1858 (28 page)

Ironically, one of the men was Richard Winsor, a twenty-three-year-old college teacher, who had witnessed the deportation of another kidnapped black man, Anthony Burns from Boston, four years earlier. As the instant army of abolitionists raced out of Oberlin toward Wellington in a caravan of vehicles, a passerby in the growing crowd asked Winsor, riding in a buggy with John Scott and Jackson Chestnut, where he was going.

Waving three rifles in one hand and his floppy hat in the other, Winsor yelled out as loudly as he could, “I am going to Wellington to rescue John Price!”
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Everyone roared as the armada of abolitionists sped northward. Oddly, one of those cheering on the crowd as it left for Wellington was Henry Peck, who decided not to go. It was Peck, however, who would become a central character in what would soon unfold as one of the most important dramas of the Civil War era.

Peck, the thirty-seven-year-old married father of four, was a graduate of both Oberlin College and its Theological Seminary. The well-dressed teacher, who fancied bright white shirts and dark ties, was of medium height and sported a moderately sized beard, no moustache. Peck had a high forehead, large ears, and a noticeable wart on his upper lip. He was one of the state’s most distinguished Underground Railroad leaders, and in early September had sent five fugitive slaves from Oberlin to Canada. He made no secret that he had raised money to purchase guns for John Brown’s 1856 attacks against slaveholders in Kansas and Missouri. Peck had campaigned actively for the Republicans in the 1856 presidential election, earning the enmity of area Democrats and the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, the state’s leading Democratic newspaper.

The army of horses, buggies, and wagons moved as fast as it could, so fast, in fact, that several wagons suffered broken wheels when they hit ruts in the road. The men leading the caravan hailed everyone they passed and urged them to join them in their assault on the slave hunters in Wellington. Hundreds did so. When the men from Oberlin arrived in Wellington, they discovered a huge crowd gathered in the public square that had been there since morning, when its members watched the fire department put out a blaze that ruined three wood buildings in town. Those people joined the abolitionists as they arrived. The crowd swelled over the next few minutes as more and more wagons and riders arrived as the alarm over John Price’s kidnapping spread. “The leaves of the forest seemed to carry the news,” said an eyewitness.
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The members of the crowd, many brandishing rifles and revolvers, surged through the square and its adjacent streets. The spacious square was so crowded that there was no room left to stand, so many people slipped into public buildings to peer out from their windows. Dozens made it to the rooftops of buildings to watch the commotion below. Teenagers climbed trees and perched themselves on sturdy limbs to witness what transpired next. One observer put the size of the crowd at five hundred people, another counted one thousand. It was not a typical abolitionist crowd, made up of wealthy members of the community and ministers. The gathering did contain the usual abolitionists: wealthy landowners, merchants, and ministers from both Oberlin and Wellington. But there were also poor farmers, cobblers, carpenters, an undertaker, a grocer, harness master, shoemaker, brick-maker, and dozens of students and professors from Oberlin College—people from every walk of American life. Many of them were black freedmen. One bystander described the scene, “It was a very noisy time; a great deal of excitement and confusion.”
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The smell of charred timber from the morning fire was still in the air and those who watched the enormous armed crowd gather were transfixed by the sight. “A fire in the morning and war at night!” exclaimed one woman.
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As the tension built among members of the angry crowd, ready for action, John Watson, one of the leaders of the rescue, obtained a warrant for the arrest of the slave hunters from a judge in Wellington. He returned to find the mob on the edge of revolution because someone had started a rumor that either Deputy Marshal Lowe or the Wellington mayor had wired for a large contingent of federal troops that would arrive on the 5:13 p.m. train to restore order. The crowd now began to scream for Price’s release in order to free him before the army appeared.

A frantic Oliver Wadsworth, fearful that the mob would attack his hotel and destroy it, posted employees at all of its doors to keep people out. Despite his employees’ presence, several of the abolitionists from Oberlin, and newly arrived recruits from Wellington, walked inside the hotel and up to a third floor attic room where Price was being held. They were joined by the local constable, Barnabas Meacham, who told everyone that he wanted to avoid violence. The slave catchers insisted that they had met every legal provision of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. They had a federal warrant for the return of Price, had signed certificates authorizing their apprehension of the runaway, and had gone directly to a local U.S. marshal, Lowe, who was bound by law to aid them in their search for Price. That seemed obvious under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and even more appropriate under the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court’s
Dred Scott
decision that a slave living in a free state was still a slave and belonged to someone. But the Oberlin men believed that their arrest warrant for the Kentuckians superseded the slave hunters’ federal writs. Inexplicably, Constable Meacham then left to seek legal advice from a local judge.
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Wadsworth and the slave hunters agreed that something dramatic was needed to avoid an attack by the furious mass of people in the village square. There was talk of violence throughout the crowd and one man, pointing to the store that had burned in the morning, said that the crowd had to do the same thing to Wadsworth’s Hotel. Another said, “They would have [Price] if they had to tear the house down.”
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Jennings asked Price if he would talk to the crowd and explain that he was amenable to going back to Kentucky because he was legally obligated to do so. Price agreed. Jennings walked on to the porch on the second floor and told the suddenly hushed crowd that he had legal papers to take Price away. “This boy is mine by the laws of Kentucky and of the United States,” he bellowed.

“You dry up!” shouted someone in the crowd. “There are no slaves in Ohio and never will be north of the Ohio River.”

“This boy is willing to go to Kentucky,” Jennings said.

