The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston

The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston. By Albert J. von Frank. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998. (Harvard University Press, 79 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138). $27.95. In 1854, Emerson wrote in his journal: "Ask not, Is it Constitutional? Ask, Is It right?" This concept is crucial to von Frank's fascinating new book on the trial and rendition of fugitive slave Anthony Burns in May of 1854. In it he fuses together the actions of militant abolitionists with the ideas of New England's major Transcendentalist thinkers. The author delineates the crucial moment in Boston's cultural history when a revolution in thought took place that transformed a deeply split community into one with a majority in favor of antislavery. Much transpired before this cultural climax occurred. The early successful efforts of Boston's tiny group of abolitionists to free fugitives like William and Ellen Craft (1850) and Shadrach Minkins (1851), led to the stiffening of governmental resistance and the failure to liberate Thomas Sims (1851). The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and the Kansas-Nebraska Act primed New England for a realignment of community response to slavery. It was the Burns case, with its failed armed attack to free the incarcerated fugitive, and the fruitless legal haranguing that could not prevent his rendition, that lit the spark mobilizing Boston and Massachusetts against slavery. Von Frank makes a subtle and sophisticated argument demonstrating how Emerson's and Thoreau's transcendental ideas of individual responsibility, moral goodness, and faith in progress coalesced with the "higher law" doctrine of Garrison and other abolitionists, to forge an "antislavery revolution" that would propel the nation into civil war. The Fugitive Slave Law, called by Emerson that "filthy enactment," and the Burns case created the conditions for a confrontation in Boston between the Emersonian view of conscience and an "unjust and evil" law that resulted in this "pocket revolution." Ever the true democrat Emerson saw laws as "imitable, all alterable," with true authority resting with the people. A person must oppose the Fugitive Slave Law since it violated one's conscience. Thoreau echoed this higher law sentiment with his antislavery piece, "Civil Disobedience": "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in a prison." It was the Burns case that popularized the Transcendentalist's intellectual realization that if the people of Massachusetts enforced this law, they would become accomplices to the slave power. …