The Invisible Line (16 page)

Having acquired property in town, Wall gave one house to his sister and Langston in exchange for their rambling farm, which was half an hour's ride northwest of Oberlin. With the farm in his name, Wall was no longer just a tradesman. He had become a planter, with cornfields, pastures for sheep and cattle, and graceful orchards leading in neat rows to ancient woods of chestnut and hickory. Like his father, Wall had other people cultivate his land. Though born a slave, he was now the master of a white tenant and laborers. By 1858 O.S.B. and Amanda Wall had two boys and a girl, all light enough to burn in the sun. They named their second son Stephen, for his grandfather the plantation owner, who had given so much to and taken away so much from O.S.B. Wall.
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Even as the Wall family prospered in Oberlin, however, their lives were never completely secure. Reports trickled in of court-sanctioned kidnappings in southern and central Ohio. The town reeled with word from Cincinnati of Margaret Garner, who cut her daughter's throat rather than surrender her to slave-catchers. In 1854 Anthony Burns brought his own chilling story to Oberlin, where he was enrolling as a student. That spring he had run away from his master in Virginia, only to be captured in Boston and marched by a military guard past a crowd of tens of thousands to a boat that took him back south. He survived to tell his tale because horrified Bostonians raised $1,300 to redeem him. It was only a matter of time before the slave-catchers reached Oberlin.
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They first started arriving in August 1858. In the summer heat Oberliners were besieged from within and without. Upon John Mercer Langston's election as town clerk the year before, the man he defeated switched parties from Republican to Democrat and was appointed deputy U.S. marshal by the proslavery federal administration. Carrying an open grudge against Oberlin's black residents, the new marshal, Anson Dayton, said that he was willing to capture fugitive slaves. He started responding to advertisements and reward notices, sending south descriptions of local blacks and offering to arrest them for money.
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In mid-August Dayton tried to seize an entire family, only to be driven away when the father, waving a shotgun, called for help. The next week he and three men dragged a mother and her children from their home in the middle of the night. She wailed so loudly that her neighbors woke up and mobbed the kidnappers; for decades townsfolk would remember her cries. Days later Dayton tried again, timing his move to coincide with the college's commencement exercises. With fire-bells ringing, students rushed out of a graduation speech and thwarted the assault. Soon afterward a local stonecutter named James Smith received a warning that Dayton had offered to kidnap him for someone in North Carolina. Smith met Dayton in the street and thrashed him with a hickory stick. Oberlin's abolitionists decided to spirit Smith out of the area before Dayton could strike back. Flush with victory but wary of a continuing threat, local abolitionists composed nervous lyrics: “Who, bearing his revolvers twain, / Fled from a boy but with a cane, / And bawled for help with might and main? / Our Marshal.” A week later, in early September, Anderson Jennings came to town.
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BEFORE REACHING OBERLIN, JENNINGS had been told that Wack's Tavern was a hospitable place for a Southern gentleman to conduct Southern business. Although Chauncey Wack had come from Vermont, his politics were deep Dixie. Each Election Day he would haunt Oberlin's polling places, challenging black voters. He could be counted on to connect Jennings with people willing to help him.
¹⁹

Jennings arranged to meet Anson Dayton and told him about his slave Henry. The marshal shook his head. No one in Oberlin answered to that description, but he had ideas about where they could look and a network of local informants to help them. Even though Jennings's slave was not in the area, Dayton took the time to describe all of the town's paupers from the time he was clerk, just in case Jennings recognized anyone. At the mention of one John Price—age about twenty, dark black, five feet eight inches tall, heavyset—Jennings and Dayton found themselves in business.
²⁰

Jennings thought Price sounded like his neighbor John Bacon's slave. On a January day two years earlier Bacon had left his two slaves alone while visiting with his in-laws. The Ohio River was frozen over, and the slaves had simply walked across the ice, like Eliza in
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. There had been no trace of either one since. Until now.
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On Dayton's instruction, Jennings wrote Bacon that night, asking for power of attorney to arrest the fugitive. Wack mailed it the next morning. In the meantime there was still the matter of Jennings's slave Henry. On a tip from one of the marshal's informants, Jennings and Dayton caught a train to Painesville, on the other side of Cleveland, where a person answering to Henry's description had newly turned up. But almost immediately after they started asking townspeople about Henry, fifty armed abolitionists confronted them. “They gave us twenty minutes to leave,” the Kentuckian complained, “and then wouldn't allow us that!” It was what abolitionist strongholds such as Painesville had been preparing for since the Fugitive Slave Act's passage eight years earlier. For Jennings and Dayton, the thrill of hot pursuit was doused by sickening fear. When word of the incident got back to Oberlin, the town's abolitionists found themselves with another verse to sing: “Who fled from Painesville on the car, / Because he had no taste for war, / Or more especially for tar? / Our Marshal.”
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The Kentuckian packed up and left Oberlin as soon as he could. It was Saturday, September 4, 1858. Home again, empty-handed, Jennings may have thought that his career hunting slaves was over before it had even begun. But a visit from John Bacon sent him right back north. Bacon told Jennings that Richard Mitchell, a local slave-catcher who had made multiple incursions into Ohio, had just left for Oberlin with the legal papers authorizing Jennings to capture John Price. Mitchell and Jennings had probably passed each other in steamboats on the Ohio River.
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Jennings and Bacon conferred and reached an agreement. If Jennings returned to Oberlin and captured Price, Bacon promised him five hundred dollars or “one half of what the nigger would sell for.” It was a generous offer to a man who insisted that he had only notified Bacon about Price “out of pure neighborly regard.” “Never made no bargain with him about pay no-ways,” Jennings would later insist.
²⁴

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
.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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