Bacon was a wealthy man—worth at least twice as much as Jennings—but he had never invested his money in slaves. The two he owned were part of an inheritance from his father, and after they ran off, he never bought any others. Perhaps that had to do with the humiliating circumstances under which he lost his slaves—the naïveté, arrogance, or sheer stupidity of leaving them alone. Even worse, the escapes could never be just his own sorry business—because of his neglect, the whole community had reason for alarm. When one slave ran away, others were bound to get ideas and follow. It was as if Bacon had introduced a contagion into his neighbors’ homes. Just a few years earlier a distinguished New Orleans physician announced his discovery of drapetomania, “the disease causing Negroes to run away.” According to Dr. Samuel Cartwright, such cases required one of two treatments: humane living conditions for slaves, or the unrelenting use of the whip.25
But a third cure existed for Southerners like Bacon. Nothing would stop the spread of the running-away disease like capturing the fugitives. That was surely worth five hundred dollars, more than twenty times the average reward for a slave. Bacon wanted John Price back in Kentucky. “He is still my property,” he said. “Never parted with my interest in him. He is still mine, bone and flesh.”26
IN THE DAYS AFTER Jennings left Oberlin, the town slowly returned to its familiar rhythms. Fall classes were starting at the college, and tradesmen like O.S.B. Wall were catching up on their work. Still, reminders of the evils of slavery were everywhere. Newspapers were reporting that a naval brig, the Dolphin, had captured an illegal slave ship bound for Cuba, a mere three hours from port. On East College Street in Oberlin, stories about the Dolphin would have been of immediate interest. Generations of shoemakers’ apprentices spent their days reading the newspaper aloud while the shoemakers cut, sewed, and lasted. O.S.B. Wall’s apprentice, Charles Jones, had himself been born in Africa and most likely been brought illegally to the United States, some forty years after the 1808 ban of the Atlantic slave trade.27
When Jennings appeared in Oberlin once again, this time accompanied by a second Southerner, abolitionists like O.S.B. Wall knew that they were facing imminent crisis. In his dustcoat and top hat, Wall did not have to go far to find people to talk to about the slave-catchers. A block down East College Street at the corner with Main was the town’s respectable hotel, the Palmer House, and just next to it was a whitewashed wood-frame building where his brother-in-law kept his law office. Just a short way back past the shoe shop, Langston and Wall’s sister Caroline lived in the house O.S.B. Wall had traded them, a two-story saltbox with a low veranda across the front, one of Oberlin’s finest.28
Although Langston was often away on business in early September 1858, Caroline was not alone with their three children, Arthur, Ralph, and baby Chinque, named for the hero of the Amistad slave revolt. Langston’s brother Charles was visiting from Columbus, where for years the black community had been feeling constant pressure from slave-catchers. Down in Columbus, rumors circulated that Southern sympathizers were writing up descriptions of the blacks they passed on the streets and swearing fugitive slave warrants out on them, even if they had always been free. Charles Langston was a forty-year-old schoolteacher, slightly built with a meticulous part in his hair that emphasized his fragile features, but he was capable of breathing fire over the threats to liberty. “I have long since adopted as my God, the freedom of the colored people of the United States, and my religion, to do any thing that will effect that object,” he declared, “however much it may differ from the precepts taught in the Bible.”29
Oberlin’s blacks braced themselves for the worst. Wall had been raised by Quakers, but the idea that he, his wife, and their children could be kidnapped and taken south—and that the government and courts had every incentive to abet such a crime—was enough to drive him to contemplate violence. Oberlin’s blacks started keeping shotguns, rifles, revolvers, and knives at home and at work, in their pockets, over their doors, and by their beds. A local blacksmith kept his firearms within reach, as well as his hammer and a sharpened poker kept searing hot in the forge. “If any one of those men darkens my door, he is a dead man,” he said, a sentiment that was widely shared. “Kill a man? No. But kill a man-stealer? Yes! Quicker’n a dog.”30
THE SUN DAWNED SLOWLY on the northern edge of Oberlin. Amid the shadows, a young man stood outside a lonely shack stuck between the town and the country, a temporary home for a local charity case. Hungry, coughing, John Price wrapped himself in a blanket but still shivered in the autumn chill. He walked with a limp. A distant sound reached through daybreak’s stillness—a horse pulling a cart. As it drew closer, Price recognized the boy at the reins. It was Shakespeare Boynton. In better days Price had worked on the Boynton family farm about three miles outside Oberlin.31
The thirteen-year-old asked Price if he wanted to work that morning digging potatoes. At the very least, Shakespeare said, John would get a “good ride” out of it. The man heaved himself into the cart, and together they rode along the dirt roads northeast of Oberlin. Shakespeare drove slowly. Price took a jackknife from his pocket and started picking his teeth.
