JAMES RAWSON JOHNSON¹ Probably the frequent correspondent of Frederick Douglass’ Paper, James Rawson Johnson, an African American abolitionist from Syracuse, New York. Johnson was a supporter of the Liberty party and the religious abolitionist cause, as well as hydropathy. FDP, 26 June, 11 September, 9 October 1851, 1 January, 12, 26 February, 25 March, 8 April, 20 May, 9 July, 15 October 1852; DouglassPapers, ser. 3, 1:582-84, 587-88, 590-92, 596, 599. TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Wading River, L[.] I., [N.Y.] 4 July [18]54.

MY DEAR DOUGLASS:—

I never felt so solemn—never so heavy at heart any 4th of July, in my life.
While I am writing, I hear the sound of cannon from Greenport, on Long Island; and the water of the L. I. Sound,²Long Island Sound separates Long Island, New York, and the southeastern shore of New York from the East River to Upper New York Bay, and connects with the northern Block Island Sound, located southwest of New London, Connecticut. Ninety miles long and three to twenty miles wide, it is fed by the northern Housatonic, Connecticut, and Thames rivers. Its major port cities are New Haven, New London, and Bridgeport, Connecticut. It is a primary shipping route along the Atlantic coast and a popular residential boating center. Saul Cohen, ed., The Columbia Gazetteer of the World, 3 vols. (New York, 1998), 2:1774; Seltzer, Columbia Lippancott Gazetteer of the World, 1079. is such a faithful conductor of sound, that I plainly hear the booming cannon from old Connecticut, the State where I drew my infant breath, and where the bodies of my dear parents rest in their graves. But to these noisy expressions of joy, there is no response from my bosom.

That fugitive from American oppression, Anthony Burns,³The fugitive slave Anthony Burns (1834-62) precipitated one of the most dramatic incidents connected with enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Born in Stafford County, Virginia, Burns was hired out from age seven onward. On reaching his late teens, he was sent to Richmond, where he soon began working under the nominal supervision of a local druggist, who allowed Burns to find his own employment and report back every two weeks with his earnings. Aided by a sympathetic seaman, Burns stowed away on a Northern merchant ship in February 1854 and reached Boston early the next month. He remained there until 24 May 1854, when he was arrested on a warrant from Edward G. Loring, a fugitive slave commissioner. Fearful of his fate and apparently intimidated by the presence of his master and other hostile whites, Burns initially wanted to return south voluntarily and had to be persuaded to even accept legal counsel. Coinciding as it did with congressional passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Burns’s arrest and confinement caused intense excitement among antislavery Bostonians. An emotion-charged evening rally at Faneuil Hall ended in violence when Thomas Wentworth Higginson led an unsuccessful mob attack on the courthouse where Burns was being held. Efforts to purchase Burns’s freedom were thwarted, and Richard Henry Dana’s able but hastily contrived legal defense proved futile. President Franklin Pierce, anxious to appease Southern supporters, sent federal troops to Boston to assist in the fugitive’s rendition. On 2 June 1854, Boston police, together with 1,500 volunteer militiamen and military detachments from Rhode Island and New Hampshire, escorted Burns through crowds of would-be rescuers and saw him safely aboard the U.S. revenue cutter Morris, bound for Norfolk, Virginia. After several months’ confinement in Richmond, Burns was sold at auction for $910 to a North Carolina slave trader. In February 1855, Northern sympathizers led by the black Boston clergyman Leonard A. Grimes purchased Burns’s freedom for $1,300. As a slave, Burns had been a devout Christian and Baptist lay preacher. He continued his ministerial career as a free man, and after studying at Oberlin College and Fairmont Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, he assumed the pastorate of Zion Church in St. Catharines, Canada West. Anthony Burns to Richard Henry Dana, 23 August 1854, in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge, La., 1977), 109; Charles Emery Stevens, Anthony Burns: A History (1856; New York, 1969); Marion Gleason McDougall and Albert Bushnell Hart, eds., Fugitive Slaves, 1619-1865 (1891; New York, 1967), 44-45; Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, The Fugitive Law and Anthony Burns: A Problem in Law Enforcement (Philadelphia, 1975); Campbell, Slave Catchers, 31, 99-100, 106, 117-21; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 207-09; Samuel Shapiro, “The Rendition of Anthony Burns," JNH, 44:34-51 (January 1959); Donald M. Jacobs, “A History of the Boston Negro from the Revolution to the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1968), 286-91; DANB, 80-81. has a
stronger hold on my mind at this hour, than the “heroes of the Revolu-
tion.” He attempted to apply the doctrines which they asserted, and lo! the
arm of the United States of America is raised to crush him! Is it so? or am
I in the midst of a vexatious, troubled dream?—Yes, it is so; the terrible
reality is upon us.

I am sad to-day, because my hopes for the peaceful abolition of
American slavery greatly decline. My expectation of its speedy abolition