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By the late 1870s, Phillips’ fabled fortune had totally vanished, depleted in part by four decades of charitable giving.
Such workers’ uprisings, in Phillips’ view, were the moral equivalents of slave insurrections, “the righteous and honorable resistance of a heart-broken and poverty-stricken people to a despotism which flaunts its insolence and cruel rule. Of all the cants that are canted in this canting world, the cant of our American hypocrites bewailing European communism is the most disgusting.”
When the day arrived on June 30, 1881, however, Phillips carried no script as he followed the long procession into Harvard’s Sanders Theatre.
He gestured toward Boston, speaking as he did so of Harry Vane as “the noblest human being who ever walked the streets of yonder city. I do not forget Franklin or Sam Adams, Washington or [La]Fayette, Garrison or John Brown. Vane dwells an arrow’s flight above them all, and his touch consecrated the continent to measureless toleration of opinion and entire equality of rights.”
The “book-educated class of the North” had ever betrayed a “chronic distrust of the people” and a desire to stifle their free expression. To become university educated, Phillips told his scholarly listeners, was to become an enemy of popular rights.
If indeed American workers found their peaceful organizing efforts thwarted by repression, he warned, they would have perfect justification to emulate Russia’s violent nihilists. “I honor Nihilism,” he maintained, “since it redeems human nature from being utterly vile, made up only of heartless oppression and contented slaves.”
Except for a very brief appearance in 1883, he never again addressed the public. He sensed now that he too was fast becoming a fact of history, and therefore, he had nothing more that he wished to say.
Poverty, obscurity, and loneliness filled the Phillipses’ last three years together.
Still, his last spoken thoughts were troubled and centered on her. “What will become of Ann?” he asked.
Relatives and friends saw to Ann’s care, and she lived on for fourteen months, until April 23, 1885.
