Wendell Phillips

American social reformer

• Born: November 29, 1811
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: February 2, 1884
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

Phillips was one of the foremost orators and writers in the American abolitionist and other social movements through the mid-nineteenth century.

Early Life

Wendell Phillips traced his American ancestry to the Reverend Mr. George Phillips, who came to Massachusetts with John Winthrop in 1630 on the Arbella. His father, John Phillips, was a prominent Boston politician, who served as a judge, as the presiding officer of the state senate, and as the first mayor of Boston under that city’s corporate charter, as well as on the Harvard Board of Overseers. One of his relatives was the founder of Phillips Andover Academy, while another founded Phillips Exeter Academy. Wendell’s mother, Sarah Walley, was the devoutly Calvinist daughter of a middle-class Boston merchant. Although Sarah came from a less distinguished family than her husband, she could trace her American ancestry to the early seventeenth century.

As a child, Phillips received the typical education of a Boston patrician. He attended Boston Latin School, where he won distinctions for his oratory, was graduated from Harvard College in 1831, and then studied at Harvard’s new law school under Justice Joseph Story until 1834.

As a young lawyer, Phillips could look forward to what appeared to be a certain and successful future. Phillips was already financially secure from his inheritance. Politically, Phillips was fully in the tradition of conservative New England Federalists. He wrote in his Harvard class book of 1831, “I love the Puritans, honor Cromwell, idolize Chatham and Hurrah for Webster.” He was connected by social class, and often by blood, to the most powerful and important families in Massachusetts. He was already noted as an unusually talented speaker and writer. In addition, he was healthy, physically fit, tall, handsome, and aristocratic in his bearing. Later in life, when proper Bostonians shunned him for his abolitionist activities, Phillips condescendingly retorted that his detractors were “men of no family.”

By 1835, Phillips was on his way to building a successful and profitable law practice. Phillips was not particularly enthusiastic about law practice, but he probably would not have needed to continue in the field for long. Like his father, Phillips could have looked forward to a successful career in politics, which would have been enhanced by his remarkable speaking ability, brilliant mind, and superb debating skills. In October, 1837, Phillips solidified his position in Boston society when he married Ann Terry Greene, the orphaned daughter of a wealthy and prominent Boston merchant. In that year, however, Phillips abandoned his law practice and society life for a fulltime career as an abolitionist agitator, social reformer, and professional orator.

Life’s Work

In 1837, Phillips’s life changed dramatically. In March, he gave a short speech supporting abolition at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. By the end of 1837, Phillips was a professional abolitionist speaker. This shift—from a socially prominent lawyer to a leading speaker for a despised group of radical reformers—was the result of his heritage, his marriage, and the events of the mid-1830’s.

As an educated patrician, Phillips firmly believed in noblesse oblige. It was not inconsistent for him to champion the rights of an oppressed minority. Indeed, moderate opposition to slavery was part of his Federalist political background and his Puritan social and cultural heritage. Phillips was, in fact, a profoundly religious man whose Puritan background no doubt led him to a movement such as abolition, which sought to root out the most sinful American institution—slavery.

Phillips’s relationship with Ann Terry Greene was critical to his development as an abolitionist. When he met Greene, she was already a committed abolitionist, active in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. While courting Ann in 1836, Wendell met William Lloyd Garrison and the other abolitionists whom he soon would join. Although an invalid most of her life, Ann was actively involved in Wendell’s career, giving him both intellectual and emotional support. Phillips claimed not only that Ann made him into an abolitionist but also that she was always ahead of him in analyzing the social issues of the movement.

Throughout their marriage, Ann encouraged Phillips to remain uncompromising in his opposition to slavery, in his support of the freemen, and in support of the rights of women. Their only major political disagreement was over the rights of the Irish. Ann retained the anti-Irish bias of most Bostonians of her class; Wendell saw the Irish as an exploited class, much like blacks, and thus in need of an eloquent champion to further their search for social justice. When he met Ann in 1836, Phillips was not yet an abolitionist. Two events, one in 1835 and the other in 1837, coalesced with his relationship with Ann and his background to bring Phillips into the antislavery movement.

