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I do so, however, more often by implication than by direct rebuttal, for I assume that individual biography can not always claim to speak as general history.
I believe that Phillips’ reform commitments can best be understood not through psychology
in arguing these positions, I do not wish to reassert the “neoabolitionist” liberal scholarship of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Phillips’ deeply held conception of himself as a heroic republican actor, who replicated the inspired leadership of Sam Adams, Oliver Cromwell, and others.
As the eighth of nine closely spaced children, he had plenty of elder brothers and sisters to befriend and challenge him.
John and Sarah Phillips assured Wendell that he was a child of special importance, whose spiritual growth and personal development concerned them deeply.
several grazed cows on the Common.
ten minutes of walking would have taken him past the statehouse and then to State Street, the financial heart of the city, where great merchants and bankers arranged the lucrative investments that underwrote the city’s explosive growth.
their sons had become Wendell’s playmates. Bookish Lothrop Motley grew up to write history,
Behind Beacon Hill, however, near the Charles River, lay a growing black community of artisans and unskilled workers—“Nigger Hill,” as the whites called it—which proper families like the Phillipses regarded as “a place of vague horror.”
Sometimes when blacks appeared, Wendell, Tom Appleton, and others would form into Boston’s most privileged neighborhood gang and attempt to drive them off with volleys of rocks.
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.”
While many of Boston’s fashionable families were beginning to abandon trinitarian doctrines of “orthodox” Protestantism for Unitarianism, John and Sarah Phillips held to the creed of their Congregationalist parents and vigorously impressed them upon their children.
Later on, Wendell was to assert that he had “learned of my father, long before boyhood ceased,” to resist the “yoke of ignorance and superstition” that he always associated with overzealous Puritanism.
There, Sarah Phillips made Christian affection the essence of her son’s nurturing, supporting her husband’s spiritual authority in Wendell’s eyes with the most compelling of personal appeals. For example, she assured Wendell that he was her favorite child, and she often took him aside for prayers.
Other Harvard-bound boys attended Exeter or Andover, two private academies founded by Wendell’s kinsmen, but Wendell’s family preferred to keep him home.
just before Wendell’s matriculation, Headmaster Gould decided to start an English department, and Phillips’ class was the first required to compose extensively in that language.
For this reason, God did not fashion a human soul “to be subject to animal propensities, to the desires of that body in which it is enclosed.”
As he wrote in another schoolboy essay, since religion initially inspired all that was “noble and sublime” in life, people could find “knowledge of God and His will” revealed through the study of art and literature, as well as through their prayers.
Headmaster Gould required his charges to practice forensics, that skill which Boston’s great preachers and statesman had traditionally honed into high art, and at such declamation Phillips found that he, too, excelled.
There were always “great rivals” over whom the leader must “excel,” he wrote, “implacable enemies to overpower and a fickle mob to conciliate.” The person wishing to “possess himself of uncommon attainments, maintain first rank among his classmates, or become a second Cicero” must first learn to exercise constant dominion over himself.
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, I never contend with, but like a coward run away from by forgetting.”
Finally, they acknowledged the rich benevolence toward his city that John Phillips had exercised in his will “to the full extent of his means, which were very considerable.” The $115,000 distributed among medical institutions in Boston, the public library, the Society of Natural History, the Boston Maritime Society, the City Music Hall, and various colleges exceeded a tithe of the near million-dollar estate.
Beecher’s powerful message had urged the “unredeemed” to seize the moment of their own salvation by voluntarily renouncing sin and filling their lives with God’s controlling will. Rushing to his room, Phillips threw himself on the floor, begged God to assume mastery over his life and to remove from him all impulses to commit evil. Soon after, at Latin School, Phillips began to hold earnest conversations with his friends about “the trinity, atonement or some other point of orthodox theology.”32
“From that day to this … whenever I have held a thing to be wrong, it has held no temptation. Whenever I have known a thing to be right, it has taken no courage to do it.”
In this figurative but authentic sense, the nation’s history and Wendell Phillips’ personal narrative had become conjoined in the loss of fathers.
the Boston City Council chose to inter John Phillips in the Common’s Granary Burial Ground between headstones that marked the graves of Samuel Adams and James Otis. Wendell walked past the three of them every day on his way to class at the Latin School.
Phillips accustomed himself to an unvarying workday that began with compulsory prayers at six. Recitations in Greek and Latin came next, then a cold breakfast followed by more recitations in mathematics and science. Lunch was at one o’clock followed by more work in Greek and Latin. Phillips ate dinner with his classmates at six o’clock and finished the day with evening prayers.
Greek and Latin courses only extended what Phillips had learned from Headmaster Gould, and judging from his neatly drawn pages of exercises, mathematics and geometry must also have come easily.
