The young lawyer went back to his office sadly and thoughtfully.
He said, twenty years later, before the anti-slavery meeting on the
anniversary of this mob: "Let me thank the women who came here twenty
years ago, some of whom are met here to-day, for the good they have done
me. I thank them for all they have taught me. I had read Greek and Roman
and English history; I had by heart the classic eulogies of brave old
men and martyrs; I dreamed, in my folly, that I heard the same tone in
my youth from the cuckoo lips of Edward Everett;--these women taught me
my mistake. They taught me that down in those hearts, which loved a
principle for itself, asked no man's leave to think or speak, true to
their convictions, no matter at what hazard, flowed the real blood of
'76, of 1640, of the hemlock-drinker of Athens, and of the martyr-saints
of Jerusalem. I thank them for it!"
The year after the Garrison mobbing scene, Phillips began to take part
in the lyceum lectures, which at that time were popular, as the
University Extension lectures are now. He spoke usually upon some topic
in natural science, being more fond of this evidently than of the law.
The colored people were refused admittance to lectures; and this fact
so incensed Emerson, Sumner, George William Curtis, and Phillips, that
they refused to speak where the negroes were not admitted. This refusal
soon broke the exclusive and unnatural custom.
In this year, 1836, Phillips met a young lady two years younger than
himself, Ann Terry Greene, the daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant.
Her cousin, Miss Grew, was to go by stage-coach with her intended
husband to Greenfield, Mass., and Miss Greene was to accompany them.
Phillips was asked to join the party. The brilliant young woman, as she
herself said, "talked abolition to him all the way up." Mr. Phillips was
never a great talker, but a good listener. He said, "I learn something
from every one."
Both parents were dead; and she had been received as a daughter into the
home of her uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Henry G. Chapman, who lived in
Chauncy Place, near Summer Street. Both were warm friends of Garrison,
and deeply interested in the anti-slavery movement. The young girl, with
all the enthusiasm of youth, and the impulse of a strong and noble
nature, espoused the cause of the slave, and was not afraid to stand for
the right in a choice so unpopular among the rich and aristocratic.
The acquaintance begun on the stage-coach resulted in an engagement the
same year; and the following year, Oct. 12, 1837, they were married.
Like Mrs. Browning, Miss Greene was an invalid at the time of her
marriage, and remained thus all her life.
"Of Mr. Phillips's unbounded admiration and love for his wife," writes
Francis Jackson Garrison in his memorial sketch of "Ann Phillips," "of
his chivalrous devotion to her, and absolute self-abnegation through
the more than forty-six years of their married life, and of his
oft-confessed indebtedness to her for her wise counsel and inspiration,
matchless courage, and unswerving constancy, the world knows in a
general way; but only those who have been intimately acquainted with
them both can fully realize and appreciate it all. They also know how
ardent was her affection for him, and how great her pride in his labors
and achievements."
When his speeches were first published in book form, in 1863, he wrote
on the title-page of one volume, and gave it to his wife, "Speeches and
Lectures. By Ann Phillips." Thus thoroughly did he appreciate her
helpfulness.
Mrs. Phillips wrote to a friend regarding her husband, whom she called
her "better _three-quarters_," "When I first met Wendell, I used to
think, 'It can never come to pass; such a being as he is could never
think of me.' I looked upon it as something as strange as a fairy-tale."
A month after her marriage, she wrote a friend, Nov. 19, 1837: "Only
last year, on my sick-bed, I thought I should never see another
birthday, and I must go and leave him in the infancy of our love, in the
dawn of my new life; and how does to-day find me? the blessed and happy
wife of one I thought I should never perhaps live to see. Thanks be to
God for all his goodness to us, and may he make me more worthy of my
Wendell! I cannot help thinking how little I have acquired, and Wendell,
only two years older, seems to know a world more."
And yet, with all this depreciation of self, she had such a fine mind
and sound judgment that Phillips deferred to her constantly, talked over
with her the arguments of his speeches, and valued her approval more
than that of all the world beside. As in the case of John Stuart Mill
and his wife, intellectual companionship seemed the basis of their
extremely happy married life.
Four years later they moved into a modest brick house, 26 Essex Street,
given to Mrs. Phillips by her father, where they lived for forty years.
From here Mrs. Phillips writes to a friend concerning herself: "Now what
do you think her life is? Why, she strolls out a few steps occasionally,
_calling_ it a walk; the rest of the time from bed to sofa, from sofa to
rocking-chair; reads generally the _Standard_ and _Liberator_, and that
is pretty much all the literature her aching head will allow her to
peruse; rarely writes a letter, sees no company, makes no calls, looks
forward to spring and birds, when she will be a little freer.... I am
not well enough even to have friends to tea, so that all I strive to do
is to keep the house neat and keep myself about. I have attended no
meetings since I helped fill 'the negro pew.' What anti-slavery news I
get, I get second-hand. I should not get along at all, so great is my
darkness, were it not for Wendell to tell me that the world is still
going.... We are very happy, and only have to regret my health being so
poor, and our own sinfulness. Dear Wendell speaks whenever he can leave
me, and for his sake I sometimes wish I were myself again; but I dare
say it is all right as it is."
In 1846 Mrs. Phillips writes: "Dear Wendell has met with a sad
affliction this fall in the death of his mother.... She was everything
to him--indeed, to all her children; a devoted mother and uncommon
woman.... So poor unworthy I am more of a treasure to Wendell than ever,
and a pretty frail one. For his sake I should love to live; for my own
part I am tired, not of life, but of a sick one. I meet with but little
sympathy; for these long cases are looked upon as half, if not wholly,
_make-believes_,--as if _playing well_ would not be far better than
playing sick."
On the same sheet of paper Mr. Phillips writes: "Dear Ann has spoken of
my dear mother's death. My good, noble, dear mother! We differed utterly
on the matter of slavery, and she grieved a good deal over what she
thought a waste of my time, and a sad disappointment to her; but still I
am always best satisfied with myself when I fancy I can see anything in
me which reminds me of my mother. She lived in her children, and they
almost lived in her, and the world is a different one, now she is gone!"
