Phillips, Wendell (1811-1884)

Wendell Phillips (1811-1884)

Sources

Orator

Beacon Hill. Bostonians looking back on the life of Wendell Phillips observed that he was born on Beacon Street and died on Common Street. He epitomized the exclusive social circle that his cousin Oliver Wendell Holmes dubbed “the Brahmins,” an allusion to the caste system of India. The Phillips family tree led directly back to one of the Puritan ministers who arrived on the Arbella with John Winthrop; Wendell Phillips’s father served as a mayor of Boston and was buried in a grave between Samuel Adams and James Otis upon his sudden death after a year in office. Phillips’s closest boyhood friends were future historian John Lothrop Motley and Thomas Appleton, son of the visionary manufacturer whose textile mills at Lowell generated fortunes for the Boston elite. Phillips was the only student in his Harvard College class for whom a private carriage called on every Saturday morning.

Abolitionist. After preparing briefly for a career in law Phillips was introduced to the antislavery movement by his future wife, Anne Greene, who had moved upon the death of her parents into the household of her cousin Maria Weston Chapman, one of the central figures in Boston abolitionism. Phillips made his debut for the cause at a meeting in Faneuil Hall after the murder of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois, in November 1837. Stirred to respond when the attorney general of Massachusetts defended the mob that attacked Lovejoy as a legitimate successor to the mobs led by Samuel Adams, Phillips demonstrated his quiet, mesmerizing speaking style and his passion for preserving the integrity of Boston that had been “consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots.”

Radical Vanguard. Phillips soon became chief lieutenant of abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, delivering addresses for the cause and developing its theoretical premises. He joined Garrison in spurning any participation in politics, which he considered incompatible with the promotion of moral principles. Although Phillips sometimes shared goals with antislavery politicians, his rigid insistence on complete conformity with every implication of abolitionism led him into conflicts with men as sympathetic to his cause as Horace Mann and Charles Sumner. When the Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln for president, Phillips branded him “the Slave-Hound of Illinois” because in proposing the gradual abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia while in Congress, Lincoln had included temporary arrangements for the retrieval of fugitive slaves. Particularly outraged by the pursuit of runaways into Boston, Phillips joined Garrison in adopting the motto “No Union with Slavery” and calling for Massachusetts to break all ties with the Southern states.

Politics. Notwithstanding Phillips’s policy of disunion, he declared support for the war after the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Contrary to the declared federal intent to avoid interference with slavery, he welcomed every opportunity that the war provided to strike at the institution. He also came to take a more active role in politics, including strong support for a radical challenge to the reelection of Lincoln. Political involvement helped undermine Phillips’s relationship with Garrison, who had entered the fray on Lincoln’s side. When the war ended, Garrison moved to dissolve the American Anti-Slavery Society on the ground that it had fulfilled its purpose. Phillips engineered the defeat of the proposal and upon Garrison’s retirement assumed the presidency of the organization, for which he adopted the new motto “No Reconstruction without Negro Suffrage.” His efforts over the next five years were rewarded by the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in March 1870.

New Directions. Phillips concentrated in the 1870s on labor reform as the emerging issue of the future. After declining for decades to seek office as an antislavery politician despite advantages that gave him excellent prospects for success, he accepted the nomination for governor of Massachusetts on the Labor Reform ticket in 1870. He called for legislation to limit working hours and also distinguished his campaign through his defense of Chinese immigrants that employers sought to exploit and laborers sought to exclude. In the years following this unsuccessful candidacy his program for labor shifted to support for expansion of the money supply through circulation of paper currency. These views on regulation and finance were even more unpopular within Phillips’s social class than his abolitionism had been. He also spoke in support of many other political causes during the 1870s, including the enforcement of civil rights in the South, woman suffrage, and temperance, as well as delivering many addresses on casual topics. From the end of the war until his retirement in 1880 he was the most popular lecturer in the country, the last of the great orators of New England. He died on 2 February 1884.

Sources

Irving H. Bartlett, Wendell Phillips: Brahmin Radical (Boston: Beacon, 1961);

James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips, Liberty’s Hero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986).