»
He meant to say, "I am about to seize the crown; I dare
not do it in the faces of sixty thousand republican soldiers: I
must give them work at a distance to do.
He meant to say, "I am about to seize the crown; I dare
not do it in the faces of sixty thousand republican soldiers: I
must give them work at a distance to do.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v20 - Phi to Qui
He needed all his resources
merely to hold his ground and to get a hearing. You cannot com-
pare oratory in those circumstances with oratory in a dress debate,
or even with the oratory of a great parliamentary contest. On this
last has often hung, no doubt, the life of a ministry. On Phillips's
mastery over his hearers depended sometimes his own life, sometimes
that of the antislavery cause- with which, as we now all see and
as then hardly anybody saw, was bound up the life of the nation.
It was, in my judgment, the oratory of Phillips which insured the
maintenance of that great antislavery struggle during the last ten
years or more which preceded the War. His oratory must be judged
with reference to that to its object as well as to its rhetorical
qualities. He had and kept the ear of the people. To have silenced
that silver trumpet would have been to wreck the cause.
I speak
of the Abolitionist cause by itself - that which relied solely on moral
forces and stood completely outside of politics.
Yet Phillips never made a concession. There was no art of speech
he would not employ to win the attention of his audience. But he
never softened an invective or compromised the clear logic of his
statement in order to divert the hostility which confronted him. He
would coax, cajole, ridicule, transpierce, or overwhelm an opponent,
but never yielded a jot in principle. I have known him try all means
to conciliate and then all means to crush, all within a few minutes.
He had the art of so exciting curiosity, that a raging mob which
half caught the first half of a sentence would still its own tumult in
order to hear what was coming next. He shrank from no danger: on
his unfailing cool courage and self-possession rested half the orator's
power. When in Faneuil Hall he called the Attorney-General recre-
ant, there were cries "Take that back! " and a tumult. "Fellow-
citizens," answered the young Bostonian, "I cannot take back my
words. " It was the motto of his whole career. Twenty-four years
later, April 21st, 1861, he was to speak in the Music Hall of Boston
for the War. Against his habit, he wrote out his speech;—it was a
turning-point in his history as orator and as abolitionist. He read me
the speech, which began: "Many times this winter, here and else- .
where, I have counseled peace,-urged as well as I know how the ex-
pediency of acknowledging a Southern Confederacy, and the peaceful
separation of these thirty-four States. One of the journals announces
## p. 11411 (#25) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11411
to you that I come here this morning to retract those opinions. No,
not one of them. " Those were days of flame and fire, and I said
to Phillips that they would never let him get farther. "Well," he
answered, "if I cannot say that I will say nothing. " And he read on.
"I need them all,- every word I have spoken this winter, every act
of twenty-five years of my life, to make the welcome I give this
War hearty and hot. " The result justified his gallantry. The low
murmurs which the opening sentence provoked were swept away in
the storm of passionate cheers which followed.
All this dwelling upon the moral attributes of the orator may
seem out of place in a brief criticism; but it is inevitable. Take away
the moral impulse and there would have been no orator, no oratory,
no thirty years of unmatched eloquence, no such rhetorical lesson as
the speeches of Phillips now give. There is, unhappily, no adequate
record of them; as there is none of the speeches of any orator of
the first order, except where they were written out like those of the
great Greek, or written and rewritten like his Roman rival's or like
Burke's, or unless, like those of the one great English orator of
this generation, Bright, they were fully reported at the time. Phillips
was never thought worth reporting till late in life. He was of the
minority; and then as now, the tyranny of the majority in this coun-
try was oppressive and relentless. They meant to keep him in obscur-
ity: it was the sun of his genius which burst through the mists and
darkness which enveloped him. Traditions still fresh tell you of
the beauty of Phillips's presence on the platform, of his incompar-
able charm of manner and voice, of his persuasiveness, and much else.
But oratory, save under such conditions as I mentioned above, is
evanescent. That of Phillips did its work: it is the eulogy would
value most. There was in him the poet. He had in abounding
measure the sympathies without which no oratory, be its other qual-
ities what they may, carries an audience captive. He put himself
instantly on easy terms with those before him. He could be col-
loquial and familiar, he delighted in repartee,-in which he never
found his equal,- the next moment he was among the clouds, and
on the just and unjust alike descended a rain of eloquence, beneath
which sprang forth those seeds of virtue and moral faith and reli-
gious hatred of wrong which presently covered the land.
There was much of the Greek in him: the sense of ordered beauty
and of art. He had culture; the fire of true patriotism; serenity of
mind. Not a speech in which those high qualities are not visible.
They were still more evident as you heard him; and still more, per-
haps, the symmetrical quality of mind and speech which is almost.
the rarest in modern oratory or modern life. He had indomitable
good-nature on the platform. The hard things he said about men had
no root in his heart; they were meant to fasten attention not on the
·
## p. 11412 (#26) ###########################################
11412
WENDELL PHILLIPS
sin only, which is abstract, but on the sinner. Intellectually a Greek,
his moral nature was Hebraic, and the language of the Old Testament
is inwrought in his oratory. But there was a smile on his face while
the lightnings flashed. The authority with which he spoke was due
largely to this coolness; but it is idle to ascribe it to any one trait,
and to seek for the sources of it in mere rhetoric or mere culture.
The true source of it was the whole man.
Gow. Surachey
билу
W.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. -Wendell Phillips was born in Boston, Mas-
sachusetts, November 29th, 1811; a son of the city's first mayor, and
allied to the State's best blood and brains. He graduated at Harvard
College in 1831, and from its Law School in 1833. A year later he
was admitted to the bar. His career as a leader of men and a pub-
lic orator, however, began early, and almost uninterruptedly engaged
him until the close of his life. His denunciatory speech on the mur-
der of Lovejoy, in 1837, may be reckoned the opening of his platform
career. His "great speeches" followed each other rapidly. He threw
himself fervently into the Abolition movement, and succeeded Will-
iam Lloyd Garrison as president of the Anti-Slavery Society, in 1865.
His continuous tours as a lecturer occupied all his latter years.
died February 2d, 1884.
He
The following selection is from one of the most famous of his gen-
eral lectures. Only one other was equally identified with his name in
popular regard,- that on 'Lost Arts'; a brilliant mosaic of apocrypha
from all ages, so plausibly stated that it was hard to resist convic-
tion of their truth while listening to his easy, graceful, conversational
periods, spoken as though he had just remembered some interesting
facts and wished to share the pleasure with a group of friends.
THE HERO OF HAYTI
From Toussaint l'Ouverture,' a lecture delivered in 1861. Copyright 1863,
by Wendell Phillips
Tmingo.
HIS is what Edward Everett calls the Insurrection of St. Do-
mingo. It bore for its motto on one side of its banner,
"Long live the King"; and on the other, "We claim the
Old Laws. " Singular mottoes for a rebellion. In fact, it was the
posse comitatus; it was the only French army on the island; it
## p. 11413 (#27) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11413
was the only force that had a right to bear arms: and what it
undertook it achieved. It put Blanchelande his seat; it put
the island beneath his rule. When it was done, the blacks said
to the governor they had created, "Now grant us one day in
seven; give us one day's labor; we will buy another, and with
the two buy a third," the favorite method of emancipation at
that time. Like the Blanchelande of five years before, he re-
fused. He said, "Disarm! Disperse! " and the blacks answered,
"The right hand that has saved you, the right hand that has
saved the island for the Bourbons, may perchance clutch some
of our own rights;" and they stood still. This is the first
insurrection, if any such there were in St. Domingo,- the first
determined purpose on the part of the negro, having saved the
government, to save himself.
At such a moment Toussaint l'Ouverture appeared.
He had been born a slave on a plantation in the north of the
island, an unmixed negro,- his father stolen from Africa. If
anything, therefore, that I say of him to-night moves your admi-
ration, remember, the black race claims it all,- we have no part
nor lot in it. He was fifty years old at this time. An old negro
had taught him to read. His favorite books were Epictetus,
Raynal, military memoirs, Plutarch. In the woods he learned
some of the qualities of herbs; and was village doctor. On the
estate, the highest place he ever reached was that of coachman.
At fifty he joined the army as physician. Before he went, he
placed his master and mistress on shipboard, freighted the vessel
with a cargo of sugar and coffee, and sent them to Baltimore;
and never afterward did he forget to send them, year by year,
ample means of support. And I might add, that of all the lead-
ing negro generals, each one saved the man under whose roof he
was born, and protected the family.
Let me add another thing. If I stood here to-night to tell
the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of French-
men, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain
of the nineteenth century. Were I here to tell you the story of
Washington, I should take it from your hearts,-you, who think
no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the
Father of his Country. I am about to tell you the story of
a negro who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it
from the reluctant testimony of Britons, Frenchmen, Spaniards,—
## p. 11414 (#28) ###########################################
11414
WENDELL PHILLIPS
men who despised him as a negro and a slave, and hated him
because he had beaten them in many a battle. All the materials
for his biography are from the lips of his enemies.
