The Invisible Line (17 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 with 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Like an approaching train, the mob roared its way up the stairs. People slammed into the door, but Jennings and his men held fast, threatening to shoot anyone who crossed the threshold. Winsor told Price to crouch low and hold on to him around the waist. Together they inched toward the door.

For a moment the people on the third-floor landing found themselves at a stalemate. But then Winsor passed a note to them through the hole in the wall where the stovepipe had been. Someone looked through, saw that Jennings was within arm's reach, and punched with all his might.

The blow through the hole in the wall blindsided Jennings. It staggered him, ruined his hat, and left him bloody. The rope slipped through his fingers, and the mob pushed the door open. In an instant Winsor and Price slipped out, and Jennings could only watch as his prize went “a paddlin' down stairs over the heads of the crowd, as it seemed to me.”
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The current of outstretched arms carried John Price all the way into the Wellington town square. Outside in the cool dusk, the cart that O.S.B. Wall had taken from Oberlin was waiting. Simeon Bushnell covered Price with a blanket, snapped the reins, and headed north, first to Oberlin and eventually to Canada. In the hour that followed, hundreds of men who now called themselves the “Rescuers” traveled the same road, but at a decidedly more leisurely pace.

Wall rode home with Langston. Halfway to town they recognized a man galloping in toward them, shouting. It was John Mercer Langston. He had gone to Oberlin after finishing his business in Erie County, only to find the town virtually empty. Dashing south to Wellington, he passed Sim Bushnell and had the pleasure of congratulating John Price personally on his newfound liberty.
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All around them the road was filling up with their neighbors also heading back to Oberlin, singing and laughing and hollering, already telling and retelling their stories. With the Langston brothers at his side, Wall took his place in the victory parade.

T
HE MEN LOCKED ARMS as they marched down the broad hallway outside the courtroom. They were young and old, every shape, size, and color, all formally dressed, holding valises. O.S.B. Wall and Charles Langston took their places among them. Nodding to wives, well-wishers, and newspapermen lining the way, twenty defendants walked two by two into the April rain. It was not much warmer than the day, five months before, when they had been indicted. After a brief walk they stopped outside a shabby building with narrow arched windows and stone guard towers. While the U.S. marshal conferred with the sheriff over the terms of confinement, the men were slowly soaked through as they contemplated their new home, the Cuyahoga County Jail.
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