WENDELL PHILLIPS
Birth and Ancestry of Wendell Phillips--His Education and Social
Advantage--The Lovejoy Murder--Speech in Faneuil Hall--The
Murder Justified--Mr. Phillips' First Speech--He Defends the
Liberty of the Press--His Ideality--He Joins the Garrisonian
Abolitionists'--Gives up the Law and Becomes a Reformer--His
Method and Style of Oratory--Abolitionists' Blamed for the Boston
Mob--Heroism of the Early Abolitionists'--His Position in Favor
of "Woman's Rights"--Anecdote of His Lecturing--His Services in
the Cause of Temperance--Extract with His Argument on Prohibition
--His Severity towards Human Nature--His Course During and Since
the War--A Change of Tone Recommended.
Wendell Phillips was born in Boston, Mass., Nov. 29, 1811.
He is son of John Phillips, first Mayor of Boston. The Phillips family
justly rank among the untitled aristocracy of Massachusetts. Liberal
views, noble manners, love of learning and benevolent liberality have
become in that state associated with the name.
John Phillips, the grand uncle of Wendell Phillips, was the founder
of Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire. Besides this he endowed a
professorship in Dartmouth College, and contributed liberally to
Princeton College, and gave $31,000 to Phillips Academy in Andover.
His nephew Samuel Phillips, planned, founded and organized Phillips
Academy in Andover. He was a member of the provincial Congress during
the Revolutionary war--a member of the convention to form the United
States Constitution in 1779, and a State Senator for twenty years
following the adoption of the constitution, and for fifteen years was
president in the Senate, and was from first to last the particular and
trusted friend of Gen. Washington. If there be such a thing in America
as a just and proper aristocracy it inheres in families in whom public
virtues and services have been as eminent as in this case.
Wendell Phillips was a graduate of Harvard College in 1831, and at the
Cambridge law school in 1833, and was admitted to the Suffolk bar in
1834.
A precise and elegant scholar, gifted with all possible advantages of
family, position, and prestige, Wendell Phillips began life with every
advantage. But the very year after his admission to the bar, he was a
witness of the mob in which Garrison was dragged disgracefully through
Boston, for the crime of speaking his conscientious opinions.
The spirit of his Puritan fathers was strong within him--and he was
acting in accordance with all his family traditions when he at once
espoused the cause of Liberty.
His earliest public speech was made on an occasion befitting a son of
old Massachusetts.
On November 7, 1837, the Rev. E. P. Lovejoy, was shot by a mob at
Alton, Illinois, while attempting to defend his printing press from
destruction. When news of this event was received in Boston, Dr.
Channing headed a petition to the Mayor and Aldermen asking the use
of Faneuil Hall for a public meeting. It will scarcely be credited by
the present generation that a request so reasonable and so natural,
headed by a name so commanding as that of Dr. Channing, should have
been flatly refused. The Mayor and Aldermen of Boston in those days
trembled before the rod of southern masters, and however well disposed
towards their own distinguished citizens, dared not encourage them in
the expression of any sentiments which might possibly be disagreeable
to the South. It is true that this was the third printing press which
Lovejoy had attempted to defend. It is true that he had a perfect legal
right in his own state of Illinois to print whatever he chose. It is
true also that the rioters who came from Missouri and attacked his
house and shot him, were the vilest and profanest scum of society which
a slave state can breed; but for all that, the State of Massachusetts
at that time could scarcely find a place or a voice to express
indignation at the outrage. Dr. Channing, undismayed by the first
rebuff, addressed an impressive letter to his fellow citizens which
resulted in a meeting of influential gentlemen at the old court room.
Here measures were taken to secure a much larger number of names to the
petition. This time the Mayor and Aldermen consented.
The meeting was held on the 8th of December, and organized with the
Hon. Jonathan Phillips for chairman. Dr. Channing opened the meeting
with an eloquent address, and resolutions drawn up by him were read and
offered.
The attorney general of Massachusetts appeared now as the advocate of
the rioters. He compared the slaves to a menagerie of wild beasts,
and the Alton rioters to the orderly mob who threw the tea overboard
in 1773--talked of the "conflict of laws" between Missouri and
Illinois, declared that Lovejoy was presumptuous and imprudent and
died as the fool dieth. Then with direct and insulting reference to
Dr. Channing, he asserted that a clergyman with a gun in his hand, or
one mingling in the debates of a popular assembly, were equally out of
place. This speech produced, as was natural, a sensation in Faneuil
Hall, and Wendell Phillips who had come without expecting to speak,
rose immediately to his feet and amid the boisterous efforts of the
mobocratic party in the house to drown his voice made his first public
speech.
Mr. Phillip's style of oratory is peculiarly solemn and impressive. The
spirit of whole generations of Puritan ministers seems to give might
to it. There is no attempt to propitiate prejudice--none to throw out
popular allurements--it is calm, intense, and commanding.
"Sir," he said, in the course of this speech, "when I heard the
gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side
by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those
precious lips, (pointing to the portraits in the hall) would have
broken into voices to rebuke the recreant American; the slanderer of
the dead. * * * Sir, for the sentiments that he has uttered, on soil
consecrated by the prayers of the Puritans and the blood of patriots,
the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up."
A storm of mingled applause and hisses interrupted the bold young
orator--with cries of "take that back--take that back." The uproar
became so great for a time that he could not be heard. One or two
gentlemen came to Mr. Phillips' side while the crowd still continued
to shout. "Make him take that back--he sha'nt go on till he takes
that back." Mr. Phillips came forward to the edge of the platform,
and looking on the excited multitude with that calm, firm, severe
bearing-down glance which seems often to have such mesmeric effects,
said solemnly:
"Fellow citizens, I cannot take back my words. Surely the attorney
general so long and well known here, needs not the aid of your hisses
against one so young as I am--my voice, never before heard in your
walls." After this the young orator was heard to the end of his
speech without interruption. In this first speech, which was wholly
unpremeditated, he showed all that clearness, elegance of diction,
logical compactness, and above all, that weight of moral conviction
which characterized all his subsequent oratory.
In allusion to the speech of the attorney general he said:
"_Imprudent!_ to defend the liberty of the press! Why? Because the
defence was unsuccessful! Does success gild crime into patriotism and
the want of it change heroic self-devotion into imprudence? Was Hampden
imprudent when he drew the sword and threw away the scabbard? Yet he,
judged by that single hour, was unsuccessful. After a short exile the
race he hated sat again upon the throne.
"Imagine yourselves present when the first news of Bunker Hill battle
reached a New England town. The tale would have run thus: 'The patriots
are routed--the red coats victorious--Warren lies dead upon the field.'
With what scorn would that Tory have been received who should have
charged Warren with imprudence, who should have said that 'bred a
physician, he was out of place, and died as the fool dieth.' How would
the intimation have been received that Warren and his successors should
have waited a better time?'
"_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 no one a right to make it because it displeases the
community? Who invented this libel on his country? It is this very
thing which entitled Lovejoy to greater praise. The disputed right
which provoked the revolution was far beneath that for which he died.
(Here was a strong and general expression of disapprobation.) 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 if England had
offered to put a gag on his lips. Mr. Chairman, from the bottom of
my heart I thank that brave little band at Alton for resisting. We
must remember that Lovejoy had fled from city to city--suffering the
destruction of three printing presses patiently. At length he took
counsel with friends, men of character, of tried integrity, of wide
views of Christian principle. They thought the crisis had come--that
it was full time to assert the laws. They saw around them, not a
community like our own, of fixed habits and character, but one in the
gristle, not yet hardened in the bone of manhood. The people there,
children of our older States, seem to have forgotten the blood-tried
principles of their fathers, the moment they lost sight of New England
hills. Something was to be done to show them the priceless value of
freedom of the press, to bring back and set right their wandering and
confused ideas. He and his advisers looked on a community, struggling
like a drunken man, indifferent to their rights and confused in
their feelings. Deaf to argument, haply they might be stunned into
sobriety. They saw that of which we cannot judge, the _necessity_ of
resistance. Insulted law called for it. Public opinion, fast hastening
on the downward course, must be arrested. Does not the event show they
judged rightly? Absorbed in a thousand trifles, how will the nation
all at once come to a stand? Men begin as in 1776 and 1640 to discuss
principles and weigh characters, to find out where they are. Haply we
may awake before we are borne over the precipice."
