“THE CHINAMAN WORKS CHEAP

BECAUSE HE IS A BARBARIAN

AND SEEKS GRATIFICATION

OF ONLY THE LOWEST,

THE MOST INEVITABLE

WANTS.”1

For the white abolitionists, this was a class struggle rather than a race struggle. It would be quite mistaken for us to infer, now that the civil war is over and the political landscape has 1. Here is what was said of the Phillips family in Nathaniel Morton’s NEW ENGLAND’S MEMORIAL (and this was while that illustrious family was still FOB!): HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

shifted, that the stereotypical antebellum white abolitionist in general had any great love for the welfare of black Americans. White abolitionist leaders knew very well what was the source of their support, in class conflict, and hence Wendell Phillips warned of the political danger from a successful alliance between the “slaveocracy” of the South and the Cotton Whigs of the North, an alliance which he termed “the Lords of the Lash and the Lords of the Loom.” The statement used as the title for this file, above, was attributed to Phillips by the news cartoonist and reformer Thomas Nast, in a cartoon of Columbia facing off a mob of “pure white” Americans armed with pistols, rocks, and sticks, on behalf of an immigrant with a pigtail, that was published in Harper’s Weekly on February 18, 1871. There is no reason to suppose that the cartoonist Nast was failing here to reflect accurately the attitudes of this Boston Brahman — as we are well aware how intensely uncomfortable this man was around any person of color. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1811

November 29, Friday: Wendell Phillips was born in Boston as a descendant of that municipality’s 1st mayor.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 29 of 11 M 1811// The day has passed as usual, the mind susceptible of tender impressions - E W Lawton is consider’d some better - ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

ESSENCE IS BLUR. SPECIFICITY, THE OPPOSITE OF ESSENCE, IS OF THE NATURE OF TRUTH.

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

1822

Lemuel Shaw, with few precedents to guide him, drew up a charter for Boston, which would stand until 1913. Boston transformed itself from a town into a city by adopting this new charter and proceeding to elect a mayor. Their 1st mayor would be John Phillips, Wendell Phillips’s father (Wendell himself was in this year graduating from the Boston Latin School.

ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION).

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

1831

Wendell Phillips would graduate in this year from Harvard College and go on to Harvard Law School.

“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.

May 3, Tuesday: Zampa, ou La fiancee de marbre, an opera comique by Ferdinand Herold to words of Melesville, was performed for the initial time, at the Theatre de Ventadour, Paris.

Wendell Phillips submitted a college requirement “Some beautiful results to which are led by the Differential Calculus in the development of Functions” (21 ¼ x 28 ¾ inches) that is still on file at Harvard College:

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 3 of 5 M / Today was sub committee Meeting. The number present was small as it usually is the Meeting previous to the General committee. — enough however met to transact the buisness necessary to be done - & brotherly & sisterly love seemed

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS prevalent. - RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

YOUR GARDEN-VARIETY ACADEMIC HISTORIAN INVITES YOU TO CLIMB ABOARD A HOVERING TIME MACHINE TO SKIM IN METATIME BACK ACROSS THE GEOLOGY OF OUR PAST TIMESLICES, WHILE OFFERING UP A GARDEN VARIETY OF COGENT ASSESSMENTS OF OUR PROGRESSION. WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP! YOU SHOULD REFUSE THIS HELICOPTERISH OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORICAL PAST, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD THINGS HAPPEN ONLY AS THEY HAPPEN. WHAT THIS SORT WRITES AMOUNTS, LIKE MERE “SCIENCE FICTION,” MERELY TO “HISTORY FICTION”: IT’SNOT WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1833

August: Dr. James Cowles Prichard pioneered “the term monomania, meaning madness affecting one train of thought … adopted in late times instead of melancholia.” (Herman Melville’s father-in-law, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, would utilize this concept “monomania” in a legal opinion in 1844, and Melville would deploy it in MARDI AND A VOYAGE THITHER in 1849, and then in MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE in 1851 as the defining characteristic of the psychology of the maimed Captain Ahab.) As what in this year would have been considered to be a prime instance of such monomania, in this year there appeared Lydia Maria Child’s infamous APPEAL IN FAV OR OF THAT CLASS OF AMERICANS CALLED AFRICANS.

(The author’s “madness affecting one train of thought” was immediately recognized, and in an attempt at a cure her library privileges at the Boston Athenæum were summarily revoked.) The Reverend William Ellery Channing walked down to Child’s cottage from his home on Beacon Hill, a mile and a half, to discuss the book with her for all of 3 hours, but not because he agreed with her — the Reverend Channing considered Child misguided and a zealot. Child later commented that she had “suffered many a shivering ague-fit in attempting to melt, or batter away the glaciers of his prejudices.” The window of William HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS Davis Ticknor’s Old Corner Bookstore was smashed because this APPEAL was on display. Having overheard

his parents discussing APPEAL (and perhaps having heard of that smashed window at the Old Corner Bookstore, which had been smashed by someone leaning against or being shoved against it), the 11-year-old Edward Everett Hale considered heaving a stone at it through the shop window. This is the book that a manager of the American Bible Society refused to read for fear it would make him an abolitionist, and in fact it would be what the 22-year-old Wendell Phillips would be reading just as he was abandoning the practice of law in order to devote his life to abolitionism. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS Here is the cover of a modern edition of that offending treatise:

Outspoken in her condemnation of slavery, Mrs. Child pointed out its contradiction with Christian teachings, and described the moral and physical degradation it brought upon slaves and owners alike — not omitting to mention the issue of miscegenation, and not excepting the North from its share of responsibility for the system. “I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken,” she wrote in the Introduction, “but though I expect ridicule and censure, it is not in my nature to fear them.” As a direct result of this, she would lose her editorial post with The Juvenile Miscellany (if you are so impolite and inconsiderate that you mention that we routinely molest our black servants, we certainly cannot allow you to have contact with our children).

HISTORY’S NOT MADE OF WOULD. WHEN SOMEONE REVEALS, FOR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS INSTANCE, IN 1833, THAT A CONCEPT “MONOMANIA” WOULD BE UTILIZED IN A LEGAL OPINION IN 1844, S/HE DISCLOSES THAT WHAT IS BEING CRAFTED IS NOT REALITY BUT PREDESTINARIANISM. THE RULE OF REALITY IS THAT THE FUTURE HASN’T EVER HAPPENED, YET — AS OF 1833, 1844 DID NOT EXIST. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1834

Wendell Phillips, with no intention whatever of practicing law, was admitted to the bar.

YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT EITHER THE REALITY OF TIME OVER THAT OF CHANGE, OR CHANGE OVER TIME — IT’S PARMENIDES, OR HERACLITUS. I HAVE GONE WITH HERACLITUS.

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS November 7, Tuesday, 1837: In a speech, Waldo Emerson demonstrated that he was not yet ready for the slavery issue.2

Horace Mann, Sr. accepted the offer of the hospitality of the Emerson family to reside with them while in Concord to attend a school convention.

The abolitionist publisher Reverend Elijah Parish Lovejoy was killed in Alton, Illinois with a gun in his hand,

2. Gougeon, Len. “Abolition, The Emersons, and 1837.” New England Quarterly 54 (1981): 345-64 “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Gougeon details Emerson’s involvement (or lack thereof) with the abolition movement in the years preceding his first antislavery speech delivered in November 1837. Gougeon initially focuses on the interest of Emerson’s own family in promoting freedom for the blacks: Emerson’s sister Mary and his stepfather the honored Reverend Ezra Ripley were actively “involved in the antislavery agitation of the 1830s and 1840s,” the latter consistently supporting the movement until his death in 1841. But the strongest proponent in Emerson’s family was his younger brother Charles, with whom Emerson maintained a close relationship. As early as April 1835 Charles publicly declared his opposition to slavery, delivering in Concord a speech, “Lecture on Slavery.” It was Emerson’s wife, however, who exerted the greatest influence on her husband, for she was “one of [the] most active members from the outset” of the Women’s Anti-Slavery Society. Secondly, in contrast to Boston, “[t]he environment of Concord in the 1830s ... was quite favorable to the abolition cause,” acting as a “depot of the underground railroad” and a junction for well-known abolitionists. These frequent antislavery lecturers stirred the community with their ideas, and the many newspaper articles and library acquisitions opposing slavery provided the community with current information. Although his family and his neighbors participated actively in the abolitionist cause, Emerson remained “largely disengaged from the antislavery agitation” being aware of the issue but unwilling to take a public stand. His reluctance to join the cause was due in part to his adherence to the commonly held belief that the blacks were inferior by nature to the Caucasians and thus, that they would always be subservient. The other factor that confused the issue for Emerson was his emphasis on “individuality, especially individual moral responsibility”: Emerson felt that both the “slaves and slave owners are responsible for the unpardonable outrage of slavery, and only they themselves, as individuals, can correct the situation.” Reform must come from within — not forcefully from without. Even the gradual abolitionist involvement of his highly respected teacher and friend, the Reverend William Ellery Channing, did not spur Emerson to make a public statement. But Emerson finally felt compelled to speak out when, on November 7, 1837, an angry mob brutally murdered an abolitionist publisher in Alton, Illinois. In the resultant speech, however, Emerson placed more emphasis on “the need to allow and encourage a free discussion of the question than upon the problem of slavery itself.” Instead of taking a strong stand with the abolitionists, he stressed the importance of “individual moral judgment regarding the question of slavery,” individual expression of ideas, and an individual need for reform. Hence, neither the abolitionists, his friends, nor Emerson himself was pleased with the speech that was “[t]epid and philosophical to a fault.” Emerson, restricted by his own views, was not yet ready to take a strong public stance on an issue he clearly opposed. [Janet B. Ergino (Sommers), May 1989] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS attempting to defend his final printing press from a white mob.3

During a memorial prayer meeting in Hudson, Ohio, John Brown would stand in the back and suddenly at the age of 37 publicly consecrate his life to the destruction of human enslavement, by any means necessary (he raised his right hand as if taking a vow and spoke a single sentence: “Here before God, in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery”). According to a historian, Waldo Emerson was also much impressed, although of course Waldo would not offer to do anything more dangerous than talk

3. Elijah Parish Lovejoy was no amateur at this. He had had four prior presses destroyed by white mobs. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS up the idea that other people might feel compelled to do something!

In the midst of a placid lecture on heroism, he suddenly burst out before a Bostonian assembly: Lovejoy has given his breast to the bullet for his part and had died when it was better not to live. He is absolved [...] I sternly rejoice that one was found to die for humanity and the rights of free speech and opinion. It is said that a shudder ran through his cultured audience.

Abby Kelley, however, would have held Mr. Lovejoy to a somewhat higher standard:

He had better have died as did our Savior, saying “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.”

As would the Reverend Samuel Joseph May: Although May incorrectly assumed that the convention shared his views, he had placed his finger upon the central dilemma of the antislavery movement: the problem of violent means. May failed to gain general acceptance of his opinions, but he proved the more consistent thinker. Without a complete rejection of force, abolitionists had left the door open to acceptance of violence. Self-defense in war naturally paralleled self-defence against the slave owner. The controversy over violent means, which divided the American Peace Society in 1838 and contributed to the demise of the AASS in 1840, began when an angry Alton, Illinois, mob murdered the abolitionist Elijah Parish Lovejoy.... Except for May, few abolitionists rejected Lovejoy’s course. Henry I. Bowditch, a nonresistance advocate, believed that Lovejoy was “the last being on earth an abolitionist ought to think of, if he would be true to the cause he espouses.” Both Grimké sisters disapproved of Lovejoy’s methods. “There is no such thing as trusting in God and pistols at the same time,” Angelina Grimké maintained. May was the only abolitionist to publicly condemn the “martyrdom” of Lovejoy and charge the AASS with duplicity. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS William Lloyd Garrison had declared early on that his quest was for martyrdom: My trust is in God, my aim is to walk in the footsteps of his son, my rejoicing to be crucified to the world, and the world to me.

Nevertheless, martyrdom was a boon which this benefactor never would be granted: William Lloyd Garrison, along with Wendell Phillips, Theodore Dwight Weld, Frederick Douglass, and many other prominent leaders of the Anti-Slavery Society never really experienced “the altar.” Despite their willingness to be sacrificed to the cause, most of the well-known leaders of the movement did not meet a tragic death. They continued to live valuable and meaningful lives long after slavery had been abolished and they died from natural causes in their seventies and eighties. Other abolitionists, less familiar to the general public, suffered attacks, injuries, and even persecution in their struggle against slavery. These persecuted members were necessary to the antislavery movement, since they provided the connection of blood that bound all committed abolitionists in sacrificial ties. Yet most of these persecuted abolitionists did not reach national prominence. The first and only effective martyr to the abolition movement was Elijah Parish Lovejoy.... . He was killed by a mob in Dalton, Illinois, on November 17, 1837, and his personal destruction came to be regarded as a forecast of the fate that all human liberty must suffer if slavery were perpetuated. He won the martyr’s crown because he died and lost, not because he triumphed. His death also affected for a short time members outside of the abolitionists’ ranks. For a decade after Lovejoy’s death, lust for martyrdom permeated abolitionism, and many individuals demonstrated in life what he had demonstrated in death. But without the death ritual their suffering had only a

Here is the matter as it was reported in the Alton Observer: Night had come to the town of Alton, Illinois and a crowd began to gather in the darkness. Some of the men stooped to gather stones. Others fingered the triggers of the guns they carried as they made their way to a warehouse on the banks of the Mississippi River. As they approached, they eyed the windows of the three-story building, searching for some sign of movement from inside. Suddenly, William S. Gilman, one of the owners of the building, appeared in an upper window. “What do you want here?” he asked the crowd. “The press!” came the shouted reply. Inside the warehouse was Elijah Parish Lovejoy..., a Presbyterian minister and editor of the Alton Observer. He and 20 of his supporters were standing guard over a newly arrived printing press from the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society. This was the fourth press that Lovejoy had received for his paper. Three others already had been destroyed by people who opposed the antislavery views he expressed in the Observer. But Lovejoy would not give up. This time, in an attempt to hide the arrival of the new press, secret arrangements were made. A steamboat delivered the press at 3 o’clock in the morning on November 7, 1837, and some of Lovejoy’s friends ere there to meet it. Moving quickly, they carried the press to the third floor of Gilman’s warehouse, but not before they were spotted by members HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS of the mob. Word of the arrival of the press spread throughout the town all that day. As nightfall approached, mob leaders were joined by men from the taverns, and now the crowd stood below, demanding this fourth press. Gilman called out: “We have no ill feelings toward, any of you and should much regret to do any injury; but we are authorized by the Mayor to. defend our property and shall do so with our lives.” The mob began to throw stones, breaking out all the windows in the warehouse. Shots were fired by members of the mob, and rifle balls whizzed through the windows of the warehouse, narrowly missing the defenders inside. Lovejoy and his men, returned the fire. Several people in the crowd were hit, and one was killed. “Burn them out!”, someone shouted. Leaders of the mob called for a ladder, which was put up on the side of the building. A boy with a torch was sent up to set fire to the wooden roof. Lovejoy and one of his supporters, Royal Weller, volunteered to stop the boy. The two men crept out- side, hiding in the shadows of the building. Surprising the mob, they rushed to the ladder, pushed it over and quickly retreated inside. Once again a ladder was put in place. As Lovejoy and Weller made another brave attempt to overturn the ladder, they were spotted. Lovejoy was shot five times, and Weller was also wounded. Lovejoy staggered inside the warehouse, making his way to the second floor before he finally fell. “My God. I an shot,” he cried. He died almost immediately. By this time the warehouse roof had begun to burn. The men remaining inside knew they had no choice but to surrender the press. The mob rushed into the vacant building. The press Lovejoy died defending was carried to a window and thrown out onto the river bank. It was broken into pieces that were scattered in the Mississippi River. Fearing more violence, Lovejoy’s friends, did not remove his body from the building until the next morning. Members of the crowd from the night before, feeling no shame at what they had done, laughed and jeered as the funeral wagon moved slowly down the street toward Lovejoy’s home. Lovejoy was buried on November 9, 1837, his 35th birthday.

FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E.

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS Lecture Season: The 9th course of lectures offered by the Salem Lyceum.

The Salem Lyceum — 9th Season Horace Mann, Sr. Education George S. Hillard Books John S. Williams of Salem Ireland John W. Browne of Salem War Leonard Withington The Light which the Theory of our Government Sheds on the Practice of its Citizens W.B.O. Peabody Hebrew Commonwealth H.R. Cleveland The Superstitions of the Classic Ages Jones Very of Salem Epic Poetry Thomas Spencer of Salem The Vegetation of Salem and Vicinity William M. Rogers Ross’s Expedition to the Polar Seas Samuel M. Worcester of Salem Irish Eloquence James C. Alvord The Mutual Relations and Influences of the Various Occupations of Life Oliver Wendell Holmes English Versification Abel L. Peirson of Salem Animal Magnetism M. Mariotti Marie Louise, the Widow of Napoleon William Lincoln The French Neutrals of Nova Scotia James Walker Transcendentalism An Exhibition by Pupils from the N.E. Institution for the Blind O.W.B. Peabody English Female Writers of the Last Century John P. Cleveland Ancient History of Michigan George Bancroft The Capacity of the Human Mind for Culture and Improvement Henry Ware, Jr. The Poetry of Mathematics John Lewis Russell of Salem Geology HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

During the lecture season in Boston, in all, 26 different courses were being offered, if one omits the courses which had fewer than eight lectures. Out of a total population of 80,000, paid attendance added up to 13,000. Wendell Phillips, the star, calculated that to date he had given his lecture “The Lost Arts” two thousand times and had earned a total of $150,000 from it.

IT IS NO COINCIDENCE THAT IT IS MORTALS WHO CONSUME OUR HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS, FOR WHAT WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO DO IS EVADE THE RESTRICTIONS OF THE HUMAN LIFESPAN. (IMMORTALS, WITH NOTHING TO LIVE FOR, TAKE NO HEED OF OUR STORIES.)

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1838

Formation of a Nonresistance Society in Boston. All the members were abolitionists, the reason being that slavery was understood as a form of violence. If one could create a world in which there was no resistance to evil, it would be a world in which there could be no slavery, because this would be a world which lacked the “martial spirit” which was “the same as the spirit of slaveholders, a spirit which leads men to dominate over his brother, to crush and despoil him.” The general agent of the new society was the Reverend Henry C. Wright. The vote to establish the constitution written by William Lloyd Garrison was 30 to 13. Wendell Phillips and William Ladd were in attendance but declined to join. Arthur Tappan would decline to join such a group.

Elizur Wright, Junior relocated to Boston where successively he would edit several gazettes.

THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD. IN A BOOK THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT HISTORY, ISSUED BY RANDOM HOUSE IN 2016, I FIND THE PHRASE “LOOKED UPON FROM THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF HISTORY, ....” ONLY A MERE STORYTELLER, NEVER A HISTORIAN, COULD HAVE PENNED SUCH A PHRASE — BECAUSE NO BIRD HAS EVER FLOWN OVER HISTORY.

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS During this year William Cooper Nell became secretary of the Adelphic Union Library Association.

During a celebration of the demise of human slavery in the British West Indies, at the Belknap Street Church in Boston, William Cooper Nell had the honor of addressing the assembly.

The “experiment” of the freeing of the slaves, in the West Indies, per Wendell Phillips:

Frederick Douglass’s NARRATIVE

[T]hose who stare at the half-peck of corn a week, and love to count the lashes on the slave’s back, are seldom the “stuff” out of which reformers and abolitionists are to be made. I remember that, in 1838, many were waiting for the results of the West India experiment, before they could come into our ranks. Those “results” have come long ago; but, alas! few of that number have come with them, as converts. A man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the produce of sugar, –and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women,– before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS December 5, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured in Boston.

This was lecture Number 1 of a series of ten on “Human Life,” and was entitled “The Doctrine of the Soul.”4 He had sent Jones Very a freebee ticket and had invited him to come along afterwards from the Masonic Temple to the Reverend Cyrus Bartol’s home for a session of the Transcendental Club.

Coming into Boston from Salem, Very arrived early and went first to the home of the Reverend William Ellery Channing, finding Wendell Phillips and the Reverend James Freeman Clarke there and proceeding to expound for three hours with the elderly Reverend Channing listened patiently and carefully and sympathetically. Channing’s conclusion was that those who had presumed Very to have lost his Reason were mistaken, as what he had lost was merely his Senses.The relationship between Unitarian ministers and anti-slavery advocates THE LIST OF LECTURES

cannot be understood unless one takes class differences into account: They were gentlemen; they occupied a high position in the community; they belonged to a privileged order.... With the solitary exception of Wendell Phillips, who was regarded as an aristocratic demagogue, the Abolitionists were poor, humble, despised people, of no influence; men one could not ask to dine.5

4. Summaries of the lectures are in Cabot, Volume II, pages 733-737. The net receipts for the series would be $461.92 5. Octavius Brooks Frothingham’s BOSTON UNITARIANISM, 1820-1850. NY, 1890, pages 196-7. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS In fact, the class segregation was so manifest that there is only one occasion on which the Reverend William Ellery Channing and William Lloyd Garrison were in the same room at the same time, and that was when they encountered one another quite by accident at the meeting of a legislative committee. One of the biographers of Channing, John W. Chadwick, has referred to his persistent refusal to have anything to do with such people as “the most inexplicable feature of his antislavery career, and the most unfortunate.”

NEVER READ AHEAD! TO APPRECIATE DECEMBER 5TH, 1838 AT ALL ONE MUST APPRECIATE IT AS A TODAY (THE FOLLOWING DAY, TOMORROW, IS BUT A PORTION OF THE UNREALIZED FUTURE AND IFFY AT BEST). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1839

April 16, Tuesday: William Lloyd Garrison addressed an amalgamated audience at Mechanics Hall in New Bedford, with Frederick Douglass in the audience.6

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

6. Frederick Douglass also, during this period, attended lectures by Wendell Phillips, the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, and other abolitionists. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1840

May: William Lloyd Garrison, Friend Lucretia Mott, Wendell Phillips, Maria Weston Chapman, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, Ann Greene Phillips, and Charles Lenox Remond sailed for London and the World Anti-Slavery Convention. On the first day of the convention, however, the vote was that the female delegates would not be permitted to vote, whereupon all the Garrisonian immediatists boycotted the convention.

While Mr. Rogers was in London, in attendance upon the “World’s Anti-Slavery Convention,” in 1840, he was careful to go upon the ground at Smithfield, –now a cattle market– that was sanctified, in his sight, and that of all men who know where true greatness lies, by the martyrdom of his illustrious ancestor [John Rogers].

