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His answer, of course, was “not a one.… they came into the Union as they went out of the Union, an aristocracy” wedded to “states rights, the subordination of labor and the impracticality of the two races living together.”
The South had triumphed indeed, Phillips concluded. “We can trust neither Congress, nor Andrew Johnson, nor the Republican party. The only hope remaining is the people.”
there was someone else to rely upon, specifically Edward McPherson, Republican clerk of the House of Representatives. At the close of his speech, Phillips repeated a suggestion he had been making since midsummer. If representatives from the southern governments were actually permitted to take their seats in Congress, they would ally at once with the Democrats, form a majority, and direct Reconstruction as they pleased, but if the clerk of the House refused to call the southerners’ names as part of the roll, then Republicans could organize the Congress on their own to combat Andrew Johnson.46
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First, the president of the United States publicly denounced him as a traitor, and then, even as Andrew Johnson cried from the platform, “why not hang Thaddeus Stevens and Wendell Phillips?” the Workingman’s party in Boston unanimously nominated him for Congress.
graciously declined the other, observing that were he to go to Congress, “I should, paradoxically as it might sound, incur responsibility to a far greater extent than I should gain power.”
In response, Republicans in Congress developed a plan of Reconstruction to take to the voters, embodied in a proposed Fourteenth Amendment.
When it had first been proposed in March, 1866, however, Phillips had reacted sharply, warning congressional radicals that he would oppose the amendment vigorously. “We do not see how it is not a substantial surrender of the negro into white hands and permission for unrepublican governments,” he had admonished Sumner.
The Republicans had begun their own Reconstruction program without insisting on black enfranchisement. Phillips feared that they might never require it of the South.
The moment the amendment passed Congress, therefore, Phillips called on the public to reject it by repudiating the Republicans at the polls. “Let that party be broken that sacrifices principle to preserve its existence,” he announced.
“I know of no other channel, this summer, in which to work,” he declared. “I cannot tell you to desert the Republican Party; I know no where else for you to go.”
In late July, mobs swept through New Orleans, avenging themselves by murdering dozens of black and white radicals who had peacefully assembled in a constitutional convention to consider Negro suffrage.
Many Republicans had also developed a keen awareness that Johnson’s Reconstruction plans meant leaving the” ballot in white southerners’ hands, thereby jeopardizing their own party’s maJority status in the electorate. Slowly they too began to see the logic of freedmen’s suffrage, for blacks would surely vote Republican.
By the summer of 1867, as Congress pushed Radical Reconstruction forward, some began to suspect that Phillips had written a script which the Republican majority was now enacting into law.
By mid-1867, after Congress had passed the Reconstruction and Tenure of Office acts, the pro-Johnson New York World observed dejectedly that as Phillips pressed forward, he pulled along an army of powerful editors and politicians.
Two months later, that same paper devoted six long columns to an interview with Phillips, wherein the orator endorsed Thaddeus Stevens for president in 1868, demanded Johnson’s ouster, and insisted that Congress pass constitutional amendments guaranteeing universal male suffrage, compulsory public education, and national citizenship.
The Rochester, New York, Morning Express captured his image aptly, declaring early in 1867, “Probably no other man in the country has been generally so right in the past quarter century as Wendell Phillips.”
Upon returning from his trip, he accordingly assured his fellow abolitionists that “we seem to be on the very eve of all that the friends of freedom have ever asked of this nation … That is, the absolute civil and political equality of the colored man under our institutions of government.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton inquired sharply of him, “My question is this, Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?”
short, Phillips did not believe that society actually oppressed women, despite his recognition that it curtailed their political activities and economic self-determination. Women already possessed power, in his view, while blacks most clearly did not. Phillips’ bias no doubt derived from his lifelong deference to his wife and mother.
Whenever the abolitionists had “torn off the masks” of religion, history, politics, or fashion, “the same hideous features were behind it—the sneering, gibbering spectre—this was America,”
Clearly, impeachment had become Phillips’ desperate sine qua non, were America to evolve into a racially free society in the decades ahead. Just as clearly, Phillips pos sessed at this late hour no resources for developing some original, more effective means for influencing Radical Reconstruction or for preserving his sense of political fulfillment.
Although Phillips could not have known it in 1867, land redistribution and compulsory public education for freedmen could never be serious currency in his transactions with the Republicans. Starting in 1865, Johnson returned to their former owners nearly all abandoned or confiscated lands.
Republicans had little taste for land redistribution, as Thaddeus Stevens discovered when Congress crushed his confiscation bill in 1867.
For the most part, Republicans believed instead that free labor required the freedmen to gain political independence by rising unassisted in the economic world. Grants of land, they argued, would only undermine the blacks’ incentive to work, save money, and learn upright habits.
If Congress actually purged Johnson, Phillips believed, the Republicans would proceed to conduct social revolution in the South. They would be disposed toward nominating a true radical for president and would spurn Grant, whom he had already excoriated as a drunkard and a political cipher.
