Anthony Burns (31 May 1834 – 17 July 1862) was a central figure in one of the most famous freedom‑seeker cases of the Maafa in the United States. He was born in Stafford County, Virginia, the thirteenth and last child of his mother and her third husband. Burns learned to read and write and became a preacher at the Falmouth Union Church in Falmouth, Virginia. As an adult, he was described as about six feet tall, with a dark complexion and scars on his cheek and right hand.
In early 1854, at about nineteen, Anthony Burns self‑emancipated and traveled by ship from Virginia to the free state of Massachusetts. In Boston, he worked first for a pie company and then for “Coffin Pitts, clothing dealer, no. 36 Brattle Street.” His newfound freedom was brief. Under the Fugitive Act of 1850, residents of free states were required by federal law to aid in the capture of freedom seekers, and claimants could secure the return of Black people they asserted as “property” on minimal proof. Although the Maafa had been legally abolished in Massachusetts in the 1780s, Burns remained at risk under federal law. On 24 May 1854, he was seized “while walking in Court Street” and arrested as a freedom seeker.
African and Euro-American abolitionists in Boston quickly rallied in his defense, seizing on Burns’s arrest to challenge the Act. As Amos Adams Lawrence, a Conscience Whig, later wrote of the Burns affair, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs & woke up stark mad Abolitionists.”
On 26 May, before Burns’s case was decided, a multiracial crowd of abolitionists and other Bostonians, outraged at his arrest, stormed the courthouse in an effort to free him. In the melee, Deputy U.S. Marshal James Batchelder was fatally wounded, becoming one of the first federal officers killed while enforcing the Act. The authorities kept Burns in custody, but the crowds of opponents—including such Black abolitionists as Lewis Hayden and others from Boston’s Black community—continued to grow. The federal government rushed in troops, and additional marshals, and anti‑Maafa activists from across the region converged on Boston to sustain the protests. Contemporary observers estimated that the government’s costs for seizing, guarding, trying, and transporting Burns reached around $40,000.
The next day, Burns was brought to a hearing under the Act. Boston lawyer Richard Henry Dana Jr. and African American attorney Robert Morris represented him, offering a vigorous defense. Despite their efforts and the intense public pressure, Commissioner Edward G. Loring ruled in favor of the Virginia claimant, ordering Burns returned under federal law.
Following the decision, Boston was effectively placed under military occupation for Burns’s removal. The streets between the courthouse and the harbor bristled with federal troops, local militia, and marshals holding back thousands of protesters as Burns was marched in chains to the ship that would carry him back to Virginia.
Abolitionists in Boston, however, refused to let his story end there. Led especially by Reverend Leonard A. Grimes of Twelfth Baptist Church, they raised funds to purchase Burns’s freedom from his Virginia claimant, securing his legal release in 1855.
Proceeds from the publication of his narrative, combined with financial support, enabled Burns to study at Oberlin College in Ohio during the mid‑1850s. After a brief period of ministry in Indianapolis, he migrated in 1860 to St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada West, a major community for Black freedom seekers and their descendants. There, he served as pastor of Zion Baptist Church until his death from tuberculosis in 1862, at about twenty‑eight years of age.
Source:
http://nmaahc.si.edu/Blog/anthonyburns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Burns
