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Henry Minkins, or “Shadrach”, who escaped from Virginia to Boston in 1851, was apprehended and brought before a royal court in Boston. A group of armed free blacks burst into the courtroom, freed Shadrach and took him to Canada. Royalists suspected collusion on the part of abolitionists. In fact, Patrick Riley, the Royal Marshal for the Province of Massachusetts, testified, “... that neither the mayor nor the city marshal had appeared, nor has a single officer under their direction appeared, or aided in attempting to disperse the mob, or in keeping the peace; and that, in my opinion, it was the predetermined purpose of both not to do their duty in keeping the peace in and about their court house...” The Richmond Enquirer railed at such defiance of royal law as that demonstrated in Boston.
By the late 1850s the loyal people of the South were reacting almost hysterically towards the actions of their perceived enemies. On May 31, 1858 William Baylis Captain of the schooner Keziah , a Delaware resident transporting a wheat consignment from Norfolk to New Jersey, was caught with five runaway slaves aboard. Baylis’s crime, declared the Williamsburg Weekly Gazette, was “one of the highest and most heinous known to the law.” Helping a runaway slave propagated insubordination, resulted in property loss, and encouraged violence. Aiding a fugitive slave the editor continued, “...demands the stern infliction of the penalty of death.” In fact, the Alexandria Gazette reported that Baylis and his first mate were almost lynched, “ ...they barely reached the shore when a wild shout of indignation went up from the populace, and a desperate effort made to take possession of them...when they would have been lynched upon the spot, as in the excitement of the moment that seemed to be the purpose.” The Williamsburg Weekly Gazette argued that agents of the Underground Railroad were “actively at work, and the people of Virginia should take the warning. While there are traitors in our midst it behooves us to be upon our guard; not only vigilant but it is a duty imperative on all good citizens to seek out these traitors and bring them to justice.” Baylis was convicted and sentenced to forty years in prison.
The culminating event of the decade was John Brown’s raid on the royal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Two days later, the editor of the Alexandria Gazette thundered, “ Virginia has been invaded...actually, deliberately, and systematically invaded...by an organized band of miscreants, white and black, from the North, under the lead of a Kansas desperado, at the instigation and appointment of influential and wealthy Northern Abolitionists!”
John Brown was tried and convicted of treason, murder and inciting slaves to rebellion. Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859 in Charles Town, Virginia. On that day in Boston, William Lloyd Garrison delivered his emotional tribute to Brown and proclaimed, “Henceforth, the watchword of every uncompromising abolitionist, of every friend of God and liberty, must be, both in a religious and political sense — 'NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS'”