THE STORY 




CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL 



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5M 5/80 (T2555s8)418D->o/ 




THE STORY OF 
WENDELL PHILLIPS 

Soldier of the Common Good 



BY 
CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL 

Author of "Stories of the Great Railroads," 
"Why I am a Socialist," etc. 



CHICAGO 

CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 
CO-OPERATIVE 




Copyright 1914 
By CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL 



JOHN K. HIGGINS 

PRINTER AND BINDER 



376-382 MONROE STREET 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I THE ENLISTMENT 5 

II THE FIRST BATTLES 34 

III ON THE FIRING LINES 47 

IV THE INTERESTS THEN AND THE INTERESTS 

Now 68 

V STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 82 

VI JOHN BROWN AND HARPER S FERRY ... 97 

VII THE MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR . 114 

VIII PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 131 

IX THE MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVILEGE . . 149 

X THE ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION . 165 



THE STORY OF 
WENDELL PHILLIPS 



THE ENLISTMENT 

MEN and women, all under the sway of a pas 
sionate excitement, many half maniacal with 
rage, have crowded the hall to the limit of its 
capacity. All are upon their feet, surging, 
shouting, screaming, gesticulating. On the 
platform before them is a tall, grave, handsome 
man, waiting to be heard. Without bravado, 
without concern, he stands and waits. Part of 
the audience desires to hear him ; part desires 
to drown his voice with clamors ; part is deter 
mined to take his life. 

He stands and waits. Even his foes, look 
ing upon him there, admit it is a remarkable 
figure against which they storm. His stature 
suggests strength and repose, but something 
more than bulk impresses the men gazing here 
5 



6 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

upon him. What moves them in spite of them 
selves is the manifest attitude of a man un 
afraid, sincere and intent upon his message, not 
upon himself. 

After a time a lull comes in the rioting tor 
nado of noises that has shaken the building. 
Instantly, this man, standing there so quietly, 
shoots into the opening a shining arrow of a 
sentence, straight, barbed, and singing as it 
flies. At the sound of it, uproar redoubles. 
On the platform, the speaker stands and waits, 
an archer with bow drawn. At the next lull, 
almost before the crowd is aware, he has loos 
ened two of his burning shafts ; at the next, 
three ; at the next, the clamor dies away and 
friends and foes stand under the charm of a 
silver voice that rings forth one fascinating pe 
riod after another. Hostile forces cease to 
contend on the floor. After a moment or two 
comes a ripple of involuntary applause. Be 
fore long the whole rapt audience is cheering. 
At the end of two hours it thinks the man may 
have been speaking ten minutes. He bows and 
leaves the platform amid thundering cheers, 
and sown behind him are conviction and unper- 
ishing seeds of thought. 

At any time between 1837 and 1861 such 
a scene was common in the life of this man. 



THE ENLISTMENT 7 

Of no other orator that ever lived are such 
triumphs recorded. Wherever he goes he 
sways men with a new necromancy. Audiences 
the most bitterly hostile seem unable to with 
stand his peculiar eloquence; the beautiful bell- 
like voice is wings to lofty thought, invincible 
logic and soul-searching words; even the minds 
fortified against reason learn from his lips. 
Yet, in his long life of ceaseless activities, he 
debated for no crown, argued for no fees, strove 
for no reward, sought no place nor any fame, 
cared for no achievement for its own sake, and 
used his unequaled gifts only for some cause of 
justice or freedom in which he could earn noth 
ing but obloquy, hatred and isolation. 

This is the career of Wendell Phillips, the 
most marvelous and the most inspiring in his 
tory. Here was a man endowed with every con 
ceivable advantage for the winning of what we 
call success: a brilliant and powerful mind 
trained in the best schools; a gift of extem 
poraneous and moving eloquence, an attractive 
presence, great personal magnetism, a famous 
lineage, social standing and prestige; entered 
upon a profession he loved and for which he 
had every qualification, with hosts of powerful 
friends, a taste for public affairs and public 
life, an almost unequaled aptitude for debate; 



8 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

a young man with every avenue of preferment 
and distinction open to him. He deliberately 
abandoned them all, and like a religious enthu 
siast rising above every thought of self, made 
of his life one long sacrifice on the altars of 
righteousness. 

No man ever gave up more for the sake of 
his faith. All his brilliant career was wrecked 
in an instant. His friends and his family de 
serted and repudiated him. Some of his rela 
tives declared that he was insane and planned 
to have him confined in an asylum. His 
mother, to whom he was most tenderly attached, 
condemned his course. The press covered him 
with ridicule and abuse; he became a social 
pariah. For more than twenty years he lived 
in daily danger of his life, with a price on his 
head; to face such gatherings as I have de 
scribed and worse, to stand and defy mobs that 
were thirsting for his blood, became his all but 
daily experience. At old Faneuil Hall in Bos 
ton men will show you now the little back stair 
case down which he was whisked to safety after 
his speeches, while the street in front was filled 
with those that waited to lynch him. So late 
as January, 1861, after preaching in Theodore 
Parker s church, bodyguards of young men must 
needs surround and protect him to his doors 



THE ENLISTMENT 9 

that he might not be murdered for quoting the 
word of God against human slavery. 

Through all this, as I hope to show, he 
walked with a beautiful serenity, at peace with 
God and his own conscience. Without a word 
of complaint he accepted the place he had made 
for himself, closed his law office, shut the 
door upon his profession, took full in the face 
whatever blows passionate hatred could give 
him. I think he even had foreknowledge that 
the malice he aroused in his later years would 
pursue him after death ; that it would deny him 
his place among the world s orators and belit 
tle his achievements. Yet his philosophy of 
conscience never failed him ; to the end of his 
life he never ceased from the task he had laid 
upon himself. 

When a cause was won, and in the natural 
revulsion of popular feeling men sought to make 
him its hero, he put aside their tributes and de 
manded their attention to the next unpopular 
reform. 

Compared with such a career, the stories of 
the men that on grounds of material triumph 
have won places in the world s regard seem but 
poor indeed. They toiled for themselves, or 
for the glory of achievement, for party or fac 
tion, or at best for what is called national 



10 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

success. This man s single and unselfish pur 
pose was to win better conditions for the un 
fortunate, wherever they might be, to strive 
against injustice, to further brotherhood, to 
spread liberty. As ardently as other men 
sought wealth or power he sought the Common 
Good. When to this singular and noble aspira 
tion we add a life so pure that he seemed to 
his contemporaries to be without a human weak 
ness, surely we have a radiant figure before 
which the statues of our military champions 
shrink and the records of greasy and self-seek 
ing statesmen grow merely contemptible. In 
an age half-mad about material success and po 
litical honors, such a life is the only model for 
the young, and the only light worth following. 
As much as conscience is above appetite he 
shines above all heroes tainted with a selfish 
purpose. For reasons that I shall deal with 
hereafter, every possible effort has been made 
to conceal and suppress the story of his life ; 
yet none other is so valuable to an American, 
for none other begins to reveal so clearly how 
great a power for good is but one man stand 
ing alone, if he be not afraid, if he be conse 
crated to a worthy cause, and if he rise above 
a personal aim. 



THE ENLISTMENT 11 

Mr. Phillips was by faith and conviction the 
most ardent of democrats, but his lineage and 
all his antecedents were what is called aristo 
cratic. His family was, in the snobbish phrase, 
one of the best in New England; certainly it 
was one of the most distinguished. It dated 
in America back to 1630, when the Rev. George 
Phillips, who had been rector of Buxted, Eng 
land, left his charge on some issue of faith and 
conscience and settled at Watertown, in the 
colony of Massachusetts Bay. From him Wen 
dell was in the seventh generation of descent. 
All the men between had been eminent in colonial 
or early American affairs, being noted patriots, 
clergymen, lawyers, orators or public servants. 
One was lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts, 
one was a colonel, one a member of the gover 
nor s council, two founded the famous Phillips 
Academies at Exeter and Andover and a chair 
of theology at Dartmouth College. Wendell s 
father, John Phillips, was a graduate of Har 
vard, a leader of the bar and in the legislature, 
the first mayor of Boston, and held by the com 
munity in profound and deserved respect. He 
lived on the aristocratic Beacon Hill, where 
Wendell, a fifth son, was born November 29, 
1811, and where he was reared in an atmosphere 



THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

of decorum, culture and as much luxury as 
seemed consistent with the strict piety of his 
parents. 

The Puritan household was serious but 
kindly ; the children were early trained to be 
self-respecting, self-reliant and faithful to cer 
tain rather lofty conceptions of duty and con 
duct. One of the rules in John Phillips s fam 
ily was " never ask another to do for you what 
you can do yourself, and never ask another to 
do for you what you would not do for yourself 
if you could." The father was never so much 
of an aristocrat that he did not believe in work 
ing with the hands ; each of the boys must learn 
the use of tools ; and under this tuition Wen 
dell became something of a carpenter, a craft 
for which he never quite lost his preference. 
Acute observers have pointed out that in 
America the greatest peril lies in the second 
generation of the rich, whose members, never 
trained to labor and reared in parasitic sloth, 
grow up with a conviction of their superior 
caste more arrogant and poisonous than can be 
found elsewhere upon earth. His own native 
convictions and good sense would have saved 
Wendell Phillips in any event from such a 
taint, but there was also a practical grace in 
the fact that he had learned to work with his 



THE ENLISTMENT 13 

hands. In after years he saw that without 
such work, without the trained hand as well as 
the trained mind, there cannot be for individ 
uals or society the most wholesome conditions, 
whether mentally, physically, or spiritually; 
and he never forgot the respect he gained at 
the bench for the men that create the world s 
wealth and furnish the world s onward impulse. 

In his boyhood days he had amusements that 
showed the unusual bent of his intellect. His 
near neighbor and playmate was a lad named 
John Lothrop Motley, himself destined to a 
distinguished career, and the greatest fun they 
knew was to get into the Phillips attic, dress 
themselves in the discarded finery of another 
generation and enact scenes from dramas of 
their own and other contriving. Even then 
Phillips had a taste for declamation, and, it is 
said, a noticeably fine voice. When he was five 
years old he was wont to play church, with 
chairs for auditors and himself in an extem 
porized pulpit as the preacher. When his 
father asked him if he did not get tired of 
preaching (his harangues being apparently of 
a great length), he said, with a twinkle of dry 
and characteristic humor: 

" No, I don t get tired, but it s rather hard 
on the chairs." 



14 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

He was fitted at the famous Boston Latin 
School (where one of his chums and dearest 
friends was Charles Sumner) and went thence 
to Harvard. In college he was distinguished 
as the most brilliant man in his class and the 
leader of the aristocratic set. The position 
and fame of his family gave him a certain pres 
tige, but his wit and talent would have made 
him conspicuous anywhere. He was a noted 
athlete ; in college, the champion boxer, oars 
man, fencer and horseman of his time. He 
loved these things for their own sake and had 
pursued them under difficulties, for in those 
days the Boston schools sternly discouraged 
athletics. All through his college course men 
prophesied great things of his after career. 
Every good gift of nature seemed to be his; a 
powerful frame, perfect health, a winning pres 
ence, a capacious mind and a natural disposi 
tion toward things clean and good. His hab 
its were always right ; he went through college 
without a smirch. 

When he had been graduated he entered the 
law school under Judge Story, who seems to 
have been greatly taken with his pupil and 
predicted for him an extraordinary career at 
the bar. From Judge Story s tutelage he 
went to a law office in Lowell, where he spent 



THE ENLISTMENT 15 



six months and first met Benjamin F. Butler, 
then an errand boy in another office. Thence 
lie returned to Boston, opened an office of his 
own in Court Street and began at once to have 
a large and profitable practise. He was al 
ready noted equally for his eloquence and his 
learning; his friends clearly foresaw that there 
was no high place in the nation to which he 
might not reach. 

The time was 1833. The nation was sleep 
ing serenely upon a volcano and the few that 
suspected the fact took pains not to betray 
their suspicions. About 3,000,000 Americans 
were held as chattel possessions by about 
300,000 other Americans, and that one tremen 
dous fact constituted the volcano. At the 
time of the founding of the country, all men, 
North and South, were agreed that slavery was 
wrong and must some day be abolished, but 
neither the United States nor any other nation 
had then awakened to the unspeakable iniquity 
of the institution. The first slaves in the 
American territory had been convicts, or white 
men kidnaped in England and sold to the colo 
nial planters ; slavery was therefore a thing 
familiar and viewed as a sanctioned cus 
tom; it had always existed somewhere on earth 
^ and against an institution so ancient and re- 



16 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

spectable the country was disposed to move 
slowly, even after the eloquent warnings and 
appeals of Washington and Jefferson. Still, 
it did move and slavery was well on its way to 
disappear when Eli Whitney changed all this 
with his invention of the cotton gin. 

That brought in the tremendous power of 
profits, the greatest force in modern life. 
Cotton became the staple of the whole South 
ern country, slave labor was employed in cul 
tivating the cotton, in a short time it was 
discovered that th e annual average profit of a 
slave s labor was about 35 per cent., and in the 
face of such enormous returns all moral consid 
erations and all the arguments of the wisest 
of the fathers naturally were forgotten. The 
South came to look upon slavery as the one 
source of its sacred prosperity. The North, 
getting its share of the cotton business, came 
to acquiesce in the same view, and for many 
years the necessity of slavery was not ques 
tioned. Many men in the North and some 
even in the South did not in their souls believe 
in the thing, but over the average conscience 
the great fact of 35 per cent, profit rolled an 
extinguishing flood. 

From this state of lethal acquiescence the 
country began slowly to awake chiefly because 



THE ENLISTMENT 17 

of the ceaseless denunciations of one remarkable 
man. 

William Lloyd Garrison had begun life as 
an obscure printer, penniless and without ad 
vantages of education, and, by dint of repeat 
ing his own passionate protest against slavery, 
had drawn about him a small following of men 
and women, universally deemed to be crazy. 
After the passage of the Missouri Compromise 
in 1820, anti-slavery agitation had been sup 
posed to be silenced. Garrison made himself 
intensely hated by reviving it. 

All the " better elements " at the North sym 
pathized with the South about slavery. Lead 
ers of Northern capital and wealth ardently 
championed it as beneficent and necessary; 
Northern commercial classes were united in its 
support; Northern pulpits found that it was 
specially ordered and commanded in the Bible 
and to oppose it was a form of blasphemy ; 
Northern politicians contended in subserviency 
to the slave-owning element; all the power of 
Northern Society was exerted in its defense, it 
being definitely and forever settled that to own 
slaves was good form, and to object to slave- 
owning was to read oneself out of the social 
register. Beyond these were classes that tried 
to prove by excess of devotion to the slave- 



18 THE STORY OP WENDELL PHILLIPS 

owners cause the certainty of their own social 
eminence; classes that violently aped their su 
periors, and classes that did not care. These 
latter were generally of an ardent profession 
of patriotism. Slavery did not concern them ; 
what they wanted was to be left alone and to 
contemplate undisturbed the surpassing gran 
deur and greatness of their country, knowing 
quite well that whatever it did was right 

Nothing else in history is so extraordinary 
as the one fact that all of this condition of 
moral turpitude, and all of the succeeding tur 
moil that ended in an appalling war, were based 
upon the profits of an inconsiderable number 
of persons. 

In 1855, when the total population of the 
United States was about 30,000,000, the num 
ber of persons that owned slaves was 348,214. 
Only two persons owned so many as a thousand 
slaves each; and nine owned each between five 
hundred and a thousand. It was for the sake 
of the 35 per cent, profit of 348,214 persons 
that the country came to civil war after years 
of practical anarchy. Contemplating this stu 
pendous fact, it is evident that we ought to 
learn history over again ; certainly nothing in 
the existing method of instruction will avail to 
explain such an anomaly. 



THE ENLISTMENT 19 

But if we can once come to understand it 
aright there is no other chapter of history that 
is so valuable for instruction, and principally 
because of the startling parallel it affords with 
the national situation to-day. 

In 1833 there was no obvious reason why 
the North should have been particularly alert 
in championing the cause of the comparatively 
small band of Southern slave owners ; or at 
least no reason that a just man could deem to 
be sufficient to excuse support of a crime so 
hideous as slavery; and yet as to-day millions 
of men are enrolled in defense of the wage sys 
tem that have no interest in it, so in those days 
millions of the bitterest opponents of Abolition 
were to be found among Northern business men. 
For these strange facts the hidden reasons then 
and now are identical. Capital and money 
sympathized with the South because slaves 
were property, and when slavery was attacked 
all property was thought to be attacked; also, 
because all about the world, capital stands to 
gether. The commercial classes sympathized 
because the Northern mills lived on Southern 
cotton and Southern cotton was grown by slave 
labor; therefore, to attack slavery was commer 
cial high treason ; it was bad for business. The 
pulpit naturally followed the lure of the big 



20 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

pew rents. The politicians naturally followed 
the political sutlers wagons ; they always do. 
These affinities are in a way understandable, 
however grotesque and silly. But the weirdest 
aspect of all was this thing I have before re 
ferred to, the attitude of what is called So 
ciety ; the weirdest and the most pernicious. 
Society set the example and pace for all the 
other elements, far exceeded them in bitterness, 
inspired them with murderous hatred, ap 
plauded the mobs when it did not actually lead 
them, filled the press with fury, ringed the 
noses of clergymen and dragged them behind, 
indurated the public conscience, blasted any 
agitator with the damnation of its disapproval, 
and instigated its millions of bourgeois imi 
tators to amazing acts of violence. And the 
sweet and ^adequate reason that animated So 
ciety was that the South had all the social 
prestige and was the social dictator. Do you 
know why? It was furthest removed from 
damning labor, always the badge of social deg 
radation. The South was more idle than the 
Nortjj ; and although slavery made it more idle, 
it was by virtue of its superior idleness our 
hereditary and highest aristocracy. North 
ern Society looked upon Southern Society with 
such awe-struck reverence as that wherewith all 



THE ENLISTMENT 

our Society now regards the English nobility. 
To be in touch with Southern social leaders 
was the certificate of gentility ; the more you 
hated the Negro, the more vehemently you de 
fended the institution of slavery, and the more 
laboriously you argued for the 348,214 and 
their 35 per cent, profit, the brighter shone 
your certificate. 

Every feature of this situation we have since 
seen reproduced with marvelous fidelity in the 
conflict against the wage system. 

As to-day we see business men forming 
" Citizens Alliances " to uphold the employers 
in strike difficulties wherein business men have 
no direct concern, so in 1833 the same element 
formed voluntary associations to suppress any 
agitation of the question of slavery. As to-day 
the business men in a strike zone form the mob 
that shoots and deports the head of a labor 
union, so in 1833 and later the same element 
formed the greater part of the mobs that broke 
up anti-slavery meetings and tarred and 
feathered anti-slavery speakers. As to-day 
every person that agitates the labor issue is 
blacklisted by the press and shunned by So 
ciety, so in 1833 men that objected to slavery 
found, in the very heart of the North, a taboo 
raised against them, their families and their 



%2 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

business. As to-day the whole force of com 
merce is arrayed in defence of the profits 
arising from the wage system, so in 1833 sim 
ilar forces were determined there should be no 
attacks upon chattel slavery. 

The close parallel does not fail even when 
we come to labor, for it must be admitted that 
in 1833 as to-day labor was often singularly 
blind to its own injuries. In a material way 
it suffered from slavery more than any other 
element, and yet it often seemed indifferent. 
Not always, for among the strongest oppo 
nents of slavery came many from this class ; 
but still the spectacle was sometimes witnessed 
of working people violently attacking men that 
were only striving to end a condition inimical 
to labor. This is not quite the anomaly it 
seems. We are to remember that the whole 
subject was most ably and persistently be 
fogged or distorted by practically the entire 
press, so that the very name of anti-slavery 
agitation became invested in the public mind 
with merely hateful and grotesque significance. 
To be an ^anti-slavery agitator w r as to be a pes 
tilent demagogue, an enemy of peace and pros 
perity, and a traitor to the proud American 
nation and its flag. 

Under the stress of this hysteria very strange 



THE ENLISTMENT %& 

things were said and done. Public men of emi 
nence seemed to be always on their knees to the 
348,214 slave owners. Northern governors 
like Edward Everett professed pride and pleas 
ure in the capture of runaway slaves fleeing 
toward Canada and freedom. The Rev. Dr. 
Dewey, a prominent Unitarian clergyman, de 
clared that he would return his own mother to 
slavery if to do so would help to preserve the 
Union. The President of Brown University 
denounced the agitation of the question of 
slavery and said that for Congress to pass an 
Abolition act for the District of Columbia 
would be bad faith. Practically the entire col 
lege and university element of the North was 
of his opinion and strenuously opposed any 
talk of Abolition. All about the North, known 
Abolitionists were assaulted, driven from their 
homes, hunted, tarred and feathered, stripped, 
beaten, shot at, and sometimes killed. The 
Governor of South Carolina declared slavery to 
be the corner-stone of the Republic and de 
manded that laws should be passed to punish 
with death any interference with or discussion 
of it. Edward Everett wished Massachusetts 
to make a penal offense of any spoken or 
printed utterance against slavery. Four 
Southern legislatures demanded of the North- 



24 THE STOEY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

ern States that all Abolition societies should 
be suppressed. More than one Northern State 
started dutifully to obey. The State of 
Georgia kept a standing reward of five thou 
sand dollars for the kidnaping of William 
Lloyd Garrison. A wealthy planter circulated 
a hand-bill offering rewards for the killing of 
anti-slavery leaders, the prices varying accord 
ing to the prominence of the man designated. 
The Congress of the United States, with the 
aid of Northern votes, passed a law forbidding 
the offering of petitions to abolish slavery in 
the District of Columbia or elsewhere. 

All for the sake of the 35 per cent, profits 
of the 348,214 persons that held slaves! 

The newspapers, preachers, editors, teach 
ers, news agencies, college presidents, social 
reformers, philanthropists and tradesmen that 
in our own day have championed the 500,000 
persons deriving benefit from the wage system 
have never displayed a more touching fidelity. 

Against this iron-clad fortress of prejudice 
Garrison began to hammer with his bare hands. 
At first nobody heeded him. Then the commer 
cial gentlemen looked down the wall side, saw 
him at work all alone and laughed. Then he 
began to annoy their fat souls by disturbing 
their quiet, so they undertook to kill him. It 



THE ENLISTMENT 25 

was one of their genial attempts in this direc 
tion that started Wendell Phillips upon the 
work of his life. In Washington Street, Bos 
ton, a mob of " gentlemen of standing and 
property," a broadcloth mob of the leaders and 
saviors of Society, had seized Garrison and was 
about to hang him. In Boston; cradle of lib 
erty and that sort of thing; in Boston, on Oc 
tober 21, 1835. Garrison had been saying in 
Boston a few words in favor of human free 
dom, and so a mob of gentlemen had a rope 
around him and was dragging him along Wash 
ington Street to hang him. He had said his 
few w r ords to a company of about thirty women 
that sat in a hall they had hired and paid for 
to hear him, and the mayor of Boston had 
burst into the room and had driven the women 
into the street; whereupon the mob of gentle 
men seized Garrison, and was dragging him 
along with the rope around him to hang him 
for talking in favor of human liberty. In 
Boston, fifty-nine years after the Declaration 
of Independence. 

Phillips was sitting in his office nearby and 
heard the uproar the gentlemen made, for of 
course they were very angry. He went forth 
to learn the occasion. There was Garrison 
with the rope around him being dragged down 



26 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

the street. Phillips looked attentively upon 
his face, for he had never seen the like before. 
It was very pale, but calm and sweet, as if the 
man were sustained to his death by some noble 
and lofty passion, like that of a Christian mar 
tyr. The lips uttered no protest and the 
hands were not lifted against the rope ; the man 
strode along, erect, resolute and self-contained. 

"Who is that?" said Phillips to another 
spectator of this scene. 

" Why, that s Garrison the damned Abo 
litionist, and they re going to hang him ! " 

The mob and the violence shocked and ap 
palled Phillips s fastidious sense of decency and 
reciprocal rights. He thought that the Bos 
ton regiment, a famous militia band of which 
he was an officer, ought to be called out to dis 
perse the rioters. His colonel pointed out to 
him that the regiment was in the mob. 

He went back to his office and began to 
think profoundly about " the damned Abolition 
ist " and his cause. He had never before paid 
much attention to the slavery issue ; in a gen 
eral way he was opposed to slavery, but, like 
all other young men in his station, he deemed 
it settled by the Missouri Compromise and not 
a vital question of the day. But to hang a 
man for his opinions that assaulted the very 



THE ENLISTMENT 

foundations of the faith he had built for him 
self. Because the key note of his character 
and to a great extent the explanation of his 
career, lay in this one fact, that mentally he 
was a child of revolution. He had made close 
and sympathetic studies of the American and 
French revolutions and arrived at the con 
clusion that in all secular history these were the 
most important events. His researches had 
not revealed to him the theory later day think 
ers have discovered, apparently by clairvoy 
ance, that the American struggle was carried 
on by smugglers and other depraved men for 
merely selfish ends; that Samuel Adams was a 
trickster and Washington and LaFayette a 
pair of congenial land thieves. To his mind 
the American revolution represented a great 
forward step in the human advance and the men 
that took part in it were soldiers in the eternal 
cause of man. Among these his favorite hero 
was James Otis standing forth to defy the king 
and to risk his life for free speech. Free speech 
seemed always to Phillips the most important 
of human rights, for it was the right by which 
man defended the others. But, seventy years 
after the heroic achievement of James Otis, a 
mob takes the place of a king and denies the 
same right that Otis upheld. Neither the king 



8 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

nor the mob could possibly be right; Garrison 
was a still more heroic figure than Otis. As 
to the cause that he spoke for, how could hu 
man slavery be defended or even excused? 
Thus he pondered, that day and many days 
afterward, while he tried to adjust some balance 
between the accepted state of society and the 
principles he knew for truth. 

