Virginia Hamilton by Anthony Burns: The Defeat, Triumph of a Fugitive Slave

Dana and then on Robert Morriss, but he made no reply.
    Dana thought it was all over then. But Judge Loring said to Anthony reassuringly,“Anthony, do you wish for time to think about this? Do you wish to go away and meet me here tomorrow or next day, and tell me what you will do?”
    All in the courtroom watched Anthony. He gave a slight twitching of his deformed hand, but no one knew whether he meant yes or no by the movement. He did not know himself.
    I will have to go back, he was thinking. I will be whipped unto an inch of my life. I will die a slave.
    Judge Loring looked doubtful, but at last he said to Anthony, “I understand you to say that you would.”
    Very faintly, Anthony said, “I would.”
    â€œThen you shall have it,” Loring said.
    Marshal Freeman whispered to the judge. Judge Loring replied out loud, “No sir, he must have the time necessary.”
    Again the Marshal whispered. Judge Loring replied sternly, “I can’t help that, sir—he shall have the proper time.”
    The day was Thursday. “You shall have until Saturday morning,” Judge Loring told Anthony and his defenders, and struck his gavel down.
    Anthony was taken back to the jury room high up in the court building. There four men, including Deputy Asa Butman, guarded him.
    â€œTony, boy,” Butman said to him, mimicking words spoken by Charles Suttle, “now we here are curious. Did the Colonel just raise you up or did he buy you from somebody?”
    The other guards nodded encouragement. “Come on, lad, you know us here for your friends.”
    Anthony knew they thought him a fool. He had figured out that they hoped to get information from him for Mars Charles and Mars Brent. He knew there must be a reward for him. Every runaway slave had a price on his head.
    Wonder how much Mars Charles think me worth?
    Anthony played dumb; he acted confused, stared off into space, and told his jailers nothing.
    The court had emptied, and almost at once news of Anthony’s arrest spread throughout Boston. The concerned public learned that slave hunters were in the city, hoping to force another wretched soul back into bondage.
    All sympathetic citizens, and there were thousands, felt duty bound to disobey the Fugitive Slave Act on behalf of the captured fugitive in their midst. But there was another factor that mobilized them: for months there had been a proposal before Congress that would allow slavery in the Great Plains lands of Kansas and Nebraska. The two tracts were to be territories within the Louisiana Purchase, the enormous parcel of land, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, bought from France in 1803. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had closed the Louisiana Purchase to slavery “forever.” But people on the proslavery as well as the antislavery sides had been sending their settlers into Kansas and Nebraska to agitate and to be in a position to vote for their sides once the territories were divided into states.
    On May 25, 1854, the very same day that Anthony appeared in court, theKansas-Nebraska Bill passed in the United States Senate. It permitted slavery in states that would be carved from the two territories if it was provided for in the state constitutions. So in effect it repealed the Missouri Compromise. After these victories for slavery, the jailing of a poor fugitive in a Boston court house at the bidding of a slave owner was the very last straw for those against slavery. Thus had the slavocracy rocked the cradle of liberty.
    By evening the news that Anthony Burns had escaped from the South only to be captured in the free North moved from town to town and newspaper to newspaper across the country.
    KIDNAPPING AGAIN! read the first leaflet out of Boston that told the tale:
    A man was stolen Last Night
By the Fugitive Slave Bill Commissioner
He will have His

MOCK
TRIAL

On Saturday, May 27, in the Kidnapper’s Court
Before the Honorable Slave Bill