Wendell Phillips - Postbellum Activism

Postbellum Activism

After African Americans gained the right to vote under the 15th Amendment in 1870, Phillips switched his attention to other issues, such as women's rights, universal suffrage, temperance and the labor movement.

Phillips's philosophical ideal was mainly self-control of the animal, physical self by the human, rational mind, although he admired rash activists like Elijah Lovejoy and John Brown.

Historial Gilbert Osofsky has argued that Phillips's nationalism was shaped by a religious ideology derived from the European Enlightenment as expressed by Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. The Puritan ideal of a Godly Commonwealth through a pursuit of Christian morality and justice, however, was the main influence on Phillips' nationalism. He favored fragmenting the American republic in order to destroy slavery, and he sought to amalgamate all the American races. Thus, it was the moral end which mattered most in Phillips' nationalism.