Hundreds of other Oberlinians followed Watson’s lead, many riding by horse and buggy but others going on foot. Keeping a pledge that he had made years before to assist all freedom seekers in distress, Watson raced off to Wellington to rescue Price from the prospect of re-enslavement. A crowd promptly gathered in front of African American John Watson’s grocery on South Main Street to decide on a course of action. About 1 p.m., Ansel Lyman, a white college student and fervent abolitionist whose father owned a farm in the southern part of town, reported that while walking near Pittsfield at midday he had seen John Price–a young freedom seeker residing in Oberlin–being whisked off against his will by three white strangers in a carriage heading toward Wellington. On Monday, September 13, 1858, news reached downtown Oberlin of an audacious kidnapping of an African American in broad daylight. by all justifiable means in our power.” Six years later James Harris Fairchild, a professor at Oberlin College, proudly observed, “No fugitive was ever taken here and returned to slavery and this result has been secured without an instance of bloodshed or violence. In response, a mass meeting of local residents held in October 1850 avowed their dedication to a higher moral law than any human-made statute and publicly pledged to protect the “fugitive brother. To the alarm of antislavery Oberlinians, however, Congressional passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 threatened the town’s sanctuary tradition by making any effort to help freedom seekers a federal crime. Most went on to Canada, but some took up residence in Oberlin itself. Kornblith and Carol Lasser (LSU Press, 2018)įrom the mid-1830s forward, Oberlin gained a well-deserved reputation for harboring freedom seekers fleeing bondage via the Underground Railroad. Adapted with permission from Elusive Utopia: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Oberlin, Ohio by Gary J.
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