“The federal government soon got a chance to flex it’s muscles in Boston.
A seventeen-year-old slave named Thomas Sims escaped from Georgia
in February 1851 and stowed away on a ship to Boston, where he too
found work as a waiter. When his owner traced him, the mayor of
Boston decided to allow the police to be deputized by federal marshals
to cooperate in Sim’s arrest. This time officials sealed the courthouse with
a heavy chain[which abolitionists publicized as a symbol of the slave
power’s reach into the North] and guarded it with police and soldiers.
For nine days in April 1851 vigilance committee lawyers vainly sought
writs of habeas corpus and tried other legal maneuvers to free Sims.
When the federal commissioner found for his owner, 300 armed
deputies and soldiers removed him from the courthouse at 4:oo a.m.
and marched him to the navy yard where 250 U.S. soldiers waited to
place him on a ship going south to slavery.
Sim’s owner subsequently sold him at the slave auction in Charleston.
He was taken to New Orleans and sold to a brickmason in Vicksburg,
Mississippi, where Sims was living when Union troops besieged the
city in 1863. He escaped into federal lines and obtained a special pass
from General Ulysses S Grant to return to Boston, where he arrived in
time to watch the presentation of colors to the 54th Massachusetts
Infantry, the first black regiment recruited in the North.
A dozen years after the Civil War, Sims became a clerk and messenger
in the office of the U.S attorney general, under whose auspices he had
been remanded a generation earlier.”
Excerpted from “The Battle Cry of Freedom[The Civil War Era]”,
author James M. McPherson. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York.
The above account illustrates how merciless the government could be
back then and in some ways still is.
Islander.
PS. The beginning chapters of “Battle Cry of Freedom” contain a
comprehensive description of slavery and the events that led to the
Civil War.