1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [24]
The ardor for abolition reached into farther-flung quarters, too. In 1854, when an escaped slave named Anthony Burns had been arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act, an urban mob—variously composed of free Negro laborers, radical Unitarian ministers, and others—gathered to free him. They stormed the federal courthouse, which was surrounded by police and wrapped in protective chains (an apt symbol, many people thought, for the current state of American justice). Amid the melee, one protester shot and killed a police deputy. Two weeks later, Burns was marched in shackles down State Street, guarded by hundreds of soldiers with loaded guns and an entire battery of artillery, toward the wharf, where a naval cutter waited to carry him back into bondage. Lampposts and storefronts along the route were draped in black mourning; crowds hissed at the soldiers as they passed, then surged forward into the street until cavalrymen beat them back with the flats of their sabers. It was Boston’s most thrilling demonstration against tyranny since the Tea Party almost a century before. The city was—before the eyes of all the world, and to the satisfaction of many Bostonians—a battleground for freedom once more.29
Garrison and Phillips condemned the mob violence. Yet they, too, grew increasingly radical, and increasingly certain that the day of jubilee for American slaves would never arrive by legal means. Phillips gave up the practice of law entirely, saying he could never work within a system in thrall to slaveholders. Garrison went even further. A month after Anthony Burns was sent south, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society held its annual Fourth of July picnic. One by one, orators addressed the assembly from a dais on which an American flag hung upside down and draped in mourning. Finally it was Garrison’s turn. The abolitionists’ chieftain, his spectacles flashing in the summer glare, spoke passionately of the document that had been signed on that very day in 1776, asserting the equality of all mankind—the document that had been a touchstone of the antislavery movement almost since its original publication. But then, as Garrison’s speech reached its climax, he lit a candle on the table beside him and held up a copy of the United States Constitution: the document that had betrayed the promises of the Declaration, hardened the chains that held black men and women in servitude, and created a corrupt system by which slaveholders, almost since its ratification, had imposed their political will on the entire nation. Declaring it “the source and parent of all other atrocities—a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” Garrison touched the document to the flame.
As the paper blazed up and then flaked into ashes, he intoned: “So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say, Amen!”
“Amen!” roared the crowd in reply.30
Perhaps it is no surprise that men like these should have reacted skeptically, at best, to the Republicans’ presidential nominee in 1860. To Garrison and Phillips, the unknown Midwesterner (born in Kentucky to Virginian parents, they must have noted with alarm) was simply one more mediocre politician to warm the presidential chair for another four years, while the nation drifted closer and closer toward despotism. Lincoln would “do nothing to offend the South,” Garrison predicted after hearing of the nomination. But Phillips’s outrage truly boiled over. Addressing an antislavery meeting just after the Republicans announced their nominee, he sneered: “Who is this huckster in politics? Who is this