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Another demanding associate, Sidney Howard Gay, well-born editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard during much of the 1840s and 1850s, was overly sensitive, a whiner who provoked fights and then sulked.
“I thank God that he made me … so that I can shake my head defyingly, and [in] utmost carelessness, even at intended insult, since if there be anything about it worth remembering, time will give me means for proving it was passed by only because it was despised.
His supporters were social misfits “half educated, impertinent and too misguided to see that if we were aristocratic, we wouldn’t employ poor folks.”
Phillips’ old friend Charles Sumner moved to the forefront of a “Conscience Whig” insurgency, which demanded that the party’s “Cotton Whig” leadership join its outcry against the further expansion of slavery. Winthrop, Webster, and Everett responded for the party at first by making anti-Texas statements, while assuring their southern Whig allies that they meant not a word of them. Soon a serious factional breach between Conscience and Cotton Whigs opened in Massachusetts and other northern states.
While they mobilized voters, he righteously decried the shabbiness of elections and insisted, as a republican moralist, that government simply conform to his demand that it serve the highest good.
He began to ignore his first recognition that sectionalism grew from “the thing itself” and began to tell his colleagues that they, the abolitionist disunionists, were really the ones responsible for Congress’s turmoil over slavery. By developing this position, as will be seen, Phillips fell prey to inconsistencies that would plague him with political frustration.
Referring to conflicts over slavery emanating from Washington, Phillips once observed: “We cannot make crises. We can only prepare for them”
Garrisonians and Conscience Whigs together announced a huge nonpartisan meeting at Faneuil Hall, and Phillips shared the platform with Sumner, Palfrey, and John Quincy Adams.
Somehow, according to Phillips, abolitionists now had to succeed in making their notably unpopular creed attractive, without sacrificing principles.
Phillips soon became dismayed by disunionism’s stunning unpopularity. Large defections hit the Garrisonian societies once the rank and file heard the disunionist message. Income plummeted, the organization shrank, and Phillips’ “Hundred Convention Movement” died aborning.
He also tried to shore up disunionism by inviting antislavery Whigs to ally with Garrisonians against their common enemy, the Liberty party.
In short, Phillips’ conflicting desires for both power and moral purity never permitted him to live realistically with a simple truth: sectionally minded people wished, most of all, to affect their nation’s policies at the ballot box and had no desire whatever to cast aside the Constitution.
In the deepening political crisis, Mrs. F. H. Drake (Bernardo’s future guardian) wrote Phillips to ask a very serious question: What had the disunionist abolitionists actually accomplished since the early 1840s? Phillips answered with an eloquent expression of commitment that allowed him to explain away all his political ambivalence and sense of failure. “Set the world on fire,” Phillips first responded triumphantly.
“If, in the lowest deep, there be a lower deep for profligate statesmen, let all former apostates stand aside and leave it vacant. Hell, from beneath, is moved for thee at thy coming.”1 Thus did Phillips greet Daniel Webster’s famous Seventh of March Speech in the United States Senate defending the Compromise of 1850.
To his shame, Phillips could not forget that he had admired Webster so greatly at that time as to wish his election as president. Furthermore, Phillips resented Webster as his greatest competitor for forensic dominion in Massachusetts, for their messages and self-assigned political roles were acknowledged by all as moral opposites.
“The men we honor, and the maxims we lay down in measuring our favorites, show the level and morals of the time,” Phillips warned, and to one so terribly hero-conscious, it certainly seemed “a grave thing when a state puts a man among her jewels.”
Webster, however, seemed a living denial of Phillips’ psychic makeup; he embodied a perverted reversal of Phillips’ animating truth and therefore represented a terrible personal threat that must be rendered impotent.
A protest meeting against it, held in October, 1850, brought Phillips together with Frederick Douglass, now a Liberty party supporter; former Conscience Whigs who had become Free-Soilers; and two militants-without-portfolio,
Phillips felt instinctively drawn to the role of conspirational insurgent in a city where Webster and his cohorts plotted evil.
The long evening sessions—debates about secret escapes—plans to evade where we can’t resist—the door watched that no spy may enter—
All the while, the vigilance committee could agree on nothing.
Any black threatened by a federal marshal, said Phillips, “should feel justified by using law of God and man in shooting that officer.”
the hated Webster openly mocked the abolitionists as a vanquished foe.
If whites must remain nonviolent themselves, he declared at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society meeting in 1851, they must also begin “launching a new measure” by actively supporting blacks who took up arms, either against their masters or against the federal marshals.
Such a death might actually “have a wholesome effect,” Phillips said. “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” he exclaimed with a fury hot even for him, “so may it ever be with slavehunters!”
Angry Syracuse abolitionists wrested an escapee from federal marshals in 1851, and the same year, a slaveholder seeking a fugitive ventured into Christiana, Pennsylvania, where re-sisters shot and killed him.
As further evidence, Phillips also claimed that the same Free-Soil politicians who abused the Garrisonians in public were actually quite “willing to confess, privately, that our movement produced theirs, and that its continued existence is the bread of their life.”
Moral suasion alone possessed the power to “save the freedom of the white race from being melted down into luxury, or buried in the gold of its own success.” Garrisonian agitators, Phillips explained, preserved and promoted republican values that harmonized material progress and the nation’s spiritual growth.
