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1 When John Suttle’s most valuable female slave gave birth to Anthony Burns, her thirteenth child, on May 31, 1834, while Anthony’s father, her third husband, lay dying from the effects of stone dust inhalation, the United States was embarked on yet another period of remarkable economic expansion.1 The Union had recovered from the Panic of 1819, resolved the Missouri crisis, and survived the Bank War and the Nullification Crisis. President Andrew Jackson, in his own view, at least, had defended the Union from self-interested financial elites and then from South Carolinian advocates of state sovereignty—in both instances, men who failed to recognize the wisdom and virtue of the Founding Fathers. As the market economy expanded westward, Americans looked beyond the Appalachians and across the Great Plains to the Pacific; within a decade, the Democratic C h A P T e R 1 Perceiving the North Star It is a pity . . . that agreeable to the nature of things Slavery and Tyranny must go together and that there is no such thing as having an obedient and useful Slave without the painful exercise of undue and tyrannical authority. —A North Carolina planter She [my mother] had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become a great grandmother in his service. She had rocked him in infancy, attended him in childhood, served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless left a slave—a slave for life—a slave in the hands of strangers; and in their hands saw her children, her grandchildren, and her great grandchildren, divided, like so many sheep, without being gratified with the small privilege of a single word, as to their or her own destiny. —Frederick Douglass I do not think it was intended for any man to be a slave. I never thought so, from a little boy. The slaves are not contented and happy. They can’t be: I never knew one to be so where I was. —Henry Banks, a fugitive slave from Stafford County, Virginia 2 the imperfect revolution editor John O’Sullivan would speak of America’s providential mission “from sea to shining sea” and coin the phrase “Manifest Destiny.” Like so many other African Americans who had toiled on plantations, in industry, or in the homes of their masters, Anthony Burns’s forefathers and family had been instrumental in building the New Nation. John Suttle of Stafford County, Virginia, operated a large quarry that had supplied much of the stone for America’s grand new capital on the Potomac. It was Suttle’s slaves who quarried the stone; transported it; and, like Anthony’s father, sometimes succumbed to the nefarious effects of its dust. With a slaveholder in the White House in 1834 and a Southern economy dependent on King Cotton, slavery seemed well entrenched, and Anthony Burns would quickly learn that he was a member of a caste that did not have the right to share in the nation’s growing riches or even in the fruits of his own labor. His role was to serve the master who owned him. As Burns matured, his growing strength would be a two-edged sword; he could take pride in his prowess but, as a slave, he knew that his increased physical strength and stamina raised his value on the market and that his owner had the right to hire him out or even sell him to the Deep South, where labor was in short supply and sellers received a very good premium for able-bodied slaves.2 Even sooner than that, however, Burns learned that a crisis in the “big house,” including the death of a master, often precipitated heart-wrenching change in the lives of slaves. When Anthony was just a toddler, John Suttle died and his family came upon hard times, exacerbated by the devastating recession of 1837 and his widow’s tendency to live well beyond her means. Burns was about three years old when his mistress lost the quarry and had to sell five of Anthony’s siblings to reduce her debts. She then moved to the neighboring village of Aquia. Still unable to pay her bills, Catherine Suttle hired Anthony’s mother out to a white family living at a considerable distance from her new home, thus separating the aging female slave from her remaining children...

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