Brave Men and Women: Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs

by Osgood E. Fuller

THE TIMES WHEN HE APPEARED--"WHO IS THIS FELLOW?"--A FLAMING ADVOCATE OF LIBERTY--LIBERTY OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT--POWER TO DISCERN THE RIGHT--THE MOB-BEATEN HERO TRIUMPHANT.

Long chapters of history are illumined as by as electric light in the following characteristic address from his pulpit by Henry Ward Beecher, at the time the name of the great philanthropist was added to the roll of American heroes.

THE TIMES WHEN HE APPEARED.

The condition of the public mind throughout the North at the time I came to the consciousness of public affairs and was studying my profession may be described, in one word, as the condition of imprisoned moral sense. All men, almost, agreed with all men that slavery was wrong; but what can we do? The compromises of our fathers include us and bind us to fidelity to the agreements that had been made in the formation of our Constitution. Our confederation first, and our Constitution after. These were regarded everywhere as moral obligations by men that hated slavery. "The compromises of the Constitution must be respected," said the priest in the pulpit, said the politician in the field, said the statesmen in public halls; and men abroad, in England especially, could not understand what was the reason of the hesitancy of President Lincoln and of the people, when they had risen to arms, in declaring at once the end for which arms were taken and armies gathered to be the emancipation of the slaves. There never has been an instance in which, I think, the feelings and the moral sense of so large a number of people have been held in check for reasons of fidelity to obligations assumed in their behalf. There never has been in history another instance more notable, and I am bound to say, with all its faults and weaknesses, more noble. The commercial question--that being the underlying moral element--the commercial question of the North very soon became, on the subject of slavery, what the industrial and political question of the South had made it. It corrupted the manufacturer and the merchant. Throughout the whole North every man that could make any thing regarded the South as his legal, lawful market; for the South did not manufacture; it had the cheap and vulgar husbandry of slavery. They could make more money with cotton than with corn, or beef, or pork, or leather, or hats, or wooden-ware; and Northern ships went South to take their forest timbers, and brought them to Connecticut to be made into wooden-ware and ax-helves and rake-handles, and carried them right back to sell to the men whose axes had cut down the trees. The South manufactured nothing except slaves. It was a great manufacture, that; and the whole market of the North was bribed. The harness-makers, the wagon-makers, the clock-makers, makers of all manner of implements, of all manner of goods, every manufactory, every loom as it clanked in the North said, "Maintain," not slavery, but the "compromises of the Constitution." The Constitution--that was the veil under which all these cries were continually uttered.

The distinction between the Anti-slavery men and Abolitionists was simply this: The Abolitionists disclaimed the obligation to maintain this government and the compromises of the Constitution, and the Anti-slavery men recognized the binding obligation and sought the emancipation of slaves by the more circuitous and gradual influence; but Abolitionism covered both terms. It was regarded, however, throughout the North as a greater sin than slavery itself, and none of you that are under thirty years of age can form any adequate conception of the public sentiment and feeling during the days of my young manhood. A man that was known to be an Abolitionist had better be known to have the plague. Every door was shut to him. If he was born under circumstances that admitted him to the best society, he was the black sheep of the family. If he aspired by fidelity, industry, and genius, to good society, he was debarred. "An Abolitionist" was enough to put the mark of Cain upon any young man that arose in my early day, and until I was forty years of age. It was punishable to preach on the subject of liberty. It was enough to expel a man from Church communion, if he insisted on praying in the prayer-meeting for the liberation of the slaves. The Church was dumb in the North, not in the West. The great publishing societies that were sustained by the contributions of the Churches were absolutely dumb.

"WHO IS THIS FELLOW?"

