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Anglo-American Memories

<h3> CHAPTER IX WENDELL PHILLIPS </h3> It was in the winter of 1860-61 that the Massachusetts allies of the Southern Slave Power made their last effort. Spite of Webster's death, with whom died the brains of the party and its vital force, these men were still powerful in Boston. The surrender of Anthony Burns in May, 1854, the birth of the Republican Party at Worcester in July of the same year, the election of Mr. Henry Wilson as Governor, the cowardly assault in the United States Senate on Charles Sumner by Mr. Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, in 1856—these events had indeed stirred the people of Massachusetts into revolt against the Slave Party in this Free State. But there had come a lull. There were still hopes that a conflict between North and South might be averted and that politics might do the work of arms. Mr. Franklin Pierce was President, but Mr. Banks had been elected Speaker of the House of Representatives at the first session of the Thirty-fourth Congress in December, 1855. Mr. Blaine said that marked an epoch, and he described it in his brilliant {85} Twenty Years of Congress as "a distinctive victory of the Free States over the consolidated power of the Slave States." But the Republicans were slow in coming to power, and their nomination of General Frémont in 1856 sowed distrust among the sounder men of the party. Mr. Buchanan's election seemed to confirm the ascendency of the South, and the mind of Boston, or at any rate of State Street, reverted to commercial politics. The Abolitionists were as much under a cloud as ever. From 1857 to 1860 things seemed to be going backward. The Harper's Ferry business alarmed the ingrained conservatism of Boston, and though the hanging of John Brown shocked a good many merchants and bankers, they could not understand, and were far from approving, Brown's scheme or Brown's methods. The state of feeling in Boston was, in short, confused, and the emotions of 1854 had gone to sleep. The crisis came in December, 1860. The Abolitionists tried to hold an Anti-Slavery Convention in Tremont Temple, on the anniversary of the hanging of John Brown or the day after. They do not seem to have expected trouble; at any rate, they took no sufficient precautions to keep the peace and keep control of their own meeting. A "broadcloth mob"—the phrase long since became classic in Boston—occupied the hall in force, captured the platform peacefully, elbowed the Abolitionists off it, appointed their own chairman, Mr. Richard S. Fay, and passed {86} their own resolutions. "Broadcloth," said Phillips, "does not make a gentleman." The Convention was summoned to consider "How shall American slavery be abolished?" The John Brown anniversary was thought a suitable day for the discussion of that question, but Brown's death was referred to simply as "too glorious to need defence or eulogy." When Mr. Fay, the ringleader of the mob, thinking his work done, had departed, Mr. Frank Sanborn, the lawful chairman, resumed his place, and would have held the lawfully summoned meeting. Then the mob leaders, Mr. Murray Howe now at their head, made a fresh attack. The police sided with them and the Mayor cleared the hall. There is a little confusion of dates. Brown was, in fact, hanged December 2nd, the fateful day of Austerlitz and of the Third Napoleon's coup d'état. But these events in Boston occurred, I think, on the 3rd. The men who had been driven out of Tremont Temple by the mob, of which the Mayor finally took command, reassembled in the evening, very quietly, in a little hall in Belknap Street, on what was impolitely known as Nigger Hill, not far from the rather aristocratic Mount Vernon Street. Wendell Phillips, to an audience of perhaps three or four hundred—all the place would hold—made an unreported speech, red-hot with wrath. A little more than a year before, November 1st, 1859, a fortnight after Brown's attempt and while he lay in prison waiting to be hanged, Phillips had spoken in {87} Brooklyn, and announced that the lesson of the hour was insurrection. But he weakened the force of that counsel by adding that the age of bullets was over; it was an insurrection of thought; like that of the last thirty years; he still had in mind. Now, here in Boston, and not for the first time nor for the last, he was face to face with forces which were not intellectual nor moral, but forces of violence. Phillips could not readily shake off the influences of his whole public life. He still believed in "moral suasion." He was presently to learn that moralities and the counsels of peace were a poor defence against men prepared to back their opinions with revolvers. But even after the hanging of Brown, at his grave in North Elba, Phillips could say: "I do not believe slavery will go down in blood. Ours is the age of thought." Perhaps the meeting of December, 1860, marks the beginning of his conversion, but by no means its completion. He had long been used to mobs and mob law. But now the lesson was being pressed home. A memorable evening to me, because from it came my acquaintance with Phillips, whom I had never met. Under the spell, I suppose, of his passionate eloquence, I went home and wrote him a letter. I