Conflagration by John A. Buehrens

Author:John A. Buehrens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press

Rendition and Insurrection

In which Boston Transcendentalists try to stop “The Rendition of Anthony Burns,” radicalize the antislavery movement, and help form the “Secret Six” behind John Brown’s plan for a slave insurrection.

IN THE WINTER AND SPRING OF 1854, national US politics centered on the “Nebraska bill.” So did the political attention of antislavery Boston. As maneuvered along by Senator Douglas of Illinois, the proposal would overturn the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and employ popular sovereignty—the votes of new white, male residents—to determine if any part of the huge Kansas/Nebraska territory would be slave or free. Most Democrats, even in the North, felt obliged to support Douglas as a matter of party loyalty (and patronage). The Whig Party, already split in Boston between Cotton Whigs and Conscience Whigs, would come apart after dividing on this issue. Mass meetings protesting the bill took place in Boston and elsewhere. In Congress, the debate grew so heated that violence was just below the surface. A petition against the bill, started by Harriet Beecher Stowe and signed by over three thousand clergy of all denominations, was to be presented to Congress by Senator Edward Everett of Massachusetts on March 7, the anniversary of Webster’s infamous speech favoring the 1850 Compromise. Despite his credentials as a Unitarian minister and as a past president of Harvard, Everett thoroughly bungled the occasion. He somehow failed to vote when an early form of the Nebraska bill came up and passed the Senate. Antislavery Bostonians were outraged, and Everett was forced to resign. The House then passed the bill on May 22; the Senate, two days later. Senator Charles Sumner then re-presented the petition with added signatures on May 25, saying that passing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which overturned the 1820 Compromise, makes “all future compromises impossible. Thus it puts Freedom and Slavery face to face, and bids them grapple. Who can doubt the result?”1

Democrats celebrated. Antislavery outrage in Boston expressed itself in the form of mass protests and an urban riot over the capture of yet another fugitive slave. James Freeman Clarke named it, in a sermon given the following Sunday and widely reprinted, “The Rendition of Anthony Burns.”2 The dramatic events in Boston took place just as the political drama in Washington was also unfolding.

Anthony Burns was nineteen years old when he escaped slavery in Virginia, arriving in Boston by ship in 1853. He found work first in Hayden’s haberdashery, then in another clothing shop, and joined the Twelfth Baptist Church on Beacon Hill. On Wednesday, May 24, 1854, as he was just coming home from work, federal marshals seized him, taking him to the courthouse. Almost simultaneously, Boston Democrats celebrating the Kansas-Nebraska Act stole cannon from an armory, dragged them to the Common, and fired a salute. Pastor Grimes did not learn that his congregant was in jail until the next morning. After visiting the prisoner, he alerted Parker as head of the Vigilance Committee. They found Burns already in court, before Judge Edward G. Loring, sitting as a commissioner under the Fugitive Slave Act.

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