The Battle of Principles Part 2

The man back of Wendell Phillips and the abolition movement was William Lloyd Garrison. This reformer began his career in 1825, as a practical printer and occasional writer of articles for the daily press. Among Garrison's friends were two Quakers, one a young farmer, John Greenleaf Whittier; the other was Benjamin Lundy, who for several years had spent his time and fortune protesting against the slave traffic. Lundy had visited Hayti, to examine the conditions of negro life there,--had returned to Baltimore, where he had been brutally beaten by a slave dealer, and had finally come to Boston to test out the anti-slavery sentiment in New England. He held a meeting in a Baptist church, only to have it broken up by the pastor, who refused to allow Lundy to continue his remarks, on the ground that his position could only be offensive to the South, and therefore dangerous. But Lundy succeeded in having a committee appointed to consider the problem, and young Garrison was one of its members. A few months later, Garrison was made the editor of a journal in Bedford, where he began to advance more and more radical theories, until a rival editor was irritated to the point of charging him with "the pert loquacity of a blue jay." But Garrison's fidelity to his own convictions, and his courage in airing them in public, had won the respect of the Quaker enthusiast, Lundy, and the old man walked all the way from Baltimore to Bedford to ask Garrison to join him in his work of agitation. A year later the two men, one old and discouraged, the other young and hopeful, both being practically penniless,--started work in Baltimore. Troubles came thick and fast. The slave dealer who had beaten Lundy now attacked young Garrison. Carelessly worded criticisms of a Northern slave dealer from Garrison's own town of Newburyport led to a suit for libel, and a fine of fifty dollars; neither man could raise the money to pay the fine, and Garrison went to jail for forty-nine days. But the youth was full of courage and faith, and in 1831 we find him once more in Boston, starting a new paper, that was, if possible, more radical than ever.

In this second venture he was alone, his office was a garret, his only helper a negro boy whom he had freed. His paper was called the _Liberator_, and the first edition appeared in January, 1831. Garrison registered his sublime vow in his opening editorial: "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice.... I am in earnest,--I will not equivocate,--I will not excuse,--I will not retract a single inch,--and I will be heard." His battle cry was "Immediate, unconditional emanc.i.p.ation on the soil."

No movement that wrought so great a national convulsion ever had a more feeble origin. The Revolutionary fathers had three million colonists as supporters. The leaders of the Home Rule movement had four millions of Irishmen to back them. Cobden and Bright were supported and cheered on by the manufacturers of Central England. But young Garrison stood alone, with empty hands, a slave boy to support, a hand-press printing a sheet twelve inches square, never knowing where the money for the next edition was to come from. His motto was "Our country is the world, and our countrymen all men, black or white." The genius of his message was unmistakable: "Is slavery wrong anywhere? Then it is wrong everywhere.

Was it wrong once in Palestine? Then it is wrong in all lands. Is a wrongdoer bound to do right at any time? Then he is bound to do right instantly." He distributed his sheets among the merchants of Boston.

Beacon Street shook with laughter, for a new Don Quixote had arisen. But from the first the South was alarmed, for that little sheet from the printing-press fell upon the South like the stroke and tread of armed men.

The _Liberator_ soon brought friends to this unknown youth. But in August of this same year, 1831, an event occurred which lifted Garrison,--almost without his being aware of it,--into truly national prominence. This was the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia,--a negro uprising under the leaders.h.i.+p of a genuine African slave who knew the Bible by heart, who claimed to have communication with the Holy Spirit, and who finally employed an eclipse of the sun as a sign to his followers that they were to arise and slay their masters. The ma.s.sacre which resulted lasted forty-eight hours, and sixty-one white people on the neighbouring plantations lost their lives. Retribution followed swiftly, and where the slightest suspicion of guilt was to be found, negroes were shot at sight or burned against the nearest tree.

Southampton County saw a veritable reign of terror. A storm of indignation swept over the South; thousands of slave owners living on their great estates, miles from the nearest military station, feared themselves victims of a servile insurrection. The cause of the uprising was at once sought for, and a hundred writers laid the blame at the door of the Boston _Liberator_. Garrison was indicted for felony in North Carolina. The legislature of Georgia offered a reward for $5,000 to any one who would kidnap him and deliver his body within the limits of the state. With one voice the entire South cried out that the _Liberator_ must be suppressed.

