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It is no small thing: to be a man!

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In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-three, Emerson said the reason Phillips was the best public speaker in America was because he had spoken every day for fourteen years.

This observation didn’t apply to Phillips at all, but Emerson used Phillips to hammer home a great general truth, which was that practise makes perfect.

Emerson, like all the rest of us, had certain pet theories, which he was constantly bolstering by analogy and example. He had Phillips in mind when he said that the best drill for an orator was a course of mobs.

But the cold fact remains that Phillips never made a better speech, even after fourteen years’ daily practise, than that reply to Attorney-General Austin, at Faneuil Hall.

He gave himself, and it was himself full-armed and at his best. All the conditions were exactly right–there was hot opposition; and there also was love and encouragement.

His opponent, with brag, bluster, pomposity, cheap wit, and insincerity, served him as a magnificent foil. Never again were wind and tide so in his favor.

It is opportunity that brings out the great man, but he only is great who prepares for the opportunity–who knows it will come–and who seizes upon it when it arrives.

In this speech, Wendell Phillips reveals himself at his best–it has the same ring of combined courage, culture and sincerity that he showed to the last. Clear thinking and clear speaking marked the man. Taine says the style is the man–the Phillips style was all in that first speech, and here is a sample:

To draw the conduct of our ancestors into a precedent for mobs, for a right to resist laws we ourselves have enacted, is an insult to their memory. The difference between the excitement of those days and our own, which this gentleman in kindness to the latter has overlooked, is simply this: the men of that day went for the right, as secured by laws. They were the people rising to sustain the laws and the constitution of the province. The rioters of our day go for their own wills, right or wrong. Sir, when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips [pointing to the portraits in the hall] would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American–the slanderer of the dead!

The gentleman said he should sink into insignificance if he condescended to gainsay the principles of these resolutions. For the sentiments he has uttered, on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up!

Allusion has been made to what lawyers understand very well–the “conflict of laws.” We are told that nothing but the Mississippi River runs between Saint Louis and Alton; and the conflict of laws somehow or other gives the citizens of the former a right to find fault with the defender of the press for publishing his opinions so near their limits. Will the gentleman venture that argument before lawyers? How the laws of the two States could be said to come into conflict in such circumstances, I question whether any lawyer in this audience can explain or understand. No matter whether the line that divides one sovereign State from another be an imaginary one or ocean-wide, the moment you cross it, the State you leave is blotted out of existence, so far as you are concerned. The Czar might as well claim to control the deliberations of Faneuil Hall, as the laws of Missouri demand reverence, or the shadow of obedience, from an inhabitant of Illinois.

Sir, as I understand this affair, it was not an individual protecting his property; it was not one body of armed men assaulting another, and making the streets of a peaceful city run blood with their contentions. It did not bring back the scenes in some old Italian cities, where family met family, and faction met faction, and mutually trampled the laws underfoot. No; the men in that house were regularly enrolled under the sanction of the mayor. There being no militia in Alton, about seventy men were enrolled with the approbation of the mayor. These relieved each other every other night. About thirty men were in arms on the night of the Sixth, when the press was landed. The next evening it was not thought necessary to summon more than half that number; among these was Lovejoy. It was, therefore, you perceive, Sir, the police of the city resisting rioters–civil government breasting itself to the shock of lawless men. Here is no question about the right of self-defense. It is, in fact, simply this: Has the civil magistrate a right to put down a riot? Some persons seem to imagine that anarchy existed at Alton from the commencement of these disputes. Not at all. “No one of us,” says an eye-witness and a comrade of Lovejoy, “has taken up arms during these disturbances but at the command of the mayor.” Anarchy did not settle down on that devoted city till Lovejoy breathed his last. Till then the law, represented in his person, sustained itself against its foes. When he fell, civil authority was trampled underfoot. He had “planted himself on his constitutional rights”–appealed to the laws–claimed the protection of the civil authority–taken refuge under “the broad shield of the Constitution. When through that he was pierced and fell, he fell but one sufferer in a common catastrophe.” He took refuge under the banner of liberty–amid its folds; and when he fell, its glorious stars and stripes, the emblem of free constitutions, around which cluster so many heart-stirring memories, were blotted out in the martyr’s blood.