Ghosts of the Civil War

Barbara F. Berenson

Boston’s role in the abolitionist movement is barely visible

November 27, 2011|By Barbara F. Berenson

WALKING AROUND Boston, we see high-profile sites reminding us that Boston basically started the American Revolution: the Boston Massacre site, the Old State House, Faneuil Hall. But we rarely recognize the places once famous in this city’s equally important role in the abolitionist movement that led to the Civil War. We should commemorate the 150th anniversary of that war by erecting interpretive signs at neglected Civil War sites and monuments.

Twelve Post Office Square fronts busy Congress Street. Few drivers and pedestrians likely notice the virtually invisible sign on the building marking the spot where, in 1831, William Lloyd Garrison began publishing his radically abolitionist and nationally influential weekly newspaper, The Liberator. Garrison’s relentless and uncompromising calls for immediate emancipation were eventually heard: He played an essential role in propelling the nation to Civil War. But few Bostonians are aware of it.

Does anyone who walks by 26 Court Street, steps from Boston’s City Hall and currently the headquarters of the Boston Public Schools, know that it was the site of a cruel courthouse where runaway slaves were returned to slavery? In 1854, a federal commissioner ordered fugitive slave Anthony Burns back to slavery. While thousands of Bostonians lined the streets in furious protest, federal troops marched Burns from the downtown courthouse - mocked as a “slave pen’’ by abolitionists - to Boston Harbor, where a ship waited to transport him to the South. Amos A. Lawrence, whose family had made its fortune converting slave-picked cotton to cloth, said of that day: “We went to bed one night old fashioned conservative compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists!’’

Today’s newer building bears a strong resemblance to the courthouse it replaced, but the only interpretive plaque on the building says the former courthouse was “the site of the labors of John Augustus’’; a second plaque identifies him as the founder of probation. There is no mention of Anthony Burns’s “mock trial’’ - nor of the unsuccessful attempted mob rescue of Burns which resulted in the indictments of several leading abolitionists. The Burns case was not an obscure moment; it forcefully demonstrated that the North’s vision of liberty could no longer accommodate the slave-holding South.

Nor is there a marker at the Orpheum Theater, formerly known as the Boston Music Hall, on Hamilton Place. On Jan. 1, 1863, Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Ralph Waldo Emerson were among thousands who gathered at the Music Hall or the nearby Tremont Temple Baptist Church (also underappreciated) to await word that President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation.