Part 14

A negro having been chained to a tree and burned to death for killing an officer who attempted to arrest him, the judge decided in favor of the mob. Rev. Mr. Lovejoy protested against such barbarity, and his printing-office was at once destroyed by the lawless. He moved his paper to Alton, Ill., but the slavery sympathizers destroyed his press. Some citizens reimbursed him for the loss. Another press was purchased and destroyed, and then another. The fourth press, the mayor and law-abiding citizens determined should be defended.

In the evening a mob gathered from the saloons,--their usual place of starting,--and threatened to burn the building where it was stored. The officials seemed powerless, the building was fired, and the Rev. Mr. Lovejoy received three balls in his breast.

The death of this young minister in a free State sent a thrill of indignation throughout the North. Dr. William Ellery Channing and one hundred others called a meeting at Faneuil Hall, Boston, for the morning of Dec. 8.

The Hon. Jonathan Phillips, a relative of Wendell Phillips, presided over the crowded assemblage. Dr. Channing spoke eloquently. Soon in the gallery, James T. Austin, the Attorney-General of Massachusetts, a prominent lawyer, and member of Dr. Channing's congregation, arose and declared that Lovejoy "died as the fool dieth," and compared his murderers to the men who destroyed the tea in Boston harbor. The audience was intensely excited.

Young Phillips, twenty-six years old and comparatively unknown, standing among the people,--there are no seats in the hall,--said to his neighbor, "Such a speech in Faneuil Hall must be answered in Faneuil Hall."

"Why not answer it yourself?" whispered the man.

"Help me to the platform and I will," was the reply; and pushing his way through the turbulent crowd he reached the rostrum.

He began with all the grace and self-control which characterized him in after years. There were mingled cries of, "Question," "Hear him," "Go on," "No gagging," and the like.

"Riding the whirlwind undismayed," says George William Curtis, in his eulogy, "he stood upon the platform in all the beauty and grace of imperial youth--the Greeks would have said a god descended--and in words that touched the mind and heart and conscience of that vast multitude, as with fire from heaven, recalling Boston to herself, he saved his native city and her cradle of liberty from the damning disgrace of stoning the first martyr in the great struggle for personal freedom."

"Mr. Chairman," he said, "when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips (pointing to the portraits on the wall) would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American--the slanderer of the dead.... Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered, on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up."

This was received with applause and hisses, with cries of, "Make him take back 'recreant.' He sha'n't go on till he takes it back."

As soon as he could proceed he said, "Fellow-citizens, I cannot take back my words. Surely the Attorney-General, so long and well-known here, needs not the aid of your hisses against one so young as I am,--my voice never before heard within these walls!"

"In the annals of American speech," says Curtis, "there had been no such scene since Patrick Henry's electrical warning to George the Third.... Three such scenes are illustrious in our history. That of the speech of Patrick Henry at Williamsburg, of Wendell Phillips in Faneuil Hall, and of Abraham Lincoln in Gettysburg--three, and there is no fourth."

From this time Wendell Phillips was famous; but, save for the approbation of his young wife, he stood nearly alone. He had already spoken once before an Anti-Slavery Convention at Lynn, Mass. He was now a despised abolitionist. His family were disappointed, his college was surprised, his law constituency well-nigh disappeared. He was socially ostracized.

James Russell Lowell, who also knew what it cost to be on the unpopular side, spoke thus nobly of Phillips:

"He stood upon the world's broad threshold; wide The din of battle and of slaughter rose; He saw God stand upon the weaker side, That sank in seeming loss before its foes; Many there were, who made great haste and sold Unto the cunning enemy their swords; He scorned their gifts of fame and power and gold, And, underneath their soft and flowery words, Heard the cold serpent hiss; therefore he went And humbly joined him to the weaker part, Fanatic named, and fool, yet well content So he could be the nearer to God's heart, And feel its solemn pulses sending blood Through all the wide-spread veins of endless good."

Mr. Phillips turned his time and thought more than ever to the lecture platform, because in this way he could mould public opinion. He began to deliver "The Lost Arts," in 1838, which gives a glimpse of early civilization in glass-making, in gems, colors, metals, canals, etc., and gave it over two thousand times during the next forty-five years, receiving for it, Dr. Martyn says, which statement he heard from Phillips's own lips, a net result of $150,000.

When asked to lecture he would state his price if he were to speak on science or biography, of which he was especially fond, but would make no charges and pay his own expenses if he might speak on slavery or temperance. If he spoke once he was sure to be sought again, and sooner or later the people heard concerning the subjects to which he had dedicated his life.

Having been made the general agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Phillips organized a strong lecture force, and made every schoolhouse and church where he was allowed to enter the centre for discussions. Mrs. Phillips's health seeming to fail more and more, it was deemed wise to cross the ocean for her sake. They accordingly sailed from New York for London, June 6, 1839, arriving in July. They visited France, Italy, and Germany, and remained abroad two years, without, however, any improvement for the invalid wife.

On June 12, 1840, a World's Anti-Slavery Convention began its sessions in London. A call had been issued, addressed to the "Friends of the slave of every nation and of every clime." American societies sent delegates, Wendell Phillips and his wife, already abroad, Lucretia Mott, the distinguished Quaker, Garrison, and many others.

When they reached England, the women were refused as delegates. They asked Wendell Phillips to plead their cause. When he left the house in London to do so, his wife said to him, "Wendell, don't shilly-shally."

He spoke with his usual politeness and power: "It is the custom there [America] not to admit colored men into respectable society; and we have been told again and again that we are outraging the decencies of humanity when we permit colored men to sit by our side. When we have submitted to brickbats and the tar-tub and feathers in America, rather than yield to the custom prevalent there of not admitting colored brethren into our friendship, shall we yield to parallel custom or prejudice against women in Old England?

"We cannot yield this question if we would, for it is a matter of conscience, ... and British virtue ought not to ask us to yield."

The women were not admitted, however, and were obliged to sit in the gallery as spectators. None the less the women of both nations owe Phillips hearty thanks for his appreciation and his justice. Father Mathew, the great temperance leader of Ireland, deeply regretted the exclusion of the women delegates.

After the convention, Phillips and his wife went, by way of Belgium and the Rhine, to Kissingen, in Bavaria. He writes to a friend in England: "To Americans it was especially pleasant to see at Frankfort the oldest printed Bible in the world, and two pairs of Luther's shoes, which Ann would not quit sight of till I had mustered German enough to ask the man to let the 'little girl' feel of them."

Again he writes: "We started for Florence, by Bologna, that jewel of a city; ... for she admits women to be professors in her university, her gallery guards their paintings, her palaces boast their sculptures. I gloried in standing beside a woman-professor's monument, set up side by side with that of the illustrious Galvani."

To Garrison he writes from Naples, having then the same sympathy for the poor and the laborer which he showed through life: "When you meet in the same street a man encompassed with all the equipage of wealth, and the beggar, on whose brow disease and starvation have written his title to your pity, the question is, involuntarily, Is this a Christian city? To my mind the answer is, No....

"I hope the discussion of the question of property will not cease until the Church is convinced that, from Christian lips _ownership means responsibility for the right use_ of what God has given; that the title of a needy brother is as sacred as the owner's own, and infringed upon, too, whenever that owner allows the siren voice of his own tastes to drown the cry of another's necessities.... None know what it is to live till they redeem life from monotony by sacrifice."

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."