We naturally ask this question because we are aware that 3.5 million of Burns’ compatriots were still enslaved. But to the abolitionists of Boston, and their growing list of supporters, Burns was not a number: he was the manifestation of an evil that was right in front of them. Most Bostonians had not seen the plantations of the South; in Anthony Burns, they saw a cause they could rally around. Therefore, when Burns had his trial, he was defended by none other than Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882), the man who had written the well-known Two Years before the Mast a decade earlier. Just as important, a crowd of several thousand Bostonians gathered outside the courtroom, hoping to influence the result.