“Though I had never seen him before, I was drawn to him by an irresistible attraction” his roommate John Tappan Pierce remembered. “Phillips was really handsome,” recalled classmate Edgar Buckingham, “in figure and feature a young Apollo.”
Phillips seemed, in short, “perfectly transparent … no subterfuge, no pretence about him. He was known to all to be just what he seemed.”
But the theorem first learned in childhood, that freedom derived from self-discipline, also carried far beyond Phillips’ social manner and personality.
the continuities between Phillips’ perspectives as a Harvard conservative and his visions as a radical agitator were as strong as they are striking.
essays themselves convey an authenticity that invites the historian’s trust.
The eight volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; the eight of Hume’s History of England; the studies of Cromwellian England, the Stuart kings, the French and American revolutions; the writings of Burke, Machiavelli, Locke, and Montesquieu that he borrowed from Harvard’s library were by no means all required as assignments.
that passion must be controlled at all cost, for unrestrained passion could cause personal debasement and endless social destruction, creating the worst imaginable forms of enslavement for individuals and nations.
Phillips also expressed his deep fear of social disorder, condemning the demagogue’s dexterous efforts to manipulate his listeners’ prejudices, and to “enflame their passions” in order to make them “tools for his schemes of aggrandisement.” To avoid this danger, eloquence must always be used in the legislative chamber, not on the street corner. In this way, powerful speech would serve the ends of order, remaining “deliberative, and addressed to sensible men” who were motivated by “interests,” not enslaved by “passions.”
Phillips scorned the idea of the noble savage. To follow one’s natural instincts was to become “self-willed, obstinate and ignorant.” The “spirit of the savage is uniformly servile,” Phillips insisted, and hence “we see them always become submissive,” fit only for domination by civilized rulers who understood that true freedom resulted from upholding, not denying, society’s customs and laws.
The lesson to his own age, thought Phillips, was perfectly clear: people must either submit to the wisdom “of those who have gone before” or “bind posterity in chains which we think it degrading to wear.”
England’s peers seemed to Phillips to have been “knit with the very vitals of the constitution,” completely enmeshed in the nation’s history. Their influence, he claimed, had “extended down through all respectable classes,” and their power seemed doubly secure, Phillips maintained, because England’s nobles had owed their positions to no degenerate hierarchy derived from unmerited birthright. Theirs was instead an aristocracy based on talent (just as Boston’s also claimed to be),
Phillips had now discovered his heroes, powerful figures of action from the past who set forth unmistakable examples of distinguished leadership. Burke, Pitt, Wellington, Cromwell, the signers of the Magna Carta, the leaders of the Glorious Revolution—all appeared to Phillips as supremely talented figures rooted in their society, who had struck spontaneously with dramatic power to enforce their passion for orderly freedom.
Phillips had now collapsed the emotional distance between himself and a dramatic past where he could fantasize about his high personal aspirations and his desire to dominate in the most important affairs of his time and also see confirmed his rigid morality of self-restraint.
Moreover, he had discovered a way to express his deep attachment to the republican political values of individual liberty and social order that undergirded such visions of history and his unremitting hostility to unregulated power, to “artificial” hierarchy, and to every evidence of unchecked passion in society. In all these respects, the ideological elements that formed the foundation of Phillips’ later abolitionism were clearly prefigured.
To the list of patriot-heroes he was already compiling, he would add Elijah Lovejoy, William Lloyd Garrison, Crispus Attucks, and John Brown—great symbols of his own struggles against slavery.
The greatest leader of all, in Phillips’ view, was that rare genius who could combine the powers of scholar and public leader. “They were [so combined] in Burke,” he wrote, for Burke “aimed for perfection in each department.”
Republicanism represented a complex body of ideas that the Civil War generation was to revise for a variety of contradictory ends. Southern planters, for example, came to regard their right to hold slaves as essential to their own republican liberty. Northern wage earners, by contrast, were soon to insist that republicanism supported their struggles with factory owners over wages, workdays, and shop conditions.
The true scholar must also be the virtuous, independent statesman who transcended ordinary politics “to stand outside organizations, with no bread to earn, no candidate to elect … no object but truth to tear a question open and riddle it with light.”
never found himself trapped in nostalgia and therefore passively withdrawn from or seriously out of touch with contemporary life. On the contrary, Phillips used history as a mythic baseline against which to measure himself and the validity of his social perceptions.
He recognized, in short, that many of the oldest supports for elitism were in decay.
The implications of this change, Phillips felt, could not be stressed enough. “We have learned to believe that every man has a mind fit (and able) to be cultivated,” that it is “better for all in a nation to be enlightened, than for a few people to be perfectly learned.”
