Political Career
In 1850 Gardner, politically a Whig, was elected to the Boston City Council, serving until 1853. He then became involved with the Know Nothing movement, winning election as governor of Massachusetts by a wide margin. In line with the nativist and anti-Catholic politics of the movement, Gardner proposed an amendment to the Massachusetts state constitution banning appropriations of tax funds to Catholic schools, which was passed by the state legislature and ratified after it was approved by referendum.
Before Gardner's election, on May 24, 1854 Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Edward G. Loring, a Suffolk County probate judge who also as served U.S. commissioner of the Circuit Court in Massachusetts, ordered that Burns be forced back into slavery in Virginia, outraging abolitionists and the increasingly antislavery public in Massachusetts. Under the pressure of a public petition campaign spearheaded by William Lloyd Garrison, the legislature passed two Bills of Address calling for Judge Loring to be removed from his state office, in 1855 and 1856, but in both cases Gardner declined to remove Loring. (A third Bill of Address to remove Loring from office was later approved by Gardner's Republican successor, Nathaniel Prentice Banks.)
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