Nearly a dozen years later Mr. Phillips writes to a friend: "We are this
summer at Milton, one of the most delightful of our country towns, about
ten miles from Boston. Ann's brother has a place here, and we are with
him. She is as usual--little sleep, very weak, never goes down-stairs,
in most excellent and cheerful spirits, interested keenly in all good
things, and, I sometimes tell her, so much my motive and prompter to
every good thing, that I fear, should I lose her, there'd be nothing of
me left worth your loving."
After they had been married thirteen years, having no children of their
own, Mr. and Mrs. Phillips took into their home, as a daughter, Phoebe
Garnaut, twelve years old, the daughter of the lovely Eliza Garnaut, who
had died of cholera the year before, through her unselfish devotion to
others. This child remained to brighten the Phillips' home for ten
years, when she married Mr. George Washburn Smalley, the London
correspondent of the _New York Tribune_, and made her home abroad.
Dr. Buckingham says truly that Wendell Phillips "was a lover all his
life,--not with the instinctive love of youth alone, but with the
secured attachment, the quiet confidence of the heart, the beautiful
affectionateness, which, in the later years of the pure and good, is a
far superior development of character, and a far richer enjoyment, than
the effervescence of youthful days. She was, as he wrote me once, his
counsel, his guide, his inspiration."
As long as Mr. Phillips lived, whenever he was at home, he visited the
markets daily, searching for things which should tempt the appetite of
"Ann." Lovely flowers were in her windows from one year's end to the
other, placed there by his thoughtfulness or that of other dear friends.
Fond of music, he daily left her money for the hand-organs played
beneath her window. Her love, her cheer, her enthusiastic devotion to
the great causes which he pleaded with inimitable grace and power, more
than paid him for all his care and self-sacrifice.
Two months after their marriage came the event which made him, like
Byron, "awake to find himself famous."
On Nov. 7, 1837, the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered by a
pro-slavery mob in Alton, Ill. He was a Presbyterian clergyman from
Maine, a graduate of Waterville College. Going West, he became the
editor of the St. Louis _Observer_, a weekly religious paper of his own
denomination.
A negro having been chained to a tree and burned to death for killing an
officer who attempted to arrest him, the judge decided in favor of the
mob. Rev. Mr. Lovejoy protested against such barbarity, and his
printing-office was at once destroyed by the lawless. He moved his
paper to Alton, Ill., but the slavery sympathizers destroyed his press.
Some citizens reimbursed him for the loss. Another press was purchased
and destroyed, and then another. The fourth press, the mayor and
law-abiding citizens determined should be defended.
In the evening a mob gathered from the saloons,--their usual place of
starting,--and threatened to burn the building where it was stored. The
officials seemed powerless, the building was fired, and the Rev. Mr.
Lovejoy received three balls in his breast.
The death of this young minister in a free State sent a thrill of
indignation throughout the North. Dr. William Ellery Channing and one
hundred others called a meeting at Faneuil Hall, Boston, for the morning
of Dec. 8.
The Hon. Jonathan Phillips, a relative of Wendell Phillips, presided
over the crowded assemblage. Dr. Channing spoke eloquently. Soon in the
gallery, James T. Austin, the Attorney-General of Massachusetts, a
prominent lawyer, and member of Dr. Channing's congregation, arose and
declared that Lovejoy "died as the fool dieth," and compared his
murderers to the men who destroyed the tea in Boston harbor. The
audience was intensely excited.
Young Phillips, twenty-six years old and comparatively unknown, standing
among the people,--there are no seats in the hall,--said to his
neighbor, "Such a speech in Faneuil Hall must be answered in Faneuil
Hall."
"Why not answer it yourself?" whispered the man.
"Help me to the platform and I will," was the reply; and pushing his way
through the turbulent crowd he reached the rostrum.
He began with all the grace and self-control which characterized him in
after years. There were mingled cries of, "Question," "Hear him," "Go
on," "No gagging," and the like.
"Riding the whirlwind undismayed," says George William Curtis, in his
eulogy, "he stood upon the platform in all the beauty and grace of
imperial youth--the Greeks would have said a god descended--and in words
that touched the mind and heart and conscience of that vast multitude,
as with fire from heaven, recalling Boston to herself, he saved his
native city and her cradle of liberty from the damning disgrace of
stoning the first martyr in the great struggle for personal freedom."
"Mr. Chairman," he said, "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 pictured lips (pointing to the
portraits on the wall) would have broken into voice to rebuke the
recreant American--the slanderer of the dead.... Sir, for the sentiments
he has uttered, on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the
blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up."
This was received with applause and hisses, with cries of, "Make him
take back 'recreant.' He sha'n't go on till he takes it back."
As soon as he could proceed he said, "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 within these walls!"
"In the annals of American speech," says Curtis, "there had been no
such scene since Patrick Henry's electrical warning to George the
Third.... Three such scenes are illustrious in our history. That of the
speech of Patrick Henry at Williamsburg, of Wendell Phillips in Faneuil
Hall, and of Abraham Lincoln in Gettysburg--three, and there is no
fourth."
From this time Wendell Phillips was famous; but, save for the
approbation of his young wife, he stood nearly alone. He had already
spoken once before an Anti-Slavery Convention at Lynn, Mass. He was now
a despised abolitionist. His family were disappointed, his college was
surprised, his law constituency well-nigh disappeared. He was socially
ostracized.
James Russell Lowell, who also knew what it cost to be on the unpopular
side, spoke thus nobly of Phillips:
"He stood upon the world's broad threshold; wide
The din of battle and of slaughter rose;
He saw God stand upon the weaker side,
That sank in seeming loss before its foes;
Many there were, who made great haste and sold
Unto the cunning enemy their swords;
He scorned their gifts of fame and power and gold,
And, underneath their soft and flowery words,
Heard the cold serpent hiss; therefore he went
And humbly joined him to the weaker part,
Fanatic named, and fool, yet well content
So he could be the nearer to God's heart,
And feel its solemn pulses sending blood
Through all the wide-spread veins of endless good."
