The Imperfect Revolution: Anthony Burns and the Landscape of Race in Antebellum America

Epilogue: Anthony Burns, Past and Present

121 hearing of Anthony Burns’s death, William Lloyd Garrison commented that the case of the last fugitive slave returned from Boston had “become historic,” and he predicted that Burns would “form a conspicuous figure in the drama of the times.”1 The legendary abolitionist was only partially right. Burns’s case has become historic, but his story has yet to find its rightful place in mainstream history alongside those of other Americans who stirred hearts and inspired dreams—sometimes on the streets of Boston. Although e P I L O gu e Anthony Burns, Past and Present . . . And, as I thought of Liberty Marched handcuffed down that sworded street, The solid earth beneath my feet Reeled fluid as the sea. I felt a sense of bitter loss,— Shame, tearless grief, and stifling wrath, And loathing fear, as if my path A serpent stretched across. All love of home, all pride of place, All generous confidence and trust, Sank smothering in that deep disgust And anguish of disgrace. Down on my native hills of June, And home’s green quiet, hiding all, Fell sudden darkness like the fall Of midnight upon noon! And Law, an unloosed maniac, strong, Blood-drunken, through the blackness trod, Hoarse-shouting in the ear of God The blasphemy of wrong. . . . —John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Rendition” [We] have therefore Resolved, Unanimously, that he [Anthony Burns] be excommunicated from the communion and fellowship of this church. . . . Done by order of the church in regular church meeting, this twentieth day of October, 1855. —Wm. W. West, Clerk 122 epilogue Burns has captured the attention of several brilliant scholars, his story remains unknown to many Americans and certainly to most Canadians— even if he is, to the present day, perhaps the most famous refugee who ever made Canada his adopted home. The Burns drama can tell Americans and Canadians much about their histories and the people who shaped them. Anthony Burns’s story has also been misinterpreted and sometimes misused . Influenced by Burns’s first chronicler, Charles Emery Stevens, scholars who have focused on the drama have suggested that it precipitated an antislavery groundswell, or even a pocket revolution, in Emerson’s Boston that spread throughout the North, making the Civil War and the extirpation of slavery on American soil almost inevitable. Some scholars have argued that the Burns rendition was a watershed that changed the way many ordinary Americans in the North viewed slavery and the federal government’s support of it; others have said that, at a minimum, it encouraged Bostonians to embrace principles of equality and natural rights, which lay at the heart of the Revolutionary heritage handed down to them from their forefathers. The image of Burns being escorted down the hallowed streets of Boston clashed with notions of a city on a hill embellished by the memory of the Adamses, Paul Revere, and their Revolutionary compatriots. Butsuchconclusionsignorethecomplexity;theconfusionandchaos;and, above all, the racial, ethnic, and class tensions in mid-nineteenth-century Boston. Not everyone prayed for Burns as he was held in the courthouse awaiting Commissioner Loring’s decision on his fate; not everyone shared his anguish as he passed through the city’s narrow streets under heavy guard, wearing coattails like a domestic slave being auctioned in a Southern slave pen; not everyone cared about him as he reportedly languished in isolation with little water or food in Robert Lumpkin’s infamous prison after he was returned to Richmond, Virginia. Indeed, in midcentury Boston, antislavery feelings competed with a wide range of other concerns, and it is far from clear that abolitionist sentiments were on the rise during or immediately after the drama. Most white Bostonians went about their business as usual, stopping only to gaze at a grand spectacle around two o’clock on a beautiful day in early June 1854. Most, including several leading antislavery figures, identified little or not at all with Burns. Many whites simply regarded the drama, America’s greatest show of force in peacetime, as a novelty, as a source of excitement or entertainment, as a spectacle. The outcome also satisfied their underlying concerns with law and order. Many white Bostonians had been strong supporters of the recently deceased Daniel Webster, the “Great Ora- epilogue 123 tor.” Like him, they sought to conserve the Union, the fruit of their fathers’ Revolution. This meant respecting the laws of the Union and standing by the compromises of...