WENDELL PHILLIPS.
THE DEMOSTHENES OF AMERICA.
O MORE majestic figure in the anti-slavery struggle for thirty years—1835 to 1865—appeared on the American rostrum than the “silvery tongued orator,” Wendell Phillips.
In 1830, William Lloyd Garrison wrote in the “Liberator,”—a journal founded primarily by the abolitionists for the sole purpose of freeing the slaves—“I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. I am in earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.” But the abolitionists remained many years a small and despised faction, and, with all of Garrison’s determination, might never have amounted to anything had he not enlisted in his cause such men and masters as Wendell Phillips on the platform, Henry Ward Beecher in the pulpit, Charles Sumner in the United States Senate, and Harriet Beecher Stowe among novelists. It was a great day of promise when such educated talent caught the spirit of Garrison’s zeal.
In 1835, an angry pro-slavery mob dragged William Lloyd Garrison through the streets of Boston. 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. It was the bugle-blast which cheered the pioneers in the movement, and awoke the slumbering spirits in sympathy with it, but whose timid hopes had not dared to dream of its possible ultimate success.
As Demosthenes aroused and fired the Athenians, so Phillips’ appeals carried like an avalanche everything before them. The only way to prevent his influence was to prevent his speaking, and accordingly when he went to New York in 1847, there was such a prejudice against the abolitionists, and such a predominant pro-slavery sentiment, that he could not procure a hall in either of these cities in which to speak. Finally, Henry Ward Beecher, who had recently become pastor of Plymouth Church, prevailed upon his congregation to allow Phillips to address the people from their pulpit.
From this memorable occasion Beecher, himself, it is said, became a flaming torch, second only to Phillips in his efforts in the same cause, while Plymouth Congregation seconded him with all its mighty influence, a further account of which may be found under the treatment of Henry Ward Beecher in this volume.
Wendell Phillips was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 29th day of November, 1811, and died there February 2, 1884. His parents were prominent in Boston society, his father at one time being Mayor of the city. Phillips was educated at Harvard College, graduating in 1831, after which he studied law at Cambridge and was admitted to the bar in 1833; but his gift as an orator, in which he is regarded as second only to Daniel Webster, and his overmastering zeal in the abolitionist movement, required so much of his time that he did little practice before the court. He was a most fascinating platform speaker outside of politics, and was in constant demand as a lecturer. His most celebrated addresses were “Toussaint l’Ouverture” and “The Lost Arts,” the former being used as an argument of the native ability, intelligence, and possibility of progress on the part of the negro under proper opportunities.
The eloquence of Phillips was impassioned and direct, but his manner was so pleasingly polished as not to give personal offence to his most antagonistic hearers, while his English was singularly pure and simple, and his delivery was characterized by a nervous sympathy that was peculiarly magnetic.
Like most other great orators, Wendell Phillips has left behind him in literature only his public speeches and letters. One volume of these was published in Boston in 1862, another (largely a revision of the first, with additions to the same) in 1869.
POLITICAL AGITATION.
LL hail, Public Opinion! To be sure, it is a dangerous thing under which to live. It rules to-day in the desire to obey all kinds of laws, and takes your life. It rules again in the love of liberty, and rescues Shadrach from Boston Court House. It rules to-morrow in the manhood of him who loads the musket to shoot down—God be praised!—the man-hunter Gorsuch. It rules in Syracuse, and the slave escapes to Canada. It is our interest to educate this people in humanity, and in deep reverence for the rights of the lowest and humblest individual that makes up our numbers. Each man here, in fact, holds his property and his life dependent on the constant presence of an agitation like this of anti-slavery. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day, or it is rotten. The living sap of to-day outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand intrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.
All clouds, it is said, have sunshine behind them, and all evils have some good result; so slavery, by the necessity of its abolition, has saved the freedom of the white race from being melted in the luxury or buried beneath the gold of its own success. Never look, therefore, for an age when the people can be quiet and safe. At such times Despotism, like a shrouding mist, steals over the mirror of Freedom. The Dutch, a thousand years ago, built against the ocean their bulwarks of willow and mud. Do they trust to that? No. Each year the patient, industrious peasant gives so much time from the cultivation of his soil and the care of his children to stop the breaks and replace the willow which insects have eaten, that he may keep the land his fathers rescued from the water, and bid defiance to the waves that roar above his head, as if demanding back the broad fields man has stolen from their realm.
TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE.
[Toussaint L’Ouverture, who has been pronounced one of the greatest statesmen and generals of the nineteenth century, saved his master and family by hurrying them on board a vessel at the insurrection of the negroes of Hayti. He then joined the negro army, and soon found himself at their head. Napoleon sent a fleet with French veterans, with orders to bring him to France at all hazards. But all the skill of the French soldiers could not subdue the negro army; and they finally made a treaty, placing Toussaint L’Ouverture governor of the island. The negroes no sooner disbanded their army, than a squad of soldiers seized Toussaint by night, and taking him on board a vessel, hurried him to France. There he was placed in a dungeon, and finally starved to death.]
F I were to tell you the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of French men, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I to tell you the story of Washington, I should take it from your hearts,—you, who think no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of his country. But I am to tell you the story of a negro, Toussaint L’Ouverture, who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of his enemies, men who despised him because he was a negro and a slave, hated him because he had beaten them in battle.
Cromwell manufactured his own army. Napoleon, at the age of twenty-seven, was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw. Cromwell never saw an army till he was forty; this man never saw a soldier till he was fifty. Cromwell manufactured his own army—out of what? Englishmen,—the best blood in Europe. Out of the middle class of Englishmen,—the best blood of the island. And with it he conquered what? Englishmen,—their equals. This man manufactured his army out of what? Out of what you call the despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized by two hundred years of slavery, one hundred thousand of them imported into the island within four years, unable to speak a dialect intelligible even to each other. Yet out of this mixed, and, as you say, despicable mass he forged a thunderbolt and hurled it at what? At the proudest blood in Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike blood in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English, and they skulked home to Jamaica. Now, if Cromwell was a general, at least this man was a soldier.
Now, blue-eyed Saxon, proud of your race, go back with me to the commencement of the century, and select what statesman you please. Let him be either American or European; let him have a brain the result of six generations of culture; let him have the ripest training of university routine; let him add to it the better education of practical life; crown his temples with the silver locks of seventy years, and show me the man of Saxon lineage for whom his most sanguine admirer will wreathe a laurel, rich as embittered foes have placed on the brow of this negro,—rare military skill, profound knowledge of human nature, content to blot out all party distinctions, and trust a state to the blood of its sons,—anticipating Sir Robert Peel fifty years, and taking his station by the side of Roger Williams, before any Englishman or American had won the right; and yet this is the record which the history of rival States makes up for this inspired black of St. Domingo.
Some doubt the courage of the negro. Go to Hayti, and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had, and ask them what they think of the negro’s sword.
I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of blood. This man never broke his word. I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him into his grave. I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves. This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave-trade in the humblest village of his dominions.
You think me a fanatic, for you read history, not with your eyes but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of history will put Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright consummate flower of our earlier civilization, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the stateman, the martyr, Toussaint L’Ouverture.
