Charles Krupa/AP Photo
A protester sits in the “Free Speech Zone” during a reenactment celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and start of the American Revolution, April 19, 2025, in Lexington, Massachusetts.
April 19th—the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord and the start of the American Revolution—has come and gone. It provided a historical peg on which Americans could both celebrate their forebears’ opposition to autocratic rule by authoritarian means and renew that same battle today in opposition to the monarchial ambitions and police-state tactics of Donald Trump. Some demonstrators did turn out in Revolutionary-era garb to protest on that day, but far more have assembled and marched, by the millions, on three other days during Trump’s first one hundred as our 47th president.
But that Lexington and Concord spirit—in particular, the speedy mobilization of patriots in response to unjust governmental incursion—was alive and well earlier this month, as residents of Acton, Massachusetts, just five miles down the road from Concord, gathered to protest and “discourage” the continuation of a government operation to arrest immigrants (the legal grounds for which tend to be somewhere between shaky and nonexistent).
Here’s a report from a longtime organizer and Acton resident:
ICE finally made its appearance in my home town of Acton MA yesterday [May 10th].
We mobilized a handful of verifiers, including me, and after a couple of immigrants were picked up at a housing court, enough of us reached the scene to discourage further arrests.
What is remarkable is the push back today [May 11th]. Several organizations ranging from Indivisible through the Democratic town committee sponsored a rally in front of the town hall. A crowd of some 250 persons came together on a few hours’ notice with handmade signs, improvised chants, rousing speakers including our state senator and our state representative (a formerly undocumented Brazilian migrant). We circulated flyers with information on the statewide LUCE hotline [LUCE is a Massachusetts-based immigrant advocacy group] to report ICE raids and train and mobilize verifiers to observe and investigate. The legislators reported on pro-immigrant bills that they were sponsoring.
What I sniffed in the air was the spirit of rebellion against tyranny that invoked the 250th anniversary of the battle of Concord Bridge at which a militia captain from Acton, Isaac Davis, was the first to fall. A commemorative plaque honoring him was right there. All the speakers invoked the spirit of the Minutemen determined to defend their entire community, including undocumented immigrants from Trump’s increasingly deranged assaults. And I felt something move in me and the crowd. We can’t know the outcome, but we know that there is no turning back.
The Acton emergency squad evokes memories not only of the Minutemen, but also of the widespread acts of resistance that occurred in Massachusetts and across Northern states during the 1850s in opposition to the efforts of slave hunters to seize escaped slaves and return them to Southern bondage. With the passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850, not just local governmental officials but all citizens of Northern states were legally required to help the hunters forcibly seize and return formerly enslaved Blacks (or free Blacks whom the hunters would mislabel as escapees) to whatever awaited them on the Southern concentration camps known as “plantations.”
So much for “states’ rights,” the doctrine that Southern propagandists after they’d lost the Civil War insisted was the cause for which the South fought. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, a Southern-controlled federal government could run roughshod over the anti-slavery statutes and norms of Northern states and threaten those who resisted the seizure of Blacks with federal prosecution.
But resist many Northerners—whites as well as Blacks—did. As I noted in a Prospect column seven years ago,
the North greeted the new law with fury and resistance. Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, and Wisconsin all enacted “personal liberty laws” … forbidding public officials from cooperating with the slave owners or the federal forces sent to back them up, denying the use of their jails to house the captives, and requiring jury trials to decide if the owners could make off with their abductees … Opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act also took to the streets (and jury rooms, where verdicts were rendered that freed some of the captives). Crowds would form to oppose and resist, sometimes forcibly, the apprehensions of African Americans.
According to H. Robert Baker, a historian at Georgia State University, whole sections of Milwaukee, Chicago, and Boston “became no-go zones for slave catchers.”
A kindred conflict to that of the 1850s is obviously with us today, as the Trump administration mobilizes and reassigns any number of federal agencies to the task of rounding up undocumented immigrants or anyone with suspicious tattoos (and suddenly, it now appears that all tattoos are suspicious), and as states and cities that have long depended on the work and good deeds of immigrants to keep them up and running attempt to resist.
However, as was not the case in the 1850s, states and cities now get a significant share of their funding from the federal government, which complicates the task of resistance. Moreover, by arresting and threatening judges and mayors opposed to these immigrant lock-ups and deportations, the Trump administration goes well beyond the actions of the pro-Southern presidents who governed during the 1850s. Then again, Trump’s chief enforcer, Stephen Miller, has been able to closely study the police-state tactics of authoritarian regimes in other lands and other times, a course of study not as readily available to the likes of Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan (our 1850s presidents).
But despite the neo-police-state abuses confronting America today, the Minutemen and -women of Acton have shown that the spirit of ’76 (well, ’75) and the commitment of the fugitive slave resisters of the 1850s (who went on to fight for the Union in the following decade) are still alive and kicking, and by no means need be limited to Acton. For those who heed and honor and seek to renew America’s revolutionary and egalitarian ideals, that’s very good news.
