The Lesson of the Hour: Wendell Phillips on Abolition & Strategy

The Abolitionists were revolutionaries, willing to tear up the Southern economy and society by the roots, wreck Northern commerce, and disrupt the Union irretrievably. They renounced all traditional politics. They openly hoped for the defeat of their own country in the Mexican War. They preached and practiced racial equality. They fought for the equality of women. They understood the need to break up the North in order to reconstitute it without slavery. Although William Lloyd Garrison was the founder of the movement and remains the most widely known of the Abolitionists, Wendell Philliops was the real leader. This volume is the only collection of his work generally available. It includes six speeches charting a revolutionary course for abolition, edited and with an introduction by Noel Ignatiev, establishing their historical context. This collection of Wendell Phillips’s speeches brings back to light one of the magnificent rhetoricians of the abolition movement. Noel Ignatiev’s introduction makes a compelling case for treating Phillips as the ‘real leader’ of 19th century American radicalism, and the orator’s words as a guide to an alternative society. [David W Blight]