Saturday, 11 September 1886: Dinner at the Wendell Phillips Club

The Wendell Phillips Club gathered at Boston’s Revere House for a dinner in Frederick’s on the evening of the eleventh. This illustrious hotel was not the North End address of the famed Revolutionary patriot, but nearer to sites dear to the early days of the American Antislavery Society. Boston’s black community, the African American Joy Street Church, the society’s Antislavery Office, the home of militant black abolitionist and former state representative Lewis Hayden, and the offices of the Liberator all lay in the neighborhood to the west of the hotel. The town home of the Shaw family, under whose son, Robert Gould Shaw, Douglass’s son Lewis had served in the Massachusetts 54th and fought in that fateful assault on Battery Wagner in the Civil War could be found further south along the edge of Boston Common. Indeed, the 54th had marched along Beacon Street past the home as Douglass stood on its balcony. He had followed the men – that great hope for their people – to the docks to see them off to “thunder at the gates.”

Veterans of the American Antislavery Society dominated the dinner, of course. Douglass had parted ways with them quite acrimoniously in the 1850s, but decades had passed, slavery had ended, alliances had shifted, participants had died. Garrison had passed away in 1879 and when Wendell Phillips followed him five years later, Frederick and Helen attended the funeral despite having just married.

Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd’s son, planned to attend the September 11th dinner, but he had also organized “an informal gathering” a few days later on the 13th or 14th,“say between 4 & 7 P.M.” He hoped to “bring together all the old ‘original’ antislavery friends in this vicinity” to meet both Douglass and his guest from out of town. Alas! Douglass would be boarding the City of Rome on the thirteenth and unable to join the soiree at the Garrison home. Garrison’s get-together seemed more a sentimental and private occasion to reminisce. The Club dinner clearly had a public purpose considering its location and its illustrious guest list.

First, true to the name of the organization, such longtime abolitionists as James N. Buffum of Lynn, who had accompanied Douglass on his first voyage overseas, Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, whom he credited as his first host in Boston, newspaper editor Oliver Johnson, and former state representative Lewis Hayden took seats at the table. Douglass noted each along with the departed in his remarks. “If I have done anything for the colored people,” he declared, “it is in a great measure due to my having had the good-fortune, when I escaped from slavery, to become acquainted with William Lloyd Garrison, and with Wendell Phillips, and with our friend Oliver Johnson, and with Dr. Bowditch.”

Like the bon voyage party at Cedar Hill, this one also implicitly highlighted the accomplishments of African Americans. Hayden had sheltered many escaping slavecatchers and served in the Massachusetts legislature. The first black graduate of Harvard Law School, Judge George Lewis Ruffin, also joined the company.

While Douglass continued to insist his Grand Tour would be a private visit, others seem to have made particular requests of him. “I am not going as an advocate,” he reminded his audience. Nevertheless, should he have reason to speak in England, “I shall not hesitate to declare my own entire sympathy with that grand old man, Mr. Gladstone, in his endeavors to remove the reproach of oppression from England and to extend the desired liberty to Ireland.” The urging here to pressure the British Prime Minister to support Irish Home Rule probably came from the dinner’s most prominent guest, Boston’s first Irish Catholic mayor, Hugh O’Brien.

Hayden, too, made a request. He asked that Douglass write to him, and he seemed most curious as to the racial attitudes toward people of African descent in other countries. The Irish, English, and Scots had all amazed Douglass before with their absence of prejudice against his race and, indeed, their embrace of him as something akin to beautiful. Only Americans abroad had shown hatred.

As the Wendell Phillips Club raised their alcohol-free glasses to toast Douglass’s upcoming trip, African Americans elsewhere worried about their futures. The Supreme Court no longer considered their civil rights worth protecting when it overturned the Civil Rights Act in 1883. Lynchings went unprosecuted and often undocumented. White audiences laughed themselves silly at the grotesqueries of minstrel shows. The Lost Cause and reconciliation narratives began to dominate not only popular but academic histories of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Remembering abolition had importance for current events. Knowing that another way of living – visiting a place where one could be free from the noise of racism to simply think and be – meant hope. Thus began Douglass's reporting of the African diaspora in Europe.

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Sources:
Account of the Wendell Phillips Club dinner, including excerpts of Douglass's speech and people in attendence:  Frederic May Holland, Frederick Douglass: The Colored Orator (1891; New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1895), 362-63.

Francis Garrison to FD, Boston, 2 Sept 1886, General Correspondence, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/collections/frederick-douglass-papers/?fa=segmentof:mfd.06006/&sb=shelf-id&sp=1&st=slideshow#slide-34

FD to Lewis Hayden and "Watson" [I haven't identified him, yet], Paris, 19 Nov 1886, in Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip Foner (1955; New York: International Publishers, 1975), 4: 444-47.

Revere House Records, Massachusetts Historical Society: http://www.masshist.org/collection-guides/view/fa0019

Revere House images: Revere House, Wikipedia, 9 Sept 2017:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revere_House