The second story told of him is this: About the time he
reached the camp, the army had been subjected to two insults.
First their commissioners, summoned to meet the French Com-
mittee, were ignominiously and insultingly dismissed; and when
afterward François, their general, was summoned to a second
conference, and went to it on horseback, accompanied by two
officers, a young lieutenant, who had known him as a slave,
angered at seeing him in the uniform of an officer, raised his
riding-whip and struck him over the shoulders. If he had been
the savage which the negro is painted to us, he had only to
breathe the insult to his twenty-five thousand soldiers, and they
would have trodden out the Frenchmen in blood. But the indig-
nant chief rode back in silence to his tent, and it was twenty-
four hours before his troops heard of this insult to their gen-
eral. Then the word went forth, "Death to every white man! "
They had fifteen hundred prisoners. Ranged in front of the
camp, they were about to be shot. Toussaint, who had a vein
of religious fanaticism, like most great leaders,-like Moham-
med, like Napoleon, like Cromwell, like John Brown, he could
preach as well as fight,- mounting a hillock, and getting the ear
of the crowd, exclaimed:-"Brothers, this blood will not wipe
out the insult to our chief; only the blood in yonder French
camp can wipe it out. To shed that is courage; to shed this is
cowardice and cruelty besides; "-and he saved fifteen hundred
lives.
I cannot stop to give in detail every one of his efforts. This
was in 1793. Leap with me over seven years; come to 1800:
what has he achieved? He has driven the Spaniard back into
his own cities, conquered him there, and put the French banner
over every Spanish town; and for the first time, and almost the
last, the island obeys one law. He has put the mulatto under
his feet. He has attacked Maitland, defeated him in pitched
battles, and permitted him to retreat to Jamaica; and when the
French army rose upon Laveaux, their general, and put him in
chains, Toussaint defeated them, took Laveaux out of prison,
and put him at the head of his own troops. The grateful
French in return named him general-in-chief. "Cet homme fait
## p. 11415 (#29) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11415
l'ouverture partout," said one (This man makes an opening every-
where); hence his soldiers named him "L'Ouverture," the opening.
This was the work of seven years. Let us pause a moment,
and find something to measure him by. You remember Mac-
aulay says, comparing Cromwell with Napoleon, that Cromwell.
showed the greater military genius, if we consider that he never
saw an army till he was forty; while Napoleon was educated
from a boy in the best military schools in Europe. Cromwell
manufactured his own army; Napoleon at the age of twenty-
seven was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw.
They were both successful; but, says Macaulay, with such disad-
vantages the Englishman showed the greater genius. Whether
you allow the inference or not, you will at least grant that it is
a fair mode of measurement. Apply it to Toussaint. Cromwell
never saw an army till he was forty: this man never saw a
soldier till he was fifty. Cromwell manufactured his own army
-out of what? Englishmen, the best blood in Europe; out of
the middle class of Englishmen, the best blood of the island.
And with it he conquered-what? Englishmen, their equals.
This man manufactured his army-out of what? Out of what
you call the despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized
by two hundred years of slavery, one hundred thousand of them
imported into the island within four years, unable to speak a
dialect intelligible even to each other. Yet out of this mixed,
and as you say, despicable mass, he forged a thunderbolt and
burled it at-what? At the proudest blood in Europe, the
Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike
blood in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at
the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English, and they skulked
home to Jamaica. Now if Cromwell was a general, at least this
man was a soldier. I know it was a small territory; it was not
as large as the continent: but it was as large as that Attica,
which with Athens for a capital has filled the earth with its
fame for two thousand years. We measure genius by quality,
not by quantity.
Further, Cromwell was only a soldier; his fame stops there.
Not one line in the statute-book of Britain can be traced to
Cromwell; not one step in the social life of England finds its
motive power in his brain. The State he founded went down
with him to his grave. But this man no sooner put his hand
――――――
## p. 11416 (#30) ###########################################
11416
WENDELL PHILLIPS
on the helm of State than the ship steadied with an upright
keel, and he began to evince a statesmanship as marvelous as his
military genius. History says that the most statesmanlike act of
Napoleon was his proclamation of 1802, at the peace of Amiens,
when, believing that the indelible loyalty of a native-born heart
is always a sufficient basis on which to found an empire, he said:
"Frenchmen, come home. I pardon the crimes of the last twelve
years; I blot out its parties; I found my throne on the hearts
of all Frenchmen; "- and twelve years of unclouded success
showed how wisely he judged. That was in 1802. In 1800 this
negro made a proclamation; it runs thus: "Sons of St. Domingo,
come home. We never meant to take your houses or your lands.
The negro only asked that liberty which God gave him. Your
houses wait for you; your lands are ready; come and cultivate
them;" and from Madrid and Paris, from Baltimore and New
Orleans, the emigrant planters crowded home to enjoy their estates,
under the pledged word, that was never broken, of a victorious
slave.
-
Again, Carlyle has said, "The natural king is one who melts
all wills into his own. " At this moment he turned to his armies,
- poor, ill-clad, and half-starved, and said to them: Go back
and work on these estates you have conquered; for an empire.
can be founded only on order and industry, and you can learn
these virtues only there. And they went. The French admiral,
who witnessed the scene, said that in a week his army melted
back into peasants.
It was 1800. The world waited fifty years before, in 1846,
Robert Peel dared to venture, as a matter of practical states-
manship, the theory of free trade. Adam Smith theorized, the
French statesmen dreamed, but no man at the head of affairs had
ever dared to risk it as a practical measure. Europe waited till
1846 before the most practical intellect in the world, the English,
adopted the great economic formula of unfettered trade. But in
1800 this black, with the instinct of statesmanship, said to the
committee who were drafting for him a constitution: "Put at the
head of the chapter of commerce that the ports of St. Domingo
are open to the trade of the world. " With lofty indifference
to race, superior to all envy or prejudice, Toussaint had formed.
this committee of eight white proprietors and one mulatto,—not
a soldier nor a negro on the list; although Haytian history proves
## p. 11417 (#31) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11417
that with the exception of Rigaud, the rarest genius has always
been shown by pure negroes.
Again, it was 1800, at a time when England was poisoned on
every page of her statute-book with religious intolerance, when
a man could not enter the House of Commons without taking
an Episcopal communion, when every State in the Union except
Rhode Island was full of the intensest religious bigotry. This
man was a negro. You say that is a superstitious blood. He
was uneducated. You say that makes a man narrow-minded.
He was a Catholic. Many say that is but another name for
intolerance. And yet―negro, Catholic, slave - he took his place
by the side of Roger Williams, and said to his committee:
"Make it the first line of my Constitution that I know no differ-
ence between religious beliefs. "
Now, blue-eyed Saxon, proud of your race, go back with me
to the commencement of the century, and select what statesman
you please. Let him be either American or European; let him
have a brain the result of six generations of culture; let him
have the ripest training of university routine; let him add to it
the better education of practical life; crown his temples with the
silver of seventy years, -and show me the man of Saxon lin-
eage for whom his most sanguine admirer will wreathe a laurel
rich as embittered foes have placed on the brow of this negro:
rare military skill, profound knowledge of human nature, content
to blot out all party distinctions and trust a State to the blood of
its sons,-anticipating Sir Robert Peel fifty years, and taking his
station by the side of Roger Williams before any Englishman or
American had won the right;—and yet this is the record which
the history of rival States makes up for this inspired black of
St. Domingo.
It was 1801. The Frenchmen who lingered on the island
described its prosperity and order as almost incredible. You
might trust a child with a bag of gold to go from Samana to
Port-au-Prince without risk. Peace was in every household; the
valleys laughed with fertility; culture climbed the mountains;
the commerce of the world was represented in its harbors. At
this time Europe concluded the Peace of Amiens, and Napoleon
took his seat on the throne of France. He glanced his eyes
across the Atlantic, and with a single stroke of his pen reduced.
Cayenne and Martinique back into chains. He then said to his
## p. 11418 (#32) ###########################################
11418
WENDELL PHILLIPS
>>>
Council, "What shall I do with St. Domingo? The slavehold-
ers said, "Give it to us. Napoleon turned to the Abbé Gré-
goire: "What is your opinion? " "I think those men would
change their opinions if they changed their skins. " Colonel
Vincent, who had been private secretary to Toussaint, wrote a
letter to Napoleon, in which he said: "Sire, leave it alone: it is
the happiest spot in your dominions; God raised this man to
govern; races melt under his hand. He saved you this island;
for I know of my own knowledge that when the Republic could
not have lifted a finger to prevent it, George III. offered him
any title and any revenue if he would hold the island under the
British crown. He refused, and saved it for France. " Napoleon
turned away from his Council, and is said to have remarked, "I
have sixty thousand idle troops: I must find them something to
do.
