by Noel Rae
“Dr. S. G. Howe then presented a series of resolutions which set forth that the trial on Saturday was an outrage not to be sanctioned, or tamely submitted to—That as the South has decreed, in the late passage of the Nebraska Bill, that no faith is to be kept with freedom; so, in the name of the living God, and on the part of the North, we declare that henceforth and forever, no compromises should be made with slavery. That … it is the will of God that every man should be free; we will as God wills; God’s will be done!”
Wendell Phillips said, among other things, that the question to be settled was “whether we shall adhere to the result of the case of Shadrach or the case of Sims. Will you adhere to the case of Sims and see this man carried down State Street between two hundred men? (No!)” Theodore Parker also spoke, and “after some fiery remarks” said that when the meeting adjourned it should re-convene “in Court Square tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock. A hundred voices cried out, ‘No, to-night!’ ‘Let us take him out!’ ‘Let us go now!’ ‘Come on!’” This was followed by a good deal of shouting, confusion and indecision—“the scene was tumultuous in the extreme.” Then, just as things were quietening down, “a man at the lower end of hall cried out, ‘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 audience immediately began rapidly to leave the hall, and most of them wended their way to Court Square.”
“At the Court House the crowd halted on the east side and endeavored to force the door on that part of the building, but failing in their attempt they ran round to the door on the west side, opposite the Railroad Exchange, with loud cries that the fugitive was in that wing of the building, and there proceeded with a long plank which they used as a battering ram, and two axes, to break in and force an entrance … The battering ram was manned by a dozen or fourteen men, white and colored, who plunged it against the door until it was stove in. Meantime, several brickbats had been thrown at the windows, and the glass rattled in all directions. The leaders, or those who appeared to act as ringleaders in the melee, continually shouted, ‘Rescue him!’ ‘Bring him out!’ ‘Where is he?’ &c. &c. The Court House bell rung an alarm at half past nine o’clock. At this point reports of pistols were heard in the crowd, and firearms, we understand, were used by those within the building.” Large numbers of Boston policemen now appeared, headed by Chief Taylor who “pressed through the excited multitude and, with great heroism, seized several men with axes in their hands.
“At the time the mob beat down the westerly door of the Court House, several men employed as United States officers were in the passage-way, using their endeavors to prevent the ingress of the crowd, and among the number was Mr. James Batchelder, a truckman in the employ of Colonel Peter Dunbar, who, almost at the instant of the forcing of the door, received a pistol shot in the abdomen. Mr. Batchelder uttered the exclamation, ‘I’m stabbed!’ and falling backwards into the arms of watchman Isaac Jones, expired almost immediately.”
News of the murder had a sobering effect on the crowd, so did the arrival of more police “fully armed for any emergency.” Several arrests were made—“A. G. Brown, Jr., American, 23 years of age, riotous conduct; John J. Roberts, American, 25 years of age, breaking a gas lamp in the square; Walter Phinney, colored, 36, and John Wesley, colored, 26, riotous conduct …” Two companies of artillery also arrived, whose “presence served to restore quiet, and Court House Square was soon deserted by the rioters. At half past twelve o’clock the square was deserted.” To be on the safe side, a steamship was dispatched to Fort Independence “where she took on board a corps of the United States Marines.” Also, “during the tumult, a number of our most respectable citizens called at the police office and tendered their services to assist in maintaining peace and order. Their offer was accepted.”
The next day, Saturday, the crowd reassembled in Court Square while “the body of the unfortunate officer Batchelder, who fell a victim to the unrestrained passions of the mob last night, was removed by order of Coroner Smith to his late residence in Charlestown. As the coffin was being placed in the covered carriage which conveyed it out of the Square, the noisy outcries of the assembled multitude were hushed.” Mayor Smith and High Sheriff Eveleth then appeared on the court house steps and warned the crowd “that a sufficient force was in readiness to preserve the public peace; and that, at all hazards, the laws of the city, the laws of the State, and the laws of the United States SHALL be maintained. (Applause.) Just as the mayor closed his remarks, a colored man made some demonstration of disrespect, and he was immediately arrested.”
