Part 12

He endured the stings of the pro-slavery hornets, as they were called, with stoical dignity and forbearance, but in spite of all good resolutions, they had an effect upon the inner man. Like the good Maritornes when Sancho Panza mistook her for an evil spirit, he endured the drubbing as long as flesh-and-blood would stand it, and then retaliated in good earnest. It was discovered at length, that Wendell Phillips had a sharp tongue, as well as a silver one, and could use it also with some temper. Of course he was blamed for this, and very few considered what provocation he had, or gave him credit for his previous forbearance. The habit increased rather than abated in him with age, and finally acquired the nature of a familiar demon that would appear unexpectedly in the midst of a brilliant discourse and sadly mar the effect of it.

His tendency to exaggeration, disregard of fact, and recklessness of statement, may all be attributed to his irregular, improvised manner of working. There are few public speakers, indeed, who escape these faults. What preparation he made for his speeches will probably never be known. He was always as mysterious on this point as a professional juggler. To a lady who once asked him about it, he replied, that he never made any preparation. For those of his speeches that have been published, we are obliged to a skilful short-hand writer named Yerrinton, who was Wendell Phillips' devoted admirer, and never missed an opportunity of hearing him on a fresh subject in Boston or New York.

To judge from internal evidence, it would seem likely that having divided his subject, as a lawyer does his argument, into a number of points, and having filled his mind somewhat full of them, he wrote out a careful and well-studied opening to his address, and then committed it to memory. This would enable him to make terms, as it were, with his audience in those first critical moments of his speech, and afterwards he could rely on his native wit and genius to carry him through. When his subject was a criticism of public events, this was not so difficult, and it gave him the advantage of a certain vivacious energy which appealed strongly to his hearers; but it was a dangerous practice. An orator who has a certain length of time to fill, and a reputation to sustain, is obliged to go on at all hazards. He cannot afford to be dull, nor to stop for a moment's reflection. If his memory fails him for an instant, imagination must supply its place. In this manner he often made misstatements which were quite unintentional, and must have been deeply regretted afterwards. Some allowance too should be made for a man who feels himself in a desperate position. His historical lectures on "The Lost Arts," "Daniel O'Connel," and "Toussaint," must sooner or later have been committed to memory, and were repeated again and again in a nearly identical form.

To amend for these deficiencies, his delivery was perfect, and even more than that. One of our best critics has called him matchless in this respect, and no other orator of the century, except possibly Canning, may be compared to him. Webster was more effective, but rather ponderous. Choate's style was peculiar, and Everett's cold and studied. Gladstone resembles him more, perhaps, than any other, but Gladstone has a decided solemnity of manner which is a help to him among his countrymen, but a defect as judged by classic standards. With Wendell Phillips, it was not only that every phase of thought and feeling was portrayed at once in his face, attitude, and gestures, but this was done with such grace and purity as only belongs to the very highest art. It was as if a figure in Raphael's "School at Athens" had suddenly stepped out from the picture and explained the thought of the master to us in words.

There is nothing I can compare with the unconscious grace and purity of Phillips in his best moments except a picture by Raphael, or one of Milton's shorter poems. It was no lurid brilliancy or artificial light that shone from him, but rather the cheerful radiance of spring sunshine. No matter how gloomy the political outlook might be, or in what sombre colors he depicted it, this light from the man himself illuminated his subject and gave encouragement to his hearers. The most prolonged applause could not disturb a muscle in his countenance, and a storm of hisses appeared to have as little effect on him. From the first word to the last, he was master of the platform, and no one dreamed of contesting his right to it. His gestures were his own, and could not be imitated, for they were the creation of the moment. There was something magical in this art of his, and if his wisdom and judgment had only equalled it, he might have counted among the greatest of men.

Emerson sent one of Webster's orations to Carlyle, and the latter complained that it was monotonous and lacked the poetic quality of Demosthenes. This is quite true, but at the same time it may be said that Webster's speeches, judged simply as literature, have not been surpassed by five other American writers. The grand roll of his sentences does not become wearisome to a lover of sound reasoning, and in the presentation of his subject he has rarely been equalled. An oration of his is not like a picture hanging on the wall, but rather a public building which one can walk around and look at from the four cardinal points. Even his speech on the fugitive-slave bill, for which he has been so much blamed, contains the best analysis of the slavery question up to that time which had yet been made. He considered slavery a great evil, and his mistake evidently consisted in supposing that a great evil could exist in one part of the nation without vitiating the whole of it.

