Wendell Phillips biography

Dromo's Den

Wendell Phillips Biography

PHILLIPS, Wendell (1811–84). An eminent American orator and reformer, born in Boston. He was educated at Harvard, graduating in 1831, the year of the first appearance of the Liberator. After a three years' course at the Cambridge Law School he was admitted to the Suffolk County bar, but he was little interested in professional eminence. On Oct. 21, 1835, from his office window he indignantly saw Garrison dragged at a rope's end by a respectable mob; in 1836 he joined the Abolitionists, and thereafter was occasionally heard at meetings of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He came at once into prominence by his Faneuil Hall speech of Dec. 8, 1837. At the instance of Dr. W. E. Channing a public assembly had convened to protest in a suitable manner against the murder of the Rev. E. P. Lovejoy (q.v.) at Alton, Ill. This purpose seemed likely to be defeated by J. T. Austin, Attorney-General of Massachusetts, who commended the Alton rioters and affirmed that Lovejoy "died as the fool dieth." To this Phillips made a brilliant and crushing reply, whose eloquence he never surpassed, and which has been ranked by Curtis with Henry's oration at Williamsburg and Lincoln's Gettysburg address. From that time he was an antislavery leader, preëminently the orator of the movement. In 1839 he withdrew from the practice of law through scruples against compliance with the attorney's oath to the Constitution, and later he refused to stand for a Congress which he could not enter without swearing allegiance to that same Constitution. He called for the immediate and complete abolition of slavery, declared the Church particeps criminis for its attempt to justify slavery by the Scriptures, opposed colonization for the negro, discontinued voting, and regarded disunion as the best means for accomplishing emancipation. He was not, however, like Garrison, a nonresistant. In the Abolitionist divisions of 1839–40 he with Garrison opposed the organization of the Abolitionists into a political party and the attempt to bar any from the antislavery platform on the ground of religious beliefs. In 1840 he was the representative of the Massachusetts Abolitionists at the London World's Antislavery Convention. Differences arose between himself and Garrison in 1864 in regard to Lincoln's reëlection, which he did not favor; and in 1865 these differences were renewed when he advocated and Garrison opposed the continuance of the Antislavery Society. His contention was that the work of the society was not finished until the negro obtained the suffrage. As a result he was elected in Garrison's stead (1865) to the presidency of the society, which was dissolved in April, 1870, on the passing of the Fifteenth Amendment. Phillips was prominently active in the various controversies of the Reconstruction. He spoke in behalf of Ireland, of Crete, of the Indian, prison reform, also of the abolition of capital punishment, prohibitory legislation regulating the sale of liquor, the greenback theory, and in connection with the labor question urged that vast combinations of capital with unlimited monopolies and powers tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. In 1870 he received about 20,000 ballots as labor reform and temperance candidate for the governorship of Massachusetts.

Phillips must be compared among American orators to Everett, Clay, and Webster; and his achievement is, perhaps, to be reckoned greater than that of any of these when it is considered that, whereas they represented a strong political organization or powerful conservative opinion, he attacked existing prejudices and institutions, for years spoke to hostile audiences, was denounced by the two great parties and belonged to none. His manner was that of "simple colloquy," so that Greeley said Phillips made one think it easy to be an orator. His voice was in the baritone register, used largely in what elocutionists call the upper chest notes, and remarkable not so much for its compass, volume, or intensity as for its timbre. In gesture or general action he was sparing. He seldom employed the dramatic mode of expression. But in invective or epigram he was unsurpassed; he possessed wit, which most other notable American orators have lacked, and he told an anecdote with much skill. Phillips was not a scholar in the restricted sense, for this the demands made upon his time as a public speaker did not permit. But his reading was considerable, and he could always find illustrative material in the one subject he was accustomed to say he knew thoroughly, the great English Revolution. In addition to his antislavery and other reform speeches, he appeared in various lyceum addresses, the most noteworthy of which are The Lost Arts, Toussaint l'Ouverture, and Daniel O'Connell, and in 1881 he made a distinguished oration on The Scholar in a Republic at the centennial anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard. During antislavery days he always offered to speak without remuneration and to pay his expenses if he might use antislavery for a literary subject. He wrote for the Liberator and the Antislavery Standard and published a number of pamphlets, including The Constitution a Proslavery Compact (1844); Can Abolitionists Vote or Take Office under the United States Constitution? (1845); Review of Spooner's Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1847); Review of Webster's Seventh-of-March Speech (1850); Review of Kossuth's Course (1851); Defense of the Anti-slavery Movement (1853). Collections of Speeches, Lectures, and Letters have appeared at Boston, the first series, edited by James Redpath, in 1864, the second by T. C. Pease in 1892. These are edited from the best stenographic reports.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol XVIII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 510.