»
He meant to say, "I am about to seize the crown; I dare
not do it in the faces of sixty thousand republican soldiers: I
must give them work at a distance to do. ” The gossip of Paris
gives another reason for his expedition against St. Domingo. It
is said that the satirists of Paris had christened Toussaint the
Black Napoleon; and Bonaparte hated his black shadow. Tous-
saint had unfortunately once addressed him a letter, "The first
of the blacks to the first of the whites. " He did not like the
comparison. You would think it too slight a motive. But let
me remind you of the present Napoleon, that when the epigram-
matists of Paris christened his wasteful and tasteless expense at
Versailles Soulouquerie, from the name of Soulouque, the Black
Emperor, he deigned to issue a specific order forbidding the use
of the word. The Napoleon blood is very sensitive. So Napo-
leon resolved to crush Toussaint, from one motive or another;
from the prompting of ambition, or dislike of this resemblance,-
which was very close. If either imitated the other, it must
have been the white, since the negro preceded him several years.
They were very much alike, and they were very French,-
French even in vanity, common to both. You remember Bona-
parte's vainglorious words to his soldiers at the Pyramids: "Forty
centuries look down upon us. " In the same mood, Toussaint
said to the French captain who urged him to go to France in
his frigate, "Sir, your ship is not large enough to carry me. "
Napoleon, you know, could never bear the military uniform.
He hated the restraint of his rank; he loved to put on the gray
>>
## p. 11419 (#33) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11419
coat of the Little Corporal, and wander in the camp. Toussaint
also never could bear a uniform.
He wore a plain coat, and
often the yellow Madras handkerchief of the slaves. A French
lieutenant once called him a maggot in a yellow handkerchief.
Toussaint took him prisoner next day, and sent him home to his
mother. Like Napoleon, he could fast many days; could dictate
to three secretaries at once; could wear out four or five horses.
Like Napoleon, no man ever divined his purpose or penetrated
his plan.
He was only a negro; and so in him they called it
hypocrisy. In Bonaparte we style it diplomacy. For instance,
three attempts made to assassinate him all failed, from not firing
at the right spot. If they thought he was in the north in a car-
riage, he would be in the south on horseback; if they thought
he was in the city in a house, he would be in the field in a tent.
They once riddled his carriage with bullets; he was on horseback
on the other side. The seven Frenchmen who did it were ar-
rested. They expected to be shot. The next day was some saint's
day; he ordered them to be placed before the high altar, and
when the priest reached the prayer for forgiveness, came down
from his high seat, repeated it with him, and permitted them.
to go unpunished. He had that wit common to all great com-
manders, which makes its way in a camp. His soldiers getting
disheartened, he filled a large vase with powder, and scattering
six grains of rice in it, shook them up, and said: "See, there
is the white, there is the black; what are you afraid of? " So
when people came to him in great numbers for office, as it is
reported they do sometimes even in Washington, he learned the
first words of a Catholic prayer in Latin, and repeating it, would
say, "Do you understand that? "—"No, sir. "—"What! want an
office, and not know Latin? Go home and learn it! "
Then again, like Napoleon,-like genius always,- he had con-
fidence in his power to rule men. You remember when Bonaparte
returned from Elba, and Louis XVIII. sent an army against him,
Bonaparte descended from his carriage, opened his coat, offering
his breast to their muskets, and saying, "Frenchmen, it is the
Emperor! " and they ranged themselves behind him, his soldiers,
shouting "Vive l'Empereur! " That was in 1815. Twelve years
before, Toussaint, finding that four of his regiments had deserted
and gone to Leclerc, drew his sword, flung it on the grass, went
across the field to them, folded his arms, and said, "Children,
## p. 11420 (#34) ###########################################
11420
WENDELL PHILLIPS
can you point a bayonet at me? " The blacks fell on their
knees praying his pardon. His bitterest enemies watched him,
and none of them charged him with love of money, sensuality, or
cruel use of power. The only instance in which his sternest critic
has charged him with severity is this: During a tumult, a few
white proprietors who had returned, trusting his proclamation,
were killed. His nephew, General Moise, was accused of inde-
cision in quelling the riot. He assembled a court-martial, and on
its verdict ordered his own nephew to be shot, sternly Roman
in thus keeping his promise of protection to the whites. Above
the lust of gold, pure in private life, generous in the use of
his power, it was against such a man that Napoleon sent his
army, giving to General Leclerc, the husband of his beautiful
sister Pauline, thirty thousand of his best troops, with orders
to reintroduce slavery. Among these soldiers came all of Tous-
saint's old mulatto rivals and foes.
Holland lent sixty ships. England promised by special mes-
sage to be neutral; and you know neutrality means sneering at
freedom, and sending arms to tyrants. England promised neu-
trality, and the black looked out on the whole civilized world
marshaled against him. America, full of slaves, of course was
hostile. Only the Yankee sold him poor muskets at a very high
price. Mounting his horse, and riding to the eastern end of
the island, Samana, he looked out on a sight such as no native
had ever seen before. Sixty ships of the line, crowded by the
best soldiers of Europe, rounded the point. They were soldiers
who had never yet met an equal; whose tread, like Cæsar's,
had shaken Europe; - soldiers who had scaled the Pyramids, and
planted the French banners on the walls of Rome. He looked
a moment, counted the flotilla, let the reins fall on the neck of
his horse, and turning to Christophe, exclaimed: "All France is
come to Hayti: they can only come to make us slaves; and we
are lost! " He then recognized the only mistake of his life,-
his confidence in Bonaparte, which had led him to disband his
army.
—
Returning to the hills, he issued the only proclamation which
bears his name and breathes vengeance: "My children, France
comes to make us slaves. God gave us liberty; France has no
right to take it away. Burn the cities, destroy the harvests, tear
up the roads with cannon, poison the wells, show the white man
## p. 11421 (#35) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11421
the hell he comes to make;"-and he was obeyed. When the
great William of Orange saw Louis XIV. cover Holland with
troops, he said, "Break down the dikes, give Holland back to
ocean; " and Europe said, "Sublime! » When Alexander saw
the armies of France descend upon Russia, he said, "Burn Mos-
cow, starve back the invaders;" and Europe said, "Sublime! "
This black saw all Europe marshaled to crush him, and gave to
his people the same heroic example of defiance.
It is true, the scene grows bloodier as we proceed. But
remember, the white man fitly accompanied his infamous at-
tempt to reduce free men to slavery with every bloody and cruel
device that bitter and shameless hate could invent. Aristocracy
is always cruel. The black man met the attempt, as every such
attempt should be met, with war to the hilt. In his first strug-
gle to gain his freedom, he had been generous and merciful,
saved lives and pardoned enemies, as the people in every age
and clime have always done when rising against aristocrats.
Now, to save his liberty, the negro exhausted every means,
seized every weapon, and turned back the hateful invaders with a
vengeance as terrible as their own, though even now he refused
to be cruel.
Leclerc sent word to Christophe that he was about to land at
Cape City. Christophe said, "Toussaint is governor of the island.
I will send to him for permission. If without it a French sol-
dier sets foot on shore, I will burn the town, and fight over its
ashes. "
Leclerc landed. Christophe took two thousand white men,
women, and children, and carried them to the mountains in
safety; then with his own hands set fire to the splendid palace
which French architects had just finished for him, and in forty
hours the place was in ashes. The battle was fought in its
streets, and the French driven back to their boats. Wherever
they went, they were met with fire and sword. Once, resisting
an attack, the blacks, Frenchmen born, shouted the Marseilles
Hymn, and the French soldiers stood still; they could not fight
the Marseillaise. ' And it was not till their officers sabred them
on that they advanced, and then they were beaten. Beaten in
the field, the French then took to lies. They issued proclama-
tions, saying, "We do not come to make you slaves; this man
Toussaint tells you lies. Join us, and you shall have the rights
## p. 11422 (#36) ###########################################
11422
WENDELL PHILLIPS
you claim. »
They cheated every one of his officers, except
Christophe and Dessalines and his own brother Pierre; and finally
these also deserted him, and he was left alone. He then sent
word to Leclerc, "I will submit. I could continue the struggle
for years, could prevent a single Frenchman from safely quit-
ting your camp. But I hate bloodshed. I have fought only for
the liberty of my race. Guarantee that, I will submit and come
in. " He took the oath to be a faithful citizen; and on the same
crucifix Leclerc swore that he should be faithfully protected, and
that the island should be e. As the French general glanced
along the line of his splendidly equipped troops, and saw oppo-
site Toussaint's ragged, ill-armed followers, he said to him, “L'Ou-
verture, had you continued the war, where could you have got
arms? " "I would have taken yours," was the Spartan reply.
