Two Years and After

One August afternoon in Boston, a 19-year-old Harvard dropout walked to the wharf and stepped aboard a merchant ship bound for California. The year was 1834, and the student was Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

Son of a prominent Cambridge family, Dana had tired of his studies. Seeking adventure, and hoping to improve his health, he was trading the life of a Brahmin for that of a common sailor. For the next two years, the brig would be his home as it rounded Cape Horn and sailed up the western coast of South America.

Some years later he would publish a book, Two Years Before the Mast, the most widely read sea narrative from his time. The book chronicles the rough and sometimes brutal life of a seaman, as well as the exotic ports he visited.

But there is much more about the book’s author and how his years at sea changed his life and direction. Returning in 1836 Dana re-enrolled in Harvard to study law. Admitted to the bar in 1840, he began soliciting cases. He was not surprised when sailors showed up at his door.

While at sea, bunking “before the mast,” that is, in the ship’s forecastle, Dana quickly learned both the discipline and the dangers of maritime trade. At sea he and mates were bound by the authority, reasonable or capricious, fair or cruel, of the captain.

After witnessing the flogging of a fellow sailor—“A man—a human being, made in God’s likeness—fastened up and flogged like a beast!”—Dana vowed to do what he could to improve sailors’ lives. In the following years, Dana became a much sought-after attorney in maritime law, filing suits for sailors’ back pay and defending seaman charged with mutiny. In 1841 he published The Seaman’s Friend, a handbook on the rights and responsibilities of sailors.

But seamen were not the only ones to benefit from Dana’s services. There were others arriving in Boston whose very lives were threatened, fugitives from the South. Having ended slavery in Massachusetts in the 1780s, the Commonwealth had become a haven for fugitives, arriving by sea and by land.

In Boston, free blacks and abolitionist whites had organized to provide housing, jobs and protection for the escapees. But with passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, their safety was in peril.

As the hub of the national abolitionist movement, Boston was targeted by the federal government, intent on making it an example of slave-law enforcement. No less than Massachusetts senator, Daniel Webster, and President Millard Fillmore, sanctioned plans to capture run-away slaves in Boston and return them to their Southern owners.

The first person arrested in Boston under the Fugitive Slave Law was Shadrach Minkins, a waiter in the Cornhill Coffee Shop. Nine months earlier, Minkins had escaped slavery in Norfolk, Virginia.

On a chilly morning in February, 1851, federal agents grabbed Minkins while he was waiting tables and rushed him to the courthouse for a hearing on his extradition. Immediately, however, Boston abolitionists, black and white, responded. While dozens jammed the corridors of the federal court, others filled the street outside.

Meanwhile, a young attorney named Richard Henry Dana, Jr., filed a habeas corpus petition, seeking Minkins’ release. After the petition was denied and other measures failed, the door to the courtroom was forced open and about twenty black citizens rushed in, grabbed Minkins—still wearing his restaurant apron—and carried him into the streets. Before long he had disappeared, led to a hiding place in the city. Before dawn of the next day, he arrived at the home of abolitionists in Concord, and then on to Montreal.

In the coming months, Dana would represent many fugitive slaves, as well as abolitionists charged with abetting their escape. Championing the cause of the oppressed, however, would lead to his being shunned by the prominent society he had abandoned.

A fellow attorney, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., wrote of Dana: “He was counsel of the sailor and the slave, courageous, skillful but still the advocate of the poor and unpopular.…In the mind of wealthy and respectable Boston almost anyone was to be preferred to him.”

Sometimes there are experiences that change the way we look at the world and give us direction for the future. For Dana, two years before the mast made all the difference.