The Battle of Principles

its advocate and voice. Garrison was the pen for abolition, Emerson its philosopher, Greeley its editor, and in Wendell Phillips abolition had its advocate. Politica

, the great cause and the great man, all met and melted together at a psychologic moment. In retrospect Phillips seems like a special gift of God to the anti-slavery period. Webster had more weight and majesty, Evere

n up by the pastor, who refused to allow Lundy to continue his remarks, on the ground that his position could only be offensive to the South, and therefore dangerous. But Lundy succeeded in having a committee appointed to consider the problem, and young Garrison was one of its members. A few months later, Garrison was made the editor of a journal in Bedford, where he began to advance more and more radical theories, until a rival editor was irritated to the point of charging him with "the pert loquacity of a blue jay." But Garrison's fidelity to his own convictions, and his courage in airing them in public, had won the respect of the Quaker enthusiast, Lundy, and the old man walked all the way from Baltim

peared in January, 1831. Garrison registered his sublime vow in his opening editorial: "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice.... I am in earnest,

a slave boy to support, a hand-press printing a sheet twelve inches square, never knowing where the money for the next edition was to come from. His motto was "Our country is the world, and our countrymen all men, black or white." The genius of his message was unmistakable: "Is slavery wrong anywhere? Then it is wrong everywhere. Was it wrong once in Palestine? Then it is wr

hey were to arise and slay their masters. The massacre which resulted lasted forty-eight hours, and sixty-one white people on the neighbouring plantations lost their lives. Retribution followed swiftly, and where the slightest suspicion of guilt was to be found, negroes were shot at sight or burned against the nearest tree. Southampton County saw a veritable reign of terror. A storm of indignation swept over the South; thousands of slave owners living on their great estates, miles

th; Nat Turner had never seen a copy of the paper,-and Garrison had been specific in his statements that he did not believe in activ

ips led the forces of abolition. Cotton was king, and the fear of losing the Southern trade sent the mercantile classes into a panic of fear. Garrison's enemies were by no means confined to the South. He was like Da

or an active crusade, and this old minister, with a literary reputation in Europe almost as great as that of Washington Irving, published an abolition book called "Slaver

rf to see Lafayette's boat come in. He was thirteen when he heard Daniel Webster's oration on Adams and Jefferson. He was sixteen when he entered Harvard College, and formed his lifelong friendship with his roommate, John Lothrop Motley. He studied law with Charles Sumner, in the office of Judge Story, a legal star of the first magnitude. He was counted one of the handsomest youths in Boston. There was nothing too bright or too hard for Wendell Phillips to aspire to, or hope for. At the critical moment, when he had to decide upon his future career, ambition sang to him, as to every noble youth. George William Curtis represents Phillips as sometimes forecasting the future, as he

put them out also, they sent a message to Mayor Lyman asking protection. When the mayor arrived with the police, instead of dispelling the mob and protecting liberty of speech, the mayor dispelled the women and protected the mob. Discovering that they had the sympathy of the mayor and would be protected by the police, the lawless element rushed upon the office of the Liberator, smashed in the doors and windows, and dragged Garrison forth. Bareheaded, with a rope about his waist, his coat torn off, but with erect head, set lips, flashing eyes, Garrison was dragged down the street to the City Hall. On every side rose the shout "Kill him! Lynch him! -- the abolitionist!" Askin

r of the Presbyterian Observer. At that time he was not an abolitionist, and, perhaps because he had married the daughter of a slave owner, he had taken no strong position either for or against slavery. One day an officer arrested a black man in St. Louis who resisted arrest, and in the mêlée the officer was killed. His friends claimed that the negro was a freeman, and that th

aw, once again the "mysterious, metaphysical electric frenzy" broke forth, only this time it destroyed his printing office. The young minister decided to leave the slave State, and crossed to Alton, Illinois, where there was not only liberty of speech but liberty of the printing-press. But a mob crossed over from Missouri and destroyed his press. Determined to maintain his rights, Lovejoy then brought another press down the Ohio River from Cincinnati. A group of his friends carried the type from the steamboat to the warehouse, but the next night a second mob co

