Brave Men and Women Part 5

VII.

WENDELL PHILLIPS

(BORN 1811--DIED 1884.)

THE TIMES WHEN HE APPEARED--"WHO IS THIS FELLOW?"--A FLAMING ADVOCATE OF LIBERTY--LIBERTY OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT--POWER TO DISCERN THE RIGHT--THE MOB-BEATEN HERO TRIUMPHANT.

Long chapters of history are illumined as by as electric light in the following characteristic address from his pulpit by Henry Ward Beecher, at the time the name of the great philanthropist was added to the roll of American heroes.

THE TIMES WHEN HE APPEARED.

The condition of the public mind throughout the North at the time I came to the consciousness of public affairs and was studying my profession may be described, in one word, as the condition of imprisoned moral sense. All men, almost, agreed with all men that slavery was wrong; but what can we do? The compromises of our fathers include us and bind us to fidelity to the agreements that had been made in the formation of our Const.i.tution. Our confederation first, and our Const.i.tution after. These were regarded everywhere as moral obligations by men that hated slavery.

"The compromises of the Const.i.tution must be respected," said the priest in the pulpit, said the politician in the field, said the statesmen in public halls; and men abroad, in England especially, could not understand what was the reason of the hesitancy of President Lincoln and of the people, when they had risen to arms, in declaring at once the end for which arms were taken and armies gathered to be the emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves. There never has been an instance in which, I think, the feelings and the moral sense of so large a number of people have been held in check for reasons of fidelity to obligations a.s.sumed in their behalf. There never has been in history another instance more notable, and I am bound to say, with all its faults and weaknesses, more n.o.ble.

The commercial question--that being the underlying moral element--the commercial question of the North very soon became, on the subject of slavery, what the industrial and political question of the South had made it. It corrupted the manufacturer and the merchant. Throughout the whole North every man that could make any thing regarded the South as his legal, lawful market; for the South did not manufacture; it had the cheap and vulgar husbandry of slavery. They could make more money with cotton than with corn, or beef, or pork, or leather, or hats, or wooden-ware; and Northern ships went South to take their forest timbers, and brought them to Connecticut to be made into wooden-ware and ax-helves and rake-handles, and carried them right back to sell to the men whose axes had cut down the trees. The South manufactured nothing except slaves. It was a great manufacture, that; and the whole market of the North was bribed. The harness-makers, the wagon-makers, the clock-makers, makers of all manner of implements, of all manner of goods, every manufactory, every loom as it clanked in the North said, "Maintain," not slavery, but the "compromises of the Const.i.tution." The Const.i.tution--that was the veil under which all these cries were continually uttered.

The distinction between the Anti-slavery men and Abolitionists was simply this: The Abolitionists disclaimed the obligation to maintain this government and the compromises of the Const.i.tution, and the Anti-slavery men recognized the binding obligation and sought the emanc.i.p.ation of slaves by the more circuitous and gradual influence; but Abolitionism covered both terms. It was regarded, however, throughout the North as a greater sin than slavery itself, and none of you that are under thirty years of age can form any adequate conception of the public sentiment and feeling during the days of my young manhood. A man that was known to be an Abolitionist had better be known to have the plague.

Every door was shut to him. If he was born under circ.u.mstances that admitted him to the best society, he was the black sheep of the family.

If he aspired by fidelity, industry, and genius, to good society, he was debarred. "An Abolitionist" was enough to put the mark of Cain upon any young man that arose in my early day, and until I was forty years of age. It was punishable to preach on the subject of liberty. It was enough to expel a man from Church communion, if he insisted on praying in the prayer-meeting for the liberation of the slaves. The Church was dumb in the North, not in the West. The great publishing societies that were sustained by the contributions of the Churches were absolutely dumb.

"WHO IS THIS FELLOW?"

