood in Boston on his glad way from the vulture 
 of the States to the safe refuge of English law. 
 He showed me his broad bosom scarred all over 
 with the branding iron, his back one mass of rec- 
 ords how often the lash had tortured him for his 
 noble efforts to get free. As I looked at him the 
 empty and lying eulogy dropped from my nerve- 
 less hand and I thanked God that statue and eulogy 
 both were only a horrid nightmare and that there 
 were still roofs in Boston, safe shelter for these 
 heroic children of God's right hand ! 
 
 The impression created by Webster's bargain 
 and the bill he supported did not wear off ; they 
 
STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 93 
 
 were of the order of things that men do not 
 easily forget. Slowly the people began to 
 awaken to the true nature of the power that 
 had subverted the Republic. The South, dis- 
 daining Webster's sacrifice, contemptuously re- 
 fused him the mess of pottage for which he had 
 bartered his soul. Disappointment and the 
 signs of popular disgust shortened his life. 
 President Fillmore rewarded him by making 
 him Secretary of State, but he died in two 
 years, and his place in the Senate was filled by 
 Charles Sumner, who from the same platform 
 in Faneuil Hall with Wendell Phillips and Fred- 
 erick Douglass, the Negro, had denounced Web- 
 ster for his surrender. Massachusetts had 
 taken the first forward step. 
 
 Upon every phase of these developments Phil- 
 lips kept watch, seeking to turn each to the ad- 
 vantage of his cause. The most singular thing 
 is that in all the darkest days of the movement 
 there is not in his speeches nor letters nor re- 
 corded comments one note of discouragement. 
 He seems to tower above average men, seeing 
 over their heads to the end of the road. To 
 him the failure of Abolition was unthinkable. 
 If men turned traitor or ceased from the fight, 
 so much the worse for them. When the North 
 cringed, Phillips jeered in its face. When the 
 
94 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 South threatened to secede, he cried, " Let it 
 go ! " Nothing could take liim by surprise or 
 find him unprepared. When audiences hissed 
 and threatened to lynch him, he flung back their 
 taunts and turned their ridicule upon them- 
 selves. He never flinched, never hesitated, 
 never modified his expressions, never made a con- 
 cession to hostile public sentiment, never lost 
 a chance to strike a blow, and was altogether 
 the most indomitable, irrepressible, and insist- 
 ent fighter in history. 
 
 At Cincinnati once in these days he was to 
 lecture before an audience, nine-tenths of which 
 would have been delighted to see him hanged. 
 He knew perfectly well what he faced, but with 
 unruffled composure he walked down the stage 
 and stood waiting for silence. When it came 
 he held up a single sheet of paper. All eyes 
 were now fixed upon him ; all men sat breath- 
 lessly watching. " If this sheet of paper," be- 
 gan Mr. Phillips in his dulcet tones, " were the 
 Constitution of the United States and I thought 
 it permanently protected the infamy of slave- 
 holding, I would tear it into pieces like this," 
 and he tore the paper into fragments and flung 
 them at his feet. With snarls and howls men 
 rushed over the foot-lights to seize him. Be- 
 
STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 95 
 
 fore they could reach him, friends from behind 
 had grasped him in their arms, hurled him into 
 a carriage at the stage door and whipped him 
 away to safety. 
 
 Again in Cincinnati some years later, a man 
 brought to the hall a bottle of vitriol intending 
 to throw it in Mr. Phillips's face. A great 
 paving stone was pitched at him from a gallery 
 box and crashed into the stage at his feet. 
 Often men came to his meetings with ropes in 
 their pockets to hang him. 
 
 And yet under the surface of things appar- 
 ently so untoward the seed sown by the Aboli- 
 tionists was bearing unsuspected fruit. Gar- 
 rison, Phillips and the others like them touched 
 the consciences of men; therein lay their 
 power. Every day the Abolitionist band, so 
 led and inspired, grew in numbers and activity. 
 Slowly righteous men regained their courage 
 as they gazed upon leaders that were without 
 fear. Among such men, as a compensation 
 for his usual experiences Phillips found some- 
 times a strength of love that must have warmed 
 his heart, and even among the indifferent or 
 the hostile was often an admission of his un- 
 matched oratory. As illustrating this and 
 also his power to interest and to please I may 
 
96 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 mention the fact, unique, I think, in the his- 
 tory of the American platform, that on one 
 visit to Cortland, New York, he was called 
 upon to deliver four lectures in twenty-six 
 hours. 
 
VI 
 
 JOHN BROWN AND HARPER'S FERRY 
 
 But to return to the events that swung 
 the nation behind the Abolitionists. Two 
 years after the passage of the Fugitive 
 Slave Law came " Uncle Tom's Cabin," 
 which focussed the country's attention upon the 
 essential immorality of slavery. The same 
 year the Whigs were annihilated in the Presi- 
 dential election and thoughtful men perceived 
 that a new party, based upon stronger opposi- 
 tion to the slave Interests, was inevitable. Yet 
 those Interests continued to walk their wild road 
 whither that led. In 1854 they passed the 
 Kansas and Nebraska bill, repealing the Mis- 
 souri Compromise and opening all the Terri- 
 tories to the advance of slavery. In the 
 same year they secured the arrest and indict- 
 ment of Mr. Phillips and Theodore Parker for 
 obstructing the enforcement of the Fugitive 
 Slave Law. On May 22, 1856, Preston S. 
 Brooks, a Representative from South Carolina, 
 97 
 
98 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 stole into the Senate Chamber, crept behind 
 Charles Sumner as he sat at his desk writing, 
 and beat him almost to death with a heavy cane 
 — for the sake of the cause of Profits. The 
 same year the Republican party was launched 
 with John C. Fremont as its President on a plat- 
 form frankly inimical to the slave oligarchy 
 and cast an ominously large vote. In 1857 
 the Supreme Court, controlled by the Interests, 
 handed down the Dred Scott decision, and Chief 
 Justice Taney therein advanced the doctrine 
 that " the black man has no rights that the 
 white man is bound to respect." Extraordi- 
 nary are the potentialities of a phrase ! To the 
 aroused conscience of the country, steadily ad- 
 dressed by the Abolitionists, this phrase struck 
 home with peculiar force. It was something 
 concrete and easily understandable; something 
 also that seemed to embody in a few words the 
 whole spirit of the slave-holding Interests. 
 Men that had no strong aversion to slavery and 
 detested the Abolitionists rejected the idea that 
 a Negro was something less than a horse or a 
 dog and began belatedly to perceive the irre- 
 pressible struggle. 
 
 The passage of the Kansas and Nebraska 
 bill and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise 
 were followed by civil war in Kansas. The 
 
question of slavery or freedom being left to the 
 people of that Territory, the slave Interests de- 
 termined to win it for slavery. To that end 
 they poured their adherents into Kansas, seized 
 the Territorial government, stuffed the ballot- 
 boxes, dispossessed the officers that had been 
 legally elected, and began everywhere to drive 
 out the anti-slavery element. In response 
 Free Soil champions preached a new crusade 
 that was assumed by thousands ; the contend- 
 ing forces met in desperate struggles that made 
 Kansas truly a dark and bloody ground: and 
 at last there appeared on the scene the com- 
 manding figure of John Brown. 
 
 We have no need to follow here all the de- 
 velopments of the story. When Kansas had 
 been made a Free State, Brown returned to the 
 East and began to meditate the enterprise that 
 culminated in Harper's Ferry. For their own 
 good reasons, doubtless, reactionary writers like 
 John Hay and Theodore Roosevelt have de- 
 scribed this as an insane freak and Brown him- 
 self as a half-mad fanatic. They overlook the 
 fact that Brown explained his plans and ideas 
 in the utmost detail to some of the ablest Aboli- 
 tionist leaders, and that cool-headed men like 
 Parker and Frank Sanborn, and men of peace 
 like Gerrit Smith, gave him their complete sup- 
 
100 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 port. His project failed, to be sure, and 
 Brown was hanged. Immediate success is the 
 only test the reactionary mind can apply to any- 
 thing. Brown made an armed movement into 
 the South; he was captured and hanged. 
 Therefore he was a madman. Minds of this 
 order cannot grasp the ideals of a man that 
 felt he would rather die protesting than live in 
 a State whose constitution sanctioned human 
 slavery. Elsewhere, liberty-lovers easily un- 
 derstood. To France, for instance, John 
 Brown became one of the world heroes. " That 
 ends slavery in America ! " said Victor Hugo, 
 when he heard of Brown's hanging. Few in 
 America saw the truth so clearly. 
 
 From all these developments Mr. Phillips 
 pointed anew his familiar insistence that until 
 slavery were abolished there could be neither 
 peace, security nor national righteousness. 
 As he had protested vehemently against the 
 Mexican war, calling it a wicked device to en- 
 large the slave territory, so in successive 
 speeches he entered separate protests against 
 the Kansas and Nebraska bill, against the as- 
 sault upon Sumner and the applause that 
 greeted the assault, against the Dred Scott 
 decision, against the attempt to seize Kansas 
 
101 
 
 for slavery, against the trial of John Brown, 
 and now against his hanging. 
 
 This was one of his historic utterances. It 
 was delivered in Henry Ward Beecher's Ply- 
 mouth Church, Brooklyn. To speak as Phil- 
 lips spoke then required a high order of moral 
 courage. The cherished hope of the slave- 
 holders was that they could implicate Phillips 
 in Brown's plot, have him indicted as accessory, 
 and thus get him into slave-holding territory 
 where he could be hanged. His house was 
 watched, he was dogged by detectives and there 
 was a likelihood that his papers would be seized 
 and examined. Entirely undismayed by all 
 these conditions, Mr. Phillips openly avowed 
 his complete sympathy with Brown's attempt. 
 
 People do me the honor to say, in some of the 
 Western papers, that this is traceable to some 
 teachings of mine. It is too much honor to such 
 as me. Gladly, if it were not fulsome vanity, 
 would I clutch this laurel of having any share 
 in the great resolute daring of that man who flung 
 himself against an empire in behalf of justice and 
 liberty. They were not the bravest men who 
 fought at Saratoga and Yorktown in the war of 
 1776. O no ! It was rather those who flung 
 themselves at Lexington, few and feeble, against 
 the embattled ranks of an empire, till then thought 
 irresistible. . . . 
 
 "Commonwealth of Virginia!" There is no 
 
102 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 such tiling. Lawless, brutal force is no basis of 
 a government, in the true sense of that word. No 
 civil society, no government, can exist except on 
 the basis of the willing submission of all its citi- 
 zens and by the performance of the duty of ren- 
 dering equal justice between man and man. 
 
 Whatever calls itself a government, and refuses 
 that duty, or has not that assent, is no govern- 
 ment. It is only a pirate ship. Virginia — the 
 Commonwealth of Virginia ! She is only a chronic 
 insurrection. I mean exactly what I say. I am 
 weighing my words now. She is a pirate ship and 
 John Brown sails the sea, a lord high admiral of 
 the Almighty with his commission to sink every 
 pirate he meets on God's ocean of the Nineteenth 
 Century. I mean literally and exactly what I say. 
 In God's world there are no majorities, no minori- 
 ties; one on God's side is a majority. . . . John 
 Brown has twice as much right to hang Governor 
 Wise as Governor Wise has to hang him. . . . 
 
 But John Brown violated the law. Yes. On 
 yonder desk lie the inspired words of men who 
 died violent deaths for breaking the laws of 
 Rome. Why do you listen to them so reverently? 
 Huss and WicklifFe violated laws; why honor 
 them? George Washington, had he been caught 
 before 1783, would have died on the gibbet for 
 breaking the laws of his sovereign. Yet I have 
 heard that man praised within six months. Yes, 
 you say, but these men broke bad laws. Just so. 
 It is honorable, then, to break bad laws and such 
 law-breaking history loves and God blesses ! Who 
 says, then, that slave-laws are not ten thousand 
 times worse than any these men resisted? What- 
 ever argument excuses them makes John Brown 
 a saint. 
 
JOHN BROWN AND HARPEr's FERRY 103 
 
 The next day after that portentous tragedy 
 at Charlestown he went to New York and ac- 
 companied the body to North Elba, Brown's old 
 home, where it was to be buried. It was he that 
 pronounced the funeral oration, most moving of 
 all his addresses, most moving of all memorial 
 addresses in the language. Its closing words 
 will live in the memory of every person that 
 ever read them, when after reviewing Brown's 
 heroism and sacrifice he said: 
 
 God make us all worthier of him whose dust 
 we lay among these hills he loved. Here he girded 
 himself and went forth to battle. Fuller success 
 than his heart ever dreamed God granted him. 
 He sleeps in the blessings of the crushed and the 
 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. 
 
 The next year, 1860, saw the prearranged 
 division of the Democratic party, the election 
 of Lincoln and the birth of the Southern Con- 
 federacy. At first Mr. Phillips thought that 
 to allow the seceding States to depart would 
 be better than to try to detain them with force. 
 Their absence would at least clear from what 
 Avas left of the Union the stain of slavery, and 
 he believed it would in time work out the 
 death of the institution even in the South it- 
 self. Most persons at the North, frightened at 
 
104 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 the prospect, favored every concession that 
 would induce the Southern States to remain. 
 In Massachusetts a very strong movement was 
 under way to repeal the Personal Liberty Act, 
 of which Mr. Phillips was one of the authors, 
 because it had given offense to the slave Inter- 
 ests. At Washington a bill, supported if not 
 actually drawn by Lincoln himself, was intro- 
 duced to prohibit any agitation of the question 
 of slavery. 
 
 On December 2, 1860, Phillips was an- 
 nounced to speak in Tremont Temple against 
 slavery. The Interests induced the mayor to 
 close the hall against him. Phillips repaired 
 to the colored people's church in Belknap 
 Street, and delivered his address there. The 
 rioters attempted to seize him but his friends 
 hurried him out of the rear entrance toward 
 his home. Before he reached Essex Street the 
 mob had discovered him and poured across the 
 Common in pursuit. A bodyguard of young 
 men protected him, marching in a circle with 
 locked arms about him until he reached his 
 house. 
 
 Theodore Parker, the Abolitionist preacher 
 of Boston, was now dead and Mr. Phillips some- 
 times supplied his pulpit. Two weeks after the 
 Belknap Street riot Mr. Phillips delivered an- 
 
other anti-slavery speech in Parker's pulpit. 
 Again the mob was there, attempting first to 
 break up the meeting and then to lynch the 
 speaker, and again he was protected to his 
 home by his volunteer body guard. I take 
 pleasure in noting that this was composed of 
 German Turners. The Turn Verein had heard 
 of the attempt to throttle free speech and had 
 resolved to defend its champion, and for weeks 
 members of the Verein mounted guard day and 
 night over the Phillips house. 
 
 On January 20, he spoke again from Par- 
 ker's pulpit and the previous scenes were re- 
 peated, except that the mob was larger, more 
 determined and more blood-thirsty. It was 
 necessary for the police, who had hitherto been 
 held off by the pro-slavery mayor, to assist the 
 Turners, and one of the policemen subsequently 
 testified to the difficulty with which Mr. Phil- 
 lips's life was saved. 
 
 Yet on each of these occasions he appeared 
 to be above fear, spoke with all of his old time 
 fire and effectiveness, and declared his position 
 unequivocally. On February 17, he spoke 
 again from Parker's pulpit on " Progress " and 
 again a phalanx of friends of free speech must 
 be drawn about him as a bulwark. But as he 
 spoke on, men that had come resolved to hang 
 
106 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 him listened to his words, launched in that mar- 
 velous voice ; gradually they forgot their pas- 
 sions ; at last conquered in spite of their preju- 
 dices, they joined with the rest of the audience 
 in tumultuous applause. 
 
 The war came, and in the presence of the 
 national crisis Mr. Phillips resumed his duties 
 as an American citizen, fervently supported the 
 Union, and used his eloquence to further en- 
 listments and to encourage the nation in those 
 trying hours. He did not like Lincoln and did 
 not trust him, believing him to be a politician 
 and an opportunist Avithout convictions against 
 slavery. He was repelled by Lincoln's declara- 
 tion that he would save the Union with slavery 
 if he could and without slavery if he must ; by 
 his endorsement of the Fugitive Slave Law and 
 attempts to enforce it in the first part of the 
 war ; by the long postponement of emancipation, 
 and by the earlier conduct of the war upon rea- 
 sons of political tactics. On these matters he 
 freely criticized the administration while he sup- 
 ported it. But when Abraham Lincoln was as- 
 sassinated the most eloquent tribute to his good 
 qualities came from the lips of Wendell Phillips 
 in the memorial address of April 28, 1865, de- 
 livered at Tremont Temple. " These are sober 
 days," began Mr. Phillips. " The judgments 
 
of God have found us out," and he proceeded 
 to show that the barbarism of slavery had 
 echoed in the barbarism of assassination, and in 
 this way we were paying our penalty for our 
 long indifference to a national sin. " And 
 what of him," he said, " in whose precious blood 
 this momentous lesson is writ? He sleeps in 
 the blessings of the poor, whose fetters God 
 commissioned him to break." 
 
 The terrible event turned the joy of the 
 Abolitionists to mourning. Yet their thirty 
 years' war had ended in triumph ; their cause 
 was won. Five days before Lincoln fell, the 
 flag had been restored upon Fort Sumter in the 
 harbor of Charleston, against which the first 
 shot of the Rebellion had been fired. A dis- 
 tinguished company of public men attended the 
 ceremony ; Henry Ward Beecher w as the orator 
 of the day, Henry Wilson, Judge Holt and 
 George Thompson of England were there. So 
 was one other man. Thirty years before, he 
 had been dragged through the streets of Bos- 
 ton to be hanged for preaching the abolition of 
 slavery ; now with slavery abolished he stood 
 the nation's honored guest at the ceremonies 
 that marked the end of the long struggle. 
 What must have been the emotions that day of 
 William Lloyd Garrison! 
 
108 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 And jet the satisfaction that belongs to these 
 thoughts is dimmed, it must be admitted, in 
 anyone that stops to consider the present state 
 of the people that with such a staggering ex- 
 penditure of blood and treasure were set free. 
 
 Chattel slavery was abolished; the deadly 
 clutch of 35 per cent, profit was taken from 
 the throats of the colored race; but the day of 
 justice and reparation for which Phillips and 
 Garrison labored is still put afar off by sur- 
 viving feudalism and surviving savagery. If 
 the men that at such risk of life and with such 
 sacrifices agitated for freedom could return 
 now to see the extent to which their work has 
 been nullified in the South they might ques- 
 tion whether much of it had not been in vain. 
 Certainly a condition in which Americans of 
 dark complexion are denied because of that 
 complexion the rights guaranteed by the Con- 
 stitution, the protection of the laws, the ordi- 
 nary operations of justice, the place of citi- 
 zens, the commonest considerations of human- 
 ity, is a condition of which the old self-sacri- 
 ficing Abolitionists never dreamed and no 
 thoughtful American at the close of the war 
 would have thought possible. Who, for in- 
 stance, would have thought that in seven states 
 of the Union the Constitution would be openly 
 
abolished to gratify a mere racial prejudice or 
 that we should ever see a condition of helotage 
 legally established for millions of our fellow 
 Americans? Who would have thought that 
 such things could be done without a protest 
 from the regions that produced the Garrisons, 
 Phillipses, Browns, Gerrit Smiths, Stevenses 
 and the rest that thundered against the other 
 kind of slavery? And who can reflect upon 
 these conditions and avoid the thought that 
 there is as urgent need now of a Phillips and a 
 Garrison as there was in 1833? 
 
 What Wendell Phillips would have thought, 
 for instance, of the " Jim Crow car," that 
 hideous disgrace to our civilization, we know 
 well enough from the testimony of Frederick 
 Douglass. Before the war the steamboats on 
 Long Island Sound and elsewhere in the North 
 would not allow a colored person to travel 
 otherwise than as a " deck " or steerage pas- 
 senger, which is to say that colored persons 
 were not allowed a place to sleep. Phillips 
 knew this and whenever he was on the same boat 
 with Douglass he would leave his own cabin 
 and spend the night on the forward deck with 
 the great colored man, walking to and fro in 
 conversation. He felt that so long as such 
 savage regulations existed he had no right to 
 
110 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 a greater luxury than was allowed to his 
 brother of darker skin. 
 
 We may know well enough, therefore, that 
 if the life of Mr. Phillips had been prolonged, 
 neither the barbarous " Jim Crow " laws nor 
 the laws that nullify the Constitution and de- 
 prive the colored American of his rights would 
 have been passed without at least one vehe- 
 ment protest. 
 
 It is certain, too, that he would have real- 
 ized the true underlying causes for a condition 
 in which 10,000,000 people are the victims of 
 such wrong and injustice. He would have 
 seen that aside from the natural snobbishness 
 of a certain American element and the rancors 
 left by the war, the true origin of these perse- 
 cutions was solely economic. He would have 
 seen that the hatred felt at the South against 
 the Negro was like the hatred once felt in Cali- 
 fornia against the Chinese and sprang from the 
 same poisonous competitive system that is the 
 origin of nine-tenths of the ills of society. 
 Colored laborers were in competition with 
 white laborers ; under the existing system all 
 laborers are harassed with the idea that there 
 is not enough work for all. In such conditions 
 every dollar earned by a colored man was 
 deemed a dollar taken from a white man. 
 
Ill 
 
 Therefore the white laborer, imbued with the 
 belief, surviving from slavery days, that he was 
 the higher intelligence and of the greater de- 
 serving, was determined to abolish that com- 
 petition and keep the colored man " in his 
 place," which according to these authorities is 
 either to be an uncomplaining* and hopeless 
 drudge for white men or else to lie in the grave, 
 I never could quite make out which. 
 
 Wendell Phillips would have perceived, too, 
 the cowardice of the persons that understand 
 well enough the perils of these conditions and 
 fear to speak of them, pushing all aside with 
 the hollow pretense that " the question ought 
 to be left to the South, which best understands 
 the Negro." He would have scorned the men 
 that sit in the United States Senate and see 
 this monstrous system of injustice carried to 
 its limits and utter no word of protest. He 
 would have perceived the fraudulent nature of 
 the argument that the Negro is incapable of 
 anything better than a meniaPs position in 
 life. He would know the great truth and in- 
 sist upon it that the color of a man's skin has 
 nothing to do with either his character or his 
 abilities; that there is no such thing in all this 
 world as a racial difference great enough to 
 take cognizance of; that men are everywhere 
 
112 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 about the same ; that all so-called " races " if 
 endowed with about the same opportunities will 
 make about the same progress ; that progress 
 is a matter of opportunity and liberty, not of 
 complexion. He would have seen, too, how 
 hypocritical is the assertion that the Negro 
 in America is centuries behind the white man, 
 for he knew that the moment the Negro secured 
 an equal opportunity with the white man the 
 Negro's achievements were at least as great. 
 
 All these things he felt not merely because 
 he believed in democracy and equality as the 
 basic creed of his religion but because he was 
 accustomed to disregard hysteria and conven- 
 tional clamor and to learn for himself the truth. 
 Science in our day has shattered the last pre- 
 tense that there is any such thing in this world 
 as a separate race, establishing as a scientific 
 fact the universal brotherhood that Christ 
 taught. Phillips, in advance of his time, saw 
 this when even other Abolitionists were be- 
 fogged about the " sons of Ham " and other 
 nonsense. He, therefore, was the one man of 
 his day able to recite properly the wonderful 
 story of Toussaint I'Ouverture, that man of 
 unmixed African descent whose genius as a 
 military commander, statesman and law-giver 
 compelled the admiration of all Europe and re- 
 
113 
 
 mains conspicuous among a thousand other 
 illustrations that disprove the inferiority of 
 the Negro or of any other race. Through this 
 marvelous appreciation of one of the greatest 
 men that ever lived shines this prophetic belief 
 in the day to be when the world will see that all 
 men are what environment, opportunity, lib- 
 erty or bondage, poverty or sufficiency, has 
 made them. 
 
VII 
 
 THE MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR 
 LABOR 
 
 The war was over; the once hated 
 Abolitionists became the idols of the na- 
 tion; men saw now that through all the thirty 
 years of preparatory agitation, the cause sup- 
 ported by a fugitive handful had been, in fact, 
 an eternal verity; the name, once a badge of 
 shame, became a sign of honor. 
 
 In this great but quite natural transforma- 
 tion, Mr. Phillips was for a few months, the 
 most conspicuous figure ; even with the war 
 heroes he divided the popular acclaim. The 
 man that had been everywhere discredited as 
 a liar and a fomentor of dissension attained 
 of a sudden to a degree of respectability that 
 would have unsettled one of smaller faith. In 
 1865 and 1866 his audience and following were 
 beyond those of any other man in the country. 
 Whatever he said was repeated and accepted; 
 
 he was overwhelmed with invitations to speak; 
 114 
 
MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 115 
 
 on platforms, where, a few years before, his 
 life had been in peril of murderous mobs, he 
 spoke now to applauding thousands. For a 
 time he was the incomparable favorite in the 
 lecture courses ; he was offered twenty times the 
 engagements he could fill. 
 
 Before so great a popularity the doors of 
 political preferment swung open. What office 
 did he wish? Any place was at his choice. 
 Would he go to Congress? Would he be 
 Governor? Nominations were thrust before 
 him where nomination meant election and elec- 
 tion meant a long career in the public service. 
 
 We know now that at least one of these op- 
 portunities had for him a strong allurement. 
 The Senate was very attractive to him ; he liked 
 its dignity and its opportunity to affect na- 
 tional policies. Yet, without hesitation, he put 
 from him every temptation from the one path 
 he had chosen for his feet, knowing well the ar- 
 duous nature of the work ahead and looking 
 forward to the time, when, because of that work, 
 he should once more be hated. 
 
 It was, in fact, the second great turning 
 point in his career; the most important chap- 
 ter was just beginning. As no man ever does 
 anything for but one reason, so, I suppose, in- 
 spiration itself is not single and indivisible. 
 
116 THE STORY OF WENDELI. PHILLIPS 
 
 To his great services and sacrifices in the anti- 
 slavery cause, Mr. Phillips was first impelled 
 by his fervent faith in democracy, his sense of 
 justice and his human sympathies. But after 
 a time he saw in it something else, whereof the 
 vision was not possessed by his fellows, and it 
 was this broader view that presently wrought 
 his downfall as the idol of the hour. 
 
 While his popularity and prestige endured 
 he used all on the side of the Negro. From the 
 war struggle the nation passed to the recon- 
 struction struggle; a story not exhilarating to 
 the patriot that reads of it. To preserve for 
 the Negro in peace what had been won for him 
 in war demanded no less skill, determination and 
 steady fighting. 
 
 Andrew Johnson, the friend of the former 
 slave-holders, was now President and under his 
 protection and encouragement the old slave 
 oligarchy hoped to rise again. This is a fact 
 commonly obscured or omitted in history, and 
 yet the record of it is indubitable. Johnson 
 was at heart a pro-slavery man and always had 
 been. He had been chosen by Lincoln for the 
 nomination for vice-president, and the country 
 was now reaping a bitter harvest for that blun- 
 der. Johnson came from Tennessee, where he 
 was one of those extremely doubtful persons, a 
 
MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 117 
 
 " favorite son." Anybody that knew anything 
 about him knew that he was unfitted to be thrust 
 into the second place in the government, but 
 Lincohi was determined to have him there be- 
 cause of his supposed influence in the " border 
 states " about which was much concern in the 
 minds of the politijcians. The fact that he 
 had no convictions against slavery naturally 
 weighed but little in the mind of Lincoln, whose 
 environment and training had been such as 
 largely to obscure this point. 
 