He went down to his house in peace; it was summer. Leclerc
remembered that the fever months were coming, when his army
would be in hospitals, and when one motion of that royal hand
would sweep his troops into the sea. He was too dangerous
to be left at large. So they summoned him to attend a coun-
cil; and here is the only charge made against him,- the only
charge, they say he was fool enough to go. Grant it: what
was the record? The white man lies shrewdly to cheat the negro.
Knight-errantry was truth. The foulest insult you can offer a
man since the Crusades is, "You lie. " Of Toussaint, Hermona,
the Spanish general, who knew him well, said, "He was the
purest soul God ever put into a body. " Of him history bears
witness, "He never broke his word. " Maitland was traveling
in the depths of the woods to meet Toussaint, when he was met
by a messenger and told that he was betrayed.
He went on,
and met Toussaint, who showed him two letters, one from the
French general offering him any rank if he would put Maitland
in his power, and the other his reply. It was, "Sir, I have
promised the Englishman that he shall go back. " Let it stand,
therefore, that the negro, truthful as a knight of old, was cheated
by his lying foe. Which race has reason to be proud of such a
record?
-
But he was not cheated. He was under espionage. Suppose
he had refused: the government would have doubted him,-
would have found some cause to arrest him. He probably rea-
soned thus: "If I go willingly, I shall be treated accordingly;
## p. 11423 (#37) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11423
and he went. The moment he entered the room, the officers
drew their swords and told him he was prisoner; and one young
lieutenant who was present says, "He was not at all surprised,
but seemed very sad. " They put him on shipboard and weighed
anchor for France. As the island faded from his sight, he turned
to the captain, and said, “You think you have rooted up the tree
of liberty, but I am only a branch; I have planted the tree so
deep that all France can never root it up. ”
Arrived in Paris, he was flung into jail, and Napoleon sent
his secretary Caffarelli to him, supposing he had buried large
treasures. He listened awhile, then replied, "Young man, it is
true I have lost treasures, but they are not such as you come
to seek. " He was then sent to the Castle of Joux, to a dun-
geon twelve feet by twenty, built wholly of stone, with a narrow
window high up on the one side, looking out on the snows of
Switzerland. In winter, ice covers the floor; in summer, it
is damp and wet. In this living tomb the child of the sunny
tropic was left to die. From this dungeon he wrote two letters
to Napoleon. One of them ran thus:-
"Sire, I am a French citizen. I never broke a law. By the
grace of God, I have saved for you the best island of your realm.
Sire, of your mercy grant me justice. "
Napoleon never answered the letters. The commandant al-
lowed five francs a day for food and fuel. Napoleon heard of
it, and reduced the sum to three. The luxurious usurper, who
complained that the English government was stingy because it
allowed him only six thousand dollars a month, stooped from
throne to cut down a dollar to a half, and still Toussaint did not
die quick enough.
This dungeon was a tomb. The story is told that in Jose-
phine's time, a young French marquis was placed there, and the
girl to whom he was betrothed went to the Empress and prayed
for his release. Said Josephine to her, "Have a model of it
made, and bring it to me. " Josephine placed it near Napoleon.
He said, "Take it away,-it is horrible! ? She put it on his
footstool, and he kicked it from him. She held it to him the
third time, and said, "Sire, in this horrible dungeon you have
put a man to die. " "Take him out," said Napoleon, and the girl
saved her lover. In this tomb Toussaint was buried, but he
did not die fast enough. Finally the commandant was told to go
into Switzerland, to carry the keys of the dungeon with him, and
## p. 11424 (#38) ###########################################
11424
WENDELL PHILLIPS
to stay four days; when he returned, Toussaint was found starved
to death. That imperial assassin was taken, twelve years after,
to his prison at St. Helena, planned for a tomb as he had
planned that of Toussaint; and there he whined away his dying
hours in pitiful complaints of curtains and titles, of dishes and
rides. God grant that when some future Plutarch shall weigh
the great men of our epoch, the whites against the blacks, he do
not put that whining child at St. Helena into one scale, and into
the other the negro, meeting death like a Roman, without a mur-
mur, in the solitude of his icy dungeon!
ANTIQUITY OF INVENTIONS AND STORIES
From Lecture on The Lost Arts'
I
HAVE been somewhat criticized, year after year, for this en-
deavor to open up the claims of old times. I have been
charged with repeating useless fables with no foundation.
To-day I take the mere subject of glass. This material, Pliny
says, was discovered by accident. Some sailors, landing on the
eastern coast of Spain, took their cooking utensils, and supported
them on the sand by the stones that they found in the neigh-
borhood; they kindled their fire, cooked the fish, finished the
meal, and removed the apparatus; and glass was found to have
resulted from the nitre and sea-sand, vitrified by the heat. Well,
I have been a dozen times criticized by a number of wise men,
in newspapers, who have said that this was a very idle tale;
«<
that there never was sufficient heat in a few bundles of sticks to
produce vitrification,— glass-making. I happened, two years ago,
to meet on the prairies of Missouri, Professor Shepherd, who
started from Yale College, and like a genuine Yankee brings up
anywhere where there is anything to do. I happened to men-
tion this criticism to him. "Well," says he, "a little practical
life would have freed men from that doubt. " Said he, We
stopped last year in Mexico, to cook some venison.
We got
down from our saddles, and put the cooking apparatus on stones
we found there; made our fire with the wood we got there, re-
sembling ebony; and when we removed the apparatus there was
pure silver gotten out of the embers by the intense heat of that
almost iron wood. Now," said he, "that heat was greater than
any necessary to vitrify the materials of glass. »
## p. 11425 (#39) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11425
Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all
wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention,
to use, or beauty, or form, we are borrowers.
You may glance around the furniture of the palaces in
Europe, and you may gather all these utensils of art or use; and
when you have fixed the shape and forms in your mind, I will
take you into the museum of Naples, which gathers all the re-
mains of the domestic life of the Romans, and you shall not find
a single one of these modern forms of art or beauty or use that
was not anticipated there. We have hardly added one single line.
or sweep of beauty to the antique. .
All the boys' plays, like everything that amuses the child in
the open air, are Asiatic. Rawlinson will show you that they
came somewhere from the banks of the Ganges or the suburbs
of Damascus. Bulwer borrowed the incidents of his Roman
stories from legends of a thousand years before. Indeed, Dun-
lop, who has grouped the history of the novels of all Europe
into one essay, says that in the nations of modern Europe there
have been two hundred and fifty or three hundred distinct
stories. He says at least two hundred of these may be traced,
before Christianity, to the other side of the Black Sea. If this
were my topic, which it is not, I might tell you that even our
newspaper jokes are enjoying a very respectable old age. Take
Maria Edgeworth's essay on Irish bulls and the laughable mis-
takes of the Irish. Even the tale which either Maria Edgeworth
or her father thought the best is that famous story of a man
writing a letter as follows: "My dear friend, I would write you.
in detail more minutely, if there was not an impudent fellow
looking over my shoulder, reading every word. "-"No, you lie :
I've not read a word you have written! " This is an Irish bull;
still it is a very old one. It is only two hundred and fifty years
older than the New Testament. Horace Walpole dissented from
Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and thought the other Irish bull was
the best,- of the man who said, "I would have been a very
handsome man, but they changed me in the cradle. " That comes
from Don Quixote, and is Spanish; but Cervantes borrowed it.
from the Greek in the fourth century, and the Greek stole it
from the Egyptian hundreds of years back.
There is one story which it is said Washington has related,
of a man who went into an inn and asked for a glass of drink
from the landlord, who pushed forward a wine-glass about half the
XX-715
## p. 11426 (#40) ###########################################
11426
WENDELL PHILLIPS
usual size; the teacups also in that day were not more than half
the present size. The landlord said, "That glass out of which
you are drinking is forty years old " "Well," said the thirsty
traveler, contemplating its diminutive proportions, "I think it is
the smallest thing of its age I ever saw. " That story as told is
given as a story of Athens three hundred and seventy-five years
before Christ was born. Why! all these Irish bulls are Greek,-
every one of them. Take the Irishman who carried around a
brick as a specimen of the house he had to sell; take the Irish-
man who shut his eyes and looked into the glass to see how he
would look when he was dead; take the Irishman that bought
a crow, alleging that crows were reported to live two hundred
years, and he meant to set out and try it; take the Irishman who
met a friend who said to him, "Why, sir, I heard you were dead. "
"Well," says the man, "I suppose you see I'm not. " "Oh, no,”
says he, "I would believe the man who told me a good deal
quicker than I would you. " Well, those are all Greek.
A score
or more of them, of a parallel character, come from Athens. .
