Book Review: The Radical Advocacy of Wendell Phillips: Abolitionism, Democracy, and Public Interest Law
The Radical Advocacy of Wendell Phillips: Abolitionism, Democracy, and Public Interest Law. By Peter Charles Hoffer. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2024. Softcover, 152 pp. $29.95.
Reviewed by Tim Talbott
Wendell Phillips may not be the first name that comes to the average American’s mind when asked to name a famous 19th century abolitionist. Even a quick Google search does not list Phillips among twenty four abolitionist personalities. More popular figures like newspaperman William Lloyd Garrison, orator and editor Frederick Douglass, author Harriet Beecher Stowe, militant activist John Brown, and politician Charles Sumner claim more prominent places in our memory. However, among those at the time who were working to eradicate slavery, Phillips was as recognized and respected as anyone.
Phillips is the focus of several biographies that have appeared over the last 60 years or so. Additional works about Phillips have spotlighted different aspects of his career in Civil War-era reform movements. Historian Peter Charles Hoffer adds to this later body of studies with his recently published The Radical Advocacy of Wendell Phillips: Abolitionism, Democracy, and Public Interest Law.
This rather brief book (116 pages of text), which contains an introduction, conclusion, and six chapters, is part of Kent State University Press’s growing American Abolitionism and Antislavery series. In it Hoffer convincingly argues that Phillips was America’s first true public interest lawyer, advocating for social and political issues then viewed by even some of his fellow anti-slavery proponents as radical. However, with the aid of Phillips’s writings and orations, Hoffer shares a portrait of the abolitionist as one ahead of his times and a key figure in change for the better.
While this book is certainly not a strict biography of Phillips, it necessarily has important information about his life and its events that influenced his views. Born in 1811, into a wealthy Boston family, Phillips graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law, but found work as an attorney in both Lowell and Boston relatively boring. One day while observing Boston life through his law office window on Court Street, Phillips saw an anti-abolitionist mob assault William Lloyd Garrison before Garrison was finally jailed for his own safety. The event eventually had a remarkable impact on Phillips and his life’s direction. Starting in 1837, Phillips began speaking out on the social and political ills of slavery and its threat to democracy. As Hoffer states, “The issue of slavery, to Phillips at least, was inseparable from the issue of free persons’ legal rights.” (26)
In that spirit, Phillips took up additional social justice causes, including an effort to desegregate Boston’s schools in the early 1840s. In this role, Hoffer explains, “Phillips acted in the role of public interest lawyer. He did not have a formal (paying) client. (He did not need clients; with his own inherited wealth and Ann’s [his wife’s] wealth, he was one of the richest men in Boston.) He intervened because he believed in the cause of desegregation. Addressing public bodies, he spoke in terms of best public outcomes.” (35)
Despite opposition to Phillips’s increasingly radical opinions, he consistently found himself invited to offer his views on stage after stage. His oratory became legendary, his arguments difficult to refute, and his logic sharp. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, Phillips took on issue after issue attempting to inform citizens about the ills of slavery specifically and the wrongs of inequality generally. He understood that laws were ultimately the will of the people—made by their elected representatives—and that the laws would not change until the ideas of the people, in other words, public opinion, did. This battle for democratic positivism was difficult, but one Phillips was willing to devote his time and treasure toward.
Perhaps the greatest accolade that Phillips could receive is imitation. Countless others since Phillips’s time—including many in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s—have incorporated his strategy and tactics to advocate for equal rights and social reform.
Hoffer’s research in The Radical Advocacy of Wendell Phillips is thorough, his arguments are well-argued, and his interpretation of Phillips’s importance in American history will have more students of the Civil War-era reevaluating his unfortunately shadowed role among period abolitionists.
Phillips, like Garrison in his earlier career, initially had no difficulty in essentially wishing the slaveholders and their region an unfond fairwell. After the war started, he enthusiastically jumped up on the Union Express, becoming a perpetual, typical bluestocking thorn in the more pragmatic Lincoln’s side.
Very helpful introduction to Phillips, whom I did not know of until reading this book review. Thanks for a good overview of a lawyer engaged in the pursuit of the public good.