Later it became clear that Garrison's part in the Nat Turner rebellion was nil. The _Liberator_ had not a single subscriber in the South; Nat Turner had never seen a copy of the paper,--and Garrison had been specific in his statements that he did not believe in active resistance to authority, or in the use of force of any kind. But the storm had broken, and Garrison had to fight his way through it.

Even in Boston Garrison had to face the mob, and meet the scorn of the ruling cla.s.ses of the city. His movement had no popular support, in the true sense of the word, as it had twenty years later, when Wendell Phillips led the forces of abolition. Cotton was king, and the fear of losing the Southern trade sent the mercantile cla.s.ses into a panic of fear. Garrison's enemies were by no means confined to the South. He was like David with his sling; and slavery, with all its va.s.sals, North as well as South, was Goliath armed with steel. But for Garrison there were only two words, Right and Wrong, and he would not compromise concerning either.

Within two years he succeeded in organizing in Philadelphia the American Anti-Slavery Society; by 1835 he convinced William Ellery Channing that the time had fully come for an active crusade, and this old minister, with a literary reputation in Europe almost as great as that of Was.h.i.+ngton Irving, published an abolition book called "Slavery," which is said to have been read by every prominent man in public life. In 1840 the society numbered not less than 200,000, and the hardest of Garrison's work was done.

But he was to have a potent ally in Wendell Phillips, the explanation of whose career is in his birth gifts. One of his ancestors was a Cambridge graduate, who rebelled against the tyranny of Charles, and exchanged wealth and position for a New England wilderness. It was one of his forefathers who was the first mayor of Boston. Another founded Phillips Exeter Academy. Wendell Phillips himself began his career at the moment when Madison's State Papers had won him the presidency, when John Adams was the glory of the city, when Channing was the light of the pulpit, and Lyman Beecher was the idol of orthodox Boston. He was in his early teens when he waited four hours on a Boston wharf to see Lafayette's boat come in. He was thirteen when he heard Daniel Webster's oration on Adams and Jefferson. He was sixteen when he entered Harvard College, and formed his lifelong friends.h.i.+p with his roommate, John Lothrop Motley.

He studied law with Charles Sumner, in the office of Judge Story, a legal star of the first magnitude. He was counted one of the handsomest youths in Boston. There was nothing too bright or too hard for Wendell Phillips to aspire to, or hope for. At the critical moment, when he had to decide upon his future career, ambition sang to him, as to every n.o.ble youth. George William Curtis represents Phillips as sometimes forecasting the future, as he saw himself "succeeding Ames, and Otis and Webster, rising from the bar to the Legislature, from the Legislature to the Senate, from the Senate--who knows whither? He was already the idol of society, the applauded orator, the brilliant champion of the eloquent refinement and the conservatism of Ma.s.sachusetts. The delight of social ease, the refined enjoyment of taste and letters and art, opulence, leisure, professional distinction, gratified ambition, all offered bribes to the young student." The measure of his manhood is in the way he thrust aside all honours and emoluments that stood in the path of duty. Only he who knows what he renounces gains the true blessing of renunciation.

The young orator's att.i.tude towards slavery was determined by the mobbing of Garrison. One October afternoon in 1835 Wendell Phillips sat reading by an open window in his office on Court Street. Suddenly his attention was diverted from the page by voices, angry and profane, rising from the street without. Looking down he saw a mult.i.tude moving up the street, and soon found that the mult.i.tude had become a mob. Five thousand men were collected in front of the anti-slavery office, and were trying to crowd their way up the stairs in search of Garrison. In another room thirty women were a.s.sembled to organize a woman's abolition society. When the women found that the mob wanted to put them out also, they sent a message to Mayor Lyman asking protection. When the mayor arrived with the police, instead of dispelling the mob and protecting liberty of speech, the mayor dispelled the women and protected the mob.

Discovering that they had the sympathy of the mayor and would be protected by the police, the lawless element rushed upon the office of the _Liberator_, smashed in the doors and windows, and dragged Garrison forth. Bareheaded, with a rope about his waist, his coat torn off, but with erect head, set lips, flas.h.i.+ng eyes, Garrison was dragged down the street to the City Hall. On every side rose the shout "Kill him! Lynch him! ---- the abolitionist!" Asking who the man was, Phillips was told that this was Garrison, the editor of the _Liberator_. Meeting the commander of the Boston regiment, of which he was a member, he exclaimed, "Why does not the mayor call out the troops? This is outrageous!" "Why," answered the officer, "don't you see that our militia are also the mob?" It was all too true. The mob was made up of men of property and standing. In that hour Wendell Phillips had his call. In the person of that man dragged down the street with a rope around his waist, the most gifted speaker in Boston had found his client; in the crusade against slavery he found his cause, and soon his clarion voice was heard sounding the onset.

