Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

Bradburn argued that it was time to use the power of the state to protect the rights and honor the citizenship of free Black people from Massachusetts.51 Bradburn later recalled that he had entered that debate “with more feeling than I remember to have done into any other.” He was furious with the subcommittee’s “truckling subserviency to a corrupt and blind popular opinion, and the legal cobwebs with which those quibbling lawyers had attempted to fetter me.” When a colleague warned him to back off lest he damage his political prospects, he paid no attention. Soon his peers began coming over to his side. The “quibbling” arguments of the committee members, he recalled, “found no favor in the masses of the House when once I had succeeded in getting before them the facts.” The House voted to form a new subcommittee and instructed it to report out Bradburn’s resolutions or “others containing the principles of the same.” The House having changed its mind, the Senate soon followed, and Bradburn’s bill passed on April 8, 1839.52 Abolitionists hailed the Massachusetts resolutions as a great victory. The state could now dispatch emissaries southward to liberate free Blacks languishing in jails, whether kidnapped from the North or arrested in southern ports.