During the winter of 1860-61, as southern states announced their intention to secede from the Union, the great Abolitionist Wendell Phillips walked the streets of Boston under threat of attack from mobs that blamed him for the breakup. Barely one year later, when Phillips traveled to Washington, the Vice President of the United States welcomed him to the Senate chamber, the Speaker of the House invited him to dinner, and President Lincoln received him as a guest at the White House.
The Abolitionists were revolutionaries, willing to tear up the Southern economy and society by the roots, wreck Northern commerce, and disrupt the Union irretrievably. They renounced all traditional politics. They openly hoped for the defeat of their own country in the Mexican War. They preached and practiced racial equality. They fought for the equality of women. They understood the need to break up the Union in order to reconstitute it without slavery.
Have ever revolutionaries been more thoroughly vindicated by events?
Although William Lloyd Garrison was the founder of the movement and remains the most widely known of the Abolitionists, Wendell Phillips was the real leader. This volume is the only collection of his work generally available. It includes six speeches charting a revolutionary course for abolition, with an introduction establishing their historical context.
Edited, and with a new introduction by Noel Ignatiev
"Six important speeches by Wendell Phillips, one of the great figures in American history, mark this volume as an indispensable source that should be read by all serious students of the national past and present." -Sterling Stuckey, University of California at Riverside, author of Slave Culture and Going Through the Storm
."This collection of Wendell Phillips's speeches brings back to light one of the magnificent rhetoricians of the abolition movement. Noel Ignatiev's introduction makes a compelling case for treating Phillips as the "real leader" of nineteenth century American radicalism, and the orator's words as a guide to an alternative society." -David W. Blight, Amherst College, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