In 1840, a World’s Anti-slavery Convention was called in London. Women from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, were delegates to that convention. I was one of the number; but, on our arrival in England, our credentials were not accepted because we were women. We were, however, treated with great courtesy and attention, as strangers, and as women, were admitted to chosen seats as spectators and listeners, while our right of membership was denied — we were voted out. This brought the Woman question more into view, and an increase of interest in the subject has been the result. In this work, too, I have engaged heart and hand, as my labors, travels, and public discourses evince. The misrepresentation, ridicule, and abuse heaped upon this, as well as other reforms, do not, in the least, deter me from my duty. To those, whose name is cast out as evil for the truth’s sake, it is a small thing to be judged of man’s judgement. SEXISM FEMINISM

In a speech to the Anti-Slavery Convention in London, Friend Arnold Buffum of Providence, Rhode Island would charge that a woman had been denied membership in the Society of Friends in Philadelphia because she was black, and it would seem that in all likelihood he was making reference to Sarah Douglass’s account of how her mother had been encouraged not to apply for membership. In this speech Friend Arnold indicated that the practice of asking blacks to sit aside, in special seats, still was continuing among American Friends.)

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS August 10, Tuesday: William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Parker Pillsbury, and John A. Collins, as members of a “promiscuous” (that is, “integrated”) group totaling about 45, boarded the steamboat to Nantucket Island from which David Ruggles had been ejected in July, and held an antislavery meeting in the “Blacks Only” section. Possibly, they sang (to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” all six stanzas of the following song, which was composed by Garrison during this year: HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

1842

Henry Thoreau, in charge of selecting speakers for the Concord Lyceum, received $109.20 instead of the customary $125.00, and chose to spend exactly $100.00 and return exactly $9.20 in order to remind the town’s citizens of their frugality. The historian George Bancroft received $10.00 for his lecture, and others received

this sum which was the highest that Thoreau would consent to pay, but some he was able to persuade to lecture for $8.00 and the Reverend Theodore Parker was willing to come for $3.00. In addition, Horace Greeley,

Wendell Phillips, Waldo Emerson, and he himself lectured gratis. However, Thoreau found that he had stirred up a noisy controversy by inviting the abolitionist Phillips to speak freely –even for free– for some inhabitants of Concord believed more in the achieving of concord through silence, than in the free discussion of ideas with which they happened to disagree.

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

1844

March 3, Sunday: Mrs. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne gave birth to a girl infant, named Una Hawthorne after Spenser’s heroine. Nathaniel Hawthorne commented that he thought he preferred “a daughter to a son, there is something so especially piquant in having helped to create a future woman.” The godfather of the infant was John L. O’Sullivan of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review.

That morning and continuing that evening, at a non-resistance meeting which was part of a series of lectures on reform and reformers at Boston’s Amory Hall by various reformers such as Charles Lane, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison –and Henry Thoreau– Waldo Emerson delivered his lengthy sermon “New England Reformers.”

The proof text for this sermon was MARK 8:36: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lost his own soul?”

Waldo felt that his effort had had a good reception, and jotted down into his journal that:

Somebody said of me after the lecture at Amory Hall ... “The secret of his popularity is, that he has a damn for everybody.”

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS March 5, Tuesday: Affairs were a mite disagreeable among the curators at the Concord Lyceum. The committee voted to invite the outrageous antislaver Wendell Phillips to lecture whereupon curators the Reverend Barzillai Frost

and John Keyes resigned to register outrage at such an allowance for diversity of opinion. Whereupon the remaining curators, clearly relieved that these two were gone, voted to fill their emptied positions with Waldo Emerson and with Henry Thoreau. ... that winter we entertained Dr Sears & Dr Hayes Lyceum lecturers for with Mr Emerson and Mr Frost I was a curator of that institution and had a regular quarrel over Phillips and an abolition lecture before the Lyceum— This was an old grievance. Years before the abolitionists insisted upon having him lecture because they could thus get an audience and could not for an anti slavery meeting. My father took up the objection that such topics as abolition and temperance were not proper in a literary course to which all parties went any more than political or sectarian addresses would be. Added to this was his disgust at Phillips attacks on the Constitution and Union, and there were hot debates at special meetings of the Lyceum over the question. I remember one where Father most fiercely attacked Phillips’ sentiments and expressions, and charged him with ‘leading captive silly women’ and foolish men, that made a buzzing like a hornets nest, and Phillips himself was got to the meeting to answer the attack, which he did eloquently I thought but not logically or effectively. This had slumbered unforgotten and came up in my time, when it fell to me to advocate the same views and have another row over it. This time they didnt as they threatened to bring Phillips himself to put me down, but set Dr Bartlett & Col Whiting &c to advocate their cause. I always thought I had the better of that encounter, even if Mrs Brooks their leader did contradict my statements in the open meeting with the words ‘Thats false Mr Keyes’ and my reply with a low bow ‘I had it Madam from your own husband’ and left them to settle the dispute. Any how our side carried their point and Phillips didnt lecture on abolition before the Lyceum, and as I remember Mr Emerson for that reason wouldn’t. It was the only difference I ever had for a moment with Mr— Emerson and I have often regretted that I let Mr. Frost put me up to that HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS disagreement. J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

March 31, Sunday: In the morning at Boston’s Amory Hall, Wendell Phillips lectured on “Texas,” and in the evening the Reverend John Pierpont lectured on the “Influence of Slavery on the Religion and Morals of the Country.”

THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE, APRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, A MERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT. THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO “INSTANT” HAS EVER FOR AN INSTANT EXISTED.

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

1845

Wendell Phillips’s CAN ABOLITIONISTS VOTE OR TAKE OFFICE UNDER THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION? was printed in New-York: If the majority set up an immoral Government, I obey those laws which seem to me good, because they are good — and I submit to all the penalties which my disobedience of the rest brings on me.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

February 24, Monday: Wendell Phillips alleged Frederick Douglass to be “now writing out his story.”

Who Wrote Douglass’s ARRATIV N ? E

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS March 11, Tuesday: The owner of 1,200 acres of planted land, Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman), died of exposure near Fort Wayne, Indiana.7

Frederick Douglass lectured in Worcester and Wendell Phillips spoke in Concord on the annexation of Texas and the impending war against Mexico.

Evidently Phillips used the occasion of this Concord lecture to convey news of the impending publication of 8 the NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE. WRITTEN BY HIMSELF. As William S. McFeely’s 1991 biography of Douglass has it,

[P]erhaps Douglass’s telling of his odyssey is closest cousin to Thoreau’s account of his altogether safe escape to Walden Pond. That quietly contained, subversive tale has reverberated ever since its telling with a message of radical repudiation of corrupt society. Henry Thoreau heard a Wendell Phillips lecture describing Douglass’s exodus –and reporting that a written account was on its way– in the spring of 1845 as he was planning his sojourn outside Concord. Robert D. Richardson, Jr., who wrote Thoreau’s intellectual biography, has said that it is not “an accident that the earliest stages of Thoreau’s move to Walden coincide with ... the publication of Douglass’s narrative of how he gained his freedom. WALDEN is about self-emancipation.”

7. Refer to Price, Robert. JOHNNY APPLESEED: MAN AND MYTH (1954). 8. Later, when Wendell Phillips would become irritated at what he took to be Frederick Douglass’s pushiness, so utterly unsuited for one who had formerly been a mere slave, whom we white people had tried to reach down and raise, he turned out not too be above making a remark about Douglass’s “wool” (that is, his nappy Negroid hair) being “set afire.” At the very least, such a remark about a racial characteristic considered undesirable was not very PC! At the worst, what Phillips was suggesting was that Douglass was a colored man who had quite forgotten what was a colored man’s proper role, of loyal servitude to the ideas of white men. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS What Richardson actually says in that “intellectual biography” of 1986 is, on page 151, that Phillip’s speech

stirred Henry Thoreau to compare Phillips to Spencer’s Red Cross Knight and to write up the speech the following day in a long letter to the Liberator, printed on March 28. One of Phillips’s topics was a young ex-slave named Frederick Douglass, who was just then making a stir as a speaker and was talking about his intention or writing his own life. Thoreau shared Phillips’s indignation that Douglass was being urged to keep silent, lest he compromise people. Going to Walden was Thoreau’s liberation, his experiment in freedom, and his account of himself in WALDEN is an interesting parallel to Douglass’s account of his liberation, which was published and reviewed in June 1845, three months after Phillips’s speech in Concord and just shortly before Thoreau’s move out to the pond.

Richardson adds in a footnote that he is referring to pages 60-61 of REFORM PAPERS. That reference amounts to the following:

To our disgrace we know not what to call him, unless Scotland will lend us the spoils of one of her Douglasses, out of history or fiction, for a season, till we be hospitable and brave enough to hear his proper name, –a fugitive slave in one more sense than we; who has proved himself the possessor of a fair intellect, and has won a colorless reputation in these parts; and who, we trust, will be as superior to degradation from the sympathies of Freedom, as from the antipathies of slavery. When, said Mr. Phillips, he communicated to a New Bedford audience, the other day, his purpose of writing his life, and telling his name, and the name of his master, and the place he ran from, the murmur ran round the room, and was anxiously whispered by the sons of the Pilgrims, “He had better not!” and it was echoed under the shadow of Concord monument, “He had better not!”

Richardson revisits, on pages 315-6, his unsubstantiated hypothesis that it was the white man Phillips’s acknowledged and convenient presence and speech in Concord rather than the black man Douglass’s unacknowledged and inconvenient presence and speech in Concord that had motivated Thoreau (and this is the authoritative source from which McFeely obtains the excerpts he quotes, material which I here indicate in HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS boldface):

In his notes as in his speech [the “Slavery in Massachusetts” oration in Framingham MA on July 4, 1854, “the ninth anniversary of his move out to the pond for personal liberation”], Henry Thoreau makes heavy and uncharacteristic use of heaven and hell, angels and devils, adopting, for the time and the cause, the rhetorical style of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass.... One of the important meanings of Thoreau’s life, and of WALDEN, is the imperative of freedom or liberation. It is thus entirely fit that the final stages of the printing and publishing of WALDEN, should coincide with Thoreau’s renewed involvement in the anti-slavery movement, and the aftermath of the Anthony Burns affair. Nor is it an accident that the earliest stages of Thoreau’s move to Walden coincided with the emergence of Frederick Douglass, and the publication of Douglass’s narrative of how he gained his freedom. WALDEN is about self-emancipation, but not at the expense of ignoring the problem of external, physical freedom. The Thoreau who sought his own freedom was, inevitably, involved in the political movement to abolish slavery, and his involvement grew rather than diminished as time went on.

Wendell Phillips presented the non-cooperation-with-government position in Concord, with Thoreau in attendance. A couple of weeks later, therefore, in the issue dated March 28th, “Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum” would appear in The Liberator. Thoreau would be reporting that: “We must give Mr. Phillips the credit of being a clean, erect, and what was once called a consistent man. He at least is not responsible for slavery ... for the hypocrisy and superstition of the church, nor the timidity and selfishness of the state.... In this man the audience might detect a sort of moral principle and integrity.” Thoreau would pun (rather tastelessly, it seems to us now) on Frederick Douglass’s “fair intellect,” and on his “colorless reputation.”

After March 11: We have now for the third winter had our spirits refreshed and our faith in the desstiny of the common wealth strengthened by the presence and the eloquence of Wendell Philips, and we wish to tender to him our thanks and our sympathy. The admission of this gentleman into the Lyceum has been strenuously oppossed by a large & respectable portion of our fellow citizens, who themselves we trust, or whose descendants we trust, will be as faithful conservatories of the new order of things, when at length it shall be the order of the day –and in each instance the people have voted that they would hear him, by carrying all their ears and all their cousins to the lecture room –and being very silent that they might hear. One young woman as we hear, walked 5 miles through the snow from a neighboring town to be present on the occasion. We saw some men and women who had long ago come out, going in once more through this free and hospitable portal –and our neighbors confessed that they had had a sound season this once– It was the lecturers aim to show that the state & especially the church had to do, and now alas had done –with Texas and slavery –and how much the individual should have to do with the state & the Church. These were fair themes and not misstimed –addressed to a fit audience –and not a few. We give Mr Phillips the credit of being a clean, an erect, and what was once called a consistent man– He at least is not responsible for Slavery –nor our American Independence –for the hypocrisy and superstition of the Church –or the timidity and selfishness of the state –or for the indifference and willing ignorance of individuals. He stands so distinctly, so firmly, & so effectively, alone, and one honest man’s voice is so much more than a host –that we cannot but feel that he does himself injustice when he reminds us of “the American society which he represents.” It is rare that we have the pleasure of listening to so clear and sound a speaker. to one who has obviously so few cracks and flaws in his moral nature –who having words at his command to a remarkable degree, has much more HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS than words if these should fail in his unquestionable sincerity and integrity –secures the genuine respect of his audience, aside from their admiration of his rhetoric. He unconsciously tells his biography as he proceeds –and we seem to see him early and earnestly deliberating on this subject –and wisely and bravely –without counsel of man –occupying a ground at once –from which the varying tides of public opinion cannot drive him. No one could mistake –the genuine modesty & truth with which he affirmed –when speaking of the framers of the Constitution “I am wiser than they” –who with him improved these seventy- year’s additional experience of its working. Or the consistently and unhesitating prayer which does not conclude like the Thanksgiving proclamations with “God save the Commonwealth of Mass” –but “God dash it into a thousand pieces;” And make us a new one of course. WENDELL PHILLIPS We consider Mr P as one of the most conspicuous and earnest champions of a true church & state at present in the field, and perhaps no one is laboring more efficiently toward an immediate & practical end. The degredation & suffering of the black man –will not have been in vain if they contribute thus indirectly to give a loftier tone to the religion and politics of this country– We would fain express our appreciation of the wisdom and steadiness, so rare in the reformer –with which he declared that he was not born to abolish slavery, or reform the church –but simply to do the right. His positions have the advantage of being not only morally & politically sound and expedient, but philosophically true, and a rare clearness and singleness of perception is coupled with a still rarer felicity of expressive utterance We DANIEL WEBSTER have heard a few, a very few, good political speakers –Webster & Everett –who afforded us the pleasure of larger intellectual conceptions –strength and acuteness –of soldier like steadiness and resolution –and of a graceful and natural oratory– But in this man there was a sort of moral worth and integrity –which was more graceful than his rhetorick and more discriminating than his intellectual which was more stable than their firmness. A something which was not eloquence which was not oratory –or wit or scholarship which was working not for temporary –but for worthy & untrivial ends. It is so sweet rare and encouraging to listen to the oratory who is content with another alliance, than with the popular party –or the sympathy of the martyrs– Who can afford sometimes to be his own auditor when the mob stay away –and hears him self without reproof. That we feel ourselves in danger of slandering all mankind by affirming that there is one man who is at once an eloquent speaker and a righteous man.

While there remains a fragment on which a man can stand –and dare not tell his name”– referring to the case of Frederick , to our disgrace we know not what to call him, unless Scotland will lend us one of her hero Douglasses out of history or fiction for a season –till we be trustworthy and hospitable enough to hear his proper name.– A fugitive slave, in one more sense than we — who has proved himself a possessor of a White intellect, and has won a colorless reputation among us — who we trust will prove himself as superior to temptation from the sympathies of freedom, as he has done to the degradation of slavery. When he communicated his purpose said Mr. Philips the other day to a New Bedford audience of writing his life and telling his name and the name of his master and the place he ran from– This murmur ran round the room, and was timidly whispered by the sons of the Pilgrims “he had better not” –and it was echoed under the shadow of Concord monument– “he had better not.” But he is going to England where this revelation will be safe. Perhaps on the whole the most interesting fact elicited by these addresses is the readiness of the people at large, of whatever sect or party, and the more liberal and least timid of the conservatives to entertain with good will and hospitality the most heretical opinions thus frankly and plainly expressed –roving that all men are easily convertible to the right if you will only show it to them Such clear and candid declarations of opinion whetted and clarified the intellect of all parties like an electuary and furnished each with additional arguments to support what he deemed that right. “Well,” says one; “He put it on to us poor Democrats pretty hard”. “That’s a severe dose” says another, “Well”, responds the minister it’s all true, every word of it.” One of our most impartial and discriminating neighbors affirmed that he had perfectly demonstrated to his mind the truth of principles which he knew to be false. One elderly & sensible lady told us that she was much pleased –but as we inquired did you like it wholly every part of it –and she answered she must confess as she had heard but one antislavery lecture before she was not used to hearing the church so spoken of, but yet she liked it –and she was one of those who sit with honor under the very nave of the church. We have no desire to be overly critical and in the present complexion of affairs we would only say to him and such as are like him –God speed you. ANDRÉS BERNÁLDEZ As the spanish Chronicler said that from Cape Alfaetio the easternmost part of terra firma on which columbus landed –travellers might walk due west till they came quite round again to cape saint Vincent in Spain– “and god grant them a pleasant journey–” –but we suspect that there may be a Pacifica ocean to be crossed, which is to this atlantic as 10 to 3 –before they come to the Cape St. Vincent we have heard of –and will not remember ever to have seen it before. However westward lies the way. and Fare well. No wonder, said one who is a judger of these matter, no wonder the people wanted to hear “we cant do better than get him again.” But it becomes the many who yield their so easy assent to his positions, and suffer not the sometimes honest prejudice of their neighbors to hinder his free speech to hear him with seriousness & with a spirit at least as prepared and as resolved as his own for the issue. He does not bewilder and mystify his audience with sophistry –as the mere partisan always does –but furnishes HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS a light which all may use to their profit. ... Oh the muskrats are the greatest fellows to gnaw their legs off. Why I caught one once that had just gnawed his third leg off, this being the 3d time he had been trapped, and he lay dead by the trap, for he could’nt run on one leg.

BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS April 22, Tuesday: The Signal, an antislavery gazette of Michigan, coordinated the collection of moneys for the manumission of Henry Bibb’s wife and child “if the objects be living.” Interestingly, the arrangements made were that rather than allowing Bibb himself to collect the funds and coordinate the effort, friends of liberty in each area were to “appoint a collector” –a white man it goes without saying– “then transmit them to us.” Pay careful attention to this fact: even the white abolitionists of America, since they were white, would not trust an abolitionist of color, even to act in his own professed interest.

Wendell Phillips provided one of the obligatory prefaces-by-a-white-man without which white men would of course have been quite unable to peruse Frederick Douglass’s new book.9

9. Even if you haven’t noticed, this is just the way it is: white men, then as now, need to be told what to think by other white men. (Those who are impressed by THE BELL CURVE can probably see this, if they choose, as clear evidence of racial superiority.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Frederick Douglass’s NARRATIVE

Yet it is sad to think, that these very throbbing hearts which welcome your story, and form your best safeguard in telling it, are all beating contrary to the “statute in such case made and provided.” Go on, my dear friend, till you, and those who, like you, have been saved, so as by fire, from the dark prisonhouse, shall stereotype these free, illegal pulses into statutes; and New England, cutting loose from a blood-stained Union, shall glory in being the house of refuge for the oppressed, — till we no longer merely “hide the outcast,” or make a merit of standing idly by while he is hunted in our midst; but, consecrating anew the soil of the Pilgrims as an asylum for the oppressed, proclaim our welcome to the slave so loudly, that the tones shall reach every hut in the Carolinas, and make the broken-hearted bondman leap up at the thought of old Massachusetts.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS June 10, Tuesday: In Concord, the Middlesex House, which had been created out of an old country house, burned (but would be rebuilt). This illustration, since it contains telephone wires, is assuredly the new structure rather than the old structure (which has been described as a converted country house):10

I [John Shepard Keyes] was busy with a full bar of the lawyers at the calling of the docket the Tuesday following when an alarm of fire caused the court to break up, and the old Middlesex Hotel was burnt to the ground. It caught from a defective flue, and in an hour was entirely consumed, no other buildings were burnt tho in much danger, and the prisoners in jail were removed as it was within 30 or 40 ft of the hotel. A good story was told and I think truly of my old law teacher E Millen Esq who rushed up to his room at the first alarm seized a valise and brought it safely out when on looking at it & finding it not his own with a lawyers care and prudence carried it back to the room and bore away his own, leaving that to its fate. I believe it was rescued with much of the furniture but the old hall, bar room dining room and parlor that had seen so much, and heard more of the good old times gone by, were wiped out. It made quite a hole in Concord, and although rebuilt after a year or more the new one never had the business or the success of the old. J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY

10. This hotel stood on the corner of the Mill Dam and Monument Square, opposite the Wright Tavern (where the pay telephones are now). A hotel had existed on the site prior to 1789, when John Richardson traded his house for the hotel then held by Middlesex County to house jailers and county court officials. The hotel was a center of town and county life in the period when the county courts were held in Concord and prior to the arrival of the railroad in the early 1840s. Rebuilt in 1846, the hotel would go through a succession of owners and proprietors, including Ebenezer Thompson, Thomas D. Wesson, Herman Newton, Samuel A. Hartshorn, George Heywood and James W. Jacobs. It would close in 1882, remain vacant for nearly two decades, be sold in 1900 (to Stedman Buttrick, Edward Waldo Emerson, Richard F. Barrett, and Prescott Keyes), then sold to the Town of Concord, and finally demolished. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

Margaret Fuller reviewed the NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE for the New-York Tribune. This specimen of her Sex objectified the author cold-bloodedly and perfunctorily as a “specimen” of “the Black Race,” and added her voice to the white voices presuming that Frederick Douglass himself had authored the written form of this self-presentation: The book is prefaced by two communications — one from William Lloyd Garrison, and one from Wendell Phillips. That from the former is in his usual over-emphatic style. His motives and his course have been noble and generous; we look upon him with high respect; but he has indulged in violent invective and denunciation till he has spoiled the temper of his mind. Like a man who has been in the habit of screaming himself hoarse to make the deaf hear, he can no longer pitch his voice on a key agreeable to common ears. ...that prevalent fallacy which substitutes a creed for faith, a ritual for a life.... Unspeakably affecting is the fact that he never saw his mother at all by daylight. “I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

Who Wrote Douglass’s ARRATIV N ? E

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

1846

The Reverend Leonard Withington, having for 8 years been off the board of the Dummer Academy (established by bequest of acting governor William Dummer in 1761, this Newbury institution has come to prefer to be referred to as The Governor’s Academy), returned for another term. During most of his tenure this time, which would end in 1850, he would be serving as President.

Boston’s citizens again petitioned those in authority over them to bring to an end the racial segregation of their public schools. William Cooper Nell signed a petition, signed also by William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Francis Jackson (1789-1861), and Williams, asking the city of Boston to grant equal school rights to children of color. The School Board responded to this concern, to the effect that the racial discrimination which they saw fit to practice was a racial discrimination which was ordained of God and a racial discrimination which was “founded deep in the physical, mental, and moral nature of the two races.” What the protesting blacks needed was not indignation against their betters but cultivation of “a respect for themselves.” The committee voted 55 to 12 to continue the existing segregation of school facilities. Looking for someone more appropriate to the teaching of the black children at Boston’s Smith School than the white man Abner Forbes, who was known to have been beating them,11 Horace Mann, Sr. first offered Forbes’s position to the Reverend Samuel Joseph May and then to Ambrose Wellington.12 The inheritor of this post would need to be a white male it goes without saying, but would need to disbelieve in corporal punishment, and would need to be able to accept and honor the intellectual capabilities of black children. So, here’s an interesting question, don’t you suppose? Why did not Superintendent Mann consider offering that post to Henry Thoreau of Concord?

