36 Facts About Wendell Phillips

Wendell Phillips was an American abolitionist, labor reformer, temperance activist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, and attorney.

Wendell Phillips was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 29,1811, to Sarah Walley and John Wendell Phillips, a wealthy lawyer, politician, and philanthropist, who was the first mayor of Boston.

Wendell Phillips was a descendant of Reverend George Phillips, who emigrated from England to Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1630.

Wendell Phillips was schooled at Boston Latin School, and graduated from Harvard College in 1831.

Wendell Phillips went on to attend Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1833.

In 1834, Wendell Phillips was admitted to the Massachusetts state bar, and in the same year, he opened a law practice in Boston.

In 1836, Wendell Phillips was supporting the abolitionist cause when he met Ann Greene.

Phillips and Greene were engaged that year and Greene declared Wendell to be her "best three quarters".

Wendell Phillips, watching from nearby Court Street, was a witness to the attempted lynching.

Wendell Phillips joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and frequently made speeches at its meetings.

Wendell Phillips was a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted fugitive slaves in avoiding slavecatchers.

Wendell Phillips disagreed with abolitionist Lysander Spooner and maintained that slavery was part of the Constitution, and more generally disputed Spooner's notion that any judge could find slavery illegal.

Wendell Phillips's death engendered a national controversy between abolitionists and anti-abolitionists.

In 1854, Wendell Phillips was indicted for his participation in the celebrated attempt to rescue Anthony Burns, a captured fugitive slave, from a jail in Boston.

Wendell Phillips met Mary Brown and the coffin in Troy, New York, where she changed trains, and expressed, unsuccessfully, his wish that Brown would be buried, with a monument, in Mt.

Wendell Phillips spoke at the funeral and on the way home, repeated his speech the next night to a wildly enthusiastic audience in Vergennes, Vermont.

Twelve days after the attack on Fort Sumter, Wendell Phillips announced his "hearty and hot" support for the war.

In 1854, Wendell Phillips helped Stone call a New England Woman's Rights convention to expand suffrage petitioning into the other New England states.

Wendell Phillips was a member of the National Woman's Rights Central Committee, which organized annual conventions throughout the 1850s, published its Proceedings, and executed plans adopted by the conventions.

Wendell Phillips was a close adviser of Lucy Stone, and a major presence at most of the conventions, for which he wrote resolutions defining the movement's principles and goals.

Historian Gilbert Osofsky has argued that Wendell Phillips's nationalism was shaped by a religious ideology derived from the European Enlightenment, as expressed by Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.

Wendell Phillips favored getting rid of American slavery by letting the slave states secede, and he sought to amalgamate all the American "races".

Unlike other white abolitionist leaders such as Garrison, Wendell Phillips thought that securing civil and political rights for freedmen was an essential component of the abolitionist cause, even after the formal legal end of slavery.

In 1879, Wendell Phillips argued that black suffrage and political participation during Reconstruction had not been a failure, and that the main error of the era had been the failure to redistribute land to the freedmen.

Wendell Phillips defended black voters as being "less purchasable than the white man," credited black labor and rule for the nascent regrowth of the Southern economy, and commended black bravery against attacks from the first Ku Klux Klan.

Wendell Phillips was active in efforts to gain equal rights for Native Americans, arguing that the Fifteenth Amendment granted citizenship to Indians.

Wendell Phillips proposed that the Andrew Johnson administration create a cabinet-level post that would guarantee Indian rights.

Wendell Phillips helped create the Massachusetts Indian Commission with Indian rights activist Helen Hunt Jackson and Massachusetts governor William Claflin.

Wendell Phillips lobbied against military involvement in the settling of Native American problems on the Western frontier.

Wendell Phillips accused General Philip Sheridan of pursuing a policy of Indian extermination.

Public opinion turned against Native American advocates after the Battle of the Little Bighorn in July 1876, but Wendell Phillips continued to support the land claims of the Lakota.

Wendell Phillips delivered his last public address on January 26,1884, over the objections of his physician.

Wendell Phillips spoke at the unveiling of a statue to Harriet Martineau.

Wendell Phillips died in his home, on Common Street in Boston's neighborhood of Charlestown, on February 2,1884.

Wendell Phillips's body was taken to Faneuil Hall, where it lay in state for several hours.

Timothy Thomas Fortune eulogized Wendell Phillips, calling him a reformer who was as bold as a lion, who had reformed a great wrong, and who had left a rejuvenated Constitution.