To Garrison's organized agitation, begun in 1832, that soon spread all over the country, must be added a second cause for anti-slavery sentiment,--the murder of Lovejoy. This was on the night of November 7, 1837. The Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy was a young Presbyterian minister, a graduate of Princeton Seminary. He began his career as pastor of a little church in St. Louis and editor of the _Presbyterian Observer_. At that time he was not an abolitionist, and, perhaps because he had married the daughter of a slave owner, he had taken no strong position either for or against slavery. One day an officer arrested a black man in St. Louis who resisted arrest, and in the melee the officer was killed. His friends claimed that the negro was a freeman, and that there was a plot to kidnap him and sell him into the Southern cotton fields, and that he had a right to resist. The real facts will, doubtless, never be known. To slave owners, however, it was intolerable that a black man should resist an officer under any circ.u.mstances. A mob collected, the negro was bound to a stake, wood piled round about, and the prisoner was burned to death.

Efforts were made to punish the murderers. In the irony of events the name of the judge was Lawless, and he charged the grand jury substantially as follows: "When men are hurried by some mysterious metaphysical electric frenzy to commit a deed of violence they are absolved from guilt. If you should find that such was the fact in this case, then act not at all. The case transcends your jurisdiction, and is beyond the reach of human law." Of course all the murderers went free.

When Mr. Lovejoy commented editorially upon this outrageous charge, encouraging lynch law, once again the "mysterious, metaphysical electric frenzy" broke forth, only this time it destroyed his printing office. The young minister decided to leave the slave State, and crossed to Alton, Illinois, where there was not only liberty of speech but liberty of the printing-press. But a mob crossed over from Missouri and destroyed his press. Determined to maintain his rights, Lovejoy then brought another press down the Ohio River from Cincinnati. A group of his friends carried the type from the steamboat to the warehouse, but the next night a second mob collected, and when Lovejoy stepped from the building he was riddled with bullets, the warehouse burned, and the press, for the third time, flung into the Mississippi. The news of this murder aroused the continent, filling the South with exultation, and the North with alarm. Slavery, a subject which had long been tabooed, suddenly became the one topic of conversation in the home, the store, the street-car. All editors wrote about it; all Northern pulpits began to preach on the subject. More f.a.ggots had been flung upon the fire, and oil added to the fierce flames.

Every explosion asks for powder, but also a spark. Falling on ice, a spark is impotent, falling on powder, an explosion is inevitable.

Wendell Phillips had already been aroused to sympathy with Garrison and hatred of slavery, and news of the murder of Lovejoy fell upon his heart like a spark on a powder magazine. When Boston heard that Lovejoy had been shot by the mob in Alton, Illinois, while defending his printing-press, the leading men of Boston came together in Faneuil Hall.

William Ellery Channing made the opening address, and asked that the meeting go on record through an indignant protest against this a.s.sault upon the rights of free citizens. James T. Austin, attorney-general of the commonwealth, replied in a bitter and insulting reference to Channing, a.s.serting that a clergyman with a gun in his hand, or mingling in the debate of a popular a.s.sembly in Faneuil Hall, was marvellously out of place. Austin compared the slaves of the South to a menagerie of wild beasts, and a.s.serted that Lovejoy in defending them was presumptuous, and died as a fool dieth. He added that the rioters in Alton killed Lovejoy and flung his press into the river in the spirit of the Boston mob that boarded the British s.h.i.+ps in 1773, and threw the tea overboard on the night of the "Boston Tea Party."

That was a great moment in the history not only of liberty, but also in that of eloquence. Wendell Phillips, then but six years out of Harvard College, rose to reply. "A comparison has been drawn between the events of the Revolution and the tragedy at Alton. We have heard it a.s.serted here in Faneuil Hall that Great Britain had a right to tax the colonies.

