Secret Six and others are indicted for plotting to free Anthony Burns.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, Theodore Parker, John Phillips, Frank Sanborn, and Martin Stowell, and others are brought to trial on April 3, 1855. During the trial, Parker defends himself and the others by attacking the immorality of slavery in a 200-page defense that he later publishes. The judge, Fugitive Slave Commissioner Benjamin Curtis, rules that the charges against the men are invalid because of faulty language in the indictment on April 14, 1854. A petition to remove Judge Loring, who issued the indictments, succeeds in 1858.