1858 (27 page)

Forney never forgave the president for casting him aside and spent the rest of his life castigating Buchanan in the columns of his newspapers, speeches, and later in his memoirs. His criticism was relentless. The loquacious Forney, with an acidic sense of humor, became a popular speaker at dinner parties, outdoor festivals, and barbecues and regaled crowds by telling them, “We were all working to make J. B. president for twenty-five years before we got him in [long pause] and a pretty mess we made of it!”
³⁵⁷

Worst of all, from the White House point of view, Forney spent much of 1858 blasting the administration over its Kansas policy. Buchanan denounced Forney and took away some government advertising from his journals. Forney used the White House assaults to present himself to the public as a maligned victim of a savage witch hunt. “It was a dark hour…instantly, the whole government power was organized against us. Everybody who sympathized with us in office was removed. The press…was the target of merciless abuse. Our subscribers dropped off like leaves in October. My heart sank under the pressure, but we were right and that carried us through.”
³⁵⁸

Forney told his followers that he had met the same fate as Stephen Douglas and others who disagreed with Buchanan; he was ostracized. Forney warned Democrats throughout 1858 that Buchanan’s petty party politics would only result in Republican victories at the polls in the autumn.

Forney called Buchanan and his men “traitors” to the Democratic Party. In blistering editorials and speeches throughout the fall of 1858, he accused Buchanan of “petty proscriptions which village politicians would despise and which honorable men would laugh at.” He added of the president’s campaign against him that “this transaction proved not so much the prejudice of my old friend, Buchanan, as it did his littleness.”
³⁵⁹

Following his letter to Baker early in the year, Buchanan appeared to have forgotten John Forney and their dispute. But Forney did not forget. Now, as the political campaigns began in the fall of 1858, two years after their acrimonious parting, Forney, through his newspaper, speeches, and friends, had become a major player in the Democratic Party and a national figure in his own right. Newspapers began referring to the Northern wing of the organization as the “party of Douglas and Forney.” And now, as election day approached, Forney had a plan to exact terrible revenge against his former friend in the White House.
³⁶⁰

Chapter Ten

On a chilly winter evening in January 1856, slave John Price fled his Kentucky farm on horseback with two other slaves. They reached Brown County, Ohio, after a dangerous crossing of the swirling Ohio River near the town of Ripley. Price—a stout, five-feet-eight-inch tall man in his twenties with a deformed left foot—and his companions met a Quaker on the Ohio side of the river that night. The Quaker turned out to be a member of the Underground Railroad, which consisted of intricately connected routes in Ohio and other Northern states followed by slaves who had fled their plantations. There were hundreds of them that took runaways to cities in the Northern states, where they moved in with members of the black community or to Canada, where slavery had been outlawed earlier in the century. The slaves’ rescuer moved Price and his friends to Oberlin, a small, quiet town of tree-lined streets that surrounded a village green in the northern part of the state that was home to Oberlin College. Many of its professors were staunch abolitionists. Two of them, James Monroe and Henry Peck, were also among the most active Underground Railroad leaders in Ohio; Monroe was a state legislator.
³⁶¹

There, the trembling runaways found an integrated, liberal-thinking village of 2,250 residents that had prided itself for years on protecting fugitive slaves. Oberlin was one of several dozen “utopian” communities founded in the early 1830s where devoted religious people could live and work in harmony free from racism and economic strife. These towns reflected the new religious ideal of Protestant sects, particularly the Presbyterians, that men and women had to lead moral lives in addition to worshipping God in order to be saved. That meant integrated residential villages and schools, such as Oberlin College, with its eight hundred students, the centerpiece of the town. It was one of the few integrated colleges—men and women, blacks and whites—in the country.
³⁶²

Blacks had lived in Oberlin since 1835, when the community formed one of the first antislavery societies in Ohio; 230 residents were members.
³⁶³

In 1853, the community even assumed the responsibility for the medical care of Lee Dobbins, a frail four-year-old slave child who was too ill to travel by the time he and his mother reached the community during their escape from a Southern plantation. The town’s doctors and nurses did all they could, but the child died a month later. His funeral was attended by over two thousand residents in a very public display of the area’s hatred of slavery. More than a dozen runaway slaves lived in town by 1858. For these reasons, and because his health was poor when he arrived, John Price decided to reside in Oberlin and not to travel on to Canada.

