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On Wednesday, May 24, 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the last great legislative effort to achieve compromise in the conflict over slavery and avert a civil war. Drafted mainly by Stephen Douglas, the act outraged antislavery opinion by allowing territories to decide by popular vote whether to enter the Union as free or slave states.
On the evening of that same Wednesday, a federal marshal in Boston arrested Anthony Burns under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law, which dated from the Compromise of 1850. After 1850 it had become increasingly clear that the South would never agree to restrict slavery to its original boundaries, while the extension of slavery into the West was unacceptable to the North. Stephen Douglas's "freedom of choice" formula satisfied neither side, and so the Kansas-Nebraska Act turned out to be a step toward the war it was intended to avert.
In this context, the effort to return Burns to slavery in Virginia triggered a violent confrontation between the abolitionists of Massachusetts and the federal government of President Franklin Pierce, whose secretary of war was Jefferson Davis, later to be president of the Confederacy. The federal government succeeded in its immediate object, but at the cost of triggering a political realignment first in Massachusetts, and subsequently in the nation. The Whig party dissolved, the previously dominant Democratic party divided into irreconcilable factions, and the stage was set for the emergence of the Republican party and Abraham Lincoln.
The Trial of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston
by Albert J. von Frank
Harvard Univ. Press
409 pp.; $27.95
Professor von Frank retells the story of the Burns case to make two points. First, he thinks that the personal experience of Northerners with this sort of close-to-home drama had more to do with the political realignment (he wants to call it a "revolution") than did the more distant issues like the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Second, von Frank is an admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he thinks that other historians have unfairly characterized Emerson as a salon-party sage who preached liberty but held racist views and took no active part in the struggle to end slavery.
Von Frank says that Emerson is the "subject" of his book whereas Anthony Burns is its "object." That phraseology might seem to reflect the tendency of some abolitionists to care a lot more about the cause of freedom in general than about the lives of individual slaves in particular. Von Frank himself is not guilty of any such slighting of the personal element, however. His book is rich in sympathetic details about Burns and what happened to him.
Anthony Burns had no ambition to become a political cause. When he appeared in court the morning after his arrest, he was fatalistic and passive, reasoning (correctly, as it turned out) that his return to Virginia was inevitable and that it would go harder for him if he resisted. The first task for volunteer attorney Richard Henry Dana (the author of Two Years Before the Mast) was to persuade Burns to accept his assistance. Magistrate Edward Loring unwisely tried to mollify Dana by granting a continuance, and thus gave the abolitionist forces time to organize a public meeting and a rescue.
The Boston Vigilance Committee convened the meeting on Friday evening in Faneuil Hall, where abolitionists Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker delivered impassioned speeches that expressed much more hatred toward the slave owners than love for the slaves. Von Frank comments, "Nothing in the record of the Burns affair is more striking to a modern audience or at first more off-putting than the apparent incapacity of even the most committed of the radicals to express a direct, authentic outrage on Burns's personal behalf."
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