Boston Combusts: The Fugitive Slave Case of Anthony Burns

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The week of Burns’ arrest coincided with large Boston conventions being held by abolitionists and women’s rights groups. Thus famed author Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin had helped radicalize middle- and upper-class white Northerners against slavery, happened to be in town, along with hundreds of abolitionists from across the North. Moreover, the month of May had witnessed the passage in Congress of the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act. This nullified the 1820 Missouri Compromise and allowed for the possibility of slavery in new federal territories based on Stephen Douglas’ concept of “popular sovereignty.”

On the same day Burns had stood before Judge Loring, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner expressed the outrage many Northerners felt toward the Kansas-Nebraska Act: “It annuls all past compromises with Slavery, and makes all future compromises impossible. Thus it puts Freedom and Slavery face to face, and bids them grapple.” In late May 1854, Boston was in a grappling mood, and Burns was in the middle of the fight.

The BVC organized a huge meeting for the evening of Friday, May 26, at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall. Some 5,000 irate antislavery protesters attended. Wealthy merchant George Russell, a founding member of the BVC, opened the meeting and immediately set the tone: “The time will come when Slavery will pass away….I hope to live in a land of liberty — in a land where no slave hunter shall dare pollute with his presence.”

Next, America’s most radical abolitionist, Wendell Phillips, condemned what he perceived as the twin outrages of that same May week: “I call [the Kansas-Nebraska Act] knocking a man down, and this [the arrest of Burns] is spitting in his face after he is down.” Phillips called for an assault on the courthouse the next morning to rescue Burns: “See to it that tomorrow, in the streets of Boston, you ratify the verdict of Faneuil Hall, that Anthony Burns has no master but God.”

After Phillips’ impassioned abolitionist oration, the Rev. Parker took to the podium, again asking the crowd to assemble the next morning to rescue Burns. “I love peace,” said Parker, “but there is a means and there is an end; liberty is the end, and sometimes peace is not the means towards it.” Parker advocated violent action: “I have heard hurrahs and cheers for liberty many times; I have not seen a great many deeds done for liberty. I ask you, are we to have deeds as well as words?” The crowd screamed, “Yes!” Before Parker had finished, an unknown man ran into the packed hall and shouted “a mob of negroes is in Court Square attempting to rescue Burns!”

While the white abolitionists were meeting in Faneuil Hall, members of Boston’s African-American community had been meeting at the same time at the nearby Tremont Temple. After the meeting, blacks rushed to the courthouse in an attempt to rescue Burns. In the ensuing confusion, hundreds of people ran from the Faneuil Hall meeting to help the Tremont Temple protesters. Parker’s plan for the Saturday morning rescue attempt was jettisoned, as an estimated 2,000 antislavery protesters mobbed Court Square that Friday night, hoping to free Burns.

The first challenge facing the rioters involved getting into the courthouse. The doors were locked, and U.S. Marshal Freeman was expecting trouble. He had strengthened the doors and gathered about 50 armed deputies to “protect” Burns. The rioters were led by white abolitionist and BVC member the Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who would later help finance John Brown’s failed 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. Higginson found a battering ram and assaulted the courthouse door. Inside, the armed deputies waited anxiously. When the door was finally breached, Higginson rushed in, along with a few black and white rioters. A furious hand-to-hand battle ensued, during which the Rev. Higginson was slashed in the face with a sword. A couple of gunshots rang out.

Tags: African American History, Civil War Times, Historical Conflicts

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