Wendell Phillips: “Under the Flag”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Phillips delivered this speech just as sectional crisis was merging with the Civil War. Following Abraham Lincoln's election, nearly all of the slave states seceded. Confederates then fired on U.S. forces attempting to provision Fort Sumter, the federal installation located in Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. This hostile act led Lincoln's call for seventy-five thousand troops to prevent seceding states from leaving the Union. Lincoln's appeal to arms placed Phillips in a difficult position.

For nearly two decades Phillips had been the abolitionists' premier advocate of northern disunion, the doctrine that slavery could be abolished only if the free states dissolved their constitutional ties with the South. Arguing that in 1787 the Founding Fathers had built protections for slavery throughout the Constitution, Phillips had insisted that the institution's survival depended entirely on northern legal and political support. Were this support withdrawn, slavery would collapse either through insurrection or as a result of planters' demoralization. Throughout the crisis of 1861, Phillips had deployed these arguments to urge that the seceding states be allowed to depart in peace. Now, however, Lincoln had declared a war against the slave system that Phillips so hated in order to preserve the Union that Phillips had so long condemned. In this speech Phillips resolves this obvious contradiction by abandoning his northern disunionism while welcoming civil war as the means for forging a new and radically egalitarian American state.

Phillips demonstrates throughout this speech the enormous differences that always distinguished his understanding of the Civil War from the views of those who prosecuted it, Lincoln and the Republican Party. For Lincoln and for most Republicans, warfare aimed to reassemble the Union as it had existed prior to 1861, not to remake the nation through social and political revolution. Even when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he made clear that his primary motive was to restore the Union. In this fundamental respect, the “union” to which Phillips swore his allegiance in 1861 was worlds apart from the Constitution that Lincoln maintained. So although it seems on first reading of “Under the Flag” that Phillips was recanting his northern secessionism, in truth he remained as opposed as he had ever been to the Union as it had always existed. Instead, he now sought to transform that tyrannous arrangement through the force of arms.

In this address Phillips makes the revolutionary nature of his expectations clear in his dramatic contrasts between a South mired in the “barbarism” of the “thirteenth and fourteenth century” and a North that “thinks” and is fully involved in the egalitarian “nineteenth century.” Warfare between two such antithetical civilizations, “Civilization against Barbarism” must, in Phillips's view, lead to the destruction of the latter and to the complete transformation of the entire nation to lift up “all tongues, all creeds, all races—one brotherhood.” Implicit in this prediction are all the specific measures that Phillips and other radical abolitionists demanded during the war and in its immediate aftermath. For Phillips and the other radicals for whom he spoke, final victory would be assured only when the emancipated slaves possessed complete civil rights, occupation of lands confiscated from rebel planters, access to education, and unqualified male suffrage. In this respect, Phillips's “Under the Flag” oration clearly anticipated the epochal struggles for racial equality in the South after emancipation.