WENDELL PHILLIPS
It was in the winter of 1860-61 that the Massachusetts allies of the
Southern Slave Power made their last effort. Spite of Webster's
death, with whom died the brains of the party and its vital force,
these men were still powerful in Boston. The surrender of Anthony
Burns in May, 1854, the birth of the Republican Party at Worcester in
July of the same year, the election of Mr. Henry Wilson as Governor,
the cowardly assault in the United States Senate on Charles Sumner by
Mr. Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, in 1856--these events had
indeed stirred the people of Massachusetts into revolt against the
Slave Party in this Free State.
But there had come a lull. There were still hopes that a conflict
between North and South might be averted and that politics might do
the work of arms. Mr. Franklin Pierce was President, but Mr. Banks
had been elected Speaker of the House of Representatives at the first
session of the Thirty-fourth Congress in December, 1855. Mr. Blaine
said that marked an epoch, and he described it in his brilliant {85}
_Twenty Years of Congress_ as "a distinctive victory of the Free
States over the consolidated power of the Slave States."
But the Republicans were slow in coming to power, and their
nomination of General Frémont in 1856 sowed distrust among the
sounder men of the party. Mr. Buchanan's election seemed to confirm
the ascendency of the South, and the mind of Boston, or at any rate
of State Street, reverted to commercial politics. The Abolitionists
were as much under a cloud as ever. From 1857 to 1860 things seemed
to be going backward. The Harper's Ferry business alarmed the
ingrained conservatism of Boston, and though the hanging of John
Brown shocked a good many merchants and bankers, they could not
understand, and were far from approving, Brown's scheme or Brown's
methods. The state of feeling in Boston was, in short, confused, and
the emotions of 1854 had gone to sleep.
The crisis came in December, 1860. The Abolitionists tried to hold
an Anti-Slavery Convention in Tremont Temple, on the anniversary of
the hanging of John Brown or the day after. They do not seem to have
expected trouble; at any rate, they took no sufficient precautions to
keep the peace and keep control of their own meeting. A "broadcloth
mob"--the phrase long since became classic in Boston--occupied the
hall in force, captured the platform peacefully, elbowed the
Abolitionists off it, appointed their own chairman, Mr. Richard S.
Fay, and passed {86} their own resolutions. "Broadcloth," said
Phillips, "does not make a gentleman." The Convention was summoned
to consider "How shall American slavery be abolished?" The John
Brown anniversary was thought a suitable day for the discussion of
that question, but Brown's death was referred to simply as "too
glorious to need defence or eulogy." When Mr. Fay, the ringleader of
the mob, thinking his work done, had departed, Mr. Frank Sanborn, the
lawful chairman, resumed his place, and would have held the lawfully
summoned meeting. Then the mob leaders, Mr. Murray Howe now at their
head, made a fresh attack. The police sided with them and the Mayor
cleared the hall.
There is a little confusion of dates. Brown was, in fact, hanged
December 2nd, the fateful day of Austerlitz and of the Third
Napoleon's _coup d'état_. But these events in Boston occurred, I
think, on the 3rd. The men who had been driven out of Tremont Temple
by the mob, of which the Mayor finally took command, reassembled in
the evening, very quietly, in a little hall in Belknap Street, on
what was impolitely known as Nigger Hill, not far from the rather
aristocratic Mount Vernon Street. Wendell Phillips, to an audience
of perhaps three or four hundred--all the place would hold--made an
unreported speech, red-hot with wrath. A little more than a year
before, November 1st, 1859, a fortnight after Brown's attempt and
while he lay in prison waiting to be hanged, Phillips had spoken in
{87} Brooklyn, and announced that the lesson of the hour was
insurrection. But he weakened the force of that counsel by adding
that the age of bullets was over; it was an insurrection of thought;
like that of the last thirty years; he still had in mind. Now, here
in Boston, and not for the first time nor for the last, he was face
to face with forces which were not intellectual nor moral, but forces
of violence. Phillips could not readily shake off the influences of
his whole public life. He still believed in "moral suasion." He was
presently to learn that moralities and the counsels of peace were a
poor defence against men prepared to back their opinions with
revolvers. But even after the hanging of Brown, at his grave in
North Elba, Phillips could say: "I do not believe slavery will go
down in blood. Ours is the age of thought."
Perhaps the meeting of December, 1860, marks the beginning of his
conversion, but by no means its completion. He had long been used to
mobs and mob law. But now the lesson was being pressed home.