He was in fact, close upon the first great 
turning point in his life and as so often hap 
pens in such cases a mere accident brought in 
the deciding factor. Not long after the day 
of the respectable mob in Washington Street, 
Phillips and Sumner were invited to join a 
coaching party to Greenfield and to meet a 
young woman described as charming, talented 
and brilliant, by name, Ann Terry Greene. 
The morning dawned cold and stormy and 
Sumner refused to go forth, declaring that no 
young woman was worth braving such a storm 
to meet. Phillips kept the engagement. Ann 
Terry Greene proved to be one of the thirty 
women that the mayor of Boston had driven 
from their hall on the day that Garrison so 
narrowly escaped lynching. She was a fervent 
Abolitionist ; she talked Abolition to Phillips all 
the way to Greenfield and back. He became 
fully converted to the cause, fell in love with 



THE ENLISTMENT %\) 

his instructress, married her October 12, 1837, 
and took into his life one of its most powerful 
influences. 

As a rule, a man that does anything unusual 
in this world does it under the inspiration of 
some woman. Whether what he does makes for 
good or ill commonly depends upon the woman s 
nature. It happened that Ann Terry Greene 
was one of the most extraordinary women of 
her times. She was a natural insurgent and 
natural reformer. To some women the world 
is a mere parade ground for dress patterns. 
To her it was a battlefield resounding with 
ceaseless conflict. All about her she saw wrong 
and injustice; she yearned and burned to have 
every wrong abolished and every injustice cor 
rected. Hers was no limited field of vision; 
any kind of injustice, anywhere, was enough to 
stir her resentment. By some irony of fate, 
being a soul so combative, she was, or thought 
she was, a helpless invalid, so that her part in 
the conflict must be exerted through others. 
She made of her husband her capable soldier 
and he testified that all his life she went before 
him into every cause he espoused. 

At the house of Miss Greene s uncle, Henry 
G. Chapman, not long after the coaching party, 
Phillips madej the acquaintance of Garrison. 



30 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

The two were irresistibly drawn to each other. 
Phillips perceived that here was a prophet bear 
ing the fire of a great cause and upon him 
slowly settled the conviction that his place was 
at the side of this pure-souled apostle of right 
eousness. In such an issue he could not palter 
with his conscience, nor refuse to be honest with 
himself, nor count the cost of being true. De 
liberately he came to this decision ; having 
reached it, weighing all together, he gave him 
self up to follow it without reservation. On 
March 28, 1837, he attended the quarterly 
meeting at Lynn of the Massachusetts Anti- 
Slavery Society and there he made his first 
Abolitionist speech. 

Next day the strange news went about aris 
tocratic Boston as of a great and appalling 
disaster that men could hardly credit. Noth 
ing in the history of the American Brahmin 
caste had so shaken its moldy fibres. Wendell 
Phillips had been its pet, its pride, the example 
of heredity and lineage to which it pointed, 
the brilliant son of its first family. He might 
have rolled drunken in the gutter, or wasted 
himself in dissipation, or committed crimes, and 
held his caste unimpeached. But to attack ex 
isting conditions and to range himself with the 



THE ENLISTMENT 31 

victims of those conditions was to be indeed 
beyond hope. 

In the face of the self-made pariah, Society 
indignantly slammed the doors, while his family 
writhed in the agony of an ineffable shame. If 
he had only died ! said his relatives ; the grave 
had no pang like this. At the present dis 
tance and to souls not perfectly attuned to 
Society s distinctions there appears a certain 
element of the comic in their distress, but 
it was to them very real and tragic. Some 
tried to parry the blow by saying he had gone 
suddenly insane ; you can not blame Respectable 
Persons for the acts of a madman. In the 
house of Worldly Wiseman the puzzle was un 
readable. That a young man with every ad 
vantage and every chance of success should cast 
away his life was inconceivable folly. Some 
commentators found relief in the fortunate fact 
that his poor, dear father had not lived to see 
this day. All the cost of his education wasted, 
all the traditions of his family dishonored, a 
young life already in ruins how melancholy 
was this spectacle! But such were the fruits 
of the spirit of social unrest abroad in the land, 
and thus was youth misled by pestilent agi 
tators. 



THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

Upon the young man thus sadly gone astray 
these comments fell without visible effect. 
Having determined which way his duty led, 
thither he went rejoicing. The storm of crit 
icism he faced with the same composure with 
which he faced mobs ; no one ever saw that un 
der that faultless bearing he was hurt; but 
beyond doubt he paid the price, full measure. 
He loved friendship, he was among the most 
companionable of men, he valued highly the 
approval of his family ; it was not without a 
wrench that he took himself outside of his caste. 
For almost fifty years there poured upon his 
head a ceaseless flood of hatred, ridicule and 
misrepresentation ; no man heard him complain 
nor repine at his lot, and the bitterest personal 
attack seldom provoked any retort, even when 
he was outrageously lied about. All he took 
in silence, looking far ahead to the goal and 
thinking of himself as an instrument of reform ; 
an instrument whose feelings and fame were of 
no importance. Silently he withdrew from the 
old scenes and the old circles and took for his 
new friends Garrison and the men and women 
that, like Garrison, held that in the face of mon 
strous injustice the just man has no right to 
a life of ease and pleasure. Other historic 
figures have enrolled themselves in unpopular 



THE ENLISTMENT 33 

causes, but usually, I think, for the sake of 
personal aim or a personal hate. Wendell 
Phillips remains the one conspicuous example 
of unstained purity of motive. From the 
causes he espoused he had nothing to gain but 
loneliness, obscurity and disgrace. 



II 

THE FIRST BATTLES 

His real entrance as orator and agitator 
upon the turbulent stage of his day was made 
in dramatic fashion. On December 8, 1837, 
when he had just passed his twenty-sixth birth 
day, a mass meeting was called at Faneuil Hall 
to protest against the murder of the Rev. 
Elijah P. Lovejoy, at Alton, Illinois; an event 
that was to be great in American history, 
though at the time no one so deemed it. Love- 
joy, who was not an Abolitionist, by the way, 
had been the editor of a religious newspaper at 
St. Louis. A Negro in St. Louis killed an offi 
cer that was trying to arrest him and a mob 
broke into the jail where the Negro was con 
fined and burned him alive. Lovejoy, in his 
journal, commented severely upon the farcical 
judicial proceedings that followed this event 
and the mob wrecked his printing office. 

He moved what was left of his enterprise to 
Alton, on what was called Free Soil, where he 
34 



THE FIRST BATTLES 35 

believed he would be safe. Two presses that 
he landed were successively destroyed by mobs. 
He obtained a third and asked protection of 
the mayor. The mayor said he was unable to 
preserve order, but authorized Love joy to de 
fend himself. A mob gathered, killed Love joy 
and threw his press into the river. 

In Boston, the number of persons that de 
sired to protest against this outrage was not 
large but was fairly courageous. To lessen 
the extreme likelihood of bloodshed the meeting 
was held in the morning. Faneuil Hall was 
filled, more than half of the audience being 
without sympathy with the purpose of the 
meeting and many disposed to make trouble if 
they could. William Ellery Channing and 
others spoke; resolutions were offered de 
nouncing Love joy s murder; when James 
Tricothie Austin, attorney-general of Massa 
chusetts, w r ell known, able and popular, pushed 
his way to the edge of the gallery and delivered 
a skilful and bitter attack upon the resolutions 
and the previous speakers. He defended the 
mob at Alton, likening it to the men that threw 
the tea into Boston Harbor and to other 
patriots of the American Revolution. Love- 
joy, he said, had brought his death upon him 
self and had died as the fool dieth ; and he 



36 THE STOEY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

fiercely rebuked Dr. Channing, who was a cler 
gyman, for taking part in the present meet 
ing. 

At Austin s first sentence, the pro-slavery 
element in the hall cheered vehemently, and as 
he proceeded it was evident that he was carry 
ing with him the majority of his hearers. The 
defeat of the resolutions was imminent, as the 
contending factions roared and struggled. 
Phillips was standing among the spectators 
on the main floor, for in those days Faneuil 
Hall had no seats. As Austin ended amid 
tremendous cheering, Phillips unexpectedly 
leaped upon the platform and stood forth to 
answer him. The crowd saw before them a 
young man, tall, fair, with face and form ex 
pressive of power and resolution, waiting to 
speak. Its sheer curiosity silenced it and, in 
a moment, out boomed, in that strange, melodi 
ous voice, the first piercing sentence. 

Clamor redoubled at once; there were cries 
of "Question!" "Go on!" "Hear him!" 
and so on. With the next lull in the storm 
came the next sentence; in another moment the 
young orator was launched upon one of his 
most famous orations. It was a faultless speci 
men of his style; compact, restrained, direct, 
without a wasted word, and in spite of the re- 



THE FIRST BATTLES 37 

straint, burning with feeling. It contained 
some immortal sentences. 

Sir, when I heard the gentleman lay down prin 
ciples which place the murderers of Alton side by 
side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and 
Adams, I thought those pictured lips [pointing to 
the portraits in the hall] would have broken into 
voice to rebuke the recreant American the slan 
derer of the dead! 

In one passage he struck in this, his first 
great public address, a keynote to which in the 
closing years of his life he was often to return, 
and I think it is interesting that he had found 
so early a broad, sociological basis for his faith. 

Presumptuous to assert the freedom of the press 
on American ground ! Is the assertion of such 
freedom before the age? So much before the age 
as to leave one no right to make it because it dis 
pleases the community? Who invents this libel on 
his country? It is this very thing which entitles 
Lovejoy to greater praise; the disputed right which 
provoked the Revolution taxation without rep 
resentation is far beneath that for which he 
died ! 

At this, the audience, which had been hang 
ing intent upon his words as they came flying 
forth without halt in the perfect mastery of his 
art, broke into a violent clamor of protest and 
the disorder began again. Possibly Phillips 
had stirred it for the express purpose of quell- 



38 THE STOEY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

ing it with one of his irresistible climaxes. At 
the first cessation of the noise he said : 

One word, gentlemen. As much as thought is 
better than money, so much is the cause in which 
Lovejoy died nobler than a mere question of taxes. 
James Otis thundered in this hall when the king 
did but touch his pocket. Imagine, if you can, his 
indignant eloquence had England offered to put a 
gag upon his lips! 

That was the turning point of the battle. 
Thenceforward he carried his audience on the 
surge of his eloquence and when he made an 
end the resolutions were carried overwhelmingly. 

The impressions made by this speech upon 
the persons who heard it seem to have been 
extraordinary. Dr. Channing frequently re 
ferred to it as an amazing flight of eloquence, 
the power of Phillips s voice over the angry 
crowd seeming to be almost inexplicable. Oli 
ver Johnson, who was present that day, thought 
that the report of it was only a pale reflection 
of the lightning that came from the orator s 
lips. One effect of it was to put Phillips into 
a commanding position in the anti-slavery 
movement, and another was to accelerate the 
isolation that had been coming upon him from 
the time he announced his adhesion to Garri 
son s cause. His law practise was dwindling; 



THE FIRST BATTLES S9 

a man cannot very well practise law in a com 
munity, part of which regards him as a lunatic 
and the rest as a dangerous firebrand. He had 
become the idol of the little band of Abolition 
ists, but he had the intense hatred of the aris 
tocracy for he had committed what is in all 
ages the unpardonable crime. He had turned 
against his own caste. 

In 1839 he took his wife abroad for her 
health and in London was the hero of a singu 
lar episode that I must tell later. In 18-il he 
returned to Boston. Soon afterward occurred 
there one of the first of the famous fugitive 
slave cases that were subsequently the occasion 
of some of his most searching eloquence. A 
Virginia Negro named Latimer, having made 
his escape from his owner, was detected and 
arrested. An effort was made to prevent his 
return to slavery and a Boston judge ruled 
that the slave was property, the Constitution 
of the United States authorized the owner of 
slave property to seize it wherever he found it, 
and Latimer must be returned. The event 
struck deep at Phillips s basic faith. To his 
mind the people of Massachusetts were impelled 
by reverence for a piece of parchment to com 
mit an act of abhorrent wrong and injustice, 
violating natural conscience and the rights that 



40 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

are above all constitutions. He vehemently 
protested at Faneuil Hall, but he did more than 
protest. In accordance with his belief that a 
man s life should in every way square with his 
convictions, he closed his law office and aban 
doned his profession. A lawyer swears to up 
hold the Constitution of the United States. 
To Mr. Phillips, that Constitution, inasmuch 
as it recognized and defended man s ownership 
in a fellow man, was " a covenant with death 
and a league with hell." Therefore he could 
not consistently uphold it. He took a small 
house at No. 26 Essex Street, and thenceforth, 
isolated except for his fellow Abolitionists, he 
devoted all his life to battling for the reforms 
in which he believed. 

One of these in which he was a conspicuous 
leader sought to improve the status of women. 
His mind was so constituted that against any 
condition of injustice, anywhere, in Ireland or 
Russia, in the attitude of men toward women 
or of the State toward prisoners, it instinc 
tively revolted. In the view of Mr. Phillips, 
as of Mr. Garrison, women were entitled to 
every right enjoyed by men, and the laws and 
customs based upon the alleged inferiority of 
women were fossils remaining from the barbar 
ous ages. Many women were in the anti- 



THE FIRST BATTLES 41 

slavery movement ; indeed, its women were often 
abler than its men. Lydia Maria Child, Lu- 
cretia Mott, Sarah and Angelina Grirnke, and 
Abby Kelly Foster were clearly the intellectual 
equals of any living men. But the custom was 
very rigid that women should take no part in 
public affairs ; they could not vote and appar 
ently it was held that they had properly no 
other rights. Garrison and Phillips strove to 
give them equal place with men in the Abolition 
movement, and it is an odd fact that this 
was the first rock upon which the anti-slavery 
movement split. 

Those that believed woman s part in life to 
be silence and knitting withdrew and flocked 
by themselves. Presently they became involved 
in schemes of compromise and political action 
(to which Garrison and Phillips were opposed) 
and trickled into the short-lived and futile 
Liberty party, finally emerging from that bar 
ren waste to rejoin their former comrades with 
actual Abolition in sight. 

But the issue about women came sharply to 
a head while the Phillipses were in London. 
They had been appointed delegates to an inter 
national anti-slavery conference organized by 
the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. 
In Great Britain the prejudice against admit- 



4# THE STORY OF WENDELL, PHILLIPS 

ting women to any share in public affairs was 
even stronger than in America, and woman s 
position in general was worse. The men in 
charge of the convention refused to allow Mrs. 
Phillips and the other American women dele 
gates to be admitted. As soon as the delib 
erations were opened, Mr. Phillips sprang at 
the face of British conservatism with a resolu 
tion for the seating of all delegates with cre 
dentials from any anti-slavery society. British 
conservatism was painfully shocked. Mr. Phil 
lips shocked it again by delivering, in the de 
bate upon his resolution, a powerful argument 
in behalf of equality for women. It was heard 
far beyond the convention hall, for the press 
took up the issue it raised and a fierce discus 
sion arose that can hardly be said to have 
ceased again until it came to flower in the 
great British suffrage movement of this day. 

But in the convention hall Mr. Phillips was 
defeated. The strength of British conserva 
tism was too great. For no other reason than 
custom, the women delegates were not admitted 
to the floor of the convention but were herded 
into the gallery as spectators, where, when 
Garrison came, he insisted upon taking his 
place among them. He would not sit as a del 
egate in a convention that declared men to be 



THE FIRST BATTLES 43 

better than women. Phillips continued to fight 
from the floor. He and Garrison became ex 
ceedingly unpopular in consequence and at the 
close of the conference were conspicuously 
slighted at the final meeting in Exeter Hall. 
Incidentally, the conference failed to be of any 
use to the anti-slavery movement, which it was 
intended to foster, but proved of much use to 
the woman suffrage movement, which it was in 
tended to discourage a pleasing illustration 
of the eternal futility of the reactionary mind. 

It was when her husband left her to make 
his argument in behalf of women that Ajm 
Terry Phillips addressed to him a remark that 
subsequently became famous. She said: 

" Wendell, don t shilly-shally." 

There was, in fact, the smallest likelihood 
that he should ever shilly-shally about any 
thing, but the mind of Mrs. Phillips, shut in an 
apparently frail body, was of such uncompro 
mising resolution that she sometimes frightened 
the casual listener, and what was unpardon 
able weakness in her view would have seemed to 
the average person no more than an agreeable 
amenity. 

In his arguments for woman suffrage Phil 
lips, in his usual lucid way, stated the whole 
case and seeing far beyond any of his contem- 



44 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

poraries foreshadowed the industrial woman of 
the Twentieth century. One of his admirable 
addresses contained this : 

The subject is so large, that it might well fill 
days instead of hours. It covers the whole sur 
face of American society. It touches religion, 
purity, political economy, wages, the safety of 
cities, the growth of ideas, the very success of our 
experiment. If this experiment of self-govern 
ment is to succeed, it is to succeed by some saving 
element introduced into the politics of the present 
day. You know this: your Websters, your Clays, 
your Calhouns, your Douglases, however intel 
lectually able they may have been, have never 
dared or cared to touch that moral element of our 
national life. Either the shallow and heartless 
trade of politics had eaten out their own moral 
being, or they feared to enter the unknown land 
of lofty right and wrong. 

Neither of these great names has linked its fame 
with one great moral question of the day. They 
deal with money questions, with tariffs, with par 
ties, with State law; and if, by chance, they touch 
the slave question, it is only like Jewish hucksters 
trading in the relics of saints. The reformers 
the fanatics, as we are called are the only ones 
who have launched social and moral questions. I 
risk nothing when I say, that the Anti-Slavery dis 
cussion of the last twenty years has been the salt 
of this nation: it has actually kept it alive and 
wholesome. Without it our politics would have 
sunk beyond even contempt. So with this ques 
tion. It stirs the deepest sympathy; it appeals to 
the highest moral sense; it inwraps within itself 
the greatest moral issues. Judge it, then, candidly, 



THE FIRST BATTLES 4*5 

carefully, as Americans; and let us show ourselves 
worthy of the high place to which God has called 
us in human affairs. 

And again, on another occasion, speaking of 
the ballot, he said: 

We claim it therefore, for woman. The reply 
is that woman has not sense enough. If she has 
not, so much the more shame for your public 
schools, educate her! If God did not give her 
mind enough, then you are brutes; for you say to 
her: " Madam, you have sense enough to earn 
your own living, don t come to us ! " You make 
her earn her own bread, and if she has sense enough 
to do that, she has sense enough to say whether 
Fernando Wood or Governor Morgan shall take 
one cent out of every hundred to pay for fire 
works. When you hold her up in both hands and 
say: "Let me work for you! Don t move one 
of your dainty fingers ! We will pour wealth into 
your lap, and be ye clothed in satin and velvet, 
all ye daughters of Eve ! " then you will be con 
sistent in saying that woman has not sense enough 
to vote; but if she has sense enough to work, to 
depend for her bread on her work, she has sense 
enough to vote. 

Then, again, men say, " She is so different from 
man that God did not mean that she should vote/ 
Is she ? Then I do not know how to vote for her. 
One of two things is true: She is either exactly 
like man exactly like him, teetotally like him, 
and if she is, then a ballot box based upon brains 
belongs to her as well as to him; or she is differ 
ent, and then I do not know how to vote for her. 
If she is like me, so much like me that I know 
just as well how to vote for her as she knows how 



46 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

to vote for herself, then the very basis of the 
ballot box being capacity she, being the same as 
I, has the same right to vote. And if she is so 
different that she has a different range of avoca 
tions and powers and capacities, then it is neces 
sary she should go into the legislature, and with 
her own voice say what she wants, and write her 
wishes into statute books, because nobody is able 
to interpret her. Choose which horn of the di 
lemma you please. 

More than half a century has elapsed since 
Phillips made this point, and in all the discus 
sion there has been on the question of woman 
suffrage nobody has been able to refute or 
evade its logic. But he would have been 
amazed if at that time any one had assured 
him that half a century would pass before bis 
countrymen awoke to an act of justice so ob 
vious and necessary as equal and universal 
suffrage. 



Ill 

ON THE FIRING LINES 

THE first great fact persistently thrust 
upon the attention of every investigator of the 
story of slavery in America is the tremendous 
and wide-spreading power that always pertains 
to great profits. 

Profits seem to breed their own power and 
miraculously to emanate it ; and from small 
profits to great the degree of power generated 
seems to increase in geometrical ratio. In our 
own day we have seen clearly enough and often 
enough how apparently irresistible is the power 
put forth by the Controlling Interests that 
reap most of the huge profits of the existing 
system; and the power exerted by the 35 per 
cent, profits of slavery was akin to this. As in 
our own day, secret, insidious influences started 
from the seat of profits and ran out of sight 
across the country until they echoed in some 
print or pulpit for the benefit of the profit- 
makers and the injury of anybody that at- 
47 



48 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

tacked them. Exactly what the Socialists are 
to-day in the columns of the kept press the 
Abolitionists were sixty years ago. The 
spirit of profits has changed not at all and 
the tactics have changed but little. Every 
man that offends them is still a liar and a 
scoundrel; still every exposition of their 
thievery and graft is extravagance, falsehood 
and vituperation; and still all the forces of 
education, the press, literature and the church 
are employed to overwhelm with discredit 
whomsoever shall stand and clamor for justice. 
Exactly so it was with the Abolitionists, and 
the heaviest burden of the hatred they aroused 
fell upon Phillips. To read now what was said 
of him, even in the Northern press, between 
1837 and 1861, you would think, if unenlight 
ened, that you were reading of a man in 
capable of telling the truth about anything and 
given over to depraved and wanton designs 
against the prosperity of his country and the 
fame of its best and purest citizens. It is a 
very curious fact that in all ages the means of 
directing public opinion and of writing history 
are almost exclusively in the hands of reaction 
ary influences. Phillips was at the mercy of 
these. Naturally he belonged to the educated 
and literary circles. North and South they 



ON THE FIRING LINES 49 

turned upon him with a ferocity of hatred only 
to be paralleled in the case of the leader of a 
labor union that threatens profits with a strike 
or of a literary man that allies himself with 
the cause of the toilers. 

The power of the slave-holders profits was 
as absolute in all branches of the national gov 
ernment as the power of the Controlling Inter 
ests has ever been in our time, and then as now 
it was a power that rotted the courts and made 
a travesty of justice. As in these days the 
Federal bench is filled from the ranks of the 
railroad and corporation attorneys, so in those 
days no man could hope to become a judge un 
less he was known to be sound in his subserviency 
to the slave-holding Interests. This was nec 
essary because court cases affecting -ssues of 
slavery were as common then as railroad cases 
are now. 

In all this the North, controlled by its busi 
ness men and their affiliations, tamely ac 
quiesced, although sometimes it was a condition 
that reacted severely upon individual business 
men. Of this I must cite here one example 
for the sake of its many-sided illumination of 
conditions North and South and for its light 
upon the career of Wendell Phillips. 

In the early forties, free-born colored men, 



50 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

natives and citizens of Massachusetts, that 
were sailors on Northern ships, were exposed 
to great danger in Southern ports. Especially 
in Charleston they were liable to be arrested 
on fictitious charges, to be thrown into jail and 
to be sold into slavery, whence they could sel 
dom be rescued. In the farcial courts of jus 
tice presided over by the slave-owners puppets 
a man thus seized had as little chance as a 
labor union has in a State court now. 

For this aggression, utterly lawless as it 
was, the slave-holding element was not without 
its pretense of an excuse. Slaves were contin 
ually escaping to the North and their owners 
found increasing difficulty in recovering them. 
Many thousands of such fugitives had made 
their way through the Northern States to 
Canada, where they were safe under the pro 
tection of the British flag. Abolitionists like 
Garrison and Phillips were frankly engaged in 
aiding these escapes, and, as the center of the 
Abolitionist movement was in Massachusetts, 
the slave-owning interests retaliated by kidnap 
ing Massachusetts colored men that ventured 
into Southern ports a fact aptly pointing 
Garrison s assertion (subsequently appropriated 
by Lincoln) that the nation could not endure 
half slave and half free. 



ON THE FIRING LINES 51 

So long as the slavery issue was one of ab 
stract right and wrong, the better element of 
Massachusetts, the business men and the com 
mercial classes generally, sided with the South. 
But the seizure of these seamen affected them 
differently. They owned ships. Sometimes a 
ship that left Boston full-handed for Charles 
ton would return half-manned because its Negro 
sailors had been seized and imprisoned. On its 
voyage it must pass Cape Hatteras, a danger 
ous place for under-manned shipping. Prop 
erty sacred property was therefore put 
in peril of loss. Consciences that cared noth 
ing about the wrongs and sufferings of three 
million slaves awoke to action and Massachu 
setts loudly protested. 

