USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Romantic days in old Boston : the story of the city and of its people during the nineteenth century > Part 9
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And then Mr. Phillips, who was only twenty- six and comparatively unknown, closed with these words, " I am glad, sir, to see this crowded house. It is good for us to be here. When liberty is in danger, Faneuil Hall has the right, it is her duty, to strike the key-note for these United States. I am glad, for one reason, that remarks such as those to which I have alluded have been uttered here. The passage of these resolutions, in spite of this opposition, led by the Attorney General of the Commonwealth, will show more clearly, more decisively, the deep indignation with which Boston regards this outrage."
After this memorable beginning, Faneuil Hall became, each year, more and more identified with the cause of the Abolitionists. On its platform, Garrison, Sumner, Theodore Parker, Edmund Quincy, Douglass, Higginson, Howe and John A. Andrew - to name only a few on the honorable roll - reasserted whenever their testimony would help the principles of anti-slavery reform and defended as the need of the moment demanded the cause of freedom for all men.
Another long-venerated Boston structure which had deeply stirring associations for those concerned with this struggle of the slave for freedom, was the Old Court House. Through the east door of this building was effected in Feb-
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ruary, 1851, the rescue of Shadrach, a colored waiter at the Cornhill Coffee House, who had been arrested as a fugitive from slavery under the law which Daniel Webster condemned him- self by supporting. In 1851, pending the trial of Thomas M. Sims, the Court House was girdled with heavy chains to prevent another rescue, and, in order to reach their tribunals of justice, the judges of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts were obliged to stoop under this symbol of the slave-holders' supremacy even in a non slave-holding State. Many a son of Boston, however, was now fired with mighty indignation that such things should be, and, on the next occasion when the Fugitive Slave Law was to be enforced in their city, determined speeches against it were made in Faneuil Hall and a careful plan for rescuing Anthony Burns, the victim, was formed. Un- happily the plan did not succeed. Though a band of Abolitionists, prominent among whom were Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Lewis Hayden, burst open the middle door on the west side of the Court House by means of a heavy beam of wood, the firing of a shot from some unknown quarter precipitated a panic, and the rescuers' organization was demoralized, with the result that poor Burns was left to his keepers and his fate. An eye witness 1 who was
1 " Cliftondale " in the Boston Transcript.
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on his way to school describes thus the rendition which followed:
"In passing through Court Square I was surprised at seeing a crowd of men and boys in that generally rather quiet thoroughfare. The Cadets, Colonel Amory, were in line on the City Hall side, and the open, upper windows of the Court House were filled with United States marines or soldiers. . From the head of State Street I saw State troops in the inter- secting streets, guarding that thoroughfare. On passing down Water Street I found the City Guard.
" I returned to the square in time to witness a procession from Worcester in which a stalwart colored man carried a banner lettered with an anti-slavery motto. As it neared me a man named Allen, a stationer on State Street whose brother was a lieutenant in the Boston City Guard, rushed to the darkey, drew the pole down until he had hold of the cross-bar and the two then struggled for the possession of the banner. Others on both sides took part, and after a small riot that and other banners were torn to shreds and the pieces scattered among the crowd as souvenirs of the occasion, and the members of the procession merged with the crowd like a ' dissolving view.'
" Another procession soon emerged from the Court House door, with Burns as the central
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figure, preceded by police and United States marshals, and surrounded by United States troops. I was in the immediate rear and against the rope drawn across State Street when the procession had entered it and I watched till it reached the wharf, as it had been threatened that bottles of vitriol would be thrown from : upper windows upon it; but I did not witness any such proceeding. If ever 'State Rights ' were violated, though, they were on that oc- casion."
Miss Martha Russell, a newspaper corre- spondent of the period, whose heart was in the right place and who was endowed with a sprightly style, wrote thus categorically of what happened just before Burns was led away :
" BOSTON, May 26, 1854.