Price, however, with few skills beyond those of a farmer, had floundered. He had been unable to make enough money to pay rent, so the local townspeople cared for him as a pauper. He had roomed in different houses, rent free, for a year. Price worked for a dollar a day harvesting crops in nearby farms in good weather; he performed odd jobs around town in the winter. He felt bad that he was depending on the charity of others and let everyone in Oberlin know that they should contact him if there was any work to be done so he could earn money for his own rent.

He was working at the farm of Lewis Boynton just north of Oberlin on September 13, 1858, a crisp autumn day. The farmer had hired him to pick potatoes. Boynton’s teenage son Shakespeare picked Price up in a buggy at the home of his black freedman farmer landlord late in the morning. The two drove away, intent on reaching the Boynton farm by lunchtime. Shortly after noon, just as they had driven across the Oberlin town line, Shakespeare Boynton started to slow down as he spotted another buggy following them on the roadway, its horse trotting at a rapid clip after them, kicking up clouds of dust on the highway. John Price, cleaning his teeth with a pocket knife and casually looking out at the woods and farmland they passed, paid no attention to what was going on.

A moment later, the second buggy, carrying two slave hunters from Kentucky, Samuel Davis and Richard Mitchell, and Jacob Lowe, a deputy marshal in Oberlin whom they brought along for protection, caught up to the slowly moving carriage. Lowe had the writs and papers of Davis and Mitchell that gave them permission to bring Price back to his plantation south of the Ohio River.
³⁶⁴
The teenager, who turned out to be an accessory to the plot, brought his vehicle to a halt. Two of the three men in the other buggy jumped out, shouting, grabbed a startled Price and pulled him into their carriage.
³⁶⁵

The men held on to Price and told him they would return him to his owner. They were headed for Wellington, a nearby town with a train station. They planned to wait at a hotel and then board the 5:13 p.m. train south to Columbus, Ohio, and from there take Price back to Kentucky. A short time later their buggy passed two Oberlin College students, Ansel Lyman and Seth Bartholomew, on their way back to the campus. Price cried out for help but the two young men did not seem to hear him.

Hoping that the two men they passed on the road did not understand that Price had been kidnapped, the three slave hunters drove to Wellington at a leisurely pace and took a room at the Wadsworth Hotel. A handsomely designed three-story building with wide, columned porches on the first and second floors that faced the town’s sizable public square, the hotel was located just three doors down from one of the community’s churches. A bar and restaurant on the first floor were favorite dining and drinking spots for the town’s residents; the porch and half dozen trees in front provided shade in the summertime. The slave hunters had a fourth accomplice, Anderson Jennings, who was on his way from Oberlin. Jennings, a neighbor of the farmer who had owned John Price, was in the area to capture a runaway of his own and decided to go after Price, too.

At the same time that the three kidnappers and Price were eating lunch at the Wadsworth Hotel, telling their waitress that jittery Price was a business colleague, the two young college students they passed on the highway arrived back in Oberlin. Ansel Lyman began to walk briskly through town, looking for leaders of the antislavery movement, of which there were many. In hurried conversations, Lyman told men he knew that John Price had been abducted and was probably headed toward Wellington. Word spread quickly. The men whom Lyman told about the abduction ran to stores and homes to tell others. Those men fanned out through the community to alert anyone they could find. One man, Simeon Bushnell, a thirty-two-year-old, short, bearded, talkative printer, burst into the local bookstore owned by James Fitch and yelled at the customers there, including Fitch and Oberlin professor Henry Peck, “They have carried off one of our men in broad daylight and are an hour on their way already.”

Someone else in the stored yelled, “They can’t have him!”

The people in the store rushed into the street, where other angry towns-people were gathering and shouting that John Price had to be rescued.

Resident Artemas Halbert said that many men began looking for guns. “Simeon Bushnell...was talking to Oliver Wall. One of them said they ought not to go without a gun and the other said he knew where he could get a gun,” Halbert said, adding that when he reached Wellington he saw numerous men armed with revolvers.
³⁶⁶

Within minutes, word of the kidnapping spread throughout the town and to the campus of the college. Dozens of men arrived in the town center, running and walking, in front of John Scott’s store on South Main Street. There were no speeches, just the repetition of the story. Men then ran to procure weapons. Some jumped on their horses and others into their buggies and wagons. Many commandeered wagons from townspeople or farmers in the village after explaining the urgency of the moment. Bushnell carried a gun and told others thinking of going to Wellington that they had no business there without a gun.
³⁶⁷