Phillips looked upon slavery as a crime, and attacked it in an uncompromising manner. His speeches are not much like Webster's, but they are excellent reading; full of keen, vivid thought, bright sayings, and genial humor. He had the imagination of Demosthenes, but without the logical faculty. Many of them possess historical value, and but for too much _voix blanc_, like the brightness of new silver, might be compared with Emerson's essays. Certain passages and individual sentences are of rare beauty. Speaking of Lovejoy thirty years after his death, he said, "How cautiously men sink into nameless graves, while now and then one forgets himself into immortality." At the time of the Dred Scott decision, he exclaimed: "Is Liberty dead? Is the valley of the Mississippi her grave? Are the Rocky Mountains her monument; and shall the Falls of Niagara chant forever her requiem?" In his Brooklyn address of November 1st, 1859, the finest of his orations, and one which he must have prepared with exceptional care, after telling the story of Tsar Nicholas, who insisted on building a straight railroad from Moscow to St. Petersburg in spite of the opposition of the engineers, he continued: "An intelligent democracy says of slavery, or a law, or a creed, 'This is justice, or it is not'; the track of God's thunderbolt is a straight line from justice to iniquity, and the church or state that cannot stand it must get out of the way." Or take this illustration of his subject from Athenian life--which is itself Athenian, and very much in the vein of Demosthenes:--

"Anacharsis went into the forum at Athens, and heard a case argued by the great minds of the day, and saw the vote. He walked out into the streets, and somebody said to him, 'What think you of Athenian liberty?' 'I think,' said he, 'wise men argue causes, and fools decide them.' Just what the timid scholar two thousand years ago said in the streets of Athens, that which calls itself the scholarship of the United States says today of popular agitation, that it lets wise men argue questions, and fools decide them. But that unruly Athens, where fools decided the gravest questions of polity and right and wrong, where it was not safe to be just, and where property, which you had garnered up by the thrift and industry of to-day, might be wrung from you by the caprices of the mob to-morrow,--that very Athens probably secured the greatest human happiness and nobleness of its era, invented art, and sounded for us the depths of philosophy: God lent to it the noblest intellects, and it flashes to-day the torch that gilds yet the mountain-peaks of civilization."

At a memorial meeting of Sumner's friends in 1874, Phillips concluded his remarks with the same expression that Cicero used in regard to Homer:--"There was no one like Sumner." He was not a mellow-toned orator of peace and conciliation, but soul-stirring, and one could detect the distant flash of a sword-blade in his periods.

In private life, he was the most delightful of men. Good orators always have the finest manners, for it is from them that we learn the art of behavior; but Wendell Phillips never brought the great man of the world to the drawing-room or dining-table, but was so perfectly a gentleman that he seemed almost like a prince who had abdicated his hereditary possessions. He did not seem to have been bred to good manners, but born to them, so natural and unconstrained was everything he said and did. Never self-conscious and never self-forgetful; where consideration was needed he was sure to be at hand. He was at once dignified and deferential, even to children and servants, whom he was sure to remember in the homes where he visited, and usually had a kind word for them at the right moment. I do not think he could have treated even the meanest of women with disrespect.

He never talked too long or too brilliantly, but seemed to be on the watch to give everyone present a fair chance. His presence in a room was stimulating, and made people brighter than their ordinary wont. Of small conversation, conversational pleasantries, and what is called table-talk, he happily knew nothing. He had no sharp wit or repartee, but plenty of genial humor, and could of course tell a story to perfection. His imitations of other orators were highly amusing, especially what he called Webster's Rochester speech: "The public debt; it must be paid; and it _shall_ be paid;--how much is it?" He would go through the performance and then resume his seat at the table, laughing like a child. When Emerson and Phillips dined together they would look at one another, as it seemed, with a kind of awe, as if they were more wonderful to each other than to ordinary mortals. It was after such an occasion that Emerson said, "This man is such a perfect artist that he ought to be walking all the galleries of Europe, and yet here he is fighting these hard questions." He did not appear to care much for society however, and always declined an invitation where he was in danger of being lionized, or otherwise made use of.

A characteristic anecdote is told of him during the expedition of the abolitionists to England in 1853. They were entertained there by their British allies, and also by members of the nobility. A certain duchess (or countess perhaps) invited them to a lawn-party, and while they were engaged in drinking coffee on her lawn, an uncomfortable drizzling mist came down on the company. The gentlemen all carried their hats in their hands, out of respect for the duchess, who wore a sort of lace tiara; but in this emergency Phillips, who had a speech to make at Birmingham next evening, placed his on his head and continued to wear it. The consequence was that when the duchess gave them a second entertainment Phillips was not invited. He was as independent as this on all occasions.

The anti-slavery movement carried along with it a variety of other social and political movements such as spiritualism, total abstinence, and the prevention of capital punishment; which prevented many sympathetic friends of the cause from joining it, and gave it a quaint, and sometimes even a comical aspect. These Utopian and impracticable notions were accepted by the abolitionists partly on the log-rolling principle, and partly from a tendency of those people to separate themselves from what is real and tangible. It seems strange that a man of Wendell Phillips' culture and mental endowments should not have been able to distinguish between a necessary and possible reform, and those vague theories of human happiness and perfection which are not based on the logic of experience, but indicate rather a wayward mental condition in the devotees. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, what should be said of unripe and superficial thinking? We wonder what were Wendell Phillips' reflections concerning the women in Bloomer costume, and the paradoxical persons who frequented the anti-slavery fairs, and created disturbances at the anti-slavery conventions. If questioned about them he would probably have said, with a laugh, "Oh, those are our barnacles;" but they were only extreme cases of the general tendency.

It was not the right element for a man of his calibre: he did not become a spiritualist, nor was he so intolerant as to object to the use of brandy for cooking purposes; but he published an injudicious and even intemperate letter to the chief-justice of Massachusetts and the president of Harvard College, arraigning them for drinking wine at a public banquet. He exerted himself strenuously to obtain the repeal of capital punishment; and when that failed, and also an attempt to obtain a pardon for a miserable murderer, whom it was merely a kindness to hang, he attacked the governor of the state in a sermon before the Theodore Parker Society, which was little better than a tirade of invectives. He never appeared as an advocate of woman suffrage before the public, but he is said to have approved of it. Neither would he go to the polls to vote; at first because the national constitution supported slavery, and afterwards because the government maintained an army and encouraged war.

He missed a fine opportunity to escape from this narrow routine and enter the arena of practical politics when the Free-soil party was formed to prevent the extension of slavery. However, he either did not think of it, or preferred to hold fast to his former friends, though he little knew how little they cared for him, and he continued for ten years longer to lecture on Toussaint and talk moral-suasion,--riding hard on the Garrisonian formula. It seems like small business when we recollect the work that Seward and Sumner and Chase were doing meanwhile.

It was the attack on Harper's Ferry that broke the spell at last, and awoke Wendell Phillips to a higher and more useful life. It is difficult to realize now, the courage that was required to appear before the public in defence of what was generally considered the outrage of a madman. It is easier for men to understand the differential calculus, than that rebellion against government is either the greatest of crimes or the highest of virtues. When government becomes so bad that honesty and virtue cannot endure it, revolution is imminent. Phillips, Emerson and Thoreau, John A. Andrew and Rev. J. M. Manning, pastor of the Old South church, were the ones who asserted this. Andrew and his friends called a meeting, nominally to obtain funds for the wife and daughters of John Brown. The hall was crowded with a remarkably intelligent looking class of people. Andrew presided, and claimed that whatever might be thought of his Virginia raid, John Brown himself, considered from his own standpoint, was in the right. Rev. Mr. Manning said, if John Brown had consulted him in regard to inciting a slave insurrection he should certainly have advised him not to do it, but he was far from regretting that the attempt had been made. Phillips was the last speaker, and treated his subject in the boldest revolutionary manner; and before he had finished the applause was deafening. A judge of the superior-court sat on the front bench clapping his hands with a noise like pistol shots.

This served him as a preparation for the Brooklyn address already referred to, which, if it had been equal throughout, might be classed among the world's great speeches, and it is certainly one of the most brilliant orations of either ancient or modern times. Certain passages in it remind one of a shower of falling stars. It is remarkable for its light and shade. He began with a gay and graceful compliment to Thomas Corwin, an old statesman of the Henry Clay school, who was seated on the platform; but he soon became intensely serious. "The lesson of the hour is insurrection. And why is it? Because we are all recreant Americans; recreant to the principles of our ancestors." After a while he changed to a sort of rippling humor, which was peculiar to him, and delighted his audience immensely, describing the subterfuges which had come into fashion to escape using the word slavery. "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." Then he became deeply pathetic as he referred to the heroic man condemned to death and lying wounded in a Virginia prison; and concluded with an outburst of spiritual triumph like that in Goethe's tragedy of Egmont. "They have brave men in Virginia: it was not an old, grey-headed man entering Harper's Ferry that they were afraid of, it was the John Brown in every man's own conscience that made them tremble."

He achieved an equal success of a different kind soon after, in attempting to deliver the same speech in New York city. A portion of the hall was filled with pro-slavery roughs who cursed and reviled him, and threw various missiles at him. A stone which struck a chair near him on the platform might have done him very serious injury. Nothing dismayed, he continued his speech, and taking his text from the insults of his enemies, hurled defiance back in their teeth. His friends who accompanied him and were ready to defend him from personal violence, said that on this occasion Phillips surpassed any thing they had known of him before; and fairly quelled the mob by his courage, address, and personal magnetism.

