First Berenson spoke in front of the statue of Wendell Phillips by Daniel Chester French, unveiled 100 years ago in 1915. Its inscription reads: “Whether in chains or in laurels, liberty knows nothing but victories.”

Phillips was a child of privilege inspired to abolitionism by his beloved wife and by the sight (in 1835) of Garrison set upon by a mob of Boston gentleman-merchants who depended on Southern cotton for their livelihood. And he came to be celebrated as an orator, as the opposite of a politician — too much moral purity.

While Garrison folded up The Liberator in 1865, Phillips spoke out for continuing reform, till “South Carolina must be the counterpart of New-York, each man owning his house, with the school-house behind him and a ballot in his right hand… till [Pres.] Andy Johnson could see John Hancock under a black skin.”

William Monroe Trotter.

At the statue’s unveiling in 1915, William Monroe Trotter, one of the leaders of Boston’s African-American community, commended Phillips for that persistence:

Wendell Phillips was potent in creating a public

sentiment which insisted upon Lincoln's procla-

mation of emancipation. Of this immortal docu-

ment he said: "To three millions of slaves this

proclamation is sunlight, scattering the despair of

centuries, and the blessings of the poor bear it up to the throne of God." Then at once he set in to make this emancipation secure.

Down the path, a statue of Sumner stands on a pedestal reading, simply, “SUMNER.” Berenson has a theory: it’s because the people who put the statue up in the 1870s couldn’t have imagined a moment when Boston wouldn’t recognize one of its greatest statesmen, who nudged Lincoln, overrode Johnson, and led the postwar remaking of the Constitution as much as anyone else. (Lincoln admired Sumner’s purity, calling him “my idea of a bishop.”)

It was in the nature of the radical Republicans that they were more disagreeable than Abe. Garrison, for example, bitterly broke with his friend Frederick Douglass over small matters of politics and publishing. Douglass made a note in his eulogy:

“Speaking for myself I must frankly say I have sometimes thought him uncharitable to those who differed from him… To say this of him is simply to say that he was human, and it may be added when he erred here he erred in the interest of truth. He revolted at halfness, abhorred compromise, and demanded that men should be either hot or cold.”

We remember that Sumner was brutally caned by Preston Brooks, a South Carolina congressman, only after Sumner had earlier called Brooks’s cousin a pimp for ‘the harlot, Slavery.’ (Which is not to say that Sumner deserved it — though unsympathetic commentators have done just that.) And our guest Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that Sumner singlehandedly hobbled Reconstruction, the great project of his life, by his hostility to fellow Republican and President, Ulysses S. Grant

This sort of orneriness was what got the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments passed. But it may help explain why we don’t quite grant our Boston abolitionists their enormous stature. The Radical Republicans’ reputation suffered with Reconstruction’s, the thought down South that they had overreached, that their approach was unsporting and utopian.

But that only means we should reckon with these men not as pure politicians, but as something rarer: as examples of conscience, as dreamers. They wanted to force the issue, to change American hearts and minds on slavery, race, religion, women’s suffrage and rights of labor. And so they were ever uncompromising, in that word’s good and bad sense.

To quote one of Phillips’s eulogists, speaking just as well for Garrison and Sumner (seen below):