Mr. Phillips turned his time and thought more than ever to the lecture
platform, because in this way he could mould public opinion. He began to
deliver "The Lost Arts," in 1838, which gives a glimpse of early
civilization in glass-making, in gems, colors, metals, canals, etc.,
and gave it over two thousand times during the next forty-five years,
receiving for it, Dr. Martyn says, which statement he heard from
Phillips's own lips, a net result of $150,000.
When asked to lecture he would state his price if he were to speak on
science or biography, of which he was especially fond, but would make no
charges and pay his own expenses if he might speak on slavery or
temperance. If he spoke once he was sure to be sought again, and sooner
or later the people heard concerning the subjects to which he had
dedicated his life.
Having been made the general agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery
Society, Phillips organized a strong lecture force, and made every
schoolhouse and church where he was allowed to enter the centre for
discussions. Mrs. Phillips's health seeming to fail more and more, it
was deemed wise to cross the ocean for her sake. They accordingly sailed
from New York for London, June 6, 1839, arriving in July. They visited
France, Italy, and Germany, and remained abroad two years, without,
however, any improvement for the invalid wife.
On June 12, 1840, a World's Anti-Slavery Convention began its sessions
in London. A call had been issued, addressed to the "Friends of the
slave of every nation and of every clime." American societies sent
delegates, Wendell Phillips and his wife, already abroad, Lucretia Mott,
the distinguished Quaker, Garrison, and many others.
When they reached England, the women were refused as delegates. They
asked Wendell Phillips to plead their cause. When he left the house in
London to do so, his wife said to him, "Wendell, don't shilly-shally."
He spoke with his usual politeness and power: "It is the custom there
[America] not to admit colored men into respectable society; and we have
been told again and again that we are outraging the decencies of
humanity when we permit colored men to sit by our side. When we have
submitted to brickbats and the tar-tub and feathers in America, rather
than yield to the custom prevalent there of not admitting colored
brethren into our friendship, shall we yield to parallel custom or
prejudice against women in Old England?
"We cannot yield this question if we would, for it is a matter of
conscience, ... and British virtue ought not to ask us to yield."
The women were not admitted, however, and were obliged to sit in the
gallery as spectators. None the less the women of both nations owe
Phillips hearty thanks for his appreciation and his justice. Father
Mathew, the great temperance leader of Ireland, deeply regretted the
exclusion of the women delegates.
After the convention, Phillips and his wife went, by way of Belgium and
the Rhine, to Kissingen, in Bavaria. He writes to a friend in England:
"To Americans it was especially pleasant to see at Frankfort the oldest
printed Bible in the world, and two pairs of Luther's shoes, which Ann
would not quit sight of till I had mustered German enough to ask the man
to let the 'little girl' feel of them."
Again he writes: "We started for Florence, by Bologna, that jewel of a
city; ... for she admits women to be professors in her university, her
gallery guards their paintings, her palaces boast their sculptures. I
gloried in standing beside a woman-professor's monument, set up side by
side with that of the illustrious Galvani."
To Garrison he writes from Naples, having then the same sympathy for
the poor and the laborer which he showed through life: "When you meet in
the same street a man encompassed with all the equipage of wealth, and
the beggar, on whose brow disease and starvation have written his title
to your pity, the question is, involuntarily, Is this a Christian city?
To my mind the answer is, No....
"I hope the discussion of the question of property will not cease until
the Church is convinced that, from Christian lips _ownership means
responsibility for the right use_ of what God has given; that the title
of a needy brother is as sacred as the owner's own, and infringed upon,
too, whenever that owner allows the siren voice of his own tastes to
drown the cry of another's necessities.... None know what it is to live
till they redeem life from monotony by sacrifice."
After the return of the Phillipses, the anti-slavery work was taken up
more vigorously than ever. Colored children were not allowed to study in
the schools with white in Boston. Phillips agitated till separate
colored schools were abolished. He appealed to the Legislature of his
native State to compel railroads, as common carriers, to admit the negro
to the cars, and finally was successful.
He shared, like Henry Ward Beecher and Lucretia Mott, the discomforts of
the colored man. Frederick Douglass said, in his oration on Phillips,
given before his own race, in Washington, 1884: "On one occasion, after
delivering a lecture to the New Bedford Lyceum, before a highly
cultivated audience, when brought to the railroad station (as I was not
allowed to travel in a first-class car, but was compelled to ride in a
filthy box called the 'Jim Crow' car), he stepped to my side, in the
presence of his aristocratic friends, and walked with me straight into
this miserable dog-car, saying, 'Douglass, if you cannot ride with me, I
can ride with you.'
"On the Sound, between New York and Newport, in those dark days, a
colored passenger was not allowed abaft the wheels of the steamer, and
had to spend the night on the forward deck, with horses, sheep, and
swine. On such trips, when I was a passenger, Wendell Phillips preferred
to walk the naked deck with me to taking a state-room. I could not
persuade him to leave me to bear the burden of insult and outrage
alone."
In 1850 the "irrepressible conflict" between freedom and slavery was
reaching its climax. The Fugitive-Slave Law, fathered by Henry Clay,
and, to the dismay of a large portion of the North, upheld by Daniel
Webster in his 7th of March speech, had been signed by the President,
Millard Fillmore, Sept. 18, 1850. This bill made slave-hunting and the
return of slaves to their masters a duty.
A great company, presided over by Charles Francis Adams, and addressed
by Phillips and others, in Faneuil Hall, protested; but the North was
powerless or suppliant. Mobs broke up anti-slavery meetings in New York
City. Colored men, on one pretext or another, were seized and carried
back to slavery.
On April 3, 1851, Thomas Sims, a slave, was arrested in Boston, and,
after a hurried examination before the United States Commissioner, was
given up to his pursuers. The poor slave youth begged this favor: "Give
me a knife," he said, "and when the commissioner declares me a slave, I
will stab myself to the heart, and die before his eyes."
At midnight the Mayor of Boston, with two or three hundred policemen,
heavily armed, placed Sims on board the ship Acorn, and sent him back
into bondage.
Great meetings were held on Boston Common and in Tremont Temple to
protest against this action, but they were of no avail. A year later, on
the anniversary of the rendition of Sims, Phillips gave a thrilling
address at the Melodeon. Looking towards the future, he said, "I know
what civil war is.... And yet I do not know that, to an enlightened
mind, a scene of civil war is any more sickening than the thought of a
hundred and fifty years of slavery. 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 imbruted 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
darkness which has brooded over the Carolinas for two hundred years?"