And we have heard the mob at Alton, drunken murderers of Lovejoy, compared to those patriot fathers who threw the tea overboard! Fellow citizens, is this Faneuil Hall doctrine? The mob at Alton were met to wrest from a citizen his just rights,--met to resist the laws. Lovejoy had stationed himself within const.i.tutional bulwarks. He was not only defending the freedom of the press, but he was under his own roof, in arms with the sanction of the civil authority. The men who a.s.sailed him went against and over the laws. The mob, as the gentleman terms it (mob, forsooth!--certainly we sons of the tea-spillers are a marvellously patient generation!), the 'orderly mob' which a.s.sembled in the Old South to destroy the tea were met to resist, not the laws, but illegal exactions. Shame on the American who calls the tea tax and Stamp Act laws! Our fathers resisted, not the king's prerogative, but the king's usurpation. To find any other account you must read our revolutionary history upside down. To draw the conduct of our ancestors into a precedent for mobs is an insult to their memory. They were the people rising to sustain the laws and const.i.tution of the province. The rioters of our day go for their own wills, right or wrong. Sir, when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hanc.o.c.k, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips [pointing to the portraits in the hall] would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American,--the slanderer of the dead.

Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered, on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up. Imprudent to defend the liberty of the press! Why? Because the defense was unsuccessful? Does success gild crime into patriotism, and the want of it change heroic self-devotion into imprudence? Was Hampden imprudent when he drew the sword and threw away the scabbard?"

The next morning young Phillips, like Lord Byron, awoke to find himself famous. Merchants, politicians, who had long been staggering like drunken men, indifferent to their rights, and confused in their feelings, were stunned into sobriety, and began to discuss principles, and weigh characters, and a.n.a.lyze public leaders, and wakening, men found that they had been standing on the edge of a precipice. Phillips, already devoted to the slave, became now his tireless champion through many years, till the emanc.i.p.ation of 1863.

One evening in May, 1854, a negro was seen skulking in the shadows near a dock in Boston. This coloured man, Anthony Burns by name, was a slave, who had escaped from his Southern master, and after weeks had reached Philadelphia, where a Quaker had stowed him away in a s.h.i.+p bound for Boston. A Boston policeman who caught sight of the negro recalled the rewards offered for the capture of slaves, and soon ran the fugitive down, and had him before United States Commissioner Loring. The next morning Theodore Parker hastened to the court-room to say that he was the chaplain of the Abolition Society, and had come to offer counsel.

But the fugitive was afraid to accept the overture, lest his master punish him the more severely.

The news spread quickly throughout the city, and two nights later a meeting in Faneuil Hall was attended by an enormous gathering, aroused to the highest pitch of excitement. Hand-bills had been put out, stating that kidnappers were in the city. The people were in a frenzy. Theodore Parker delivered one of his most impa.s.sioned addresses. "I am an old man; I have heard hurrahs and cheers for liberty many times; I have not seen a great many _deeds_ done for liberty. I ask you, Are we to have deeds as well as words?" Parker moved that, when the meeting adjourned, it should be to meet the following morning in the square before the court-house. But he had raised too great a storm to control; a rumour that a mob of negroes was at that very moment trying to rescue Burns was all that was needed to empty the room; and the crowd rushed out to the court-house square. There they discovered a small party of men, led by Thomas W. Higginson, trying to batter down the court-house doors. The crowd lent them willing hands. But the marshall defended the building,--shots were fired,--Higginson wounded, and several of his followers arrested. Two companies of artillery were at once ordered out by the mayor, and the attempt to rescue the negro met with complete and disastrous failure. Wendell Phillips and Parker were the leaders in the fight. When asked what he would regard as grounds for the return of Burns to his master, Phillips answered, "Nothing short of a bill of sale from Almighty G.o.d."

The day of the transfer of the slave to the United States revenue cutter found Boston in a state of siege. Twenty-two companies of Ma.s.sachusetts soldiers patrolled the city; two rows of soldiers, armed with muskets, shotted to kill, stood on either side of the street through which Burns was to be led to the vessel. The windows were filled with people, the houses hung in black, the United States flags were draped in mourning.

From a window near the court-house hung a coffin, with the legend: "The funeral of liberty." The procession itself was composed of a battalion of United States artillery, one of United States marines, the marshall's posse of 125 men guarding the fugitive, and a small cannon, with two more platoons of marines to guard it. To such a pa.s.s had come Boston, with its respect for law, and its reputation for obedience to those clothed in authority. A Charleston paper spoke of the return of Burns as a Southern victory, but added that two or three such victories would ruin the cause. For the movement against slavery was now rising, with all the advance of a tidal wave and a mighty storm.