From this time Wendell Phillips was identified with the radical
abolitionists.
His nature is characterized by an extreme ideality. He is essentially
in all things a purist. Had he not thus early in life been absorbed
by the exigencies of a moral conflict, Mr. Phillips would have shown
himself one of the most thorough and carefully cultivated men of
literature in our country. The demand for perfection is one of the most
rigorous in his nature, and would have shown itself in an exacting
precision in style, orthography, rhetoric and pronunciation. In regard
to all these things his standard is that of an idealist. But the moral
nature derived from his Puritan ancestry, was stronger than every other
portion of him, and his ideality became concentrated upon the existing
conflict in American society. His nature led him at once to take the
most strenuous and rigorous ground side by side with William Lloyd
Garrison.
Tried by his severe standard, the constitution of the United States,
by an incidental complicity with slavery, had become a sinful compact:
a covenant with death and an agreement with hell--and with the
unquestioning consistency which belonged to his Puritan blood, he did
not hesitate to sacrifice to this belief his whole professional future.
He abandoned his legal practice and took leave of the Suffolk bar,
because he could not conscientiously take the oath to support the
Constitution of the United States. What things were gain to him he
counted loss.
Henceforth there was no career open to him but that of the agitator and
popular reformer. He brought to the despised and unfashionable cause
not only the prestige of one of the most honored Massachusetts names,
and the traditions of a family which was among orthodox circles as a
Hebrew of the Hebrews, but the power of decidedly the first forensic
orator that America has ever produced. His style was so dazzling, so
brilliant, his oratory so captivating, that even the unpopularity of
his sentiments could not prevent the multitudes from flocking to hear
him. He had in a peculiar degree that mesmeric power of control which
distinguishes the true orator, by which he holds a multitude subject to
his will, and carries them whither he pleases.
His speeches were generally extempore, and flowed on with a wonderful
correctness, and perfect finish of language, without faltering, without
the shadow of an inelegance--his sentences succeeding one another
with a poised and rhythmical fullness, and his illustrations happily
running through the field of ancient and modern history, and with the
greatest apparent ease selecting whatever he needed from thence for the
illustration of his subject. In invective no American or English orator
has ever surpassed him. At the bar of his fervid oratory he would
arraign, try and condemn with a solemn and dignified earnestness that
might almost have persuaded the object of his attack of his own guilt.
Warren Hastings is said to have judged himself to be the basest of men
while he listened to the denunciations of Burke, and something of the
same experience may have befallen those who were arraigned by Phillips.
There was need enough at this time for a man thus endowed to come to
the help of liberty in America, for the creeping influence of the
despotic South, lulling, caressing, patronizing, promising, threatening
and commanding, had gone very nigh to take away the right of free
inquiry and free speech through the whole Northern States.
The few noble women, who formed the original Boston Anti-Slavery
Society, were a mark everywhere spoken against. Even after the stormy
and scurrilous attack of the mob which drove them out from their
meeting, and which almost took the life of Garrison, there was not a
newspaper in Boston, except the Liberator, which did not, in giving an
account of the matter, blame the abolitionists instead of the rioters.
It was the old story that the lamb had troubled the wolf, and ought
to be eaten up forthwith. The Advertiser spoke of the affair, "not so
much as a riot, as the prevention of a riot," and "considered the whole
matter as the triumph of law over lawless violence, and the love of
order over riot and confusion." The Christian Register recommended to
the ladies to imitate the early Christians of Trajan's day, and meet
in secret, adding, with a sneer, "if the _vanity_ of the ladies would
allow."
A leading orthodox divine shortly after preached a sermon to illustrate
and defend the doctrine that no man has a right to promulgate any
opinion distasteful to the majority of society where he lives. All, in
short, seemed to be going one way--newspapers, pulpits, bar and bench,
and the gay world of fashion, were alike agreed that if discussing
the condition and rights and wrongs of the slave, was disagreeable to
southern people it ought to be put a stop to at once and everywhere,
and that the Abolitionists were a pestilent sect, who turned the world
upside down.
