Considering History: Concord, Protest, and Patriotism

This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.

April 19^th marked a truly historic American anniversary: the 250^th of the 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord that in many ways inaugurated the Revolutionary War and the creation of the United States. There were numerous events in both towns and other locations in honor of that anniversary, of course. And on Monday here in New England, we celebrated the unique annual holiday that commemorates those battles and frames them as an origin point for not just the Revolution and nation but for American patriotism as well: Patriots’ Day.

That anniversary should be commemorated. But the subsequent question is how we do so, and in particular what stories of American patriotism we tell and share. I want to make the case for commemorating, on Patriots’ Day and throughout the year, a handful of other inspiring Concord figures, that reflect critical patriotism as one of our most defining Revolutionary legacies.

Naturalist, Transcendentalist, and author Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay Concord’s annual poll tax for a six-year stretch during the 1840s, and his resulting brief stint in the town jail, is relatively well known. But Thoreau was actually one of a few Concord figures who took part in this form of critical patriotic protest. Thoreau’s friend and Transcendentalism mentor Bronson Alcott also refused to pay the poll tax in 1843 and was arrested (although not jailed), and Thoreau reported in a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson that Alcott’s motivation “was nothing but principle, for I never heard a man talk honester.”

Even more inspiring was a Revolutionary-era African American ancestor to these 1840s Concord tax protests, Brister Freeman. Freeman had been enslaved to two Concord residents, but gained his freedom due to his Revolutionary War military service. He bought land in Walden Woods in 1785, and for the next six years Freeman refused to pay the town’s poll tax. His motivations for this action are unclear, but what is definite is that Concord was trying to deny Freeman the opportunity to take part in the town meeting, which was technically the right of all property owners. In 1791 Freeman chose to sign half his property over to Concord rather than go to jail for his tax resistance.

Inspired by both his own tax protest and these contemporary and historic forebears, Thoreau would write an essay arguing for the concept of “civil disobedience” as one of the most important forms of civic action and patriotism. Based on his 1848 Concord Lyceum address “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government,” originally published under the title “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), and republished after Thoreau’s death as “Civil Disobedience” (1866), this stirring piece makes the case that “it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be; what is once well done is done forever.” And more exactly, Thoreau argues for critical patriotic resistance as a necessary goal, especially in dark times: “If the law is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”

Five years after publishing “Resistance to Civil Government,” Thoreau was part of an important moment of such counter-friction in resistance to injustice. That injustice was the case of Anthony Burns, an African American man who had escaped enslavement in Virginia in 1853 and made his way to Boston. In 1854, federal slave catchers, led by the infamous Deputy U.S. Marshal Asa O. Butman and operating under the aegis of the controversial 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, captured Burns and brought him to trial before Judge Edward G. Loring. Loring ruled that Burns would remain enslaved and be returned to Virginia, and in response Massachusetts residents revolted in protest: first outside the courthouse in late May (led by members of the Boston Vigilance Committee which had formed in the aftermath of the Fugitive Slave Act’s passage), and then at a number of broader anti-slavery protests throughout the summer.

At one of those mass protests, on July 4^th, 1854, in Framingham, Massachusetts, Thoreau delivered a stirring speech that would become the basis for another essay, “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854). In his speech, he argued that

they whom truth requires at present to plead guilty are, of all the inhabitants of the State, preeminently innocent. While the Governor, and the Mayor, and countless officers of the Commonwealth are at large, the champions of liberty are imprisoned.

And in the essay he overtly connects the case to the April 19^th Revolutionary commemorations, writing,

just a week after the authorities of Boston assembled to carry back a perfectly innocent man, and one whom they knew to be innocent, into slavery, the inhabitants of Concord caused the bells to be rung and the cannons to be fired, to celebrate their liberty — and the courage and love of liberty of their ancestors who fought at the bridge. As if those three millions had fought for the right to be free themselves, but to hold in slavery three million others.

Inspired by the Burns case, the collective mass protests, and the arguments of prominent voices like Thoreau’s, Massachusetts residents took action. The wealthy young Bostonian Amos Adams Lawrence wrote to his uncle about the moment that “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” Lawrence would become a leading financial supporter of the Abolitionist cause, and he wasn’t alone in being so affected. A petition to the Massachusetts State Legislature led to the passage of the nation’s most overt anti-Fugitive Slave Act law, the 1855 Personal Liberty Bill, which required that slave catchers stay off state property and that fugitive slaves receive a trial by jury (among other provisions). And when Anthony Burns once again escaped slavery, he returned to Boston to public celebrations, lived there in peace, and then with the support of the community enrolled at Oberlin College — a living embodiment of the true legacies of America’s Revolutionary ideals.