The Bull-Run Rout / Scenes Attending the First Clash of Volunteers in the Civil War

THE
BY EDWARD HENRY CLEMENT
CAMBRIDGE JOHN WILSON AND SON University Press 1909
From the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society for March, 1909.
I find a pretty complete picture of the psychology of those bewildered and dreadful weeks and months in two speeches of Wendell Phillips in that series of wonderful orations in which he rode the storm seeking to direct it to great issues. Some of these speeches I had the fortune to hear. I have been looking up certain things I heard delivered in that deliberate utterance of his with its polished periods, precise and penetrating as rifle-shots, yet freighted with passion, white-hot with intense conviction. It is only necessary to compare these two speeches of Phillips's to show how men's minds tossed and turned and agonized in those days,—the minds of honest, independent, fearless, conscientious men, too. In a speech of April 9, 1861, at New Bedford, Wendell Phillips was in Cassandra vein. Besides many other epigrammatic deliverances to similar effect, he said:
Inaugurate war, we know not where it will end; we are in no condition to fight. The South is poor; we are rich. The poor man can do twice the injury to the rich man that the rich man can do to the poor. War will start up every man whose livelihood hangs upon trade, intensifying him into a compromiser. Those guns fired on Fort Sumter are only to frighten the North into a compromise. If the Administration provokes war it is a trick,—nothing else. It is the masterly cunning of that devil of compromise, the Secretary of State. He is not mad enough to let the States run into battle. He knows that the age of bullets is over. If a gun is fired in Southern waters it is fired at the wharves of New York, at the bank-vaults of Boston, at the money of the North. It is meant to alarm. It is policy, not sincerity.
Thus in New Bedford, April 9; and no wonder that the local reporter records that the lecture was interrupted with frequent hisses. Twelve days later, on a Sunday, April 21, the same day that Fletcher Webster addressed an out-door meeting in State Street, speaking from the Old State House balcony, Phillips addressed an excited, crowded meeting in Music Hall. That day Phillips was the prophet militant. He began by saying that he gave this war a welcome hearty and hot. He would not recant or retract anything, he said; he needed everything he had been saying to justify so momentous an evil as civil war.