CONTINGENCY ALTHOUGH VERY MANY OUTCOMES ARE OVERDETERMINED, WE TRUST THAT SOMETIMES WE ACTUALLY MAKE REAL CHOICES.

11. It will help us be more considerate of master Forbes, if we bear in mind that among white men he was being considered a disgrace, because he was teaching students of color. We have the following from the autobiography of William J. Brown, a Rhode Islander of color: “[I]t was considered such a disgrace for white men to teach colored schools that they would be greatly offended if the colored children bowed or spoke to them on the street. Mr. Anthony, who was at one time teaching the colored school [in Providence], became very angry because Zebedee Howland met him on the street, spoke to him, raised his hat and bowed. He took no notice of his dark complexioned scholar, but the next Monday morning took poor Zebedee and the whole school to task, saying, ‘When you meet me on the street, don’t look towards me, or speak to me; if you do, I will flog you the first chance I get.’” 12. Mann, a stuffed shirt advocate of citizen indoctrination who is given a lot of credit in stuffed shirt histories of education, had just, in his 10th annual report to the Massachusetts Board of Education, suggested hiring mostly females as teachers — since God had implanted in the maternal breast a “powerful, all-mastering instinct of love” that would make it possible for male superiors to induce them to work cheap and, nevertheless, do the right thing. Well, that’s not exactly what he said — it’s merely what he was understood to mean by those who knew how to read the code in use at the time. He might equally well have pointed out that women have smaller heads and smaller brains, had his audience been a different audience, and conveyed precisely the same message. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS The propagating fissure in the Liberty Bell had by this point gotten too bad to permit ringing it any more, unless something was done to stop this propagation and to stop the rough edges of the hairline fissure from rubbing together.

In Boston, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair put out for sale a printing entitled THE LIBERTY BELL, as a fund-raising effort of the “Friends of Freedom”:

• Thompson, George. “A Fragment, Verbatim et Literatim From my Journal in Upper India” • Howitt, William. “Onward! Right Onward!” • Atkinson, William P. “The True Reformer” • Higginson, J.W. “Sonnet to William Lloyd Garrison” [presumably this was a typo for T.W. Higginson] • Parker, Theodore. “A Parable” • Longfellow, Henry W. “The Poet of Miletus” • Joshua Reed Giddings. “Fugitive Slaves in Northern Ohio”

• Anonymous. “Our Country” • Cabot, Susan C. “Thought” • Anonymous. “Interference: On Reading a Paper, In Defence [sic] of Slavery, Written by a Clergyman” • Hitchcock, Jane Elizabeth. “All are Needed” • Parker, Theodore. “Jesus There is No Name So Dear as Thine” • ---. “Oh Thou Great Friend to All the Sons of Men” • ---. “Dear Jesus Were Thy Spirit Now on Earth” • Clarkson, Thomas. “Letter” • Follen, Eliza Lee. “Song, for the Friends of Freedom” • Harriet Martineau. “A Communication” • Jones, Benjamin S. “Our Duty” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS • Samuel Joseph May. “Extract From a Speech at the Anti-Texan Meeting in Faneuil Hall, 1845” • Thompson, George. “Early Morning” • ---. “Sonnet: To Blanche” • Fuller, S. Margaret. “The Liberty Bell” • Hornblower, Jane E. “A Fragment” • Haughton, James. “Pro-Slavery Appeal To the World for Sympathy, Answered from Old Ireland” • Spooner, Allen C. “Jubilee” • ---. “Discouragements and Incentives” • Ross, Georgiana Fanny. “Stanzas On Reading J. H. Wiffen’s Translation of Tasso” • Browne, John W. “A Vision of the Fathers” • Watts, Alaric A. “A Remonstrance” • Lee, E [probably Eliza Buckminster]. “The Dream within a Dream” • Bowring, John. “Think of the Slave” • Furness, William H. “Self-Denial” • William Lloyd Garrison. “Fight On!” • Howitt, Mary. “Some Passages from the Poetry of Life” • William Lloyd Garrison “Sonnet . . . . Character” • Wendell Phillips. “The Church” • Friend Daniel Ricketson. “Lines to the Trans-Atlantic Friends of the Slave” • Kirkland, Caroline M. “Recollections of Anti-Slavery at the West” This familiar essay reveals the same lively, ironic style that made the author’s A New Home: Who’ll Follow? popular. • Quincy, Edmund. “Phoebe Mallory; the Last of the Slaves” A narrative of the life of Phoebe Mallory, the last living person to have been enslaved in Massachusetts. Mallory died in 1845. • Lowell, James Russell. “The Falconer” • The Reverend Adin Ballou. “Is there any Friend?” • Lowell, Maria. “The Slave-Mother” • Lucretia Mott. “What is Anti-Slavery Work?” • Clay, Cassius M. “God and Liberty” • Linstant. “Influence de l’emigration Europeenne Sur le Sort de la Race Africaine aux Etats Unis d’Amerique” • Weston, Anne Warren. “Sonnet in Memory of Elizabeth Fry” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS • Howitt, William. “The Worst Evil of Slavery”

MDCCCXLVI

ONE COULD BE ELSEWHERE, AS ELSEWHERE DOES EXIST. ONE CANNOT BE ELSEWHEN SINCE ELSEWHEN DOES NOT. (TO THE WILLING MANY THINGS CAN BE EXPLAINED, THAT FOR THE UNWILLING WILL REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS.)

September 24, Thursday: From records of the Donner party kept by Hiram Miller and James F. Reed, it would appear that they made camp near the entrance to the canyon of the South Fork of the Humboldt River just downstream from Twin Bridges: “Thu 24 this day North west we mad down Sinking Creek valley about 10 and encamped at the foot of a Red earth hill good grass and water wood plenty in the Vallies Such as sage greace wood & ceder &C—.”

There was a convention in Faneuil Hall to protest against returning “Joe” to New Orleans as a fugitive slave. John Quincy Adams presided. Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, the Reverend Theodore Parker, and Samuel Gridley Howe spoke. Waldo Emerson sent a letter: It is high time our bad wealth came to an end. I am sure I shall cheerfully take my share in the ruin of such a prosperity, and shall very willingly turn to the mountains to chop wood, and seek to find for myself and my children labors compatible with

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS freedom and honor.

At some point toward the end of this month Navajo warriors raided Socorro, New Mexico. General Kearny, passing nearby on his way to California after his recent conquest of Santa Fe, would learn of the raid and send a note to Colonel Alexander William Doniphan, his 2d in command in Santa Fe, ordering a regiment of soldiers into Navajo territory to one way or another secure a peace treaty with these natives.

THE AGE OF REASON WAS A PIPE DREAM, OR AT BEST A PROJECT. ACTUALLY, HUMANS HAVE ALMOST NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE DOING, WHILE CREDITING THEIR OWN LIES ABOUT WHY THEY ARE DOING IT.

Wendell Phillips “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

Colonel Alexander William Doniphan HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

1847

Frederick Douglass inscribed a copy of his NARRATIVE in ink on the flyleaf and presented it to N.B. [Boone?] Spooner of Plymouth MA in a quarter-leather clamshell box with ornate gold stamping on the spine: “N.B. Spooner / From his sincere / Friend. / Frederick Douglass / 1847” (estimated present value at auction, $12,500- $15,000): HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS The Spooner family was a founding family, although we do not know on what ship they came over. Their Plymouth home is presently open for tourist visits. This N.B. Spooner was of the same household in Plymouth as Thoreau’s friend and disciple James Walter Spooner.

Wendell Phillips responded to Lysander Spooner’s THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF SLAVERY, issued in 1845 and 1846 in two parts, with a lengthy legal brief REVIEW OF LYSANDER SPOONER’S ESSAY ON THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF SLAVERY, demonstrating that the Founding Fathers had intended the Constitution to legalize human slavery. Under this circumstance, the only corrective was disunion. The Constitution, because it allowed the use of force by one man, the slavemaster, over another man, the slave, was not an instrument of order but one of anarchy.

Late September: Late in this month Frederick Douglass revealed some startling news: rather than turn over to the anti- slavery society the considerable funds that had been entrusted directly to him by British friends (most of the lecture receipts and book sale profits had been handed instead to his white traveling companion, who, acting on explicit instructions from headquarters, had been during this lecture trip sequestering as many of these donations as possible and holding them away from Douglass), he was planning to use these moneys to start up his own newspaper, in Rochester, New York, to be called The North Star. This despite the most bitter

opposition from Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison in particular was objecting that this idea was insane, since 1.) the new Douglass paper would be unnecessary competition for his The Liberator which was having enough financial trouble already, and since 2.) Douglass had no clue what he was getting himself into, had never done any writing or editing and thus had no grasp of how difficult the crafts of writing and editing actually were. No, Douglass’s grandiloquent plan was a recipe for disaster!13

13. The idea that Frederick Douglass had no clue how difficult writing actually was is a strange one to hear coming from the mouth of Garrison, since Garrison had earlier written a letter asserting that Douglass had himself written his NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE (a claim which Douglass himself had never made and would never make), and since this narrative allegedly authored by Douglass had turned out to be an acknowledged literary masterpiece (now, a “classic”) and a runaway 19th-Century moneymaking bestseller. Whoever wrote the NARRATIVE of 1845 already knew how to write and knew how to write exceedingly well — but Douglass did not know and would not be able to learn even the rudiments! HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

1849

December: 9th issue of the Massachusetts Quarterly Review: • Senatorial Speeches on Slavery, by James G. Birney • A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. By HENRY D. THOREAU. Boston and Cambridge: James Monroe & Company. 1849. pp. 413 [this review was by James Russell Lowell]. • A Scientific Statement of the Doctrine of the Lord, or Divine Man, by Henry James • Validity of Instruments and Contracts executed on Sunday, by Richard Hildreth • European Agriculture and Rural Economy. From Professional Observation. By HENRY COLMAN, Honorary Member of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, of the National Agricultural Society of France, and of the National Agricultural Society of the United States. 1849. Boston: Little & Brown. London: John Petheram. 2d Edition: 2 vols. 8vo. pp. xxvi. and 492, and xxiv. and 588 [this review was by Frederic Howes]. • The Financial Condition of Russia, by Major Pelt, (Leipsic.) • Report of the Commissioners relating to the Condition of the Indians in Massachusetts, by Wendell Phillips • The Administration of the Late Mr. Polk, by Theodore Parker • Ten Discourses on Orthodoxy. By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, Pastor of the Unitarian Church, Washington, D.C. Boston: Crosby & Nichols. Washington: Taylor & Maury. • List of New Publications Received. • Pamphlets. CONSULT THIS ISSUE HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

1850

Fall: The Alcott family moved from Atkinson Street in Boston to 50 High Street on the edge in between the highfalutin’ neighborhoods of the family’s rich supporters and the utter slums of Fort Hill. During this period Bronson’s mother, Anna Alcox, stayed with them for several months and, although she was very intimate with rural poverty, was horrified at this urban squalor: “…you are so good to wate on them that neade.” Abba was musing in her journal:

It is more respectable to be in my family —than a Servant of the Public in any capacity— and to be used by it is ignoble.

At that time in Boston, for a family of four, unless you had an income of at least $550.00 per year, you would probably wind up being badly victimized by one or another of the “bottom-feeders” who abounded in the slums, and yet, for the years 1851, 1852, and 1853, Abba Alcott’s income varied, usually somewhere between $0.05 to $1.00 per day while Bronson Alcott brought in hardly anything at all, perhaps a dollar very occasionally.14 Meanwhile, however, Abba was organizing a petition that women should be allowed to vote on proposed amendments to the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that were to be offered at the forthcoming Massachusetts State Constitutional Convention. According to Harriet Robinson’s 15 MASSACHUSETTS IN THE WOMAN SUFFERAGE MOVEMENT, this petition was signed not only by persons such as A. Bronson Alcott but also by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Samuel Eliot Sewall, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone, Wendell Phillips, and the Reverend Samuel Joseph May. The motion to allow women to vote on these proposed amendments to the state constitution, however, failed badly, 14 male delegates for to 108 male delegates against.

14. According to Leone Levi’s WAGES AND EARNINGS OF THE WORKING CLASSES - REPORT TO SIR ARTHUR BASS (London: John Murray, 1885), the population of England was at this point divided into a laboring class of 19,300,000 persons, a lower middle class of 6,900,000, and an upper class of 1,500,000 “taxpayers” (we don’t know what tax is referred to here). In the laboring classes, spinners (in cotton factories) earned about £1 a week, which amounted to perhaps £50 a year. Skilled labourers were lucky to earn more than £1.25 a week, say £65 a year. Agricultural workers earned around half these amounts, though they usually received in addition their accommodation and some food. The average sort of earnings in 1851 for the English laboring class was £52 a year, and for the lower middle class £80 per year. To receive such wages people often worked 60 hours a week or more. The lower middle class were people like teachers who earned between £75 and £100 a year. What were regarded as “the middle classes” had family incomes of between £150 and £500 per annum -- there were just over 90,000 English households in that category. What were considered “the higher middles classes” had incomes between £500 and £3000, and in this category were situated 18,300 families. The “higher class” English, of which there were 1,889, had annual incomes of between £3000 and £50,000. (In GREAT EXPECTATIONS, therefore, Pip, since he had acquired a newfound income of £500 a year, was being described by Charles Dickens as having been propelled straight up all the way from having been the apprentice to a blacksmith, lowest of the low, into the higher end of the middle classes — with an income approximately one order of magnitude greater than Joe the blacksmith’s accompanied by no responsibilities whatever.) 15. Boston: Roberts, 1881, page 91 HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS October 23, Wednesday: According to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speaking retrospectively in 1870, “The movement in England, as in America, may be dated from the first National Convention, held at Worcester, Mass., October, 1850.”

FEMINISM

Although Angelina Emily Grimké Weld was elected to be a member for this vital convention, it would turn out that she would be unable to attend.

Why was it that Stanton, and also Susan B. Anthony, Friend Lucretia Mott, and other pioneers regarded this 1850 Convention in Worcester as the beginning of the crusade for woman’s equality? Why had it not been the 1848 meeting at Seneca Falls for which Stanton had drafted the celebrated Declaration of Sentiments and in which Mott had played such a leading role? • The gathering at Seneca Falls had been largely a local affair as would be several others that followed, whereas by way of radical contrast this Worcester convention had attracted delegates from most of the northern states. • Seneca Falls had sparked discussion but it was not clear in its aftermath that there was a national constituency ready to take up the cause. The attendance in response to this Worcester meeting’s Call of those who wanted to see a woman’s rights movement, and the positive reaction to its published proceedings both here and in Europe, showed that a sufficient number of women, and some men, were indeed ready. • This 1850 convention eventuated in a set of standing committees which marked the beginnings of organized work for woman’s rights. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS The records of the convention may be studied at:

http://www.wwhp.org/Resources/WomensRights/proceedings.html

Waldo Emerson declined to address this convention, and continued to decline such invitations until the 1855 convention in Boston, saying “I do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in public affairs,” meaning of course “I do not think it yet appears that we wish to grant women this equal share in public affairs.”

Were I in a sarcastic mood, I would characterize this attitude by inventing a news clipping something like the following:

His Excellency, Hon. Ralph W. Emerson, Representative of the Human Race, treated with the woman, Mrs. James Mott, for purposes of pacification and common decency.

At the beginning of the meeting a Quaker male, Friend Joseph C. Hathaway of Farmington, New York, was appointed President pro tem. As the meeting was getting itself properly organized, however, Paulina Wright Davis was selected as President, with Friend Joseph sitting down instead as Secretary for the meeting. At least three New York Quakers were on the body’s Central Committee — Hathaway, Friend Pliny Sexton and Friend Sarah H. Hallock, and we immediately note that although this Central Committee was by and large female, two of the three Quakes in this committee were male.

During the course of this convention Friend Lucretia Mott had occasion to straighten out Wendell Phillips, and he later commented that “she put, as she well knows how, the silken snapper on her whiplash,” that it had been “beautifully done, so the victim himself could enjoy the artistic perfection of his punishment.”

Now here is a news clipping from this period, equally legitimately offensive, which I didn’t make up:16

His Excellency, Gov. Ramsey and Hon. Richard W. Thompson, have been appointed Commissioners, to treat with the Sioux for the lands west of the Mississippi. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS The list of the “members” of this Convention is of interest in that it includes Sophia Foord of Dedham MA, Sojourner Truth of Northampton, Elizabeth Oakes Smith the lyceum lecturer, etc. The newspaper report described Truth’s appearance as dark and “uncomely.” Friend Lucretia Mott, a leader at the convention, described Truth more charitably as “the poor woman who had grown up under the curse of Slavery.” Those on the list, those who officially registered as “members” of the Convention, some 267 in all, were only a fraction of the thousands who attended one or more of the sessions. As J.G. Forman reported in the New-York Daily Tribune for October 24, 1850, “it was voted that all present be invited to take part in the discussions of the Convention, but that only those who signed the roll of membership be allowed to vote.” The process of signing probably meant that people who arrived together or sat together would have adjacent numbers in the sequence that appears in the Proceedings. This would explain the clustering of people by region and by family name: • 1 Hannah M. Darlington Kennett Square, Pennsylvania • 2 T.B. Elliot Boston • 3 Antoinette L. Brown Henrietta NY • 4 Sarah Pillsbury Concord NH • 5 Eliza J. Kenney Salem MA • 6 M.S. Firth Leicester MA • 7 Oliver Dennett Portland ME • 8 Julia A. McIntyre Charlton MA • 9 Emily Sanford Oxford MA • 10 H.M. Sanford Oxford MA • 11 C.D.M. Lane Worcester • 12 Elizabeth Firth Leicester MA • 13 S.C. Sargent Boston • 14 C.A.K. Ball Worcester • 15 M.A. Thompson Worcester • 16 Lucinda Safford Worcester • 17 S.E. Hall Worcester • 18 S.D. Holmes Kingston MA • 19 Z.W. Harlow Plymouth MA • 20 N.B. Spooner Plymouth MA • 21 Ignatius Sargent Boston • 22 A.B. Humphrey Hopedale •23M.R. Hadwen Worcester •24J.H. Shaw Nantucket Island • 25 Diana W. Ballou Cumberland RI •26Olive Darling Millville MA • 27 M.A. Walden Hopedale • 28 C.M. Collins Brooklyn CT • 29 A.H. Metcalf Worcester • 30 P.B. Cogswell Concord NH • 31 Sarah Tyndale Philadelphia • 32 A.P.B. Rawson Worcester • 33 Nathaniel Barney Nantucket Island • 34 Sarah H. Earle Worcester MA • 35 Parker Pillsbury Concord NH • 36 Lewis Ford Abington MA •37J.T. Everett Princeton MA • 38 Loring Moody Harwich MA •39 Sojourner Truth Northampton •40 Friend Pliny Sexton Palmyra NY • 41 Rev. J.G. Forman W. Bridgewater MA • 42 Andrew Stone M.D. Worcester • 43 Samuel May, Jr. Leicester MA 16. From the Dakota Tawaxitku Kin, or The Dakota Friend, St. Paul, Minnesota, November 1850. This word “Sioux,” incidentally, is a hopelessly offensive and alienating term, for it is short for the Ojibwa term “nadouessioux” or “enemy.” A better term would be “Dakota,” which in the Dakota language means “union” or “ally.” It tells you a lot about the patronizing attitude of these missionaries, that they would be willing to use an offputting term like “Sioux” in this newspaper. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS • 44 Sarah R. May Leicester MA •45 Frederick Douglass Rochester NY • 46 Charles Bigham Feltonville MA • 47 J.T. Partridge Worcester • 48 Eliza C. Clapp Leicester MA • 49 Daniel Steward East Line MA • 50 E.B. Chase Valley Falls MA •51 Sophia Foord Dedham MA •52E.A. Clark Worcester •53E.H. Taft Dedham MA • 54 Olive W. Hastings Lancaster, Pennsylvania • 55 Rebecca Plumly Philadelphia • 56 S.L. Hastings Lancaster, Pennsylvania • 57 Sophia Taft • 58 Anna E. Ruggles Worcester • 59 Mrs. A.E. Brown Brattleboro VT • 60 Janette Jackson Philadelphia • 61 Anna R. Cox Philadelphia • 62 Cynthia P. Bliss Pawtucket, Rhode Island • 63 R.M.C. Capron Providence • 64 M.H. Mowry Providence • 65 Mary Eddy Providence •66Mary Abbott Hopedale • 67 Anna E. Fish Hopedale • 68 C.G. Munyan Hopedale • 69 Maria L. Southwick Worcester • 70 Anna Cornell Plainfield CT • 71 S. Monroe Plainfield CT • 72 Anna E. Price Plainfield CT • 73 M.C. Monroe Plainfield CT • 74 F.C. Johnson Sturbridge MA • 75 Thomas Hill Webster MA • 76 Elizabeth Frail Hopkinton MA • 77 Eli Belknap Hopkinton MA • 78 M.M. Frail Hopkinton MA • 79 Valentine Belknap Hopkinton MA • 80 Phebe Goodwin West Chester, Pennsylvania • 81 Edgar Hicks Brooklyn NY • 82 Ira Foster Canterbury NH • 83 Effingham L. Capron Worcester • 84 Frances H. Drake Leominster MA • 85 Calvin Fairbanks Leominster MA • 86 E.M. Dodge Worcester • 87 Eliza Barney Nantucket Island • 88 Lydia Barney Nantucket Island • 89 Alice Jackson Avondale, Pennsylvania • 90 G.D. Williams Leicester MA • 91 Marian Blackwell Cincinnati OH • 92 Elizabeth Earle Worcester •93 Friend Joseph C. Hathaway Farmington NY •94E. Jane Alden Lowell MA • 95 Elizabeth Dayton Lowell MA • 96 Lima H. Ober Boston • 97 Mrs. Lucy N. Colman Saratoga Springs NY • 98 Dorothy Whiting Clintonville MA • 99 Emily Whiting Clintonville MA • 100 Abigail Morgan Clinton MA • 101 Julia Worcester Milton NH HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS • 102 Mary R. Metcalf Worcester • 103 R.H. Ober Boston • 104 D.A. Mundy Hopedale • 105 Dr. S. Rogers Worcester • 106 Jacob Pierce PA • 107 Mrs. E.J. Henshaw W. Brookfield MA • 108 Edward Southwick Worcester • 109 E.A. Merrick Princeton MA • 110 Mrs. C. Merrick Princeton MA •111Lewis E. Capen PA • 112 Joseph Carpenter New-York • 113 Martha Smith Plainfield CT • 114 Lucius Holmes Thompson CT • 115 Benj. Segur Thompson CT •116C.S. Dow Worcester • 117 S.L. Miller PA • 118 Isaac L. Miller PA • 119 Buel Picket Sherman CT • 120 Josiah Henshaw W. Brookfield MA • 121 Andrew Wellington Lexington MA • 122 Louisa Gleason Worcester • 123 Paulina Gerry Stoneham MA • 124 Lucy Stone West Brookfield MA • 125 Ellen Blackwell Cincinnati OH • 126 Mrs. Chickery Worcester • 127 Mrs. F.A. Pierce Worcester • 128 C.M. Trenor Worcester • 129 R.C. Capron Worcester • 130 Wm. Lloyd Garrison Boston • 131 Emily Loveland Worcester • 132 Mrs. S. Worcester Worcester • 133 Phebe Worcester Worcester • 134 Adeline Worcester Worcester • 135 Joanna R. Ballou MA • 136 Abby H. Price Hopedale • 137 B. Willard MA • 138 T. Poole Abington MA • 139 M.B. Kent Boston • 140 D.H. Knowlton • 141 E.H. Knowlton Grafton MA • 142 G. Valentine MA • 143 A. Prince Worcester • 144 Lydia Wilmarth Worcester • 145 J.G. Warren Worcester • 146 Mrs. E.A. Stowell Worcester • 147 Martin Stowell Worcester • 148 Mrs. E. Stamp Worcester • 149 C. M. Barbour Worcester • 150 Daniel Mitchell Pawtucket, Rhode Island • 151 Alice H. Easton • 152 Anna Q.T. Parsons Boston • 153 C.D. McLane Worcester • 154 W.H. Channing Boston • 155 Wendell Phillips Boston • 156 Abby K. Foster Worcester • 157 S. S. Foster Worcester • 158 Paulina Wright Davis Providence • 159 Wm. D. Cady Warren MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS • 160 Ernestine L. Rose New-York • 161 Mrs. J. G. Hodgden Roxbury MA • 162 C.M. Shaw Boston • 163 Ophilia D. Hill Worcester • 164 Mrs. P. Allen Millbury MA • 165 Lucy C. Dike Thompson CT • 166 E. Goddard Worcester • 167 M.F. Gilbert West Brookfield MA • 168 G. Davis Providence • 169 A.H. Johnson Worcester • 170 W.H. Harrington Worcester • 171 E.B. Briggs Worcester • 172 A.C. Lackey Upton MA • 173 Ora Ober Worcester • 174 A. Barnes Princeton RI • 175 Thomas Provan Hopedale • 176 Rebecca Provan Hopedale • 177 A.W. Thayer Worcester • 178 M.M. Munyan Millbury MA • 179 W.H. Johnson Worcester • 180 Dr. S. Mowry Chepachet RI • 181 George W. Benson Northampton • 182 Mrs. C.M. Carter Worcester • 183 H.S. Brigham Bolton MA • 184 E.A. Welsh Feltonville MA • 185 Mrs. J.H. Moore Charlton MA • 186 Margaret S. Merrit Charlton MA • 187 Martha Willard Charlton MA • 188 A.N. Lamb Charlton MA • 189 Mrs. Chaplin Worcester • 190 Caroline Farnum • 191 N.B. Hill Blackstone MA • 192 K. Parsons Worcester • 193 Jillson Worcester • 194 E.W.K. Thompson • 195 L. Wait Boston • 196 Mrs. Mary G. Wright CA • 197 F.H. Underwood Webster MA • 198 Asa Cutler CT • 199 J.B. Willard Westford MA • 200 Perry Joslin Worcester • 201 Friend Sarah H. Hallock Milton NY • 202 Elizabeth Johnson Worcester • 203 Seneth Smith Oxford MA • 204 Marian Hill Webster MA • 205 Wm. Coe Worcester • 206 E.T. Smith Leominster MA • 207 Mary R. Hubbard • 208 S. Aldrich Hopkinton MA • 209 M.A. Maynard Feltonville MA • 210 S.P.R. Feltonville MA • 211 Anna R. Blake Monmouth ME • 212 Ellen M. Prescott Monmouth ME • 213 J.M. Cummings Worcester • 214 Nancy Fay Upton MA • 215 M. Jane Davis Worcester • 216 D.R. Crandell Worcester • 217 E.M. Burleigh Oxford MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS • 218 Sarah Chafee Leominster MA • 219 Adeline Perry Worcester • 220 Lydia E. Chase Worcester • 221 J.A. Fuller Worcester • 222 Sarah Prentice Worcester • 223 Emily Prentice Worcester • 224 H.N. Fairbanks Worcester • 225 Mrs. A. Crowl Worcester • 226 Dwight Tracy Worcester • 227 J.S. Perry Worcester • 228 Isaac Norcross Worcester • 229 M.A.W. Johnson Salem OH • 230 Mrs. C.I.H. Nichols Brattleboro VT • 231 Charles Calistus Burleigh Plainfield CT • 232 E.A. Parrington Worcester • 233 Mrs. Parrington Worcester • 234 Harriet F. Hunt Boston • 235 Chas F. Hovey Boston • 236 Friend Lucretia Mott Philadelphia • 237 Susan Fuller Worcester • 238 Thomas Earle Worcester • 239 Alice Earle Worcester • 240 Martha B. Earle Worcester • 241 Anne H. Southwick Worcester • 242 Joseph A. Howland Worcester • 243 Adeline H. Howland Worcester • 244 O.T. Harris Worcester • 245 Julia T. Harris Worcester • 246 John M. Spear Boston • 247 E.J. Alden • 248 E.D. Draper Hopedale • 249 D.R.P. Hewitt Salem MA • 250 L.G. Wilkins Salem MA • 251 J.H. Binney Worcester • 252 Mary Adams Worcester • 253 Anna T. Draper • 254 Josephine Reglar • 255 Anna Goulding Worcester • 256 Adeline S. Greene • 257 Silence Bigelow • 258 A. Wyman • 259 L.H. Ober • 260 Betsey F. Lawton Chepachet RI • 261 Emma Parker Philadelphia • 262 Olive W. Hastings Lancaster MA (error?) • 263 Silas Smith IO • 264 Asenath Fuller • 265 Denney M.F. Walker • 266 Eunice D.F. Pierce • 267 Elijah Houghton HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

