Cincinnati, Ohio, March 24, 1862,

The most dangerous man in America walked into a liquor dealer's opera house on a Monday evening

and tried to talk about freedom. He did not get very far.

Wendell Phillips was 50 years old, tall, broad-shouldered,

Harvard-educated, Boston-bred, and accustomed to hatred. For a quarter century, he had been

called Abolition's Golden Trumpet, the finest orator of his generation, a man whose voice

could fill a hall and empty a conscience in the same breath. He had given up a law

practice, a social standing, and the good opinion of his own family to spend his life telling Americans

that slavery was a sin. His family had considered committing him to a sanatorium for it. He regularly

carried a pistol. He had need of one. Phillips had not always been a firebrand.

He came from the highest rung of Boston Society, the son of the city's first mayor, a Mayflower

descendant with every advantage wealth and breeding could confer. He attended Boston Latin School,

went to Harvard College, graduated from Harvard Law School, and opened his own practice in 1834.

He was 23 years old and destined for a respectable, forgettable life in the law.

Then, on an October afternoon in 1835, he watched from his office window on Court Street as a pro-slavery mob dragged William Lloyd

Garrison through the streets of Boston with a rope around his neck. Garrison had committed

the sin of publishing an abolitionist newspaper called The Liberator. The mob intended to make an example

of him. Phillips stood at the window, unable to intervene,

and something in him broke open. Within a year, he had abandoned his practice, married a committed

abolitionist named Anne Terry Green, and thrown himself into the movement that would define his life.

His wife, he later admitted, had converted him. His family's reaction

was to wonder if he had lost his mind. By 1862, Phillips was the most famous public speaker

...