Meantime, what had become of Sims? On arriving at Savannah he was
severely whipped, and confined in a cell for two months. He was then
sent to a slave-market at Charleston, and thence to another market at
New Orleans. Finally he was purchased by a brick-mason, taken to
Vicksburg, and in 1863 he escaped to the besieging army of Grant, and
was given transportation to the North.
Three years later, May 14, 1854, Anthony Burns, a slave, was arrested,
and on June 2, marched through Court Street and State Street, over the
ground where Crispus Attucks, a colored man, fell as the first victim in
the Boston Massacre in the Revolution, to the wharf, in the centre of a
concourse of people, guarded by companies of militia and protected by
cannon. The streets were draped in black by the indignant citizens, and
the bells tolled a dirge, as the bound slave was thrust into the hold of
a vessel ready to start for Virginia. Burns was the last black man
carried back to his masters from Massachusetts.
Meantime, Wendell Phillips had been fighting other battles. In October,
1850, the first National Woman Suffrage Convention was held at
Worcester, Mass. Nine States responded. Phillips spoke earnestly, but no
full report of his address or of others was taken.
The next year, 1851, at Worcester, he made a brilliant speech at the
second National Woman Suffrage Convention. Of that speech, given in full
in Mr. Phillips's "Speeches and Lectures" published in 1863, Mr. Curtis
says, in his eulogy of Phillips: "In his general statement of principle
nothing has been added to that discourse; in vivid and effective
eloquence of advocacy it has never been surpassed."
"What we ask is simply this," said Phillips, "what all other classes
have asked before: Leave it to woman to choose for herself her
profession, her education, and her sphere. We deny to any portion of the
species the right to prescribe to any other portion its sphere, its
education, or its rights.... The sphere of each man, of each woman, of
each individual, is that sphere which he can, with the highest exercise
of his powers, perfectly fill. The highest act which the human being can
do, that is the act which God designed him to do.... The tools, now, to
him or her who can use them....
"While woman is admitted to the gallows, the jail, and the tax-list, we
have no right to debar her from the ballot-box."
He had no fears that woman's natural grace or tenderness would be marred
by depositing her vote in the ballot-box. "Let education," he said,
"form the rational and moral being, and nature will take care of the
woman."
On another occasion Mr. Phillips gave this illustration: "Goethe said,
that, 'if you plant an oak in a flower-pot, one of two things was sure
to happen,--either the oak will be dwarfed, or the flower-pot will
break.' So we have planted woman in a flower-pot, hemmed her in by
restrictions; and, when we move to enlarge her sphere, society cries
out, 'Oh, you'll break the flower-pot!' Well, I say, let it break. Man
made it, and the sooner it goes to pieces the better. Let us see how
broadly the branches will throw themselves, and how beautiful will be
the shape, and how glorious against the moonlit sky or glowing sunset
the foliage shall appear!"
He thought the idea that woman would have no time for political matters
an absurdity, when the soldier, the busy manufacturer, the lawyer, the
president of a college, and the artisan have time to vote.
"Responsibility," he said, "is one instrument--a great instrument--of
education, both moral and intellectual. It sharpens the faculties. It
unfolds the moral nature. It makes the careless prudent, and turns
recklessness into sobriety.... Woman can never study those great
questions that interest and stir most deeply the human mind, until she
studies them under the mingled stimulus and check of this
responsibility.... The great school of this people is the jury-box and
the ballot-box.... Great political questions stir the deepest nature of
one-half the nation; but they pass far above and over the heads of the
other half. Yet, meanwhile, theorists wonder that the first have their
whole nature unfolded, and the others will persevere in being dwarfed."
In 1861, in Cooper Institute, New York, Mr. Phillips said: "Let public
opinion only grant that, like their thousand brothers, those women may
go out, and, wherever they find work to do, do it without a stigma being
set upon them. Let the educated girl of twenty have the same liberty to
use the pen, to practise law, to write books, to serve in a library, to
tend in a gallery of art, to do anything that her brother can do." And
he asked for woman equal wages with man for the same work.
The anti-slavery war was still waging. The Kansas and Nebraska Act, by
which the people were left to fight out the battle of slavery or freedom
on their own soil, resulted, as might have been expected, in bloodshed.
Among those who went to Kansas, determined to help make it a free State,
was John Brown, whose pathetic life has been written recently by that
eminent anti-slavery worker and author, Frank B. Sanborn, Esq., of
Concord, Mass.
During those dreadful years of civil war in Kansas, Brown and his family
suffered all manner of hardships. Some of his sons were in prison, and
some murdered. He had always wished to free the slaves, had helped many
to escape, and in 1859 carried out a plan, long in his mind, to
establish a station in Virginia, near enough to a free State, where
fugitive slaves could defend themselves for a time, till they could be
helped into Canada.
On Sunday evening, Oct. 16, 1859, Brown, with eighteen men, arrived at
Harper's Ferry, broke down the armory-gate, and took possession of the
village, without firing a gun. The citizens soon armed, several men were
killed, and, before the next night, Brown and his company, now reduced
to six, were barricaded in the engine-house. Colonel Robert E. Lee,
afterwards the Confederate general, arrived with some United States
marines from Washington, and Brown was ordered to surrender, which he
refused to do. When he was finally captured, his two sons were dead, and
he was thought to be dying from his wounds.
He met his death bravely on the scaffold at Charlestown, Va., Dec. 2.
1859.
He wrote a friend, a short time before his death, "I think I cannot
better serve the cause I love so much than to die for it; and in my
death I may do more than in my life."
The day he died, he wrote on a piece of paper and handed it to one of
the guards, "I, John Brown, am now quite _certain_ that the crimes of
this _guilty land_ will never be purged away but with _blood_. I had, as
I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it
might be done."
As he rode on the wagon to the scaffold, at eleven o'clock, looking out
over the two thousand Virginian soldiers, the distant hills, and the
Blue Ridge Mountains, he said, "This is a beautiful country; I have not
cast my eyes over it before--that is, in this direction." He thanked his
jailer for his kindness, and said, "I am ready at any time--do not keep
me waiting;" and died without a tremor.
