Discovering Justice Students change history in 1854 trial of runaway slave

BANGOR – Massachusetts Judge Edward G. Loring appeared relieved Monday to learn that Maine schoolchildren had voted 61-13 to change history and allow him to keep his job.

In 1854, Loring was removed from his position after he sent fugitive slave Anthony Burns back to his Virginia master. Seven years later, the nation would be torn apart by civil war.

More than 75 students, teachers, judges, attorneys and court employees took on the role of Massachusetts senators after a Boston theater troupe on Monday performed “The Trial of Anthony Burns” in the third-floor courtroom of the U.S. District Court.

Sponsored by Discovering Justice, an educational outreach program based in the John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse in Boston, it was the program’s first presentation in Maine. It is scheduled to be performed today at the federal courthouse in Portland.

“This is your courtroom,” District Judge John Woodcock told the group before the performance began. “Each of you has a stake in what happens here. … There is no greater reflection on who we are as a people than what goes on in this courtroom. … [It] goes to the heart of what it means to be American citizens.”

In May 1854, the nation’s deep division over slavery boiled out of the courthouse and onto the streets of Boston when an escaped slave named Anthony Burns was tried. After a three-day jury-waived trial, Loring ruled that the slave had to be returned to his master, citing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which had been upheld by the Massachusetts Supreme Court. More than 50,000 people protested the decision on the streets of Boston and marshal law was declared.

Four years after Burns’ conviction, Loring went on trial in the state Senate. Senators passed a resolution urging the Massachusetts governor to remove the judge from his post after 15,000 petitions from citizens were submitted. Loring could be removed by the governor because he had been appointed by the state to serve as a probate judge. When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, he was appointed by the federal judiciary to decide runaway-slave cases.

On Monday, Truman Forbes, 11, a sixth-grader at the Adams School in Castine, agreed with those 19th century senators.

“I never knew slaves could get away,” he said, as he and his classmates filed out of the courtroom. “I voted for the judge to go because I didn’t think [his decision] was fair. Slavery was really bad for black people. Black people and white people are the same.”

Derek Jones, 17, a junior at Hampden Academy, disagreed and voted to keep Loring on the bench.

“He never broke any laws,” he said after the program. “Although the judgment he passed most people considered immoral, he did what he had to do. He followed the law.”

“The Trial of Anthony Burns” is one of four historical productions Boston-based Theatre Espresso has collaborated on with Art & the Law, a program sponsored by Discovering Justice. The other interactive plays cover the Salem witch trials, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the Palmer raids, in which immigrants were arrested and threatened with deportation during World War I.

Teachers received study guides developed for grades six through 12 to help prepare students for the events, so they could learn the historical background against which the plays unfold, Gabrielle King, the chief operating officer for Discovering Justice, said Monday after the performance.

The response in Bangor to the play and the opportunity to question the actors and Woodcock was positive.

“They taught us a lot in an interesting way,” Chloe Taub, 12, a pupil at the Castine school, said. “I got a lot more out of it than I would have from a history book or a lecture.”

Bringing history to life and into the present is why the Discovering Justice program brings nearly 3,000 young people into federal courthouses each year in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and now Maine, said Amory Files, manager of the program, as she left the federal building.