American Abolitionist, was the descendant of a Boston family of aristocratic leanings. Educated at Harvard University, he was called to the bar in 1834; but in 1837 joined the movement for the abolition of slavery, and two years later retired from his profession because he could no longer abide by the oath of fidelity to the United States Constitution. His speeches on behalf of the movement were full of inspiration and mastery of the resources of oratory, notably that uttered over the grave of Brown, the Harper’s Ferry insurrectionist, in 1859. He spoke with equal eloquence on temperance and the emancipation of women. When, after the Civil War, Garrison ceased to be president of the Anti-Slavery Society, on the ground that the cause was won, Phillips took his place, and succeeded in winning for the negro full citizenship. In 1870 he resigned his office, and his organ, “The Anti-Slavery Standard,” was converted into a monthly magazine. Wendell Phillips continued until a few years before his death to advocate social and moral reforms upon the platform. “Speeches, Letters, and Lectures” (1863); “A Memorial of W. Phillips from the City of Boston” (1884).

Personal

  May we not think now that the task of binding up the wounds of a bruised and shattered country, of reconciling jarring interests thrown into new and delicate relationships, of bringing peace to sore and wearied nerves, and abiding quiet to those who are fated to dwell side by side in close proximity, may require faculties of a wider and more varied adaptation, and a spirit breathing more of Calvary and less of Sinai? It is no discredit to the good sword gapped with the blows of a hundred battle fields, to hang it up in all honor, as having done its work. It has made place for a thousand other forces and influences each powerless without it, but each now more powerful and more efficient in their own field. Those who are so happy as to know Mr. Phillips personally, are fully aware how entirely this unflinching austerity of judgment, this vigorous severity of exaction, belong to the public character alone, how full of genial urbanity they find the private individual. We may be pardoned for expressing the hope that the time may yet come when he shall see his way clear to take counsel in public matters with his own kindly impulses, and that those genial traits which render his private intercourse so agreeable, may be allowed to modify at least his public declarations.

  The aid which Mr. Phillips gave to the cause of woman was characterized like all his work, by a great strength of purpose, and solidity of moral conviction. There was nothing airy, fanciful, or voluntary in his advocacy of woman suffrage. The solidity of Mr. Phillip’s belief was matched by the extension of his views. Some have spoken of him as having shown a failure of judgment in his later years. He was not infallible. But his view of justice was infallible, for it was founded upon the truth of God himself…. Wendell Phillips would have thrown open to women the doors of every opportunity, of every career. He would have had them free as air in the streets, which he wished to see pure enough for the presence of angels, and which, we know, would only attain that purity when the angels of humanity should walk in them. But let no one think or say that this heart’s desire of his involved the desertion of home and the neglect of its duties. His own devotion to the woman who was home to him shows us that he knew the value of the fireside, and its dear and sacred intimacy.

  Few names that the history of the commonwealth of Massachusetts has underscored are more worthy of being cherished than that of the Phillips family; and it is a matter for public congratulation, that there exist to-day such worthy monuments for its perpetuation as the two academies of Andover, Mass., and of Exeter, N.H. We have intimated that these two institutions are monuments to a family. They are so, because they were built up, not by the wisdom and self-denial of one individual of that family, but by the very remarkable unanimity of aim and coincidence of judgment of six members of it, representing three generations. Still more essentially are they so, because they were the outcome of a marked nobleness of spirit and elevation of character, that have not ceased to distinguish representatives of the Phillips family through nine generations.

  I pass from conversations in the privacy of his study and library, to say a word or two of what Mr. Phillips was in his still more private affections. I never saw his wife; though in his conversations and his correspondence with me he often spoke of her, and it was my privilege to exchange many communications with her. He was a lover all his life…. She was, as he wrote once “his council, his guide, his inspiration.” Within a year or two, in correspondence with him, I ventured to call her his Egeria; and I think they were both greatly pleased with her being so called…. So the wife of Mr. Phillips was his Egeria, his councillor, his guide, and his inspiration.

  Since then we have lost Wendell Phillips, and all the town has been debating whether he was the noblest or the basest man that ever lived, and we discriminating souls have decided that he was a mixture of the two.

