More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Abolitionists certainly harbored self-absorbed desires to remain untainted by the impure world outside their movement, but Phillips’ leadership and his ideology sought also to inspire an overriding imperative to remake America, not retreat from it.37
Phillips’ verbal assault on the legislature opened a campaign by abolitionists that led, several years later, to the repeal of Massachusetts laws against interracial marriage. It also confirmed his apostasy from Beacon Hill.
Phillips confessed that he “hardly dared stand by the side” of these working-class abolitionists who made their living “by drudgery and daily toil, and by the sweat of their brow.”
They “poured their all into the treasury of the common cause,” Phillips remarked, “while others were pampered with luxury and never felt for their brothers in bonds as bound with them.”
For all its extremism, Phillips’ emphatic republican conviction about the moral superiority of an America universally dedicated to self-employment spoke directly to the primary values of the North’s rapidly expanding middle-class political culture.42 Henceforth, his demands and many of the North’s shared political creeds would remain significantly attuned to each other.
French civilization certainly permitted him to expand his sense of history’s dramatic possibilities, for he visited the homes of Voltaire and Rousseau and the church where John Calvin had preached.
Phillips grew increasingly disturbed by the “powerful contrasts” he encountered between “wealth beyond that of fairy tales, and poverty, bare and starved at its side.” The misery that Phillips believed “bad laws and bad religion alike” had fastened on the bulk of Europe’s population violated all his Yankee assumptions about how a free society ought to work. It “saddens one here at every step,” he informed Garrison. “In our country, the same contrasts exist, but they are not as yet so sharply drawn as here. The moral stagnation and death … only makes us value more highly the stirring arena at
...more
The wealthy must be held to account for their impact on society by the “needy brother,” who, Phillips was now convinced, held a title to the bread of life every bit “as sacred as the owner’s own.”
Then there was the problem of race relations in Europe, or better, as Phillips judged it, the disturbing absence of such a problem. Even as “refinement” stood “face to face with barbarism,” it appeared to him that black people all across Europe were treated as social equals.
Phillips had left Boston a deeply engaged abolitionist. He was to return with a much-expanded and heightened suspicion of tyrannous power, which he now defined in economic as well as racial terms.
“I tattle on all this to show you how far from vulgar the Liberator would be, ma, in London,” Phillips chided his mother, suggesting that he moved easily among authentic nobility whose titles dwarfed the social pretensions of Beacon Hill.12
For the rest of the convention, Phillips occupied himself learning about British efforts to weaken the American slave economy by growing cheap cotton in India with free labor.
Wendell and Ann Phillips now had to confront the dismaying possibility that her lingering illness might make her a permanent invalid. At the same time, Wendell’s examination of race and class relations had given him considerably more radical convictions than before.
Upper-class women of this era were particularly vulnerable to protracted “feminine complaints” that had cultural as well as physical causes.
Perhaps, too, a modern medical consultant is correct in suggesting that Ann’s illness originated in rheumatism or rheumatic fever.24 Whatever its origin, the disease caused Ann Phillips a lifetime of anguish.
Sarah had also taught her son that his attainment of life’s spiritual rewards depended on his constant restraint of passion. Phillips was therefore far better prepared than even he suspected to bow to the sexual repression and routine sacrifices demanded by Ann’s illness.
A terribly particular shopper, he would, for example, habitually buy two boxes of strawberries when he only needed one, so that the very best from each could be picked out for Ann.
For example, he hired organ grinders to play daily outside Ann’s window, and she loved the music, but a neighbor complained in 1858 that the concerts disturbed the fragile health of a seriously ill relative and asked Phillips to restrict them. For nearly a year, Phillips refused to compromise until threats of police action forced a grudging settlement.
Wendell and Ann assumed responsibility for sponsoring Wendell Phillips Garrison. William Lloyd Garrison had named his second son after Wendell Phillips, who, with Ann, then took his responsibility for this namesake very seriously, paying his way through Harvard and giving him warm support throughout childhood and adolescence.
Marriage supported each partner as a completely developed individual. Their decision in 1854 that Wendell should leave Essex Street for weeks of touring lectures marked a momentous passage across this threshold.
Ann Phillips discovered that she could greatly expand her boundaries of self-sufficiency, while Wendell gained fame as the greatest, most controversial public speaker of his day.
Clearly, anger had no place in his part of their correspondence, and he took pains to erase all suggestion of it, quickly asking “Char’s pardon” whenever he acted pettish or peevish, or spoke with sharpness.
When Wendell wrote Ann he maintained emotional boundaries that she was free to ignore. Yet this dialogue, overall, resonated with candor and emotional power.
For instance, she particularly disapproved of his consorting with antislavery politicians like Joshua R. Giddings and Salmon P. Chase, saying of the latter, “Such a free soiler as he does more harm to anti-slavery than Pierce, Douglas & Co.”
For Phillips, social equality between the races offered the truest test of a republican state, uniting rich and poor as well as black and white. And conversely, hierarchies of racial discrimination constituted as great a danger to the North’s body politic as did southern bondage itself.