A memorable evening to me, because from it came my acquaintance with
Phillips, whom I had never met. Under the spell, I suppose, of his
passionate eloquence, I went home and wrote him a letter. I
explained that I was a Whig that my family and friends were Whigs,
that I belonged in a hostile camp, but that I thought there ought to
be free speech in Boston, and I would do what I could for that cause
and for him if he would say what. I was, as most young, {88} or old,
men of Massachusetts then were, against slavery, especially in
Massachusetts, but not an Abolitionist.
The next day, about noon, the door of my law office in State Street
opened, and Phillips walked in. Without a word of preface he said:
"You wrote me a letter?"
"Yes."
"Will you come and see me at my house this evening, and we will have
a talk? This morning I have not a moment."
Again I said yes, and the door closed and he was gone. Often as I
had seen Phillips on the platform it seemed to me I had never seen
him till then. A clear, strong, dry north light came in at the
windows and illuminated his face and figure. He had the bearing of a
man to whom authority and sweetness of nature belonged in like
degree. He has been called a thousand times the Apollo of the
platform. An Apollo he was not except in graceful dignity and
demeanour. It his masculine beauty appeared to derive from Greece,
it had become Græco-Roman, and finally borrowed its blonde colouring
from some Scandinavian Balder.
So careless was he of mere conventionality that while he stood in the
doorway, or just inside, the soft light grey felt hat he wore, since
known as a Homburg hat, remained on his head. When I reminded him of
it long after, he said with a laugh:
"Well, you did not ask me to sit down."
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"No, you gave me no time."
I mention it because, with his hat on and his hand on the door, his
manner and bearing were of a grave courtesy like none other. And in
this transitory attitude, just on the wing, there was a serene
leisureliness as if to hurry were unknown to him. His eye took in
everything in these ten seconds. There was not a word beyond what I
have repeated; a purely business call to make an appointment. But I
knew when he had gone that another influence had come into my life,
stronger for the time than all others.
I went in the evening, as I had been bidden, to the little house in
Essex Street where Phillips chose to live, as if to measure the
breadth of the gulf that he had put between himself and the world
into which he had been born; a world of easy circumstances if not
wealth, and bound together by a hundred social ties nearly all of
which he had broken. Phillips had what at that time would be called
wealth, for which he had other uses than mere expense on comfort. A
narrow door opened into a narrow hall out of which climbed narrow
stairs, with a narrow landing half-way up where the stairs turned,
and at the top a still narrower passage to the door of the parlour.
Inside, the same impression of restricted space; a room perhaps
sixteen feet by fourteen, and plainly furnished; a worn carpet on the
floor, a large shabby sofa at the end nearest the door opposite the
fire-place. Phillips was sitting on the sofa. He rose and held out
his {90} hand: "It's very good of you to come. I am afraid I was
abrupt this morning." Then he plunged almost at once into the
situation, with a forecast of what he thought likely to happen. "Not
much, if anything, till the meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society in
January. That, I dare say, they will try to break up. Lincoln has
been elected President and Andrew Governor. You know what I think of
Lincoln. But Andrew I know well, and I do not believe mob law will
be allowed to rule while Andrew is Governor." He had already
described Andrew in Tremont Temple: "For the first time within my
memory we have got a man for Governor of Massachusetts, a frank,
true, whole-souled, honest MAN." Alas! Andrew was to disappoint him
bitterly in this one matter of free speech, though in no other.
"But you are to speak in another fortnight at the Music Hall," I
said. "Do you think they will let you alone then?"
"Why," said Phillips, "that's on a Sunday"; as if that would matter
to men whose passions, interests, animosities, all led them to
silence the orator whom they thought, honestly enough from their
point of view, a public danger. He asked me if I had heard anything.
I had not, but when Phillips told me he was going to speak on "Mobs
and Education" I answered, "But that's a challenge."
"They can take it as they like," he replied, quite softly and coolly,
adding: "If you hear anything perhaps you'll let me know."
{91}
Our talk lasted late, turned on some personal matters, then drifted
far away to national issues, and much else. I thought Phillips, if
anything, more eloquent in talk than in oratory, yet with never a
sentence which had in it the ring of the platform. He was direct,
simple, persuasive, and luminous. His frankness surprised me, but he
told me afterward he had made inquiries and thought it safe to be
frank. No doubt he saw that mine was a sincere devotion, and perhaps
he was aware of the enchantments he wove about whom he would. At any
rate, he gave me his confidence from the start.
During the next fortnight I saw many men among my Whig acquaintances.
