I learned a new word usage recently—neighboring. In Thomas Friedman’s op-ed, “Why Minnesota Matters More Than Iran for America’s Future,” he discussed returning to his native Minnesota and witnessing, “something that I’d never seen in nearly 50 years: a spontaneous uprising of civic activism propelled by a single idea—I am my neighbor’s keeper, whoever he or she is and however he or she got here…. they were all propelled by a verb I’d never heard before: ‘neighboring,’ as in, Today I will be neighboring—going out to protect the good people next door or down the block.”1 This activism was what we too witnessed in the news coverage of Minnesota’s response to the ICE enforcement raids in their state. As Friedman writes, “Minnesotans are winter people. Don’t come for winter people in winter. They’re not afraid of the cold. Just the opposite. The weather has forged a unique Minnesota neighborliness—not everywhere, not always, but in a lot of places on a lot of days. Its power is rooted in its ordinariness—just a basic human impulse to look out for your neighbors and, yes, dig their cars out of the snow on Monday because you know they will do the same for you on Wednesday.”
As I read an account of the Boston Abolition Riot of 1836 recently, I was struck by the repetition of history—the similarities to what we are encountering now with immigration enforcement raids but also the civic activism of the response. Neighboring may be a new verb form to me, but the concept is enduring.
The Boston Abolition Riot of 1836
I find history fascinating. For historical scholarly research, JSTOR is absolutely my favorite database. While I don’t get to dig into historical scholarship very often for my work now, I still get my fix through JSTOR Daily, a newsletter with “original, research-backed articles that help you understand the world.” While the main JSTOR database is behind academic institution paywalls, JSTOR Daily articles colloquialize an academic treatment of a topic and allow free access to the underlying scholarship. I frequently find my interest piqued by a newsletter article and dig deeper into the subject. Often, there’s a clear through-line that runs from a historical narrative discussed in a JSTOR Daily article to what’s currently happening.
When reading Matthew Wills’s recent newsletter article, “Defying Slave Hunters in Boston’s Courts,”2 I was struck by the many parallels to the current ICE enforcement actions. In my flawed understanding of history (probably from associating that era with Lousia May Alcott and her father), I assumed Boston, during that period, was predominantly pro-abolition and a refuge for Black Americans. As Wills notes:
Anti-abolitionist violence was a serious threat in the 1830s, and not just in the Southern states. To take one notorious example: noted abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was almost lynched in October 1835 by pro-slavery supporters. This happened in Boston, Massachusetts—a city whose newspapers were almost unanimous in supporting mob action against Garrison.
With their “deep ties to slaveholding interests,” writes legal historian Lyndsay Campbell, Boston’s ruling business elites characterized “its own mob actions as rational and constitutionally legitimate.” But collective action by Black abolitionists and their allies was, of course, an outrage.
Boston’s “abolition riot” of August 1, 1836 was thus unusual. It was a pro-abolitionist action, perhaps the first of its kind. The city’s “self-
appointed respectable class” were shocked to see anyone other than themselves using extrajudicial action to achieve their ends.3
The Underlying Facts
The Boston Abolition Riot story centers around two African American women, Eliza Small and Polly Ann Bates, who sailed from Baltimore to Boston on a ship called the Chickasaw. Upon arriving in Boston, the Chickasaw was boarded by Matthew Turner, a Baltimore slave catcher, who purported that Eliza Small and Polly Ann Bates were fugitive slaves and belonged to Baltimore businessman and state senator John Morris. Although there are conflicting news reports, the women appeared to have papers attesting that they were free persons. Turner, pretending to be a Methodist minister, tricked the women into letting him review their free papers and refused to return them. Some accounts indicate that Turner destroyed the women’s free papers. The enslaved women Morris was seeking to recapture had different names and Turner offered no proof aside from his own conjecture based on Eliza and Polly Ann’s appearance from Morris’s description. Nevertheless, the captain of the Chickasaw detained Eliza Small and Polly Ann Bates on board. 4
Hearing of the women’s plight, Samuel Adams, a free black man who ran a boarding house near the waterfront, tried to board the Chickasaw several times and, while being rebuffed, saw that the women were being held captive. In his habeas corpus petition, Adams swore that he had been informed that the captain of the Chickasaw was intending to put the captives on a Baltimore bound ship that day to evade legal proceedings. The order was signed by a Judge Shaw, and the women were removed from the Chickasaw and placed in the local jail for “safe keeping”5
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793
The next part of the story requires a bit of a digression into the Fugitive Slave Act to understand why the turn of events happened as they did. The original Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 empowered enslavers to recapture fugitive slaves even in non-slave states. The act put escaped slaves and the progeny of female escaped slaves at risk of recapture for the rest of their lives—not only were long-escaped persons who had lived freely for decades forever at the mercy of slave catchers, so were their children. The demand for slaves in the south created a market for slave catchers in northern states. Because of the vagueness of the law, many free black persons, who had never been enslaved, were kidnapped and sold into slavery under the auspices of the act. Hundreds, if not thousands, of free Black Americans were thus enslaved. Northern states enacted personal liberty laws to weaken the impact of the act and try to prevent their free Black citizens from being kidnapped and enslaved. Some of these personal liberty laws mandated jury trials, forbade the use of local jails, or otherwise created obstacles to enforcement. This, in turn, led to discrepancies between states on the procedure for the capture of escaped slaves, creating confusion for slave catchers as to the correct legal process in various jurisdictions.6
In this case, Turner, the slave catcher, appeared to believe that he faced a two-step judicial process before he could legally remove the women from Massachusetts:
[S]tep one was a federal warrant to authorize him to take Bates and Small before a court where, in step two, he would apply for a certificate authorizing their removal under the Fugitive Slave Act. Section 3 of that Act authorized the slave owner or “his agent or attorney” to “seize or arrest” the fugitive and proceed to either a judge of the circuit or district court in the state or to “any magistrate of a county, city or town corporate, wherein such seizure or arrest shall be made.” In court, the slaveowner, agent or attorney would prove ownership and then be granted a certificate to authorize the removal and return of the fugitive.7
As noted above, procedural requirements changed throughout various jurisdictions. Turner seemed to believe that obtaining a warrant from a federal judge was the required practice in Massachusetts courts and in this instance would delay his ability to detain the women, as the nearest federal judge was in Cambridge.8
The Court Case
The description of the hearing is fascinating.
