Sanborn was nearly kidnapped, Louisa May Alcott informed a friend. Great ferment in town. Annie Whiting immortalized herself by getting into the kidnapper's carriage so that they could not put the long legged martyr in. One of the rascals grabbed her and said, Get out. I won't, said Annie. I'll tear your clothes. Tear away, they said. We'll whip up the horses and make them run away if you dont get out. So Let them run to the devil, I won't stir. The smart little woman didn't budge until the riot was over. Sanborn's schoolboys rushed about like heroes.

After so long an interval, Sanborn wrote of it, with no effort at arresting me, I had fairly concluded the Senate officials had given up their idea of taking me to Washington. This they would have done, had they been wise. But on the evening of April 3rd, after I had been out making calls in the village of Concord, and was sitting quietly in my study on the first floor, after nine o'clock, my door-bell rang. Julia had gone to bed. Sarah was in her room. Without anticipating any harm, I went down into the front hall in my robe and answered the bell. A young man presented himself, and handed me a note, which I stepped back to read by the light of the hall lamp. It said the bearer was a person deserving charity. I am satisfied that he would be so before he ever got away from Concord that night.

When I looked up from reading the note, Sanborn continued, four men had entered my hall. One of them came forward and layed his hand on me, saying, I arrest you. I said, By what authority? If you have a warrant read it, for I will not go with you unless you show your warrant. He began to read the order of the Senate for my arrest. Sarah, who had feared, as I did not, what this visit meant, now rushed down the stairs, opened the other door of the hall, and began to cry out to the neighbors. Seeing they were likely to be interrupted in their mission, my five callers slipped a pair of handcuffs on my wrists and forced me from the house.

I was young and strong, Sanborn wrote, and I resented this indignity. They had to lift me and carry me to the door, where my sister stood, screaming. I braced my feet against the doorposts and delayed them. I did the same at the posts of the veranda. The church bells were ringing a fire alarm, the people were gathering by tens. I braced my feet against the stone posts of the gateway, checking their progress once more. When the four rascals lifted me to insert me, feet foremost, in their covered hack, an anxious driver on the box, I braced myself against the sides of the carriage door and broke them in. They then realized it was my unfettered feet that made all this trouble, so one of the four grasped my feet and brought them together, so that I could no longer use them in resistance.

God Almighty's tongs, a farmer had called Sanborn's long legs when he'd first seen the schoolmaster striding over a stage, performing in one of Louisa May Alcott's plays. Those long legs served Sanborn well now.

They got me into the hack only as far as my knees, he reported, when my sister, darting forward, grasped the long beard of my footman and pulled with so much force he lost his grasp. My feet felt the ground again, outside the carriage. A great crowd had collected, among them Colonel Whiting and his daughter Annie. With his stout cane, the Colonel began to beat the horses. My bearers were left a rod or two behind the hack into which they had not been able to force me. Still they held me, hatless and in my evening slippers, in the street in front of my house.

At that moment, Sanborn said, my counsel, J.S. Keyes, appeared by my side, asking if I petitioned for a writ of Habeas Corpus. By all means, I told him. Keyes hurried over to Judge Hoar's house. Hearing the tumult, and suspecting what it was, he had already begun filling out a writ of personal replevin. In less than ten minutes, the writ was in the hands of Concord's deputy sheriff, John Moore, who made the formal demand on my captors to surrender their prisoner. Stupidly, they refused. So the sherrif called on the 150 men and women present to act as his posse comitatus, which some twenty of the men gladly did, and I was forcibly snatched from senatorial custody. At the same time, my Irish neighbors rushed upon them and forced them to take to their broken carriage, and make off toward Lexington, the way they had come. They were pursued by twenty or thirty of my townsmen, some of them as far as Lexington.

I was committed to the custody of Captain George L. Prescott, Sanborn remembered, and spent the night in his house, armed, for my better defense, with a six-shooter, which Mr. Bull, the inventor of the Concord grape and then chairman of the Selectmen, had insisted I should take. I slept peacefully all the rest of that night.

John S. Keyes, John Andrew, Samuel Sewall, and Robert Treat Paine came together to act as legal counsel on Sanborn’s behalf. The next day, on April 4^th, they went before Herman Melville’s father-in-law, Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw.

