Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War

William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and the Symmetry of Autobiography: Charisma and the Character of Abolitionist Leadership

 89  William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and the Symmetry of Autobiography Charisma and the Character of Abolitionist Leadership 8 When explaining the motivations of America’s white abolitionists, many historians emphasize the importance of “grassroots” approaches. Yet, the problem of motivation can also be fruitfully investigated by consider-­ ing the movement “from the top down,” in this instance by comparing the biographies of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. By examining the lives of these two preeminent abolitionists and then by suggesting their impact on their less well-­known associates, it becomes possible to understand the leadership of Garrisonian abolitionism as well as the sources of the movement’s collective motivation. In the following analysis, qualities of leadership and the biographical elements that nourished them are of central importance, particularly the roles in the lives of Phillips and Garrison of absent fathers, of dominant single mothers, of climactic moments of self-­definition, and of the long-­ term influences of wives, marriages, and families.1 The longevity of the Garrisonians’ collective commitment to their cause must be attributed in some measure to the powerful inspiration contributed by these visible men. The sources of their personal magnetism, in turn, can be found Originally published as “Garrison, Phillips and the Symmetry of Autobiography: Charisma and the Character of Abolitionist Leadership” in John R. McKivigan and Randall Miller, eds., The Moment of Decision: Biographical essays on American Character and Regional Identity (Westport, CT: Green-­ wood Press, 1994), 117–33. Reprinted with permission. 1. For the latest survey of the historiography of abolitionist motivation, see Richard O. Curry and Lawrence Goodheart, “‘Knives in Their Heads’: Passionate Self-­Analysis and the Search for Identity in Recent Abolitionist Historiography,” Canadian Journal of American Studies 13 (1983): 401–14. Among the best recent examinations of the dynamics of abolitionism from the “bottom up,” see Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca, 1984); and Christopher Padgett, “Hearing the Abolitionist Rank and File: The Wesleyan Methodist Schism of 1843,” Journal of the Early Republic 12 (1992): 63–84.
90  COMMITMENTS in Garrison’s and Phillips’s lifelong responses to these intimate circumstances and influences. No two individuals can seem to have had less in common than did Phillips and Garrison—the Beacon Hill “aristocrat” versus the nondescript commoner, the Harvard graduate versus the self-taught printer’s devil, the cosmopolitan orator versus the provincial scribbler, the Calvinist intellectual versus the Christian utopian. Contemporaries puzzled over how these two could tolerate each other, let alone share so close a friendship.2 Yet, the friendship itself suggests that these two leaders sensed their less apparent commonalities of temperament, wrought by similarities of background and experience. These shared characteristics endowed both men with qualities that continuously deepened their own commitments to leadership in abolitionism while allowing them to nurture the long-term participation of their colleagues. Lawrence Friedman has demonstrated that groups of abolitionists found refuge from a hostile world in family-like communities that clustered around dominating personalities . Some found a supportive leader in the congenial Gerrit Smith, while others were attracted to the steady evangelicalism of Lewis Tappan. Garrisonians, by contrast, responded to the charisma of Garrison and Phillips, leaders whose very natures seemed to radiate spiritual inspiration and spontaneous insight.3 As both Max Weber and Anthony F. C. Wallace have employed the term, charisma is a quality imputed to visionary moral leaders by their followers, especially in times of great social uncertainty, when traditional institutions and venerable moral categories seem to have lost their public support. According to both of these scholars, charismatic leaders derive their power from ambiguous historical contexts and from the perceptions of crisis on the part of their followers, not just from the innate qualities possessed by leaders themselves. If ever there was a period when traditional institutions and received wisdom no longer seemed capable of 2. For the most recent treatments of both of these figures, see James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, IL, 1991); James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero (Baton Rouge, 1986; repr., 1998). Much of the material in this chapter is drawn from these two books; subsequent documentation on Garrison and Phillips will refer the reader, wherever possible, to primary sources. 3. Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism (New York, 1982).
91  William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell...