Excerpts

Saturday, April 12, 1851

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 newspaperCommonwealth. 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.

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Interview with The Patriot Ledger
Can-do attitude turned Boston into a great city
By Lane Lambert

The sites are familiar to anyone who visits Boston – the MBTA’s Park Street subway station; the Back Bay’s European elegance; and the Boston Common memorial to the 54th Massachusetts, one of the first official black regiments in the Civil War. For author and longtime Weymouth resident Stephen Puleo, those places are far more than tourist stops. They’re landmarks of public projects and the anti-slavery movement, all of which transformed Boston into a world-class city within the span of 50 years, from 1850 to the turn of the 20th century.

Puleo, a communications consultant and Suffolk University lecturer, chronicles those events in his latest Beacon Press book, A City So Grand: The Rise of An American Metropolis. In his first extensive interview, he talks about Boston’s important forgotten figures of the era, and why a disastrous 1872 fire turned out to be a good thing

What was your first encounter with Boston’s history?

I grew up in Burlington, but my dad grew up in the North End, so he took me there frequently when I was a boy. It’s a neighborhood with both Revolutionary War history and Italian heritage, and I’ve loved Boston history since then.

Boston is most famous for its colonial past, and known today as a university, financial and high-tech center. What turned your attention to the post-1850 decades?

It’s a period that’s largely unwritten about. Boston makes this huge transition from being a large town to a world-class city. By the dawn of the 20th century, Boston was as influential as New York, Paris and London. In this period, the word “no” wasn’t in Boston’s vocabulary. Projects like the development of Back Bay and the building of the subway combined private and government cooperation – a sense of common spirit in ways that don’t exist today. Some of it was born out of necessity. The Back Bay was a polluted eyesore, and the city needed more room from the inf lux of Irish immigrants. They needed a plan to keep wealthy families from fleeing the city. The subway was also seen as a way of making Boston a modern city.

But you say the whole transformation really started with the abolitionist movement of the 1850s, before the Civil War.

Boston was anti-slavery for a number of reasons, partly from the religious and educational tradition. But the case that really galvanized the movement was the return of the runaway slave Thomas Sims from Boston to his master (in 1851), from the Fugitive Slave Act. There were a lot of firebrands, but they were talkers, not doers, and the Sims case humiliated them.

And then there’s the subway.

The subway was the other can-do project. It opened up downtown streets that were congested (by trolleys), and it connected the city to outlying neighborhoods … and eventually to nearby towns. The Boston Elevated system connected the city first. By about 1915, the total system – the subway underground around the center city, and the elevated emanating from that – was complete.

The downtown fire of 1872 was the worst of the time except for the famous Chicago fire. Now it’s an almost forgotten episode.

It had a great impact at the time. It burned 65 acres and hundreds of buildings. But it also showed Boston’s resilience. The whole area was rebuilt in two to three years. The whole hydrant system was improved, along with water lines and natural gas flow. So good comes out of that, too.

When historians look back at our era 100 years from now, are there any projects that will compared to the scale of Back Bay, the subway and the abolition movement?

One thing would be the current immigration of mostly Asians and Hispanics, though it’s happening in different ways from the Irish and Italian immigration of the 19th century. I would hesitate to compare the Big Dig to Back Bay, because the Back Bay development went quite smoothly, and the state actually made a profit on it. The breadth of the Boston area’s transportation system might be a comparison. The MBTA has expanded across Greater Boston – and look at the highway system built in the 1950s and ’60s. That certainly changed the South Shore. And I hesitate to compare something like the Vietnam War protests to the abolition movement. That was about slavery, owning people as chattel. Nothing compares to that.

Could a mega-project like Back Bay or the subway be done today?

I don’t know if it could. Every good idea is a little ahead of its time, and in the media environment we live in now, a very small number of people can protest with an influence far beyond their numbers. That discourages the sort of risk-taking and putting forth of great ideas you saw in Boston in the late 1800s. Today some great ideas get stopped in their tracks.