The Imperfect Revolution: Anthony Burns and the Landscape of Race in Antebellum America, and: Fugitive Slave on Trial: The Anthony Burns Case and Abolitionist Outrage (review)

Reading these two books together illuminates how differently two scholars can approach the same subject, providing fresh paths through relatively well-travelled scholarly ground. While both center on the furor surrounding the 1854 return of fugitive slave Anthony Burns from Boston to Virginia, Maltz’s legal narrative stays mostly within the courtrooms of Boston, while Barker’s social and political history ranges from Virginia to Canada. Both do justice to the drama and significance of the events, and both try and succeed to varying degrees in taking seriously all sides of contemporary debates over Burns’s fate.

Maltz’s straightforward narrative is not argument-driven, but his narrative choices are of course interpretive. The book is over a third done by the time the reader encounters Burns, but that is the result of useful background, dating from 1787, to the legal and political issues involved. There follows a blow-by-blow account of the hearing over whether to return Burns to his master, and then the trials that resulted from abolitionist outrage toward Judge Charles Loring once he ruled against Burns. Those interested in these details will relish this volume, and this detailed narrative approach highlights the varied legal and political aspects of the abolitionist reaction to Loring and his decision. It will surely become the standard secondary source on the legal aspects of the Burns and Loring cases.

There are downsides to this approach, however. One is a relative inattention to the complexities of the political landscape in which these cases took place. There are too many hasty, shorthand references to “abolitionists and others” to do justice to the byzantine divisions and subdivisions within politics that permeated the atmosphere surrounding those courthouses (37). Key political phenomena such as the reticence of conservative sympathizers to openly defend Loring are left inadequately explored in the haste of the narrative and the downplaying of analysis. While Maltz allows all sides to speak for themselves by extensive quotations from their arguments, the privileging of procedural detail comes at the expense of helping readers truly understand the defenders of the Fugitive Slave Act (FSA): when speaking for themselves they make powerful, even Lincolnian, arguments for the rule of law, but when Maltz pauses briefly to describe them they are simply southern sympathizers (see, e.g., 30, 93). And on the other side of the debate, Maltz takes no pains to explore the place of resistance to the FSA in the ideology and program of the abolitionists. The result of this analytical paucity is to lend a certain “of course that’s what they would do” quality to his reporting of abolitionist responses.

To be sure, there is no shortage of drama even in Maltz’s Dragnet-style storytelling, and specialist readers and teachers will be able to pull out several fascinating themes for analysis. The totality of Maltz’s story, for instance, illustrates that both abolitionists and conservatives of all stripes were willing to embrace extralegal and even lawless behavior at key moments, even as they appealed repeatedly to law and passionately anticipated the verdicts. The degree to which this generation of Bostonians and Americans were committed to the rule of law would be a natural discussion point for anyone teaching this book.

Indeed, the student-friendly length and sparse scholarly apparatus strongly suggest the intent that this volume should be adopted in classrooms. But while not riddled with legalese, Maltz’s account is peppered enough with legal terminology that it might work better in a law school than an undergraduate course. And I have my doubts as to whether Maltz’s no-frills...