hearing before Geo. T. Curtis
on the proceedings for the rendition of Shadrach was going
on, a large number of men, chiefly negroes, made their way
into the court-room by one door, swept through, taking the
fugitive along with them, and out at the other, leaving the
indignant Commissioner to telegraph to Mr. Webster in Washington
that he thought it was a case of levying war. I went into
the court-room during the trial of Mr. Wright, and saw seated
in the front row of the jury, wearing a face of intense gravity,
my old friend Francis Bigelow, always spoken of in Concord
as "Mr. Bigelow, the blacksmith." He was a Free Soiler and
his wife a Garrison Abolitionist. His house was a station
on the underground railroad where fugitive slaves were harbored
on their way to Canada. Shadrach had been put into a buggy
and driven out as far as Concord, and kept over night by Bigelow
at his house, and sent on his way toward the North Star the
next morning. Richard H. Dana, who was counsel for Elizur
Wright, asked Judge Hoar what sort of man Bigelow was. To
which the Judge replied: "He is a thoroughly honest man, and
will decide the case according to the law and the evidence
as he believes them to be. But I think it will take a good
deal of evidence to convince him that one man owns another."

It is not, perhaps, pertinent to my personal recollections
but it may be worth while to tell my readers that Theodore
Parker, Wendell Phillips, and some others were indicted afterward
for participation in an intended rescue of Anthony Burns,
another fugitive slave. The indictment was quashed by Judge
Curtis, who had probably got pretty sick of the whole thing.
But Parker, while in jail awaiting trial, prepared a defence,
which is printed, and which is one of the most marvellous
examples of scathing and burning denunciation to be found
in all literature. I commend it to young men as worth their
study.

Some time after the Shadrach case, Asa O. Butman, a United
States Deputy Marshal, who had been quite active and odious
in the arrest and extradition of Burns, came to Worcester
one Saturday afternoon, and stopped at the American Temperance
House. This was October 30, 1854. It was believed that he
was in search of information about some fugitive negroes who
were supposed to be in Worcester, and I suppose that to be
the fact, although it was claimed that his errand was to summon
witnesses against persons concerned in the riot which to