But there had come a lull. There were still hopes that a conflict between North and South might be averted and that politics might do the work of arms. Mr. Franklin Pierce was President, but Mr. Banks had been elected Speaker of the House of Representatives at the first session of the Thirty-fourth Congress in December, 1855. Mr. Blaine said that marked an epoch, and he described it in his brilliant Twenty Years of Congress as "a distinctive victory of the Free States over the consolidated power of the Slave States."
But the Republicans were slow in coming to power, and their nomination of General Frémont in 1856 sowed distrust among the sounder men of the party. Mr. Buchanan's election seemed to confirm the ascendency of the South, and the mind of Boston, or at any rate of State Street, reverted to commercial politics. The Abolitionists were as much under a cloud as ever. From 1857 to 1860 things seemed to be going backward. The Harper's Ferry business alarmed the ingrained conservatism of Boston, and though the hanging of John Brown shocked a good many merchants and bankers, they could not understand, and were far from approving, Brown's scheme or Brown's methods. The state of feeling in Boston was, in short, confused, and the emotions of 1854 had gone to sleep.
The crisis came in December, 1860. The Abolitionists tried to hold an Anti-Slavery Convention in Tremont Temple, on the anniversary of the hanging of John Brown or the day after. They do not seem to have expected trouble; at any rate, they took no sufficient precautions to keep the peace and keep control of their own meeting. A "broadcloth mob"—the phrase long since became classic in Boston—occupied the hall in force, captured the platform peacefully, elbowed the Abolitionists off it, appointed their own chairman, Mr. Richard S. Fay, and passed their own resolutions. "Broadcloth," said Phillips, "does not make a gentleman." The Convention was summoned to consider "How shall American slavery be abolished?" The John Brown anniversary was thought a suitable day for the discussion of that question, but Brown's death was referred to simply as "too glorious to need defence or eulogy." When Mr. Fay, the ringleader of the mob, thinking his work done, had departed, Mr. Frank Sanborn, the lawful chairman, resumed his place, and would have held the lawfully summoned meeting. Then the mob leaders, Mr. Murray Howe now at their head, made a fresh attack. The police sided with them and the Mayor cleared the hall.
There is a little confusion of dates. Brown was, in fact, hanged December 2nd, the fateful day of Austerlitz and of the Third Napoleon's coup d'état. But these events in Boston occurred, I think, on the 3rd. The men who had been driven out of Tremont Temple by the mob, of which the Mayor finally took command, reassembled in the evening, very quietly, in a little hall in Belknap Street, on what was impolitely known as Nigger Hill, not far from the rather aristocratic Mount Vernon Street. Wendell Phillips, to an audience of perhaps three or four hundred—all the place would hold—made an unreported speech, red-hot with wrath. A little more than a year before, November 1st, 1859, a fortnight after Brown's attempt and while he lay in prison waiting to be hanged, Phillips had spoken in Brooklyn, and announced that the lesson of the hour was insurrection. But he weakened the force of that counsel by adding that the age of bullets was over; it was an insurrection of thought; like that of the last thirty years; he still had in mind. Now, here in Boston, and not for the first time nor for the last, he was face to face with forces which were not intellectual nor moral, but forces of violence. Phillips could not readily shake off the influences of his whole public life. He still believed in "moral suasion." He was presently to learn that moralities and the counsels of peace were a poor defence against men prepared to back their opinions with revolvers. But even after the hanging of Brown, at his grave in North Elba, Phillips could say: "I do not believe slavery will go down in blood. Ours is the age of thought."
Perhaps the meeting of December, 1860, marks the beginning of his conversion, but by no means its completion. He had long been used to mobs and mob law. But now the lesson was being pressed home.
A memorable evening to me, because from it came my acquaintance with Phillips, whom I had never met. Under the spell, I suppose, of his passionate eloquence, I went home and wrote him a letter. I explained that I was a Whig that my family and friends were Whigs, that I belonged in a hostile camp, but that I thought there ought to be free speech in Boston, and I would do what I could for that cause and for him if he would say what. I was, as most young, or old, men of Massachusetts then were, against slavery, especially in Massachusetts, but not an Abolitionist.
The next day, about noon, the door of my law office in State Street opened, and Phillips walked in. Without a word of preface he said:
"You wrote me a letter?"
"Yes."
"Will you come and see me at my house this evening, and we will have a talk? This morning I have not a moment."