Cicero said that he had seen the entire Iliad, which is a poem
as large as the New Testament, written on a skin so that it
could be rolled up in the compass of a nut-shell. Now this is
imperceptible to the ordinary eye.
merely to hold his ground and to get a hearing. You cannot com-
pare oratory in those circumstances with oratory in a dress debate,
or even with the oratory of a great parliamentary contest. On this
last has often hung, no doubt, the life of a ministry. On Phillips's
mastery over his hearers depended sometimes his own life, sometimes
that of the antislavery cause- with which, as we now all see and
as then hardly anybody saw, was bound up the life of the nation.
It was, in my judgment, the oratory of Phillips which insured the
maintenance of that great antislavery struggle during the last ten
years or more which preceded the War. His oratory must be judged
with reference to that to its object as well as to its rhetorical
qualities. He had and kept the ear of the people. To have silenced
that silver trumpet would have been to wreck the cause.
I speak
of the Abolitionist cause by itself - that which relied solely on moral
forces and stood completely outside of politics.
Yet Phillips never made a concession. There was no art of speech
he would not employ to win the attention of his audience. But he
never softened an invective or compromised the clear logic of his
statement in order to divert the hostility which confronted him. He
would coax, cajole, ridicule, transpierce, or overwhelm an opponent,
but never yielded a jot in principle. I have known him try all means
to conciliate and then all means to crush, all within a few minutes.
He had the art of so exciting curiosity, that a raging mob which
half caught the first half of a sentence would still its own tumult in
order to hear what was coming next. He shrank from no danger: on
his unfailing cool courage and self-possession rested half the orator's
power. When in Faneuil Hall he called the Attorney-General recre-
ant, there were cries "Take that back! " and a tumult. "Fellow-
citizens," answered the young Bostonian, "I cannot take back my
words. " It was the motto of his whole career. Twenty-four years
later, April 21st, 1861, he was to speak in the Music Hall of Boston
for the War. Against his habit, he wrote out his speech;—it was a
turning-point in his history as orator and as abolitionist. He read me
the speech, which began: "Many times this winter, here and else- .
where, I have counseled peace,-urged as well as I know how the ex-
pediency of acknowledging a Southern Confederacy, and the peaceful
separation of these thirty-four States. One of the journals announces
## p. 11411 (#25) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11411
to you that I come here this morning to retract those opinions. No,
not one of them. " Those were days of flame and fire, and I said
to Phillips that they would never let him get farther. "Well," he
answered, "if I cannot say that I will say nothing. " And he read on.
"I need them all,- every word I have spoken this winter, every act
of twenty-five years of my life, to make the welcome I give this
War hearty and hot. " The result justified his gallantry. The low
murmurs which the opening sentence provoked were swept away in
the storm of passionate cheers which followed.
All this dwelling upon the moral attributes of the orator may
seem out of place in a brief criticism; but it is inevitable. Take away
the moral impulse and there would have been no orator, no oratory,
no thirty years of unmatched eloquence, no such rhetorical lesson as
the speeches of Phillips now give. There is, unhappily, no adequate
record of them; as there is none of the speeches of any orator of
the first order, except where they were written out like those of the
great Greek, or written and rewritten like his Roman rival's or like
Burke's, or unless, like those of the one great English orator of
this generation, Bright, they were fully reported at the time. Phillips
was never thought worth reporting till late in life. He was of the
minority; and then as now, the tyranny of the majority in this coun-
try was oppressive and relentless. They meant to keep him in obscur-
ity: it was the sun of his genius which burst through the mists and
darkness which enveloped him. Traditions still fresh tell you of
the beauty of Phillips's presence on the platform, of his incompar-
able charm of manner and voice, of his persuasiveness, and much else.
But oratory, save under such conditions as I mentioned above, is
evanescent. That of Phillips did its work: it is the eulogy would
value most. There was in him the poet. He had in abounding
measure the sympathies without which no oratory, be its other qual-
ities what they may, carries an audience captive. He put himself
instantly on easy terms with those before him. He could be col-
loquial and familiar, he delighted in repartee,-in which he never
found his equal,- the next moment he was among the clouds, and
on the just and unjust alike descended a rain of eloquence, beneath
which sprang forth those seeds of virtue and moral faith and reli-
gious hatred of wrong which presently covered the land.
There was much of the Greek in him: the sense of ordered beauty
and of art. He had culture; the fire of true patriotism; serenity of
mind. Not a speech in which those high qualities are not visible.
They were still more evident as you heard him; and still more, per-
haps, the symmetrical quality of mind and speech which is almost.
the rarest in modern oratory or modern life. He had indomitable
good-nature on the platform. The hard things he said about men had
no root in his heart; they were meant to fasten attention not on the
·
## p. 11412 (#26) ###########################################
11412
WENDELL PHILLIPS
sin only, which is abstract, but on the sinner. Intellectually a Greek,
his moral nature was Hebraic, and the language of the Old Testament
is inwrought in his oratory. But there was a smile on his face while
the lightnings flashed. The authority with which he spoke was due
largely to this coolness; but it is idle to ascribe it to any one trait,
and to seek for the sources of it in mere rhetoric or mere culture.
The true source of it was the whole man.
Gow. Surachey
билу
W.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. -Wendell Phillips was born in Boston, Mas-
sachusetts, November 29th, 1811; a son of the city's first mayor, and
allied to the State's best blood and brains. He graduated at Harvard
College in 1831, and from its Law School in 1833. A year later he
was admitted to the bar. His career as a leader of men and a pub-
lic orator, however, began early, and almost uninterruptedly engaged
him until the close of his life. His denunciatory speech on the mur-
der of Lovejoy, in 1837, may be reckoned the opening of his platform
career. His "great speeches" followed each other rapidly. He threw
himself fervently into the Abolition movement, and succeeded Will-
iam Lloyd Garrison as president of the Anti-Slavery Society, in 1865.
His continuous tours as a lecturer occupied all his latter years.
died February 2d, 1884.
He
The following selection is from one of the most famous of his gen-
eral lectures. Only one other was equally identified with his name in
popular regard,- that on 'Lost Arts'; a brilliant mosaic of apocrypha
from all ages, so plausibly stated that it was hard to resist convic-
tion of their truth while listening to his easy, graceful, conversational
periods, spoken as though he had just remembered some interesting
facts and wished to share the pleasure with a group of friends.
THE HERO OF HAYTI
From Toussaint l'Ouverture,' a lecture delivered in 1861. Copyright 1863,
by Wendell Phillips
Tmingo.
HIS is what Edward Everett calls the Insurrection of St. Do-
mingo. It bore for its motto on one side of its banner,
"Long live the King"; and on the other, "We claim the
Old Laws. " Singular mottoes for a rebellion. In fact, it was the
posse comitatus; it was the only French army on the island; it
## p. 11413 (#27) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11413
was the only force that had a right to bear arms: and what it
undertook it achieved. It put Blanchelande his seat; it put
the island beneath his rule. When it was done, the blacks said
to the governor they had created, "Now grant us one day in
seven; give us one day's labor; we will buy another, and with
the two buy a third," the favorite method of emancipation at
that time. Like the Blanchelande of five years before, he re-
fused. He said, "Disarm! Disperse! " and the blacks answered,
"The right hand that has saved you, the right hand that has
saved the island for the Bourbons, may perchance clutch some
of our own rights;" and they stood still. This is the first
insurrection, if any such there were in St. Domingo,- the first
determined purpose on the part of the negro, having saved the
government, to save himself.
At such a moment Toussaint l'Ouverture appeared.
He had been born a slave on a plantation in the north of the
island, an unmixed negro,- his father stolen from Africa. If
anything, therefore, that I say of him to-night moves your admi-
ration, remember, the black race claims it all,- we have no part
nor lot in it. He was fifty years old at this time. An old negro
had taught him to read. His favorite books were Epictetus,
Raynal, military memoirs, Plutarch. In the woods he learned
some of the qualities of herbs; and was village doctor. On the
estate, the highest place he ever reached was that of coachman.
At fifty he joined the army as physician. Before he went, he
placed his master and mistress on shipboard, freighted the vessel
with a cargo of sugar and coffee, and sent them to Baltimore;
and never afterward did he forget to send them, year by year,
ample means of support. And I might add, that of all the lead-
ing negro generals, each one saved the man under whose roof he
was born, and protected the family.
Let me add another thing. If I stood here to-night to tell
the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of French-
men, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain
of the nineteenth century. Were I here to tell you the story of
Washington, I should take it from your hearts,-you, who think
no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the
Father of his Country. I am about to tell you the story of
a negro who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it
from the reluctant testimony of Britons, Frenchmen, Spaniards,—
## p. 11414 (#28) ###########################################
11414
WENDELL PHILLIPS
men who despised him as a negro and a slave, and hated him
because he had beaten them in many a battle. All the materials
for his biography are from the lips of his enemies.