A mile or so out of town, a small black carriage appeared in the distance, kicking up a high column of dust. By the time Price noticed it minutes later, it was only a few rods away. A man jumped into the cart while it was moving and put his arm around Price. A second man screamed at him to give over his jackknife. He held on to it for an instant but dropped it in the dust when he saw the man reaching for a revolver.
“Bring him along!” cried a third man, holding the reins of the carriage.
“I’ll go with you” was all Price could say. In an instant he was in the back of the carriage. One of the men who grabbed him sat to the side, hand in coat pocket. The carriage hurtled forward, while Shakespeare turned his cart around and headed back into Oberlin.
If John had hoped the boy would sound the alarm, he was disappointed. Shakespeare headed straight to Wack’s Tavern, where Jennings was waiting. On word that his men had John in their hands, Jennings took out his roll of bills and peeled off a twenty. “Good money,” the boy later said.32
Five days of planning was all it had taken once Jennings got back to Oberlin. Five days to spring the trap. He had returned to Oberlin in the dark of night on Wednesday, September 8. Richard Mitchell, the man Bacon had sent north, was waiting for him at the tavern. Mitchell handed over the power of attorney papers but warned Jennings that Dayton, the U.S. marshal, would have nothing to do with capturing John Price—no doubt frightened by what had happened in Painesville. The next morning they worked out their plan. Capturing Price at night was too dangerous—someone could take a shot at them and never get caught. It would have to be during the day, and out of town. If they could whisk John away from Oberlin, it would be smooth sailing to Kentucky.33
On Friday, Jennings rode the train to Columbus and swore out a warrant for John’s arrest as a fugitive slave. Although the federal courthouse in Cleveland was much closer, it was crawling with abolitionists. In Columbus slave warrants were routine, and for years the marshals there had been helping Southerners make arrests. Jennings paid a deputy marshal and a local jailer one hundred dollars to come north to assist him. Back in Oberlin on Saturday, the slave-catchers heard about the Boyntons, active Democrats and supporters of slavery who routinely hired day laborers in town. Jennings rode out to the Boynton farm, met Shakespeare, and brought him on board.34
By Sunday, September 12, the plan was set. The next morning the Boynton boy would ask Price to pick some potatoes, and Mitchell and the two men from Columbus would grab their man. Jennings would hang around Wack’s to throw the abolitionists off the scent. Upon getting word from Shakespeare that Price had been taken, Jennings would meet his men in Wellington, ten miles south of Oberlin. From there the train would take them to Columbus, where the federal court would formally declare their captive the property of John Bacon. From Columbus, they would ride to Cincinnati, and from
Cincinnati, up the Ohio River and back to Kentucky.35
The carriage rolled northeast toward Elyria. Perhaps Price had reason for hope. Someone there could turn him loose—there were plenty of friendly souls in Elyria. But after a mile the carriage turned south. They were taking a road that would skirt around Oberlin and get them to the train station at Wellington. Price had already read the warrant for his arrest. He understood that the farmland and forests racing by could be his last glimpses of free soil.
An hour later, at the Pittsfield crossroads south of Oberlin, the carriage slowed down by a quiet country cemetery. Price lunged. The man next to him grabbed him, but he was not trying to escape. His captors did not see what he saw: two young men walking along the road. One of them—enormous, bearded, and dressed in black—may have looked familiar. Price cried out.36
The young men did not look up. They just kept walking. Six hard hands pushed, pulled, and punched Price back into his seat.
