Meanwhile an incident in Boston was used to arouse a feeling against him. On the evening of the 24th of May Anthony Burns was seized there as a fugitive slave, on the claim of a citizen of Virginia, and detained by the marshal in a room of the Court-House. In the course of the evening of the 26th, immediately after a meeting at Faneuil Hall, addressed by Abolitionists, the Court-House was attacked by a number of citizens, and in the defence, James Batchelder, one of the guard, was killed. The report of his death caused a great sensation at Washington. It was received while the impression of Mr. Sumner's midnight speech was still fresh, and was at once attributed to that effort. Mr. Sumner was treated as responsible for this act, and the official organs of the Administration openly denounced him as "murderer." It was predicted in the speech that the bill would "scatter dragons' teeth," which he was assured would "fructify in civil strife and feud"; but plainly there was nothing to suggest or excite violence, even if at the time the speech had been known in Boston, as it was not. It was concluded on the morning of the 26th of May, at too late an hour for the telegraph, and in fact was not known in Boston until it reached there by mail on the 27th; but Batchelder was killed on the previous evening. And yet, in the face of these unquestionable facts, there was a cry against Mr. Sumner. The _Union_, which was the official organ, thus broke forth on the morning of May 30th. "Boston in arms against the Constitution, and an Abolition fanatic, the distant leader, safe from the fire and the fagot he invokes from his seat in the Senate of the United States, _giving the command_. Men shot down in the faithful discharge of duty to a law based upon a constitutional guaranty, and _the word which encourages the assassin_ given by a man who has sworn on the Holy Evangelists and in the presence of his Maker to support the Constitution of the country. But our Charles Sumner tells us that a new era has been inaugurated, ... that the Constitution shall not be obeyed, and that Slavery shall at all and every hazard be uprooted and destroyed, in spite of all that has been pledged and written in other days." The _Star_, another organ of the Administration, repeated the imputations of the _Union_, in a long article, of which the following is a specimen. "If Southern gentlemen are threatened and assaulted, while legally seeking to obtain possession of property for the use of which they have a solemn constitutional guaranty, if legal rights can only be sought for and established at the bayonet's point, _certain Northern men now in our midst_ will have to evince a little more circumspection than they have ever evinced in their walk, talk, and acts.