The Boston Globe, August 2025
“We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs,” Amos A. Lawrence wrote in 1854, “and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” Lawrence, one of Boston’s most prominent philanthropists and textile barons, is separated from us by more than a century and a half. But there is something familiar about his political morality. He, like us, was inclined to live as if the world’s ills — in his case, slavery — were someone else’s problems. His mills depended on Southern cotton. He had toured plantations and returned with diary entries that described Black people as “half monkeys.” His was the racism of distance — of abstraction.
Burns had stowed away for weeks in the belly of a ship to escape enslavement in Virginia. By the time he stepped ashore in Boston, he had become both free and criminal — property that had, under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, escaped its rightful owner. When federal marshals arrested him on false pretenses, hoping to sneak him back into bondage before the public noticed, Boston erupted. The courtroom became a spectacle. The public was barred. Burns’s own lawyer was rendered powerless — forbidden to object, speak, or protect his client in any meaningful way. And in a final insult, a government agent tricked Burns into dictating a letter affirming his status as an enslaved person. The judge empathized with Burns but nonetheless ruled against him.
