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Indeed, the abolitionists appealed primarily to the fears and sectional feeling of their audience, as if slavery were a crime that federal officials and Southerners were committing against free white men. When passions had been sufficiently whipped up, the meeting was interrupted on cue by a voice from the back shouting, "Mr. Chairman, I am just informed that a mob of negroes is in Court Square attempting to rescue Burns! I move we adjourn to Court Square!" The riot was on.

The group from Faneuil Hall converged with a crowd of white and black men at the courthouse, where they joined battle with local police and dozens of working men who had been deputized for the emergency as federal marshals. (Another of the less attractive practices of the Yankee abolitionists was the rhetorical abuse they continually directed at these mostly Irish deputies.) The mob was repulsed, but a 24-year-old Irish deputy was killed in the skirmish, and the ensuing confusion—or abolitionist coverup—was such that it never was conclusively determined whether the man had been stabbed or shot, let alone who was responsible.

After the failed rescue, attempts were made to purchase Burns's freedom from his owner, Charles Suttle, and to mount a legal defense. Suttle eventually refused to sell, probably because he was so disgusted at the Yankee behavior. The law was all on his side. Dana could only throw up a barrage of bogus technical objections, hoping that public opinion would intimidate magistrate Loring, who earned his real living as a state judge. The federal government called out the militia, and Loring dutifully issued the unpleasant order returning Burns to his owner. (Loring lost his state judgeship in consequence but was appointed by President Buchanan to the Court of Claims.) With an escort of federal marshals, Suttle brought Burns back to Virginia in chains and, just as Burns had feared, threw him into a stinking dungeon and then sold him.

The story, however, had a happy ending with a curious twist. Burns managed to smuggle a note out of his cell describing his condition, and the plea for help eventually reached Dana. A subscription was raised to buy Burns's freedom. The new owner was willing to sell, and the barely literate (but intelligent and resourceful) ex-slave eventually entered Oberlin College on a scholarship. He addressed a dignified rebuke to his old Virginia church, which had excommunicated him for "disobeying the laws of God and men" by escaping from slavery. At his death in 1862, he was the much-esteemed pastor of a Baptist church in Ontario, and signed himself in his last letter as "Anthony Burns, Ex-Abolitionist: now thinks Lee a Better Man."

I found the saga of Anthony Burns much more interesting than von Frank's effort to give credit to Ralph Waldo Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists. Many of the leading Boston abolitionists were admirers of Emerson, but Emerson himself contributed little more than a few lofty pronouncements to the effect that slavery violated a higher law vaguely grounded on nature rather than on divine revelation. He seems to have had nothing to say about the crucial "how" questions.

Slavery did violate a higher law, but like all evils it needed to be eliminated in the right way and with the right weapons. Precipitating the secession of the Southern states before the North was ready to meet the challenge was not necessarily the way to help the slaves. Several years after the Burns episode, Lincoln was elected to the presidency and led the North to a victory that ended slavery, but the outcome could easily have been otherwise. Finally, if Emerson's abolitionist friends contributed to ending slavery, they contributed just as much to the vindictive side of the Reconstruction era, which in the end backfired.

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