Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen , and: The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston (review)

Abstract

Reviews 121 single truth" (75), as they are but "fragments of stories" (83), especially where their "context is unspecified" (93), with the admonition that they be seen as "constructions to be taken apart, analyzed, and understood" (135); and the perception that "photography also represents the imaginary and the intangible" (90). Neither ray of joy nor spark of humor lights the melancholy pages of Family Frames. There is a useful, informative discussion near the end about the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which puts to shame the self-concerned pages that precede it, and puts to flight 'theoretical' comments about what "exposes cinema and photography for their constructedness and their dependence on convention" (180), or about how "as we read photographs, we project particular masks, particular ideological frames, onto the images" (86), or about how one may "overturn several essential elements of photography: its illusion of mimetic representation or the effect of the real" (87). Patrick Maynard Collison, Gary L. Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.304 pp. ISBN 0-674-80298-5, $27.95. Von Frank, Albert J. The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. 431 pp. ISBN 0-674-03954-8, $27.95. Fugitive slaves in nineteenth-century America present biographers and historians with formidable methodological and interpretive challenges. Clearly, the stories need to be told; collectively and individually, fugitive slaves played a central role in the country's sectional conflict. Yet even those famed cases that commanded the historical stage involved slaves who, thrust by circumstances into the spotlight, might not have been remembered otherwise, who likely would have left no more to posterity than any other ordinary human being, whose stories were always told for them, not by them. As a result, scholars writing their histories confront several related difficulties: the dearth of primary sources and reliable second-hand accounts, the adjustment of argumentative claims to the available material, the problems of contextualization and theoretical perspective. Gary Collison and Alfred J. Von Frank, approaching this undertaking from two quite different directions, have produced works that, considered together, illustrate the strengths and shortcomings of the biographical genre in completing a fugitive slave's journey from bondage to freedom to scholarly fame. In Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen, Collison draws on contemporary newspaper accounts, personal correspondence, census records, and court documents in order to reconstruct part of the life of the first runaway slave captured in Boston under the notorious 122 biography 22.1 (Winter 1999) 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Given the paucity of primary material, Collison extrapolates much of the rest of Minkins's life as he delves into the issues that the case embodied. Ultimately, what becomes apparent is that the importance of this biography lies less in what it has to say about Minkins himself than in what it says about African American life in the mid-nineteenth century and about the political and legal workings of the Fugitive Slave Law. Coming at a time of deteriorating intersectional conflict, the Minkins case quickly became a cause célèbre for abolitionists, who saw an opportunity to challenge the reviled fugitive slave provision of the Compromise of 1850; for conservative Whig politicians, who wanted to reaffirm the authority of federal statute; and for proslavery southerners, who longed for an embarrassing legal defeat of the Boston radicals. Collison's biography of Minkins, which begins with his childhood and ends with his death, is the most comprehensive treament to date of the episode. We learn that the young man at the center of the case had been a domestic slave in Norfolk, Virginia, before escaping in 1850 (probably aboard a northbound ship), making his way to Boston, and beginning to integrate himself into the free black community there. Within a year, a southern slave-hunter had tracked Minkins down, arrested him, and set up a legal battle over his fate. The showdown never came to pass, however, because several members of the Boston Vigilance Committee re-captured Minkins from within the courthouse itself and spirited him away, first to Concord, and then to Montreal, where he lived out the rest of...