feeling became greatly aroused.  Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker delivered strong addresses at a meeting in Faneuil Hall while an unsuccessful attempt to rescue Burns from the Court House was made under the leadership of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who with others of the attacking party was wounded.  It was finally decided in court that Burns must be returned to his master.  The law was obeyed; but Boston had been made very angry, and generally her feeling had counted for something in the history of the country.  The people draped their houses in mourning, hissed the procession that took Burns to his ship and at the wharf a riot was averted only by a minister’s call to prayer.  This incident did more to crystallize Northern sentiment against slavery than any other except the exploit of John Brown, and this was the last time that a fugitive slave was taken out of Boston.  Burns himself was afterwards bought by popular subscription, and ultimately became a Baptist minister in Canada.

In 1834 Dr. Emerson, an army officer stationed in Missouri, removed to Illinois, taking with him his slave, Dred Scott.  Two years later, again accompanied by Scott, he went to Minnesota.  In Illinois slavery was prohibited by state law and Minnesota was a free territory.  In 1838 Emerson returned with Scott to Missouri.  After a while the slave raised the important question:  Had not his residence outside of a slave state made him a free man?  Beaten by his master in 1848, with the aid of anti-slavery lawyers Scott brought a suit against him for assault and battery, the circuit court of St. Louis rendering a decision in his favor.  Emerson appealed and in 1852 the Supreme Court of the state reversed the decision of the lower court.  Not long after this Emerson sold Scott to a citizen of New York named Sandford.  Scott now brought suit against Sandford, on the ground that they were citizens of different states.  The case finally reached the Supreme Court of the United States, which in 1857 handed down the decision that Scott was not a citizen of Missouri and had no standing in the Federal courts, that a slave was only a piece of property, and that a master might take his property with impunity to any place within the jurisdiction of the United States.  The ownership of Scott and his family soon passed to a Massachusetts family by whom they were liberated; but the important decision that the case had called forth aroused the most intense excitement throughout the country, and somehow out of it all people remembered more than anything else the amazing declaration of Chief Justice Taney that “the Negroes were so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”  The extra-legal character and the general fallacy of his position were exposed by Justice Curtis in a masterly dissenting opinion.