Wendell Phillips on the War

PHILLIPS Wendell

Erscheinungsdatum: 1861

Beschreibung

Letterpress broadside with text in six columns. Measuring 630 by 458mm. Old folds, some creases, toning, and edgewear. Boston, The Liberator, A good copy of Wendell Phillips' famous speech delivered before the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society on 21 April, 1861. ?Not less than four thousand people were crowded within the walls of the spacious Music Hall . and almost an equal number were excluded, because of the impossibility of finding even an inch of standing room.? Speaking in the wake of the attack on Fort Sumter, Phillips lauds the galvanisation of the North as ?Massachusetts men marshalled for war.? He sees the essence of the war as ?no struggle between different ideas, but between barbarism and civilization.? He unpacks this contrast further by saying: ?The North thinks - can appreciate argument - it is the nineteenth century - hardly any struggle left in it but that between the working class and the money kings. The South dreams - it is the thirteenth and fourteenth century - baron and serf - noble and slave.? Furthermore, Phillips emphasises his support for Abraham Lincoln, discusses the constitutional issues behind secession, and argues that the Civil War is a ?holier? cause than the Revolutionary War. He beseeches abolitionists and Americans to ?wipe away the stain that hangs about the toleration of human bondage.? ANB notes the importance of Phillips' speeches: ?In the years immediately before the Civil War Phillips?s oratory, not his labors for the American Anti-Slavery Society, defined his greatest significance . [H]e fashioned speeches that dramatized the moral imperative facing the North: people must confront the South and destroy slavery. Collected in books and widely reprinted in newspapers, Phillips?s speeches, particularly those urging defiance of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, supporting free-soil struggles in Kansas, and praising John Brown?s invasion of Harpers Ferry, gave Yankee political culture a strain of egalitarian extremism that presaged a war for slave emancipation. The onset of the war itself magnified Phillips?s stature and influence as ?abolition?s golden trumpet.? Discarding his disunionism, he declared secession to be treason and demanded war aims that would free the slaves, cede them their former masters? lands, grant them full civil rights, furnish them with free public education, and guarantee them full manhood suffrage.? An unenthusiastic graduate of Harvard Law School, Wendell Phillips (1811-84) found an outlet for his intellect and passion when introduced to Boston's abolitionist circle by his wife, Ann Terry Greene, who was ?a fervent supporter of the abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, and a dedicated member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society? (ibid). Garrison's newspaper, The Liberator, the most successful of its kind is responsible for this publication. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 247579

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Wendell Phillips on the War

Erscheinungsdatum: 1861