PHILLIPS, WENDELL (1811-1884), American orator and reformer, was born in Boston on Nov. 29, 1811. His father, John Phillips (1770-1823), a man of wealth and influence, graduated at Harvard college in 1788, and became "town advocate and public prosecutor," and in 1822 first mayor of Boston. Phillips attended the public Latin school, entered Harvard college before he was 16 and graduated in 1831. He graduated at the Harvard law school in 1834, and was admitted to the bar in Boston. He soon came under the influence of the anti-slavery movement, witnessing in 1835 the mobbing, in Boston, of William Lloyd Garrison.
A meeting was held on Dec. 8, 1837, at Faneuil Hall to express the sentiments of the people on the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy, at Alton (Ill.) for defending his press from a pro-slavery mob. In the course of the meeting a speech was made in opposition to its general current by James T. Austin, attorney-general of the State, who said that Lovejoy had died "as the fool dieth," and compared his murderers to the men who threw the tea into Boston harbour just before the War of Independence. The speech seemed likely to divide the audience, when Wendell Phillips took the platform. "When I heard," he said, "the gentleman lay down principles which placed the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Han cock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought these pictured lips (pointing to their portraits) would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead." This appeal not merely determined the sentiment of the meeting; it gave Wendell Phillips his first fame and determined his career.
Although loving his profession, and this especially for the opening it gave in the direction of public life, he lived henceforth the life of an agitator, or, like his father, that of a "public prose cutor." Accepting unhesitatingly the leadership of Garrison, and
becoming like him a disunionist, he lived essentially a platform life, interested in a variety of subjects, but first and chiefly an abolitionist. In 1865, however, after the Civil War, he broke with Garrison over the question of discontinuing the Anti-Slavery Society; and from that date until the society was disbanded in 187o, he, instead of Garrison, was its president. Phillips' style of eloquence was direct and brilliant, but eminently self-controlled. He may be said to have introduced the direct and colloquial man ner upon the American public platform. His logic, while never obtruded, was rarely at fault, but he loved the flash of the rapier, and was never happier than when he had to face a mob and utterly foil it by sheer superiority in fencing. The two volumes of his speeches, as edited by James Redpath, were fortunately made from verbatim reports, and they wisely enclose in parentheses those indications of favour or dissent from the audience which transformed so many of his speeches into exhibitions of gladiato rial skill. After slavery had fallen Phillips associated himself freely with reformers occupied in other paths. He contended in later years for prohibition, woman suffrage and various penal and administrative reforms. He died in Boston on Feb. 2, See his Speeches, Lectures and Letters (1892) ; Lorenzo Sears, Wendell Phillips, Orator and Agitator (19°9) ; also George L. Austin, The Life and Times of Wendell Phillips (1888) ; C. E. Russell, Story of Wendell Phillips: Soldier of the Common Good (1914); and George Edward Woodbury, Heart of Man and Other Papers (1920).