HOW MASSACHUSETTS IN 1854 SURRENDERED THE
FUGITIVE SLAVE ANTHONY BURNS
It was in May, 1854, that Anthony Burns of Virginia was arrested in
Boston as a fugitive slave and brought before Judge Loring, United
States Commissioner under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. I am not
going to re-tell the familiar story of his so-called trial and of the
surrender of Burns to Colonel Suttle, also of Virginia. The actual
military rank held by Suttle I do not know, but I call him Colonel on
general principles; or on the principle announced by the late Max
O'Rell in his book on America; with its population of sixty millions;
"_la plupart des colonels_." But I will tell what I saw; and what
sort of impression the event made at the time upon an eye-witness who
belonged to the dominant and most conservative party in the State;
the Whig party.
The arrest of Burns made a stir in the old Commonwealth comparable to
none other which had occurred down to that time. From Worcester,
where I was then reading more or less law with Mr. Hoar, I went to
Boston to look on at these proceedings. I went from no particular
feeling of sympathy with Burns, nor yet mainly from {30} abhorrence
of that subservience to slaveholders in which, until after Webster's
Seventh of March speech in 1850, Massachusetts had been steeped. I
went from curiosity. I wanted to see how the legal side of it was
managed. For though the popular dislike of such proceedings, which
neither the Shadrach nor the Sims case had fully roused, was then
slumbering, the State had, so long ago as 1843, passed a law
forbidding any judge or other officer holding a commission from the
State to take any part in the rendition of any person claimed as a
fugitive slave under the old Act of Congress of 1793. Yet here was a
Massachusetts Judge of Probate sitting as United States Commissioner
and doing the work which in the South itself was done by bloodhounds,
and by the basest of mankind. I thought I should like to see how
such a man looked while engaged upon that task; the more so as he
bore a good Massachusetts name; and what kind of a trial a fugitive
slave was to have on Massachusetts soil.
Burns was seized on a Wednesday evening, May 24th. He appeared
before Judge Loring at nine o'clock Thursday morning, handcuffed,
between two policemen. It was obviously intended that the "trial"
should begin and end that same morning. Burns had been allowed to
see nobody. He had no counsel. When Robert Morris, a coloured
lawyer, tried to speak to him the policemen drove him away. By
chance, Mr. Richard H. Dana, Jr., and another lawyer of repute, {31}
Mr. C. M. Ellis, heard of what was going on, and went to the
court-room. Dana intervened, not as counsel, for he had no standing
as counsel, but as _amicus curiæ_, and asked that the hearing be
postponed and that Burns be allowed to consult friends and counsel.
The black man sat there "stupefied and terrified," as Dana said,
incapable of thought or action. After repeated protests by Dana and
Ellis, Judge Loring put off the hearing till Saturday. But Burns was
still kept in secret confinement. When Wendell Phillips asked to see
him to arrange that he should have counsel, the United States Marshal
refused. Phillips went to Cambridge to see Judge Loring, and Judge
Loring gave him an order of admission to the cell. But he said to
Phillips--this Judge-Commissioner said of the cause he was about to
try judicially--
"Mr. Phillips, the case is so clear that I do not think you will be
justified in placing any obstacle in the way of this man's going
back, _as he probably will!_"
A remark without precedent or successor in Massachusetts
jurisprudence, which, before and since, has ever borne an honourable
renown for judicial impartiality.
When I went to the Court House on the Saturday it had become a
fortress. There were United States Marshals and their deputies,
police in great numbers, and United States Marines. The chain had
not then been hung about the building nor had Chief Justice Shaw yet
crawled beneath it. I was allowed to enter the building, and to {32}
go upstairs to the corridor on the first floor, out of which opened
the door of the court-room where Burns was being tried, not for his
life, but for freedom which was more than life. There I was stopped.
The police officer at the door would listen to nothing. The
court-room, free by law and by custom to all citizens, was closed by
order, as I understood, not of the Commissioner who was holding his
slave-court, but by the United States Marshal, who was responsible
for the custody of Burns and alarmed by the state of public opinion.
While I argued with the police, there came up a smart young officer
of United States Marines. He asked what it was all about. I said I
was a law student and wished to enter. "Admit him," said the officer
of United States Marines. He waited till he saw his order obeyed and
the police stand aside from the door; then bowed to me and went his
way. So it happened that it was to an officer of an armed force of
the United States that I was indebted for the privilege of entering a
Massachusetts court-room while a public trial was going on.
Inside they were taking testimony. Mr. Dana and Mr. Ellis were now
acting as counsel for Burns, who still seemed "stupefied and
terrified." The testimony was only interesting because it concerned
the liberty of a human being. Judge Loring sat upon the bench with,
at last, an anxious look as if he had begun to realize the storm that
was raging outside, and the revolt of Massachusetts against this
business of slave-catching {33} by Massachusetts judges. I spoke for
a moment with Mr. Dana and then with one or two of the anti-slavery
leaders who sat listening to the proceedings. That sealed my fate.
When I returned after the adjournment I was again refused admission,
and ordered to leave the Court House. When I told the Deputy Marshal
I had as much right there as he had and would take no orders from
him, he threatened me with arrest. But of this he presently thought
better, and finding all protest useless, I went away.
Of the "trial," therefore, I saw and heard little. But of the
Faneuil Hall meeting called to protest against the surrender I saw
much, though not of the sequel to it in Court Square. Most of the
Abolitionist leaders were there, but the Abolitionists at that time
would have been lost in the great spaces of Faneuil Hall. The three
thousand men who crowded it were the "solid men of Boston," who by
this time had begun to think they did not care to see a Virginian
slave-holder crack his whip about their ears. The Puritan temper was
up. The spirit of Otis and Hancock and Sam Adams burned once more in
the hearts of living men. The cheers were incessant; cheers for men
who a few days before had been almost outcasts--far outside at any
rate, the sacred sphere in which the men of State Street and Beacon
Street dwelt. Theodore Parker, who spoke first from a gallery, was
cheered, and Phillips was cheered. As the evening drew on, it was
evident that violent {34} counsels were likely to prevail. Already
there had been, all over the city, talk of a rescue. Parker, ever
prone to extreme views, was for it, and made a speech for which he
was indicted but of course never tried. The indictment was but a
piece of vindictive annoyance. But evidently nothing had been
prepared, or, if it had been, these leaders had not been taken into
the confidence of the men who meant real business.
Toward the end some one--name unknown--moved that the meeting adjourn
to the Revere House to groan Suttle. Parker, who was not chairman,
put the motion and declared it carried, as beyond doubt it was, and
with wild shouts the vast audience, too closely packed to move
quickly, set their faces to the door and began streaming slowly out.
Phillips, who was against this plan and against any violence not
efficiently organized, came forward on the platform. The few
sentences he uttered have never, I think, been re ported or printed,
but I can hear them still. At the first note of that clarion voice
the surging throng stopped and turned. Said Phillips:
"Let us remember where we are and what we are going to do. You have
said that you will vindicate the fame of Massachusetts. Let me tell
you that you will never do it by going to the Revere House to-night
to attempt the impossible feat of insulting a kidnapper. The zeal
that won't keep till to-morrow never will free a slave."
In that single moment, he had recovered his control of the audience.
The movement to the {35} doors had stopped. Every one waited for
what was coming. Phillips was at his best. He was master of himself
and of those before him. The words of entreaty were words of
command. He stood and spoke as one having authority.
But just then came a voice from the other end of the hall. It
belonged to Mr. Charles L. Swift, the vehement young editor of a
weekly paper called _The Commonwealth_, and it announced that a mob
of negroes had attacked the Court House, which had been turned into a
gaol, and wanted help to rescue Burns. That dissolved the spell.
Faces were again turned to the door. The shouts which Phillips had
silenced broke loose once more; and the three thousand citizens of
Boston had become a mob. It was all to no purpose. The hall was
long in emptying itself: and long before those who were really in
earnest could reach the Court House, the ill-advised and ill-planned
attack had been made and failed. Colonel Higginson, who, I believe,
devised it and led it, had not at that time any experience in
measures of war. He had plenty of courage of the hot-headed
kind--the kind not then needed. Perhaps Alcott who, after the rush
had been made with no success, marched coolly up the steps leading to
the door defended by armed police and troops, umbrella in hand, was
as much a hero as anybody. But it was all over, I gathered in a few
minutes, and the only casualty was the death of a Marshal's deputy,
James Batchelder. I had got away from Faneuil Hall as soon as I
could, and the distance {36} to the Court House is short, but I
arrived too late to see anything but an empty square and that open
doorway with a phalanx of defenders inside.
Burns was not rescued. He was surrendered, and no man who saw it
ever forgot that shameful spectacle, nor doubted that it was the
rendition of Anthony Burns which completed the conversion of the Old
Bay State from the pro-slavery to the anti-slavery faith. Webster
had held the Puritan conscience in chains for a generation. It
revolted, no doubt, at the Seventh of March speech; it was stirred by
the Shadrach and Sims cases; but the final emancipation of the State
from its long thraldom to the slave power coincided with the
surrender of Burns to Suttle. On that Saturday, men saw for
themselves, and for the first time, what fugitive slave-hunting in
Massachusetts really meant, and what degree of degradation it brought.
The Court House in chains; the Chief Justice stooping to pass beneath
them; the streets and squares crowded with State Militia, guarding
the entrance to every street on the route; United States Marines in
hollow square with Burns and the United States Marshals in the
centre; United States troops preceding and United States artillery
following. It was fitting that it should be so. The State and the
United States were partners in the crime, equal offenders against the
moral law, or against the higher law, which till then had been the
heritage of the Puritan {37} Commonwealth, and had sometimes been
heard of even in Washington. They shared in the guilt and shared in
the infamy. Both have since amply atoned for their sin, but nothing,
not even a Four Years' Civil War for Union and Freedom, not even the
blood of heroes and martyrs, will ever quite wash out from the memory
of those who saw it the humiliations of that day. It blistered and
burnt and left a scar for ever. This procession took its course in
broad daylight down State Street on its way to Long Wharf, where a
United States revenue cutter waited to embark the kidnapped
slave--kidnapped by process of law--and his master, Suttle. The
steps of the Merchants' Exchange were thronged with Lawrences and
Fays and Lorings who had been foremost in trying to crush the
anti-slavery agitation. But when this column drew near, these
friends and servants of the slave-owner and of the cotton trade
suddenly remembered that they were men before they were merchants;
and men of Massachusetts at that. They broke into groans and cries
of execration, and the troops marched past them to the music of
hisses and curses. All this I saw and heard. The re-enslavement of
Burns was the liberation of Massachusetts. The next time I saw
troops in the streets of Boston was in April, 1861, when the Sixth
Massachusetts Regiment, answering to the call of President Lincoln,
started for Washington via Baltimore, with results known to the world.
{38}
One more incident. On the Sunday Theodore Parker preached in the
Music Hall, then the largest hall in Boston, what he called a sermon
on these events. But Parker's sermons were very often like those of
Cromwell's colonels; you heard in them the clash of arms, and in this
more than in most. He never cared deeply about measuring his words,
and he believed in speaking the truth about men as well as things
with extreme plainness. On this Sunday he was in his finest Old
Testament mood; the messenger of the wrath of the Almighty. He flung
open his Bible with the gesture of a man who draws a sword, and in
tones that rang like a cry of battle, thundered out his text:
"Exodus xx. 15. 'Thou shalt not steal.'"
The text was itself a sermon. It was the custom in this Music Hall
church to applaud when you felt like it, or even to hiss. A deep
murmur, which presently swelled into a roar of applause, greeted the
text. The face of the preacher was aflame; so were his words as he
told the story of this awful week and set in the clear light of truth
the acts and words of the Massachusetts Judge who had brought
disgrace upon Massachusetts. When he came to the attack on the Court
House, the abortive attempt to rescue Burns, and the death of the
Marshal's deputy killed at his post, he burst out:
"Edward Greely Loring, I charge _you_ with the murder of James
Batchelder. _You_ fired the shot that made his wife a widow and his
children {39} orphans. Yours is the guilt. The penalty a righteous
God will exact for that life he will demand from you."
To say that, he left his pulpit, which was but a desk on the Music
Hall platform, stepped a little to one side, and stood full in view
of the great company which had gathered to hear him on this peaceful
Sabbath morning; a fair target for another shot had any hearer been
minded to try one. You think that a fanciful suggestion? Then you
little know the fierceness of the feelings which in those days raged
in Boston. They presently grew fiercer, and reached a climax in 1860
and the early winter of 1861; when men on both sides for many months
went armed, and were quite ready to use their arms; and when Phillips
and Garrison were in daily peril of their lives from assassination
and, less frequently but more deadly, from mobs.
Among all that devoted band there was no braver soul than Parker's.
He was by profession and training a scholar, a theologian, a man of
books and letters, with a rare knowledge of languages and literature,
and the best collection of German ballads in America; shelves full of
them in his library at the top of his house. But by temperament he
was a fighter; as befitted the grandson of that Captain John Parker
who commanded the minute men at Lexington, April 19th, 1775. He
wrote much, preached often and well, and for twenty years was a great
force in Boston and elsewhere. A fiery little man, with {40} a ruddy
face and great dome of a head, spectacles over his pale blue eyes,
the love of God and of his fellow-men in his heart; and by them
beloved.
{41}