Part 15

After the return of the Phillipses, the anti-slavery work was taken up more vigorously than ever. Colored children were not allowed to study in the schools with white in Boston. Phillips agitated till separate colored schools were abolished. He appealed to the Legislature of his native State to compel railroads, as common carriers, to admit the negro to the cars, and finally was successful.

He shared, like Henry Ward Beecher and Lucretia Mott, the discomforts of the colored man. Frederick Douglass said, in his oration on Phillips, given before his own race, in Washington, 1884: "On one occasion, after delivering a lecture to the New Bedford Lyceum, before a highly cultivated audience, when brought to the railroad station (as I was not allowed to travel in a first-class car, but was compelled to ride in a filthy box called the 'Jim Crow' car), he stepped to my side, in the presence of his aristocratic friends, and walked with me straight into this miserable dog-car, saying, 'Douglass, if you cannot ride with me, I can ride with you.'

"On the Sound, between New York and Newport, in those dark days, a colored passenger was not allowed abaft the wheels of the steamer, and had to spend the night on the forward deck, with horses, sheep, and swine. On such trips, when I was a passenger, Wendell Phillips preferred to walk the naked deck with me to taking a state-room. I could not persuade him to leave me to bear the burden of insult and outrage alone."

In 1850 the "irrepressible conflict" between freedom and slavery was reaching its climax. The Fugitive-Slave Law, fathered by Henry Clay, and, to the dismay of a large portion of the North, upheld by Daniel Webster in his 7th of March speech, had been signed by the President, Millard Fillmore, Sept. 18, 1850. This bill made slave-hunting and the return of slaves to their masters a duty.

A great company, presided over by Charles Francis Adams, and addressed by Phillips and others, in Faneuil Hall, protested; but the North was powerless or suppliant. Mobs broke up anti-slavery meetings in New York City. Colored men, on one pretext or another, were seized and carried back to slavery.

On April 3, 1851, Thomas Sims, a slave, was arrested in Boston, and, after a hurried examination before the United States Commissioner, was given up to his pursuers. The poor slave youth begged this favor: "Give me a knife," he said, "and when the commissioner declares me a slave, I will stab myself to the heart, and die before his eyes."

At midnight the Mayor of Boston, with two or three hundred policemen, heavily armed, placed Sims on board the ship Acorn, and sent him back into bondage.

Great meetings were held on Boston Common and in Tremont Temple to protest against this action, but they were of no avail. A year later, on the anniversary of the rendition of Sims, Phillips gave a thrilling address at the Melodeon. Looking towards the future, he said, "I know what civil war is.... And yet I do not know that, to an enlightened mind, a scene of civil war is any more sickening than the thought of a hundred and fifty years of slavery. Take the broken hearts, the bereaved mothers, the infant wrung from the hands of its parents, the husband and wife torn asunder, every right trodden under foot, the blighted hopes, the imbruted souls, the darkened and degraded millions, sunk below the level of intellectual life, melted in sensuality, herded with beasts, who have walked over the burning marl of Southern slavery to their graves, and where is the battle-field, however ghastly, that is not white--white as an angel's wing--compared with the blackness of that darkness which has brooded over the Carolinas for two hundred years?"

Meantime, what had become of Sims? On arriving at Savannah he was severely whipped, and confined in a cell for two months. He was then sent to a slave-market at Charleston, and thence to another market at New Orleans. Finally he was purchased by a brick-mason, taken to Vicksburg, and in 1863 he escaped to the besieging army of Grant, and was given transportation to the North.

Three years later, May 14, 1854, Anthony Burns, a slave, was arrested, and on June 2, marched through Court Street and State Street, over the ground where Crispus Attucks, a colored man, fell as the first victim in the Boston Massacre in the Revolution, to the wharf, in the centre of a concourse of people, guarded by companies of militia and protected by cannon. The streets were draped in black by the indignant citizens, and the bells tolled a dirge, as the bound slave was thrust into the hold of a vessel ready to start for Virginia. Burns was the last black man carried back to his masters from Massachusetts.

Meantime, Wendell Phillips had been fighting other battles. In October, 1850, the first National Woman Suffrage Convention was held at Worcester, Mass. Nine States responded. Phillips spoke earnestly, but no full report of his address or of others was taken.

The next year, 1851, at Worcester, he made a brilliant speech at the second National Woman Suffrage Convention. Of that speech, given in full in Mr. Phillips's "Speeches and Lectures" published in 1863, Mr. Curtis says, in his eulogy of Phillips: "In his general statement of principle nothing has been added to that discourse; in vivid and effective eloquence of advocacy it has never been surpassed."