“Filling the courtroom were two or three hundred spectators, mainly African Americans. The newspapers generally depicted them as an undifferentiated mass characterized by emotions (especially “excitement”), rather than a people with thoughts, but….[an observer] perceived “not the slightest indication of confusion, but on the contrary, every person observed perfect order and decorum.”9
Two or three hundred people represented a significant percentage of the Black population of Boston in 1836. There were also a handful of white women abolitionists in attendance. The attorney for John Morris tried to make the case for rightful ownership of the women, suggesting postponing the case to gather more evidence. The attorney for Eliza and Polly Ann argued that under the Massachusetts Bill of Rights all were born free and entitled to liberty. Judge Shaw, however, ruled on a very narrow issue. Setting the warrant issue aside, he said that the Fugitive Slave Act only allowed Turner to seize the women and bring them to court. It did not allow him to convert the Chickasaw to a prison to detain them. He said that the women should be discharged. Judge Shaw was not finished speaking when Turner noisily interrupted him. “Turner attempted to take command, ordering the crowd to take their seats and disobeying Shaw’s repeated orders to be silent.”10
One of the abolitionist women understood that Turner’s next move would be to gin up a new charge such as theft to immediately re-detain the women and understood that time was of the essence. She got word to Eliza and Polly Ann that they should flee as quickly as possible as soon as the Judge ruled they were discharged. Not realizing that Judge Shaw had more to say, the court spectators created a phalanx around the women, subduing those trying to impede their departure. The mass movement by the crowd allowed the women to be spirited away by a waiting coach. A search by local constabulary ensued, but the women were never detained and are thought to have ended up in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Neighboring
When I read Friedman’s article about neighboring in Minneapolis, I immediately realized that was why I found Eliza and Polly Ann’s story is so compelling. I read one estimate that in 1836 the Black population of Boston consisted of 1,875 people. If the news reports of 200 to 300 Black spectators attending the hearing for Eliza and Polly Ann are accurate, that means an incredible ten to fifteen percent of the total Black population showed up to support the women. And these were women that they didn’t know. They’d only recently come from Baltimore and weren’t even off their ship before the neighboring began with Samuel Adam’s brave attempts to board the Chickasaw and assess their welfare. It’s even more compelling when put in the context of the danger to themselves they were exposed to by standing up for the women. Surely, they understood their actions increased their visibility and the risk of being kidnapped and enslaved under the color of the Fugitive Slave Act. They chose to stand up for each other anyway.
Through-line to Today
So many aspects of this story resonate with our current timeline but one thing that really struck me was the amount of conflicting information in the various historical news reports. So much bias and prejudice are baked into the narrative of events that it becomes difficult to piece together what really happened. Why, for instance, has this event, primarily coordinated by Black citizens and female abolitionists, been deemed a “riot” when other, more violent events of that same period were given benign names? Thinking ahead, how will future historians interpret today’s news reports or even statements of government officials painting citizens exercising their constitutional rights as domestic terrorists?
Stories like this remind us how critical access to accurate, factual information is and sadly, how it is increasingly becoming harder to find. But more importantly, it should serve as a lesson on how important and timeless neighboring is.
Access Historical Research Resources at KCLL and Beyond
If you find yourself in need of historical legal research resources, the Hein Online database available in-house at KCLL is a great starting point. You can find out more at https://kcll.org/databases/. I also highly recommend subscribing to the JSTOR Daily https://daily.jstor.org/ and to the free public access version of JSTOR https://about.jstor.org/oa-and-free/ which allows registered users to view 100 articles per month.
1 See Thomas Friedman, Why Minnesota Matters More Than Iran for America’s Future, New York Times (March 15, 2026) https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/opinion/columnists/minneapolis-
ice-trump-neighbor.html.
2 See Matthew Wills, Defying Slave Hunters in Boston’s Court, JSTOR Daily (March 2, 2026) https://daily.
jstor.org/defying-slave-hunters-in-bostons-courts/.
3 Id.
4 See Lyndsay Campbell, The “Abolition Riot” Redux: Voices, Processes, 94 New England Quarterly 7, 12-16 (March 2021).
5 Id. at 18-19.
6 The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 federalized the process, to strengthen the rights of the enslavers and remove the jurisdictional obstacles that the personal library laws put in place. It also significantly increased the fines and penalties for obstruction.
7 See Note 4 at 17.
8 Id. at 24.
9 Id. at 22-23.
10 Id. at 28.
