Anthony Burns

Anthony Burns (31 May 1834 – 17 July 1862) was born a slave in Stafford County, Virginia. As a young man, he became a Baptist and a "slave preacher" at the Falmouth Union Church in Falmouth, Virginia. In 1853 he escaped from slavery and reached Boston, where he started working.

The following year, he was captured under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and tried under the law in Boston. The law was fiercely resisted in Boston, and the case attracted national publicity, large demonstrations, protests and an attack on US Marshals at the courthouse. Federal troops were used to ensure Burns was transported to a ship for return to Virginia after the trial. He was eventually ransomed from slavery, with his freedom purchased by Boston sympathizers. Afterward he was educated at Oberlin College and became a Baptist preacher, moving to Upper Canada for a position.

At the age of nineteen, Anthony Burns in 1853 escaped slavery in Richmond, traveling by ship to Boston in the free state of Massachusetts. In Boston he worked for a pie company and for a man named "Coffin Pitts, clothing dealer, no.36 Brattle Street."

On May 24, 1854 he was discovered "while walking in Court Street" and arrested. As a hub of resistance toward the "slave power" of the South, Boston had numerous residents who tried to free Burns. President Franklin Pierce made an example of the case to show he was willing to strongly enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. The show of force turned many New Englanders against slavery who had passively accepted its existence before.

On May 26, before Burns' court case, a crowd of abolitionists of both races, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson and other Bostonians outraged at Burns' arrest, stormed the court house to free the man. In the melee, Deputy U.S. Marshal James Batchelder was fatally stabbed, the second U.S. Marshal to be killed in the line of duty. The police kept control of Burns, but the crowds of opponents, including such black abolitionists as Thomas James and Lewis Hayden, grew large. While the federal government sent US troops in support, numerous anti-slavery activists arrived in Boston to join the protest and continue the faceoff. It has been estimated the government's cost of capturing and conducting Burns through the trial was upwards of $40,000.

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