ading men of Boston came together in Faneuil Hall. William Ellery Channing made the opening address, and asked that the meeting go on record through an indignant protest against this assault upon the rights of free citizens. James T. Austin, attorney-general of the commonwealth, replied in a bitter and insulting reference to Channing, asserting that a clergyman with a gun in his hand, or mingling in the debate of a popular assemb

s with the sanction of the civil authority. The men who assailed him went against and over the laws. The mob, as the gentleman terms it (mob, forsooth!-certainly we sons of the tea-spillers are a marvellously patient generation!), the 'orderly mob' which assembled in the Old South to destroy the tea were met to resist, not the laws, but illegal exactions. Shame on the American who calls the tea tax and Stamp Act laws! Our fathers resisted, not the king's prerogative, but the king's usurpation. To find any other account you must read our revolutionary history upside down. To draw the conduct of our ancestors into a precedent for mobs is an insult to their memory. They were the people rising to sustain the laws and constitution of the province. The rioters of our day g

hts, and confused in their feelings, were stunned into sobriety, and began to discuss principles, and weigh characters, and analyze public leaders, and wakening, men found tha

had stowed him away in a ship bound for Boston. A Boston policeman who caught sight of the negro recalled the rewards offered for the capture of slaves, and soon ran the fugitive down, and had him before United States Commissioner Loring. The

s as well as words?" Parker moved that, when the meeting adjourned, it should be to meet the following morning in the square before the court-house. But he had raised too great a storm to control; a rumour that a mob of negroes was at that very moment trying to rescue Burns was all that was needed to empty the room; and the crowd rushed out to the court-house square. There they discovered a small party of men, led by Thomas W. Higginson, trying to batter down the court-house doors. The crowd

n black, the United States flags were draped in mourning. From a window near the court-house hung a coffin, with the legend: "The funeral of liberty." The procession itself was composed of a battalion of United States artillery, one of United States marines, the marshall's posse of 125 men guarding the fugitive, and a small cannon, with two more platoons of marines to

in another year. Phillips rose upon the opposition like a war eagle against an advancing storm. Brave men defied the law, organized the Underground Railroad, and in every way possible defeated the purpose of the Fugitive Slave Law. So in 1854 when Senator Douglas engineered through Congress the famous Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the Missouri Compromise, the North refused to accept what was so palpably pro-slavery legislation. This was revolutionary. Instantly the North divided into two camps. The one question of the hour was "Shall a fugitive slave be furnished with weapons with which to defend his per

llips achieved the astonishing feat of speaking three hundred times a year. Eloquence is born of a great theme like the woes and wrongs of three million slaves. It is sometimes said that oratory is dying out in our Congress. But Congress is now a board of trade, discussing duties, protective tariffs on wool, cotton, and hides. Beecher and Phillips had a grea

ting him, but paying him this tribute, "That man is an infernal machine set to music." His method was practically the memoriter method. A gentleman, who heard him give his "Daniel O'Connell" four times in succession, found that the lecture was repeated without the slightest variation whatsoever, in ideas, sentences, inflection of the voice, or even gesture. Phillips prepared hi

l Phillips?" To which Mr. Beecher made the instant answer, "Wendell Phillips is not a Republican. Wendell Phillips is a radical and an independent. What this country needs is not a man of words but a man of deeds." A few nights later Wendell Phillips was lecturing in the Brooklyn Acade

troying the building. The tumultuous scenes of that night, when bricks came through the windows, and the police were stationed in Cranberry and Orange Streets, were repeated all over the land. Again and again Wendell Phillips was mobbed. Once, at the very beginning of his career as an abolitionist, he spoke with an old Quaker. Peo

thou art a holder of slaves, thou wilt go to hell.' I said

our and a half. Finally he leaned over the desk and shouted down to a reporter, "Thank God there is no manacle for the printing-press." Armed friends rescued him,

mself into the labour movement and helped organize the working classes into a solid force against capitalism. He took up the cause of suffrage and the higher education of woman, gave himself to the temperance problem and prohibition. He lectured oftentimes two hundred nights a year in the great cities of the land, seeking always to manufacture manhood of a good quality. He became himself our f

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