Our talk lasted late, turned on some personal matters, then drifted far away to national issues, and much else. I thought Phillips, if anything, more eloquent in talk than in oratory, yet with never a sentence which had in it the ring of the platform. He was direct, simple, persuasive, and luminous. His frankness surprised me, but he told me afterward he had made inquiries and thought it safe to be frank. No doubt he saw that mine was a sincere devotion, and perhaps he was aware of the enchantments he wove about whom he would. At any rate, he gave me his confidence from the start.
During the next fortnight I saw many men among my Whig acquaintances. They made no secret of their purpose to break up that Sunday meeting at the Music Hall. Soon these rumours became public. When the subject of Phillips's discourse was announced, the rumours spread and grew more menacing. The police felt themselves called on to take notice of what was likely to happen. Phillips, long used to dealing with mobs, seemed to think the police superfluous. Some of us who had looked into the matter well knew they were not. Seeing Phillips from day to day, I asked him again and again to promise his friends one thing, viz. that he would put himself and leave himself in their hands. He still thought we were making too much of a slight danger, but finally he promised. There had been mobs in Boston before this, where the police and the mob had acted together. They so acted when Richard S. Fay and Amos Lawrence, and Murray Howe and their friends broke up the Anti-Slavery Convention in Tremont Temple on the morning of December 3rd—this same month. And it was that mob from which Phillips was to take his text on this Sunday. A piquant situation, if it had not been something much more serious, with all the materials of a great tragedy.
This time the mob leaders, whoever they were, had changed their tactics. They did not propose to capture the Music Hall or prevent Phillips from speaking. He was to be dealt with outside. None the less did the police and Phillips's friends, unaware of details, take measures to guard the interior. The police were in force in the lobbies and passages and at the exterior approaches to the platform; but out of sight. Scores of them were in the building, and a much larger force in waiting hard by. The platform, which ran from one side of the hall to the other at the south end, was garrisoned by Phillips's friends, armed. The enemy also were armed, and no man could say what that Sabbath morning might bring forth. Naturally, we did not know of the decision of the mob leaders, all in broadcloth, to postpone their assault till the meeting was over. We expected trouble inside, and were ready for it. I said as little as possible to Phillips of what I thought likely to happen. I well knew that if he were told there was any peril in freedom of speech, his speech would be freer than ever.
He always believed in personalities, saying:
"In such a cause as ours you must at all hazards rouse attention. Men whose minds are made up against you will listen to a personal attack when they will listen to nothing else. If I denounce the sin they go to sleep, but when I denounce the sinner they wake up."
There was to be no going to sleep on this eventful Sunday. The speech on "Mobs and Education" is perhaps the most personal, and the most merciless, of all Phillips's speeches. The Tremont Temple rioters had delivered themselves into his hands. He knew every man among them and the joint in every armour. Many of them were there on Sunday. You saw the arrow leave the platform and sink deep in the quivering flesh. The cheers were soon mingled with hisses. The air grew hot. But the majority were there to hear and the hisses were silenced. There were passes of burning eloquence, of pathos, of invective that tore its way through all defences.
"I have used strong words. But I was born in Boston, and the good name of the old town is bound up with every fibre of my heart. I dare not trust myself to describe the insolence of men who undertake to dictate to you and me what we shall say in these grand old streets."
Thus spoke the aristocrat, the Bostonian proud of Boston and of his own descent from six or seven generations of the Boston Phillipses; an aristocracy equal to the best. His contempt for the Fays and the rest of the "cotton clerks" was largely a contempt for the plebeian. Plebeians, to the Boston mind, most of them were. Fay is pilloried for ever in this speech; and others are pilloried.