"DEAR FRIENDS :- I have a great many things to say to you and scarcely know where to begin. I am in a great 'whew,' as Aunt Lydia used to say. There is a fugitive slave now confined in Boston Court House, and has been there ever since Wednesday night. His master came on, brought a man with him and 'nabbed ' him at once. He was going off with him but Mr. Dana interfered, and tomorrow he will have his trial. The whole city is in excitement; to-night there is a great meeting in Faneuil Hall of all parties,
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a regular indignation meeting, and I am going. They have not put chains about the Court House yet, as they did when they took Sims, but many people think there will be bloodshed before they get through. I shall go up to the Commonwealth office tomorrow, and as those windows command a view of State Street and Court Street, I shall see all the proceedings that can be seen outside the Court House. If Boston people allow another fugitive slave to be taken from here, and just now when that rascally Nebraska bill has passed, they de- serve to be hung as high as were the Salem witches.
" I have been noticing books this forenoon. Mr. Giddings, Mr. Hale and, I think, Mr. Whittier, will be in town this week. I hope to see them. The anniversaries of the different moral and benevolent societies are held here next week. I wish you could hear some of the speeches. I go to hear Theodore Parker preach.
" Men say that he is not orthodox and all that; he says some things I do not believe, yet he never gives his hearers a stone when they ask for bread. He is a noble, fearless, but somewhat impulsive man. I care less for his theological notions and dogmas than I do for the great human heart within him.
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"Sunday morning. I hoped by this time to tell you that the fugitive slave was free, but he is now in the Court House, guarded by three companies of troops - the marines from the navy yard, the regular United States troops from Governor's Island and a company of volunteers. The city is one great ferment. On Friday evening I went to Faneuil Hall. As I expected, the hall was a dense jam; there are no seats on the lower floors and the whole surface was packed with men standing. The galleries, the window-sills, the ante-rooms, were crowded with men and women, and outside was a great crowd that could not get in at all, so they made speeches out there. The meeting was organized by appointing George Russell of Roxbury chairman. There were several speakers, among them Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker. Dr. Howe read the resolu- tions. I liked Mr. Phillips best of all. There seemed but one voice among speakers and people and that was that the slave, Anthony Burns, should not go back to Virginia. Such shouts and groans and hisses and cries of, 'To the Court House!' 'Let us free him tonight!' It was all Wendell Phillips could do, with his wondrous eloquence, to pacify them and show them the madness of an attempt to rescue him until after he had had his mockery of a trial. Before he had done speaking a man crowded
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himself into the doorway crying that there was a crowd collected around the Court House in Court Square, and they were about to attack the Court House. There was one general rush for the door. When we got out, which was not until among the last, the crowd were hurrying up to the Court House. We came up to the Commonwealth office. There was a crowd up there but we gave them a wide berth and came home, meeting on the way a company of military. Another passed the house soon after we reached it. The crowd at- tacked the Court House, broke one door, broke windows, etc., and were met by persons who were guarding the prisoner, the tools of the United States marshal, who was there himself, all armed with revolvers and swords. There were some pistols fired and one man killed. The man killed was said to have been inside the house and one of the men hired to guard the prisoner. The alarm bells were rung [and] as soon as possible, the mayor was there with the police. The mayor then ordered out two or three companies of military troops, while the United States marshal sent for more marines and for more regulars. None of the city troops volunteered to help the marshal, but a company of foreigners. The services of these were accepted and they were quartered in the Court House, to the great exasperation of the citizens.
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The city troops guard the building and try to keep the peace.
" Yesterday morning at the hour appointed for the trial the crowd about the Court House was very great; but every avenue was guarded and at the upper windows soldiers were looking down. Commissioner Loring would let no one in on the prisoner's behalf if he could help it and so much did Mr. Dana 1 who had taken up the prisoner's defence, make of this point, that they finally granted a postponement until Monday in order that he might prepare for the defence. So all day yesterday the Court House was guarded, and it is said that the marshal has sent to Newport for more troops. I did not go up street in the morning as I had planned, for I did not think it would be wise, but when my friends came home they said I might have gone. I went just at sunset up to the Common and then down past the Court House. The troops were drawn up before the door that was battered down the night before and there was a crowd that was constantly increasing. There was a rumor that Wendell Phillips' house was to be attacked and J. went with some others to buy Colt's revolvers. These gentlemen were going to stay in Mr. Phillips' house to guard it.
