Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

[260] latest effort was to sneer at a “higher law” Most able and eloquent advocate I could you find no other cause to plead than that of our lowest instincts against our highest and holiest sentiments? Alas that your last and ablest argument was the duty of hunting slaves! Sagacious statesmen! Fated to die not very old, and yet live long enough to see all the plans of your manhood become obsolete ideas, except just those you had abandoned! Surely you were a great party leader! for you found the Whig party strong, spent life in its service, and died prophesying its annihilation; found it decent, at least in profession, left it despicable in utter shamelessness; found it the natural ally of free labor and free speech, stirred it to a contest with its rival in servile bidding for Southern fellowship, and left it despicable for the attempt, and still more despicable and ridiculous for its failure! The curses of the poor have blighted your laurels. You were mourned in ceiled houses and the marts of trade; but the dwellers in slave-huts and fugitives along the highways thanked God, when you died, that they had one enemy the less. Wherever that terrible face turned, it carried gloom to the bondman. On how many a humble hearth did it cost the loftiest Christian principle to forbear calling down curses on your head!

“ And yet your flatterers tell us this was the ‘ grandest growth of our soil and institutions I ’ this the noblest heart Massachusetts can offer to the world for a place beside the Phocions and the Hampdens, the Jays and the Fayettes Thank God, then, we are not Massachusetts men!”

When I think of the long term and wide reach of his influence, and look at the subjects of his speeches,--the mere shells of history, drum-and-trumpet declamation, dry law, or selfish bickerings about trade,--when I think of his bartering the hopes of four million of bondmen for the chances of his private ambition, I recall the criticism