Wendell Phillips on the War.

£2,250 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A good copy of Wendell Phillips’ famous speech delivered before the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society on 21 April, 1861. “Not less than four thousand people were crowded within the walls of the spacious Music Hall … and almost an equal number were excluded, because of the impossibility of finding even an inch of standing room.” Speaking in the wake of the attack on Fort Sumter, Phillips lauds the galvanisation of the North as “Massachusetts men marshalled for war.” He sees the essence of the war as “ no struggle between different ideas, but between barbarism and civilization .” He unpacks this contrast further by saying: “The North thinks - can appreciate argument - it is the nineteenth century - hardly any struggle left in it but that between the working class and the money kings. The South dreams - it is the thirteenth and fourteenth century - baron and serf - noble and slave.” Furthermore, Phillips emphasises his support for Abraham Lincoln , discusses the constitutional issues behind secession, and argues that the Civil War is a “holier” cause than the Revolutionary War. He beseeches abolitionists and Americans to “wipe away the stain that hangs about the toleration of human bondage.” ANB notes the importance of Phillips’ speeches: “In the years immediately before the Civil War Phillips’s oratory, not his labors for the American Anti-Slavery Society, defined his greatest significance … [H]e fashioned speeches that dramatized the moral imperative facing the North: peopl

• Year: 1861

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.