  His comprehensive philanthropy had made him, even during the anti-slavery contest, the untiring advocate of other great reforms. His powerful presentation of the justice and reason of the political equality of women, at Worcester, in 1851, more than any other single impulse, launched the question upon the sea of popular controversy. In the general statement of principle nothing has been added to that discourse; in vivid and effective eloquence of advocacy it has never been surpassed. All the arguments for independence echoed John Adams in the Continental Congress. All the pleas for applying the American principle of representation to the wives and mothers of American citizens echo the eloquence of Wendell Phillips at Worcester.

  After a long and stormy life his sun went down in glory. All the English-speaking people on the globe have written among the names that shall never die, the name of that scoffed, detested, mob-beaten Wendell Phillips…. He has taught a lesson that the young will do well to take heed to—the lesson that the most splendid gifts and opportunities and ambitions may be best used for the dumb and the lowly…. He belongs to the race of giants, not simply because he was in and of himself a great soul, but because he bathed in the providence of God, and came forth scarcely less than a god; because he gave himself to the work of God upon earth, and inherited thereby, or had reflected upon him, some of the majesty of his master. When the pigmies are all dead, the noble countenance of Wendell Phillips will still look forth, radiant as a rising sun—a sun that will never set. He has become to us a lesson, his death an example, his whole history an encouragement to manhood—to heroic manhood.

  In his outward man, Wendell Phillips was cast in classic mold. His oratorical mother was Mâyâ the Eloquent, and his father was Jupiter the Thunderer. Above the middle height, his form was patterned after the best models of manhood, and closely resembled, by actual measurements, the Apollo Belvedere. He was neither stout nor thin, but retained from youth to age his suppleness and grace of proportion. Of nervous sanguine temperament, his complexion was ruddy, and gave him the appearance of one whose soul looked through and glorified the body; hence that singular radiance which was often startling. The head was finely set upon broad shoulders and a deep chest. The chin was full and strong; the lips red and somewhat compressed; the nose aquiline; the eyes blue, small but piercing; the brow both broad and high…. In middle life he lost a large part of his hair; but this only served the more clearly to reveal the superb contour of the skull. His profile was fine-cut as a cameo. In expression the face was at once intellectual and serene; it wore a look of resolute goodness. His pose was easy and natural, every change of attitude being a new revelation of manly grace. No nobler physique ever confronted an audience.

  One could but speak of him after all and preëminently as “a gentleman!” His true, enfleshed democracy was born of that exquisite courtesy towards all humankind which was the breath of his very being. His scholarship and eloquence were its natural attributes as much as were his beauty of person and grace of manner. I recall him clearly, dressed simply with a loose short robe in place of a coat, spotless linen, no jewelry of any kind—stud, chain, or ring—well-worn trousers, a light vest, and, as I recall, slippered feet. He was when standing, a figure of graceful model and height, five feet eleven, of fair complexion, with soft reddish-gold hair, clean-shaven cheeks and jaw, a face that always seemed to me to be illumined from within. The eyes were rather small and deep-set, but penetrative, a light-blue gray in hue; the head was large well proportioned and balanced. Except as to the height of the imperial forehead and the rounded coronal beyond and above, its size, breadth, and height would not strike one at first. The full face was very kindly yet grave and quiet in expression. The eyes held you firmly and at once. The profile was noble and exquisite in line, effect, and proportion. The nose, at roots broad, at nostrils full, yet fine and even delicate in shape, was a well-moulded Roman, approaching the aquiline in form. Below was a longish upper lip, a mouth of strength and repressed lines, drawn down slightly at the ends—a touch of the lion’s character; lips well-rounded but not full; below, a strongly defined chin, not large or heavy, but fully indicative of will-power and firmness. The curving eyebrows were large and wide apart, approaching the antique in shape. But it was a noble forehead, the height above the brows, and the depth from the ears forward and upward, that commanded attention. He was possessed and moulded of grace. His pose was always statuesque. His garb was simple, refined, neutral, yet it became his own and was part of his personality. In conversation, Mr. Phillips’ voice was simply delicious—low, even-toned, softly modulated, and yet possessing a clear, easy distinctness of enunciation which was a great delight to listeners.

  While Mr. Phillips was a raging lion in denouncing iniquity wherever he found it, among his friends and in his family he was the most gentle and affectionate of men.

