military politician statesman author
He was born on January 14, 1824 at Paisley, Scotland, United Kingdom, the son of John Phillips. He emigrated with his parents to the United States about 1838 and settled in Randolph County in southern Illinois, where he was reared in the strictest tenets of Presbyterianism.
He went to the local schools of Randolph County and acquired some training in Latin and mathematics.
He became editor of a newspaper at Chester, Illinois, studied law, and was admitted to the bar. In 1855 he went to Kansas as a special correspondent of the New York Tribune and became conspicuous as a radical anti-slavery journalist and politician. He wrote The Conquest of Kansas by Missouri and her Allies (1856) in the interest of Fremont's candidacy for president.
He was a participant in many of the important political gatherings in Kansas Territory and became a member of the state legislature. In 1858 he and four associates founded the town of Salina.
At the outbreak of the Civil War he became an officer in the Union Army, winning prominence as a commander of Indian troops in Indian Territory and Arkansas. He was mustered out as colonel of the 3rd Indian Regiment on June 10, 1865.
After the Civil War he returned to law and politics. While most of the anti-slavery radicals became conservatives, he merely transferred his radicalism to economic issues. His economic theories were given formal statement in a book called Labor, Land and Law; a Search for the Missing Wealth of the Working People (1886).
He was elected to Congress from Kansas in 1872, 1874, and 1876, and while there he was interested chiefly in land legislation, postal-savings banks, postal telegraphy, greenbacks, and silver. His Civil War experiences resulted in close association with problems relating to Indians, especially the Cherokee.
After his retirement from Congress he became attorney for the Cherokee and engaged in law practice in Washington. In 1890 he was again nominated for Congress but was defeated by the candidate of the People's party. He wrote voluminously, fiction, verse, and essays, as well as economic and political discussions. From 1885 to 1887 he published several articles in the North American Review. However, much of his writing was anonymous and can not be identified.
He died in 1893 at Fort Gibson, Oklahoma.
William Addison Phillips was the first justice of the Kansas Supreme Court under the Leavenworth Constitution, he founded the city of Salina, Kansas. During the Civil War he was commissioned colonel for his brilliant service and served as commander of the Cherokee Indian Regiment. Phillips was a well-known attorney for the Cherokee Indians at Washington.
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He was a Republican in politics, and, when he found it necessary to choose between his party and his principles, he supported the party. On questions that were not partisan issues he was independent.
He presented his views in a program, that includes: a graduated land tax for the purpose of reducing the size of holdings, preservation of public timber and reforestation of cut-over land, lease of grazing rights on public domain in tracts large enough to support a family, reservation in the public interest of subsoil rights to minerals, postal-savings banks through which the government might borrow from its people in national emergencies, organization of all labor, graduated taxation of large fortunes and inheritances, and regulation of public utilities.
In 1859 he married Carrie Spillman, who died in 1883. They had four children. He married his second wife, Anna B. (Stapler) Phillips in 1885 at Tahlequah in the Indian Territory.
