1858 (29 page)

“Forward! Forward!” yelled Lincoln so loudly that dozens of people in the square heard him. The small vanguard of rescuers reached the third floor, and the attic room, in minutes, but did not rush in. The slave hunters and deputy marshal were heavily armed, with ample ammunition. The six might be killed or wounded. Lincoln thought for a minute and then led the men downstairs to the floor below the attic refuge. There, they broke into a guest room and piled bedding and furniture in the middle of the floor and pulled straw out of a mattress, preparing to burn out the men above them.

Events were happening quickly. A second group of rescuers, led by thirty-one-year-old bearded black freedman John Scott, broke down the back door of the hotel and confronted owner Wadsworth and two others. One of Scott’s men yelled, “The first Democrat that keeps us from going up the stairs I will shoot.” He meant it, too, and aimed a revolver at one of the men and fired. Scott, panicky that someone would be killed, managed to hit his arm as he pulled the trigger and the bullet missed the man and smashed into the ceiling.

Scott and his band rushed up the staircase. Lincoln, hearing them downstairs, met up with them and both groups proceeded to the attic room. Richard Winsor, sporting his traditional goatee and moustache, was inside, trying to comfort Price, who now realized that he might be freed. The docile slave begged Winsor to get him back to Oberlin or to Canada; he did not want to go back to slavery. Winsor slipped a note out of the open stovepipe near the door to let Lincoln know that the door was held fast by just a rope on the other side.

“If you don’t open this door, I will [shove] my gun through it and shoot you,” Lincoln yelled. The men in the hallway pulled on the door and it opened slightly. Lincoln stuck his gun through the opening and crashed it down on the head of slave hunter Jennings, who was trying to push the door shut. As Jennings fell, he let go of the rope that held the door. The eleven rescuers burst into the room and began to grapple with those inside. Several men who had been climbing the ladder jumped into the room through the window. Winsor, thinking quickly, placed Price behind him, holding him with his arms, and rushed out of the room as the armed men in the hallway ran in.
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By now, hearing the noise of a gunshot and fighting, dozens of other men, several brandishing weapons, had charged into the hotel and began to climb the stairs. Winsor and another man placed Price on the shoulders of the first men on the staircase; they passed him downward on their shoulders, flight by flight, and eventually to the lobby. Winsor and the men there brought Price out of the building as the melee in the room continued; no one engaged in the fist fight was even aware that Price was gone.
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Those in the room were scared. “Good many got through the window. Don’t know how many. Ten or fifteen at least. Others come in at the door. They crowded all around John and moved towards the door. I made no demonstration to fight at all,” said the clearly rattled slave catcher Anderson Jennings.
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Outside, shouts of jubilation went up as Winsor suddenly emerged from the hotel with the runaway. The buggy that John Scott had driven to Wellington from Oberlin was waiting in the square, close to the porch of the hotel. Simeon Bushnell was driving it. Winsor pushed Price into the buggy and climbed in next to him. The crowd parted as the trio sped out of Wellington and headed north for Oberlin, Price smiling but still worried, Bushnell urging his horse to trot faster, and Winsor, a wide smile on his face, lifting both arms into the air in triumph.
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Throughout the evening all of the rescuers returned on horseback or in buggies and wagons, proud that they had worked together to prevent a man’s return to slavery. They celebrated in the homes of neighbors, in dorms at the college, on streets, and on the village green.

Winsor celebrated, too, but first he brought John Price to the home of Calvin Fairchild in Oberlin. Fairchild was against slavery but was not a member of the Underground Railroad and not one of the fiery public advocates for the antislavery cause in town. If federal marshals came searching for John Price, the home of Fairchild would be the last place they would look.

There was joy and relief in Oberlin. The members of the Underground Railroad had done their job again, this time very publicly, and the whole community was proud of them. For Price’s rescuers, the incident was over. For the federal government, it was not. The abolitionists wanted to make a public example of John Price? Then the federal government was going to make an example out of them.

Price’s rescue was not new. The first successful recorded escape was by a slave from Albany, New York, who left his farm in 1705 and fled to Canada, where he was given refuge. By the 1760s, on the eve of the American Revolution, thousands of slaves were escaping from their owners each year; in 1760 alone there were more than nine hundred ads for runaways in Southern newspapers. Despite severe punishment for the runaways who were caught, tens of thousands of slaves continued to flee over the years.

Slaves made it to the homes or businesses of men and women, black and white, who hid them during the day and transported them by carriage, wagon, and horse by night to the next community on the trek to safe cities in the North or to Canada. Those who aided the runaways were sometimes beaten and sometimes shot. Some were killed. Others were given stiff prison terms lasting up to four years. The Underground Railroad workers had established well-run networks by the 1820s. A slave could be moved from Virginia to Canada, by land or sea, in just a few weeks. One of the most efficient railroads was in Ohio, with twenty routes and over two hundred safe houses.

Despite these efforts, slave catchers apprehended many fugitives and returned them to their plantations. Sometimes groups of Northerners prevented them by staging public rescues. These had taken place since 1851, and by 1858 there had been at least one each year.

All of the rescues of captured slaves by mobs in Northern states received substantial coverage in both the mainstream newspapers and abolitionist journals, but no rescue in American history would receive the media coverage that the freeing of John Price did in the autumn of 1858. No rescue would have as much impact on the nation, either. It was a rescue that would grow from a single, widely publicized incident into a much larger one and, by the time the story was over, would push millions of fence-sitters on the slavery question into the radical camp, reenergize the abolitionist movement that had been weakened by the
Dred Scott
decision of 1857, and dramatically affect American politics.

