By Tom Foran Clark, from a work in progress, The Significance of Being Frank: The Life and Times of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. Tom has a particular fondness for New England and the great gifted nineteenth century New England authors. A former public library director, he is the owner of Ameribilia Books and Collectibles. Part one here.

(part 2 of 2...part 1 here)

-- At that moment, Sanborn said, -- my counsel, J.S. Keyes, appeared by my side, asking if I petitioned for a writ of Habeas Corpus. By all means, I told him. Keyes hurried over to Judge Hoar's house. Hearing the tumult, and suspecting what it was, he had already begun filling out a writ of personal replevin. In less than ten minutes, the writ was in the hands of Concord's deputy sheriff, John Moore, who made the formal demand on my captors to surrender their prisoner. Stupidly, they refused. So the sheriff called on the 150 men and women present to act as his posse comitatus, which some twenty of the men gladly did, and I was forcibly snatched from senatorial custody. At the same time, my Irish neighbors rushed upon them and forced them to take to their broken carriage, and make off toward Lexington, the way they had come. They were pursued by twenty or thirty of my townsmen, some of them as far as Lexington.

-- I was committed to the custody of Captain George L. Prescott, Sanborn remembered, -- and spent the night in his house, armed, for my better defense, with a six-shooter, which Mr. Bull, the inventor of the Concord grape and then chairman of the Selectmen, had insisted I should take. I slept peacefully all the rest of that night.

John S. Keyes, John Andrew, Samuel Sewall, and Robert Treat Paine came together to act as legal counsel on Sanborn's behalf. They went before Chief Justice Shaw the next day, on April 4th.

-- The court room was filled with my Concord and Boston friends, Sanborn remembered, -- including the always elegant Mr. Wendell Phillips and, in his workingman's outfit, Mr. Walt Whitman.

Whitman later said he had been at the hearing specifically to help rescue Sanborn, had it become necessary. There were plenty others, Whitman said, who'd also come to take action should the trial go wrong. With him were Whitman's publishers, Charles Thayer and William Eldridge, at whose store an abolitionist society called the Black Strings were known to meet. Another of their authors, James Redpath, whose biography of John Brown was one of the firms most popular books, was there, too. The journalist Richard Hinton, who had recommended Leaves of Grass to Thayer and Eldridge, was also there. William Douglas O'Connor, the blue-eyed firebrand, to whom the firm had paid an advance on a forthcoming antislavery novel titled Harrington, was there. And there, at the back of the room, on a high stool, sat the tall, gray-bearded Whitman, in a loose jacket and an open shirt. Sanborn would remember Whitman's intense eyes under the shaggy eyebrows, scanning the courtroom.

Judge Shaw declared that no one but an officer of the Senate had the legal authority to undertake such an arrest as had just been attempted. That was that. Sanborn returned to Concord a hero, lauded by Higginson, Thoreau, Alcott, and Emerson at a spontaneous homecoming celebration held at Town Hall. Thoreau's remarks were greeted with applause and laughter when he said, -- The government ought to have arrested slave kidnappers, not Mr. Sanborn!

-- I don't remember what was going on when last I wrote, Louisa May Alcott wrote a friend on April 5th. -- But this last Tuesday night we had here a new sort of amusement called kidnapping. I'm so full of wrath over it, I don't dare unbottle myself for fear of the explosive consequences. I was not in the fray, but am to serve on a Vigilance Committee, so I will have my share to do in future combats.