THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC

WENDELL PHILLIPS

AN ORATION DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY OF THE PHI BETA KAPPA OF HARVARD COLLEGE, JUNE 30, 1881

INTRODUCTION

Wendell Phillips, orator and agitator, was born in Boston, November 29, 1811. He was graduated from Harvard College in 1831, and from the Harvard Law School in 1834. The following year he opened a law office in Boston. In 1837 he married Miss Anne Terry Greene, through whom he became acquainted with William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist. His wife was always an invalid, but to her influence Phillips attributed the decisive impulses of his life. Two years prior to his marriage, however, upon seeing Garrison dragged by a mob through the streets of Boston, he had dedicated his life to the antislavery cause. Shortly after his marriage, at a meeting held in Faneuil Hall to denounce the murder at Alton, Illinois, of an abolitionist named Lovejoy, Phillips made the first and most famous of his speeches. Thereafter, public speaking constituted his life work. He had already noted the estrangement of Boston society on account of his abolition sentiments, and this Faneuil Hall speech completed it; but having a competency through his inheritance and that of his wife, he was enabled to give himself up to the promotion of the antislavery cause. He became the recognized orator of the abolitionists. He also delivered lyceum lectures, from which he derived a considerable income, giving his lecture on "The Lost Arts" over two thousand times, and receiving therefor $150,000. After the Civil War, other reforms (all referred to in his speech in this volume) claimed his attention, his attitude being that of the agitator to the end. He died February 2, 1884.

It is perhaps even yet too early to get a proper historical perspective of Phillips's life. We can truly appreciate his methods and influence only by remembering that he was primarily and solely an agitator. Whereas Lincoln was conservative and constructive, Phillips was radical and destructive. In Lincoln we recognize the genius of constructive statesmanship, based on the past and present, but building for the future; Phillips was a child of genius, not a practical statesman. He was by nature and cultivation a fighter and an iconoclast. Poise, perspective, a just estimate of men and events are conspicuously absent in his speeches. His philosophy of our government was: Educate public opinion through agitation against moral and political wrongs, and trust the people to do the rest. The antislavery agitation furnished Phillips a field for the exercise of his peculiar talents. Once grant that man could not rightly hold property in man, and the intellectual part of the debate was won; the rest was purely a moral appeal, and herein Phillips was master. Hence it was that other questions, such as the currency, labor, and suffrage problems, which he essayed to deal with after the war, — questions which he showed no signs of having carefully studied, did not so readily lend themselves to settlement by his methods. There is, therefore, all the more praise for his oratory that he was listened to eagerly to the end. Throw away half of his contention, and there is usually enough left to startle the reader into a new train of thought. How much more, then, must his words have startled the hearer, under the spell of Phillips's delivery!

In the history of American oratory the career of Phillips is unique. With most men in modern times public speaking is merely incident to their careers. During the fifty years of Phillips's active life, oratory was his sole profession. Presumably the fifty-seven orations and addresses contained in the two-volume series of his works, some of the lectures delivered thousands of times, represent a far from complete collection of the speeches made by him, — addresses on less important occasions and of a more extemporaneous nature. In an age of powerful orators, North and South, Phillips was distinctively the orator of his time. In ultimate influence he was excelled by Webster, so that in the general estimate we must concede that Webster was the greater orator; but in the immediate influence over an audience he excelled Webster, — particularly in view of the fact that many of Phillips's most successful speeches

were addressed to hostile listeners. And since he ordinarily addressed fairly intelligent audiences, it must be inferred that his wonderful power was due to subject-matter and style, as well as to his manner of delivery.

In delivery, Phillips set the fashion for the direct, conversational style. Though perhaps not possessing the power of mere weight that Webster wielded, he improved on Webster's occasional tendency to a heavy and pompous style. Tall, lithe, and graceful, resembling, by actual measurement, the Greek Apollo, - Phillips's manner of speaking was, according to all his contemporaries, that of high-bred conversationalism. A contemporary and a competent critic, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, says of Phillips's style:

“The keynote to the oratory of Wendell Phillips lay in this: that it was essentially conversational the conversational raised to its highest power. Perhaps no orator ever spoke with so little apparent effort or began so entirely on the plane of his average hearers. It was as if he simply repeated, in a little louder tone, what he had just been saying to some familiar friend at his elbow. The effect was absolutely disarming. Those accustomed to spreadeagle eloquence felt, perhaps, a slight sense of disappointment. But he held them by his very quietness. The poise of his manly figure, the easy grace of his attitude, the thrilling modulation of his perfectly trained voice, the dignity of his gesture, the keen penetration of his eye, all aided to keep his hearers in hand. The colloquialism was never relaxed; but it was familiarity without loss of keeping. . . . Then, as the argument went on, the voice grew deeper, the action more animated, and the sentences came in a long, sonorous swell, still easy and graceful, but powerful as the soft stretching of a tiger's paw. He could be terse as Carlyle, or his periods could be prolonged and cumulative as those of Choate or Evarts: no matter; they carried in either case the same charm."

