314 HENRY INGERSOLL BOWDITCH. 



South, was shocked by what it regarded as revolutionary, lawless, and 

 not respectable methods of agitating a reform that was generally desired 

 by the North ; aud its ostracism, for the time, of such men as Dr. Bow- 

 ditch, Charles Sumner, and Edmund Quincy, " learned in those arts 

 that make a gentleman," as Lowell said of him, is evidence of the 

 intensity of its opposition and of the courage needed to face it. 



When an escaped slave, Anthony Burns, was given up to his 

 master in May, 1854, and taken in fetters down Court and State 

 Streets with •' an overwhelming force of soldiers," State and national, 

 Dr. Bovvditch dashed past the police on guard, under the rope stretched 

 across Tremont Street, through the cordon line, at the head of a crowd 

 of excited citizens, down to the wharf, where a devoted band of Aboli- 

 tionists stood in horror to see the tug bearing the returned slave steam 

 away to the United States cutter, which carried back to slavery the 

 negro who had been given up to his former master by the United 

 States judge in Massachusetts. In describing this scene, Dr. Bowditch 

 showed all the fire and pathos of the orator. One could feel the death- 

 like silence that came over that little group, willing to be called 

 fanatics aud radicals aud iconoclasts, but determined not to abate in 

 the least their fight against a great national crime. Then and there, 

 with a contempt for legalities and an utter disregard of conventional 

 public opinion, they vowed that such a disgrace should never again 

 happen to the soil of Massachusetts. At Dr. Bowditch's instigation 

 they formed the Anti-man-hunting League, a secret oath-bound club, 

 with twenty-four lodges in as many towns, and four hundred and 

 sixty-nine members armed with billies and trained by frequent drills 

 for capturing and carrying off to one of their places for concealment 

 any slaveholder who should come to the State to hunt and reclaim a 

 runaway slave. Dr. Bowditch was the secretary, and their records 

 were kept in cipher. " Wrong-headed and absurd as the plan may 

 seem to many, if not all, 'reasonable' persons," he said, ' ; I am 

 proud to remember that I was among the first of those who advocated 

 physical resistance to slavery as we saw it in the North." 



Less than a decade later he saw Colonel Shaw march down Court 

 Street at the head of his negro regiment ; he lived to see slavery abol- 

 ished, peace and industry established in the South, and himself honored 

 at the North with Phillips and Garrison, and loved by his Southern 

 associates. He had been a hard hitter in the fight. When once asked 

 his political opinio ^d while on the "sacred soil of Virginia" serving as 

 a volunteer, in answer to the call for aid for the wounded after the 

 second battle of Bull Run, he said, " Wendell Phillips is a proslavery 