Victor Hugo said, "His hangman is the whole American Republic.... What
the South slew last December was not John Brown, but slavery."
Brown's body was delivered to his wife, and she bore it to New York.
Wendell Phillips met the funeral company at that city, and they carried
the body to North Elba, in the Adirondack Mountains. He was buried Dec.
8, 1859, Mr. Phillips speaking eloquently and touchingly at the grave.
"He has abolished slavery in Virginia," said Phillips.... "History will
date Virginia emancipation from Harper's Ferry. True, the slave is still
there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on yon hill, it looks green
for months--a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree. John Brown
has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes,--it does
not live,--hereafter."
How strange it was that only a few short months afterward thousands of
Union soldiers were marching to battle, singing that inspiring strain,--
"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
And his soul is marching on!"
While Brown lay in prison at Charlestown, Va., a meeting was held in
Tremont Temple, Boston, to raise money for his impoverished family. John
A. Andrew, not then governor, presided. Emerson, Phillips, and the Rev.
J. M. Manning, Congregationalist, of the "Old South" Church, made
earnest addresses. The latter said, "I am here to represent the church
of Sam Adams and Wendell Phillips; and I want all the world to know that
I am not afraid to ride in the coach when Wendell Phillips sits on the
box."
In New York a meeting for the same purpose was confronted by a fierce
mob. On Staten Island, when Phillips attempted to lecture, George
William Curtis presiding, a mob gathered on the road and sidewalk. A
lady driving up, a man from West Brighton rushed to the carriage-door,
followed by several rough men, and exclaimed, "I advise you, madam, not
to go in; there is going to be trouble."
"What trouble, sir?" said she calmly.
"Two hundred of us," said the leader, "have sworn to tear this man from
the desk and plant him in the Jersey marshes."
"I don't think that will be allowed, sir," she replied.
"Well, if you have force enough to prevent it, go ahead."
"I do not say any such thing," she answered; "but this is not a
political meeting. I have come to hear a literary lecture, and I think
there will be decent men enough here to check any disturbance."
The bravery of the woman seemed to abash the crowd. Though some climbed
on ladders to the windows of the church and shouted, "Fetch him out!"
they did not attempt to batter down the doors. They threw stones and
cursed after the lecture was over, but Phillips was not harmed.
An attempt was made to mob him in Philadelphia. He wrote to his wife's
cousin, Miss Grew, "I have become so notorious, that at Albany,
Kingston, and Hartford the Lyceum could not obtain a church for me; and
the papers riddled me with pellets for a week; but that saved
advertising, and got me larger houses gratis. At Troy they even thought
of imitating Staten Island, and getting up a homoeopathic mob, but
couldn't."
Phillips was becoming accustomed to mobs. He had, says Mr. Higginson, "a
careless, buoyant, almost patrician air, as if nothing in the way of
mob-violence were worth considering." Dec. 2, 1860, on the anniversary
of John Brown's execution, being debarred from speaking in Tremont
Temple, a crowded meeting was held in the Belknap-street colored church.
The mob determined to get him into their hands, says Charles W. Slack,
in George Lowell Austin's life of Phillips, and were only prevented "by
a cordon of young men, about forty or more in number, who with locked
arms and closely compacted bodies, had Phillips in the centre of their
circle, and were safely bearing him home."
On Jan. 24, 1861, the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-slavery
Society was held in Tremont Temple. Mrs. Lydia Maria Child describes the
scene: "Soon the mob began to yell from the galleries. They came
tumbling in by hundreds.... Such yelling, screeching, and bellowing I
never heard....
"Mr. Phillips stood on the front of the platform for a full hour, trying
to be heard whenever the storm lulled a little. They cried, 'Throw him
out! Throw a brickbat at him! Your house is afire; go put out your
house!' Then they'd sing, with various bellowing and shrieking
accompaniments, 'Tell John Andrew, tell John Andrew, John Brown's dead!'
I should think there were four or five hundred of them. At one time they
all rose up, many of them clattered down-stairs, and there was a surging
forward toward the platform. My heart beat so fast I could hear it; for
I did not then know how Mr. Phillips's armed friends were stationed at
every door, and in the middle of the aisle. At last it was announced
that the police were coming. Mr. Phillips tried to speak, but his voice
was again drowned. Then ... he stepped forward and addressed his speech
to the reporters stationed directly below him."
He said to the reporters--the noisy crowd shouted, "Speak louder! We
want to hear what you're saying!"--"While I speak to these pencils, I
speak to a million of men. What, then, are these boys? We have got the
press of the country in our hands.... My voice is beaten by theirs, but
they cannot beat types. All hail and glory to Faust, who invented
printing, for he made mobs impossible." Nothing seemed to fire the great
orator like opposition. He was the very soul of courage.
The Civil War had begun. Phillips, who had been in favor of disunion,
because he and other anti-slavery men and women wished no union with
slavery, now that the first shot had been fired on April 12, 1861,
became a firm supporter of the Union.
He said in his lecture "Under the Flag," delivered in Music Hall, April
21, 1861, and contained in the first volume of his speeches: "The cannon
shot against Fort Sumter has opened the only door out of this hour.
There were but two. One was compromise; the other was battle.... The
South opened this with cannon shot, and Lincoln shows himself at the
door. The war, then, is not aggressive, but in self-defence, and
Washington has become the Thermopylæ of liberty and justice. Rather than
surrender that capital, cover every square foot of it with a living
body; crowd it with a million of men, and empty every bank vault at the
North to pay the cost. Teach the world once for all, that North America
belongs to the Stars and Stripes, and under them no man shall wear a
chain."
The speech was reported for the _Boston Journal_; but fearing that the
war Democrats would not be pleased, it was suppressed. The friends of
Phillips, learning of this, had it printed as an extra, and scattered
one hundred thousand copies of it.
Through these early years of the war Phillips was urging the arming of
the negroes; and when some white men doubted their courage, he lectured
through the land upon Toussaint L'Ouverture, the great leader of Hayti,
whom he thus pictures:--
"Of Toussaint, Hermona, the Spanish general, who knew him well, said,
'He was the purest soul God ever put into a body.' Of him history bears
witness, 'He never broke his word.'"
