The Tactics Boston Used Against Slave Catchers in the 1850's Offer Lessons for Resisting ICE Deportations Now
As federal agents deploy to Minneapolis after fatal ICE shootings, the antebellum abolitionist movement reveals what happens when communities refuse to comply with unjust laws.
This past weekend, thousands of Americans took to the streets in cities across the country. In Minneapolis, Portland, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and New York, protesters carried signs reading “Stop ICE Terror Now” and chanted “ICE out now!” The catalyst: the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis on January 8th. Good was a wife and mother of three. The Department of Homeland Security claimed the agent acted in self-defense after Good allegedly “weaponized her vehicle.” A day later, two more people were shot by Border Patrol agents in Portland under similar circumstances, with officials offering the same justification.
In response to the protests, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the deployment of “hundreds more” federal agents to Minneapolis to protect ICE officers from demonstrators. The message was clear: the federal government would double down, not back down.
If this feels unprecedented, it isn’t. Nearly 175 years ago, another American city faced the same dilemma: federal agents arriving to seize residents, a community rising in defiance, and a government determined to enforce deeply unjust laws. That city was Boston. And what happened there offers a blueprint for resistance that history has conveniently filed away.
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The Original "Deportation Force"
On September 18, 1850, President Millard Fillmore signed the Fugitive Slave Act into law. The legislation wasn’t subtle in its intent. It required state and local authorities throughout the country, including in free states, to assist in capturing freedom seekers and returning them to enslavers. Federal marshals could deputize ordinary citizens to join the hunt. Anyone who helped a freedom seeker escape faced fines up to $1,000 and six months in prison.
The law came with a built-in incentive for corruption. Federal commissioners who ruled that a suspected freedom seeker should be returned to slavery received $10. If they ruled for the person’s release? Just $5. The accused, meanwhile, could not testify in their own defense. Due process was not simply limited; it was deliberately gutted.
Massachusetts had attempted to shield its Black residents. In 1843, the state passed the Act Further to Protect Personal Liberty, which forbade state judges and law enforcement from acting on accusations that a Black resident was an escaped slave. The Fugitive Slave Act was designed to override exactly these kinds of protections.
Boston’s mayor at the time, John Bigelow, announced his intention to comply with the federal government and “go after escaped slaves.” The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was unsparing in his assessment, calling Bigelow a “creeping, crawling official” who didn’t even rise to the level of representing the “meanness and degradation of the city.”
A City That Fought Back
Boston’s Black community refused to accept its fate quietly. In October 1850, Black Bostonians gathered at the African Meeting House to plan their response. They called upon white allies to join them at Faneuil Hall, where they formed the Boston Vigilance Committee together. The committee’s mission was straightforward: protect the city’s Black residents by any means necessary.
One member’s declaration captured the spirit of the moment: “Constitution or no constitution, law or no law, we will not allow a fugitive slave to be taken from Massachusetts.”
The committee got to work immediately. When slave hunters arrived in Boston that autumn searching for Ellen and William Craft, a couple who had famously escaped Georgia, the committee thwarted them at every turn. The hunters were arrested multiple times on charges including conspiracy to kidnap, slapped with $30,000 in bonds, and eventually run out of the city entirely. The Liberator reported gleefully that they had “gone off with their ears full of fleas.”
In February 1851, slave catchers arrested a man named Shadrach Minkins while he worked as a waiter at the Cornhill Coffee House. His arrest was the first in New England under the new law. Minkins couldn’t testify, couldn’t face a jury, and couldn’t defend himself. But he wouldn’t need to. Before the weekend ended, approximately 100 people stormed the courthouse, overwhelmed the federal officials, and spirited Minkins to safety. He eventually made it to Montreal.
The community organized armed patrols. By 1854, Black Bostonians had formed the Massasoit Guards, named after the Native American leader who first allowed the Pilgrims to settle in 1620. The state refused to grant them militia status, which would have allowed them to carry firearms. So they carried cudgels instead and patrolled the West End and the northern slope of Beacon Hill, where the majority of the city’s Black population lived.
Not every rescue attempt succeeded. Thomas Sims and Anthony Burns were both captured and returned to slavery despite fierce resistance. Burns’ case, in particular, sparked riots so intense that a federal deputy was killed. But even these “failures” shifted public opinion. As one Bostonian later recalled: “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”
The outrage over Burns’ return led directly to the Massachusetts Personal Liberty Act of 1855, which made it virtually impossible to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in the state.
The Patterns Don’t Change
The parallels are impossible to ignore. A federal government demanding local compliance with the seizure of residents. Financial incentives baked into an unjust system. The deputization of ordinary citizens. The denial of due process. Communities organizing in defiance.
What Boston’s abolitionists understood, and what today’s protesters seem to grasp, is that unjust laws are not self-enforcing. They require willing participants. The Fugitive Slave Act demanded that northerners actively engage in the machinery of slavery. ICE enforcement asks the same of local police, employers, and neighbors today.
The Vigilance Committee didn’t just resist; they made resistance costly. They filed lawsuits. They posted warnings. They organized legal defense funds. They created networks of safe houses. They showed up in numbers that made enforcement difficult. The question Boston answered in 1850 is the same question American cities face now: When the law itself becomes the instrument of injustice, what do we owe to one another?
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Sources
National Park Service. “The Fugitive Slave Laws and Boston.” Boston National Historical Park, Boston African American National Historic Site. Updated January 5, 2026.
Huffman, Zack. “In 1850s Boston, Slave Case Sparked Conflict.” The Bay State Banner, March 22, 2019.
“Slave-Hunters in Boston.” Boston Liberator, November 1, 1850. Reprinted in William Still, The Underground Railroad. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872.
Halperin, Jaydie and Bob Potenza. “The Fugitive Slave Laws in Boston: Part 2, 1850–1855.” The West End Museum.
Duster, Chandelis and Sergio Martínez-Beltrán. “Nationwide Anti-ICE Protests Call for Accountability After Renee Good’s Death.” NPR, January 11, 2026.
Parker, Theodore. “Caution!! Colored People of Boston.” Poster, 1851. Library of Congress.
Thank you for this history-- it's somehow weightier when we can say to the fainter-hearted "it's been done before!"
That being said--since the bad guys are now heavily armed with bullets and chemicals, and are trying to provoke a violent response, my big takeaway is that those of us in blue states NEED to put extreme pressure on our state legislators to enact laws with consequences. Pritzker and Walz both, as I understand it, have made noises but... Do not threaten, guys. Promise, and follow through.
This is what we need, an organized, pissed-off resistance!