DOC Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China; 1579-1724 by Liam Matthew Brockey in History

Description

Before 1854; most Northerners managed to ignore the distant unpleasantness of slavery. But that year an escaped Virginia slave; Anthony Burns; was captured and brought to trial in Boston--and never again could Northerners look the other way. This is the story of Burns's trial and of how; arising in abolitionist Boston just as the incendiary Kansas-Nebraska Act took effect; it revolutionized the moral and political climate in Massachusetts and sent shock waves through the nation. In a searching cultural analysis; Albert J. von Frank draws us into the drama and the consequences of the case. He introduces the individuals who contended over the fate of the barely literate twenty-year-old runaway slave--figures as famous as Richard Henry Dana Jr.; the defense attorney; as colorful as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Bronson Alcott; who led a mob against the courthouse where Burns was held; and as intriguing as Moncure Conway; the Virginia-born abolitionist who spied on Burns's master. The story is one of desperate acts; even murder--a special deputy slain at the courthouse door--but it is also steeped in ideas. Von Frank links the deeds and rhetoric surrounding the Burns case to New England Transcendentalism; principally that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His book is thus also a study of how ideas relate to social change; exemplified in the art and expression of Emerson; Henry Thoreau; Theodore Parker; Bronson Alcott; Walt Whitman; and others. Situated at a politically critical moment--with the Whig party collapsing and the Republican arising; with provocations and ever hotter rhetoric intensifying regional tensions--the case of Anthony Burns appears here as the most important fugitive slave case in American history. A stirring work of intellectual and cultural history; this book shows how the Burns affair brought slavery home to the people of Boston and brought the nation that much closer to the Civil War.