They made no secret of their purpose to break up that Sunday meeting
at the Music Hall. Soon these rumours became public. When the
subject of Phillips's discourse was announced, the rumours spread and
grew more menacing. The police felt themselves called on to take
notice of what was likely to happen. Phillips, long used to dealing
with mobs, seemed to think the police superfluous. Some of us who
had looked into the matter well knew they were not. Seeing Phillips
from day to day, I asked him again and again to promise his friends
one thing, viz. that he would put himself and leave himself in their
hands. He still thought we were making too much of a slight danger,
but finally he promised. There had been mobs in Boston before this,
where the police and the mob had acted together. They so acted {92}
when Richard S. Fay and Amos Lawrence, and Murray Howe and their
friends broke up the Anti-Slavery Convention in Tremont Temple on the
morning of December 3rd--this same month. And it was that mob from
which Phillips was to take his text on this Sunday. A piquant
situation, if it had not been something much more serious, with all
the materials of a great tragedy.
This time the mob leaders, whoever they were, had changed their
tactics. They did not propose to capture the Music Hall or prevent
Phillips from speaking. He was to be dealt with outside. None the
less did the police and Phillips's friends, unaware of details, take
measures to guard the interior. The police were in force in the
lobbies and passages and at the exterior approaches to the platform;
but out of sight. Scores of them were in the building, and a much
larger force in waiting hard by. The platform, which ran from one
side of the hall to the other at the south end, was garrisoned by
Phillips's friends, armed. The enemy also were armed, and no man
could say what that Sabbath morning might bring forth. Naturally, we
did not know of the decision of the mob leaders, all in broadcloth,
to postpone their assault till the meeting was over. We expected
trouble inside, and were ready for it. I said as little as possible
to Phillips of what I thought likely to happen. I well knew that if
he were told there was any peril in freedom of speech, his speech
would be freer than ever.
{93}
He always believed in personalities, saying:
"In such a cause as ours you must at all hazards rouse attention.
Men whose minds are made up against you will listen to a personal
attack when they will listen to nothing else. If I denounce the sin
they go to sleep, but when I denounce the sinner they wake up."
There was to be no going to sleep on this eventful Sunday. The
speech on "Mobs and Education" is perhaps the most personal, and the
most merciless, of all Phillips's speeches. The Tremont Temple
rioters had delivered themselves into his hands. He knew every man
among them and the joint in every armour. Many of them were there on
Sunday. You saw the arrow leave the platform and sink deep in the
quivering flesh. The cheers were soon mingled with hisses. The air
grew hot. But the majority were there to hear and the hisses were
silenced. There were passes of burning eloquence, of pathos, of
invective that tore its way through all defences.
"I have used strong words. But I was born in Boston, and the good
name of the old town is bound up with every fibre of my heart. I
dare not trust myself to describe the insolence of men who undertake
to dictate to you and me what we shall say in these grand old
streets."
Thus spoke the aristocrat, the Bostonian proud of Boston and of his
own descent from six or seven generations of the Boston Phillipses;
an aristocracy equal to the best. His contempt for the Fays and the
rest of the "cotton clerks" was {94} largely a contempt for the
plebeian. Plebeians, to the Boston mind, most of them were. Fay is
pilloried for ever in this speech; and others are pilloried.
I will quote one passage, not from Phillips, but a passage from
Edward Everett on free speech which Phillips himself quoted toward
the end of his discourse. I quote it because Phillips used often to
say that American oratory had few finer examples to show:
I seem to hear a voice from the tombs of departing ages, from the
sepulchres of nations that died before the sight. They exhort
us, they adjure us, to be faithful to our trust. They implore
us, by the long trials of struggling humanity, by the awful
secrets of the prison house where the sons of Freedom have been
immured, by the noble heads which have been brought to the block,
by the eloquent ruins of nations, they conjure us not to quench
the light that is rising on the world. Greece cries to us by the
convulsed lips of her poisoned, dying Demosthenes, and Rome
pleads with us in the mute persuasion of her mangled Tully.
It is not often that a great orator opens his heart to us about the
merits of a rival, or whispers to us any one of the secrets of his
own or another's eloquence. I cannot remember whether Phillips ever
paid to Everett in public the tribute I have often known him pay in
private. If he had lived in an age when issues were less vital, or
less deadly, he might have found in Everett a model. But Everett has
no passion, and passion is an element in almost all Phillips's
speeches. And passion, of quite another kind, fierce, vindictive,
murderous, he was to meet in another ten minutes.
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