It was at the beginning of this Egyptian era in America that the young aristocrat of Boston appeared. His blood came through the best colonial families. He was an aristocrat by descent and by nature; a n.o.ble one, but a thorough aristocrat. All his life and power a.s.sumed that guise. He was n.o.ble; he was full of kindness to inferiors; he was willing to be, and do, and suffer for them; but he was never of them, nor equaled himself to them. He was always above them, and his gifts of love were always the gifts of a prince to his subjects. All his life long he resented every attack on his person and on his honor, as a n.o.ble aristocrat would. When they poured the filth of their imaginations upon him, he cared no more for it than the eagle cares what the fly is thinking about him away down under the cloud. All the miserable traffickers, and all the scribblers, and all the aristocratic b.o.o.bies of Boston were no more to him than mosquitoes are to the behemoth or to the lion. He was aristocratic in his pride, and lived higher than most men lived. He was called of G.o.d as much as ever Moses and the prophets were; not exactly for the same great end, but in consonance with those great ends. You remember, my brother, when Lovejoy was infamously slaughtered by a mob in Alton?--blood that has been the seed of liberty all over this land! I remember it. At this time it was that Channing lifted up his voice and declared that the moral sentiment of Boston ought to be uttered in rebuke of that infamy and cruelty, and asking for Faneuil Hall in which to call a public meeting. This was indignantly refused by the Common Council of Boston. Being a man of wide influence, he gathered around about himself enough venerable and influential old citizens of Boston to make a denial of their united request a perilous thing; and Faneuil Hall was granted to call a public meeting to express itself on this subject of the murder of Lovejoy. The meeting was made up largely of rowdies. They meant to overawe and put down all other expressions of opinion except those that then rioted with the riotous. United States District-attorney Austin (when Wendell Phillips's name is written in letters of light on one side of the monument, down low on the other side, and spattered with dirt, let the name of Austin also be written) made a truculent speech, and justified the mob, and ran the whole career of the sewer of those days and justified non-interference with slavery.

Wendell Phillips, just come to town as a young lawyer, without at present any practice, practically unknown, except to his own family, fired with the infamy, and, feeling called of G.o.d in his soul, went upon the platform. His first utterances brought down the hisses of the mob.

He was not a man very easily subdued by any mob. They listened as he kindled and poured on that man Austin the fire and lava of a volcano, and he finally turned the course of the feeling of the meeting.

Practically unknown when the sun went down one day, when it rose next morning all Boston was saying, "Who is this fellow? Who is this Phillips?" A question that has never been asked since.

A FLAMING ADVOCATE OF LIBERTY.

Thenceforth he has been a flaming advocate of liberty, with singular advantages over all other pleaders. Mr. Garrison was not noted as a speaker, yet his tongue was his pen. Mr. Phillips, not much given to the pen, his pen was his tongue; and no other like speaker has ever graced our history. I do not undertake to say that he surpa.s.sed all others. He had an intense individuality, and that intense individuality ranked him among the n.o.blest orators that have ever been born to this continent, or I may say to our mother-land. He adopted in full the tenets of Garrison, which were excessively disagreeable to the whole public mind. The ground which he took was that which Garrison took. Seeing that the conscience of the North was smothered and mute by reason of the supposed obligations to the compromises of the Const.i.tution, Garrison declared that the compromises of the Const.i.tution were covenants with h.e.l.l, and that no man was bound to observe them. This extreme ground Mr. Phillips also took,--immediate, unconditional, universal emanc.i.p.ation, at any cost whatsoever. That is Garrisonism; that is Wendell Phillipsism; and it would seem as though the Lord rather leaned that way, too.

I shall not discuss the merits of Mr. Garrison or Mr. Phillips in every direction. I shall say that while the duty of immediate emanc.i.p.ation without conditions was unquestionably the right ground, yet in the providence of G.o.d even that could not be brought to pa.s.s except through the mediation of very many events. It is a remarkable thing that Mr.

Phillips and Mr. Garrison both renounced the Union and denounced the Union in the hope of destroying slavery; whereas the providence of G.o.d brought about the love of the Union when it was a.s.sailed by the South, and made the love of the Union the enthusiasm that carried the great war of emanc.i.p.ation through. It was the very ant.i.thesis of the ground which they took. Like John Brown, Mr. Garrison; like John Brown, Mr. Phillips; of a heroic spirit, seeking the great and n.o.ble, but by measures not well adapted to secure the end.

Little by little the controversy spread. I shall not trace it. I am giving you simply the atmosphere in which he sprang into being and into power. His career was a career of thirty or forty years of undiminished eagerness. He never quailed nor flinched, nor did he ever at any time go back one step or turn in the slightest degree to the right or left. He gloried in his cause, and in that particular aspect of it which had selected him; for he was one that was called rather than one that chose.

He stood on this platform. It is a part of the sweet and pleasant memories of my comparative youth here, that when the mob refused to let him speak in the Broadway Tabernacle before it moved up-town--the old Tabernacle--William A. Hall, now dead, a fervent friend and Abolitionist, had secured the Graham Inst.i.tute wherein to hold a meeting where Mr. Phillips should be heard. I had agreed to pray at the opening of the meeting. On the morning of the day on which it was to have taken place, I was visited by the committee of that Inst.i.tute--excellent gentlemen, whose feelings will not be hurt now, because they are all now ashamed of it; they are in heaven. They visited me to say that in consequence of the great peril that attended a meeting at the Inst.i.tute, they had withdrawn the liberty to use it, and paid back the money, and that they called simply to say that it was out of no disrespect to me, but from fidelity to their supposed trust. Well, it was a bitter thing.

