Wendell Phillips was an orator, abolitionist, and women's rights and labor advocate, born in Boston, Massachusetts. After attending the Boston Latin School, he graduated from Harvard in 1831 and obtained a Harvard law degree in 1833. By 1836 Phillips had become smitten by Ann Terry Greene, a fervent supporter of the abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, and a dedicated member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. William Lloyd Garrison quickly became his closest associate and deepest source of inspiration despite their differences over abolitionist doctrine. Phillips had few reservations about the use of coercive force; he rejected Garrison's pacifism and religious perfectionism. In the 1850s, no public speaker more completely dominated the debate over the problem of slavery and the growing crisis between North and South than did Phillips. In the years immediately before the Civil War, he fashioned speeches that dramatized the moral imperative facing the North: people must confront the South and destroy slavery. Joining other Radical Republicans, Phillips grew increasingly critical of President Abraham Lincoln's reluctance to prosecute a forthright war of slave liberation, a posture that put him much at odds with Garrison and many other Lincoln supporters within the American Anti-Slavery Society. Later, Garrison and his supporters declared the abolitionists' crusade a success, retired, and left Phillips as president of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In his final years, he ran unsuccessfully for governor of Massachusetts as the nominee of the Workingman's and Temperance parties.