MORE THAN TEN YEARS ago I began putting together source material on an ordinary slave. He escaped from bondage only to be recaptured, and thus galvanized and unified the antislavery movement. This fugitive slave became famous in the process and now is dutifully mentioned in most of our history books.
Once I involved myself in researching the man’s life, I felt that he somehow deserved more than a paragraph or a mere mention in the historical references on Slavery, Abolitionist Causes, and Famous Fugitives.
It was not until 1985, though, that I had the opportunity to reconstruct the fugitive’s life and times as an in-depth biography. Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave is the result.
Anthony Burns is a narrative history of events surrounding Anthony’s life as well as a biography. In the research material, however, there existed no day-to-day calendar of events to outline Burns’s activities and movement as an ordinary slave child and youth. His life only became well documented from approximately his twentieth year, when he was hired out to Richmond, Virginia, and carefully began to plan his escape. Therefore it became necessary to invent and “backfill” from this later material.
Various documents place Anthony Burns at the Hiring Ground over several years in his youth and state that he was in charge of other slaves. Anthony was actually hired out to the individual slave owners as described here. It is also true that his hand was horribly mangled while he was employed by a Mr. Foote. As a result of the torture and pain of his wound, he had several religious experiences and became quite devout.
However, the slave owner who hired Whittom and Simon is an invention, as are the slave owners Archibald Davenport and Ebenezer Caldwell and the four slaves in Anthony’s charge— Whittom, Efrum, Luther, and Simon.
There are five shadowy but actual people who were in some way important in Anthony’s development but who are only mentioned occasionally in the documentation of his life. These people are referred to in the documentary material as Anthony’s “mother,” who tried to keep him safe with her and wanted him to grow up to be a preacher; “a sailor,” who helped Anthony escape to the North; Anthony’s “older sister,” whose baby was in Anthony’s care; “a seer and fortuneteller,” who predicted Anthony would go free; and Anthony’s “father,” who died when he was quite young. In the absence of documents citing the real names of these individuals, I have given them names: Mamaw for Anthony’s “mother,” Cal Cross for “a sailor,” Sister Janety for Anthony’s “older sister,” Maude Maw for “a seer and fortuneteller,” and Big Walker for Anthony’s “father.” I have also given them active roles in his life, drawing from whatever supporting factual material was available.
The remaining individuals in the list of characters are real people who were known in Burns’s time. Some were famous then and are still historically significant: P. T. Barnum, Richard Dana, Cyrus Gould, Samuel G. Howe, Thomas Higginson, Theodore Parker, President Franklin Pierce, Wendell Phillips, Shadrach, and Thomas Sims. Some are generally unknown now but we should take note of their courage: Charles Mayo Ellis, Leonard Grimes, William Jones, Coffin Pitts, and Martin Stowell. Others were relatively unknown at the time but will be infamous always: Asa Butman, Mr. and Mrs. Foote, Charles Suttle, John and Mistress Suttle, Ben Hallett, and Robert Lumpkin. Still others, such as Edward Loring, David McDaniel, George Drew, and John Favor, were in many ways captured by events. Whatever marks of character they possessed—strengths or weaknesses—were revealed under the pressure of circumstance.
You might ask, What does the life of a slave born a hundred and fifty years ago have to do with us? Here was a poor fugitive who lived but nine years of his total life of twenty-eight years in freedom. Yet he did become free, and he died a free man, so why not let it go at that? What does a single slave out of millions like him, long gone and best forgotten, have to do with us—you, me—in this last decade before the year 2000?
Today readers of Anthony Burns enjoy an inalienable right to freedom and the pursuit of happiness given to them by the Constitution and its amendments. Such an assumption of liberty was unknown to those captured by a tragically cruel system of human servitude. Ultimately Anthony Burns did know freedom, but at a regrettable cost to himself, mentally and physically.
As the author of this life of Anthony Burns, I have experienced an enormous sense of relief and satisfaction at having at last set free through the word one man’s struggle for liberty. All these years Anthony Burns has lived in my thoughts: this man, born a slave, whose painstaking and burning desire to “get gone” from crippling bondage was all but forgotten by history. By writing about him I found that he not only came to life for me but that he lives again for all of us. In gaining a sense of who he was we learn about ourselves. As long as we know he is free, we too are liberated.
One last word should be given with regard to those abolitionist advocates, witnesses, and lawyers in the cause of freedom for slaves, and particularly in the cause of Anthony Burns. If I emphasize Anthony Burns and the work of such humble souls as Reverend Grimes and Coffin Pitts more than the abolitionists and their efforts, it is because most of the famed among the abolitionists have long since written about their lives: Thomas Higginson, Wendell Phillips, Richard Dana, Theodore Parker, and others have all produced monographs or autobiographies that, somewhat incidentally, tell us what they did on behalf of Anthony Burns. In their own works these men are justifiably the center of events. In their accounts of the great abolitionist cause, the swirling intrigues surrounding Burns, and the battle between freedom and slavery, Burns seems to recede into the shadows.
For once I wanted readers to have a book in which the oppressed slave, a common man, was at the center of his own struggle.
VIRGINIA HAMILTON
New York City
December 1987