In 1835, a mob dragged the abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison through the streets of Boston with a rope around his body. Phillips witnessed the event with shock and outrage. At the time, Phillips was not sympathetic to abolition. However, he considered himself to be fully a son of the American Revolution. As such, he believed in free speech for all, even radicals such as Garrison. The threatened lynching of Garrison violated Phillips’s sense of order and constitutional rights. The young patrician lawyer now had a new view of the abolitionists—as protectors of civil liberties, because they were the victims of intolerance.

Phillips was even more profoundly affected by the death of Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist printer in Alton, Illinois. In 1837, Lovejoy was thrice attacked by mobs that threw his press into the Mississippi River. When a fourth press arrived in Alton, Lovejoy vowed to defend it. In the process, he was killed. At a meeting called to denounce this event, James T. Austin, Massachusetts’s antiabolitionist attorney general, took the floor and gave an eloquent speech attacking Lovejoy. Austin compared Lovejoy’s killers to the revolutionaries who organized the Boston Tea Party and declared that Lovejoy was “presumptuous and imprudent” for challenging the sentiments of the day. Phillips, still relatively unknown in Boston and not yet a committed abolitionist, immediately took the floor to answer Austin. His response electrified the crowd in Boston’s Faneuil Hall; the printed version had a similar effect on those who read it. Pointing to the portraits of revolutionary leaders on the wall of Faneuil Hall, Phillips declared

Sir, when I heard the gentleman [Austin] lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead.… Sir, for the sentiment he has uttered, on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up.

Phillips then went on to defend the rights of free speech and of the press and to attack those who would deny it to abolitionists.

This speech was the beginning of Phillips’s career as the greatest abolitionist speaker of the day. Indeed, in an age of great orators, Phillips may have been the best. Besides speaking on abolition, Phillips often gave lectures on artistic and cultural topics and on other political issues. He was in constant demand and made a good living from his speaking tours. Phillips gave one nonpolitical lecture, entitled “The Lost Arts,” more than two thousand times in his career and earned more than $150,000 from it.

As an antislavery agitator, Phillips was noted for his “eloquence of abuse.” Northern politicians who supported slavery risked the wrath of his wit. Edward Everett was “a whining spaniel,” Senator Robert Winthrop “a bastard who has stolen the name Winthrop,” and Daniel Webster “a great mass of dough.” Abraham Lincoln, who had once represented a slaveowner in a fugitive slave case, was “the slave hound from Illinois.” When lecturing, Phillips could be abusively eloquent without even using words. During one speech, he mentioned the name of a United States attorney who was notorious for his support of the Fugitive Slave Law. Phillips then stopped his speech, asked for a glass of water, rinsed his mouth, spat the water out, and continued.

Besides his marvelous rhetoric, Phillips made important intellectual contributions to the antislavery movement. Phillips accepted Garrison’s analysis that the Constitution was “a covenant with death and an agreement in Hell” that favored slavery. Because Phillips could not conscientiously support the Constitution, he ceased to practice law shortly after joining the abolitionist movement. However, he applied his legal training and knowledge to his speeches, articles, and pamphlets. His analysis of the Constitutional Convention, The Constitution a Pro-Slavery Compact: Or, Selections from the Madison Papers (1844), was particularly important to the Garrisonian analysis of the American government.

More important than his antislavery theory was the role he developed as a professional agitator. Phillips was harsh, extreme, and unfair in his speeches and his pamphlets. His rhetoric, however, was purposeful. He sought to enrage the people of the North by dwelling on the horrors of slavery. In a speech on slavery, he would assert that “The South is one great brothel, where half a million women are flogged into prostitution.” His goal was to force his audiences to contemplate the evil of slavery. Phillips succeeded far better than any of his contemporaries.