The public excitement was greatly increased by the Fugitive Slave legislation of 1850 and 1854. Many Northern men who were opposed to slavery in the North condoned slavery in the South. Just as Demetrius urged that by the making of images of Diana "we have our gain," so timid capital in the North bowed like a suitor at the feet of the imperial South, and advised silence, remembering that through the money of Southern planters it had its livelihood. Wendell Phillips went up and down the land stirring up opinion against the law. He spoke three hundred times in one year and two hundred and seventy-five times in another year. Phillips rose upon the opposition like a war eagle against an advancing storm. Brave men defied the law, organized the Underground Railroad, and in every way possible defeated the purpose of the Fugitive Slave Law. So in 1854 when Senator Douglas engineered through Congress the famous Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the Missouri Compromise, the North refused to accept what was so palpably pro-slavery legislation. This was revolutionary. Instantly the North divided into two camps. The one question of the hour was "Shall a fugitive slave be furnished with weapons with which to defend his person, and has he the right of self-defense?" The whole land became a debating society, and heaved with excitement, like the heaving of an earthquake. The merchant pointed to his ledger, and urged caution. But liberty was stronger than the ledger, and the heaving emotion burst through the statutes and rent the laws asunder. Soon the Fugitive Slave Law, had become a dead letter.

The South had gone one step too far. Abolition stood suddenly in a new light; "More abolitionists had been made by this single piece of hostile legislation," said Greeley, "than Garrison and Phillips could have made in half a century."

For thirty years Wendell Phillips was the crowned king of the lecture platform. It was the golden age of the lyceum. Men had more leisure than to-day. Our era of the drama, music, and travel pictures had not yet come. The winter nights were long, books few, magazines had not yet developed, and the people were hungry for instruction and eloquence.

Wendell Phillips achieved the astonis.h.i.+ng feat of speaking three hundred times a year. Eloquence is born of a great theme like the woes and wrongs of three million slaves. It is sometimes said that oratory is dying out in our Congress. But Congress is now a board of trade, discussing duties, protective tariffs on wool, cotton, and hides.

Beecher and Phillips had a great theme--liberty, the emanc.i.p.ation of millions of slaves. The modern orator in the Senate discusses the mathematics of woolen goods. It is hard to be eloquent over one salt barrel and two piles of cowhides. A sermon or a lecture on topics that fifty years ago would have crowded the greatest room and the street outside would not to-day draw a corporal's guard.

But in those heroic days, there was a great opportunity, and the opportunity was matched by the man. Phillips was handsome as an Apollo.

His voice was sweet as a harp. No man ever studied the art of public speech more scientifically. He played upon an audience as a skillful musician upon the banks of keys in an organ. A Southern slaveholder heard him in the Academy of Music, hating him, but paying him this tribute, "That man is an infernal machine set to music." His method was practically the memoriter method. A gentleman, who heard him give his "Daniel O'Connell" four times in succession, found that the lecture was repeated without the slightest variation whatsoever, in ideas, sentences, inflection of the voice, or even gesture. Phillips prepared his lectures with the greatest care, and then repeated them hundreds of times. From the moment when he came upon the platform his presence filled the eye and satisfied it. His very ease and poise begat confidence and delight. He carved each sentence out of solid suns.h.i.+ne.

He stood quietly, made few gestures, adopted the conversational tone and took the audience into his confidence.

Some of his finest effects were produced by the injection of a parenthesis. Once in an evening sermon in Plymouth Church, when Beecher was urging the reelection of Lincoln and defending the Republican party, a disputatious individual called out from the congregation, "What about Wendell Phillips?" To which Mr. Beecher made the instant answer, "Wendell Phillips is not a Republican. Wendell Phillips is a radical and an independent. What this country needs is not a man of words but a man of deeds." A few nights later Wendell Phillips was lecturing in the Brooklyn Academy of Music before the St. Patrick's Society, and made his reply in the form of a parenthesis, barbing his shaft with an exquisite inflection of his voice. "Mr. Beecher said last Sunday night (_forgetting his own vocation_), 'Wendell Phillips is a man of words, instead of a man of deeds.'"

