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Spooner showed Phillips his plan four months before he mustered sufficient courage to circulate it more widely, and Phillips’ objections to it were practical ones only. The state would certainly crush such a movement as an act of treason, he wrote Spooner, for no voluntary effort like his could ever “compete with an organized despotism like ours.”
Brown was indeed a personality of unfathomable personal power. Yet his raid was no more a supreme act of his personal will than it was the predictable result of the abolitionists’ half articulated desire for a righteous triumph by blood sacrifice, which Phillips and many others had indisputably helped to foster.
His time with Brown’s family moved Phillips deeply. “If you could have seen those young widows and children, in that rude roof on the hills, so serenely meeting and accepting their part in the martyrdom, as good and grand in their places as the old man in his,” Phillips exclaimed to Ralph Waldo Emerson a short time afterwards.
“John Brown,” Phillips exclaimed in triumph, “is the impersonator of God’s law, moulding a better future, and setting it for an example.”
“Prudence, skill, courage, thrift, knowledge of his time, knowledge of his opponents [and] undaunted daring”—these were the traits that Phillips saw fused in Brown’s character.
For decades he had called from the speaker’s platform for people to trample on the law; Brown had simply marched southward, gun in hand, achieving an eloquence in his deeds that no mere speaker could ever match.
Phillips continued to sneer at Lincoln (“This huckster in politics … this country court advocate”)
For the first time in American history “the slave has chosen a President of the United States,” he announced. “We have passed the Rubicon.” Although Lincoln, as Phillips stressed, was “not an abolitionist, hardly an antislavery man,” he nevertheless “consents to represent the antislavery idea,” for behind the “pulling of wires and creaking of wheels” that manufactured his election stood the true orchestrators of sectional politics—the abolitionists.
Lincoln, Phillips assured his listeners, was only “in place.” Garrison was “in power!”
Every step makes hands worth less and brains more,”
Therefore, Phillips concluded, if the South truly wished to leave the Union, the North should hasten its peaceful departure, thereby securing a victory no less majestic than that of 1776.
By December, 1860, nearly everyone involved with Massachusetts’ industry was cursing Phillips for saying such things. Southern threats of secession had begun to destroy the state’s North-South trade as nervous bankers clamped down on credit, mill owners laid off workers, and businesses failed.
Seeking to placate the South, Amos Lawrence, Nathaniel Appleton, Edward Everett, and other former Cotton Whigs pressed the state legislature to repeal Massachusetts’ Personal Liberty Law of 1842. (Phillips responded by testifying for the need for a much more stringent bill.)
Meanwhile, Phillips wisely took measures to protect himself, collecting a bodyguard of young admirers like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (a distant relative), George W. Smalley, and Higginson, who were joined by various militant blacks.
Phillips did receive at least one private threat, as well as a carefully wrapped box that Ann feared might contain a bomb. She opened it to find instead only a dead cat.
Between 1820 and 1860, the city’s population had expanded from 43,000, to 178,000. By 1870, it would reach 25 1,ooo.
When Phillips’ father had been mayor, the town had been populated almost exclusively by Anglo-American Protestants, and its budget had been $171,000. By 1865, however, 45 percent of the residents were immigrants, mostly Irish Catholic, and the city spent $6.5 million on its annual operations. Just five years later that figure would rise to $12.4 million.
Nevertheless, his advocacy of the municipal police proposal reflected none of these elitist motives. Instead he supported it as a means of separating alcohol from politics in the hope that such separation would restore civil liberties that belonged to all classes.
The last anyone had heard from Wendell Phillips had been his cry that peaceful disunion accorded with “God’s natural laws.” As waves of militant patriotism swept through Boston, its greatest radical censor, so hated and venerated just a few months before, remained silent.
everyone he talked to was pressing him to support the war. If he complied, he lamented, he would also be forced to “renounce my past … belie my pledges, disavow every profession of faith, bless those that I have cursed, start afresh with a new set of political principles, and admit that my life has been a mistake.”
With a smooth rhetorical transition (and some clever advance preparation) Phillips had maintained the public reputation for moral consistency he so cherished, even as he dramatically reversed his entire political position.
“Our struggle is between barbarism and civilization, between a North that thinks and is the nineteenth century,” and a South that “dreams” and “is the thirteenth or fourteenth century—baron and serf—noble and slave.”
He advised Phillips, “You must now place yourself before the country in a true, national position so to gather around you the popular heart that the White House itself shall reverently ask its order at your lips.”
The Fosters and Pillsbury, in deadly earnest about their proposal, twice interrupted antislavery society meetings in 1861 with resolutions that called on abolitionists to withdraw all support from the proslavery government. It was, of course, Phillips’ old disunionism, now applied to wartime conditions, but he had absolutely no time for it.
Phillips, indeed, had become an editorialist-at-large, a pundit, whose views on rapidly changing current affairs were somehow worth knowing simply because he uttered them.