The second story told of him is this: About the time he
reached the camp, the army had been subjected to two insults.
First their commissioners, summoned to meet the French Com-
mittee, were ignominiously and insultingly dismissed; and when
afterward François, their general, was summoned to a second
conference, and went to it on horseback, accompanied by two
officers, a young lieutenant, who had known him as a slave,
angered at seeing him in the uniform of an officer, raised his
riding-whip and struck him over the shoulders. If he had been
the savage which the negro is painted to us, he had only to
breathe the insult to his twenty-five thousand soldiers, and they
would have trodden out the Frenchmen in blood. But the indig-
nant chief rode back in silence to his tent, and it was twenty-
four hours before his troops heard of this insult to their gen-
eral. Then the word went forth, "Death to every white man! "
They had fifteen hundred prisoners. Ranged in front of the
camp, they were about to be shot. Toussaint, who had a vein
of religious fanaticism, like most great leaders,-like Moham-
med, like Napoleon, like Cromwell, like John Brown, he could
preach as well as fight,- mounting a hillock, and getting the ear
of the crowd, exclaimed:-"Brothers, this blood will not wipe
out the insult to our chief; only the blood in yonder French
camp can wipe it out. To shed that is courage; to shed this is
cowardice and cruelty besides; "-and he saved fifteen hundred
lives.
I cannot stop to give in detail every one of his efforts. This
was in 1793. Leap with me over seven years; come to 1800:
what has he achieved? He has driven the Spaniard back into
his own cities, conquered him there, and put the French banner
over every Spanish town; and for the first time, and almost the
last, the island obeys one law. He has put the mulatto under
his feet. He has attacked Maitland, defeated him in pitched
battles, and permitted him to retreat to Jamaica; and when the
French army rose upon Laveaux, their general, and put him in
chains, Toussaint defeated them, took Laveaux out of prison,
and put him at the head of his own troops. The grateful
French in return named him general-in-chief. "Cet homme fait
## p. 11415 (#29) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11415
l'ouverture partout," said one (This man makes an opening every-
where); hence his soldiers named him "L'Ouverture," the opening.
This was the work of seven years. Let us pause a moment,
and find something to measure him by. You remember Mac-
aulay says, comparing Cromwell with Napoleon, that Cromwell.
showed the greater military genius, if we consider that he never
saw an army till he was forty; while Napoleon was educated
from a boy in the best military schools in Europe. Cromwell
manufactured his own army; Napoleon at the age of twenty-
seven was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw.
They were both successful; but, says Macaulay, with such disad-
vantages the Englishman showed the greater genius. Whether
you allow the inference or not, you will at least grant that it is
a fair mode of measurement. Apply it to Toussaint. Cromwell
never saw an army till he was forty: this man never saw a
soldier till he was fifty. Cromwell manufactured his own army
-out of what? Englishmen, the best blood in Europe; out of
the middle class of Englishmen, the best blood of the island.
And with it he conquered-what? Englishmen, their equals.
This man manufactured his army-out of what? Out of what
you call the despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized
by two hundred years of slavery, one hundred thousand of them
imported into the island within four years, unable to speak a
dialect intelligible even to each other. Yet out of this mixed,
and as you say, despicable mass, he forged a thunderbolt and
burled it at-what? At the proudest blood in Europe, the
Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike
blood in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at
the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English, and they skulked
home to Jamaica. Now if Cromwell was a general, at least this
man was a soldier. I know it was a small territory; it was not
as large as the continent: but it was as large as that Attica,
which with Athens for a capital has filled the earth with its
fame for two thousand years. We measure genius by quality,
not by quantity.
Further, Cromwell was only a soldier; his fame stops there.
Not one line in the statute-book of Britain can be traced to
Cromwell; not one step in the social life of England finds its
motive power in his brain. The State he founded went down
with him to his grave. But this man no sooner put his hand
――――――
## p. 11416 (#30) ###########################################
11416
WENDELL PHILLIPS
on the helm of State than the ship steadied with an upright
keel, and he began to evince a statesmanship as marvelous as his
military genius. History says that the most statesmanlike act of
Napoleon was his proclamation of 1802, at the peace of Amiens,
when, believing that the indelible loyalty of a native-born heart
is always a sufficient basis on which to found an empire, he said:
"Frenchmen, come home. I pardon the crimes of the last twelve
years; I blot out its parties; I found my throne on the hearts
of all Frenchmen; "- and twelve years of unclouded success
showed how wisely he judged. That was in 1802. In 1800 this
negro made a proclamation; it runs thus: "Sons of St. Domingo,
come home. We never meant to take your houses or your lands.
The negro only asked that liberty which God gave him. Your
houses wait for you; your lands are ready; come and cultivate
them;" and from Madrid and Paris, from Baltimore and New
Orleans, the emigrant planters crowded home to enjoy their estates,
under the pledged word, that was never broken, of a victorious
slave.
-
Again, Carlyle has said, "The natural king is one who melts
all wills into his own. " At this moment he turned to his armies,
- poor, ill-clad, and half-starved, and said to them: Go back
and work on these estates you have conquered; for an empire.
can be founded only on order and industry, and you can learn
these virtues only there. And they went. The French admiral,
who witnessed the scene, said that in a week his army melted
back into peasants.
It was 1800. The world waited fifty years before, in 1846,
Robert Peel dared to venture, as a matter of practical states-
manship, the theory of free trade. Adam Smith theorized, the
French statesmen dreamed, but no man at the head of affairs had
ever dared to risk it as a practical measure. Europe waited till
1846 before the most practical intellect in the world, the English,
adopted the great economic formula of unfettered trade. But in
1800 this black, with the instinct of statesmanship, said to the
committee who were drafting for him a constitution: "Put at the
head of the chapter of commerce that the ports of St. Domingo
are open to the trade of the world. " With lofty indifference
to race, superior to all envy or prejudice, Toussaint had formed.
this committee of eight white proprietors and one mulatto,—not
a soldier nor a negro on the list; although Haytian history proves
## p. 11417 (#31) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11417
that with the exception of Rigaud, the rarest genius has always
been shown by pure negroes.
Again, it was 1800, at a time when England was poisoned on
every page of her statute-book with religious intolerance, when
a man could not enter the House of Commons without taking
an Episcopal communion, when every State in the Union except
Rhode Island was full of the intensest religious bigotry. This
man was a negro. You say that is a superstitious blood. He
was uneducated. You say that makes a man narrow-minded.
He was a Catholic. Many say that is but another name for
intolerance. And yet―negro, Catholic, slave - he took his place
by the side of Roger Williams, and said to his committee:
"Make it the first line of my Constitution that I know no differ-
ence between religious beliefs. "
Now, blue-eyed Saxon, proud of your race, go back with me
to the commencement of the century, and select what statesman
you please. Let him be either American or European; let him
have a brain the result of six generations of culture; let him
have the ripest training of university routine; let him add to it
the better education of practical life; crown his temples with the
silver of seventy years, -and show me the man of Saxon lin-
eage for whom his most sanguine admirer will wreathe a laurel
rich as embittered foes have placed on the brow of this negro:
rare military skill, profound knowledge of human nature, content
to blot out all party distinctions and trust a State to the blood of
its sons,-anticipating Sir Robert Peel fifty years, and taking his
station by the side of Roger Williams before any Englishman or
American had won the right;—and yet this is the record which
the history of rival States makes up for this inspired black of
St. Domingo.
It was 1801. The Frenchmen who lingered on the island
described its prosperity and order as almost incredible. You
might trust a child with a bag of gold to go from Samana to
Port-au-Prince without risk. Peace was in every household; the
valleys laughed with fertility; culture climbed the mountains;
the commerce of the world was represented in its harbors. At
this time Europe concluded the Peace of Amiens, and Napoleon
took his seat on the throne of France. He glanced his eyes
across the Atlantic, and with a single stroke of his pen reduced.
Cayenne and Martinique back into chains. He then said to his
## p. 11418 (#32) ###########################################
11418
WENDELL PHILLIPS
>>>
Council, "What shall I do with St. Domingo? The slavehold-
ers said, "Give it to us. Napoleon turned to the Abbé Gré-
goire: "What is your opinion? " "I think those men would
change their opinions if they changed their skins. " Colonel
Vincent, who had been private secretary to Toussaint, wrote a
letter to Napoleon, in which he said: "Sire, leave it alone: it is
the happiest spot in your dominions; God raised this man to
govern; races melt under his hand. He saved you this island;
for I know of my own knowledge that when the Republic could
not have lifted a finger to prevent it, George III. offered him
any title and any revenue if he would hold the island under the
British crown. He refused, and saved it for France. " Napoleon
turned away from his Council, and is said to have remarked, "I
have sixty thousand idle troops: I must find them something to
do.