Minutes later the carriage stopped in the center of Wellington. Where Oberlin had been built to fulfill God’s mission on Earth, the town ten miles south was merely a place where farmers sold their crops and shipped them to Columbus. The town square was a muddy void, crisscrossed with wheel ruts. It was bounded by narrow wood-frame and brick storefronts, their whitewash dusted over, a humbly steepled church, and a squat stone town hall. Small trees, planted around the time the railroad came to town a few years earlier, were just beginning to supply a little shade. At the heart of it was Wadsworth’s Hotel, a broad brick building with two stories of whitecolumned verandas across the front. The train depot was a block away.37
Farmers, tradesmen, and assorted loafers looked on quietly as the three captors walked John through the street, across the planked sidewalk, and into the hotel. Once inside, they told the hotel owner, Oliver Wadsworth, that they had arrested John and were taking him to Kentucky—but in the meantime they wanted something to eat. All of them, including John, sat down for lunch. Afterward they went upstairs and tossed John into the large room just above the front entrance and shut the door behind them. “That was the first time I ever eat with a nigger,” one of the slave-catchers would remember.38
BACK IN OBERLIN, summer was returning after a chilly Monday morning. Men were rolling up their shirtsleeves. Most people on the streets were students going to and from class. O.S.B. Wall would not have heard the shouts at first as he reopened the shop after lunch.
Ansel Lyman, a twenty-two-year-old Oberlin College student, told anyone who would listen that he had been walking by the Pittsfield graveyard four miles south of town when he heard a cry for help. Two years earlier he had fought alongside John Brown as a lieutenant in the Kansas Free State Army. The instant John Price’s shouts broke the silence of the lonely road, Lyman was back at war.39
Knowing he was outnumbered and outgunned, Lyman acted like nothing had happened, waited for the carriage to pass out of sight, and then headed for Oberlin. At first sight of him, his classmates huddled around, then broke to spread the word all over town.40
O.S.B. Wall ran into the street. From shops and classrooms, hundreds were gathering in an angry roar—grocers, harness-makers, blacksmiths, students, clerks. Wall worked his way toward an awning where a dozen or so men stood loading their revolvers and rifles. Charles Langston was buckling a holster. His brother John was in Erie County all day on a case—Charles would do the fighting for him.41
A few steps farther, and someone grabbed Wall’s arm.
It was Simeon Bushnell, a head shorter than Wall. The pale printer’s clerk, usually quiet in abolitionist meetings, was hoarse from shouting. He had a cart rigged up and asked if Wall would join him. People were already starting on the journey to Wellington. Riding through cheering crowds, students and townspeople waved their hats and rifles, shouting, “I am going to rescue John Price!”42
Bushnell and Wall were part of an armada of buggies, wagons, and hay carts. The two men were conspicuous in the throng, but not because of the contrasts that they represented—skinny and stout, white and black. They attracted notice because Bushnell was driving his horse hard, and Wall was carrying a gun.43
WHEN JENNINGS ARRIVED IN Wellington after eating his lunch in Oberlin, he could see groups of people milling around Wadsworth’s Hotel. The front entrance and the halls on the first and second floors were packed. Jennings said that he knew where his men were holed up with John Price because fifty or sixty men were “crowding up the steps around the door.” They had guns and were asking for the people who had John. Without saying a word to anyone, Jennings pushed through the throng and knocked on the door.44
Thinking back on the day’s events, Jennings remembered that he “didn’t like the looks of the room, because it was large, and there was folding doors, and there was no fastening to the door.” He went looking for Oliver Wadsworth, the hotel owner, and secured a room on the top floor. Armed with pistols and knives, the four slave-catchers walked John Price upstairs. The mob let them by, but Jennings could sense that the calm would not last.45
Their new room was lit by the semicircle of a single fantail window. A bare mattress lay sadly in the back corner. Once there had been a stove, but all that remained was a hole in the wall by the door, where the pipe would have gone. Jennings could hear the crowd rumbling below.
