Wendell Phillips and American Institutions

Abstract

THE American Negro's current struggle for his civil rights has made historians deeply aware of all that the first crusade in his behalf failed to accomplish century ago. The men who championed the Negro's cause had success so equivocal that some have labeled it outright failure.' Whether one wishes to the abolitionists or not, they neither found peaceful means to end slavery nor persuaded the American people to accept the Negro as full and equal citizen. Since the publication of Stanley M. Elkins' brilliant book on slavery, it has become increasingly common to ascribe the failings of antislavery thought to its anti-institutional character. Instead of seeing slavery as A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, the abolitionists tended to view it as sin to be exorcised. Rather than seeking institutional means for subverting it, they made an emotional demand for total solution.' '2 When that solution finally came by war, they were unequipped to direct the nation toward resolution of the problem of race relations. John L. Thomas, biographer of William Lloyd Garrison, has assigned the abolitionists a large share of the blame for the fact that the war was fought without any clear sense of purpose.3 Similarly, George M. Fredrickson has argued that the Civil War exposed the weakness of the prewar intellectuals' anti-institutional posture. The concept of anti-institutionalism, if not the term itself, is very much product of the pre-Civil War era. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Garrison, and Wendell Phillips were quite open about their argu-