Mr. Samuel Hoar, founder of a famous fam 
ily, was then an eminent citizen of the State. 
With other commissioners he was sent on a 
peaceful embassy to Charleston to see if the 
slave-holding Interests could be induced to give 
over slave-catching and kidnaping when these 
practises affected Boston pocket-books. As 
soon as Mr. Hoar s presence was known in 
Charleston his life was in danger. A mob gath 
ered about his hotel, and if the Governor of the 
State had not ordered his deportation under an 
armed guard he would have been lynched. 



52 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

Mr. Phillips, eagerly watching every day s 
developments for texts, seized this occasion for 
one of his most famous speeches. He pointed 
out that in refusing protection to Mr. Hoar, 
South Carolina had violated the express pro 
visions of the Constitution and that for the 
insult put upon Massachusetts no redress was 
obtainable within the Union. He therefore 
demanded that since citizens of Massachusetts 
were deprived of their constitutional rights in 
South Carolina, and the national Government 
would not protect them therein, Massachusetts 
should protect herself and decline to recognize a 
Union thus already nullified by one of the 
States. 

Officially, Massachusetts was still dominated 
by the influences that sympathized with slave- 
holding. In silence it swallowed the insults, 
but upon the masses of its people the effect 
was otherwise. State pride was touched, and 
from the time that Mr. Hoar so narrowly es 
caped the Charleston mob, a growing sentiment 
questioned the righteousness of a slave-owning 
oligarchy that had cast aside all pretense of 
civilized restraint and openly returned to the 
methods of the jungle. In all these progres 
sions it seems to be true that the uttered word 
of truth must be reinforced by some object les- 



ON THE FIRING LINES 53 

son, patent to all men s eyes ; neither is wholly 
effective alone. Phillips s speech, in spite of 
the usual efforts to suppress or ignore it, 
served to carry home the significance of Mr. 
Hoar s narrow escape from the savages of 
Charleston, and from that date Boston as a 
whole was never again utterly indifferent on the 
slave question. 

Yet observe how strange was the sequel this 
story was to have in other days. Phillips had 
used the power of his eloquence in behalf of 
Samuel Hoar s cause. Forty-two years after 
Mr. Hoar s escape, Wendell Phillips died in 
Boston. Samuel Hoar was still alive. So 
great and so savage was the hatred Mr. Phil 
lips had drawn upon himself in the closing 
years of his life that not even his death could 
soften it. Among the bitter taunts flung upon 
his grave was one from Samuel Hoar. He 
said that he did not attend Wendell Phillips s 
funeral, but he approved of it. 

After the decision in the fugitive slave case, 
to which I referred in the first chapter of this 
chronicle, he was out of Society, out of his pro 
fession, out of the church, out of all old ties 
and associations ; out, to a great extent, of the 
view of the community that generally abhorred 
him. He no longer looked upon himself as an 



54 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

American nor upon the Constitution as a thing 
to which he owed allegiance. He was become 
a man without a country. In later years he 
resumed his civic duties, but to his death his 
isolation remained and grew. Hatred seems to 
have been allotted to him as fame to other men. 
Year after year his figure, the loneliest in his 
tory, rose upon the scene like that rock in the 
Indian Ocean that is so strange and solitary a 
monument in a wide range of empty sea. 

So situated, he labored incessantly in the 
causes to which he had given over his life. He 
became the general agent of the Massachusetts 
Anti-Slavery Society and largely directed its 
campaigns; he wrote and published pamphlets, 
some signed and some anonymous, attacking 
slavery from every possible angle of advan 
tage; he furnished articles to the small but 
vigorous Abolitionist press ; he used his modest 
income in the support of the movement ; he made 
his house a refuge for Abolitionists and fugi 
tive slaves ; and wherever and whenever he could 
find opportunity he raised his voice in those 
eloquent protests that no man can read now 
with unquickened pulses. Behind his most in 
nocent address, as a masked battery, he car 
ried Emancipation. Thus he had a lecture 
with the attractive title " Street Life in 



ON THE FIRING LINES QQ 

Europe," made from his observations abroad. 
But when a rural lyceum or lecture course was 
induced to accept it, men heard behind the 
street scenes of Europe the strenuous insist 
ence against slavery in America. In at least 
one famous instance he managed in this way to 
break through the crust of Northern culture 
and indifference and to drag before the con 
science of a reluctant Northern community the 
great moral issue of the day. The place was 
probably the last on earth to suggest itself to 
you. It was Concord, Massachusetts, sacred 
in American literature and famous for one of 
the most heroic deeds of the American revolu 
tion. 

In our day we sometimes wonder that influ 
ences in the community apparently isolated 
from the Interests, should nevertheless be 
ardent in their defense. Even this mystery 
had its counterpart in the day of the Abolition 
struggle, for in many a remote New England 
village, where no commercial concern could be 
pleaded, the spirit was hot for the South and 
slavery, and men were not safe if they talked 
for Abolition. Venerable ministers of the Gos 
pel maintained from the pulpit the righteous 
ness of the slave market and its divine 
sanction. In behalf of the principle of 



56 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

slavery, men otherwise of peaceful walk were 
ready at all times to fight and to shed blood, 
although no interest of theirs, near nor remote, 
was menaced, but only of the 348,214 persons 
in the South, that for an annual profit of 35 
per cent, held slaves. 

It was against a flood of hysteria like this 
that Phillips made incessant war, going for 
inspiration again ancl again to the spirit of the 
French and American revolutions. His utter 
most conviction was that there could be no such 
thing as a republic where equal rights were 
denied to any part of the population, and, in 
his own powerful phrase, a government that 
tolerated human slavery was only a pirate ship. 
While he thundered against the evil as a whole, 
he lost no chance to attack its ramifications 
and by-products, and through one of these 
ramifications he now struck effectively at that 
snobbery in so-called social circles that had 
closed their doors to him. 

It was then the custom throughout the North 
for persons of social eminence or social ambi 
tions to prove their superiority and right to a 
seat among the elect by showing bitterness 
against the colored race, just as to-day per 
sons of similar mentality and similar ambitions 
make a point of sneering at labor unions and 



ON THE FIRING LINES 57 

scorning " the lower orders." This was in all 
communities an easy badge of gentility. In 
Boston, the highest circles of society had se 
cured a condition under which colored children 
were not allowed to go to the public schools 
used by the white children, but were herded by 
themselves in inferior buildings where they re 
ceived inferior tuition. Mr. Phillips, most con 
scientious of democrats, despised the distinction 
of color made by the School Committee, de 
spised its origin, which he knew well enough to 
be a smug and greasy snobbery, and declared 
war upon it. First he presented a petition 
that colored children be admitted to the white 
schools. Some element of chance seemed al 
ways to fight on his side ; he could hardly have 
foreseen what was to happen to his advantage 
in this case. The Committee, in denying the 
petition, made the blunder of offering its so- 
called reasons, backed by the opinion of dis 
tinguished but foolish counsel. Nothing could 
better have suited Mr. Phillips s purposes. 
He tore into the " reasons," shattering them 
with his terrible sarcasm, and then, using his 
great legal knowledge and powers of argument, 
he made of the city solicitor s opinion a thing 
of shreds and patches. Here, too, shone forth 
another of his dominant traits, for no man was 



58 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

ever more relentless in his cause or less knowing 
of discouragement. In his steady, pertinacious, 
unflinching way, he brought up the same issue 
next year and the next, always defeated and 
always making headway. At last he got his 
case before the Legislature, and in 1854* he 
forced it through to victory. The law of the 
State was changed to make impossible the dis 
crimination he opposed and he had the satis 
faction of seeing colored children admitted to 
the schools on equal footing with the white. 

Fourteen years passed from the beginning of 
that struggle until his steady fighting won suc 
cess. 

Meantime, living his own life in his own way 
at his Essex Street home, and engaged daily in 
the anti-slavery struggle as the business of his 
Soul, he had many other activities similarly in 
spired. To him any injustice anywhere de 
manded from a just man all possible protest. 
He looked upon the human race as no more than 
beginning to emerge from bondage ; the typical, 
complacent American view was that here, at 
least, it had topped the summit of its journey. 
This difference and one other make him stand 
out so sharply against his times ; the other be 
ing that with all the heart of him he abhorred 



ON THE FIRING LINES 59 

compromise, and compromise was the choicest 
idol of his day. 

" Who can not hate can love not " 

sings Swinburne. Phillips had an extraordi 
nary Capacity for hating all things evil, but 
first of all he hated the idea of striking a bar 
gain with conscience. Right was right to be 
followed purely for its own sake and for no 
other reward. Wrong was wrong and not to 
be trafficked with. In the midst of the furious 
conflict with slavery that he tried to provoke 
and to aggravate he found time to deliver pow 
erful arguments in favor of other causes he 
held to be right and just: in favor of woman s 
suffrage, against capital punishment, for the 
removal of an unjust judge, in behalf of Ire 
land, against the sodden public conscience that 
views with indifference the lost souls of the 
street. Amid all these efforts and still giving 
his unflagging assistance to Garrison in the de 
tails of the anti-slavery campaign he found time 
to prepare and deliver scholarly orations like 
that on " The Lost Arts " ; biographical trib 
utes, like those on " Daniel O Connell w and 
" Toussaint L Ouverture," and stimulating ad 
dresses on Christianity and morals. His mind 



60 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

seemed a prodigious engine that rested not 
but at all times labored full steam ahead. 

His private walk was no less extraordinary. 
Mrs. Phillips, to whom he w/as wholly devoted, 
was a chronic invalid and for forty-six years 
he was her nurse, attendant and always cheer 
ful companion. He did much of his work at 
night while she slept in an adjoining room. 
She had a bell at her hand with which she was 
wont to summon him. One night he made 
count of her calls and they totalled twenty-six. 
Yet it is the unvarying testimony on all sides 
that he never once departed from the one atti 
tude of kindly devotion ; he was invariably the 
gallant and attentive lover. In a season when 
she seemed to be more than usually ill he did 
not leave the house for sixty days, spending 
all his waking hours about her bed side. 
Surely an exceptional man! 

The charm of his wonderful oratory and the 
magnetism of his presence sometimes won him 
a hearing from assemblies that detested his 
opinions. Thus " The Lost Arts " spread his 
fame and enlarged his audiences. It is re 
corded of many communities that with trepida 
tion and misgiving they engaged him to deliver 
this lecture, expecting to see some raging per 
son, full of sound and fury and bellowing like 



ON THE FIRING LINES 61 

a bull ; for newspapers had created and per 
sistently spread the belief that he was a fire- 
eater, a dangerous maniac and an unqualified 
liar. When he stepped upon the stage, so 
evidently a man of learning and refinement, and 
with his bell-like voice began so quietly to ad 
dress them in polished phrases, speaking in 
dubitable truth, they were stricken with a 
comical amazement. 

The very style of his oratory was a startling 
innovation. At that time and for long after 
ward, the common conception of an orator was 
of a man violently swinging his arms and sing 
songing rhetorical and flowery phrases in a 
way that burlesqued nature. Mr. Phillips 
used very few gestures and these most modest ; 
he never shouted; he never seemed to be ex 
cited; he never sing-songed; he spoke to five 
thousand exactly as he would speak to one. 
His compelling power lay in the force of his 
ideas, in his simple, direct language, in the 
compact and mighty phrases into which he 
wrought his words. He revolutionized oratory 
in America. Since his time it has never been 
easy for Bombast to carry off the fustian noise 
that alone had been popular among us. Some 
thing most extraordinary, and to this day un- 
equaled, lay in the mere arrangement of his 



62 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

sentences. They could not have been studied, 
for he never wrote out anything he was to say, 
and in his most extempore addresses the same 
quality appears. I mean he could always so 
marshal his words, nervous, swift, vital, sting 
ing as they were, that they had a subtle 
rhythm and melodic import aside from their 
burning verbal significance. He was, I sup 
pose, the clearest-minded man that ever con 
fronted an audience and swayed it to his will. 
Analyzing his speeches now, it appears that his 
mind worked simultaneously in two divisions. 
One was supervising and directing the immedi 
ate utterance; the other was arranging his 
argument far ahead. Greater intellectual feats 
than these are not recorded of any other orator. 
Webster, Chatham, Burke, Fox, Sheridan, 
Clay, prepared with great care the periods 
with which they charmed their hearers. This 
man at a moment s notice would speak with all 
the perfection of form and beauty of married 
thought and word attainable by any prepara 
tion. 

A Virginia slave named Thomas Sims es 
caped to Boston and was captured there. In 
spite of the most strenuous efforts of Garrison, 
Phillips, Edmund Quincy and other good men, 
a Massachusetts judge returned him to slavery. 



ON THE FIRING LINES 63 

This event brought forth two of Phillips s 
most celebrated orations ; one when the judge s 
decision was made known, one upon its first 
anniversary a daring thought to celebrate 
such an event! English literature has no 
passages more tremendous than those in which 
Wendell Phillips poured forth on these two oc 
casions the liquid fire of his indignation, and 
in " The Sims Anniversary," particularly, that 
noble paragraph beginning " Take the broken 
hearts, the bereaved mothers," seems to me to 
represent the highest flight reached by this or 
any other orator of our race. 

Here are some extracts from this great 
speech. They will indicate the unflinching 
courage of the man as well as the eloquence of 
the orator: 

Thomas Sims is the first man that the city of 
Boston"" has Topenty bound and fettered and sent 
back to bondage. I have no heart to dwell on 
so horrible an outrage: that sad procession in the 
dim morning through our streets the poor youth 
his noble effort to break his chains mocked 
with one short hour of freedom and then thrust 
back to the hell he had escaped, by brother men, 
in the prostituted names of justice and religion. 
We sit down with the single captive and weep 
with him as the iron enters into his soul too 
sad for the moment to think of the disgrace of 
our city or even the wickedness of its rulers. Pity 



64? THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

swallows up indignation. We might be forgiven 
if for the moment we mistook our sadness for 
despair, and even fancied the event disastrous to 
others than the victim. But not so. Liberty 
knows nothing but victories. In a cause like ours 
to which every attribute of the most high is pledged, 
everything helps us. ... 

I go further. I do not believe that if we should 
live to the longest period Providence ever allots 
to the life of a human being we shall see the total 
abolition of slavery, unless it comes in some critical 
conjunction of national affairs, when the slave, tak 
ing advantage of a crisis in the fate of his mas 
ter, shall dictate his own terms. How did French 
slavery go down ? How did the French slave trade 
go down? When Napoleon came back from Elba, 
when his fate hung trembling in the balance, and 
he wished to gather around him the sympathies of 
the liberals of Europe, he no sooner set foot in 
the Tuileries than he signed the edict abolishing 
the slave trade, against which the Abolitionists of 
England and France had protested for twenty 
years in vain. And the trade went down, because 
Napoleon felt that he must do something to gild 
the darkening hour of his second attempt to clutch 
the sceptre of France. How did the slave sys 
tem go down? When, in 1848, the Provisional 
Government found itself in the Hotel de Ville, 
obliged to do something to draw to itself the 
sympathy and liberal feeling of the French nation, 
they signed an edict it was the first from the 
nascent Republic abolishing the death penalty 
and slavery. The storm which rocked the vessel 
of state almost to foundering snapped forever the 
chain of the French slave. Look, too, at the his- 



ON THE FIRING LINES 65 

tory of Mexican and South American emancipa 
tion; you will find that it was, in every instance, 
I think, the child of convulsion. 

The hour will come God hasten ij; ! when 
the American people shall so stand on the deck 
of their Union, " built i the eclipse and rigged 
with curses dark." If I live to see that hour 
I shall say to every slave, " Strike now for Free 
dom! The balance hangs trembling; it is un 
certain which scale shall kick the beam. Strain 
every nerve, wrestle with every power God and 
nature have put into your hands, for your place 
among the races of this Western world " ; and that 
hour would free the slave. 

The Abolitionist who shall stand in such an hour 
as that and keep silence, will be recreant to the 
cause of three million of his fellow men in bonds. 
I believe that, probably, is the only way in which 
we shall ever, any of us, see the downfall of Ameri 
can slavery. I do not shrink from the toast with 
which Dr. Johnson flavored his Oxford port 
" Success to the first insurrection of the blacks in 
Jamaica ! " I do not shrink from the sentiment 
of Southey, in a letter to Duppa " There are 
scenes of tremendous horror which I could smile 
at by Mercy s side. An insurrection which should 
make the Negroes masters of the West Indies is 
one." I believe both these sentiments are dictated 
by the highest humanity. I know what anarchy 
is. I know what civil war is. I can imagine the 
scenes of blood through which a rebellious slave 
population must march to their rights. They are 
dreadful. And yet I do not know that, to an en 
lightened man, a scene of civil war is any more 
sickening than the thought of a hundred and fifty 
years of slavery. 



66 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

Take the broken hearts, the bereaved mothers, 
the infant wrung from the hands of its parents, 
the husband and wife torn asunder, every right 
trodden under foot, the blighted hopes, the im- 
bruted souls, the darkened and degraded millions, 
sunk below the level of intellectual life, melted in 
sensuality, herded with beasts, who have walked 
over the burning marl of Southern slavery to their 
graves, and where is the battle-field, however 
ghastly, that is not white, white as an angel s 
wing compared with the blackness of that dark 
ness which has brooded over the Carolinas for two 
hundred years? Do you love mercy? Weigh out 
the fifty thousand hearts that have beaten their 
last pulses amid agonies of thought and suffering 
fancy faints to think of, and the fifty thousand 
mothers, who, with sickening senses, watch for the 
footsteps that are not wont to tarry long in their 
coming, and soon find themselves left to tread the 
pathway of life alone add all the horrors of 
cities sacked and lands laid waste that is war. 
Weigh it now against some young, trembling girl 
sent to the auction block, some man like that taken 
from our courthouse and carried back into Georgia; 
multiply that individual agony into three millions ; 
multiply that into centuries, and that into all the 
relations of father and child, husband and wife; 
heap on all the deep moral degradation both of 
oppressor and the oppressed and tell me if Wa 
terloo or Thermopylae can claim one tear from the 
eyes even of the tenderest spirit of mercy com 
pared with this daily system of hell amid the most 
civilized Christian people on the face of the earth ! 

No, I confess, I am not a non-resistant. The 
reason why I advise the slave to be governed by a 
policy of peace is because he has no chance. If 



ON THE FIEING LINES 67 

he had one if he had as good a chance as those 
who went up to Lexington seventy-seven years 
ago I should call him the basest recreant that 
ever deserted wife and child if he did not vindi 
cate his liberty by his own right hand. 

Later in the same remarkable speech he re 
curred to this topic and expressed clearly his 
fundamental faith that there arc conceivable 
conditions under which there is nothing left 
but violence. 

You will say this is bloody doctrine anarch 
ical doctrine; it will prejudice people against the 
cause. I know it will. Heaven pardon those who 
make it necessary! Heaven pardon the judges, 
the merchants and the clergy who make it neces 
sary for hunted men to turn when they are at 
bay., and fly at the necks of their pursuers! It 
is not our fault! I shrink from no question, how 
ever desperate, that has in it the kernel of pos 
sible safety for a human being, hunted by twenty 
millions of slave-catchers in this Christian repub 
lic of ours. I am willing to confess my faith. 
It is this, that the Christianity of this country is 
worth nothing, except it is or can be made capable 
of dealing with the question of slavery. I am 
willing to confess another article of my faith: that 
the constitution and government of this country 
is worth nothing, except it is or can be made 
capable of grappling with the great question of 
slavery. 



IV 



THE INTERESTS THEN AND THE IN 
TERESTS NOW 

THE great strength of the real Abolition 
ists, of Phillips, Garrison and their followers, 
lay in the fact that they would never compro 
mise. 

This was all the more remarkable in a coun 
try where compromise is as natural and easy 
as dining. It may, in fact, be described as 
the national American vice ; we all practice it. 
Except independence in 1776 and chattel 
slavery after 1863 we can hardly name a na 
tional issue that has been fought through to 
the end relentlessly. The good nature that is 
so charming at home and in some other places, 
and a bore when it induces us to submit with 
such unapproachable patience to strap-hang 
ing in street cars and to extortion by railroads, 
is a nuisance when it gets into public affairs. 
A thing is either right or wrong. When it is 

an issue to be decided by public action the 
68 



THE INTERESTS THEN AND NOW 69 

favorite good naturcd American way is to try 
to make it both; which is not only impossible 
but imbecile. 

It was so about chattel slavery previous to 
1863 and it is so to-day about wage slavery. 

As Garrison and Phillips and the rest stead 
ily drove the national conscience before them 
on the slavery issue there arose a vast body of 
men that knew in their hearts and souls that 
slavery was wrong, but were too cowardly or 
too good natured to say so. These incessantly 
proposed compromises of different kinds with 
a doddering idea of staving off the inevitable 
conflict. They left behind an innumerable 
progeny industriously engaged to-day in the 
same endeavor. In the old days they said that 
of course things were not exactly as they ought 
to be but we must not talk about Abolition ; 
the thing to do was to restrict slavery. Keep 
it out of the new territories but leave it alone 
in the South. How this would help the men 
and women then held in a terrible and degrad 
ing bondage, no one could say, but such was 
the platform of millions of men that must have 
known better. To-day their intellectual de 
scendants, knowing equally well that basic con 
ditions are wrong, dally similarly with feeble, 
footless proposals of reform. " Tell us not of 



70 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

abolishing wage slavery," say these of little 
faith and less courage ; " rather let us strive 
to better the condition of the slaves." So we 
have the social settlement, the playground as 
sociation, the anti-child labor league, the tene 
ment reform societies, and other gropings for 
betterment, while the system that manufactures 
every evil condition continues to work overtime 
and burden society with its poisonous prod 
ucts. 

The laws passed by the Southern states mak 
ing it a crime to teach a slave to read, with a 
few other civilized devices of that kind, includ 
ing the ready shot gun, discouraged in Phil- 
lips s day some of the manifestation of this 
snivelling spirit of the uplift. The rest 
showed itself in a scheme to buy the slaves one 
at a time and deport them to Africa (a bril 
liant suggestion that was the foundation of the 
present republic of Liberia), and in some feeble 
protests against allowing slavery to engulf 
every corner of the land as well as to adminis 
ter every part of the government. So exact 
is the parallel with present day conditions that 
someone should develop it to the end, merely 
as a historical study, if for no other reason. 
The perfect counterpart of the Progressive 
party of these days was the Free Soil party 



THE INTERESTS THEN AND NOW 71 

of those, which figured in three successive presi 
dential elections and once cast a very significant 
vote. That anyone should think it worth while 
to have free soil until we had free men seems 
now strange enough, but it was an idea ex 
tremely popular among certain orders of dough 
faces in 1852. The avowed principles of the 
Free Soil party were not to abolish chattel 
slavery any more than the avowed principles 
of the Progressive party are to abolish wage 
slavery to-day; but merely to regulate the evil, 
a fact from which we can estimate the antiquity 
of the regulative school of political quackery. 

With the Free Soil fake neither Phillips nor 
Garrison would have aught to do which was 
well ; otherwise slavery might have lasted much 
longer. The point with these two extremists 
and their followers was that on a matter of 
conscience there can be no compromise; it is 
either fight or surrender. They believed that 
slavery was a wrong for which all the words 
in all the tongues spoken by man could find 
no adequate expression. They were perfectly 
willing to die fighting it, but they would not 
for one instant admit that it was a thing to be 
" regulated." 

To all the members of the Free Soil party, 
therefore, Phillips became an object of dislike 



THE STOEY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

almost as much as he was to the truckling 
Whigs whom he so mercilessly lashed with his 
savage sarcasms. To them he was a wild and 
half-mad enthusiast, an eccentric, irrational 
fanatic, and above all, a detestable dealer in 
extravagances. That is the word in all ages 
beloved of the dough-face. Whatever he lacks 
the courage to do or say is " extravagance." 
Cowering far out of danger of even stray shots, 
he points to the man on the firing line and de 
nounces him as extravagant. Why can t he 
keep cool as we do, here back of the sutlers 
wagons and out of range? Slavery isn t half 
as bad as he paints it. I know many of the 
slave-holders and they are mighty nice fellows. 
He so exaggerates everything! And then he 
always appeals to the mob and the spirit of 
social unrest ; he has none of the spirit of im 
partial inquiry ; there is nothing nice and re 
fined about his methods and nothing scholarly. 
Having transacted all of which they would be 
take themselves to the passing of innocuous reso 
lutions and the choosing of candidates for the 
best offices. 

But Phillips knew well enough that the great 
est and only eventual force in the world is the 
power of a moral idea and that it was lost the 
instant it fell to lasciviating with a compro- 



THE INTERESTS THEN AND NOW 73 

mise. He knew that, however men might be 
swerved and seemingly obsessed by the madness 
of much profits, at bottom the masses were 
moral and the way to abolish any evil was to 
appeal to their consciences about it. They 
would not respond to the first appeal nor to the 
tenth, perhaps, but in the end the response was 
inevitable if only those that were banded 
against the evil were steadfast and implacable, 
caring nothing about weapons but fighting al 
ways. 