It was during the following eight years that Wendell Phillips proved himself the great orator. Wasson, who never quite approved of him, said that Webster might have excelled him, but that Choate or Everett could not be compared with him. The largest halls could not contain the people who wished to hear him. He was several times mobbed, and his life was in continual danger. A body-guard of devoted young friends escorted him to and from his house. He never ceased calling for the emancipation of the negroes, and when that was accomplished, for their enlistment as volunteers and a more vigorous prosecution of the war. His criticism of public affairs was not always judicious, but it warmed the hearts of the people and strengthened the hands of the anti-slavery party in Washington. The real difficulty at that time was best known to Lincoln and his cabinet; the difficulty of organizing such large armies with so small a number of trained and experienced officers. Good judges have given an opinion that the practice of appointing noted politicians to important commands lengthened the war at least two years, and one after another, all these men had to be removed; but what else could the government do? The officers of the regular army nearly all belonged to the democratic party, and President Lincoln hardly knew whom he could trust. Phillips knew as little of military affairs as Grant did of oratory.

Just one year after the Brooklyn address, he was called upon to celebrate the election of Abraham Lincoln in Boston Music Hall. For once Phillips and his audience were in perfect harmony, and also in the best of spirits. Men little dreamed at that time of the awful chasm that was to open beneath them. His speech was full of the most delicious humor; rather a biting humor at times, as we read it now, but it did not seem so in the way he spoke it. It was like a wedding feast: laughter and applause were so frequent that the wonder is that the speaker was able to keep the thread of his discourse. Among a dozen witty passages, he said, "Now I would like to have a law that one-third of our able men should not be eligible for the presidency. Then every third man could be depended on to tell the truth. Listen to Mr. Seward on the prairies; what magnificent speeches he has made there since Mr. Lincoln's nomination. When he ceased to be a candidate for the presidency, he became a man again."

In the winter of 1863 he went to Washington for the first time, and lectured on the lesson of the hour. "Old Abe" went to hear him and expressed himself as being greatly pleased with the exhibition, as he called it. Next day a committee of influential citizens called on him to inquire if he could deliver his oration on "Toussaint" that evening for the benefit of his admirers; and then that was not enough, but they must have his lecture on "The Lost Arts" the evening afterward. This was a fine triumph for him after twenty-five years of social ostracism but his anxiety in regard to the condition of the country, prevented him from enjoying it as he might have.

Meanwhile a storm was preparing for him in the quarter he least expected it. The old abolitionists, whom nobody had thought of since the repeal of the Missouri compromise and who were beginning to feel a good deal neglected, looked upon Phillips now as a deserter from their standard of non-resistance and moral suasion, and perhaps also eyed his brilliant course with some little jealousy. In the spring of 1865 Garrison returned from hoisting the flag at Fort Sumter, fully satisfied that the negroes could be safely trusted in future to the patriarchal care of the central government. Phillips thought otherwise. He argued that the black man still suffered from the effects of slavery; that they were very much at the mercy of their former masters, who would naturally bear them no good-will; that their future political position would depend on the action of Congress and not on the administration; and that it was still advisable for northern friends to keep watch over their interests.

From this private difference of opinion an obstinate controversy soon developed itself, in which a large portion of the public took part on one side or the other. Senator Sumner and his friends supported Phillips; while Governor Andrew, who disliked him for no very good reason, and Senator Wilson for a much better one, supported Garrison. Both parties being thus strongly reinforced, the dispute rose to a high pitch. Phillips finally carried the day, and was fully justified afterwards for doing so; but the Garrison party took mortal offence at him for this, and would never afterwards recognize him except by a cold and distant courtesy. George Thompson, an English friend of Garrison who came over providentially at that time, quoted Phillips' earlier speeches against him (an inconsistency which was rather to his credit) and exclaimed, "I appeal from Phillips drunk to Phillips sober:" nor was this the worst of it. [Footnote: A year after this he said to two Rhode Island ladies, who were among the few friends that remained faithful to him all through life, "It seems hard that of the men whom I worked with for thirty years only three or four are willing to speak to me now."] But Phillips endured the storm like a man. He argued his case with all the ardor and energy of his nature, but there escaped from him not one opprobrious or resentful sentence towards his former associates. Emerson said (to quote him again, and we hope for the last time): "How handsomely Mr. Phillips has behaved in his controversy with Mr. Garrison. In fact Phillips was the same we have always known him." But the wound went deep into him; and seven years later, when he said at the Radical Club, "I have known cases in which it only took _one_ to make a quarrel," we all recognized what he was thinking of.