1 Richard H. Dana, Jr.
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" C. has been up to the square this morning. There were not many people about and all was quiet. He heard that the merchants of Boston had offered the master his price for the slave, $1,200, for which he offered to sell him Friday, and that now he refuses to take that and wants them to pay all his expenses besides. If I had my way I would take that slaveholder down to the old Liberty Tree on the corner where they used to take Tories, with a halter round his neck and ride him on a rail out of town. That would be all the coin he would get from me for his slave. I am ashamed of their trying to buy him. The Whigs and Democrats are as much excited about the matter as the anti-slavery people, indeed, it is said they complain of the luke- warmness of the Free Soilers. They want the Free Soilers to go ahead while they stand behind the corner and cry 'Go ahead!' The Free Soilers have done it in the times gone by and they are ready to do it now, though they would like someone to cooperate. Mr. B. very much deplores the outbreak Friday night; he thought the tone of some of the speeches made at Faneuil Hall Friday night very in- judicious, and indeed the outbreak has done much to lessen the chance of the poor fellow's rescue. Tomorrow we shall see what will be done. I am to go to the office in the morning
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to see the crowd and will write you all about it. Very truly yours,
" MARTHA RUSSELL." 1
The trifling advantages gained by slavery from such renditions as that of Burns were vastly outweighed by the indignation against the slave-power and all its abettors which was fed by these transactions. In all ages and nations it has been held odious to return fugi- tives into the hands of their oppressors, and no matter how eloquently a Daniel Webster might argue in a Seventh of March speech that it was the constitutional duty of Massachusetts strictly to enforce the extradition law, the awakened conscience of Boston cried out against such acts. To urge the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law was now the surest way to engender violent resistance to it. Moreover, there was very good ground for belief that the law was unconstitutional in its provisions. The United States Constitution had provided that " no person shall be deprived of his liberty without due process of law " and that "in all suits at common law where the value in con- troversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved." Yet Sims and Burns were deprived of their liberty without
1 In a letter to friends in North Brandford, Connecticut, quoted in the Notes and Queries department of the Boston Transcript.
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seeing either judge or jury! This disregard of the rights of the slave when in a free State it was which started in many minds the new and disturbing thought that, sooner or later, force would have to be met by force. How that thought constantly grew in power is the story of the next ten years in Boston.
CHAPTER V
WENDELL PHILLIPS: AGITATOR
A LTHOUGH " agitating " was not a tra- dition in the Phillips family, loving and serving Boston was. Very early the lad who was to do so much for the cause of the slave began to show enthusiasm for the glorious name and goodly fame of the city which had chosen his father for its first mayor. Born (Nov. 29, 1811) in the stately house of colonial design which still stands at the corner of Beacon and Walnut Streets, Wendell Phillips grew up with the historic Common for a play- ground, and with J. Lothrop Motley and Thomas Gold Appleton, lads destined, like himself, to hold an honored place upon the rolls of Boston's famous men, for play-fellows. "Wendell Phil- lips, Motley and I," Appleton has recorded, " used to frolic in the gallery of the Motley House [at the corner of Walnut and Chestnut Streets] and I recall that their favorite pastime used to be to strut about in any fancy costume they could find in the corners of the old attic and shout scraps of poetry and snatches of
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dialogue at each other. It was a fine sight to watch them, for both were noble-looking fellows; and even then Wendell's voice was a very pleasant one to listen to, and his gestures as graceful as could be."