The courtroom was filled with my Concord and Boston friends, Sanborn remembered, including the always elegant Mr. Wendell Phillips and, in his workingman's outfit, Mr. Walt Whitman.

Whitman later said he had been at the hearing specifically to help rescue Sanborn, had it become necessary. There were plenty others, Whitman said, who’d also come to take action should the trial go wrong. With him were Whitman's publishers, Charles Thayer and William Eldridge, at whose store an abolitionist society called the Black Strings were known to meet. Another of their authors, James Redpath, whose biography of John Brown was one of the firm’s most popular books, was there, too. The journalist Richard Hinton, who had recommended Leaves of Grass to Thayer and Eldridge, was also there. The blue-eyed firebrand William Douglas O'Connor, to whom the firm had paid an advance on a forthcoming antislavery novel titled Harrington, was there. And there, at the back of the room, on a high stool, sat the tall, gray-bearded Whitman, in a loose jacket and an open shirt. Sanborn would remember Whitman's intense eyes under the shaggy eyebrows, scanning the courtroom.

Judge Shaw declared that no one but an officer of the Senate had the legal authority to undertake such an arrest as had just been attempted. That was that. Sanborn returned to Concord a hero, lauded by Higginson, Thoreau, Alcott, and Emerson at a spontaneous homecoming celebration held at Town Hall. Thoreau's remarks were greeted with applause and laughter when he said, -- The government ought to have arrested slave kidnappers, not Mr. Sanborn!

I don't remember what was going on when last I wrote, Louisa May Alcott wrote a friend on April 5th. But this last Tuesday night we had here a new sort of amusement called kidnapping. I'm so full of wrath over it, I don't dare unbottle myself for fear of the explosive consequences. I was not in the fray, but am to serve on a Vigilance Committee, so I will have my share to do in future combats.

You have seen by the papers, Sanborn now wrote his mother, the state of affairs in my case. We have entirely defeated the outrageous purpose of the ruffians who came to seize me. I will remain in Concord, and pursue my duties, feeling very little apprehension for the future. The people defended me, and will again. George Walker and other friends of mine are here today. I will be suing for damages the four ruffians who are being held to bail for my kidnapping. I will build my new schoolhouse out of their money.

No further effort was made to arrest me, Sanborn wrote later, the time and manner of my seizure having put the public opinion of Massachusetts wholly on my side. Boston's citizens presented Sarah, lately celebrated, quite a lioness, with a handsome revolver in recognition of her tact and courage. I gained extraordinary notoriety, becoming popular in quarters where I had not been known before.

Whitman was highly visible in Boston. He'd come, March through May, to correct proofs for a new edition of Leaves of Grass. In mid-March he strolled with Emerson for two hours under the giant Elms on Tremont and Beacon Streets. Emerson tried to persuade Whitman not to publish his Children of Adam poems, which Whitman had provided to him either in manuscript form or in proofs. The more Emerson argued against their publication, the more adamant Whitman became in their defense. -- I told him I only felt more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory, Whitman wrote, -- and to exemplify it. Whereupon we went and had a good dinner at the American house.

Emerson secured temporary reading privileges at the Boston Athenaeum for one W. Whitman, of Brooklyn. When he wasn't there or at the Stereotype Foundry, Whitman strutted up and down busy Washington Street. He found Boston striking for its seeming so progressive while being so straitlaced. Everybody here is so like everybody else, he wrote. But I am Walt Whitman!

Emerson would tell me years later, Sanborn said, that when Whitman had come to Boston in the spring of 1860, Emerson had asked Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell whether or not he should invite Whitman to the Saturday Club. They had declared no wish to meet him, so he was not asked. I remembered that Alcott, Emerson, and Thoreau all wished to invite Whitman to Concord, but Mrs. Alcott, Mrs. Emerson, and Sophia Thoreau were not willing to have him. So the invitation wasn't given.

Abraham Lincoln was enmeshed in a four-way race pitting him against John Bell of Tennessee, John Breckinridge of Kentucky, and Stephen Douglas of Illinois. Lincoln campaigned as a plain and honest man devoted only to preserving the Union, as opposed to, say, President Buchanan and all the nation’s Democrats.

On May 18th, at their convention in Chicago, the Republicans chose Lincoln to be their candidate for the office of President.

I sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad! sang Walt Whitman.