Not that the two men were ever unfriendly, for they were co-workers, standing side by side in the great movement. Once when the trustees of yonder Academy refused to allow Mr. Phillips to speak, Mr. Beecher made it a point of honour with his trustees to let Wendell Phillips speak in Plymouth Church, and ran the risk of the mob destroying the building.

The tumultuous scenes of that night, when bricks came through the windows, and the police were stationed in Cranberry and Orange Streets, were repeated all over the land. Again and again Wendell Phillips was mobbed. Once, at the very beginning of his career as an abolitionist, he spoke with an old Quaker. People waited to greet the old Quaker and asked him home for the night; but they pelted Wendell Phillips with rotten eggs as he went down the street in the dark. Afterwards Wendell Phillips said to the old Quaker, "I said just what you did, and yet you were invited home to fried chicken and a bed, while I received raw eggs and stone."

"I will tell thee the difference, Wendell. Thou said, 'If thou art a holder of slaves, thou wilt go to h.e.l.l.' I said, 'If thou dost not hold slaves, thou wilt not go to h.e.l.l.'"

But Wendell Phillips would not b.u.t.ter parsnips with fine words. Once in Boston four hundred men surrounded him, got possession of the hall, and jeered him for an hour and a half. Finally he leaned over the desk and shouted down to a reporter, "Thank G.o.d there is no manacle for the printing-press." Armed friends rescued him, guarded him home, and for a week, night and day, the Boston police guarded the house. Those were tumultuous days. But this great man braved and outlived the storm.

When the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation was declared, William Lloyd Garrison said nothing remained now but to die. But Phillips opposed the dissolution of the Anti-Slavery Society, because he saw that when the physical fetters were broken, there still remained the fetters of the mind and heart that must be destroyed. So far from ending his labours, Phillips now redoubled his activities. He threw himself into the labour movement and helped organize the working cla.s.ses into a solid force against capitalism. He took up the cause of suffrage and the higher education of woman, gave himself to the temperance problem and prohibition. He lectured oftentimes two hundred nights a year in the great cities of the land, seeking always to manufacture manhood of a good quality. He became himself our finest example of the power and influence of the scholar in the Republic. And when the end came, he received from his fellow countrymen the admiration and the love that he had deserved. And the friends who knew him best were not surprised that the last words on his lips were the words of his friend James Russell Lowell, that summarized the ideal that Wendell Phillips had pursued for thirty years.

"New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our _Mayflower_, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key."

IV

CHARLES SUMNER: THE APPEAL TO EDUCATED MEN

In every country and time, the era of national peril has been the creative era for the intellect. The eloquence of Greece was at its best when Philip attacked Athens and Demosthenes defended its liberties.

Dante's poems were born of the collision between the despots who sought to enslave Florence, and the patriots who dreamed of democracy. Milton's songs were written during the English Revolution, when the Puritan, seeking to diffuse the good things of life, and the Cavalier, who wished to monopolize the earth's treasure, came into a deadly collision.

In accordance with that principle it seems natural to expect that the scholars of the Republic should do their best work during the era of agitation, when the national intellect was white hot, and public excitement burned by day and night. The anti-slavery epoch, therefore, was the Augustan Era of American literature, when the historians, poets and philosophers lent distinction to American literature. At that time Motley was writing his "History of the Netherlands"; Prescott, his "History of Mexico and Spain"; Whittier, his songs of slavery and freedom; Lowell was the satirist of the debate, and was writing his "Biglow Papers," and Emerson, the philosopher, was undermining the foundations and shaking the principles of slavery, even as Samson pulled down the temple of the olden time.

Emerson, the philosopher, did the thinking, and furnished the intellectual implements to the abolitionists. Beginning his career as a preacher, he resigned his position, moved to Concord, and dwelt apart from men, but "as he mused, the fire burned." Easily our first man of American letters, he is among the first essayists of all ages and climes. Essentially, however, he was a man of intellect, an American Plato, "a Greek head screwed upon Yankee shoulders," to use Holmes'

expression. His essay upon "The American Scholar," and his book on "Nature," brought him fame in England, and invitations to lecture before their colleges. Early in his career he won the friends.h.i.+p of Arnold of Rugby, of Matthew Arnold the son, of Arthur Hugh Clough, and of Thomas Carlyle. He returned from his honours in England to find himself the centre of the intellectual movement of New England. A number of younger men gathered around him, until Emerson's group at Concord became like unto Goethe's group at Weimar, and Coleridge's in London. During the late forties American educators, orators and statesmen began to quote the striking sentences from Emerson. Little by little it came about that the fighters went to Emerson as to an a.r.s.enal for their intellectual weapons. His first notable contribution to abolitionism was his "Story of the West India Emanc.i.p.ation." Then came his "Essay on the Fugitive Slave Law," his speech on the a.s.sault on Mr. Sumner, his writings on Kansas, and on John Brown. Few men have had such power to condense a statement of philosophy into a single epigram. Grant once said of his soldiers that while each man took aim for himself, Winchester slew all the thousands. Not otherwise, hundreds of orators and reformers went up and down the land attacking slavery, but while the voices were many, the argument was one, and Emerson for a time did the speaking for the abolitionists.

What Emerson stated in pure white light, Whittier made popular through his poems of Slavery and Freedom. By way of preeminence he was the poet of the abolition movement, and the Sir Galahad among our singers. Reared among the Friends, he had the simplicity of the Quaker, but the solidity and ma.s.siveness of the fighting Puritan. Strange as it may seem, he was at once the poet of peace, insisting upon the crime of war, and the poet of freedom, insisting upon the destruction of slavery. The fire and glow, the moral earnestness, the spiritual pa.s.sion of Whittier, are best ill.u.s.trated in his "Lost Occasion," and "Ichabod." At length the newspapers of the North took up his work. For some years before the war broke out, scarcely a month pa.s.sed by without a new poem of liberty by Whittier. Soon these poems that were published in the newspapers were recited in the schools by the children, quoted in the pulpits by the preachers, and used by the orators as feathers for their arrows. Once Wendell Phillips concluded an impa.s.sioned oration by reciting one of Whittier's stanzas, when a man in the audience shouted, "That arrow went home!" to which Wendell Phillips answered, "Yes, and I have a quiver full of arrows, every one of which was made by a man of peace,--John Greenleaf Whittier." If Emerson's philosophy was like the diffused white daylight that makes clear the landscape for an army, Whittier's occasional poems like "Ichabod" were thunderbolts that blasted forever all compromise and expediency.

Sometimes what the essayist fails to achieve ridicule easily accomplishes. James Russell Lowell was the satirist of the abolition movement. With biting scorn and irony he laughed men out of narrowness, ignorance, and selfishness. During the last epoch in his career Lowell achieved world-wide fame as a diplomat, and was universally admired as the all round man of letters. But now that he has gone, in retrospect, the historian perceives that the first era of Lowell's career was the influential era. He was the Milton of the anti-slavery epoch, as Lincoln was its Cromwell. His influence in England, in developing an anti-slavery sentiment there, was, if possible, more influential than in the home country. The great English editor, William Stead, tells us that he owes to Lowell's message the influences that made him an editor and a reformer. In the critical moments of his life he found in Lowell the inspiration and support that he found in no other books, save in Carlyle's "Cromwell" and the Bible. "In Russia, in Ireland, in Rome, and in prison, Lowell's poems have been my constant companions." The poet used the story of Moses emanc.i.p.ating the Hebrew slaves as an ill.u.s.tration of the abolitionist as the unknown leader whom G.o.d would raise up to lead the three million black men out of Southern slavery.

"What G.o.d did for the Egyptian bondsmen, he believed G.o.d would do; because what G.o.d was, G.o.d is. He goes on:--

"From what a Bible can a man choose his text to-day! A Bible which needs no translation; and which no priestcraft can close from the laity,--the open volume of the world, upon which, with a pen of suns.h.i.+ne and destroying fire, the inspired Present is even now writing the annals of G.o.d. Methinks the editor who should understand his calling, and be equal thereto, would truly deserve that t.i.tle that Homer bestows upon princes.

He would be the Moses of our nineteenth century; and whereas the old Sinai, silent now, is but a common mountain, stared at by the elegant tourist, and crawled over by the hammer of the geologist, he must find his tables of the new law here among factories and cities in this wilderness of sin, called the progress of civilization, and be the captain of our exodus into the Canaan of a truer social order."

Certain stanzas of Lowell, also, were quoted even more widely, and were ever upon the lips of college students. Many a soldier boy who went to battle from the forest and factory, the fields and the mines, scarcely knew that his inspiration--like Phillip's oratory--was embodied in Lowell's poem, "The Present Crisis":--

"Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, G.o.d's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

"Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,-- Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth G.o.d within the shadow, keeping watch above His own."