Oratory

  Some of us remember the Lovejoy meeting held in Faneuil Hall in ’37, and the speech of the State’s Attorney, casting scorn and ridicule upon the martyr, and how a young man, seizing his chance, sprang to his feet, held fast the chairman’s eye till he reached the platform, and, amid mingled applause and hisses, poured forth such a flood of indignant invective, such royal reason, that his victim never recovered from the stroke. It was the first intimation of the young orator’s gifts. And from that time to the present, his name and fame have made way throughout the country; the rumour of him has crossed the seas, and he stands now the first of American orators, with honors yet to be won in new fields for which his genius has been fitted by wide acquaintance with the people, and by past controversies with powerful opponents.

  None who have heard Wendell Phillips can be satisfied with any description of the charm with which these things have been uttered. Standing before the people with the ease of one born for his task, with the authority that comes of lowliness before a great idea, relying absolutely upon the eloquence of his truth, simple almost to coldness even amid his most scathing rebukes, his gestures few and natural, his voice clear and flexible, his serene, high forehead, fair hair, and light blue eye modifying the severity of his low features, he is listened to with alternations of breathless silence and wild outbursts of enthusiasm. He has never made a failure, never lost an opportunity…. His foes have never dared listen to him. Mobs sent to break up his meetings have been known to return to their employers, saying, “Never man spake like this man.” I have sat under his voice for more than an hour, and it always seemed to have been only a few minutes. Consecrated to “one idea,” as the sneerers said, he called about that a wealth of illustration, anecdote, lighting up with it long tracks of history, until one could only regret that his critics did not exchange all their so-called ideas for this one. “Let no one despise the negro any more,” said a man of letters who heard him; “he gave us Wendell Phillips.”

  So simple, pure, and direct is the oratory of Mr. Phillips that it evades description. We can dwell upon the manifold beauties of a picture by a great artist; but it is difficult to dilate upon Giotto’s O. There it stands. It is without a flaw. It completely answers the purpose for which it was intended. There is nothing more to be said about it. So it is with the eloquence of Mr. Phillips…. The orator culls none of the flowers of rhetoric as he goes: you may search in vain through his volume of published speeches for one beautiful metaphor, one brilliant antithesis, one elaborately constructed period. He has no peroration. But, on the other hand, he never utters a sentence that a child might not comprehend; he uses no illustration the force of which would not be apparent to the group about the stove in a country store; he discusses political issues in such a way that the young girl who has come to the lecture with her lover, who never read a debate in Congress in her life, and does not know the names of the Senators from her own State, understands what he says, and is interested…. We have said little, after all, of the eloquence of Wendell Phillips, except that it cannot be described. No man who has heard it has ever denied its marvellous power; no man has ever imitated it, or conveyed a conception of its fascination to another; no man who has not heard it will ever know what makes it great.

  As an orator, Mr. Phillips has few equals, and no superiors. His fellow citizens justly look upon him as a most distinguished man, and wherever he speaks he is always greeted with a full house, and an appreciative audience. It is to be regretted that time has made such inroads upon his health as to partially prevent him from appearing upon the lecture platform. His public utterances will always occupy a prominent place among the best thoughts of the age.

  The keynote to the oratory of Wendell Phillips lay in this: that it was essentially conversational—the conversational raised to its highest power. Perhaps no orator ever spoke with so little apparent effort, or began so entirely on the plane of his average hearers. It was as if he simply repeated, in a little louder tone, what he had just been saying to some familiar friend at his elbow. The effect was absolutely disarming. Those accustomed to spread-eagle eloquence felt, perhaps, a slight sense of disappointment. Could this easy, effortless man be Wendell Phillips? But he held them by his very quietness; it did not seem to have occurred to him to doubt his power to hold them. The poise of his manly figure, the easy grace of his attitude, the thrilling modulation of his perfectly-trained voice, the dignity of his gesture, the keen penetration of his eye, all aided to keep his hearers in hand. The colloquialism was never relaxed, but it was familiar without loss of dignity. When he said “isn’t” and “wasn’t” or even, like an Englishman, dropped his g’s, it did not seem inelegant; he might almost have been ungrammatical and it would not have impaired the finer air of the man. Then, as the argument went on, the voice grew deeper, the action more animated, and the sentences came in a long sonorous swell, still easy and graceful, but powerful as the soft stretching of a tiger’s paw. He could be as terse as Carlyle, or his periods could be as prolonged and cumulative as those of Choate or Evarts; no matter; they carried in either case the same charm.

  Eloquent as Mr. Phillips was as a lecturer he was far more effective as a debater. Debate was to him the flint and steel which brought out all his fire. His memory was wonderful. He would listen to an elaborate speech for hours, and, without a single note in writing of what had been said, reply to every part of it as fully and completely as if the speech were written out before him. Those who heard him when not confronted by an opponent, have a very limited comprehension of his amazing resources as a speaker.

  Our glorious summer days sometimes breed, even in the very rankness of their opulence, enervating and unhealthy weaknesses. The air is heavy. Its breath poisons the blood; the pulse of nature is sluggish and mean. Then come the tempest and the thunder. So was it in the body politic, whether the plague was slavery or whatever wrong; whether it was weakness in men of high degree or tyranny over men of low estate; whether it was the curse of the grogshop, or the iron hand of the despot at home or abroad,—so it was that like the lightning Phillips flashed and struck. The scorching, hissing bolt rent the air, now here, now there. From heaven to earth, now wild at random, now straight it shot. It streamed across the sky. It leaped in broken links to a chain of fire. It sometimes fell with reckless indiscrimination alike on the just and on the unjust. It sometimes smote the innocent as well as blasted the guilty. But when the tempest was over, there was a purer and a fresher spirit in the air, and a sweeter health. Louder than the thunder, mightier than the wind, the earthquake, or the fire, a still small voice spake in the public heart, and the public conscience woke.

  The Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College, which consists of the fifteen or twenty best scholars in each college class, and a few other people whom these choose on the ground of scholarship or intellectual note, is probably in temper as conservative a body as is to be found in New England. It is their custom every year to have a public oration, to which they march in solemn procession, headed by the oldest living members. Toward the end of Mr. Wendell Phillips’s life, he was invited to deliver one of these orations, a little to the disquiet of prudent Phi Beta Kappa men, who were aware that his temper was not precisely of a conservative order. A good many went to hear him with much curiosity as to what he might say, and apprehension that they might have to disapprove it by silence at moments which to less balanced minds might seem to call for applause. In the earlier parts of his oration they found themselves agreeably surprised: he said nothing to which they were unprepared to assent, and what he said, he said beautifully. They listened with relief and satisfaction; when the moment for applause came, they cordially applauded. So the oration went on with increasing interest on the part of the audience. Finally, when some fresh moment for applause came, they applauded, as a matter of course; and it was not until they had done so that they stopped to think that what the cleverest of our oratorical tricksters had betrayed them into applauding was no less revolutionary an incident than the then recent assassination of the Emperor Alexander of Russia. Now, this result was attained simply by a skilful use of words: in this case very probably by a deliberately malicious use of words that should make a theatre full of people do a thing which not one of them really wished to do. It was not what he said that they applauded; it was what he implied,—not dynamite and dagger, but that not very clearly defined notion of liberty and freedom and the rights of man, which still appeals to the American heart.

  It is surprising that so thorough an historian as Von Holst has omitted to make mention of his speech [Lovejoy Speech], which really struck the key-note of the anti-slavery movement from first to last. As we have it now, revised by its author from the newspaper reports of the time, it is one of the purest, most spontaneous and magnetic pieces of oratory in existence. It deserves a place beside those two famous speeches of James Otis and Patrick Henry which ushered in the war of separation from England. It possesses even a certain advantage, in the fact that it never has been nor is likely to be made use of for school declamations. It will always remain fresh, vigorous, and original as when it was first delivered.

  This austere and irreconcilable enthusiast with the blood of the martyr in his veins, was in oratory a pure opportunist. He was a general who went into battle with a force of all arms, but used infantry or artillery or cavalry as each seemed most apt to the moment. He formed his plan, as Napoleon did, on the field and in presence of the enemy. For Phillips—and the fact is vital to all criticism of his oratory—spoke almost always, during twenty-five years of his oratorical life, to a hostile audience. His audiences were often mobs; they often sought to drive him from the platform, sometimes to kill him. He needed all his resources merely to hold his ground and to get a hearing. You cannot compare oratory in those circumstances with oratory in a dress debate, or even with the oratory of a great parliamentary contest. On this last has often hung, no doubt, the life of a ministry. On Phillips’s mastery over his hearers depended sometimes his own life, sometimes that of the antislavery cause—with which, as we now all see and as then hardly anybody saw, was bound up the life of the nation. It was, in my judgment, the oratory of Phillips which insured the maintenance of that great antislavery struggle during the last ten years or more which preceded the War. His oratory must be judged with reference to that—to its object as well as to its rhetorical qualities. He had and kept the ear of the people. To have silenced that silver trumpet would have been to wreck the cause. I speak of the Abolitionist cause by itself—that which relied solely on moral forces and stood completely outside of politics.