This is another respect in which he was the 
greatest figure of his times, that he saw all this 
so plainly while what were called the best minds 
never seemed to suspect a truth so great and 
vital. While they fooled and fiddled about, 
wasting time in deeds analogous to the trust 
busting and regulative fol-de-rol of our own 
times, he kept incessantly repeating his simple 
talisman, " This thing is wrong, it is absolutely 
wrong, it is utterly wrong ! " and lo, at last the 
walls fell and the evil vanished. 

But he did this at a cost to himself, and he 
knew it, and knew it would be so from the be 
ginning, and no man ever heard him complain 
about it. Therefore, I hail him as the great 
est American, because he put service above all 
other considerations and then stood unshakable 



74* THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

in that creed. If you are as sick as I am of 
having the galumphing military heroes and the 
faking augurs of statecraft crammed down 
your throat, come and consider for a time a reaJ 
man and have refreshing for your soul. 

Next to the national appetite for compro 
mise, the deadest weights on social progress in 
America are the timidity of its champions and 
their failure to grasp the simple little fact that 
what they are enlisted in is not an afternoon tea 
party but a war. In war you must take blows 
as well as give them. But we seem to think 
that we can deal with a situation as terrific as 
now confronts modern society and still keep on 
good terms with the bandit beneficiaries of that 
system we are trying to dispossess. 

For instance, w r e have always had an almost 
superstitious terror for the printed word if it 
appears in a newspaper, and we have never been 
able to understand that a large part of our 
press is controlled absolutely by the pow r ers of 
evil that keep it ; consequently its hostility to 
men or measures is without real significance. 
To be abused by the newspapers that in former 
days were kept by the slave owning power was 
a badge of honor equalled only by abuse from 
the newspapers that in our own time are kept 
by the gatherers of huge profits and the culti- 



THE INTERESTS THEN AND NOW 75 

vators of the financial melon patch. Nothing 
that such journals can say of an honest man 
can harm him, unless by some misfortune they 
should say good of him. In that case he should 
utilize the comment for the narrow observation 
of his walk and ways, for assuredly he has been 
doing something he should not do. 

All this is perfectly obvious to anybody that 
will take the time to consider carefully concern 
ing newspapers and the sources of their opin 
ions ; but the average man still continues to 
allow himself to be affected by press attacks 
and the average leader to fear adverse com 
ment. 

Mr. Phillips had none of these delusions. He 
had learned the first great lesson every re 
former must learn if he is to be of the slightest 
effect with his reforms. He had learned to dis 
regard criticism. He knew well enough that 
the beneficiaries of the system of 35 per cent, 
profits on slave labor would not yield without 
a struggle the fatness of their pleasant arrange 
ments, and he knew that their power would be 
sufficient to array against their assailants a 
wide variety of influences. He knew too that 
one of the favorite weapons of reaction is to 
attack the methods of those that strive for pro 
gress. He understood all this and estimated it 



76 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

at its true value. One of the things for which 
we owe him undying gratitude is that he never 
hesitated for a moment to speak the plain, un 
varnished truth about any situation and never 
cared what lies were set afloat about him the 
next day by the kept press of that period. His 
views on this subject were so clear that I think 
they ought to be remembered by every person 
interested in securing better conditions. In his 
great lecture on Daniel O Connell, one of his 
most eloquent utterances, he said this: 

O Connell has been charged with coarse, violent, 
and intemperate language. The criticism is of 
little importance. Stupor and palsy never under 
stand life. White-livered indifference is always 
disgusted and annoyed by earnest conviction. 
Protestants criticised Luther in the same way. It 
took three centuries to carry us far off enough to 
appreciate his colossal proportions. It is a hun 
dred years to-day since O Connell was born. It 
will take another hundred to put us at such an 
angle as will enable us correctly to measure his 
stature. Premising that it would be folly to find 
fault with a man struggling for life because his 
attitudes were ungraceful, remembering the Scyth 
ian king s answer to Alexander, criticising his 
strange weapon, " If you knew how precious 
freedom was, you would defend it even with axes/ 
we must see that O Connell s own explanation 
is evidently sincere and true. He found the Irish 
heart so cowed, and Englishmen so arrogant, that 
he saw it needed an independence verging on inso- 



THE INTERESTS THEN AND NOW 77 

lence, a defiance that touched extremest limits, to 
breathe self-respect into his own race, teach the 
aggressor manners, and sober him into respectful 
attention. It was the same with us Abolitionists. 
Webster had taught the North the bated breath 
and crouching of a slave. It needed with us an 
attitude of independence that was almost insolent, 
it needed that we should exhaust even the Saxon 
vocabulary of scorn, to fitly utter the righteous 
and haughty contempt that honest men had for 
man-stealers. Only in that way could we wake 
the North to self-respect, or teach the South that 
at length she had met her equal, if not her master. 
On a broad canvas, meant for the public square, 
the tiny lines of a Dutch interior would be in 
visible. In no other circumstances was the French 
maxim, " You can never make a revolution with 
rose-water," more profoundly true. The world 
has hardly yet learned how deep a philosophy lies 
hid in Hamlet s, 

" Nay, and thou lt mouth, 
I ll rant as well as thou." 

From the very beginning of his career he 
saw that whoever stopped to pay heed to criti 
cism would never get anywhere. To his mind 
the only important thing was that a man should 
strike at wrong and injustice with whatsoever 
weapon he could command and care naught 
what might be said of the posture of his blows. 
Unless he did his best without compromise and 
without counting the cost to himself he could 
never be on good terms with that conscience that 



78 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

to Phillips was the strongest and highest of hu 
man influences. He said something like this far 
back in the early days of his anti-slavery en 
listment, on that occasion when he shocked and 
dismayed the placid town of Concord : 

I do not care for criticisms upon my manner of 
assailing slavery. In a struggle for life it is 
hardly fair for men who are lolling at ease to re 
mark that the limbs of the combatants are not 
arranged in classic postures. I agree with the last 
speaker that this is a serious subject; had it been 
otherwise I should not devote my life to it. 
Stripling as I am, I but echo the voice of the ages, 
of our venerable forefathers of statesmen, poets, 
philosophers. The gentleman has painted the dan 
gers to life, liberty, and happiness that would be 
the consequence of doing right. These dangers 
now exist by law at the South. Liberty may be 
bought at too dear a price; if I cannot have it 
except by sin, I reject it. But I cannot so blas 
pheme God as to doubt my safety in obeying Him. 
The sanctions of English law are with me; but 
if I tread the dust of law beneath my feet and 
enter the Holy of Holies, what do I find writ 
ten there? " Thou shalt not deliver unto his mas 
ter the servant which is escaped to thee; he shall 
dwell with you, even among you." I throw my 
self then on the bosom of Infinite Wisdom. Even 
the heathen will tell you, " Let justice be done 
though the heavens fall " ; and the old reformer 
answered when warned against the danger of go 
ing to Rome, " It is not necessary that I should 
live; it 2* necessary that I go to Rome." But now 
our pulpits are silent whoever heard this sub- 



THE INTERESTS THEN AND NOW 79 

ject presented until it was done by " silly women " 
and "striplings"? The first speaker accused me 
of ambition; let me tell him that ambition chooses 
a smoother path to fame. And to you, my young 
friends, who have been cautioned against exciting 
topics and advised to fold your hands in selfish 
ease, I .would say, Not so throw yourselves upon 
the altar of some noble cause! To rise in the 
morning only to eat and drink, and gather gold 
that is a life not worth living. Enthusiasm is the 
life of the soul. 

The difference between the time-serving, timid 
souled, American Congressman and the men 
that are real factors in progress be once de 
scribed in an article in the Liberator, and the 
description is as good to-day as it was when 
it was written. If we substitute the present 
struggle against wage slavery for the struggle 
against chattel slavery that was uppermost in 
Phillips s mind when he wrote this comparison, 
no observer of these times will note any differ 
ence. He said: 

The reformer is careless of numbers, disregards 
popularity, and deals only with ideas, conscience, 
and common-sense. He feels, with Copernicus, 
that as God waited long for an interpreter, so he 
can wait for his followers. He neither expects 
nor is over-anxious for immediate success. The 
politician dwells in an everlasting Now. His 
motto is "Success" his aim, votes. His object 
is not absolute right, but, like Solon s laws, as much 
right as the people will sanction. His office is, 



80 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

not to instruct public opinion, but to represent it. 
Thus, in England, Cobden, the reformer, created 
sentiment, and Peel, the politician, stereotyped it 
into statutes. 

This very idea of the power of determined 
men, however few, in a cause of righteousness 
he expressed far better than any of us could 
attempt to express it in an address he made in 
April, 1872, before the International Grand 
Lodge of the Knights of St. Crispin. The 
shoemakers trade union used to bear this name, 
so it appears that in nomenclature, anyway, we 
have made some progress. Mr. Phillips said : 

I am told that you represent from 70,000 to 
100,000 men, here and elsewhere. Think of it! 
One hundred thousand men ! They can dictate the 
fate of this nation. Give me fifty thousand men 
in earnest, who can agree on all vital questions, 
who will plant their shoulders together, and swear 
by all that is true and just that for the long years 
they will put their great idea before the country, 
and those 50,000 men will govern the nation. So 
if I have 100,000 men represented before me, who 
are in earnest, who get hold of the great question 
of labor, and having hold of it, grapple with it, 
and rip it and tear it open, and invest it with 
light, gathering the facts, piercing the brains about 
them and crowding those brains with the facts 
then I know, sure as fate, though I may not live 
to see it, that they will certainly conquer this na 
tion in twenty years. It is impossible that they 
should not. And that is your power, gentlemen. 



THE INTERESTS THEN AND NOW 81 

And again he saw always this great truth 
that entrenched privilege is not to be dislodged 
by passing resolutions and devising polite 
measures of reform, but by sheer, brutal, 
straight-out fighting; and he saw that the very 
uncouthness of the weapons of progress against 
which lady-like and perfumed reformers were 
always objecting was in itself a product of the 
conditions it combated. Thus to workingmen 
he said once : 

I know labor is narrow; I know she is aggres 
sive; I know she arms herself with the best weap 
ons that a corrupt civilization furnishes all true. 
Where do we get these ideas? Borrowed them 
from capital, every one of them; and when you 
advance to us on the level of peace, unarmed, we ll 
meet you on the same. While you combine and 
plot and defend, so will we. 

But Mr. Johnson says, " Come into the world 
with the white banner of peace." Ay, we will, 
when you disarm. . . . Labor comes up and says, 
" They have shotted their cannon to the lips; they 
have rough ground their swords as in battle; they 
have adopted every new method; they have in 
vented every dangerous machine and it is all 
planted like a great park of artillery against us. 
They have incorporated wealth; they have hidden 
behind banks; they have concealed themselves be 
hind currency; they have sheltered themselves in 
taxation ; they have passed rules to govern us 
and we will improve upon the lesson they have 
taught us. When they disarm, we will not be 
fore!" 



STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 

FROM 1840 to 1859 the whole anti-slav 
ery cause seemed to move in immitigable 
gloom. Most of its advocates, including 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, had no hope that 
in their time they should see chattel slavery 
overthrown. While the Abolitionists were di 
vided and quarreling about woman suffrage and 
political action, the united slave-holding inter 
ests swept from victory to victory, increasing 
every year their hold upon the nation. They 
dominated all branches of the government, most 
of the courts, both of the great parties. Be 
tween the Whigs and the Democrats of that day 
was only this difference, that the Democrats 
went a little further in abject servility to the 
Interests an achievement by no means easy 
and due to superior ability, not to surpassing 
desire. 

Yet all this time events and conditions were 
at work unseen, shaping the nation s course to 
82 



STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 83 

the will of the Abolitionists. Beyond their 
knowledge, beyond their dreaming, every impor 
tant event was reinforcing their appeals to the 
conscience of the nation. 

The great intellectual idol of the North and 
most conspicuous Whig was Daniel Webster, 
then a Senator from Massachusetts. Two gen 
erations of American school children have been 
reared to reverence this man, though it would 
puzzle any impartial observer to say why. 
There was not one thing in his career that could 
appeal to a reflective person as worthy of ad 
miration. He was, to be sure, of extraordinary 
appearance, having deep, shaggy, overhanging 
brows, a ponderous head and deep-set eyes 
of a remarkable brilliancy, and it must be on 
his looks alone that his fame is founded. He 
was for many years the oratorical model of the 
country and yet an analysis of his speeches, if 
anyone to-day should make such a study, would 
show chiefly a tawdry and an over-ornamented 
rhetoric. He held high places but his public 
papers never revealed any conception of pub 
lic duty beyond a cheap sort of patriotism. 
His " Reply to Haynes " has been declaimed by 
a million school boys, and yet, stripped of the 
halo of artificial glory that surrounds it, is but 
sorry stuff. In all his career he never devel- 



84 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

oped one idea of social service, never said one 
word for the human cause, never furthered one 
aim except his own advancement ; and yet for 
some reason the North was possessed of an ir 
rational frenzy about him. For many years he 
had cherished the common and fatal ambition 
of the American statesman. He wished to be 
President, and this ambition now served in a 
singular way to bring about the sharper clash 
between slave Interests and freemen that was 
needed at this juncture to revive the Abolition 
cause. 

In 1850, the 348,214 slave-owners, being 
made drunk with power, introduced in Congress 
a fugitive slave law far more drastic and tyran 
nical than had ever before been conceived. It 
not only transformed all government officers, 
including postmasters and deputy marshals, 
into slave-catchers, but provided a special set 
of slave-catching commissioners, punished citi 
zens that hindered captures or helped escapes, 
and rewarded those that returned a slave. 

When this astounding measure reached the 
Senate, all men turned to Webster to see what 
he would do. Millions of men that liked not 
Abolition heaved the gorge at being impressed 
as man-catchers. These hoped Webster would 
attack the bill. In the midst of a tense and 



STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 85 

dramatic scene in the Senate chamber, March 
7, 1850, while even his adversaries seemed sorry 
to see his humiliation, Webster sold himself for 
the chance of the Presidency. He supported 
the entire measure. 

Against this wallowing in shame the masses 
of the people at the North mentally revolted. 
The official and social North congratulated the 
man on his abject groveling, but " Ichabod," 
Whittier s greatest poem, struck the real note 
of popular thought and launched at the truck 
ler the scorn he had earned : 

"So lost! So fallen! The light withdrawn 

That once he bore; 
The glory of his gray hairs gone 
Forever more ! " 

Revile him not, the tempter hath 

A snare for all; 
And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath, 

Befit his fall! 

O, dumb be passion s stormy rage 

When he who might 
Have lighted up and led his age 

Falls back in night. 

Scorn! Would the angels laugh to mark 

A bright soul driven, 
Fiend goaded, down the endless dark, 

From hope and heaven! 



86 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

Let not the land once proud of him 

Insult him now 
Nor brand with deeper shame his dim, 

Dishonored brow. 

But let its humbled sons instead 

From sea to lake, 
A long lament, as for the dead, 

In sadness make. 

Of all we loved and honored, naught 

Save power remains, 
A fallen angel s pride of thought, 

Still strong in chains. 

All else is gone; from those great eyes 

The soul has fled: 
When faith is lost, when honor dies, 

The man is dead ! 

Then pay the reverence of old days 

To his dead fame; 
Walk backward with reverted gaze 

And hide the shame! 

" The man is dead ! " the poet said. He was 
so, indeed, though few realized the fact. To 
Phillips, who had long distrusted and despised 
Webster, the event merely confirmed an old 
judgment. After his custom he used it as a 
text for the lessons he desired to enforce. At a 
Faneuil Hall meeting, called to denounce the 
Fugitive Slave law, he spoke in his most im 
pressive style. Later he returned to the sub- 



STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 87 

ject in his Fraternity lecture called " Idols," 
delivered in Boston on October 4, 1859, so 
merciless and still so moving that it leaves the 
reader almost breathless. It contains that fa 
mous excoriation of Rufus Choate still de 
claimed by school boys. 

Since revolutionary days no other man in 
Massachusetts had been held in such popular 
regard as Webster, while Rufus Choate was the 
leader of the Massachusetts bar and mentioned 
with reverence by the ordinary citizen. To at 
tack these two men was a bold undertaking; it 
was flying in the face of that accepted public 
opinion that Phillips himself described as the 
tyrant of the republic. Yet he knew perfectly 
well upon what flimsy grounds such opinion 
existed and he knew, too, that in these cases 
the esteem in which the men was held was with 
out just warrant, since neither had ever done 
one thing for that cause of man that alone is 
of any importance in this world. Therefore in 
" Idols " he spared not. Webster s statue had 
recently been ordered to be placed in the State 
House. That was the occasion for the present 
oration and the explanation of its title. Here 
is one extract : 

The honors we grant mark how high we stand 
and they educate the future. The men we honor 



88 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

and the maxims we lay down in measuring our 
favorites show the levels and morals of the time. 
Two men have been in every one s mouth of late 
and men have exhausted themselves trying to pay 
their admiration and their respect. The courts 
have covered the grave of Mr. Choate with eulogy. 
We are told that " he worked hard/ " he never 
neglected his client," " he flung over the discus 
sions of the forum the grace of a rare scholar 
ship," " no pressure or emergency ever stirred him 
to an unkind word." A ripe scholar, a profound 
lawyer, a faithful servant of his client, a gentle 
man. This is a good record, surely. May he 
sleep in peace! What he earned, God grant he 
may have! But the bar that seeks to claim for 
such a one a place among great jurists must itself 
be weak indeed; for this is only to make him out 
the one-eyed monarch of the blind. Not one high- 
moral trait specified; not one patriotic act men 
tioned; not one patriotic service claimed. Look 
at Mr. Webster s idea of what a lawyer should 
be in order to be called great, in the sketch he 
drew of Jeremiah Mason, and notice what stress 
he lays on the religious and moral elevation, and 
the glorious and high purposes which crowned his 
life ! Nothing of this now ! I forget. Mr. Hal- 
lett did testify for Mr. Choate s religion. But the 
law maxim is that a witness should be trusted only 
in matters he understands, and the evidence there 
fore amounts to nothing. Incessant eulogy; but 
not a word of one effort to lift the yoke of cruel 
or unequal legislation from the neck of its vic 
tims; not one attempt to make the code of his 
country wiser, purer, better; not one effort to 
bless his times or breathe a higher moral purpose 
into the community; not one blow struck for right 



STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 89 

or for liberty while the battle of the giants was 
going on about him; not one patriotic act to stir 
the hearts of his idolators; not one public act of 
any kind whatever about whose merit friend or 
foe could even quarrel, unless when he scouted 
our great charter as a " glittering generality," or 
jeered at the philanthropy which tried to prac 
tise the Sermon on the Mount. When Cordus, the 
Roman senator, whom Tiberius murdered, was ad 
dressing his fellows he began : " Fathers, they 
accuse me of illegal words; plain proof that there 
are no illegal deeds with which to charge me." 
So with these eulogies words, nothing but words ; 
plain proof there were no deeds to praise. 

His final flaying of Choate will probably en 
dure so long as anything in oratorical literature 
endures : 

Yet this is the model which Massachusetts offers 
to the Pantheon of the great jurists of the world! 

Suppose we stood in that lofty temple of juris 
prudence, on either side of us the statues of the 
great lawyers of every age and clime, and let 
us see what part New England Puritan, edu 
cated, free New England would bear in the 
pageant. Rome points to a colossal figure, and 
says, " That is Papinian, who, when the Emperor 
Caracalla murdered his own brother, and ordered 
the lawyer to defend the deed, went cheerfully to 
death, rather than sully his lips with the atrocious 
plea; and that is Ulpian, who, aiding his prince 
to put the army below the law, was massacred at 
the foot of a weak, but virtuous throne." 

And France stretches forth her grateful hands, 
crying, " That is D Aguesseau, worthy, when he 



90 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

went to face an enraged king, of the farewell his 
wife addressed him Go ! forget that you have 
a wife and children to ruin, and remember only 
that you have France to save/ " 

England says, " That is Coke, who flung the 
laurels of eighty years in the face of the first 
Stuart, in defence of the people. This is Selden, 
on every book of whose library you saw written 
the motto of which he lived worthy, Before every 
thing, Liberty ! That is Mansfield, silver-tongued, 
who proclaimed, 

Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs 
Receive our air, that moment they are free. 

" This is Romilly, who spent life trying to make 
law synonymous with justice, and succeeded in 
making life and property safer in every city of 
the empire. And that is Erskine, whose eloquence, 
spite of Lord Eldon and George III, made it safe 
to speak and to print." 

Then New England shouts, " This is Choate, 
who made it safe to murder; and of whose health 
thieves asked before they began to steal." 

Of Webster, Phillips said: 

No man criticises when private friendship moulds 
the loved form in 

" Stone that breathes and struggles, 
Or brass that seems to speak." 

Let Mr. Webster s friends crowd their own halls 
and grounds with his bust and statues. That is 
no concern of ours. But when they ask the State 
to join in doing him honor, then we claim the right 
to express an opinion. . . . We cannot but remem- 



STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 91 

ber that the character of the commonwealth is 
shown by the character of those it crowns. A 
brave old Englishman tells us the Greeks had offi 
cers who did pluck down statues if they exceeded 
due symmetry and proportion. " We need such 
now," he adds, " to order monuments according 
to men s merits." Indeed we do! When I think 
of the long term and wide reach of his influence, 
and look at the subjects of his speeches, the mere 
shells of history, drum-and-trumpet declamation, 
dry law, or selfish bickerings about trade, when 
I think of his bartering the hopes of four millions 
of bondmen for the chances of his private ambi 
tion, I recall the criticism on Lord Eldon, " No 
man ever did his race so much good as Eldon pre 
vented." Again, when I remember the close of 
his life spent in ridiculing the Anti-Slavery move 
ment as useless abstraction, moonshine, " mere 
rub-a-dub agitation," because it did not minister 
to trade and gain, methinks I seem to see written 
all over his statue Tocqueville s conclusion from 
his survey of French and American democracy, 
" The man who seeks freedom for anything but 
freedom s self, is made to be a slave ! " 

Edward Everett, who was to the slave-hold 
ing Interests of his day such a facile and knee- 
crooking valet as many a United States Sena 
tor has been to the profit-gouging Interests 
of our times, had delivered on Webster one of 
those eulogies that produce mental nausea in 
every healthy reader. Mr. Phillips deals with 
Everett too, according to his deserts: 



92 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

Blame me not that I again open the record, Mr. 
Chairman. His injudicious friends will not let 
him die. Indeed, the heavy yoke he laid on inno 
cent and friendless victims frets and curses them 
yet too keenly to allow him to be forgotten. He 
reaps only what he sowed. In the Talmud the 
Jews have a story that Og, King of Bashan, lifted 
once a great rock to hurl it on the armies of Judah. 
God hollowed it in the middle, letting it slip over 
the giant s neck, there to rest while he lived. This 
man lifted the Fugitive Slave Bill to hurl it, as 
at Syracuse, on the trembling and hunted slave, 
and God has hung it like a mill-stone about his 
neck for evermore. While the echoes of Everett s 
periods still lingered in our streets, as I stood with 
the fresh printed sheet of his eulogy in my hand, 
there came to me a man, successful after eight 
attempts in flying from bondage. Week after 
week he had been in the woods, half-starved, seek 
ing in vain a shelter. For months he had pined 
in dungeons, waiting the sullen steps of his mas 
ter. At last God blessed the eighth effort and he 
stood in Boston on his glad way from the vulture 
of the States to the safe refuge of English law. 
He showed me his broad bosom scarred all over 
with the branding iron, his back one mass of rec 
ords how often the lash had tortured him for his 
noble efforts to get free. As I looked at him the 
empty and lying eulogy dropped from my nerve 
less hand and I thanked God that statue and eulogy 
both were only a horrid nightmare and that there 
were still roofs in Boston, safe shelter for these 
heroic children of God s right hand ! 

The impression created by Webster s bargain 
and the bill he supported did not wear off ; they 



STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 93 

were of the order of things that men do not 
easily forget. Slowly the people began to 
awaken to the true nature of the power that 
had subverted the Republic. The South, dis 
daining Webster s sacrifice, contemptuously re 
fused him the mess of pottage for which he had 
bartered his soul. Disappointment and the 
signs of popular disgust shortened his life. 
President Fillmore rewarded him by making 
him Secretary of State, but he died in two 
years, and his place in the Senate was filled by 
Charles Sumner, who from the same platform 
in Faneuil Hall with Wendell Phillips and Fred 
erick Douglass, the Negro, had denounced Web 
ster for his surrender. Massachusetts had 
taken the first forward step. 

Upon every phase of these developments Phil 
lips kept watch, seeking to turn each to the ad 
vantage of his cause. The most singular thing 
is that in all the darkest days of the movement 
there is not in his speeches nor letters nor re 
corded comments one note of discouragement. 
He seems to tower above average men, seeing 
over their heads to the end of the road. To 
him the failure of Abolition was unthinkable. 
If men turned traitor or ceased from the fight, 
so much the worse for them. When the North 
cringed, Phillips jeered in its face. When the 



94 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

South threatened to secede, he cried, " Let it 
go ! " Nothing could take him by surprise or 
find him unprepared. When audiences hissed 
and threatened to lynch him, he flung back their 
taunts and turned their ridicule upon them 
selves. He never flinched, never hesitated, 
never modified his expressions, never made a con 
cession to hostile public sentiment, never lost 
a chance to strike a blow, and was altogether 
the most indomitable, irrepressible, and insist 
ent fighter in history. 

