USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Romantic days in old Boston : the story of the city and of its people during the nineteenth century > Part 10
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Slavery Convention. The call to this convention had been addressed to " friends of the slave of every nation and of every clime." Accordingly, when the various American societies appointed delegates they sent women as well as men, following their recent resolution on this matter. Garrison and Phillips were among the men appointed, Mrs. Phillips and Mrs. Chapman among the women. But when Wendell Phillips proceeded to present the credentials of the delegates he found that women were not ex- pected to sit with the body. This was his opportunity and he decided to appeal the matter to the convention itself. On the morning the convention was to open his wife instructed him as he left their boarding-place:
" Wendell, don't shilly-shally."
He obeyed her. In a speech which has become historic as the first ever made by a man in advocacy of the rights of women he declared that, with the delegates from Massa- chusetts, this was a matter of conscience. " We think it right for women to sit by our side in America," he asserted, "and we think it right for them to do the same here. We could not go back to America to ask for any aid from the women of Massachusetts if we had deserted them when they chose to send out their own sisters as their representatives here." None the less, it was decreed that women should be wel-
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comed to the galleries only, and then merely as spectators, not as participants in the pro- ceedings of the Convention. Garrison had been detained at sea by storms and did not reach London until the Convention was nearing its end, but as soon as he learned that the cre- dentials of the women delegates had been dis- honored he declared that, he, too, would sit in the gallery. Afterwards he said, "If there is any one act of my life of which I am par- ticularly proud it is in refusing to join such a body [the London Conference] on terms which were manifestly reproachful to my constituents and unjust to the cause of liberty." Necessarily, however, that gallery where the head of the American Abolitionists sat surrounded by the excluded women-delegates became one of the most interesting places in the hall!
To the stand which Phillips and Garrison had taken upon this mooted matter Daniel O'Connell the great Irish liberator rallied also, it is interesting to note, though at first his feeling had been against accrediting the women. His support naturally strengthened the great admira- tion which Phillips had for him, an admiration which was to do much, in America, for the young orator, as well as for the famous Irishman.
The summer of 1841 found the Phillipses back in Boston making preparations to begin housekeeping. Mrs. Phillips had inherited from
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her father a modest brick house at 26 Essex Street and here they took up their abode. The Garrisons, the Chapmans and the Lorings were all within five minutes' walk, and later Theodore Parker, also, was to be a near neigh- bor. Phillips greatly enjoyed his home. To Miss Elizabeth Pease, a friend whom he and Mrs. Phillips had made in England, he wrote:
" November 25, 1841.
" I am writing in our own parlor - wish you were in it - on Thanksgiving Day. Did you ever hear of that name? 'Tis an old custom in New England, begun to thank God for a providential arrival of food from the mother- country in sixteen hundred and odd year, and perpetuated now, wherever a New Englander dwells, some time in autumn, by the Governor's appointment. All is hushed of business about me; the devout pass the morning at church; those who have wandered to other cities hurry back to worship to-day where their fathers knelt, and gather sons and grandsons, to the littlest prattler, under the old roof-tree to - shall I break the picture? - cram as much turkey and plum-pudding as possible; a sort of compromise by Puritan love of good eating for denying itself that 'wicked papistrie ' Christmas." 1
1 Memorial of Ann Phillips.
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A pleasant little glimpse of the young couple's life together at "No. 26 " as they often called it to their friends is afforded by this letter of Mrs. Phillips to Miss Pease: "There is your Wendell seated in the arm-chair, lazy and easy as ever, perhaps a little fatter than when you saw him, still protesting how he was ruined by marrying. Your humble servant looks like the Genius of Famine, as she always did, one of Pharaoh's lean kine. She laughs consider- ably, continues in health in the same naughty way, has been pretty well for her this winter. Now what do you think her life is? Why, she strolls out a few steps occasionally, calling it a walk; the rest of the time from bed to sofa, from sofa to rocking-chair; reads, generally, the Standard and Liberator, and that is pretty much all the literature her aching head will allow her to peruse; rarely writes a letter, sees no company, makes no calls, looks forward to spring and birds, when she will be a little freer; is cross very often, pleasant at other times, loves her dear L- and thinks a great deal of her; and now you have Ann Phillips.
