Wendell Phillips: “The Philosophy of the Abolition Movement”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In addition to orations for the multitudes, Phillips also directed his eloquence to his abolitionist colleagues. In this personalized setting he acted as the movement's most compelling ideologist and its most sophisticated strategic thinker. An excellent example of his work in this regard is his address to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1853 titled “The Philosophy of the Abolition Movement.” In it he offers comprehensive justifications for the abolitionists' disdain for moderate approaches and their harsh verbal assaults on their opponents. In Phillips's view, it was precisely the abolitionists' extremism that justified their actions and guaranteed their ultimate success.

When Phillips delivered this speech, his weary abolitionist co-workers were much in need of ideological reinforcement. Their three decades of agitation had not led to slavery's obliteration; instead, the South's “peculiar institution” had become greatly entrenched. Since Phillips had entered the movement in 1837, the enslaved population had increased from two million to three million, new slave states had been added to the Union, and Congress had approved a harsh new law to ensure the return of fugitives. Judged against the abolitionists' high initial expectations, their three decades of effort seemed to have yielded little, precisely the impression that Phillips's speech sought to counter.

Phillips's remarks demonstrate why he was considered by his critics to be abolitionism's master of vituperation or, by his beleaguered co-workers, a vital source of inspiration. His startling declaration that the “South is one great brothel, where half a million of women are flogged to prostitution, or, worse still, are degraded to believe it honorable” is typical of the extraordinarily polemical statements that he so frequently wove throughout his speeches. Reading excerpts of this speech one can begin to sense how Phillips built the remarkable ideological indictments of slavery that so dismayed his opponents and so energized his fellow abolitionists.

To accompany its electrifying language, Phillips's speech builds a defense of the abolitionist movement around a wholesale indictment of the custodians of the nation's most powerful institutions—clerics, politicians, legal authorities, and newspaper editors. According to Phillips, these shapers of public opinion had so thoroughly corrupted the nation's prevailing values with defenses of slavery that abolitionists were left no choice but full-throated denunciation. In a nation governed by a tyranny of the majority, moderate approaches and compromising tactics were simply not possible. Abolitionist duty instead demanded that corrupted opinion makers be individually named and unabashedly exposed, for only then did it become possible for public opinion to change. Thus, Phillips argued, the abolitionists' extreme language and uncompromising demands were anything but unreasonable. Instead, they constituted the highest statesmanship, marking their movement as one that displayed “sound judgment, unerring foresight [and] the most sagacious adaptation of means to ends.”

Apart from encouraging his fellow immediatists, the strategies recommended by Phillips in this speech also proved of crucial importance as political disagreements between North and South grew ever more intense in the 1850s. As northern resistance to slavery's westward expansion led to the rise of the Republican Party, abolitionists acted boldly on Phillips's admonition never to “throw away any weapon which ever broke up the crust of an ignorant prejudice.” Since Republicans opposed only slavery's westward expansion while repudiating emancipation for the slaves themselves, it remained to the abolitionists alone to challenge politicians such as Abraham Lincoln and the public opinion they courted with uncompromised demands for emancipation and equality.