At this meeting the small and unpopular set of Abolitionists was in a measure reinforced by persons who had not been identified with them; for it was a meeting in the interests of free speech. Lovejoy had been killed by a mob in Illinois, and the people of Boston were called to their historic Town Hall to remonstrate. The moderator selected was Jonathan Phillips, a relative of Wendell’s, and a man deservedly of leading position in Boston. He was rich, enterprising and wise. He was a leader in philanthropic organization. He was a great friend of Dr. William Ellery Channing, who said of him once, “I have had much more from Mr. Phillips than he ever had from me;” this from a friend who was saying that Phillips had derived great profit from Dr. Channing’s preaching. Benjamin F. Hallett, a distinguished anti-Masonic leader, moved the resolutions. Hillard, a young lawyer, sustained them, and the event of the day—on the program—was a speech from Dr. Channing, whose reputation as a man of letters and a leader in religious opinion was at its height, and who was senior pastor of the most fashionable and influential church in Boston. But the meeting was held in Faneuil Hall, which, by a clause in the city charter, must be given for the use of any fifty citizens who asked for it for a public purpose. Of course, at such a meeting any citizen might be present. On this occasion the enemies of the Abolitionists were on hand in force. When the fit moment came for them to reply, James T. Austin, one of the political leaders of the State, of Democratic antecedents, but now Attorney General of the State, under the rule of the newly named Whig party, took the floor against the resolutions proposed. It was clear enough that the hall was well filled with marketmen and truckmen, and other laboring men, who, in those days, all supposed that a “nigger” was the most despicable creature in the world, excepting that an “Abolitionist” was worse. Austin never spared invective, and he used it on this occasion to denounce Lovejoy and those who abetted him.
I doubt if Phillips knew he was going to speak when he went to the meeting. Indeed, it is quite sure, that Austin secured for him the attention of the unfriendly assembly. But he had not spoken long before he was sure of their audience.
“I thought this floor would yawn open before the gentleman and swallow him up. I thought the pictured forms behind me here would step from their frames in horror at his words.” These are Phillips’s phrases, which in one form or another those men repeat who heard him.
The meeting was pitilessly opposed to him and his. After a fashion a vote was obtained for all the resolutions of sympathy. But nobody cared whether they passed or not. Nobody heard Phillips that day who did not know that there was an orator in the town who could do much what he would with any audience.
He spared nobody and no thing in his attack. He never did till the last hour of his life. And it is right to say, that the people he opposed, denounced and satirized, replied with the sneer so often lavished on such men, “He has a devil and is mad, why do you hear him?” “Phillips’s crazy talk” is the phrase you constantly find as you turn over private or published letters of those times. None the less did people go to hear him, and, as I said, he could do with an audience, friendly or unfriendly, much what he would. He seemed to be—I think he was—quite careless about preparation. If he was asked to speak for the cause, he spoke. He thus had, very soon, the best possible training for his business. If I am right, it is the only training worth much—namely, constant practice. I have never, in forty years, varied from the opinion I expressed the night I first heard him, that he was the best public speaker we had in New England, as he was the best I had heard anywhere. He had the double gift of language and of easy familiar gesture. He was absolutely at his ease. He talked with his audience, played with them, joked with them, reasoned with them, scolded them, ridiculed them, soothed them, flattered them and compelled them, just as he chose. He knew his audience through and through. He knew what speech to make to them. He was never guilty of that ghastly folly which insists on addressing to the audience of to-day the speech which pleased some other audience a week ago.
I have no intention of writing his biography or an abridged history of the time in which he was so active. I think he did not long remain at the bar. I think it was as early as 1838 that he refused to take the attorney’s oath of allegiance to the United States, without which he could not practice in any United States Court. For the theory of the extreme Abolitionists was that they must break up the Constitution of the United States. But in practice very few of their adherents followed them fully here, and many a man who cordially supported their newspapers and their meetings, voted as he chose at the next election, or when the time came went loyally into battle for the old flag. Nay, of Phillips himself I remember this: I met him on the Sunday before Fort Sumter was fired upon, and we walked half a mile together. He had brought up town the last news from the bulletin about the preparations of the South Carolina batteries. I had been on the spot, on Sullivan’s Island, and pointed out some inconsistency in the narrative, saying, what I thought then, that I believed the whole thing would turn out to be mere Carolina bluster. To which he replied with great cordiality, “I am sure I hope so;” and from that moment to the end of the war I think no one enjoyed the national successes more thoroughly than he.
Side by side with the Anti-Slavery excitement, which every one connects with his name, was the growth of what may fairly enough be called the “Lyceum Movement.” In the beginning this was thought as pure a piece of philanthropy as the other. Almost every public spirited man considered it his duty to have one or more “Lectures” which he should deliver at the call of his neighbors when they had a “Lyceum.” I have no doubt that Phillips’s early lecturing was a bit of philanthropic effort of this sort. But as things went on, enterprising committees began to raise the price of their tickets, to send for distant lecturers and to pay them enough to make it worth their while to come. Even college societies and the providers for Commencement entertainments found it wise to pay a handsome honorarium to their speakers, and I am afraid that the element of philanthropy has long since disappeared from what is called the “Lecture Platform.” Phillips had an ingenious way of uniting the functions of a literary and of a political lecturer. No one was in more demand than he for the regular work of the winter Lyceums. But it would often happen that the timidity of a committee made them pause before they would listen to his radicalism in a lecture. For such agents he was quite ready. If people had scruples they must pay for them. His program was: “For a literary lecture without politics, $100 and my expenses.” “For a political lecture, nothing, and I pay my fares.”
He used to tell a story of his arrival at a western city where the committee were divided, four to four, on the question whether they would hear his lecture on the “Lost Arts” or a political speech. Perhaps he would determine between them.
“Let us have both,” said Phillips. To which they eagerly assented. So he delivered the “Lost Arts” first, innocent as a new rosebud of any political bias. Then a recess was given to the audience, and all who wished to go might go. But of course, after that beginning, no one went. And so Phillips had another hour, and an audience for as many heresies as he chose to utter.