When he was captured by the French and taken to France, "As the island
faded from his sight, he turned to the captain and said, 'You think you
have rooted up the tree of liberty, but I am only a branch; I have
planted the tree so deep that all France can never root it up.'"
He was thrown into a stone dungeon, twelve feet by twenty. "This dungeon
was a tomb. The story is told that, in Josephine's time, a young French
marquis was placed there, and the girl to whom he was betrothed went to
the Empress and prayed for his release. Said Josephine to her, 'Have a
model of it made and bring it to me.' Josephine placed it near Napoleon.
He said, 'Take it away, it is horrible!' She put it on his footstool,
and he kicked it from him. She held it to him the third time, and said,
'Sire, in this horrible dungeon you have put a man to die.' 'Take him
out,' said Napoleon, and the girl saved her lover.
"In this tomb Toussaint was buried, but he did not die fast enough.
Finally the commandant was told to go into Switzerland, to carry the
keys of the dungeon with him, and to stay four days; when he returned,
Toussaint was found starved to death....
"'No RETALIATION,' was his great motto and the rule of his life; and
the last words uttered to his son in France were these, 'My boy, you
will one day go back to St. Domingo; forget that France murdered your
father.'"
Early in 1863 Phillips saw colored troops, the Fifty-fourth and
Fifty-fifth Regiments, march through the same street where Garrison had
been mobbed and Anthony Burns carried back into slavery by United States
troops, singing the John Brown song. Times were indeed changed since
Phillips himself was mobbed for suggesting negro soldiers.
When the war was over, and Abraham Lincoln lay dead, Phillips spoke in
Tremont Temple to a hushed and mourning company: "What the world would
not look at, God has set to-day in a light so ghastly bright that it
dazzles us blind. What we would not believe, God has written all over
the face of the continent with the sword's point, in the blood of our
best and most beloved. We believe the agony of the slave's hovel, the
mother, and the husband, when it takes its seat at our own board....
"He was permitted himself to deal the last staggering blow which sent
rebellion reeling to its grave; and then, holding his darling boy by the
hand, to walk the streets of its surrendered capital, while his ears
drank in praise and thanksgiving which bore his name to the throne of
God in every form piety and gratitude could invent; and finally to seal
the sure triumph of the cause he loved with his own blood. He caught the
first notes of the coming jubilee, and heard his own name in every one.
Who among living men may not envy him?"
In the great matters of reconstruction and constitutional changes,
Phillips took an ardent and helpful part. He criticised sharply, perhaps
not always wisely, (for who can be infallible in judgment?) but he was
always earnest and unselfish. When asked to let his name be used for
Congress, he refused, preferring to hold no party allegiance where
principle was at stake.
He constantly urged the ballot for the negro. "Reconstruct no State," he
said, "without giving to every loyal man in it the ballot. I scout all
limitations of knowledge, property, or race. Universal suffrage for me;
that was the Revolutionary model. Every freeman voted, black or white,
whether he could read or not. My rule is, any citizen liable to be
hanged for crime is entitled to vote for rulers. The ballot insures the
school."
When the slavery question was settled, Wendell Phillips could not stop
working. He wrote to a meeting of his old abolition comrades, two months
before his death, "Let it not be said that the old abolitionist stopped
with the negro, and was never able to see that the same principles
claimed his utmost effort to protect all labor, white and black, and to
further the discussion of every claim of humanity."
He said to a friend, "Now that the field is won, do you sit by the
camp-fire, but I will put out into the underbrush."
He had for years been a total abstainer, and now more than ever was an
earnest advocate of prohibition. In Tremont Temple, Jan. 24, 1881, he
reviewed Dr. Crosby's "Calm view of Temperance."
Phillips stood manfully for the temperance pledge. "We make a pledge by
joining a church," he said. "The husband pledges himself to his wife,
and she to him, for life. Is the marriage ceremony, then, a curse, a
hindrance to virtue and progress?
"Society rests in all its transactions on the idea that a solemn
promise, pledge, assertion, strengthens and assures the act.... The
witness on the stand gives solemn promise to tell the truth; the officer
about to assume place for one year, or ten, or for life, pledges his
word and oath; the grantor in a deed binds himself for all time by
record; churches, societies, universities, accept funds on pledge to
appropriate them to certain purposes and no other.... No man ever
denounced these pledges as unmanly.... The doctor's principle would
unsettle society; and if one proposed to apply it to any cause but
temperance, practical men would quietly put him aside as out of his
head."
Phillips told this story concerning the pledge. A man about sixty came
to sit beside him as he was travelling in a railway car. He had heard
Phillips lecture on temperance the previous evening. "I am master of a
ship," said he, "sailing out of New York, and have just returned from my
fiftieth voyage across the Atlantic. About thirty years ago I was a sot,
shipped, while dead drunk, as one of the crew, and was carried on board
like a log. When I came to, the captain sent for me. He asked me, 'Do
you remember your mother?' I told him she died before I could remember
anything. 'Well,' said he, 'I am a Vermont man. When I was young I was
crazy to go to sea. At last my mother consented I should seek my fortune
in New York.'
"He told how she stood on one side the garden gate and he on the other,
when, with his bundle on his arm, he was ready to walk to the next town.
She said to him, 'My boy, I don't know anything about towns, and I
never saw the sea; but they tell me those great towns are sinks of
wickedness, and make thousands of drunkards. Now, promise me you'll
never drink a drop of liquor.'
"He said, 'I laid my hand in hers and promised, as I looked into her
eyes for the last time. She died soon after. I've been on every sea, and
seen the worst kinds of life and men. They laughed at me as a milksop,
and wanted to know if I was a coward; but when they offered me liquor, I
saw my mother across the gate, and I never drank a drop. It has been my
sheet-anchor. I owe all to that. Would you like to take that pledge?'
said he."
He took it. "It has saved me," he said. "I have a fine ship, wife and
children at home, and I have helped others."
Dr. Crosby favored license. Phillips said, "The statute books in forty
States are filled with the abortions of thousands of license laws that
were never executed, and most of them were never intended to be."