 When Johnson took ofl^ce his first idea was 
 to bring back the revolted states on the same 
 basis on which they had existed in the Union 
 previous to secession. The late slave-holders 
 joyfully accepted this proposition and began 
 to pass laws that virtually re-established slav- 
 ery and would return the country to the con- 
 dition it was in before the war. To prevent a 
 catastrophe so tremendous called for the best 
 leadership of the North, and the man that did 
 most to preserve the hard-won fruits of liberty 
 was Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, now 
 almost forgotten except by those that care for 
 history as it really is and not as it is pretended. 
 
 Stevens, Phillips and Charles Sumner, and 
 after them Ben Wade, Henry Wilson and 
 Schuyler Colfax, were the leaders of the ele- 
 
118 THE STOEY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 ment that insisted upon enfranchisement and 
 equal rights regardless of color. Nothing 
 short of complete democracy would content the 
 man to whom democracy was a religion. The 
 opposition was led by President Johnson, who 
 became the center of fierce dissension in the 
 party that had elected him, and the target of 
 some of Phillips's most bitter and acrid sar- 
 casm. 
 
 The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth 
 amendments to the Constitution establishing 
 equal rights represented the victory of the rad- 
 ical element after years of controversy. 
 
 At the outset Phillips had come to the part- 
 ing of the ways with Garrison. The end of 
 the war showed an irreconsilable difference be- 
 tween them. Garrison held that the work of 
 the Abolitionists had ended ; Phillips said it had 
 just begun. Garrison wished to disband the 
 American Anti-Slavery Society; Phillips in- 
 sisted that its functions were never greater nor 
 more important. At the annual meeting in 
 1865 the clash came. Garrison moved to dis- 
 band; Phillips strongly opposed the motion. 
 On the vote Phillips had a large majority and 
 Garrison practically withdrew from the move- 
 ment. Thereafter, the chief burden, including 
 the support of the Standard^ the society's or- 
 
MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 119 
 
 gan, fell upon the shoulders and purse of 
 Phillips. 
 
 The two men never lost their respect for each 
 other, but their temperamental differences were 
 so strong that probably only the great bond 
 of their mutual affection had previously kept 
 them together. Garrison was a humanitarian, 
 Phillips a militant democrat. Besides, Garri- 
 son was the elder and had suffered the more 
 from the terrible strain of thirty-five years of 
 fighting; his nature was to seek peace and pur- 
 sue it. He was, in fact, one of gentle and stu- 
 dent-like inclinings, driven into battle by the 
 sheer fervor of an overmastering faith. One 
 may surmise that with infinite relief he hailed 
 the end of strife. We are also to consider that 
 the intensity of his feeling against slavery had 
 not only worn him down, but at the same time 
 had circumscribed his view ; for such is commonly 
 the effect of a cause upon its pioneers and those 
 whom it exclusively possesses. 
 
 With Phillips the case was very different, and 
 here we return upon that one thing that he saw 
 and the others failed to see. He had long un- 
 derstood that the foundations of the slavery 
 question were much broader than the surface in- 
 dications, for he alone of the Abolitionist lead- 
 ers saw the economic origin of the issue. To 
 
120 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 his mind, the slavery question was a lahor ques- 
 tion, and it was but one part of a still greater 
 labor question that must be settled if society 
 was to endure. He alone perceived that the 
 abolition of African slavery was only one 
 gained battle in a long warfare; he wanted to 
 go on with the rest. Wage slaver}^ was as truly 
 slavery as chattel slavery and as much a thing 
 to be abolished. Nevertheless, there was this 
 difference, that, whereas chattel slaver\' was 
 confined to a few regions in a few countries, 
 wage slavery was universal; and while chattel 
 slavery involved some millions, wage slavery in- 
 volved and degraded the entire working class 
 of the world. 
 
 In other words he had been thinking along 
 economic lines and obtaining economic enlight- 
 enment ; an achievement that alone would dis- 
 tinguish him as far in advance of his times. 
 
 He looked out upon the world and saw that 
 everywhere the toilers, who were the sole crea- 
 tors of wealth, were the bottom of the social 
 structure. They created wealth for other men 
 to enjoy, but of the wealth the\^ created the^" 
 obtained veiy little for themselves. In conse- 
 quence of this arrangement, steadily becom- 
 ing more oppressive to them, they lived in in- 
 suificiencv and under conditions that made 
 
MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 121 
 
 health, intelligence and progress impossible 
 among them. He saw that the population 
 thus injuriously affected was in every country 
 the majority; that as their economic condi- 
 tion declined, the national vigor would be low- 
 ered; that the chattel slavery against which 
 the Abolitionists warred was only one result 
 of a system that less frankly enslaved work- 
 ing men everywhere. This was the system the 
 Abolitionists really attacked when they made 
 war on chattel slavery, and against this sys- 
 tem he was resolved to continue to fight. 
 
 He had also in another way a clear view of 
 things as they were in his time, and as they 
 were to be after him. Nothing about this re- 
 markable man was more wonderful than his pre- 
 vision, in which he far surpassed any other man 
 that my reading has encountered. We think it 
 an achievement that Napoleon should have pre- 
 dicted the fate of Great Britain in South Africa 
 and our naval war of 1812, but these seem 
 small feats of prophecy compared with some 
 that are recorded of Phillips. With substan- 
 tial accuracy and equal facility he could fore- 
 tell the course of any political movement or eco- 
 nomic development, predict the path of national 
 evolution or prophesy about inventions. He 
 foretold wireless telegraphy and aviation with 
 
12S THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 as much certainty as the outcome of the Civil 
 War or the ruin of President Johnson. In the 
 midst of the anxious battle against African 
 slavery, he foresaw the steady arising of the 
 far greater struggle in behalf of all labor, and 
 at the same time, the developing threat of the 
 money power, the growth of the lawless great 
 corporation and the approach of their control 
 of the Government. 
 
 So with the same courage that he had shown 
 when in 1837 he took his place with the hated 
 Abolitionists, and in the same spirit of unselfish 
 consecration to a great cause, he committed 
 himself to the agitation for justice to labor, then 
 beginning in a despised way to make itself 
 faintly heard. It was, in a sense, a more des- 
 perate step than the other, since in the common 
 view of the bourgeoisie, if the Abolitionists had 
 been mad fanatics the labor agitators were the 
 lowest dregs of humanity. But so early as No- 
 vember 2, 1865, Phillips took his way to a labor 
 meeting in Faneuil Hall and made a speech in 
 which he unequivocally declared himself in the 
 first notable utterance in this country in favor 
 of an eight-hour day. He said: 
 
 It is twenty-nine years this month since I first 
 stood on the platform of Faneuil Hall to address 
 an audience of the citizens of Boston. I felt then 
 
MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 123 
 
 that I was speaking for the cause of the laboring 
 men, and if to-night I should make the last speech 
 of my life, I would be glad that it should be in 
 the same strain, — for laboring men and their 
 rights. 
 
 The labor of these twenty-nine years has been 
 in behalf of a race bought and sold. The South 
 did not rest its system wholly on this claim to own 
 its laborers; but according to Chancellor Harper, 
 Alexander H. Stevens, Governor Pickens and John 
 C. Calhoun, asserted that the laborer must neces- 
 sarily be owned by capitalists or individuals. That 
 struggle for the ownership of labor is now some- 
 where near its end; and we fitly commence a 
 struggle to define and to arrange the true rela- 
 tions of capital and labor. 
 
 To-day one of your sons is born. He lies in 
 his cradle as the child of a man without means, 
 with a little education and with less leisure. The 
 favored child of the capitalist is borne up by every 
 circumstance as on the eagle's wings. The prob- 
 lem of to-day is how to make the chances of the 
 two as equal as possible; and before this movement 
 stops, every child born in America must have an 
 equal chance in life. 
 
 Eight hours for labor, eight hours for sleep, 
 eight hours to be the worker's own, was Mr. 
 Phillips's view of the next great reform. I 
 have no idea why America is so backward about 
 these things. The eight-hour movement, so 
 very young then in the United States, was old 
 elsewhere. In front of the Parliament House 
 at Melbourne, AustraHa, you will find a hand- 
 
124< THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 some monument to commemorate the adoption 
 by Australia of this humane proposal. That 
 monument had become a familiar sight to Mel- 
 bourne, long before the eight-hour principle was 
 widely recognized in the United States, a fact 
 that may afford us another measure of Mr. Phil- 
 lips's far advance upon his contemporaries. 
 
 " You must imitate the tenacity of the Aboli- 
 tionists in adherence to a single issue," he went 
 on. " A political movement saying, ' We will 
 have our rights ' is a mass meeting in perpetual 
 session. Filtered through the ballot box comes 
 the will of the people and statesmen bow to it. 
 Go home and say that the working men of Mas- 
 sachusetts are a unit and that they mean to 
 stereotype their purposes on the statute-book." 
 
 Such words fell like a cold douche upon thou- 
 sands of men more than willing to make Phillips 
 their hero. At first some of these tried to ex- 
 cuse the eccentricity by assuming that Phillips 
 had now in mind a career in politics, and re- 
 membering that to flatter the groundlings was 
 always permissible or even laudable in one cher- 
 ishing such an ambition. The groundlings had 
 votes and it was practical politics to make 
 promises to them and fool them to the top of 
 their bent. All candidates did so; it was part 
 of the game; but of course one was not obliged 
 
MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 125 
 
 to remember such promises when one got into 
 office. 
 
 But when Mr. Phillips calmly put aside every 
 proffer of office and went his way Insisting upon 
 the issues he deemed important, caring not the 
 least for popularity, his recent adherents fell 
 rapidly away. For some reason not easy to 
 understand in a democracy, any recognition of 
 the essential rights of labor has always been 
 particularly offensive to a certain part of the 
 American public. In a few years, Phillips, for 
 the sake of his position on labor, and for no 
 other reason, was back again In his old situa- 
 tion ; he was facing hatred and incessant attack 
 In front, while behind him was a thin rank of 
 half-hearted support. 
 
 In at least one aspect of his development the 
 philosophical might find abundant subject for 
 reflection. In plain speech. It was the old as- 
 sailant under a new name; thereby abundantly 
 illustrating the fact that names change and the 
 forms of issues, but at heart the contest remains 
 from generation to generation about the same. 
 When, before the war, he denounced chattel 
 slavery, he was assailed by the slaveholding In- 
 terests of the South; when, after the war, he 
 threatened wage-slavery, he was assailed by the 
 financial and manufacturing Interests of the 
 
126 THE STOBY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 North. In both instances, the impulse of the 
 hatred that descended upon him was identical. 
 He threatened somebody's profits by threaten- 
 ing an existing system that bulwarked those 
 profits. That is all, and that is the reason why 
 Southern fire-eaters offered a price for his head ; 
 why mobs came with ropes to hang him ; why a 
 score of times he narrowly escaped with his life. 
 Similarly, that alone was the reason why, at 
 this place in his story, he became to a certain 
 class the worst hated man in the United States. 
 The frank Southerner of the slave-ow^ning In- 
 terests desired to have him killed; the colder 
 Northerner of other Interests ostracised him 
 while he lived and exulted when he died. The 
 difference does not seem remarkable. If the 
 feeling of the Southern Interests seems to have 
 been the more intense, we are to remember that 
 the imperiled profits of the Southern Interests 
 were correspondingly the greater. 
 
 Yet, the man that was thus hated with such 
 an excess of passion was not one that in him- 
 self would win anything but applause from the 
 honest and sincere. In his private walk he was 
 kindly, generous, sympathetic and reasonable. 
 The Southerners were long taught to regard 
 him as their worst enemy ; he was, in fact, their 
 best friend, striving to remove from them and 
 
MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 127 
 
 from the country the evil that made us a scan- 
 dal among nations and infinitely retarded the 
 progress of the South. He never made the 
 error of confounding men with the conditions 
 that impel them to objectionable action. What 
 he desired was to change the conditions. 
 
 He kept his purse drained for private char- 
 ity and in behalf of the causes that he sup- 
 ported, filling it with proceeds from his lectures 
 and emptying it again. No applicant for re- 
 lief departed from him without assistance. 
 After his death there came to light a thousand 
 instances of his unostentatious generosity. A 
 Southern woman whose family had been ruined 
 by the war, was living in Boston by precarious 
 returns from lectures. One morning Phillips 
 was returning from a Massachusetts town 
 where he had lectured the night before, and 
 found this lady on the same train. He invited 
 her to a seat beside him and led her to reveal 
 to him something of her troubles. He inquired 
 how much she received for each lecture. 
 
 " Five dollars," said she, " and I am glad to 
 get that." 
 
 " It is not enough," said Mr. Phillips. " I 
 get $100 or $200 and I give only opinions while 
 you give information. You must allow me to 
 divide my fee with you," and he finally per- 
 
128 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 suaded her to let him put into her purse a roll 
 of bills. When she arrived at home and exam- 
 ined the money she found that it was one hun- 
 dred dollars. 
 
 This lady is said to have been a niece of Jef- 
 ferson Davis. Ten years before she would 
 probably have heard with pleasure that Wen- 
 dell Phillips, the damned Abolitionist, had been 
 lynched, because he was trying to interfere with 
 the profits of the slave-owners. In the car 
 with her that morning rode men that scowled 
 with no less hatred upon Wendell Phillips, the 
 damned labor agitator, because he was trying 
 to interfere with the profits of the labor ex- 
 ploiters. It would puzzle the ordinary mind to 
 detect the essential difference. 
 
 Mr. Everett O. Foss, a prominent citizen 
 of Dover, New Hampshire, supplies mc with 
 this anecdote, not before printed. 
 
