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Theme of fighting for racial freedom.
In this respect, the subtitle Liberty’s Hero itself suggests the lifelong sense of liberation that Phillips discovered for himself and envisioned for the nation after he had himself claimed to be a literal extension of a past that affirmed these republican values. In a closely related sense, the subtitle Liberty’s Hero also conveys Phillips’ deeply held conception of himself as a heroic republican actor, who replicated the inspired leadership of Sam Adams, Oliver Cromwell, and others. Acting on this radically republican sense of himself Phillips challenged his contemporaries to explore their
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it explores as has no other biography Phillips’ marriage to a mysterious, reclusive invalid and the enormous influence of Ann Greene Phillips on her husband’s career. Likewise, these sources reveal Phillips’ influential roles within the white abolitionist community and his
interactions with blacks as well. In addition this book explains the highly personalized nature of Phillips’ rhetoric by connecting such expressions to the moral structure of his private world. And by extending such analyses, it also sets forth the sources of Phillips’ eloquence and accounts for his great impact on his audiences.
Becky and Jenny Stewart, my zestful daughters, often give forth with raucous snoring noises whenever I begin pontificating about Wendell Phillips or any other historical topic. Grateful for their lighthearted lessons in humility, and for much more, I dedicate this work to them.
John had obtained his own first fortune by inheritance, his second upon his marriage to Sarah Walley, a member of one of Boston’s great old trading families, and the third by giving much-valued legal advice to Boston’s mercantile leaders. He then began an illustrious career in the politics of his city and state, and in 1805 John and Sarah Phillips occupied their fine new residence.1
there were ample gardens on three sides of the house. Following this grand arrival came the Appletons, Motleys, Lowells, and still other Otises, each family bringing its crystal glassware and inlaid English furniture. Old Boston families like the Phillipses were now amassing new fortunes and rebuilding their city to suit their needs and tastes.
The Phillips family mansion on Beacon Hill was Wendell Phillips’ childhood home, 1811–1828. This photograph appeared in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Wendell Phillips Centenary (Privately printed, 1911),3.
As the eighth of nine closely spaced children, he had plenty of elder brothers and sisters to befriend and challenge him. There were also solicitous elders close by, notably his paternal grandmother, Margaret Phillips,
Servants tended him too, especially his beloved nurse Polly, for whom Wendell developed so enduring an attachment that years later, after his own marriage and his mother’s death, he brought Polly to service in his own home. She was his “second mother,” his wife later reminded him.3 But most of all, John and Sarah Phillips assured Wendell that he was a child of special importance, whose spiritual growth and personal development concerned them deeply.
There Tom Appleton remembered watching while Phillips and Motley would “strut about in any fancy costume they could find, and shout short scraps of poetry and snatches of dialogue at each other.” At about that age, Phillips also assisted the precocious Motley with his first attempt at a novel. “It opened,” Phillips remembered, “not with ‘one solitary horseman,’ but two, riding up to an inn in the valley of the Housatonic. Neither of us had ever seen the Housatonic, but it sounded grand and romantic.”
John and Sarah did not interfere, preferring to let their son develop on his own what proved to be a lifelong passion for history and the drama he sensed in it.
As high-ranking members of Boston’s social elite, Sarah and John Phillips fully expected their sons to succeed them in the “Brahmin aristocracy,” as people began to call it. This wish was, in part, their reason for granting Wendell such freedom to associate and explore.
“Never ask another to do for you what you can do for yourself; and never ask another to do for you what you would not do for yourself if you could.” Acting accordingly, John made his sons learn the rudiments of several artisan crafts (Wendell became especially adept at carpentry) and held them responsible for day-to-day household maintenance.10
Many years later, another friend repeated an anecdote that Phillips recounted of himself as a four- or five-year-old, when he used to arrange the parlor chairs in rows, stand before them with a Bible propped in front of him, and address the imaginary audience. When his father inquired as to whether he ever tired of this play, Wendell remembered replying, “No, but it is rather hard on the chairs.”
John and Sarah Phillips held to the creed of their Congregationalist parents and vigorously impressed them upon their children. They spoke with an age-old authority confirmed by personal visits, for Wendell’s zealously Calvinist grandmother, Margaret Phillips, often resided in her son’s home. She kept close track of the family’s religious state and continued to make John give strict account of his spiritual standing. At a well-established thirty-four, he still felt constrained to assure his mother that despite his worldly obligations, “I hope to keep my mind on my eternal welfare, agreeably to
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“Be good and do good; this is my whole desire for you,” Phillips once explained, was the sum of his mother’s injunctions.
True piety was much more than the handmaiden of a young man’s gentlemanly virtues; it was the indispensible prerequisite for family acceptance and a successfully conducted life.
Those who failed to “gain experience from past misfortune” inevitably squandered the “wisdom and prudence” that could be gained from “lessons so dearly bought,” for reversal should teach self-discipline.
But the prizes for public address his masters awarded Wendell were indications not only of rare personal ability; they symbolized wider recognition as well. “What first led me to observe him and fix him in my memory,” one Latin School classmate remembered, “was his elocution, and I began to look forward to declamation day with interest, mainly on his account.”23 By cultivating Wendell’s sense of self-reliance and self-discipline, John and Sarah Phillips had brought up a boy who was able to assume a public pose with natural grace and to arrest the attention of others with his flow of words.
“Attention is the key to knowledge,” he insisted, “and persevering industry and steady application lead to eminence.”
John Phillips had died abruptly by heart attack on the evening of May 28, 1823, soon after the passing of his own mother, the only grandmother that Wendell had known. While recovering from one family loss, Wendell had to face a second one, far more grievous and unexpected.26 It was, no doubt, the terrible shock of his father’s death that caused the boy to repress his memory of John Phillips, to whom he seldom referred in subsequent years. “The heart in such a plight forgets,” he once consoled a bereaved friend, “but I would not say more, being a poor hand at such thoughts. What griefs I have,
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In such pious households, a conversion experience often marked a significant moment in a son’s or daughter’s passage from adolescence to adulthood.