The people did not believe him. There were more loud jeers. One man yelled that the only way to prove that contention was to have Price address them.
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Price, afraid of being harmed by his captors, walked slowly out on to the balcony and looked down at the crowd. All eyes were upon him. Uncertain what to say, he told them, “I suppose I’ve got to go back to Kentucky.”

Walter Soules from Oberlin was suddenly on the second-story wooden balcony near him. He yelled, “Had you not rather go to Canada?”

The runaway did not have time to answer. John Copeland, a twenty-four-year-old black freedman carpenter from Oberlin appeared, pointed a gun at Jennings, and told Price to jump off the balcony while he “shot the damned old rascal.”

People in the crowd started shouting “Jump! Jump!” The Kentuckians and Deputy Marshal Lowe, afraid that either Copeland or someone else would start shooting at them, fled the balcony. They grabbed Price by his arms and hustled him inside and again took him up one flight of stairs to the small attic room.

There, the kidnappers were constantly visited by unarmed members of the crowd who attempted to talk them into releasing Price. “They would come in about two or three at a time,” Jennings said later. Some left and some remained.
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Two men, Charles Marks and Norris Woods, Democratic Party leaders in Oberlin, then climbed up the ladder as others held it on the ground. As they did, Judge Isaac Bennett emerged on the balcony and tried to quiet the noisy crowd. He attempted to shove the ladder from the building but could not; he then pulled out his revolver and aimed it at Marks and Woods, who had been drinking earlier, and forced the pair to scramble back down the ladder to the ground.

Judge Bennett then left the hotel to study the papers that Lowe had handed him and the writ to arrest the kidnappers. Men from Wellington and Oberlin, including some college students, moved through the crowd, trying to pacify the angry, gun-toting abolitionists in order to prevent the incident from evolving into a full-scale riot in which dozens of people might be killed. Constable Meacham still could not figure out what to do and dispatched a man to a nearby town to procure a writ of habeas corpus in case he decided to arrest the slave hunters. Deputy Marshal Lowe kept insisting he had the legal right to put Price on the train to Columbus and reminded anyone he could find that the rumor about the soldiers on their way via railroad was true. But while Lowe had wired for help, he did not know if men would be forthcoming.

What followed was a comedy of errors, misunderstandings, miscommunications, and a total breakdown of law enforcement and jurisprudence. Judge Bennett went back to the hotel, met with the slave hunters, and then left. The local justice of the peace, William Houk, was summoned to verify Lowe’s writs, but the justice forgot his glasses and had to go back to his office to retrieve them. On the way, he bumped into Judge Bennett, who assured him the writs were in order and he did not have to double-check them. But the justice forgot what Bennett said and went on his way, meandering through the crowd toward his office, not to be seen again.

Each time Lowe looked out the window at the mob below, he saw more men with guns. “The colored people seemed the most warlike,” said Jacob Wheeler, a local farmer who was an eyewitness. “[I] think some of the younger lads among the white folks had some guns, too.”
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Throughout the crowd, the marshal heard loud shouts of encouragement to free Price no matter what the cost. Most men were yelling that people should rush into the hotel and grab the runaway, but a few urged genuine destruction of property. “Some said they’d tear the [hotel] down,” said one bystander, Chauncey Wack. Norris Woods said, “I expected there’d be shooting up there and I wanted to see it.”
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Deputy Marshal Lowe, certain that people were going to be hurt if the standoff continued much longer, then asked a group of men to accompany him, with Price and the slave hunters, on the train to Columbus. The deputy marshal would not release Price to the slave hunters; they would let a judge in Columbus decide what to do. No one wanted to go and the plan was dropped. Outside, a group of men were pressuring Constable Meacham to arrest the slave hunters for kidnapping, but he could not make up his mind. A college student, James Patton, convinced Lowe that if he addressed the crowd from the other side of the square, not the balcony, he might have more success. He and Patton walked around the perimeter of the crowd and Lowe read the warrant from the porch of a store on the opposite side of the square, but nobody paid any attention to him. In a bizarre incident in the middle of all this, Jacob Wheeler found out that one of the slave hunters lived near his relatives in Kentucky and tried to gain permission to talk to him to see how his relatives were doing.

By then, the 5:13 p.m. train was traveling closer to Wellington. So was William Lincoln, another Oberlin student. Lincoln, who was twenty-seven at the time, an impetuous man with pronounced mood swings, was determined to rescue Price, peacefully or violently, and did not understand why that had not been accomplished already. Just as he arrived in town, the long-awaited 5:13 p.m. train pulled into the railroad depot just a block from the public square, but there were no soldiers on it.

The people in the mob were relieved, but then a fresh rumor circulated that the next train, due in at eight o’clock,
would
carry several hundred troops. This frightened Lincoln. Someone in the crowd told him that no one had assumed a position of leadership within the mob and that “if anything is done to save the man, you will have to do it.” Lincoln, feeling a sense of destiny, nodded in agreement and told the man to find twelve volunteers to storm the hotel with him.
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Only five men arrived to join him; one was Ansel Lyman, who alerted Oberlin to the kidnapping and had experience in confrontations with slavers as one of John Brown’s former Kansas raiders. The six walked quickly through the crowd, those that had guns holding them at their sides. They climbed the front porch of the hotel and rushed the guards at the door, knocking some to the ground and engaging the others in hand-to-hand combat. It appeared that they would be turned back, but then Lincoln pulled out his revolver, pointed it at the head of one of the hotel’s protectors, and shouted, “Quit, or I’ll blow your brains out.”

The protectors backed off and the men charged into the hotel lobby and then began to climb the wooden staircase toward the attic room where Price was being held. Most of the daylight had started to fade. The stairs and hallways, lit by only a few lamps, were quite dark.