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23 What really happened during Anthony Burns’s travail in Boston? In the days that followed Burns’s embarkation, strong antislavery sentiments , genuine admiration for the Virginian fugitive, and disaffection with the Pierce administration motivated Charles Emery Stevens to write the first history of the Burns affair. Although he deplored the outcome of the trial, Stevens sought to portray the drama in a positive light, suggesting that the crisis had fueled a groundswell of antislavery sentiment in Boston and throughout much of the North. Later historians, often drawing extensively on Stevens’s work, picked up where he left off. They depicted the Burns rendition as a critical step on the path toward the Civil War and the elimination of slavery. For many, the Burns affair constituted a watershed. But what about the cheers and the applause for Burns’s captors, the clashes between crowd members and abolitionists, the branding of Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips as murderers, the inconsistent or lackluster support for the rescue of Burns even among antislavery advocates, and the predominance of indifferent spectators in the multitudes? Many of the thousands who gathered seemed to be curious rather than incensed.1 They appeared C h A P T e R 3 The Background to the Spectacle Slavery has a guaranty . . . in the prejudices of caste and color, which induce even large majorities in all the free States to regard sympathy with the slave as an act of unmanly humiliation and self-abasement. —Senator William Dayton, New Jersey And why is it that the old spirit has left us—the spirit of ’76? It is not merely the Commissioners, and the Marshals, and the Mayors, who have disgraced us. They are but the creatures of public sentiment. —Rev. James Freeman Clarke The position of the colored citizens of Boston is in many features a peculiar one. . . . [T]hey enjoy certain facilities denied to their [black] brethren . . . yet the extremes of equality and proscription [meet] in their case. —William Cooper Nell 24 the imperfect revolution determined to see the now-famous Burns as he was escorted to Boston’s T Wharf, the John Taylor, and slavery in the South. That indifferent and curious spectators were not exceptions but represented the majority belies the usual interpretation of the Burns drama as an important antislavery groundswell. The situation was more complex. We need to take a new look at the historical context in which the Burns drama unfolded, particularly the genesis of the federal government’s new fugitive slave legislation and the landscape of race relations in the antebellum North. The new Fugitive Slave Law represented what many white Southerners considered the only major “concession made to the South” in the Compromise of 1850, a grab bag of measures designed to resolve the sectional conflict over the expansion of slavery into the Mexican cession. Other components of the Compromise included the admission of California into the Union as a free state, the organization of the remaining portions of the Mexican cession as territories with no a priori restrictions on slavery, settlement of the boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico in favor of the latter, federal assumption of Texas’s pre-annexation debt, and abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, coupled with a guarantee that no measures toabolishslaveryinthenation’scapitalwouldbeadoptedwithouttheconsent of both its citizens and those of neighboring Maryland. Senator Henry Clay initially combined these measures into a single piece of legislation dubbed the Omnibus Bill. When the unified package failed to pass Congress, Senator Stephen Douglas steered the individual measures through both chambers as distinct pieces of legislation. The process sparked debates on each measure that revealed the attitudes of Northerners and Southerners.2 The debates on the bill that became the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 shed critical light on the context in which the Burns drama unfolded. In particular, the exchanges between politicians underscored the prevalence of Northern racism and the recognition of it by both Northern and Southern leaders. Indeed , some white Southerners viewed the racist attitudes of Northern whites as the best assurance that slave owners’ rights to their human property would be respected and that fugitive slave legislation would be enforced.3 Jefferson Davis put forth his view that the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law ultimately depended on public opinion and racial attitudes, not on bureaucratic regulation.His principal concernwas whether ornottheappeal to higher law by some white Northerners who regarded slavery as inconsistent with God’s will would outweigh the...

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