In Wendell Phillips, at last, the scornful world met its match, for he
was fully capable of meeting scorn with superior scorn, and retorting
on contempt with contempt, and he stood as high above the fear of man
that bringeth a snare, as any of the most unworldly of his Puritan
grandfathers.
The little band of Abolitionists that gathered around him and Garrison,
men and women, were every one of them heroes. They were of the old
revolutionary stock of Boston, and every way worthy of their lineage,
and there was need enough it should be so, for the struggle was no
inconsiderable one--it was for life and death. Cast out of society,
looked on as the off-scouring of the earth, hemmed in everywhere with
slanders, often alienated from friends once the dearest and most
admiring, laboring almost alone with an incessant and exhausting zeal,
some of more delicate organization sunk under the trial, and may be
said to have given their lives to the cause.
Wendell Phillips speaks of them feelingly in one of his later speeches,
delivered on the anniversary of the Boston Mob:
"Many of those who met in this hall at that time are gone. They died as
Whittier well says--
'Their brave hearts breaking slow,
But self-forgetful to the last,
In words of cheer and bugle glow,
Their breath upon the darkness past.'
"In those days, as we gathered around their graves, and resolved that
the narrower the circle became the closer we would draw together,
we envied the dead their rest. Men ceased to slander them in that
sanctuary; and as we looked forward to the desolate vista of calamity
and trial before us, and thought of the temptations which beset us
on either side, from worldly prosperity which a slight sacrifice of
principle might secure, or social ease so close at hand, by only a
little turning aside, we almost envied the dead the quiet sleep to
which we left them--the harvest reaped, and the seal set beyond the
power of change."
The career of Phillips in those days was often amid threats of personal
violence. Assassination, the favorite argument of slavery, was held
up before him, and the recent death of Lovejoy showed that the
threat was not an empty one. At home, his house, in turn with that of
other leading abolitionists, was threatened with incendiary violence,
notwithstanding it was the shelter of an invalid wife, whose frail
life often seemed to hang on a thread. From that shaded and secluded
invalid chamber, however, came no weak prayers or faltering purposes,
for a braver, higher heart was never given to human being than the one
that beat there. In the darkest and most dangerous hours, from that
sick room came words of hope and cheer and inspiration, prompt ever to
bid him go where the cause called for him, and strengthening him by
buoyant fearlessness and high religious trust. Such women are a true
inspiration to men.
It is not wonderful that with such rare experience of how noble a being
woman may be, and with such superior women for friends and associates,
that Wendell Phillips should have formed a high ideal of womanhood, and
become early one of the most enthusiastic supporters of all reforms in
which the interest of woman is concerned.
On the 15th and 16th of October, 1857, he offered at a convention held
in Worcester a series of resolutions in relation to the political
rights of women which cover all the ground contended for by modern
reformers. His speech on this subject is one of the most able and
eloquent on record, and forms a part of the permanent literature of the
movement.
He speaks of womanhood with a solemn and religious earnestness, with
the fervor of knightly times, and pleads against all customs and laws
which bear hardly upon her delicate organization, which mislead her
from following her highest aspirations.
An anecdote in circulation about him shows that he not only held such
theories, but that he was helpful in practice. It is so in keeping with
his general character as to be extremely probable. Notwithstanding the
unpopularity of his abolition sentiments, Mr. Phillips' power as an
orator was such that when lecturing on ordinary subjects he commanded
the very highest prices in the literary market. On one of his tours
he met in the cars a woman who was seeking a self-supporting career
as a lecturer. Mr. Phillips inquired into her success, and found that
independent of her expenses she made at the rate only of five dollars a
time. He declared that such an inequality with his own success was an
injustice, and added that he must beg her to allow him to equalize the
account for once, by accepting the proceeds of his last lecture.
Mr. Phillips had a way of making his fame and reputation gain him a
hearing on the unpopular subject which he had most at heart. Committees
from anxious lyceums used to wait on him for his terms, sure of being
able to fill a house by his name.
"What are your terms, Mr. Phillips?"
"If I lecture on anti-slavery, nothing. If on any other subject one
hundred dollars."
The success of his celebrated lecture on the Lost Arts, which has been
perhaps more than a thousand times repeated, is only a chance specimen
of what he might have done in this department of lecturing, could he
have allowed himself that use of his talent.