 Mr. Foss was an ardent admirer of Phil- 
 lips and undertook, on his own responsibility, 
 when he was a very young man, to have his idol 
 deliver a lecture in Dover. The town was 
 deluged with a terrific storm that night and 
 only one person appeared at the hall. Instead 
 of lecturing, Mr. Phillips invited Mr. Foss 
 across the street to the old American House, 
 where he ordered a pot of tea, his favorite bev- 
 
MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 1^9 
 
 erage, and sat and talked until late into the 
 night. It was a wonderful strain of speech 
 that Mr. Foss was privileged to hear; Phil- 
 lips seemed to have read everything and to 
 have been everywhere, and he went lightly over 
 and through all the topics of the day, illumin- 
 ating each with a wealth of illustrations, facts, 
 epigrams, views, stories and quotations, such 
 as probably no other man then alive could have 
 given. 
 
 Later Mr. Foss induced Phillips to return 
 to Dover and again attempt a lecture. For 
 some reason it was poorly attended, but Mr. 
 Phillips spoke with his accustomed force and 
 brilliancy, for the size of his audience never 
 made any difference to him. After he had 
 made an end, he and Foss once more adjourned 
 to the hotel and tea. 
 
 " Mr. Foss," said Phillips, suddenly, " how 
 much have you lost on this lecture engage- 
 ment ? " 
 
 Mr. Foss tried to evade the subject, but 
 Phillips persisted until the young man named 
 the approximate amount. 
 
 " You must let me share it," said Phillips, 
 and produced bills to half the amount, which 
 he insisted, and would not be denied, that Mr. 
 Foss sihould accept. They drank their tea 
 
130 THE STORY OF WENDELI. PHILLIPS 
 
 and talked for a time and then Phillips said 
 suddenly : 
 
 " Mr. Foss, do you know, I have a partner 
 In this business and one that holds me to a very 
 strict account for everything I do? It is my 
 wife. Now she will want to know all about this 
 affair and she will not like it. I don't dare to 
 go home and tell her of it as the case now 
 stands. I shall have to make a little change 
 in our arrangements in order to satisfy her. 
 I shall have to ask you to take the rest of this 
 money, or I shall never be able to make my 
 partner think that I have done right." Nor 
 would he desist until Mr. Foss had accepted 
 the proffer. 
 
 Managers of lyceum courses can relate of 
 other famous lecturers anecdotes of quite a 
 different flavor. 
 
VIII 
 
 PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 
 
 To Mr. Phillips, after the war closed, the 
 work before him seemed perfectly clear. All 
 that had been gained was no more than a be- 
 ginning. Part of a great evil had been abol- 
 ished; the achievement merely revealed the 
 greater task. Others might be willing to sit 
 with folded hands ; he fought right on. He 
 saw about him a nation cursed with poverty in 
 the midst of abounding wealth ; afflicted with 
 intemperance, the product of poverty; afflicted 
 with a foolish, medieval superstition that ex- 
 cluded women from the ballot ; denying educa- 
 tion and opportunity to the greater part of its 
 children. At the same time its toilers were over- 
 worked and underfed, its free institutions were 
 threatened by an abnormal aggregation of 
 riches in the hands of a few, and the process 
 steadily developed under which the rich must 
 grow richer and the poor poorer. Here, it 
 
 seemed to him, lay a great field, demanding the 
 131 
 
132 THE STORY OF WENDELI. PHILLIPS 
 
 ceaseless labors of any man that believed in 
 democracy and the rise of the race. 
 
 Turning over the records of these ten or 
 twelve years, his activities seem prodigious. 
 He carried on the Standard, fought with al- 
 most savage pertinacity for the rights of the 
 Negro and against the policies of the Johnson 
 administration, argued for the cause of Ireland 
 against England, the cause of Crete against 
 Turkey, the cause of the Indians against the 
 United States, for woman suffrage, for the 
 outcasts of the street, and in and out of sea- 
 son for the cause of labor. To all this there 
 is no companion record, for he had nothing to 
 gain from all this campaigning; not even ap- 
 plause. 
 
 Enlightenment seems to be an order of 
 mind ; if a man dwells in a cave about one ques- 
 tion you can usually find him feudal on every- 
 thing else that pertains to human progress. If 
 he hates the "nigger" he rejects woman suf- 
 frage; if he objects to free speech he believes 
 that you can lower the cost of living by putting 
 slippery elm on the free list. Conversely, I 
 have seldom found a man that believed in 
 woman suffrage that was not also an opponent 
 of war, capital punishment and the ethics of 
 the jungle. All his days Mr. Phillips was a 
 
PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 13S 
 
 fervent antagonist of the barbarism of capital 
 punishment and to agitate against it on every 
 suitable occasion was one of the labors of these 
 busy days. So far back as 1855 in an elab- 
 orate argument on this topic he said: 
 
 The harvest of the gallows is reaped from the 
 poor, the ignorant, the friendless — the men who, 
 in the touching language of Charles Lamb, are 
 " never brought up, but dragged up " ; who never 
 knew what it was to have a mother, to have edu- 
 cation, moral restraint. They have been left on 
 the highways, vicious, drunken, neglected. Society 
 cast them off. She never extended over them a 
 single gentle care; but the first time this crop 
 of human passion, the growth of which she never 
 checked, manifests itself — the first time that ill- 
 regulated being puts forth his hand to do an act 
 of violence, society puts forth her hand and stran- 
 gles him ! Has society done her duty ? Could 
 the intelligence, the moral sense and the religion 
 of Massachusetts go up and stand by the side of 
 that poor unfortunate Negro, who was the last man 
 executed in this Commonwealth, and say that they 
 had done their duty by him.^ He had passed his 
 life in scenes of vice; he had never known what 
 it was to have a human being speak to him in a 
 tone of sympathy. Had society done her duty.'* 
 He never landed in our city but the harpies of 
 licentiousness and drink beset him, and the churches 
 never rose up in their majesty to forbid it. 
 Steeped to the lips in vice for thirty years, when 
 society found him guilty of an act of violence, the 
 natural result of such a life, did society take him 
 and say, " God gave this man to me an innocent 
 
134 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 soul, and I have let him grow up into this mon- 
 ster, and now I will take him and restrain him; 
 I will throw around him moral influences, and see 
 if I cannot make a human being of him"? Did 
 society retreat to the wall? Did she try to save 
 that man? No; she inflicted upon him the se- 
 verest punishment — she took away his life. " So- 
 ciety is an instrument of good," said one of your 
 members a few days ago. Then she is bound to 
 educate the man thrown into her hands. . . . 
 
 If you can come down one step, if you can give 
 up the rack and the wheel, impaling, tearing to 
 death with wild horses, why cannot you come down 
 two and adopt imprisonment? Why cannot you 
 come down three, and instead of putting the man 
 in jail, make your prisons, as Brougham recom- 
 mends, moral hospitals, and educate him? Why 
 cannot you come down four and put him under 
 the influence of some community of individuals 
 who will labor to waken again the moral feelings 
 and sympathies of his nature? 
 
 He was the persistent, tireless, whole-hearted 
 friend of Ireland and the Irish patriots, de- 
 fending them with the full force of his eloquence 
 against the slanders of Froude and others. He 
 watched with such sympathy as Swinburne and 
 other radicals showed the struggle of Italy to 
 be free, and when at last that was accomplished 
 he wrote this : 
 
 At all times, the fate of Rome has been of ut- 
 most interest. Every scholar, every lover of art, 
 every student of jurisprudence, every apostle of 
 liberty, remembers that, after leading the old 
 
PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 135 
 
 world, Rome guarded its treasures across the gulf 
 of the middle and troubled ages. To every lover 
 of the past and every servant of the future it 
 seems natural to call Italy " My Country." Three 
 centuries ago she inspired modern civilization. In 
 this generation the battle for European liberty has 
 centered on Rome. At last she opens her gates to 
 the nineteenth century. 
 
 Congratulations to Garibaldi and Mazzini. 
 They behold the morning. What will the noon 
 be.^ Nothing less than Europe a brotherhood of 
 republics. 
 
 Kings, like other spectres, will vanish at the 
 cock-crowing. 
 
 May the glory and service of Rome in this new 
 epoch transcend her " trebly hundred triumphs ** 
 and all the splendor of the age of Leo. 
 
 But the feature of Wendell Phillips's life and 
 faith of which the least has been said pertains 
 to his convictions about economics. 
 
 Few persons in this country have any con- 
 ception of his radical views about finance, co- 
 operation, the division of wealth, trades unions, 
 and other problems that in our day have be- 
 come acute, nor how far he was in advance of 
 any other public man of his day. He was the 
 first prominent American to adopt the doctrine 
 now become familiar as the first plank in the 
 program of the Socialist party. The fact has 
 always been sedulously concealed, but he was 
 a Socialist, neither more nor less. He was con- 
 
136 THE STORY OF WENDELI. PHILLIPS 
 
 vinced of the essential truth of the Socialist 
 philosophy, and being so convinced, note next 
 how he stood by the faith. 
 
 In 1871, he was instrumental in bringing 
 about a Labor Reform Convention held at 
 Worcester, Massachusetts. He was its chair- 
 man and wrote its platform, which was unani- 
 mously adopted. The very first sentence 
 contains the substance of the modern Socialistic 
 creed : 
 
 We affirm, as a fundamental principle, that la- 
 bor, the creator of wealth, is entitled to all it 
 creates. 
 
 I do not know how there could be a more ex- 
 plicit declaration. But listen to what follows : 
 
 Affirming this, we avow ourselves willing to ac- 
 cept the final results of the operation of a prin- 
 ciple so radical — such as the overthrow of the 
 whole profit-making system, the extinction of all 
 monopolies, the abolition of privileged classes, uni- 
 versal education and fraternity, perfect freedom 
 of exchange, and best and grandest of all, the 
 final obliteration of that foul stigma upon our so- 
 called Christian civilization, the poverty of the 
 masses. 
 
 All this in 1871 — think of it ! The Social- 
 ist platform makers of to-day have hardly gone 
 beyond most of it. 
 
PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 137 
 
 Resolved^ that we declare war with the wages 
 system^ which demoralizes alike the hirer and the 
 hired, cheats both and enslaves the working man; 
 war with the present system of finance, which robs 
 labor and gorges capital, makes the rich richer 
 and the jDoor poorer and turns a republic into an 
 aristocracy of capital; war with these lavish grants 
 of the public lands to speculating companies, and 
 whenever in power, we pledge ourselves to use 
 every just and legal means to resume all such 
 grants heretofore made; war with the system of 
 enriching capitalists by the creation and increase 
 of public interest-bearing debts. 
 
 We demand that every facility and all encour- 
 agement shall be given by law to co-operation in 
 all branches of industry and trade, and that the 
 same aid be given to co-operative efforts that has 
 heretofore been given to railroads and other enter- 
 prises. 
 
 At that time the emploj^ees of mills and fac- 
 tories were worked twelve and sometimes four- 
 teen hours a day and few persons could see 
 anything wrong in the system. On this sub- 
 ject the resolutions of Mr. Phillips declare: 
 
 We demand a ten-hour day for factory work, as 
 a first step, and that eight hours be the working- 
 day of all persons thus employed hereafter. 
 
 He even recognized, so far in advance of his 
 times, the principle of equal pay for equal 
 work. 
 
138 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 We demand that whenever women are employed 
 at public expense to do the same kind and amount 
 of work as men perform, they shall receive the 
 same wages. 
 
 He saw clearly that interest-bearing bonds 
 are a bulwark to the exploiting classes. In the 
 next sentence he said: 
 
 We demand that all public debts be paid at 
 once in accordance with the terms of the contract, 
 and that no more debts be created. 
 
 And he foresaw -the evils of contract labor, 
 for almost twenty 3^ears in advance of legisla- 
 tion on this subject he said in bis platform: 
 
 Viewing the contract importation of coolies as 
 only another form of the slave-trade, we demand 
 that all contracts made relative thereto be void in 
 this country. 
 
 When be presented this platform, Mr. Phil- 
 lips said, addressing the convention : 
 
 I regard the movement with which this conven- 
 tion is connected as the grandest and most com- 
 prehensive movement of the age. And I choose 
 my epithets deliberately ; for I can hardly name 
 the idea in which humanity is interested that I 
 do not consider locked up in the success of this 
 movement of the people to take possession of their 
 
 In the forty years that have passed since 
 that utterance, there has not appeared a better 
 
PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 139 
 
 statement of the nature of the proletarian in- 
 spiration. 
 
 Renewed clamor broke out when this platform 
 and his speech thereon appeared. The news- 
 papers called Phillips a nihilist and a dangerous 
 person; they had not yet learned the word 
 anarchist, that in later years they applied in- 
 discriminately to every man that protested 
 against existing conditions. From this time 
 Mr. Phillips's reputation steadily declined. 
 Many persons viewed with sorrow the sad fail- 
 ure of the promise of the war period. He 
 might have been sensible and successful; he 
 might have gone to Congress or been a Senator 
 or a judge. Instead, he insisted upon casting 
 in his lot with this handful of rag-tag and bob- 
 tail. And who were they? Nothing but com- 
 mon working men ! Sad was the case, and 
 attention was once more directed to the fact 
 that in his earlier days his family had tried to 
 lock him up in an insane asylum because he 
 attacked African slavery. Perhaps there was 
 something in that. Certainly any man that 
 aligned himself with a lot of greasy mechanics 
 could hardly be right in his mind. 
 
 In the previous year he had accepted from 
 the Labor and Temperance parties a nomina- 
 tion for Governor, knowing, of course, that his 
 
140 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 election was impossible, but seizing the oppor- 
 tunity to gain audiences for his two favorite 
 causes. 
 
 In his letter, dated September 12, 1870, ac- 
 cepting the nomination of the Labor Party he 
 said: 
 
 Law should do all it can to give the masses 
 more leisure, a more complete education, better 
 opportunities, and a fair share of profits. It is 
 a shame to our Christianity and civilization for 
 our social system to provide and expect that one 
 man at seventy years of age shall be lord of many 
 thousands of dollars, while hundreds of other men, 
 who have made as good use of their talents and 
 opportunities, lean upon charity for their daily 
 bread. Of course, there must be inequalities. 
 But the best minds and hearts of the land should 
 give themselves to the work of changing this gross 
 injustice, this appalling inequality. I feel sure 
 that the readiest way to turn public thought and 
 effort into this channel, is for the workingmen to 
 organize a political party. No social question ever 
 gets fearlessly treated here till we make politics 
 turn on it. The real American college is the bal- 
 lot-box. On questions like these, a political party 
 is the surest and readiest, if not the only, way to 
 stir discussion, and secure improvement. 
 