LIBERTY OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT.

If there is any thing on earth that I am sensitive to, it is the withdrawing of the liberty of speech and thought. Henry C. Bowen, who certainly has done some good things in his life-time, said to me: "You can have Plymouth Church if you want it." "How?" "It is the rule of the church trustees that the church may be let by a majority vote when we are convened; but if we are not convened, then every trustee must give his a.s.sent in writing. If you choose to make it a personal matter, and go to every trustee, you can have it." He meanwhile undertook, with Mr.

Hall, to put new placards over the old ones, notifying men quietly that the meeting was to be held here, and distributed thousands and tens of thousands of hand-bills at the ferries. No task was ever more welcome. I went to the trustees man by man. The majority of the trustees very cheerfully accorded the permission. One or two of them were disposed to decline and withhold it. I made it a matter of personal friendship. "You and I will break, if you don't give me this permission." And they signed. So the meeting glided from the Graham Inst.i.tute to this house. A great audience a.s.sembled. We had detectives in disguise, and every arrangement made to handle the subject in a practical form if the crowd should undertake to molest us. The Rev. Dr. R.S. Storrs consented to come and pray, for Mr. Wendell Phillips was by marriage a near and intimate friend and relation of his. The reporters were here; when were they ever not?

Mr. Phillips began his lecture, and, you may depend upon it, by this time the lion was in him, and he went careering on. Hie views were extreme; he made them extravagant. I remember at one point--for he was a man without bl.u.s.ter, serene, self-poised, never disturbed in the least--he made an affirmation that was very bitter, and the cry arose over the whole congregation. He stood still, with a cold, bitter smile in his eye, and waited till they subsided, when he repeated it with more emphasis. Again the roar went through. He waited and repeated it, if possible, more intensely, and he beat them down with that one sentence until they were still, and let him go on.

POWER TO DISCERN THE RIGHT.

The power to discern right amid all the wrappings of interest and all the seductions of ambition was singularly his. To choose the lowly for their sake, to abandon all favor, all power, all comfort, all ambition, all greatness--that was his genius and glory. He confronted the spirit of the nation and of the age. I had almost said he set himself against nature, as if he had been a decree of G.o.d over-riding all these other insuperable obstacles. That was his function. Mr. Phillips was not called to be a universal orator any more than he was a universal thinker. In literature and in history widely read, in person magnificent, in manners most accomplished, gentle as a babe, sweet as a new-blown rose, in voice clear and silvery, yet he was not a man of tempests, he was not an orchestra of a hundred instruments, he was not an organ, mighty and complex. The nation slept, and G.o.d wanted a trumpet, sharp, wide-sounding, narrow and intense; and that was Mr.

Phillips. The long-roll is not particularly agreeable in music, or in times of war, but it is better than flutes or harps when men are in a great battle, or are on the point of it. His eloquence was penetrating and alarming. He did not flow as a mighty Gulf Stream; he did not dash upon this continent as the ocean does; he was not a mighty rushing river. His eloquence was a flight of arrows, sentence after sentence polished, and most of them burning. He slung them one after the other, and where they struck they slew. Always elegant, always awful. I think his scorn is and was as fine as I ever knew it in any human being. He had that sublime sanctuary in his pride that made him almost insensitive to what would by other men be considered obloquy. It was as if he said every day in himself: "I am not what they are firing at. I am not there, and I am not that. It is not against me. I am infinitely superior to what they think me to be. They do not know me." It was quiet and unpretentious, but it was there. Conscience and pride were the two concurrent elements of his nature.

THE MOB-BEATEN HERO TRIUMPHANT.

He lived to see the slave emanc.i.p.ated, but not by moral means. He lived to see the sword cut the fetter. After this had taken place, he was too young to retire, though too old to gather laurels of literature or to seek professional honors. The impulse of humanity was not at all abated.

His soul still flowed on for the great under-ma.s.ses of mankind, though, like the Nile, it split up into scores of mouths, and not all of them were navigable. After a long and stormy life his sun went down in glory.

All the English-speaking people on the globe have written among the names that shall never die the name of that scoffed, detested, mob-beaten, persecuted wretch--Wendell Phillips. Boston, that persecuted and would have slain him, is now exceedingly busy in building his tomb and rearing his statue. The men that would not defile their lips with his name are thanking G.o.d to-day that he lived.

