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WENDELL PHILLIPS

(1811-1884)

BY GEORGE W. SMALLEY

MERSON said of Phillips that he was the best orator in America, because he had spoken every day for fourteen years. What Emerson meant was, that immense practice was the secret of Phillips's supremacy. It was one secret; but not, I think, the secret. He was one of those men in whom the orator is born, not made. It may be doubted whether he ever delivered a better speech than his first, at that memorable

meeting in Faneuil Hall on the murder of Lovejoy. The germ of all his oratory lies there; the methods which he followed all his life he adopted, instinctively and unconsciously, in that critical instant of his life. He had not meant to speak. He went up to Faneuil Hall in the state which is called unprepared,- that is to say, his preparation consisted in years of thought and study, in a profound moral sense, in the possession of an imaginative and oratorical genius and of a diction which for his purpose was nearly perfect. It was the speech of Austin, Attorney-General of Massachusetts, in opposition to the object of the meeting, and his invective upon Lovejoy, which brought Phillips from the floor to the platform. I quote once more the famous sentence,-"Sir, when I heard the Attorney-General place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead." I asked Phillips, with whom I often talked over his speeches and his life, whether the image was thought out beforehand. "Oh no," he answered: "it was the portraits themselves which suggested it as I spoke."

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WENDELL PHILLIPS

The answer covers much. For this austere and irreconcilable enthusiast, with the blood of the martyr in his veins, was in oratory a pure opportunist. He was a general who went into battle with a

force of all arms, but used infantry or artillery or cavalry as each seemed most apt to the moment. He formed his plan, as Napoleon did, on the field and in presence of the enemy. For Phillips-and the fact is vital to all criticism of his oratory-spoke almost always, during twenty-five years of his oratorical life, to a hostile audience. His audiences were often mobs; they often sought to drive him from the platform, sometimes to kill him. He needed all his resources merely to hold his ground and to get a hearing. You cannot compare oratory in those circumstances with oratory in a dress debate, or even with the oratory of a great parliamentary contest. On this last has often hung, no doubt, the life of a ministry. On Phillips's mastery over his hearers depended sometimes his own life, sometimes that of the antislavery cause—with which, as we now all see and as then hardly anybody saw, was bound up the life of the nation. It was, in my judgment, the oratory of Phillips which insured the maintenance of that great antislavery struggle during the last ten years or more which preceded the War. His oratory must be judged with reference to that- to its object as well as to its rhetorical qualities. He had and kept the ear of the people. To have silenced that silver trumpet would have been to wreck the cause. I speak of the Abolitionist cause by itself - that which relied solely on moral forces and stood completely outside of politics.

Yet Phillips never made a concession. There was no art of speech he would not employ to win the attention of his audience. But he never softened an invective or compromised the clear logic of his statement in order to divert the hostility which confronted him. He would coax, cajole, ridicule, transpierce, or overwhelm an opponent, but never yielded a jot in principle. I have known him try all means to conciliate and then all means to crush, all within a few minutes. He had the art of so exciting curiosity, that a raging mob which half caught the first half of a sentence would still its own tumult in order to hear what was coming next. He shrank from no danger: on his unfailing cool courage and self-possession rested half the orator's power. When in Faneuil Hall he called the Attorney-General recreant, there were cries "Take that back!" and a tumult. "Fellowcitizens," answered the young Bostonian, "I cannot take back my words." It was the motto of his whole career. Twenty-four years later, April 21st, 1861, he was to speak in the Music Hall of Boston for the War. Against his habit, he wrote out his speech; - it was a turning-point in his history as orator and as abolitionist. He read me the speech, which began: "Many times this winter, here and else- . where, I have counseled peace,-urged as well as I know how the expediency of acknowledging a Southern Confederacy, and the peaceful separation of these thirty-four States. One of the journals announces

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