 If my name will strengthen your movement, you 
 are welcome to it. 
 
 Allow me to add, that, though we work for a 
 large vote, we should not be discouraged by a 
 small one. 
 
 Your truly, 
 
 Wendell Phillips. 
 
I 
 
 PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 141 
 
 He received in the State about twenty thou- 
 sand votes. 
 
 In 1871 he intensified the feeling against 
 him in the better classes by giving his support 
 to General Benjamin F. Butler, who w^as mak- 
 ing an active canvass for the Governorship. 
 This incident has grievously afflicted his courtly 
 biographer, who has adopted the current ex- 
 planation that Phillips supported Butler be- 
 cause of the old friendship begun at Lowell 
 when both were youths. All his life Phillips 
 had sacrificed his personal preference to his 
 sense of duty, and his friendships and even his 
 family ties to his convictions. He had been 
 bound to Garrison by tender bonds of affec- 
 tion and admiration; yet even from Garrison 
 he had parted for the sake of principle. He 
 had never been intimate with Butler; the two 
 had little in common; yet the comical explana- 
 tion is still urged that some excess of personal 
 friendship brought him to Butler's support. 
 
 I suppose that for an act so inexpressibly 
 offensive to the social and political Brahmins 
 of Massachusetts some unusual reason was de- 
 manded, but the truth is that Phillips applied 
 to Butler the same standard he applied to every 
 other public man. What ideas did he stand 
 for? For justice to labor, for the plain people 
 
142 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 and for the cause of temperance. That was 
 enough. Phillips supported him. 
 
 Butler was defeated in the Republican con- 
 vention, but we are to hear more of him in this 
 story. 
 
 Upon every possible occasion Mr. Phillips 
 continued to call the attention of his country- 
 men to the growing peril of corporation su- 
 premacy in their affairs and to the demands of 
 labor. Some of his utterances at this period, 
 because of their astonishingly accurate fore- 
 cast of coming conditions in America, are 
 likely to startle any present day reader. In- 
 vestigators of the modern situation have done 
 nothing more than to verify his predictions. 
 Thus in October, 1871, he said this: 
 
 The land of England [meaning the great es- 
 tates] has ruled it for six hundred years. The 
 corporations of America mean to rule it in the 
 same way, and unless some power more radical 
 than that of ordinary politics is found, will rule 
 it inevitably. 
 
 I confess that the only fear I have in regard to 
 republican institutions is whether, in our day, any 
 adequate remedy will be found for this incoming 
 flood of the power of incorporated wealth. No 
 statesman, no public man yet, has dared to defy 
 it. Every man that has met it has been crushed 
 to powder; and the only hope of any effective 
 grapple with it is in rousing the actual masses^ 
 
I 
 
 PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 143 
 
 whose interests permanently lie in an opposite di- 
 reetion, to grapple with this foree. 
 
 And again : 
 
 To me the Labor movement means just this: 
 It is the last noble protest against the power of 
 incorporated wealth, seeking to do again what the 
 Whig aristocracy of Great Britain has successfully 
 done for two hundred years. Thirty thousand 
 families own Great Britain to-day. 
 
 In a speech delivered in April, 1872, he said: 
 
 I rejoice at every effort working men make to 
 organize; I do not care on what basis they do 
 it. Men sometimes say to me: "Are you an 
 Internationalist? " I say, I do not know what an 
 Internationalist is; but they tell me it is a system 
 by which the working men from London to Gibral- 
 tar, from Moscow to Paris, can clasp hands. Then 
 I say " Godspeed, Godspeed, to that or any simi- 
 lar movements." 
 
 So I welcome organization. I do not care 
 whether it calls itself Trades-Union, Crispin, In- 
 ternational or Commune; anything that masses up 
 the units in order that they may put in a united 
 force to face the organization of capital; anything 
 that does that, I say amen to it. 
 
 No mincing of words. Now, as in the Abo- 
 lition days, he accepted the full measure of 
 faith and stood squarely upon that, never 
 flinching. And here I take occasion to point 
 out another of his traits, well worth the atten- 
 
144 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 tlon of a nation so overfond of compromise 
 With W endell Phillips it was either one thing 
 or the other ; either support or no support. If 
 he believed in a cause, he stood for the whole 
 of it and to the end. He would waste neither 
 time nor effort in half-hearted advocacy of any 
 movement, since all about him were so many 
 conflicts to which he could give unreservedly the 
 limit of his enthusiasm and strength. 
 
 But when individual public men were to be 
 considered he had a different feeling. His 
 idea was to take the good in every man and 
 make the most of it but never to acquiesce in 
 the evil. At all times he discountenanced and 
 despised the hysteria of hero worship that 
 seems to possess Americans above any other 
 people. Because a President had done one 
 good thing, that did not mean that he was a 
 divinity. Phillips knew men well enough to 
 know that the differences of ability and intel- 
 lect were not great enough to warrant canoni- 
 zation, and that the only really important dif- 
 ferences were in moral purpose and in service 
 to the race. His attitude toward President 
 Grant was typical. He praised Grant for up- 
 holding the rights of the colored people but 
 condemned his treatment of Sumner and his 
 policy about Santo Domingo. 
 
 1 
 
PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 145 
 
 One more instance of his extraordinary pow- 
 ers occurring in these days ought not to be 
 omitted from this chronicle. It was in 1875. 
 Grant, with the aid of Federal troops, was 
 trying to restore order in Louisiana, where 
 former Confederates had risen against a Gov- 
 ernor elected by enfranchised colored men. 
 Southern sj^mpathizers in Boston called a meet- 
 ing at Fanueil Hall to denounce Grant's course 
 in this regard. Mr. Phillips attended, sitting 
 in the gallery, and with no intention of speak- 
 ing. Men on the floor below, noting his silent 
 figure, began to call for a speech from him. 
 He sat quite still, his arm resting upon his 
 cane and his chin upon his arm while he grimly 
 watched the proceedings. The clamor for him 
 becoming so great that the meeting could not 
 proceed, the chairman was obliged to invite him 
 to speak. He slowly arose in his place and in 
 a profound hush began an address. Then, in 
 the old place, the familiar old scene was reen- 
 acted. At the first sentence arose hisses and 
 violent outcries ; then ensued a gradually dimin- 
 ishing clamor; then silence; then applause; and 
 the meeting that had been called to denounce 
 Grant adopted a resolution in his support. 
 
 It was about this time that I first heard him. 
 He was lecturing on Charles Sumner. While 
 
146 THE STORY OF WENDP^LL PHILLIPS 
 
 a local celebrity went through the form of in- 
 troducing him, he sat on a sofa at the back of 
 the stage and looked upon us in a way that 
 spoke at once extreme kindness and yet author- 
 ity and confidence. When he arose and came 
 forward there was something peculiarly grace- 
 ful in his movements ; when he began to speak 
 a thrill of astonishment and pleasure went over 
 the audience. Every mind hung upon each 
 word that fell from his lips. When he was 
 done a man near me protested at the brevity of 
 the address ; Mr. Phillips had spoken nearly 
 two hours, but none of us knew it. His tall, 
 powerful figure seemed to be the embodiment of 
 strength in repose and gave an impression of 
 intellectual supremacy, the like of which I have 
 never known. His hair was quite gray, his 
 eyes were keen and kindly, his complexion 
 ruddy and eloquent of health and right living. 
 His expression was tinged with a certain mel- 
 ancholy, such as I have observed in the faces 
 of most men to whom life means more than lust 
 and gluttony, but was wonderfully strong and 
 as if the man within saw only fine and beautiful 
 things not known to the rest of us. I doubt if 
 any person that heard him ever quite lost the 
 mental effect he created. 
 
 Something pathetic pertains to his life in 
 
 I 
 
PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 147 
 
 these years. His private charities and his sup- 
 port of the Anti-Slavery Standard had 
 strained his little means, so that he was obliged 
 to go about the country lecturing, although he 
 had long hoped to be able to spend his winters 
 in quiet and comfort and the company of Mrs. 
 Phillips. His lecture seasons began in Novem- 
 ber and lasted until April. They took him on 
 long tours through every Northern State, 
 sometimes entailing great hardship and ex- 
 posure. He was long past sixty, his life had 
 been one ceaseless struggle, he was beginning 
 to feel the strain. The lectures, too, failed 
 somewhat in popularity after he had come to be 
 regarded as a maniac and dangerous person on 
 the labor question. Yet he must needs go the 
 weary round year after year. Something pa- 
 thetic pertained also to his own view of himself. 
 He recognized fully the utter isolation he had 
 made. With a kind of smiling sadness, infin- 
 itely moving, he used to refer to himself as 
 " that Ishmaelite," and once he wrote that his 
 home was a sleeping car and his only friends 
 were the brakemen and porters. The health of 
 Mrs. Phillips continued to be, in her own opin- 
 ion, most precarious, and gave him ceaseless 
 concern. Thousands of adherents that on the 
 slavery issue had stood by him loyally, turned 
 
148 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 from him as soon as he took up the cause of 
 labor. Others were old and retired, the fire 
 gone out, the spirit sitting in the ashes. 
 Many others had died. The generation before 
 which he had played so great a part was pass- 
 ing; he was being left alone. Many another 
 man so situated would have abandoned a cause 
 utterly unpromising and retired to his fireside 
 for peace and enjo3^ment in his closing years. 
 Wendell Phillips went straight on. 
 
IX 
 
 THE MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVI- 
 LEGE 
 
 Some men view the human cause with con- 
 genital indifference ; some serve in it spasmod- 
 ically and at the touch of an intermittent 
 conscience; some view it, I should judge, as a 
 kind of diversion; some seek it for their own 
 preferment. 
 
 To Wendell Phillips it was a sublime reli- 
 gion whereof he was the conscientious devotee, 
 serving without remission and performing with 
 equal fidelity and in a spirit of joyous zeal all 
 rites great or small. Liberty he loved with a 
 kind of passion and a fervent loyalty that never 
 wavered nor doubted ; for unlike so many others 
 of her followers, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burke 
 and the rest, the years never chilled the fire in 
 his breast. Out of his religion he made a creed 
 broad enough for all aspects of life. For all 
 public affairs he worshiped justice as the cure 
 of evil; and it seemed to him that every victim 
 149 
 
150 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 of injustice anywhere in the world had an in- 
 fallible claim upon the utmost service of every 
 true man. For the private walk, apart from 
 the world, mercy, kindness and purity were the 
 sure guides. 
 
 He did not only the charity that came in his 
 way to do, but sought abroad for occasions to 
 practise the faith that was in him. For the 
 most unfortunate victims of the present system 
 of society he had the genuine sympathy and 
 broad personal tolerance that seems to come 
 only to those that, like Phillips, have worked 
 out for themselves the economic bases of all 
 social ills. He felt no repugnance toward 
 criminals and jail-birds, understanding that 
 these are merely the products of a system that 
 darkens the whole earth with countless miser- 
 ies. He knew that men are chiefly what their 
 environments make them, and he turned his 
 resentment upon the environments, not upon 
 the stricken creatures that were sent out thence 
 to prey upon the world. 
 
 When he was in Boston, it was his custom to 
 go about in the mornings unostentatiously from 
 court to court and from prison to prison look- 
 ing for unfortunate persons, first offenders and 
 those that had plainly erred from necessitj^ 
 with purpose to help and rescue them. Many 
 
MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVILEGE 151 
 
 a young man that had started wrong found his 
 path reversed for him and never knew whose 
 hand was reached out to him in the dark ; and 
 it was partly these ventures in practical char- 
 ity, too little celebrated, that kept his purse 
 lean and compelled him, in his own phrase, to 
 spend his winters battling with snow-drifts as 
 he toured the country delivering lectures. 
 
 As a general rule, in this world of ours, the 
 men that have been the great and enduring 
 artists have been also lovers of Liberty, and the 
 lovers of Liberty have been also of a full heart 
 of compassion. If you are a follower of Shel- 
 ley, the poet of Liberty, you have no doubt 
 paused often (not always with undimmed eyes, 
 very likely) above that story of Shelley at 
 Great Marlow when he alone befriended and 
 championed the wretched girl that had been 
 led astray. Note then its companion piece in 
 the life of Liberty's orator. 
 
 Going home across Boston Common one night 
 Mr. Phillips was accosted by a courtezan. She 
 looked in his face and then apologized for 
 speaking to him. " You are not of my kind," 
 she said, " but for the love of God, give me 
 some money." He stopped and talked with 
 her; he was not ashamed, bearing in mind his 
 Master and the Magdalene, to take her arm 
 
152 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 and walk with her while he questioned her ; and 
 he ended by providing her with shelter and em- 
 ployment until he had the satisfaction of seeing 
 her emancipated and reformed. This is the 
 one incident of the kind of which we have posi- 
 tive record, but we may be sure that it was not 
 alone in his experience. 
 
 In all this he makes one think of such a 
 knight as dear old Edmund Spenser dreamed, 
 going about with unmixed devotion to do loyal 
 service for some noble conception ^f duty. In- 
 deed, I have stumbled here upon the very word 
 that best describes him. " Sir Galahad," a 
 great poet named him in one of the fairest of 
 all the tributes to his fame, and upon every one 
 that saw him for the first time there was always, 
 I think, an Impression made of a something 
 knightly about the man, '* A courteous, 
 kindly, but most courageous warrior," another 
 observer calls him, " the very Red Cross Knight 
 of his times." 
 