Outside the hotel, the town square was filling. Hundreds of people with hundreds of rifles and shotguns were shouting and pushing in the midafternoon sun. Time was getting short. A little after five—in a mere two hours—the train for Columbus would be pulling into Wellington station. Another train from Cleveland, rumored to be carrying proslavery federal troops to fight the mob, was scheduled to arrive at four. An onlooker remembered the crowd yelling that they would “ ‘have the boy or pull the house down,’ ‘pull the roof off,’ ‘wouldn’t leave one brick on another.’ ” Some were running for ladders to reach the room where John Price was being held captive.46
O.S.B. Wall and Charles Langston had ridden into Wellington with guns ready. But as the crowd grew and started calling for blood, the two men pulled back. Resisting the emotional force of the mob, they settled on a different tack. Wall wanted to examine the slave-catchers’ legal papers, while Langston and a small group of other Oberlin abolitionists, black and white, sought out a local justice of the peace and swore out an arrest warrant on the slave-catchers for kidnapping. They then found a constable willing to demand that the Kentuckians supply proof of their authority to seize Price.47
Why Wall and Langston threw themselves into such a technical and time-consuming process—and why the crowd held back—is not easy to explain. Perhaps they maintained an unshakable faith that the law would favor liberty. But every educated abolitionist understood full well that the Fugitive Slave Act gave John Price and their cause little hope. “I went to Wellington,” Langston remembered, “knowing that colored men have no rights in the United States which white men are bound to respect; that the courts had so decided; that Congress had so enacted; that the people had so decreed.”48
More likely Wall and Langston sensed that resorting to legal arguments could work in their favor even if the arguments were doomed to fail. For one thing, although the legal strategy may have been nonviolent, it was confrontational. Jennings had felt secure in the top-floor room, insulated from the inarticulate mob below. The arrest warrant forced him to talk face-to-face with abolitionists who attacked his fundamental sense that his actions were legitimate. Over and over again in the hours that followed, Jennings found himself admitting groups of three or four men and showing them his legal documents. He offered to free Price for $1,400. One abolitionist cheerfully counteroffered five dollars, and another said he would pay a nickel.49
Perhaps for the first time in his life, Jennings was forced to interact with blacks as his equals, or even his social superiors. As John Mercer Langston had long known, the opportunity to make legal arguments admitted blacks into an “aristocracy of eloquence.” When Charles Langston entered the hotel room wi
th an abolitionist delegation, he demanded to see the Southerners’ papers and gestured out the window, saying, “You might as well give the negro up, as they are going to have him any way.” Jennings thought he was a lawyer.50
The arrest warrant kept the crowd happy, as hundreds eagerly listened to the people who had met with Jennings. The hours were slipping away from the slave-catchers. “There was a great deal of excitement and noise and confusion; didn’t take much note of time,” one Oberlin abolitionist said. “Didn’t hardly know it was night when it was night.” The four o’clock Cleveland train came and went, with no troops arriving to disperse the crowd.51
Faced with the possibility of missing the train to Columbus, Jennings grew impatient with the arguing and took John Price outside onto a platform above the crowd. With Jennings looming behind him, Price stammered that the slave-catchers’ papers were legal and that he “supposed” he had to go with them back to Kentucky. Rather than calming the crowd, Price’s words goaded it into action. “You will have to go back, will you? We’ll see about that!” shouted one man. Others waved their arms and called for John to jump. Some trained their rifles on Jennings, who grabbed Price and pulled him inside.52
The crowd rushed for the hotel entrance. Jennings hustled Price back to their room, slammed the door, and wrapped a piece of rope around the knob and a wall bracket, pulling as tight as he could. In the excitement, Jennings did not notice that an Oberlin student who had been looking at the Southerners’ papers was still in the room. Richard Winsor—twenty-three years old, short, inconspicuous—made his way over to Price and quietly asked him if he wanted to be free. Price said yes.53
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