deserve it? No.Later Burns escaped slavery by fleeing to the Boston, where slavery had already been abolished. However, his freedom is short-lived. He was soon re-captured by his master, who demanded his return. According to the Fugitive Slave Act, a runaway can be captured in any free state 0 even as far north as Massachusetts. Burns was then imprisoned. After being tried, the commissioner entitled Burn’s master what he claimed – to have his “property” back. The means and evidence used by the commissioner to reach this end is also, far from just.Richard Dana paled. Loring had accepted Burns’s alleged admissions to Shuttle as evidence, though to do so was wrong and unconstitutional. A man was protected from being a witness against himself. He was protected from giving testimony against himself by the Fugitive Slave Act.Burns was then put into a small jail cell, which can only be reached through a trap door, with his hands and legs tightly chained. For the next four months he became ill from the tight iron shackles on his body and the extremely hot room. His feet swelled to a huge size and his wrists were bloody from handcuffs biting into his flesh. He was soon living in the foul smell of his excrement. He was given rotted meat and a chunk of cornbread a day and a bucket of water each week. Everyday when he was well enough, he was brought down to the grounds of the jail and put on display, forced to kneel in a cage, and was humiliated and cursed at for an hour or two. And what has he done to deserve this? Fleeing from tyranny.In the poem The Hurricane by Bob Dylan, a black man was dealt with similar injustice as Tom Robinson and Anthony Burns.How can the life of such a manBe in the palm of some fool’s hand?To see him obviously framedCouldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a landWhere justice is just a gameDylan was referring Rubin Carter, a famous boxer who was wrongly accused and conv...
