Speeches, Lectures, and Letters.

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Compilation of anti-slavery speeches delivered by celebrated orator and abolitionist, Wendell Phillips (1811–1884). “They will serve, therefore at least, as a contribution to the history of our Antislavery struggle, and especially as a specimen of the method and spirit of that movement which takes its name from my illustrious friend, William Lloyd Garrison.” (Introduction)

Includes Phillips’ speeches with such titles as “The Murder of [Rev. E.P.] Lovejoy,” The Boston Mob, Harper’s Ferry, Burial of John Brown, and Toussaint L’Ouverture. Other speeches include Woman’s Rights, Lincoln’s Election, and The War for the Union. An 1866 newspaper clipping laid in comprises Phillips’ address to the Cooper Union in New York City discussing Reconstruction-era politics.

“As an orator who conceived of himself as a latter-day Patrick Henry or Edmund Burke, Phillips’s conception of the abolitionist as the catalyst for revolution in public opinion fitted his oratorical talents perfectly. In the 1850s no public speaker more completely dominated the debate over the problem of slavery and the growing crisis between North and South than did Phillips. ... In the years immediately before the Civil War Phillips’s oratory, not his labors for the American Anti-Slavery Society, defined his greatest significance. ... Phillips’s speeches, particularly those urging defiance of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, supporting free-soil struggles in Kansas, and praising John Brown’s invasion of Harpers Ferry, gave Yankee political culture a strain of egalitarian extremism that presaged a war for slave emancipation.” (ANB)

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