Mr. Phillips is far from being a man of one idea. Energetic as was
his abolition campaign, he has found time and strength to strike some
of the heaviest and most victorious blows for temperance. He has been
a vigorous defender of the interests of the Maine Law, endangered in
Massachusetts by the continual compliances of rank and fashion. His
letter to Judge Shaw and President Walker is a specimen of unfearing
and unflinching exposure and rebuke of those practices and concessions
of public men, which cast contempt on the execution of law. His oration
on Metropolitan Police has powerful arguments in favor of the policy of
legislative prevention of intemperance.
We have selected his argument on the subject, both as a good example of
his style and manner, and as a powerful presentation of a much needed
argument.
"Some men look upon this temperance cause as whining bigotry, narrow
asceticism, or a vulgar sentimentality, fit for little minds, weak
women, and weaker men. On the contrary, I regard it as second only to
one or two others of the primary reforms of this age, and for this
reason. Every race has its peculiar temptation; every clime has its
specific sin. The tropics and tropical races are tempted to one form
of sensuality; the colder and temperate regions, and our Saxon blood,
find their peculiar temptation in the stimulus of drink and food. In
old times our heaven was a drunken revel. We relieve ourselves from
the over-weariness of constant and exhaustive toil by intoxication.
Science has brought a cheap means of drunkenness within the reach of
every individual. National prosperity and free institutions have put
into the hands of almost every workman the means of being drunk for
a week on the labor of two or three hours. With that blood and that
temptation, we have adopted democratic institutions, where the law has
no sanction but the purpose and virtue of the masses. The statute-book
rests not on bayonets, as in Europe, but on the hearts of the people.
A drunken people can never be the basis of a free government. It is
the corner-stone neither of virtue, prosperity, nor progress. To us,
therefore, the title-deeds of whose estates and the safety of whose
lives depend upon the tranquillity of the streets, upon the virtue of
the masses, the presence of any vice which brutalizes the average mass
of mankind, and tends to make it more readily the tool of intriguing
and corrupt leaders, is necessarily a stab at the very life of the
nation. Against such a vice is marshalled the Temperance Reformation.
That my sketch is no mere fancy picture, every one of you knows. Every
one of you can glance back over your own path, and count many and
many a one among those who started from the goal at your side, with
equal energy and perhaps greater promise, who has found a drunkard's
grave long before this. The brightness of the bar, the ornament of the
pulpit, the hope and blessing and stay of many a family,--you know,
every one of you who has reached middle life, how often on your path
you set up the warning, "Fallen before the temptations of the streets!"
Hardly one house in this city, whether it be full and warm with all
the luxury of wealth, or whether it find hard, cold maintenance by the
most earnest economy, no matter which,--hardly a house that does not
count, among sons or nephews, some victim of this vice. The skeleton
of this warning sits at every board. The whole world is kindred in this
suffering. The country mother launches her boy with trembling upon the
temptations of city life; the father trusts his daughter anxiously to
the young man she has chosen, knowing what a wreck intoxication may
make of the house-tree they set up. Alas! how often are their worst
forebodings more than fulfilled! I have known a case--and probably many
of you can recall some almost equal to it--where one worthy woman could
count father, brother, husband, and son-in-law, all drunkards,--no man
among her near kindred, except her son, who was not a victim of this
vice. Like all other appetites, this finds resolution weak when set
against the constant presence of temptation. This is the evil. How are
the laws relating to it executed in this city? Let me tell you.
"First, there has been great discussion of this evil,--wide, earnest,
patient discussion, for thirty-five years. The whole community has been
stirred by the discussion of this question. Finally, after various
experiments, the majority of the State decided that the method to stay
this evil was to stop the open sale of intoxicating drink. They left
moral suasion still to address the individual, and set themselves as
a community to close the doors of temptation. Every man acquainted
with his own nature or with society knows that weak virtue, walking
through our streets, and meeting at every tenth door (for that is the
average) the temptation to drink, must fall; that one must be a moral
Hercules to stand erect. To prevent the open sale of intoxicating
liquor has been the method selected by the State to help its citizens
to be virtuous; in other words, the State has enacted what is called
the Maine Liquor Law,--the plan of refusing all licenses to sell, to
be drunk on the spot or elsewhere, and allowing only an official agent
to sell for medicinal purposes and the arts. You may drink in your own
parlors, you may make what indulgence you please your daily rule, the
State does not touch you there; there you injure only yourself, and
those you directly influence; that the State cannot reach. But when you
open your door and say to your fellow-citizens, 'Come and indulge,' the
State has a right to ask, 'In what do you invite them to indulge? Is it
in something that helps, or something that harms, the community?'"
