Thomas Wentworth Higginson

“ After slavery had fallen Phillips associated himself freely with reformers occupied in other paths, herein separating himself from the other patrician of the movement, Edmund Quincy, who always frankly said that after slavery was abolished there was nothing else worth fighting for. ”

“ He was not always the best judge of character, and was sometimes allied in these movements with men who were little more than demagogues. But the proof he gave by his transfer of energies that the work of reform was never quite finished — this was something of peculiar value, and worth the risk of some indiscretions. The life of a reformer did not in itself make him thoroughly happy ”

“ Wendell Phillips himself attended the public Latin school, entered Harvard College before he was sixteen, and graduated in 1831 in the same class with the historian John Lothrop Motley. He graduated at the Harvard law school in 1834, and was admitted to the bar in Boston. He soon came under the influence of the anti-slavery movement, witnessing in 1835 the mobbing, in Boston, of William Lloyd Garrison. ”