Orator

Beacon Hill.

Bostonians looking back on the life of Wendell Phillips observed that he was born on Beacon Street and died on Common Street. He epitomized the exclusive social circle that his cousin Oliver Wendell Holmes dubbed "the Brahmins," an allusion to the caste system of India. The Phillips family tree led directly back to one of the Puritan ministers who arrived on the Arbella with John Winthrop; Wendell Phillips's father served as a mayor of Boston and was buried in a grave between Samuel Adams and James Otis upon his sudden death after a year in office. Phillips's closest boyhood friends were future historian John Lothrop Motley and Thomas Appleton, son of the visionary manufacturer whose textile mills at Lowell generated fortunes for the Boston elite. Phillips was the only student in his Harvard College class for whom a private carriage called on...