After the Civil War, when legalized bondage but not black subjugation had ended, Phillips would always insist, “We have abolished the slave, but the master remains.”
To a greater extent than some other Garrisonians, Phillips had seized the power of the state, not the conscience of a converted public alone, to secure freedom for all races and classes.
The commissioners were “small men,” Phillips charged, and Solicitor Chandler brought shame upon his office by supporting an “odious system” as a “tool of a few narrow-minded and prejudiced men.” Mann’s “timid silence” was also a fair barometer of white Boston’s “paltry moral vision,” Phillips continued.
Finally, however, in the 1850s a series of court battles and legislative maneuvers led by Charles Sumner, among others, did result in the passage of a statewide school desegregation law.
In this long struggle, as in the railway boycotts, white Garrisonians like Phillips had cooperated effectively with Boston’s most militant blacks, many of whom were barbers, artisans, and day laborers. Their interracial organization had, for some moments at least, obliterated the boundaries of class as well as caste, just as Phillips’ republicanism so often required.
In their dealings with blacks, white abolitionists were often given to paternalism and sentimentality. Blacks tended to react by drawing away into self-help groups of their own during the 1840s and 1850s,
At first glance, to be sure, Phillips presented himself as a formidable aristocrat to people of all colors, and he was certainly capable of snobbery whenever he felt socially threatened. Yet he also carried into personal race relations the same sincerity and openness that his college friends had found so likable, and he never gave evidence of the conspicuous racism that affected some of his white colleagues.
Toussaint L’Ouverture, Phillips’ second great revolutionary black exemplar, had liberated Haiti from French rule in the 1790s. As Phillips explained him, Toussaint was a black genius who had created a great Negro republic out of the chaos and disruption of slavery.
Toussaint, Phillips declared, had been a more able Cromwell than Cromwell himself, a self-taught scholar-activist in the mold of Edmund Burke,
Sometimes he even claimed that blacks were superior to whites. “Your Anglo-Saxon blood—it is water,” he once told a white audience.
his most private dealings with black people, he encountered situations where paternalism would have been, for many whites, the only response imaginable. Phillips was, after all, well known throughout the North for his wealth and his willingness to befriend the oppressed. Obscure blacks facing desperate circumstances therefore turned to him for money and often sought his direct intervention. Invariably, he responded with great compassion and generosity, remaining sensitive to his supplicants’ feelings as well as to their needs.
Ill will soon began to surface on all sides, for American Catholic leaders began to question the authenticity of the petition, and the bishop of New York declared that people in Ireland had no business telling Irish Americans what reform movements to join. O’Connell, a keen politician, responded by backtracking, and abolitionists began to accuse him of cowardice. By the end of 1843 the Irish American-abolitionist alliance had collapsed.25 When O’Connell refused to vouch for the petition, Phillips’ optimism sank.
Still, as Ann Phillips’ comments also suggest, Phillips never gave in completely to his distaste for Irish culture and politics, though he and the Irish certainly remained at odds,
Herein lay Phillips’ deepest objection to their projects, as he explained quite bluntly, declaring that every scheme like Ballou’s or Collins’ “kills individual development.”
By depriving people of their economic independence, socialism thus became the antithesis of freedom, “the double-reinforced essence of aristocracy,” little better for the individual’s self-fulfillment than enslavement to a southern master.
To be sure, only someone independently wealthy could sincerely suggest that workers find “other pursuits” until the market corrected their wages.
When, however, workers began to declare that industrial labor threatened their individual freedom and economic initiative, none defended their interests more vocally than did Phillips.
The most pungent spice in the “hyena soup,” in her opinion, was Phillips’ proposal to dissolve the Union.1 Three months before Child’s letter, Phillips had declared in a Faneuil Hall speech that the North was “the real slave-holder of America, and that the Constitution of 1787 was the [South] Carolinians’ charter of safety.”
“There is a 4 July 1776 to men as well as to nations,” he remarked once to Charles Sumner while explaining why he refused to support the Constitution. “I speak for changing the laws, all the time washing my hands of them.”
It was black George Latimer, not white Wendell Phillips, who finally persuaded most Garrisonians to vote for disunion.
All these writers also rejected Phillips’ legal positivism, that is, his claim that slavery was protected by laws that, though wholly immoral, were perfectly constitutional and so must be interpreted literally.14 Phillips responded to these challenges in 1844 and 1845 by composing two large pamphlets of his own.
Phillips, in short, had assumed the posture of a narrow legal literalist in order to become as much a secessionist on behalf of his state as any slaveholding “fire-eater”; he used the southern constitutionalists’ own best arguments for completely contrary ends.
The Liberty party had thus taken “the first steps toward anarchy,” Phillips warned, and as a republican apostle of social and legal order, he would have none of it.
“The God who made the land is my God as well as yours.”
the Boston clique, though always close, began to congregate more often at Maria Weston Chapman’s house, only a five-minute walk from the homes of Garrison, Francis Jackson, the Weston sisters, and Wendell Phillips.