"No one supposes," said Phillips later, "that law can make men
temperate.... But law can shut up those bars and dram-shops which
facilitate and feed intemperance, which double our taxes, make our
streets unsafe for men of feeble resolution, treble the peril to
property and life, and make the masses tools in the hands of designing
men to undermine and cripple law."
Phillips also worked untiringly for labor reform. He wrote to Mr. George
J. Holyoake, in England, "There'll never be, I believe and trust, a
class-party here, labor against capital, the lines are so indefinite,
like dove's-neck colors. Three-fourths of our population are to some
extent capitalists; and, again, all see that there is really, and ought
always to be, alliance, not struggle, between them." Again he said,
"Capital and labor are only the two arms of a pair of scissors,--useless
when separate, and only safe when fastened together, cutting everything
before them."
He urged fewer hours for labor, better wages, and united effort among
workingmen. He said to them, "Why have you not carried your ends before?
Because in ignorance and division you have let the other side have their
own way. We are ruled by brains.... You want books and journals.... When
men have wrongs to complain of they should go to the ballot-box and
right them.... Men always lose half of what is gained by violence. What
is gained by argument is gained forever."
In an address in 1872 he said to labor, "If you want power in this
country, if you want to make yourselves felt, ... 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.'"
Mr. Phillips carried out his ideas of labor under his own roof. So kind
and considerate was he to his servants, that his cook, who was his nurse
in childhood, used to leave the door open into the kitchen, that she
might hear him pass and repass. She said, "Bless him, there is more
music in his footfall than in a cathedral organ!"
When she was too old for work, he placed her in a home of her own, and
went to see her every Saturday, when possible, with many gifts for her
comfort, till she died. He paid the best wages to servants of anybody in
the neighborhood. "Good pay, good service," he used to say.
He was always generous. One day on the cars he met a woman thinly clad,
a lecturer from the South, a niece of Jefferson Davis, as he afterwards
learned. She had received five dollars for her work. Mr. Phillips said,
"I don't want to give offence, but you know I preach that a woman is
entitled to the same as a man if she does the same work. Now, my price
is fifty or a hundred dollars; and, if you will let me divide it with
you, I shall not have had any more than you, and the thing will be
even."
The lady at first refused, but was persuaded to take it. When she
reached home she found there were fifty dollars--all he had received for
his lecture at Gloucester.
In 1870 Phillips accepted the nomination for the governorship of
Massachusetts from the prohibition and the labor parties, though he
said, and undoubtedly with truth, that he had no desire to be governor.
He received over twenty thousand votes.
When blamed because he favored General Butler for governor, he replied
that he did not know a man among all the candidates whom he would make a
saint of. "The difficulty is," said he, with his natural love of humor,
"saints do not come very often; and, when they do, it is the hardest
thing in the world to get them into politics."
When Andrew Johnson was not impeached, as Phillips hoped he would be, he
used to say, "Congress has deposed him without impeachment. 'Friend,
I'll not shoot thee,' said the Quaker to the footpad, 'but I'll hold thy
head in the water until thee drown thyself.' The Republican party has
taken a leaf out of that scrupulous Christian's book."
Phillips was a Protectionist. In early life he was a free-trader, but
changed his views. "Under free trade," he said, "our country would be
wholly agricultural.... Should we lose our diversified occupations, we
would suffer a great loss, though there might be a pecuniary gain.... If
all the world were under one law, and every man raised to the level of
the Sermon on the Mount, free trade would be so easy and charming! But
while nations study only how to cripple their enemies,--that is, their
neighbors,--and while each trader strives to cheat his customer, and
strangle the firm on the other side of the street, we must not expect
the millennium."
He smiled at the "shoals of college-boys, slenderly furnished with Greek
and Latin, but steeped in marvellous and delightful ignorance of life
and public affairs, filling the country with free-trade din."
Phillips pleaded the cause of the Irish in his wonderful lecture on
Daniel O'Connell. He was also the friend and advocate of the Indian.
He opposed capital punishment, because he thought the old Testament
law--about which scholars disagree--was no more binding upon us than
scores of others given to the Jews about "abstaining from meats offered
to idols, and from blood and from things strangled," etc. Once men were
hanged in England for stealing a shilling. We are gradually learning
that reform is what society needs--not revenge.
Mr. Phillips spoke on finance before the American Social Science
Association. His plan was, says Austin: "Take from the national banks
all right to issue bills; let the nation itself supply a currency ample
for all public needs; reduce the rate of interest."
In the summer of 1880 Mr. Phillips and his wife spent some time at
Princeton, Mass. He was then sixty-nine years old. He wrote a friend: "I
laze and ride on horseback, exploring the drives.... The rest of the
time I sleep. I weigh a hundred and seventy-five pounds, and don't feel
as old as I am."
To another friend he wrote of the extreme stillness of the place: "A
passer-by is an event. The only noise ever made is by the hens. The only
thing that ever happens is when we miss the cat. But we always keep
awake at the sunsets, they are splendid."
The next year, June 30, 1881, he was asked to give the address at
Harvard College, on the Centennial Anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa.
His subject was "The Scholar in a Republic."
"It was," says Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "the tardy recognition of him
by his own college and his own literary society, and proved to be, in
some respects, the most remarkable effort of his life. He never seemed
more at his ease, more colloquial and more extemporaneous; and he held
an unwilling audience spellbound, while bating absolutely nothing of his
radicalism."
He pleaded for the great reforms for which he had labored all his life.
"The fathers," he said, "touched their highest level when, with
stout-hearted and serene faith, they trusted God that it was safe to
leave men with all the rights he gave them. Let us be worthy of their
blood, and save this sheet-anchor of the race,--universal
suffrage,--God's church, God's school, God's method of gently binding
men into commonwealths in order that they may at last melt into
brothers....
"These agitations are the opportunities and the means God offers us to
refine the taste, mould the character, lift the purpose, and educate the
moral sense of the masses, on whose intelligence and self-respect rests
the State. God furnishes these texts. He gathers for us this audience,
and only asks of our coward lips to preach the sermons....
