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Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest

“Under the Flag”

by James Brewer Stewart, PhD, Aaron Gulyas, MA

Date: 1861

Author: Wendell Phillips

Genre: Speech

Summary Overview

Wendell Phillips’s calling was that of the political agitator, and his gifts were those of a compelling public speaker and intellectual. Since his speeches circulated widely in print, his audiences of readers were even more numerous and far-flung than those who heard him in person. His embrace of civil war as a means to annihilate slavery is evident in “Under the Flag” (1861), a speech Phillips delivered in Boston just nine days after Confederate forces fired on a U.S. military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, marking the beginning of the Civil War.

Defining Moment

Phillips delivered this speech just as sectional crisis was merging with the Civil War. Following Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860, nearly all of the slave states seceded. On April 12, l861, Confederates then U.S. forces attempting to provision Fort Sumter, the federal installation located in Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. This hostile act led Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand troops to prevent seceding states from leaving the Union. Lincoln’s appeal to arms placed Phillips in a difficult position.

For nearly two decades Phillips had been the abolitionists’ premier advocate of northern disunion, the doctrine that slavery could be abolished only if the free states dissolved their constitutional ties with the South. Arguing that in 1787 the Founding Fathers had built protections for slavery throughout the Constitution, Phillips had insisted that the institution’s survival depended entirely on northern legal and political support. Were this support withdrawn, slavery would collapse either through insurrection or as a result of planters’ demoralization. Throughout the crisis of 1861, Phillips had deployed these arguments to urge that the seceding states be allowed to depart in peace. Now, however, Lincoln had declared a war against the slave system that Phillips so hated in order to preserve the Union that Phillips had so long condemned. In this speech Phillips resolves this obvious contradiction by abandoning his northern disunionism while welcoming civil war as the means for forging a new and radically egalitarian American state.

Author Biography

Born in Boston in 1811, Wendell Phillips joined the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1837. Phillips became a highly sought-after public speaker despite his controversial advocacy of immediate emancipation, racial equality, women’s rights, and antislavery violence and his denunciations of American politics as irredeemably pro-slavery.

Within the American Anti-Slavery Society, Phillips became the abolitionists’ resident intellectual by developing sophisticated justifications for the role of radical agitators in refreshing America’s democracy. He also became their leading legal controversialist by attacking the movement’s opponents with unmatched vitriol and by developing widely debated claims that the United States Constitution was a pro-slavery document. Phillips had the unique ability to make ordinary Americans respond substantively to the egalitarianism of an otherwise highly unpopular radical abolitionist movement. His extraordinary oratory explains this result, but only when it is recalled that Phillips was steeped in a nationalistic version of American history that touched the memories, fears, and aspirations of his ever-expanding Yankee audiences.

As conflict deepened between North and South during the 1850s, Phillips became a proponent of violent resistance, and when the insurrectionist John Brown invaded Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, Phillips defended him. He embraced the Civil War as a crusade for black equality and took a prominent role in efforts to achieve these goals during the reconstruction of the postwar South from 1865 to 1870. After the dissolution of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1870, Phillips continued demanding black equality but also expanded his advocacy to include the labor movement, temperance, women’s suffrage, and equal rights for Native Americans and Chinese immigrants. He died on February 2, 1884.

Historical Document

MANY times this winter, here and elsewhere, I have counselled peace,—urged, as well as I knew how, the expediency of acknowledging a Southern Confederacy, and the peaceful separation of these thirty-four States. One of the journals announces to you that I come here this morning to retract those opinions. No, not one of them! 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.…

