Wendell Phillips: Liberty's Hero

by James Brewer Stewart

Anyone sufficiently endowed with talent or will could now address millions, Phillips imagined. One’s moment of greatest influence would be brief, he wrote, and “destined to pass away in a generation,” but for great leaders a secure place in posterity should be of “no matter.”

In seeking to fulfill the demands of his upbringing, he yearned to emulate the great hero-patriots, those dominating figures who, by crushing disorder with mighty acts, had extended the boundaries of liberty.

Another classmate could have had no idea of how seriously he, too, erred when he insisted that “Wendell Phillips in college and Wendell Phillips six years later were entirely different men.”

Charles Sumner, for example, Phillips’ undergraduate acquaintance, discovered in Story a teacher who inspired like no other, and he studied his cases with monkish concentration.

At one point he spent nineteen successive evenings in the Tremont Theatre, glassy eyed and riveted to his seat as the beautiful and accomplished English actress Fanny Kemble performed on stage.

In one spare moment, for example, he felt driven, despite a headache, to record a dream in verse, stanza after stanza. He remembered his being ferried in a coffin-boat with a shroud for a sail, steered by a “skeleton helmsman.”

Phillips must have gotten on well with Burr, whom he met in Philadelphia, for the old man graciously offered to show him around the town.

Phillips decided to begin his law practice in Lowell, Massachusetts, some thirty-five miles from Boston.

While practicing in Lowell, the great radical-to-be took no interest in the growing social controversies around him.

Phillips joined his partner Hopkinson in supporting the career of the rising conservative Whig politician Daniel Webster, whose oratory he had admired since 1828,

Clients proved difficult to come by, and soon Phillips was spending less time with litigants and cases than he did alone or hobnobbing with Sumner and the other attorneys who worked near his office.

His notebooks reveal, too, that he began reading extensively in the histories of New England towns and in the diaries of early Puritans. The plan of research he set out only confirms how all-consuming this enterprise was becoming for him.

On October 21, 1835, the din of angry voices in the street near his office startled Phillips from his work. The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society had scheduled a meeting for earlier that day at their headquarters on nearby Washington Street, with controversial British abolitionist George Thompson as the principal speaker.

For perhaps the first time, he glimpsed the turbulent world of active abolitionism, the eventual answer to all his questions about his direction in life.

Phillips would later remember, “I did not understand antislavery then.… My eyes were sealed.”

Contrary to some popular beliefs, Phillips did not witness the Garrison mob and catapult himself into the abolitionists’ ranks. Yet the incident did begin a far more complicated process.

It gave Phillips something important to discuss soon after with Ann Terry Greene, a vivacious, dedicated member of the Female Anti-Slavery Society, whom he met the following month. From that point on, his life would take a dramatic turn.

Saturday morning in November, Charles Sumner failed to appear at Phillips’ office, despite earlier promises. They had agreed the day before to escort Miss Greene together on a coach ride to nearby Greenfield in the company of a mutual friend, James Alvord, and his fiancée. Sumner, a reader of the Liberator, knew that Ann Greene belonged to the Female Anti-Slavery Society, believed in women’s rights, and had been trapped in the meeting hall by the Garrison mob the month before. Alvord had assured Sumner and Phillips that Ann Greene was attractive,...

she addressed Phillips without hesitation and left him with one clear impression. If he wanted her to take an interest in him, he had first better take an interest in the cause of the slave.

Phillips always claimed that “my wife made an out and out abolitionist of me, and she always preceded me in the adoption of the various causes I have advocated.”

She also drove him closer to the movement simply because Phillips’ mother openly disliked Ann Greene’s opinions, and Phillips felt compelled to defend them.

On the evening that Phillips met William Lloyd Garrison, however, the boundaries of class did begin to vanish. Only a movement so socially inclusive as abolitionism could have brought together the son of John Phillips and the son of an alcoholic itinerant who had deserted his family decades before.

“I will be as harsh as truth, as uncompromising as justice.… Tell a man to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher, … but urge me not to moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not retreat an inch—and I WILL BE HEARD.”

Since June, 1836, her health had been deteriorating dangerously, and no one could diagnose the cause. If her complaints were like those that kept her an invalid in later years, then she lost all appetite and fought constant nausea.

as Ann grew worse, Phillips saw at least the opportunity to make an all-important gesture of love before her death. In early December he dropped his inhibition, striking desperately to express his love for Ann Greene and to restore his sense of mastery over his feelings and his purpose in life.

“he went upstairs, saw her alone for twenty minutes, and came down a fiance.” Every day thereafter he visited her, and her health began to improve. “We can’t help hoping that she is really getting better,” Ann Weston wrote.

For the first time in his life, he had felt driven to take spontaneous action to master the chaos he felt around and within him.