explained that I was a Whig that my family and friends were Whigs, that I belonged in a hostile camp, but that I thought there ought to be free speech in Boston, and I would do what I could for that cause and for him if he would say what. I was, as most young, {88} or old, men of Massachusetts then were, against slavery, especially in Massachusetts, but not an Abolitionist. The next day, about noon, the door of my law office in State Street opened, and Phillips walked in. Without a word of preface he said: "You wrote me a letter?" "Yes." "Will you come and see me at my house this evening, and we will have a talk? This morning I have not a moment." Again I said yes, and the door closed and he was gone. Often as I had seen Phillips on the platform it seemed to me I had never seen him till then. A clear, strong, dry north light came in at the windows and illuminated his face and figure. He had the bearing of a man to whom authority and sweetness of nature belonged in like degree. He has been called a thousand times the Apollo of the platform. An Apollo he was not except in graceful dignity and demeanour. It his masculine beauty appeared to derive from Greece, it had become Græco-Roman, and finally borrowed its blonde colouring from some Scandinavian Balder. So careless was he of mere conventionality that while he stood in the doorway, or just inside, the soft light grey felt hat he wore, since known as a Homburg hat, remained on his head. When I reminded him of it long after, he said with a laugh: "Well, you did not ask me to sit down." {89} "No, you gave me no time." I mention it because, with his hat on and his hand on the door, his manner and bearing were of a grave courtesy like none other. And in this transitory attitude, just on the wing, there was a serene leisureliness as if to hurry were unknown to him. His eye took in everything in these ten seconds. There was not a word beyond what I have repeated; a purely business call to make an appointment. But I knew when he had gone that another influence had come into my life, stronger for the time than all others. I went in the evening, as I had been bidden, to the little house in Essex Street where Phillips chose to live, as if to measure the breadth of the gulf that he had put between himself and the world into which he had been born; a world of easy circumstances if not wealth, and bound together by a hundred social ties nearly all of which he had broken. Phillips had what at that time would be called wealth, for which he had other uses than mere expense on comfort. A narrow door opened into a narrow hall out of which climbed narrow stairs, with a narrow landing half-way up where the stairs turned, and at the top a still narrower passage to the door of the parlour. Inside, the same impression of restricted space; a room perhaps sixteen feet by fourteen, and plainly furnished; a worn carpet on the floor, a large shabby sofa at the end nearest the door opposite the fire-place. Phillips was sitting on the sofa. He rose and held out his {90} hand: "It's very good of you to come. I am afraid I was abrupt this morning." Then he plunged almost at once into the situation, with a forecast of what he thought likely to happen. "Not much, if anything, till the meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society in January. That, I dare say, they will try to break up. Lincoln has been elected President and Andrew Governor. You know what I think of Lincoln. But Andrew I know well, and I do not believe mob law will be allowed to rule while Andrew is Governor." He had already described Andrew in Tremont Temple: "For the first time within my memory we have got a man for Governor of Massachusetts, a frank, true, whole-souled, honest MAN." Alas! Andrew was to disappoint him bitterly in this one matter of free speech, though in no other. "But you are to speak in another fortnight at the Music Hall," I said. "Do you think they will let you alone then?" "Why," said Phillips, "that's on a Sunday"; as if that would matter to men whose passions, interests, animosities, all led them to silence the orator whom they thought, honestly enough from their point of view, a public danger. He asked me if I had heard anything. I had not, but when Phillips told me he was going to speak on "Mobs and Education" I answered, "But that's a challenge." "They can take it as they like," he replied, quite softly and coolly, adding: "If you hear anything perhaps you'll let me know." {91} Our talk lasted late, turned on some personal matters, then drifted far away to national issues, and much else. I thought Phillips, if anything, more eloquent in talk than in oratory, yet with never a sentence which had in it the ring of the platform. He was direct, simple, persuasive, and luminous. His frankness surprised me, but he told me afterward he had made inquiries and thought it safe to be frank. No doubt he saw that mine was a sincere devotion, and perhaps he was aware of the enchantments he wove about whom he would. At any rate, he gave me his confidence from the start. During the next fortnight I saw many men among my Whig acquaintances. They made no secret of their purpose to break up that Sunday meeting at the Music Hall. Soon these rumours became public. When the subject of Phillips's discourse