Wendell Phillips’s calling was that of the political agitator, and his gifts were those of a compelling public speaker and intellectual. Since his speeches circulated widely in print, his audience expanded to readers who were even more numerous and far-flung than those who heard him in person. His embrace of civil war as a means to annihilate slavery is evident in “Under the Flag,” a speech Phillips delivered in Boston on April 21, 1861, just nine days after Confederate forces fired on a U.S. military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, marking the beginning of the Civil War.