Wendell Phillips

“ That his chum could not go was a disappointment to Phillips—he paced the stone-paved courtway of the tavern with clouded brow. All around was the bustle of travel, and tearful friends bidding folks good-by, and the romantic rush of stagecoach land.
The ease and luxury of travel have robbed it of its poetry—Ruskin was right!
But it didn't look romantic to Wendell Phillips just then—his chum had failed him—the weather was cold, two days of hard jolting lay ahead. And—"Ah! yes—it is Miss Greene! and Miss Grew, and Mr. Alvord. To Greenfield? why, how fortunate!" ”

“ When pygmies are all dead, the noble countenance of Wendell Phillips will still look forth, radiant as a rising sun,—a sun that will never set. He has become to us a lesson, his death an example, his whole history an encouragement to manhood,—to heroic manhood. ”

“ The fame of Wendell Phillips as an orator was made. Father Taylor once said, "If Emerson goes to hell, he will start emigration in that direction." And from the day of that first Faneuil Hall speech Wendell Phillips gradually caused Abolitionism in New England to become respectable.
[Pg 409] Phillips was twenty-seven years old when he gave that first, great speech, and for just twenty-seven years he continued to speak on the subject of slavery. He was an agitator—he was a man who divided men. ”

“ One could heartily wish that the born duchess had left Wendell Phillips to work out his own salvation. It is hardly the sign of a strong character for a man to be guided in the choice of a profession by feminine counsel; but he was still young, tender-hearted, and susceptible, and if left to himself might have escaped the impending danger. It was a temptation at once to his ambition as an orator and the latent heroism in him,—his disposition to self-sacrifice. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In private life, he was the most delightful of men. Good orators always have the finest manners, for it is from them that we learn the art of behavior; but Wendell Phillips never brought the great man of the world to the drawing-room or dining-table, but was so perfectly a gentleman that he seemed almost like a prince who had abdicated his hereditary possessions. He did not seem to have been bred to good manners, but born to them, so natural and unconstrained was everything he said and did. Never self-conscious and never self-forgetful ”

“ Ingersoll and Wendell Phillips were the two greatest orators of their time, and probably of all time. Their power sprang from their passion for freedom, for truth, for justice, for a world filled with light and with happy human beings. But for this divine passion neither would have scaled the sublime heights of immortal achievement. The sacred fire burned within them and when they were aroused it flashed from their eyes and rolled from their inspired lips in torrents of eloquence. ”

“ Being a close student, and endowed by Nature with a retentive memory, he supplies himself with the most complicated dates and historical events. Nothing can surpass the variety of his matter. He extracts from a subject all that it contains, and does it as none but Wendell Phillips can. His voice is beautifully musical, and it is calculated to attract wherever it is heard. He is a man of calm intrepidity, of a patriotic and warm heart, with temper the most gentle, a rectitude of principle entirely natural, a freedom from ambition, and a modesty quite singular. ”

“ We are glad, though at a late hour, to pay, with many others, our tribute to the ability and worth of Wendell Phillips, and to review his life and work. Glad to do this, for his life was clean and clear, the kind men love to honor; his work was that of the philanthropist and patriot. He had entered his seventy-third year, having been born November 29, 1811, in a house which is still standing on the lower corner of Beacon and Walnut streets, Boston. He came from one of Boston’s aristocratic families; for several generations the Phillipses were well known, rich and influential. ”

“ God calls each one of you. He asks you to give your life to him. He has a special work for you to do. You have heard of Wendell Phillips who did so much to make slavery unlawful in America! Once, when Wendell was a boy fourteen years of age, he heard Lyman Beecher preach. In the course of his sermon the preacher said, "You belong to God." The boy Wendell thought that the preacher looked straight at him when he said that. He went to his home at the close of the service, climbed the stairs to his room, shut the door, knelt in prayer, saying, "O God, I belong to thee, take what is thine own." ”

“ “It's just what Wendell Phillips said,” she declared. “'The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.'”
The young minister stroked his chin thoughtfully, and let his gaze wander over the backyard in silence. ”

“ She was a woman of heroic nature and very strong convictions. Her husband used to say that she first made him an abolitionist. They had no children, but adopted an orphaned daughter of Mrs Eliza Garnaut, a friend, and this young girl (afterwards the wife of George W. Smalley) , brought much light and joy into the household. Their worldly circumstances were easy, though they were always ready to impoverish themselves for the sake of others. Wendell Phillips died in Boston on the 2nd of February 1884. ”

“ After Lincoln's re-election, she again looked to Wendell Phillips for an adequate policy at this juncture, and she was not disappointed. "Phillips has just returned from Washington," Mrs. Stanton wrote her. "He says the radical men feel they are powerless and checkmated.... They turn to such men as Phillips to say what politicians dare not say.... We say now, as ever, 'Give us immediately unconditional emancipation, and let there be no reconstruction except on the broadest basis of justice and equality!...' Phillips and a few others must hold up the pillars of the temple.... ”

“ A young man of twenty-four witnessed this cruel treatment and determined to abandon the practice of law and devote his life to the same cause. That man was Wendell Phillips. He first came into prominence by his impassioned address in Faneuil Hall, Boston, in 1837, at an indignation meeting called to condemn the killing of Lovejoy, at Alton, Illinois, while defending his anti-slavery newspaper office against a pro-slavery mob. The direct and impassioned eloquence of the orator on this occasion was the key-note to the forward movement toward the liberation of the black man. ”