At Cincinnati once in these days he was to 
lecture before an audience, nine-tenths of which 
would have been delighted to see him hanged. 
He knew perfectly well what he faced, but with 
unruffled composure he walked down the stage 
and stood waiting for silence. When it came 
he held up a single sheet of paper. All eyes 
were now fixed upon him ; all men sat breath 
lessly watching. " If this sheet of paper," be 
gan Mr. Phillips in his dulcet tones, " were the 
Constitution of the United States and I thought 
it permanently protected the infamy of slave- 
holding, I would tear it into pieces like this," 
and he tore the paper into fragments and flung 
them at his feet. With snarls and howls men 
rushed over the foot-lights to seize him. Be- 



STRIPPING OFF THE MASKS 95 

fore they could reach him, friends from behind 
had grasped him in their arms, hurled him into 
a carriage at the stage door and whipped him 
away to safety. 

Again in Cincinnati some years later, a man 
brought to the hall a bottle of vitriol intending 
to throw it in Mr. Phillips s face. A great 
paving stone was pitched at him from a gallery 
box and crashed into the stage at his feet. 
Often men came to his meetings with ropes in 
their pockets to hang him. 

And yet under the surface of things appar 
ently so untoward the seed sown by the Aboli 
tionists was bearing unsuspected fruit. Gar 
rison, Phillips and the others like them touched 
the consciences of men ; therein lay their 
power. Every day the Abolitionist band, so 
led and inspired, grew in numbers and activity. 
Slowly righteous men regained their courage 
as they gazed upon leaders that were without 
fear. Among such men, as a compensation 
for his usual experiences Phillips found some 
times a strength of love that must have warmed 
his heart, and even among the indifferent or 
the hostile was often an admission of his un 
matched oratory. As illustrating this and 
also his power to interest and to please I may 



96 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

mention the fact, unique, I think, in the his 
tory of the American platform, that on one 
visit to Cortland, New York, he was called 
upon to deliver four lectures in twenty-six 
hours. 



VI 

JOHN BROWN AND HARPER S FERRY 

BUT to return to the events that swung 
the nation behind the Abolitionists. Two 
years after the passage of the Fugitive 
Slave Law came " Uncle Tom s Cabin/ 
which focussed the country s attention upon the 
essential immorality of slavery. The same 
year the Whigs were annihilated in the Presi 
dential election and thoughtful men perceived 
that a new party, based upon stronger opposi 
tion to the slave Interests, was inevitable. Yet 
those Interests continued to walk their wild road 
whither that led. In 1854 they passed the 
Kansas and Nebraska bill, repealing the Mis 
souri Compromise and opening all the Terri 
tories to the advance of slavery. In the 
same year they secured the arrest and indict 
ment of Mr. Phillips and Theodore Parker for 
obstructing the enforcement of the Fugitive 
Slave Law. On May 22, 1856, Preston S. 
Brooks, a Representative from South Carolina, 
97 



98 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

stole into the Senate Chamber, crept behind 
Charles Sumner as he sat at his desk writing, 
and beat him almost to death with a heavy cane 
for the sake of the cause of Profits. The 
same year the Republican party was launched 
with John C. Fremont as its President on a plat 
form frankly inimical to the slave oligarchy 
and cast an ominously large vote. In 1857 
the Supreme Court, controlled by the Interests, 
handed down the Dred Scott decision, and Chief 
Justice Taney therein advanced the doctrine 
that " the black man has no rights that the 
white man is bound to respect." Extraordi 
nary are the potentialities of a phrase ! To the 
aroused conscience of the country, steadily ad 
dressed by the Abolitionists, this phrase struck 
home with peculiar force. It was something 
concrete and easily understandable; something 
also that seemed to embody in a few words the 
whole spirit of the slave-holding Interests. 
Men that had no strong aversion to slavery and 
detested the Abolitionists rejected the idea that 
a Negro was something less than a horse or a 
dog and began belatedly to perceive the irre 
pressible struggle. 

The passage of the Kansas and Nebraska 
bill and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise 
were followed by civil war in Kansas. The 



JOHN BROWN AND HARPER S FERRY 99 

question of slavery or freedom being left to the 
people of that Territory, the slave Interests de 
termined to win it for slavery. To that end 
they poured their adherents into Kansas, seized 
the Territorial government, stuffed the ballot- 
boxes, dispossessed the officers that had been 
legally elected, and began everywhere to drive 
out the anti-slavery element. In response 
Free Soil champions preached a new crusade 
that was assumed by thousands; the contend 
ing forces met in desperate struggles that made 
Kansas truly a dark and bloody ground: and 
at last there appeared on the scene the com 
manding figure of John Brown. 

We have no need to follow here all the de 
velopments of the story. When Kansas had 
been made a Free State, Brown returned to the 
East and began to meditate the enterprise that 
culminated in Harper s Ferry. For their own 
good reasons, doubtless, reactionary writers like 
John Hay and Theodore Roosevelt have de 
scribed this as an insane freak and Brown him 
self as a half-mad fanatic. They overlook the 
fact that Brown explained his plans and ideas 
in the utmost detail to some of the ablest Aboli 
tionist leaders, and that cool-headed men like 
Parker and Frank Sanborn, and men of peace 
like Gerrit Smith, gave him their complete sup- 



100 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

port. His project failed, to be sure, and 
Brown was hanged. Immediate success is the 
only test the reactionary mind can apply to any 
thing. Brown made an armed movement into 
the South; he was captured and hanged. 
Therefore he was a madman. Minds of this 
order cannot grasp the ideals of a man that 
felt he would rather die protesting than live in 
a State whose constitution sanctioned human 
slavery. Elsewhere, liberty-lovers easily un 
derstood. To France, for instance, John 
Brown became one of the world heroes. " That 
ends slavery in America ! " said Victor Hugo, 
when he heard of Brown s hanging. Few in 
America saw the truth so clearly. 
- From all these developments Mr. Phillips 
pointed anew his familiar insistence that until 
slavery were abolished there could be neither 
peace, security nor national righteousness. 
As he had protested vehemently against the 
Mexican war, calling it a wicked device to en 
large the slave territory, so in successive 
speeches he entered separate protests against 
the Kansas and Nebraska bill, against the as 
sault upon Sumner and the applause that 
greeted the assault, against the Dred Scott 
decision, against the attempt to seize Kansas 



for slavery, against the trial of John Brown, 
and now against his hanging. 

This was one of his historic utterances. It 
was delivered in Henry Ward Beecher s Ply 
mouth Church, Brooklyn. To speak as Phil 
lips spoke then required a high order of moral 
courage. The cherished hope of the slave 
holders was that they could implicate Phillips 
in Brown s plot, have him indicted as accessory, 
and thus get him into slave-holding territory 
where he could be hanged. His house was 
watched, he was dogged by detectives and there 
was a likelihood that his papers would be seized 
and examined. Entirely undismayed by all 
these conditions, Mr. Phillips openly avowed 
his complete sympathy with Brown s attempt. 

People do me the honor to say, in some of the 
Western papers, that this is traceable to some 
teachings of mine. It is too much honor to such 
as me. Gladly, if it were not fulsome vanity, 
would I clutch this laurel of having .any share 
in the great resolute daring of that man who flung 
himself against an empire in behalf of justice and 
liberty. They were not the bravest men who 
fought at Saratoga and Yorktown in the war of 
1776. O no! It was rather those who flung 
themselves at Lexington, few and feeble, against 
the embattled ranks of an empire, till then thought 
irresistible. . . . 

"Commonwealth of Virginia!" There is no 



THE STOEY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

such thing. Lawless, brutal force is no basis of 
a government, in the true sense of that word. No 
civil society, no government, can exist except on 
the basis of the willing submission of all its citi 
zens and by the performance of the duty of ren 
dering equal justice between man and man. 

Whatever calls itself a government, and refuses 
that duty, or has not that assent, is no govern 
ment. It is only a pirate ship. Virginia the 
Commonwealth of Virginia! She is only a chronic 
insurrection. I mean exactly what I say. I am 
weighing my words now. She is a pirate ship and 
John Brown sails the sea, a lord high admiral of 
the Almighty with his commission to sink every 
pirate he meets on God s ocean of the Nineteenth 
Century. I mean literally and exactly what I say. 
In God s world there are no majorities, no minori 
ties; one on God s side is a majority. . . . John 
Brown has twice as much right to hang Governor 
Wise as Governor Wise has to hang him. . . . 

But John Brown violated the law. Yes. On 
yonder desk lie the inspired words of men who 
died violent deaths for breaking the laws of 
Rome. Why do you listen to them so reverently? 
Huss and Wickliffe violated laws; why honor 
them? George Washington, had he been caught 
before 1783, would have died on the gibbet for 
breaking the laws of his sovereign. Yet I have 
heard that man praised within six months. Yes, 
you say, but these men broke bad laws. Just so. 
It is honorable, then, to break bad laws and such 
law-breaking history loves and God blesses ! Who 
says, then, that slave-laws are not ten thousand 
times worse than any these men resisted? What 
ever argument excuses them makes John Brown 
a saint. 



JOHN BROWN AND HARPER*S FERRY 103 

The next day after that portentous tragedy 
at Charlestown he went to New York and ac 
companied the body to North Elba, Brown s old 
home, where it was to be buried. It was he that 
pronounced the funeral oration, most moving of 
all his addresses, most moving of all memorial 
addresses in the language. Its closing words 
will live in the memory of every person that 
ever read them, when after reviewing Brown s 
heroism and sacrifice he said: 

God make us all worthier of him whose dust 
we lay among these hills he loved. Here he girded 
himself and went forth to battle. Fuller success 
than his heart ever dreamed God granted him. 
He sleeps in the blessings of the crushed and the 
poor, and men believe more firmly in virtue now 
that such a man lias lived. Standing here, let us 
thank God for a firmer faith and fuller hope. 

The next year, 1860, saw the prearranged 
division of the Democratic party, the election 
of Lincoln and the birth of the Southern Con 
federacy. At first Mr. Phillips thought that 
to allow the seceding States to depart would 
be better than to try to detain them with force. 
Their absence would at least clear from what 
was left of the Union the stain of slavery, and 
he believed it would in time work out the 
death of the institution even in the South it 
self. Most persons at the North, frightened at 



104 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

the prospect, favored every concession that 
would induce the Southern States to remain. 
In Massachusetts a very strong movement was 
under way to repeal the Personal Liberty Act, 
of which Mr. Phillips was one of the authors, 
because it had given offense to the slave Inter 
ests. At Washington a bill, supported if not 
actually drawn by Lincoln himself, was intro 
duced to prohibit any agitation of the question 
of slavery. 

On December 2, I860, Phillips was an 
nounced to speak in Tremont Temple against 
slavery. The Interests induced the mayor to 
close the hall against him. Phillips repaired 
to the colored people s church in Belknap 
Street, and delivered his address there. The 
rioters attempted to seize him but his friends 
hurried him out of the rear entrance toward 
his home. Before he reached Essex Street the 
mob had discovered him and poured across the 
Common in pursuit. A bodyguard of young 
men protected him, marching in a circle with 
locked arms about him until he reached his 
house. 

Theodore Parker, the Abolitionist preacher 
of Boston, was now dead and Mr. Phillips some 
times supplied his pulpit. Two weeks after the 
Belknap Street riot Mr. Phillips delivered an- 



other anti-slavery speech in Parker s pulpit. 
Again the mob was there, attempting first to 
break up the meeting and then to lynch the 
speaker, and again he was protected to his 
home by his volunteer body guard. I take 
pleasure in noting that this was composed of 
German Turners. The Turn Verein had heard 
of the attempt to throttle free speech and had 
resolved to defend its champion, and for weeks 
members of the Verein mounted guard day and 
night over the Phillips house. 

On January 20, he spoke again from Par 
ker s pulpit and the previous scenes were re 
peated, except that the mob was larger, more 
determined and more blood-thirsty. It was 
necessary for the police, who had hitherto been 
held off by the pro-slavery mayor, to assist the 
Turners, and one of the policemen subsequently 
testified to tHe difficulty with which Mr. Phil- 
lips s life was saved. 

Yet on each of these occasions he appeared 
to be above fear, spoke with all of his old time 
fire and effectiveness, and declared his position 
unequivocally. On February 17, he spoke 
again from Parker s pulpit on " Progress " and 
again a phalanx of friends of free speech must 
be drawn about him as a bulwark. But as he 
spoke on, men that had come resolved to hang 



106 THE STOEY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

him listened to his words, launched in that mar 
velous voice; gradually they forgot their pas 
sions ; at last conquered in spite of their preju 
dices, they joined with the rest of the audience 
in tumultuous applause. 

The war came, and in the presence of the 
national crisis Mr. Phillips resumed his duties 
as an American citizen, fervently supported the 
Union, and used his eloquence to further en 
listments and to encourage the nation in those 
trying hours. He did not like Lincoln and did 
not trust him, believing him to be a politician 
and an opportunist without convictions against 
slavery. He was repelled by Lincoln s declara 
tion that he would save the Union with slavery 
if he could and without slavery if he must ; by 
his endorsement of the Fugitive Slave Law and 
attempts to enforce it in the first part of the 
war ; by the long postponement of emancipation, 
and by the earlier conduct of the war upon rea 
sons of political tactics. On these matters he 
freely criticized the administration while he sup 
ported it. But when Abraham Lincoln was as 
sassinated the most eloquent tribute to his good 
qualities came from the lips of Wendell Phillips 
in the memorial address of April 23, 1865, de 
livered at Tremont Temple. " These are sober 
days," began Mr. Phillips. "The judgments 



of God have found us out," and he proceeded 
to show that the barbarism of slavery had 
echoed in the barbarism of assassination, and in 
this way we were paying our penalty for our 
long indifference to a national sin. " And 
what of him," he said, " in whose precious blood 
this momentous lesson is writ? He sleeps in 
the blessings of the poor, whose fetters God 
commissioned him to break." 

The terrible event turned the joy of the 
Abplitionists to mourning. Yet their thirty 
years war had ended in triumph ; their cause 
was won. Five days before Lincoln fell, the 
flag had been restored upon Fort Sumter in the 
harbor of Charleston, against which the first 
shot of the Rebellion had been fired. A dis 
tinguished company of public men attended the 
ceremony ; Henry Ward Beecher was the orator 
of the day, Henry Wilson, Judge Holt and 
George Thompson of England were there. So 
was one other man. Thirty years before, he 
had been dragged through the streets of Bos 
ton to be hanged for preaching the abolition of 
slavery; now with slavery abolished he stood 
the nation s honored guest at the ceremonies 
that marked the end of the long struggle. 
What must have been the emotions that day of 
William Lloyd Garrison! 



108 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

And jet the satisfaction that belongs to these 
thoughts is dimmed, it must be admitted, in 
anyone that stops to consider the present state 
of the people that with such a staggering ex 
penditure of blood and treasure were set free. 

Chattel slavery was abolished; the deadly 
clutch of 35 per cent, profit was taken from 
the throats of the colored race ; but the day of 
justice and reparation for which Phillips and 
Garrison labored is still put afar off by sur 
viving feudalism and surviving savagery. If 
the men that at such risk of life and with such 
sacrifices agitated for freedom could return 
now to see the extent to which their work has 
been nullified in the South they might ques 
tion whether much of it had not been in vain. 
Certainly a condition in which Americans of 
dark complexion are denied because of that 
complexion the rights guaranteed by the Con 
stitution, the protection of the laws, the ordi 
nary operations of justice, the place of citi 
zens, the commonest considerations of human 
ity, is a condition of which the old self-sacri 
ficing Abolitionists never dreamed and no 
thoughtful American at the close of the war 
would have thought possible. Who, for in 
stance, would have thought that in seven states 
of the Union the Constitution would be openly 



abolished to gratify a mere racial prejudice or 
that we should ever see a condition of hclotage 
legally established for millions of our fellow 
Americans? Who would have thought that 
such things could be done without a protest 
from the regions that produced the Garrisons, 
Phillipses, Browns, Gerrit Smiths, Stevenses 
and the rest that thundered against the other 
kind of slavery? And who can reflect upon 
these conditions and avoid the thought that 
there is as urgent need now of a Phillips and a 
Garrison as there was in 1833? 

What Wendell Phillips would have thought, 
for instance, of the " Jim Crow car," that 
hideous disgrace to our civilization, we know 
well enough from the testimony of Frederick 
Douglass. Before the war the steamboats on 
Long Island Sound and elsewhere in the North 
would not allow a colored person to travel 
otherwise than as a " deck " or steerage pas 
senger, which is to say that colored persons 
were not allowed a place to sleep. Phillips 
knew this and whenever he was on the same boat 
with Douglass he would leave his own cabin 
and spend the night on the forward deck with 
the great colored man, walking to and fro in 
conversation. He felt that so long as such 
savage regulations existed he had no right to 



110 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

a greater luxury than was allowed to his 
brother of darker skin. 

We may know well enough, therefore, that 
if the life of Mr. Phillips had been prolonged, 
neither the barbarous " Jim Crow " laws nor 
the laws that nullify the Constitution and de 
prive the colored American of his rights would 
have been passed without at least one vehe 
ment protest. 

It is certain, too, that he would have real 
ized the true underlying causes for a condition 
in which 10,000,000 people are the victims of 
such wrong and injustice. He would have 
seen that aside from the natural snobbishness 
of a certain American element and the rancors 
left by the war, the true origin of these perse 
cutions was solely economic. He would have 
seen that the hatred felt at the South against 
the Negro was like the hatred once felt in Cali 
fornia against the Chinese and sprang from the 
same poisonous competitive system that is the 
origin of nine-tenths of the ills of society. 
Colored laborers were in competition with 
white laborers ; under the existing system all 
laborers are harassed with the idea that there 
is not enough work for all. In such conditions 
every dollar earned by a colored man was 
deemed a dollar taken from a white man. 



Ill 

Therefore the white laborer, imbued with the 
belief, surviving from slavery days, that he was 
the higher intelligence and of the greater de 
serving, was determined to abolish that com 
petition and keep the colored man " in his 
place," which according to these authorities is 
either to be an uncomplaining 1 and hopeless 
drudge for white men or else to lie in the grave, 
I never could quite make out which. 

Wendell Phillips would have perceived, too, 
the cowardice of the persons that understand 
well enough the perils of these conditions and 
fear to speak of them, pushing all aside with 
the hollow pretense that " the question ought 
to be left to the South, which best understands 
the Negro." He would have scorned the men 
that sit in the United States Senate and see 
this monstrous system of injustice carried to 
its limits and utter no word of protest. He 
would have perceived the fraudulent nature of 
the argument that the Negro is incapable of 
anything better than a menial s position in 
life. He would know the great truth and in 
sist upon it that the color of a man s skin has 
nothing to do with either his character or his 
abilities; that there is no such thing in all this 
world as a racial difference great enough to 
take cognizance of; that men are everywhere 



THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

about the same ; that all so-called " races " if 
endowed with about the same opportunities will 
make about the same progress ; that progress 
is a matter of opportunity and liberty, not of 
complexion. He would have seen, too, how 
hypocritical is the assertion that the Negro 
in America is centuries behind the white man, 
for he knew that the moment the Negro secured 
an equal opportunity with the white man the 
Negro s achievements were at least as great. 

All these things he felt not merely because 
he believed in democracy and equality as the 
basic creed of his religion but because he was 
accustomed to disregard hysteria and conven 
tional clamor and to learn for himself the truth. 
Science in our day has shattered the last pre 
tense that there is any such thing in this world 
as a separate race, establishing as a scientific 
fact the universal brotherhood that Christ 
taught. Phillips, in advance of his time, saw 
this when even other Abolitionists were be 
fogged about the " sons of Ham " and other 
nonsense. He, therefore, was the one man of 
his day able to recite properly the wonderful 
story of Toussaint POuverture, that man of 
unmixed African descent whose genius as a 
military commander, statesman and law-giver 
compelled the admiration of all Europe and re- 



113 

mains conspicuous among a thousand other 
illustrations that disprove the inferiority of 
the Negro or of any other race. Through this 
marvelous appreciation of one of the greatest 
men that ever lived shines this prophetic belief 
in the day to be when the world will see that all 
men are what environment, opportunity, lib 
erty or bondage, poverty or sufficiency, has 
made them. 



VII 

THE MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR 
LABOR 

THE war was over; the once hated 
Abolitionists became the idols of the na 
tion; men saw now that through all the thirty 
years of preparatory agitation, the cause sup 
ported by a fugitive handful had been, in fact, 
an eternal verity ; the name, once a badge of 
shame, became a sign of honor. 

In this great but quite natural transforma 
tion, Mr. Phillips was for a few months, the 
most conspicuous figure ; even with the war 
heroes he divided the popular acclaim. The 
man that had been everywhere discredited as 
a liar and a fomentor of dissension attained 
of a sudden to a degree of respectability that 
would have unsettled one of smaller faith. In 
1865 and 1866 his audience and following were 
beyond those of any other man in the country. 
Whatever he said was repeated and accepted ; 

he was overwhelmed with invitations to speak; 
114 



MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 115 

on platforms, where, a few years before, his 
life had been in peril of murderous mobs, he 
spoke now to applauding thousands. For a 
time he was the incomparable favorite in the 
lecture courses ; he was offered twenty times the 
engagements he could fill. 

Before so great a popularity the doors of 
political preferment swung open. What office 
did he wish? Any place was at his choice. 
Would he go to Congress? Would he be 
Governor? Nominations were thrust before 
him w r here nomination meant election and elec 
tion meant a long career in the public service. 

We know now that at least one of these op 
portunities had for him a strong allurement. 
The Senate was very attractive to him ; he liked 
its dignity and its opportunity to affect na 
tional policies. Yet, without hesitation, he put 
from him every temptation from the one path 
he had chosen for his feet, knowing well the ar 
duous nature of the work ahead and looking 
forward to the time, when, because of that work, 
he should once more be hated. 

It was, in fact, the second great turning 
point ,in his career; the most important chap 
ter was just beginning. As no man ever does 
anything for but one reason, so, I suppose, in 
spiration itself is not single and indivisible. 



116 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

To his great services and sacrifices in the anti- 
slavery cause, Mr. Phillips was first impelled 
by his fervent faith in democracy, his sense of 
justice and his human sympathies. But after 
a time he saw in it something else, whereof the 
vision was not possessed by his fellows, and it 
was this broader view that presently wrought 
his downfall as the idol of the hour. 

While his popularity and prestige endured 
he used all on the side of the Negro. From the 
war struggle the nation passed to the recon 
struction struggle; a story not exhilarating to 
the patriot that reads of it. To preserve for 
the Negro in peace what had been won for him 
in war demanded no less skill, determination and 
steady fighting. 

Andrew Johnson, the friend of the former 
slave-holders, was now President and under his 
protection and encouragement the old slave 
oligarchy hoped to rise again. This is a fact 
commonly obscured or omitted in history, and 
yet the record of it is indubitable. Johnson 
was at heart a pro-slavery man and always had 
been. He had been chosen by Lincoln for the 
nomination for vice-president, and the country 
was now reaping a bitter harvest for that blun 
der. Johnson came from Tennessee, where he 
was one of those extremely doubtful persons, a 



MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 117 

" favorite son." Anybody that knew anything 
about him knew that he was unfitted to be thrust 
into the second place in the government, but 
Lincoln was determined to have him there be 
cause of his supposed influence in the " border 
states " about which was much concern in the 
minds of the politicians. The fact that he 
had no convictions against slavery naturally 
weighed but little in the mind of Lincoln, whose 
environment and training had been such as 
largely to obscure this point. 

When Johnson took office his first idea was 
to bring back the revolted states on the same 
basis on which they had existed in the Union 
previous to secession. The late slave-holders 
joyfully accepted this proposition and began 
to pass laws that virtually re-established slav 
ery and would return the country to the con 
dition it was in before the war. To prevent a 
catastrophe so tremendous called for the best 
leadership of the North, and the man that did 
most to preserve the hard-won fruits of liberty 
was Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, now 
almost forgotten except by those that care for 
history as it really is and not as it is pretended. 

Stevens, Phillips and Charles Sumner, and 
after them Ben Wade, Henry Wilson and 
Schuyler Colfax, were the leaders of the ele- 



118 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

ment that insisted upon enfranchisement and 
equal rights regardless of color. Nothing 
short of complete democracy would content the 
man to whom democracy was a religion. The 
opposition was led by President Johnson, who 
became the center of fierce dissension in the 
party that had elected him, and the target of 
some of Phillips s most bitter and acrid sar 
casm. 

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth 
amendments to the Constitution establishing 
equal rights represented the victory of the rad 
ical element after years of controversy. 

At the outset Phillips had come to the part 
ing of the ways with Garrison. The end of 
the war showed an irreconsilablc difference be 
tween them. Garrison held that the work of 
the Abolitionists had ended ; Phillips said it had 
just begun. Garrison wished to disband the 
American Anti-Slavery Society; Phillips in 
sisted that its functions were never greater nor 
more important. At the annual meeting in 
1865 the clash came. Garrison moved to dis 
band; Phillips strongly opposed the motion. 
On the vote Phillips had a large majority and 
Garrison practically withdrew from the move 
ment. Thereafter, the chief burden, including 
the support of the Standard, the society s or- 



MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 119 

gan, fell upon the shoulders and purse of 
Phillips. 