They had not achieved a meeting of minds, she wrote bitterly. Instead, he had simply defied her and gone his way, defining his quests for power and black emancipation apart from their relationship.
Phillips’ train pulled in on March 15, and as he peered out the window of his car at the skyline, he enquired “what that engine round house” was used for. “Speak respectfully,” replied a companion. “That is the Capitol Dome.”41 Phillips indeed had much to discover about the workings of Washington, D.C.
Abraham Lincoln would, in fact, soon invite Phillips to a private interview.
After 1862, no Radical Republican, in Congress or out, brought a more pervasive political influence to the cause of emancipation than did Phillips.
Finally, on September 22, he concluded further that abolitionist pressure was compatible with Republican political aims and issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which ordered that on January 1, 1863, all slaves in rebel states would be declared free,
But Lincoln received not an ounce of his praise for this momentous turn to emancipation. Instead, Phillips declared that the people had wrung the proclamation from this reluctant president, who had now taken only the “first step in the direction of a union that every man may love and die for.” The proclamation itself did not secure an American nationality, Phillips insisted, for it offered no guarantee for a “Union of the future … as indestructible as the granite that underlies this continent.”
Phillips demanded that the government create a bureau of freedmen to “guard and aid the advent of these three million” into the status of citizens and allow the slaves to confirm that citizenship by arming them to fight. “Nationality! It is built on races,” Phillips told his audience in conclusion. “The despised negro … comes in with the sound of trumpets, an army with banners, in the terror of the conflict, to insure us success.”
Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, and Garrison declared his eagerness to dissolve the society, despite Phillips’ immediate objection that the nation needed the abolitionists now more than ever. In January, 1863, for example, Garrison hinted at an antislavery gathering that final victory lay just ahead.
As Douglass put it, abolitionists must never disband until “the black man of the South, and the black man of the North, shall have been admitted fully and completely into the body politic of America.”3 He was clearly reflecting the sentiments of the conspicuously absent Wendell Phillips as well.
As the Christian paternalist Garrison supported Lincoln and Banks, the Radical Republican Phillips began demanding that black men be granted independent citizenship, “in accord with our philosophy of government since the 4th day of July 1776.”
Phillips next detailed what he believed could be a truly effective Reconstruction policy, some of his reasons for boycotting Garrison’s victory celebration suddenly became clear. Slavery would never truly be destroyed, he insisted, until the federal government “crumbled up the nobles’ estates into small farms” and put them “into the hands of the negroes and white men who fought for [them].”
He called for the enactment of two constitutional amendments, one prohibiting slavery and the other providing that “no state shall make any distinction among its citizens on account of race or color.” Then he demanded even more, proposing federal laws that guaranteed land and public education for every former slave.
The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society was now on record in opposition to Lincoln’s second term, in favor of social revolution in the South, and controlled by a majority loyal to Wendell Phillips.
Phillips, meanwhile, received assurances of support from the predictable sources—the Fosters, Pillsbury, Henry Wright, and most of the female and black abolitionists.
Soon, however, Phillips saw his naïve hopes deflated. Instead of expanding his role in politics and reshaping the Republican party, he was charged with abetting prosouthern “copperheads.” Fremont, as Lincoln’s supporters pointed out, would draw votes away from the wartime president even as his commander, Ulysses S. Grant, prepared to move south.
Indeed, from every perspective, Phillips’ engagement in presidential politics could only be judged a debacle.
Had even the slightest grounds remained for reconciliation, Garrison dashed them in January, 1865, when he announced to a meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society that the enfranchisement of the freedmen, though proper, must not be imposed on the South.
The national franchise, in short, had become Phillips’ most crucial mechanism of all for overcoming class divisions as well as racial barriers.
Powerless and propertyless, they set off for the factory “each Monday morning almost as hopeless as the previous.”
from 1865 onward, he regarded labor and temperance questions as essential elements of the larger and long-continuing tasks of Reconstruction, the most pressing of which for the moment was black suffrage.
Port Royal, South Carolina, Phillips emphasized, former slaves who controlled their own work time had already transformed abandoned cotton plantations into models of free-labor civilization. This experiment, he declared, confirmed that increased leisure stimulated free workers to produce more, not less.
“Capital and labor are not enemies,” he declared, “but friends [and] they cannot lead a separate life.”
Only three weeks separated the assassination of Abraham Lincoln from Garrison’s last appearance as a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Phillips received the news of the president’s murder with badly divided emotions.
Though he soon became involved in fierce litigation with Garrison over a bequest in an abolitionist’s estate, he never attacked his estranged colleague directly or slandered him privately to others.
Johnson’s policies, the white South’s intransigence, and the Republicans’ seeming timorousness had all finally inspired Phillips to open a full-scale attack. Selecting “The South Victorious” as the title of his newest speech on Reconstruction, he delivered it first in Boston, on October 17, 1865, and afterward repeated it in towns all over New England.
