American Agitators

Two FRIENDS OF MAN (425 pp.]--Ralph Korngold--Little, Brown ($5).

They were as different as two men could be. William Lloyd Garrison was the son of a hard-drinking sailor, Wendell Phillips the son of a rich Boston lawyer. Garrison had picked up scraps of knowledge as a printer's devil, Phillips had been a Harvard dandy. Garrison wore the solemn look of a New England preacher, Phillips sported the manners of a worldly sophisticate.

Yet these two men formed the stiff-necked, tough-spirited leadership of the most fiery social movement in 19th Century U.S.--abolitionism. Their collaboration and eventual split is the subject of Ralph Korngold's Two Friends of Man, a galloping history that has much of the excitement and frenzy of its subject.

"I Will Be Heard." Garrison became an abolitionist hero in 1830 when, as a young Baltimore editor, he denounced a slave trader in print. Fined $50 and costs for his "gross and malicious libel," he went to jail because he lacked the money. In jail he. wrote a thundering pamphlet about his case--and his career as a reformer had begun.

He was neither an original thinker nor a canny leader, but he was a magnificent pamphleteer. In Boston he began publishing the Liberator, a propaganda paper championing abolition. In a dingy room in Merchants' Hall he set up an old press and printed his famous manifesto: "I am in earnest ... I will not retreat a single inch--AND I WILL BE HEARD." He was as good as his word. Though the Liberator never paid expenses or ever had more than 3,000 subscribers, its articles shook, scandalized and aroused the nation.

The slave owners knew an enemy when they saw one. Georgia's legislature offered $5,000 for Garrison's arrest and conviction "under the laws of the State." Mississippi slave owners made up a purse for his capture. Georgetown, D.C. passed a law forbidding Negroes to read his paper. Garrison was hated in Boston too: he kept harping on the guilt of northern ship owners for transporting the Negroes in the first place. Finally, the free Negroes of Boston organized to protect him; each night a bodyguard, armed with cudgels, trailed him home. Even so, in 1835 he came close to being lynched when a mob dragged him through the Boston streets.

Aristocrat in Politics. A witness of this riot was a tall, fair-haired young lawyer who, it was generally agreed, had a brilliant career before him. Wendell Phillips, shocked by the mob violence, became interested in Garrison's movement. His family thought him mad. When he threw himself into the abolition crusade they tried to have him committed as a lunatic.

Phillips' career testified to the truth of Dostoevsky's remark that "an aristocrat is irresistible when he goes in for democracy." He risked his life repeatedly, faced mobs with the hauteur of a nobleman awaiting the guillotine, and dissipated his fortune in charities. In an age of florid oratory he stirred his listeners with a lean, precise, deadly effective style. When Emerson heard him, he felt as if "the whole air was full of splendors." A Virginia paper called him "an infernal machine set to music."

Unlike most reformers, he grew more radical with age. In 1842 he publicly cursed the Constitution because it tolerated slavery. He reached the peak of his bitterness during Lincoln's first term. To Phillips, Lincoln was "a huckster in politics," a man whose hesitations and contradictions on slavery made him unfit to be the leader of a moral crusade. After the

Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, Phillips conceded, "Lincoln was slow, but he got there. Thank God for him."

Into the Underbrush. At the war's end, Garrison and Phillips parted company. Garrison felt that with the legal emancipation of the Negroes the abolitionists' work was done. Phillips insisted that unless the Negroes were helped to win land and economic independence they would sink back into quasi-slavery.

He saw many other evils requiring remedy. In his late 50s, the destitute Brahmin became a spokesman for the rising trade unions. "Now that the field is won," he told an abolitionist crony, "do you sit by the campfire, but I will put out in the underbrush."

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