Wendell Phillips, Reconstruction (American National Biography)

The Garrisonians, moreover, did not share Phillips's vision of a radically reconstructed South, and debates over these questions finally fractured the abolitionist movement. After the passage in 1865 of the Thirteenth Amendment, freeing all slaves, Garrison and his supporters declared the abolitionists' crusade a success, retired, and left Phillips as president of a much depleted American Anti-Slavery Society. For the next five years, until the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, Phillips put nearly all of his energies into the struggle for black equality, speaking and writing on the imperative of guaranteeing former slaves the full rights and the protections of citizenship. With the passage of that amendment, Phillips finally conceded that there was little else he could do to help secure the future of African Americans living in the old Confederacy.