The Telegraph-courier. [volume] (Kenosha, Wis.) 1888-1946, 1923-11-22

Missing started that for ten minutes he
could not make himself heard. For almost
an hour he was interrupted constantly
with Kisses and catcalls, but finally his
eloquence prevailed and the audience was
laughing, crying or applauding as Phillips
willed.
The effect of the speech was best il
Illustrated in its reaction on a classmate of
mine who had gone with me at my re-
quest to hear Phillips This young man
came from Louisiana and was himself a
large STAKEHOLDER. OF course. he detested
Phillips. He said before the meeting he
was going only to jeer at him.
He thoroughly hated the principle Phil
lips was defending, and yet from the hostile
demonstration, in which my friend joined,
he ended by applauding the orator with
unrestrained enthusiasm. After the meet
ing the young man spent some hours in
my room upbraiding himself for having
been weak enough to have been carried
away by Phillips's eloquence.
At that time the country was very much
excited about the case of Anthony Burns.
Burns was runaway slave who had es-
capped to Bpston, where he had been taken
up by philanthropic abolitionists of the
Phillips school,
They had given him their protection and
had educated him. He proved to be man
- $50 -
pering in business, had married we'll and
was living with his wife and children in a
comfortable home near Boston which he
owned.
Then when Burns thought his freedom
was secure, his owner discovered him and
under the fugitive slave law got an order
from the United States Court to deliver
him up. The matter caused a tremendous
stir. The people Of Boston rioted about it,
so that Anthony Burns. after his arrest
by United States Marshal, had to be
escorted to the warship on which he was
to be sent South into slavery again by a
troop of United States cavalry.
Phillips's description of the mans escape
from servitude, his education, his rise, his
industrial success, his home, his family and
of his being torn away by the law to be
returned to slavery was so affecting that
the whole audience was in tears. His de-
nunciation of the conditions that made
such a thing possible was so eloquent. that
the hostile crowd forgot it's prejudice and
lost sight of the fact that the victim of
the law was negro. They grasped the
truth that he was a man like themselves.
Most surprising of all, although they
were all redhot constitutionalists, they
applauded wildly Phillips's dramatic appeal
to heaven when he said:
God damn a constitution if it can com
NIT crime like this against humanity and
liberty!"
That was the greatest speech 1 have ever
heard before or since. 1t was the only one
1 ever heard that captured and converted
a hostile audience. Its effect eventually.
was the repeal of the fugitive slave law
and indirectly the election of Abraham
Lincoln as President of the United States.
have heard Henry Ward Beecher de-
liver some of his most effective speeches
in which he aroused his auditors to an ex-
citement bordering on insanity, but they
were addressed to friendly audiences. One
in particular remember in which Beecher
spoke for the freedom of ireland. The hall
was packed with Irishmen, and before he
finished they almost tore down the walls
in the frenzy of their enthusiasm,
Throughout my term in the United