Wendell Phillips

Wendell Phillips’s fiery speeches galvanized the faithful and converted the undecided to the abolitionist cause. A Boston lawyer, Phillips garnered fame as an orator with his fervent 1837 attack on the Southern “slaveocracy,” after a proslavery mob murdered crusading newspaperman Elijah Lovejoy. Phillips was a disciple of William Lloyd Garrison, and, like his mentor, he believed that slavery had so infected the country that the Constitution itself was tainted. After the Civil War, Phillips became one of the first leaders of the U.S. labor movement.