Wendell Phillips: Liberty's Hero

SIX: Race, Class, and New England Abolitionists

SIX Race, Class, and New England Abolitionists Three weeks after returning from Europein the summer of 1841,Wendell Phillips became happilyengaged in civil disobedience, joining abolitionists in New York, Philadelphia,and Boston to resist segregation in the transportation systems. He told gatherings of abolitionists about the freedom he had witnessed blacks enjoying in "backward" Europe, and he rode in Negro cars, defying railroad company rules. In these cars he began to understand for the first time some of the day-to-day humiliation facing black people in Massachusetts, and what he learned affronted him.1 Riding on the EasternRailway in September,1841, Phillips sat dressed in gentleman's waistcoat and top hat with ablack Garrisonian, a printer's assistant named William Nell. The car was dirty, smelly, and dark, thanks in part to the grimy little windows, which were nailed shut. The conductor behaved churlishly toward Phillips, for he was consorting with a "nigger." Bred a gentleman, Phillips felt particularly sensitive to insults and from his privileged position actually empathized more completely than did most whites with blacks who endured these degradations . Others who resisted—including David Ruggles, a redoubtable i. Liberator,August 13, 1841; National Anti-Slavery Standard, September 23, 1841; Carleton Mabee, Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War (New York, 1970), 91-127. 97 98 WENDELL PHILLIPS black artisan who regularly invaded "whites only" cars—were therefore gentlemen too, regardless of their social origin or race.2 For Phillips, social equality between the races offered the truest test of a republican state, uniting rich and poor as well as black and white. And conversely, hierarchies of racial discrimination constituted as great a danger to the North's body politic as did southern bondageitself. To draw battle lines against slavery in the nation of necessity meant passing laws to erase caste lines in Massachusetts. Social designs that would endure for a lifetime thus drew Phillips into integration struggles during the 18405, and in this respect, Radical Reconstruction began for him then, in Boston, not in the South in 1867. After the Civil War, when legalized bondage but not black subjugation had ended, Phillips would always insist, "We have abolished the slave, but the master remains."3 In February, 1841, Phillips spoke against segregationat the state legislature , emphasizing that those he represented (a petitioning group of black and white abolitionists) were not acting as sectional agitators but simply as Massachusetts citizens. Privately owned railroads received "special privileges and franchises" from the state, he argued.The state, therefore, had the right and the duty to make these enterprises treat all citizens as equals. "These corporations are public servants," Phillips maintained, "and therefore bound to serve in accordance with the laws of the commonwealth," which had been designed "to secure the rights of all the people." The Jim Crow cars constituted a violation of black people's citizenship as well as a "direct insult" to their persons, and "this community, Mr. Chairman, is not one whose theory tolerates privileged classes." Were shabbily dressed whites suddenly forced into segregated seats, Phillips observed, public outrage would stop the practice at once. Legal equality recognized no limitations of class; it should permit no racial ones either, and to prevent the inequity of segregation, he contended, the legislature needed only to enforce the principles upon which Massachusetts' law had first been founded. "We ask not for the creation ofnew law,"he emphasized. "Weask the legislature to say what is law." Since law, according to Phillips, must insure the public's good above all else, legislators should override the private choices of the segregationists . Otherwise, the state was assisting in the destruction of the i. National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 4, September23, 1841; Oliver Johnson to Phillips, September 12, 1841, Blagden Papers. 3. See, for example, National Anti-Slavery Standard, February 3, 1866. RACE, CLASS, AND ABOLITIONISTS 99 republican liberty of everyone in Massachusetts, black and white, rich and poor." The legislature failed to respond to Phillips' arguments, and railroads continued to discriminate for several years before succumbing to abolitionist pressure. As Phillips had made clear during this contest, however , he now equated racial equality with the public's good and insisted that positive law must prevent an individual's discriminatoryuse ofprivate property. Toa greater extent than some other Garrisonians, Phillips had seized the power of the state, not the conscience of a converted public alone, to secure freedom for...