It was at the beginning of this Egyptian era in America that the young aristocrat of Boston appeared. His blood came through the best colonial families. He was an aristocrat by descent and by nature; a noble one, but a thorough aristocrat. All his life and power assumed that guise. He was noble; he was full of kindness to inferiors; he was willing to be, and do, and suffer for them; but he was never of them, nor equaled himself to them. He was always above them, and his gifts of love were always the gifts of a prince to his subjects. All his life long he resented every attack on his person and on his honor, as a noble aristocrat would. When they poured the filth of their imaginations upon him, he cared no more for it than the eagle cares what the fly is thinking about him away down under the cloud. All the miserable traffickers, and all the scribblers, and all the aristocratic boobies of Boston were no more to him than mosquitoes are to the behemoth or to the lion. He was aristocratic in his pride, and lived higher than most men lived. He was called of God as much as ever Moses and the prophets were; not exactly for the same great end, but in consonance with those great ends. You remember, my brother, when Lovejoy was infamously slaughtered by a mob in Alton?--blood that has been the seed of liberty all over this land! I remember it. At this time it was that Channing lifted up his voice and declared that the moral sentiment of Boston ought to be uttered in rebuke of that infamy and cruelty, and asking for Faneuil Hall in which to call a public meeting. This was indignantly refused by the Common Council of Boston. Being a man of wide influence, he gathered around about himself enough venerable and influential old citizens of Boston to make a denial of their united request a perilous thing; and Faneuil Hall was granted to call a public meeting to express itself on this subject of the murder of Lovejoy. The meeting was made up largely of rowdies. They meant to overawe and put down all other expressions of opinion except those that then rioted with the riotous. United States District-attorney Austin (when Wendell Phillips's name is written in letters of light on one side of the monument, down low on the other side, and spattered with dirt, let the name of Austin also be written) made a truculent speech, and justified the mob, and ran the whole career of the sewer of those days and justified non-interference with slavery. Wendell Phillips, just come to town as a young lawyer, without at present any practice, practically unknown, except to his own family, fired with the infamy, and, feeling called of God in his soul, went upon the platform. His first utterances brought down the hisses of the mob. He was not a man very easily subdued by any mob. They listened as he kindled and poured on that man Austin the fire and lava of a volcano, and he finally turned the course of the feeling of the meeting. Practically unknown when the sun went down one day, when it rose next morning all Boston was saying, "Who is this fellow? Who is this Phillips?" A question that has never been asked since.

A FLAMING ADVOCATE OF LIBERTY.

Thenceforth he has been a flaming advocate of liberty, with singular advantages over all other pleaders. Mr. Garrison was not noted as a speaker, yet his tongue was his pen. Mr. Phillips, not much given to the pen, his pen was his tongue; and no other like speaker has ever graced our history. I do not undertake to say that he surpassed all others. He had an intense individuality, and that intense individuality ranked him among the noblest orators that have ever been born to this continent, or I may say to our mother-land. He adopted in full the tenets of Garrison, which were excessively disagreeable to the whole public mind. The ground which he took was that which Garrison took. Seeing that the conscience of the North was smothered and mute by reason of the supposed obligations to the compromises of the Constitution, Garrison declared that the compromises of the Constitution were covenants with hell, and that no man was bound to observe them. This extreme ground Mr. Phillips also took,--immediate, unconditional, universal emancipation, at any cost whatsoever. That is Garrisonism; that is Wendell Phillipsism; and it would seem as though the Lord rather leaned that way, too.

I shall not discuss the merits of Mr. Garrison or Mr. Phillips in every direction. I shall say that while the duty of immediate emancipation without conditions was unquestionably the right ground, yet in the providence of God even that could not be brought to pass except through the mediation of very many events. It is a remarkable thing that Mr. Phillips and Mr. Garrison both renounced the Union and denounced the Union in the hope of destroying slavery; whereas the providence of God brought about the love of the Union when it was assailed by the South, and made the love of the Union the enthusiasm that carried the great war of emancipation through. It was the very antithesis of the ground which they took. Like John Brown, Mr. Garrison; like John Brown, Mr. Phillips; of a heroic spirit, seeking the great and noble, but by measures not well adapted to secure the end.