"If in this critical battle for universal suffrage ... there be any
weapon, which, once taken from the armory, will make victory certain, it
will be, as it has been in art, literature, and society, summoning woman
into the political arena.... The literary class, until half a dozen
years, has taken note of this great uprising only to fling every
obstacle in its way.
"The first glimpse we get of Saxon blood in history is that line of
Tacitus in his 'Germany,' which reads, 'In all grave matters they
consult their women.' Years hence, when robust Saxon sense has flung
away Jewish superstition and Eastern prejudice, and put under its foot
fastidious scholarship and squeamish fashion, some second Tacitus, from
the Valley of the Mississippi, will answer to him of the Seven Hills,
'In all grave questions we consult our women.' ...
"To be as good as our fathers we must be better.... With serene faith
they persevered. Let us rise to their level. Crush appetite and prohibit
temptation if it rots great cities."
In the winter of 1882 he made his last lecture tour, when he was
seventy-one. He had the same noble presence, the same exquisitely toned
voice which began his speech as in ordinary conversation, the same calm
self-poised manner, as in middle life. The eyes were blue and small, the
smile sweet, the figure straight, the whole bearing one of perfect
mastery of both self and audience. I have heard, "his attitude was a
study for the sculptor--yet unconscious and natural," truly says Mr.
Martyn. "The weight of the body was usually supported upon the left
foot, with the right slightly advanced at an easy angle--an attitude of
combined firmness and repose."
His speeches were never written out. He disliked writing, and thought it
"a mild form of slavery--a man chained to an ink-pot." He said, "The
chief thing I aim at is to master my subject. Then I earnestly try to
get the audience to think as I do."
He once wrote a young man, who had asked him about public speaking: "I
think practice with all kinds of audiences the best of teachers. Think
out your subject carefully. Read all you can relative to the themes you
touch. Fill your mind; and then talk simply and naturally. Forget
altogether that you are to make a speech or are making one.... Remember
to talk up to an audience, not down to it. The commonest audience can
relish the best thing you can say if you say it properly. Be simple, be
earnest."
"He faced his audience," says Curtis, "with a tranquil mien, and a
beaming aspect that was never dimmed. He spoke, and in the measured
cadence of his quiet voice there was intense feeling, but no
declamation, no passionate appeal, no superficial and feigned emotion.
It was simply colloquy--a gentleman conversing. Unconsciously and surely
the ear and heart were charmed.
"How was it done? Ah! how did Mozart do it, how Raphael? The secret of
the rose's sweetness, of the bird's ecstasy, of the sunset's glory--that
is the secret of genius and of eloquence."
Phillips's habit in travelling was to carry a large shawl, which he
always spread between the sheets of his bed in the various hotels, to
prevent a cold; an example to other speakers. His supper before an
address was usually, it is said, three raw eggs and a cup of tea.
Mr. Phillips had already moved his home from 26 Essex Street, in the
spring of 1881, to No. 37 Common Street, not far away, as his home had
to be torn down for the widening of the street. It was a severe trial to
both, but it did not remain their earthly home for long.
Mr. Phillips made his last public address at the unveiling of Anne
Whitney's statue of Harriet Martineau at the "Old South" Church, Boston,
Dec. 26, 1883.
His wife was seriously ill through January, and he watched most
devotedly by her bedside. On the 26th of the month he was taken ill with
angina pectoris. He felt that the end was near. He said, "I have no fear
of death. I have long foreseen it. My only regret is for poor Ann. I had
hoped to close her eyes before mine were shut." To a friend who spoke to
him of his always expressed belief in the divinity of Christ, though
many of his friends were Unitarian, he said, quoting the words of an
eminent Semitic scholar: "I find the whole history of humanity before
him and after him points to him, and finds in him its centre and its
solution. His whole conduct, his deeds, his words, have a supernatural
character, being altogether inexplicable from human relations and human
means. I feel that here there is something more than man."
"Then you have no doubt about a future life?" said the friend.
"I am as sure of it as I am that there will be a to-morrow," was the
reply.
On Saturday evening, Feb. 2, 1884, at fifteen minutes past six, he
closed his eyes calmly and quietly forever.
All Boston, all America, was moved at the death of the great
leader--patrician born, yet the people's advocate. The funeral was held
at eleven o'clock Wednesday, Feb. 6, at Hollis-street Church, and then
the body was borne to Faneuil Hall, two colored companies forming a
guard of honor.
There, where he had won his first fame in youth at the Lovejoy meeting,
where he had stirred the whole land by his eloquence in the cause of the
oppressed, it was fitting he should sleep at last.
The Irish National League of Boston sent a mound of flowers, three feet
by four, with the word "Humanity" in the centre, in violets on a bed of
carnations. The Irish-American Societies of Boston sent a harp four feet
high of ivy leaves and japonicas, with the word "Ireland" in the centre.
One of the harp strings was broken. Others sent a sheaf of ripened
wheat, a crown of ivy and roses, and a wreath of laurel.
From one o'clock till four, thousands passed the form of their beloved
dead; rich and poor, Irish and American, black and white, children and
adults. One old colored woman, with tears flowing down her cheeks, said,
"Our Wendell Philips has gone." Another said, "He was de bes' fren' we
ever hed. We owes him a heap!"
Frederick Douglass looked on in sorrow. "I wanted to see this throng,"
he said, "and to see the hold that this man had upon the community. It
is a wonderful tribute."
Thousands were unable to enter Faneuil Hall, and filled every available
inch of space in the street, and windows and balconies of buildings. A
vast crowd followed up State Street to Washington, up School to
Tremont, to the old Granary burying-ground, where the body was laid in
the family vault.
Mrs. Phillips died Saturday, April 24, 1886, two years after her
husband. She had been closely confined to her home for the greater part
of fifty years. "She lay as if asleep," says Francis J. Garrison, "with
all the purity and guilelessness of her youthful face ripened into
maturity. It seemed transfiguration."
The body of Wendell Phillips was carried with that of his wife to
Milton, a beautiful suburb where they had often spent their summers; and
both were buried in the same grave, side by side, in a lot which he had
purchased a year or two before his death. A noble pine-tree stands near
the spot. On a plain slab at the head of the grave are the words, "Ann
and Wendell Phillips."