In 1860, Phillips opposed Lincoln, as he had almost all other politicians, because the latter was not sufficiently antislavery. During the Civil War, however, Phillips’s agitation was sympathetic to Lincoln and the cause of the Union. He intuitively understood that the war would destroy slavery, and he supported the Emancipation Proclamation, even though it did not extend to all slaves in the nation.

Unlike many abolitionists, Phillips did not discontinue his work with the end of the war and the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. In 1865, he severed his relationship with his longtime associate Garrison because the latter wanted to dissolve his American Anti-Slavery Society. Phillips thought that the job of the abolitionists remained unfulfilled. Emancipation alone was insufficient; Phillips was farsighted enough to realize that freedom required granting full political and social equality to former slaves. Thus, Phillips remained a tireless supporter of equal rights for the freedmen throughout the 1870’s.

With the Constitution no longer proslavery, Phillips felt free to participate in politics. In 1870, he ran for governor of Massachusetts on the Labor Reform ticket and received twenty thousand votes. By this time, Phillips divided his energies between caring for his invalid wife, agitating for the rights of the freedmen, and opposing the exploitation of workers in the emerging industrial economy. He agitated for an eight-hour day and a reorganization of the nation’s economy to protect the poor and the working classes from the robber barons of the Gilded Age. By the time of his death in 1884, Phillips was a full-fledged labor radical, as indicated by his last major publication, The Labor Question (1884).

Significance

In 1881, Phillips was invited back to his alma mater to give the Phi Beta Kappa address. In his speech, titled “The Scholar in a Republic,” Phillips argued that the role of an educated man in a free society is “to help those less favored in life.” This had been the life of Phillips. In an age of great orators, he was among the best. Born to lead the elite, he led instead a movement that sought freedom for those at the bottom of society. He provided hard logic, brilliant rhetoric, and a measure of upper-class cachet for the antislavery movement. Phillips flourished on the fringes of American politics, consciously creating an “office” for himself as an agitator. Phillips never made policy. Nevertheless, by helping to create an antislavery constituency, Phillips was able to influence politics and politicians throughout his career. In the process of opposing slavery, Phillips helped legitimize the professional agitator in American politics and society.

Bibliography

Bartlett, Irving H. Wendell and Ann Phillips: The Community of Reform, 1840-1880. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. A brief biography of Phillips and his wife, based on a large collection of Phillips family letters discovered during the 1970’s. Includes many letters written to and from Ann and Wendell Phillips. Focuses on the private life, as well as the public life, of the Phillipses.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Wendell Phillips: Boston Brahmin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961. A sympathetic modern biography of Phillips. Covers his entire career, focusing almost entirely on his public life.

Filler, Louis, ed. Wendell Phillips on Civil Rights and Freedom. New York: Hill and Wang, 1965. A short collection of some of Phillips’s greatest speeches. This volume begins with his brilliant defense of Elijah Lovejoy’s right to publish an antislavery newspaper.

Hofstadter, Richard. “Wendell Phillips: The Patrician as Agitator.” In The American Political Tradition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949. A superb essay on Phillips and his role as an agitator. One of the first modern reappraisals of Phillips.

Korngold, Ralph. Two Friends of Man: The Story of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Boston: Little, Brown, 1950. Study of the two leaders of the radical or Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement.

Stewart, James Brewer. Holy Warriors. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976. A superb short history of the antislavery movement that places Phillips in the context of other abolitionists. An excellent introduction to history of abolition.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Wendell Phillips, Liberty’s Hero. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. Comprehensive biography, tracing Phillips’s life, involvement in the abolitionist movement, and influence of his wife, Ann. Stewart demonstrates how Phillips played a greater role in the abolitionist movement than was previously understood.

Wiecek, William M. The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America: 1760-1848. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. Study of abolitionist thought, which places the ideas and theories of Phillips in context with other antislavery thinkers.