Roth discusses the trial of Anthony Burns, the last escaped slave in the United States to be returned to the South under the Fugitive Slave Act, which is reenacted each week in Boston's federal courthouse for middle and high school students. Acting as state senators, the students grappled with the laws and mores of mid-nineteenth-century America and how different the country's moral landscape was before the Civil War. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 led to the kidnapping of black people on the streets of northern cities and returned to captivity, which created a backlash of abolitionist activity and the passage of new personal liberty laws in the North.
