President Fillmore ordered the district attorney to prosecute all “aiders and abettors of this flagitious offense.” A grand jury indicted four blacks and four whites, but juries refused to convict them. “Massachusetts Safe Yet! The Higher Law Still Respected,” proclaimed an antislavery newspaper. But a Savannah editor expressed a more common opinion—perhaps in the North as well as in the South—when he denounced Boston as “a black speck on the map—disgraced by the lowest, the meanest, the BLACKEST kind of NULLIFICATION.”9
