Lovejoy, a Western
anti-slavery preacher and editor, who had been driven from one place to
another in Missouri and Illinois, had finally settled at Alton, and was
there shot to death while defending his printing press against a mob. At
a public meeting in Faneuil Hall, the Attorney-General of Massachusetts,
James T. Austin, expressing what was doubtless the general sentiment of
the time as to such individual insurrection against pronounced public
opinion, compared the Alton mob to the Boston "tea-party," and declared
that Lovejoy, "presumptuous and imprudent," had "died as the fool
dieth." Phillips, an almost unknown man, took the stand, and answered in
the speech which opens this volume. A more powerful reinforcement could
hardly have been looked for; the cause which could find such a defender
was henceforth to be feared rather than despised. To the day of
his death he was, fully as much as Garrison, the incarnation of the
anti-slavery spirit. For this reason his address on the Philosophy
of the Abolition Movement, in 1853, has been assigned a place as
representing fully the abolition side of the question, just before it
was overshadowed by the rise of the Republican party, which opposed only
the extension of slavery to the territories.
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