Wendell Phillips, circa 1850.
In “Speech at the Melodeon” (January 27th 1853) Wendell Phillips defends his mentor William Lloyd Garrison and other fellow abolitionists against the charge that they lacked “Christian courtesy” and were only hurting their cause by saying not-nice things about, gasp, slave owners.
Wendell Phillips was in favour of the “immediate abolition” of slavery in the US “without repatriation” of Black people back to Africa. An extreme position that will become US policy in 12 years.
What others said about Phillips:
- Charlotte Forten, a 16-year-old Black girl, saw him speak in 1854 and told her diary that he spoke “eloquently and beautifully, as he always does”.
- George Lewis Ruffin, the first Black person to graduate Harvard Law School, said Phillips was “the one white American wholly color-blind and free from race prejudice”.
The Melodeon was a concert hall in Boston. In 1852 it featured Professor Anderson, Wizard of the North, and Donetti’s Comic Troupe of Acting Monkeys, among others.
The US in 1853, as Phillips tells it:
“The South is one great brothel, where half a million of women are flogged to prostitution, or, worse still, are degraded to believe it honorable. The public squares of half our great cities echo to the wail of families torn asunder at the auction block … The Press says, ‘It is all right,’ and the Pulpit cries, ‘Amen.'”
and:
“We [abolitionists] are weak here – out-talked, out-voted. You load our names with infamy and shout us down. But our words bide their time.”
Phillips lays out the charges he argues against:
“Ion’s charges [in the London Leader] are the old ones, that we Abolitionists are hurting our own cause – that, instead of waiting for the community to come up to our views, and endeavoring to remove prejudice and enlighten ignorance, by patient explanation and fair argument, we fall at once, like children, to abusing everything and everybody.”
You know the type: frothing fanatics.
Phillips says the Garrisonians have been at this for 22 years and know what works and what does not:
“We have facts for those who think – arguments for those who reason; but he who cannot be reasoned out of his prejudices, must be laughed out of them; he who cannot be argued out of his selfishness, must be shamed out of it by the mirror of his hateful self held up relentlessly before his eyes;”
He notes:
“There are far more dead hearts to be quickened, than confused intellects to be cleared up”
In the battle for hearts and minds, it is mainly the hearts that have to be won. But either way:
“We expect to accomplish our object long before the nation is made over into saints, or elevated into philosophers. To change public opinion, we use the very tools by which it was formed. That is, all such as an honest man may touch.”
Phillips saw himself as being on the side of God, truth, justice and history. Therefore the abolitionists would win and the next century blush.
– Abagond, 2021.
See also:
- argument:
- early 1800s:
- 2010s:
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Abagond 
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