Wendell Phillips: “The Murder of Lovejoy”

About the Author

Born in Boston in 1811, Wendell Phillips joined the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1837, associating thereafter with the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, that movement's most visible and divisive leader. Endowed with exceptional rhetorical gifts, Phillips became a highly sought-after public speaker despite his controversial advocacy of immediate emancipation, racial equality, women's rights, and antislavery violence and his denunciations of American politics as irredeemably pro-slavery. Within the American Anti-Slavery Society, Phillips became the abolitionists' resident intellectual by developing sophisticated justifications for the role of radical agitators in refreshing America's democracy. He also became the Garrisonians' leading legal controversialist by attacking the movement's opponents with unmatched vitriol and by developing widely debated claims that the U.S. Constitution was a pro-slavery document.

As conflict deepened between North and South during the 1850s, Phillips became a proponent of violent resistance, and when the insurrectionist John Brown invaded Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, Phillips defended him. He embraced the Civil War as a crusade for black equality and took a prominent role in efforts to achieve these goals during the reconstruction of the postwar South from 1865 to 1870. After the dissolution of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1870, Phillips continued demanding black equality but also expanded his advocacy to include the labor movement, temperance, women's suffrage, and equal rights for Native Americans and Chinese immigrants. He died on February 2, 1884.

Phillips's importance involved his unique ability to make ordinary Americans respond substantively to the egalitarianism of an otherwise highly unpopular radical abolitionist movement. His extraordinary oratory explains this result, but only when it is recalled that Phillips was steeped in a nationalistic version of American history that touched the memories, fears, and aspirations of his ever-expanding Yankee audiences. He also became an acute analyst of democracy's responses to the power of public opinion, knowledge that allowed him to become one of the nation's first media stars. Phillips's speeches became highly orchestrated events involving extended tours, heavy advance publicity, press conferences and private interviews, huge audiences, autographed photos, and ongoing editorial commentary. Thus did the media-conscious Phillips invent the role of the political “opinion maker” while multiplying his listeners' resentments against the slaveholding South.

Phillips's importance also stemmed from his empowering presence within the abolitionist movement. Possessing two degrees from Harvard, he continued reading deeply in history, the classics, law, literature, and political economy. As radical abolitionism's most deeply feared polemicist, he was noted as much for his impressive learning as for his use of extraordinarily personal invective and his mesmerizing rhetoric. His vehement attacks on pro-slavery politicians and clerics, his justifications of violence on behalf of emancipation, and his arguments in favor of overthrowing the U.S. Constitution significantly amplified the abolitionist movement's political influence as the Civil War drew closer. During that war and during Reconstruction, Phillips's leadership secured for the abolitionists a central political role in struggles to gain equality for the emancipated slaves. During the 1870s Phillips also played a prominent role in the labor movement.

Finally, Phillips's importance derives from his career as one of the nation's most generous philanthropists. Upon marrying the abolitionist and heiress Anne Terry Greene, the extraordinarily wealthy Phillips united his fortune with a second, even larger, fortune, and his speaking fees eventually earned him a third. Over nearly four decades this childless couple quietly dispersed one of the antebellum era's largest private estates, almost all of it to needy individuals.