March 24, 1862

Wendall Phillips booed in Cincinnati
Abolitionist orator Wendall Phillips is booed while attempting to give a lecture in Cincinnati, Ohio. The angry crowd was opposed to fighting for the freedom of slaves, as Phillips advocated. He was pelted with rocks and eggs before friends whisked him away while a small riot broke out.

Phillips was perhaps the most outspoken abolitionist of the era. Born in Boston to a wealthy New England family, Phillips was educated at Harvard and practiced law until he became swept up in the anti-slave crusade in the 1830s. The abolitionist movement was a major cause of the rising tension between North and South in the 1830s. Abolitionists denounced slavery as a sin, and they framed the debate over slavery as a moral issue rather than an economic or political one. Called the "golden trumpet" of the movement, Phillips' shrill denunciation of slavery won many converts to the abolitionist cause and attracted many other northerners to moderate anti-slave positions.

When the war began, Phillips and other abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison exerted pressure on the Lincoln administration to make the destruction of slavery the primary objective of the war. For the first year and half, President Lincoln insisted that the Union's war goal was reunion of the states. He did this in order to keep the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware from seceding. Not until the Emancipation Proclamation of September 1862 would the stated purpose of the war shift.

The incident in Cincinnati demonstrated the fierce resistance that existed in the northern states to the proposition of fighting a war to free the slaves. The most outspoken resisters lived in the "Butternut" region--the southern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Called "Butternuts" because their homespun clothing was died a light brown from nut extracts, residents of the region did not own slaves but they shared many sentiments with Southerners. Lincoln encountered serious resistance from this area when he announced his Emancipation Proclamation.

I know this has been discussed before, but an outstanding book about the soldier's attitude about slavery, both North and South; is "What This Cruel War Was Over" by Chandra Manning. She tells this story in the words of the soldiers themselves; using their letter home as her reference.  

I would recommend this book to anyone who's interested in what the soldiers actually thought about the subject of slavery in their own words.
   

--Last edited by Bill on 2008-03-24 07:34:25 --