»
He meant to say, "I am about to seize the crown; I dare
not do it in the faces of sixty thousand republican soldiers: I
must give them work at a distance to do. ” The gossip of Paris
gives another reason for his expedition against St. Domingo. It
is said that the satirists of Paris had christened Toussaint the
Black Napoleon; and Bonaparte hated his black shadow. Tous-
saint had unfortunately once addressed him a letter, "The first
of the blacks to the first of the whites. " He did not like the
comparison. You would think it too slight a motive. But let
me remind you of the present Napoleon, that when the epigram-
matists of Paris christened his wasteful and tasteless expense at
Versailles Soulouquerie, from the name of Soulouque, the Black
Emperor, he deigned to issue a specific order forbidding the use
of the word. The Napoleon blood is very sensitive. So Napo-
leon resolved to crush Toussaint, from one motive or another;
from the prompting of ambition, or dislike of this resemblance,-
which was very close. If either imitated the other, it must
have been the white, since the negro preceded him several years.
They were very much alike, and they were very French,-
French even in vanity, common to both. You remember Bona-
parte's vainglorious words to his soldiers at the Pyramids: "Forty
centuries look down upon us. " In the same mood, Toussaint
said to the French captain who urged him to go to France in
his frigate, "Sir, your ship is not large enough to carry me. "
Napoleon, you know, could never bear the military uniform.
He hated the restraint of his rank; he loved to put on the gray
>>
## p. 11419 (#33) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11419
coat of the Little Corporal, and wander in the camp. Toussaint
also never could bear a uniform.
He wore a plain coat, and
often the yellow Madras handkerchief of the slaves. A French
lieutenant once called him a maggot in a yellow handkerchief.
Toussaint took him prisoner next day, and sent him home to his
mother. Like Napoleon, he could fast many days; could dictate
to three secretaries at once; could wear out four or five horses.
Like Napoleon, no man ever divined his purpose or penetrated
his plan.
He was only a negro; and so in him they called it
hypocrisy. In Bonaparte we style it diplomacy. For instance,
three attempts made to assassinate him all failed, from not firing
at the right spot. If they thought he was in the north in a car-
riage, he would be in the south on horseback; if they thought
he was in the city in a house, he would be in the field in a tent.
They once riddled his carriage with bullets; he was on horseback
on the other side. The seven Frenchmen who did it were ar-
rested. They expected to be shot. The next day was some saint's
day; he ordered them to be placed before the high altar, and
when the priest reached the prayer for forgiveness, came down
from his high seat, repeated it with him, and permitted them.
to go unpunished. He had that wit common to all great com-
manders, which makes its way in a camp. His soldiers getting
disheartened, he filled a large vase with powder, and scattering
six grains of rice in it, shook them up, and said: "See, there
is the white, there is the black; what are you afraid of? " So
when people came to him in great numbers for office, as it is
reported they do sometimes even in Washington, he learned the
first words of a Catholic prayer in Latin, and repeating it, would
say, "Do you understand that? "—"No, sir. "—"What! want an
office, and not know Latin? Go home and learn it! "
Then again, like Napoleon,-like genius always,- he had con-
fidence in his power to rule men. You remember when Bonaparte
returned from Elba, and Louis XVIII. sent an army against him,
Bonaparte descended from his carriage, opened his coat, offering
his breast to their muskets, and saying, "Frenchmen, it is the
Emperor! " and they ranged themselves behind him, his soldiers,
shouting "Vive l'Empereur! " That was in 1815. Twelve years
before, Toussaint, finding that four of his regiments had deserted
and gone to Leclerc, drew his sword, flung it on the grass, went
across the field to them, folded his arms, and said, "Children,
## p. 11420 (#34) ###########################################
11420
WENDELL PHILLIPS
can you point a bayonet at me? " The blacks fell on their
knees praying his pardon. His bitterest enemies watched him,
and none of them charged him with love of money, sensuality, or
cruel use of power. The only instance in which his sternest critic
has charged him with severity is this: During a tumult, a few
white proprietors who had returned, trusting his proclamation,
were killed. His nephew, General Moise, was accused of inde-
cision in quelling the riot. He assembled a court-martial, and on
its verdict ordered his own nephew to be shot, sternly Roman
in thus keeping his promise of protection to the whites. Above
the lust of gold, pure in private life, generous in the use of
his power, it was against such a man that Napoleon sent his
army, giving to General Leclerc, the husband of his beautiful
sister Pauline, thirty thousand of his best troops, with orders
to reintroduce slavery. Among these soldiers came all of Tous-
saint's old mulatto rivals and foes.
Holland lent sixty ships. England promised by special mes-
sage to be neutral; and you know neutrality means sneering at
freedom, and sending arms to tyrants. England promised neu-
trality, and the black looked out on the whole civilized world
marshaled against him. America, full of slaves, of course was
hostile. Only the Yankee sold him poor muskets at a very high
price. Mounting his horse, and riding to the eastern end of
the island, Samana, he looked out on a sight such as no native
had ever seen before. Sixty ships of the line, crowded by the
best soldiers of Europe, rounded the point. They were soldiers
who had never yet met an equal; whose tread, like Cæsar's,
had shaken Europe; - soldiers who had scaled the Pyramids, and
planted the French banners on the walls of Rome. He looked
a moment, counted the flotilla, let the reins fall on the neck of
his horse, and turning to Christophe, exclaimed: "All France is
come to Hayti: they can only come to make us slaves; and we
are lost! " He then recognized the only mistake of his life,-
his confidence in Bonaparte, which had led him to disband his
army.
—
Returning to the hills, he issued the only proclamation which
bears his name and breathes vengeance: "My children, France
comes to make us slaves. God gave us liberty; France has no
right to take it away. Burn the cities, destroy the harvests, tear
up the roads with cannon, poison the wells, show the white man
## p. 11421 (#35) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11421
the hell he comes to make;"-and he was obeyed. When the
great William of Orange saw Louis XIV. cover Holland with
troops, he said, "Break down the dikes, give Holland back to
ocean; " and Europe said, "Sublime! » When Alexander saw
the armies of France descend upon Russia, he said, "Burn Mos-
cow, starve back the invaders;" and Europe said, "Sublime! "
This black saw all Europe marshaled to crush him, and gave to
his people the same heroic example of defiance.
It is true, the scene grows bloodier as we proceed. But
remember, the white man fitly accompanied his infamous at-
tempt to reduce free men to slavery with every bloody and cruel
device that bitter and shameless hate could invent. Aristocracy
is always cruel. The black man met the attempt, as every such
attempt should be met, with war to the hilt. In his first strug-
gle to gain his freedom, he had been generous and merciful,
saved lives and pardoned enemies, as the people in every age
and clime have always done when rising against aristocrats.
Now, to save his liberty, the negro exhausted every means,
seized every weapon, and turned back the hateful invaders with a
vengeance as terrible as their own, though even now he refused
to be cruel.
Leclerc sent word to Christophe that he was about to land at
Cape City. Christophe said, "Toussaint is governor of the island.
I will send to him for permission. If without it a French sol-
dier sets foot on shore, I will burn the town, and fight over its
ashes. "
Leclerc landed. Christophe took two thousand white men,
women, and children, and carried them to the mountains in
safety; then with his own hands set fire to the splendid palace
which French architects had just finished for him, and in forty
hours the place was in ashes. The battle was fought in its
streets, and the French driven back to their boats. Wherever
they went, they were met with fire and sword. Once, resisting
an attack, the blacks, Frenchmen born, shouted the Marseilles
Hymn, and the French soldiers stood still; they could not fight
the Marseillaise. ' And it was not till their officers sabred them
on that they advanced, and then they were beaten. Beaten in
the field, the French then took to lies. They issued proclama-
tions, saying, "We do not come to make you slaves; this man
Toussaint tells you lies. Join us, and you shall have the rights
## p. 11422 (#36) ###########################################
11422
WENDELL PHILLIPS
you claim. »
They cheated every one of his officers, except
Christophe and Dessalines and his own brother Pierre; and finally
these also deserted him, and he was left alone. He then sent
word to Leclerc, "I will submit. I could continue the struggle
for years, could prevent a single Frenchman from safely quit-
ting your camp. But I hate bloodshed. I have fought only for
the liberty of my race. Guarantee that, I will submit and come
in. " He took the oath to be a faithful citizen; and on the same
crucifix Leclerc swore that he should be faithfully protected, and
that the island should be e. As the French general glanced
along the line of his splendidly equipped troops, and saw oppo-
site Toussaint's ragged, ill-armed followers, he said to him, “L'Ou-
verture, had you continued the war, where could you have got
arms? " "I would have taken yours," was the Spartan reply.
