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Wendell Phillips — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Abolitionism

On October 21, 1835, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society announced that British abolitionist George Thompson would be speaking. Pro-slavery forces posted nearly 500 notices of a $100 reward for the citizen that would first lay violent hands on him. Thompson canceled at the last minute, and William Lloyd Garrison, editor and publisher of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, was quickly scheduled to speak in his place. A lynch mob formed, forcing Garrison to escape through the back of the hall and hide in a carpenter's shop. The mob soon found him, putting a noose around his neck to drag him away. Several strong men, including the mayor, intervened and took him to the most secure place in Boston, the Leverett Street Jail. Phillips, watching from nearby Court Street, was a witness to the attempted lynching.

After being converted to the abolitionist cause by Garrison in 1836, Phillips stopped practicing law in order to dedicate himself to the movement. Phillips joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and frequently made speeches at its meetings. So highly regarded were Phillips' oratorical abilities that he was known as "abolition's golden trumpet".

Phillips lectured widely throughout his lifetime and for which he was paid handsomely. From his speaking engagements, he earned $10,000 to $15,000 annually; for those programs concerning abolitionist themes, he charged no fee. Phillips's cash donations to needy individuals and families was extensive. Of his estimated $150,000 income earned over 45 years, his itemized personal gifts amounted to over $65,000.

Like many of Phillips' fellow abolitionists who honored the free-produce movement, he condemned the purchase of cane sugar and clothing made of cotton, since both were produced by the labor of slaves. He was a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, which assisted fugitive slaves in avoiding slavecatchers.

It was Phillips's contention that racial injustice was the source of all of society's ills. Like Garrison, Phillips denounced the Constitution for tolerating slavery. He disagreed with abolitionist Lysander Spooner and maintained that slavery was part of the Constitution, and more generally disputed Spooner's notion that any judge could find slavery illegal. An abolitionist pamphlet penned by Phillips outlined so compellingly that the US Constitution was a slaveholder's legal device to perpetuate slavery that it was recommended by a John C. Calhoun supporter for distribution in the South with only minor alterations.

In 1845, in an essay titled "No Union With Slaveholders", he argued that the country would be better off, and not complicit in their guilt, if it let the slave states secede:

The experience of the fifty years...shows us the slaves trebling in numbers slaveholders monopolizing the offices and dictating the policy of the Government—prostituting the strength and influence of the Nation to the support of slavery here and elsewhere—trampling on the rights of the free States, and making the courts of the country their tools. To continue this disastrous alliance longer is madness. The trial of fifty years only proves that it is impossible for free and slave States to unite on any terms, without all becoming partners in the guilt and responsible for the sin of slavery. Why prolong the experiment? Let every honest man join in the outcry of the American Anti-Slavery Society. (Quoted in Ruchames, The Abolitionists p. 196)

Phillips' alliance with the Garrisonians came with liabilities as many northerners, in both political parties, were devoted to the Union. Anti-slavery constitutionalists considered disunionism among abolitionists a threat to their cause.

On December 8, 1837, in Boston's Faneuil Hall, Phillips' leadership and oratory established his preeminence within the abolitionist movement. Bostonians gathered at Faneuil Hall to discuss Elijah P. Lovejoy's murder by a mob outside his abolitionist newspaper's office in Alton, Illinois, on November 7. Lovejoy died defending himself and his press from pro-slavery rioters who set fire to a warehouse storing his press and shot Lovejoy as he stepped outside to tip a ladder being used by the mob. His death engendered a national controversy between abolitionists and anti-abolitionists.

At Faneuil Hall, Massachusetts attorney general James T. Austin defended the pro-slavery mob, comparing their actions to 1776 patriots who fought against the British and declaring that Lovejoy "died as the fool dieth!"

The 26-year-old Phillips, infuriated by what he considered a slanderous distortion of the American Revolution, leapt to the stage and denounced Austin in a rousing extemporaneous speech that drew cheers from the audience. The episode catapulted Phillips into a leading position in the American abolitionist movement.

Before the Civil War

In 1854, Phillips made a speech at the Boston Courthouse where Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave, was being imprisoned; however, it was believed that he was not involved in the celebrated attempt to rescue Burns.

After John Brown was executed in December 1859, Phillips attended and spoke at his funeral, at the John Brown Farm in remote North Elba, New York. He met Mary Brown and the coffin in Troy, New York, where she changed trains, and expressed, unsuccessfully, his wish that Brown would be buried, with a monument, in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which he felt would help the abolitionist cause. He spoke at the funeral and on the way home, repeated his speech the next night to a wildly enthusiastic audience in Vergennes, Vermont.

On the eve of the Civil War, Phillips gave a speech at the New Bedford Lyceum in which he defended the Confederate States' right to secede:

A large body of people, sufficient to make a nation, have come to the conclusion that they will have a government of a certain form. Who denies them the right? Standing with the principles of '76 behind us, who can deny them the right? ...I maintain on the principles of '76 that Abraham Lincoln has no right to a soldier in Fort Sumter. ...You can never make such a war popular. ...The North never will endorse such a war."

In 1860 and 1861, many abolitionists welcomed the formation of the Confederacy because it would end the South's stranglehold over the United States government. This position was rejected by nationalists like Abraham Lincoln, who insisted on holding the Union together while gradually ending slavery. Twelve days after the attack on Fort Sumter, Phillips announced his "hearty and hot" support for the war. Disappointed with what he regarded as Lincoln's slow action, Phillips opposed his reelection in 1864, breaking with Garrison, who supported a candidate for the first time.

