Boston Combusts: The Fugitive Slave Case of Anthony Burns

Burns was unaware of Suttle’s scheme and legal maneuverings designed to spirit him out of Boston — until suddenly someone ran up behind him and clapped a hand on his shoulder as he walked home from work. It was Butman. Burns later recalled him shouting, “Stop, stop; you are the fellow who broke into a silversmith’s shop the other night.” Knowing he had done no such thing, Burns went peaceably with Butman, intending to clear up an obvious case of mistaken identity.

Burns was placed in a jail cell on the third floor of Boston’s federal courthouse. Suttle soon appeared, doffed his hat, bowed theatrically and said with mock politeness, “How do you do, Mr. Burns?” Suttle then asked Burns why he had escaped and, receiving no satisfactory answer, asked, “Haven’t I always treated you well, Tony?” Burns responded with telling silence. As the anxious prisoner would later admit: “I got no supper nor sleep that night….Next morning, I was taken down [to stand before a judge] with the bracelets on my wrists.”

The BVC members quickly learned of Burns’ arrest and began planning a multipronged strategy. They would use both legal and extralegal tactics in their attempt to free Burns. The committee members were intimately aware of what their cohorts on the Syracuse (New York) Vigilance Committee had done three years before, when escaped slave William Henry had been arrested under the Fugitive Slave Law. In a premeditated act of opposition, an abolitionist mob had rushed into the Syracuse jail on October 1, 1851, and rescued Henry, who was soon smuggled to Canada. But federal authorities had also learned from the Syracuse affair and meant to forestall such lawlessness in the future.

Boston was abuzz with plots on May 25 as Burns stood before Judge Edward Loring, who was acting as commissioner under the Fugitive Slave Law. Amos A. Lawrence, a member of one of the North’s wealthiest industrial families (ironically, the Lawrences had gotten rich in a New England textile industry dependent on Southern cotton), pledged to fully finance Burns’ legal defense. Lawrence also wrote a scathing letter to Boston Mayor Jerome Smith, saying he “would prefer to see the courthouse razed rather than [Burns] should be returned to slavery.” The BVC arranged to have one of the nation’s finest lawyers, Bostonian Richard Henry Dana, represent Burns.

Dana approached the exhausted Burns in the courtroom, explaining that he wanted to represent him at no cost. The former slave, still shocked from seeing his Virginia master and rightfully fearing retaliation when he was sent back to the Old Dominion, didn’t want to cause any trouble. “It will be no use, they have got me,” he told Dana. Later, famed Boston abolitionist the Rev. Theodore Parker, a leading member of the BVC, also advised Burns to allow for a vigorous legal defense, but Burns continued to hesitate, saying, “If I must go back, I want to go back as easy as I can.” Eventually, members of the BVC convinced Burns to cooperate.

Dana approached Judge Loring and sought a delay of the trial so he could prepare Burns’ defense. Loring, perhaps unwilling to offend prominent citizens such as Dana, Parker, lawyer Wendell Phillips and others, agreed to postpone the proceedings until the following Monday, May 29. Burns went back to jail while the BVC shifted into high gear. Over the next few days, according to historian Henry Mayer, “Boston endured the most dramatic and emotional week in its history since the landing of the hated tea.” The 1773 Boston Tea Party had been a symbolic vigilante act aimed at promoting freedom against tyranny, and the members of the BVC saw the Burns case as another historic opportunity.

Boston in 1854 was not just the abolitionist capital of America but also the North’s intellectual center. Some of the most important writers in the country, many of whom shared abolitionist sentiments, lived in or around Boston. Their ranks included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison, educator Bronson Alcott and poet John Greenleaf Whittier. This close-knit network of Boston-area intellectuals championed the dictates of conscience, and for them, slavery was more than simply unconscionable: It was evil incarnate.