" Now I'll take up another strain. This winter has been marked to us by our keeping house the first time. I call it housekeeping; but, alas! we have not the pleasure of enter- taining angels, awares or unawares. We have a small house, but large enough for us, only a
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OS LEFAYAUS AV.
THE HOME OF WENDELL PHILLIPS, WHICH STOOD AT 26 ESSEX STREET.
Mr. Phillips is shown just entering the door.
WENDELL PHILLIPS' STUDY. From a photograph.
FRANK SANBORN. From an early photograph. Page 154.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. After the Hawes Portrait. Page 169.
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few rooms furnished - just enough to try to make me more comfortable than at board. But then I am not well enough even to have friends to tea, so that all that I strive to do is to keep the house neat and to keep myself about. I have attended no meetings since I helped to fill 'the negro pew.' What anti- slavery news I get, I get second-hand. I should not get along at all, so great is my darkness, were it not for Wendell to tell me that the world is still going on. . We are very happy, and only have to regret my health being so poor and our own sinfulness. Dear Wendell speaks whenever he can leave me, and for his sake I sometimes wish I were myself again; but I dare say it is all right as it is." 1
The Standard, to which allusion has here been made, was the organ of that faction of the Abolitionists which had withdrawn from the Garrisonian camp. Phillips remained the at- torney-general of the Boston forces whose organ was The Liberator, and in that capacity he was very glad soon to be the spokesman at Faneuil Hall of the seventy thousand Irishmen who, with Daniel O'Connell and Father Mathew at their head, had sent over to their fellow countrymen here an urgent appeal to identify themselves with the Abolitionists. Up to this time the Irish in America had, almost without
1 Memorial of Ann Phillips.
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exception, been on the side of slavery. The reason for this appears to have been that they feared the competition which would be offered in the labor market by the negro if free. Phillips, however, by the power of his matchless elo- quence, as he held that imposing petition in his hand, won to the side of freedom for the black man this huge Irish audience all of whom knew, themselves, only too well, the meaning of oppression. "Ireland," he said, "is the land of agitation and agitators. We may well learn a lesson from her in the battle for human rights. . I trust in that love of liberty which every Irishman brings to the country of his adoption, to make him true to her cause at the ballot-box, and throw no vote without asking if the hand to which he is about to trust political power will use it for the slave. When an American was introduced to O'Connell in the lobby of the House of Commons, he asked, without putting out his hand, ' Are you from the South? ' ' Yes, sir.' 'A slaveholder, I presume? ' 'Yes, sir.' 'Then,' said the great liberator, 'I have no hand for you! ' and walked away. Shall his countrymen trust that hand with political power which O'Connell deemed it pollution to touch? "
Soon after this Phillips took a step for which he was greatly criticized: he personally seceded from the Union because, as he held, its Con-
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stitution was a pro-slavery one! The occasion for this step was the famous ruling of Judge Shaw in the case of a mulatto named Latimer, who, in October, 1842, came to Boston from Norfolk, Virginia, and was thrown into jail on a charge of theft. It soon became clear that all that the man had stolen was - himself, and friends rallied to his side and demanded a trial
by jury. Judge Shaw, however, denied this privilege on the ground that Latimer was a fugitive slave. "The Constitution of the United States," he declared, "authorizes the owner of such an one to arrest him in any State to which he may have fled." At a Sunday night meeting in Faneuil Hall, called together by the Abolitionists to denounce this decision, Phil- lips, referring to Judge Shaw's ruling exclaimed, " We presume to believe the Bible out-weighs the statute-book. When I look on those crowded thousands and see them trample on their consciences and on the rights of their fellow- men at the bidding of a piece of parchment, I say, my curse be on the Constitution of these United States! " The case of Latimer had made him see clearly that his real quarrel, in all this advocacy of the black, was with the old pro- slavery Constitution, a document which de- manded that a Civil War must be fought before it could be effectually amended. From this time on Phillips neither practised in the courts
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- because, as an attorney he would have had to take an oath to support the Constitution - or used his right of ballot, since to vote would have been to participate actively in governmental affairs.
