The Lesson of the Hour
Wendell Phillips on Abolition & Strategy
by Wendell Phillips
Edited & introduced by Noel Ignatiev
Publication date: January 2001
Paperback: $12.00
Hardcover: $28.00
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During the winter of 1860-61, as southern states announced their intention to secede from the Union, the great Abolitionist Wendell Phillips walked the streets of Boston under threat of attack from mobs that blamed him for the breakup. Barely one year later, when Phillips traveled to Washington, the Vice President of the United States welcomed him to the Senate chamber, the Speaker of the House invited him to dinner, and President Lincoln received him as a guest at the White House.
The Abolitionists were revolutionaries, willing to tear up the Southern economy and society by the roots, wreck Northern commerce, and disrupt the Union irretrievably. They renounced all traditional politics. They openly hoped for the defeat of their own country in the Mexican War. They preached and practiced racial equality. They fought for the equality of women. They understood the need to break up the Union in order to reconstitute it without slavery.
Have ever revolutionaries been more thoroughly vindicated by events?
Although William Lloyd Garrison was the founder of the movement and remains the most widely known of the Abolitionists, Wendell Phillips was the real leader. This volume is the only collection of his work generally available. It includes six speeches charting a revolutionary course for abolition, with an introduction establishing their historical context.
Edited, and with a new introduction by Noel Ignatiev.
“Six important speeches by Wendell Phillips, one of the great figures in American history, mark this volume as an indispensable source that should be read by all serious students of the national past and present.”
- Sterling Stuckey, University of California at Riverside, author of Slave Culture and Going Through the Storm
“This collection of Wendell Phillips's speeches brings back to light one of the magnificent rhetoricians of the abolition movement. Noel Ignatiev's introduction makes a compelling case for treating Phillips as the "real leader" of nineteenth century American radicalism, and the orator's words as a guide to an alternative society.”
- David W. Blight, Amherst College, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
Further Reading
Every purchase of Noel Ignatiev’s memoir Acceptable Men comes with a 40% discount on Facing Reality and The Lesson of the Hour. Use the check out code KERR, and read them—as they are meant to be—in conversation.
Acceptable Men: Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World
Noel Ignatiev was heavily influenced by the politics of C.L.R. James, a Trinidadian scholar, revolutionary, and activist from the 1930s through 1980s. A key aspect of James’s ideas was that the new socialist society exists in the experience and actions of the working class in this society. In Facing Reality, which James wrote with Cornelius Castoriadis and Grace Lee, he developed this idea in relation to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In conclusion, James wrote: “[The revolutionary organization’s] task is to recognize and record. It can do this only by plunging into the great mass of people and meeting the new society that is there.” That is how Noel saw his task as a steelworker and in everything else.
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Paperback: $12
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