Wendell Phillips and the “Ever-Restless Ocean” of Democracy
Posted by W. Caleb McDaniel on May 26, 2011 This post was
originally published on my old blog as Wendell Phillips and the
“Ever-Restless Ocean” of Democracy. I presented the essay in
2011 at the Wendell Phillips Bicentennial Commemoration at
Harvard Law School in Cambridge.  American democracy means, at
the very least, majority rule. And Wendell Phillips was, above
all, a democrat. “I plant myself always on democratic
principles,” Phillips said in 1865. “I am a democrat, ingrained,
from top to toe.”1  Of course, Phillips could not always be so
explicit in calling himself a democrat, because during his
lifetime, the Democratic Party was committed officially to
silencing abolitionists like him. But in retrospect, few things
about Phillips are clearer than that he was a democrat. In an
era when even the Democratic Party committed itself, at most, to
universal white manhood suffrage, Phillips advocated the right
to vote without respect to sex or complex