The two men never lost their respect for each 
other, but their temperamental differences were 
so strong that probably only the great bond 
of their mutual affection had previously kept 
them together. Garrison was a humanitarian, 
Phillips a militant democrat. Besides, Garri 
son was the elder and had suffered the more 
from the terrible strain of thirty-five years of 
fighting; his nature was to seek peace and pur 
sue it. He was, in fact, one of gentle and stu 
dent-like inclinings, driven into battle by the 
sheer fervor of an overmastering faith. One 
may surmise that with infinite relief he hailed 
the end of strife. We are also to consider that 
the intensity of his feeling against slavery had 
not only worn him down, but at the same time 
had circumscribed his view ; for such is commonly 
the effect of a cause upon its pioneers and those 
whom it exclusively possesses. 

With Phillips the case was very different, and 
here we return upon that one thing that he saw 
and the others failed to see. He had long un 
derstood that the foundations of the slavery 
question were much broader than the surface in 
dications, for he alone of the Abolitionist lead 
ers saw the economic origin of the issue. To 



120 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

his mind, the slavery question was a labor ques 
tion, and it was but one part of a still greater 
labor question that must be settled if society 
was to endure. He alone perceived that the 
abolition of African slavery was only one 
gained battle in a long warfare ; he wanted to 
go on with the rest. Wage slavery was as truly 
slavery as chattel slavery and as much a thing 
to be abolished. Nevertheless, there was this 
difference, that, whereas chattel slavery was 
confined to a few regions in a few countries, 
wage slavery was universal ; and while chattel 
slavery involved some millions, wage slavery in 
volved and degraded the entire working class 
of the world. 

In other words he had been thinking along 
economic lines and obtaining economic enlight 
enment; an achievement that alone would dis 
tinguish him as far in advance of his times. 

He looked out upon the world and saw that 
everywhere the toilers, who were the sole crea 
tors of wealth, were the bottom of the social 
structure. They created wealth for other men 
to enjoy, but of the wealth they created they 
obtained very little for themselves. In conse 
quence of this arrangement, steadily becom 
ing more oppressive to them, they lived in in 
sufficiency and under conditions that made 



MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 

health, intelligence and progress impossible 
among them. He saw that the population 
thus injuriously affected was in every country 
the majority; that as their economic condi 
tion declined, the national vigor would be low 
ered ; that the chattel slavery against which 
the Abolitionists warred was only one result 
of a system that less frankly enslaved work 
ing men everywhere. This was the system the 
Abolitionists really attacked when they made 
war on chattel slavery, and against this sys 
tem he was resolved to continue to fight. 

He had also in another way a clear view of 
things as they were in his time, and as they 
were to be after him. Nothing about this re 
markable man was more wonderful than his pre 
vision, in which he far surpassed any other man 
that my reading has encountered. We think it 
an achievement that Napoleon should have pre 
dicted the fate of Great Britain in South Africa 
and our naval war of 1812, but these seem 
small feats of prophecy compared with some 
that are recorded of Phillips. With substan 
tial accuracy and equal facility he could fore 
tell the course of any political movement or eco 
nomic development, predict the path of national 
evolution or prophesy about inventions. He 
foretold wireless telegraphy and aviation with 



THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

as much certainty as the outcome of the Civil 
War or the ruin of President Johnson. In the 
midst of the anxious battle against African 
slavery, he foresaw the steady arising of the 
far greater struggle in behalf of all labor, and 
at the same time, the developing threat of the 
money power, the growth of the lawless great 
corporation and the approach of their control 
of the Government. 

So with the same courage that he had shown 
when in 1837 he took his place with the hated 
Abolitionists, and in the same spirit of unselfish 
consecration to a great cause, he committed 
himself to the agitation for justice to labor, then 
beginning in a despised way to make itself 
faintly heard. It was, in a sense, a more des 
perate step than the other, since in the common 
view of the bourgeoisie, if the Abolitionists had 
been mad fanatics the labor agitators were the 
lowest dregs of humanity. But so early as No 
vember 2, 1865, Phillips took his way to a labor 
meeting in Faneuil Hall and made a speech in 
which he unequivocally declared himself in the 
first notable utterance in this country in favor 
of an eight-hour day. He said : 

It is twenty-nine years this month since I first 
stood on the platform of Faneuil Hall to address 
an audience of the citizens of Boston. I felt then 



MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 

that I was speaking for the cause of the laboring 
men, and if to-night I should make the last speech 
of my life, I would be glad that it should be in 
the same strain, for laboring men and their 
rights. 

The labor of these twenty-nine years has been 
in behalf of a race bought and sold. The South 
did not rest its system wholly on this claim to own 
its laborers; but according to Chancellor Harper, 
Alexander H. Stevens, Governor Pickens and John 
C. Calhoun, asserted that the laborer must neces 
sarily be owned by capitalists or individuals. That 
struggle for the ownership of labor is now some 
where near its end; and we fitly commence a 
struggle to define and to arrange the true rela 
tions of capital and labor. 

To-day one of your sons is born. He lies in 
his cradle as the child of a man without means, 
with a little education and with less leisure. The 
favored child of the capitalist is borne up by every 
circumstance as on the eagle s wings. The prob 
lem of to-day is how to make the chances of the 
two as equal as possible; and before this movement 
stops, every child born in America must have an 
equal chance in life. 

Eight hours for labor, eight hours for sleep, 
eight hours to be the worker s own, was Mr. 
Phillips s view of the next great reform. I 
have no idea why America is so backward about 
these things. The eight-hour movement, so 
very young then in the United States, was old 
elsewhere. In front of the Parliament House 
at Melbourne, Australia, you will find a hand- 



THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

some monument to commemorate the adoption 
by Australia of this humane proposal. That 
monument had become a familiar sight to Mel 
bourne, long before the eight-hour principle was 
widely recognized in the United States, a fact 
that may afford us another measure of Mr. Phil- 
lips s far advance upon his contemporaries. 

" You must imitate the tenacity of the Aboli 
tionists in adherence to a single issue," he went 
on. " A political movement saying, We will 
have our rights is a mass meeting in perpetual 
session. Filtered through the ballot box comes 
the will of the people and statesmen bow to it. 
Go home and say that the working men of Mas 
sachusetts are a unit and that they mean to 
stereotype their purposes on the statute-book." 

Such words fell like a cold douche upon thou 
sands of men more than willing to make Phillips 
their hero. At first some of these tried to ex 
cuse the eccentricity by assuming that Phillips 
had now in mind a career in politics, and re 
membering that to flatter the groundlings was 
always permissible or even laudable in one cher 
ishing such an ambition. The groundlings had 
votes and it was practical politics to make 
promises to them and fool them to the top of 
their bent. All candidates did so ; it was part 
of the game; but of course one was not obliged 



MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 125 

to remember such promises when one got into 
office. 

But when Mr. Phillips calmly put aside every 
proffer of office and went his way insisting upon 
the issues he deemed important, caring not the 
least for popularity, his recent adherents fell 
rapidly away. For some reason not easy to 
understand in a democracy, any recognition of 
the essential rights of labor has always been 
particularly offensive to a certain part of the 
American public. In a few years, Phillips, for 
the sake of his position on labor, and for no 
other reason, was back again in his old situa 
tion ; he was facing hatred and incessant attack 
in front, while behind him was a thin rank of 
half-hearted support. 

In at least one aspect of his development the 
philosophical might find abundant subject for 
reflection. In plain speech, it was the old as 
sailant under a new name; thereby abundantly 
illustrating the fact that names change and the 
forms of issues, but at heart the contest remains 
from generation to generation about the same. 
When, before the war, he denounced chattel 
slavery, he was assailed by the slaveholding In 
terests of the South; when, after the war, he 
threatened wage-slavery, he was assailed by the 
financial and manufacturing Interests of the 



126 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

North. In both instances, the impulse of the 
hatred that descended upon him was identical. 
He threatened somebody s profits by threaten 
ing an existing system that bulwarked those 
profits. That is all, and that is the reason why 
Southern fire-eaters offered a price for his head ; 
why mobs came with ropes to hang him ; why a 
score of times he narrowly escaped with his life. 
Similarly, that alone was the reason why, at 
this place in his story, he became to a certain 
class the worst hated man in the United States. 
The frank Southerner of the slave-owning In 
terests desired to have him killed ; the colder 
Northerner of other Interests ostracised him 
while he lived and exulted when he died. The 
difference does not seem remarkable. If the 
feeling of the Southern Interests seems to have 
been the more intense, we are to remember that 
the imperiled profits of the Southern Interests 
were correspondingly the greater. 

Yet, the man that was thus hated with such 
an excess of passion was not one that in him 
self would win anything but applause from the 
honest and sincere. In his private walk he was 
kindly, generous, sympathetic and reasonable. 
The Southerners were long taught to regard 
him as their worst enemy ; he was, in fact, their 
best friend, striving to remove from them and 



MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 

from the country the evil that made us a scan 
dal among nations and infinitely retarded the 
progress of the South. He never made the 
error of confounding men with the conditions 
that impel them to objectionable action. What 
he desired was to change the conditions. 

He kept his purse drained for private char 
ity and in behalf of the causes that he sup 
ported, filling it with proceeds from his lectures 
and emptying it again. No applicant for re 
lief departed from him without assistance* 
After his death there came to light a thousand 
instances of his unostentatious generosity. A 
Southern woman whose family had been ruined 
by the war, was living in Boston by precarious 
returns from lectures. One morning Phillips 
was returning from a Massachusetts town 
where he had lectured the night before, and 
found this lady on the same train. He invited 
her to a seat beside him and led her to reveal 
to him something of her troubles. He inquired 
how much she received for each lecture. 

" Five dollars," said she, " and I am glad to 
get that." 

" It is not enough," said Mr. Phillips. " I 
get $100 or $200 and I give only opinions while 
you give information. You must allow me to 
divide my fee with you," and he finally per- 



128 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

suaded her to let him put into her purse a roll 
of bills. When she arrived at home and exam 
ined the money she found that it was one hun 
dred dollars. 

This lady is said to have been a niece of Jef 
ferson Davis. Ten years before she would 
probably have heard with pleasure that Wen 
dell Phillips, the damned Abolitionist, had been 
lynched, because he was trying to interfere with 
the profits of the slave-owners. In the car 
with her that morning rode men that scowled 
with no less hatred upon Wendell Phillips, the 
damned labor agitator, because he was trying 
to interfere with the profits of the labor ex 
ploiters. It would puzzle the ordinary mind to 
detect the essential difference. 

Mr. Everett O. Foss, a prominent citizen 
of Dover, New Hampshire, supplies me with 
this anecdote, not before printed. 

Mr. Foss was an ardent admirer of Phil 
lips and undertook, on his own responsibility, 
when he was a very young man, to have his idol 
deliver a lecture in Dover. The town was 
deluged with a terrific storm that night and 
only one person appeared at the hall. Instead 
of lecturing, Mr. Phillips invited Mr. Foss 
across the street to the old American House, 
where he ordered a pot of tea, his favorite bev- 



MAN UNAFRAID ENLISTS FOR LABOR 129 

erage, and sat and talked until late into the 
night. It was a wonderful strain of speech 
that Mr. Foss was privileged to hear; Phil 
lips seemed to have read everything and to 
have been everywhere, and he went lightly over 
and through all the topics of the day, illumin 
ating each with a wealth of illustrations, facts, 
epigrams, views, stories and quotations, such 
as probably no other man then alive could have 
given. 

Later Mr. Foss induced Phillips to return 
to Dover and again attempt a lecture. For 
some reason it was poorly attended, but Mr. 
Phillips spoke with his accustomed force and 
brilliancy, for the size of his audience never 
made any difference to him. After he had 
made an end, he and Foss once more adjourned 
to the hotel and tea. 

"Mr. Foss," said Phillips, suddenly, "how 
much have you lost on this lecture engage 
ment?" 

Mr. Foss tried to evade the subject, but 
Phillips persisted until the young man named 
the approximate amount. 

" You must let me share it," said Phillips, 
and produced bills to half the amount, which 
he insisted, and would not be denied, that Mr. 
Foss should accept. They drank their tea 



130 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

and talked for a time and then Phillips said 
suddenly : 

" Mr. Foss, do you know, I have a partner 
in this business and one that holds me to a very 
strict account for everything I do? It is my 
wife. Now she will want to know all about this 
affair and she will not like it. I don t dare to 
go home and tell her of it as the case now 
stands. I shall have to make a little change 
in our arrangements in order to satisfy her. 
I shall have to ask you to take the rest of this 
money, or I shall never be able to make my 
partner think that I have done right." Nor 
would he desist until Mr. Foss had accepted 
the proffer. 

Managers of lyceum courses can relate of 
other famous lecturers anecdotes of quite a 
different flavor. 



VIII 
PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 

To Mr. Phillips, after the war closed, the 
work before him seemed perfectly clear. All 
that had been gained was no more than a be 
ginning. Part of a great evil had been abol 
ished; the achievement merely revealed the 
greater task. Others might be willing to sit 
with folded hands ; he fought right on. He 
saw about him a nation cursed with poverty in 
the midst of abounding wealth ; afflicted with 
intemperance, the product of poverty ; afflicted 
with a foolish, medieval superstition that ex 
cluded women from the ballot ; denying educa 
tion and opportunity to the greater part of its 
children. At the same time its toilers were over 
worked and underfed, its free institutions were 
threatened by an abnormal aggregation of 
riches in the hands of a few, and the process 
steadily developed under which the rich must 
grow richer and the poor poorer. Here, it 

seemed to him, lay a great field, demanding the 
131 



132 THE STORY OF WENDELL, PHILLIPS 

ceaseless labors of any man that believed in 
democracy and the rise of the race. 

Turning over the records of these ten or 
twelve years, his activities seem prodigious. 
He carried on the Standard, fought with al 
most savage pertinacity for the rights of the 
Negro and. against the policies of the Johnson 
administration, argued for the cause of Ireland 
against England, the cause of Crete against 
Turkey, the cause of the Indians against the 
United States, for woman suffrage, for the 
outcasts of the street, and in and out of sea 
son for the cause of labor. To all this there 
is no companion record, for he had nothing to 
gain from all this campaigning; not even ap 
plause. 

Enlightenment seems to be an order of 
mind ; if a man dwells in a cave about one ques 
tion you can usually find him feudal on every 
thing else that pertains to human progress. If 
he hates the " nigger " he rejects woman suf 
frage; if he objects to free speech he believes 
that you can lower the cost of living by putting 
slippery elm on the free list. Conversely, I 
have seldom found a man that believed in 
woman suffrage that was not also an opponent 
of war, capital punishment and the ethics of 
the jungle. All his days Mr. Phillips was a 



PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 

fervent antagonist of the barbarism of capital 
punishment and to agitate against it on every 
suitable occasion was one of the labors of these 
busy days. So far back as 1855 in an elab 
orate argument on this topic he said : 

The harvest of the gallows is reaped from the 
poor, the ignorant, the friendless the men who, 
in the touching language of Charles Lamb, are 
" never brought up, but dragged up " ; who never 
knew what it was to have a mother, to have edu 
cation, moral restraint. They have been left on 
the highways, vicious, drunken, neglected. Society 
cast them off. She never extended over them a 
single gentle care; but the first time this crop 
of human passion, the growth of which she never 
checked, manifests itself the first time that ill- 
regulated being puts forth his hand to do an act 
of violence, society puts forth her hand and stran 
gles him ! Has society done her duty ? Could 
the intelligence, the moral sense and the religion 
of Massachusetts go up and stand by the side of 
that po.or unfortunate Negro, who was the last man 
executed in this Commonwealth, and say that they 
had done their duty by him? He had passed his 
life in scenes of vice; he had never known what 
it was to have a human being speak to him in a 
tone of sympathy. Had society done her duty? 
He never landed in our city but the harpies of 
licentiousness and drink beset him, and the churches 
never rose up in their majesty to forbid it. 
Steeped to the lips in vice for thirty years, when 
society found him guilty of an act of violence, the 
natural result of such a life, did society take him 
and say, " God gave this man to me an innocent 



134? THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

soul, and I have let him grow up into this mon 
ster, and now I will take him and restrain him; 
I will throw around him moral influences, and see 
if I cannot make a human being of him"? Did 
society retreat to the wall? Did she try to save 
that man? No; she inflicted upon him the se 
verest punishment she took away his life. " So 
ciety is an instrument of good," said one of your 
members a few days ago. Then she is bound to 
educate the man thrown into her hands. . . . 

If you can come down one step, if you can give 
up the rack and the wheel, impaling, tearing to 
death with wild horses, why cannot you come down 
two and adopt imprisonment? Why cannot you 
come down three, and instead of putting the man 
in jail, make your prisons, as Brougham recom 
mends, moral hospitals, and educate him? Why 
cannot you come down four and put him under 
the influence of some community of individuals 
who will labor to waken again the moral feelings 
and sympathies of his nature? 

He was the persistent, tireless, whole-hearted 
friend of Ireland and the Irish patriots, de 
fending them with the full force of his eloquence 
against the slanders of Froude and others. He 
watched with such sympathy as Swinburne and 
other radicals showed the struggle of Italy to 
be free, and when at last that was accomplished 
he wrote this: 

At all times, the fate of Rome has been of ut 
most interest. Every scholar, every lover of art, 
every student of jurisprudence, every apostle of 
liberty, remembers that, after leading the old 



PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 135 

world, Rome guarded its treasures across the gulf 
of the middle and troubled ages. To every lover 
of the past and every servant of the future it 
seems natural to call Italy " My Country." Three 
centuries ago she inspired modern civilization. In 
this generation the battle for European liberty has 
centered on Rome. At last she opens her gates to 
the nineteenth century. 

Congratulations to Garibaldi and Mazzini. 
They behold the morning. What will the noon 
be? Nothing less than Europe a brotherhood of 
republics. 

Kings, like other spectres, will vanish at the 
cock-crowing. 

May the glory and service of Rome in this new 
epoch transcend her " trebly hundred triumphs " 
and all the splendor of the age of Leo. 

But the feature of Wendell Phillips s life and 
faith of which the least has been said pertains 
to his convictions about economics. 

Few persons in this country have any con 
ception of his radical views about finance, co 
operation, the division of wealth, trades unions, 
and other problems that in our day have be 
come acute, nor how far he was in advance of 
any other public man of his day. He was the 
first prominent American to adopt the doctrine 
now become familiar as the first plank in the 
program of the Socialist party. The fact has 
always been sedulously concealed, but he was 
a Socialist, neither more nor less. He was con- 



136 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

vinced of the essential truth of the Socialist 
philosophy, and being so convinced, note next 
how he stood by the faith. 

In 1871, he was instrumental in bringing 
about a Labor Reform Convention held at 
Worcester, Massachusetts. He was its chair 
man and wrote its platform, which was unani 
mously adopted. The very first sentence 
contains the substance of the modern Socialistic 
creed : 

We affirm, as a fundamental principle, that la 
bor, the creator of wealth, is entitled to all it 
creates. 

I do not know how there could be a more ex 
plicit declaration. But listen to what follows: 

Affirming this, we avow ourselves willing to ac 
cept the final results of the operation of a prin 
ciple so radical such as the overthrow of the 
whole profit-making system, the extinction of all 
monopolies, the abolition of privileged classes, uni 
versal education and fraternity, perfect freedom 
of exchange, and best and grandest of all, the 
final obliteration of that foul stigma upon our so- 
called Christian civilization, the poverty of the 
masses. 

All this in 1871 think of it! The Social 
ist platform makers of to-day have hardly gone 
beyond most of it. 



PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 137 



Resolved, that we declare war with the wages 
system, which demoralizes alike the hirer and the 
hired, cheats both and enslaves the working man 
war with the present system of finance, which robs 
labor and gorges capital, makes the rich richer 
and the poor poorer and turns a republic into an 
aristocracy of capital; war with these lavish grants 
of the public lands to speculating companies, and 
whenever in power, we pledge ourselves to use 
every just and legal means to resume all such 
grants heretofore made; war with the system of 
enriching capitalists by the creation and increase 
of public interest-bearing debts. 

We demand that every facility and all encour 
agement shall be given by law to co-operation in 
all branches of industry and trade, and that the 
same aid be given to co-operative efforts that has 
heretofore been given to railroads and other enter 
prises. 

At that time the employees of mills and fac 
tories were worked twelve and sometimes four 
teen hours a day and few persons could see 
anything wrong in the system. On this sub 
ject the resolutions of Mr. Phillips declare: 

We demand a ten-hour day for factory work, as 
a first step, and that eight hours be the working- 
day of all persons thus employed hereafter. 

He even recognized, so far in advance of his 
times, the principle of equal pay for equal 
work. 



II 



138 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

We demand that whenever women are employed 
at public expense to do the same kind and amount 
of work as men perform, they shall receive the 
same wages. 

He saw clearly that interest-bearing bonds 
are a bulwark to the exploiting classes. In the 
next sentence he said: 

We demand that all public debts be paid at 
once in accordance with the terms of the contract, 
and that no more debts be created. 

And he foresaw the evils of contract labor, 
for almost twenty years in advance of legisla 
tion on this subject he said in bis platform: 

Viewing the contract importation of coolies as 
only another form of the slave-trade, we demand 
that all contracts made relative thereto be void in 
this country. 

When he presented this platform, Mr. Phil 
lips said, addressing the convention : 

I regard the movement with which this conven 
tion is connected as the grandest and most com 
prehensive movement of the age. And I choose 
my epithets deliberately; for I can hardly name 
the idea in which humanity is interested that I 
do not consider locked up in the success of this 
movement of the people to take possession of their 
own. 

In the forty years that have passed since 
that utterance, there has not appeared a better 



PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 139 

statement of the nature of the proletarian in 
spiration. 

Renewed clamor broke out when this platform 
and his speech thereon appeared. The news 
papers called Phillips a nihilist and a dangerous 
person; they had not yet learned the word 
anarchist, that in later years they applied in 
discriminately to every man that protested 
against existing conditions. From this time 
Mr. Phillips s reputation steadily declined. 
Many persons viewed with sorrow the sad fail 
ure of the promise of the war period. He 
might have been sensible and successful; he 
might have gone to Congress or been a Senator 
or a judge. Instead, he insisted upon casting 
in his lot with this handful of rag-tag and bob 
tail. And who were they? Nothing but com 
mon working men ! Sad was the case, and 
attention was once more directed to the fact 
that in his earlier days his family had tried to 
lock him up in an insane asylum because he 
attacked African slavery. Perhaps there was 
something in that. Certainly any man that 
aligned himself with a lot of greasy mechanics 
could hardly be right in his mind. 

In the previous year he had accepted from 
the Labor and Temperance parties a nomina 
tion for Governor, knowing, of course, that his 



140 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

election was impossible, but seizing the oppor 
tunity to gain audiences for his two favorite 
causes. 

In his letter, dated September 12, 1870, ac 
cepting the nomination of the Labor Party he 
said: 

Law should do all it can to give the masses 
more leisure, a more complete education, better 
opportunities, and a fair share of profits. It is 
a shame to our Christianity and civilization for 
our social system to provide and expect that one 
man at seventy years of age shall be lord of many 
thousands of dollars, while hundreds of other men, 
who have made as good use of their talents and 
opportunities, lean upon charity for their daily 
bread. Of course, there must be inequalities. 
But the best minds and hearts of the land should 
give themselves to the work of changing this gross 
injustice, this appalling inequality. I feel sure 
that the readiest way to turn public thought and 
effort into this channel, is for the workingmen to 
organize a political party. No social question ever 
gets fearlessly treated here till we make politics 
turn on it. The real American college is the bal 
lot-box. On questions like these, a political party 
is the surest and readiest, if not the only, way to 
stir discussion, and secure improvement. 

If my name will strengthen your movement, you 
are welcome to it. 

Allow me to add, that, though we work for a 
large vote, we should not be discouraged by a 
small one. 

Your truly, 

WENDELL PHILLIPS. 



PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 141 

He received in the State about twenty thou 
sand votes. 

In 1871 he intensified the feeling against 
him in the better classes by giving his support 
to General Benjamin F. Butler, who was mak 
ing an active canvass for the Governorship. 
This incident has grievously afflicted his courtly 
biographer, who has adopted the current ex 
planation that Phillips supported Butler be 
cause of the old friendship begun at Lowell 
when both were youths. All his life Phillips 
had sacrificed his personal preference to his 
sense of duty, and his friendships and even his 
family ties to his convictions. He had been 
bound to Garrison by tender bonds of affec 
tion and admiration; yet even from Garrison 
he had parted for the sake of principle. He 
had never been intimate with Butler; the two 
had little in common; yet the comical explana 
tion is still urged that some excess of personal 
friendship brought him to Butler s support. 

I suppose that for an act so inexpressibly 
offensive to the social and political Brahmins 
of Massachusetts some unusual reason was de 
manded, but the truth is that Phillips applied 
to Butler the same standard he applied to every 
other public man. What ideas did he stand 
for? For justice to labor, for the plain people 



THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

and for the cause of temperance. That was 
enough. Phillips supported him. 

Butler was defeated in the Republican con 
vention, but we are to hear more of him in this 
story. 

