Many Massachusetts moderates were disgusted that Boston’s actions played such an active role in Sims’s horrific punishment. “My appeal is to these people,” Sumner wrote, “and my hope is to create in Massachusetts such a public opinion as will render the [Fugitive Slave] law a dead letter.” Once again, perhaps a measure of good could be extracted from an act of evil. The Sims episode, he concluded, had given Massachusetts and the other free states “a sphere of discussion which they would otherwise have missed.”