 In the world of profits, employers and busi- 
 ness, he continued to be the Ishmael, for 
 without hint of turning, he went his way de- 
 nouncing the system that bulwarked profits on 
 one side and multiplied poverty on the other. 
 Labor first and all the phases of its cause, and 
 all the forces that preyed upon it, then tern- 
 
MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVILEGE 153 
 
 perance and woman suffrage were more and 
 more the favorite themes of his addresses. I 
 ought to give you a few specimens from these 
 vigorous .appeals. Here, for instance, is one on 
 the burning economic issue of our day as well 
 as his : 
 
 Let me tell you why I am interested in the 
 labor question. Not simply because of the long 
 hours of labor; not simply because of a specific 
 oppression of a class. I sympathize with the 
 sufferers there; I am ready to fight on their side. 
 But I look out upon Christendom, with its three 
 hundred millions of people, and I see that out 
 of this number one hundred millions never had 
 enough to eat. Physiologists tell us that this body 
 of ours, unless it is properly fed, properly de- 
 veloped, fed with rich blood and carefully nour- 
 ished, does no justice to the brain. You can not 
 make a bright man nor a good man in a starved 
 body, and so this one-third of the inhabitants of 
 Christendom, who have never had food enough, can 
 never be what they should be. 
 
 Now I say that the social civilization which 
 condemns every third man in it to be below the 
 average in the nourishment God prepared for him 
 did not come from above; it came from below, and 
 the sooner it goes down the better. 
 
 Come on this side of the ocean. You will find 
 forty millions of people, and I suppose they are 
 in the highest state of civilization; and yet it is 
 not too much to say that out of that forty mil- 
 lions, ten millions, at least, who get up in the 
 morning and go to bed at night, spend all the 
 day in the mere effort to get bread enough to live. 
 
154 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 They have not elasticity enough, mind or body 
 left to do anything in the way of intellectual or 
 moral progress. 
 
 Since that time, of course, all the evil condi- 
 tions that Mr. Phillips perceived and decried 
 have vastly increased upon us. 
 
 That is why I say, lift a man, give him life, 
 let him work eight hours a day, give him the 
 school, develop his taste for music, give him a 
 garden, give him beautiful things to see and good 
 books to read, and you will starve out those lower 
 appetites. ... So it is with women in prostitu- 
 tion. Poverty is the road to it; it is this that 
 makes them the prey of the wealthy and the leisure 
 of another class. . . . Give a hundred women a 
 good chance to get a good living, and ninety-nine 
 of them will disdain to barter their virtue for gold. 
 
 He saw that poverty was the source of social 
 evils and that poverty was unnecessary. Ob- 
 serve how clearly he saw, also, the threat of the 
 autocracy of wealth. 
 
 I hail the Labor movement for two reasons; 
 and one is that it is my only hope for democracy. 
 At the time of the anti-slavery agitation, I was 
 not sure whether we should come out of the strug- 
 gle with one republic or two; but republics I knew 
 we should still be. I am not so confident, indeed, 
 that we shall come out of this storm as a republic 
 imless the Labor movement succeeds. Take a 
 power like the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New 
 York Central Railroad, and there is no legislative 
 independence that can exist in its sight. As well 
 
MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVILEGE 155 
 
 expect a green vine to flourish in a dark cellar as 
 to expect honesty to exist under the sliadow of 
 those upas trees. Unless there is a power in your 
 movement, industrially and politically, the last 
 knell of democratic liberty in this Union is struck; 
 for, as I said, there is no power in one State to 
 resist such a giant as the Pennsylvania road. 
 
 Colonel Thomas Scott, of the Pennsylvania, 
 was the J. Pierpont Morgan of his day, and of 
 him Mr. Phillips said: 
 
 We have thirty-eight one-horse Legislatures in 
 this country, and we have a man like Tom Scott, 
 with three hundred and fifty million dollars in his 
 hands; and if he walks through the States, they 
 [the Legislatures] have no power. Why, he need 
 not move at all. If he smokes as Grant does, a 
 puff of the waste smoke out of his mouth upsets 
 the Legislature. 
 
 Now, there is nothing but the rallying of men 
 against money that can contest with that power. 
 Rally industrially if you will ; rally for eight hours, 
 for a little division of profits, for co-operation; 
 rally for such a banking power in the government 
 as would give us money at three per cent. 
 
 Only organize and stand together. Claim some- 
 thing together and at once; let the nation hear a 
 united demand from the laboring voice, and then, 
 when you have got that, go on after another; but 
 get something. 
 
 I say, let the debts of the country be paid, 
 abolish the banks, and let the government lend 
 every Illinois farmer (if he wants it) who is now 
 borrowing money at 10 per cent, money on the 
 half-value of his land at 3 per cent. The same 
 
156 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 policy that gave a million acres to the Pacific 
 Railroad, because it was a great national effort, 
 will allow of our lending Chicago twenty millions 
 of money at 3 per cent, to rebuild it [after the 
 great Chicago fire]. 
 
 From Boston to New Orleans, from Mobile to 
 Rochester, from Baltimore to St. Louis, we have 
 now but one purpose; and that is, having driven 
 all other political questions out of the arena, hav- 
 ing abolished slavery, the only question left is 
 labor — the relations of capital and labor. . . . 
 
 If you do your duty — and by that I mean 
 standing together and being true to each other — 
 the Presidential election you will decide, every 
 state election you may decide if you please. 
 
 If you want power in this country; if you want 
 to make j^ourselves felt; if you do not want your 
 children to wait long years before they have the 
 bread on the table they ought to have, the leisure 
 in their lives they ought to have, the opportunities 
 in life they ought to have; if you don't want to 
 wait yourselves — write on your banner, so that 
 every political trimmer can read it, so that every 
 politician, no matter how short-sighted he may be, 
 can read it, "We never forget! If you launch 
 the arrow of sarcasm at labor, we never forget; 
 if there is a division in Congress, and you throw 
 your vote in the wrong scale, we never forget. 
 You may go down on your knees and say, * I am 
 sorry I did the act * ; and we will say, ' It will 
 avail you in heaven, but on this side of the grave 
 never.' " So that a man in taking up the Labor 
 Question will know he is dealing with a hair- 
 trigger pistol, and will say, " I am to be true 
 to justice and to man; otherwise I am a dead 
 duck." 
 
MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVILEGE 157 
 
 The one way out of the nation's sore trouble 
 and from the monstrous injustice that labor 
 suffered lay in the organization and united po- 
 litical efforts of the working class. He saw 
 it and in every address he made on labor he 
 urged it. Once he said : 
 
 Now, let me tell you where the great weakness 
 of an association of workingmen is. It is that it 
 cannot wait. It does not know where to get its 
 food for next week. If it is kept idle for ten 
 days, the funds of the society are exhausted. 
 Capital can fold its arms, and wait six months; 
 it can wait a year. It will be poorer, but it does 
 not get to the bottom of the purse. It can afford 
 to wait; it can tire you out, and starve you out. 
 And what is there against that immense preponder- 
 ance of power on the part of capital.^ Simply 
 organization. That makes the wealth of all the 
 wealth of every one. So I welcome organization. 
 . . . One hundred thousand men ! It is an im- 
 mense army. I do not care whether it considers 
 chiefly the industrial or the political questions; it 
 can control the nation if it is in earnest. The rea- 
 son why the Abolitionists brought the nation down 
 to fighting their battle is that they were really in 
 earnest, knew what they wanted, and were deter- 
 mined to have it. Therefore they got it. The 
 leading statesmen and orators of the day said they 
 would never urge Abolition ; but a determined man 
 in a printing-office said that they should, and — 
 they did it. 
 
 As to the necessity of political action he 
 said: 
 
158 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Gentlemen, we see the benefit of going into poli- 
 tics. If we had not rushed into politics, had not 
 taken Massachusetts by the four corners and shaken 
 her, you never would have written your criticisms. 
 We rush into politics because politics is the safety- 
 valve. We could discuss as well as you if you 
 would only give us bread and houses, fair pay and 
 leisure, and opportunities to travel: we could sit 
 and discuss the question for the next fifty years. 
 It's a very easy thing to discuss, for a gentleman 
 in his study, with no anxiety about to-morrow. 
 Why, the ladies and gentlemen of the reign of 
 Louis XV and Louis XVI, in France, seated in 
 gilded saloons and on Persian carpets, surrounded 
 with luxury, vrith the products of India and the 
 curious manufactures of ingenious Lyons and 
 Rheims, discussed the rights of man, and balanced 
 them in dainty phrases, and expressed them in 
 such quaint generalizations that Jefferson borrowed 
 the Declaration of Independence from their hands. 
 There they sat, balancing and discussing sweetly, 
 making out new theories, and daily erecting a 
 splendid architecture of debate, till the angry crowd 
 broke open the doors, and ended the discussion in 
 blood. They waited too long, discussed about half 
 a century too long. You see, discussion is very 
 good when a man has bread to eat, and his chil- 
 dren all portioned off, and his daughters married, 
 and his house furnished and paid for, and his will 
 made; but discussion is very bad when 
 
 ..." Ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers ! 
 Ere the sorrow comes with years "; 
 
 discussion is bad when a class bends under actual 
 oppression. We want immediate action. 
 
MODERN WAE AGAINST PRIVILEGE 159 
 
 In bis great speech, " The Foundation of the 
 Labor ^lovement," be said : 
 
 The labor of yesterday, capital, is protected 
 sacredly. Not so the labor of to-day. The labor 
 of yesterday gets twice the protection and twice 
 the pay that the labor of to-day gets. Why is it 
 not entitled to an equal share? 
 
 Are you quite certain that capital — the child of 
 artificial laws, the product of society, the mere 
 growth of social life — has a right to only an equal 
 burden with labor, the living spring? We doubt 
 it so much that we think we have invented a way 
 to defeat the Pennsylvania Central. We think we 
 have devised a little plan by which we will save the 
 Congress of the nation from the moneyed corpora- 
 tions of the State. When we get into power, there 
 is one thing we mean to do. If a man owns a 
 single house, we will tax him one hundred dollars. 
 If he owns ten houses of like value, we won't tax 
 him one thousand dollars, but two thousand dollars. 
 If he owns a hundred houses, we won't tax him ten 
 thousand dollars, but sixty thousand dollars; and 
 the richer a man grows, the bigger his tax, so that 
 when he is worth forty million dollars he shall not 
 have more than twenty thousand dollars a year to 
 live on. We'll double and treble and quintuple and 
 sextuple and increase tenfold the taxes, till Stewart 
 out of his uncounted millions, and the Pennsylvania 
 Central out of its measureless income, shall not 
 have anything more than a moderate lodging and 
 an honest table. The corporations we would have 
 are those of associated labor and capital, — co- 
 operation. 
 
 We'll crumble up wealth by making it unprofit- 
 able to be rich. The poor man shall have a larger 
 
160 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 income in proportion as he is poor. The rich man 
 shall have a lesser income in proportion as he is 
 rich. You will say, " Is that just? " My friends, 
 it is safe. Man is more valuable than money. 
 You say, " Then capital will go to Europe." Good 
 heavens, let it go ! 
 
 About this time be received a visit from 
 Lucien Sanial, who had been one of the early 
 republican patriots of France and was then a 
 leader of the International, one of the first 
 working men's alliances. Mr. Sanial explained, 
 the scope and purposes and platform of the 
 order in which he was so much interested. Mr. 
 Phillips listened until his visitor made an end 
 and then reaching into his desk produced writ- 
 ings and speeches of his own in which he had 
 advocated the identical principles of the Inter- 
 national. Mr. Sanial was delighted and urged 
 liim to take up the cause and lead it and make 
 it popular in America. Mr. Phillips sadly 
 shook his head. 
 
 " I am too old," he said. " I must no longer 
 think of doing the work of you young men. I 
 can give you all my sympathy, and do, but the 
 day for new causes has passed from me. Do 
 you young men take it up and carry it through 
 to success." 
 
 This is the first acknowledgment I have found 
 from him anywhere that he was beginning to 
 
MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVIT^EGE 161 
 
 feel the burden of years and of labors. For 
 nearly forty years these had been incessant. 
 Except for that one excursion to Europe in his 
 youth, he had not known, since he stepped upon 
 the platform of Faneuil Hall at the Love joy 
 meeting, one day of rest. Some friends now 
 urged him to take the repose that he had earned, 
 but although Mr. Phillips did not feel equal to 
 embarking upon new and arduous movements, 
 he was still less willing to keep silent upon the 
 issues to which he had given his faith. He 
 foresaw that his part was to die in the harness, 
 not to rust in idleness, and he continued to give 
 unequivocal testimony in their behalf. 
 
 Men called Napoleon the Sword of the 
 French Revolution. Phillips was the perfect 
 son of the American Revolution and the em- 
 bodiment of its idea. All its achievements and 
 its great intellectual leaders he viewed with a 
 peculiar reverence, and his favorite line of 
 thinking was that what they were to the mon- 
 archists of their day the true American ought 
 to be toward the reactionaries of his. So much 
 as was gained for progress by the generation of 
 the Revolution ought to be gained for progress 
 by every generation ; for there should be no such 
 thing as standing still, no such thing as con- 
 tentment with what had been inherited from the 
 
162 THE STORY OF WENDELI. PHILLIPS 
 
 past. Every age should have its Samuel 
 Adams, its James Otis and its Patrick Henry. 
 The places that these men had made famous 
 by their deeds or speeches were sacred to him; 
 in his walks about the city he was fond of vis- 
 iting them and recalling the memories attached 
 to each; and none was dearer to him than the 
 Old South Meeting House, the oldest building 
 in Boston. In 1876, business threatened to 
 destroy this interesting relic, for it had been 
 sold by the Society that owned it and the 
 ground space was demanded by profits. Mr. 
 Phillips took part in a movement that, appeal- 
 ing to the patriotic pride of Boston, raised a 
 fund large enough to preserve the historic 
 building. In behalf of this movement he de- 
 livered on June 14, 1876, in the church itself, 
 one of the most famous of his orations. He 
 said: 
 
 These arches will speak to us, as long as 
 they stand, of the sublime and sturdy religious 
 enthusiasm of Adams; of Otis's passionate elo- 
 quence 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, unim- 
 paired, the free life 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 
 
MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVILEGE 163 
 
 it is a nobler consecration; I will not say that it is 
 a better use. I only say that 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. 
 
