I’m currently reading a history of the Underground Railroad, a loose but broad operation that smuggled slaves from the South to the North and Canada before the Civil War. Oh, okay, it’s Bound for Canaan by Fergus Bordewich, and it’s a darn good read
At one point, he mentions a street riot in Boston, shortly after the passing of draconian extensions to the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, in which a quickly-assembled abolitionist mob stormed a courthouse in which a captured slave was being held (the North was never “free country”, or even all that safe for fugitives, and the changes made it much less so). Anyway, the mob took “the city’s sword of justice” from the courthouse along with the man, who was quickly taken safely to Canada. Bordewich gave no other details about it.
That’s a new one on me. I’m certainly familiar with the Sword of Justice as a literary metaphor, and those are all the Google hits I can find, but was it also a real item commonly adorning American courtrooms as well?
