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UNDER THE FLAG

BY

WENDELL PHILLIPS

WENDELL PHILLIPS

1811-1884

There are men born to meet great emergencies. That is the end of their existence, and they are competent for no other. Until their hour strikes, they seem to lag superfluous on the stage of the world; they have abilities, but no cue to employ them; other men are at work, but they stand idle; if they are questioned, they cannot tell why they take hold of nothing; it is only that nothing interests them; nothing seems worth while; there is in them no inward monitor bidding them act; on the contrary, that monitor seems to counsel them to wait. Meanwhile, the world seems to pass them by; but at last, the cause they were waiting for discloses itself, and then they pass by and above the world, and become the wonder, the idol, the motive force of a generation.

Wendell Phillips was a Boston Brahmin; he belonged to the elect, to the aristocracy; he was by heredity as well as personal predilection a man of culture and refinement, with cool manners, deliberate speech, and a certain intellectual hauteur which was discouraging to intrusive familiarities. He was courteous, but he seemed bored; he regarded the ordinary pursuits and preoccupations of his fellow-men with polite indifference. After leaving Harvard he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1834; but he had no serious purpose of practising law; it was respectable to have a profession, and Phillips was eminently respectable. He sat every day in his office for a few hours, but no clients came to him, and he wanted none. Phillips is clever enough to be anything," said his friends, but he is incurably indolent. The world isn't good enough for him." Phillips himself intimated that if some good cause would come along, to which he could feel inspired to devote himself, he would be glad to do so, heart and soul; meanwhile there was nothing for it but resignation.

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One day there was a noise in the street, and Phillips sauntered to the window of his office and looked out. A dishevelled man was being hurried along in the midst of an excited throng of well-dressed people, who were dragging him by a rope knotted round his waist. The man was Garrison, the anti-slavery fanatic. The crowd apparently meant to hang him. His offence was publishing a newspaper advocating unconditional and instant emancipation of all slaves. He was to be murdered, in New England, by the descendants of Puritans who had fought for freedom from English oppression, because he had exercised the hard-won right of free speech. This mob was going to hang him because he wished to disturb the prosperity of the institution of slavery in the South.

Garrison was rescued by the authorities; but Phillips walked home meditating. Was Garrison right in disturbing the public harmony? On what did that harmony depend? On toleration of a great moral wrong. Garrison was right, then, if morality was to be vindicated. And the quiet, cool Boston Brahmin, as he walked home, made up his

mind that he would take Garrison's part; that he, too, would champion the slaves; and that this was, and should be the cause to which he would devote himself "heart and soul"! This decision on the part of a young man twenty-four years old was of importance to his country, though no one then suspected it. No one knew, not even himself, the resources of strength, courage, and dauntless perseverance concealed beneath the young man's languid, well-bred, kid-gloved exterior. None of the heroes of colonial and revolutionary times were more indomitable and formidable than he, once that cool blood of his was up. With violence and death staring him in the face, he would say things that no one else dared to say, with an eloquence that no one else could rival. Here was a man who would face furious mobs, and face them down, stupefying and appalling them by the perfection of his cool contempt for them, and defiance of them, and finally leading them captive, overpowered by moral truth uttered as no other man of his day could utter it. Phillips was the champion of anti-slavery on the platform; the exhorter, the denouncer, the inspirer, the expounder, the master of argument, the conqueror in debate; who would give no quarter, and never let up so long as one black slave remained in America. Utterly different in all other respects from Daniel Webster, he was like him in one thing-the power to rouse great masses of human beings to frenzy-frenzy of rage, of enthusiasm, of triumph. When Phillips was at his best (which was when the odds against him were most terrible) no one was more eloquent than he.

The speech on the killing of Lovejoy, another abolitionist, made the new orator known, and from that time his career was public history. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Garrison, and did not hesitate to charge the constitution itself with immorality, to be amended or abolished. He spoke with the utmost bitterness against Lincoln's second election, because he held him to have paltered with political virtue. His pale face was like a polished battle-axe; it typified, perhaps, the narrowness as well as the incisiveness of his mind. He loved the battle; he deigned to no manoeuvres, but hewed his way straight through the enemy's line; and no array of Macedonian phalanxes could withstand him. Under the Flag" is a splendid and characteristic speech, showing all the eloquence and fervor, the excellencies and faults, that belong to Phillips's style of oratory.

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After the struggle was over he quarrelled with Garrison; both were doctrinaires. He spent the latter years of his life in advocating minor reforms, but his day was past. He was always a first favorite on the platform, and crowds attended him; but his cause was won, and his occupation gone. He died in 1884, at the age of seventy-three.

UNDER THE FLAG

Delivered at Boston, April 21, 1861

Therefore thus saith the Lord: Ye have not hearkened unto me in proclaiming liberty every one to his brother, and every man to his neighbor; behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the Lord, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine.-Jeremiah, xxxiv. 17.

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ANY times this winter, here and elsewhere, I have counselled peace-urged as well as I knew how the expediency of acknowledging a Southern Confederacy, and the peaceful separation of these thirty-four States. One of the journals announces to you that I come here this morning to retract those opinions. No, not one of them! I need them all-every word I have spoken this winter-every act of twenty-five years of my life, to make the welcome I give this war hearty and hot. Civil war is a momentous evil. It needs the soundest, most solemn justification. I rejoice before God to-day for every word that I have spoken counselling peace; but I rejoice also with an especially profound gratitude, that now, the first time in my anti-slavery life, I speak under the stars and stripes, and welcome the tread of Massachusetts men marshalled for war.

No matter what the past has been or said; to-day the slave asks God for a sight of this banner, and counts it the pledge of his redemption. Hitherto it may have meant what you thought, or what I did; to-day it represents sovereignty and justice. The only mistake that I have made was in supposing Massachusetts wholly choked with cotton dust and cankered with gold. The South thought her patience and generous willingness for peace were cowardice; to-day shows the mistake. She has been sleeping on her arms since '83, and the first cannonshot brings her to her feet with the war-cry of the Revolution on her lips. Any man who loves either liberty or manhood must rejoice at such an hour.

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