 Among those that listened to and applauded 
 his address on this occasion was Dom Pedro, 
 then Emperor of Brazil. Great as it was, Mr. 
 Phillips surpassed it three years later by his 
 wonderful and moving tribute to William Lloyd 
 Garrison, whose life of service came to an end 
 on May 23, 1879. " Serene, fearless, marvel- 
 ous man ! Mortal, with so few shortcomings ! 
 Farewell, for a very little while, noblest of 
 Christian men ! Leader, brave, tireless, un- 
 selfish! When the ear heard thee, then it 
 blessed thee ; the eye that saw thee gave witness 
 to thee. More truly than it could ever hereto- 
 fore be said since the great patriarch wrote it, 
 ' the blessing of him that was ready to perish ' 
 was thine eternal great reward." 
 
 All these years he continued upon the lecture 
 platform throughout each winter season. The 
 
164 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 range of his subjects was phenomenal; no other 
 orator has ever attained to so wide a variety. 
 He had a most unusual gift by which he made 
 interesting every topic he touched upon, so that 
 whether his lectures were upon phases of 
 science, history, biography, reform, political 
 economy, law, religion or politics, the listener 
 was always charmed and always carried away 
 a new thought or a memorable phrase. Some- 
 times he wove together into one his discourses 
 upon " Labor," " Temperance " and " Woman 
 Suffrage," his three favorite reforms ; and once 
 he accomplished the seemingly impossible feat 
 of uniting into one lecture addresses so far 
 apart as " Toussaint L'Ouverture " and " The 
 Lost Arts." This latter achievement was to 
 relieve the embarrassment of a rural lyceum 
 association that could not decide which of the 
 two it would prefer. 
 
 i 
 
THE ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF 
 REACTION 
 
 There is courage for the battle-field and 
 another order of courage that stands squarely 
 before the hostile ranks of one's own order and 
 deliberately speaks home the most unpalatable 
 truths. When in 1861 mobs pursued him 
 across Boston Common and besieged his house, 
 Mr. Phillips looked upon them with absolutely 
 unshaken fortitude. " All this time," said 
 Colonel Higginson, a witness of the scene, 
 " there was something peculiarly striking and 
 characteristic in his demeanor. There was ab- 
 solutely nothing of bull-dog combativeness ; but 
 a careless, buoyant, almost patrician air, as if 
 nothing in the way of mob-violence were worth 
 considering, and all the threats of opponents 
 were simply beneath contempt." This was his 
 physical courage in 1861 when his life was in- 
 cessantly in peril. 
 
 In 1881 he gave, of many, the most conspic- 
 165 
 
166 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 uous illustration of the still nobler courage that 
 speaks conviction disregarding aught else. 
 Although he was a graduate of Harvard, and 
 its most distinguished living graduate, the in- 
 stitution had never paid to him the slightest 
 token of regard or appreciation, but had stood 
 aloof, looking upon him with cold disapproval 
 as a mere agitator. But in 1881 he was in- 
 vited bj his own literary society to deliver the 
 Phi Beta Kappa oration. Colonel Higginson 
 testifies that " an unwilling audience " assem- 
 bled on this occasion, and assuredly it was not 
 without reason unwilling, for there is not of 
 record another such terrific arraignment as 
 reactionary scholasticism received that day. 
 
 " The Scholar in a Republic " was the title 
 Mr. Phillips chose for his address. He had 
 prepared it with great care, recognizing that 
 at last he had an opportunity to strike one 
 great blow at the traditional enemy of democ- 
 racy in America ; for then as now the Ameri- 
 can university was the great backward looking 
 influence in the national life. He had known 
 only too well in his own career how doggedly 
 the American college sets its back against 
 every democratic advance ; how cowardly the 
 educated class had been in the slavery issue; 
 how persistently it had hampered the feet 
 
ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 167 
 
 of the Abolition movement ; how it had sneered 
 and was then sneering at every mention of the 
 labor question, more momentous than chattel 
 slavery. He must have made up his mind to 
 say this to his hearers in words they could not 
 possibly forget. The men he w^as to address 
 were the very Brahmins of that social order 
 into which he himself had been born. He was, 
 therefore, doubly affronting them, for in their 
 eyes he was here again, as so often before, a 
 traitor to his caste; but now with offense pe- 
 culiar and redoubled. 
 
 Into the very face of the cold and intellec- 
 tual aristocracy he hurled the unadorned truth. 
 He tempered no words, he disguised nothing, he 
 drove home his bare convictions and spared 
 none. Colonel Higginson, who heard it, says 
 that this was the most remarkable effort of 
 Mr. Phillips's life. " He never seemed more at 
 ease, more colloquial and more extemporane- 
 ous." Yet in form, construction, compact 
 utterance, lofty and well considered ideas, it is 
 the most perfect specimen of American elo- 
 quence. A kind of noble passion vibrates in 
 every word of it, as paragraph by paragraph 
 it tears from the reactionary scholar the veil 
 of hypocrisy and leaves him naked and con- 
 temptible. 
 
168 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Timid scholarship either shrinks from sharing in 
 these agitations or denounces them as vulgar and 
 dangerous interference by incompetent hands with 
 matters above them. A chronic distrust of the 
 people pervades the book-educated class of the 
 North; they shrink from that free speech which 
 is God's normal school for educating men, throw- 
 ing upon them the grave responsibility of deciding 
 great questions and so lifting them to a higher 
 level of intellectual and moral life. Trust the 
 people — the wise and the ignorant, the good and 
 the bad — with the gravest questions, and in the 
 end you educate the race. At the same time you 
 secure not perfect institutions, not necessarily good 
 ones, but the best institutions possible while human 
 nature is the basis and the only material to build 
 with. Men are educated and the State is uplifted 
 by allowing all — every one — to broach all their 
 mistakes and advocate all their errors. The com- 
 munity that will not protect its most ignorant and 
 unpopular member in the free utterance of his 
 opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only 
 a gang of slaves ! 
 
 It seems to me that the foundation of the 
 democratic faith has never had an equal expres- 
 sion. 
 
 I urge on college-bred men that as a class they 
 fail in republican duty when they allow others to 
 lead in the agitation of the great social questions 
 which stir and educate the age. 
 
 He then reviewed American scholarship in 
 its relation to the great issues in the country's 
 history. What had it done in the great move- 
 
ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 169 
 
 merit against chattel slavery? He instanced 
 as typical of its spirit one of the greatest of 
 American scholars that in Congress quoted 
 from the New Testament to uphold slavery and 
 offered to bear a musket in its defense. 
 
 And again it was so in the case of John 
 Brown. " While the first of American schol- 
 ars could hardly find in the rich vocabulary 
 of Saxon scorn words enough to express, amid 
 the plaudits of his class, his loathing and con- 
 tempt for John Brown, Europe thrilled to him 
 as proof that our institutions had not lost all 
 their native and distinctive life. She had 
 grown tired of our parrot note and cold moon- 
 light reflection of older civilizations. . . . But 
 long before our ranks marched up State Street 
 to the John Brown song, the banks of the Seine 
 had hailed the new life which had given us 
 another and nobler Washington. . . . And yet 
 the book-men, as a class, have not yet acknowl- 
 edged him." For forty years, the men that 
 had urged Abolition had been obliged to combat 
 first of all the opposition of the highly educated 
 class. What had that class done for other just 
 and worthy causes? In the movements for 
 prison reform and criminal law reform it had 
 never taken the slightest interest. It had 
 allowed the work of mitigating the barbarous 
 
170 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 criminal code to be done by men outside, by 
 members of another class. What had it done 
 for woman suffrage, for temperance, for polit- 
 ical regeneration? In all these movements its 
 attitude had been one of cold hostility because 
 each movement represented something demo- 
 cratic and the fixed position of the educated 
 class was against democracy. 
 
 He turned to other problems and confronted 
 his hearers with the record of their indifference 
 to such a cause as that of Ireland. What edu- 
 cated man had ever lifted his voice against the 
 further oppression of the Irish people? And 
 yet, their cause was the cause upon which the 
 American nation had been founded. 
 
 We ought to clap our hands at every fresh Irish 
 " outrage," as a parrot-press styles it, aware that 
 it is only a far-off echo of the musket-shots that 
 rattled against the old State House on the fifth 
 of March/ 1770, and of the warwhoop that made 
 the tiny spire of the Old South tremble when Bos- 
 ton rioters emptied the three India tea ships into 
 the sea. 
 
 He passed next to a subject still less pal- 
 atable to his Brahmin hearers — the attitude 
 of educated Americans toward the revolution- 
 ists in Russia. 
 
 Then note the scorn and disgust with which we 
 gather up our garments about us and disown the 
 
ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 171 
 
 Sam Adams and William Prescott, the George 
 Washington and John Brown of St. Petersburg, 
 the spiritual descendants, the living representatives 
 of those that make our history worth anything in 
 the world's annals — the Nihilists. 
 
 Nihilism is the righteous and honorable resist- 
 ance of a people crushed under an iron rule. 
 Nihilism is evidence of life. When " order reigns 
 in Warsaw," it is spiritual death. Nihilism is the 
 last weapon of victims choked and manacled beyond 
 all other resistance. It is crushed humanity's only 
 means of making the oppressor tremble. God 
 means that unjust power shall be insecure; and 
 every move of the giant, prostrate in chains, 
 whether it be to lift a single dagger, or stir a 
 city's revolt, is a lesson on justice. One might w^ell 
 tremble for the future of the race if such a despot- 
 ism could exist without provoking the bloodiest 
 resistance. 
 
 I honor Nihilism, since it redeems human nature 
 from the suspicion of being utterly vile, made up 
 only of heartless oppressors and contented slaves. 
 Every line in our history, every interest of civiliza- 
 tion, bids us rejoice when the tyrant grows pale 
 and the slave rebellious. We cannot but pity the 
 suiFering of any human being, however richly de- 
 served; but such pity must not confuse our moral 
 sense. Humanity gains. 
 
 Chatham rejoiced when our fathers rebelled. 
 For every single reason they alleged, Russia counts 
 a hundred, each one ten times bitterer than any 
 Hancock or Adams could give. Sam Johnson's 
 standing toast in Oxford port was, " Success to the 
 first insurrection of slaves in Jamaica," — a senti- 
 ment Southey echoed. " Eschew cant," said the 
 old moralist. But of all the cants that are canted 
 
172 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 in this canting world, though the cant of piety may 
 be the worst, the cant of Americans bewailing Rus- 
 sian nihilism is the most disgusting. 
 
 In Russia there is no press, no debate, no ex- 
 planation of what government does, no remon- 
 strance allowed, no agitation of public issues. 
 Dead silence, like that which reigns at the summit 
 of Mount Blanc, freezes the whole empire, long 
 ago described as " a despotism tempered by assassi- 
 nation." Meanwhile, such despotism has unsettled 
 the brains of the ruling family, as unbridled power 
 doubtless made some of the twelve Caesars insane 
 — a madman sporting with the lives and comfort 
 of a hundred millions of men. The young girl 
 whispers in her mother's ear, under a ceiled roof, 
 her pity for a brother knouted and dragged half 
 dead into exile for his opinions. The next week 
 she is stripped naked and flogged to death in the 
 public square. No inquiry, no explanation, no 
 trial, no protest; one dead uniform silence — the 
 law of the tyrant. Where is there ground for any 
 hope of peaceful change? Where the fulcrum upon 
 which you can plant any possible lever .^ 
 
 Machiavelli's sorry picture of poor human na- 
 ture would be fulsome flattery if men could keep 
 still under such oppression. No, no ! In such a 
 land dynamite and the dagger are the necessary 
 and proper substitutes for Faneuil Hall and the 
 Daily Advertiser. Anything that will make the 
 madman quake in his bedchamber, and arouse his 
 victims into recklessness and desperate resistance. 
 This is the only view an American, the child of 
 1620 and 1776, can take of Nihilism. Any other 
 unsettles and perplexes the ethics of our civiliza- 
 tion. 
 
 Born within sight of Bunker Hill, in a common- 
 
ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 173 
 
 wealth which adopts the motto of Algernon Sydney, 
 sub libertate quietem (" accept no peace without 
 liberty ") ; son of Harvard, whose first pledge was 
 " Truth "; citizen of a republic based on the claim 
 that no government is rightful unless resting on 
 the consent of the people and which assumes to 
 lead in asserting the rights of humanity — I at 
 least can say nothing else and nothing less; no, 
 not if every tile on Cambridge roofs were a devil 
 hooting my words ! 
 
 I shall bow to any rebuke from those who hold 
 Christianity to command entire non-resistance. 
 But criticism from any other quarter is only that 
 nauseous hypocrisy which, stung by threepenny 
 tea-tax, piles Bunker Hill with granite and statues, 
 prating all the time of patriotism and broadswords, 
 while, like another Pecksniff, it recommends a cen- 
 tury of dumb submission and entire non-resistance 
 to the Russians, who for a hundred years have seen 
 their sons by thousands dragged to death or exile 
 — no one knows which in this worse than Venetian 
 mystery of police — and their maidens flogged to 
 death in the market-place, and who share the same 
 fate if they presume to ask why. 
 