1851

Wendell Phillips, who was noticeably reluctant and uncomfortable when it came to sharing quarters with black abolitionists while on lecture tours, knew very well that the abolitionist struggle, for white abolitionists, had nothing whatever to do with a desire to improve the conditions of life available to black Americans. At this point he gave his game away by declaring to his white friends:

“My friends, if we never freed a slave, we have at least freed ourselves in the effort to emancipate our brother man.”17 Obviously, the name of Wendell’s game would be Set-The-White-Man-Free-From-Being-His-Brother’s- Keeper. (Let the names of our favorite games be accurately descriptive! :-)

It is to be noted that this was the game that was being played in Virginia as well during this year, for there was a new law being put in effect which would oblige free blacks to leave that State of grace within a year — or be reduced again to slavery. The local version of Set-The-White-Man-Free-From-Being-His-Brother’s- Keeper, being played down south, was Go-Be-Free-Somewhere-Else, and the local version being played up north was At-Least-We-Tried-And-Are-Now-Therefore-Among-The-Righteous — but these slightly differing versions amount to very much the same sort of stupid racist bag of tricks of What-Is-Of-The-Last-Importance- Is-The-White-Man’s-Righteousness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS Surprise surprise! It was a white man’s game in which the person of color was but a pawn.18

17. Has it become clear to you, in view of the above, why, when in 1842 the surviving 35 of the black privateers of the Amistad mutiny had been sent back to Africa aboard the bark Gentleman, they had been sent home as mere charity wards with nobody ever thinking to return to them their prize schooner La Amistad admittedly worth $70,000 — which they had won fair and square with their blood, sweat, and tears? For sure, had it been 35 surviving free white privateers, they would not have been denied this booty which belonged to them, but because they were instead free blacks, it never even occurred to any of the white players in this legal drama to give them their prize schooner back! One of the open issues of this drama, therefore, is: what happened to the La Amistad? Where did this valuable piece of property go? Which white men were allowed to profit from it? Our history books are, of course, silent. This is a question which, due to the ingrained nature of our race prejudice, it has never occurred to us to pose:

“In those parts of the Union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery ... and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.” — Alexis de Tocqueville HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS Here the executive committee of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society position themselves around Robert Purvis during this year. I don’t mean to suggest that all of these folks would have totally agreed with Phillips or with his white-man’s- game of Set-The-White-Man-Free-From-Being-His-Brother’s-Keeper. I only mean to insist that that was in fact the predominant, most influential white attitude:

During this year was published in Philadelphia PA by the firm of Campbell & Powers John Campbell’s NEGRO-MANIA: BEING AN EXAMINATION OF THE FALSELY ASSUMED EQUALITY OF THE VARIOUS RACES OF MEN; DEMONSTRATED BY THE INVESTIGATIONS OF CHAMPOLLION, WILKINSON AND OTHERS, TOGETHER WITH A CONCLUDING CHAPTER, PRESENTING A COMPARATIVE STATEMENT OF THE CONDITION OF THE NEGROES IN THE WEST INDIES BEFORE AND SINCE EMANCIPATION. EMANCIPATION JAMES WILKINSON

Surprise surprise! Black people are inferior to white people.2

In this year also appeared Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright’s REPORT ON THE DISEASES AND PECULIARITIES OF THE NEGRO RACE (DeBow’s Review XI), in which he declared the seeking of freedom by people of color to be a medical condition, an illness, an ailment to which he assigned the New Greek designation “drapetomania.” (To prevent such an ailment from manifesting itself the slavemaster must avoid making himself too familiar with his or her slaves, never in any manner allowing them to consider themselves as equals with their white masters. Upon the detection symptoms of this medical condition, such as the slave’s becoming sulky and dissatisfied without cause, the curative treatment should include “whipping the devil out of them.”19

18. Maybe you don’t agree. 19. [To be perfectly frank here: I have yet to establish that any sensible person at the time took Dr. Cartwright seriously, so the possibility remains open, at least in my own mind) that he was merely some sort of running dog whom only a modern historian reconstructing this in retrospect would ever tendentiously take seriously. What do you think?] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS (Other Southern physicians would suggest that the removal of both big toes might be adequate to render running impossible.)

The first complete gorilla skeleton reached England. Previously, all that had been seen by Europeans had been a few skulls. Clearly, gorilla people were also inferior to white people.

Publication of Dr. Josiah Clark Nott’s AN ESSAY ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MANKIND, VIEWED IN CONNECTION WITH NEGRO SLAVERY DELIVERED BEFORE THE SOUTHERN RIGHTS ASSOCIATION, 20 14 DECEMBER, 1850.

Professor Samuel George Morton’s ADDITIONAL OBSERVATION ON HYBRIDITY.

20. The attitude of the Southern Rights Association seems to have been that black slaves had no Southern rights. The attitude of Dr. Nott seems to have been that one sufficient reason for the appropriateness of such a political fact had been revealed by the science of biology — according to the advice of the most prominent of the learned white practitioners in that field. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS April 3, Thursday: Thomas Simms (Sims)’s arrest. The United States Commissioner in Boston, George Ticknor Curtis, ordered that that teenage runaway, who had been living and working in Boston, be sent back to his owner in Georgia (who was, possibly, also his father), who in all likelihood would torture him and might well murder him by due process of law. Sims was a man seriously addicted to his pleasures, a drinker and habitué of the Ann Street bordellos. He had been something of a hard case: he carried a knife, and when arrested had cut Asa Butman pretty severely in the leg.... The abolitionists put it out that Sims had died from the whipping he got when he arrived back in Savannah that spring of 1851. But it wasn’t true. According to Leonard W. Levy’s THE LAW OF THE COMMONWEALTH AND CHIEF JUSTICE SHAW (Oxford, 1957), it had become notorious that no fugitive slave had ever been returned from Boston. Webster Whigs were dismayed that the whole state of Massachusetts was known as the cradle of “mad Abolitionism.” It had become a matter of pride, not alone in the South, that a fugitive should be seized in Boston and taken back to slavery. Then, on Thursday evening, April 3, 1851 —before the excitement of the Shadrach [Frederick Jenkins] case had subsided— the city government of Boston was presented with an opportunity to make good on its promises of loyally enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act: Thomas Sims was taken into custody as a fugitive slave belonging to Mr. James Potter, a rice planter of Chatham

The Sunday Boston Globe for February 9, 1997 featured a review of Gary Collison’s book SHADRACH MINKINS: FROM FUGITIVE SLAVE TO CITIZEN, with two handsome woodcuts and a photo of an ad for the sale of Shadrach:21 A man came from Norfolk VA to Boston with documents attesting to the fact that a waiter at Taft’s Cornhill Coffee House, Frederick Wilkins AKA Shadrach, was an escaped slave. The Commissioner of the US Circuit Court, George Ticknor Curtis, by politics a “Cotton Whig,” issued a warrant for the arrest of said runaway, who was seized as he unsuspectingly served the breakfast of US Deputy Marshall Patrick Riley. After hustling the waiter through back streets to the courthouse, Riley notified City Marshal Francis Tukey and Mayor Bigelow that he had “got a nigger.” Brad Dean summarizes: “In September 1850 the United States Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which granted slaveholders the right to seize runaway slaves anywhere in the U.S. and carry them back to the South. The first attempt at rendition in February 1851 failed when abolitionists rescued a runaway called Shadrach (Frederick Jenkins) from his captors in Boston and sent him on to safety in Canada. Less than two months later, however, another runaway, Thomas Simms (Sims), was seized in Boston, but on that occasion local, state, and federal troops ensured that Sims’s owners were able to carry him back to Georgia. Henry 21. So, what was a “Cotton Whig”? –Ronald Bailey, in considering the extended economic impact of the slave economy on industrialization in New England, has proposed that we employ a new term, the “slave(ry) trade,” so that we can refer not simply to the trade in slaves, between nations and inside our nation, but to the entire national economy that we built directly or tangentially around slave labor and its produce. This can be, he suggests, a useful shorthand which will remind us of the complex economic linkages wrought by slaveholding. New England textile mill owners and planter interests in the South and the Caribbean maintained a steady commerce of raw goods and finished supplies. The selfinterests of these groups were sometimes so close that the distinction between them broke down; individuals or families could become industrial capitalists as well as plantation owners. Bailey has cited, in detail, economic relationships between New England merchants and Caribbean plantation owners which personalize the economic relationship between northern industry and the slave plantations. Rowland Gibson Hazard, a Rhode Island manufacturer of negro cloth, was able somehow to support abolitionist principles while also producing products which directly implicated him in, to use Bailey’s phrase, the slave(ry) trade. Somehow such people were able to experience a shift in their moral values without fundamentally reassessing the consequences of their own economic activities. As a result, they could embrace antislavery sentiments, but not sufficiently to cease all economic participation in the slave(ry) trade, and not sufficiently to become ardent abolitionists. “Why,” Stachiw asks, “didn’t they expand their perceptions of moral principles to encompass the full consequences of their actions?” (One explanation that has been proferred is that their opposition to abolitionism drew less from their moral stand against it than from their opposition to what they saw as the threat to their status, as local elites, that was being presented by upstart immediatists.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS Thoreau and hundreds of thousands of others in the North were outraged by the Fugitive Slave Law and the Sims rendition, which seemed to them flagrant violations by the federal government of the rights guaranteed to states under the US Constitution. As a consequence of these and similar actions by the federal government, the Nullification movement, which posited that a state had a right to nullify laws mandated by the federal government, garnered more serious attention in the North than it had before been accorded. Two key events immediately preceded and helped set the stage for the meeting sponsored by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on July 4th, 1854. On May 24th, Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave working in a Boston clothing store, was arrested and slated to be shipped back to Virginia. Abolitionists protested at Faneuil Hall, and the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson [of Boston’s Vigilance Committee] led a failed attempt to rescue Burns from the Boston jail.”

Anthony Burns was given a new suit for the occasion and was escorted under heavy guard by the militia to a revenue cutter which returned him to slavery. (It is estimated that it cost our government some $100,000 to make him a slave again.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS Brad Dean continues: “The second key event was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which became law on May 30. One provision of the Act was the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, an action that removed the explicit prohibition of slavery in the northern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase.

Thoreau was incensed over the Burns affair. On May 29th, he began a long, scathing journal entry with these two sentences, the second of which would echo again in “SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS”: “These days it is left to one Mr. Loring to say whether a citizen of Massachusetts is a slave or not. Does any one think that Justice or God awaits Mr. Loring’s decision?”22 The arrangements by which Thoreau joined William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and the others on the podium at Framingham are not known. The absence of his name from announcements of the event suggests that he was a last-minute addition, but we do not know whether he was asked to speak or sought the opportunity. In view of his aroused emotions at the moment and of his apparent difficulty getting Concordians to talk about the North rather than the South, it is certainly possible that the announced rally struck him as an ideal forum to get things off his chest. Minimal time to prepare was not really a problem because on the issue of slavery and Massachusetts his long-stewing thought and rhetoric had already reached the boiling point. Indeed, in writing SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS”, he essentially mined his still fresh journal entries on Burns and earlier passages on the Thomas Simms (Sims) case.”

22. THE JOURNAL OF HENRY D. THOREAU, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis Henry Allen, 14 volumes. Boston MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906, 6:313. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS April 11, Friday: Wendell Phillips addressed an assembly on Boston Common about the Thomas Simms (Sims) case. This image of that amalgamated, which is to say, multi-racial, meeting would appear in Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion for May 3, 1851:

CONSULT THE WIKIPEDIA HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS May 3, Saturday: For the 7th time in its four years of existence, San Francisco, California, was almost entirely destroyed by fire.

Henry Thoreau laid out a road for Luther Hosmer, from his house near the road to Sudbury through land owned by James P. Brown to Marlboro Road at Thomas Wheeler’s,

while meanwhile, on Boston Common, William Lloyd Garrison spoke against slavery.

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/65.htm HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS That night Waldo Emerson delivered “The Fugitive Slave Law” in Concord. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

On April 11th, Wendell Phillips had addressed a previous assembly on the Common, about the Thomas Simms (Sims) case. This image of that previous meeting was appearing in this day’s first issue of a new Boston magazine created by publisher Frederick Gleason and editor Maturin Murray Ballou, Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion.23 Since the important detail that would not have been missed by any of the 19th- Century viewers of this image is that the assembly being depicted was amalgamated, which is to say, multi- racial, the fact that the orator depicted is Phillips rather than Garrison is not by way of comparison of any great

23. Gleason was the publisher of the Boston story paper, The Flag of Our Union. Ballou would purchase the Pictorial in 1855 and substitute his own name for Gleason’s in the title. In 1859 Ballou would finish and Gleason would return with a 16-page story-paper, Gleason’s Literary Companion, which would continue until 1670. In about 1857 Henry Thoreau would copy from the initial offerings of the Pictorial into his Indian Notebook #10. CONSULT THE WIKIPEDIA HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS moment:

July 2, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal about the reactions he experienced during speeches by Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips.

July 2, Wednesday: It is a fresh cool summer morning– From the road at N Barretts on my way to P. Blood’s at 81/2 A M. the Great Meadows have a slight bluish misty tinge in part; elsewhere a sort of hoary sheen –like a fine downiness –inconceivably fine & silvery far away –the light reflected from the grass blades –a sea of grass hoary with light –the counterpart of the frost in spring As yet no mower has profaned it – scarcely a foot-step since the waters left it. Miles of waving grass adorning the surface of the earth. Last night –a sultry night –which compelled to leave all windows open, I heard two travellers talking aloud – was roused out of my sleep by their loud day-like & somewhat unearthly discourse at perchance 1 o’clock– THEODORE PARKER From the country whiling away the night with loud discourse– I heard the words Theodore Parker & Wendell WENDELL PHILLIPS Phillips loudly spoken –& so did half a dozen of my neighbors who also were awakened –such is fame– It affected like Dante talking of the men of this world in the infernal regions– If the traveller had called my own name I should equally have thought it an unearthly personage which it would take me some hours into day-light to realize. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS My genius hinted before I fairly awoke –Improve your time. What is the night that a traveller’s voice should sound so hollow in it! That a man speaking aloud in the night –speaking in regions under the earth should utter the words Theodore Parker? A Traveller! I love his title A Traveller is to be reverenced as such– His profession is the best symbol of our life Going from –toward– It is the history of every one of us. I am interested in those that travel in the night. It takes but little distance to make the hills & even the meadows look blue today– That principle which gives the air an azure color is more abundant. To-day the milk-weed is blossoming– Some of the raspberries are ripe –the most innocent & simple of fruits – the purest & most etherial. Cherries are ripe –strawberries in the gardens have passed their prime Many large trees –especially elms about a house are a surer indication of old family distinction & worth –than any evidence of wealth. Any evidence of care bestowed on these trees –secures the traveller’s respect as for a nobler husbandry than the raising of corn & potatoes. I passed a regular country door-yard this forenoon. the unpainted one story house –long & low with projecting stoop –a deep grass plot unfenced for yard –hens & chickens scratching amid the chip dirt about the door– This last the main feature relics of wood-piles –sites of the wooden towers– The night shade has bloomed & the Prinos or winter-berry. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

1852

A photograph was taken of Arrowhead, that is now on a postcard which you can purchase there. Many things in this photograph are different from what appears today. Plowed fields were coming right up to the lawn, the trees were small, and you can see a large working barn set away from the house.

In this year Frederick Douglass had at least one Daguerreotype (presumably, many) made:24

According to Wendell Phillips, Douglass had been so influenced by John Brown that,

24. You will note that, since this is a Daguerreotype, it presents a mirror image and it would thus appear to us now, who have become accustomed to positive photographs made from negatives, as if the subject had parted his hair on the right. The photo was recently disposed of at a Sotheby’s auction upon an bid of $184,000 by an anonymous telephone participant.

“Everything in life is unusual until you get accustomed to it.” — The Scarecrow, in THE MARVELOUS LAND OF OZ (L. Frank Baum, 1904) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS at one point during a anti-slavery meeting in Boston’s toney Faneuil Hall,

he had advocated that the slaves of the South had

no possible hope except in their own right arms.

He was thus standing to commit the Biblical error of “trying to hold Eloah in one’s fist.” But Sojourner Truth was sitting in the front row listening to this. As Douglass was finishing, Truth called out

FREDERICK! IS GOD DEAD?

Debating Holding One’s God in One’s Fist HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS Frederick Douglass did not necessarily appreciate such treatment or benefit from this correction; he would refer to Sojourner Truth as one “who seemed to feel it her duty to trip me up in my speeches and to ridicule my efforts to speak and act like a person of cultivation and refinement.”