"What we ask is simply this," said Phillips, "what all other classes have asked before: Leave it to woman to choose for herself her profession, her education, and her sphere. We deny to any portion of the species the right to prescribe to any other portion its sphere, its education, or its rights.... The sphere of each man, of each woman, of each individual, is that sphere which he can, with the highest exercise of his powers, perfectly fill. The highest act which the human being can do, that is the act which God designed him to do.... The tools, now, to him or her who can use them....

"While woman is admitted to the gallows, the jail, and the tax-list, we have no right to debar her from the ballot-box."

He had no fears that woman's natural grace or tenderness would be marred by depositing her vote in the ballot-box. "Let education," he said, "form the rational and moral being, and nature will take care of the woman."

On another occasion Mr. Phillips gave this illustration: "Goethe said, that, 'if you plant an oak in a flower-pot, one of two things was sure to happen,--either the oak will be dwarfed, or the flower-pot will break.' So we have planted woman in a flower-pot, hemmed her in by restrictions; and, when we move to enlarge her sphere, society cries out, 'Oh, you'll break the flower-pot!' Well, I say, let it break. Man made it, and the sooner it goes to pieces the better. Let us see how broadly the branches will throw themselves, and how beautiful will be the shape, and how glorious against the moonlit sky or glowing sunset the foliage shall appear!"

He thought the idea that woman would have no time for political matters an absurdity, when the soldier, the busy manufacturer, the lawyer, the president of a college, and the artisan have time to vote.

"Responsibility," he said, "is one instrument--a great instrument--of education, both moral and intellectual. It sharpens the faculties. It unfolds the moral nature. It makes the careless prudent, and turns recklessness into sobriety.... Woman can never study those great questions that interest and stir most deeply the human mind, until she studies them under the mingled stimulus and check of this responsibility.... The great school of this people is the jury-box and the ballot-box.... Great political questions stir the deepest nature of one-half the nation; but they pass far above and over the heads of the other half. Yet, meanwhile, theorists wonder that the first have their whole nature unfolded, and the others will persevere in being dwarfed."

In 1861, in Cooper Institute, New York, Mr. Phillips said: "Let public opinion only grant that, like their thousand brothers, those women may go out, and, wherever they find work to do, do it without a stigma being set upon them. Let the educated girl of twenty have the same liberty to use the pen, to practise law, to write books, to serve in a library, to tend in a gallery of art, to do anything that her brother can do." And he asked for woman equal wages with man for the same work.

The anti-slavery war was still waging. The Kansas and Nebraska Act, by which the people were left to fight out the battle of slavery or freedom on their own soil, resulted, as might have been expected, in bloodshed. Among those who went to Kansas, determined to help make it a free State, was John Brown, whose pathetic life has been written recently by that eminent anti-slavery worker and author, Frank B. Sanborn, Esq., of Concord, Mass.

During those dreadful years of civil war in Kansas, Brown and his family suffered all manner of hardships. Some of his sons were in prison, and some murdered. He had always wished to free the slaves, had helped many to escape, and in 1859 carried out a plan, long in his mind, to establish a station in Virginia, near enough to a free State, where fugitive slaves could defend themselves for a time, till they could be helped into Canada.

On Sunday evening, Oct. 16, 1859, Brown, with eighteen men, arrived at Harper's Ferry, broke down the armory-gate, and took possession of the village, without firing a gun. The citizens soon armed, several men were killed, and, before the next night, Brown and his company, now reduced to six, were barricaded in the engine-house. Colonel Robert E. Lee, afterwards the Confederate general, arrived with some United States marines from Washington, and Brown was ordered to surrender, which he refused to do. When he was finally captured, his two sons were dead, and he was thought to be dying from his wounds.

He met his death bravely on the scaffold at Charlestown, Va., Dec. 2. 1859.

He wrote a friend, a short time before his death, "I think I cannot better serve the cause I love so much than to die for it; and in my death I may do more than in my life."

The day he died, he wrote on a piece of paper and handed it to one of the guards, "I, John Brown, am now quite _certain_ that the crimes of this _guilty land_ will never be purged away but with _blood_. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."

As he rode on the wagon to the scaffold, at eleven o'clock, looking out over the two thousand Virginian soldiers, the distant hills, and the Blue Ridge Mountains, he said, "This is a beautiful country; I have not cast my eyes over it before--that is, in this direction." He thanked his jailer for his kindness, and said, "I am ready at any time--do not keep me waiting;" and died without a tremor.

Victor Hugo said, "His hangman is the whole American Republic.... What the South slew last December was not John Brown, but slavery."