When young Phillips was eleven he began to attend the Boston Public Latin School which (till 1844) stood on School Street upon a portion of the ground now occupied by the Parker House. An impressionable lad always, he was wont to think much as he went back and forth to school of the famous dead who had made Boston what it was. "Boston boys had reason to be thankful for their birthright," he declared in referring to these memories. " The noble deeds and sacred places of the old town are the poetry of history and the keenest ripeners of character." Such, at any rate, they proved to be in his case. And the mere contemplation of Faneuil Hall and the Old South Church strengthened in him his early determination to be a great orator even as James Otis and Dr. Warren had been. " What led me first to observe him," a fellow-student has said, " was his elocution; and I soon came to look forward to declamation day with interest, mainly on his account. The pieces chosen were chiefly such as would excite patriotic feelings and an enthusiasm for freedom." Wendell Phillips, however, did not need to have such "pieces "
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chosen for him. Already he had studied and committed most of the famous speeches of history, and he lost no opportunity to go where he could hear such speeches pronounced by the great men of his own time and town. Like the younger Pitt he made the study of oratory the diversion of his boyhood. Hearing Harrison Gray Otis or Edward Everett talk of policies and politics in Boston was to him as fascinating an occupation as visiting the circus is to the country lad who has been performing acrobatic stunts with the old farm horse.
When Wendell was fourteen a very great thing happened to Boston; Washington's friend, Lafayette, came to be the guest of the city. In a charming address made, years afterwards, to an audience of schoolchildren in Music Hall, Phillips thus recalled this stirring occasion, and no one of us who has ever been a hero-wor- shipper can listen coldly to his words: "I was a little boy in a class in the Latin School at the time and we were turned out on yonder Com- mon in a grand procession at nine o'clock in the morning. And for what? Not to hear fine music - no; but for something better than music, that thrilled more than eloquence - a sight which should live in the memory forever, the best sight which Boston ever saw - the welcome of Lafayette on his return to this country, after an absence of a score of years.
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I can boast, boys and girls, more than you. I can boast that these eyes have beheld the hero of three revolutions, this hand has touched the right hand that held up Hancock and Washington. Not all this glorious celebration can equal that glad reception of the nation's benefactor by all that Boston could offer him - a sight of her children. It was a long procession; and, unlike other processions, we started punc- tually at the hour published. They would not let us wander about and did not wish us to sit down. I there received my first lesson in hero-worship. I was so tired after four hours' waiting I could scarcely stand; but when I saw him - that glorious old Frenchman! - I could have stood until today."
At sixteen the boy entered Harvard and formed that friendship with Edmund Quincy, the president's son, which was to mean so much to both as well as to the Abolition cause. In college, however, Phillips was still what he had been made by the circumstances of his life, a proud leader of the aristocracy, a handsome, well-born, well bred lad who, though dis- tinguished above all his mates for purity of character and earnestness of purpose, seemed predestined to conservatism and to a prosperous career as the defender of the rights of those who possessed, - and who wished to retain. Such a youth, of blue Boston blood, went naturally,
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then as now, after being graduated from college into the Harvard Law School, and Phillips proved no exception to the rule. At college Charles Sumner had been one of Phillips' friends and in the Law School the two continued their intimacy counting themselves very for- tunate to be students together under Judge Story, the legal luminary of that day. When Phillips had completed his course the judge foretold for him an unprecedented career, little thinking in how extraordinary a sense the prophecy was to be a true one.
A trip to Philadelphia followed Phillips' release from studies and, on his way home after its enjoyment, he made the acquaintance, in New York, of Aaron Burr. The slayer of Hamilton was exceedingly polite to the young law graduate, showing him the sights of the metropolis and otherwise making him feel at home. Thus it was that, when Burr came to Boston for a visit, soon after Phillips' return, the younger man called on him at the Tremont House and returned the courtesies. Among other places he took Burr to the Athenæum, then on Pearl Street, to see the treasures of the place. " As they walked down the hall between the alcoves," records F. B. Sanborn (in his Recol- lections of Wendell Phillips) "Phillips caught sight of a bust of Hamilton, one of the orna- ments of the library, which he had forgotten was
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there. He tried on some pretext to draw Burr in another direction; but he, too, had seen the bust and marched straight up to it. He stood facing it for a moment, then turned and said: ' A remarkable man - a very remarkable man.' " After which he wheeled about and walked composedly away.