 Before the war, Americans were like the crowd 
 in that terrible hall of Eblis which Beckford 
 painted for us — each man with his hand pressed 
 on the incurable sore in his bosom, and pledged 
 not to speak of it; compared with other lands, we 
 were intellectually and morally a nation of cow- 
 ards. ... At last that disgraceful seal of slave 
 complicity is broken. Let us inaugurate a new de- 
 parture, recognize that we are afloat on the current 
 of Niagara, eternal vigilance the condition of our 
 safety, that we are irrevocably pledged to the 
 
174 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 world not to go back to bolts and bars — could not 
 if we would;, and would not if we could. Never 
 again be ours the fastidious scholarship that shrinks 
 from rude contact with the masses. Very pleas- 
 ant it is to sit high up in the world's theatres and 
 criticise the ungraceful struggles of the gladiators, 
 shrug one's shoulders at the actors' harsh cries, 
 and let every one know that but for " this villainous 
 saltpetre you would yourself have been a soldier." 
 But Bacon says, " in the theatre of man's life, God 
 and his angels only should be lookers on." " Sin 
 is not taken out of man as Eve was out of Adam 
 by putting him to sleep." " Very beautiful," says 
 Richter, " is the eagle when he floats with out- 
 stretched wings aloft in the clear blue; but sub- 
 lime when he plunges down through the tempest 
 to his eyry on the cliff, where his unfledged young 
 ones dwell and are starving." Accept proudly the 
 analysis of Fisher Ames : " A monarchy is a man 
 of war, staunch, iron-ribbed and resistless when 
 under full sail; yet a single hidden rock sends her 
 to the bottom. Our republic is a raft, hard to steer 
 and your feet always wet; but nothing can sink 
 her." If the Alps, piled in cold and silence be 
 the emblem of despotism, we joyfully take the 
 ever restless ocean for ours, — only pure because 
 never still. 
 
 Colonel Higginson says that " many a re- 
 spectable lawyer and divine felt bis blood run 
 cold " when he realized the significance of these 
 utterances. 
 
 One may perceive clearly from this and other 
 similar specimens that democracy was with 
 Wendell Phillips much more than a passing 
 
ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 175 
 
 belief; it was the active principle of all healthy 
 public life that he would apply in large meas- 
 ure whenever any of our institutions seemed to 
 be at fault. In this Phi Beta Kappa oration, 
 he made some slighting reference to civil-serv- 
 ice reform, which was bitterly resented. This 
 inspired him to a fuller exposition of his views. 
 He objected, he said, to civil-service reform as 
 urged by the recognized reformers, because it 
 was not democratic. Instead of creating an 
 office-holding caste, as they proposed, he would 
 solve the whole difficulty by applying democ- 
 racy to it. He would have all the postmasters, 
 custom officers and the like elected by the peo- 
 ple instead of being appointed ; for by this 
 change both power and responsibility would 
 rest in the people's hands, where alone it should 
 rest. 
 
 Mr. Phillips still further alienated business 
 and the middle class by his support of General 
 Benjamin F. Butler, who now returned to pol- 
 itics and succeeded in being elected, on an inde- 
 pendent nomination, to the governorship of 
 Massachusetts. Butler was in bourgeois eyes 
 the very political devil. He was believed to 
 win his power in politics by what are called 
 " all the tricks of the demagogue," and his suc- 
 cess was believed to herald some kind of 
 
176 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 proletarian uprising that imminently threat- 
 ened profits. Mr. Phillips gave his support to 
 Butler because Butler represented a protest 
 against existing conditions and stood for the 
 emancipation of labor. But no reasons, how- 
 ever good, could have excused the act in the 
 eyes of those that hated democracy. They did 
 not forgive Mr. Phillips ; they have not forgiven 
 him yet; they and their class will never forgive 
 him. In the long lists of grievances this class 
 has against him, his support of Butler is not 
 the least ponderable. 
 
 For all this Mr. Phillips cared even less than 
 he had cared in his younger days for the wrath 
 of the slave-owning Interests. The world and 
 its opinions meant very little; few things con- 
 cerned him now but the causes to which he had 
 given his life, and his constant care for Mrs'. 
 Phillips. He felt that his part in the fight was 
 almost done. 
 
 At the beginning of 188S, he was obliged to 
 move from the old house at No. 26 Essex Street, 
 in which he and his wife had lived so comfort- 
 ably for forty years. The city had decided to 
 widen Harrison Avenue and the work would in- 
 volve the demolition of the house. Mr. Phil- 
 lips was beyond seventy ; he had for his old 
 home a very great attachment; to leave it was 
 
I ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 177 
 
 a genuine liardship. He found new quarters 
 at No. 37 Common Street, but the charm was 
 broken. Once after the Essex Street home had 
 been destroyed he went back and stood for a 
 time looking at the vacant site. " It is no 
 matter," he said ; " I am almost through with 
 it all." 
 
 One that knew him well and recalls much 
 about him that throws light upon his character, 
 tells me of seeing him about this time walking 
 slowly up Beacon Hill and examining all the 
 sights of the place with such interest as a 
 stranger might show. His tall figure was per- 
 fectly erect, his hair was white, there was about 
 every movement a certain authoritative and 
 still graceful significance; he gave the impres- 
 sion of a man perfectly sure of himself. At 
 the top of the hill he stood for a long time care- 
 fully observing the State House, as if he had 
 never seen it before. Then he turned and 
 looked out over the city, and my informant says 
 that the image that came into his mind was 
 that of St. Genevieve watching over her city of 
 Paris, as depicted in the Pantheon. 
 
 That fall and early winter he was out lec- 
 turing as usual and apparently in good health. 
 On December 3, 1883, he, with William Lloyd 
 Garrison, Jr., was a speaker at Old South 
 
178 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Church upon the occasion of the unveiling of 
 Anne Whitney's statue of Harriet Martineau. 
 He spoke with great feeHng, directing his re- 
 marks, as was his usual custom, to bear upon 
 the question that was always uppermost in his 
 thoughts. 
 
 Harriet Martineau saw, not merely the question 
 of free speech, but the grandeur of the great move- 
 ment just then opened. This great movement is 
 second only to the Reformation in the history of 
 the English and the German race. In time to 
 come, when the grandeur of this movement is set 
 forth in history, you will see its proportions and 
 beneficial results. Harriet Martineau saw it fifty 
 years ago, and after that she was one of us. She 
 was always the friend of the poor. Prisoner, 
 slave, wage-serf, worn-out by toil in the mill, no 
 matter who the sufferer, there was always one 
 person who could influence Tory and Liberal to 
 listen. 
 
 It was his last public address. On January 
 1, 1884, he wrote to Patrick Collins, then a 
 member of Congress from Boston, begging at- 
 tention to the condition of Alaska, which was 
 then without a territorial government and ap- 
 parently in a state of anarchy. I think this 
 was his last letter on public aflPairs. On Jan- 
 uary 26, he was seized with an acute form of 
 heart disease. He lingered a week, suffering 
 great agony and perfectly aware of his doom, 
 
ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 179 
 
 but always calm and cheerful. His extraordi- 
 nary power of self-control that had borne him 
 unmoved through so many trying scenes did not 
 desert him now. " I have no fear of death," 
 he said to his physician, who was also his 
 friend. " I have long foreseen it. My only 
 regret is for poor Ann. I had hoped to close 
 her eyes before mine were shut." To another 
 friend he declared his absolute Christian faith 
 and confidence. His faculties remained per- 
 fectly clear; he talked cheerfully with the 
 watchers and tried to prevent them from taking 
 any trouble on his account. About six o'clock 
 on the evening of Saturday, February 2, 
 1884, he sighed, closed his eyes and passed 
 away like one sinking into sleep. 
 
 The immediate cause of his death was ascer- 
 tained to be angina pectoris ; but an eminent 
 medical authority declared it was something 
 else. In his judgment the incessant attacks of 
 more than forty years had worn down the war- 
 rior's heart ; under the brave and unruffled front 
 that he presented to the world, the arrows had 
 taken effect at last. 
 
 The funeral, in accordance with Mr. Phil- 
 lips's known preference, was most simple. 
 From the church the body was borne, escorted 
 by colored troops, to Faneuil Hall, where it lay 
 
180 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 for three hours, and a long procession of the 
 poor and of the colored population passed the 
 coffin. The tears that were shed by these were 
 the dead man's true eulogy and even more elo- 
 quent than the great tribute that, three months 
 later, George William Curtis paid to him at the 
 memorial meeting in Tremont Temple, when 
 the community made recognition of the loss it 
 had sustained. 
 
 Ten years after Mr. Phillips's death, the 
 city of Boston, somewhat belatedly, affixed to 
 the wall of the postoffice building, which now 
 rises on the site of the old home in Essex street, 
 this tablet: 
 
 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 RECOGNI- 
 TION OF HIS FELLOW CITIZENS WERE BY 
 HIM ACCOUNTED AS NAUGHT COM- 
 PARED 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. 
 
ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 181 
 
 IN BOSTON 
 
 HE WAS BORN 29tH NOVEMBER, 1811, AND DIED 2ND 
 FEBRUARY, 1884. 
 
 THIS TABLET WAS ERECTED IN 1894- BY ORDER OF 
 THE CITY COUNCIL OF BOSTON. 
 
 I can not help noticing that this tribute con- 
 tains no mention of that greater cause of eman- 
 cipation to which Mr. Phillips devoted the lat- 
 ter half of his life and which, in his judgment, 
 included the abolition of chattel slavery. So 
 far, I believe, this is the only public memorial 
 to the greatest American orator. 
 
 His fame has suffered sorely and most un- 
 justly because of the nature of the reforms that 
 he espoused and for no other reason. If he 
 had confined his eloquence to academic subjects 
 or to pleading at the bar, there would now be 
 of him a greater number of statues and me- 
 morials than perpetuate the name of Daniel 
 Webster. The substantial truth of all that he 
 urged against American scholarship is verified 
 by the record in his own case. Mention of him 
 is carefully excluded from all school books, 
 school children are never told anything of his 
 marvelous story, the next generation after his 
 own grows up in practical ignorance that he 
 ever lived. The reason for all this is solely the 
 
182 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 fact that he was enlisted in causes unpopular 
 among the prosperous element that controls 
 and directs American education. He was an 
 agitator; what that element desires is peace and 
 silence upon the very topics that Phillips per- 
 petually stirred. He championed the cause of 
 hated labor, he made war upon capitalism 
 and the wage system, he took his place with 
 the advocates of absolute democracy, indus- 
 trial and political ; and for this reason alone 
 his name is slighted and his services forgot- 
 ten. 
 
 Yet if we were to consider nothing but his 
 great gift in art, how barren would be any 
 account of oratory that did not dwell upon his 
 unequalled achievements ! Nothing that we 
 read of Demosthenes, Mirabeau, Chatham, 
 Burke or Erskine compares with the amazing 
 story of this man's command over the spoken 
 word. Or if we think of historical accuracy, 
 how much better than a bundle of lies is a 
 recital of the anti-slavery struggle that dwells 
 not at length upon his great services? Or if 
 we consider the ethics of public and private 
 life, whither shall we turn for another example 
 of a man so conspicuously blameless? What 
 better or more inspiring lesson can be drawn 
 from all history than this life of unswerving 
 
ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 183 
 
 devotion to conscience and duty? Other men 
 have flashed into fame by the sacrifice of one 
 moment on some altar of patriotism. This 
 man's sacrifice was of all the years of his life 
 — all that comfort, leisure, peace, culture, 
 study, learning, friendship, achievement and 
 honor can mean to one endowed beyond almost 
 all other men for the enjoyment of these. 
 
 In the life of Wendell Phillips, alone of all 
 the famous men whose careers I have ever en- 
 countered, the biographer can find nothing that 
 tarnishes the luster of the consistent whole. 
 No excuses are demanded for him and no al- 
 lowances ; there is nothing about him to 
 conceal. In public and in private life he 
 walked without deviation from the loftiest 
 standards. Cautious friends sometimes de- 
 plored what they called the violence of his ut- 
 terances ; they never had the slightest cause to 
 regret a lapse in his conduct, not one surren- 
 der to temptation, not one instance of faltering 
 in duty. I know not where shines another such 
 character, nor an}^ other study so rich in sat- 
 isfaction as the record of his life. For in the 
 words that he himself applied to Washington 
 he was " the bright consummate flower, of our 
 civilization and in all ways the incarnation 
 of the highest American ideal." 
 
184 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 
 
 Swinburne might have written for him the 
 tribute he wrote for Mazzini: 
 
 Thou knowest that here the likeness of the best 
 
 Before thee stands; 
 The head most high^ the heart found faithfullest, 
 
 The purest hands! 
 
 Diligently the whole story of our civil war 
 is perverted and distorted to the minds of the 
 rising generation. The glory for the abolition 
 of slavery is bestowed upon men that had no 
 feeling nor conviction against the hateful in- 
 stitution and were no more thaji the passive 
 instruments in the hands of an aroused public 
 opinion. Back of all these, back of the mili- 
 tary commanders whose statues rise now in 
 every square of the national capital, back of 
 the misread and misunderstood Emancipation 
 Proclamation, was the little band of Abolition- 
 ists, steadily appealing to the nation's con- 
 science. The real emancipators of the slaves 
 were Garrison, Phillips, John Brown and the 
 few that standing with them upon the exalted 
 ground of right, despised expediency and re- 
 fused to compromise. Guns roar and armies 
 march and generals maneuver in the center of 
 all men's attention, but the real force that 
 moves the world and is always mightier than 
 all of these is the force of moral conviction. 
 
ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 185 
 
 But for the steady persistent agitation of the 
 Abolitionists, at the risk of their lives and in the 
 face of fiercest opposition, there would have 
 been no sentiment to rescue Kansas, to hail 
 John Brown, to recruit the Northern armies, 
 and to fire them with the spirit of a superb con- 
 secration that carried them to the victory at 
 last. We have loaded with honors the men that 
 obeyed this profound feeling by leading the 
 armies of the Union. We have rewarded with 
 silence and obscurity many of the men that for 
 thirty years stood and proclaimed the truth ; 
 but none have we neglected as we have neglected 
 Wendell Phillips, champion of labor and foe 
 of the wage system. 
 
 Oh for a spirit such as thine that wrought 
 Above all dust and dross of selfish aim. 
 That purely gave its all of toil and thought 
 And had no care for calumny nor blame. 
 Praise, prize, nor laurel, victory nor fame; 
 That thrust a shield between the weak and strong 
 And eased on lowly limbs the bondman's thong. 
 Great heart that knew no passion save for right, 
 no hatred but of wrong! 
 
 THE END 
 
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