Transcendentalists in the Streets

On June 2, 1854, life in the city of Boston ground to a halt as its inhabitants gathered to watch a single African-American man walk down State Street on a Friday afternoon. A military force of nearly one thousand men, armed with guns, a large cannon, and orders to fire on the crowd if necessary, cleared the streets and guarded the cortege. For eight days Anthony Burns of Virginia had been incarcerated in the Federal Court House, awaiting a hearing under the notorious Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Throughout the week, Boston’s abolitionists had pursued a range of legal and extralegal strategies to secure the release of the man who had become, rather tangentially to his own dire cause, a symbol of resistance to the Slave Power. Hours of prestigious legal counsel, reams of inflammatory handbills, and dozens of impassioned exhortations from Protestant pulpits were mobilized in his defense. A failed attempt at armed rescue resulted only in the death of an Irish-born truckman who was part of the marshal’s guard. Finally, several of Burns’s friends and political supporters organized a drive to buy him from Charles F. Suttle, his putative owner. This last possibility seemed especially promising, but Suttle changed his mind, despite his desire to recoup the considerable expenses he incurred in trying to recover his slave. Suttle may have been concerned about the legal perils (if not the bitter ironies) of selling a slave to abolitionists in Massachusetts, but it appears more likely that he was responding to pressures from those (including President Franklin Pierce) who wished to use the Burns case as a demonstration of the federal government’s commitment to the Compromise of 1850. As Anthony Burns approached a Virginia-bound steamer, standing in shackles before an urban audience restrained at gunpoint, that commitment could not have been more palpable.

The drama of Burns’s procession through the streets of Boston is staged dramatically and illuminated brilliantly by Albert J. Von Frank in his book-length study of the Anthony Burns affair. The reader follows Burns’s heavily-guarded footsteps through the eyes of a wide assortment of city dwellers, ranging from outraged antislavery ministers, to a black teenager who wished Burns the strength to kill himself, to the gleeful militiamen who taunted the fugitive with a chorus of the popular minstrel number, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” Here, and throughout this impressive presentation, painstaking research and eloquent writing convey a meaningful sense of the public impact of Burns’s rendition.

Anthony Burns was by no means the first fugitive slave to be recovered in the North (or even in Boston) after 1850, but Von Frank makes a strong case that this particular trial pricked white consciences, fired the imaginations of previously inert proponents of free labor, and unsettled the moral boundaries of slavery. Three weeks after Judge Edward G. Loring had certified the claim on Burns as the legal property of another man, the former fugitive found himself back in the South, his body chained and handcuffed for what would be four months in an unventilated pen without a toilet. In the North, meanwhile, Burns’s symbolic body hovered freely and ominously over an intensified antislavery climate. As Von Frank argues with great force and energy, Anthony Burns haunted the writings of the major figures of the American Renaissance (including Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, published a year later) and his trial forced a major realignment in Massachusetts politics in the direction of an emergent Know-Nothing coalition—and ultimately toward the Republicans. It was the specter of federal troops imposing slave law on the people of the purportedly free state of Massachusetts, Von Frank suggests, rather than the conflicts over Kansas and Nebraska, that pushed Northerners to regard compromise as politically impossible and morally bankrupt and to flirt with thoughts of disunion and visions of bloody redemption.

The intellectual weight of The...