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 God 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 surpassed all others. He
had an intense individuality, and that intense individuality ranked him
among the noblest 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 Constitution, Garrison declared
that the compromises of the Constitution were covenants with hell, and
that no man was bound to observe them.
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