As soon as Phillips' eyes had been opened to the fact that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document he " came out." Nor was he long to be alone in the position he had taken. There was soon a band of come-outers, with Garrison and Quincy to officer them. The question thus raised became the topic of debate at every anti-slavery meeting, and in 1843 the Massa- chusetts Society adopted " come-outer " reso- lutions, their example in this matter being fol- lowed, the next year, by the societies in New England and throughout the free States gener- ally. "No Union with Slave-holders " was now their motto. To be sure, there remained other earnest Abolitionists who did not see the matter thus, and they it was who formed the Liberty Party in the hope of attaining reform through the ballot - just as the Socialist Party now hopes to do. Thus it came about that the " moral suasionists and the political actionists " lined up in opposition each to the other.
Phillips certainly made out a wonderful case for his side in his argument The Constitution a Pro-Slavery Compact, which he wrote and pub- lished in 1845. And his brochure, published
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in the same year, "Can Abolitionists Vote or Take Office under the United States Con- stitution? " is full of wit and telling stories. There is no better way of making plain his position as a " come-outer " than to quote a
few paragraphs from this pamphlet. " My object," he says, " in becoming a disunionist is to free the slave, and meantime to live a consistent life. I want men to understand me. And I submit that the body of the Roman people understood better and felt more ear- nestly the struggle between the people and the princes, when the little band of democrats left the city and encamped on Mons Sacer, outside, than while they remained mixed up and voting with their masters. . . . Because we refuse to aid a wrongdoer in his sin we by no means proclaim that we think our whole character better than his. It is neither phari- saical to have opinions nor presumptuous to guide our lives by them. He would be a strange preacher who should set out to reform his circle by joining in all their sins. This reminds me of the tipsy Duke of Norfolk, who seeing a drunken friend in the gutter hiccoughed: 'My dear fellow, I can't help you out, but I'll do better - I'll lie down by your side!'"
Of course, Phillips was branded as a crank and a zealot by reason of the position he had taken, and he was told that he was meanwhile
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losing a golden opportunity to help amend the Constitution by voting right, but to this he replied that he could not, on that account, swear to support it " as it is. What it may become we know not. We speak of it as it is and repudiate it as it is. We will not brand it as Pro-Slavery after it has ceased to be so. This objection to our position reminds me of Miss Martineau's story of the little boy who hurt himself and sat crying on the sidewalk. 'Don't cry,' said a friend, 'it won't hurt you to-morrow.' 'Well then,' whimpered the child, ' I won't cry to-morrow!'"
A man who would refuse to vote because the Constitution under which he must needs exercise the suffrage defended an institution he abhorred would, not unnaturally, proceed to cut himself off, also, from an organized church whose officers were, most of them, advocates of slavery. Phillips had had a very religious mother and he was himself deeply religious. To a personal friend who asked him, not long before his death, whether he had ever consecrated himself to God he replied, " Yes, when I was a boy fourteen years of age, in the old church at the North End, I heard Lyman Beecher preach on the theme, ' You belong to God,' and I went home, after that service, threw myself on the floor of my room, with locked doors, and prayed, ' Oh God,
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I belong to Thee; take what is Thine own. I ask this, that whenever a thing be wrong it may have no power of temptation over me; whenever a thing be right it may take no courage to do it.' From that day to this," added Phillips, " it has been so. Whenever I have known a thing to be wrong it has held no temptation. Whenever I have known a thing to be right it has taken no courage to do it."1 A man who could honestly say this when arrived at old age would not lightly have broken away from the institution through which so much of moral power had come to him. Phillips continued to hold fast to his ancestral faith, but he, none the less, denounced the Church as it existed precisely in the spirit in which many good men today are denouncing it. Yet at many a meeting of the Radical Club he testified in no uncertain fashion to his own strictly orthodox beliefs. He was not a member of this club, which was wont to meet at the Chestnut Street home of Rev. John T. Sargent and his wife, but he was a frequent guest there, and he always took the conservative ground when religious radicalism was being advanced. On one occasion, when Emerson had read an essay on religion in which he claimed that Christianity was only one faith more, a modifica-