The Reverend Carlos Martyn, in his biography of Phillips, says: "It was this colloquial quality, infinitely varied yet without interruption, which made him the least tedious of speakers. You heard him an hour, two hours, three hours and were unconscious of the lapse of time. Indeed, he never seemed to be making a speech. It was no oration for the crown, with drum and trumpet declamation — only a gentleman talking. He had exactly the manner for an agitator, it was so entirely without agitation. This

repose, fire under snow, enabled him to husband all his electricity and flash it out to magnetize the audience."

Phillips's style of delivery, as was said, set a fashion. It taught the value of high-bred conversationalism. Bombast and artificiality, rant and roar went out of date, and the era of trained naturalism began. In this regard Phillips made every speaker and every audience his debtor.

This conversational style also characterizes his rhetoric and diction. His sentences have the variety, the brevity, and the directness of ordinary conversation. While the subject-matter of many of his speeches has to-day only a historical interest, and though they contain many arguments and sentiments utterly at variance with our beliefs and with subsequent events, the student of oratory will find — barring the extreme invective - no better or safer models of oratorical composition. The leading qualities of his style are his colloquial diction, his strength and energy, his invective, and his striking phrases.

Strength and energy were of course necessary for his work as an agitator. Though frequently mistaken, he is never knock-kneed. He strikes hard and often. He does not reserve his force for a periodic or final climax, but oftentimes every sentence is a climax. His thought, as distinguished from what has been described as his manner of delivery, is in constant motion. In many of his speeches there is no orderly arrangement in argument or exposition, and yet the thought is always clear and never lags. His is not the "stately flow of eloquence"; the main thought current is constantly reënforced by unseen springs, deflected by eddies and side currents, "boiling and turmoiling," like the Niagara rapids.

By common acknowledgment Phillips stands at the head of all orators, ancient or modern, in his use of invective. He hits right and left, sometimes his friends as well as his foes. Webster, Choate, Everett, Seward, Kossuth, and even Lincoln are among the mẹn whom he attacked. His aforementioned maiden speech, delivered at the age of twenty-six, illustrates his power in invective. The attorney-general of the commonwealth had spoken in defense of the murder by the mob. Two sentences in Phillips's reply are as follows:

"Sir, 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 in the hall] 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."

Take this example from his speech on "Public Opinion," which also includes his reasons for the use of invective:

"Men blame us for the bitterness of our language and the personality of our attacks. It results from our position. The great mass of the people can never be made to stay and argue a long question. They must be made to feel it, through the hides of their idols. When you have launched your spear into the rhinoceros hide of a Webster or Benton, every Whig and Democrat feels it. See to it, when Nature has provided you a monster like Webster, that exhibit him himself a whole menagerie- through the you country. . . . No man, since the age of Luther, has ever held in his hand, so palpably, the destinies and character of a mighty people, as did Webster on the seventh of March. He stood like the Hebrew prophet betwixt the living and the dead. . . . He gave himself up into the lap of the Delilah of slavery, for the mere promise of a nomination, and the greatest hour of the age was bartered away. It is not often that Providence permits the eyes of twenty millions of thinking people to behold the fall of another Lucifer, from the very battlements of Heaven, down into that 'lower deep of the lowest deep' of hell."

Again, he characterizes Webster as "Sir Pertinax McSycophant," styles Mr. Choate a "political mountebank," and alludes to the "cuckoo lips of Edward Everett." In his lecture on " Idols," after making various nations eulogize their great lawyers, he concludes, "Then New England shouts, 'This is Choate, who made it safe to murder, and of whose health thieves asked before they began to steal!'

Contrasted with the calmness and attractiveness of Phillips's manner, imagine the effect as these thunderbolts were hurled. Keen and graceful as a Damascus blade, his invective, it has been well said, lends new meaning to the term "philippic." The Richmond Inquirer, speaking of him before the Civil War, said, "Wendell Phillips is an infernal machine set to music."

His speeches are full of striking phrases. Prior examples are illustrative. Following are a few others, selected almost at random :