Was Truth seconding the puerile Nathaniel Hawthorne sentiment found in his biography of Franklin Pierce, that when it be God’s will, then will human slavery “vanish like a dream” without anybody needing to lift their little finger? Nope, Sojourner knew that slavery was not a dream that would vanish like a dream.

The interesting fact about these two apparently identical attitudes, that of Hawthorne and that of Truth, is that they are as diametrically opposed as black and white. Although the two might be made to appear similar in outline in poor light, on the basis of their shared vocabulary of God-talk, in fact were we to ask the powerful beneficiaries of injustice to trust in God to correct wrongs being done by them, this would be the opposite of our asking the powerless victims of injustice to trust in God to correct wrongs being done to them. The difference, which makes these two situations opposite, is that a powerful beneficiary of injustice has no basis for relying on his or her own judgment, since such a judgment is and must be inherently merely self-serving.

Note that Hawthorne’s position was compatible with the vengeance of the strong against the weak, merely enabling this vengeance to continue, whereas Sojourner Truth’s position was incompatible with the vengeance of the weak against the strong, preventing it from beginning. In the case of the powerful, what trusting in God to correct wrongs leads to is violence and more violence and the perpetuation of violence, whereas in the case of the powerless, this leads only to: decency and more decency.25

August 22, Sunday: At an antislavery meeting in the meetinghouse of the Religious Society of Friends in Salem, Ohio, Sojourner Truth confronted Frederick Douglass with a demand to know, “Is God gone?” This is the event to which Harriet Beecher Stowe would be alluding, when she published an article on Truth more than a decade later in The Atlantic Monthly, recounting again the fabrication (she had initiated this three years before, in the pages of the New-York Independent) she alleged that she had heard straight from the mouth of Wendell Phillips (who had not claimed to have been himself present), ascribing the confrontation to a meeting of undesignated date in Boston’s Faneuil Hall and positioning Truth in the front row of seats.26 Mrs. Stowe was in the process of making “Frederick, is God dead?” such a famous repolished phrase that “Is God dead?” would eventually be inscribed on Truth’s tombstone in Battle Creek, Michigan. In Douglass’s own very much later version of what he had said at that meeting at the Friends’ meetinghouse in Salem, we note that he is not struck speechless. He reconstructed the incident, instead, as one in which it had been him who had had the last

25. Ask yourself what Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi would have said to Hawthorne, and what he would have said to Truth. — What the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. would have said. —What Henry Thoreau would have said (had Hawthorne had enough respect for his neighbor to walk a mile and ask for advice). 26. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s article would also create other false factual details, such as that Sojourner Truth was out of Africa, that she was dead, that her initial white help had come from the Quakers, etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS word: “‘No,’ I answered, ‘and because God is not dead slavery can only end in blood.’” Douglass would then go on, in his memoirs, to prove himself right by pointing out that 1.) in fact slavery had then ended in blood, in the US Civil War of 1862-1865, and that 2.) Truth herself eventually had learned to agree with is “sanguinary doctrine,” and had become, as he had been earlier, “an advocate of the sword.” He had taken his “quaint old sister” to have been speaking in opposition to this at the time because this woman “was of the Garrison school of non-resistants, and was shocked at my sanguinary doctrine.”27

Debating Holding One’s God in One’s Fist Douglass would not controvert (of course) that an incident something like what had been reported had indeed occurred, but would also (of course) refrain from confessing this incidental detail — that in fact her deliberate harassment of him while he was orating had occurred in a low-rent Quaker venue in Ohio rather than, as fabricated by Stowe or Phillips, in downtown Boston’s toney Faneuil Hall. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

1854

During the Anthony Burns case, after Transcendentalist poets and preachers had attacked the Boston

27. Although it was not Friedrich Nietzsche but Waldo Emerson who 1st spoke of the death of God (he did so, as a counterfactual hypothetical, in his Divinity School Address address in 1838), his point then had been that to consider that the age of direct inspiration was over was to consider impiously that God had died. This was the same thought as expressed here by Truth when she inquired of the belligerent Douglass in effect whether he supposed that human individuals would need to take the issues of cosmic injustice into their own self-righteous and deluded hands. –All this was quite different from the twist which Nietzsche would give to the thought in the 1881-1885 period, for he would in that later marketplace of ideas begin to raise not the question of whether anyone was supposing impiously that God was dead but, rather, what was going to follow from the fact that God had, indeed, become totally unavailable to us — and, what was going to follow from the fact that this had happened at our own responsibility. These meditations on the question “Is God dead?” in these antebellum years would not include any reflection on the possibility of God having absented himself, or having died, such ideas being unthinkable absurdities within all then-pertinent frames of reference. The Nietzsche stuff about how God died of shame, and the consequent “God is dead” school of theology, would come within an unrecognizably altered frame of consciousness. So, we need to block it entirely out of our minds for our purposes here.

According to Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass had been so influenced by John Brown that he had advocated that the slaves of the South had

no possible hope except in their own right arms.

Douglass was thus standing to commit the Biblical error “trying to hold Eloah in one’s fist.” But Phillips had situated Sojourner Truth in the front row listening to this. As Phillips had Douglass finish, he had Truth calling out

FREDERICK! IS GOD DEAD?

Was Phillips’s Truth seconding a puerile Hawthorne sentiment, that when it be God’s will, then will human slavery “vanish like a dream” without anybody needing to lift their little finger? Nope, Sojourner knew that slavery was not a dream that would vanish like a dream!

The interesting fact about these two apparently identical attitudes, that of Hawthorne and that of Truth, is that they are as diametrically opposed as are black and white. Although the two might be made to appear similar in outline in poor light, on the basis of their shared vocabulary of God-talk, in fact were we to ask the powerful beneficiaries of injustice to trust in God to correct wrongs being done by them, this would be the opposite of our asking the powerless victims of injustice to trust in God to correct wrongs being done to them. The difference, which makes these two situations opposite, is that a powerful beneficiary of injustice has no basis for relying on his or her own judgment, since such a judgment is and must be inherently merely self-serving.

Note that Hawthorne’s position was compatible with the vengeance of the strong against the weak, merely enabling this vengeance to continue, whereas Sojourner Truth’s position was incompatible with the vengeance of the weak against the strong, preventing it from beginning. In the case of the powerful, what trusting in God to correct wrongs leads to is violence and more violence and the perpetuation of violence, whereas in the case of the powerless, this leads only to: decency and more decency. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS courthouse, the building had been converted into a sort of armored slavepen, in that it was guarded by a

detachment of US Marines, and two artillery companies with loaded cannons and with fixed bayonets on their rifles, as well as by the US Marshall’s guard consisting of “a gang of about one-hundred and twenty men, the lowest villains in the community, keepers of brothels, bullies, blacklegs, convicts....” Not even the judges, let alone the jurors, the witnesses, and the litigant attorneys, were being permitted inside the courthouse without first passing a cordon of men five men deep, and proving their right to be there. Boston abolitionists had offered the slavemaster of Burns the sum of $1,200 in return for a document in manumission, but had been refused.

Nothing in the whole record of the Burns affair is more striking to a modern audience or at first more off- putting than the apparent incapacity of even the most committed of the radicals to express a direct, authentic outrage on Burns’s personal behalf. Phillips’s unelaborated reference to his “suffering” is as close as they come. The evil that Parker undertakes to agitate against is the threat to the civil liberties of Northern white men. There is an oddity about this argument even on the supposition that it consciously appeals to self-interest ... if they are to be made to fight again, it must probably be for the same thing [their own personal liberty] and not ... for ... the right of another man than oneself to be free.

WENDELL PHILLIPS At some point in the year, in regard to the enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act in regard to the Burns case, the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson would deliver a sermon entitled “Massachusetts in Mourning.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS January 25, Wednesday: The day was so cold that Henry Thoreau’s driver in Worcester mentioned that, although he drove in the mornings, he did not wear gloves or mittens — except that very morning. “He had a very large hand, one of his fingers as big as three of mine. But this morning he had to give up.” Thoreau returned to Concord at noon.

Judge Alexander Hamilton formally deferred implementation of the negative ruling of the Missouri Supreme Court, that the Scotts still were enslaved, pending an opportunity for the US Supreme Court determine whether or not it desired to intercede in the case. DRED SCOTT HARRIET ROBINSON SCOTT MRS. IRENE EMERSON

Lucy Stone delivered a lecture at the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s Tabernacle, suggesting that no matter how contemptuous the abolitionists were of such a person as Mitchel, “the slaveholders themselves” would “dump on him more contempt” even than that. John Mitchel was in the gallery to hear himself being denounced by a woman from the pulpit, and commented afterward that not having ever experienced before a HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS woman speaking in such a manner in public, he had been surprised to find himself “listening with respectful attention, for more than an hour.” He found Lucy “very intelligent” and “unaffected” and “young.” He had attended this meeting, he said, for the good of his health, “as a Russian after a hot bath goes out and rolls himself in the snow.”

At the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, William Lloyd Garrison proposed, and the meeting accepted, a resolution that “John Mitchel has revealed himself to be a braggart patriot, and a thoroughly unprincipled man, utterly recreant to all his professions of liberty.” (Mitchel would respond that if he was a “braggart patriot,” Garrison was an “ass.” Then Wendell Phillips took the floor, and characterized Mitchel as being a product of “British tyranny,” from whom the life had been crushed through its persecution. The British “had sent him to us, the poorest and meanest Slave he had ever heard of.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS May 24, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau left at 4:30 AM for the Cliffs, and in the afternoon went to Pedrick’s meadow.

This would turn out, in Boston, to be the day of Anthony Burns’s arrest. It seems Burns, a 6-footer classifiable as an “escaped slave,” had made the mistake of attempting to send a note to a brother still held in Virginia. The note had of course been intercepted by his brother’s “owner,” who had thus discovered where he was hiding.

He was arrested by US Marshall Asa O. Butman while working as a presser in a tailor shop on Brattle Street in Boston, and accused of running away from his owner Mr. Charles Francis Suttle.28 Thomas Wentworth Higginson would lead an assault on the jail, and in the attempt to rescue Burns, a deputy named James Batchelder would be killed.29

A telegram originating in Washington DC, allegedly from President of the United States of America Franklin

28. At the time of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, according to Lawrence Lader’s THE BOLD BRAHMINS (NY: Dutton, 1961, page 140), there were some 600 “runaway slaves” living and working in the city of Boston. 29. James Batchelder was either shot or stabbed, either by an abolitionist on purpose or by accident or by another police agent on purpose or by accident. What we know for sure is that he quickly bled out after his femoral artery was “nearly divided.” It would be said that he had received the wages for his sin of favoring human enslavement, but it needs to be mentioned that we do not know how many children this Irish immigrant had in some Boston tenement, to feed and clothe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS Pierce,30 sided with the kidnappers of Burns but offered a quite ambiguous sentiment,

The law must be executed.

indeed one with which all anarchists everywhere would be able most heartily to concur: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. would be the attorney for the defense. The trial would cost more than $40,000.00 and would be lost. In the course of all this lawyer Dana would be assaulted at night by a hired thug.31 Democrats had dragged cannon from the Custom House to the Common, and were there firing off salutes to the new Kansas-Nebraska Act extending the territory of American slavery, at 8PM while Anthony Burns was being taken into custody as he walked home along Brattle Street. (Caleb Page, a Boston truckman who had gone along with Butman to arrest Burns, would later be outraged when informed that he had helped in the recapture of an escaped slave — Butman had assured his hired day-deputy that he was merely assisting in the capture of a thief which technically under the law was a correct explanation as, under the law as it then existed, Burns was stealing himself and his services from their rightful owner. The next day in court there a broken bone would be seen to be protruding from his right hand, but this had not been the result of harm he had sustained while he was being taken into custody, for as a child that hand had been damaged in some machinery at a shop to which his owner had hired out his labor. Dana would describe the “scarred” right hand for the court record as “a bone stands out from the back of it, a hump an inch high, and it hangs almost useless from the wrist, a huge scar or gash covering half its surface.” I do not know whether this meant that the white bone was protruding permanently through the skin, or whether this meant that the deformed bone made a pronounced lump under the skin.)

Brad Dean summarized: “In September 1850 the United States Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which granted slaveholders the right to seize runaway slaves anywhere in the U.S. and carry them back to the South. The first attempt at rendition in February 1851 failed when abolitionists rescued a runaway called Shadrach (Frederick Jenkins) from his captors in Boston and sent him on to safety in Canada. Less than two months later, however, another runaway, Thomas Simms (Sims), was seized in Boston, but on that occasion local, state, and federal troops ensured that Sims’s owners were able to carry him back to Georgia. Thoreau and hundreds of thousands of others in the North were outraged by the Fugitive Slave Law and the Sims rendition, which seemed to them flagrant violations by the federal government of the rights guaranteed to states under the US Constitution. As a consequence of these and similar actions by the federal government, the Nullification movement, which posited that a state had a right to nullify laws mandated by the federal government, garnered more serious attention in the North than it had before been accorded. Two key events immediately preceded and helped set the stage for the meeting sponsored by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on July 4, 1854. On May 24, Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave working in a Boston clothing store, was arrested and slated to be shipped back to Virginia. Abolitionists protested at Faneuil Hall, and the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson led a failed attempt to rescue Burns from the Boston jail. Burns was escorted under heavy guard by the militia to a revenue cutter, which returned him to slavery. The second key event was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which became law on May 30. One provision of the Act was the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, an action that removed the explicit prohibition of slavery in the northern

30. Although this telegram must have been a fraud –since President Pierce was never indited as a co-conspirator in this kidnapping of Burns– our history books say nothing further about the source of the telegram and appear to have little interest in uncovering who it was in Washington who could have been behind such a slanderous misuse of a President’s name. –And recently, when Rodney King was attacked and abused by the “LAPD,” an armed and exceedingly dangerous group of bigoted criminals operating in the Los Angeles area, the same sort of slanderous attack was made on the good name of President George Herbert Walker Bush! 31.Hopefully, this hired thug was not in the employ of the White House plumbers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS reaches of the Louisiana Purchase. Thoreau was incensed over the Burns affair. On May 29, he began a long,

scathing journal entry with these two sentences, the second of which would echo again in “SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS”: “These days it is left to one Mr. Loring to say whether a citizen of Massachusetts is a slave or not. Does any one think that Justice or God awaits Mr. Loring’s decision?”32 The arrangements by which Thoreau joined William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and the others on the podium at Framingham MA are not known. The absence of his name from announcements of the event suggests that he was a last-minute addition, but we do not know whether he was asked to speak or sought the opportunity. In view of his aroused emotions at the moment and of his apparent difficulty getting Concordians to talk about the North rather than the South, it is certainly possible that the announced rally struck him as an ideal forum to get things off his chest. Minimal time to prepare was not really a problem because on the issue of slavery and Massachusetts his long-stewing thought and rhetoric had already reached the boiling point. Indeed, in writing “Slavery in Massachusetts,” he essentially mined his still fresh journal entries on Burns and earlier passages on the Thomas Simms (Sims) case.”

May 27, Saturday: In the afternoon Henry Thoreau went to Saw Mill Brook.

In London, the Athenaeum reported that although Thoreau was a graduate of Harvard College and therefore qualified as a minister, instead he had chosen to manufacture pencils and had moved into a hut on the shore of a pond in order to live in a primitive manner and write. The article described WEEK as “a curious mixture of dull and prolix dissertation, with some of the most faithful and animated descriptions of external nature which has [sic??] ever appeared.”

In Worcester, Bronson Alcott succeeded in persuading the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson to take charge of the Boston vigilantes, and the two took the train into Boston. Martin Stowell of Worcester came also. When they reached Boston, however, they found that the Committee was unable to agree upon a plan of action, and it appears that the Reverend took matters into his own hands. He went out and purchased a dozen axes 32. THE JOURNAL OF HENRY D. THOREAU, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis Henry Allen, 14 volumes. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906, 6:313. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS with which to attack the door of the courthouse. That night, at the mass rally at Faneuil Hall at which the committee intended to instigate the sort of howling mob which would be needed in order to cover their purposive activity and distract the guards, the committee members slipped out early and took up their positions at the courthouse and waited for the mob to be marshalled. When Martin Stowell gave the signal, a black man ran to the west door and hammered it open with a 12-foot beam and leaped inside, with the Reverend Higginson close behind him. The people who managed to get inside the courthouse were immediately, however, repulsed by a group of policemen with clubs. The Reverend Higginson was badly beaten on the head and face, and one of the policemen was killed either by knife or gunshot to the midriff. The police began arresting individual rioters, and the mob began to pull back, but the Reverend Higginson, and a lawyer named Seth Webb who had been one of his classmates in college, held firm. Then they were joined by Alcott, cane in hand, who walked right up to the door of the courthouse and looked in. A shot was fired inside the building, or was not fired (although some claimed this, Alcott himself never made any mention of having heard such a sound), as Alcott turned around and came back away from the courthouse.

A little-known fact is that Newport, Rhode Island businessman George Thomas Downing was one of those involved in this attack on the Boston courthouse.

One of the onlookers to these events, who would take no part in them but would suffer in his home town for having so much as been present, was Moncure Daniel Conway. Word that he had been present would circulate in Virginia, so that when he attempted to return to visit his father and mother, a crowd of young men would confront him and order him to leave the town immediately or suffer the consequences.

The Boston mayor, Dr. Jerome Van Crowninshield Smith, a local-politics weathervane, issued the following HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS declaration:

Under the excitement that now pervades the city, you are respectfully requested to cooperate with the Municipal authorities in the maintenance of peace and good order. The law must be obeyed, let the conse- quences be what they may.

Of course, just as the courthouse officials could agree with peace with quiet, the abolitionists could agree with peace with justice. –They could agree that the ideal of peace and good order was utterly incompatible with kidnapping, and with human enslavement. They could agree that the higher law, which was the law of righteousness, and the law of nature and of God, must be obeyed — whatever the consequences. RESISTING THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW HIGHER LAW

A jury, meeting in the building in which Anthony Burns was being held and judged, rendered a verdict of guilty at 10:15 PM — James Wilson was to hang.

Because there had been an alert that Peter Dunbar’s33 truckmen were planning to attack the home of Wendell Phillips, Phillips being elsewhere but his family being in the home, Bronson Alcott, Henry Kemp, Francis Jackson, and the Reverend Samuel Joseph May each armed themselves with a pistol, to sit out the night in the Phillips parlor. They would sit out this night with their pistols in their laps, however, without incident.

Because there were fears that the slavemaster, Mr. Charles Francis Suttle, and his attorney at law, William Brent, might be attacked at their lodgings on the 1st floor of the Revere House, an honor guard of southern students was recruited from Harvard College.34 Suttle and Brent then relocated to a room in the hotel’s garret, for greater security inside their cordon of armed students.

Knowing that during the attack on the courthouse he had discharged his pistol toward Watson Freeman but that Freeman had been unharmed, Lewis Hayden considered it entirely possible that it had been his bullet that had

33. What relation would this Peter Dunbar, a member of the management team at the Customs House on the waterfront, and his son Peter Dunbar, Jr., the captain of the guard at the courthouse guarding Anthony Burns, have been to Concord’s Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau? 34. Moncure Daniel Conway, as a Harvard student from the South, was recruited to take part in this armed guard at the hotel. The two visitors to Boston were not unknown to him, but rather, they were close neighbors or distant relatives. Nevertheless, he declined to get involved in the affair. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS struck the deputy James Batchelder in the major vein of his leg, causing him to bleed out and promptly killing him. Therefore in the evening some activist friends got Hayden into a carriage and conveyed him to the home of Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch in Brookline. (In that period, no-one would have imagined that a person of

color could have been permitted to ride inside such a horse-and-carriage. Thus, drawing the carriage’s window curtains was in and of itself adequate to provide complete concealment.) Hayden was met at his destination by a group of black men resolved to prevent the re-enslavement of Burns.

The Reverend Higginson in a note to his wife in Worcester, written in haste from a home in Boston in which he had sought refuge after the attempted rescue of Anthony Burns: “There has been an attempt at rescue, and failed. I am not hurt, except for a scratch on the face which will probably prevent me from doing anything more about it, lest I be recognized.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS May 30, Tuesday: The Kansas-Nebraska Act.

In Boston, the New England Anti-Slavery Society met to try to figure out what to do, while the presser of the Brattle Street tailor shop, Anthony Burns, was on trial in the courthouse, on the charge of being a fugitive from enslavement. Behind barricades of ropes stretched across Courthouse Square, the courthouse was being guarded by regiments of US troops. The night was so cold that Thoreau had to go out and cover his watermelon plants. The Boston Post, a Democratic mouthpiece, was editorializing that “What these bold, bad men [the paper instances the Reverend Theodore Parker and aristocrat Wendell Phillips by name] are doing, is nothing more nor less than committing treason.”

A false report had appeared in the Boston Daily Times, on Monday, May 29th, that Friend John Greenleaf Whittier had offered “any aid, by money or muscle,” to effect a violent rescue of Anthony Burns. (Whittier had in fact incautiously commented in a message that had become generally known, that “anything” would be preferred to sending Burns “out of Boston as a slave.”) On this day Whittier wrote to the newspaper, offering as further explanation of the attitude he was seeking to express, that “I regard all violence as evil and self- destructive.”

In Concord in the afternoon Henry Thoreau went to Clintonia swamp and Pond.

May 30. Tuesday. Whiteweed. Spergularia rubra, apparently a day or two, side of railroad above red house. Yarrow. P.M. — To Clintonia Swamp and Pond. Saw a black snake, dead, tour feet three inches long, slate-colored beneath. Saw what was called a California cat which a colored man brought home from California, — an animal at least a third smaller than a cat and shaped more like a polecat or weasel, brown-gray, with a cat-like tail of alternate black and white rings, very large cars, and eyes which were prominent, long body like a weasel, and sleeps with its head between its fore paws, curling itself about; a rank smell to it. It was lost several days in our woods, and was caught again in a tree; about a crow’s nest.35 Ranunculus repens, perhaps a day or two; channelled peduncle and spreading calyx and conspicuously spotted leaves. The leaves of the tall buttercup are much larger and finely cut and, as it were, peltate. Pickerel are not easily detected, — such is their color, — as if they were transparent. Vetch. I see now green high blueberries, and gooseberries in Hubbard’s Close, as well as shad-bush berries and strawberries. In this dark, cellar-like maple swamp are scattered at pretty regular intervals tufts of green ferns, Osmunda cinnamomea, above the dead brown leaves, broad, tapering fronds, curving over on every side from a compact centre, now three or four feet high. Wood frogs skipping over the dead leaves, whose color they resemble. Clintonia. Medeola. The last may be earlier. I am surprised to find arethusas abundantly out in Hubbard’s Close, maybe two or three days, though not yet at Arethusa Meadow, probably on account of the recent freshet. It is so leafless that it shoots up unexpectedly. It is all color, a little hook of purple flame projecting from the meadow into the air. Some are comparatively pale. This high-colored plant shoots up suddenly, all flower, in meadows where it is wet walking. A superb flower. Cotton-grass here also, probably two or three days for the same reason. Eriophorum polystachyon var. latifolium, having rough peduncles. The twigs of the dwarf willow, now gone to seed, are thickly invested with cotton, containing little green seed- vessels, like excrement of caterpillars, and the shrubs look at a little distance like sand cherries in full bloom. These are among the downy seeds that fly. Found a ground-robin’s nest, under a tuft of dry sedge which the winter had bent clown, in sprout-land on the side of Heywood Peak, perfectly concealed, with two whitish eggs very thickly sprinkled with brown; made of coarse grass and weed stems and lined with a few hairs and stems of the mahogany moss. The pink is certainly one of the finest of our flowers and deserves the place it holds in my memory. It is now in its prime on the south side of the Heywood Peak, where it grows luxuriantly in dense rounded tufts or hemispheres, raying out on every side and presenting an even and regular surface of expanded flowers. I count in one such tuft, of an oval form twelve inches by eight, some three hundred fully open and about three times as many buds, — more than a thousand in all. Some tufts consist wholly of white ones with a very faint tinge of pink. This flower is as elegant in form as in color, though it is not fragrant. It is associated in my mind with the first heats of summer, or [those] which announce its near approach. Few plants are so worthy of cultivation. The shrub oak pincushion (?) galls are larger, whiter, and less compact than those of the white oak. I find the linnaea, and budded, in Stow’s Wood by Deep Cut. Sweet flag. Waxwork to-morrow. I see my umbrella toadstool on the hillside has already pierced the ground.