All winter long, I have acted with that party which cried for peace. The antislavery enterprise to which I belong started with peace written on its banner. We imagined that the age of bullets was over; that the age of ideas had come; that thirty millions of people were able to take a great question, and decide it by the conflict of opinions; that, without letting the ship of state founder, we could lift four millions of men into Liberty and Justice. We thought that if your statesmen would throw away personal ambition and party watchwords, and devote themselves to the great issue, this might be accomplished. To a certain extent it has been. The North has answered to the call. Year after year, event by event, has indicated the rising education of the people,—the readiness for a higher moral life, the calm, self-poised confidence in our own convictions that patiently waits—like master for a pupil—for a neighbor’s conversion. The North has responded to the call of that peaceful, moral, intellectual agitation which the antislavery idea has initiated. Our mistake, if any, has been that we counted too much on the intelligence of the masses, on the honesty and wisdom of statesmen as a class. Perhaps we did not give weight enough to the fact we saw, that this nation is made up of different ages; not homogeneous, but a mixed mass of different centuries. The North thinks,—can appreciate argument,—is the nineteenth century,—hardly any struggle left in it but that between the working class and the money-kings. The South dreams,—it is the thirteenth and fourteenth century,—baron and serf,—noble and slave. Jack Cade and Wat Tyler loom over its horizon, and the serf, rising, calls for another Thierry to record his struggle. There the fagot still burns which the Doctors of the Sorbonne called, ages ago, “the best light to guide the erring.” There men are tortured for opinions, the only punishment the Jesuits were willing their pupils should look on. This is, perhaps, too flattering a picture of the South. Better call her, as Sumner does, “the Barbarous States.” Our struggle, therefore, is between barbarism and civilization. Such can only be settled by arms. The government has waited until its best friends almost suspected its courage or its integrity; but the cannon shot against Fort Sumter has opened the only door out of this hour. There were but two. One was compromise; the other was battle. The integrity of the North closed the first; the generous forbearance of nineteen States closed the other. The South opened this with cannon-shot, and Lincoln shows himself at the door. The war, then, is not aggressive, but in self defence, and Washington has become the Thermopylae at Liberty and Justice. Rather than surrender that Capital, cover every square feet of it with a living body; crowd it with a million of men, and empty every bank vault at the North to pay the cost. Teach the world once for all, that North America belongs to the Stars and Stripes, and under them no man shall wear a chain. In the whole of this conflict, I have looked only at Liberty,—only at the slave.…

The noise and dust of the conflict may hide the real question at issue. Europe may think, some of us may, that we are fighting for forms and parchments, for sovereignty and a flag. But really the war is one of opinions: it is Civilization against Barbarism: it is Freedom against Slavery. The cannon-shot against Fort Sumter was the yell of pirates against the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, the war-cry of the North is the echo of that sublime pledge. The South, defying Christianity, clutches its victim. The North offers its wealth and blood in glad atonement for the selfishness of seventy years. The result is as sure as the throne of God. I believe in the possibility of justice, in the certainty of union. Years hence, when the smoke of this conflict clears away, the world will see under our banner all tongues, all creeds, all races,—one brotherhood,—and on the banks of the Potomac, the Genius of Liberty, robed in light, four and thirty stars for her diadem, broken chains under feet, and an olive-branch in her right hand.

Glossary

diadem: crown

Fort Sumter: the U.S. fort on the coast of South Carolina, site of the first hostilities in the Civil War

Jack Cade: the leader of a revolt in England in 1450

Jesuits: an order of Catholic priests, known historically for their efforts to expose and eliminate heresy, or false church doctrine

olive-branch: a traditional symbol of peace

Potomac: the Potomac River, often used as a figure of speech to refer to the area surrounding Washington, D.C., and the seat of government

Sumner: Charles Sumner, U.S. senator, abolitionist, and one of the leaders of the Radical Republicans during Reconstruction

Thermopylae: the Greek site of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE

Thierry: nineteenth-century liberal French historian Augustin Thierry

Wat Tyler: leader of the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

Document Analysis

Phillps begins his speech by explaining that he has, over the chaotic and troubling secession winter of 1861, advised peace and reminds his audience that he has advised the recognition of the Confederacy and a “peaceful separation” of the United States. While some have reported, he claims, that he is planning on retracting his ideas, he denies this. He welcomes the war.

Abolitionism, he explains, had always embraced peace, had hoped that “the age of bullets was over; that the age of ideas had come,” and could work for the freedom of slaves without a national catastrophe. The north had responded to “the call of that peaceful, moral, intellectual agitation which the antislavery idea has initiated.” The problem, Phillips, explains is not so much that the United States consists of different ideas or policies but that it actually consists of people who live in “a mixed mass of different centuries.”

