Great meetings were held on Boston Common and in Tremont Temple to protest against this action, but they were of no avail. A year later, on the anniversary of the rendition of Sims, Phillips gave a thrilling address at the Melodeon. Looking towards the future, he said, "I know what civil war is.... And yet I do not know that, to an enlightened mind, a scene of civil war is any more sickening than the thought of a hundred and fifty years of slavery. Take the broken hearts, the bereaved mothers, the infant wrung from the hands of its parents, the husband and wife torn asunder, every right trodden under foot, the blighted hopes, the imbruted souls, the darkened and degraded millions, sunk below the level of intellectual life, melted in sensuality, herded with beasts, who have walked over the burning marl of Southern slavery to their graves, and where is the battle-field, however ghastly, that is not white--white as an angel's wing--compared with the blackness of that darkness which has brooded over the Carolinas for two hundred years?" Meantime, what had become of Sims? On arriving at Savannah he was severely whipped, and confined in a cell for two months. He was then sent to a slave-market at Charleston, and thence to another market at New Orleans. Finally he was purchased by a brick-mason, taken to Vicksburg, and in 1863 he escaped to the besieging army of Grant, and was given transportation to the North. Three years later, May 14, 1854, Anthony Burns, a slave, was arrested, and on June 2, marched through Court Street and State Street, over the ground where Crispus Attucks, a colored man, fell as the first victim in the Boston Massacre in the Revolution, to the wharf, in the centre of a concourse of people, guarded by companies of militia and protected by cannon. The streets were draped in black by the indignant citizens, and the bells tolled a dirge, as the bound slave was thrust into the hold of a vessel ready to start for Virginia. Burns was the last black man carried back to his masters from Massachusetts. Meantime, Wendell Phillips had been fighting other battles. In October, 1850, the first National Woman Suffrage Convention was held at Worcester, Mass. Nine States responded. Phillips spoke earnestly, but no full report of his address or of others was taken. The next year, 1851, at Worcester, he made a brilliant speech at the second National Woman Suffrage Convention. Of that speech, given in full in Mr. Phillips's "Speeches and Lectures" published in 1863, Mr. Curtis says, in his eulogy of Phillips: "In his general statement of principle nothing has been added to that discourse; in vivid and effective eloquence of advocacy it has never been surpassed."