CAT 35. Ringtail (Bassariscus astutus) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring-tailed_Cat HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

Our national birthday, Tuesday the 4th of July: This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 50th birthday.

Rowland Hussey Macy (1822-1919) had gotten started in retail in 1851 with a dry goods store in downtown Haverhill. Macy’s policy from the very first was “His goods are bought for cash, and will be sold for the same, at a small advance.” On this date Macy’s 1st parade marched down the main drag of the little New England village. It was too hot and only about a hundred people viewed his celebration. In 1858 Macy would sell this store and, with the financial backing of Caleb Dustin Hunking of Haverhill, relocate the retail business to easier pickings in New-York. (So, have you heard of the New York Macy’s department store? –Have you shopped there?)

When the mayor of Wilmington, Delaware jailed City Council member Joshua S. Valentine for setting off firecrackers, he was mobbed by a group of indignant citizens. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

Henry Thoreau went at “8 A.M. –To Framingham.”

At this abolitionist picnic celebrating our nation’s birthday and the Declaration of Independence, attended by some 600, a man the Standard described as “a sort of literary recluse,” name of Henry David Thoreau, declared for dissolution of the federal union.

Sojourner Truth was another of the speakers, although we do not know whether she spoke before of after Thoreau (the newspaper reporter who was present failed entirely to notice that Sojourner took part), nor HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS whether he sat on the platform beside her. Stephen Symonds Foster and Abby Kelley Foster were present

(Abby probably brought her daughter Alla to the pic nic, for it was always a family affair, with swings for the children, boating on a nearby pond, and a convenient refreshment stand since the day would be quite hot, HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS and confined her remarks to an appeal for funds), and Lucy Stone, as were Wendell Phillips, Charles Lenox

Remond, and William Lloyd Garrison.36

When the meeting in the shady amphitheater was called to order at 10:45AM by Charles Jackson Francis, the first order of business had to be election of officials for the day. Garrison became the event’s president and HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS Francis Jackson of Boston, William Whiting of Concord, Effingham L. Capron of Worcester, Dora M. Taft of Framingham, Charles Lenox Remond of Salem, John Pierpont of Medford, Charles F. Hovey of Gloucester, Jonathan Buffum of Lynn, Asa Cutler of Connecticut, and Andrew T. Foss of New Hampshire its vice presidents. The Reverend Samuel J. May, Jr., of Leicester, William H. Fish of Milford, and R.F. Wallcut of Boston became its secretaries. Abby Kelley Foster, Ebenezer D. Draper, Lewis Ford, Mrs. Olds of Ohio, Lucy Stone, and Nathaniel B. Spooner would constitute its Finance Committee. Garrison then read from Scripture, the assembly sang an Anti-Slavery hymn, and Dr. Henry O. Stone issued the Welcome.

36. There was an active agent of the Underground railroad on that platform, we may note, and it was not the gregarious Truth but the “sort of literary recluse” Thoreau. That is, please allow me to state the following in regard to the existence of eyewitness testimony, that the Thoreau home in Concord was in the period prior to the Civil War a waystation on the Underground Railway: we might reappraise Thoreau’s relationship with Sojourner Truth, of whom it has been asserted by Ebony Magazine that she was a “Leader of the Underground Railroad Movement” (February 1987), by asking whether there is any comparable eyewitness testimony, that Truth ever was involved in that risky and illegal activity? Her biographer refers to her as a “loose cannon,” not the sort of close-mouthed person who could be relied upon as a participant in a quite secret and quite illegal and quite dangerous endeavor, and considers also that no such evidence has ever been produced. The Thoreaus, in contrast, not only were never regarded as loose in this manner, but were, we know, regarded as utterly reliable — and in the case of the Thoreau family home the evidence for total involvement exists and is quite conclusive. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS I will quote a couple of paragraphs about the course of the meeting from the Foster biography, AHEAD OF HER TIME:

Heading the finance committee, Abby made her usual appeal for funds, Stephen called on the friends of liberty to resist the Fugitive Slave Law, “each one with such weapons as he thought right and proper,” and Wendell Phillips, Sojourner Truth, and Lucy Stone held the audience in thrall with their “soul-eloquence.” After an hour’s break for refreshments Henry Thoreau castigated Massachusetts for being in the service of the Slaveholders and demanded that the state leave the Union. “I have lived for the last month –and I think that every man in Massachusetts capable of the sentiment of patriotism must have had a similar experience– with the sense of having suffered a vast and indefinite loss. I did not know what ailed me. At last it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country.” Thoreau’s speech is still reprinted, but William Lloyd Garrison provided the most dramatic moment of that balmy July day. Placing a lighted candle on the lectern, he picked up a copy of the Fugitive Slave Law and touched it to the flame. As it burned, he intoned a familiar phrase: “And let all the people say Amen.” As the shouts of “Amen” echoed, he burned the U.S. commissioner’s decision in the Burns case. Then he held a copy of the United States Constitution to the candle, proclaiming, “So perish all compromises with tyranny.” As it burned to ashes, he repeated, “And let all the people say Amen.” While the audience responded with a tremendous shout of “Amen,” he stood before them with arms extended, as if in blessing. No one who was present ever forgot the scene; it was the high point of unity among the Garrisonian abolitionists.

This biography of Abby Kelley, with its suggestion that Thoreau’s speech, which it condenses to three sentences, must have been significant because it is “still reprinted,” overlooks the fact that Thoreau had not been granted an opportunity to read his entire lecture. A contemporary comment on the speech was more accurate:

Henry Thoreau, of Concord, read portions of a racy and ably written address, the whole of which will be published in the Liberator.

That is, Thoreau delivered a 4th-of-July oration at Framingham MA on “SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS”, criticizing the governor and the chief justice of Massachusetts who were in the audience. –But, he was not HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS allowed the opportunity to read his entire essay.

The whole military force of the State is at the service of a Mr. Suttle, a slaveholder from Virginia, to enable him to catch a man whom he calls his property; but not a soldier is offered to save a citizen of Massachusetts from being kidnapped! Is this what all these soldiers, all this training has been for these seventy-nine years past? Have they been trained merely to rob Mexico, and carry back fugitive slaves to their masters? These very nights, I heard the sound of a drum in our streets. There were men training still; and for what? I could with an effort pardon the cockerels of Concord for crowing still, for they, perchance, had not been beaten that morning; but I could not excuse this rub-a-dub of the “trainers.” The slave was carried back by exactly such as these, i.e., by the soldier, of whom the best you can say in this connection is that he is a fool made conspicuous by a painted coat.

Note that on paper, at least, if not verbally as well, he made a reference to martyrdom by hanging: “I would side with the light, and let the dark earth roll from under me, calling my mother and my brother to follow.” Here is another account of the actual speech, as opposed to what was printed later, from one who was there in the audience standing before that platform draped in mourning black:

He began with the simple words, “You have my sympathy; it is all I have to give you, but you may find it important to you.” It was impossible to associate egotism with Thoreau; we all felt that the time and trouble he had taken at that crisis to proclaim his sympathy with the “Disunionists” was indeed important. He was there a representative of Concord, of science and letters, which could not quietly pursue their tasks while slavery was trampling down the rights of mankind. Alluding to the Boston commissioner who had surrendered Anthony Burns, Edward G. Loring, Thoreau said, “The fugitive’s case was already decided by God, –not Edward G. God, but simple God.” This was said with such serene unconsciousness of anything shocking in it that we were but mildly startled. — AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMORIES, AND EXPERIENCES OF MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY (Boston MA: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), Volume I, pages 184-5. [Moncure Daniel Conway]

DISUNION ANTHONY BURNS EDWARD GREELEY LORING At the end of the morning meeting Thoreau was on the platform while Garrison, the featured speaker, burned the federal Constitution on a pewter plate as a “covenant with death” because it countenanced the return of runaway slaves to their owners — Margaret Fuller’s grandfather Timothy Fuller Sr., who had refused to HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS consent to that document when it was originally promulgated because of its ridiculous mincing about slavery, would have been proud of him! Thoreau’s inflammatory oratory was less inflammatory than addresses made on that occasion by Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Charles Lenox Remond, for their speeches drew comments but Thoreau’s did not. On our nation’s birthday the platform had been draped in black crepe as a symbol of mourning, as at a state funeral, and carried the insignia of the State of Virginia, which stood as the destination of Anthony Burns, and this insignia of the State of Virginia was decorated with — with, in magnificent irony, ribbons of triumph! Above the platform flew the flags of Kansas and Nebraska, emblematic of the detested new Kansas/Nebraska Act. As the background of all this, the flag of the United States of America was hung, but it was upside down, the symbol of distress, and it also was bordered in black, the symbol of death.

I think no great public calamity, not the death of Daniel Webster, not the death of Charles Sumner, not the loss of great battles during the War, brought such a sense of gloom over the whole State as the surrender of Anthony Burns.

Garrison placed a lighted candle on the lectern, and touched a corner of the Fugitive Slave Law to the flame. As it burned, he orated “And let all the people say Amen” and the crowd shouted “Amen!” Then he touched a corner of the US commissioner’s decision in the Burns case to the candle flame. Then he touched a corner of a copy of the federal Constitution to the candle flame, and orated “So perish all compromises with tyranny.” As the paper was reduced to ashes, he orated “And let all the people say Amen” and stood with his arms extended as if in blessing.

William Lloyd Garrison (in 1865)

Moncure Daniel Conway’s comment, later, about the moment when Garrison set the match to the constitution, HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS and the few scattered boos and hisses were drowned out by the thunderous “Amen” of the crowd, was:

That day I distinctly recognized that the antislavery cause was a religion.

In the afternoon Moncure Daniel Conway spoke, as a Virginian aristocrat, a child of position and privilege. Look at me! It was his 1st antislavery attempt at identity politics grandstanding. Leaning on the concept, he insisted that the force of public opinion in his home state was so insane and so hotheaded that every white man with a conscience, “or even the first throbbings of a conscience,” was a slave to this general proslavery public posture. He offered that to resist this Southern certitude, each Northerner would need to “abolish slavery in his heart.”37 AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II

(So, you see, the white man has been self-enslaved: the problem is not so much that slavery harms the black man as that slavery harms the white man, shudder.)

Then Wendell Phillips spoke.

37. We may note how different this was from the Reverend Theodore Parker’s “kill the Negro in us.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS We know that Sojourner Truth spoke from that mourning-draped platform after a white man from Virginia had described his being thrown in jail there on account of his antislavery convictions, because in her speech she commented on this: how helpful it was for white people to obtain some experience of oppression. She warned that “God would yet execute his judgments upon the white people for their oppression and cruelty.” She asked why it was that white people hated black people so. She said that the white people owed the colored race a debt so huge that they would never be able to pay it back — but would have to repent so as to have this debt forgiven them. Nell Painter has characterized this message as “severe and anguished,” and has commented that despite the cheers and applause, “Her audiences preferred not to grapple with all she had to say.” Her humor must have been such, Painter infers, as to allow her white listeners to exempt themselves from this very general denunciation:

They did not hear wrath against whites, but against the advocates of slavery. It is understandable, no doubt, that Truth’s audiences, who wanted so much to love this old black woman who had been a slave, found it difficult to fathom the depths of her bitterness.

Carleton Mabee’s BLACK FREEDOM

Americans at large often held the abolitionists responsible for the war. They argued that the abolitionists’ long agitation, strident as it often was, had antagonized the South into secession, thus beginning the war, and that the abolitionists’ insistence that the war should not end until all slavery had been abolished kept the war going. In 1863 the widely read New York Herald made the charge devastatingly personal. It specified that by being responsible for the war, each abolitionist had in effect already killed one man and permanently disabled four others. … While William Lloyd Garrison preferred voluntary emancipation, during the war he came to look with tolerance on the abolition of slavery by military necessity, saying that from seeming evil good may come. Similarly, the Garrisonian-Quaker editor, Oliver Johnson, while also preferring voluntary emancipation, pointed out that no reform ever triumphed except through mixed motives. But the Garrisonian lecturer Pillsbury was contemptuous of such attitudes. Freeing the slaves by military necessity would be of no benefit to the slave, he said in 1862, and the next year when the Emancipation Proclamation was already being put into effect, he said that freeing the slaves by military necessity could not create permanent peace. Parker Pillsbury won considerable support for his view from abolitionist meetings and from abolitionist leaders as well. Veteran Liberator writer Edwin Percy Whipple insisted that “true welfare” could come to the American people “only through a willing promotion of justice and freedom.” Henry C. Wright repeatedly said that only ideas, not bullets, could permanently settle the question of slavery. The recent Garrisonian convert, the young orator Ezra Heywood, pointed out that a government that could abolish slavery as a military necessity had no antislavery principles and could therefore re-establish slavery if circumstances required it. The Virginia aristocrat-turned-abolitionist, Moncure Daniel Conway, had misgivings that if emancipation did not come before it became a fierce necessity, it would not reflect true benevolence and hence could not produce true peace. The Philadelphia wool merchant, Quaker Alfred H. Love, asked, “Can so sublime a virtue as … freedom … be the offspring of so corrupt a parentage as war?” The long-time abolitionist Abby Kelley Foster –the speak-inner and Underground Railroader– predicted flatly, if the slave is freed only out of consideration for the safety of the Union, “the hate of the colored race will still continue, and the poison of that wickedness will destroy us as a nation.” Amid the searing impact of the war –the burning fields, the mangled bodies, the blood-splattered hills and fields– a few abolitionists had not forgotten their fundamental belief that to achieve humanitarian reform, particularly if it was to be thorough and permanent reform, the methods used to achieve it must be consistent with the nature of the reform. … What abolitionists often chose to brush aside was that after the war most blacks would still be living in the South, among the same Confederates whom they were now trying to kill. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

July 5, Wednesday: The following item has been extracted from page 2, column 2 of the Boston Commonwealth of this date by Bradley P. Dean, to add to our understanding of the context for Henry Thoreau’s delivery of “SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS” during the previous day, on the mourning-crepe-draped platform of the 4th of July commemoration at the Harmony Grove in Framingham MA:

ANTI-SLAVERY CELEBRATION AT FRAMINGHAM A meeting of Anti-Slavery people, called under the auspices of the Mass. Anti-Slavery Society, was held at Framingham yesterday. A beautiful grove near the lake, furnished a fine place for the meeting. Many people entertained themselves by taking a sail upon the lake. About two thousand persons were present, extra trains being there from Boston and Worcester. Mr. [William Lloyd] Garrison presided, and speeches were made by him, Wendell Phillips, C. L. Remond, Lucy Stone, John Pierpont, S.S. Foster, John C. Cluer, and others. At the close of Mr. Garrison’s speech he burned the Fugitive Slave Act, Commissioner Loring’s decision and the Constitution of the United States. The burning of the Slave Act and Loring’s decision was received with decided approbation; but the burning of the Constitution was witnessed with disgust and indignation by a large number of those who were assembled, some of whom vented their feelings by hisses and ou[t]cries.

RESISTING THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW JOHN PIERPONT HDT WHAT? INDEX

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It is no more than fair to state that Mr. Garrison said that he did not do this as the act of the meeting, but as his own individual expression of opinion[.] But this furnishes no excuse for the proceeding. By the printed notice of the meeting, all “friends of Impartial Freedom and Universal Emancipation,” “all who reject with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man,” were invited to be present at Framingham. Under this invitation, anti-slavery men, who hold that the Constitution of the United States furnishes no aid whatever to slavery and that under it, the most radical anti-slavery action is legal and proper, had a right to be present, without having their feelings and principles insulted by such a performance. We speak now only of the act of discourtesy: whether it was worth while to perform an act, at this time, which could gratify only a few men, and must inevitably tend to increase the odium under which all true anti-slavery men have to labor, is another question which we do not now discuss. We take the occasion, speaking as we have no doubt we do, in behalf of a very large majority of the “friends of impartial freedom and universal emancipation,” in this community, to repudiate this act of Mr. Garrison’s, and say that they have no sympathy with it or approved of it.

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON WENDELL PHILLIPS LUCY STONE STEPHEN S. FOSTER

At this last moment Henry Thoreau would be adding admonitions to avoid despair and desperate haste to Chapter 1 of his WALDEN manuscript. To me, it seems likely that he did this because of Mr. Garrison’s ill- advised act of desperation on that black-mourning-bunting-draped platform. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1855

During this year the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson sailed with his wife to the Portuguese island of Fayal and back, for her health. There is in existence a letter by the Reverend, in which he describes a trip to Mt. Ktaadn taken in this year by himself, Theophilus Brown, and eight others from Worcester. The five women of this party were wearing bloomers and sensible shoes, and the native guide reportedly commented “There’s

no better grit to be scared up anywhere than them women have.” The Reverend Higginson, and Dr. Seth Rogers,38 also led groups of armed men during this year from Worcester to the Kansas Territory. I don’t know whether the trip to Ktaadn was before or after the Kansas trip. Wendell Phillips contributed $100.00 to purchase carbines for anti-slavery white people emigrating to the Kansas Territory. The Reverend Adin Ballou’s

Hopedale Community of Christian non-violenters near Worcester sent a party to establish a colony for peace, about 40 miles north of St. Paul, in a location called “Union Grove” near Monticello, Minnesota; however, weather, and difficulties of travel and transport and funding along the way, forced that peace party to sell its wagons and livestock and possessions and return to their origin with but the clothing on their backs. (Or, perhaps, God forced them to turn back because of the unrighteousness of their temperance.) Because the congregation of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher funded the award of one Bible and one Sharps carbine to each member of an anti-slavery group emigrating to the Kansas territory, these deadly ten-rounds-per-

38. Any relation to the Nathaniel Peabody Rogers of Concord, New Hampshire, who put out the Herald of Freedom prior to his death in 1846, and about whom Henry Thoreau wrote in the last issue of THE DIAL, or to the Elizabeth Rogers Mason Cabot who so appreciated WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS? This Dr. Seth Rogers was a walking and canoeing companion of Thoreau’s. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS minute assault weapons would become known in succeeding years as “Beecher’s Bibles”: The most warlike demonstration, and one which excited the greatest attention, was at New Haven. Charles B. Lines, a deacon of a New Haven congregation, had enlisted a company of 79 emigrants. A meeting was held in the church shortly before their departure, for the purpose of raising funds. Many clergymen and many of the Yale College faculty were present. The leader of the party said that Sharps rifles were lacking, and they were needed for self-defense. After an earnest address from Henry Ward Beecher, the subscription began. Professor Silliman started it with one Sharps rifle; the pastor of the church gave the second; other gentlemen and some ladies followed the example. As fifty was the number wanted, Beecher said that if twenty-five were pledged on the spot, Plymouth Church would furnish the rest. Previous to this meeting, he had declared that for the slave- holders of Kansas the Sharps rifle was a greater moral agency than the Bible; and from that time the favorite arms of the Northern emigrants became known as “Beecher’s Bibles.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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John Brown reads his Bible: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS According to this textbook, the Southern white “Christians” were organizing in a similar manner: Yet one notable company was raised through the energy and sacrifice of Colonel Buford, of Alabama. He issued an appeal for 300 industrious and sober men, capable of bearing arms and willing to fight for the cause of the South. He would himself contribute $20,000, and he agreed to give each man who enlisted 40 acres of good Kansas land and support him for a year. He sold his slaves to provide the money he had promised. Owing to the fervent appeals of the press, contributions from many quarters were obtained, and the enthusiasm was not confined to the men. A daughter of South Carolina sent to the editor of a newspaper a gold chain which would realize enough to furnish one man, and she begged him to let the ladies of her neighborhood know when more money was needed, for then, she wrote, “we will give up our personal embellishments and expose them for sale.” Buford raised 280 men from South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Many of them were the poor relations and dependents of the wealthy slave-holders; others were poor whites. Some were intelligent, and afterwards proved worthy citizens; but the majority were ignorant and brutal, and made fit companions for the Missouri border ruffians, by whom they were received with open arms. The day that Buford’s battalion started from Montgomery, they marched to the Baptist church. The Methodist minister solemnly invoked the divine blessing on their enterprise; the Baptist pastor gave Buford a finely bound Bible, and said that a subscription had been raised to present each emigrant with a copy of the Holy Scriptures. Three or four thousand citizens gathered on the river bank to bid them farewell, and there were not lacking “the bright smiles and happy faces” of the ladies to cheer them on. A distinguished citizen made them an address, saying that “on them rested the future welfare of the South; they were armed with the Bible, a weapon more potent than Sharpe’s rifles; and, in the language of Lord Nelson, ‘every man was expected to do his duty.’" The South Carolina contingent had not, on leaving home, been provided with Bibles; it had there been proclaimed that all the equipment needed was a good common country rifle. Further along in this text from which I am quoting, there are presumptive assertions, such as one on page 279 attesting that Sharps rifles were shipped West inside crates stamped BIBLES. One may cast doubt upon such tall textbook tales without contesting the existence of the Sharps repeating rifle, or contending that no churchly congregations contributed money toward their purchase, or impugning the fact that these weapons of remote rapid death were in the period humorously (!) being referred to, among the people humorously referred to as “Christians,” as “Beecher’s Bibles.” It has never to my knowledge been corroborated, that actual boxes of these rifles actually were shipped west, actually stenciled with the word BIBLES on the outside — it has not to my awareness been substantiated, that this was something more than merely a humorous (!) manner of talking HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS about this righteous dealing of death.

