He was taken to the Mayor's room, provided with needful clothing, thrust into a closed carriage, and driven rapidly to jail, "as a disturber of the peace," but in reality to save his life. The mob clung to the wheels, dashed open the doors, seized the horses, and tried to upset the carriage; but the driver laid his whip on horses and heads of rioters alike, and Garrison was finally safely locked in a cell.
Wendell Phillips looked on bewildered, and seeing, near by, the colonel of his own Suffolk regiment, in which he also was an officer, said, "Why does not the Mayor call out the regiment? We would cheerfully take arms in such a case as this."
The reply was, "Don't you see that the regiment is in the mob?"
The young lawyer went back to his office sadly and thoughtfully.
He said, twenty years later, before the anti-slavery meeting on the anniversary of this mob: "Let me thank the women who came here twenty years ago, some of whom are met here to-day, for the good they have done me. I thank them for all they have taught me. I had read Greek and Roman and English history; I had by heart the classic eulogies of brave old men and martyrs; I dreamed, in my folly, that I heard the same tone in my youth from the cuckoo lips of Edward Everett;—these women taught me my mistake. They taught me that down in those hearts, which loved a principle for itself, asked no man's leave to think or speak, true to their convictions, no matter at what hazard, flowed the real blood of '76, of 1640, of the hemlock-drinker of Athens, and of the martyr-saints of Jerusalem. I thank them for it!"
The year after the Garrison mobbing scene, Phillips began to take part in the lyceum lectures, which at that time were popular, as the University Extension lectures are now. He spoke usually upon some topic in natural science, being more fond of this evidently than of the law.
The colored people were refused admittance to lectures; and this fact so incensed Emerson, Sumner, George William Curtis, and Phillips, that they refused to speak where the negroes were not admitted. This refusal soon broke the exclusive and unnatural custom.
In this year, 1836, Phillips met a young lady two years younger than himself, Ann Terry Greene, the daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant. Her cousin, Miss Grew, was to go by stage-coach with her intended husband to Greenfield, Mass., and Miss Greene was to accompany them. Phillips was asked to join the party. The brilliant young woman, as she herself said, "talked abolition to him all the way up." Mr. Phillips was never a great talker, but a good listener. He said, "I learn something from every one."
Both parents were dead; and she had been received as a daughter into the home of her uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Henry G. Chapman, who lived in Chauncy Place, near Summer Street. Both were warm friends of Garrison, and deeply interested in the anti-slavery movement. The young girl, with all the enthusiasm of youth, and the impulse of a strong and noble nature, espoused the cause of the slave, and was not afraid to stand for the right in a choice so unpopular among the rich and aristocratic.