Book Review

Albert J. Von Frank argues that ideas, specifically Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalist notions of freedom and slavery, activated by the Boston trials of Anthony Burns in the spring of 1854, galvanized northerners to resist further compromises with slavery. These ideas, spread through public shock at the treatment of Burns, destroyed the second party system and turned the Know-Nothing party into a successful party. As reaction spread, Emersonian ideas also spurred the formation of the new Republican party, consequently making civil war inevitable.	1
The author describes the conflicts—intellectual, legal, and social (there were mobs in the streets)—that surrounded the trial and Burns's return to Virginia. The case drew together local blacks and whites. Many who appear in the account are familiar; President Franklin Pierce, the cotton Whig Amos Lawrence, Mayor J. V. C. Smith, the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, the transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker, the provocateur William Lloyd Garrison, the orator Wendell Phillips, and the lead attorney, Richard Henry Dana Jr.	2
Von Frank also includes important and helpful sketches of black leaders; Frederick Douglass, William C. Nell, Frances Watkins Harper, Charlotte Forten, and Rev. Leonard Grimes, the always watchful pastor of Burns—and the one abolitionist who never forgot Burns's personal suffering. Particularly important is William J. Watkins, who claimed republicanism, an Emersonian concept in Von Frank's scheme, as the legacy of African Americans.	. . .