He made it elear that he still valued Sumner personally as highly as ever, but he reminded Sumner that he had now become Phillips’ senator, a public servant and a point of political influence. From now on, the agitator would treat him as the “philosophy of abolitionism” demanded, putting political need ahead of personal affection.
“We gain ground daily,” he reassured himself by assuring Pease, for the Whig defeat might lead to “the formation, very soon, of two great parties, Northern and Southern, and the beginning of the end.” His prediction happened to be stunningly accurate,
Phillips plunged into a period of deep depression in the aftermath of the Burns affair. His pride in his self-control and his hatred of sentimentality rarely allowed him to reveal in his letters more than the outlines of his feelings.
With this admission, abolitionism’s confident philosopher glimpsed the terrifying prospect that there was no sure, steady advance in public opinion after all, and if this was actually so, why agitate? Why contribute great oratory to the cause?
On November 20, 1854, Phillips set out on his first “abolitionizing trip,” as Ann soon called them. He was to make dozens of them during the next quarter century. The list of those who would join Phillips at the podium at his various stops included Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune; Salmon P. Chase, Ohio’s new Free-Soil party senator; Antoinette Brown, the dynamic feminist, Cassius M. Clay, a hard-bitten political abolitionist from Kentucky; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendentalist sage; and Joshua R. Giddings,
“I regard you as providentially raised up to be the James Otis of the new revolution,” wrote William Lloyd Garrison to Phillips in 1857. The year before, Thomas Wentworth Higginson had also offered him the same challenging thought: “Some prophetic character must emerge as the new crisis culminates.… Your life has been merely preliminary to the work that is coming for you.”
Through forensics, not disunionist politics, Phillips finally began gathering the national power he had always wanted, even as he forced the radical voice of abolitionism into debates that led to Civil War.
He showed his usual ambivalence about bloodshed, expressing the hope that the fighting presaged peaceful disunion even as he pledged a hundred dollars to a rifle fund for the free-soil guerrillas. Preston Brooks’s attack on Sumner aroused in him the same wrath as had the Burns and Sims affairs, and again he blasted the “corrupted” leaders of Massachusetts politics from the platform.
Editors, moreover, gladly filled their newspapers with densely printed multiple columns, sometimes in several installments, that reproduced to the last word even the lengthiest of speeches. Newsmen assumed, quite accurately, that subscribers made few sharp distinctions between hearing a speech and reading
Phillips developed a popular repertoire of noncontroversial, “elevating” topics. Audiences were eager to hear speeches titled “Chartism,” “Water,” “Geology,” or “Street Life in Europe,” but the universal favorite was “The Lost Arts,” a speech Phillips repeated many hundreds of times and from which he made many thousands of dollars in fees.
Read today, it seems an innocuous little talk. Phillips simply explains that most modern inventions of which people boasted so proudly had really been put to use ages before. In the realms of new discovery, in fact, there had actually been little progress for many centuries, said Phillips, reciting a string of fascinating examples.
He then began a paean to the same belief in free inquiry and the individualistic values of self-improvement that, not so coincidentally, inspired some of the North’s deepest hatred of southern civilization.
(Demagogues, Phillips had always believed, inflamed the passions of mobs. Orators, by contrast, elevated audiences’ interests.)
The experience, from the viewpoint of lyceum managers, was certainly worth Phillips’ $250 fee.
Perhaps Phillips made only a few heart-and-soul converts to disunionism, but there surely can be no doubt, in light of all these statements about the impact of his speaking, that he exercised a pervasive influence upon a receptive middle-class northern popular culture, sectionalizing it in ways that had enormous political implications.
Why, by the vigor of such a civilization as ours, we shall take the State of Mississippi by the nape of its neck, and shake every decrepit white man out of it and give it into the hands of the slave that now tills it, and make America to represent the ideal to which our fathers consecrated it. Be worthy of this day!
Boston’s conservative unionists had no easier a time of it than slaveholders from their famous local agitator. They, after all, had been forced to endure nearly four decades of unceasing Phillips invective. Plainly, they hated him, and for the best of reasons. He slandered their characters, assailed the morality of their economic endeavors, assisted their political enemies, degraded their reputations, sneered at their social pretensions, accused them of racial barbarianism, and indicted them as traitors to their city and state. They, in turn, vilified him in their presses, raised mobs against
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How, one finally wonders, did Phillips generate such seemingly effortless rhetorical power? The answer is simply that he worked at it tirelessly.
Revealing another mood, Phillips once set down a grand historical chart that outlined the rise of freedom in Europe from A.D. 957, when the city-state of Cambrai adopted uniform taxation, through the late thirteenth century, when the king of Aragon promulgated a charter of liberties.
By general Garrisonian standards, of course, all Republicans had grave shortcomings when it came to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, and treating blacks as equals. Yet William Lloyd Garrison had also begun to suspect that his years of crying in the wilderness were finally starting to be vindicated.
“Our business is to cry ‘unclean, unclean—thief, robber, pirate, murderer’—to put the brand of Cain on every one of them.” He also wondered pointedly why Phillips had made remarks supportive of Charles Sumner in a recent speech. Was Phillips, too, losing his backbone?
“Your danger and Pillsbury’s,” he wrote Abby Foster, “is intolerance—you are leaning to sectarianism and bigotry. You incline to suspect the honesty of those you cannot at once convince to your views.”