He went down to his house in peace; it was summer. Leclerc
remembered that the fever months were coming, when his army
would be in hospitals, and when one motion of that royal hand
would sweep his troops into the sea. He was too dangerous
to be left at large. So they summoned him to attend a coun-
cil; and here is the only charge made against him,- the only
charge, they say he was fool enough to go. Grant it: what
was the record? The white man lies shrewdly to cheat the negro.
Knight-errantry was truth. The foulest insult you can offer a
man since the Crusades is, "You lie. " Of Toussaint, Hermona,
the Spanish general, who knew him well, said, "He was the
purest soul God ever put into a body. " Of him history bears
witness, "He never broke his word. " Maitland was traveling
in the depths of the woods to meet Toussaint, when he was met
by a messenger and told that he was betrayed.
He went on,
and met Toussaint, who showed him two letters, one from the
French general offering him any rank if he would put Maitland
in his power, and the other his reply. It was, "Sir, I have
promised the Englishman that he shall go back. " Let it stand,
therefore, that the negro, truthful as a knight of old, was cheated
by his lying foe. Which race has reason to be proud of such a
record?
-
But he was not cheated. He was under espionage. Suppose
he had refused: the government would have doubted him,-
would have found some cause to arrest him. He probably rea-
soned thus: "If I go willingly, I shall be treated accordingly;
## p. 11423 (#37) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11423
and he went. The moment he entered the room, the officers
drew their swords and told him he was prisoner; and one young
lieutenant who was present says, "He was not at all surprised,
but seemed very sad. " They put him on shipboard and weighed
anchor for France. As the island faded from his sight, he turned
to the captain, and said, “You think you have rooted up the tree
of liberty, but I am only a branch; I have planted the tree so
deep that all France can never root it up. ”
Arrived in Paris, he was flung into jail, and Napoleon sent
his secretary Caffarelli to him, supposing he had buried large
treasures. He listened awhile, then replied, "Young man, it is
true I have lost treasures, but they are not such as you come
to seek. " He was then sent to the Castle of Joux, to a dun-
geon twelve feet by twenty, built wholly of stone, with a narrow
window high up on the one side, looking out on the snows of
Switzerland. In winter, ice covers the floor; in summer, it
is damp and wet. In this living tomb the child of the sunny
tropic was left to die. From this dungeon he wrote two letters
to Napoleon. One of them ran thus:-
"Sire, I am a French citizen. I never broke a law. By the
grace of God, I have saved for you the best island of your realm.
Sire, of your mercy grant me justice. "
Napoleon never answered the letters. The commandant al-
lowed five francs a day for food and fuel. Napoleon heard of
it, and reduced the sum to three. The luxurious usurper, who
complained that the English government was stingy because it
allowed him only six thousand dollars a month, stooped from
throne to cut down a dollar to a half, and still Toussaint did not
die quick enough.
This dungeon was a tomb. The story is told that in Jose-
phine's time, a young French marquis was placed there, and the
girl to whom he was betrothed went to the Empress and prayed
for his release. Said Josephine to her, "Have a model of it
made, and bring it to me. " Josephine placed it near Napoleon.
He said, "Take it away,-it is horrible! ? She put it on his
footstool, and he kicked it from him. She held it to him the
third time, and said, "Sire, in this horrible dungeon you have
put a man to die. " "Take him out," said Napoleon, and the girl
saved her lover. In this tomb Toussaint was buried, but he
did not die fast enough. Finally the commandant was told to go
into Switzerland, to carry the keys of the dungeon with him, and
## p. 11424 (#38) ###########################################
11424
WENDELL PHILLIPS
to stay four days; when he returned, Toussaint was found starved
to death. That imperial assassin was taken, twelve years after,
to his prison at St. Helena, planned for a tomb as he had
planned that of Toussaint; and there he whined away his dying
hours in pitiful complaints of curtains and titles, of dishes and
rides. God grant that when some future Plutarch shall weigh
the great men of our epoch, the whites against the blacks, he do
not put that whining child at St. Helena into one scale, and into
the other the negro, meeting death like a Roman, without a mur-
mur, in the solitude of his icy dungeon!
ANTIQUITY OF INVENTIONS AND STORIES
From Lecture on The Lost Arts'
I
HAVE been somewhat criticized, year after year, for this en-
deavor to open up the claims of old times. I have been
charged with repeating useless fables with no foundation.
To-day I take the mere subject of glass. This material, Pliny
says, was discovered by accident. Some sailors, landing on the
eastern coast of Spain, took their cooking utensils, and supported
them on the sand by the stones that they found in the neigh-
borhood; they kindled their fire, cooked the fish, finished the
meal, and removed the apparatus; and glass was found to have
resulted from the nitre and sea-sand, vitrified by the heat. Well,
I have been a dozen times criticized by a number of wise men,
in newspapers, who have said that this was a very idle tale;
«<
that there never was sufficient heat in a few bundles of sticks to
produce vitrification,— glass-making. I happened, two years ago,
to meet on the prairies of Missouri, Professor Shepherd, who
started from Yale College, and like a genuine Yankee brings up
anywhere where there is anything to do. I happened to men-
tion this criticism to him. "Well," says he, "a little practical
life would have freed men from that doubt. " Said he, We
stopped last year in Mexico, to cook some venison.
We got
down from our saddles, and put the cooking apparatus on stones
we found there; made our fire with the wood we got there, re-
sembling ebony; and when we removed the apparatus there was
pure silver gotten out of the embers by the intense heat of that
almost iron wood. Now," said he, "that heat was greater than
any necessary to vitrify the materials of glass. »
## p. 11425 (#39) ###########################################
WENDELL PHILLIPS
11425
Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all
wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention,
to use, or beauty, or form, we are borrowers.
You may glance around the furniture of the palaces in
Europe, and you may gather all these utensils of art or use; and
when you have fixed the shape and forms in your mind, I will
take you into the museum of Naples, which gathers all the re-
mains of the domestic life of the Romans, and you shall not find
a single one of these modern forms of art or beauty or use that
was not anticipated there. We have hardly added one single line.
or sweep of beauty to the antique. .
All the boys' plays, like everything that amuses the child in
the open air, are Asiatic. Rawlinson will show you that they
came somewhere from the banks of the Ganges or the suburbs
of Damascus. Bulwer borrowed the incidents of his Roman
stories from legends of a thousand years before. Indeed, Dun-
lop, who has grouped the history of the novels of all Europe
into one essay, says that in the nations of modern Europe there
have been two hundred and fifty or three hundred distinct
stories. He says at least two hundred of these may be traced,
before Christianity, to the other side of the Black Sea. If this
were my topic, which it is not, I might tell you that even our
newspaper jokes are enjoying a very respectable old age. Take
Maria Edgeworth's essay on Irish bulls and the laughable mis-
takes of the Irish. Even the tale which either Maria Edgeworth
or her father thought the best is that famous story of a man
writing a letter as follows: "My dear friend, I would write you.
in detail more minutely, if there was not an impudent fellow
looking over my shoulder, reading every word. "-"No, you lie :
I've not read a word you have written! " This is an Irish bull;
still it is a very old one. It is only two hundred and fifty years
older than the New Testament. Horace Walpole dissented from
Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and thought the other Irish bull was
the best,- of the man who said, "I would have been a very
handsome man, but they changed me in the cradle. " That comes
from Don Quixote, and is Spanish; but Cervantes borrowed it.
from the Greek in the fourth century, and the Greek stole it
from the Egyptian hundreds of years back.
There is one story which it is said Washington has related,
of a man who went into an inn and asked for a glass of drink
from the landlord, who pushed forward a wine-glass about half the
XX-715
## p. 11426 (#40) ###########################################
11426
WENDELL PHILLIPS
usual size; the teacups also in that day were not more than half
the present size. The landlord said, "That glass out of which
you are drinking is forty years old " "Well," said the thirsty
traveler, contemplating its diminutive proportions, "I think it is
the smallest thing of its age I ever saw. " That story as told is
given as a story of Athens three hundred and seventy-five years
before Christ was born. Why! all these Irish bulls are Greek,-
every one of them. Take the Irishman who carried around a
brick as a specimen of the house he had to sell; take the Irish-
man who shut his eyes and looked into the glass to see how he
would look when he was dead; take the Irishman that bought
a crow, alleging that crows were reported to live two hundred
years, and he meant to set out and try it; take the Irishman who
met a friend who said to him, "Why, sir, I heard you were dead. "
"Well," says the man, "I suppose you see I'm not. " "Oh, no,”
says he, "I would believe the man who told me a good deal
quicker than I would you. " Well, those are all Greek.
A score
or more of them, of a parallel character, come from Athens. .
Cicero said that he had seen the entire Iliad, which is a poem
as large as the New Testament, written on a skin so that it
could be rolled up in the compass of a nut-shell. Now this is
imperceptible to the ordinary eye.
