On September 13, 1858, John Price, a farm laborer in his mid-20s, was kidnapped on a country road in northern Ohio. A posse of slave hunters organized by a Kentuckian named Anderson Jennings hustled him into a buggy and headed for nearby Wellington, where they planned to take the next train south. Their first stop would have been Columbus, where they expected to obtain a “certificate of removal” from a cooperative fugitive slave commissioner, authorizing them to return Price to slavery in Kentucky.
Fortunately, the abduction was witnessed by an Oberlin student named Ansel Lyman, who raced back to town and raised the alarm.
Hundreds of Oberliners, both black and white, quickly set off for Wellington, where they surrounded the kidnappers, who were holding their prisoner in a hotel near the railroad depot.
Charles Langston, an African-American leader of the Oberlin community, attempted to negotiate with Jennings, explaining that he had no chance of reaching the train station. The slave hunter was intransigent, relying on a rumor that federal troops had been summoned to break up the mob. Langston warned the Kentuckian that the Oberliners would never allow Price to be returned to slavery and ended the negotiation.
As the crowd became more agitated, two groups of Oberliners rushed the hotel. One of the groups was led by John Anthony Copeland, the subject of my book The "Colored Hero" of Harpers Ferry, who would join John Brown the following year in his attempt to free the slaves of Virginia. They knocked down Jennings and his men and carried Price to a waiting wagon – driven by young Simeon Bushnell – that bore him triumphantly to Oberlin.
Such open defiance was more than the pro-slavery Buchanan administration could tolerate. Indictments were issued against Langston and Bushnell, along with 35 others who had participated in the rescue to varying degrees, for violating the Fugitive Slave Act.
Langston and Bushnell were the first two defendants to face trial in the Cleveland federal court. The prosecutor referred to the defendants as “outraging the law of the land” and threatening to “tear down and annihilate the government of these United States.” The defense boldly replied that “slavery is like a canker” that must give way to “Higher Law.” The jury members, who had been hand-selected for their approval of the Fugitive Slave Act, did not take long to return the predictable convictions.
Bushnell, who was a white bookstore clerk, stood mute at sentencing. Langston, however, took full advantage of the platform and spoke to the nation.
He condemned the slave hunters as “lying hidden and skulking about” and he praised the fugitives “who had become free … by the exercise of their own God-given powers – by escaping from the plantations of their masters.”
Rebuking the court itself for racism, he expressed no contrition and virtually promised to continue rescuing fugitives.
“If ever a man is seized near me, and is about to be carried South,” he said, “I stand here to say that I will do all I can, for any man thus seized and held.”
The judge was moved by Langston’s eloquence, which led him to impose a less-than-maximum jail sentence and fine. Even more impressed was John Brown, who paid close attention to the trial, and later obtained Langston’s assistance recruiting two black Oberliners – Copeland and his relative Lewis Leary – for the raid on Harpers Ferry.
John Price was spirited to Canada by Copeland, where he was reported by Langston’s brother, John Mercer Langston, to repose “under his own vine and fig tree, with no one to make him afraid.”
Copeland and Leary arrived at Brown’s headquarters just a few days before the attack on Harper’s Ferry in October 1859. Leary died in the fighting; Copeland was captured and hanged.
[NOTE: This post is adapted from my article in The Conversation.]
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