I am the hounded slave . . . . I      wince at the bite of the dogs,  Hell and despair are upon me . . . .      crack and again crack the      marksmen...

I clutch the rails of the fence . . . .      my gore dribs thinned with      the ooze of my skin,  I fall on the weeds and stones,  The riders spur their unwilling      horses and haul close,  They taunt my dizzy ears . . . .      they beat me violently over      the head with their whip-      stocks.

He staid with me a week before      he was recuperated and      passed north,  I had him sit next me at table . . . .      my firelock leaned in the corner.

Anthony Burns, whose arrest and trial under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 touched off riots and protests by abolitionists and citizens of Boston in the spring of 1854. Whitman, too, protested by writing the satirical work "A Boston Ballad," one of the twelve untitled poems of the 1855 Leaves of Grass.

The illustration shows reformer Wendell Phillips (1811-1884) addressing an April 11,1851 meeting to protest the case of Thomas Sims, a fugitive slave being tried in Boston.

Reproduced from Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South, ed. Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr., with Kym S. Rice (Richmond: The Museum of the Confederacy and Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991).