Brown's body was delivered to his wife, and she bore it to New York. Wendell Phillips met the funeral company at that city, and they carried the body to North Elba, in the Adirondack Mountains. He was buried Dec. 8, 1859, Mr. Phillips speaking eloquently and touchingly at the grave. "He has abolished slavery in Virginia," said Phillips.... "History will date Virginia emancipation from Harper's Ferry. True, the slave is still there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on yon hill, it looks green for months--a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree. John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes,--it does not live,--hereafter."

How strange it was that only a few short months afterward thousands of Union soldiers were marching to battle, singing that inspiring strain,--

"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, And his soul is marching on!"

While Brown lay in prison at Charlestown, Va., a meeting was held in Tremont Temple, Boston, to raise money for his impoverished family. John A. Andrew, not then governor, presided. Emerson, Phillips, and the Rev. J. M. Manning, Congregationalist, of the "Old South" Church, made earnest addresses. The latter said, "I am here to represent the church of Sam Adams and Wendell Phillips; and I want all the world to know that I am not afraid to ride in the coach when Wendell Phillips sits on the box."

In New York a meeting for the same purpose was confronted by a fierce mob. On Staten Island, when Phillips attempted to lecture, George William Curtis presiding, a mob gathered on the road and sidewalk. A lady driving up, a man from West Brighton rushed to the carriage-door, followed by several rough men, and exclaimed, "I advise you, madam, not to go in; there is going to be trouble."

"What trouble, sir?" said she calmly.

"Two hundred of us," said the leader, "have sworn to tear this man from the desk and plant him in the Jersey marshes."

"I don't think that will be allowed, sir," she replied.

"Well, if you have force enough to prevent it, go ahead."

"I do not say any such thing," she answered; "but this is not a political meeting. I have come to hear a literary lecture, and I think there will be decent men enough here to check any disturbance."

The bravery of the woman seemed to abash the crowd. Though some climbed on ladders to the windows of the church and shouted, "Fetch him out!" they did not attempt to batter down the doors. They threw stones and cursed after the lecture was over, but Phillips was not harmed.

An attempt was made to mob him in Philadelphia. He wrote to his wife's cousin, Miss Grew, "I have become so notorious, that at Albany, Kingston, and Hartford the Lyceum could not obtain a church for me; and the papers riddled me with pellets for a week; but that saved advertising, and got me larger houses gratis. At Troy they even thought of imitating Staten Island, and getting up a homoeopathic mob, but couldn't."

Phillips was becoming accustomed to mobs. He had, says Mr. Higginson, "a careless, buoyant, almost patrician air, as if nothing in the way of mob-violence were worth considering." Dec. 2, 1860, on the anniversary of John Brown's execution, being debarred from speaking in Tremont Temple, a crowded meeting was held in the Belknap-street colored church. The mob determined to get him into their hands, says Charles W. Slack, in George Lowell Austin's life of Phillips, and were only prevented "by a cordon of young men, about forty or more in number, who with locked arms and closely compacted bodies, had Phillips in the centre of their circle, and were safely bearing him home."

On Jan. 24, 1861, the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society was held in Tremont Temple. Mrs. Lydia Maria Child describes the scene: "Soon the mob began to yell from the galleries. They came tumbling in by hundreds.... Such yelling, screeching, and bellowing I never heard....

"Mr. Phillips stood on the front of the platform for a full hour, trying to be heard whenever the storm lulled a little. They cried, 'Throw him out! Throw a brickbat at him! Your house is afire; go put out your house!' Then they'd sing, with various bellowing and shrieking accompaniments, 'Tell John Andrew, tell John Andrew, John Brown's dead!' I should think there were four or five hundred of them. At one time they all rose up, many of them clattered down-stairs, and there was a surging forward toward the platform. My heart beat so fast I could hear it; for I did not then know how Mr. Phillips's armed friends were stationed at every door, and in the middle of the aisle. At last it was announced that the police were coming. Mr. Phillips tried to speak, but his voice was again drowned. Then ... he stepped forward and addressed his speech to the reporters stationed directly below him."

He said to the reporters--the noisy crowd shouted, "Speak louder! We want to hear what you're saying!"--"While I speak to these pencils, I speak to a million of men. What, then, are these boys? We have got the press of the country in our hands.... My voice is beaten by theirs, but they cannot beat types. All hail and glory to Faust, who invented printing, for he made mobs impossible." Nothing seemed to fire the great orator like opposition. He was the very soul of courage.

The Civil War had begun. Phillips, who had been in favor of disunion, because he and other anti-slavery men and women wished no union with slavery, now that the first shot had been fired on April 12, 1861, became a firm supporter of the Union.

