Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War

The Orator and the Insurrectionist

139  The Orator and the Insurrectionist 8 “I regard you as providentially raised up to be the James Otis of the new revolution,” wrote William Lloyd Garrison to Wendell Phillips in 1857. The year before, Thomas Wentworth Higginson had also offered him the same challenging thought: “Some prophetic character must emerge as the new crisis culminates. . . . Your life has been merely preliminary to the work that is coming for you.”1 The Kansas-Nebraska Act opened this new crisis, and in its aftermath Wendell Phillips began to fulfill this prophetic role that he too had long yearned to attain. After Stephen A. Douglas’s bill became law, parties slowly collapsed, the nation lurched toward catastrophe, and Wendell Phillips secured a formidable reputation as the North’s most compelling sectional orator. Through forensics, not disunionist politics, Phillips finally began gathering the national power he had always wanted, even as he forced the radical voice of abolitionism into debates that led to Civil War. The Kansas-Nebraska Act set off a sectional footrace to the territories and triggered a disruptive train of events. Free-state and Southern settlers became locked in guerrilla combat as they struggled to control the territories . Meanwhile, former Whigs, former Democrats, and Free-Soilers endorsed the Wilmot Proviso and coalesced to form a huge new sectional party that called itself Republican. The Whig Party fragmented and the Originally published as “The Orator and the Insurrectionist,” in James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips : Liberty’s Hero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 177–208. Reprinted with permission. 1. William L. Garrison to Phillips, October 15, 1857, and Thomas W. Higginson to Phillips, November 18, 1856, Crawford Blagden Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
140  CONSEQUENCES Democrats began splitting along sectional lines. In the presidential election of 1856, the Republican nominee, John C. Fremont, carried eleven Northern states and received no Southern support, showing well against the Democratic winner, James Buchanan. The Republican’s motto had decried “Bleeding Sumner” as well as “Bleeding Kansas,” for just before the election an outraged South Carolina congressman, Preston Brooks, beat Phillips’s friend senseless with a heavy cane, avenging “insults” to his family’s honor uttered by Charles Sumner during a speech, “The Crime Against Kansas.” The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its famous Dred Scott decision, which seemed to guarantee slavery the right to move wherever it wished. Black people, the chief justice affirmed, had “no rights that white men were bound to respect. Phillips denounced all these developments with a predictable mixture of distress, disdain, and self-vindication. His public appraisal of the new Republican Party rehearsed all the old themes. After all, he emphasized, most Republicans were even more conservative about the Constitution and immediate emancipation than the Free-Soilers had been. He lamented their moral shortcomings, vilified their leaders, and occasionally gave credit to the most advanced of them when they defied their party’s “half-measures.” Phillips also continued zealously to preach disunion, for the Kansas conflicts and the Dred Scott decision, he said, only recon firmed what he had first said in 1842, that every attempt to hedge in slavery with constitutional restrictions was doomed. In 1858 he found American politics as bankrupted as they had been in 1840. “I have nothing new to say,” he admitted, as he rose to address the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1857. “You will not be surprised that at these gatherings, repeated year after year, there is very little new to be offered. We only repeat the same exposition of principle, varying it by application to the latest facts.”2 The continuity of Phillips’s behavior was equally clear when he reacted to the violence in Kansas. He showed his usual ambivalence about bloodshed , expressing the hope that the fighting presaged peaceful disunion 2. Liberator, July 10, 1857, and see Phillips’s speeches reported on May 19, 1854, August 8, 1856, February 30, 1857, and May 11, 1858, for his specific views on major sectional events from 1854 through 1858.
141  The Orator and the Insurrectionist even as he pledged a hundred dollars to a rifle fund for the free-soil guerrillas . Preston Brooks’s attack on Sumner aroused in him the same wrath as had recent confrontations in Boston between abolitionists and public officials over the return of fugitive slaves to their masters. Again and again he...