Less than two weeks after Lincoln’s announcement, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips visited Congress on Sumner’s invitation. Republican senators were eager to meet him. “They crowded around me still more numerous,” Phillips told his wife with shock. “A year ago, Phillips would have been sacrificed to the Devil of Slavery anywhere on Pennsylvania Avenue,” wrote an astonished reporter for the New York Tribune. “Never has there been a time when Abolitionists were as much respected,” another writer observed.