In mid-1862, Phillips's nephew, Samuel D. Phillips, died at Port Royal, South Carolina, where he had gone to take part in the so-called Port Royal Experiment to assist the slave population there in the transition to freedom.

Women's rights activism

Phillips was also an early advocate of women's rights. In 1840 he led the unsuccessful effort at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London to have America's women delegates seated. In the July 3, 1846, issue of The Liberator he called for securing women's rights to their property and earnings as well as to the ballot. He wrote:

I have always thought that the first right restored to woman would be that of the full and unfettered control of all her property and earnings, whether she were married or unmarried. This, too, is, in one sense, the most important to be secured. The responsibility of such a trust at once develops character and intellect, and goes far to afford the hitherto mission and indispensable motive to education. Next in order of importance and time, comes the ballot. So it has always been with all disfranchised classes; first property—then political influence and rights; the first prepares for, gives weight to, challenges, finally secures the second.

In 1849 and 1850, he assisted Lucy Stone in conducting the first woman suffrage petition campaign in Massachusetts, drafting for her both the petition and an appeal for signatures. They repeated the effort the following two years, sending several hundred signatures to the state legislature. In 1853, they directed their petition to a convention charged with revising the state constitution, and sent it petitions bearing five thousand signatures. Together Phillips and Stone addressed the convention's Committee on Qualifications of Voters on May 27, 1853. In 1854, Phillips helped Stone call a New England Woman's Rights convention to expand suffrage petitioning into the other New England states.

Phillips was a member of the National Woman's Rights Central Committee, which organized annual conventions throughout the 1850s, published its Proceedings, and executed plans adopted by the conventions. He was a close adviser of Lucy Stone, and a major presence at most of the conventions, for which he wrote resolutions defining the movement's principles and goals. His address to the 1851 convention, later called "Freedom for Woman", was used as a women's rights tract into the twentieth century. In March 1857, Phillips and Stone were granted hearings by the Massachusetts and Maine legislatures on the woman suffrage memorial sent to twenty-five legislatures by the 1856 National Woman's Rights Convention. As the movement's treasurer, Phillips was trustee with Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony of a $5,000 fund given anonymously to the movement in 1858, called the "Phillips fund" until the death of the benefactor, Francis Jackson, in 1861, and thereafter the "Jackson Fund".

Reconstruction Era activism

As Northern victory in the Civil War seemed more imminent, Phillips, like many other abolitionists, turned his attention to the questions of Reconstruction. In 1864, he gave a speech at the Cooper Institute in New York arguing that enfranchisement of freedmen should be a necessary condition for the readmission of Southern states to the Union. Unlike other white abolitionist leaders such as Garrison, Phillips thought that securing civil and political rights for freedmen was an essential component of the abolitionist cause, even after the formal legal end of slavery. Along with Frederick Douglass, Phillips argued that without voting rights, the rights of freedmen would be "ground to powder" by white Southerners.

He lamented the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment without provisions for black suffrage, and fervently opposed the Reconstruction regime of President Andrew Johnson, affixing a new masthead to the National Anti-Slavery Standard newspaper which read "Defeat the Amendment–Impeach the President." As Radical Republicans in Congress broke with Johnson and pursued their own Reconstruction policies through the Freedmen's Bureau bills and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, their views converged increasingly with Phillips'. However, most congressional Republicans disagreed with his assertion that "suffrage is nothing but a name because the voter has not...an acre from which he could retire from the persecution of landlordism"; in other words, Phillips and the Republicans diverged on the issue of land redistribution to the freedmen.

Despite his belief that Ulysses S. Grant was not suited for the presidential office and dissatisfaction with Grant's and the party's refusal to endorse his comprehensive Reconstruction program of "land, education and the ballot", Phillips supported Grant and the Republican Party in the 1868 election. The Republicans did pass the Fifteenth Amendment constitutionalizing black suffrage in 1870, but the goal of land redistribution was never realized.

By 1870, Wendell Phillips had joined the short-lived Labor Reform Party, unsuccessfully running for Governor of Massachusetts. Phillips gathered support from labor activists and proponents of temperance and women's suffrage. During this time, Phillips collaborated with leader of the Eight-hour day movement Ira Steward, but the two fell out when Phillips publicly criticized fellow labor activist George E. McNeill.

In 1879, Phillips argued that black suffrage and political participation during Reconstruction had not been a failure, and that the main error of the era had been the failure to redistribute land to the freedmen. He defended black voters as being "less purchasable than the white man," credited black labor and rule for the nascent regrowth of the Southern economy, and commended black bravery against attacks from the first Ku Klux Klan.

As the Reconstruction era came to a close, Phillips increased his attention to other issues, such as women's rights, universal suffrage, temperance, and the labor movement.

Wendell Phillips

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Wendell Phillips

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Wendell Phillips across IJR

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Early life and education

Marriage to Ann Terry Greene

Abolitionism

Trip to Europe

Before the Civil War

Women's rights activism

Postwar activism

Reconstruction Era activism

Equal rights for Native Americans

Illness and death

Recognition and legacy

Wendell Phillips across IJR

Notable quotes