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37 2 A Political Show Trial in the Northern District The Oberlin-Wellington Fugitive Slave Rescue Case Paul Finkelman On Monday, September 13, 1858, William Shakespeare Boynton, the thirteen-year-old son of an Oberlin farmer, asked John Price, a fugitive slave living in Oberlin, if he wanted to earn some money harvesting potatoes. Price declined but agreed to accompany Boynton to the house of another black he thought would be interested in the work. Although Price was a fugitive slave, he saw no threat from young Boynton and readily hopped into his buggy. But Boynton was in fact working for Anderson Jennings, a Kentucky slave catcher who was operating under a power of attorney from John Bacon, Price’s owner. Jennings also had a warrant for Price under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, issued by a commissioner from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. For $20—a significant sum at the time—Boynton had agreed to lure Price out of Oberlin so he could be quietly seized. About a mile outside Oberlin, Jacob K. Lowe, a U.S. deputy marshal from Columbus—together with Samuel Davis, a deputy sheriff from Franklin County, and Richard P. Mitchell, Bacon’s Kentucky neighbor who was moonlighting as a slave catcher—overtook Boynton, seized Price, and then headed to Wellington, Ohio, about ten miles away. In Paul Finkelman 38 Wellington, they took Price to the Wadsworth Hotel to wait for the next train to Columbus, where Price would be formally remanded to Jennings under the Fugitive Slave Law. Meanwhile, Jennings remained in Oberlin until Boynton returned. He then paid the young teenager and set out for Wellington at a leisurely pace.1 These carefully calculated plans might have worked, except that shortly after Price’s capture, the buggy carrying Price and his captors passed two Oberlin residents who were heading home. Price yelled to them for help. Neither offered any assistance, but when they reached Oberlin, one of them, Ansel W. Lyman, an Oberlin College student who had served with John Brown in Kansas , immediately spread word about the “kidnapping”—as abolitionists referred to the seizure of fugitive slaves. Within minutes, Oberlin residents—students, college professors, shopkeepers, laborers—were gathering vehicles and horses, as well as rifles and pistols, and heading to Wellington. By the end of the day, Price would be rescued and quickly sent to Canada, where he would remain free. Shortly after the rescue, the federal prosecutor secured grand jury indictments of thirty-seven men for violating the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Presiding over the grand jury was Judge Hiram Willson, a loyal Democrat who had been appointed to the newly created U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio in 1855. Like his sponsor, President Franklin Pierce, Willson was a classic doughface Democrat—a northern man with southern principles. He was a strong booster of Cleveland and northern Ohio and earned his seat on the court by lobbying heavily for the creation of the new district.2 But he was also deeply loyal to the proslavery agenda of northern Democrats, such as Pierce and James Buchanan, who seethed at the hostility to the Fugitive Slave Law coming out of their own constituencies. Willson’s charge to the grand jury condemned opponents of the law, asserting that theirs was “a sentiment semi-religious in its development, and almost invariably characterized by intolerance and bigotry.”3 Willson apparently saw no irony in accusing those who opposed the Fugitive Slave Law of “intolerance and bigotry,” even though the law was directed at only one group of people—African Americans —and was utterly intolerant of their legal rights. The indictments that came from Judge Willson’s charge would lead to the first significant trials in Ohio’s newly created Northern District Court. More than a century and a half later, these prosecutions remain among the court’s most famous cases. To understand the Oberlin cases, we must begin in the town and state where Price was seized. 39 The Oberlin-Wellington Fugitive Slave Rescue Case The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the Rescue of John Price Fugitives from Virginia and Kentucky regularly escaped across the Ohio River into the Buckeye State. The Ohio River was a great highway to freedom for countless blacks, many of whom went no farther than Cincinnati. Despite obvious discrimination, the occasional antiblack race riot, and the threat from Kentucky slave catchers, the Queen City had...

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