In the early spring of 1854, Anthony Burns escaped from Alexandria, Virginia, by hiding on a ship bound for the North. He arrived in Boston at the end of March; before long, his owner learned of his whereabouts and came to reclaim him. Marshalls arrested Burns and confined him to the federal courthouse.
President Pierce ordered U.S. troops to Boston to join local police and state militia to hold Burns and keep order; he also ordered a U.S. ship to stand by to take Burns back to the South.
Burns lived briefly in Rocky Mount, but in the spring of 1855 a group of African Americans in Boston, acting through their Baptist minister, Leonard Grimes (a black man who had been born free in Virginia), bought his freedom for $1,300.
Catharine's, Ontario, Canada in 1860 to accept a call from Zion Baptist Church. Thousands of African Americans had migrated to Canada as refugees from slavery in the antebellum years, establishing communities in Ontario. Burns died from tuberculosis on July 17, 1862.
The trial of Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave from Virginia, occurred in Boston, Massachusetts, during the spring of 1854. Hired out in Richmond, Burns had saved money and stowed away on a ship to Boston, where he worked in a clothing store.
In all 30,000 slaves fled to Canada, many with the help of the underground railroad - a secret network of free blacks and white sympathizers who helped runaways. Canada was viewed as a safe haven, where a black person could be free. ... But others countered the slave-owners' propaganda and encouraged slaves to take flight.
Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas, or the Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations in Kansas Territory, and to a lesser extent in western Missouri, between 1854 and 1859. It emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas.
Anthony Burns (1834-1862) was a fugitive African American slave whose recapture in Boston forced his return to slavery, thus angering many Northerners and increasing the moral force of the abolitionists.