“ In Wendell Phillips, at last, the scornful world met its match, for he was fully capable of meeting scorn with superior scorn, and retorting on contempt with contempt, and he stood as high above the fear of man that bringeth a snare, as any of the most unworldly of his Puritan grandfathers. ”

“ The South had gone one step too far. Abolition stood suddenly in a new light; "More abolitionists had been made by this single piece of hostile legislation," said Greeley, "than Garrison [Pg 89] and Phillips could have made in half a century."
For thirty years Wendell Phillips was the crowned king of the lecture platform. It was the golden age of the lyceum. Men had more leisure than to-day. Our era of the drama, music, and travel pictures had not yet come. The winter nights were long, books few, magazines had not yet developed, and the people were hungry for instruction and eloquence. ”

“ He never, however, undertook to prepare and train himself for public speaking, as was done by Mr. Choate or Mr. Everett, or had the constant and varied practice under which the fine powers of Wendell Phillips came to such perfection. But his fame as an orator constantly increased, so that before his death no other man in Massachusetts was so much in demand, especially on those occasions where the veterans of the war were gathered to commemorate its sacrifices and triumphs. ”

“ The Irish Nationalists are not even lawless according to English statutes until a new and atrocious statute has to be invented to make them so. In their resistance to this lawless law every American heart is with them. "I pity a slave," said Wendell Phillips, "but a rebellious slave I respect." The rebellious slave always succeeds—the future fights for him. Let us suppose for a moment that the riotous Boston of fifty years ago has returned; that a howling mob is rushing up Washington Street yelling for the blood of Garrison and Phillips. ”

“ The Slave's most eloquent advocate, Wendell Phillips, in the "National Standard," of February 4, 1871, in honor of the departed, bore the following pertinent testimony to his great worth in the cause of Liberty.
"I should not dare to trust my memory for the number of fugitive slaves this brave old friend has helped to safety and freedom—nearly three thousand, I believe. What a rich life to look back on! How skilful and adroit he was, in eluding the hunters! ”

“ How Wendell Phillips, in the anti-slavery meetings, used to lash pro-slavery men with such formidable facts as these,--and to quote how Clay and Calhoun and Webster and Everett had pledged themselves that slavery should never be discussed, or had proposed that those who discussed it should be imprisoned,-- while, in spite of them all, the great reform was moving on, and the abolitionists were forcing politicians and people to talk, like Sterne's starling, nothing but slavery! ”

“ Was it an inherited public tendency from the spirit of intolerance which formerly persecuted the Quakers? However that may be, it is an historical fact that great social reformers always have begun in a similar manner, and their importance can fairly be measured by the violence and duration of the opposition to them.
Wendell Phillips did not at first take an interest in the anti-slavery cause. The abolitionists were not personally known to him, and his mind was largely occupied with the pleasures of fashionable society, where he shone before all others. ”

“ Faneuil Hall over this occurrence that Wendell Phillips first made his
appearance as an anti-slavery orator. Also in 1836 the office at
Cincinnati in which James G. Birney published The Philanthropist, was
sacked, the types scattered, and the press broken and sunk in the river. ”

“ In fact, with much show of justice, his admirers claimed for him the original suggestion of the idea of an “irrepressible conflict,” afterwards so elaborately pronounced by William H. Seward. Public announcements, from prominent speakers of the successful party, amply revealed the feast to which the South was invited. Wendell Phillips, the most able, eloquent, and sagacious of the original Abolitionists, thus pointedly defined the situation: “No man has a right to be surprised at this state of things. It is just what we have attempted to bring about. ”

“ John Phelps, who was born in Hubbardston, Mass., in 1824, died at New Orleans. He went South at the age of twenty-two; was one of the founders, and became President of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange, and later President of the National Cotton Exchange.
April 24.—Death of Maj. Albert L. Richardson, for thirty years postmaster of Montvale, in Woburn, Mass.
April 24.—Mrs. Wendell Phillips died at her home on Common Street, Boston. She was married to the great abolitionist orator about fifty years ago, but before that time she had espoused the antislavery cause. ”

“ What do they want with a ballot they can't defend? with a bludgeon they can't wield? with a flaming sword that would make them scream if they once saw its naked edge and understood its symbolic meaning? Manifold and various as his labors were, he found time in June of this year to perform one more labor of love, in writing a noble tribute to his friend, Wendell Phillips. It took the form of a letter to the Republican of Scranton, Pa. Incidentally he speaks his warm praise of the city which was his home. A great city, he calls it, "because any day you can meet great men on its streets . ”

“ Among these little affairs was one which we called "Company K's Skirmish," because it brought out the fact that this company, which was composed entirely of South Carolina men, and had never shone in drill or discipline, stood near the head of the regiment for coolness and courage,—the defect of discipline showing itself only in their extreme unwillingness to halt when once let loose. It was at this time that the small comedy of the Goose occurred,—an anecdote which Wendell Phillips has since made his own.
One of the advancing line of skirmishers, usually an active fellow enough, was observed to move clumsily and irregularly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was the speaker's aim to show what the State, and above all the Church, had to do, and now, alas! have done, with Texas and slavery, and how much, on the other hand, the individual should have to do with Church and State. These were fair themes, and not mistimed, and his words were addressed to "fit audience, and not few."
We must give Mr. Phillips the credit of being a clean, erect, and what was once called a consistent man. He at least is not responsible for slavery, nor for American Independence ”