Our immigration nation
Richard White: The story of an escaped slave resonates with furor over today’s deportation efforts .
Like everyone else in California in this winter of travel bans and deportation orders, I cannot avoid President Trump. He makes me fear what is about to happen. And because I am teaching my usual survey course on 19th century U.S. history at Stanford, my fears are specific. Donald Trump has conjured up Anthony Burns. Now Anthony Burns haunts me. He may soon haunt California.
Like most of today’s immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, Burns committed no crime beyond wanting to be free to earn his daily bread, but in doing so he violated the law.
Burns was a black man who by fleeing north broke the law. His arrest crystallized the conflict over slavery. Maybe he can clarify our current condition in California.
Burns was a Virginia slave who escaped to Massachusetts. Literate, he wrote his brother telling him he was safe, but the letter was intercepted and traced to Boston. His owner demanded that Boston authorities enforce a federal law — the Fugitive Slave Act — and in 1854 Burns was arrested. When an antislavery mob led by a Unitarian minister, Thomas Higginson, attacked the federal courthouse and a deputy died in the melee, Massachusetts called out the militia to send Burns back into slavery. Officials marched Burns through Boston to the ship that would carry him into bondage. Along the route, the buildings were draped in black. American flags hung upside-down, and church bells tolled. As a member of the Whig Party wrote, “We went to bed old-fashioned conservative Whigs and woke up stark mad abolitionists.”
Most Whigs became Republicans, who claimed the Fugitive Slave Act turned citizens of free states into slave catchers. A majority of Republicans tried to make the act unenforceable. They found clever ways to do so.
Those who supported the sending of Burns and others back to slavery said the law must be obeyed. They feared for the integrity of their country, which was splitting apart. Such anxiety over the fate of the republic needs to be taken seriously. It runs deep in the history of the United States. Donald Trump has tapped into it.
But this fear must also be examined. This anxiety is usually subterranean, and it does not always run pure. Nativism and racism often taint it. The vast majority of those we would expel have lived among us for years. If they had committed ordinary crimes, the statute of limitations would have expired. But for living among us and working for us and with us, they are criminals.
That’s why, this winter, Anthony Burns resonates.
The slave catchers who seized Burns had the law on their side. Those who tried to free him broke the law. Burns was a criminal, but his crime was inseparable from his seeking liberty and paid labor. What was praiseworthy for a free white man was criminal for an enslaved black man. This does not seem to be the kind of issue that is settled by arguing that the law must be obeyed. Neither does our current question of arresting and deporting those whose crime is illegally crossing the border to work and support their families.
We are largely on our own here. In moments of crisis, our institutions have often proved feeble. The courts usually protest after the fact. Corporations, in the 19th century and today, are in the business of making money, not seeking justice. Universities, at least research universities, are no different. I work for one. They will talk beautifully, but when federal funds are at stake, I would not want them protecting my back.
In teaching my survey course — moving through slavery, the Indian Removal Act, and the virtual pogroms waged against Chinese immigrants — I recognize our talent for repentance. Most of us now see these actions as shameful. Boston abolitionists were ashamed, and they eventually bought and freed Burns even as they recognized the problem went beyond one sympathetic victim.
Repentance is easy. The hard thing is stopping what we will regret before it happens. That was the issue that Republicans faced in the 1850s, and many acted to subvert enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. They did so in state legislatures, in elections and in the street.
Anthony Burns is more than a specter from our past; he is someone who lives among us and passes us on the streets. Republicans, once mobilized to save Burns, have become the party whose president would order his arrest, but this time she would be a Latina or a Muslim.
Our reaction to her appearance, far more than tweets or executive orders, will be a defining moment. As in the 1850s, we have begun a journey to a potentially very dangerous place. What we will do, in California and nationally, matters more than what the president does.
Richard White is a professor of history at Stanford University. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at http://bit.ly/SFChronicleletters.