Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

The federal government soon got a chance to flex its muscles in Boston. A seventeen-year-old slave named Thomas Sims escaped from Georgia in February 1851 and stowed away on a ship to Boston, where he too found work as a waiter. When his owner traced him, the mayor of Boston decided to allow the police to be deputized by federal marshals to cooperate in Sims’s arrest. This time officials sealed the courthouse with a heavy chain (which abolitionists publicized as a symbol of the slave power’s reach into the North) and guarded it with police and soldiers. For nine days in April 1851 vigilance committee lawyers vainly sought writs of habeas corpus and tried other legal maneuvers to free Sims. When the federal commissioner found for his owner, 300 armed deputies and soldiers removed him from the courthouse at 4:00 a.m. and marched him to the navy yard, where 250 U. S. soldiers waited to place him on a ship going south to slavery.10