1 Evidence of Rev. O. P. Gifford, D. D. Reported in the Golden Rule August 15, 1889.
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tion of Judaism or Buddhism, Phillips, in a masterly rejoinder, maintained that Chris- tianity had in it something essentially different from the religious experience of other races. On another occasion, at the same place, he commented thus on the paper which Rev. W. H. Channing had just read on " the Christian Name:" "Jesus is the divine type who has given His peculiar form to the modern world. . Europe shows a type of human character not paralleled anywhere else. The intellect of Greece centred around power and beauty; that of Rome around legal justice. The civi- lization of modern Europe was inspired by a great moral purpose. Imperfect as it was and limited in many ways, the religious element there had steadily carried those nations for- ward. The battle for human rights was finally fought on a Christian plane. ... The power that urged the world forward came from Chris- tianity." And one day, when John Weiss spoke on " Heart in Religion," contending that Jesus was effeminate, Phillips said, " You speculate as to whether Jesus was a masculine character. Look at the men who have learned of Him most closely, - at Paul and Luther and Wesley. Were they effeminate? Yet the disciple is but a faint reflection of his Master. The character from which came the force which has been doing battle ever since with wrong and
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falsehood and error was nothing less than masculine; but sentiment is the toughest thing in the world, - nothing else is iron." A man so honoring Christ could not be anti-Christian
though he was "anti-Church."
" He dis-
tinguished," says his biographer, Carlos Martyn, (writing in 1890) " between Christianity and Churchianity; the distinction may be needed again sometime." How interestingly history repeats itself in the case of reformers! I am constantly hearing this distinction made today by men who think the Church of Christ is not living up to the Truth Christ came to proclaim.
Because Wendell Phillips was no longer a practising lawyer, with a lawyer's natural means of self-expression and self-assertion; be- cause, too, he had cut away from church organization and the help that might have afforded him, he now proceeded to construct for himself a platform, - he became, in a word, that new thing in American life, a professional agitator. It was his firm belief that in every age there are wrongs which must be righted, and he maintained that neither the press, nor political parties, nor the pulpit could do so much towards getting them righted as a free citizen who should have the will and the skill to present to the attention of the people at large the particular question under debate. He was by no means deceived as to the diffi-
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culties which would be encountered in winning adherents to an unpopular cause. For he saw - none more clearly - that, " in a country like ours, of absolute democratic equality . there is no refuge from the tyranny of public opinion. The result is that, if you take the old Greek lantern and go about to seek among a hundred, you will find not one single American who really has not, or who does not fancy at least that he has, something to gain or lose in his ambition, his social life or his business from the good opinion and the votes of those around him. And the consequence is that, instead of being a mass of individuals, each one fearlessly blurting out his own convictions, as a nation, compared with other nations, we are a mass of cowards." 1
Phillips, however, was just enough not to blame the pulpit or the press unduly for being bound by the average sentiment. " As the minister's settlement and salary," he said, " depend upon the unity and good will of the people he preaches to, he cannot fairly be expected, save in exceptional and special cases, to antagonize his flock. If all clergymen were like Paul or Luther or Wesley they might give, not take orders. But as the average clergyman is an average man he will be bound by average
1 Oration delivered at the O'Connell Celebration in Boston, August 6, 1870.
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conditions." 1 Similarly, he held it to be unreasonable to expect of the press a loftier tone than that taken by the constituency who support it. " The moment therefore," he concluded, " that a large issue, twenty years ahead of its age, presents itself to the considera- tion of an empire or of a republic, just in pro- portion to the freedom of its institutions is the necessity of a platform outside of the press, of politics and of the Church, whereon stand men with no candidate to elect, with no plan to carry, with no reputation to stake, with no object but the truth, no purpose but to tear the question open and let the light through it."
Especially in a republic is agitation necessary, he insisted, in his lecture on Public Opinion. " Only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity." Surely we of today know the truth of that great saying, first set forth at the Melodeon, in Boston, January 28, 1852. "Republics," he then went on, "exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated. ... Never, to our latest posterity, can we afford to do without prophets like Garrison, to stir up the monotony of wealth and reawake the people to the great ideas that are constantly fading out of their
1 Extract from a lecture on Agitation.
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minds - to trouble the waters that there may be health in their flow." One other axiom held by Wendell Phillips, agitator, was that he and others like him should, on the platform, tell " the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." Under this rule he used a plainness of speech which often considerably shocked a , generation inured to euphemism. Words " with which we have no concern," to paraphrase Barrie's Tommy, abounded in his lectures. But, like Whitman, he was coarse, not for coarseness' sake but because he wished to goad his hearers to attention. As when he declared the South to be " one great brothel," or again, when, speaking of the defection of Webster, he said, " It is not often that Providence per- mits the eyes of twenty millions of thinking people to behold the fall of another Lucifer, from the very battlements of Heaven, down into that 'lower deep of the lowest deep ' of hell."
Of course, under the present system, a man who should speak his mind thus freely would need to have a modest inheritance upon which to live. Phillips, happily, was so circumstanced that, even before he began to earn large fees from his lectures, he was independent in matters of money. And he had a very happy home life in spite of the invalidism of his beloved wife. Dr. Samuel A. Green, ex-Mayor of Boston, who was a near neighbor of Phillips when the
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orator lived on Essex Street once told me that, often as he was at the Phillips home, he never saw Mrs. Phillips. Yet he constantly felt her presence, for her husband quoted her wit and wisdom to all his friends and so passed on to them something of the inspiration he him- self drew from her brave and buoyant spirit. Debarred from attendance at concerts, of which she was very fond, Mrs. Phillips de- rived much pleasure in listening to the strains of the hand-organs which played often under her window, and it is said that her last word to Mr. Phillips, when he was going out, would always be, "Wendell, don't forget the organ money." The meals in their little home were always served in the invalid's room, he on this side and she on that of a tiny table, and at such times the married lovers were wont to converse in the language of Molière. As the husband put it to a friend, "We eat in French."
Early in 1847 a new neighbor came to take up his abode near the Phillips home, Theodore Parker, whose house in Exeter Place was hence- forth directly in the rear of "26 Essex Street." Though Phillips and Parker differed greatly in their theology they were united in love of books and in zeal for human freedom. Their intimacy became a source of great joy and stimulus to both. Both needed it, too, for Abolitionists were bitterly hated by those who
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would not or could not understand them, and Phillips and Parker often carried their lives in their hands as they walked down Essex Street to their homes after a stormy meeting. Frederick Douglass, in a letter to Mary Liver- more, tells of one occasion in particular when it was proposed to shed the blood of Phillips to appease the slave god of the South, and when Phillips and Maria Weston Chapman literally hazarded their lives by walking through the dense excited mass of people from Cambridge Street through Belknap [Joy] Street "to the little Baptist Church once presided over by Father Snowdon." It took great courage in those times even to express sympathy with Parker or Phillips! What has been characterized as "one of the bravest acts of Henry Ward Beecher's life " was when, in 1850, after the Abolitionists had been mobbed in New York, that gifted preacher (then not an Abolitionist himself) opened Plymouth Church to Phillips and appeared with him on the platform to signify his appreciation of free speech. Phillips was always perfectly serene on these dangerous occasions. "I was amazed," Beecher wrote afterward, " at the unagitated Agitator, - so calm, so fearless, so incisive, - every word a bullet. I never heard a more effective speech than Mr. Phillips' that night. He seemed in- spired and played with his audience (turbulent,
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of course) as Gulliver might with the Lilliputians. He had the dignity of Pitt, the vigor of Fox, the wit of Sheridan, the satire of Junius, - and a grace and music all his own."
To Phillips, as to all other right-minded New Englanders, Webster's advocacy of the Fugitive Slave Law was a severe trial of faith in human nature, - as well as a keen disappointment. Webster had previously done yeoman service on the side of freedom. Moreover, it would seem to have been true, as Henry Cabot Lodge says, that " no man in all history ever came into the world so equipped physically to serve a noble cause by speech." The impression Web- ster commonly produced was like that made upon the English navvy who pointed at Webster in the streets of Liverpool and said, "There goes a king." Sydney Smith exclaimed when he saw him, " Good heavens, he is a small cathedral by himself." And Carlyle, who did not too much love America, wrote to Emerson, " Not many days ago I saw at breakfast the notablest of all your notabilities, Daniel Webster. . As a logic fencer or parliamentary Her- cules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world. The tanned complexion; that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under the precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown; the mastiff mouth accurately closed;
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