Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

---

[426] hall which formerly occupied this place. He had sat where you sit, in the seats, looking up to us. It had been a stormy, hard gathering,--a close fight; the press calumniating us; every journal in Boston ridiculing the idea which we were endeavoring to spread. As I passed down the stairs homeward, he put his arm within mine, and said, “You shall never need to ask me again to share that platform.” It was the instinct of his nature, true as the bravest heart. The spot for him was where the battle was hottest. He had come, as half the clergy come,--a critic. He felt it was not his place; that it was to grapple with the tiger, and throttle him. And the pledge that he made he kept; for, whether here or in New York, as his reputation grew, when that lordly mammoth of the press, the Tribune, overgrown in its independence and strength, would not condescend to record a word that Mr. Garrison or I could utter, but bent low before the most thorough scholarship of New England, and was glad to win its way to the confidence of the West by being his mouthpiece,--with that weapon of influence in his right hand, he always placed himself at our side, and in the midst of us, in the capital State of the Empire.

You may not think this great praise; we do. Other men have brought us brave hearts; other men have brought us keen-sighted and vigilant intellects,--but he brought us, as no one else could, the loftiest stature of New England culture. He brought us a disciplined intellect, whose statement was evidence, and whose affirmation the most gifted student hesitated long before he ventured to doubt or to contradict. When we had nothing but our characters, nothing but our reputation for accuracy, for our weapons, the man who could give to the cause of the slave that weapon was indeed one of its ablest and foremost champions.