was announced, the rumours spread and grew more menacing. The police felt themselves called on to take notice of what was likely to happen. Phillips, long used to dealing with mobs, seemed to think the police superfluous. Some of us who had looked into the matter well knew they were not. Seeing Phillips from day to day, I asked him again and again to promise his friends one thing, viz. that he would put himself and leave himself in their hands. He still thought we were making too much of a slight danger, but finally he promised. There had been mobs in Boston before this, where the police and the mob had acted together. They so acted {92} when Richard S. Fay and Amos Lawrence, and Murray Howe and their friends broke up the Anti-Slavery Convention in Tremont Temple on the morning of December 3rd—this same month. And it was that mob from which Phillips was to take his text on this Sunday. A piquant situation, if it had not been something much more serious, with all the materials of a great tragedy. This time the mob leaders, whoever they were, had changed their tactics. They did not propose to capture the Music Hall or prevent Phillips from speaking. He was to be dealt with outside. None the less did the police and Phillips's friends, unaware of details, take measures to guard the interior. The police were in force in the lobbies and passages and at the exterior approaches to the platform; but out of sight. Scores of them were in the building, and a much larger force in waiting hard by. The platform, which ran from one side of the hall to the other at the south end, was garrisoned by Phillips's friends, armed. The enemy also were armed, and no man could say what that Sabbath morning might bring forth. Naturally, we did not know of the decision of the mob leaders, all in broadcloth, to postpone their assault till the meeting was over. We expected trouble inside, and were ready for it. I said as little as possible to Phillips of what I thought likely to happen. I well knew that if he were told there was any peril in freedom of speech, his speech would be freer than ever. {93} He always believed in personalities, saying: "In such a cause as ours you must at all hazards rouse attention. Men whose minds are made up against you will listen to a personal attack when they will listen to nothing else. If I denounce the sin they go to sleep, but when I denounce the sinner they wake up." There was to be no going to sleep on this eventful Sunday. The speech on "Mobs and Education" is perhaps the most personal, and the most merciless, of all Phillips's speeches. The Tremont Temple rioters had delivered themselves into his hands. He knew every man among them and the joint in every armour. Many of them were there on Sunday. You saw the arrow leave the platform and sink deep in the quivering flesh. The cheers were soon mingled with hisses. The air grew hot. But the majority were there to hear and the hisses were silenced. There were passes of burning eloquence, of pathos, of invective that tore its way through all defences. "I have used strong words. But I was born in Boston, and the good name of the old town is bound up with every fibre of my heart. I dare not trust myself to describe the insolence of men who undertake to dictate to you and me what we shall say in these grand old streets." Thus spoke the aristocrat, the Bostonian proud of Boston and of his own descent from six or seven generations of the Boston Phillipses; an aristocracy equal to the best. His contempt for the Fays and the rest of the "cotton clerks" was {94} largely a contempt for the plebeian. Plebeians, to the Boston mind, most of them were. Fay is pilloried for ever in this speech; and others are pilloried. I will quote one passage, not from Phillips, but a passage from Edward Everett on free speech which Phillips himself quoted toward the end of his discourse. I quote it because Phillips used often to say that American oratory had few finer examples to show: I seem to hear a voice from the tombs of departing ages, from the sepulchres of nations that died before the sight. They exhort us, they adjure us, to be faithful to our trust. They implore us, by the long trials of struggling humanity, by the awful secrets of the prison house where the sons of Freedom have been immured, by the noble heads which have been brought to the block, by the eloquent ruins of nations, they conjure us not to quench the light that is rising on the world. Greece cries to us by the convulsed lips of her poisoned, dying Demosthenes, and Rome pleads with us in the mute persuasion of her mangled Tully. It is not often that a great orator opens his heart to us about the merits of a rival, or whispers to us any one of the secrets of his own or another's eloquence. I cannot remember whether Phillips ever paid to Everett in public the tribute I have often known him pay in private. If he had lived in an age when issues were less vital, or less deadly, he might have found in Everett a model. But Everett has no passion, and passion is an element in almost all Phillips's speeches. And passion, of quite another kind, fierce, vindictive, murderous, he was to meet in another ten minutes. {95} <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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