He has taught some lessons--lessons that the young will do well to take heed to--that the most splendid gifts and opportunities and ambitions may be best used for the dumb and lowly. His whole life is a rebuke to the idea that we are to climb to greatness by climbing up on the backs of great men, that we are to gain strength by running with the currents of life, that we can from without add any thing to the great within that const.i.tutes man. He poured out the precious ointment of his soul upon the feet of that diffusive Jesus who suffers here in his poor and despised ones. He has taught young ambitions, too, that the way to glory is the way often-times of adhesion simply to principle, and that popularity and unpopularity are not things to be known or considered. Do right and rejoice. If to do right will bring you under trouble, rejoice in it that you are counted worthy to suffer with G.o.d and the providences of G.o.d in this world.

He belongs to the race of giants, not simply because he was, in and of himself a great soul, but because he had bathed in the providence of G.o.d and came forth scarcely less than a G.o.d; because he gave himself to the work of G.o.d upon earth, and inherited thereby, or had reflected upon him, some of the majesty of his Master. When pigmies are all dead, the n.o.ble countenance of Wendell Phillips will still look forth, radiant as a rising sun, a sun that will never set. He has become to us a lesson, his death an example, his whole history an encouragement to manhood--and to heroic manhood.

VIII

MARY WORDSWORTH

(BORN 1770--DIED 1859.)

THE KINDLY WIFE OF THE GREAT POET.

"A creature not too bright or good For human nature's daily food."

The last thing that would have occurred to Mrs. Wordsworth would have been that her departure, or any thing about her, would be publicly noticed amidst the events of a stirring time. Those who knew her well regarded her with as true a homage as they ever rendered to any member of the household, or to any personage of the remarkable group which will be forever traditionally a.s.sociated with the Lake District; but this reverence, genuine and hearty as it was, would not, in all eyes, be a sufficient reason for recording more than the fact of her death. It is her survivorship of such a group which const.i.tutes an undisputed public interest in her decease. With her closes a remarkable scene in the history of the literature of our century. The well-known cottage, mount, and garden at Rydal will be regarded with other eyes when shut up or transferred to new occupants. With Mrs. Wordsworth, an old world has pa.s.sed away before the eyes of the inhabitants of the district, and a new one succeeds, which may have its own delights, solemnities, honors, and graces, but which can never replace the familiar one that is gone.

There was something mournful in the lingering of this aged lady--blind, deaf, and bereaved in her latter years; but _she_ was not mournful, any more than she was insensible. Age did not blunt her feelings, nor deaden her interest in the events of the day. It seems not so very long ago that she said that the worst of living in such a place (as the Lake District), was its making one unwilling to go. It is too beautiful to let one be ready to leave it. Within a few years the beloved daughter was gone, and then the aged husband, and then the son-in-law, and then the devoted friend, Mr. Wordsworth's publisher, Mr. Moxon, who paid his duty occasionally by the side of her chair; then she became blind and deaf. Still her cheerfulness was indomitable. No doubt, she would in reality have been "willing to go," whenever called upon, throughout her long life; but she liked life to the end. By her disinterestedness of nature, by her fort.i.tude of spirit, and her const.i.tutional elasticity and activity, she was qualified for the honor of surviving her household--nursing and burying them, and bearing the bereavement which they were vicariously spared. She did it wisely, tenderly, bravely, and cheerfully; and then she will be remembered accordingly by all who witnessed the spectacle.

It was by the accident, so to speak, of her early friendship with Wordsworth's sister, that her life became involved with the poetic element which her mind would hardly have sought for itself in another position. She was the incarnation of good sense, as applied to the concerns of the every-day world. In as far as her marriage and course of life tended to infuse a new elevation into her views of things, it was a blessing; and, on the other hand, in as far as it infected her with the spirit of exclusiveness, which was the grand defect of the group in its own place, it was hurtful; but that very exclusiveness was less an evil than an amus.e.m.e.nt, after all. It was rather a serious matter to hear the poet's denunciation of the railway, and to read his well-known sonnets on the desecration of the Lake region by the unhallowed presence of commonplace strangers; and it was truly painful to observe how the scornful and grudging mood spread among the young, who thought they were agreeing with Wordsworth in claiming the vales and lakes as a natural property for their enlightened selves. But it was so unlike Mrs.

Wordsworth, with her kindly, cheery, generous turn, to say that a green field, with b.u.t.tercups, would answer all the purposes of Lancashire operatives, and that they did not know what to do with themselves when they came among the mountains, that the innocent insolence could do no harm. It became a fixed sentiment when she alone survived to uphold it, and one demonstration of it amused the whole neighborhood in a good-natured way. "People from Birthwaite" were the bugbear--Birthwaite being the end of the railway. In the Summer of 1857, Mrs. Wordsworth's companion told her (she being then blind) that there were some strangers in the garden--two or three boys on the mount, looking at the view.