* * * * *
In our recent war it is scarcely needful to say that Mr. Phillips has
always been a counsellor for the most thorough, the most intrepid and
most efficient measures.
During the period of comparative vacillation and uncertainty, when
McClellan was the commander-in-chief, and war was being made on
political principles, Mr. Phillips did his utmost in speeches and
public addresses in the papers, to stir up the people to demand a more
efficient policy.
Since the termination of the war and the emancipation of the slave, Mr.
Phillips seems to show that the class of gifts and faculties adapted to
rouse a stupid community, and to force attention to neglected truths
are not those most adapted to the delicate work of reconstruction.
The good knight who can cut and hew in battle, cannot always do the
surgeon's work of healing and restoring. That exacting ideality which
is the leading faculty of Mr. Phillips' nature leads him constantly to
undervalue what has been attained, and it is to be regretted that it
deprived him of the glow and triumph of a victory in which no man than
he better deserved to rejoice.
Garrison hung up his shield and sword at a definite point, and marked
the era of victory with devout thankfulness; and we can but regret,
that the more exacting mind of Phillips was too much fixed on what yet
was wanting to share the well earned joy.
When there is strong light there must be shadow, and the only shadow we
discern in the public virtues of Mr. Phillips is the want of a certain
power to appreciate and make allowances for the necessary weaknesses
and imperfections of human nature.
He has been a teacher of the school of the law rather than that of the
Gospel; he has been most especially useful because we have been in a
state where such stern unflinching teachings have been indispensable.
Mr. Phillips' methods indeed, of dealing with human nature, savor
wholly of the law and remind us forcibly of the pithy and vigorous
account which John Bunyan puts into the mouth of his pilgrim.
"I saw one coming after me swift as the wind, and so soon as the man
overtook me, it was but a word and a blow, for down he knocked me and
laid me for dead. But when I was a little come to myself I asked him
wherefore he served me so. He said because of my secret inclining to
Adam the first, and with that he struck me another deadly blow on the
breast, and beat me down backward, and so I lay at his foot as dead
as before. So when I came to myself, I cried him mercy; but he said,
I know not how to show mercy, and with that he knocked me down again.
He had doubtless made an end of me but that one came by and bid him
forbear.
Who was he that bid him forbear? I did not know him at first but as he
went by, I perceived the holes in his hands and his side."
There is a time for all things, and this stern work of the land had to
be done in our country. Almighty God seconded it by awful providences,
and pleaded against the oppressor in the voice of famine and battle, of
fire and sword.
The guilty land had been riven and torn, and in the language of
scripture, made an astonishment and a desolation!
May we not think now that the task of binding up the wounds of a
bruised and shattered country, of reconciling jarring interests thrown
into new and delicate relationships, of bringing peace to sore and
wearied nerves, and abiding quiet to those who are fated to dwell side
by side in close proximity, may require faculties of a wider and more
varied adaptation, and a spirit breathing more of Calvary and less of
Sinai?
It is no discredit to the good sword gapped with the blows of a hundred
battle fields, to hang it up in all honor, as having done its work.
It has made place for a thousand other forces and influences each
powerless without it, but each now more powerful and more efficient in
their own field.
Those who are so happy as to know Mr. Phillips personally, are fully
aware how entirely this unflinching austerity of judgment, this
vigorous severity of exaction, belong to his public character alone,
how full of genial urbanity they find the private individual. We may
be pardoned for expressing the hope that the time may yet come when he
shall see his way clear to take counsel in public matters with his own
kindly impulses, and that those genial traits which render his private
intercourse so agreeable, may be allowed to modify at least his public
declarations.
[Illustration: Henry Ward Beecher]