Born in Boston in 1811, Wendell Phillips joined the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1837, associating thereafter with the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, that movement’s most visible and divisive leader. Endowed with exceptional rhetorical gifts, Phillips became a highly sought-after public speaker despite his controversial advocacy of immediate emancipation, racial equality, women’s rights, and antislavery violence and his denunciations of American politics as irredeemably pro-slavery. Within the American Anti-Slavery Society, Phillips became the abolitionists’ resident intellectual by developing sophisticated justifications for the role of radical agitators in refreshing America’s democracy. He also became the Garrisonians’ leading legal controversialist by attacking the movement’s opponents with unmatched vitriol and by developing widely debated claims that the United States Constitution was a pro-slavery document.