In Memory of Anthony Burns @ Literature class

Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave
Author : Virginia Hamilton
Country : USA
Language : English
Publisher : Scholastic Inc
Publication date : November 1989
Pages : 193

Born a slave in Virginia, Anthony Burns was twenty when he escaped to Boston in 1854. There, for a few short months, he lived and worked as a free man. But overnight Burns' brief time of happiness ended. He was arrested and held without bail at the instigation of his former owner, Charles Suttle, who came to Boston invoking the Fugitive Slave Act - a highly controversial federal law that allowed owners to reclaim escaped slaves by presenting proof of ownership. Suttle made it clear that he had every intention of taking Anthony home.
But Anthony had powerful allies: thousands of abolitionists who saw him as a symbol of freedom imperiled; the Boston Vigilance Committee, a group of legal professionals sworn to use any means within their power to defend the rights of fugitive slaves; and Richard Dana, the patrician lawyer and author of Two Years Before the Mast, who stepped forward to defend Anthony without charge.
At a time when antislavery feeling was at a fever pitch in the North, the Burns case literally rocked Boston. His hearings triggered massive, violent riots, and thousands of troops, called in by a federal administration openly sympathetic to the fugitive slave laws, turned the former Cradle of Liberty into an armed camp. At its center, haunted by memories of his life as a slave, hardly daring to hope that his defenders would prevail, was Anthony Burns himself.
Here is historical reconstruction at its finest. Newbery Medal winner Virginia Hamilton has put her lifelong interest in black history and her formidable gift as a novelist to striking use in this fascinating account. No one but she could have taken the dramatic true story of Anthony Burns and made it unforgettable.