Meanwhile, inside the court house the examination of Burns was in progress. Under the Fugitive Slave Act there was no jury, no habeas corpus and no right of appeal, but Burns was allowed to have a lawyer, and Richard Henry Dana volunteered to serve. Dana did his best to cast doubt on the legality of the Fugitive Slave Law, and on whether Burns really was the man Charles Suttle, the owner, said he was. But the first objection was dismissed, and as to the second, Burns was his own worst enemy: soon after his arrest, when Suttle visited him in jail, Burns’ first words, in front of witnesses, were “How do you do, Master Charles?” (Burns, who seems to have been something of an innocent, had given himself away by writing a letter to his brother, also owned by Suttle, telling him where he was. “And as is the custom at the South, when letters are received directed to slaves, they are delivered to the owner of such slaves, who opens them and examines their contents.”) Suttle apparently was not a hard master, and in the conversation that followed Burns readily admitted that he had never been whipped, had been allowed to choose who he would work for when hired out, and was well looked after when sick. Burns also confirmed the story that he had not intended to run away, but had taken a nap while on board a ship docked in Alexandria, and was still asleep when the ship set sail.
The most famous victim of the notorious Fugitive Slave Law, Anthony Burns’ arrest in Boston, trial and return to slavery did much to radicalize the people of New England—“We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs,” wrote one prominent merchant, “and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”
One solution would have been to buy Burns his freedom. Suttle at first agreed to this, and named $1,200 as his price, a sum which was soon raised, mostly from the black community; but then he decided not to sell until he had proved his point by winning his case. This was done in a few days. Only by disregarding his oath of office and embracing the abolitionists’ “higher law” could Commissioner Loring have come to any other decision than the one he did: “On the law and facts of the case, I consider the claimant entitled to the certificate from me which he claims.”
“As soon as the decision was rendered, the court room was cleared of all spectators, to allow the necessary preparations to be made for the sending back of the fugitive. Court Square was also cleared of the crowds which thronged it. Every window overlooking the square was filled with at least a dozen heads of persons anxious to witness the poor fugitive when he should be brought out. The shutters of the stores on State Street were closed and business was completely suspended. At ten o’clock a detachment of the Dragoons passed up Court Street, and were received with groans and hisses, and cries of ‘Shame! Shame!’ &c.”
As well as the dragoons “a detachment of the 4th Regiment U. S. Artillery, having previously been to the Navy Yard and received a field piece, marched up State Street. The cannon was drawn by a pair of horses, and it was planted in Court Square a little south of the easterly entrance of the Court House, and pointing towards Court Street”—almost exactly the same thing had been done by British redcoats at the time of the Boston Massacre. Along with the artillery, there were U. S. Marines, “some 1500 or 1800 men of the Volunteer Militias, all with their guns loaded,” and hundreds of police and special officers. The side streets were roped off, and orders were given to shoot anyone who crossed a police line. The troops then formed a square, and Burns was brou
ght out of the Court House and placed in the middle of the square, which then headed for Long Wharf. Probably feeling overwhelmed, “Burns appeared as indifferent as the most uninterested spectator, and the cries of ‘Shame! Shame!’ the hisses, groans and other demonstrations which greeted his appearance did not seem in the least to excite him.”
Many of the buildings on Court Street were draped as if for a funeral. One owner “displayed heavy folds of black cambric from each of the three windows of his office,” and several others had “their awnings hung with festoons of black. The Commonwealth office presented three American flags dressed in mourning, and lines of crepe were stretched across the street.” Soon after, “a coffin was lowered out of one of the windows with the inscription ‘Liberty’ on it.”
At length prisoner and escort arrived at Long Wharf where “the steamer John Taylor was lying. Burns was marched directly aboard and taken to the cabin out of sight of the crowd. The wharves and vessels in the vicinity were crowded with thousands of persons gathered to witness the embarkation.” At last “the word to cast off was given,” and “at precisely twenty minutes after three the steamer swung from the wharf and proceeded down the harbor.”
On his return to Virginia, Burns spent some in prison in Richmond before being sold by Suttle to a North Carolina speculator called Mc Daniel for $905—almost three hundred dollars less than the offer he had refused on principle in Boston. McDaniel then turned around and sold him to some members of Boston’s black community, led by the Rev. Leonard Grimes, for $1300—a quick profit of nearly fifty per cent. Once free, Burns paid a return visit to Boston and then moved on to Oberlin College, Ohio, the first college to admit women and blacks. After that he settled in Upper Canada, where he became a non-ordained Baptist minister and died of tuberculosis in 1862, aged twenty-eight. (The cause of the non-ordination may have been this: soon after being freed, Burns applied to the Baptist church that he had belonged to in Virginia for “a letter of dismission in fellowship and of recommendation to another church.” In reply, he was informed that he had been unanimously excommunicated on the grounds that he had “absconded from the service of his master, and refused to return voluntarily, thereby disobeying both the laws of God and man.”)
A few weeks after Burns was returned to Virginia, several hundred Bostonians gathered for a July 4 picnic in a grove of oak trees near Framingham. The event was sponsored by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the day was to be observed not as a celebration but as one of “humiliation and sorrow.” Banners depicted Virginia triumphant and Massachusetts downtrodden. The American flag was hung upside down and trimmed with black crepe. Among the speakers were Henry Thoreau, Wendell Phillips, Lucy Stone, Sojourner Truth, and, most notably, William Lloyd Garrison, whose newspaper, The Liberator, had already denounced the Burns case with headlines reading:
“SLAVE HUNTING DEFENDED AT THE POINT OF THE BAYONET—CIVIL LIBERTY PROSTRATE BEFORE MILITARY DESPOTISM—MASSACHUSETTS IN CHAINS AND HER SUBJUGATION ABSOLUTE!”
In a gesture that would have reminded his Protestant listeners of Martin Luther publicly burning the papal bull of excommunication—an act that many consider the start of the Reformation—Garrison, after describing the Constitution as being, among other things, “most bloody and heaven-daring … a system of the most atrocious villainy … the source and parent of the other atrocities … a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” held up a copy of that document, struck a match and set it on fire, exclaiming “So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say, Amen!”
The 54th Massachusetts Regiment assaulting the formidable defense works of Fort Wagner during the siege of Charleston. The regiment, composed of black troops and white officers, all of them volunteers, launched their attack at dusk after a day-long bombardment which was believed to have knocked out the fort’s artillery; instead, as they closed in, “the fort became a mound of fire from which poured a stream of shot and shell.” The picture shows the moment when Colonel Shaw was killed while a color sergeant holds high the Union flag. The attack failed to take the fort, but succeeded in demonstrating to skeptics that black soldiers would fight just as bravely as whites.
CHAPTER 14
THE CIVIL WAR
INTERVIEWED WHEN HE WAS A VERY OLD MAN, SAM WORD RECALLED THE TIME when he was a very young boy and the Union troops arrived at the Arkansas plantation where he had been born into slavery. “Mother had lots of nice things, quilts and things, and kept ’em in a chest in her little old shack. One day a Yankee soldier climbed in the back window and took some of the quilts. He rolled ’em up and was walking out of the yard when mother saw him and said, ‘Why you nasty, stinkin’ rascal! You say you come down here to fight for the niggers, and now you’re stealin’ from me!’ He said, ‘You’re a Goddam liar! I’m fightin’ for $14 a month and the Union.’”
Many others in the North would have agreed with the thieving Yankee that the aim of the war was to save the Union, not to end slavery. At the same time, many in the South had no doubt that they were fighting to preserve slavery. Mississippi’s Declaration of Secession, of January 9, 1861, offered an explanation of “the prominent reasons which have induced our course.”
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.” A blow at slavery was not only a blow at “the greatest material interest in the world,” it was a blow at “civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.” Among these facts were the “hostility to the institution” displayed ever since the North West Ordinance of 1787; the reluctance to admit “new slave States into the Union” and the attempt to confine slavery “within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.” Then there was the way the North “has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union” and “advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst. It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.” To remain in the Union would bring “utter subjugation.”
Can the author of the Mississippi Declaration—Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II—have read the text of the Republican platform adopted in 1860? Here, for example, is Clause 4: “Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend.” John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was condemned—“We denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.” To be sure, Clause Eight denied “the authority of Congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States”; but to oppose slavery’s extension to the as yet unformed states was a far cry from proposing its extinction in states where it was already established.
In his debates with Stephen Douglas, and in his many speeches, Lincoln had also made his stance quite clear. Personally, “I have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any Abolitionist.” It was a “monstrous injustice,” but politically “we must not interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists, because the Constitution forbids it.” However, when it came to the extension of slavery into the Territories, especially Kansas and Nebraska, he was “inflexible.” These future states must be reserved “for poor”—and implicitly white—“people to go to and better their condition. This they cannot do, to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be planted within them.” As to civil rights, “
There is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” On the other hand, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” He did not “favor making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them for holding office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”
In March, 1861, in his first inaugural address, Lincoln re-affirmed his position: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” In August, 1862, writing to Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, he declared, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about Slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union.”
This was made clear in the Emancipation Proclamation. Hedged about with qualifications—only the slaves in certain designated states were freed—the Proclamation was presented primarily as a “necessary war measure … warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity.” However, as often happens in wartime, intentions were overtaken by events, and the document was taken to mean more than it said.