He said in his lecture "Under the Flag," delivered in Music Hall, April 21, 1861, and contained in the first volume of his speeches: "The cannon shot against Fort Sumter has opened the only door out of this hour. There were but two. One was compromise; the other was battle.... The South opened this with cannon shot, and Lincoln shows himself at the door. The war, then, is not aggressive, but in self-defence, and Washington has become the Thermopylæ of liberty and justice. Rather than surrender that capital, cover every square foot of it with a living body; crowd it with a million of men, and empty every bank vault at the North to pay the cost. Teach the world once for all, that North America belongs to the Stars and Stripes, and under them no man shall wear a chain."

The speech was reported for the _Boston Journal_; but fearing that the war Democrats would not be pleased, it was suppressed. The friends of Phillips, learning of this, had it printed as an extra, and scattered one hundred thousand copies of it.

Through these early years of the war Phillips was urging the arming of the negroes; and when some white men doubted their courage, he lectured through the land upon Toussaint L'Ouverture, the great leader of Hayti, whom he thus pictures:--

"Of Toussaint, Hermona, the Spanish general, who knew him well, said, 'He was the purest soul God ever put into a body.' Of him history bears witness, 'He never broke his word.'"

When he was captured by the French and taken to France, "As the island faded from his sight, he turned to the captain and said, 'You think you have rooted up the tree of liberty, but I am only a branch; I have planted the tree so deep that all France can never root it up.'"

He was thrown into a stone dungeon, twelve feet by twenty. "This dungeon was a tomb. The story is told that, in Josephine's time, a young French marquis was placed there, and the girl to whom he was betrothed went to the Empress and prayed for his release. Said Josephine to her, 'Have a model of it made and bring it to me.' Josephine placed it near Napoleon. He said, 'Take it away, it is horrible!' She put it on his footstool, and he kicked it from him. She held it to him the third time, and said, 'Sire, in this horrible dungeon you have put a man to die.' 'Take him out,' said Napoleon, and the girl saved her lover.

"In this tomb Toussaint was buried, but he did not die fast enough. Finally the commandant was told to go into Switzerland, to carry the keys of the dungeon with him, and to stay four days; when he returned, Toussaint was found starved to death....

"'No RETALIATION,' was his great motto and the rule of his life; and the last words uttered to his son in France were these, 'My boy, you will one day go back to St. Domingo; forget that France murdered your father.'"

Early in 1863 Phillips saw colored troops, the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Regiments, march through the same street where Garrison had been mobbed and Anthony Burns carried back into slavery by United States troops, singing the John Brown song. Times were indeed changed since Phillips himself was mobbed for suggesting negro soldiers.

When the war was over, and Abraham Lincoln lay dead, Phillips spoke in Tremont Temple to a hushed and mourning company: "What the world would not look at, God has set to-day in a light so ghastly bright that it dazzles us blind. What we would not believe, God has written all over the face of the continent with the sword's point, in the blood of our best and most beloved. We believe the agony of the slave's hovel, the mother, and the husband, when it takes its seat at our own board....

"He was permitted himself to deal the last staggering blow which sent rebellion reeling to its grave; and then, holding his darling boy by the hand, to walk the streets of its surrendered capital, while his ears drank in praise and thanksgiving which bore his name to the throne of God in every form piety and gratitude could invent; and finally to seal the sure triumph of the cause he loved with his own blood. He caught the first notes of the coming jubilee, and heard his own name in every one. Who among living men may not envy him?"

In the great matters of reconstruction and constitutional changes, Phillips took an ardent and helpful part. He criticised sharply, perhaps not always wisely, (for who can be infallible in judgment?) but he was always earnest and unselfish. When asked to let his name be used for Congress, he refused, preferring to hold no party allegiance where principle was at stake.

He constantly urged the ballot for the negro. "Reconstruct no State," he said, "without giving to every loyal man in it the ballot. I scout all limitations of knowledge, property, or race. Universal suffrage for me; that was the Revolutionary model. Every freeman voted, black or white, whether he could read or not. My rule is, any citizen liable to be hanged for crime is entitled to vote for rulers. The ballot insures the school."

When the slavery question was settled, Wendell Phillips could not stop working. He wrote to a meeting of his old abolition comrades, two months before his death, "Let it not be said that the old abolitionist stopped with the negro, and was never able to see that the same principles claimed his utmost effort to protect all labor, white and black, and to further the discussion of every claim of humanity."

He said to a friend, "Now that the field is won, do you sit by the camp-fire, but I will put out into the underbrush."

He had for years been a total abstainer, and now more than ever was an earnest advocate of prohibition. In Tremont Temple, Jan. 24, 1881, he reviewed Dr. Crosby's "Calm view of Temperance."

Phillips stood manfully for the temperance pledge. "We make a pledge by joining a church," he said. "The husband pledges himself to his wife, and she to him, for life. Is the marriage ceremony, then, a curse, a hindrance to virtue and progress?