After they would take Captain John Brown’s Sharps rifle away from him at Harpers Ferry, they would allow this little boy to pose with it. Grow up, son, and be a Christian like us: kill people, own slaves.

This is the Minié .58-inch bullet that was being pioneered during this year at the Harpers Ferry Arsenal by armorer James H. Burton:

A nice “unintended feature” of this bullet being introduced was that since it was hollow behind, the shooter could prepare for battle by rubbing it in feces. That would ensure that any limb struck by the bullet would need to be amputated, because of the probability of sepsis from even a flesh wound that did not shatter bone. (In other words, bacteriological warfare, but initiated from the bottom up rather than from the top down.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS For Righteousness’ Sake, by Friend John Greenleaf Whittier THE age is dull and mean. Men creep, Not walk; with blood too pale and tame To pay the debt they owe to shame; Buy cheap, sell dear; eat, drink, and sleep Down-pillowed, deaf to moaning want; Pay tithes for soul-insurance; keep Six days to Mammon, one to Cant. In such a time, give thanks to God, That somewhat of the holy rage With which the prophets in their age On all its decent seemings trod, Has set your feet upon the lie, That man and ox and soul and clod Are market stock to sell and buy! The hot words from your lips, my own, To caution trained, might not repeat; But if some tares among the wheat Of generous thought and deed were sown, No common wrong provoked your zeal; The silken gauntlet that is thrown In such a quarrel rings like steel. The brave old strife the fathers saw For freedom calls for men again Like those who battled not in vain For England’s Charter, Alfred’s law; And right of speech and trial just Wage in your name their ancient war With venal courts and perjured trust. God’s ways seem dark, but, soon or late, They touch the shining hills of day; The evil cannot brook delay, The good can well afford to wait. Give ermined knaves their hour of crime; Ye have the future grand and great, The safe appeal of Truth to Time!

August: In New-York and Albany, the firm of Miller, Orton & Mulligan was publishing the 464 pages of Frederick Douglass’s expanded self-presentation in a cloth binding, retitled as MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM and this time preferring not to employ another to do the actual writing:39 I see, too, that there are special reasons why I should write my own biography, in preference to employing another to do it. Not only is slavery on trial, but unfortunately, the enslaved people are also on trial. It is alleged that they are, naturally,

39.The 100 pages of his NARRATIVE of 1845 brought up to date and expanded as a 350-page treatment. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS inferior.

It has been alleged that the above passage from the preface of the expanded narrative amounts to Douglass’s laying a claim that he himself had written down the originary bestselling NARRATIVE, that had appeared in print bearing his holograph signature as of 1845. However, if he was making such a claim a decade after the fact, this would be the very first time that he had ever attempted such a claim. –And that’s not at all what this passage on a close reading either asserts, or implies. Those white scholars who have supposed that this passage from 1855 may readily be made retroactive to what had taken place a decade earlier are begging the question, or, they are indulging in a fantasy. The above passage neither asserts nor implies that in the preparation of the 1845 narrative, no other, no ghostwriter, had been employed. It implies precisely what it asserts, which is exactly the opposite. My religious views on the subject of resisting my master, had suffered a severe shock, by the savage persecution to which I had been subjected, and my hands were no longer tied by my religion.... A man, without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even this it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS Douglass’s frontispiece this time was engraved from a Daguerreotype, and the engraving was done by J.C. Battre. The holograph signature “Frederick Douglass” seems this time by a different hand than in the case of the signature used beneath the frontispiece in the 1st edition of 1845 (the one that had been opposite the “Written by Himself” remark on the facing page). HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS If both signatures are indeed Frederick Douglass’s, then in 1845 he had been writing carefully in a copybook standard style whereas a decade later he had created a signature style that was quite a bit more comfortable and individualistic.

Maurice S. Lee40 has cautioned, on his page 97, against our taking at face value some of the claims Douglass makes in this volume: According to MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM, Douglass’s conflict with [John] Collins and [William Lloyd] Garrison came after his first speech before a white audience in 1841 and prior to the publication of his first autobiography in 1845. However, some scholars argue that MY BONDAGE retrospectively exaggerates Garrisonian censure by projecting 1855 quarrels onto Douglass’s

40. Lee, Maurice S. SLAVERY, PHILOSOPHY, AND AMERICAN LITERATURE 1830-1860. Cambridge UP, 2005 HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS earlier life. The introduction to Douglass’s MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM was provided by his friend Dr. James McCune Smith, a black “gentleman and scholar.” Smith took this opportunity to derogate the letters that had been provided by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips as prefatory material for the 1st edition, the THE NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. WRITTEN BY HIMSELF of 1845. These letters he saw as having suggested that Douglass was deficient in rational power: With a severity reflecting the split between Douglass and the American Antislavery Society, Smith charges the white abolitionists with racism, “[T]hese gentlemen, although proud of Frederick Douglass, failed to fathom, and bring out to the light of day, the highest qualities of his mind; the force of their own education stood in their own way: they did not delve into the mind of a colored man for capacities which the pride of race led them to believe to be restricted to their own Saxon blood.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1856

March 15, Saturday: The Reverend Samuel J. May, Jr. wrote to Mrs. Elizabeth Buffum Chase: I am desirous to have Stephen S. Foster go into R. Island, as a lecturer for a few weeks. He has just returned home from some successful labours in New Hampshire. I prefer to confer with you on the subject, before laying the matter before the Executive Committee. A meeting of that committee is to be held here on Monday morning, and if you could conveniently give me a reply to this, by that time, I shall be much obliged to you. There are, we all know, “many men, many minds,” and there is a class of them, with whom Mr. Foster is better able to deal than any other person I know. Probably Wendell Phillips will attend the R. I. Convention if held. I am not authorized yet to promise him. Asa Fairbanks proposes a three-days convention (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday). What think you of that arrangement? Phillips would not give so much time to it as that, but we might have other speakers for Friday and Saturday morning, when Phillips would come (if he can come at all), and remain through. We will have a good convention, if we have any. I think S.S.F. can direct attention to it with more effect than either Brown or S. Holley, I mean, in the way of securing attendance. RHODE ISLAND HDT WHAT? INDEX

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March 27, Thursday: Death of Charles Jones Dunbar, Henry Thoreau’s favorite uncle, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau’s eccentric brother.

The Reverend Samuel J. May, Jr. wrote from the Anti-Slavery Office to Mrs. Elizabeth Buffum Chase: As W. Phillips can give no time to the R.I. Convention, until the last week in April, we have, after conferring with Providence friends, fixed upon the 25th, 26th, and 27th of that month as the days. A. Fairbanks gives me no encouragement about the formation of a State Society. It seems to me to be, like Immediate Emancipation itself, one of the first things to be done. Action, in this country, to be effective, must be organized. Nor is it a very numerous Society that is wanted. We are not politicians –thank God– I hope we are not “Know nothings” in any sense; we are not striving to form a great Lodge or body, every man of which shall talk, and move, and vote, to order. I began my note chiefly to say that I propose appointing a meeting for S.S. Foster at Pawtucket on Sunday, April 6th, and I think he will stop and see you on the Saturday evening previous, as you desired. I am not sure who the best person in Pawtucket for me to write to is, since Daniel Mitchell has gone. Will you give me your opinion as to the three best places for S.S.F. to spend the three Sundays in, which are all he can give to R.I.? WENDELL PHILLIPS ASA FAIRBANKS RHODE ISLAND

STEPHEN S. FOSTER

March 27. Uncle Charles died this morning, about midnight, aged seventy-six. The frost is now entirely out in some parts of the New Burying-Ground, the sexton tells me, - half-way up the hill which slopes to the south, unless it is bare of snow, he says. In our garden, where it chances to be bare, two or more rods from the house, I was able to dig through the slight frost. In another place near by I could not. The river is now open in reaches of twenty or thirty rods, where the ice has disappeared by melting. Elijah Wood, Senior, about seventy, tells me he does not remember that the river was ever frozen so long, nor that so much snow lay on the ground so long. People do not remember when there was so much old snow on the ground at this date. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1857

The mulatto Lewis Sheridan Leary went to Oberlin, Ohio to live.

(He would marry there and make the acquaintance of John Brown in Cleveland. To go to Harpers Ferry, he would leave behind his wife with a 6-month-old child at Oberlin, she being in ignorance of the purpose of his trip. He was given funds to go from Oberlin to Chambersburg in the company of his nephew John Anderson Copeland, Jr., a student at Oberlin College. He would get isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi

in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the three men would make a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they would get themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, he would be taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning. He would be able to dictate messages to his family and is reported as saying “I am ready to die.” The Leary child would subsequently be educated by James Redpath and Wendell Phillips.)

Charles Plummer Tidd joined John Brown’s party at Tabor, Kansas. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(He would become one of the followers of “Shubel Morgan” who would return to Kansas in 1858 to raid into Missouri. During the Winter 1857-1858 encampment of the Brown forces in the Iowa Territory, he would “ruin” a Quaker girl and the other members of the team would need to sneak him away from Springdale IA during the night. Nevertheless, the group would obtain some recruits not overly impressed with the Peace Testimony of George Fox from among the residents of this town, such as the brothers Barclay Coppoc and Edwin Coppoc. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Tidd and John E. Cook would be particularly warm friends. He opposed the attack on Harpers Ferry but nevertheless took part both in the raid on the planter Washington’s home and on the federal arsenal itself, escaped, and made his way on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. He and John Brown’s son Owen Brown would find work and safety, under assumed names, on an oil well in the vicinity of Crawford County, Pennsylvania. He would visit Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada and take part in the planning for the rescue of Aaron D. Stevens and Albert Hazlett while the Mason Commission of the Congress was presuming that he had been killed in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. On July 19, 1861 he would be able to enlist under the name “Charles Plummer” and would become a 1st Sergeant of the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers. On February 8, 1862 he would die of fever aboard the transport Northerner during the battle of Roanoke Island, a battle he had particularly wished to take part in because ex-Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the nemesis of the Harpers Ferry raiders, was in command of the Confederates. Charles Plummer Tidd’s grave is #40 in the National Cemetery in New Berne, North Carolina.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

The American Anti-Slavery Society of New-York put out a collection of anti-slavery tracts by Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and Charles Calistus Burleigh, entitled NO SLAVE HUNTING IN THE OLD BAY STATE: AN APPEAL TO THE PEOPLE AND LEGISLATURE OF MASSACHUSETTS.

January 24, Tuesday: The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson spoke in Concord in opposition to Henry Thoreau’s “prejudice for Adamhood.”

After the lecture, the Reverend Higginson and Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott and Anna Maria Whiting, walked home with Waldo Emerson to continue the discussion. Higginson’s emphasis was on the making of a contrast between a state of barbarism and a state of civilization, but Thoreau’s was on the use of the figure of the Indian to provide needed continuity between the human of civilization and the idea of nature. It was disjunctors vs conjunctors that night. Bronson Alcott’s record of the conversation amounts to the following: “My wife accompanies me to the Lyceum this evening, and we hear Higginson lecture on Barbarism and Civilization. He defends civilization against Thoreau’s prejudice for Adamhood, and celebrates its advantages — of health chiefly, among the rest. After the lecture Thoreau and I go to Emerson’s and talk further on it. Anna Whiting is there. I ask if civilization is not the ascendency of sentiment over brute force, the sway of ideas over animalism, of mind over matter. The more animated the brain, the higher is the man or creature on the scale of intelligence. The barbarian has no society; this begins in sympathy, the perception and sentiment of personality HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS binding the general in one. Thoreau defends the Indian from the doctrine of being lost or exterminated, and thinks he holds a place between civilized man and nature, and must hold it. I say that he goes along with the woods and the beasts, who retreat before and are superseded by man and the planting of orchards and gardens. The savage succumbs to the superiority of the white man. No civilized man as yet, nor refined nations, for all are brute largely still. Man’s victory over nature and himself is to overcome! the brute beast in him.”

Elizabeth Buffum Chace wrote in a letter that “Last night, Wendell Phillips lectured at Lonsdale, & he came here, and we carried him up, and then he returned with us, and spent the night. We had a nice time. He told us about his visit to North Elba, when he went with the body of John Brown; relating many little incidents which were not published in the papers.”

January 24: 2 P.M.—To Tarbell, river, via railroad. Thermometer 46. Sky thinly overcast, growing thicker at last as if it would rain. Wind northwest. See a large flock of lesser redpolls, eating the seeds of the birch (and perhaps alder [Vide the 29th]) in Dennis Swamp by railroad. They are distinct enough from the goldfinch, their note more shelly and general as they fly, and they are whiter, without the black wings, beside that some have the crimson head or head and breast. They alight on the birches, then swarm on the snow beneath, busily picking up the seed in the copse. The Assabet is open above Derby’s Bridge as far as I go or see, probably to the factory, and I know not how far below Derby’s. It opens up here sooner than below the Assabet Bath to its mouth. The blue vervain stands stiffly and abundant in one place, with much rather large brown seed in it. It is in good condition. Scare a shrike from an apple tree. He flies low over the meadow, somewhat like a woodpecker, and alights near the top twig of another apple tree. See a hawk sail over meadow and woods; not a hen-hawk; possibly a marsh hawk. A grasshopper on the snow. The droppings of a skunk left on a rock, perhaps at the beginning of winter, were full of grasshoppers’ legs. As I stand at the south end of J.P.B.’s moraine, I watch six tree sparrows, which come from the wood and alight and feed on the ground, which is there bare. They are only two or three rods from me, and are incessantly HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS picking and eating an abundance of the fine grass (short-cropped pasture grass) on that knoll, as a hen or goose does. I see the stubble an inch or two long in their bills, and how they stuff it down. Perhaps they select chiefly the green parts. So they vary their fare and there is no danger of their starving. These six hopped round for five minutes over a space a rod square before I put them to flight, and then I noticed, in a space only some four feet square in that rod, at least eighteen droppings (white at one end, the rest more slate-colored). So wonderfully active are they in their movements, both external and internal. They do not suffer for want of a good digestion, surely. NO doubt they eat some earth or gravel too. So do partridges eat a great deal. These birds, though they have bright brown and huff backs, hop about amid the little inequalities of the pasture almost unnoticed, such is their color and so humble are they. Solomon thus describes the return of Spring (Song of Solomon, ii, 10-12):— “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. “For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; “The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.”

February 6, Monday: Henry Thoreau was being written to by the conspirator and publisher James Redpath, who was

presumably in New-York, passing along a message that was to be handed surreptitiously to Franklin Benjamin Sanborn in Concord. Redpath was keeping his address secret so that if Thoreau were subpoenaed by the congressional committee, he would be able to testify that he truly did not know. Redpath had directed the printers to give him proofs of Thoreau’s lecture “A Plea for Captain John Brown” and his “Remarks at Concord on the Day of the Execution of John Brown,” and would check their typesetting before ECHOES OF HARPER’S FERRY got printed. (The “Private Life” to which the letter makes reference was another book to go through the presses during this year, THE PUBLIC LIFE OF CAPT. JOHN BROWN: WITH AN AUTO-BIOGRAPHY OF HIS CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH, a book which Redpath was dedicating to Wendell Phillips, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry D. Thoreau): THE PUBLIC LIFE OF BROWN

Febry 6, 1860 Henry D Thoreau

Dear Sir— If you do not desire to know my address, (which you had better not know if you have any prospect of being summoned to Washington) please hand the enclose knot to F.B.S. who, per- haps, may wish to see me to consult as to our future course. I have been regularly summoned, but have resolutely refused to obey the summons; & am in the country, now, to have quiet until I shall complete the forth coming Volume. I directed your Lecture to be sent to you for correction; which—I am told—has been done. Can you furnish me with an a/c of the B. of B.J? I was very conscious of the defects HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS of the a/c I copied; but as I recollect very little about the B, I cd not undertake to describe it from my own resources. I shall however, yet obtain the testimony of the eye witnesses; as I have all their names (the “Orderly Book” that you allude to) & will either see or write to every man who was present, as soon as I can get their addresses, or leave Mass.

Page 2 for K. Terrtory I shall probably visit the ground in the Spring. For the Private Life I have already a number of very Interesting Letters from Kansas men,—just such plain, matter of fact statements as you are greedy for, & which, better than any rhetorical estimates of John Brown’s character or career, exhibit to the intelligent reader the Spirit & life of the old Warrior. The very numerous faults of language (there have been very few of facts) & the im- perfect estimates of character which disfigure my Book warn me—& I will take heed the hint—to be more time in fixing another original volume. As for my forth coming Book, as it is an Edited volume only, I have nothing to fear in that a/c. I have not even yet attempted to arrange my voluminous Newspaper Materials, & do not see that I shall be able to commence it for some to come weeks yet. This is my apology or reason rather for neglecting (in appear ance) my promise with reference to Miss Thoreau’s Scrap Book. I find that the extracts that

Page 3 have made in my Book inttr for yr Lecture were incorrectly reported. Do you desire that they shall be altered? If so, please return the volume I sent you properly marked; & I will return you as many Vols as you desire with HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS the latest corrections. The 33d thousand has been printed & contains many corrections not in the Edition I sent you. The prospect is that it will reach over 50000 at least. I think it will do good among the masses; that is all I tried to do—for the educated have teachers enough; & over them I do not aspire to have influence. Remember me to Mrs Thoreau & thank her, in my own name & in behalf of my Wife, also—for her kind invitation; which we shall, as soon as possible, accept. Very trly Yours, Jas Redpath

February 6. To Cambridge. A rainy day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(While Thoreau was in Cambridge, the records of the Harvard Library indicate that he checked out Claudius Ælianus’s 5th-Century collection of miscellaneous anecdotes SOPHISTAE VARIAE HISTORIAE LIBRI XIV in a 1713 edition, the Reverend Edward Topsell’s THE HISTORY OF FOUR-FOOTED BEASTS AND SERPENTS, and Dr. Pierre Belon’s L’HISTOIRE DE LA NATVRE DES OYSEAUX AVEC LEVRS DESCRIPTIONS; & NAÏFS PORTRAICTS RETIREZ DU NATUREL: ESCRIT EN SEPT LIVRES. He would make extracts from the book on birds by Dr. Belon in his 2d Commonplace Book.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS February 21, Tuesday: The New York Evening Post carried, on page 4 under “New Publications,” a review of James Redpath’s THE PUBLIC LIFE OF CAPT. JOHN BROWN: WITH AN AUTO-BIOGRAPHY OF HIS CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH that noted that the book was dedicated “to Wendell Phillips, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry D. Thoreau, defenders of the faithful, who, when the mob shouted ‘Madman!’ said ‘Saint!’”

THE PUBLIC LIFE OF BROWN

Feb. 21. 2 P.M. — Thermometer forty-six and snow rapidly melting. It melts first and fastest where the snow is so thin that it feels the heat reflected from the ground beneath. I see now, in the ruts in sand on hills in the road, those interesting ripples which I only notice to advantage in very shallow running water, a phenomenon almost, as it were, confined to melted snow running in ruts in the road in a thaw, especially in the spring. It is a spring phenomenon. The water, meeting with some slight obstacle, ever and anon appears to shoot across diagonally to the opposite side, while ripples from the opposite side intersect the former, producing countless regular and sparkling diamond-shaped ripples.

If you hold your head low and look along up such a stream in a right light, it is seen to have a regularly braided surface, tress-like, preserving its figures as if it were solid, though the stream is seen pulsing high through the middle ripples in the thread of the stream. The ripples are as rectilinear as ice-crystals. When you see the sparkling stream from melting snow in the ruts, know that then is to be seen this braid of the spring. It was their very admiration of nature that made the ancients attribute those magnanimous qualities which are rarely to be found in man to the lion as her masterpiece, and it is only by a readiness, or rather preparedness, to see more than appears in a creature that one can appreciate what is manifest. It is remarkable how many berries are the food of birds, mice, etc. Perhaps I may say that all are, however hard or bitter. This I am inclined to say, judging of what I do not know from what I do. For example, mountain-ash, prinos, skunk-cabbage, sumach, chokecherry, cornels probably, elder-berry, viburnums, rose hips, arum, poke, thorn, barberry, grapes, tupelo, amphicarpaea, thistle-down, bayberry (?), Cornus florida, checkerberry, BARBERRY hemlock, larch, pines, etc., birch, alder, juniper. The berries and seeds of wild plants generally, however little it is suspected by us, are the food of birds, squirrels, or mice. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 3, Monday: Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, among others, orated at the Tremont Temple in

Boston, in a meeting chaired by James Redpath and billed as a memorial for John Brown, and there was an

invasion by a group of rowdy gentlemen. They took over the platform. The Boston police, out of sympathy for these indignant gentlemen, closed the meeting and emptied the hall. The abolitionists simply moved down into the Negro Church on Joy Street. One account of the evening has it that Lydia Maria Child clapped so hard during a speech by Phillips on the topic of freedom of speech that she broke her wedding band. (A week later, Douglass would orate on freedom of speech at the Boston Music Hall.) As on other occasions, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, who was exceedingly tall and thus could look over the heads of the people in a crowd, was armed and was acting as Phillips’s bodyguard. In the issue of December 15th there would appear in Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization of New-York, an illustration of the breaking up of the meeting, engraved by Winslow Homer, entitled: “EXPULSION OF NEGROES AND ABOLITIONISTS FROM TREMONT TEMPLE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS ON DECEMBER 3, 1860”: HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS Refer to Journal 14:291-2 for an account of a conversation Henry Thoreau had on this evening, defending John Brown against Joel W. Walcott’s and Sam Staples’s charge that he “did wrong” by dying. Henry Thoreau was chilled in Hill, Massachusetts while counting the rings of a hickory stump. –He found that the tree had been sixteen inches in diameter at twelve feet above the ground, and had “112 rings distinct, the first 50 within five and three quarters inches.”

On this day President James Buchanan was delivering his annual message to the federal Congress: It is with great satisfaction I communicate the fact that since the date of my last annual message not a single slave has been imported into the United States in violation of the laws prohibiting the African slave trade. This statement is founded upon a thorough examination and investigation of the subject. Indeed, the spirit which prevailed some time since among a portion of our fellow-citizens in favor of this trade seems to have entirely subsided” (SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 36th Congress, 2d session, I, No. 1, page 24). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

Thoreau was being written to by Hobart & Robbins in Boston: Boston 3d Dec’r, 1860. Mr. Henry D. Thoreau Concord, N.H. Dr. Sir Enclosed are Nine Dollars, to pay our order of the 26th. Return the enclosed bill receipted. Yr’s Resp’y Hobart & Robbins $9.00 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Our national birthday, Thursday the 4th of July: Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: “Report of the Secretary of the Navy.” –SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 37 Cong. 1 sess. No. 1, pp. 92, 97.

A return letter informed Giuseppe Garibaldi, in Italy, that the emancipation of the American negroes was “not the intention of the Federal Government” because “to throw at once upon that country in looseness, four millions of slaves” would create “a dreadful calamity.”41 What a singularly inappropriate letter for the US government to initiate upon the anniversary of its birth as a land of freedom! Further negotiations were entrusted to Henry Shelton Sanford and George Perkins Marsh, experienced senior diplomats — exactly as if we supposed there to remain some basis for further negotiations with a gentleman of honor such as Garibaldi.