Three days after his climactic audience with Ann, Phillips returned in triumph from an abolitionist bazaar with a beautiful cameo ring for her, having paid several times its actual value.29 The profit, he knew, would go to further the work of the anti-slavery societies.

To such pious souls only personal dedication seemed to stand between an America mired in corruption and God’s all-consuming judgment.

to eradicate two centuries of racism, “colorphobia,” they called it.

In many ways, the abolitionists’ hatred of slavery’s licentiousness paralleled his own rigid moralism, his detestation of unchecked power and passion, and his republican conviction that social order was the incontestable precondition of freedom.

“She differed with me utterly on the matter of slavery,” Phillips explained later on, and “grieved a good deal” about what she saw as a “waste of my time.”

His brother George also gave Phillips a blunt reminder about traditional family views on racial matters, writing in August, 1836, about the rescue of two presumed fugitives by some courageous Boston blacks: “The idea that the niggers, in open day, carried off from the Supreme Court room two prisoners has something so laughable in it one can hardly appreciate the insult.… The nig is uppermost now for sure.”2 George showed no hesitation at offending a brother who was smitten with an abolitionist, and his remark gave Phillips still another reason for approaching the movement cautiously.

In March, 1837, at the quarterly meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Phillips broke his silence to make remarks that filled columns.

Now abolitionists had been busy again, circulating petitions to Congress to prohibit the admission of new slave states, to abolish slavery in Washington, D.C., and to enact other laws unfavorable to planters’ interests. By mid-1837 Congress had been flooded with such requests, and legislative debates on slavery grew even more intemperate. Fearing sectional disruption in politics, Whig and Democratic leaders from North and South contrived a rule of procedure that prohibited all debate on antislavery petitions. When received, they had to be silently and automatically tabled.

Garrison reported that Phillips’ remarks “surprised and charmed the audience” and that they marked his “complete adhesion to the movement and his abandonment of legitimate worldly ambition.”

Suddenly, however, everything seemed to change. On November 7, 1837, in the Mississippi River town of Alton, Illinois, a mob gathered around a warehouse. Inside, an armed Elijah P. Lovejoy guarded his printing press from an inevitable attack.

When news of Lovejoy’s death reached Boston in early December, the “second” Wendell Phillips was born.

Austin angrily asserted that the mob had been perfectly right to kill Lovejoy. People had repeatedly warned Lovejoy not to print his incendiary newspaper, especially since Alton was located only a few miles from the slave state of Missouri, and Lovejoy’s mad persistence had threatened domestic peace even in his own city.

He remembered suddenly becoming “conscious that I was in the presence of a power whose motto was victory or death,”

Soon after the speech, Ann Phillips remembered, Wendell closed his Court Street law office forever “and gave himself, heart and soul, to the cause of abolition.”

Parker Pillsbury, Stephen S. Foster, and Nathaniel Rogers, a trio of harsh-spoken New Hampshire folk, disrupted church services with impromptu denunciations of proslavery religion.

Churches, political parties, marriage, and the internal workings of the antislavery societies themselves suddenly became open to exhaustive scrutiny for elements of slavery in its broadest sense. For Garrison and some of his Boston-based followers, perfectionism, nonresistance, and feminism were obvious correlations of abolitionism.

every Garrisonian belief seemed to them to undermine some God-sanctioned institution or social relationship, at a time when abolitionism needed to build on the public’s growing concern over civil liberties.

Garrison was always much more than a friend to Phillips; he was the peerless saint who had made Phillips’ self-liberating discovery of his new vocation possible in the first place.

The movement’s purity must be restored at once, Phillips declared, and recreants purged. Those who remained true to Garrison would then find “their hearts … grappled together as if by hooks of steel,”

Philips had actually discovered a new religion, abolitionism itself, which offered him opportunities to use his rhetorical gifts that a conventional pastorate could never have equaled. It provided him with a far more compelling creed than had his Congregational heritage, and it even furnished a comprehensive rebuttal to his sermonizing brother John Charles.

Phillips, by contrast, spoke of slavery in the political language of republican ideology. His was, to be sure, a language charged with a moral and religious fervor that no Garrisonian could help but applaud, and it accorded with perfectionist thinking at many points. Yet Phillips was far less immediately concerned than were most of his colleagues with redeeming souls for Christ and decrying the nation’s standing in the sight of God. Instead, Phillips hated slavery as an institution that was preeminently social and political. His criticisms invariably stressed its destructive moral impact on all of American political culture, religion, of course, included.

The abolitionists’ mission, as he described it in 1839, was to write the Declaration of Independence into the statute books, “to enlarge the canvas of law, till it shall cover all men, both black and white.…

If abolitionist agitators imperiled the Union, he declared that year, “I say … let the Union go.… Perish the Union when its cement must be the blood of the slave…. If the temple of liberty must be built, like those of Mexican idols, out of human skulls,” the sooner it was toppled the better.