Wendell Phillips (29 November 1811 - 2 February 1884), born in Boston, Massachusetts, was an American abolitionist, Native American advocate and orator.

Education

He was schooled at Boston Latin School, and graduated from Harvard in 1831. Afterwards, he went on to attend Harvard Law School from which he graduated in 1833. In 1834, Phillips was admitted to the state bar, and in the same year, he opened a law practice in Boston.

Abolitionism

After being converted to the abolitionist cause by William Lloyd Garrison in 1836, he stopped practicing law in order to fully dedicate himself to the movement. He joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and frequently made speeches at its meetings. He even went so far as to eat no cane sugar and wear no cotton, since both were produced by southern slaves. Phillips, like Garrison, denounced the Constitution for tolerating slavery. He called for disunion in 1845:

The experience of the fifty years ... shows us the slaves trebling in numbers -- slaveholders monopolizing the offices and dictating the policy of the Government -- prostituting the strength and influence of the Nation to the support of slavery here and elsewhere -trampling on the rights of the free States, and making the courts of the country their tools. To continue this disastrous alliance longer is madness. The trial of fifty years only proves that it is impossible for free and slave States to unite on any terms, without all becoming partners in the guilt and responsible for the sin of slavery. Why prolong the experiment? Let every honest man join in the outcry of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Wendell Phillips, "No Union With Slaveholders," Jan. 15, 1845, in Louis Ruchames, ed. The Abolitionists (1963) p. 196.

By 1860 many abolitionists welcomed the formation of the Confederacy because it would remove most slaveowners --the Slave Power from their powerful positions in the United States. This position was rejected by nationalists like Abraham Lincoln who insisted on holding the Union together, while gradually ending slavery.

In 1854 Phillips was indicted for participation in the attempt to free a captured fugitive slave by force from prison in Boston. It was Phillip's contention that racial injustice was the source of all society's ills. Disappointed with Lincoln's slow action, he opposed Lincoln in 1864, breaking with Garrison who supported a canddiate for the first time.

After blacks gained the right to vote with the 15th Amendment (1870), Phillips switched to new issues such as women's rights, universal suffrage, and temperance. Phillips's philosophical ideal was manly self-control of the animal, physical self by the human, rational mind, although he admired rash activists such as Lovejoy and John Brown. As Osofsky (1973) shows, Phillips's nationalism was shaped by religion. Its ideology was derived from the European Enlightenment, as expressed by Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. The Puritan ideal of a Godly Commonwealth, through a pursuit of Christian morality and justice, however, was the main influence on Phillips's nationalism. He would have fragmented the American republic to destroy slavery, and he sought to amalgamate all the American races. Thus, it was the moral end which mattered most in Phillips's nationalism.

Equal rights for Native Americans

Phillips was also active in efforts to gain equal rights for Native Americans, arguing that the 15th Amendment also granted citizenship to Indians. He proposed that the Andrew Johnson administration create a cabinet-level post that would guarantee Indian rights. Phillips helped create the Massachusetts Indian Commission with Indian rights activist Helen Hunt Jackson and Massachusetts governor William Claflin. Although publicly critical of President Ulysses Simpson Grant's drinking, he worked with his second administration on the appointment of Indian agents. Phillips lobbied against military involvement in settling Native American problems on the western frontier. He accused General Philip Henry Sheridan of pursuing a policy of Indian extermination. Public opinion turned against Native American advocates after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but Phillips continued to support the claims of the Lakota (Sioux). In the 1870's, Phillips arranged public forums for reformer Alfred B. Meacham and Indians affected by the country's removal policy, including Ponca chief Standing Bear and the Omaha Susette La Flesche.

References

• Irving H. Bartlett. Wendell Phillips, Brahmin Radical (1962)
• Hofstadter, Richard. "Wendell Phillips: The Patrician as Agitator" in The American Political Tradition (1948)
• Osofsky, Gilbert. "Wendell Phillips and the Quest for a New American National Identity" Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 1973 1(1): 15-46. Issn: 0317-7904
• Stewart, James Brewer. Wendell Phillips: Liberty's Hero. Louisiana State U. Press, 1986. 356 pp.
• Stewart, James B. "Heroes, Villains, Liberty, and License: the Abolitionist Vision of Wendell Phillips" in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Louisiana State U. Press, 1979): 168-191.

External links

• Spartacus Educational Biography
• Article from "Impeach Andrew Johnson"
• 'Toussaint L'Ouverture' A lecture by Wendell Phillips (1861)

Wendell Phillips | Wendell Phillips

1811 births | 1884 deaths | American abolitionists | Native Americans' rights activists