41. In fact President Abraham Lincoln’s own attitude toward an Emancipation Proclamation was that it was, if it was anything, a mere military tactic of last resort. He would become famous in American history as “The Great Emancipator” not because of any affection for the American negro but only after the course of events had caused him to begin to muse in desperation that “Things have gone from bad to worse ... until I felt that we had played our last card, and must change our tactics or lose the game!” Never was a man more reluctant to do the right. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS Galusha A. Grow became the only Speaker of the House of Representatives ever to be elected and take office on the 4th of July.

An artillery salute of 15 guns was fired at Camp Jackson near Pigs Point, Virginia, in honor of the 15 states that had declared or were declaring their independence from the US federal government in Washington DC.

Maria Mason Tabb Hubard wrote in her diary:

On yesterday July the 3rd heard of another shocking accident from the manufacturing of fulminating powder for percussion caps, the second death that has occurred in [from it — this is crossed out] this city from the same cause, poor young Laidley was the last victim, having an arm & his head blown off causing instant death! oh how shocking! and what a warning to all who handle any explosive, or igniting powder, and I am in constant dread of my precious Husband being injured during some of his chemical experiments.

In Charleston, South Carolina, blockading Federal ships fired a salute at sunrise, which was answered by Confederate artillery salutes from Forts Moultrie and Sumter.

In Washington DC, 29 New York regiments passed in review before the President at the White House.

In a speech sent over from the White House to the two houses of the US Congress, President Abraham Lincoln defended himself against the accusation that by suspending the basic right of habeas corpus he had violated his oath of office “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” by inquiring whether “all the laws, but one, [are] to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” He sought to justify the newly begun Civil War by the same argument that slavemasters used in the controversy over manumission without fair compensation to the slave’s “present owner,” who had “bought the slave fair and square,” for the loss of his “pecuniary investment”: “The nation purchased, with money, the countries out of which several of these [confederate] states were formed. Is it just that they shall go off without leave, and without refunding? The nation paid very large sums (in the aggregate, I believe, nearly a hundred millions) to relieve Florida of the aboriginal tribes. Is it just that she shall now be off without consent, or without making any return?”

In Baltimore citizens presented a “splendid silk national flag, regimental size,” to the 6th Massachusetts Regiment. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts was celebrating this national holiday with the 1st Massachusetts Regiment at Camp Banks near Georgetown.

At the annual abolitionist picnic at Harmony Grove in Framingham, Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Stephen Symonds Foster spoke. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 57th birthday.

Manning their line outside Alexandria VA, the white boys of the 1st Minnesota ate a local delicacy, crab, and were able to witness the skyrockets and other fireworks over the national capitol, and they had a peculiar celebration of their own:

We had a grand burlesque Indian War Dance, executed in a style which would do justice to any set of savages wherever congregated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1862

March 14, Friday: The United States government authorized payment of up to $10,000 in compensation to various United States marshals, district attorneys, etc. for services in the suppression of the slave-trade (STATUTES AT LARGE, XII. 368-9). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

The lecture at the Smithsonian Institution was by Wendell Phillips, who in those days was packing a revolver for his own protection. Among those 2,000 or so Washingtonians who jammed the hall were several free black Americans — this was apparently the first time that any black had ever gained entry to that establishment.

Early in the morning, Kady Southwell Brownell of Rhode Island attired herself in her shirt, pants, and knee- length skirt and pleaded to be allowed to carry the formation’s battle standard that day. While her pleas were being refused, the company unexpectedly encountered another Union troop formation that mistook them for Rebels. Some of the Rhode Island and New Hampshire soldiers were wearing gray coats, and that was confusing the snipers of the 4th Rhode Island. Kady grabbed the flag, ran with it to some higher ground, and began to wave it back and forth so the snipers would recognize that this was also a unit of the northern army. As the fogs were lifting on this close encounter, Kady went to the rear to fill her assigned role as Acting Nurse by assisting with the wounded. That day Robert Brownell was struck by a Minié ball and a thigh bone was shattered. Kady collected some blankets off the corpses of dead soldiers who would no longer need them, and would spend the next six weeks in New Bern, North Carolina caring for her Rob while also nursing other wounded soldiers. She would carry soup and coffee daily to a nearby Rebel hospital. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1863

January 25, Sunday: In the morning the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway spoke in the chamber of the Senate of the United States in Washington DC, and proclaimed that God had a plan and he was privy to it. God’s plan was an end to slavery and “It is a terrible error when men have one idea about that which they are doing, while God has another.” The problem people were having with each other in the United States of America reduced to the fact that although he, the Reverend Conway, knew God’s plan, nobody would pay attention to this. In the evening, when he and Wendell Phillips, George Luther Stearns, and Elizur Wright, Jr. went to the office of Abraham Lincoln, they found themselves being referred to with scant courtesy as “that Boston set.” Lincoln suggested to them that they were hard people to satisfy, because they had gotten into the habit of being dissatisfied. The delegation proposed to the Commander in Chief that he forgive and forget about General John Charles Frémont having exceeded his authority, in prematurely releasing the slaves of Missouri from bondage, but the Commander in Chief demurred. (On this day the president did make a personnel change, in replacing Burnside with Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac.)

Returning from this disappointing visit to the nation’s puzzle palace, Conway renewed his attempt to get out of this wartorn country. You’d have thought that, with his family ensconced in a grand mansion in a nice town like Concord chock full of literary light, with a cushy job in downtown Boston and lots of opportunity to express himself and a war to keep everything interesting, he’d have been in the proverbial catbird seat. But no, he still wanted to rub elbows with really civilized types. This time, when he went to make a case for this, his arguments were different from before, although not one bit more honest. The song and dance this time was that English society needed to meet him, and the American abolitionists needed for them to meet him. Why? Well, there was this other Virginia aristocat who was over there rubbing elbows, who was pro-slavery. James Murray Mason. Conway’s pitch was that he would mingle and press the flesh and munch the hors d’oeuvres and sip the claret and meanwhile he’d be telling all these really important people the truth about the horror of slavery in the American South. They would believe him and disbelieve the lies being told by James Murray Mason. This would take awhile and then he’d be right back home in the trenches with the rest of the abolitionists. Phillips and Stearns immediately put up $100.00 each to get this scheme going, and Conway would spend the next couple of months getting other people to match these contributions until he had raised enough money to make sure he had a comfortable and indefinitely prolonged trip. In this time period he confided to Emerson that it was part of his plans to put the Frost home in Concord back on the market.

Well, this might all have been realistic enough in the 1861-1862 time frame, when there was a real chance that the British government was going to recognize the Confederate States of America. But that had all been disposed of as of November 1862. The period when there was a need to influence British opinion was past. The whole thing was smoke and mirrors, concealing the fact that Conway was making his permanent escape. He had simply had enough of this war he had helped to start. Now it was going to be somebody else’s problem. Eventually he was drafted, and a $300.00 commutation fee was paid so somebody else’d have to go and fight.

Incidentally, while rubbing elbows in England, Conway was going to disgrace himself and the abolitionist cause by a particularly egregious piece of volunteer diplomatic blundering. He was going to offer, in writing, to his fellow Southerner James Murray Mason, a deal between the Northern abolitionists and the Southern states. They would see to it that the peculiar institution was abolished and the abolitionists would see to it that they got their separate country. Of course, once Mason got his hands on this piece of paper, he would first use it to blackmail and threaten Conway, and then use it to embarrass him publicly and through him embarrass the abolitionists and through the abolitionists embarrass the federal government of the United States of America. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS April 23, Thursday: Frances Dana Gage, writing from Parris Island, South Carolina, invented the “and ar’n’t I a woman” speech and inserted it into the mouth of Sojourner Truth, “the weird, wonderful creature, who was at once a marvel and a mystery.” She even had Truth assuming the pose of Story’s famed “Libyan Sibyl” sculpture.42 [T]his is testimony to the role of symbol in our public life and to our need for this symbol.... Gage crafted her “Sojourner Truth” carefully, and her sensitivity was remarkably modern. Her account is still compelling. But it is by no means the real Sojourner Truth.

42. Nell Irvin Painter’s SOJOURNER TRUTH: A LIFE, A SYMBOL (W.W. Norton). pages 174-5. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS How did Gage figure she could get away with such a misrepresentation? Oh, easy. After all, in this month’s The Atlantic Monthly, Harriet Beecher Stowe was presenting an article on Sojourner Truth, recounting an “Is God dead?” story she was claiming to have heard from the lips of Wendell Phillips. This gent, while not exactly denouncing his anti-slavery colleague Mrs. Stowe as a fabricator, would need to deny having been present on any such occasion.

< .OCCASION SUCH ANY ON PRESENT NOT WAS I

Frederick Douglass would not controvert (of course) that the incident had indeed occurred, but would also (of course) refrain from confessing a key incidental detail — that in fact this had occurred in a low-rent Quaker meetinghouse in Salem, Ohio, on August 22, 1852,rather than, as being recounted by Stowe, in upscale HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS downtown Boston’s toney Faneuil Hall.

Stowe’s article also was creating out of whole cloth a story that Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen of Wagondale, members of the Klyn Esopus Dutch Reformed Church and Isabella’s employers in upstate New York, had been Quakers. It was at this point that she was improving upon reality by making out that Truth was out of Africa, that Truth had inspired William Wetmore Story’s famed “Libyan Sibyl” statue, and even — that Truth had deceased. Obviously, Stowe was writing for THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY’s $200, and both these tall tales, the one by Gage as well as the one by Stowe, now seems to have been examples of our dealing whitely with Truth.

However, also, Stowe did reminisce about a statuette, now lost, that had been done by Charles Cumberworth at some time in the 1840s, which had depicted a black female at a fountain. This lost statuette had been remarkable enough in its own right, for that period, because:43 [T]he age-old status of the slave combined with the newer concept of race created an extremely powerful cultural formation that rendered the African American virtually the embodiment of what was not classically sculptural.... Simply to represent black slaves in sculpture was in a sense to emancipate them. Before 1860 there are no known images whatsoever of African Americans, slave or free, in marble or bronze, the more permanent and prestigious materials of the sculptor’s art.

43. Kirk Savage’s STANDING SOLDIERS, KNEELING SLAVES: RACE, WAR, AND MONUMENT IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY AMERICA (Princeton UP). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“Everything in life is unusual until you get accustomed to it.” — The Scarecrow, in THE MARVELOUS LAND OF OZ (L. Frank Baum, 1904) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1865

April 14, 10:13PM: As President Abraham Lincoln was watching the 3rd act of the British comedy “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater in Washington DC with his wife Mary, he was shot in the head from behind by John Wilkes Booth, an actor from Maryland obsessed with avenging the Confederate defeat. Booth would escape briefly into Virginia.44

After the President’s death, some person unknown would clean up his credit record at Lewis Tappan’s Mercantile Agency. They cleansed the page not with an eraser but by scraping with a knife, in such a manner that no ultraviolet or infrared scanning has been able to recover even a trace of the writing. Only the scraped, blank sections of the page remain, in between the various positive comments. What sort of negative credit remarks might have been thus purged? — Professor Scott A. Sandage’s BORN LOSERS: A HISTORY OF FAILURE IN AMERICA, which contains a clear photograph of the altered page, hypothesizes that it might well have been mentioned that he had an “extravagant wife,” or there might have been an echoing of Wendell Phillips’s derogation of Lincoln: “a first-rate second-rate man.”

44. Shortly after this, the President’s admirer P.T. Barnum would position a cabin replica in his American Museum in New-York, for display with “a playbill of Ford’s Theater picked up in President Lincoln’s box on April 14th.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS April: Volume II of LITTLE WOMEN, OR, MEG, JO, BETH AND AMY by Louisa May Alcott was published by Roberts Brothers of Boston. Submitting to the judgment of her publishers, the author allowed the “amateurish” sketches made by her sister Abby May Alcott (the “Amy March” character) to be replaced by the work of the

then well-known illustrator Hammatt Billings:

If ‘genius is eternal patience,’ as Michael Angelo affirms, Amy certainly had some claim to the divine attribute, for she persevered in spite of all obstacles, failures, and discouragements, firmly believing that in time she should do something worthy to be called ‘high art.’

THE ALCOTT FAMILY MICHELANGELO HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS Alcott cited her hero Wendell Phillips the anti-slavery orator full of grace:45

HATEVER his motive might have been, Laurie studied to some purpose that year, for he W graduated with honor, and gave the Latin oration with the grace of a Phillips and the eloquence of a Demosthenes, so his friends said. They were all there, his grandfather — oh, so proud — Mr. and Mrs. March, John and Meg, Jo and Beth, and all exulted over him with the sincere admiration which boys make light of at the time, but fail to win from the world by any after-triumphs.

Note that Alcott described a particular one of Amy’s painting pigments as being tomato-colored: From fire to oil was a natural transition for burnt fingers, and Amy fell to painting with undiminished ardor. An artist friend fitted her out with his cast-off palettes, brushes, and colors, and she daubed away, producing pastoral and marine views such as were never seen on land or sea. Her monstrosities in the way of cattle would have taken prizes at an agricultural fair, and the perilous pitching of her vessels would have produced sea-sickness in the most nautical observer, if the utter disregard to all known rules of ship building and rigging had not convulsed him with laughter at the first glance. Swarthy boys and dark-eyed Madonnas, staring at you from one corner of the studio, did not suggest Murillo; oily brown shadows of faces with a lurid streak in the wrong place, meant Rembrandt; buxom ladies and dropiscal infants, Rubens; and Turner appeared in tempests of blue thunder, orange lightning, brown rain, and purple clouds, with a tomato-colored splash in the middle, which might be the sun or a bouy, a sailor’s shirt or a king’s robe, as the spectator pleased. 45. We may note in passing that Louisa’s character “Laurie” was not a depiction of Wendell Phillips. He was not a depiction of Waldo Emerson either, although the author had suffered a rather serious crush on Emerson in her teen years, writing him love letters which, she would later acknowledge, she’d had the good judgment not to post. Perhaps Louisa didn’t allow Jo to marry because she so closely modeled this point-of-view character on herself — and as a young woman she had averred that she’d “rather be a literary spinster and paddle my own canoe.” Though many men have stepped forward to claim that they were “Laurie,” when the author was asked about this she replied that the character had been a composite of two young men she had known. One of these, Alfred Whitman, had been a member of the Concord Dramatic Union founded by Louisa and others in the mid-1850s with whom she had continued to correspond long term, and the other had been Ladislas Wisniewski, a young Polish man with whom she had shared a brief romance while she had been on tour in Europe as companion to an invalid woman. (In “My Boys,” a sketch published late in her life, Louisa would identify only Wisniewski.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS The name deployed in Chapter 27 of LITTLE WOMEN, “Mrs. S.L.A.N.G. Northbury,” was modeled by Louisa HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS on the name of the serial novelist of the 1850s, Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth:

… Pausing to turn a page, the lad saw her looking and, with boyish good- nature offered half his paper, saying bluntly, “Want to read it? That’s a first- rate story.” Jo accepted it with a smile, for she had never outgrown her liking for lads, and soon found herself involved in the usual labyrinth of love, mystery, and murder, — for the story belonged to that class of light literature in which the passions have a holiday, and when the author’s invention fails, a grand catastrophe clears the stage of one-half the dramatis personæ, leaving the other half to exult over their downfall. “Prime, isn’t it?” asked the boy, as her eye went down the last paragraph of her portion. “I think you and I could do most as well as that if we tried,” returned Jo, amused at his admiration of the trash. “I should think I was a pretty lucky chap if I could. She makes a good living out of such stories, they say;” and he pointed to the name of Mrs. S.L.A.N.G. Northbury, under the title of the tale. “Do you know her?” asked Jo, with sudden interest. “No, but I read all her pieces, and I know a fellow who works in the office where this paper is printed.” “Do you say she makes a good living out of stories like this?” And Jo looked more respectfully at the agitated group and thickly-sprinkled exclamation points that adorned the page. “Guess she does! She knows just what folks like, and gets paid well for writing it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1870

January 23, Sunday: Wendell Phillips wrote to Charles Wesley Slack to convey the information that Mr. Wright J. Potter had been given a poem from Slack, to read.

Giuseppe Verdi wrote to a friend in Paris about his failure to send along promised prose works by Richard Wagner — it seems almost as if Verdi were desiring to acquaint himself with Wagner’s nativist rants! I have long been convinced that my artistic ideal stands or falls with Germany. Only the Germany that we love and desire can help us achieve that ideal.

After United States Army troops led by Major Eugene Baker attacked a village of Piegan Blackfeet on the Marias River in Chouteau County, Montana, killing 33 men, mostly elderly, 90 women, and 50 children below the age of 12, many of them with the small pox, there wouldn’t be the usual sort of bragging. The army would be covering up this particular massacre, until in April a young officer would file a report. Investigation would reveal that the reason for all that secrecy was that the troops had raided the wrong village, killing off a whole bunch of people, man, woman, and child, who actually were friendlies. Oops, sorry about that, we’ll get it right the next time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1873

December 20, Saturday: William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass were reunited at Faneuil Hall during a centenary celebration of the Boston Tea Party, along with Lucy Stone and Abby Kelley Foster, under a banner proclaiming a women’s suffrage slogan:

TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION IS TYRANNY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1877

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s TALES OF THE WHITE HILLS, LEGENDS OF NEW ENGLAND, LEGENDS OF THE PROVINCE HOUSE (seven stories that had already appeared in book form in TWICE-TOLD TALES and MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE). 7 HAWTHORNE STORIES

While Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was marking time on his main project, a humongous bronze statue to be placed on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor, he teamed up with H.H. Richardson to do four bas-relief friezes for the four sides of the Florentine tower over the Brattle Square Church, at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Clarendon Street in Boston.46 The topics of the four friezes were scoped out as Baptism, Communion, Marriage, and Death. The statues at the corners of these friezes are now referred to by Bostonians as “The Beanblowers,” but were intended to represent a quite different conceit, to wit, Angels of Judgment blowing golden trumpets. The heads of the figures on the bas-relief friezes themselves were modeled on canonized Boston mofos, such as for instance: Waldo Emerson Edward Everett William Lloyd Garrison Nathaniel Hawthorne Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Wendell Phillips Charles Sumner

To the best of my understanding, our Henry Thoreau ain’t up there. Why ain’t he up there? –Why should he be, since his life was incomplete, and a failure? Per an article to be published in the following year in a religious organ,47

[T]he incompleteness and failure of [Thoreau’s] life cannot be concealed by all the verbiage and praise of his biographers.

46. This edifice is now run by Baptists. 47. Catholic World 1878, page 296, article by Father Isaac Hecker. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS No, as far as these people were concerned –even this “Father Thomas” who had known him personally– Henry was dead and buried and he could damn well stay dead and buried:

(“A Bird’s-Eye View of Boston” from the north as of this year, drawn by John Bachmann with color lithography by Louis Prang, should be available as a 22” x 27 1/2” reproduction in color on text weight paper in a heavy mailing tube, from Historic Urban Plans, Inc., Box 276, Ithaca NY 14851 (607 272-MAPS), for roughly $21.50 inclusive of postage.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1878

Lydia Maria Child had Roberts Brothers of Boston print her own “eclectic Bible” of quotations from the world’s religions, ASPIRATIONS OF THE WORLD: A CHAIN OF OPALS, her motive being stated as: “to do all I can to enlarge and strengthen the hand of human brotherhood.” ASPIRATIONS OF THE WORLD

The Virginia supreme court, in Kinney v. Commonwealth, 71 Virginia 858, 869, considered it the state’s duty to protect the moral welfare of both races by banning any and all sorts of interracial mingling: “The purity of public morals, the moral and physical development of both races, and the highest advancement of our cherished southern civilization, under which two distinct races are to work out and accomplish the destiny to which the Almighty has assigned them on this continent — all require that they should be kept distinct and separate, and that connections and alliances so unnatural that God and nature seem to forbid them, should be prohibited by positive law, and be subject to no evasion.” Folks, let’s not go there.

NARRATIVE OF SOJOURNER TRUTH; A BONDSWOMAN OF OLDEN TIME, EMANCIPATED BY THE NEW YORK LEGISLATURE IN THE EARLY PART OF THE PRESENT CENTURY; WITH A HISTORY OF HER LABORS AND HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS 48 CORRESPONDENCE DRAWN FROM HER “BOOK OF LIFE.” SOJOURNER TRUTH NORTHAMPTON MA ASSOCIATION OF INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION

You do know that Sojourner kept an autograph collection, don’t you? Here are some of her specimens:49

48. You will notice that I do not have here an illustration of the correct edition. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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49. William Lloyd Garrison President Abraham Lincoln Parker Pillsbury Gilbert Haven Susan B. Anthony Calvin Fairbanks Wendell Phillips Harriet Beecher Stowe Charles S. White Friend Lucretia Mott Lydia Maria Child George Thompson Gerrit Smith Captain Jonathan Walker R.S. Griffing Reverend Samuel Joseph May O.O. Howard Rowland Johnson Lydia Mott Friend Amy Post HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1881

September 24, Saturday: There was a memorial service for Stephen Symonds Foster at the Worcester Horticultural Hall, with the Reverend Samuel J. May, Jr. of Leicester, Massachusetts officiating. Comments were offered by Lucy Stone, Wendell Phillips, the Reverend Henry T. Cheever, and Parker Pillsbury. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1884

February 2, Saturday: Wendell Phillips died in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1907

March 8, Friday: Emma Goldman gave an interview to the Ohio State Journal in which she alleged grandiosely that “The doctrine of anarchy taught in this country was founded by Americans. It originated with men of the Concord School. “David Thoreau,” Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews were anarchists. They were associates of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Emerson. Those men were anarchists too.” In fact, as the interviewer ought to have explained to this Lithuanian immigrant, the actual identifiable American anarchists of that 19th-Century period had been Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812-1886), Colonel William Batchelder Greene (1818-1878), Ezra Heywood (1829-1893), Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854-1939), and Josiah Warren (1798-1874), that none of these men had been associated in any way either with the town of Concord or with the Concord School (except that Lidian Emerson did receive, in 1843 in Concord, evidently by post, a gift of a volume of tales translated by Greene’s father), that these identified individuals had had no detectable contact with or influence over Thoreau, and that in any event, Emerson, Garrison, Phillips, and Thoreau had not been, in any sense of the term, “anarchists.” Here in the case of Emma Goldman we have an example, pure and simple, of someone pretending to do influence study — and firing for effect. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1915

Daniel Chester French again, as in 1874 and in 1889, produced a depiction of the “Minute Man.” He also in this year sculpted Wendell Phillips (who had been dead for lo these many years).

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: May 26, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

WENDELL PHILLIPS WENDELL PHILLIPS

the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.