Phillips’ endorsement of Grant for president in 1868 was perhaps the single most humiliating public act of his career. He had tried to sell out for the highest possible price, but by his own reckoning, the Republican party had returned him only a pittance.
Moreover, the same principle should be applied to the control of private corporations, he declared; their governing organizations should be reconstructed to include the working class as voting stockholders and as members of boards of directors. “Inaugurate co-operative industry,” he urged. “Let the operative own the mill. Make the interest of Capital and the community identical. In no other way shall we have free self-government in this country.”
Native Americans, Phillips likewise urged, needed the protection of the ballot, and desperately so, for they lived in a nation where “every ten miles from Massachusetts Bay to Omaha is marked by an Indian massacre.”
Soon Phillips was to discover the great frustrations of so completely equating social harmony, political equality, and a moral economy with the ballot box, for despite his pleas to the contrary, industrializing America was entering a period of deepening conflict between races, classes, and genders.
Phillips offered an endorsement of land redistribution as part of a larger motion to disband the American Anti-Slavery Society, which passed easily.
Henry Wilson wrote to Charles Sumner that it was to “Wendell Phillips, more than to any other, more than to all others,” that credit must be given for the fact that “colored people were not cheated out of their citizenship after Emancipation.”
It was Phillips’ personal tragedy that he could never fully accept this more just and balanced view than his own of his magnificent abolitionist career.
Phillips added his own statement in praise of the Chinese as an “industrious, thrifty, inventive and self-respectful” people. They could be naturally absorbed into the work force as political equals without lowering wages, he argued, so long as they immigrated voluntarily and had not been lured by the false inducements of grasping factory owners.
His father would have appreciated his approach, for he campaigned much as an old Federalist might have, making no attempt to organize his supporters and relying on his good name alone to get him a hearing.
Phillips assailed the “babble and chaff of supply and demand” as a “political economy that forgets God, abolishes hearts, stomachs and hot blood, and builds its world as children do, out of tin soldiers and blocks of wood.”
Phillips hardly helped Butler’s cause by endorsing with phrases and logic reminiscent of John Brown’s time the violence that accompanied the Paris Commune in revolutionary France.
In 1872 he repudiated Ira Steward as a self-serving politician and thereafter campaigned no more for working-class candidates.
“Nothing,” he editorialized, “SHORT OF SHOOTING HALF A DOZEN SOUTHERN MILLIONAIRES AT THE DRUMHEAD WILL AWE THE Ku Klux KLAN INTO SUBMISSION.”
Most of all, however, when liberals looked South, they sniffed the taint of “Negro misrule.” Hence, when some leading Democrats endorsed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, these liberals saw a chance to develop a political alliance with which to drive Grant from office and terminate southern Reconstruction.
Complicating matters further for Republicans loyal to Grant was Charles Sumner’s bitter opposition to the president’s proposal to annex Santo Domingo.
The politician Phillips had always loved best now seemed willing to remand the freedman to the care of Democrats and Klansmen.
With the election over, Phillips made amends to Charles Sumner, his last link, save Butler, to what remained of the old Radical Republicans. Sumner needed this reassurance badly, for he had now been censured by the Massachusetts Republican party for his rebellion against Grant, and his influence in the Senate had been reduced to almost nothing. “The real old friends never waver a hair in their love and trust,” Phillips attempted to reassure him, before calling on Sumner at home, where he found his old friend ill and despondent. As they reminisced, a servant interrupted to remind the senator
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“The Negro child loses if you shut him up in separate schools, no matter how accomplished his teachers or how perfect the apparatus.”
An editorialist from the New York Times put the outcome in its proper perspective, observing that “Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison are not exactly extinct from American politics, but they represent ideas in regard to the South which the majority of the Republican Party have outgrown.”
Occasionally, he participated when Emerson, Higginson, Longfellow, Louisa Alcott, and other members convened at John T. Sargent’s house to discuss theology, aesthetics, and history.
While seeking some new acquaintances in this way, however, Phillips actually became far more anxious to reestablish one very special old friendship. William Lloyd Garrison had missed Phillips for a long time, at least since the early 1870s. In 1871, for example, he had asked Wendell Phillips Garrison to help begin a reconciliation.
Phillips had the satisfaction of hearing Garrison claim that the mob’s dangers had been worth the risk, for they had drawn his friend Wendell Phillips into the cause.
becoming tools of corruption and tyranny.” Afterward, Garrison marveled that Phillips, “as a reformer and iconoclast,” should plead “for the preservation of so much brick and mortar” and denounce the proposed removal “as something almost sacrilegious.”
historians calling themselves neoabolitionists were to claim Garrison and Phillips as the most important white egalitarians of the Civil War era.
Actually, the Phillipses had been living precariously for some time. Six years before, Phillips had been forced to refuse when Franklin Sanborn asked him to contribute for a monument to John Brown. “I have done so much within the last ten years for the associates of J. B.,” Phillips explained, “that I have no more left to do with.”