The North, he explains, is rational and logical. It “thinks,” in Phillips’s words and “can appreciate argument.” In this way, the North not only exists in the nineteenth century, but in a way “is” the nineteenth century. Other than the growing conflict between socio-economic classes, it has “hardly any struggle left.”

The South, however, does not think—it “dreams.” It represents the late medieval period—the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries— and the feudal structure which characterized that era in Europe. Here, Phillips refers to revolutionary figures such as Wat Tyler, a leader in England’s fourteenth century peasant uprising. The South, in Phillips’s presentation, is a place where people are tortured for their opinions, like the heretics of long ago. He cites Senator Charles Sumner—who was beaten severely on the floor of the Senate in retaliation for comments he made about slaveowners—in calling the South “the Barbarous States.” Such a “struggle between “barbarism and civilization” can only, Phillips asserts, be settled by force. With the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, he explains, this becomes a matter of self defense for the north.

Referring to the ancient war between the Athenians and Persians, Phillips refers to Washington as “the Thermopylae at Liberty and Justice” and urges a strong defense of the nation using hyperbole (“cover every square feet of it with a living body”; “empty every bank vault in the North to pay the cost”) to convey the severity of the nation’s plight. He then ties the defense of the Union with the abolitionist cause, proclaiming that the United States would “Teach the world once for all, that North America belongs to the Stars and Stripes, and under them no man shall wear a chain.”

Phillips, in closing the speech, cautions that the chaos and destruction of the coming war carries with it the danger of hiding “the real question at issue”—the ending of slavery. Here, he raises the issue of “Civilization against Barbarism,” explicitly equating that battle to “Freedom against “Slavery.” He views the coming losses of men and money in the war to a sacrifice to atone for the existence of slavery since the nation’s founding and predicts that, in the end, the nation will be whole and free of slavery.

Essential Themes

Phillips demonstrates throughout this speech the enormous differences that always distinguished his understanding of the Civil War from the views of those who prosecuted it, Lincoln and the Republican Party. For Lincoln and for most Republicans, warfare aimed to reassemble the Union as it had existed prior to 1861, not to remake the nation through social and political revolution. Even when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he made clear that his primary motive was to restore the Union. In this fundamental respect, the “union” to which Phillips swore his allegiance in 1861 was worlds apart from the Constitution that Lincoln maintained.

In this address Phillips makes the revolutionary nature of his expectations clear in his dramatic contrasts between a South mired in the “barbarism” of the “thirteenth and fourteenth century” and a North that “thinks” and is fully involved in the egalitarian “nineteenth century.” Warfare between two such antithetical civilizations, “Civilization against Barbarism” must, in Phillips’s view, lead to the destruction of the latter and to the complete transformation of the entire nation to lift up “all tongues, all creeds, all races—one brotherhood.” Implicit in this prediction are all the specific measures that Phillips and other radical abolitionists demanded during the war and in its immediate aftermath. For Phillips and the other radicals for whom he spoke, final victory would be assured only when the emancipated slaves possessed complete civil rights, occupation of lands confiscated from rebel planters, access to education, and unqualified male suffrage. In this respect, Phillips’s “Under the Flag” oration clearly anticipated the epochal struggles for racial equality in the South after emancipation.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

1 

Aisèrithe, A.J. and Donald Yacovone, eds. Wendell Phillips, Social Justice, and the Power of the Past (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016).

2 

Hinks, Peter P, John R. McKivigan, and R. Owen Williams. Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition: Greenwood Milestones in African American History. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007).

3 

Osofsky, Gilbert. “Wendell Phillips and the Quest for a New American National Identity” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 1973 1(1): 15-46.

4 

Stewart, James B. “Heroes, Villains, Liberty, and License: the Abolitionist Vision of Wendell Phillips” in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Louisiana State U. Press, 1979): 168-191.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Stewart, James Brewer, and Aaron Gulyas. "“Under The Flag”." Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest, edited by Aaron Gulyas, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=DDProtest_0035.
APA 7th
Stewart, J. B., & Gulyas, A. (2017). “Under the Flag”. In A. Gulyas (Ed.), Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Stewart, James Brewer and Gulyas, Aaron. "“Under The Flag”." Edited by Aaron Gulyas. Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2017. Accessed May 30, 2026. online.salempress.com.