Wendell Phillips: “The Murder of Lovejoy”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

By late 1837 the abolitionist movement had endured four years of pro-slavery violence and political repression, culminating in the murder of the newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois. Until that moment, Phillips had remained uncommitted to the cause, but news of the murder moved him to action when he delivered an impromptu speech in Lovejoy's defense during a protest meeting in Boston's Faneuil Hall. Lovejoy's conduct was particularly controversial among the largely pacifist abolitionists because he had armed himself in his own defense and among anti-abolitionists who condemned him as a violent firebrand. A vocal proponent of the latter position was Massachusetts Attorney General James T. Austin, who praised Lovejoy's killers in the Faneuil Hall meeting as patriotic resisters who had faced down the menacing abolitionists. Although he was unprepared, Phillips rose, strenuously rebutted Austin's contentions, and eloquently defended Lovejoy's conduct.

Phillips's remarks demonstrate his compelling personal identification with New England's Revolutionary past and his lifelong desire to defend its legacies against impending pro-slavery tyranny, violently if necessary. Acutely conscious that he was descended from one of Massachusetts's most illustrious Puritan families, Phillips would often draw dramatic analogies such as the one in this speech between the Bostonian James Otis's resistance to British taxation in 1765 and Lovejoy's attempts to sustain press freedom. Henceforth, Phillips would expatiate powerfully on such historical parallels, challenging Bostonians specifically and Americans in general to base their opposition to slavery on ideals of Revolutionary patriotism.

The speech also highlights Phillips's Yankee nationalism, that is, his lifelong conviction that the expanding republic must develop in conformity with New England customs and traditions. This he made clear when asserting in this speech that settlers in far-off Alton had “forgotten the blood-tried principles of their fathers the moment they lost sight of our New England hills.” Lovejoy's conduct, in Phillips's view, was heroic precisely because he attempted to uphold Yankee values against mob tyranny. Throughout his life Phillips believed that the unlimited violence that masters deployed against their slaves, abominable in its own right, also threatened the liberties of all Americans, black and white alike. Abolition, in his view, always meant the replacement of slavery's dangerously chaotic power with predictable republican liberty and Christian moral order. In this manner, one of antebellum America's most radical activists always regarded his cause as profoundly conservative.

This inaugural speech displays the elements that explain Phillips's exceptional impact as an orator. Although his beliefs were certainly radical, he promoted them by appealing to widely accepted historical myths that Americans instinctively embraced. No matter how extreme his doctrines, he enunciated them in ideological contexts that heightened his listeners' receptivity and invited their trust. Phillips's nonthreatening rhetorical style—calm, informal, sincere, epigrammatic, humorously sarcastic, and seemingly spontaneous—further magnified these effects. Never did his listeners feel that he was hectoring, manipulating, intimidating, or talking down to them.

Most crucial to explaining Phillips's appeal, however, was the rapidly spreading impression within the North that, just as he was claiming, slavery was destroying republican liberties. His overall warnings seemed to explain and even prophesy the course of political events. Mobs throughout the 1830s were indeed destroying abolitionists' presses, invading abolitionist meetings, burning black neighborhoods, and entering U.S. post offices in search of antislavery mailings. In 1838 Congress had begun denying the abolitionists' right to petition the government regarding slavery. Citing the U.S Constitution, slaveholders were forcing northerners to aid in the recapture of fugitive slaves. Increasing southern demands for slavery's westward expansion into newly opening states during the 1840s and 1850s seemed to be leading to the nationalization of the “peculiar institution.”

This powerful counterpoint between Phillips's ideas and the development of the conflict between North and South put him in the unique position of speaking as a celebrity. The public wanted to know his views simply because he offered them, whether agreeing with them or not. In short, he made himself into the nation's first political pundit, which explains why so many times his speech titles read simply “The Lessons of the Hour” or “Our Duties at the Present Moment.” These nonspecific rubrics allowed Phillips to adjust quickly the content of his speeches in order to respond to the most recent headlines, much in the manner of media commentators today.