Upon every possible occasion Mr. Phillips 
continued to call the attention of his country 
men to the growing peril of corporation su 
premacy in their affairs and to the demands of 
labor. Some of his utterances at this period, 
because of their astonishingly accurate fore 
cast of coming conditions in America, are 
likely to startle any present day reader. In 
vestigators of the modern situation have done 
nothing more than to verify his predictions. 
Thus in October, 1871, he said this: 

The land of England [meaning the great es 
tates] has ruled it for six hundred years. The 
corporations of America mean to rule it in the 
same way,, and unless some power more radical 
than that of ordinary politics is found, will rule 
it inevitably. 

I confess that the only fear I have in regard to 
republican institutions is whether, in our day, any 
adequate remedy will be found for this incoming 
flood of the power of incorporated wealth. No 
statesman, no public man yet, has dared to defy 
it. Every man that has met it has been crushed 
to powder; and the only hope of any effective 
grapple with it is in rousing the actual masses, 



PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 

whose interests permanently lie in an opposite di 
rection, to grapple with this force. 

And again : 

To me the Labor movement means just this: 
It is the last noble protest against the power of 
incorporated wealth, seeking to do again what the 
Whig aristocracy of Great Britain has successfully 
done for two hundred years. Thirty thousand 
families own Great Britain to-day. 

In a speech delivered in April, 1872, he said : 

I rejoice at every effort working men make to 
organize; I do not care on what basis they do 
it. Men sometimes say to me: " Are you an 
Internationalist? " I say, I do not know what an 
Internationalist is; but they tell me it is a system 
by w T hich the working men from London to Gibral 
tar, from Moscow to Paris, can clasp hands. Then 
I say " Godspeed, Godspeed, to that or any simi 
lar movements." 

So I welcome organization. I do not care 
whether it calls itself Trades-Union, Crispin, In 
ternational or Commune; anything that masses up 
the units in order that they may put in a united 
force to face the organization of capital; anything 
that does that, I say amen to it. 

No mincing of words. Now, as in the Abo 
lition days, he accepted the full measure of 
faith and stood squarely upon that, never 
flinching. And here I take occasion to point 
out another of his traits, well worth the atten- 



THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

tion of a nation so overfond of compromise. 
With Wendell Phillips it was either one thing 
or the other ; either support or no support. If 
he believed in a cause, he stood for the whole 
of it and to the end. He would waste neither 
time nor effort in half-hearted advocacy of any 
movement, since all about him were so many 
conflicts to which he could give unreservedly the 
limit of his enthusiasm and strength. 

But when individual public men were to be 
considered he had a different feeling. His 
idea was to take the good in every man and 
make the most of it but never to acquiesce in 
the evil. At all times he discountenanced and 
despised the hysteria of hero worship that 
seems to possess Americans above any other 
people. Because a President had done one 
good thing, that did not mean that he was a 
divinity. Phillips knew men well enough to 
know that the differences of ability and intel 
lect were not great enough to warrant canoni 
zation, and that the only really important dif 
ferences were in moral purpose and in service 
to the race. His attitude toward President 
Grant was typical. He praised Grant for up 
holding the rights of the colored people but 
condemned his treatment of Sumner and his 
policy about Santo Domingo. 



PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 145 

One more instance of his extraordinary pow 
ers occurring in these days ought not to be 
omitted from this chronicle. It was in 1875. 
Grant, with the aid of Federal troops, was 
trying to restore order in Louisiana, where 
former Confederates had risen against a Gov 
ernor elected by enfranchised colored men. 
Southern sympathizers in Boston called a meet 
ing at Fanueil Hall to denounce Grant s course 
in this regard. Mr. Phillips attended, sitting 
in the gallery, and with no intention of speak 
ing. Men on the floor belotf, noting his silent 
figure, began to call for a speech from him. 
He sat quite still, his arm resting upon his 
cane and his chin upon his arm while he grimly 
watched the proceedings. The clamor for him 
becoming so great that the meeting could not 
proceed, the chairman was obliged to invite him 
to speak. He slowly arose in his place and in 
a profound hush began an address. Then, in 
the old place, the familiar old scene was reen- 
acted. At the first sentence arose hisses and 
violent outcries ; then ensued a gradually dimin 
ishing clamor ; then silence ; then applause ; and 
the meeting that had been called to denounce 
Grant adopted a resolution in his support. 

It was about this time that I first heard him. 
He was lecturing on Charles Sumner. While 



146 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

a local celebrity went through the form of in 
troducing him, he sat on a sofa at the back of 
the stage and looked upon us in a way that 
spoke at once extreme kindness and yet author 
ity and confidence. When he arose and came 
forward there was something peculiarly grace 
ful in his movements ; when he began to speak 
a thrill of astonishment and pleasure went over 
the audience. Every mind hung upon each 
word that fell from his lips. When he was 
done a man near me protested at the brevity of 
the address ; Mr. Phillips had spoken nearly 
two hours, but none of us knew it. His tall, 
powerful figure seemed to be the embodiment of 
strength in repose and gave an impression of 
intellectual supremacy, the like of which I have 
never known. His hair was quite gray, his 
eyes were keen and kindly, his complexion 
ruddy and eloquent of health and right living. 
His expression was tinged with a certain mel 
ancholy, such as I have observed in the faces 
of most men to whom life means more than lust 
and gluttony, but was wonderfully strong and 
as if the man within saw only fine and beautiful 
things not known to the rest of us. I doubt if 
any person that heard him ever quite lost the 
mental effect he created. 

Something pathetic pertains to his life in 



PHILLIPS THE SOCIALIST 147 

these years. His private charities and his sup 
port of the Anti-Slavery Standard had 
strained his little means, so that he was obliged 
to go about the country lecturing, although he 
had long hoped to be able to spend his winters 
in quiet and comfort and the company of Mrs. 
Phillips. His lecture seasons began in Novem 
ber and lasted until April. They took him on 
long tours through every Northern State, 
sometimes entailing great hardship and ex 
posure. He was long past sixty, his life had 
been one ceaseless struggle, he was beginning 
to feel the strain. The lectures, too, failed 
somewhat in popularity after he had come to be 
regarded as a maniac and dangerous person on 
the labor question. Yet he must needs go the 
weary round year after year. Something pa 
thetic pertained also to his own view of himself. 
He recognized fully the utter isolation he had 
made. With a kind of smiling sadness, infin 
itely moving, he used to refer to himself as 
" that Ishmaelite," and once he wrote that his 
home was a sleeping car and his only friends 
were the brakemen and porters. The health of 
Mrs. Phillips continued to be, in her own opin 
ion, most precarious, and gave him ceaseless 
concern. Thousands of adherents that on the 
slavery issue had stood by him loyally, turned 



148 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

from him as soon as he took up the cause of 
labor. Others were old and retired, the fire 
gone out, the spirit sitting in the ashes. 
Many others had died. The generation before 
which he had played so great a part was pass 
ing; he was being left alone. Many another 
man so situated would have abandoned a cause 
utterly unpromising and retired to his fireside 
for peace and enjoyment in his closing years. 
Wendell Phillips went straight on. 



IX 



THE MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVI 
LEGE 

SOME men view the human cause with con 
genital indifference ; some serve in it spasmod 
ically and at the touch of an intermittent 
conscience; some view it, I should judge, as a 
kind of diversion; some seek it for their own 
preferment. 

To Wendell Phillips it was a sublime reli 
gion whereof he was the conscientious devotee, 
serving without remission and performing with 
equal fidelity and in a spirit of joyous zeal all 
rites great or small. Liberty he loved with a 
kind of passion and a fervent loyalty that never 
wavered nor doubted ; for unlike so many others 
of her followers, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burke 
and the rest, the years never chilled the fire in 
his breast. Out of his religion he made a creed 
broad enough for all aspects of life. For all 
public affairs he worshiped justice as the cure 

of evil; and it seemed to him that every victim 
149 



150 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

of injustice anywhere in the world had an in 
fallible claim upon the utmost service of every 
true man. For the private walk, apart from 
the world, mercy, kindness and purity were the 
sure guides. 

He did not only the charity that came in his 
way to do, but sought abroad for occasions to 
practise the faith that was in him. For the 
most unfortunate victims of the present system 
of society he had the genuine sympathy and 
broad personal tolerance that seems to come 
only to those that, like Phillips, have worked 
out for themselves the economic bases of all 
social ills. He felt no repugnance toward 
criminals and jail-birds, understanding that 
these are merely the products of a system that 
darkens the whole earth with countless miser 
ies. He knew that men are chiefly what their 
environments make them, and he turned his 
resentment upon the environments, not upon 
the stricken creatures that were sent out thence 
to prey upon the world. 

When he was in Boston, it was his custom to 
go about in the mornings unostentatiously from 
court to court and from prison to prison look 
ing for unfortunate persons, first offenders and 
those that had plainly erred from necessity, 
with purpose to help and rescue them. Many 



MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVILEGE 151 

a young man that had started wrong found his 
path reversed for him and never knew whose 
hand was reached out to him in the dark; and 
it was partly these ventures in practical char 
ity, too little celebrated, that kept his purse 
lean and compelled him, in his own phrase, to 
spend his winters battling with snow-drifts as 
he toured the country delivering lectures. 

As a general rule, in this world of ours, the 
men that have been the great and enduring 
artists have been also lovers of Liberty, and the 
lovers of Liberty have been also of a full heart 
of compassion. If you are a follower of Shel 
ley, the poet of Liberty, you have no doubt 
paused often (not always with undimmed eyes, 
very likely) above that story of Shelley at 
Great Marlow when he alone befriended and 
championed the wretched girl that had been 
led astray. Note then its companion piece in 
the life of Liberty s orator. 

Going home across Boston Common one night 
Mr. Phillips was accosted by a courtezan. She 
looked in his face and then apologized for 
speaking to him. " You are not of my kind," 
she said, " but for the love of God, give me 
some money." He stopped and talked with 
her; he was not ashamed, bearing in mind his 
Master and the Magdalene, to take her arm 



152 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

and walk with her while he questioned her ; and 
he ended by providing her with shelter and em 
ployment until he had the satisfaction of seeing 
her emancipated and reformed. This is the 
one incident of the kind of which we have posi 
tive record, but we may be sure that it was not 
alone in his experience. 

In all this he makes one think of such a 
knight as dear old Edmund Spenser dreamed, 
going about with unmixed devotion to do loyal 
service for some noble conception :?f duty. In 
deed, I have stumbled here upon the very word 
that best describes him. " Sir Galahad," a 
great poet named him in one of the fairest of 
all the tributes to his fame, and upon every one 
that saw him for the first time there was always, 
I think, an impression made of a something 
knightly about the man. " A courteous, 
kindly, but most courageous warrior," another 
observer calls him, " the very Red Cross Knight 
of his times." 

In the world of profits, employers and busi 
ness, he continued to be the Ishmael, for 
without hint of turning, he went his way de 
nouncing the system that bulwarked profits on 
one side and multiplied poverty on the other. 
Labor first and all the phases of its cause, and 
all the forces that preyed upon it, then tern- 



MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVILEGE 153 

perance and woman suffrage were more and 
more the favorite themes of his addresses. I 
ought to give you a few specimens from these 
vigorous appeals. Here, for instance, is one on 
the burning economic issue of our day as well 
as his : 

Let me tell you why I am interested in the 
labor question. Not simply because of the long 
hours of labor; not simply because of a specific 
oppression of a class. I sympathize with the 
sufferers there; I am ready to fight on their side. 
But I look out upon Christendom, with its three 
hundred millions of people,, and I see that out 
of this number one hundred millions never had 
enough to eat. Physiologists tell us that this body 
of ours, unless it is properly fed, properly de 
veloped, fed with rich blood and carefully nour 
ished, does no justice to the brain. You can not 
make a bright man nor a good man in a starved 
body, and so this one-third of the inhabitants of 
Christendom, who have never had food enough, can 
never be what they should be. 

Now I say that the social civilization which 
condemns every third man in it to be below the 
average in the nourishment God prepared for him 
did not come from above; it came from below, and 
the sooner it goes down the better. 

Come on this side of the ocean. You will find 
forty millions of people, and I suppose they are 
in the highest state of civilization; and yet it is 
not too much to say that out of that forty mil 
lions, ten millions, at least, who get up in the 
morning and go to bed at night, spend all the 
day in the mere effort to get bread enough to live. 



154 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

They have not elasticity enough, mind or body 
left to do anything in the way of intellectual or 
moral progress. 

Since that time, of course, all the evil condi 
tions that Mr. Phillips perceived and decried 
have vastly increased upon us. 

That is why I say, lift a man, give him life, 
let him work eight hours a day, give him the 
school, develop his taste for music, give him a 
garden, give him beautiful things to see and good 
books to read, and you will starve out those lower 
appetites. ... So it is with women in prostitu 
tion. Poverty is the road to it; it is this that 
makes them the prey of the wealthy and the leisure 
of another class. . . . Give a hundred women a 
good chance to get a good living, and ninety-nine 
of them will disdain to barter their virtue for gold. 

He saw that poverty was the source of social 
evils and that poverty was unnecessary. Ob 
serve how clearly he saw, also, the threat of the 
autocracy of wealth. 

I hail the Labor movement for two reasons; 
and one is that it is my only hope for democracy. 
At the time of the anti-slavery agitation, I was 
not sure whether we should come out of the strug 
gle with one republic or two; but republics I knew 
we should still be. I am not so confident, indeed, 
that we shall come out of this storm as a republic 
unless the Labor movement succeeds. Take a 
power like the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New 
York Central Railroad, and there is no legislative 
independence that can exist in its sight. As well 



MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVILEGE 155 

expect a green vine to flourish in a dark cellar as 
to expect honesty to exist under the shadow of 
those upas trees. Unless there is a power in your 
movement, industrially and politically, the last 
knell of democratic liberty in this Union is struck; 
for, as I said, there is no power in one State to 
resist such a giant as the Pennsylvania road. 

Colonel Thomas Scott, of the Pennsylvania, 
was the J. Pierpont Morgan of his day, and of 
him Mr. Phillips said: 

We have thirty-eight one-horse Legislatures in 
this country, and we have a man like Tom Scott, 
with three hundred and fifty million dollars in his 
hands; and if he walks through the States, they 
[the Legislatures] have no power. Why, he need 
not move at all. If he smokes as Grant does, a 
puff of the waste smoke out of his mouth upsets, 
the Legislature. 

Now, there is nothing but the rallying of men 
against money that can contest with that power. 
Rally industrially if you will; rally for eight hours, 
for a little division of profits, for co-operation; 
rally for such a banking power in the government 
as would give us money at three per cent. 

Only organize and stand together. Claim some 
thing together and at once; let the nation hear a 
united demand from the laboring voice, and then, 
when you have got that, go on after another; but 
get something. 

I say, let the debts of the country be paid, 
abolish the banks, and let the government lend 
every Illinois farmer (if he wants it) who is now 
borrowing money at 10 per cent, money on the 
half-value of his land at 3 per cent. The same 



156 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

policy that gave a million acres to the Pacific 
Railroad, because it was a great national effort, 
will allow of our lending Chicago twenty millions 
of money at 3 per cent, to rebuild it [after the 
great Chicago fire]. 

From Boston to New Orleans, from Mobile to 
Rochester, from Baltimore to St. Louis, we have 
now but one purpose; and that is, having driven 
all other political questions out of the arena, hav 
ing abolished slavery, the only question left is 
labor the relations of capital and labor. . . . 

If you do your duty and by that I mean 
standing together and being true to each other 
the Presidential election you will decide, every 
state election you may decide if you please. 

If you want power in this country; if you want 
to make yourselves felt; if you do not want your 
children to wait long years before they have the 
bread on the table they ought to have, the leisure 
in their lives they ought to have, the opportunities 
in life they ought to have; if you don t want to 
wait yourselves write on your banner, so that 
every political trimmer can read it, so that every 
politician, no matter how short-sighted he may be, 
can read it, "We never forget! If you launch 
the arrow of sarcasm at labor, we never forget; 
if there is a division in Congress, and you throw 
your vote in the wrong scale, we never forget. 
You may go down on your knees and say, I am 
sorry I did the act ; and we will say, It will 
avail you in heaven, but on this side of the grave 
never/ " So that a man in taking up the Labor 
Question will know he is dealing with a hair- 
trigger pistol, and will say, " I am to be true 
to justice and to man; otherwise I am a dead 
duck." 



MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVILEGE 157 

The one way out of the nation s sore trouble 
and from the monstrous injustice that labor 
suffered lay in the organization and united po 
litical efforts of the working class. He saw 
it and in every address he made on labor he 
urged it. Once he said : 

Now, let me tell you where the great weakness 
of an association of workingmen is. It is that it 
cannot wait. It does not know where to get its 
food for next week. If it is kept idle for ten 
days, the funds of the society are exhausted. 
Capital can fold its arms, and wait six months; 
it can wait a year. It will be poorer, but it does 
not get to the bottom of the purse. It can afford 
to wait; it can tire you out, and starve you out. 
And what is there against that immense preponder 
ance of power on the part of capital? Simply 
organization. That makes the wealth of all the 
wealth of every one. So I welcome organization. 
. . . One hundred thousand men ! It is an im 
mense army. I do not care whether it considers 
chiefly the industrial or the political questions; it 
can control the nation if it is in earnest. The rea 
son why the Abolitionists brought the nation down 
to fighting their battle is that they were really in 
earnest, knew what they wanted, and were deter 
mined to have it. Therefore they got it. The 
leading statesmen and orators of the day said they 
would never urge Abolition; but a determined man 
in a printing-office said that they should, and 
they did it. 

As to the necessity of political action he 
said: 



158 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

Gentlemen, we see the benefit of going into poli 
tics. If we had not rushed into politics, had not 
taken Massachusetts by the four corners and shaken 
her, you never would have written your criticisms. 
We rush into politics because politics is the safety- 
valve. We could discuss as well as you if you 
would only give us bread and houses, fair pay and 
leisure, and opportunities to travel: we could sit 
and discuss the question for the next fifty years. 
It s a very easy thing to discuss, for a gentleman 
in his study, with no anxiety about to-morrow. 
Why, the ladies and gentlemen of the reign of 
Louis XV and Louis XVI, in France, seated in 
gilded saloons and on Persian carpets, surrounded 
with luxury, with the products of India and the 
curious manufactures of ingenious Lyons and 
Rheims, discussed the rights of man, and balanced 
them in dainty phrases, and expressed them in 
such quaint generalizations that Jefferson borrowed 
the Declaration of Independence from their hands. 
There they sat, balancing and discussing sweetly, 
making out new theories, and daily erecting a 
splendid architecture of debate, till the angry crowd 
broke open the doors, and ended the discussion in 
blood. They waited too long, discussed about half 
a century too long. You see, discussion is very 
good when a man has bread to eat, and his chil 
dren all portioned off, and his daughters married, 
and his house furnished and paid for, and his will 
made; but discussion is very bad when 

..." Ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers ! 
Ere the sorrow comes with years "; 

discussion is bad when a class bends under actual 
oppression. We want immediate action. 



MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVILEGE 159 

In his great speech, " The Foundation of the 
Labor Movement," he said : 

The labor of yesterday, capital, is protected 
sacredly. Not so the labor of to-day. The labor 
of yesterday gets twice the protection and twice 
the pay that the labor of to-day gets. Why is it 
not entitled to an equal share? 

Are you quite certain that capital the child of 
artificial laws, the product of society, the mere 
growth of social life has a right to only an equal 
burden with labor, the living spring? We doubt 
it so much that we think we have invented a way 
to defeat the Pennsylvania Central. We think we 
have devised a little plan by which we will save the 
Congress of the nation from the moneyed corpora 
tions of the State. When we get into power, there 
is one thing we mean to do. If a man owns a 
single house, we will tax him one hundred dollars. 
If he owns ten houses of like value, we won t tax 
him one thousand dollars, but two thousand dollars. 
If he owns a hundred houses, we won t tax him ten 
thousand dollars, but sixty thousand dollars; and 
the richer a man grows, the bigger his tax, so that 
when he is worth forty million dollars he shall not 
have more than twenty thousand dollars a year to 
live on. We ll double and treble and quintuple and 
sextuple and increase tenfold the taxes, till Stewart 
out of his uncounted millions, and the Pennsylvania 
Central out of its measureless income, shall not 
have anything more than a moderate lodging and 
an honest table. The corporations we would have 
are those of associated labor and capital, co 
operation. 

We ll crumble up wealth by making it unprofit 
able to be rich. The poor man shall have a larger 



160 THE STOEY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

income in proportion as he is poor. The rich man 
shall have a lesser income in proportion as he is 
rich. You will say, " Is that just? " My friends, 
it is safe. Man is more valuable than money. 
You say, " Then capital will go to Europe." Good 
heavens, let it go ! 

About this time he received a visit from 
Lucien Sanial, who had been one of the early 
republican patriots of France and was then a 
leader of the International, one of the first 
working men s alliances. Mr. Sanial explained 
the scope and purposes and platform of the 
order in which he was so much interested. Mr. 
Phillips listened until his visitor made an end 
and then reaching into his desk produced writ 
ings and speeches of his own in which he had 
advocated the identical principles of the Inter 
national. Mr. Sanial was delighted and urged 
him to take up the cause and lead it and make 
it popular in America. Mr. Phillips sadly 
shook his head. 

" I am too old," he said. " I must no longer 
think of doing the work of you young men. I 
can give you all my sympathy, and do, but the 
day for new causes has passed from me. Do 
you y r oung men take it up and carry it through 
to success." 

This is the first acknowledgment I have found 
from him anywhere that he was beginning to 



MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVILEGE 161 

feel the burden of years and of labors. For 
nearly forty years these had been incessant. 
Except for that one excursion to Europe in his 
youth, he had not known, since he stepped upon 
the platform of Faneuil Hall at the Love joy 
meeting, one day of rest. Some friends now 
ursed him to take the repose that he had earned, 
but although Mr. Phillips did not feel equal to 
emtarking upon new and arduous movements, 
he was still less willing to keep silent upon the 
issues to which he had given his faith. He 
foresaw that his part was to die in the harness, 
not to rust in idleness, and he continued to give 
unequivocal testimony in their behalf. 

Men called Napoleon the Sword of the 
French Revolution. Phillips was the perfect 
son of the American Revolution and the em 
bodiment of its idea. All its achievements and 
its great intellectual leaders he viewed with a 
peculiar reverence, and his favorite line of 
thinking was that what they were to the mon 
archists of their day the true American ought 
to be toward the reactionaries of his. So much 
as was gained for progress by the generation of 
the Revolution ought to be gained for progress 
by every generation ; for there should be no such 
thing as standing still, no such thing as con 
tentment with what had been inherited from the 



162 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

past. Every age should have its Samuel 
Adams, its James Otis and its Patrick Henry. 
The places that these men had made famous 
by their deeds or speeches were sacred to him; 
in his walks about the city he was fond of vis 
iting them and recalling the memories attached 
to each; and none was dearer to him than the 
Old South Meeting House, the oldest building- 
in Boston. In 1876, business threatened to 
destroy this interesting relic, for it had been 
sold by the Society that owned it and the 
ground space was demanded by profits. Mr. 
Phillips took part in a movement that, appeal 
ing to the patriotic pride of Boston, raised a 
fund large enough to preserve the historic 
building. In behalf of this movement he de 
livered on June 14, 1876, in the church itself, 
one of the most famous of his orations. He 
said: 

These arches will speak to us, as long as 
they stand, of the sublime and sturdy religious 
enthusiasm of Adams; of Otis s passionate elo 
quence and single-hearted devotion; of Warren 
in his young genius and enthusiasm; of a plain, 
unaffected but high-souled people who ventured 
all for a principle, and to transmit to us, unim 
paired, the free life and self-government which 
they inherited. Above and around us unseen hands 
have written, " This is the cradle of Civil Liberty, 
child of earnest religious faith." I will not say 



MODERN WAR AGAINST PRIVILEGE 163 

it is a nobler consecration; I will not say that it is 
a better use. I only say that we come here to 
save what our fathers consecrated to the memories 
of the most successful struggle the race has ever 
made for the liberties of man. Think twice before 
you touch these walls. We are only the world s 
trustees. The Old South no more belongs to us 
than Luther s or Hampden s or Brutus s name does 
to Germany, England or Rome. Each and all are 
held in trust as torchlight guides and inspiration 
for any man struggling for justice and ready to 
die for the truth. 

Among those that listened to and applauded 
his address on this occasion was Dom Pedro, 
then Emperor of Brazil. Great as it was, Mr. 
Phillips surpassed it three years later by his 
wonderful and moving tribute to William Lloyd 
Garrison, whose life of service came to an end! 
on May 23, 1879. " Serene, fearless, marvel 
ous man I Mortal, with so few shortcomings ! 
Farewell, for a very little while, noblest of 
Christian men ! Leader, brave, tireless, un 
selfish! When the ear heard thee, then it 
blessed thee ; the eye that saw thee gave witness 
to thee. More truly than it could ever hereto 
fore be said since the great patriarch wrote it, 
* the blessing of him that was ready to perish 
was thine eternal great reward." 

