Boston Combusts: The Fugitive Slave Case of Anthony Burns

Boston would never be the same again. As Amos Lawrence described the transformation, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” At a huge July 4 outdoor meeting held in nearby Framingham a month after the Burns decision, William Lloyd Garrison made his point not with words but with flames. He stood before the crowd and burned a copy of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law and then a copy of Judge Loring’s written decision in the Burns case. Finally, Garrison held up a copy of the U.S. Constitution and set it ablaze, condemning it as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”

Thoreau would have the final word at the July 4 abolitionist meeting. His classic Walden would be published a few weeks later, but now Thoreau wanted to speak about Burns and what his fate meant to the nation. Thoreau began by rejecting any possibility of political compromise with the South: “They who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts. Their measures are half measures and makeshifts merely. They put off the day of settlement indefinitely, and meanwhile the debt accumulates.” In Thoreau’s eyes, Massachusetts and the entire North was guilty of complicity in the sins of slavery. The silence of the North was its crime: The Burns trial was “really the trial of Massachusetts.”

Thoreau believed that Northern silence in the face of the injustice against Burns and his 3 million fellow slaves could no longer continue. He echoed arguments made by Dana in front of Judge Loring: “What is wanted is men…who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority.” Thoreau was bold enough to take his remarks to their logical conclusion: “Let the State [of Massachusetts] dissolve her union with the slaveholder.”

In the end, the Rev. Grimes would succeed in buying Burns’ freedom. Burns returned to Boston, later studied at Ohio’s Oberlin College and then became a Baptist minister. On July 27, 1862, just seven weeks before Lincoln would issue his Emancipation Proclamation, 28-year-old Anthony Burns died in Canada from tuberculosis. As much as anyone, Burns had exposed the gaping divisions between North and South that would lead to disunion and Civil War.

For additional reading, see: The Trials of Anthony Burns, by Albert J. von Frank; Anthony Burns: A History, by Charles Emery Stevens; and Thoreau’s 1854 essay “Slavery in Massachusetts.”

This article was written by Chuck Leddy and originally published in the May 2007 issue of Civil War Times Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today!

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