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

Albert J. Von Frank. The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. 409 pp. $27.95.

The political and legal efforts of Boston abolitionists to keep the escaped Virginia slave Anthony Burns from being returned to slavery marked a turning point in Northern opposition to slavery. Abolitionists had used other fugitive slave cases to challenge the hated Compromise of 1850, and mobs had rioted elsewhere to attack pro-slavery representatives and to defend fugitive slaves. But the Bums case revived active resistance, to the Compromise in the year the incendiary Kansas-Nebraska Act took effect; the two events signaled for many abolitionists the futility of legislative and judicial solutions to slavery and the inevitability of civil war. A year before John Brown and his five sons went to Kansas, and five years before his raid on Harper's Ferry, black and white Bostonians stormed out of a meeting at Faneuil Hall, attacked the courthouse and marshals holding Burns, and fatally wounded one of them, James Batchelder, before retreating. When Judge Edward Greely Loring infamously decided the case in the fa vor of Charles Suttle, who claimed ownership of Bums, and ordered Burns returned to Virginia, Burns and the small army that marched him to the harbor were greeted by buildings draped in black, black-edged American flags, a black coffin hoisted above the street, and crowds jeering and attacking the soldiers.

The historical significance of the Burns case also derives from the legal, political, religious, journalistic, literary, and philosophical arguments made in defense of Burns's rights to liberty by his defense attorney, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and members of the Boston Vigilance Committee, especially Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Von Frank tells the story better than any film could, drawing on his sophisticated understanding of how different kinds of rhetoric can aid axes and muscles in effecting social change. His narrative is a fine, even suspenseful (who killed James Batchelder?) docudramatic account.

Von Frank also renews our interest in Dana, Parker, Higginson, Bronson Alcott, and Whittier. These important figures have long lived in the shade of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville, in part because we continue to judge mid-nineteenth-century writers and intellectuals by aesthetic criteria. Von Frank measures these men according to what they accomplished as political, legal, and social activists. It would make sense to apply these different standards to reassessments of the major writers of the American Renaissance, most of whom claim to be social critics. But, surprisingly, this is not the argument Von Frank pursues, choosing instead to claim that the political activism of the social reformers directly involved in the Bums case can be traced to Emerson's philosophy.

Von Frank thinks that social critics object primarily to Emersonian transcendentalism for its abstraction and idealism. Even though Emerson busied himself in Concord with his next book, English Traits, while the events surrounding the Burns case were unfolding in Boston, Von Frank concludes that his ideas were at work in the courthouse and in the streets. In many ways, New England transcendentalism informs the thought and behavior of many who protested the Fugitive Slave Law, and Emerson's absence from Boston is not the real reason to criticize him. What Von Frank misses is the depoliticized character of Emersonian transcendentalism: its insistence upon personal and individual transformation, rather than on collective and communal modes of action. No one disputes Emerson's anti-slavery convictions after 1850, but he struggled unsuccessfully to reconcile his abolitionist views with his transcendentalism. In his anti-slavery writings, he contradicts transcendentalist principles in proposing expedient solutions to slavery or elsewhere makes impractical appeals to "character" and "individualism" as our best means of overcoming slavery.

By 1854, however, public demonstrations and communal actions were necessary either to forge a national consensus for immediate abolition or to exacerbate the divisions in the nation to the point of war. Von Frank shows how privately held ideas, sentiments, and attitudes contributed to public actions, but privacy and individualism were insufficient to bring about major social changes affecting powerful economic and political interests. Emerson delivered "American Slavery" in January 1855, in large part to express his outrage over the return of Burns to slavery, but the lecture concludes with the same appeal to "buy" slaves and compensate owners, according to the British model, that Emerson had endorsed over a decade earlier: "Was there ever any contribution levied that was so enthusiastically paid as this will be?" Emerson seems blithely unaware that Northern and Southern economic interests had long been complicit in the maintenance of slavery. Elsewhere in the lecture, he reaffirms the virtues of self-relian ce--"a man's capital must be in him"--while struggling to "exalt [ldots] social action."

In "An Emersonian Epilogue," Von Frank interprets "American Slavery" as evidence of a direct link between Emersonian transcendentalism and political activism in the Burns case, but Emerson's lecture is a confused amalgam of practical compromises and moral exhortations. It is not the sort of address that would drive activists raging to the doors of the courthouse. Another politics was needed in Massachusetts at this time, and it was developed in the actions and writings of Dana, Parker, Higginson, Alcott, and Whittier. Von Frank clearly delineates the historical circumstances, personal motives, and collective actions that shaped this political activism in the 1850s. It is a great story and well told, with or without Emerson.