All these years he continued upon the lecture 
platform throughout, each winter season. The 



164 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

range of his subjects was phenomenal; no other 
orator has ever attained to so wide a variety. 
He had a most unusual gift by which he made 
interesting every topic he touched upon, so that 
whether his lectures were upon phases of 
science, history, biography, reform, political 
economy, law, religion or politics, the listener 
was always charmed and always carried away 
a new thought or a memorable phrase. Some 
times he wove together into one his discourses 
upon " Labor," " Temperance " and " Woman 
Suffrage," his three favorite reforms ; and once 
he accomplished the seemingly impossible feat 
of uniting into one lecture addresses so far 
apart as " Toussaint L Ouverture " and " The 
Lost Arts." This latter achievement was to 
relieve the embarrassment of a rural lyceum 
association that could not decide which of the 
two it w r ould prefer. 



X 



THE ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF 
REACTION 

THERE is courage for the battle-field and 
another order of courage that stands squarely 
before the hostile ranks of one s own order and 
deliberately speaks home the most unpalatable 
truths. When in 1861 mobs pursued him 
across Boston Common and besieged his house, 
Mr. Phillips looked upon them with absolutely 
unshaken fortitude. " All this time," said 
Colonel Higginson, a witness of the scene, 
" there was something peculiarly striking and 
characteristic in his demeanor. There was ab 
solutely nothing of bull-dog combativeness ; but 
a careless, buoyant, almost patrician air, as if 
nothing in the way of mob-violence were worth 
considering, and all the threats of opponents 
were simply beneath contempt." This was his 
physical courage in 1861 when his life was in 
cessantly in peril. 

In 1881 he gave, of many, the most conspic- 
165 



166 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

uous illustration of the still nobler courage that 
speaks conviction disregarding aught else. 
Although he was a graduate of Harvard, and 
its most distinguished living graduate, the in 
stitution had never paid to him the slightest 
token of regard or appreciation, but had stood 
aloof, looking upon him with cold disapproval 
as a mere agitator. But in 1881 he was in 
vited by his own literary society to deliver the 
Phi Beta Kappa oration. Colonel Higginson 
testifies that " an unwilling audience " assem 
bled on this occasion, and assuredly it was not 
without reason unwilling, for there is not of 
record another such terrific arraignment as 
reactionary scholasticism received that day. 

" The Scholar in a Republic " was the title 
Mr. Phillips chose for his address. He had 
prepared it with great care, recognizing that 
at last he had an opportunity to strike one 
great blow at the traditional enemy of democ 
racy in America; for then as now the Ameri 
can university was the great backward looking 
influence in the national life. He had known 
only too well in his own career how doggedly 
the American college sets its back against 
every democratic advance; how cowardly the 
educated class had been in the slavery issue; 
how persistently it had hampered the feet 



ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 167 

of the Abolition movement ; how it had sneered 
and was then sneering at every mention of the 
labor question, more momentous than chattel 
slavery. He must have made up his mind to 
say this to his hearers in words they could not 
possibly forget. The men he was to address 
were the very Brahmins of that social order 
into which he himself had been born. He was, 
therefore, doubly affronting them, for in their 
eyes he was here again, as so often before, a 
traitor to his caste ; but now with offense pe 
culiar and redoubled. 

Into the very face of the cold and intellec 
tual aristocracy he hurled the unadorned truth. 
He tempered no words, he disguised nothing, he 
drove home his bare convictions and spared 
none. Colonel Higginson, who heard it, says 
that this was the most remarkable effort of 
Mr. Phillips s life. " He never seemed more at 
ease, more colloquial and more extemporane 
ous." Yet in form, construction, compact 
utterance, lofty and well considered ideas, it is 
the most perfect specimen of American elo 
quence. A kind of noble passion vibrates in 
every word of it, as paragraph by paragraph 
it tears from the reactionary scholar the veil 
of hypocrisy and leaves him naked and con 
temptible. 



168 THE STORY OF WENDELL, PHILLIPS 

Timid scholarship either shrinks from sharing in 
these agitations or denounces them as vulgar and 
dangerous interference by incompetent hands with 
matters above them. A chronic distrust of the 
people pervades the book-educated class of the 
North; they shrink from that free speech which 
is God s normal school for educating men, throw 
ing upon them the grave responsibility of deciding 
great questions and so lifting them to a higher 
level of intellectual and moral life. Trust the 
people the wise and the ignorant, the good and 
the bad with the gravest questions, and in the 
end you educate the race. At the same time you 
secure not perfect institutions, not necessarily good 
ones, but the best institutions possible while human 
nature is the basis and the only material to build 
with. Men are educated and the State is uplifted 
by allowing all every one to broach all their 
mistakes and advocate all their errors. The com 
munity that will not protect its most ignorant and 
unpopular member in the free utterance of his 
opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only 
a gang of slaves ! 

It seems to me that the foundation of the 
democratic faith has never had an equal expres 
sion. 

I urge on college-bred men that as a class they 
fail in republican duty when they allow others to 
lead in the agitation of the great social questions 
which stir and educate the age. 

He then reviewed American scholarship in 
its relation to the great issues in the country s 
history. What had it done in the great move- 



ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 169 

ment against chattel slavery? He instanced 
as typical of its spirit one of the greatest of 
American scholars that in Congress quoted 
from the New Testament to uphold slavery and 
offered to bear a musket in its defense. 

And again it was so in the case of John 
Brown. " While the first of American schol 
ars could hardly find in the rich vocabulary 
of Saxon scorn words enough to express, amid 
the plaudits of his class, his loathing and con 
tempt for John Brown, Europe thrilled to him 
as proof that our institutions had not lost all 
their native and distinctive life. She had 
grown tired of our parrot note and cold moon 
light reflection of older civilizations. . . . But 
long before our ranks marched up State Street 
to the John Brown song, the banks of the Seine 
had hailed the new life which had given us 
another and nobler Washington. . . . And yet 
the book-men, as a class, have not yet acknowl 
edged him." For forty years, the men that 
had urged Abolition had been obliged to combat 
first of all the opposition of the highly educated 
class. What had that class done for other just 
and worthy causes? In the movements for 
prison reform and criminal law reform it had 
never taken the slightest interest. It had 
allowed the work of mitigating the barbarous 



170 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

criminal code to be done by men outside, by 
members of another class. What had it done 
for woman suffrage, for temperance, for polit 
ical regeneration? In all these movements its 
attitude had been one of cold hostility because 
each movement represented something demo 
cratic and the fixed position of the educated 
class was against democracy. 

He turned to other problems and confronted 
his hearers with the record of their indifference 
to such a cause as that of Ireland. What edu 
cated man had ever lifted his voice against the 
further oppression of the Irish people? And 
yet, their cause was the cause upon which the 
American nation had been founded. 

We ought to clap our hands at every fresh Irish 
" outrage," as a parrot-press styles it, aware that 
it is only a far-off echo of the musket-shots that 
rattled against the old State House on the fifth 
of March, 1770, and of the warwhoop that made 
the tiny spire of the Old South tremble when Bos 
ton rioters emptied the three India tea ships into 
the sea. 

He passed next to a subject still less pal 
atable to his Brahmin hearers the attitude 
of educated Americans toward the revolution 
ists in Russia. 

Then note the scorn and disgust with which we 
gather up our garments about us and disown the 



ATTACK OX THE CITADEL OF REACTION 171 

Sam Adams and William Prescott, the George 
Washington and John Brown of St. Petersburg, 
the spiritual descendants, the living representatives 
of those that make our history worth anything in 
the world s annals the Nihilists. 

Nihilism is the righteous and honorable resist 
ance of a people crushed under an iron rule. 
Nihilism is evidence of life. When " order reigns 
in Warsaw," it is spiritual death. Nihilism is the 
last weapon of victims choked and manacled beyond 
all other resistance. It is crushed humanity s only 
means of making the oppressor tremble. God 
means that unjust power shall be insecure; and 
every move of the giant, prostrate in chains, 
whether it be to lift a single dagger, or stir a 
city s revolt, is a lesson on justice. One might well 
tremble for the future of the race if such a despot 
ism could exist without provoking the bloodiest 
resistance. 

I honor Nihilism, since it redeems human nature 
from the suspicion of being utterly vile, made up 
only of heartless oppressors and contented slaves. 
Every line in our history, every interest of civiliza 
tion, bids us rejoice when the tyrant grows pale 
and the slave rebellious. We cannot but pity the 
suffering of any human being, however richly de 
served; but such pity must not confuse our moral 
sense. Humanity gains. 

Chatham rejoiced when our fathers rebelled. 
For every single reason they alleged, Russia counts 
a hundred, each one ten times bitterer than any 
Hancock or Adams could give. Sam Johnson s 
standing toast in Oxford port was, " Success to the 
first insurrection of slaves in Jamaica," a senti 
ment Southey echoed. " Eschew cant," said the 
old moralist. But of all the cants that are canted 



12 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

in this canting world, though the cant of piety may 
be the worst, the cant of Americans bewailing Rus 
sian nihilism is the most disgusting. 

In Russia there is no press, no debate, no ex 
planation of what government does, no remon 
strance allowed, no agitation of public issues. 
Dead silence, like that which reigns at the summit 
of Mount Blanc, freezes the whole empire, long 
ago described as " a despotism tempered by assassi 
nation." Meanwhile, such despotism has unsettled 
the brains of the ruling family, as unbridled power 
doubtless made some of the twelve Caesars insane 
a madman sporting with the lives and comfort 
of a hundred millions of men. The young girl 
whispers in her mother s ear, under a ceiled roof, 
her pity for a brother knouted and dragged half 
dead into exile for his opinions. The next week 
she is stripped naked and flogged to death in the 
public square. No inquiry, no explanation, no 
trial, no protest; one dead uniform silence the 
law of the tyrant. Where is there ground for any 
hope of peaceful change ? Where the fulcrum upon 
which you can plant any possible lever? 

Machiavelli s sorry picture of poor human na 
ture would be fulsome flattery if men could keep 
still under such oppression. No, no ! In such a 
land dynamite and the dagger are the necessary 
and proper substitutes for Faneuil Hall and the 
Daily Advertiser. Anything that will make the 
madman quake in his bedchamber, and arouse his 
victims into recklessness and desperate resistance. 
This is the only view an American, the child of 
1620 and 1776, can take of Nihilism. Any other 
unsettles and perplexes the ethics of our civiliza 
tion. 

Born within sight of Bunker Hill, in a common- 



ATTACK OX THE CITADEL OF REACTION 173 

wealth which adopts the motto of Algernon Sydney, 
sub libertate quietem (" accept no peace without 
liberty ") ; son of Harvard, whose first pledge was 
" Truth " ; citizen of a republic based on the claim 
that no government is rightful unless resting on 
the consent of the people and which assumes to 
lead in asserting the rights of humanity I at 
least can say nothing else and nothing less; no, 
not if every tile on Cambridge roofs were a devil 
hooting my words ! 

I shall bow to any rebuke from those who hold 
Christianity to command entire non-resistance. 
But criticism from any other quarter is only that 
nauseous hypocrisy which, stung by threepenny 
tea-tax, piles Bunker Hill with granite and statues, 
prating all the time of patriotism and broadswords, 
while, like another Pecksniff, it recommends a cen 
tury of dumb submission and entire non-resistance 
to the Russians, who for a hundred years have seen 
their sons by thousands dragged to death or exile 
no one knows which in this worse than Venetian 
mystery of police and their maidens flogged to 
death in the market-place, and who share the same 
fate if they presume to ask why. 

Before the war, Americans were like the crowd 
in that terrible hall of Eblis which Beckford 
painted for us each man with his hand pressed 
on the incurable sore in his bosom, and pledged 
not to speak of it; compared with other lands, we 
were intellectually and morally a nation of cow 
ards. ... At last that disgraceful seal of slave 
complicity is broken. Let us inaugurate a new de 
parture, recognize that we are afloat on the current 
of Niagara, eternal vigilance the condition of our 
safety, that we are irrevocably pledged to the 



174 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

world not to go back to bolts and bars could not 
if we would, and would not if we could. Never 
again be ours the fastidious scholarship that shrinks 
from rude contact with the masses. Very pleas 
ant it is to sit high up in the world s theatres and 
criticise the ungraceful struggles of the gladiators, 
shrug one s shoulders at the actors harsh cries, 
and let every one know that but for " this villainous 
saltpetre you would yourself have been a soldier." 
But Bacon says, " in the theatre of man s life, God 
and his angels only should be lookers on." " Sin 
is not taken out of man as Eve was out of Adam 
by putting him to sleep." " Very beautiful," says 
Richter, " is the eagle when he floats with out 
stretched wings aloft in the clear blue; but sub 
lime when he plunges down through the tempest 
to his eyry on the cliff, where his unfledged young 
ones dwell and are starving." Accept proudly the 
analysis of Fisher Ames : * A monarchy is a man 
of war, staunch, iron-ribbed and resistless when 
under full sail; yet a single hidden rock sends her 
to the bottom. Our republic is a raft, hard to steer 
and your feet always wet; but nothing can sink 
her." If the Alps, piled in cold and silence be 
the emblem of despotism, we joyfully take the 
ever restless ocean for ours, only pure because 
never still. 

Colonel Higginson says that " many a re 
spectable lawyer and divine felt his blood run 
cold " when he realized the significance of these 
utterances. 

One may perceive clearly from this and other 
similar specimens that democracy was with 
Wendell Phillips much more than a passing 



ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 175 

belief; it was the active principle of all healthy 
public life that he would apply in large meas 
ure whenever any of our institutions seemed to 
be at fault. In this Phi Beta Kappa oration, 
he made some slighting reference to civil-serv 
ice reform, which was bitterly resented. This 
inspired him to a fuller exposition of his views. 
He objected, he said, to civil-service reform as 
urged by the recognized reformers, because it 
was not democratic. Instead of creating an 
office-holding caste, as they proposed, he would 
solve the whole difficulty by applying democ 
racy to it. He would have all the postmasters, 
custom officers and the like elected by the peo 
ple instead of being appointed; for by this 
change both power and responsibility would 
rest in the people s hands, where alone it should 
rest. 

Mr. Phillips still further alienated business 
and the middle class by his support of General 
Benjamin F. Butler, who now returned to pol 
itics and succeeded in being elected, on an inde 
pendent nomination, to the governorship of 
Massachusetts. Butler was in bourgeois eyes 
the very political devil. He was believed to 
win his power in politics by what are called 
" all the tricks of the demagogue," and his suc 
cess was believed to herald some kind of 



176 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

proletarian uprising that imminently threat 
ened profits. Mr. Phillips gave his support to 
Butler because Butler represented a protest 
against existing conditions and stood for the 
emancipation of labor. But no reasons, how 
ever good, could have excused the act in the 
eyes of those that hated democracy. They did 
not forgive Mr. Phillips ; they have not forgiven 
him yet; they and their class will never forgive 
him. In the long lists of grievances this class 
has against him, his support of Butler is not 
the least ponderable. 

For all this Mr. Phillips cared even less than 
he had cared in his younger days for the wrath 
of the slave-owning Interests. The world and 
its opinions meant very little; few things con 
cerned him now but the causes to which he had 
given his life, and his constant care for Mrs. 
Phillips. He felt that his part in the fight was 
almost done. 

At the beginning of 1882, he was obliged to 
move from the old house at No. 26 Essex Street, 
in which he and his wife had lived so comfort 
ably for forty years. The city had decided to 
widen Harrison Avenue and the work would in 
volve the demolition of the house. Mr. Phil 
lips was beyond seventy; he had for his old 
home a very great attachment; to leave it was 



ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 177 

a genuine hardship. He found new quarters 
at No. 37 Common Street, but the charm was 
broken. Once after the Essex Street home had 
been destroyed he went back and stood for a 
time looking at the vacant site. " It is no 
matter," he said ; " I am almost through with 
it all." 

One that knew him well and recalls much 
about him that throws light upon his character, 
tells me of seeing him about this time walking 
slowly up Beacon Hill and examining all the 
sights of the place with such interest as a 
stranger might show. His tall figure was per 
fectly erect, his hair was white, there was about 
every movement a certain authoritative and 
still graceful significance; he gave the impres 
sion of a man perfectly sure of himself. At 
the top of the hill he stood for a long time care 
fully observing the State House, as if he had 
never seen it before. Then he turned and 
looked out over the city, and my informant says 
that the image that came into his mind was 
that of St. Genevieve watching over her city of 
Paris, as depicted in the Pantheon. 

That fall and early winter he was out lec 
turing as usual and apparently in good health. 
On December 3, 1883, he, with William Lloyd 
Garrison, Jr., was a speaker at Old South 



178 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

Church upon the occasion of the unveiling of 
Anne Whitney s statue of Harriet Martineau. 
He spoke with great feeling, directing his re 
marks, as was his usual custom, to bear upon 
the question that was always uppermost in his 
thoughts. 

Harriet Martineau saw, not merely the question 
of free speech, but the grandeur of the great move 
ment just then opened. This great movement is 
second only to the Reformation in the history of 
the English and the German race. In time to 
come, when the grandeur of this movement is set 
forth in history, you will see its proportions and 
beneficial results. Harriet Martineau saw it fifty 
years ago, and after that she was one of us. She 
was always the friend of the poor. Prisoner, 
slave, wage-serf, worn-out by toil in the mill, no 
matter who the sufferer, there was always one 
person who could influence Tory and Liberal to 
listen. 

It was his last public address. On January 
1, 1884, he wrote to Patrick Collins, then a 
member of Congress from Boston, begging at 
tention to the condition of Alaska, which was 
then without a territorial government and ap 
parently in a state of anarchy. I think this 
was his last letter on public affairs. On Jan 
uary 26, he was seized with an acute form of 
heart disease. He lingered a week, suffering 
great agony and perfectly aware of his doom, 



ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 179 

but always calm and cheerful. His extraordi 
nary power of self-control that had borne him 
unmoved through so many trying scenes did not 
desert him now. " I have no fear of death," 
he said to his physician, who was also his 
friend. " I have long foreseen it. My only 
regret is for poor Ann. I had hoped to close 
her eyes before mine were shut." To another 
friend he declared his absolute Christian faith 
and confidence. His faculties remained per 
fectly clear; he talked cheerfully with the 
watchers and tried to prevent them from taking 
any trouble on his account. About six o clock 
on the evening of Saturday, February 2, 
1884, he sighed, closed his eyes and passed 
away like one sinking into sleep. 

The immediate cause of his death was ascer 
tained to be angina pectoris; but an eminent 
medical authority declared it was something 
else. In his judgment the incessant attacks of 
more than forty years had worn down the war 
rior s heart ; under the brave and unruffled front 
that he presented to the world, the arrows had 
taken effect at last. 

The funeral, in accordance with Mr. Phil- 
lips s known preference, was most simple. 
From the church the body was borne, escorted 
by colored troops, to Faneuil Hall, where it lay 



180 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

for three hours, and a long procession of the 
poor and of the colored population passed the 
coffin. The tears that were shed by these were 
the dead man s true eulogy and even more elo 
quent than the great tribute that, three months 
later, George William Curtis paid to him at the 
memorial meeting in Tremont Temple, when 
the community made recognition of the loss it 
had sustained. 

Ten years after Mr. Phillips s death, the 
city of Boston, somewhat belatedly, affixed to 
the wall of the postoffice building, which now 
rises on the site of the old home in Essex street, 
this tablet: 

HERE 

WENDELL PHILLIPS RESIDED DURING FORTY YEARS, 

DEVOTED BY HIM TO EFFORTS TO SECURE 

THE ABOLITION OF AFRICAN SLAVERY 

IN THIS COUNTRY. 

THE CHARMS OF HOME, THE ENJOYMENT OF WEALTH 
AND LEARNING, EVEN THE KINDLY RECOGNI 
TION OF HIS FELLOW CITIZENS WERE BY 
HIM ACCOUNTED AS NAUGHT COM 
PARED WITH DUTY. 



HE LIVED TO SEE JUSTICE TRIUMPHANT, FREEDOM 

UNIVERSAL AND TO RECEIVE THE TARDY PRAISES 

OF HIS OPPONENTS. THE BLESSINGS OF 

THE POOR, THE FRIENDLESS AND THE 

OPPRESSED ENRICHED HIM. 



ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 181 

IN BOSTON 

HE WAS BORN 29TH NOVEMBER, 1811, AND DIED 2ND 
FEBRUARY, 1884. 



THIS TABLET WAS ERECTED IN 1894 BY ORDER OF 
THE CITY COUNCIL OF BOSTON. 

I can not help noticing that this tribute con 
tains no mention of that greater cause of eman 
cipation to which Mr. Phillips devoted the lat 
ter half of his life and which, in his judgment, 
included the abolition of chattel slavery. So 
far, I believe, this is the only public memorial 
to the greatest American orator. 

His fame has suffered sorely and most un 
justly because of the nature of the reforms that 
he espoused and for no other reason. If he 
had confined his eloquence to academic subjects 
or to pleading at the bar, there would now be 
of him a greater number of statues and me 
morials than perpetuate the name of Daniel 
Webster. The substantial truth of all that he 
urged against American scholarship is verified 
by the record in his own case. Mention of him 
is carefully excluded from all school books, 
school children are never told anything of his 
marvelous story, the next generation after his 
own grows up in practical ignorance that he 
ever lived. The reason for all this is solely the 



182 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

fact that he was enlisted in causes unpopular 
among the prosperous element that controls 
and directs American education. He was an 
agitator; what that element desires is peace and 
silence upon the very topics that Phillips per 
petually stirred. He championed the cause of 
hated labor, he made war upon capitalism 
and the wage system, he took his place with 
the advocates of absolute democracy, indus 
trial and political; and for this reason alone 
his name is slighted and his services forgot 
ten. 

Yet if we were to consider nothing but his 
great gift in art, how barren would be any 
account of oratory that did not dwell upon his 
unequalled achievements ! Nothing that we 
read of Demosthenes, Mirabeau, Chatham, 
Burke or Erskine compares with the amazing 
story of this man s command over the spoken 
word. Or if we think of historical accuracy, 
how much better than a bundle of lies is a 
recital of the anti-slavery struggle that dwells 
not at length upon his great services? Or if 
we consider the ethics of public and private 
life, whither shall we turn for another example 
of a man so conspicuously blameless? What 
better or more inspiring lesson can be drawn 
from all history than this life of unswerving 



ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 183 

devotion to conscience and duty? Other men 
have flashed into fame by the sacrifice of one 
moment on some altar of patriotism. This 
man s sacrifice was of all the years of his life 
all that comfort, leisure, peace, culture, 
study, learning, friendship, achievement and 
honor can mean to one endowed beyond almost 
all other men for the enjoyment of these. 

In the life of Wendell Phillips, alone of all 
the famous men whose careers I have ever en 
countered, the biographer can find nothing that 
tarnishes the luster of the consistent whole. 
No excuses are demanded for him and no al 
lowances; there is nothing about him to 
conceal. In public and in private life he 
walked without deviation from the loftiest 
standards. Cautious friends sometimes de 
plored what they called the violence of his ut 
terances; they never had the slightest cause to 
regret a lapse in his conduct, not one surren 
der to temptation, not one instance of faltering 
in duty. I know not where shines another such 
character, nor any other study so rich in sat 
isfaction as the record of his life. For in the 
words that he himself applied to Washington 
he was " the bright consummate flower, of our 
civilization and in all ways the incarnation 
of the highest American ideal." 



184 THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

Swinburne might have written for him the 
tribute he wrote for Mazzini: 

Thou knowest that here the likeness of the best 

Before thee stands; 
The head most high, the heart found faithfullest, 

The purest hands! 

Diligently the whole story of our civil war 
is perverted and distorted to the minds of the 
rising generation. The glory for the abolition 
of slavery is bestowed upon men that had no 
feeling nor conviction against the hateful in 
stitution and were no more than the passive 
instruments in the hands of an aroused public 
opinion. Back of all these, back of the mili 
tary commanders whose statues rise now in 
every square of the national capital, back of 
the misread and misunderstood Emancipation 
Proclamation, was the little band of Abolition 
ists, steadily appealing to the nation s con 
science. The real emancipators of the slaves 
were Garrison, Phillips, John Brown and the 
few that standing with them upon the exalted 
ground of right, despised expediency and re 
fused to compromise. Guns roar and armies 
march and generals maneuver in the center of 
all men s attention, but the real force that 
moves the world and is always mightier than 
all of these is the force of moral conviction. 



ATTACK ON THE CITADEL OF REACTION 185 

But for the steady persistent agitation of the 
Abolitionists, at the risk of their lives and in the 
face of fiercest opposition, there would have 
been no sentiment to rescue Kansas, to hail 
John Brown, to recruit the Northern armies, 
and to fire them with the spirit of a superb con 
secration that carried them to the victory at 
last. We have loaded with honors the men that 
obeyed this profound feeling by leading the 
armies of the Union. We have rewarded with 
silence and obscurity many of the men that for 
thirty years stood and proclaimed the truth; 
but none have we neglected as we have neglected 
Wendell Phillips, champion of labor and foe 
of the wage system. 

Oh for a spirit such as thine that wrought 
Above all dust and dross of selfish aim, 
That purely gave its all of toil and thought 
And had no care for calumny nor blame, 
Praise, prize, nor laurel, victory nor fame; 
That thrust a shield between the weak and strong 
And eased on lowly limbs the bondman s thong, 
Great heart that knew no passion save for right, 
no hatred but of wrong! 



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