The old sign "Wendell Phillips: Office " which hung outside the Court Street building in which the young man began his law practice, still hangs against the bricks of a Boston wall. Now, however, its owner is the keeper of an " old curiosity shop " on Park Street, just opposite the State House, and the fact that he will not sell the sign for any sum whatever, - because of its value to him as an advertisement, - proves that Wendell Phillips' name is still one to conjure with in Boston. Seventy-five years ago, also, the sign "drew business." During his first two seasons of practice the young lawyer paid all his own expenses; and he was beginning to get cases with fame as well as fees attached to them when what some would call chance and others Providence arrested the current of his life and turned it in quite another direction. Sumner, as has been said, was Phillips' warm friend. He had an office near by at 4 Court Street and they were often to- gether. One day, as they sat chatting in Phil- lips' office, a mutual friend burst in, informed
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them of his engagement to a Miss Grew of Greenfield and added that, with his fiancée and a cousin of hers, a Miss Ann Terry Greene, he was to make a stage journey to Greenfield on the morrow.
" But you know," he added, " that in my con- dition 'two's company,' etc., and I wish you to go, both of you, and take care of the other lady. She will require the two of you, for she is the cleverest, loveliest girl you ever met. But I warn you that she is a rabid Abolitionist. Look out or she will talk you both into that ism before you suspect what she is at."
Goodnaturedly, the two young men promised to be on hand next morning and to entertain the fair Abolitionist while the fiancés enjoyed each other. But when the next day dawned in a furious rainstorm, Sumner faithlessly kept his comfortable bed and Wendell Phillips had, all to himself, during the long journey, the attention and the conversation of Miss Ann Terry Greene. As it happened, his mind was hospitably inclined towards the Abolition argu- ments with which she plied him, for he had been a witness to the indignities heaped upon Gar- rison by the " broadcloth mob " and so was theoretically on the anti-slavery side. But the burning words of this gentle girl, who had herself been in the little company of women whose meeting the mob had interrupted, awoke
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an unwonted response in his soul and, finding that she lived in Boston, he asked and received permission to call on her. Carlos Martyn, to whose vivid Life of Wendell Phillips I am indebted for this anecdote of a romance at its dawn, says that Phillips confessed, after he had married the lady, " Yes, my wife made an out and out Abolitionist of me, and she always preceded me in the adoption of the various causes I have advocated." But Mrs. Phillips was never in the public gaze after their mar- riage, - long invalidism claimed her, poor lady ! For the rest of her days she was able to serve only through her husband.
Phillips' maiden speech for the anti-slavery cause was made, June 14, 1837, in Lynn. Four months later he and Miss Greene were married, and ere their honeymoon was over he came out at Faneuil Hall, as has been related in the preceding chapter, for Garrison, for freedom and for the slave.
The cause of Woman, also, was one which Phillips early espoused. Allusion has already been made to the fine quality of the women in the anti-slavery movement and to their tenacity of purpose in pushing this reform. It is as if they had resolved to illustrate afresh the truth of Luther's saying, "I have often- times noted when women espouse a cause they are far more fervent in faith, they hold to it
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more stiff and fast than men do; as we see in the lovely Magdalen who was more hearty and bold than Peter himself." But though the anti-slavery societies welcomed women they gave them no voice and no vote, when it came to be a question of electing officers and shaping policies. Some of the women resented this, - just as they so long resented the necessity of obeying laws they had had no chance at making. Phillips among the first saw the justice of the women's claim. In a letter written in 1838 (to Arthur Tappan) he states unmis- takably his view of this matter, " Since woman is interested equally with man in righting the wrongs of slavery; since among the blacks she suffers vitally as wife and mother, as daughter and sister, just as he does as husband and father, as son and brother; why is she not entitled to utter her indignation anywhere, everywhere, and most of all in anti-slavery committee-rooms and upon anti-slavery plat- forms? "
A capital opportunity to take a notable stand on this important matter now came Phillips' way. He was accredited the representative abroad of the anti-slavery movement and after a year spent in travelling up and down Europe in the hope of benefiting Mrs. Phillips' health the two found themselves (June, 1840) in London for the meeting of the World's Anti-
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