  He was the most polished and graceful orator our country ever produced. He spoke as quietly as if he were talking in his own parlor, and almost entirely without gestures, yet he had as great a power over all kinds of audiences as any American of whom we have any record…. Eloquent as he was as a lecturer, he was far more effective as a debater. Debate was for him the flint and steel which brought out all his fire…. In his style as a debater he resembled Sir Robert Peel, in grace and courtliness of manner and in fluency and copiousness of diction. He never hesitated for a word, or failed to employ the word best fitted to express his thought on the point under discussion…. No speaker of his day ever treated a greater variety of topics, nor with more even excellence, than Wendell Phillips…. Now that Phillips and Garrison and the era in which they flourished have passed into history, it is common for writers who treat on that period to talk of these two champions of freedom as if they were equals, or of Phillips, even, as if he were Garrison’s inferior. Those who knew both men smile at such absurdities. Phillips and Garrison were equals in one respect only—in moral courage and unselfish devotion to the slave. Garrison was a commonplace man in respect to intellectual ability, whereas Phillips was a man of genius of the rarest culture. Garrison was a strong platform speaker. Phillips was one of the greatest orators of the century. Only three men of his time could contest the palm of eloquence with him—Webster, Clay, and Beecher.

General

  Those who have listened to his perfect utterances, whether in fervid denunciation, indignant protest, or pathetic appeal, seldom have the opportunity to examine in cool blood the true character of the rhetoric that fascinated them. While they watched the magnificent stream of eloquence, it seemed like the course of a river of molten lava. Let them to-day walk over the cooled and hardened surface, and they will find how rough and full of scoriæ the track is. Mr. Phillips’s speeches have been collected in a handsome volume, with a portrait. Apart from its relations to the topics it deals with, and viewed simply as a specimen of composition, there is hardly any modern book so disappointing. The apt illustration, the witty anecdote, the emphatic statement, the traces of strong feeling, are to be seen in every discourse. But there are also slang phrases and vituperative epithets, which might be tolerated in an off-hand speech, but which when seen on the printed page debase the style and weaken its force.

  Phillips spoke always for the poor man, for the downtrodden man, for the underdog in the fight, for the man who could not speak for himself. He spoke violently often. He was not afraid of collision, though he loved peace and the battles of ideas alone. “Peace, if possible,” he wrote in the boys’ albums, “but justice at any rate.” No man must suffer injustice in order that I may be convenienced—the state is not safe so. This Phillips never failed to see, and this enabled him to deal with every problem radically. He knew that there was nothing anarchic in the real fibre of the American people—and he dreaded no temporary or sporadic violences in readjustment; he only dreaded injustice and gout.

  Phillips’ was the literary or rhetorical temperament, not the scholar’s. He had an admirable memory for odds and ends, for available scraps or telling incidents, and he spent his life in training his resources in this direction; but there is no reason to suppose that he had ever in his life studied anything with scholarly thoroughness, except possibly, as he claimed, the English Revolution. This is no reproach to him—he had a great admiration for even the semblance of scholarship in others; but no man can combine everything, and it is a wrong to our young people when we assume that such a thing as universal genius is now practicable…. His judgments of men were prompt, fearless, independent, but the judicial quality rarely belonged to them.

  As an orator Phillips was what Henry Clay would have been with a Harvard education. To Clay’s fire and magnetism he joined Everett’s rhetorical art and marvellous vocabulary. As a master of sarcasm and invective he can be compared only to John Randolph of Roanoke, and as a fierce delighter in opposition he may be compared to Webster. But Phillips’ orations, like those of Clay, are hard to read. Examined in cold blood, his sentences often seem harsh and even coarse. The fire of his invective was fed at times with unseemly material and he often depended upon his consummate oratorical skill to carry sentences that will hardly pass the searching criticism of the reader.

  His speeches were true speeches. In print, lacking the magic of his delivery, they are like the words of songs which for lyric excellence need the melodies to which they have once been wedded. Who ever heard him speak remembers his performance with admiration. As the years pass, however, this admiration often proves qualified by suspicion that, with the light which was his, he might have refrained from those denunciations of established order, which, to conservative thinking, still do mischief.