And he began at once to consider how he should announce his conversion. Having gone over, he took his whole heart with him. No compromise, no transition, not one word to retract, not a hint of apology or explanation. Yesterday an Abolitionist to whom the Constitution was a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. To-day a soldier for the Union. Presently he said:
"It will be the most important speech of my life. I don't often write, as you know, but I shall write this and will read it to you when it is finished."
Two days later he sent for me again and these were the first sentences I heard:
"Many times this winter, here and elsewhere, I have counselled peace—urged as well as I knew how the expediency of acknowledging a Southern Confederacy and the peaceful separation of these thirty-four States. One of the journals announces to you that I come here this morning to retract those opinions. No not one of them."
I said: "Mr. Phillips, you will never get beyond that. They will not listen."
"Then they will be the last sentences I shall ever utter in public. But do you listen."
And he went on, in his finest platform manner and voice:
"No, not one of them. I need them all; every word I have spoken this winter; every act of twenty-five years of my life, to make the welcome I give this War hearty and hot."
He knew what he was about. When it became known he was to speak for the Union, Charles Pollen came to me and asked whether I thought Phillips would like the Music Hall platform hung with the American flag. "Yes," said Phillips, "deck the altar for the victim." And decked it was—a forest of flags; and the flags told the story, long before Phillips opened his mouth. There was not a note of remonstrance as he announced his refusal to retract. And again he went on:
"Civil war is a momentous evil. It needs the soundest, most solemn justification. I rejoice before God to-day for every word I have spoken counselling peace, but I rejoice also, and still more deeply, that now, for the first time in my Anti-Slavery life, I speak beneath the Stars and Stripes, and welcome the tread of Massachusetts men marshalled for war."