Garrison was the pen
for abolition, Emerson its philosopher, Greeley its editor, and in
Wendell Phillips abolition had its advocate. Political kings are
oftentimes artificial kings. The orator is God's natural king, divinely
enthroned. Back of all eloquence is a great soul, a great cause and a
great peril. Our history holds three supreme moments in the story of
eloquence--the hour of Patrick Henry's speech at Williamsburg, Wendell
Phillips' at Faneuil Hall and Lincoln's at Gettysburg. The great hour
and the great crisis, the great cause and the great man, all met and
melted together at a psychologic moment. In retrospect Phillips seems
like a special gift of God to the anti-slavery period. Webster had more
weight and majesty, Everett a higher polish, Douglas more pathos,
Beecher was more of an embodied thunder-storm, but John Bright was
probably right when he pronounced Wendell Phillips one of the first
orators of his century, or of any century.

The man back of Wendell Phillips and the abolition movement was William
Lloyd Garrison. This reformer began his career in 1825, as a practical
printer and occasional writer of articles for the daily press. Among
Garrison's friends were two Quakers, one a young farmer, John Greenleaf
Whittier; the other was Benjamin Lundy, who for several years had spent
his time and fortune protesting against the slave traffic. Lundy had
visited Hayti, to examine the conditions of negro life there,--had
returned to Baltimore, where he had been brutally beaten by a slave
dealer, and had finally come to Boston to test out the anti-slavery
sentiment in New England. He held a meeting in a Baptist church, only to
have it broken up by the pastor, who refused to allow Lundy to continue
his remarks, on the ground that his position could only be offensive to
the South, and therefore dangerous. But Lundy succeeded in having a
committee appointed to consider the problem, and young Garrison was one
of its members. A few months later, Garrison was made the editor of a
journal in Bedford, where he began to advance more and more radical
theories, until a rival editor was irritated to the point of charging
him with "the pert loquacity of a blue jay." But Garrison's fidelity to
his own convictions, and his courage in airing them in public, had won
the respect of the Quaker enthusiast, Lundy, and the old man walked all
the way from Baltimore to Bedford to ask Garrison to join him in his
work of agitation. A year