On the day following the rescue of John Price, as the slave hid in the home of Fairchild, deputy marshal Jacob Lowe was back in town, walking through the public square, stopping in stores and visiting the college campus, questioning everyone he could find. So was federal marshal Matthew Johnson, who had arrived from Cleveland. He sought out the town’s proslavery residents, among them merchant Chauncey Wack and postmaster Edward F. Munson, and peppered them with questions about townspeople who might have been involved in the rescue.

Within weeks, Cleveland’s Democratic-leaning
Plain Dealer
reported that a federal investigation of the Oberlin rescue was underway, targeting the men who freed Price, and that they were going to be “immediately prosecuted.”
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Shortly afterward, federal district judge Hiram V. Willson impaneled a grand jury to consider evidence in the Oberlin case. Every single member of the grand jury was a Democrat, and it even included Lewis Boynton, the father of the teenager who lured Price to his kidnappers.

Judge Willson was biased against the Oberlin and Wellington men from the start. He told the grand jury that their job was to simply decide if the men who freed Price had violated the fugitive slave law. It was not to decide whether their views on slavery were right or wrong. They were now referred to in the press as the “Rescuers,” with a capital
R
to honor their national notoriety as a group. Willson added that while the Rescuers were obsessed with fighting for the rights of their own property and beliefs, they had no regard for the property and beliefs of others. Their antislavery feelings were religious but wrong, he said. He told the jurors that it was “a sentiment semi-religious in its development, and is almost invariably characterized by intolerance and bigotry. The leaders of those who acknowledge its obligations and advocate its sanctity are like the subtle prelates of the dark ages. They are versed in all they consider useful and sanctified learning—trained in certain schools in New England to manage words, they are equally successful in the social circle to manage hearts.”
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Willson and many others believed all abolitionists such as the Rescuers were simply too strident. Most Americans opposed to slavery were willing to work with Southerners so that over the years slavery might be eliminated. The abolitionists, though, wanted that elimination right now. Many Northerners saw that all-or-nothing approach as unreasonable and often obnoxious. Perhaps some time behind bars would chasten the whole bunch of them.
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The grand jury, reportedly made up of men who loathed abolitionists, heard witnesses over a period of two months and on December 6, 1858, handed down indictments against thirty-seven Rescuers, twenty-five from Oberlin and twelve from Wellington. There would have been even more indictments, but witnesses could not identify many of those in Wellington that day.

Those indicted represented a broad spectrum of American life. They included a bookseller/printer, a clerk, a carpenter, two cabinetmakers, two lawyers, a harness maker, a book and shoe merchant, two cobblers, six farmers, and a doctor. They included Ansel Lyman, who alerted the town to the abduction, William Lincoln, who led the assault on the front door of the hotel, John Scott, who led the charge on the rear entrance, and Richard Winsor, who spirited Price out of the room. Many of the indicted men were black.
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Among the several professors named was Henry Peck, who had not even been there. It was Peck, though, who became the focus of the media stories because of his previous political activities, in which he campaigned for Republicans on platforms filled with men armed with muskets to strike a radical note. “Wonder if the Professor will be found on said platform now, with his musketeers about him ready for the fray?” the reporter for the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
mocked, adding that “he may shut up his college for a few days and not only come into court himself, but bring his students and his
shades
with him.”
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Controversy arose immediately. All of the men indicted were Republicans and many were leaders of the area’s Underground Railroad. Why wasn’t Norris Woods, a Democrat, indicted, questioned the local newspapers. It was Woods, after all, who tried to climb up the ladder that day. Why were James Fitch and Ralph Plumb indicted? Like Peck, they did not even go to Wellington that day.

The next afternoon, half the Oberlin Rescuers arrived by train in Cleveland for their arraignment. The rest of the men from Oberlin and those who lived in Wellington—except for eight—were arraigned separately over that week.
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Seven of those indicted were runaway slaves themselves; they fled. Four others, including black freedman John Copeland, disappeared. William Lincoln, who led the assault on the hotel, was on spring break from college and agreed to turn himself in later. That morning, the Rescuers procured the services of two of the best lawyers in Ohio, Rufus Spalding, the former speaker of the Ohio state legislature, and Albert Gallatin Riddle, former county prosecutor and state legislator. They added a third attorney, Seneca Griswold, a thirty-five-year-old Oberlin graduate. The trio, all fierce antislavery advocates, worked for free.
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The Rescuers were released on their own recognizance and told to return for a trial in March. The Rescuers and dozens of other townspeople in Oberlin held a victory dinner on January 11, 1859, at the Palmer House, whose roof was still covered with snow from an earlier storm. The event was jokingly nicknamed the “Felons’ Feast.”
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At the Palmer House, following some levity, several men who gave speeches or read letters mailed to them from others warned that the federal government’s prosecution of the Oberlin Rescuers might lead to serious national events. It was the first time that civil war had been discussed in Ohio. In a letter, local attorney Stevenson Burke said he could not tell the purpose of the prosecution by the “ruling madmen” and said with great passion, “Nor can I tell what further sacrifices it may yet become necessary for the lovers of freedom to make, to render our own beloved and beautiful Ohio—indeed, and in truth the land of the free and the home of the brave—to deliver our people from the demoralizing spectacle of slave catching and slave hunting in our midst—to render it safe for the humanely disposed among us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or relieve the distressed, without fear of government spies or running the risk of fines, forfeitures, and prison bars and bolts.”