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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XII WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON A CRITICAL VIEW IN explaining why Wendell Phillips was the target for every shot in the winter of 1860-1,I said it was because he was the real leader of the anti- slavery party during all the later and more critical years of the long struggle for freedom. No doubt, Garrison at one time held the first place among the Abolitionists. He was the first of them in time, or one of the first. He had had the good fortune to be mobbed and led through the streets of Boston with a rope about his body. He had founded a weekly paper, The Liberator. Georgia had offered five thousand dollars reward for his arrest. He had unflinching courage and needed it all in the 'thirties and later. But he had very moderate abilities. His force was a moral force. He had convictions and would go any length rather than surrender any one of them. But he had almost no other of those gifts and capacities which make a leader. He had no organizing power. He was not a good writer. He was not a good speaker. He could not hold an audience. He could not keep the attention of the public which he had won in the beginning. He did not attract to the Abolitionist ranks the ablest of the men who were ready to make a fight against slavery. They did not care to serve under Garrison; under a leader who could not lead. They went into politics. So it happened that the Abolitionists had become a dwindling force. If Phillips had not appeared on the scene, with his wonderful oratory, his natural authority on the platform and off, his brilliant love of battle, his temperament, at once commanding and sympathetic, his persuasive charm the Abolitionists would have been wellnigh forgotten. He had all the moral force of Garrison, and the intellectual force which Garrison had not. Phillips himse...