He pronounced a eulogy on the Southern State which had led the way:
"South Carolina, bankrupt, alone, with a hundred thousand more slaves than whites, four blacks to three whites within her borders, flings her gauntlet at the feet of twenty-four millions of people—in defence of an idea."
A month later he was in the same mood. It was a trait of Phillips—not a good one—that he attacked most mercilessly the men who hated slavery as much as he did, but could not go as far as he did. In this February speech there is a long lampoon on Dana; counsel for the slave in all the fugitive slave cases, but never denying—what lawyer ever did deny?—that there was a constitutional obligation to return fugitives. It is human nature, but not the best side of it.
Such a reproach came ill from a man who denounced the Constitution as a covenant with death because of the compromises with slavery imbedded in the great instrument of 1787. Of these compromises the rendition of fugitive slaves was one. Phillips himself could not deny it. The difference between him and Dana was that Dana would bow to the law and Phillips would not. Dana would do what he could by legal means to rescue the fugitive. He defended him in the courts. Phillips would have defended him in the streets. Both men were needful to the time. The Abolitionists were very far from disdaining the use of legal weapons. When Theodore Parker had been indicted and the Court, at the instance of his counsel, quashed the indictment on purely technical grounds, Parker exulted. "It is a triumph for the right. We have broken their sword."
There came, however, the moment when Phillips had to cast in his lot, for good or evil, with either North or South. He hesitated long. He thought and thought. He talked with his friends, with the man in the street, with the men who had lately mobbed him. One morning he came into my office. His sunny face was clouded. He looked anxious, almost ill. He had to make the most momentous decision of his life; and he could not yet make up his mind. He said:
"I came to talk to you because I know you are against me. What I have said to you before makes no impression. You still think I ought to renounce my past, thirty years of it, belie my pledges, disown every profession of faith, bless those whom I have cursed, start afresh with a new set of political principles, and admit my life has been a mistake."
"Certainly not the last," I said, "and as for the others, are you not taking a rhetorical view, a platform view? But I will go further. I don't think it matters much what you sacrifice—consistency, principles, or anything. They belong to the past. They have nothing to do with to-day. The war is upon us. You must either support it or oppose it. If you oppose it, you fling away your position and all your influence. You will never be listened to again."
And so on. He sat silent, unmoved. Nothing I could say, nothing anybody could say, would move him. All his life long he had thought for himself; in a minority of one. It had to be so now. We talked on. Finally, I said: "I will tell you what I once heard a negro say: 'When my massa and somebody else quarrel I'm on the somebody else's side.' Don't you think the negro knows? Do you really doubt that a war between the Slave Power and the North, be the result what it may, must end in Freedom?" I am not sure that I ever did hear a negro say that, but I hoped that Phillips would open his mind to the negro if not to me. And I think he did. I trust this little artifice of debate was not very wrong. I had to urge what I could, but I knew Phillips would decide for himself. He left saying, "I will see you again to-night." I went to his house. When I opened the door of the parlour, there lay Phillips on the sofa, asleep. Ten minutes later he awoke; lay silent for another minute, then said:
"We shall not have to discuss these things any more. I am going to speak next Sunday at the Music Hall for the War and the Union."