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Reactions to the Fugitive Slave Act

Page history last edited by Mr. Hengsterman 6 years, 3 months ago

 

Shadrach Minkins (1852)

Shadrach Minkins in early 1852 in Boston, a fugitive slave from Virginia who was working in an abolitionist coffeehouse in Boston, retrieved by slave catchers, taken to a jail, broken out of that jail. One of the jailers murdered on the spot by a mob of abolitionists led by Lewis Hayden, himself a fugitive slave from Kentucky, who lived in Beacon Hill in Boston and dared Federal magistrates to come to his house and try to retrieve Shadrack Minkins by putting an entire posse on the street, and a keg of gun powder in front of his door, which he threatened he would blow up if any magistrate got near it. And that night they spirited Shadrach off to Concord, Massachusetts where the descendants of abolitionists to this day like to argue which house he stayed in, and then off across Route 2, across northern Massachusetts and on up into Canada where Shadrach remained the rest of his life as a grocer in Montreal.

 

 

Anthony Burns (1854)

We had the rescue in Boston of a fugitive slave named Anthony Burns, who was a young guy in his early twenties. He had escaped out of Virginia, up to Boston by sea. He too was working in — actually a store at one point, in a coffee shop at another point. He was even distributing copies of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. He hadn’t been there even a year and slave catchers found him, captured him.

 

 

On Wednesday evening last, about eight o'clock, Anthony Burns, colored, while walking in Court street, was taken into custody by officers Coolidge, Riley, and Laighton, under the orders of Watson Freeman, United States Marshal, and by virtue of a warrant issued by United States Commissioner Edward G. Loring, authorizing the arrest of Burns, as an alleged fugitive from the " service and labor" of Charles T. Suttle, a merchant of Alexandria, Va. The arrest was made very quietly, and he was escorted to an upper room in the court house, where, under a strong guard of officers, he was kept for the night, and the intelligence of his arrest did not transpire until the following morning. “

 

Arrest warrant for Anthony Burns, May 25, 1854 

 

Charles Nalle (1860)

On April 26, 1860, escaped slave Charles Nalle was kidnapped from a Troy bakery and taken to the District Circuit Court at State and First Streets, in Troy where he was to be sent back to Virginia under the Fugitive Slave Act. Hundreds of people, including Harriet Tubman, rushed to the site where a riot ensued, allowing Nalle to escape across the Hudson to West Troy and ultimately to freedom. 

 

 

 

 

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