| |
In the early morning dampness, Boston police and federal troops mustered by the weak light of a single gas lamp. It was just after 3:00 a.m., and some
members of the Vigilance Committee had been meeting all night in Garrison's office, expecting the worst and watching for evidence that today would be
among the darkest in Boston's storied history. "The dreaded moment was at hand," historian Leonard Levy wrote. "The authorities meant to sneak Sims
back into slavery while the city slept. It was not the bravest way to uphold the constitution, but it was the safest."
More than one hundred police officers, armed with double-edged Roman swords that Marshal Tukey had borrowed from the U.S. Naval Yard in Charlestown,
plus another hundred volunteers armed with clubs and hooks, drilled for more than an hour, their heavy boots clomping upon the dirt-packed street. The
police officers manned the inner rectangle of the "hollow square" formation and the volunteers formed the outer square. Members of the Vigilance
Committee spread the word that Sims's departure was imminent, and by 4:00 a.m., between 150 and 200 horrified abolitionists looked on as the drilling
continued.
At about 4:15, "after the moon had gone down, in the darkest hour before daybreak," the officers and volunteers assembled in a double-filed hollow
square formation, and marched to the east door of the courthouse. There, they were joined by one hundred more armed officers from the City Watch, which
formed another double file around the hollow square. Then, the main doors of the Courthouse opened and Thomas Sims appeared. "Tears were streaming down
his face, but he held his small dark frame erect," Levy described. Sims was escorted into the center of the square of armed men. At Tukey's command of
"March!" the three hundred guards "began a slow regular tramp" toward the dock.
Abolitionists and Vigilance Committee members preceded them, followed them, and flanked them as the square of armed guards continued its relentless
march down State Street, a despondent Sims at its center. "His sable cheeks were bathed in tears, and although he evinced the greatest grief and
sorrow, he marched with a firm and manly step, like a martyr and a hero to his fate," reported the abolitionist newspaper Commonwealth. The
anti-slavery men hissed and shouted "Shame!" and "Infamy!" but one witness noted that "no other attempt at disorder was made."
The entire mass finally arrived at Long Wharf, near the site of the Boston Tea Party, where once colonists disguised as Indians had dumped tea into the
harbor to protest oppression - the irony of which was also not lost on the abolitionists. The brig Acorn, its sails unfurled, was ready for
sea. The vessel was owned by John H. Pearson, whom abolitionist Wendell Phillips would one day castigate in a stinging speech, promising that
abolitionists would never forget "the infamous uses he made of the Acorn. We will put the fact that he owned the brig so blackly on
record…that his children - yes, his children - will, twenty years hence, gladly forego all the wealth he will leave them to blot it
out." Phillips added: "The time shall come when it will be thought the unkindest thing in the world for anyone to remind the son of that man that his
father's name was John H. Pearson and that he owned the Acorn."
Now, though, the ship stood in the glimmer of dawn just breaking across Boston Harbor, prepared to transport its human cargo to Georgia. The hollow
square of armed police marched close to the vessel, and one section broke ranks momentarily, like a door opening, to deliver its prisoner to a
contingent of guards awaiting Sims on board. As Sims reached the Acorn's deck, a man standing on the wharf cried out, "Sims! Preach liberty to
the slaves!" With the last words he uttered in Boston, Sims answered with a sharp rebuke to his captors: "And is this Massachusetts liberty?" He was
ushered below immediately, and within two minutes, at just after 5:00 a.m., the Acorn was moving. As the vessel left the dock, the stunned
spectators listened in solemn silence to the Rev. Daniel Foster, who asked them to kneel and pray for "the poor brother who is carried by force to the
land of whips and chains."
Boston, the birthplace of the struggle for America's liberty seventy-five years earlier, had returned her first person - a free man in the North - back
to slavery.
|
