The Battle of Principles / A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict

by Newell Dwight Hillis

Within two years he succeeded in organizing in Philadelphia the American Anti-Slavery Society; by 1835 he convinced William Ellery Channing that the time had fully come for an active crusade, and this old minister, with a literary reputation in Europe almost as great as that of Washington Irving, published an abolition book called "Slavery," which is said to have been read by every prominent man in public life. In 1840 the society numbered not less than 200,000, and the hardest of Garrison's work was done.

But he was to have a potent ally in Wendell Phillips, the explanation of whose career is in his birth gifts. One of his ancestors was a Cambridge graduate, who rebelled against the tyranny of Charles, and exchanged wealth and position for a New England wilderness. It was one of his forefathers who was the first mayor of Boston. Another founded Phillips Exeter Academy. Wendell Phillips himself began his career at the moment when Madison's State Papers had won him the presidency, when John Adams was the glory of the city, when Channing was the light of the pulpit, and Lyman Beecher was the idol of orthodox Boston. He was in his early teens when he waited four hours on a Boston wharf to see Lafayette's boat come in. He was thirteen when he heard Daniel Webster's oration on Adams and Jefferson. He was sixteen when he entered Harvard College, and formed his lifelong friendship with his roommate, John Lothrop Motley. He studied law with Charles Sumner, in the office of Judge Story, a legal star of the first magnitude. He was counted one of the handsomest youths in Boston. There was nothing too bright or too hard for Wendell Phillips to aspire to, or hope for. At the critical moment, when he had to decide upon his future career, ambition sang to him, as to every noble youth. George William Curtis represents Phillips as sometimes forecasting the future, as he saw himself "succeeding Ames, and Otis and Webster, rising from the bar to the Legislature, from the Legislature to the Senate, from the Senate—who knows whither? He was already the idol of society, the applauded orator, the brilliant champion of the eloquent refinement and the conservatism of Massachusetts. The delight of social ease, the refined enjoyment of taste and letters and art, opulence, leisure, professional distinction, gratified ambition, all offered bribes to the young student." The measure of his manhood is in the way he thrust aside all honours and emoluments that stood in the path of duty. Only he who knows what he renounces gains the true blessing of renunciation.

The young orator's attitude towards slavery was determined by the mobbing of Garrison. One October afternoon in 1835 Wendell Phillips sat reading by an open window in his office on Court Street. Suddenly his attention was diverted from the page by voices, angry and profane, rising from the street without. Looking down he saw a multitude moving up the street, and soon found that the multitude had become a mob. Five thousand men were collected in front of the anti-slavery office, and were trying to crowd their way up the stairs in search of Garrison. In another room thirty women were assembled to organize a woman's abolition society. When the women found that the mob wanted to put them out also, they sent a message to Mayor Lyman asking protection. When the mayor arrived with the police, instead of dispelling the mob and protecting liberty of speech, the mayor dispelled the women and protected the mob. Discovering that they had the sympathy of the mayor and would be protected by the police, the lawless element rushed upon the office of the Liberator, smashed in the doors and windows, and dragged Garrison forth. Bareheaded, with a rope about his waist, his coat torn off, but with erect head, set lips, flashing eyes, Garrison was dragged down the street to the City Hall. On every side rose the shout "Kill him! Lynch him! —— the abolitionist!" Asking who the man was, Phillips was told that this was Garrison, the editor of the Liberator. Meeting the commander of the Boston regiment, of which he was a member, he exclaimed, "Why does not the mayor call out the troops? This is outrageous!" "Why," answered the officer, "don't you see that our militia are also the mob?" It was all too true. The mob was made up of men of property and standing. In that hour Wendell Phillips had his call. In the person of that man dragged down the street with a rope around his waist, the most gifted speaker in Boston had found his client; in the crusade against slavery he found his cause, and soon his clarion voice was heard sounding the onset.

To Garrison's organized agitation, begun in 1832, that soon spread all over the country, must be added a second cause for anti-slavery sentiment,—the murder of Lovejoy. This was on the night of November 7, 1837. The Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy was a young Presbyterian minister, a graduate of Princeton Seminary. He began his career as pastor of a little church in St. Louis and editor of the Presbyterian Observer. At that time he was not an abolitionist, and, perhaps because he had married the daughter of a slave owner, he had taken no strong position either for or against slavery. One day an officer arrested a black man in St. Louis who resisted arrest, and in the mêlée the officer was killed. His friends claimed that the negro was a freeman, and that there was a plot to kidnap him and sell him into the Southern cotton fields, and that he had a right to resist. The real facts will, doubtless, never be known. To slave owners, however, it was intolerable that a black man should resist an officer under any circumstances. A mob collected, the negro was bound to a stake, wood piled round about, and the prisoner was burned to death.

Efforts were made to punish the murderers. In the irony of events the name of the judge was Lawless, and he charged the grand jury substantially as follows: "When men are hurried by some mysterious metaphysical electric frenzy to commit a deed of violence they are absolved from guilt. If you should find that such was the fact in this case, then act not at all. The case transcends your jurisdiction, and is beyond the reach of human law." Of course all the murderers went free. When Mr. Lovejoy commented editorially upon this outrageous charge, encouraging lynch law, once again the "mysterious, metaphysical electric frenzy" broke forth, only this time it destroyed his printing office. The young minister decided to leave the slave State, and crossed to Alton, Illinois, where there was not only liberty of speech but liberty of the printing-press. But a mob crossed over from Missouri and destroyed his press. Determined to maintain his rights, Lovejoy then brought another press down the Ohio River from Cincinnati. A group of his friends carried the type from the steamboat to the warehouse, but the next night a second mob collected, and when Lovejoy stepped from the building he was riddled with bullets, the warehouse burned, and the press, for the third time, flung into the Mississippi. The news of this murder aroused the continent, filling the South with exultation, and the North with alarm. Slavery, a subject which had long been tabooed, suddenly became the one topic of conversation in the home, the store, the street-car. All editors wrote about it; all Northern pulpits began to preach on the subject. More faggots had been flung upon the fire, and oil added to the fierce flames.

Every explosion asks for powder, but also a spark. Falling on ice, a spark is impotent, falling on powder, an explosion is inevitable. Wendell Phillips had already been aroused to sympathy with Garrison and hatred of slavery, and news of the murder of Lovejoy fell upon his heart like a spark on a powder magazine. When Boston heard that Lovejoy had been shot by the mob in Alton, Illinois, while defending his printing-press, the leading men of Boston came together in Faneuil Hall. William Ellery Channing made the opening address, and asked that the meeting go on record through an indignant protest against this assault upon the rights of free citizens. James T. Austin, attorney-general of the commonwealth, replied in a bitter and insulting reference to Channing, asserting that a clergyman with a gun in his hand, or mingling in the debate of a popular assembly in Faneuil Hall, was marvellously out of place. Austin compared the slaves of the South to a menagerie of wild beasts, and asserted that Lovejoy in defending them was presumptuous, and died as a fool dieth. He added that the rioters in Alton killed Lovejoy and flung his press into the river in the spirit of the Boston mob that boarded the British ships in 1773, and threw the tea overboard on the night of the "Boston Tea Party."

That was a great moment in the history not only of liberty, but also in that of eloquence. Wendell Phillips, then but six years out of Harvard College, rose to reply. "A comparison has been drawn between the events of the Revolution and the tragedy at Alton. We have heard it asserted here in Faneuil Hall that Great Britain had a right to tax the colonies. And we have heard the mob at Alton, drunken murderers of Lovejoy, compared to those patriot fathers who threw the tea overboard! Fellow citizens, is this Faneuil Hall doctrine? The mob at Alton were met to wrest from a citizen his just rights,—met to resist the laws. Lovejoy had stationed himself within constitutional bulwarks. He was not only defending the freedom of the press, but he was under his own roof, in arms with the sanction of the civil authority. The men who assailed him went against and over the laws. The mob, as the gentleman terms it (mob, forsooth!—certainly we sons of the tea-spillers are a marvellously patient generation!), the 'orderly mob' which assembled in the Old South to destroy the tea were met to resist, not the laws, but illegal exactions. Shame on the American who calls the tea tax and Stamp Act laws! Our fathers resisted, not the king's prerogative, but the king's usurpation. To find any other account you must read our revolutionary history upside down. To draw the conduct of our ancestors into a precedent for mobs is an insult to their memory. They were the people rising to sustain the laws and constitution of the province. The rioters of our day go for their own wills, right or wrong. Sir, when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips [pointing to the portraits in the hall] would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American,—the slanderer of the dead. Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered, on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up. Imprudent to defend the liberty of the press! Why? Because the defense was unsuccessful? Does success gild crime into patriotism, and the want of it change heroic self-devotion into imprudence? Was Hampden imprudent when he drew the sword and threw away the scabbard?"

The next morning young Phillips, like Lord Byron, awoke to find himself famous. Merchants, politicians, who had long been staggering like drunken men, indifferent to their rights, and confused in their feelings, were stunned into sobriety, and began to discuss principles, and weigh characters, and analyze public leaders, and wakening, men found that they had been standing on the edge of a precipice. Phillips, already devoted to the slave, became now his tireless champion through many years, till the emancipation of 1863.

One evening in May, 1854, a negro was seen skulking in the shadows near a dock in Boston. This coloured man, Anthony Burns by name, was a slave, who had escaped from his Southern master, and after weeks had reached Philadelphia, where a Quaker had stowed him away in a ship bound for Boston. A Boston policeman who caught sight of the negro recalled the rewards offered for the capture of slaves, and soon ran the fugitive down, and had him before United States Commissioner Loring. The next morning Theodore Parker hastened to the court-room to say that he was the chaplain of the Abolition Society, and had come to offer counsel. But the fugitive was afraid to accept the overture, lest his master punish him the more severely.

The news spread quickly throughout the city, and two nights later a meeting in Faneuil Hall was attended by an enormous gathering, aroused to the highest pitch of excitement. Hand-bills had been put out, stating that kidnappers were in the city. The people were in a frenzy. Theodore Parker delivered one of his most impassioned addresses. "I am an old man; I have heard hurrahs and cheers for liberty many times; I have not seen a great many deeds done for liberty. I ask you, Are we to have deeds as well as words?" Parker moved that, when the meeting adjourned, it should be to meet the following morning in the square before the court-house. But he had raised too great a storm to control; a rumour that a mob of negroes was at that very moment trying to rescue Burns was all that was needed to empty the room; and the crowd rushed out to the court-house square. There they discovered a small party of men, led by Thomas W. Higginson, trying to batter down the court-house doors. The crowd lent them willing hands. But the marshall defended the building,—shots were fired,—Higginson wounded, and several of his followers arrested. Two companies of artillery were at once ordered out by the mayor, and the attempt to rescue the negro met with complete and disastrous failure. Wendell Phillips and Parker were the leaders in the fight. When asked what he would regard as grounds for the return of Burns to his master, Phillips answered, "Nothing short of a bill of sale from Almighty God."